[lit-ideas] Re: voter turn-out correction

From the Washington Post article on 2002 Florida
governor's election:
"The group was told that two computer crashes -- the
first in May last year and the second in November --
erased the records of the 2002 primary and general
elections. The group's request, first reported in the
New York Times, also revealed that the lack of a
backup system meant that the records could not be
recovered."

Either the election officials are totally clueless
when it comes computer systems, or liars. Because the
scenario outlined above is extremely unlikely.

We are supposed to believe:
1. They have no backup system. Backing up data is very
simple, but it does require discpline and care, and
the technology is less than bullet proof. So backups
often fail, happens to best of us and almost every IT
organization I know has some troubles with this issue.
However, I've visited hundreds of IT centers ranging
from small educational institutions to big
corporations, and I've never even heard of single one
that doesn't have a backup system at all. It would be
insanely incompetent.

2. That a system crash destroyed the records. When
computer operating system crashes it does a ton of
things to make sure you don't loose any data. Actually
one the main reason OS crashes in the first place is
that it is written in a such a way that if there is
any chance data might get corrupted it suspends all
operations, that is effectively it crashes just to be
on the safe side. However, if you have a sudden power
failure this doesn't apply. Once again, any
half-decent IT shop has backup power (called UPS) but
they like everything else man made are less than 100%
reliable. So you might actually loose some data due to
power failure, although there is 99,99% likelihood it
can be recovered using common tools. But computers do
very strange things when power goes out all the
sudden, so it's possible data might have been
unrecoverable after a power crash. They said it
happened twice, which is about the odds of lighting
striking twice at the same place.

But even when normal measures fail, there are
specialists who can rescue the data from the hard
drive. Including intentianaly erased, multiple times
overwritten, smashed to pieces, melted and sunk to the
bottom of the sea hard drives. These guys are so good
that it is actually a serious problem nowadays to make
sure data is actually destroyed when disposing of aged
equipment.

I repeat that you just don't loose data for good like
that due to a crash, nevermind do it twice. Only way
they could've lost the records is by erasing them from
the database, either due to a mistake or
intentionally. But once again, same mistake twice?

Like a poster in slashdot put it:
"I'm a big fan of "never attribute to malice what can
properly be attributed to incompetence," but in this
case, malice -- i.e., a desire to produce insecure,
unreliable machines that can easily be rigged to
produce the "right" electoral outcome -- really is the
simplest explanation."

I'm not a conspiracy nut either, but I tend to agree.
The tech used is so badly designed and implemented
with such consistency that it is increasingly hard to
be believe they can be that clueless. One example in
particular comes to mind, the Diebold systems store
votes in an Access db. What you have in the db are
tables like this (or something similar):

   Machine1County1 Machine2County1 Machine1County2....
Candidate1 236 247 458
Candidate2 305 255 400
(Numbers being votes)

When the voter presses the touch screen the program
adds 1 to the corresponding field. How do you cheat
with this? Well you login to Access DB software,
except you don't have to actually login because they
didn't set any password (too much of an inconvenience,
not that it would stop a serious hacker.) Then you
enter the number you want on the field. There are no
paper votes to recount, no log of changes to db that
can't be erased. Gives whole new meaning to phrase
delivering the votes.


Cheers,
Teemu
Helsinki, Finland


                
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