No fraud happened in 2004
Bush won fair and square. Kerry was correct to concede. Electronic voting was not used in all precincts. We lost the election because of values, gays, deaniacs, feminazis, Moveon, Greenpeace, Nader... take your pick. But we were not cheated. There is absolutely no proof of cheating.
There. I said it. Can we move on now ? Can we be proactive and DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE PITIFUL VOTING TECHNOLOGY WE HAVE ? Can we ignore the tinfoil elephant in the room and forget fraud for a minute ?
On June 24, 2005, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) released Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) for public comment. If adopted, the guidelines will become effective in October 2006.
Our current voting system is NOT secure enough for a post 9/11 world
The current voluntary standard is from 1990 and predates palm pilots, wireless computing, the World Wide Web and Al Qaeda terrorism
Please review and comment the 2006 standards
The biggest irony of all: US has excellent system design standards
Few people who work with Quality Control have not heard of ISO-9000, the standard for quality. Major manufacturers such as GM, Intel, Motorola, Kraft and others all hold their suppliers to strict quality standards of which the most popular is ISO-9000.
Why bother with standards ?
Because standards make sure a supplier has good quality products and that the quality of those products STAYS GOOD consistently.
For software one of the more commonly adopted is Carnegie Mellon University's SEI - Software Engineering Institute standard for software quality. But there are several others, including ISO 9000-3. A comprehensive list can be found here
No mandatory voting standard
Needless to say Diebold and Triad systems do NOT qualify for any of those software standards. There is no mandatory standard they are subject to. Strange considering that the government (DoD) usually requires SEI compliance for it's mission critical software systems. Isn't voting mission critical ?
What is the problem with electronic voting ?
Suppose, for instance that on election day we have a 2 hour blackout like we had in August 2003. A blackout usually comes together with brownouts and spikes on the electricity that is being fed to all computers that are plugged in and turned on. Including the voting machine and tabulator computers. If there is not protection, some of those computers can be on the fritz. And their hard drives can be damaged too.
The dog ate my votes
If a computer glitch or a power failure happens, where do the votes go ? Like anyone who has just finished typing a homework assignment only to see it erased by a computer glitch you know the answer to this question. Unless you were lucky to have printed a copy or have it autosaved somewhere, they are gone. Completely gone. Never to be seen again.
Is "luck" a voting technology you fell comfortable with ?
Some vote tabulating machines do NOT produce printed records. And for the ones who do, it is not mandatory to print them. A $1 burger has more paperwork than your vote. As for autosaving vote tallies, guess what ? They aren't mandatory either. And that is why it is so important to comment on 2006 voting guidelines
* * * * I've seen enough Jump to Comments * * * *
A pre 9/11 mentality
My "The dog ate my votes" story might be a lot more probable than you think. The blackout in 2003 was an accident but as Global Security.org reminds us, U.S.: Blackout Shows America's Infrastructure Vulnerable To Terrorists. Hence leaving our vote tallies on the hands of luck is unnaceptable after we learned that the world is not as peaceful as we hoped for.
Swing states vulnerable
Not all counties have paperless e-voting. But the ones who do are located on crucial swing states were election results were decided by a very tiny margin. Any glitches there can substantially alter the next 4 years of our country. And given the consistency of voting patterns by state over the years, terrorists can pick and chose which votes to erase.
If you were hell bent on shocking and hurting America, wouldn't messing up a national election be big on your to do list ? Wouldn't you look for places where the most chaos could be generated ?
Why didn't banks, Corporate America panic with the 2003 blackout ?
Corporate America has, as part of every critical computer system, a Disaster Recovery Plan that usually includes saving old data at frequent intervals (hourly, daily) and keeping up to date backup tapes off site, i.e. in a different location, to allow smooth recovery in case of a fire or major disaster. Guess where they get the idea they need to do this ? SEI and similar standards.
No disaster recovery plan for votes
As a solid disaster recovery system with off site backup is not mandatory, guess what: The voting system has no such plan and no backups
Why the lack of paper trail, backups off site is so troubling
The obvious reason is that a terrorist can target a Board of Elections office. But suppose he was not that eager to meet his maker. Couldn't he just erase votes ? The entire memory of the tabulator could have been altered. Including the data. Without backups, no trace of the original vote tallies would remain. Anywhere. And more importantly, as many victims of cyber crime have found, it is very difficult to find any clues about the identity of the perpetrator. In the current voting system, without audit trails and backups no clues at all would be left in the machine
Impossible, you say ?
Almost every e-voting machine has a modem port. Turning that port off is NOT mandatory. A wireless palm pilot could dial into the machine and get access to the system. Security against a dial up is NOT mandatory for e-voting machines. We just have to trust Diebold had sense enough to include it, which is not a sure bet, considering that they left their own computers unprotected and connected to the internet until 2003. Thanks to Diebold's lack of security, their source code was widely available worldwide for 3 years, along with information on bugs and vulnerable spots. It constitutes the bulk of their current code. Any experienced hacker could have seen it. The system is very easily hacked as countless demonstrations have shown it. As you may have guessed by now, fixing those security flaws is not mandatory. Finding someone to write a palm pilot program to mess with it wouldn't be that hard for Al Qaeda.
The perfect crime
I don't believe we are at this point now, but don't forget the Al Qaeda double agent arrested in UK in 2004. He was a network administrator that ran Osama's e-mail network and shuttled between his caves and the Western world. Zarqawi uses web sites and sophisticated video streaming to spread his message. One day one of their IT guys will realize he can commit the perfect, untraceable crime and mess up with US' ego big time, without killing himself.
And he will know exactly when and where to hurt US, without ever leaving evidence connecting to him: The current US voting system