E-VOTING CODES BLOCKED FROM RELEASE + POLL

According to an article just posted on the web New York Times, the nation's largest voting machine companies have made a gesture of revealing millions of lines of code to the National Software Reference Library, but they are REFUSING to submit their proprietary source codes and copies of the software patches, updates and upgrades used to format and set up computing systems for the upcoming national elections.  (there's more...)

From the article:
"Executives at the voting machine makers said Tuesday they would not submit their most valuable data -- their proprietary source code. And they might not provide the library with copies of software patches, updates and upgrades.

Computer scientists said the conciliatory gesture wouldn't help ensure the integrity of next week's presidential election, when as many as 29 million Americans will cast electronic ballots. Some researchers worry that hackers, software bugs, ill-trained poll workers or power outages could intentionally or accidentally erase or alter voting data.

Executives from the largest equipment makers in the United States -- Election Systems & Software, Sequoia Voting Systems, Diebold Election Systems and Hart InterCivic -- announced Tuesday that they had already submitted many versions of the software that will be used to tally votes next week. The library, run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, also holds proprietary code from Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and other technology giants.

Executives acted at the request of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, a year-old federal agency created through the Help America Vote Act.

EAC Chairman DeForest Soaries Jr. acknowledged that the data was far from complete. But he said the companies' ongoing submissions could eventually make election software more transparent to computer scientists, who want ``open source'' voting software that can be independently inspected.

Scientists were pessimistic, noting that hackers could delete ballots on a particular machine without any worries that the library archives would foil them. No technology on the market today allows an election official to check software code that's already been installed and used on an individual voting machine and compare it to the software code stored in the library, noted library director Barbara Guttman.

Avi Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute of Johns Hopkins University, called the program ``meaningless.''

``At a high level, this plan sounds good,'' Rubin said. ``It reminds me of when people take security measures simply for appearance's sake -- to make you feel better. But it's not adding any real security.''"

The article:  http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Electronic-Voting-Software.html

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Department of WTF:

When you read this quote, did you share my  renewed dismay and disbelief at how f*cked up our voting integrity has become in so many precincts?:  ""No technology on the market today allows an election official to check software code that's already been installed and used on an individual voting machine and compare it to the software code stored in the library, noted library director Barbara Guttman."

I just can't believe that we have the capability to separate twins conjoined at the head, send probes to Mars, invent MRI facilities and CAT scan machines, etc.-- all these things needing elaborate and complicated software, codes, computing mechanisms, etc.-- but we have such glaring holes in our software/tech development for electronic voting.

On the one hand, one could see this coming.  Electronic machines are only starting to take the country by storm, and to be available in vast areas of the country.  Ten years ago that wasn't the case.  But ten years ago was when we would have needed people to start working on sophisticated and useful and helpful technologies to not only do the basics like conceive of electronic voting machines that could generate paper receipts, but also check codes, foil hacking, etc.

On the other hand, it is shocking that we are facing the most important election in nearly a century, millions of votes in which will be registered by machines that are easily hacked, abused, pirated, etc., and the "systems administrators" for which are refusing to make the process traceable or transparent.  Not only shocking, but incomprehensible.  How can it continue to be legal for Diebold et al. to refuse to release the proprietary code and provide copies of the patches they've installed?  Perhaps someone can explain if they read this diary.

Take the poll.