August 01, 2004

The Nation: How They Could Steal the Election This Time

The Zogby polling data released 7/30 (reflecting conditions prior to the Democratic Convention) indicates that Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mekong Delta) has taken back about 75% of the vote that went for the shell-of-a-man-formerly known-as-Ralph-Nader in 2000. That's enouraging because every vote counts, but every vote might not get counted, so it is important not to throw any votes away. But, of course, having the shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Ralph Nader on the ballot at all provides them with a plausible place to park electronic votes for Kerry that they want to lose...Look for a "surge" in the polls from the shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Ralph-Nader, they will claim it is because JFK is "for the war," which is a LIE propagated sadly and embarrasingly by the "left" as much as by the "right." And, if you have read the LNS for some time, you know the LNS denounced JFK for his vote on Iraq, but we also know neither Gore nor JFK would have gone into Iraq...and that is the bottom line...if the shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Ralph-Nader really understand or cared (either it is one or the other, either he does not understand or he does not care) he would be throwing himself and his adherents into the struggle over black box voting and other election fraud and disenfranchisement issues not jeaporadizing the only chance we have of preventing the Bush cabal from naming the next two or three Supreme Court Justices, probably including the Chief Justice...a vote for the shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Ralph-Nader is a vote for Chief Justice Scalia, even a signature on a petition to put the shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Ralph-Nader on the ballot is a vote for Chief Justice Scalia...the shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Ralph-Nader got 100K votes in Fraudida, and 14K votes in New Hampshire, even if only half of those voters had voted for Gore, the 900+ US soldiers would not have died in Iraq and the US would not have a multi-trillion Federal deficit. The shell-of-a-man-formerly known-as-Ralph-Nader said there was no difference between a vot efor Gore and a vote for Bush, now he is running on Republican money and getting on the ballot through Republican field organizations..."In a two-way trial heat between the Republican and Democratic Presidential candidates, among registered voters, Sen. John Kerry/Sen. John Edwards lead President George Bush/Vice President Dick Cheney 52-44 percent, according to the latest Newsweek Poll, conducted Thursday and Friday. In a three-way race with the Ralph Nader/Peter Camejo ticket added, Kerry/Edwards receives 49 percent of the vote; Bush/Cheney, 42 percent and Nader/Camejo, 3 percent, the poll shows." Do you understand? There is not even any room this year for voting for the shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Ralph-Nader in "safe states." There are none now...If we lived under a parlimentary system, the LNS would be Green, be we don't...If we did not labor under the Electoral College, the LNS might be Green, but we do..."Let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."

Ronnie Dugger, The Nation: The United States therefore
faces the likelihood that about three out of ten of
the votes in the national election this November will
be unverifiable, unauditable and unrecountable. The
private election companies and local and state
election officials, when required to carry out
recounts of elections conducted inside the DREs, will
order the computers to spit out second printouts of
the vote totals and the computers' wholly electronic,
fakable "audit trail." The companies and most of the
election officials will then tell the voters that the
second printouts are "recounts" that prove the
vote-counting was "100 percent accurate," even though
a second printout is not a recount.

Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election,
Show Up for Democray in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)


This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040816&s=dugger


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How They Could Steal the Election This Time
by RONNIE DUGGER

[from the August 16, 2004 issue]

On November 2 millions of Americans will cast their
votes for President in computerized voting systems
that can be rigged by corporate or local-election
insiders. Some 98 million citizens, five out of every
six of the roughly 115 million who will go to the
polls, will consign their votes into computers that
unidentified computer programmers, working in the main
for four private corporations and the officials of
10,500 election jurisdictions, could program to
invisibly falsify the outcomes.

The result could be the failure of an American
presidential election and its collapse into
suspicions, accusations and a civic fury that will
make Florida 2000 seem like a family spat in the
kitchen. Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary,
has written, "Automated voting machines will be easily
rigged, with no paper trails to document abuses."
Senator John Kerry told Florida Democrats last March,
"I don't think we ought to have any vote cast in
America that cannot be traced and properly recounted."
Pointing out in a recent speech at the NAACP
convention that "a million African-Americans were
disenfranchised in the last election," Kerry says his
campaign is readying 2,000 lawyers to "challenge any
place in America where you cannot trace the vote and
count the votes" [see Greg Palast, "Vanishing Votes,"
May 17].

The potential for fraud and error is daunting. About
61 million of the votes in November, more than half
the total, will be counted in the computers of one
company, the privately held Election Systems and
Software (ES&S) of Omaha, Nebraska. Altogether, nearly
100 million votes will be counted in computers
provided and programmed by ES&S and three other
private corporations: British-owned Sequoia Voting
Systems of Oakland, California, whose touch-screen
voting equipment was rejected as insecure against
fraud by New York City in the 1990s; the
Republican-identified company Diebold Election Systems
of McKinney, Texas, whose machines malfunctioned this
year in a California election; and Hart InterCivic of
Austin, one of whose principal investors is Tom Hicks,
who helped make George W. Bush a millionaire.

About a third of the votes, 36 million, will be
tabulated completely inside the new paperless,
direct-recording-electronic (DRE) voting systems, on
which you vote directly on a touch-screen. Unlike
receipted transactions at the neighborhood ATM,
however, you get no paper record of your vote. Since,
as a government expert says, "the ballot is embedded
in the voting equipment," there is no voter-marked
paper ballot to be counted or recounted. Voting on the
DRE, you never know, despite what the touch-screen
says, whether the computer is counting your vote as
you think you are casting it or, either by error or
fraud, it is giving it to another candidate. No one
can tell what a computer does inside itself by looking
at it; an election official "can't watch the bits
inside," says Dr. Peter Neumann, the principal
scientist at the Computer Science Laboratory of SRI
International and a world authority on computer-based
risks.

The four major election corporations count votes with
voting-system source codes. These are kept strictly
secret by contract with the local jurisdictions and
states using the machines. That secrecy makes it next
to impossible for a candidate to examine the source
code used to tabulate his or her own contest. In
computer jargon a "trapdoor" is an opening in the code
through which the program can be corrupted. David
Stutsman, an Indiana lawyer whose suits in the 1980s
exposed a trapdoor that was being used by the nation's
largest election company at that time, puts it well:
"The secrecy of the ballot has been turned into the
secrecy of the vote count."

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."

The integrity of the vote-counting inside DREs depends
on audit logs and reports they print out, but as
Neumann says, these are "not real audit trails"
because they are themselves riggable. The DREs
randomly store three to seven complete sets of alleged
duplicates of each voter's ballot, and sets of these
images can be printed out after the election and
manually counted. The companies claim that satisfies
the requirement in the 2002 Help America Vote Act
(HAVA) that "a manual audit capacity" must be
available. But as informed computer scientists
unanimously agree, if the first set of ballot images
is corrupted, they all are. I asked Robert Boram, the
chief engineer who invented a DRE sold by the RF Shoup
voting-systems company, if he could rig his DRE's
three sets of ballot images. "Give me a month," he
replied.

The United States therefore faces the likelihood that
about three out of ten of the votes in the national
election this November will be unverifiable,
unauditable and unrecountable. The private election
companies and local and state election officials, when
required to carry out recounts of elections conducted
inside the DREs, will order the computers to spit out
second printouts of the vote totals and the computers'
wholly electronic, fakable "audit trail." The
companies and most of the election officials will then
tell the voters that the second printouts are
"recounts" that prove the vote-counting was "100
percent accurate," even though a second printout is
not a recount.

HAVA was supposed to solve election problems revealed
in 2000; instead, it has made the situation worse.
Under the act the Election Assistance Commission
(EAC), appointed by President Bush, is supposed to set
standards for the vote-counting process, but four
months before the election the new agency had only
seven full-time staff members. On June 17 the EAC sent
$861 million to twenty-five states, mainly to buy
computerized machines for which no new technical
standards have been set. Its just-appointed
fifteen-member technical standards committee does not
include more than one leading critic of computerized
vote-counting.

Rather than completely testing the vote-counting
codes, there is some secretive testing of systems by
three private companies that are chosen by the
pro-voting-business National Association of State
Election Directors. The companies consult obsolete
pro-company and completely voluntary standards
promulgated by the Federal Election Commission and get
paid by the very companies whose equipment is being
tested. The three private companies, speciously called
Independent Testing Authorities, together constitute a
Potemkin village to falsely assure the states and the
voters of the security of the systems. Often their
work is misrepresented as "federal testing." The
states then test and "certify" the systems, and the
local jurisdictions put on dog-and-pony-show "logic
and accuracy tests," which are not capable of
discovering hidden codes that would change vote
totals.

"The system is much more out of control than anyone
here may be willing to admit," Dr. Michael Shamos, a
computer scientist at Carnegie-Mellon University and
for many years an examiner of voting machines for
Texas and Pennsylvania, told a House panel on June 24.
"There's virtually no control over how software enters
a voting machine." Shamos told another House panel on
July 20, "There are no adequate standards for voting
machines, nor any effective testing protocols."

Hackable computer codes control vote-counting in all
three kinds of computerized systems that will be used
again in the 2004 elections: the ballotless DREs, on
which some 36 million will vote; optical-scan systems
that electronically tally paper ballots marked by the
voters, on which 40 million people will vote; and
punch-card ballots, also tabulated by computerized
card-readers, which gained notoriety in 2000 and are
still used by 22 million voters. (Another 16 million
still vote on the old lever machines, about a million
on hand-counted paper ballots.)

Florida 2000 was universally misunderstood and
mischaracterized in the press as a crisis of hanging
chads on the punch-card ballots. The serious issue,
then as now, was embodied in the explicit though all
but unreported position that James Baker, George W.
Bush's field commander in Florida, staked out to stop
the recounting of votes. The computerized
vote-counting systems, Baker declared, are "precision
machinery" that both count and recount votes more
accurately than people do. Now, with Senator Kerry
demanding recountability, an ominously intensifying
partisan split has developed in Washington over
whether to have a voter-verified paper trail and, when
necessary, to conduct recounts with it.



Posted by richard at August 1, 2004 01:06 PM