Computerized Voting Systems ?!

Jeb Bush apparently disenfranchised tens of thousands of African American voters through a database voter purge before the 2000 election [Sources:  Salon ; The nation ; Greg Palast ; James Lee's Testimony ]

February 2007: Florida Drops Touch-Screen vote machines

"The American Mathematical society has an opinion piece about open source software vs propietary software used in mathematics. From the article : "Increasingly, proprietary software and the algorithms used are an essential part of mathematical proofs. To quote J. Neubüser, 'with this situation two of the most basic rules of conduct in mathematics are violated: In mathematics information is passed on free of charge and everything is laid open for checking.'"
 

The Onion's take on Elections

nist.gov/DraftWhitePaper.pdf

Nov. 2006 Update

Rep Peter King (R-NY)with W. Bush saying that they "will take care of the counting"

  (alternative video source)

Simply put:   Why should We The People trust private corporations to accurately count our votes through secret software?

"The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.” - Stalin

• Video testimony of programmer who helped to rig an election
• Video: Cafferty Sept 19 2006
• Has American Democracy died an electronic death in Ohio 2005's referenda defeats?
  by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
• Brad Friedman: 'The staggeringly impossible results of Ohio's '05 election'
• Exit poll results for selected precincts

I am "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." - Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc.  Aug. 14 letter  Reported by Julie Carr Smyth of Cleveland Plain Dealer. Mr. O'Dell has since stepped down as CEO of Diebold amid insider trading accusations.

Video from Princeton Univ demostrating how Diebold systems can be hacked:

• commoncause.org
• Watch Howard Dean rig an election in this short film,Votergate
• Good overview article from CommonDreams
• Journalist Greg Palast has been covering this issue closely.
• Unconfirmed Graphs indicating evidence of computer-assisted vote fraud
• ACM statement Oct 2004 : Thousands of members of one of the oldest societies of computer professionals overwhelmingly agrees that low-tech redundant (paper) trails are required to insure that votes are accurately counted. Link here
• Technology in voting systems seems to make fraud more likely.
• Diebold Caught Red-Handed
• Election Stolen with 5 lines of Visual Basic
• whoscounting.net
• Five Minutes for Democracy
• Krugman's NYT articles  Jan23, 2004  Dec 2, 2003
• Jones's article Nov 11, 2003

Related Links:

• http://www.blackboxvoting.org

• http://www.verifiedvoting.org

• http://www.ecotalk.org/VotingSecurity.htm
• How we lost the vote & how we can get it back
• FactOrMyth's Votescam Page

Questions:

• What should be the requirements for a vote-counting system?”
• What seem to be the requirements that were used to guide the development of these systems?
• Is it appropriate to expect citizens to place their trust of vote counting to computers? 
• Are voting systems an appropriate domain in which to apply computer technology?
• The voter doesn’t see the inside of an old-fashioned lever voting machine, how is a computerized system any different? 
• Is it a good idea to build voting machines on PC hardware and the Windows Operating System? 
• Is it a good idea to have all of these systems networked?