[acbny-l] a NY Times op-ed
- From: "Donald Moore" <don.moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <acbny-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2003 15:51:19 -0500
Interesting, Mr. Krudman, best known as a major Enron advisor has an
incredible fallibility rate in his columns. Unfortunately the one thing he
is consistent in is not acknowledging his errors. It would be interesting
to see how much of this was quoted out of context. On the other hand,
regardless of who really is into throwing elections we do need a system with
credibility.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Godino" <mikeg125@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <acb-l@xxxxxxx>; "ACBNY" <acbny-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, December 05, 2003 6:45 PM
Subject: [acbny-l] a NY Times op-ed
Hi all,
I didn'e see this anywhere so I thought I would pass it on.
Mike
December 2, 2003
Hack the Vote
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Inviting Bush supporters to a fund-raiser, the host wrote, "I am
committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the
president next year." No surprise there. But Walden O'Dell - who
says that he wasn't talking about his business operations - happens
to be the chief executive of Diebold Inc., whose touch-screen voting
machines are in increasingly widespread use across the United States.
For example, Georgia - where Republicans scored spectacular upset
victories in the 2002 midterm elections - relies exclusively on
Diebold machines. To be clear, though there were many anomalies in
that 2002 vote, there is no evidence that the machines miscounted.
But there is also no evidence that the machines counted correctly.
You see, Diebold machines leave no paper trail.
Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, who has introduced a bill
requiring that digital voting machines leave a paper trail and that
their software be available for public inspection, is occasionally
told that systems lacking these safeguards haven't caused
problems. "How do you know?" he asks.
What we do know about Diebold does not inspire confidence. The
details are technical, but they add up to a picture of a company
that was, at the very least, extremely sloppy about security, and
may have been trying to cover up product defects.
Early this year Bev Harris, who is writing a book on voting
machines, found Diebold software - which the company refuses to make
available for public inspection, on the grounds that it's
proprietary - on an unprotected server, where anyone could download
it. (The software was in a folder titled "rob-Georgia.zip.") The
server was used by employees of Diebold Election Systems to update
software on its machines. This in itself was an incredible breach of
security, offering someone who wanted to hack into the machines both
the information and the opportunity to do so.
An analysis of Diebold software by researchers at Johns Hopkins and
Rice Universities found it both unreliable and subject to abuse. A
later report commissioned by the state of Maryland apparently
reached similar conclusions. (It's hard to be sure because the state
released only a heavily redacted version.)
Meanwhile, leaked internal Diebold e-mail suggests that corporate
officials knew their system was flawed, and circumvented tests that
would have revealed these problems. The company hasn't contested the
authenticity of these documents; instead, it has engaged in legal
actions to prevent their dissemination.
Why isn't this front-page news? In October, a British newspaper, The
Independent, ran a hair-raising investigative report on U.S. touch-
screen voting. But while the mainstream press has reported the
basics, the Diebold affair has been treated as a technology or
business story - not as a potential political scandal.
This diffidence recalls the treatment of other voting issues, like
the Florida "felon purge" that inappropriately prevented many
citizens from voting in the 2000 presidential election. The attitude
seems to be that questions about the integrity of vote counts are
divisive at best, paranoid at worst. Even reform advocates like Mr.
Holt make a point of dissociating themselves from "conspiracy
theories." Instead, they focus on legislation to prevent future
abuses.
But there's nothing paranoid about suggesting that political
operatives, given the opportunity, might engage in dirty tricks.
Indeed, given the intensity of partisanship these days, one suspects
that small dirty tricks are common. For example, Orrin Hatch, the
chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, recently announced that
one of his aides had improperly accessed sensitive Democratic
computer files that were leaked to the press.
This admission - contradicting an earlier declaration by Senator
Hatch that his staff had been cleared of culpability - came on the
same day that the Senate police announced that they were hiring a
counterespionage expert to investigate the theft. Republican members
of the committee have demanded that the expert investigate only how
those specific documents were leaked, not whether any other breaches
took place. I wonder why.
The point is that you don't have to believe in a central conspiracy
to worry that partisans will take advantage of an insecure,
unverifiable voting system to manipulate election results. Why
expose them to temptation?
I'll discuss what to do in a future column. But let's be clear: the
credibility of U.S. democracy may be at stake.
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