BBV:Inside The Black Box

[Andy_Stephenson]

Fueled by a seemingly unending series of damaging revelations about the insecurity of electronic voting systems and the practices of the companies that make them, the burgeoning movement demanding that new election equipment generate a voter-verifiable paper ballots enters 2004 with growing legitimacy and surprising momentum.

The grassroots activists and computer scientists leading the effort to put the brakes on the nation's headlong rush toward paperless voting—based on touchscreen-equipped computers—scored a stunning, if incomplete, victory just before Thanksgiving, when California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley ordered that counties purchasing new touchscreen voting terminals must provide a "voter-verified paper audit trail," starting in July 2005, and that the four California counties already using the high-tech systems must retrofit them with printers by July 2006.

Though critics of the new technology had hoped for more—a ruling that would cover this November's elections and perhaps a moratorium on purchases of new equipment until printer-equipped systems are fully tested and certified—his ruling still marked an important turning point: it was the first time a state government has mandated a voter-verified paper record.

http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9712

[ProdigalJunkMail]

1. I just don't get why people fight the whole

verifiable paper trail??? What could possibly be the excuse other than to 'allow' an election to be modified!

TheProdigal

[greatauntoftriplets]

3. Because there are people who want the next election fixed...

...even more safely than they did the last one.

[Andy_Stephenson]

5. Not on my watch

I will not allow it.

[drdigi420]

4. these people are holy rollers

and are hell-bent on keeping the 'christians' in office, even if they have to lie, cheat, steal, or evangelize (o wait, thats redundant)

Until they stop reading the Bible as a literal history and start seeing it for what it is: a metaphor driven play discussing the internal struggle of man's own good vs evil, we will continue to see our political system held hostage by those that don't understand the difference between metaphors and reality.

[BevHarris]

12. To the extent that it's holy rolling, it's misguided even at that

Here's a concept: If you believe in God, let Him guide the world. It seems like, if you think you need to fix elections in order to invoke His word, you don't have much faith, do you?

In fact, if your life is dedicated to faith and the Bible, you'd know that such tenets as "thou shalt not bear false witness" are to be taken seriously. I don't quite see how vote-rigging would fit into following the Ten Commandments.

By the way, one of the most devout Christians I met during this endeavor is Rob Behler, the patriotic whistleblower of "rob-georgia" fame. He is an example of someone who walks the walk.

These folks that justify out-and-out power grabs and greed by pretending they are adhering to God's word are pretty sickening, aren't they? They want "faith-based" this and that, but think they need to personally manipulate to make things happen their way.

Kind of an oxymoron, isn't it? Trust in God and follow the teachings of the bible, except that you won't trust him enough to let elections be honest, and you can't follow the teachings if it might make you lose money or power.

Just my take on this. I feel totally comfortable pulling the rug out from under these fake bible-thumpers.

Bev

[ProdigalJunkMail]

14. i don't think it has to do so much with religion

as with greed and lust for power or the retention of power. I do not honestly see how literalism in the interpretation of scripture could possibly play into this. And evangelism is not lying, cheating and/or stealing. And it does appear that some of the bible is allegory and some is indeed historical.

TheProdigal

[Cocoa]

6. they think the new machines are better

a lot of opposition seems to come from election officials who have experienced the problems of the old machines, esp. punchcards, and see the new machines as solving them.

[Andy_Stephenson]

7. The new machines create more problems

than they solve.

[Cocoa]

9. maybe so

I'm in favor of the paper trail, I was just expressing my opinion that there is rational and honest opposition to it.

[Iverson]

8. the cult of novelty

You asked about an excuse. The real reason is control, but the excuse is vague invocation of progress.

[mouse7]

2. Joe Trippi mentioned BBV by name on CNN last night n/t

[Kellanved]

10. and another article (this time from Germany's Der Spiegel)

http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/english/0,1518,280606,00.html

--snip
America's Electronic Voting Machines Are Susceptible to Manipulation

Walden O'Dell is entitled to call himself a "Pioneer." The business leader from North Canton, Ohio, has qualified for the honorific because he collected 600,000 dollars for George W. Bush's election campaign. He accompanied this with a pledge to do everything possible to help Ohio "deliver its electoral votes to the president" in 2004.
But with this statement O'Dell has caused more of a stir than he could have wished. For the "Pioneer" is also chief executive of Diebold Inc., a company that among other things manufactures voting machines. About 40,000 of these are installed in 37 states and are supposed to record and count votes on November 2. Diebold is in second place, right behind the market leader, Election Systems and Software which achieved its top ranking under Chuck Hagel before he, a Republican, was elected senator from Nebraska.

Recently the states have left decisions about the technological side of voting procedures to private companies. It is shocking enough that the giants of the trade are vying to get close to the government. But in addition, O'Dell has inadvertently called attention to how susceptible the machines are to manipulation.

...
--snap
It doesn't mentíon BBV by name, but it's pretty clear as it is.

[BeFree]

11. Gotta see the code

The only way we can do anything about Nov 2 at this point is to have teams of experts pour over each and every source code that will be used on each and every machine. There being no sound reason why the code cannot be examined, our demands must be met! By court order if need be!

The only other option should be an option to cast our ballot on a piece of paper rather than a machine. It would not be difficult at all for each precinct to go to Kinkos and print paper ballots that one could then cast their votes on.

The solutions are simple, lets keep it simple.

[BeFree]

13. New names for this BBV BS??

How's about we call it something like:

Vote Away From the Black Box

Outside the Black Box Voting

[Zan_of_Texas]

15. Examine the source code? You and what army?

From the interview with David Dill of Stanford University, 7/13/03 KPFT Radio Houston:

Q: Something like 800,000 lines of software code are in Diebold's proprietary software. Is it realistic to expect a certification board to go through and find any problems, if there were one?

David Dill: "It is practically impossible for someone to review software of any length at all -- even 10,000 or maybe even 1500 -- lines of code to make sure that's 100% error-free. The certification is done by organizations called independent testing authorities. They couldn't do it, no matter how hard they tried. Now, from what I have learned, they don't try hard enough. There are claims that the code is inspected line by line. I know that that is not sufficient to find bugs and certainly not to find tampering that is deliberately hidden in that software. In fact, the tampering may not even be in the software that's presented to the independent testing authority."

Q: If I said to you right now, you could either vote on an electronic machine, such as the kind that's being put into place, without a voter verified paper trail, OR you can use a piece of paper and a pen with real human being counters as they do in rural Maine, which would you do?

David Dill: "Assuming there are good election processes, given a choice between voting on a paperless DRE and voting on a paper ballot, I would vote on the paper ballot. Because I would know that it was my vote that was being counted, not some vote that had been handled by a vendor who I don't know and don't have any reason to trust. There are various reasons that it's desirable to have electronic voting. Voters with certain types of diabilities have a lot of trouble manipulating paper ballots. For example, if someone has limited control over their hand motion, or if they are visually impaired...we need to provide some technology. I think that can be achieved without sacrificing the integrity of our election system."

From a newsclip:

Frank Shugar of SAIC, which evaluated Diebold software for the state of Maryland, said it is easy to hide undetected code in a great big code package. In fact, he put the chance of it going undetected at 99.9%.

From an interview for KPFT radio for broadcast Dec. 10, 2003:

Dan Wallach, Professor of Computer Science at Rice University and co-author of the Hopkins report which was the first independent report to examine the Diebold source code, responds: "I don't know about that other tenth of a percent. This is a classic computer security problem. Whoever gets into the machine first wins. So if the trojan horse software is in there first, you ask it to test itself -- it will always lie to you and tell you everything is fine. ... It's impossible -- you cannot test something for whether it has a trojan horse within it. Once a trojan horse is in there, it can hide itself and there's nothing you can do to detect that."