Verified Voting/Common Cause's screwball report on election risks

[Peace Patriot]

Verified Voting/Common Cause's screwball report on election risks

See Verified Voting/Common Cause Press Release 1/31/08:
http://www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org/article.php?id=6550
(Click at the bottom for the full report in pdf form.)

Verified Voting/Common Cause's list of state voting systems at risk of error or fraud in the Feb 5 Primary ("SuperTuesday"), and in other upcoming primary elections, starts with extremely over-simplified criteria for what state election systems are at risk, and, like our current "skewed-way-to-the-right" political spectrum--which simply blots out the left side of the spectrum, and pretends that it doesn't exist--concludes that certain states are at "low" risk of election miscounts or fraud because they have a paper record of the vote and do some kind of audit. They omit any category of fully transparent elections. According to them

Low risk of error/fraud: CA, CT, IL, MO, NC, WV.

But they don't say what the audit generally is--a mere %1 of paper ballots--in systems that use an electronic scanner and an electronic tabulator, both run on "trade secret" code. Nor do they say what that really means: that 99% of the ballots are dropped into a box to gather dust, and are never seen again, except in rare circumstances, and it is the electrons that are tabulated, not the ballots.


They say that at "mid" risk are states that do have some kind of a paper trail but do no auditing at all, except in the rare circumstance of a recount. These states get rewarded with a middle rating because they could count the votes if that difficult, expensive and rare circumstance--a recount--arises.

Mid-risk of error/fraud: NH, MI, AL, AZ, MA, UT, OK, WI, OH, VT, RI, OR, SD, MT, ID, NM, NE.

That is their only criteria. And the states that get a "high" risk rating (of error/fraud) are those in which all or part of the state doesn't have any paper trail at all, and cannot be audited (comparing paper ballot to machine totals) or recounted.

High-risk of error/fraud: SC, FLA, AK, DE, GA, NJ, NY (huh, NY? see below), TN, LA, DC, MD, VA, TX, MS, PA (yup), IN, KY.

And here's where their assessment goes even more haywire. They include New York in the "high risk" of a miscount or fraud category, because New York doesn't have a verified paper audit trail--that is, a piece of paper in the voter's hand with their vote on it. That's true of New York. They have the old mechanical lever voting machines. You pull a lever next to your candidate's name, and your action punches your choice into the lever machines' mechanical talliers, and you never touch a piece of paper. But the difference between this system, and Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia touchscreens, for instance, is vast, beginning with those notorious corporate names. Notorious for lying. Notorious for non-transparency. Notorious for fraud. And, in a lot of peoples' opinion, notorious for stealing elections.

Nobody manufacturers the old lever voting machines any more, so there is no corporate interest in bilking the public of billions of dollars for shoddy, new, "trade secret" code electronic technology. The older half of the population in the few states still using lever voting machines understands this older mechanical technology--lever machine voting--and is not mystified by it. People of all ages and education levels can understand it. Election officials, citizen monitors, political party observers--everybody knows what the deal is. Yeah, lever machine elections can be stolen--just as with any of the older voting methods--but familiarity, knowing the "tricks," established practice, and everybody understanding the system prevents it, almost always. It is therefore not at "high risk" of error and fraud.

Read the report's page 5 (NY), and you will see how nitpicky they get in order to force NY into this "high risk" category. NY has none of the vulnerabilities of the others' electronic systems, and long- time use has proven the old lever machines to be reliable and trustworthy. And you know that, if they were not, New Yorkers would not be quiet about!

Further, messing with lever machines sufficiently to alter an election involves visible people--and takes some effort, with every step of it potentially visible. Electronic vote stealing is completely invisible, can happen at the manufacturer (with their secret code), occurs at high speed (the speed of light), and can affect millions of votes at a time. One hacker, a couple of minutes and a few lines of secret code--that's all it takes, and an entire state's votes can be changed in sophisticated, undetectable ways, that only high tech experts and mathematicians understand. Can you write code? I can't. I've seen code. It looks like Greek to me. So, too, with probably 80% or more of the voters.

But a lever machine I can understand. By just looking at it, I can tell you where the vulnerabilities are.

The Verified Voting/Common Cause assessment leaves out the human factor.

It also leaves out the money.

It also leaves out the corruption that the money has brought--which is endemic among our election officials, many of whom now owe their allegiance to high tech corporate vendors, not to the voters.

And it leaves out something else--the election integrity activists--and they are many and passionate-- in NY and PA who are fighting the corporate take-over of their elections systems with these highly riggable electronic machines, and are trying to hang to the old reliable lever machines (or return to hand-counted paper ballots, or go to a well-audited "open-source" code electronic system--no "secret code," no big corporate interests involved).

And talk about motivation to steal elections! How about the motivation of (s)electing county supervisors, state legislators, secretaries of state and members of congress who favor larding these big corporations with billions of taxpayer dollars?

For starters. And when you get into the political partisanship of these corporations--all three major corporate vendors with very close ties to the Republican Party and rightwing causes--it makes your hair stand on end.

This cold, limited, cleansed view of the new electronic voting technology, that Verified Voting/Common Cause presents in this report, serves the corporate vendors--those who got billions of dollars for selling us the unverifiable, shoddy, error-prone, touchscreen systems (--in the case of ES&S, manufactured in sweatshops in the Philippines!). They're getting billions of dollars for replacing those with optiscans, or upgrading touchscreens with printers. They're getting billions of dollars for long-term contracts for maintenance, for code patches and upgrades, for "training," and even for printing optiscan and mail-in voting ballots (which are scanned right into the riggable, "trade secret" code electronics, just like the optiscan votes).

I'm surprised at Verified Voting. I'm not surprised at Common Cause, which has been into cleansing this corporate scam for a long time: hit us with touchscreens; then, when the citizens cry foul, hit us with optiscans, which are only slightly less riggable, because they have a ballot that might be counted--in a rare circumstance--and are also very expensive.

Their categories of risk--High, Medium, Low--should be changed, and shifted far toward the risk end, thus:

Super-duper high risk (of error/fraud) such that we must assume that it will occur.

Extremely high risk (of error/fraud) such that we must assume that those who own and control the code (or other hackers) will be sorely tempted.

And high risk (of error/fraud), such that it can easily occur and go undetected, but carries some minimal risk to the hacker (and his/her puppetmaster) of getting caught. In the latter case, the stakes of the election would be relevant. What is worth that minimal risk? (The presidency, for instance; or five pivotal senate seats in a 55-45 pro-war senate, or, locally, say, a particularly lucrative real estate development, dependent on a county supervisor's vote?)

There is hardly a state in the union that could be considered "low risk." If I had been asked the question, I would have answered: New York, if they can hang onto their lever machines. The Bushite Justice Department sued them--sued them!--to shove these riggable electronics down their throats. Verified Voting/Common Cause reports this as if it were a neutral event. It is not. It is a vicious event to pressure local people into spending a lot of money for voting machines they don't need, that will put them at "high risk" of election theft.

Our elections are largely being run by three partisan Republican corporations, using "trade secret" programming code to 'count' the electrons, in ways that most of us don't understand, with virtually no audit/recount controls.

The risk to voters with the old lever voting machines pales in comparison to this--and this Verified Voting/Common Cause report's lack of perspective on the dreadful risks in all "trade secret" code vote tabulation, in its omission of the human factor, the money factor, and the fraud motivation factors, and its throwing New York in with the highest risk e-voting systems (such as Georgia and South Carolina) , and Pennsylvania as well (similar situation to New York)--seems very ill-intended. And the intent may in fact be to defeat the active election integrity groups in those states, who are trying to prevent this corporate takeover.

The report serves the interest of corporate election system profiteering.

I've just completed a lengthy assessment of California's election integrity (can we trust the vote counts?) in anticipation of the Feb 5 Primary. On a scale of -5 to +5, I gave it a 1, because the new Secretary of State is trying to reform it, the election integrity movement in very strong in the state, and it is now going in a positive direction. But California has a long way to go, due to the high riggability of the system, and the resistance of corrupt county election officials, who just sued the SoS trying to stop minimal new auditing reforms. I would by no means give California a "low risk" rating, as to electronic error or fraud. It is highly vulnerable to both, as well as to reversal of SoS reforms if they encroach too heavily on corporate profits and power.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=141x29363

The cauldron of corruption that this corporate-run system has inflicted on our elections, and on our political culture, has cost us an incalculable price in lives, in the massive looting of our federal treasury, in our self-respect as a people, and in our bankrupt and vanishing state services. And it certainly has also cost us the disinterested public service, not only of many of our election officials, but also of many big non-profit groups, who specialize in "white-washing" and "green-washing" issues for large corporations, including this vital issue: our right to vote.

Indeed, this report reminds me of similar reports I've read by slick P.R. firms working for big logging corporations, who calculate the loss of a species of bird or fish, that has been in existence and evolving with, and intimately interacting with, the local ecology, for many millions of years, as "high," "medium" and "low" risk. "Low" risk of extirpation, when there are a few hundred of the species left in a devastated, largely deforested, vast swath of the environment. The "low" risk of more clear-cutting! The "low" risk of more pesticide use!

Tell that to the fish.