Reply #19: If it's from the inside, it won't matter if it's electronic or paper [View All]

[jobycom]

Elections take place at the precinct level, and they involve a handful of officials at each level. ANy code would have to find a way to activate itself after the initial test, then deactivate itself when the units are switched from early voting to election day voting, then reactivate itself for that voting, then deactivate itself again after the voting ended. If the code was activated at a certain vote total, there's no way to predict how many people will vote in a precinct, and that number would vary from precinct to precinct, requiring a different code for each one. If it were turned on and off on certain commands, it would be caught, because the same commands are used to test the machines as to run them live. It can be done, it would just be a lot harder than rigging paper ballots, so returning to paper ballots would be worse.

I've drilled our local elections supervisor in great detail on this, come up with every scenario I could think of, and she had an answer for it. She's a Democrat, and from what I understand she's become a recognized expert in the field from her research. And I couldn't think of a way to rig the machines that wouldn't be caught. So it would have to be an inside job, which would mean that each precinct supervisor would have to be in on it, and that makes no sense because each precinct supervisor is elected, and therefore is of the party that is going to win a district anyway, so they wouldn't have to cheat.

Now the counting machines, that's where a major conspiracy can occur, but even there, there is the possibility to catch them-- at least as strong a possibility as catching a paper ballot cheater. The votes are encoded on a chip that can't be overwritten. The chips are accounted for, so if some are stolen, that would be detected-- making it harder to steal them than to steal paper ballots. The code that read the chips wrong would have to be in the counting machine, so if their is a question of fraud, the chips can be run through a different, clean, machine, in which case the counting error would be caught.

Anybody can cheat with any system, but it's not any easier with electronic voting than with paper voting-- in fact, it's harder. They have easier ways to rig elections. And their are a lot of machines out there, and elections supervisors are paranoid, and are looking for ways that the machines can be hacked, so they try to find the ones least able to be hacked. Cheating occurs when someone like Teresa Lapore sneaks in and chooses machines with built-in errors (which is what happened in Palm Beach-- everyone in the industry knew that butterfly ballots made mistakes likely. And from what I've seen, that's still not enough of an excuse to explain a 633% increase over the previous elections in overvotes in one county), and (probably) alters ballots after they have been cast. Electronic voting makes that a lot harder. Cheating with electronic voting does require someone capable of writing complex code, gaining access, and having enough power to cover it up.

Again, it can happen. I'm glad Bev and others are hammering away at this, finding evey weakness and loophole. The Republicans will cheat, to keep power, and they will rig these machines at the local level (can't be done at the state level unless the local levels are complicit-- they don't have access.) The Democrats will cheat again when they have the power (and I want that prevented just as badly). But the idea that Bush is going to enter a command somewhere and have all the voting machines across America re-elect him is a stretch. Maybe there's a way to affect code with radio frequencies as the votes are being cast (edited; originally said "counted")(not after because the chips can't be altered). That would require some extreme sophistication, and we wouldn't be able to stop that type of conspiracy anyway. That's when we do like Cuba and take to the streets because the vote makes no sense. There are much easier ways to cheat-- starting now, when the AGs are compiling and purging voters rolls.

Now is the time we should be watching the Katherine Harrises in each state, and the Teresa Lapores. Now is the time we need to get involved at the local level, learning what our ballots will look like, learning what the states are doing on voting rolls. Now is the time we need to do our homework on how ballot makeup affects voting outcome. That's where it will come from. Especially after Florida, when they were caught red handed but allowed to get away with it.

Or at the counting machines, when a county like Duval is run by Repubs but has a large Democratic vote. The votes will be rigged there, as they were in 2000, and it won't take advanced programming skills to do it.