A Timely Second Look at Mark Crispin Miller’s Fooled Again – Introduction to a Multi-Part Series
by Joan Brunwasser, Voting Integrity editor, OpEdNews July 12, 2007
Let’s face it, computers sometimes just don’t work. I have much anecdotal evidence to prove my point, a selection of which I will share with you now.
O’Hare
When I returned from the Take Back America Conference in Washington DC one evening earlier this summer, I flew into Midway Airport, the pint-sized cousin of world-class O’Hare. When my husband came to pick me up, he told me that O’Hare, one of the largest airports in the world, had been shut down for several hours because a computer breakdown kept personnel from calculating how much baggage each plane could safely carry. Planes were not permitted to take off, causing a domino effect of hundreds of delayed and cancelled flights. It didn’t reach epidemic proportions because there was a backup computer that eventually kicked in. But the damage was done, and I was grateful that, for a change, O’Hare hadn’t figured in my plans that evening.
Compaq
A number of years ago, I fought Compaq for many months while they replaced every single component (and maybe some more than once) of my PC without ever actually fixing the problem. My computer still continually and inexplicably crashed. Finally, after seven pages of single-spaced, recorded conversations, various actions, inaction and immense aggravation on all sides, they begrudgingly offered me a new Compaq computer or its equivalent in cold hard cash. I grabbed the money, bought a Mac, and never looked back.
Who among us has not suffered from computer meltdown? There’s even a Microsoft Error Message Haiku collection that has been circulating (and growing) for years. It may have started with a contest at Salon magazine in 1998. These short poems, comprised of precisely 17 syllables, perfectly capture those feelings shared by every computer-user, serious or casual, student or senior. Time out for several juicy examples:
Chaos reigns within. Reflect, repent, and reboot. Order shall return.
Three things are certain: Death, taxes, and lost data. Guess which has occurred.
Spring will come again, But it will not bring with it Any of your files.
This site has been moved. We'd tell you where, but then we'd have to delete you.
Windows NT crashed. I am the Blue Screen of Death. No one hears your screams.
A few weeks ago, I went to a birthday brunch for a dear friend of mine on a Sunday afternoon. It just so happened that there was a small but impressive crafts fair down the street. After the brunch, I strolled between the booths, reveling in the sights and sounds while enjoying the unexpected break. I found a personable artisan complete with a Louisiana drawl who had created two pairs of earrings that clearly had my name on them – beautiful, funky but not too funky, and silver rather than gold. In short, perfect. Marie had been struggling with her card swipe machine all day, she freely confessed. Predictably, the machine stalled out after swiping my credit card. We waited a while and then waited some more. Nothing doing. She “undid” the transaction and gave me a receipt that the machine spit out, clearly labeled cancelled. I wrote a check instead and went on my way with two great pairs of earrings tucked under my arm.
Several weeks later, my credit card bill somehow contained the mysteriously-not-really-cancelled charge. I looked between the cancelled receipt I held in one hand and the credit card bill that I held in the other. Call me single-minded, but it so reminded me of what we’ve learned of the way computerized voting machines can give you every outward appearance of having registered your vote correctly, including printing out a receipt to that effect, while hiding quite a different, and completely fraudulent, story inside. Read John Washburn’s article on what the University of Connecticut recently discovered “Why VVPAT ‘paper trails’ are not enough” and you’ll understand why this incident reverberated so unpleasantly for me. http://www.bradblog.com/index.php?p=4902
Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which exists for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. We aim to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Electronic (computerized) voting systems are simply antithetical to democratic principles.
CER set up a lending library to achieve the widespread distribution of the DVD Invisible Ballots: A temptation for electronic vote fraud. Within eighteen months, the project had distributed over 3200 copies across the country and beyond. CER now concentrates on group showings, OpEd pieces, articles, reviews, interviews, discussion sessions, networking, conferences, anything that promotes awareness of this critical problem. Joan has been Election Integrity Editor for OpEdNews since December, 2005.
SAVE R VOTE in Riverside County offers to be interviewed
Hi Joan,
My name is Tom Courbat, a good friend of Brad Friedman, Bev Harris and Steve Heller. In Riverside County, I am the executive director of SAVE R VOTE, and if you go to the BradBlog you will see dozens of blog entries about our forays into Election Integrity and the progress we have made in penetrating the veil of secrecy of the Registrar of Voters in the county rated the "second worst county to vote in" by Black Box Voting. I think if you talk to any of them they will tell you that SAVE R VOTE represents grass roots efforts at the most basic and local level. I would love to tell you our story. You can find some short videos we have done by going to www.brightcove.com and typing in videotom in the search box. When it shows the some of the videos (there are now 13) just click on any one of them. Then click on "see all videos" (below the viewing screen), which brings up most of them, then click on "see all" to have all thirteen thumbnails displayed for your selection. The most current one, done just last week and used at the California Democratic Council's 55th annual meeting in LA on Saturday, is entitled "4 Key Issues in Election Integrity."
I hope as you view a few of them you will find that the barriers we have had to confront are relevant to those that nearly all election integrity advocates have to deal with, and that they are instructive.
Best regards,
Tom Courbat
951-677-64551
951-536-6091 (cell)
by
Tom Courbat (11 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 12 comments)
on Monday, August 13, 2007 at 3:54:36 AM
Miller's book is excellent. As a computer hardware person, I can say that voting by computer is probably the worst possible method available. It's not just the reliability problems, and the hack-ability problems, it is also the fact that many poll workers are usually not very computer savvy and will have difficulty setting up and using the equipment properly. We saw that happen here in Maryland in the last election primary.
Simple less fallible equipment that also creates a paper trail will be far better in the long run. However, manual equipment may actually require more effort by poll workers and therefore may be less popular with them. Even if they do not understand computers, they definitely like the process being automated and quick.
by
John R Moffett (80 articles, 14 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 610 comments)
on Monday, August 13, 2007 at 6:45:03 AM
you put your finger on a key issue. trading in our elections (and therefore our democracy) for the sake of convenience. vendor misrepresentation (or worse) and widespread layperson ignorance of the way the computers work and how easily corrupted they are combine to make a quick fix that is neither. it ends up being a deal with the devil.
by
Joan Brunwasser (139 articles, 3422 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 597 comments)
on Monday, August 13, 2007 at 7:55:25 AM
Really excellent, Joan. I'm impressed, and grateful; and also very keen to read the next installment(s)!
One teeny quibble: The book hasn't be "re-issued"--which would imply that it was out of print, and has now been republished as it was when it initially came out. Rather, it has now come out in paperback (nor was it ever out of print); and the new edition has over 100 pages of new material in the Afterword. So the book has been expanded. And, finally, it now has a different, timelier and far less cumbrous subtitle. (Also, there are several pages of glowing testimonials
on and in the paperback. Although the book was indeed largely ignored by the MSM, it did get a lot of praise on-line and in independent weeklies.)
Anyway, I thank you warmly for tackling this vitally this important project.
MCM
by
Joan Brunwasser (139 articles, 3422 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 597 comments)
on Monday, August 13, 2007 at 8:08:45 AM
What a sensible approach your article takes. You might mention that it is computer programmers and tech people who are at the forefront of the movement to make the vote transparent. See here:
Thanks for describing Mark Crispin Miller's reviewer-ignored book. I'll read it and I look forward to your series discussing it.
Steve Figler
(wurstwisdom.com)
by
Rrrandy-Steve (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 16 comments)
on Monday, August 13, 2007 at 7:20:25 PM
a bit more circumspect about praising Miller's book too much. Dr. Miller agreed to do an interview with me last year regarding the book. After sending him critical questions clarifying its contents, Miller failed to respond. I asked him several times when he would. He continued to put me off, and in the end, ended our correspondence.
While I think Dr. Miller and Fooled Again are well intentioned, I do have to wonder why he was unable to clarify his positions in the book. As one can easily observe, Dr. Miller has been very responsive to those promoting the book uncritically. This practice leaves me a bit cold, and makes me wonder about the credibility of some of the information he offers.
by
Larry Sakin (63 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 14 comments)
on Tuesday, August 14, 2007 at 8:08:34 PM
9 comments
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