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Michael E. Marotta

Oct 20 2008, 05:29 AM

This came up in "Humor" actually, regarding the ACORN cartoon. I stated there why I believe that the voting process is fundamentally sound. Given that, we also know that elections are political events and therefore subject to force and fraud.

QUOTE

Q&A: E-Voting Security Results 'Awful,' Says Ohio Secretary of State"
Computerworld (10/08/08) ; Friedman, Brad

Ohio voters who do not trust touch-screen systems to properly record their votes will be given the option of a paper ballot thanks to a policy dictated by the results of Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner's Evaluation & Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Standards, & Testing (EVEREST) analysis, which uncovered "critical security failures" in every system evaluated by teams of both corporate and academic computer scientists and security specialists. Brunner says in an interview that the results of the EVEREST tests exceeded her worst expectations. "When I finally saw the results of our [EVEREST] tests, I thought I was going to throw up," she says. "I didn't think it would be that bad. And it was--it was awful." Vote dropping was observed in the tabulators of systems manufactured by Diebold's Premier Elections Solutions subsidiary. At the federal level, voting systems have to be certified as an entire end-to-end unit, and certification by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) requires companies to submit every piece of hardware and software to a single unit in order that tests can ascertain whether they all function together without problems. The EAC recently overhauled its certification process, but Brunner calls the process "very cumbersome." She notes that Ohio's boards of elections are instructed to tally the votes by hand if necessary, and sees value in such a practice, at least as a pilot program. "I'm not so sure I'd want to experiment during the presidential elections," Brunner says

http://www.computerworld.com/action/articl...ticleId=9116465

Michael Stuart Kelly

Oct 20 2008, 07:16 AM

There is a common sense thing with Brunner that she simply didn't get and I think it is going to impact her career considerably.

If there is a threat to the voting process, the common sense thing is to take ALL reasonable measures for checking. I learned a long time ago that two pairs of eyes were better than one (or worse, none). If there are indications of voter registration fraud and Brunner's people do not have the time or structure to check it, frankly it's stupid to not allow another proper government agency to do it and depend solely on the checks on voting day.

All the hairsplitting in the world will not erase this image I now have of her and I, personally, would not support her for dog-catcher. She's a professional bureaucrat in the worst possible meaning of the word.

Voter fraud happens and the first step in the process is voter registration fraud. That is certainly nothing to ignore or treat lightly.

Going into a bank with a gang bearing guns is not the same thing as armed robbery, but it is the first step you have to do if you want to hold it up. Once the guns come out, it's too late for anybody to use common sense prevention.

Wearing a Mickey Mouse mask would simply be arrogance in believing nobody will do anything about it until the guns come out.

Michael

Michael E. Marotta

Oct 22 2008, 03:34 PM

QUOTE(Michael Stuart Kelly @ Oct 20 2008, 09:16 AM)

There is a common sense thing with Brunner that she simply didn't get ...

She is a Democrat in a Republican administration, the mirror image of Michigan's Terry Lynn Land, the GOP SOS within the Democratic Admnistration.

Also, the president of Diebold gave a lot of money to the Bush Campaign before the propriety of that became news.

In addition, if you click on various searches framing the problem, you will see that electronic voting does have detractors who warn. You can find a YouTube video on how to hack the Michigan machines without damaging the SOS lead seal. On the other hand (as many as an octopus, if needed), our county clerk here, Larry Kestenbaum is a Democrat. He and I met a decade ago on the Political Forum BBS of Bill Sederburg, our (Republican) state senator. Larry looked into electronic voting back then and decided that it was better than paper ballots -- and we know that those were compromisable, of course.

After the 2000 elections, the United Nations took an interest in American elections, which, typically did not seem to need such oversight. In 2004, UN observers were posted in some precincts, but this is a very large country.

Brant Gaede

Oct 22 2008, 09:30 PM

The strongest argument for the US electoral system is that voter fraud can be restricted to one state as opposed to the whole country. Fraud can give a candidate Illinois, but not necessarily the election. Pure popular vote and the fraud can be massive in a few areas not state specific and the election won by the guy who actually lost. To counter fraud now one can concentrate on this state and/or that state, but what are you going to do if one candidate gets 50,000,000 votes and another 49,000,000 but the "winning" candidate benefited from 2,000,000 fradulent votes from throughout the country or some geek hacking into voting computer tabulations? There is a big difference from re-examining the votes from one or two states and all 50.

--Brant

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