I thought it odd that the November 11, 2004
Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project (VTP) report entitled
Voting Machines and the Underestimate of the Bush Vote would focus so narrowly on justifying the discrepancy between the exit polls and the actual vote without ever mentioning that the openness to fraud of the electronic vote tabulation that they delineated in the July 2001 95 page report from the
Caltech/ MIT VTP. entitled
Voting: What Is, What Could Be.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/pdfs/VotingMachines3.pdf
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/2001/VTP_report_all.pdf
Electronic Voting and Security
Pp 45-47
We are concerned that we are moving away from these general principles that help guarantee the security and integrity of voting.
We are in an era of electronic voting. Almost two thirds of all votes in 2000 were counted using electronic tabulation, including computers, punch cards, scanners, and DREs (Direct Recording Electronic devices). Hand-counted paper, despite its advantages and wide use in Europe, is infrequently used in the U.S. Electronics are increasingly used to record votes. DRE machines require that voters generate votes and record votes electronically. Scanners and DREs are where the growth in the industry is occurring.
The computerization of election systems introduces significant security risks but also significant opportunities for fraud prevention and detection. For example, electronic transmission of vote tallies, so long as that transmission is secure, means that we do not have to have police ferrying ballots around on election night.
We see the following security risks associated with electronic voting.
First, we are losing openness. Electronic voting machines are completely closed. We can no longer observe the count.
Second, we are losing the ability for many people to be involved. Election equipment tries to do it all. A single computer system generates votes, records votes, counts votes, and produces the final tallies. Without openness, we lose the advantage of having many eyes on the count.
Third, separation of privilege is lost. We are headed toward monolithic systems--one machine that does it all. This risks vesting too much control over the system in the vendor's hands or in the hands of any hacker who can get inside of that monolithic system.
Fourth, many electronic devices lack redundancy and true audit ability. To audit a voting machine, one needs
a redundant recording of what the voter intended. There is the initial recording that the electronic machine made, but there must also be a separate recording against which the machine recording is tested-- an audit trail. The problem for many electronic devices is that their audit trails are simply another recording of what the machine recorded. Roy Saltman, a leading expert on voting technology, has long advocated that the true standard of audit ability is that the audit trail is produced by the voter and not by some intermediary machine. This is an important insight. It is the only way to guard against a fraud scheme in which the code occasionally drops votes; it also protects against machines that accidentally lose votes, say because of a power surge.
Fifth, we are losing public control over voting equipment. One worry with electronics is that they are sufficiently complex machines that administrators cannot inspect the inside of the devices. Even the independent testing authorities have difficulty completing speedy certification reviews of the hardware and software on new electronic devices owing to the increased complexity of the hardware and software.
Administrators must trust manufacturers, as must the voters. We prefer transparent voting systems where the operations are observable and verifiable by anyone.
All of these problems are solvable. We strongly believe that the principles of openness, many eyes, separation of privilege, redundancy, and public control must guide the design of electronic equipment.
First, we should move away from complex, monolithic machines. It is very difficult to design secure systems that must meet a complex set of requirements. Extreme simplicity is strongly recommended. We think that a better approach is to have a very simple electronic vote-recording device that is separate from other parts of the system. A machine used to prepare a ballot can be as complicated as one likes, and could even be used
for other things when elections are not happening, such as classroom instruction.
The vote-recoding device is the critical device in securing the vote. When the vote is recorded is the moment that the voter loses control over the vote. All of the problems of tampering emerge at this moment. If the vote recording is secure, then we can truly heighten the security of the entire system.
What must be secure are the devices that record and count, not the user interface that generates ballots. The device that records votes must be very secure. And it should not be expected to do anything other than record votes. It should be a very simple machine, nothing as complicated as a personal
computer. This suggests that the industry and administrators use separate devices for recording and for generating votes. That will be explored in the final section of this report.
Second, the source code for all vote recording and vote counting processes must be open source. The source code for the user interface can and should be proprietary, so that vendors can develop their products. There are many protocols for open source. We think REPORT OF THE CALTECH/MIT VOTING TECHNOLOGY PROJECT that a national commission consisting of experts on security from outside the voting industry, including other industries such as banking and Internet security, should determine the appropriate protocol for open
source in the voting equipment industry.
Third, all recording software should be openly audited in the same mode that is used to conduct the counts. Test" modes should be eliminated. Counting and recording devices should be "modeless." The test mode feature is a security vulnerability because it creates a way to cover a hack. To truly reclaim the openness of the count, interested parties (candidates, party organization, groups, etc.) should be allowed to inspect
the software as it is formatted for Election Day. All interested parties should be satisfied that votes will be
counted appropriately.
Fourth, equipment should be adapted so that voters can create a record of the vote that they can examine directly, for the sake of auditing equipment and elections. This might require some sort of simple paper recording that the voter can check and submit separately.
Fifth, we recommend audits of votes and equipment, even without a recount. Total votes and votes for each office and proposition should be logged on all equipment and recorded electronically. Election officials should inspect these recordings to detect irregularities on particular machines or at particular precincts. In addition, election officers, especially in larger jurisdictions, should randomly choose a small percent of the machines (say one percent) each year for thorough inspection.
Sixth, all equipment should log all events (votes, maintenance, etc.) that occur on the machine.
The information on the log should include what was done, when it was done, and who authorized the activity. The election office should keep those logs.
I began wondering why they stopped acting like a disinterested watchdog and instead began sounding like a shill for the Bush administration in their Nov. 9 report titled
Voting Machines and the Underestimate of the Bush"
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/pdfs/VotingMachines3.pdf
I find it totally baffling that an alleged impartial scientist investigation would end their report with a citation that would be more appropriately used by a political spindoctor:
"The following exchange between a questioner in an on-line chat and Steve Coll, Managing Editor of the Washington Post, sums up the problem nicely:
Q: Is anyone going to correlate exit-poll errors with precincts that use the new electronic voting machines to see if there's a pattern, to wit: in precincts where there's no paper trail and no way of conducting a recount, Bush outdid expectations; in other precincts, results more or less matched exit polls? I'm not saying this is the case, but as someone who felt slimed by Florida in 2000, I'd like someone to pause long enough (it's less than 24 hours after the polls closed!) to make sure we're not seeing another stolen election. I'd rather not have to wait until Jeffrey Toobin's next book to discover I've been slimed again.
A: Well, I don't want to write off legitimate questions about the integrity of the voting system. But turn the question around: Which is more likely -- that an exit polling system that has been consistently wrong and troubled turned out to be wrong and troubled again, or that a vast conspiracy carried out by scores and scores of county and state election officials was successfully carried off to distort millions of American votes? I think the Kerry campaign concluded that the former is what happened. But we'll keep our eyes open for hard evidence of abuse, and we won't be afraid to investigate if we see something significant."
Surely the Caltech/MIT VTP doesn't stand by the following statement "Which is more likely -- that an exit polling system that has been consistently wrong and troubled turned out to be wrong and troubled again, or that a vast conspiracy carried out by scores and scores of county and state election officials was successfully carried off to distort millions of American votes?" As far as I know the first significant instance of a disparity between actual results and exit polls, which are often used to verify the legitimacy of elections in many nations, came in the scandalous 2000 Florida presidential election tally that was a big part of the impetus for the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). Further, the premise that the alternative to inaccurate exit polls is "a vast conspiracy" goes against everything I cited above on Pp. 45-45 of the Caltech/MIT VTP Report of July, 2001, particularly their following statements, "Almost two thirds of all votes in 2000 were counted using electronic tabulation, including computers, punch cards, scanners, and DREs (Direct Recording Electronic devices). Hand-counted paper, despite its advantages and wide use in Europe, is infrequently used in the U.S. Electronics are increasingly used to record votes. DRE machines require that voters generate votes and record votes electronically. Scanners and DREs are where the growth in the industry is occurring." and "Third, separation of privilege is lost. We are headed toward monolithic systems--one machine that does it all. This risks vesting too much control over the system in the vendor's hands or in the hands of any hacker who can get inside of that monolithic system."
By citing these unsupportable contentions in their conclusion as if it were true, the Caltech/MIT report knowingly presents wholesale opinions of a newspaper editor that Caltech/MIT would never dare make themselves and presents them as supported by scientific fact.
These conclusions of the Voting Machines and the Underestimate of the Bush Vote are further contradicted by the November 10, 2004 study, The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy, by Dr. Steven Freeman, which concludes that "the election's unexplained exit poll discrepancies make (vote fraud) an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is the responsibility of media, academia, polling agencies and the public to investigate."
The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy, by Dr. Steven Freeman
http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/11/The_unexplained_exit_poll_discrepancy_v00k.pdf
The recent Caltech/MIT VTP report made me curious to see if perhaps the people controlling Caltech/MIT VTP might have had a vested interest in invalidating the discrepancies between the exit polls and the actual vote. Running some Google searches I came up with the following connections of the presidents of Caltech and MIT to the Bush administration and the right-wing owned electronic voting machine companies.
David Baltimore and Howard Ahmanson Jr
http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12380.html
Caltech to Renovate Historic Dabney Hall
PASADENA, Calif. -- The elegant but aged Dabney Hall of the Humanities at the California Institute of Technology will be renovated this year, thanks in part to funding from the Ahmanson Foundation. Adjacent to the university's chemistry, math, and physics departments, Dabney Hall bridges the humanities and sciences, both physically and figuratively, on Caltech's campus.
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The project donors to date include the Ahmanson Foundation, Caltech alumnus Martin D. Gray, BS '71 engineering and applied science, Caltech staff member Evelyn J. Cederbaum, and Dabney family members Tom and Diane Kettering.
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The project includes renovation of Millikan Library where staff and administrators will move to from Dabney; the total cost is $12 million.
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The renovations will "not only help reclaim the beauty of an extraordinary building invigorate the humanities for students through space enlivened by study, research, lectures, and performance" said Caltech's president David Baltimore".
A longtime friend of Caltech, the Ahmanson Foundation has supported the Institute's capital projects, student financial aid, and endowment for academic research and a humanities fellowship. The foundation concentrates its funding on cultural projects supporting the arts, education at the collegiate and precollegiate levels, medicine and delivery of health care services, specialized library collections, and programs related to homelessness. Most of the foundation's philanthropy is directed toward organizations in the Los Angeles area.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
In the early 1980s, brothers Bob and Todd Urosevich founded ES&S's originator, Data Mark. The brothers Urosevich obtained financing from the far-Right Ahmanson family in 1984, which purchased a 68% ownership stake, according to the Omaha World Herald. After brothers William and Robert Ahmanson infused Data Mark with new capital, the name was changed to American Information Systems (AIS). California newspapers have long documented the Ahmanson family's ties to right-wing evangelical Christian and Republican circles.
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According to Group Watch, in the 1980s Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr. was a member of the highly secretive far-Right Council for National Policy, an organization that included Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, Major General John K. Singlaub and other Iran-Contra scandal notables, as well as former Klan members like Richard Shoff. Ahmanson, heir to a savings and loan fortune, is little reported on in the mainstream U.S. press. But, English papers like The Independent are a bit more forthcoming on Ahmanson's politics.
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Bob Urosevich was the Programmer and CEO at AIS, before being replaced by Hagel. Bob now heads Diebold Election Systems and his brother Todd is a top executive at ES&S. Bob created Diebold's original electronic voting machine software. Thus, the brothers Urosevich, originally funded by the far Right, figure in the counting of approximately 80% of electronic voting in the United States".
An in-depth study of the role Howard Ahmanson Jr in national and California politics can be found at:
http://www.politicalamazon.com/cr-ahmanson.html
Charles M. Vest and the Bush Administration
http://foi.missouri.edu/controls/vezner.doc
Pp. 25-28
Dr. Postol, saying the POET report's conclusions were "false and unsupported," asked for an investigation by the institute on April 26, 2001. He approached Charles M. Vest, M.I.T.'s President; one year later, he approached Alexander V. D'Arbeloff, chairman of the M.I.T. corporation, saying Dr. Vest had failed to investigate "a serious case of scientific fraud."
An investigation was done by Dr. Edward F. Crawly, a professor in charge of the school's department of aeronautics and astronautics, on April 12, 2002. Dr. Crawly concluded that, "Not only do I find no evidence of research misconduct, but I also find no credible evidence of technical error."
Dr. Postol rebutted by pointing out that the GAO report faulted the Lincoln report for relying on data processed by TRW, instead of seeking the contractor's raw data. "Either there's a serious problem with the G.A.O. report, which needs to be corrected, or Lincoln Laboratory could be involved at the highest levels of management in covering up fraud," Postol said".
On Nov 4, 2002, Dr. Crawley reversed himself, revised his report, and recommended a full investigation. He did not say why he changed his mind. M.I.T. refused to give Dr. Postol a copy of the final Crawley report.
Recent actions by the institute may indicate an attempt to conceal evidence of criminal violations of federally funded research at the M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory," Postol sated, alleging that M.I.T.'s highest officials were trying to conceal evidence to protect the reputation of Lincoln Laboratory, the university's top source of federal financing.
Dr. Postol also contended that President Vest was hopelessly conflicted, due to the fact that he now sits on the White House council of science advisers and "knows that the missile defense system won't work and that his own organization has lied about its capabilities."
Military and some institute officials have long criticized Dr. Postol's focus on the TRW case, saying it is irrelevant today.
But Dr. Postol said the TRW case opened one of the few public windows on antimissile feasibility. "It's absolutely relevant - it goes to the heart of whether this system has any chance of working," he is quoted as saying in a Jan. 2003 New York Times article(8).
Even more relevant because on Dec. 17, 2002, President Bush announced the ground-based weapon would star in the nation's first antimissile system to be built in a quarter century.
An estimated $60 billion system that not only violates the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, but whose testing has been strictly internalized and shielded from the public. All information about this defensive system that has reached the public has been trivialized and outright distorted by organizations with financial stakes in its continued development - organizations that are the sole overseers and definers of all data relating to the project's success or failure. Such a process is hardly rare where the U.S. military is concerned; without internal whistle blowers - which in the case of missile defense have had their findings investigated and even classified by the Pentagon - there would be no outlet for information to reach the public regarding these expensive and politically sensitive programs".
Even congress - the legislative body responsible for funding the project - has been kept largely in the dark about the missile defense program's viability... though lately, with President Bush's recent push to accelerate and implement the program before election year 2004, there have been a few voices raised in protest, which shall be outlined below.
You can get an abbreviated version of this affair at:
http://smirkingchimp.com/viewtopic.php?topic=1091&forum...
M.I.T. Physicist Says Pentagon Is Trying to Silence Him
By JAMES DAO
WASHINGTON, July 26 - A leading critic of the military's missile defense testing program has accused the Pentagon of trying to silence him and intimidate his employer, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by investigating him for disseminating classified documents.
The case has raised questions about whether a document can be considered secret if it is widely available to the public. And it has touched off a dispute between the critic, Theodore A. Postol, and M.I.T. over how to balance academic freedom with the university's obligations to cooperate with Pentagon investigators.
At issue is correspondence between Dr. Postol, a physicist, and the General Accounting Office, an investigative branch of Congress, in which he accused the Pentagon of using doctored data to defend missile defense technology.
Dr. Postol said his conclusions had been based on an unclassified report, which he disseminated over the Internet and can now be downloaded from Web sites around the world, including one in Russia.
But after Dr. Postol began distributing the report last year, the Pentagon determined that it contained secret information. This month, Defense Department investigators asked M.I.T. officials to stop Dr. Postol from disseminating that information and to confiscate the document from him.
The university has not done so. But in an e-mail message to Dr. Postol on Monday, Charles M. Vest, the university president, said M.I.T. might be required to ``move forward with at least the initial steps'' ordered by Defense Security Service, a Pentagon agency. Dr. Postol provided a copy of that message to The New York Times.
``They are basically threatening M.I.T. that it will lose its contract to run this big laboratory if they don't abide by these demands,'' Dr. Postol said in an interview.
The institute operates the Lincoln Laboratory at Hanscom Air Force Base in Lexington, Mass., under contract with the Defense Department to do research into missile defense, weather forecasting, military surveillance and other sophisticated technologies. The lab's contract with the Pentagon was worth $319 million last year.
M.I.T. officials declined to speculate today on whether Dr. Vest would cooperate with the Pentagon's requests. But Dr. Vest issued a written statement that raised questions about the investigation of Dr. Postol.
``While M.I.T. certainly abides by the laws that protect national security, we also believe that the legitimate tools of classification of secrets should not be misused to limit responsible debate,'' the statement said. ``Trying to treat widely available public information as `secret' is a particular concern.''
Pentagon officials declined to discuss details of their investigation. But Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, argued that the department was obligated to stop Dr. Postol from disseminating potentially damaging information, even if it was readily available.
``Just because it is made public doesn't mean it's declassified,'' Colonel Lehner said.
Dr. Postol agreed that the information was potentially damaging, but only because it showed that the Pentagon was far from developing effective antimissile weapons.
For years, Dr. Postol has argued that the Pentagon's prototype antimissile system could not distinguish between decoys and enemy warheads. He has joined forces with an engineer, Nira Schwartz, who has accused her former employer, TRW, a military contractor, of faking tests and evaluations of the technology to make it appear more successful than it was.
The latest dispute arose when the Pentagon hired five scientists, including two from M.I.T.'s Lincoln Laboratory, to review TRW's technology in the wake of Dr. Schwartz's accusations. The resulting report disputed Dr. Schwartz's assertions and has been used to defend the missile defense program on Capitol Hill.
But Dr. Postol, who in the 1990's successfully challenged the effectiveness of Patriot missiles in the Persian Gulf war, analyzed the report and concluded it had distorted data to make it appear that available technology could reliably distinguish warheads from decoys. In fact, Dr. Postol contends, that technology does not yet exist.
The Pentagon and TRW have denied that assertion.
Dr. Postol first raised concerns about the Pentagon report in a letter to the White House last year. Not long after, the Pentagon determined that officials had inadvertently not removed classified information from the report before releasing it, including the tables and diagrams Dr. Postol has used to attack the testing program.
But Dr. Postol, who has done work for the Pentagon and stands to lose his security clearance, contends that the Pentagon's actions smack of a cover-up. He has recruited supporters in Congress. el3 Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Government Reform, has asked the Pentagon to review Dr. Postol's accusations about the report. Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, has asked the General Accounting Office to study the Defense Department's classification policy.
``The question that naturally arises is whether such a policy really protects national security or whether it merely serves to stifle the ability of Dr. Postol to communicate his views,'' Mr. Markey asks in a letter sent to the accounting office today.p>
In conclusion, the November 11, 2004 Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project (VTP) report entitled Voting Machines and the Underestimate of the Bush Vote is at odds in both spirit and philosophy with July 2001 95 page report from the Caltech/ MIT VTP entitled Voting: What Is, What Could Be. Further both university presidents and their universities themselves have vested interests in supporting the perception that John Kerry was not victimized by electronic voting machines or electronic tabulation fraud. Clearly they should be not be using the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project for partisan purposes but evidence suggests that is exactly what they are doing.