I've been ranting about electronic voting off and on for a while now and I thought I was fairly well versed in the issues at hand. As it turns out, I didn't know the half of it.
Here's a Lou Dobbs interview on the subject as well. Watch it.
...on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend, in blatant violation of state and federal law in addition to the reccomendations of his own office.
Secretary of State McPherson seems to have a thing for making major announcements late on Fridays just before holidays. Following in what seems to be a pattern of his, he announced late this afternoon that he was certifying Diebold Optical Scan and AccuVote TSx (touch-screens) for use in elections in the state.
The re-certification (they had been originally decertified in California in 2004 when it was revealed Diebold had installed illegal software updates on the machines) is conditional on some items but not on the one thing point he had announced last December when he sent the system back to federal authorities for further testing. At that time he said he was sending the machine's memory cards to the federal Independent Testing Authority (ITA) Lab for reinspection in light of the news out of Leon County, Florida that the cards used "intepreted code" which is specifically banned by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). A "hack test" in that county revealed that an entirely election could have its results flipped by a hacker exploiting that "interpreted code" -- without a trace being left behind.
McPherson made his announcement today without waiting to hear back from the ITA lab.
Hey! Look! We can map out political contributions to the 2004 elections (in a limited sense).
From the front page:
This is a python CGI script I [Mark Kane] did for my Fall '05 Security class with Markus Jakobsson that takes a zip code anywhere in the United States and generates a Google Map containing markers for all the political campaign contributors in that area for the 2004 election. Each marker includes name, address, amount and recipient of contribution, and an optional phone number.
Note to self: Contribute multiple times in amounts of $199 or less... < wandering off muttering about public accessibility to political contribution databases and the dilemma of whether or not there's such a thing as public information being too publicly available... >
Recently I posted a follow up to the Diebold electronic voting fiasco in North Carolina. Just to recap, Diebold decided that the new North Carolina e-voting laws which required basic accountability and audit trails for voting software/hardware were simply too much effort to comply with. They were then successful in persuading a judge to exempt them from compliance. With the help of the EFF, this exemption was (thankfully) overturned. However, in flagrant disregard for the NC legislature and judiciary, the North Carolina elections board has chosen to certify Diebold systems (and others) regardless of thier willingness or ability to comply with state law.
If you're still not convinced that this is a big deal, have a look at the e-voting track record to date.
Following up on an earlier post, with the help of the EFFa North Carolina judge today told Diebold Election Systems that the e-voting company must comply with tough North Carolina election law and dismissed the company's case seeking broad exemptions from the law.
The EFF announced today that they are taking electronic voting machine maker Diebold to court in North Carolina asserting that the equipment maker is evading North Carolina election law. Recently North Carolina passed legislation requiring electronic voting equipment manufacturers to place the source code used in the systems in escrow and to identify the programmers who contributed to the code. Diebold's response? They claim it is unreasonably difficult for them to assure voters that their equipment is capable of providing accurate and secure voting.
This from a company that has already been shown on multiple occasions to have coding and operations practices that are embarassingly amateurish and sloppy at best, nefarious at worst.
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
foilhat
