Distrust In Touch-screen Voting

We sure as hell distrust it and let's not forget that scanners can be hacked as well.

Paper, Paper, Paper! How hard can this be people?


(CBS) (The following story was written by CBS Evening News producer Phil Hirschkorn.)

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Four of of ten American voters will be casting ballots this November on equipment that's different from what they used in 2004.


One reason is the doubts raised about ATM-syle electronic touch-screen machines, which have prompted half a dozen states to turn them off and turn back to paper ballots.


In fact, at least 55 percent of Americans voting this November will vote on paper ballots that will be counted by optical scanners, according to Virginia-based Election Data Services, Inc.


"That's an all-time high for optical scan usage in this nation," says EDS President Kimball Brace.


Only one-third of voters will be using touch-screen systems, according to EDS.


"Electronic system usage will go down in 2008 for the first time since we started collecting data in 1980," Brace says.


In the key presidential battleground of Ohio, the switch away from touch-screens came after Secretary of State Jennifer Bruner took office last year and commissioned a top-to-bottom review of the Diebold machines used in 53 of Ohio's 88 counties.


"We studied these systems and all the systems in use in Ohio and the most vulnerable to risk are the touch-screen voting machines," Brunner says. "The software is antiquated, and it's unstable."


Last week Brunner sued the manufacturer, now known as Premier Election Systems, for breach of contract, citing recent elections where votes were dropped when memory cards were uploaded.


"There have been no votes lost, just votes that are missed and hours later or days later recovered," Brunner says. "We have a system that is performing inadequately."


"We are in fact in compliance with the terms of the contracts," says Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Premier, which has voting equipment in 34 states.


"We have provided a high-quality system," Riggall says.

Still, Brunner forced the state's most populous county, Cuyahoga, which includes Cleveland and has suffered computer crashes in recent elections, to abandon its touch-screens for optical scanners. Three other Ohio counties followed suit.


Bolstered by $4.5 million in federal funds, Brunner has also ordered every county in the state to print enough paper ballots to supply a quarter of the electorate expected to show up at the polls.


"If there's a machine failure or a power outage, or some kind of misprogramming with the machines, it will enable people to keep voting," Brunner says.


The national rush toward touch-screens began after Florida's too-close-to-call presidential race between Al Gore and George Bush in 2000 led to the spectacle of election officials trying to discern voter intent by studying hanging chads on punch card ballots.


Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002 with funds for states to upgrade their equipment. States spent at least $2 billion by the end of 2007, according to the Election Assistance Commission.


Florida led the way to touch-screens, but in 2006, experienced another meltdown in Sarasota, where about 18,000 ballots cast on machines made by ES&S registered no vote in a hard-fought congressional race decided by fewer than 400 votes.


The Sarasota machines contained no paper trial - a scroll, stored inside a machine, that displays a person's ballot choices before the "vote" button is hit - so the recount could not recover any lost votes.


When Charlie Crist became governor last year, he deep-sixed Florida's touch-screens. A Tampa electronics recycler was tapped to pick up nearly 30,000 of them.


The two closest swing states in the last election have made a change too.

What has happened since Florida 2000 is we've taken a problem that was a disaster for that election and made it exponentially worse.

John Bonifaz, legal director, Voter Action

Iowa became the latest state to disconnect touch-screens, when Governor Chet Culver signed a bill in April to replace the machines in 19 counties that used them with optical scanners.


New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson moved his state from a hogdepodge of voting methods onto a single paper-based system in 2006.


Most California voters now use optical scanners, with only three of the state's 58 counties using touch-screens.


In Maryland, which has experienced glitches with its paperless touch-screens, Governor Martin O'Malley pushed through a plan to abandon them in 2010.


"What has happened since Florida 2000 is we've taken a problem that was a disaster for that election and made it exponentially worse," says John Bonifaz, legal director of the watchdog Voter Action.


"These machines cannot be trusted for the counting and recording of our votes," Bonifaz says. "Computer scientists around the country have demonstrated that in less than 60 seconds one of these machines can be broken into and can infect the entire system on which people are voting."


However, machine makers are quick to retort, there's been no documented case of hacking during an actual election, despite what professors have been able to do to a single machine in a lab setting.


"Touch-screen voting machines have proven to be accurate, reliable, and secure time and time again," says Ken Fields, a spokesman for ES&S.


Fields says the ES&S equipment deployed in 43 states complies "with rigorous standards for quality, accuracy, security, and reliability."


Sequoia, which supplies 17 states with voting equipment, points to poll worker training as a cause of recent election ills. The Election Assistance Commission estimates that two million poll workers, mostly citizen volunteers, will be needed nationwide November 4.


During the last presidential election, six percent of polling places and four percent of precincts reported having too few poll workers, according to the EAC.


"It is important to note that successful elections necessitate people, processes, and the technology all working together," says Sequoia VP Michelle Shafer.


"Anytime there has been a change in voting equipment, there have been some some doubts and concerns which lessen over time due to familiarity with the new equipment," Shafer says.


Maybe so, but doubts about touch-screens have reached the point that ES&S, Premier, and Sequoia tell CBS News they're no longer getting any new orders for counties switching their systems to touch-screens.


New Jersey Congressman Rush Holt, himself first elected after a recount, particulary worries about voters in 14 states, including his own, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Georgia, and Virginia, that use touch-screen machines that have no voter-verifiable paper trail.


"If all you have is the electronic memory, you can reprint that electronic memory as many times as you want, it's going to say exactly the same thing. And you won't know whether it's right," Holt says. "More than a third of the voters in this country will be voting in an unverifiable way."


Holt's legislation, currently gridlocked on capitol Hill, would allocate millions of dollars to states to offset the cost of printing backup paper ballots and randomly auditing the machines.


"Without an audit, without the ability to audit, it will be unreliable, and without paper record, you can't really audit," Holt says. "This is the central act of democracy. It is the basis for the all the legitimacy of our government and its actions. We believe or at least want to believe that people are put in office by the will of the voters. That's what you need to be able to verify."

By Phil Hirschkorn
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(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Americans Beware! Democracy Theft 2008

What to do....what to do?

How can we stop another election from being stolen?

Seems we all know the dangers for 2008. Anyone who doesn't can read the article below, which pretty much covers it, except for one possibility: Another "terrorist strike," as several Republicans have suggested would be helpful, a declaration of martial law, and no election at all.

The question is how can we stop machine, telephone line and/or central scanner hacking, as well as other forms of election tampering, legally?

Until someone comes up with a fool proof plan, and it doesn't look as if our Congress has any real plan, I can think of only one thing we can do. We, as bloggers, citizen journalists, diarists, email writers and the like can make it very clear that if there is any reason to even suspect that the election has been stolen, all hell is going to break loose.

So, Powers-that-be, is anarchy what you want? Do you think that will help your beloved corporations and their bottom line? Do you have any idea how it feels to be surrounded by people who hate you? Have you ever felt that kind of fear?

Personally, I hope you never have to go through anything like that. So, don't mess with election 2008, unless you want a real American revolution.

The Bush/McCain Game Plan:

What May Be in Store for Obama -- And the Rest of America

by Elliot D. Cohen

Now that Barack Obama has secured the Democratic nomination, many of his supporters are looking forward with guarded optimism to a victory in November. However, while they assume that the road ahead will be a challenging one, and that the outcome may rest with key battleground states such as Ohio, what they may fail to anticipate are the kinds of obstacles that the McCain campaign in tandem with the Bush Administration might, in the coming months, place between them and victory.

It is easy enough to take one's eyes off the ball when concentrating on campaign speeches and strategies for winning over the hearts and minds of Americans. So what things might change the landscape of the current contest and tilt it in favor of the McCain camp?

First, the guarded optimism of Obama supporters assumes that the voting process will be largely a fair one. However, attention to past irregularities suggests otherwise. There are several familiar ways in which the election could be stolen. Some of these ways would be to disenfranchise African American voters and other would-be Obama supporters by purging them from voting lists, losing or failing to send out their registrations, deceiving these citizens about their proper voting precincts, and mis-allocating voting machines in precincts likely to go for Obama.

These, among other illegal and unethical tactics, were employed in key battleground states such as Florida and Ohio in both the 2000 and 2004 elections. It is pie-in-the-sky optimism to think that these same tactics won't be used, perhaps even more systematically, again in 2008. Meanwhile, faulty, insecure, and hackable electronic voting machines attached to malfunctioning printers will be used to record ballots.

In addition to these more conventional manners of voter fraud, there are also other possible ways to steal the election. All electronic voting machines transport their data over telephone lines to a central computer where tabulations of votes are made. These telephone lines are not secure, however, because, in putting into operation its unlawful warrantless surveillance program, the Bush Administration had installed computer technology at major telecom company hubs, such as those of AT&T, which intercepts and reads messages before they reach their final destination. It is therefore quite conceivable that the balloting data being transported from individual voting precincts could be intercepted and reconfigured before it reaches its main tabulation point.

Unless adequate legal protections are enacted to protect against such possibilities, we may never know whether votes were changed even before they were tabulated. Unfortunately, the Senate version of proposed legislation (S.2248) that is supposed to protect against abuses of privacy, gives telecom companies immunity against criminal and civil liability for participating in unlawful electronic searches and seizures, and does not offer adequate safeguards against the possibility of such illegal tampering with votes.

As if this wasn't unsettling enough, while the Senate and House debate the final disposition of S.2248, the possibility remains of government interception of all e-mails and phone calls sent through the phone lines, including the messages sent by the presidential candidates and their representatives. Thus, while the Nixon Administration had to break into Democratic National Headquarters in order to get the lowdown on its Democratic opponents, the McCain camp, with the assistance of the Bush Administration, may now have only to go online to read about Obama's latest strategy for winning the election; thereby giving it the potential to thwart this strategy before it succeeds. Again, it is pie-in-the-sky optimism to suppose that such tactics as this will not be used by what can arguably be regarded as the most corrupt administration in the history of America.

As recently learned, there is currently a secret deal being transacted between the Bush Administration and the Iraq government that would establish permanent military bases in Iraq, thereby nominalizing Obama's promise to withdraw troops from Iraq and giving greater credence to the stalwart position of McCain to keep American troops in Iraq.

The strategy of the McCain camp will undoubtedly include stressing McCain's military and foreign affairs experience and emphasizing Obama's lack thereof. With the establishing of permanent military bases in Iraq, this emphasis will be further vindicated.

Notwithstanding a National Intelligence Estimate according to which Iran discontinued its nuclear weapons program in 2003, Bush has stepped up his rhetoric against Iran. He recently proclaimed, "Iraq is the convergence point for two of the greatest threats to America in this new century: al-Qaida and Iran," and he threatened, "If Iran makes the right choice, America will encourage a peaceful relationship between Iran and Iraq. If Iran makes the wrong choice, America will act to protect our interests and our troops and our Iraqi partners."

The Obama camp, not to mention every U.S. citizen, should be prepared for the possibility that prior to the November election, Bush will attempt to use his "war powers" to sidestep Congressional authority and launch an attack on Iran. From a purely logistical perspective, with simultaneous wars going on in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, including a permanent presence in Iraq, it would make sense to have a commander in chief who is experienced in warfare. Obviously, this would place McCain in the enviable position of being able to boast of his wartime experiences and would leave Obama grasping for a response.

For the Obama camp, trying to win a victory against McCain and his Bush Administration support system may be like trying to play cards against an opponent who is using a loaded deck. But all American citizens on either side of the political divide should be concerned about the prospects of the 2008 presidential race becoming a power grab where the lives and liberties of all of us are used and abused to amass power and dominance, both here and abroad.

Those who support Obama need to beware. But those who support McCain need equally to beware, for winning a contest that is fixed is not really winning; and when the contest in question involves the defiling of the U.S. Constitution and the destruction of democracy, there are values at stake that far transcend one's party affiliation.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Elliot D. Cohen is a political analyst and media critic. His most recent book is The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government are turning America into a Dictatorship. He is the first-prize winner of the 2007 Project Censored Award.


(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

DOJ Blocked Investigation of N.H. Phone Jamming Election Fraud Case

Investigation points to White House involvement.

September 17, 2007

Editorial

The New Hampshire Phone Scam

On Election Day in 2002, when New Hampshire voters were going to the polls in a hotly contested Senate race, the phone lines in Democratic get-out-the-vote offices were jammed. The executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party pleaded guilty to phone harassment charges, but there has never been an adequate investigation of reports that the White House may have been involved.

Paul Hodes, a New Hampshire congressman, is asking the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to investigate. It should conduct the searching inquiry that the Justice Department has not.

The Bush administration has spent a lot of time talking about mythical cases of voter fraud and election improprieties, but the New Hampshire phone jamming case was the real thing. Republican operatives hired an Idaho telemarketing firm to jam the lines to prevent people who needed help in voting from getting through. The scheme was a direct attack on American democracy.

After the guilty plea from its executive director, the New Hampshire Republican Party paid to settle a civil lawsuit filed by the state’s Democrats. There is reason to believe, however, that the phone jamming ploy may have been coordinated out of the White House. Democrats say there were 22 phone calls between New Hampshire Republican officials and the White House Office of Political Affairs on election night and early the next morning.

Mr. Hodes says that rather than trying to learn the truth, the Justice Department has engaged in unlawful interference to block the investigation. He reports that according to one of the defense lawyers, the attorney general personally had to sign off on all actions in the case, an extraordinary rule that would slow things down considerably. According to Mr. Hodes, the only F.B.I. agent assigned to the case was told that she could not pursue leads to Washington.

It is shocking to think that anyone in the White House was involved in a dirty trick designed to prevent Americans from exercising their democratic rights. Unfortunately, after this year’s revelations about the firing of United States attorneys for partisan political reasons, the possibility cannot be dismissed out of hand.

Henry Waxman, the chairman of the House oversight committee, has a lot to investigate these days, but he should find time for the serious inquiry into the New Hampshire phone jamming case to which American voters are entitled.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.