BBV: Colleen Redman - Voting Machine Voodoo (Common Dreams)

[Dudley_DUright]

I got my first taste of electronic voting on Election Day this past November. Although lever voting booths were still being used in my county, a touch screen computer was available, and people lined up to try it. I was surprised that no one I spoke to there was aware of the controversy surrounding electronic voting. No one seemed to know that computer scientists all over the country have warned that electronic voting is open to corruption, or that John Hopkins researchers studying the problem released a report on July 23rd stating, “Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable to other contexts.”

In the days following November 4th, I looked through local town and city newspapers to see if any voting news stories would mention these concerns, but the stories I read were all about the novelty of the new touch screen machines, how easy they were to use, or how people are resistant to change.

Most Americans believe that the voting fiasco of the 2000 presidential election in Florida was caused by outdated voting practices. But this was only part of the problem. In a June 2001 article titled “Florida Vote Rife with Disparities, Study Says Rights Panel Finds Blacks Penalized,” The Washington Post reported this: “Florida’s conduct of the 2000 presidential election was marked by ‘injustice, ineptitude and inefficiency’ that unfairly penalized minority voters, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has concluded in a report that criticizes top state officials – particularly Governor Jeb bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris – for allowing disparate treatment of voters.” The article went on to cite the 167-page final draft report as stating that overzealous efforts to purge state voter lists was a factor in the widespread disenfranchisement of largely non-white voters.

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Corporations who manufacture the electronic voting systems, and benefit from million dollar contracts, have vigorously assured the public that their systems are secure. But academic researchers are not alone in their criticism of electronic voting. Recently, a military information technology contractor, SAIC, was commissioned by the State of Maryland to access the controversial touch screen voting machines and found them to be at “high risk of compromise.” A private researcher inadvertently came across unprotected voting system files on the website of Diebold, the leading voting machine manufacturer, and then posted them on the internet to show how easy electronic voting is to corrupt (New York Times/John Schwarz/July 24 ’03). The researcher, Bev Harris, author of “Black Box voting,” reported that the files included diagrams of remote communications set-ups, passwords, encryption keys, source code, user manuals and more.

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http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1117-14.htm