Reply #24: OK here is the edited version with all [View All]

[Andy_Stephenson]

suggested changes.

I believe the right to a secret secure ballot is the most important right we have. I decided to run for Secretary of State because of that belief. Thomas Paine said it best: "The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away that right is to reduce man to slavery.” I wonder if Sam Reed, the current Secretary of State, believes the same.

From the Secretary of States Office’s online publication we learn, “Electronic voting improves security, reduces the number of voter mistakes and helps insure every citizen the right to a secret ballot," so says Sam Reed, Secretary of State. I guess two out of three isn’t bad.

When we look further, Mr. Reed cites a California study whose veracity has been questioned by a number of prominent computer experts including, Bruce Schneier, founder and chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security in San Jose, who says he's ``terrified'' about the prospect of voting with the current lineup of paperless DRE machines. ``Building technology that allows people to untraceably rig the vote seems like a bad idea,'' he says. David Dill, a Stanford University computer science professor who has worked hard to bring this issue to public attention says “I've tried to find out, what kind of testing that goes on in these companies is something we don't know. They won't tell us a thing about their code or what they do to test it”. More on Professor Dill can be found at www.verifiedvoting.org . Ed Felten, Computer science professor at Princeton University calls these machines ``black boxes'' -- opaque to scrutiny and potentially subject, as Schneier notes, to tampering.

I am particularly aggrieved by software companies which are privately owned and refuse to make their code public. Mr. Reed completely overlooks the possibility that tampering capacity can be built into the software in the first place.
Incredibly, this software keeps not one, but two Microsoft Access data tables of voting results. It's like a business keeping two sets of account books. The two tables are notionally identical copies of the votes collated from all polling stations. The software uses the first table for on-demand reports which might uncover alteration of the data --such as spot checks of results from individual polling stations. The second of the two tables is the one used to determine the election result. But the second table can be hacked and altered to produce fake election totals without affecting spot check reports derived from the first table."
Georgia is "hardest hit by the growing Diebold scandal," said Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century. On election night 2002, 67 memory cards with thousands of votes went missing in Fulton County, Harris reports. The loss of memory cards is comparable to lost ballot boxes.
Right before the election in Georgia, an unexamined program 'patch' was hastily installed on the 22,000 Diebold voting machines across the state. A patch inserts a 'program fix' into the existing code.
One of the folders found on the Diebold ftp site was one named 'rob-georgia.' This folder contained patch files that instructed the computer to replace the existing GEMS program with another. This “patch” was not inspected nor certified prior to the 2002 election.
The voters of Washington demand the following safeguards for any electronic system that their tax dollars buy: Random inspection of computer voting machines after the election; Publication of the software code; and Paper 'ballots' given to each voter to inspect upon completion of his voting; to be then deposited in a 'backup' ballot box.