link dumpage: electronic voting

[sisyphusshrugged]

A Rule to Avert Balloting Woes Adds to Them

When poll workers could not find Kelly Pierce's name on the registration rolls during the primary here in March, they told him to take advantage of a new election rule that allowed him to cast his vote using a provisional ballot.

The rule is intended to prevent one of the major problems experienced in Florida during the 2000 presidential election, when scores of voters, especially minority voters, were turned away at the polls over registration questions that could not be resolved quickly.

So Mr. Pierce, who had voted regularly since 1989, filled out his paper ballot. Election administrators then proceeded to throw it out, determining that poll workers had Mr. Pierce file it in the wrong precinct.

He was hardly alone. Of the 5,914 provisional ballots cast in the Chicago primary, 5,498 were disqualified, mostly on technical grounds.

Provisional voting, the centerpiece of the Help America Vote Act that Congress passed in 2002, will be put into effect across the nation in the coming presidential election in an effort to ensure that more votes are counted.

But election officials say the experience of Mr. Pierce - and hundreds like him across the country during primary season - show how failures in carrying out the measure could end up disenfranchising voters instead.

Rolling Down the Highway, Looking Out for Flawed Elections

The elections director of Mohave County, Ariz., was so proud of his new electronic voting system that Bev Harris barely had the heart to point out its vulnerabilities. But she did, and before long she was ticking off the ways that she said an outsider could hijack his central tabulator - the computer that stores all of the county's votes - and steal an election.

By the time she had shown him a "backdoor" way to gain access to his software without a password, the elections director was visibly concerned. Before she left, he asked her to send him a list of things he could do to safeguard this year's election.

Ms. Harris's visit to Mohave County was part of a monthlong trip in which she and her deputy, Andy Stephenson, traveled to 10 states, investigating flaws in electronic voting and giving on-the-fly computer security tutorials.

The trip started out in Ohio, where they knocked on the doors of employees of Diebold, one of the largest and most criticized voting machine companies. It ended in late July in Las Vegas at Defcon, a hackers' convention, where the consensus was that cracking a voting machine might not be so hard.

Ms. Harris, the director of Black Box Voting (the Web address is www.blackboxvoting.org), has made herself public enemy No. 1 for voting machine manufacturers, and some elections officials, with her hard-edged attacks on electronic voting and her investigative style. (She acknowledges that at one point in Ohio, she and Mr. Stephenson hid in the bushes with a microphone, eavesdropping on Diebold workers.)

But there is no denying that Ms. Harris, a onetime literary publicist from the Seattle area, is responsible for digging up some of the most disturbing information yet to surface about the accuracy and integrity of electronic voting...

Every vote counts - if it's counted

On November 2, millions of Americans will vote on computers, many of which may be vulnerable to partisan hackers, disgruntled poll workers, or anyone else with a desire to alter the outcome of the election, writes Ronnie Dugger in the current issue of The Nation. "The result," he says, "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."

Dugger's detailed analysis of the problems of electronic voting and the potential for fraud and error would seem to be a crucial election story of 2004, full of the stuff journalists love -- hints of skullduggery, cronyism, and conflicts of interest. But, with a few exceptions, the advent of e-voting has remained an issue hovering persistently beneath the media's radar.

The stories that have appeared largely have been local, piecemeal and rarely rise much beyond the "he said/she said" level of reporting. As a result, the public -- to the extent that it's even aware of the controversy -- is left to its own devices to figure out a complex issue, with considerable ramifications.

Machine politics

We've won a few battles in the war against paperless voting, but at this point it's pretty clear that this year's election is going forward with almost a third of all votes being cast on unreliable, unverifiable machines. With a few exceptions, most people have shifted from fighting the machines to encouraging absentee voting (even the Republicans are joining in) and getting ready to rumble.

Meanwhile, James Pinkerton argues that this is all a diversion. Don't look now but it's the Democrats who are getting ready to steal the election.

Keep an eye open for vote suppression in gated communities...

Comments

[snuh.livejournal.com]

Bev Harris was on Howard Dean's MSNBC show (he was filling in for Tina Brown) and gave a real time demonstration on how easy it was to hack into the PC's that are logging the votes.

She's estimated that over 30% of a national vote can be manipulated.

Diebold also hosted the largest Republican fundraiser - this is why I feel Kerry better get every vote he can, he's going to need it with this sort of chicanery going on.