Seek Truth and Report It or, You Know, Whatever

Two weeks ago, the GAO  published a 107-page report that investigated vulnerabilities and outright failings of electronic voting systems.  Here's the Verified Voting summary of the report:

Voting System Vulnerabilities Identified by GAO:
•Cast ballots, ballot definition files, memory cards, and audit logs could be modified. •Supervisor functions were protected with weak or easily guessed passwords, and memory cards that allowed individuals access to voting machines were inadequately protected.
•Systems had easily picked locks and power switches that were exposed and unprotected.
•Voting machine vendors had weak security practices, including the failure to conduct background checks on programmers and system developers, and the failure to establish clear chain of custody procedures for handling software.

Voting System Failures Have Already Occurred During Elections
In addition to identifying potential vulnerabilities, GAO identified a number of cases of operational failures in real elections. These examples included:
•In California, a county presented voters with an incorrect electronic ballot, meaning they could not vote in certain races.
•In Pennsylvania, a county made a ballot error on an electronic voting system that resulted in the county’s undervote percentage reaching 80% in some precincts.
•In North Carolina, electronic voting machines continued to accept votes after their memories were full, causing over 4,000 votes to be lost.
•In Florida, a county reported that touch screens took up to an hour to activate and had to be activated sequentially, resulting in long delays.

Problems With Implementation of Voluntary Standards, Testing, and Federal Efforts to Improve Voting System Security
GAO reported that voluntary standards for electronic voting adopted in 2002 by the Federal Election Commission contain vague and incomplete security provisions, inadequate provisions for commercial products and networks, and inadequate documentation requirements. GAO also found that tests currently performed by independent testing authorities and state and local election officials do not adequately assess electronic voting system security and reliability.

The GAO report indicated that national initiatives to improve voting system security and reliability of electronic voting systems either lack specific plans for implementation or are not expected to be completed until after the 2006 election. According to GAO, “Until these efforts are completed, there is a risk that many state and local jurisdictions will rely on voting systems that were not developed, acquired, testing, operated, or managed in accordance with rigorous security and reliability standards — potentially affecting the reliability of future elections and voter confidence in the accuracy of the vote count.

The Election Assistance Commission, which was created as part of the “Help American Vote Act” began operations in January 2004. To improve the security and reliability of electronic voting systems, GAO recommends that EAC establish tasks, processes, and time frames for improving the federal voluntary voting system standards, testing capabilities, and management support available to state and local election officials. EAC commissioners agreed with GAO recommendations and stated that actions on each are either under way or intended. The National Institute of Standards’ (NIST) director also agreed with the report’s conclusions.

Not surprisingly, this report has been ignored completely by the corporate media, including the NYT, which ran a series of editorials that called the security of eVoting into question apparently to balance an abject lack of good reporting on the issue. 

We can probably attribute the corporate media's refusal to cover the news that  the BushCo administration is essentially demanding that we participate in unverifiable elections to Tweety's Law of Political Reporting: People don't need more information about stuff they already know they don't have.  That is to say, everyone who votes knows that eVoting is sweeping the country, so they don't need to hear more about it. 

Computerworld, though, bravely bucked the Tweety tide in a perfectly titled article, E-voting Grows Without Consensus, to report on the apparently haphazard process by which we are losing our franchise:

State and local election officials, looking to meet federal voting regulations, are buying electronic voting gear despite a lack of best practices guidance and money.

The deadline for meeting the mandates of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which requires that an e-voting machine be installed at every polling location, is the first election after Jan. 1, 2006.

Governments are buying the gear in the midst of a continuing controversy over the reliability and security of e-voting machines, the lack of a so-called paper trail of votes from some systems, and the fact that there are few lists of systems and best practices certified by state or federal agencies.

 

...

One of the bones of contention is that no guidelines have been set up to ensure that machines meet the federal requirements, officials said. For example, a number of local officials want to implement e-voting systems that provide paper trails, but there are no federal criteria for doing so.

"The [GAO] report buttresses what we've been saying," said Ion Sancho, supervisor of elections in Florida's Leon County, which uses optical scan devices that have to be supplemented with e-voting machines under the HAVA law. "There are concerns [that] need to be addressed," he said, citing both potential electronic and human errors.

The government is forcing a rush into e-voting without having established adequate technological guidelines, said Matthew Zimmerman, staff attorney at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil rights advocacy group that focuses on technology issues.

I'm one of blogtopia's (thanks, skippy) leading Cassandras on this topic, so reading and writing about the easy time Team BushCo is having as they disenfranchise the country by privatizing the vote is particularly painful for me, but I'll say it all again, quickly.   This is the issue.  There is no other issue.  If we've lost the vote, and I believe we have, then we have lost everything.  If we have even lost a crucial percentage of the vote, as we've seen in the last three elections, then we have lost everything.  That means no poll matters.  No protest.  No letter to the editor.  No GOTV effort.  Nothing. 

The way to fix this isn't through the current federal government, which has a vested interest in unverifiable voting machines; it's through the states.  Right now at VerifiedVoting.org you can see a map that lets you know where your state is on the question of voter-verified paper trails.  None of the legislation I've read is good enough because not any of it mandates proper audits, which involves random counting of a higher percentage of the ballots cast.  But the push to get a voter-verified paper trail is a good first step.  My fear is that these laws will lead people to believe that everything has been fixed now, when that couldn't be further from the truth.  So the fight to regain our vote is only beginning.  It's going to be a hard one but, thank god, we'll be able to count on the vigilance of the journalists at Computerworld to keep us informed during the struggle for our democracy.

 

Comments

[DavidByron]

If we've lost the vote, and I believe we have, then we have lost everything.

Well I don't have a vote of course. A lot of people in America don't. Voting turn out in the US is essentially below the threshold for a democracy anyway.

I guess I'm not sure you'd be losing much by losing the vote. You have an effective one party state as it is so I don't see it would make much difference if you just said that republicans win every time.

I disagree that voting is the key to influence or power. You can get a lot done without it and I'm not sure that having it in america achieves much. It almost seems like a distraction. In fact I wonder if we wouldn't be better off without it (or rather I wonder if you wouldn't, since I am already).

I mean would anything be significantly different if you just didn't bother with the masquerade? Presumably the current Democrats - basically a right wing party anyway - would join the Republican one-party state and as a result the Republican party would move a little bit to the left. Not much because there's not much difference.

I can see advantages and disadvantages.