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General News    H3'ed 2/26/17

Philadelphia Conference on Voting Justice and Democratizing Elections, Feb. 24-26, Friends Meeting House

By       (Page 2 of 7 pages) Become a premium member to see this article and all articles as one long page.   No comments, In Series: Election Integrity

A brief history of this disastrous stampede followed, highlighted by the Sarasota 2006 debacle where 18,000 votes had been lost when votes for the two HR candidates were accidentally (?) eliminated from some of the ballots in the most Democratic area of the county. The GOP candidate who had been far behind in the polls thus won by 400 votes and took his seat in the HR while the Democratic candidate sued without success in the wake of the most hotly contested race in the country over benighted former Sos Katherine Harris's vacated seat. "Voter error" was blamed.

After wrestling with DRE for several elections, Maryland, the Old-Line State, voted to replace them with optical scanners. Then in 2010 the budget came up short. Voters did not use scanners until 2016. Opposition by the state's director of elections Linda Lamone, an opponent of paper-based voting, had undoubtedly been a factor.

The new optical scanner is accessible to populations with disabilities, unlike the older counterparts that had influenced them to fight to retain the DREs.

The Old-Line State had already invested around $100 million in the DRE systems before purchasing the much less expensive optical scanners.

At least now few DREs are purchased anywhere in the country, said Greenhaigh. Her organization, one of the earliest advocates of paper voting, was started in 2002 by Professor David Dill, who produced a petition signed by the most distinguished computer experts in the country warning against computerized voting and advocating paper ballots. (See Dill's article in the January issue of Scientific American for an updated perspective.)

She warned against Internet voting, easily open to domestic and hostile foreign hackers and other dangers of releasing votes in cyberspace. Deemed as a good solution to problems experienced by military and expatriate voters, the Internet is certainly handy for sending out ballots all over the world, which can then be printed up, filled in, and mailed out.

But what of the universally approved system of online banking? It is hardly foolproof, said Greenhaigh. Banks lose billions a year, which they pass on to voters by increasing the costs of this convenience. They also spend additional billions attempting to fortify their systems.

A brief history of attempts and then discarding of the IV option followed, with the federal government spending millions and a disastrous experiment in Washington, DC, in 2010, which wanted this system but was persuaded by the public to be first opened for experimentation before use, which was never implemented. The famous enemy of IV, Professor Alex Halderman, came down from the University of Michigan with some graduate students to expose the vulnerabilities notoriously, inserting his employer's athletic fighting song to herald the conclusion of each experimental voter's activity. They also discovered foreign hackers Iran and China lurking within the machinery.

Nonetheless 31 states now permit IV, especially for military and overseas use. Such tacit compliance might have enticed much more foreign hacking, which has most lately been proved to have strongly influenced the 2016 election, many agree.

In Estonia this system is used, though Prof. Halderman traveled there to prove its vulnerabilities. This government has partnered with the Venezuela-based vendor Smartmatic, which still holds intellectual property rights to software used by Sequoia and now Dominion. Estonia is also getting cozy with the Russian federation.

But the new-generation IV system, software-as-a-service, is sold to be used with commercial over-the-counter hardware, so that customers can build systems inexpensively. The software is all connected via the Internet. Vendors use their own private, insecure networks ("virtual private networks," or VPN).

Pennsylvania's SoS, Pedro Cortes, left his position for two years to work for the IV vendors Everyone Counts, before returning with hands-on experience to fight veteran activists like Marybeth Kuznik, a judge of elections in Penn Township, who held a workshop on Pennsylvania election equipment that overlapped with this one.

Another discussion ensued on auditing the ballot scanners by using the images of ballots generated by the scanners. Some counties in Ohio had turned off this feature in 2016. Though certified as a security feature by the doomed-by-Congress Election Assistance Commission, the picture-taking function may have been disabled by Ohio because it slows down the scanning slightly, Wilson suggested. But since the images are just software generated by the scanners themselves and therefore could be hacked if the scanners were hacked, they are not an independent record of the votes. And posting ballot images online for the public to audit might enable the buying and selling of votes. Instead, she recommended risk-limiting audits, as did Greenhaigh. In this scenario districts are chosen at random and, according to how close vote totals are, various amounts of paper ballots are recounted by hand--fewer where totals are farther apart, and more where they are close, a worst-case scenario in any election venue.

An Illinois accountant among the listeners recommended audits before, during, and after election days, with 10 percent random samples taken across the state, witnessed in every precinct involved. He said that an election to adopt this system will clean it up before 2018.

Another, more cynical attendee and activist questioned why we go to this trouble if the Democrats clearly don't want to win.

But the people do. This has been hugely apparent since "President" Trump took office.

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Marta Steele is an author/editor/blogger who has been writing for Opednews.com since 2006. She is also author of the 2012 book "Grassroots, Geeks, Pros, and Pols: The Election Integrity Movement's Nonstop Battle to Win Back the People's Vote, (more...)
 

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