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| 1-30-07: HAVA -- The road to Boondogg... |
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| Author |
Message |
    
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 5875
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? 
Votes: 9 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 - 12:18 pm: | 
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HELP AMERICA VOTE ACT (HAVA) LOBBYIST LIST
Question: What happens if you lobby a lawmaker for $4 billion in expenditures for touch-screen (DRE) voting machines and go back to that same lawmaker two years later asking to dump DREs?
Answer: You lose credibility. It might be hard to lobby for other things. It's politically embarrassing. And your members, or funders, might have a few questions to ask about the prudence of your lobbying expenditures.
BUT HOW COULD ANYONE HAVE KNOWN?
The road to voting computers was paved with good intentions. No one knew that some of the programmers for voting computers would turn out to be convicted embezzlers.
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/2197/14318.html
No one realized that the main sponsor of the HAVA bill -- Rep. Bob Ney -- would end up going to jail on corruption charges.
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/46466.html
Few realized that the federal testing labs, Ciber and Wyle, weren't doing their jobs and their overseers -- NASED and now the EAC -- failed to check their work.
Wyle failures (Bowen Hearing): http://www.blackboxvoting.org/itahearing.pdf
Ciber failures: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/46428.html
HAVA bought a lemon.
WHO BIT INTO IT?
Progressive public interest groups. Labor unions. Civil rights groups.
While many election reform activists are under the impression that touch-screen (DRE) voting machines were some sort of Republican plot to take over America, the truth is that lobbying for the DRE-seeking "Help America Vote Act" came primarily from the foundation of the Democratic Party itself.
Activists throughout America have expressed surprise at the Democratic Party's unwillingness to pull DREs off the shelf. One reason is simply this: To do so would damage the credibility of those who lobbied for HAVA. And those who lobbied for HAVA just happen to be the biggest funders and activist workhorses for the Democratic Party itself.
WHO INVESTED THEIR CREDIBILITY (AND MEMBERSHIP FUNDS) TO LOBBY FOR HAVA?
1. Public interest groups - mostly progressive
2. Labor unions
3. Minority rights groups
4. Disability rights groups
5. Industry
Of these, the first four tend to favor Democrats but the fifth group -- industry, the group charged with writing the computer code that counts America's votes -- is made of of vendors that are more often close to the Republican Party.
Democrats lobbied HAVA in but to a large extent, Republican-affiliated vendors executed the mechanics of the plan. Some would call this comical; others, tragic.
PUBLIC INTEREST GROUP HAVA LOBBYISTS
1. People for the American Way
2. Common Cause
3. American Civil Liberties Union
4. League of Women Voters
5. American Jewish Committee
6. Hadassah
7. American Association for Retired Persons
8. Public Citizen
9. American Network of Community Options and Resources
10. Constitution Project (Georgetown University)
11. Open Society Policy Center (Soros)
12. American Bar Association
LABOR UNION HAVA LOBBYISTS
1. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)
2. Laborers International Union of North America
3. International Brotherhood of Teamsters
4. United Auto Workers
5. American Federation of Teachers
6. AFL-CIO
7. UNITE (Industrial & Textile employees)
Of the seven HAVA-lobbying groups above, five are among the Top-20 largest donors of all time to any political party. All five donate almost exclusively to the Democratic Party and its candidates. None of the top 20 Republican donors lobbied for HAVA.
According to OpenSecrets.org, the labor unions that lobbied for HAVA have given nearly $150 million to support Democrats since 1989, and six were in the Top-20 Democratic PAC funders for 2006-06.
MINORITY RIGHTS HAVA LOBBYISTS
1. NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc.
2. National Council of La Raza
3. Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund (MALDEF)
DISABILITY RIGHTS HAVA LOBBYISTS
1. American Foundation for the Blind
2. The ARC of the United States
3. National Disability Rights Network
4. Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund
5. United Cerebral Palsy Association
6. Paralyzed Veterans of America
Black Box Voting has been unable to locate the lobbying disclosure forms for the American Association of Persons with Disabilities (AAPD) featuring the vocal Jim Dickson, nor did we find any disclosure forms for the National Federation for the Blind (NFB), the group that took $1 million from Diebold. Misfiled? Misnamed? Overlooked? Omitted?
Link for NFB $1 million from Diebold: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/73/36492.html
COUNTY GOVERNMENT HAVA LOBBYING
1. Riverside County, Calif.
2. San Diego County, Calif.
3. Ventura County, Calif.
4. Miami-Dade County, FL
INDUSTRY & BUSINESS HAVA LOBBYISTS
1. Accenture
2. VoteHere
3. Election Systems & Software
4. AccuPoll
5. Danaher
6. Association of Assistive Technology Act Programs
7. US Business & Industry Council
8. Assocation of Technology Act Projects
Not found on lobbying forms pushing HAVA: The SAIC, the ITAA, and Diebold.
Diebold Election Systems Inc does not show up on the 2001-02 HAVA lobbying forms, but did lobby for elections issues in 2004 and 2005.
Also notably missing are the firms referenced by R. Doug Lewis of "The Election Center" in an August 2003 meeting. In this tape recorded meeting, he said that HAVA was put into place by an election systems task force which included Lockheed, Northrop-Grumman, EDS, and Accenture.
Of these, only Accenture shows up the lobbying forms, and there is no entity called Election anything, except for Election System & Software and another company, election.com, which lobbied for Internet voting. (See Chapter 8 of Black Box Voting for more on the Saudi-owned election.com, which was later taken over by Accenture - http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf - See Chapter 16 for more information on the tape recorded meeting: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-16.pdf )
What about Choicepoint? Choicepoint says it didn't lobby for HAVA. Choicepoint says it hasn't had any involvement in elections.
The lobbying forms don't show lobbying for voting machines, but a lobbying firm called Fleishman-Hillard Government Relations filed a registration form in 2002 indicating they planned to lobby for "Election Reform" on behalf of Choicepoint. Muddying things up, no 2002 lobbying form appeared showing that they did. In 2001, however, a lobbying form clearly puts Choicepoint in the middle of HAVA lobbying, showing that Choicepoint was involving itself in lobbying for the voter registration component of HAVA.
Choicepoint has repeatedly stated that they have "no involvement whatsoever" in elections, and in rebuttal to a controversial article that appeared for a short while on OpEd News, Choicepoint came on to deny that they lobbied for HAVA. More on Choicepoint here:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/17778.html
Choicepoint, a controversial database broker, clearly cannot state that it has "no involvement in elections."
Choicepoint stakeholder Donna Curling, wife of Choicepoint chief Doug Curling, has continued to fund election reform lobbying by providing funding for some of the activists working on the Holt Bill.
THEY THOUGHT DRE VOTING MACHINES WOULD HELP THEM BUILD THE DEMOCRATIC BASE
Those who lobbied for HAVA were convinced that the DRE machines would solve problems, helping more people vote.
1. Many of the HAVA reformers believed that with DREs, people with less education would be more likely to fill out the whole ballot. In fact, they reasoned, the DRE machines would be easier to use for educationally disadvantaged populations, minorities, non-English-speaking voters, and the disabled.
Few studies back these conclusions up, and those that do have generally not been replicated, or were not peer reviewed, and sometimes show methodology that is as flawed as the lemons HAVA bought. The occasional studies that have been done -- even those prepared by DRE advocates -- sometimes end up with troubling caveats. A Georgia study purported to show that "most people like voting on the DREs" (but rarely mentions the small print: The same study showed that the African-Americans surveyed distrusted the touch-screens).
2. The citizens' right to oversee local elections -- and especially the citizens' right to even get access to information -- has been all but eliminated through the implementation of HAVA. The original civil rights concept was virtuous.
Federal Government is the entity that enacted civil rights, HAVA reformers reasoned, so therefore let's ask the federal government to fix our elections process.
Be careful what you ask for. It just might get "fixed."
REAL SOLUTIONS
If federal government is going to correct anything, it should start with enacting tougher standards to give citizens Freedom of Access to Elections Information -- mandating that the system actually PRODUCE the information needed for citizens to make sure the right candidate was place in office, in a TIMELY manner, that is COST EFFECTIVE and USABLE, prohibiting removal of the information through proprietary claims.
And above all, local CITIZEN oversight must be protected. In almost every case, discoveries of problems with elections and the computers that count them have been discovered by ordinary citizens, not by government oversight, auditors, consultants, certifiers, or experts.
And if we are going to rid ourselves of the DREs, we need to get past the -- er -- little "problem" of the threat to credibility if former HAVA lobbyists take the courageous step of changing course.
They couldn't have known. Perhaps a set of tough investigative hearings can provide the evidence to brace those backbones for the change in direction. Look to Calif. Secretary of State Debra Bowen's well-prepped, no-nonsense hearings on the certification process for examples, and start by issuing subpoenas to Diebold's master programmer, Talbot Iredale, and Ciber's Shawn Southworth (who refused to show up for Bowen's hearing).
This thing can be done. It doesn't need a bandaid, it needs a disinfectant.
SEE FOR YOURSELF HOW HAVA CAME TO BE:
Photocopies of the lobbying forms are in the process of being uploaded to the Black Box Voting Document Archive. You will find lobbying forms for all of the groups listed above as they are uploaded here:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/2197/46539.html
PERMISSION TO REPRINT GRANTED, WITH LINK TO http://www.blackboxvoting.org
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...
Government is the servant of the people, and not the master of them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. We insist on remaining informed so that we may retain control over the instruments of government we have created.
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From the Mailbag
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Mailbag
Post Number: 152
Registered: 10-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, January 31, 2007 - 4:30 am: |
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Submitted by e-mail by one of the most outstanding election integrity researchers I know: Jody Holder:
Bev:
I do not know if you have seen this document, but it is an important report that was circulated at the time of the push for federal
legislation re election reform. Its date is July 2001.
Please see page 16, Issue 17 with their recommendations re federal funding.
Please see page 21 re the reports attitude towards touchscreen voting systems.
Any historical perspective of the road to electronic voting must include the small circle of election "officials" who have been not only
promoting electronic voting since the early 80's (The Election Center was started in 1980), but also hiding the scandalous testing and certification system. In a review of the people who have been on key committees, boards, state election officials, and promoters of electronic voting it would be a good project to create a connection chart showing the incestuous relationships that have been going on for over 20 years. That has now culminated with the current staffing of the EAC.
I do have other documents that were obtained from prior Election Center websites.
Thanks for your research, and work.
Jody Holder
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V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 771
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, February 1, 2007 - 1:40 pm: |
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Bev,
Thank you so much for this document (and the email that brought it to my attention). At the considerable risk of attracting the ire of my fellow BBV'ers, not to say "I told you so", but, err, umm, "I told you so".
This is why I get so cranked up when newbies or Greens or other folks come on here and suggest that DRE's were or are some Republican or corporate plot. There were hoards up people clammoring for DRE's, and you fingered all the main suspects.
Let's drop the crap, admit that lots and lots of people ACROSS the political spectrum screwed up on this, and get about fixing it. It is going to be VERY EXPENSIVE to the public treasury to do so, but it needs to be done.
So the next time interest groups start aligning behind some "silver bullet" to fix some percceived problem, you'll please excuse me if I wear my skeptic's hat a bit longer than most.
The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again. |
David Warman
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Lanwolf
Post Number: 3
Registered: 11-2006
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, February 1, 2007 - 6:48 pm: |
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The only groups that lobbied that had any knowledge of Computer Science were in the last industrial set; none of the rights-based groups would have had any expertise in that arena. Apparently did not even know enough to know who to ask, or that they maybe even should have asked, if the state of the art was sufficient yet. It isn't, by the way, and won't be for many years yet.
I continue to be totally baffled by the way otherwise reasonable people behave in the face of high-tech hype. And this example was very shortly after the dot com bubble burst, so it should have been noticed. But I was myself very surprised that the lobbying resulted in such swift action. By contrast, HDTV has been in the works for 10 years now, two more (at least) to go before full switch-over. |
Brant Lamb
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Brantl
Post Number: 1165
Registered: 01-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, February 2, 2007 - 5:21 am: |
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I have a problem with this 'law of unintended consequences crap'. This is really a consequence of the 'law of poor execution and monitoring'. Otherwise no one would have been willing to stand for a system that wouldn't produce some decent audit trail (physically and logically ergonomic, for easy checking and as backup documentation). The people that voted for HAVA didn't say that it had to be electronic voting, this has been proven time and again, do we need to rehash that again?
The fact that both the vendors and the testing agencies fell flat on their faces and weren't caught is not the fault of the people who enacted the original legislation, it is the fault of the oversight agencies and the vendors themselves and to some degree in the crafters of the portion of the legislation that specified the methods of oversight, and that the checkers were payed by the checkees, and that the reports were allowed to be private.
As a cautionary tale about how oversight needs to be both aggressive and well supervised about anything important (including voting systems/methods/protocols) , this has great meaning as a cautionary tale. Of course, so does the poor execution and oversight of the occupation in Iraq. Very similar in their faults.
The idea that the state of the art in computer science is not capable of making a reliable and secure voting machine is crap. The idea that you may have a very difficult or impossible time verifying that each and every one of them is secure and reliable is an argument that has a great deal of merit. And that you would need to verify each and every one of them to a high degree of certitude shouldn't be debatable. And the facts that these vendors who hired people to write their voting machine software hired several incompetant hacks or deliberate crooks isn't debatable either.
Your premise does omit that a tight little monkey's fist of Republicans own these voting companies, Kurt. In fact, two brothers owned 2 of the companies. In military parlance it's called being defeated in detail. It's kind of like this idea that's axiomatic about warfare: the best way to defeat an army is to attack it's unprotected supplies, minimal risk is involved, as the supplies won't attack you and they're absolutely essential to your enemy. |
Bev Harris
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Site_admin
Post Number: 536
Registered: 10-2006
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 2 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, February 2, 2007 - 7:32 am: |
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Brant, I guess I have to take issue with some of the points you make.
quote:The fact that both the vendors and the testing agencies fell flat on their faces and weren't caught is not the fault of the people who enacted the original legislation...
That's one of the points made in BBV's report. Those who lobbied for the bill did not know there was a breakdown in oversight. They did not ask the right questions. And in another report that I haven't released yet, I'll show you why they didn't ask those questions.
quote:The idea that the state of the art in computer science is not capable of making a reliable and secure voting machine is crap.
I'm not much interested in discussing how to make the systems secure until we first secure the rights to citizen oversight and freedom of access to elections information. Really, who gives a darn about some system a bunch of experts designed if the owners of the system -- the citizens -- can't oversee it? Hidden in the arguments that focus everything on security is the assumption that citizen oversight is irrelevant.
WHO DID THE GENETIC ENGINEERING ON THE LEMON?
As you will see when we publish more of the documents underlying HAVA, the problem was embedded in the original tight little circle of "experts" who crafted the recommendations. Nowhere -- nowhere at all -- in their thinking was even a glimmer of a concept that citizens are the ultimate owners of the government, that citizens must be able to oversee, that citizens need access to information in order to do that.
That's where they went wrong. They built a foundation based solely on experts, special interests and insiders. Then they took the consensus they had achieved between the experts, special interests and insiders to the lobbyists. It was a bright sunny juicy package, and the public interest groups bit right into it.
The article at the top of this thread above shows who bit into the lemon. It doesn't say much about who did the genetic engineering of this particular lemon. I have many of those documents. It was not the Republicans that crafted HAVA - no matter how desperately people want to point the finger at Republicans for this. It was a group of academics, experts, special interests and election industry insiders.
They were so focused on their own little kingdoms that they never stepped back to look at the most fundamental question of all: What are elections supposed to DO for the citizenry? Who actually OWNS the government?
Those who did the genetic engineering on HAVA really had very little trust in the original concept of the founders of this country, that the oversight of the citizenry is essential for the government to operate responsibly.
They left out the citizens altogether, in favor of computer experts and government taking stewardship over us all. That was what contaminated HAVA at the foundational level.
Brant, I do not believe the argument should ultimately be over designing security into technology. At its roots is something more basic: Can the citizenry oversee it in a practical, meaningful way? Because the most "secure" and system in the world with the best government oversight imaginable doesn't do the job if citizens can't oversee it.
You write:
quote:
Your premise does omit that a tight little monkey's fist of Republicans own these voting companies, Kurt. In fact, two brothers owned 2 of the companies.
Why oh why does everyone ignore the FACT that Sequoia Voting Systems -- which at one time was the second biggest voting company -- was owned by a company whose single biggest investor was supporting the Democratic Party? This investor, who is the guy behind the massive Westfield Shopping Mall conglomerate -- a worldwide operation -- was once accused of trying to BUY FOREIGN POLICY in Great Britain. He put something like $800,000 into the US Democratic Party and its candidates.
Saying two companies were owned by two brothers is also not really accurate. Close, but not quite accurate. Bob & Todd founded ES&S; Bob left ES&S and another entity closely tied to Republican Senator Chuck Hagel and the stakeholders for Kiewit took ownership control, with Todd remaining as a Vice President. Bob went on to have some ownership in the company that was later bought by Diebold, and for two years (until Kathleen Wynne's spectacular dumpster dive got him dumped by Diebold) Bob ran that division.
THE REALLY INTERESTING QUESTIONS THAT STILL HAVEN'T BEEN ANSWERED
What secret entity was it that invested heavily in Global Election Systems at about the same time ES&S took over BRC, and coincidentally at the same time Bob moved over to Global?
This could be really, really important. Shift in ownership at ES&S. Shift in ownership at Global Election Systems. One Urosevich brother stays at ES&S, one moves to Global.
To date no one STILL has publically revealed really went on during the 1996-97 confluence of events where BRC, the biggest elections industry player, was purchased by ES&S, Bob moved over to Global, Global had a large stock purchase by a non-Canadian unidentified entity, and the BRC voting computers were spread out between ES&S and the third major player, Sequoia through an SEC agreement.
There was a whole lot of shuffling going on in 1997. Because ES&S is privately held, as is Kiewit, as is the McCarthy Group, as is the entity called "Normal Investments" that was also an owner of ES&S, and because the stock transaction with Global skipped through a disclosure loophole for foreign (non-Canadian, Global was a Canadian company) investors, we still don't know if there have been more connections between the companies or not.
But saying that "two brothers owned the two companies" is overly simplistic and not particularly accurate. Two brothers founded ES&S, and one of them moved over to a company that was later acquired by Diebold, and then for two years ran the elections division for Diebold; meanwhile, the other brother has a role in ES&S, but may not have much management say.
I'd be looking for bigger players than the Urosevich brothers.
HOW DOES MICHAEL MCCARTHY CONNECT TO KIEWIT?
Another question that would shed a lot of light on things: Who is Michael McCarthy (a major stakeholder in ES&S and also Chuck Hagel's campaign finance director) and what is his relationship, really, to the Kiewit family/organizations? What I do know about him is that for some reason when Peter Kiewit died, it was Michael that came over to Omaha from Iowa to sell Kiewit's ranch. Michael has had a position on the Kiewit board of directors. Kiewit owned the Omaha World Herald, which in turn owned part of the new, powerful Nebraska investment company run by Michael McCarthy, The McCarthy Group. And the McCarthy Group and the Omaha World Herald have had controlling interest in ES&S. So who is Michael McCarthy and how did he become connected to Kiewit?
Kiewit builds most of the US military bases in the world. It builds most of the highways in the US. It built a large portion of the fiber optic cable infrastructure that wires us together. It has become involved in energy companies, mining companies, and telecommunications ventures. It's been involved in bid-rigging and fake MBE fraud (white guys using front corporations to qualify for minority contracts).
I've mapped out some of what I have learned in Chapter 3 of Black Box Voting:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-3.pdf
I don't live in Nebraska or Iowa, but if I did I'd at least check the marriage records to see if that's where the connect is.
WHY IT'S IMPORTANT NOT TO OVERSIMPLIFY
There's much we still don't know, and that's why precision is important. When we simplify, we also close off investigative avenues that might be even more important. |
V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 772
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box? 
Votes: 22 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, February 2, 2007 - 10:39 am: |
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Brant,
Never let the facts get in the way of a good crisp one-liner, I always say.
Just kidding, and rattling your cage a little.
This all reminds me of a stock answer I developed when dealing with the "political reporter" from our local paper when she would get to bird-doggin' some story that involved election law. She'd ask a question that had a very complicated counter-intuitive correct answer. (Not a rare event under PA election law.)
I'd ask her, "Do you want the correct answer, which is lengthy and complicated, and either you or your editors will edit it down to simplify it for the readership, in which case it will be demonstrably false reporting, or should I give you a line of garbage that is wrong, but short enough to get into the paper unedited, but will at least let people understand what's happening as an outcome, even if the details of whys and hows are wrong?"
She didn't like hearing that very much.
"To every problem, there's a simple answer - simple, and wrong."
(Message edited by Formerelecdir on February 02, 2007) |
Brant Lamb
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Brantl
Post Number: 1167
Registered: 01-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, February 2, 2007 - 11:32 am: |
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But the elections offices bit that lemon long before electronic voting, Bev, it just found inordinate leverage in poorly designed machines because no one has watch-dogged it for so long.
I see a couple of things as inescapable:
1. People are always going to have to be involved in checking that ballots are counted correctly.
2. Until people are as immediately involved (meaning as early in the process as you can manage) as possible, there will always be a motive for elections management personnel to gloss over anywhere from one to many 'glitches' in order to avoid 'problems'. And I believe this is the case because I believe there are always problems when you're counting hundreds of pieces of paper filled out by amateurs, and guarded by amateurs, for something that's important. I think elections officials have been conditioned like Pavlov's dogs to say as knee-jerk, "That was 1 minor problem, but if it gets any notoriety, I'll never hear the end of it, and I have time constraints." So, until you make detection of the problems as nearly inevitable as possible, you won't even stop the unintended errors, and intentional changes are in a class entirely beyond this.
And all of the argument is how do you deliver a reliable voting system and elections that haven't been subverted by any private interests, any time. |
Brant Lamb
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Brantl
Post Number: 1168
Registered: 01-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, February 2, 2007 - 11:44 am: |
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But all of this does illustrate a point. The HAVA legislation didn't certainly didn't mandate electronic voting machines, certainly didn't mandate DRE's and didn't mandate PC-based voting machines. What is in HAVA, and what HAVA's been used to buy, are two different things.
My analogy is this: saying that you want a bridge built over a river doesn't make you responsible if the company building the bridge builds an unsafe one, if you had no hand in selecting the people who built the bridge. Now, defending or trying to hush up news of the crappy bridge after it's built, that's a whole different story. |
V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 773
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, February 2, 2007 - 11:57 am: |
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Brant,
While your point ("HAVA legislation didn't certainly didn't mandate electronic voting machines") is plainly correct as a matter of cold hard legal fact, HAVA certainly did have that effect in many many states.
In addition to having to meet the standards of HAVA, voting machines also have to meet state statutorial and Constitutional requirements. When the intersection of those laws comes together, in all practicality HAVA left no other option than electronic voting in many states.
The state statutes involved pre-dated HAVA. So when HAVA says that in order to comply with accessibility, you can do "A" or "B", and state statute or case law or Constitutional mandate says "not B", you are left with only "A". And that was DRE's, in many if not most states. |
David Warman
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Lanwolf
Post Number: 4
Registered: 11-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, February 2, 2007 - 4:15 pm: |
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"The idea that the state of the art in computer science is not capable of making a reliable and secure voting machine is crap"
Not so. Until CS can factor out the human part of the equation we can not make 100% secure systems that are not amenable to clandestine human intervention. They can be cracked, therefore they will be cracked. Only when these systems start designing themselves will this assertion maybe become invalid. On that day there will be hockey in hell. So speaks 40 years as a designer in the business. Your creds? Show me the design for a 100% secure and unshakeably honest and accurate system and I will eat these words. With full proof of the case. Right now, at the most extremely "secure" case, it just takes one person in the production line to break the system.
The issue is not so much the security of the system, it is the transparency and ability to cross-check and validate the result. While preserving anonymity. Something along the lines of:
each voter takes home two machine-generated randomized yet unique PINs. One number is also recorded in the count data along with the votes cast with it.
After the count is made the results are posted, including each vote with PIN.
Each voter then has the right to check that their PIN is listed with the correct vote, and marks theirs using the second PIN, computationally irreversibly related to the recorded one.
An independant group then recounts from that posting and validates against the announced results.
Still not absolutely secure, but closer. Has the advantage of closing the loop around the technology used to implement it, and its reliability. It's a people solution, not a technology solution, so CS SOA is not so important.
Note that it requires an informed voting population that will take their own validation steps. Likely? Not really, unfortunately. |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 5877
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, February 3, 2007 - 10:14 am: |
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David: That system is not sufficiently transparent. It is, again, missing the component of meaningful CITIZEN oversight. It requires citizens to be mathematicians and cryptographers to authenticate the technology, and then private detectives to authenticate the chain of custody, and in practical terms, still requires citizens to trust experts.
The voting system ultimately controls the government itself, and the citizens own the government. The voting system needs to be able to be overseen by citizens. It really should be simple enough that an average eighth grader can understand how the voting system works.
The experts have already proven that they should not be in charge of this. It was experts who were involved in the architecture of the Help America Vote Act. It is experts that lied, misled, and hid information from the public after the citizens started investigating and exposing the problems.
So, in your design, give us a system that does not require the citizenry to trust experts, cryptographers and mathematicians. Something they can authenticate with their own eyes.
Thanks,
Bev Harris
Government is the servant of the people, and not the master of them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. We insist on remaining informed so that we may retain control over the instruments of government we have created.
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Kathleen Wynne
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Wynnek
Post Number: 75
Registered: 10-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, February 3, 2007 - 10:29 am: |
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Well put, Bev! |
David Warman
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Lanwolf
Post Number: 5
Registered: 11-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, February 3, 2007 - 12:25 pm: |
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Bev: thanks. My suggestion, the result of admittedly relatively brief contemplation, attempts to close the trust loop for each individual voter, but does not address the issue of any voter being able to vet the loop itself from an oversight perspective, as you point out.
I have already noticed that the PIN generation is weak in the sense I did not go into it deeply enough. PIN1 should be generated using some form of crypto from the vote on the voting machine itself. The actual votes can be encoded in this number. The voter then inputs it along with some personal key to an isolated PIN2 generator not at all connected with the voting equipment, and which contains no memory, i.e. a simple dedicated function calculator. Looking ahead, this could be done at any time, and could even use their own cellphone or Pocket PC or whatever.
The final "independant" check is the weak part of the suggestion as a system. I think the best that can be done is for the checking to be an open source algorithm which takes as input the voting record (all votes with their PIN1 and PIN2). Any half-way decent programmer - and there are millions of us now - can take that and write their own validator, run the download vote data against it, and publish their results. The algorithms that generate PIN1 and PIN2 should also be OS, and in fact there should be OS code around so that any voter who so desires can input their vote into their cellphone or Treo and verify that they get the same PIN1, even before they leave the booth.
So. A citizen can verify in detail that their vote appears on the register as they made it, and only they can add to the register the unique PIN2 that matches it. Nor can anyone change that later if both require voter-selected personal info for their generation since that part of the crypto is non-recoverable from the PINs.
At a higher level, any citizen can validate the published count. They can either choose to trust one (or more) variations on downloadable checking code or write their own (this would be well within the reach of any first year student).
The transparency issue here works by making the technology of the actual recording of votes relatively irrelevant, requiring only that every vote actually be recorded and transferred to the register intact. The success of that can be assessed by the second part of the voter responsibilty to validate the register with their PIN2. At that point the register is doubly check-summed yet the votes remain fully anonymous. The certainty of the vote count is now a simple function of how many of the votes got PIN2 validation, and how many voters complained that their vote was absent or incorrectly recorded, a complaint that must be backed up by the trail printout they got at the booth.
A hand-count at this point becomes a final fall-back only. It is now OK for the voting machines to report votes directly over the internet, since this part is inside the validation loop and any tampering can be detected.
This might still be susceptible to vote stuffing. There may be some info that can fold into the crypto that only the voter possess that can guard against that. Not sure. It may be that the voter registration rolls now become the point of entry for corruption, by adding fake voters.
Still has the "problem" of requiring voter participation at the counting end as well as the voting end of the process. Although a low back-end participation may be OK as long as the final tally stays close to the exit polls,and when that is not the case voters can be asked to make sure they do their back-end duty to help the recount.
Finally, the weakness of the closed system we have now is that it does only take one bad apple, because the population of voting capable machines is esentially a monoculture, with all the same failings and weaknesses of monocultured crops. This idea, OTOH, distributes all the voting validation throughout the population, each member of which can implement their own independant validation suite that can be applied to the entire vote, not just their own individual vote. Any concerned citizen can do it themselves, they do not have to wait for some PAC to win out over the incumbents or counting-house personnel to get a count check.
It might be instructive to run this by Bruce Schneier. After reformatting it as a proper process proposal. If anybody thinks it has merit here. Please poke more holes. And/or add new steps or guards or algorithm details.
And probably move to a more appropriate thread? |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 5879
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 2 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, February 3, 2007 - 2:16 pm: |
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David, So your system requires citizens to become computer programmers if they want to understand it. While you're at it, now might be a good time to require jury members to become members of the bar before they can sit on a jury.
While I appreciate the effort programmers are putting into designing a system they believe will suffice, the issue is not whether PROGRAMMERS can understand it, however many of them you say there are, and assuming they even WANT to spend hour upon hour examining the code in every single election in every single jurisdiction.
The issue is whether the average eighth grader can understand and validate it.
The public means "the public", not "members of the public who have expertise in computer programming and cryptography."
Try again. Come back with something my mother can examine. That the local cabinetmaker can authenticate. That 99 percent of the wonderful citizens who attend town meetings, write their legislators, volunteer as pollworkers, ask for public records, and otherwise act as the very backbone of democracy can truly oversee and authenticate.
It will never be appropriate to reduce the size of the pool of citizens who can exercise meaningful oversight to just those who have background as computer programmers.
So the effort, for me, fails on its premise: I don't want a system that ordinary citizens can't oversee.
Government is the servant of the people, and not the master of them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. We insist on remaining informed so that we may retain control over the instruments of government we have created.
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David Warman
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Lanwolf
Post Number: 6
Registered: 11-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Sunday, February 4, 2007 - 7:44 pm: |
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Bev: I'm not requiring every citizen to become a programmer. I am only requiring that they know at least how to make a selection on a web page or touch screen. But voting machines require that now. The difference is that they can use any random computer and access a public web site with a recognised trust certificate.
I am however noting that there are in fact millions (no exaggeration) who are capable of producing and / or critiquing code. Everybody knows somebody in this group. And it is not complex code I'm talking about. Which can be automated on a web server by any 14 yr old who gets interested. And there are many of those.
The idea is to not have to rely on a few ivory tower specialists, or harried clerks, but to instead trust e.g. your friend down the road when she says " that vote checked" or "here, go to this web page and run your own check".
You can press a button on a web page, can you not? Does that require you to be a programmer? No. Nor does my suggestion. What it does is let one trust more that the system worked via trusting that the code that checked it was not subverted because with that much exposure, and that many options for doing the check (not just one proprietary one), it is not possible to subvert the checking without being caught out.
I trust Linux more than Windows because I know of many many people who all agree that the code does not contain trapdoors for stealing personal information, for example. I do not rely on a single authority, with a financial interest, saying "trust me". Yet I do not go read the code myself (although I am fortunate enough that I would understand it if I did) because there are so many people who have. I put my trust in their numbers, and the fact that if any of them did point out security problems, those problems get fixed pronto vs getting hidden.
You missed the practical point: once there are options out there, and there is a trust network for trusting them (magazine reviews, friends, etc), they will be easy to use for anybody who can read "OK" on a button and press it with their mouse. Again, you do _NOT_ have to be a programmer to do that.
With merely browser skills, not programming, any citizen who can at least get into an Internet Cafe or library, can go to the voting website, check that their personal vote was correctly recorded, and run their own count using any one of a number of publically available and publically scrutinised tools. You don't have to write your own, you just have to know that the one you use does not contain hidden code that fakes what you see with it.
Note that even the paper ballot does not have a way for any citizen to verify that their particular ballot was included in the count. This system does. Without costing government employee time. And still without compromising voter anonymity. |
Adele Eisner
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Eisnera
Post Number: 77
Registered: 01-2006
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Sunday, February 4, 2007 - 11:40 pm: |
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What the heck is going on here?
quote:
Question: What happens if you lobby a lawmaker for $4 billion in expenditures for touch-screen (DRE) voting machines and go back to that same lawmaker two years later asking to dump DREs?
Answer: You lose credibility. It might be hard to lobby for other things. It's politically embarrassing. And your members, or funders, might have a few questions to ask about the prudence of your lobbying expenditures.
__________________________________________________
The real answer here is: Wrong question!
And to tell you the truth, when it comes to getting a transparent process of integrity for all citizens, about how those lawmakers are elected - to in part, decide on how lawmakers and others are elected, and appointed - I really don't give a hoot about the feelings and effectiveness of lobbyists - on K Street or off. I far more care about such things as the survival of the planet and a life that includes hope and love for our children.
That whole offshoot of insiders deciding and paying inside, about who gets another self-serving win or place inside, is just another symptom of the entire terminal sickness of current elections people-systems - and maybe of humanity as a whole. The inside just got too bloatedly, self-servingly greedy and thus, had to spin off a whole new entity to satellite - thus, lobbyists.
Where is citizen direct access to government in this whole thing?
What is all this declaring - who had "good intentions", and who "the bad guys" really are - all about on BBV? How does anyone here really know?
Certainly not from name only.
Though a rather low level human part of us, has us all interested in more money and more of the way that best serves own interests - upon which lobbying, and politics, and thus, elections are also based - what happened to higher ground discussions holding in foreground, "the good of the whole" here?
Certainly every organization, has many people of good intention, some however unknowledgeable, untrained, unable to perceive widely, unsure, more fearful than not to not go along, etc. so they "bite the lemon". And every organization has people regularly living out of their reptilian brains.
One thing is clear. Those who crafted HAVA and declared it ready, were reptilian - more for my own fill, right now, and the heck with anything or anyone else. The whole? What's that? The EAC and ITA's as crafted were just too bizarre to be otherwise. One doesn't need to be a consumer specialist to see that one.
Those who voted for it? Well, again who knows, one by one? Did they even think about it? Have time to? Do they even understand who their bosses really are, what they're supposed to be doing there? What other pressures were they under?
Those who lobbied for it? They need to find a real job that contributes to society as a whole. Not "eat the flesh" of some for the good of their own.
And what's this stuff about over simplifying? We have people talking about holding back on HDTV switchover, as if it's wisdom working, when milking older technologies, avoiding citizen outrage, lawmakers getting votes, and all turning up the heat slowly so people eventually will "upgrade" again - for more money again, instead of more possibly blowing the whole thing off - and the whole rest of the reptilian strategy are of course, at play.
And just like with electronic voting, no one, by the way, ever asked me if I even want HDTV, let alone when. I don't, because I also don't give hoot about having a tv as wide as my wall, watching things all stretched out, and more paid-for, brain-washing ads running in bars at top and bottom.
Asking us before declaring a whole switch would have been wisdom. Moreso with election systems. Asking us. Telling us what's up and listening to us - not lobbyists.
And how did even this road of supposed "good and bad" intentions turn into another discussion of DRE security, or not here?
Folks we're simply not there yet. We have a "system" - with some of good intention, but that overall, doesn't know, and cares less that we're even alive, other than to sell us something or otherwise extract more money or power- for their own good. It maybe used to come down to voting day when we held some leverage. Now even that is gone. Almost like an adapted symtom of a much deeper disease.
Our first job right now is not to sit and discuss DRE security, nor our thoughts on what somebody else's job is "s'pozed" to be. Ours is to hold the good of the whole, and repeatedly take that to them- and yes, understand how it's gotten this bad, so we can know how to evoke and work with, to turn it around.
Also, one worthwhile job right now, may be to just take supposed "rush" out of the election night current equation, For that too is the absolute "wrong question", when it comes to ascertaining who really won the lead for "two or four next years". First from the perspective of accuracy and transparency, not from the many excuses supposedly "needed" rush, (nor the $4 billion dollars of reptile feed already gobbled down the gullet) we may be able to develop an election system that actually serves democracy.
Our job is certainly to insist and insist and insist and enlist more to insist - that we own the government, and we'll not go quietly along without our majority's permission. We'll not sit talking to each other, but will stay out loud insisting on that one clear factor- the majority's good of the whole, as proven to the whole. That is not reptilian, but the best of humankind.
And for those who think I'm " 'too' idealistic, non-practical" I know I'm not. The real political-election problems are so deep, and humanly horrific, with our common ideals so tainted - only left in a residue of "good intentions"- that that folks, I believe is the only place it's practical to begin. |
Brant Lamb
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Brantl
Post Number: 1169
Registered: 01-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, February 5, 2007 - 5:13 am: |
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David, your system, allowing the voter to check only his own ballot, fails from the "tell him what he wants to hear but record it permanently however you want" strategy, where they keep 2 sets of books and report what you voted to you but keep a second set of books for what they actually recorded as your ballot.
A non-PC based, PROMed voting system could be proven to hold only the code that had been vetted by a wide range of people. It could be proven as reliable by aggressive vetting and testing. Would you have to either release the PROMS just before the elections with spot-checking among the already checked PROMS and then have them installed in the machines? Sure, you would. I know it can, I won't argue it further. Is it tremendously simple or cheap? No. It still may be cheaper than optical scan with hand counting, and as I envision it, much more checkable, as well.
But I, frankly, think that in order for voters to have any certainty that their ballot is counted correctly, you're going to have to have a printed, legally-binding ballot copy that the voter gets to keep. This is due to the fact that the only person with any certainty of each individual voter's intent is that individual voter and the only person who's motives should be acknowledged with regard to that specific ballot is the voter who cast it. Every thing else is shopping at the company store, on credit, where they don't even give you a receipt.
Any of the agreed/legislated legal and ruled based protocols for ballot counting can be subverted at any step and seemingly have been (hat tip to Mr. Kenneth Blackwell). |
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National Task Force on Election Reform