Secreted Ballots and a War Story
(Far more than you want to read about e-voting and maybe not quite
enough about burning airplanes)
I've been thinking a lot about the buzz developing around
auditless electronic voting
machines.
Then
this
morning, in Gets
my vote, Doc points
to Phil Windley's essay, Transparency,
eVoting and Copyright. He quotes:
I do not believe that we should be willing to buy or use voting systems where the source code and design is not open for public review. I think there are companies that would be willing to work in this model, particularly if the contract provided some long term commitments. This is not Britney Spears we're talking about here — the integrity of our voting system is a fundamental component of our government.
Phil Windley is the former CIO for the state of Utah and a Republican, so
his advocacy for open source (peer reviewed, really) election systems carries
a
lot
of weight. Read it,
and there are some great links.
"Copyright" in his title refers to the fact that Diebold, a leading seller
of these machines, is suing people who have downloaded and published Diebold's
internal memos and specs they got off an open FTP server that Diebold operated
for code updates (!). If you care to join me in a DMCA violation, you can get
the
28
MB
zip file or view
the docs and memos.
Phil's essay suggests the important core of the matter. If advocates believe,
as he
does,
that the
procurement
standards
must
be questioned,
they
need
to understand that there's no mass conspiracy by election officials buying
the machines
at the state and county levels. Rather, they're deep into a challenging
procurement process requiring skills they seldom possess, surrounded by experts
with
a vested interest in the outcome. He suggests the kind of long-term, deliberate
effort that homeowners' associations are famous for mounting against life-shattering
issues like rights to unobstructed views and height restrictions. Do you
suppose we citizens will be as determined to protect our right to a fair and
open vote?
I hope we can since this
seems
a
more
basic
issue
than
the
bulk
of
our
political
and procedural discussions. We're talking about an issue that's so close
to the core of the life of our body politic that, like breath itself, we can't
afford to debate it as if it matters no more than, say redistricting. The
power to count the votes is the key to the kingdom.
"It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people
who count the votes."
–attributed
to Josef Stalin
"Everything that can be counted doesn't necessarily
count;
everything that counts can't necessarily be counted."
–attributed
to Albert
Einstein
Obviously some things are more important than others, and accurate voting
is surely the high order bit of our society.
Mayday!
Ton Sun Nhut Airport, Saigon, Vietnam was the world's busiest
airport in 1967-68. Operating out of there was like being part of a flying
circus, a landing pattern clogged with choppers, 60 mph Cessnas, 250 mph
F4 Phantom fighters, civilian airliners and of course, we C-130 crews happy
to be arriving
in
a places serving good food
for a change. Trash haulers, as we called ourselves, are always looking
for a decent meal to punctuate the tedium of flying into tiny strips
guarded
by enemy anti-aircraft fire. (not "ack-ack", a WWII term. This
blog seeks to be syntactically precise.)
One day as we were maneuvering to land, the emergency Guard
frequency came awake. "Mayday! Mayday, this is Stalwart 34 declaring
an emergency. I'm an F4C with one engine out, low oil pressure on no. 2 and
bingo fuel.
Request immediate landing!"
"Roger Stalwart 34," came the tower's surprisingly relaxed
reply, "You're number 3 in the Emergency Traffic Pattern."
If you fly airplanes for a while, you learn that some
issues are more vital than
others.
For instance,
if you can't get the landing gear down at the same time you
need to make a radio report to headquarters, you deal with the gear. I know,
I've been there.
When
you
have
low hydraulic
pressure
at the same time you have an engine fire light, you pay attention to
the fire and leave the hydraulic pressure for later. I know, I've been there.
When you can't control the airplane at the same time you
have a fire light, you first control the airplane, then deal with the fire.
I
know,
I've
been
there.
On 25 June 1968, about 3 miles from Cambodia, our C-130 was
struck by .50 cal. machine gun fire that blossomed into a real headache,
forcing us to deal with a fire that took out engine no. 1, ignited
the left
outboard
fuel tank, distorted the front wing spar so that the left wing was bending
down
and
forward outside of the no. 1 engine, knocked out the hydraulic system
we needed to put the gear down, disabled the left aileron and generally scared
the living shit out of five 25-year-old aviators.
The flight lasted
only eight minutes and 20 miles but it occupies a larger partition in my
brain than many of the several years of my life.
The things we need to attend to sometime add up faster than we'd like, with
consequences more dire than we'd like.
Hierarchy of Needs
I'm reminded of aviation priorities as I read of strange things
happening in the country that I fought for and for which 58,000 of my comrades-in-arms
died for. I mistrust alarmism, since most alarms are premature and self-serving.
False urgency is such a staple of advertising that we're inured to it, so
that all emergencies seem equally optional. In airplanes and democracies,
they aren't. I think I'm there now.
If your freedom is threatened at the same time your job is
threatened, defend your freedom.
If your comfort is threatened at the same time your neighbors'
rights are threatened, forget about your comfort and defend others' rights
as energetically as your own, since they're identical.
If you can't be sure your vote will count, at the same time
your personal freedom is threatened, make sure your vote is guaranteed to
be counted.
There is a statistical trend in politics that only a Polyanna
would ignore. Elections that everyone knew were in the bag have
improbably gone to the underdog, even though the pre-polling, exit polling
and historic
voting patterns contradict the reported vote.
Southern Hemisfear
I don't know why I trust New Zealanders. They just seem to
be upstanding, steady folk, outnumbered by sheep, and more conservative
than we. They don't seem likely to embrace change for its own sake. So I'm
inclined to take seriously a report from
a couple of weeks ago, regarding odd results from the Georgia mid-term elections
a
year
ago
tonight. These excerpts capture the raw numbers from a long 3-page New Zealand
Herald article:
Something very odd happened in the mid-term elections in the US state of
Georgia last November.
On the eve of the vote, opinion polls showed Roy Barnes, the incumbent
Democratic governor, leading by between 9 and 11 points.
In a somewhat closer,
keenly watched Senate race, polls indicated that Max Cleland, the popular
Democrat up for re-election, was ahead by two
to five points against his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss.
Those
figures were more or less what political experts would have expected
in Georgia, a state with a long tradition of electing Democrats to statewide
office.
But then the results came in, and all of Georgia appeared to
have been turned upside down.
Barnes lost the governorship to the Republican,
Sonny Perdue, 46 per cent to 51 per cent, a swing of as much as 16 percentage
points from
the last
opinion polls.
Cleland lost to Chambliss 46 per cent to 53, a last-minute
swing of 9 to 12 points.
Red-faced opinion pollsters suddenly had a lot of explaining to do
and launched internal investigations.
...There were also big, puzzling swings in partisan
loyalties
in different parts of the state.
In 58 counties, the vote was broadly in line with the
primary election.
...In 27 counties in Republican-dominated
north Georgia, however, Max Cleland unaccountably scored 14 percentage
points higher
than he
had in the primaries.
And in 74 counties in the
Democrat-leaning south, Saxby Chambliss garnered a whopping 22 points
more for the
Republicans than
the party as a whole
had won less than three months earlier.
Now, weird
things like this do occasionally occur in elections, and the figures,
on their own,
are not proof
of anything
except statistical
anomalies
worthy of further study.
But in Georgia there
was an extra reason to be suspicious.
Last November, the state became
the first in the country to conduct an election entirely
with touchscreen
voting
machines, after
lavishing US$54
million on a new system that
promised to deliver the securest, most
up-to-date, most
voter-friendly election
in the history
of the republic.
The machines, however,
turned out to be anything but reliable.
With academic studies showing
the Georgia touchscreens to be poorly programmed,
full of security holes
and prone to
tampering,
and
with thousands of
similar machines from different companies
being introduced at high speed across
the country, computer voting may, in
fact, be US democracy's own 21st century nightmare.
In many Georgia
counties last November, the machines froze up, causing long
delays as
technicians tried to reboot
them. In heavily Democratic
Fulton County, in downtown Atlanta,
67 memory cards
from
the voting
machines went missing,
delaying certification
of the
results there for 10 days.
In neighbouring
DeKalb County, 10 memory cards were unaccounted
for;
they were
later recovered
from terminals
that had
supposedly broken
down and
been taken out of service. It
is still unclear exactly how results from these missing cards
were tabulated,
or if
they were counted
at all.
And we will probably
never know, for a highly disturbing
reason.
The vote count was not
conducted by state elections officials,
but by the
private
company that
sold Georgia the voting
machines in the
first
place,
under a strict trade-secrecy
contract that made it not
only difficult
but actually illegal --
on pain
of stiff
criminal
penalties --
for the state
to touch the equipment or
examine the proprietary
software to ensure the machines
worked properly.
There was
not even a paper trail to follow up. The machines
were
fitted with thermal
printing devices
that could
theoretically provide a
written record of voters' choices,
but these were not activated.
Consequently,
recounts
were
impossible.
Georgia was
not the only state last November to see big last-minute swings in voting
patterns.
There were others in Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois and New Hampshire
-- all in races that had been flagged as key partisan battlegrounds, and
all
eventually won by the Republican Party.
What, then, is one to
make of the fact that
the owners
of the three major
computer voting machines are all
prominent Republican
Party donors?
Or of
a recent political fund-raising letter
written to Ohio Republicans
by
Walden O'Dell, Diebold's
chief executive,
in which he said he was "committed
to helping Ohio to
deliver its electoral
votes to
the president next
year" -
even as his company
was bidding for the
contract
on the state's new
voting machinery?
...In
Dallas, during
early voting before
last November's
election, people found that
no matter how often
they tried to press
a Democrat button,
the Republican
candidate's name would light
up.
After a court
hearing, Diebold agreed
to take down
18 machines with apparent
misalignment
problems.
"And those were
the ones where
you could visually
spot a problem," Dr
Mercuri said. "What
about what you
don't see? Just
because your
vote shows up
on the
screen for the
Democrats, how
do you know it
is registering
inside the machine
for the Democrats?"
Other
problems have
shown up
periodically:
machines that
register zero
votes, or
machines that
indicate voters
coming to
the polling
station but not voting,
even when a
single race with just
two candidates
was on the
ballot.
It is not just touchscreens that are at risk from error or malicious
intrusion. Any computer system used to tabulate votes is vulnerable.
An
optical scan of ballots in Scurry County, Texas last November erroneously
declared a landslide victory for the Republican candidate for county
commissioner; a subsequent hand recount showed that the Democrat had
in fact won.
In Comal County, Texas, a computerised optical scan found
that three different candidates had won their races with exactly 18,181
votes. There was no recount or investigation, even though the
coincidence, with those recurring 1s and 8s, looked highly suspicious.
In
heavily Democrat Broward County, Florida -- which had switched to touchscreens
in the wake of the hanging chad furore -- more
than 100,000
votes were
found to have gone "missing" on election day.
The votes
were reinstated, but the glitch was never adequately explained.
One local official blamed it on a "minor software thing".
Most
suspect of all was the governor's race in Alabama, where
the incumbent Democrat, Don Siegelman, was initially declared
the winner.
Sometime after midnight, when polling station
observers and most staff had gone home, the probate judge responsible
for elections
in rural
Baldwin County suddenly "discovered" that Mr
Siegelman had been awarded 7000 votes too many. In a tight
election, the change was enough to hand victory
to his Republican challenger, Bob Riley.
County officials
talked vaguely of computer tabulation error, or a lightning
strike messing up the machines, but
the real
reason was never
ascertained
because the state's attorney general (a Republican) refused
to authorise a recount or any independent ballot inspection.
Is this just an alarmist reaction? Should we take more than
a passing interest in the known but unpublicized catalyst of the year 2000
turmoil? A well-documented tally revision caused the TV networks to reverse
their original
call
that Gore
had won Florida
and to give it to Bush instead, prompting Gore's premature concession call
to Bush, later retracted.
The "glitch" was the revision of the Volusia
County vote when someone used card ID 3 to overwrite the "master" card
ID 0 with a new Gore tally of minus 16,200 votes and plus 4,000
to the Bush total. When discovered, card 0 was re-inserted in the master
machine
and the tally revised. (The pun's too tempting: Master card ID 0, $.48;
Premature concession, Priceless.).
There's a lot of buzz surrounding e-voting story. Perhaps we'll
soon be sated with its novelty and with the complexities we must master to
glimpse the whole picture. Certainly the press will tire of it and probably
already has. Perhaps only the bloggers will have the persistence to keep
this story above the fold.
To me though, it feels like molten aluminum dripping
off the left wing. There is no larger story.
The ANZAC Treatise
Voting machine irregularities reported by the Kiwis and
a solution from the Aussies? It's enough to make a southern hemisphere junkie
weep with joy. Just yesterday, Wired published Aussies
Do it Right: E-Voting. It describes eVACS, a program developed by Software
Improvements, a down-under open-source solution that might satisfy Mr.
Windley:
"While critics in the United States grow more concerned
each day about the insecurity of electronic voting machines, Australians
designed a system two years ago that addressed and eased most of those
concerns: They chose to make the software running their system completely
open to public scrutiny.
Although a private Australian company designed
the system, it was based on specifications set by independent election
officials, who posted the code
on the Internet for all to see and evaluate. What's more, it was accomplished
from concept to product in six months. It went through a trial run in a
state election in 2001.
Phillip Green, electoral commissioner for the
Australian Capital Territory, said that going the open-source route
was an obvious choice.
"We'd been watching what had happened in America
(in 2000), and we were wary of using proprietary software that no one
was allowed to see," he
said. "We were very keen for the whole process to be transparent
so that everyone -- particularly the political parties and the candidates,
but also the world at large -- could be satisfied that the software
was actually doing what it was meant to be doing."
It raises an interesting question. If the Australian
Capital Territory knew about our voting machine problems 3 years ago, why
don't we?
Master of my Domains
My small contribution to the effort is to snag a couple of
domains, seemyvote.com and digivotereally.com. I imagine them as a way
to allow our voting to be so transparent that we collectively overwhelm centralized
record-keeping. A couple of other ideas:
- Work with manufacturers to place disposable digital camera booths near
polling places so millions can capture their voting screen before it disappears.
- Establish
WiFi web cams viewing the activity around the most suspect polling places.
(Mitch Ratcliffe and Howard Greenstein have organized correspondences.org as
a bona fide press organization with feeds appearing in Google news searches.
They might arrange for Press credentials for webcam operators.
Is that
so, guys?)
The seemyvote.com vision:
Politicians who need our votes are acting like they don't. They're behaving
like the RIAA, pretending they can treat their customers like thieves. Why
do we spend so much time worrying about the RIAA and so little time directly
managing our elected toadies?
SeeMyVote would be based on our right to enforce full, fair and equal representation,
establishing a protocol for translating individual hot issues into votes with
teeth.
SeeMyVote would be a database of real people who have
abdicated their secret ballot to advertise their real-time responses
to current issues and current
outrages. The database would match issues and outrage with politicians
and their current actions. Voters would link their next vote with their
current
values and beliefs so that, for instance, a politician's cynical work
against choice would publicly guarantee my wife's vote against him.
Combined with
other uppity women, some politicians would see that this particular form
of political cynicism is foolish, at least in his district. (Cynical
because few politicians give a rat's ass about right-to-life. They do
care about the votes of people who care about abortion).
This is the kind of data which allows politicians to explain
to each other why they can't support each others' favorite pork barrel.
They all know they're
in government in order to stay in government.
Sample SeeMyVote Report:
"The Fleemer amendment to HR 419 has caused a plurality
of Mr. Fleemer's voting constituents to commit to vote him out of office
in November. Based
on commitment data from 73% of registered voters, It appears
that Rep. Fleemer will lose his seat by a 9% margin unless his amendment
is withdrawn.
Those voter commitments have been communicated to Mr. Fleemer's
staff, other Republican and Democratic National Committees and major media
outlets.
The data are presented in detail at http://www.electoralcollage.com/fleemer.";
11:23:30 PM 
|
