Feinstein Hearing: The Hazards of Electronic Voting

[rumpel]

Last night, I finally had the time to watch the entire hearing online:
http://rules.senate.gov/hearings/2007/archive020707.ram

Now, I am even more annoyed hearing Ms McCormack actually spewing assertions that I now want her to prove.

First off, she is the only person on all three panels who starts off and gives a very cocky impression - but that's neither here or there.

Since Senator Feinstein only allows 5 minutes - all panelists give a short summary or whatever they feel is of importance. Ms McCormack does not mention the fact of the problematic sleepovers in the oral presentation - nor does any Senator mention it in form of a question.

The ranking member focuses on ballot design, just as McCormack proclaims the FL-13 is attributable to ballot design, and that; "it is not unprecedented, since in Los Angeles County there was once a race with a 13% undervote in the early 1970's.

As a side note, all others speak of a 15% undervote in FL-13, Ms McCormack continues to talk about 13%. Never mind, what difference does 2% make...anyway. I must be anal.

The ranking member steers his comments towards the stuffing of ballot boxes of 1500 paper ballots, addressing McCormack to solicit the answer that DRE's are the most accurate and the most secure in preventing vote fraud due to the ALL the security measures in place. (at about 1:44:00) Now, this is the talk of pollworkers on the ground on election day. I happen to believe that pollworkers in general are not the problem, and what we have gleaned from the data is not a 1500 stuffing of one or the other precinct, but the enabling of a far more organized, sophisticated and obscure nationwide theft of votes. This can only be easily implemented by electronic machines. Even if you had the occasional obsessed partisan pollworker or paid operatives manning certain precincts, with paper ballots it would be a massive undertaking involving many people, which, therefore, is bound to eventually leak out. No, the distrust lies in the programming and pre-shipment stage of the software.
No one - during the hearing even goes there in depth.

Ms McCormack asserts that parallel voting assures that there is no fraud, and that it showed 100% accuracy rate for all systems in use in California. At the end of the hearing McCormack shrugs off the concerns and debates as "emotional".
Paralell monitoring is another false sense of security. It only takes a few of the tampered machines sporadically and strategically placed. We all know from Clint Curtis, that Feeney requested vote switching programms which erases itself without a trace. It exists. This is not fantasy.

Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center thereafter ( at about 1:51:00 ) comments about the auditability, and says, in the Lyndon Johnson case, had there been no paper ballots, the stuffing of ballots would not stand out. Now, ranking member Mr. Bennett disagrees - to which I disagree, we have the signature pollbook (which by the way should never be made electronic either in my opinion) Bennett cites one Utah governor election, where they believe that a candidate was counted out rather than voted out. That the election official kept getting phone calls of how many votes they need.
Waldman then responds by saying, well you are talking about insider access and with that kind of access to tabulation systems machines can certainly be tampered with, such as placing a bug to be activated at a certain point...and it's completely undetectable..

Bennett cuts him off and addresses Schmidt & McCormack: Do you agree with that? - she talks about having video cameras on the tabulation computer screen throughout the process and having to trust the election official.

McCormack: The point is, parallel monitoring by independent testers so you can not have a bug. All machines have an extensive logging system, so it can be tracked back, it (bug) is detectable.

So, programmers anyone up for a challenge?
Is there a way to change the outcome of an election- when we have pollworkers "under oath", mind you, who have possession of the voting machines sometimes for weeks in their homes prior to election day,
we have parallel units running independently and unconnected at labs for monitoring,
AND several video cameras aimed at the computer screen of the tabulation system all day long -
all the while every unit is logging what it's doing.

"What's the fuss, It's all emotional allegations - the DRE's are tamper proof."

I am so impressed our election officials are at least bi-lingual they can all understand this and detect problems on the spot:
correlator=1171833547115&output=html&impl=fb&client=ca-gam-lexico&slotname=T_SERP_Top&width=728&height=90&beh_class=0_1_2_3_5&page_slots=T_SERP_Top%2CAll_TopRight%2CT_SERP_Right1%2CT_SERP_
BottomRight%2CAll_Bottom1&cust_params=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fthesaurus.reference.com%2Fbrowse%2Fcocky&ref=http%3A%2F%2F%2F&lmt=
1171833545&dt=1171833547127&cc=21&u_h=900&u_w=1440&u_ah=827&u_aw=1440&u_cd=32&u_tz=-480&u_his=4&u_java=true&u_nplug=13&u_nmime=151
(FYI, that is what my computer logs internally as unsafe java script on a website)

The hearing has big holes and experts need to contact Feinstein and Bennett - now!