$106 million Later, Maryland Will Pull Plug On Electronic Voting Machines
Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. of Maryland is nervous and wants to go back to paper ballots. I can’t say as I blame him, but please don’t try to tell me that the powers that be did not know what the problems were going to be, prior to the first million being spent! Many states have opted to incorporate electronic voting in order to comply with federal legislation in 2002 intended to phase out old-fashioned lever and punch-card machines after the “hanging chads” confusion of 2000. Many are regretting the decision and want to go back to the paper ballot!
“You have to train the poll workers,” Mr. Celeste said, “especially since many of them are of a generation for whom this technology is a particular challenge. You need to have plans in place to relocate voters to another precinct if machines don’t work, and I just don’t know whether these steps have been taken.”
Paperless touch-screen machines have been the biggest source of consternation, and with about 40 percent of registered voters nationally expected to cast their ballots on these machines in the midterm elections, many local officials fear that the lack of a paper trail will leave no way to verify votes in case of fraud or computer failure.
As a result, states are scrambling to make last-minute fixes before the technology has its biggest test in November, when voter turnout will be higher than in the primaries, many races will be close and the threat of litigation will be ever-present.
“We have the real chance of recounts in the coming elections, and if you have differences between the paper trail and the electronic record, which number prevails?” said Richard L. Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and the author of the Election Law blog, www.electionlawblog.org.
Professor Hasen found that election challenges filed in court grew to 361 in 2004, up from 197 in 2000. “What you have coming up is the intersection of new technology and an unclear legal regime,” he said.
There are examples given for how fraud can be committed upon the machines, and of course the manufacturer denies the possibility, but lets face it..we have dead people voting..anything is possible.
How do you think our ballots should be presented?
September 23, 2006 - 09:49 PM on September 23rd, 2006
“…but please don’t try to tell me that the powers that be did not know what the problems were going to be, prior to the first million being spent!.”
EXACTLY right! This was well known, and well discussed. Why in the world it went forward is what I would like to know. Everyone associated with it, anywhere, should be fired.
September 24, 2006 - 05:51 AM on September 24th, 2006
Well, on this site, we talked about it here, here,here,here, and here
Florida was the focal point of most of the articles, but the point taken away since at least 2004 is that it won’t work and e need a paper trail! Can you imagine how packed the courts will become with contested elections?
September 24, 2006 - 08:45 AM on September 24th, 2006
Ah. Right on cue. As Dem numbers stop looking so good, along comes the old Diebold argument. For all the talk of how easy it supposedly is to sabotage the voting machines, you forget one thing—it’s damnably hard to do without being noticed by election officials, poll watchers, and other parties “See, all you have to do is open this panel and find the right cable to hook into your laptop…” Yeah, and you gotta do it in plain view of election officials, poll watchers, the gods, and everybody else. Yep, nobody’s gonna ask why you hooked your laptop to the voting machine. Sure.
The real deal here is that the longer they can keep electronic voting machines out of majority-Democratic inner cities, the longer the old-fashioned methods of vote fraud can work.
September 24, 2006 - 09:17 AM on September 24th, 2006
Actuall RS, had you readf the article, you would have seen the arguements made by the election officials concerned about inner city (Democratic strongholds) problems that will occur..lines from machines breaking down, slowness of system, forcing voters to go to the next poll station in order to cast a ballot. Had you read, you would have seen that it is Dems that started the charge to end the electronic voting, after they had led the charge to use them. This is a system that was set up to fail. We need a paper trail in order to certify election and to use in a court of law!
September 24, 2006 - 01:15 PM on September 24th, 2006
3- RS, you seriously lack imagination. You can open these things with a hotel mini bar key. From there, you can connect a PDA up to one of these things and upload the software to change votes. You don’t need a laptop to do the job. Oh, what’s that you say? A PDA is too big to conceal too? Of course, then you’d want to use one of these. Still too big? IBM got Linux to boot on a pocket watch several years ago proving that you can get a fully functioning computer embedded into the end of a small USB stick. This would only take you about 2 seconds (or less) to connect to the data input port of a Diebold voting machine. From there, all you need is a distraction that lasts only a few seconds (screaming child, spilled drink, etc etc) and you can untraceably swing an election. With the rise of re-districting, all you’d need to do is have this happen in 1 or 2 districts per state and you can swing a national election.
..Chuck..
September 24, 2006 - 01:17 PM on September 24th, 2006
4 – Yup PeejZ you’re dead on there. Paper *MUST* be in place to have a permenant audit trail. When I voted in the primaries, I was asked if I wanted to use paper or electronic. I politely told them that I am a computer engineer and that I knew better than to use an electronic voting machine. At that point the room went deathly silent. I smiled, picked up my ballot and proceeded to vote.
..Chuck..
September 24, 2006 - 02:13 PM on September 24th, 2006
Thanks so much for that info Chuck! It amezes me what little it takes to ruin it for everyone! How sad that we can’t have something as simple as an electronic voting procedure. There will always be something or someone to ruin it for everyone!
September 24, 2006 - 02:34 PM on September 24th, 2006
I agree with Chuck. Electronic devices are so small, yet so capable, that there is too much chance for someone to do evil. And with so much at stake, there is plenty of incentive for someone to try.
I’ve even heard people say we should be able to vote via the Internet! Go to a website and vote. Great. Maybe Hugo Chavez could then vote in our next Presidential election!
September 24, 2006 - 03:32 PM on September 24th, 2006
8 – Heh Robert, yeah, that’s definitely a possibility.
Another point I didn’t make is that it’s already been demonstrated that the Dieblod firmware is not cryptographically secure. Basically in layman’s speak, you can hack a Diebold voting machine and never have any trace of it happening and no way to audit that the votes that it is reporting are real. I can cite specifics if anyone’s interested, but I’m a bit rushed for time at the moment to link to them. You can start at Black Box Voting and work from there.
Even if it were cryptographically secure, the point would still be there. There’s no way to independently audit what the machine is telling you. No secure system in the world operates that way.
Now if you want something that’ll *REALLY* make your blood boil, take a look at how much goes into the computers that run slot machines! Those things have security that’s probably on par with what’s running in the basements of many US government three letter agencies.
The enemy isn’t Dieblod. The enemy is elections officials who are too ignorant to know that they’re throwing away money and (more importantly) Democracy on systems that are not independently verifiable.
..Chuck..