It’s my impression, we’ve made no significant progress towards a reliable way to count votes. Sigh.
This seems important enough, I just thought people should know. If anyone has other credible information, whether conflicting or corroborating, please advise.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/09/23/bev_harris/index.html
Best wishes,
Jerry
P.S. Please let me know if this is subscriber-only content that doesn’t show up in complete form. I can’t tell from my computer.
No, if you aren’t a subscriber you can still read the first few paragraphs, or, if you want, read an annoying Salon ad and get a “free 1 day pass” to read the whole article.
Lovely stuff, by the way; business as usual. We need an open source voting system based on PGP.
I had no trouble reading the content other than a major desire to get sick.
Ron
Yow! worse than business-as-usual. This system is written in (you won’t believe this!) Microsoft Access!
Voter: “Uh, ma’am, would you mind rebooting the polling booth again? This time I almost got that button pressed before the blue screen came back…”
–James
One of my favorite signature quotes: “Microsoft isn’t the anwer; Microsoft is the question. Linux is the answer.” 
Access is a toy database. I’m sure nobody in their right mind, even at Microsoft, would think this is a good idea. A serious system would have to include support for encryption at the database level, or at the very least at the filesystem level. Ditto for audit trail support. Database integrity through internal checks. Checkpointing. Etc, etc, etc.
My experience with software development leads me to think that this is an opportunistic system that was cobbled together. Somebody saw the potential to make money and duct-taped a system together, thinking they could always fix it later. That’s what it looks like to me.
So the ductape lobby is responsible for this?
Oops, I accidentally clicked on this. Sorry.
Cranberry,
Here it’s Tuesday already and you still don’t have 2,000 posts.
What can I say? Mabey I’m 1/2 human, afterall.
And half … ?
Not. 
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming. (Or lack thereof, as the case may be.)
I clicked on this discussion and accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan! 
I’m in the business myself, so I understand exactly where you’re coming from. Access isn’t that bad of a DB, but what I find amusing / scary is that that “Specifically the flaw was that you can get at the central vote-counting database through Microsoft Access. They have the security disabled. ” (Emphasis added). You really can lock down, encrypt, etc. an access database. They just chose not to. That’s sad.
But it probably got registered for Arnie!
I think its weird that someone would try and hang this on the GOP because of this manufacturer, especially since every Republican or conservative I know is dead set against computer voting. But then, some people still think Bush “stole” the election, right? And the Dems only brought Daley down from Chicago as a sightseer before a single vote was cast…sigh.
As for Salon, Bill Clinton’s favorite website (he said), they are not real balanced between Left and Right. I had a premium membership for a year when they still had Camille Paglia but I thought it was mostly Bush-whackin’ and tittering amorality bites. [Editing in that I think its good that the info about the machines was reported there, spin or no]
Because of large immigrant populations (legal and illegal), Florida and California are the battleground of all kinds of election mischief. The recall provided an earlier-than-expected opportunity for such mischief and the granting of driver’s licenses to illegals by Jan 1, followed by a March election is no coincidence. As you may know, voter reg. cards are handed out as the licenses are granted. You check a box to proclaim your citizenship. Its up to election officials to verify citizenship. There are between 2 to 5 million illegals, so you can see how easy it would be for cash-strapped county election offices to do the verification. Of course they won’t all apply at once but there are bets already going about the Dems bringing busloads of em from the farms to the DMV…
Davis has given his best shots, pulled in all his favors and run his “puke” campaign against Arnold; pictures of Arnies dad as a Nazi, stories about his interviews in the old days, violating his immigration status (how’s that for irony after the license vote?).
I wish these @#$holes would get outta my state and go home. That includes Clinton, Jesse Jackson and Laurence Tribe, all circling around like buzzards. Hope that didn’t sound like “Hate” speech, like Al Franken’s comments about Bush at the Dean rally last night. I know Tribe is very respected but draggin’ him here to the Ninth was over the top.
I listened to the arguments yesterday at the Ninth, it made me sick. The absurdity of arguing against the same machines that got Davis elected being unfair to minorities…There were so many implications about this trial that could have been extrapolated, I am grateful they reversed it. Had they not, it has been argued that the entire 9th District could look forward to having elections invalidated (past, present and future!) due to machinery. The District includes a few other states besides California.
If Arnold (or McClintock) wins, I’ll bet a tweaked Feadog that the ACLU will be back in court, challenging the results from the bad ol chads. If Davis or Busta-move wins (which the Weekender predicts, btw), they won’t. It’s all about justice, nyuk.
Now people are mad at Hiram Johnson and the Progressives for ever penning the recall and putting it in the state Constitution! Orwellian.
As Al Gore said, “mend it, don’t end it.”
I was going to add my own rant about this, but the Weekenders pretty much covered it. As a UC student, I have $1,206 reasons to want Davis gone.
If the punch cards have a 2 percent error rate, isn’t it possible that 2 percent of the voting population isn’t serious enough about their vote to make sure they hit the hole?
It’s not wierd at all for Salon, it’s expected. I wonder why they described the machine designer as a die-hard GOP contributor but didn’t describe the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals as die-hard liberals?
Actually, the standards community is working on it. Doesn’t mean any state will adopt it, but there is progress being made, it’s just not in the papers.
[/quote]Not only is the country’s leading touch-screen voting system so badly designed that votes can be easily changed, but its manufacturer is run by a die-hard GOP donor who vowed to deliver his state for Bush next year.[/quote]
Using these machines didn’t stop my Democratic congressman from getting 94% of the vote. If it’s a right-wing conspiracy, it’s not much of one. Also, I would suggest that there are more people with the intellectual wherewithal to stuff ballot boxes than there are to hack into these systems. Especially when they’re not networked. (Note that I’m not saying they’re not networked anywhere, but many places that have adopted them do not have them networked, at least partly so that they won’t be hacked.)