RE: [UACCESS-L] New Voting Systems Assailed

[Robert Carnegie <Robert.Carnegie@seemis.com>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Kelly Pierce [mailto:kellyjosef@earthlink.net]
Sent: 29 March 2003 17:14
To: VICUG-L@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU; blindtech@yahoogroups.com;
blindnews@yahoogroups.com; uaccess-l@trace.wisc.edu;
ADA-Laws@yahoogroups.com


Wow.  That's a lot of mailing lists for one general message.


"Subject: [UACCESS-L] New Voting Systems Assailed

"While the new electronic voting systems offer independent access for the
first time to the blind and the print impaired, serious questions are
being raised about their security.  In a new book, "Black Box Voting:
Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century", it is revealed that Diebold places
the source code of its voting machine software on a publicly accessible
unsecured website.  There is no paper audit trail to verify the accuracy
of the machines. No one except the machine companies examines and tests
the source code and checks for system integrity.  States allow voting
machine companies to upgrade software at will without even testing it
themselves.  The machines have lost or miscalculated thousands of votes
in a particular race, resulting in awarding the election to the wrong
candidate when the election was not a close race."


Publishing your software doesn't make it insecure.  If the software is built
right, a bad guy can know exactly what's inside the box, except for certain
random-number security keys, and still have no way to break it.  And if it
isn't built right, but isn't published, presumably the bad guy only has to
find a politically sympathetic - or corruptible - employee of the company,
to smuggle out a copy of the program.  Not necessarily hard.

Publishing software also allows interested persons to satisfy themselves
that a politically sympathetic or corruptible employee hasn't already
rigged the software to cheat on votes.

Oh, does anyone want to ask what "source code" is?  It isn't (probably)
what goes straight into the voting machines.  Obviously they'd be morons
if they did /that/ from a Web site with no security.

"Unsecured site", without reading further, probably just means that you
don't need a password or SSL to look at the site.  (If you don't know
what SSL is, don't worry right now.)  And the site certainly /ought/
to be just for looking at.

I'm mostly not in a position to comment on the other alleged defects 
of these machines.

Voting systems should be fair and should be seen to be fair, and should
be scrutinised closely.  This needn't formally exclude sensationalist
journalism.  But the net effect might be to add to the hundred million
votes lost in 2000 from Americans who decided not to vote.

Incidentally, is the book available in Braille or speech?
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