corrente

Now that I have your attention, forget humor for a moment and come with me to the world of boring, serious reality.

Today I want to talk about my I’m a depressed, prone to heavy drinking slouch with no spirit for activism. Actually, I have spirit for activism in spades, just not of the traditional kind so much. Here’s a section from an entry on my favorite topic, electronic voting, from the people formerly known as Disinfopedia, now Source Watch:

"Whoever certified that code as secure should be fired," said Avi Rubin , technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins and co-author of the report. He is one of about 900 computer scientists in the U.S., including the founder of the GNU e-democracy project (who has now abandoned it due to unresolved concerns about inherent problems of voting electronically), who has issued grave warnings about voting by computer. In India, the protest has been even more widespread, as the ruling party has proceeded with automating the electoral process uniformly nation-wide - in a democracy of over one billion people, and few resources to challenge results.

According to the Post, "Rubin analyzed portions of Diebold software source code that was mistakenly left on a public Internet site and concluded that a teenager could manufacture "smart cards" and vote several times. Further, he said, insiders could program the machine to alter election results without detection. All machines had the same password hard-wired into the code. And in some instances, it was set at 1111, a number laughably easy to hack. Because there is no paper or electronic auditing system in the machine, there would be no way to reconstruct an actual vote, Rubin said."

In October 2003, Andrew Gumbel reported in the Independent (UK) that " Next year's US presidential election may be compromised by new voting machines that computer scientists believe are unreliable, poorly programmed and prone to tampering."

"An investigation published in today's Independent reveals tens of thousands of touch screen voting machines may be less reliable than the old punchcards, which famously stalled the presidential election in Florida in 2000, leaving the whole election open to international ridicule.

If you go to the link, all the important words are hyperlinked, and there’s a nice CV of text based info on the subject as well.

This post was prompted by the good people over Raw Story and BradBlog, who drop this little bomb of an interview:

In exclusive stunning admissions to The BRAD BLOG some 11 months after the 2004 Presidential Election, a "Diebold Insider" is now finally speaking out for the first time about the alarming security flaws within Diebold, Inc's electronic voting systems, software and machinery. The source is acknowledging that the company's "upper management" -- as well as "top government officials" -- were keenly aware of the "undocumented backdoor" in Diebold's main "GEM Central Tabulator" software well prior to the 2004 election. A branch of the Federal Government even posted a security warning on the Internet.

Pointing to a little-noticed "Cyber Security Alert" issued by the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the source inside Diebold -- who "for the time being" is requesting anonymity due to a continuing sensitive relationship with the company -- is charging that Diebold's technicians, including at least one of its lead programmers, knew about the security flaw and that the company instructed them to keep quiet about it.

"Diebold threatened violators with immediate dismissal," the insider, who we'll call DIEB-THROAT, explained recently to The BRAD BLOG via email. "In 2005, after one newly hired member of Diebold's technical staff pointed out the security flaw, he was criticized and isolated."

In phone interviews, DIEB-THROAT confirmed that the matters were well known within the company, but that a "culture of fear" had been developed to assure that employees, including technicians, vendors and programmers kept those issues to themselves.

The "Cyber Security Alert" from US-CERT was issued in late August of 2004 and is still available online via the US-CERT website . The alert warns that "A vulnerability exists due to an undocumented backdoor account, which could [ sic: allow] a local or remote authenticated malicious user [ sic: to] modify votes."

Again, plenty of live links in the body of the text for your perusal.

Now, I’m prone to intense moments of CTism, and proudly don my chapeau de foil when I get going, usually after a couple of glasses of cheap Australian wine. But even when I’m serious, I can’t shake the feeling that something is very, very wrong with voting in this country. After all, even if most political discourse is a game, filled with rhetoric and nonsense designed to distract people from the real issues, you’d think politicians would at least care that the people they go to all that trouble to manipulate into voting for them will have those votes properly tabulated?

Well, the problem seems to me to be entirely one sided. I don’t want to reveal his name, as he was kind enough to promptly respond to my e-mail, but I had an exchange last year with one of Kerry’s “legal team” a professor at a top-ten university law school, about the OH results and other areas that were in question (at least in the minds of us following e-voting issues). He had written a nice op-ed in a leading national daily about OH, and while it was good to see this issue in print, the wording of the piece struck me as all together too timid, and basically not in anyway reflective of the seriousness of the problem or possibility it entailed for representative democracy. I said as much to him in the e-mail, and he responded that essentially, he and most members of Kerry’s team were “just learning about the problem” and didn’t really understand it very well.

There have been several bills introduced into the House relating to such ‘fixes’ as making electronic machines produce a paper trail, and other suggestions about how to increase the level of confidence people feel for computerized voting. Russ Holt has introduced at least two that I know of. Interestingly, there haven’t been any Republican co-sponors for these bills. Not that they’re into bipartisanship so much, but still, you’d think a couple of them would worry for a future day then Democrats were in power, and the system could be used against Republican interests. Yet that’s not a concern. Hmmmm.

Very simply, problems with electronic voting have become so widespread, and so well documented, that it’s an issue well beyond CT land and one that sits squarely in the mainstream. I can think of stories I’ve read, solid well researched pieces in major publications, detailing problems in CA, NC, TX, FL and of course OH. Click on the links provided so far and follow the rabbit hole, I promise you it goes very, very deep.

I have two points to make about what this means for 06. The first is that people concerned with this issue shouldn’t assume that the Republicans have a master computer hidden somewhere in Virginia that’s linked to every voting machine in the nation, and which they control with the push of a button. That may be true, but it’s probably not- a more subtle and more difficult to track method is being employed, I think. As many researchers on the issue have noted, vote tampering doesn’t have to happen everywhere, just a few strategically located precincts. One large precinct can turn the results for a whole region, and when there are a lot of votes to be tallied, it’s “more likely” that unusual results are statistical probabilities. It’s a very hard thing to do, even for computer experts and dedicated activists, to predict, observe and prove vote tampering in the areas in which it occurs- we just can’t know which the tamperers will choose.

Adjunct to this point is that the old-fashioned, time honored methods of vote tampering are also still a concern. One needn’t fuck with electronic vote tallies if one prevents people from voting in the first place. OH is the prime example here, where in 2004 thousands of people in urban areas and on college campuses were give insufficient numbers of voting machines, resulting in long lines and probably fewer (Democratic) votes. There are also ID scams, intimidation, voter ‘tests’ and all the other tricks that have been employed for decades, mainly to keep black people from voting but I’m sure still used today for anyone leaning left. So we have to remember not to underestimate those who’d prevent democratic representation from happening. They use lots of tricks, and fruadulent tallying of e-voting is only one way that can happen.

The second point I’d like to make is about the word “moot.” As in, everything else progressive and liberals do to get a Democratic majority in 06 is a complete waste of time until we have some kind of guarantee that votes will be counted. Now, I’m not naive enough to suggest we can have 100% of the votes counted and 100% of voters who want to vote voting. Shit, I’d settle for 87% at this point, and I know we’ve never had a truly free and fair election in the history of this country. But when one reviews the long, depressing list of races in 2000. 2002, and 2004 that had very questionable results, counting methods and/or verification procedures, it becomes obvious that if something isn’t done soon, we may as all start singing Deutschland Uber Alles and be done with it.

I am honestly puzzled, frightened and confused by the lack of Democratic leadership on this issue. Truly- even the most sold out corporate DINO hack has got to worry that his seat isn’t secure enough to prevent a more sold out more corporate Republican hack from taking his place. But they don’t. I don’t know if this is because the consultants are telling them the issue “doesn’t play in Peroria” or because it really is a giant conspiracy and the “opposition” is in on the game. But whatever the reason keeping them back, Democrats are beyond the level of Chamberlinesque stupidity and naiveté for not making this a central focus.

I was just reading about the leader of Jewish quarter in Lodz during WWII, Chiam Rumkowski. You may remember him, for his policies of “saving the body by cutting off a limb” in which he worked with the Nazis, and sent off some groups of Jews to the gas chambers in the hope that the rest could be spared. None were, and he himself was shipped off on the last train. I wonder if his Nazi masters laughed as he went.

No I don’t.

I’m not going to get into “what can be done” about the machines themselves, as there are too many issues I don’t fully understand. One I do: it’s probably already too late, assuming every Republican was personally visited by God today and had a change of heart and voted in favor of Holt’s bill, to replace the currently installed voting machines with ones that could be trusted, if there is such a thing. I vote in a small town in rural WI, and we used paper, pencils and a box guarded by two old ladies who play bridge with my mom. As far as I could tell, my vote was counted and it didn’t cost much to do so. In my opinion, this system could be employed everywhere, even in initiative heavy states, simply by reducing the number of people who vote in a single location. More places to vote, fewer people voting there, and paper and pencil that everyone can use. Don’t hand me that crap about the blind or otherwise disabled not being able to vote in this system- I worked in a group home for severely disabled people long enough to know that there are ways to protect their rights and people motivated to do so. Those people can help them vote, even as the rest of us accept that there’s nothing wrong with simplicity, especially in voting. IIRC, it’s how they do it in Canada, and results are in the same night.

Crap, this post got long, so I’ll wrap it up with this: every time you open your mouth to speak of politics, to your lover, family, coworkers and friends, and most especially when you talk to a politician or their representative, BRING UP THIS ISSUE. If you don’t, all the marches and letters and e-mails in the world aren’t going to make a rat’s ass worth of difference. There is literally no other issue more important than this in 06. I welcome suggestions and comments about how best to address this problem.

One thing is clear: the Democratic leadership isn’t doing shit about it. That leaves it in our hands. Don’t give yourself a future in which you look out from behind bars waiting your turn for the torture chamber, wishing desperately that you’d gotten off your fat ass back in 2005, when the last threads of democracy were still strong enough to have prevented its death.