Electronic voting, without any paper-trail, will usher in stealing of elections in America like you have never seen. Florida will look like a tea party. Pity for their 'democracy'.
The Chinese have a saying: "When you steal a fishing hook to fend for your family you get hanged for it, but when you steal a country you become an Emperor".
Anybody who is mindlessly pushing for this type of a change is playing for very high stakes.
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New Voting Technology Questioned By Finn Bullers Kansas City Star
Monday 22 September 2003
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A growing national debate threatens to undermine efforts to replace older voting technology like the punch-card system that is at the heart of California's current election standoff.
In California, a panel of federal appellate judges has ruled that there are "inherent defects" in the older voting systems and that they could be overwhelmed by the large number of candidates on the state's recall ballot. Last week the court agreed to reconsider the case.
Among newer systems being implemented in California and elsewhere are touch-screen computer voting machines. But the computerized balloting that election officials long have touted as the wave of the future is under attack from scientists and computer experts who worry that computerized voting systems are vulnerable to tampering and manipulation that could easily go undetected.
"This could be something that compromises democracy," said David Dill, a Stanford University professor of computer science who researches security issues.
On the other side of the debate are election officials who see the worry as a natural, if exaggerated, reaction to change. They say tampering would require a huge, sophisticated plan and that there are plenty of safeguards to detect and protect against intrusions.
"Elections are stuck in the 19th century all across the country," said Johnson County (Mo.) Election Commissioner Connie Schmidt, who has testified before Congress on election reform. "Now we're skipping several generations from punch cards to touch-screen voting machines. And change causes stress in people."
While Kansas officials maintain their confidence in the emerging technology, Missouri will buy new voting equipment only when computers can produce a paper ballot that a voter can verify at the polls, said Spence Jackson, a spokesman for Missouri Secretary of State Matt Blunt.
"In our quest to deliver faster, more accurate election results, we've left the voting process wide open to new forms of attack and mismanagement," said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, based in Davis, Calif.
Apprehension about computerized voting has simmered for years, arising early on among the Internet fringe that feasts on conspiracy and paranoia. That current of distrust has drifted closer to the mainstream in recent months.
The Help America Vote Act - passed hastily by Congress in the wake of the 2000 presidential elections - mandates improved polling by Jan. 1, 2006. The federal government is doling out $3.9 billion to speed up the process.
But a study released this summer from Johns Hopkins and Rice universities raised concerns that touch-screen computer voting machines such as those used in Johnson County could be tampered with and that the manipulation could go undetected.
In that study, computer security expert Avi Rubin and his colleagues blasted Diebold Election Systems Inc. of McKinney, Texas, for failing to write secure computer language in its voting systems. After analyzing Diebold's confidential code, they said the company's software - used in 200 cities and counties in 12 states, including Johnson County - is an easy target for corruption.
Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins, warned that a partisan working for a voting machine vendor or a dishonest poll official could rig the equipment to miscount votes. Non-secure phone lines could be intercepted by hackers and poll results could be altered, he said.
"The big problem I have in general with electronic voting machines ... is that there are so many ways that things can go wrong without you even ever knowing what they were," said Rubin. "I don't think we should trust them."
Diebold fired back with a 27-page rebuttal, saying the study made false technical assumptions, relied on inadequate research and ignored human checks and balances that safeguard electronic election results.
"Political leaders and experienced elections officials across the country have supported the electronic voting format as holding the greatest potential for ensuring impartial, secure and accurate elections," said Thomas Swidarski, president of Diebold Election Systems, in a news release.
The firm also questioned Rubin's credibility, saying Diebold was "shocked and disappointed" to learn the researcher had stock options in VoteHere Inc., a company that competes with Diebold in the voting software market, and was a member of VoteHere's technical advisory board.
Rubin acknowledges the relationship but said he had little contact with the company and had not profited from the alliance. He said not revealing the connection before releasing the paper was a mistake.
Rubin and Diebold now are hesitant to discuss the conflict, pending possible legal action. But election officials condemn the academic study and say the threat is overblown.
"The corruption would have to run so deep, and even then I'm not sure our election procedures could be compromised," Kansas Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh said.
In Johnson County - the only government in the region to use touch-screen voting - safeguards not accounted for in the Rubin study make voting secure, said Schmidt, the county's election commissioner.
The county's election system is not connected to the Internet, avoiding a possible external attack, she said. The election office's main computer is not connected to a network and is locked in a room with a surveillance camera trained on it at all times. Schmidt has the only key to the room.
"We really are like a bank and are locked up and secure," she said. "People can't just be wandering around in the polling place and step up and vote undetected. We can balance our votes, like money, at the end of each day at every polling location and then trace it through audit tapes."
Johnson County encountered problems, however, when it used the touch-screen machines for the first time in a live election.
In the April 2002 municipal elections, some modems used to transmit results from polling places to the central election office failed. The county no longer transmits results from polling places to the central election office via modem; cartridges that record results are hand-delivered to the office.
Also, results were misreported in six races. The system miscounted hundreds of votes, and a recount was ordered.
The hand recount was done by printing an image of each ballot recorded by the touch-screen machines. No outcomes changed after the recount.
Schmidt said the voting machines worked fine, but problems arose when the results were fed into the main computer.
"We really can't answer what went wrong," Schmidt said at the time. In a recent interview, she referred all technical questions to Diebold.
Diebold investigated the problem and said in a news release issued at the time that a software error had led to the election night problem.
Barry Herron, Diebold Election Systems vice president for sales, said recently that the results from the 2002 election had been entered inaccurately. He said all the votes were recorded, but the anomaly showed up because of how workers fed in results.
After the Aug. 6, 2002, election, in which the system worked without any major problems, Schmidt issued a news release saying Johnson County voters "love" the Diebold machines. A testimonial from her appears on the company's Web site.
Schmidt said the electronic voting debate has more to do with the need to accept change than poorly designed voting machines.
"Paper ballots have more flaws than the computer ballots," Schmidt said. "Our experience proves the voting machines work if they're used in a controlled and tested method."
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Mitayo Potosi
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