History was made this week! For the first time in four election cycles, Democrats are not attacking the Diebold Corp. the day after the election, accusing it of rigging its voting machines. I guess Diebold has finally been vindicated...
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=17952
Liberal newspaper headlines:
Problems with new voting machines scattered, minor
Wednesday, November 08, 2006 By Gabrielle Banks and Dennis B. Roddy, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
electionline.org tags the week's events:
Electionline Weekly: Widespread glitches, snafus and fender-benders, but few major meltdowns
few major meltdowns keep thinking that and you'll believe all those machine malfunctions across the country produced accurate votes... nothing to investigate here... move on...
Huh? What's this from electionline.org weekly report?
PENNSYLVANIA Kat Zambon
Despite machine failures and late openings at the polls, voting problems seemed to affect relatively few of the 462,831 voters who cast ballots in Allegheny County, Pa., home to Pittsburgh and some very close contests for Congress and the state house.
Revisiting the past...
article | posted July 29, 2004 (August 16, 2004 issue) How They Could Steal the Election This Time
Ronnie Dugger
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040816/dugger
(via electionline.org link) Computer World posits:
November 9, 2006 Voting Technology: Is 'vote flipping' an e-voting problem or user error? Do e-voting machines mistakenly give votes to the wrong candidates? Todd R. Weiss
Verified Voting's David Dill back in 2004... the risk of a stolen election is extremely high...
In Another Rigged Election? The Elephant in the Voting Booth by Maureen Farrell, Buzzflash November 9th, 2004
...But, while hacking is not the sort of activity that's readily caught on tape, old-fashioned ballot pilfering is and photos of possible nefarious activity in Ohio made their way to the Internet Wednesday morning. But larger questions of fraud centered mostly on inconsistencies in electronic voting machines -- discrepancies that many had come to expect.
Stanford computer specialist David Dill, for example, told Newsweek that the risk of a stolen election was "extremely high," while exit polls raised suspicions that Zogby and the Washington Redskins had gotten it right after all.
http://www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org/article.php?id=5274
Black Box Voting Blues
Electronic ballot technology makes things easy. But some computer-security experts warn of the possibility of stolen elections By Steven Levy Newsweek Nov. 3 issue
Let's track whether now the Democrats have won big vote flipping will become evidence of a "stolen" election, or anything will.
Meanwhile...
Stanford University computer science professor David L. Dill, who founded the nonprofit Verified Voting Foundation and VerifiedVoting.org, has been looking at vote flipping and yesterday called for investigations to determine if there is a real issue. Dill rejected one theory -- that the problem is a conspiracy to defraud voters of their votes and give the election to the opposition. Once a voter picks a candidate, a review screen shows who they voted for. That ability to review the vote before it is ultimately cast, he said, makes it less likely that fraud is involved.
"It seems to me if you were trying to commit fraud, you wouldn't show [the ballot] to the voter," he said.
Oh wait, Dr. David Dill said in 2004...
In the past few months, the computer- security community has been increasingly vocal on the problems of DRE terminals. “I think the risk [of a stolen election] is extremely high,” says David Dill, a Stanford computer scientist.
In 2006, Dill rejects a conspiracy to defraud voters of their votes and give the election to the opposition.
OK, we don't really have the full remarks of Dill back in 2004.
Maybe Dill really didn't believe the risk of a stolen election being extremely high back in 2004 was any kind of support for the idea of a conspiracy back in 2004 to steal the election. Because now in 2006, Dill rejects a conspiracy to defraud voters of their votes and give the election to the opposition.
Tracking...
As well, Dr. David Dill is on to what... if you were trying to commit fraud, you wouldn't show the ballot to the voter.
Oh my. Why not?
Why not show the voter the ballot exactly as the ballot is cast, and why not even give the voter "proof" of his/her vote in the form of a so-called pin-number the voter can check?
To remedy the problem, technologists and allies are rallying around a scheme called verifiable voting. This supplements electronic voting systems with a print-out that affirms the voter’s choices. The printout goes immediately into a secure lockbox. If there’s a need for a recount, the paper ballots are tallied...
Critics of verifiable voting do have a point when they note that the printouts are susceptible to some of the same kinds of tricks once played with paper ballots. But there’s a promise of more elegant solutions for electronic voting that are private, verifiable and virtually tamperproof. Mathematician David Chaum has been working on an ingenious scheme based on encrypted receipts. But whatever we wind up using, it’s time for politicians to start listening to the geeks. They start from the premise that democracy deserves no less than the best election technology possible, so that the vote of every citizen will count. Can anyone possibly argue with that?
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3339650/
Meanwhile...
At least one other e-voting expert, Avi Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and director of Accurate, an election research center, said the only way to know for sure if votes are being placed for one candidate and given by machines to another is by having paper records of every ballot cast.
"My big worry is that we cannot ever say conclusively whether or not [vote-flipping] happens" due to software glitches, tainted code, machine rigging or other tampering, if there is no paper record, Rubin said. "Whether it happens or not, we won't know it happens."
By having paper records, actual vote totals can be later checked against the vote tallies in e-voting machines to ensure the integrity of an election, he said. "Recounts are then possible," he said.
Has no one but Net the Truth Online considered that additional machine votes can be internally manufactured? In other words, so what if real voters who show up check their paper record and later during a recount all match up.
We will never ever know how many ballots cast were cast by actual real voters and how many were cast by a software program that grabs unused registered-voters' names from the electronic polling book and casts votes for the unused name.
Seriously people, many of these experts are just not thinking like reverse-psychology, diabolical planners of the New World Order.
If you wanted people to believe there is no tampering, you would show them the voter-verified paper record matches the electronic machine's screen.
It's called Psy Ops.
Of course, you'd first create the "need" for whatever it is you really want the people to really want...
like malfunctioning of electronic voting machines (only those that don't have the voter verified paper record) during a couple of highly watched elections (razor-thin close elections, mind you)... well, you get the idea.
Q: How are vote totals tabulated in electronic voting systems
http://www.votingmachinesprocon.org/questions/tabulation.htm
November 22, 2004 Electronic Voting systems A Report for the National Research Council
http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/files/project_evoting_vvf.pdf
Making Democracy Transparent David Dill March 07, 2006
David Dill is a professor of computer science at Stanford University and founder and board director of the Verified Voting Foundation. In 2004 he recieved the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Pioneer Award" for "spearheading and nurturing the popular movement for integrity and transparency in modern elections."
Public trust in our elections is eroding. While the general public still seems to accept election results, there is an undercurrent of bitterness that has grown tremendously over the last few years. There is a rapidly expanding body of literature on the Internet about the "stolen election of 2004," and several books on election fraud have recently been written. More are in the works.
Theories of widespread election fraud are highly debatable, to say the least. Some people enjoy that debate. I do not. It encourages a sense of hopelessness and consumes energy that could instead be focused on long-term changes that could give us elections we can trust.
The election fraud debate frames the problem incorrectly. The question should not be whether there is widespread election fraud. It should be: "Why should we trust the results of elections?" It's not good enough that election results be accurate. We have to know they are accurate—and we don't.
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/03/07/making_democracy_transparent.php
http://www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org/article.php?id=6345
Amy Goodman (and guests) on the Election
Next up: David Dill, the Stanford Computer Scientist who runs VerifiedVoting.org, a group opposing paperless touchscreen voting machines.
He says he got into it because as a computer scientist he knew that computers were no way to run an election, but as he learned more and more about how we vote in America, he realized the system was rotten almost to the core. He hasn’t seen clear proof this election was stolen but he doesn’t think we can be confident that it wasn’t. As you know, paperless electronic voting machines — which were used in Ohio — can be used to steal the election undetectably.
Even with paper printouts though, he thinks that the optical scan ballots (where you fill out your vote like a standardized test and feed it to a machine which verifies it’s valid and counts it) are much better than computer voting — and much cheaper too.
Why do election officials like touchscreen machines? Well, because it’s so easy to do recounts: just press a button and the computer spits out the same results as it did last time. (The audience laughs.) It’s not a joke — these people really hate the pressure of being watched by the whole world while they recount the ballots; not being able to do a recount really makes things easier for them...
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001464
quote by Dill which indeed states potential attackers who might seek to fix elections include "hackers, candidates, zealots, foreign governments and criminal organizations":
article | posted July 29, 2004 (August 16, 2004 issue) How They Could Steal the Election This Time Ronnie Dugger
...According to Dr. David Dill, professor of computer science at Stanford, all elections conducted on DREs "are open to question." Challenging those who belittle the danger of fraud, Dill says that with trillions of dollars at stake in the battle for control of Congress and the presidency, potential attackers who might seek to fix elections include "hackers, candidates, zealots, foreign governments and criminal organizations," and "local officials can't stop it."
Last fall during a public talk on "The Voting Machine War" for advanced computer-science students at Stanford, Dill asked, "Why am I always being asked to prove these systems aren't secure? The burden of proof ought to be on the vendor. You ask about the hardware. 'Secret.' The software? 'Secret.' What's the cryptography? 'Can't tell you because that'll compromise the secrecy of the machines.'... Federal testing procedures? 'Secret'! Results of the tests? 'Secret'! Basically we are required to have blind faith."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040816/dugger
Dill in 2006 rejects a conspiracy to defraud voters of their votes and give the election to the opposition.
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