RE: Fwd: ATTENTION:: Ghost In The Machine - The Little Chip That Steals the Election

[Guest guest]

Frank,

 

What do you think would happen if the Credit Card Companies controlled

voting?

 

 

They seem able to control cash.

 

 

It is hard for me to understand why there is rampant confusion about voting!

 

 

As a Computer Engineer I can not understand how any of this stuff reported

below could happen except in one of one thousands places and that it would

not be flagged in one of a million places.

 

 

 

I have not been asked to fix this problem and never will be; as some love

this problem.

 

 

 

 

Lorenzo

 

 

 

 

Frank [califpacific]

Thursday, July 24, 2003 2:29 PM

alternative_medicine_forum

Fwd: ATTENTION:: Ghost In The

Machine - The Little Chip That Steals the Election

 

 

This is off topic, but is so important to fundamental democracy that is has

to be aired far and wide.

 

Frank

 

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16474

 

 

 

 

 

Ghost In The Machine

 

By Thom Hartmann, <http://www.alternet.org>AlterNet

July 23, 2003

 

" A defective computer chip in the county's optical scanner misread ballots

Tuesday night and incorrectly tallied a landslide victory for Republicans, "

announced the Dallas Morning News in a story on Nov. 7, just a few days

after the 2002 election. The story added, " Democrats actually won by wide

margins. "

 

Republicans would have carried the day had not poll workers become

suspicious when the computerized vote-reading machines said the Republican

candidate was trouncing his incumbent Democratic opponent in the race for

County Commissioner.

 

The poll workers were close enough to the electorate

they were part of the electorate to know their county overwhelminglyfavored

the Democratic incumbent.

 

A quick hand recount of the optical-scan ballots showed that the Democrat

had indeed won, even though the computerized ballot-scanning machine kept

giving the race to the Republican.

 

The poll workers brought the discrepancy

to the attention of the County Clerk, who notified the voting machine

company.

 

" A new computer chip was flown to Snyder [Texas] from Dallas, " County Clerk

Lindsey told the Associated Press. With the new chip installed, the computer

decided that the Democrat had, indeed, won the race.

 

In another Texas anomaly, Republican state Senator Jeff Wentworth won his

race with exactly 18,181 votes, Republican Carter Casteel won her state

House seat

with exactly 18,181 votes, and conservative Judge Danny Scheel won his seat

with exactly 18,181 votes all in Comal County.

 

Apparently, however, no poll workers in Comal County thought to ask for a

new chip.

 

The Texas incidents happened with computerized machines reading and then

tabulating paper or punch-card ballots.

 

In Georgia and Florida, where paper had been totally replaced by

touch-screen machines in many to most

precincts during 2001 and 2002, the 2002 election produced some of the

nation's most startling results.

 

USA Today reported on Nov. 3, 2002, " In Georgia, an Atlanta

Journal-Constitution poll shows Democratic Sen. Max Cleland with a

49%-to-44% lead over Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss. " Cox News Service,

based in Atlanta, reported just after the election (Nov. 7) that,

" Pollsters may have goofed " because " Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss

defeated incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Cleland by a margin of 53 to 46

percent.

 

The Hotline, a political news service, recalled a series of polls Wednesday

showing that Chambliss had been ahead in none of them. "

 

Just as amazing was the Georgia governor's race. " Similarly, " Cox News

reported on Nov. 7, " no polls predicted the upset victory in Georgia of

Republican Sonny Perdue over incumbent Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes.

 

Perdue won by a margin of 52 to 45 percent. The most recent Mason Dixon Poll

had shown Barnes ahead 48 to 39 percent last month with a margin of error of

plus or minus 4 points. "

 

Almost all of the votes in Georgia were recorded on the new touch-screen

computerized voting machines, which produced no paper trail whatsoever.

 

 

And nobody thought to ask for a new chip, although it was noted on Nov. 8 by

the Atlanta Constitution-Journal that in downtown Atlanta's predominantly

Democratic Fulton County " election officials said Thursday that memory

cards from 67 electronic voting machines had been misplaced, so ballots cast

on those machines were left out of previously announced vote totals. "

 

 

Officials added that all but 11 of the memory cards were subsequently found

and recorded.

 

Similarly, as the San Jose Mercury News reported in an editorial on Jan. 23,

2003, " In one Florida precinct last November, votes that were intended for

the Democratic candidate for governor ended up for Gov. Jeb Bush,

because of a misaligned touch screen. How many votes were miscast before the

mistake was found will never be known, because there was no paper audit. "

( " Misaligned " touch screens also caused 18 known machines in Dallas

to register Republican votes when Democratic screen-buttons were pushed:

it's unknown how many others weren't noticed.)

 

Apparently, nobody thought to ask for new chips in Florida, either.

 

In Minnesota, the Star Tribune reported just a few days before the election

(Oct. 30, 2002) that, " Dramatic political developments since Sen. Paul

Wellstone's death Friday have had little effect on voters' leanings in the

U.S. Senate race, according to a Star Tribune Minnesota Poll taken Monday

night. Wellstone's likely replacement on the ballot, former Vice President

Walter Mondale, leads Republican Norm Coleman by 47 to 39 percent close to

where the race stood two weeks ago when Wellstone led Coleman 47 to 41

percent. "

 

When the computerized machines were done counting the vote a few days later,

however, Coleman had beat Mondale by 50 to 47 percent. If Mondale had asked

for new chips, would it have made a difference? We'll never

know.

 

One state where Republicans did ask for a new chip was Alabama. Fox News

reported on Nov. 8, 2002 that initial returns from across the state showed

that Democratic incumbent Gov. Don Siegelman had won the governor's race.

 

 

But, overnight, " Baldwin County took center stage when election officials

released results Tuesday night showing Siegelman with 19,070 votes enough

for a narrow victory statewide. Later, they recounted and reduced

Siegelman's tally to 12,736 votes enough to give Riley the victory. "

 

What produced the sudden loss of about 6,000 votes? According to the Fox

report: " Probate Judge Adrian Johns, a member of the county canvassing

board, blamed the initial, higher number on 'a programming glitch in the

software' that tallies the votes. " All parties were not satisfied with that

explanation, however. Fox added: " The governor claimed results were changed

after poll watchers left. "

 

It turns out the " glitch in the software " in Alabama was discovered by the

Republican National Committee's regional director Kelley McCullough, who,

according to a story by Rachel DiCarlo in the conservative Daily Standard,

" logged onto the county's municipal website and confirmed that [incumbent

Democratic Governor] Siegelman had actually only received 12,736 votes not

the 19,070 the Associated Press projected for him. A computer glitch had

caused the error. The erroneous tally would have put Siegelman on top by

3,582 votes, but the corrected one gave Riley a 2,752-vote edge. "

 

As the Daily Standard noted, " If it hadn't been for one woman, the

Republican National Committee's regional director Kelley McCullough, things

might have gone terribly wrong for [Republican Gubernatorial candidate]

Riley. "

 

Similarly, in Davison County, South Dakota, the Democratic election auditor

noticed the machines double counting votes (it's not noted for which side)

and had a " new chip " brought in.

 

 

And this is just the tip of the iceberg of '00 and '02 election

irregularities, as reported by

www.votewatch.us " >http://www.votewatch.us>www.votewatch.us.

 

 

Either the system by which democracy exists broke that November evening,or

was hacked, or American voters became suddenly more fickle than at anytime

since Truman beat Dewey.

 

Maybe it's true that the citizens of Georgia simply decided that incumbent

Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a wildly popular war veteran, was, as

Republican TV ads suggested, too unpatriotic to remain in the Senate, even

though his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss, had sat out the Vietnam

war with a medical deferment.

 

(The BBC summed up Georgia voters' reaction in a Nov. 6, 2002 headline:

" GEORGIA UPSET STUNS DEMOCRATS. " The BBC

echoed the confusion of many Georgia voters when they wrote, " Mr. Cleland an

army veteran who lost three limbs in a grenade explosion during the Vietnam

War had long been considered 'untouchable' on questions of defense and

national security. " )

 

Maybe, in the final two days of the race, those voters who'd pledged

themselves to Georgia's popular incumbent Governor Roy Barnes suddenly and

inexplicably decided to switch to Republican challenger Sonny Perdue.

 

Maybe George W. and Jeb Bush, Alabama's new Republican governor Bob Riley,

and a small but congressionally decisive handful of other long-shot

Republican candidates around the country really did win those states where

conventional wisdom and straw polls showed them losing in the last few

election cycles, but computer controlled voting or ballot-reading machines

showed them winning.

 

Perhaps, after a half-century of fine-tuning exit polling to such a science

that it's now used to verify if elections are clean in Third World

countries, it really did suddenly become inaccurate in the United States

in the past few years and just won't work here anymore.

 

Perhaps it's just a coincidence that the sudden rise of inaccurate exit

polls happened around the same time corporate-programmed,

computer-controlled, modem-capable

voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots.

 

But if any of this is true, there's not much of a paper trail from the

voters' hand to prove it.

 

You'd think in an open democracy that the government answerable to all its

citizens rather than a handful of corporate officers and stockholders would

program, repair, and control the voting machines. You'd think the

computers that handle our cherished ballots would be open and their software

and programming available for public scrutiny.

 

You'd think there would be a paper trail of the actual hand-cast vote, which

could be followed and

audited if there was evidence of voting fraud or if exit polls disagreed

with computerized vote counts.

 

You'd be wrong.

 

Maybe Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel who left his job as head of an

electronic voting machine company to run as a long-shot candidate for the

U.S. Senate honestly won all of his elections.

 

Back when Hagel first ran for the U.S. Senate in 1996, his own company's

computer-controlled voting machines showed he'd won stunning and unexpected

victories in both the primaries and the general election.

 

The Washington Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel's " Senate victory against an

incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November

election. "

 

According to Bev Harris, author of the book,

> <http://www.blackboxvoting.com> " Black Box Voting, " Hagel won virtually

every demographic group, including many largely black communities that had

never before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to

win a Senate seat in Nebraska.

 

Six years later Hagel ran again, this time against Democrat Charlie Matulka

in 2002, and won in a landslide.

 

As his Website says, Hagel " was re-elected

to his second term in the United States Senate on November 5, 2002 with 83%

of the vote. That represents the biggest political victory in the history

of Nebraska. " What Hagel's website fails to disclose is that about 80

percent of those votes were counted by computer-controlled voting machines

put in place by the company affiliated with Hagel. Built by that company.

Programmed by that company. The chips supplied by that company.

 

" This is a big story, bigger than Watergate ever was, " said Hagel's

Democratic opponent in the 2002 Senate race, Charlie Matulka

 

(<http://www.lancastercountydemocrats.org/matulka.htm>lancastercountydemocra

ts.org/matulka.htm).

" They say Hagel shocked the world, but he didn't shock me. "

 

 

Is Matulka the sore loser the Hagel campaign paints him as, or is he

democracy's proverbial canary in the mineshaft? Between them, Hagel and

Chambliss' victories sealed Republican control of the Senate. Odds are

both won fair and square, the American way, using huge piles of corporate

money to carpet-bomb voters with television advertising.

 

But either the appearance or the possibility of impropriety in an election

casts a shadow over American democracy.

 

" The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all

other rights are protected, " wrote Thomas Paine over 200 years ago. " To take

away this right is to reduce a man to slavery.. "

 

That slavery, according to Hagel's last opponent Charlie Matulka, is at our

doorstep.

 

" They can take over our country without firing a shot, " Matulka said, " just

by taking over our election systems. "

 

Revolution by control of computer chips? Is that really possible in the USA?

 

" Imagine it's Election Day 2004, " says U.S. Congressman Rush Holt, also a

scientist with a Ph.D. in physics who knows more than a little bit about

both politics and computers. " You enter your local polling place and go to

cast your vote on a brand new touch screen voting machine. The screen says

your vote has been counted. As you exit the voting booth, however, you

begin to wonder. How do I know if the machine actually recorded my vote? "

 

It's a question that probably hasn't occurred to many Americans, even those

who used the touch-screen machines particularly notable in states where

there were " upsets " and " glitches " in the 2002 election. But it occurred

to Congressman Holt, and after looking at the law, the voting machines, and

the companies that produce them, he concluded that, " The fact is, you don't

[know if the machine actually recorded your vote]. "

 

Bev Harris has looked into the situation in depth and thinks both

Congressman Holt and candidate Matulka may be on to something. The company

tied to Hagel even threatened her with legal action when she went public

about his company having built the machines that counted his landslide

votes. (Her response was to put the law firm's threat letter on her website

and send a press release to 4,000 editors, inviting them to check it out.)

 

" I suspect they're getting ready to do this across all the states, " Matulka

told me. " God help us if Bush gets his touch screens all across the

country, " he added, " because they leave no paper trail. These corporations

are taking over America, and they just about have control of our voting

machines. "

 

Further frustrating Mutalka's efforts to get a recount, he says Nebraska

Republicans passed a law after the 2002 election that bars state officials

from examining any remaining paper ballots.

 

Other states are looking at similar bills.

 

In the meantime, exit-polling organizations have quietly gone out of

business, and the news arms of the huge multinational corporations that own

our networks are suggesting the days of exit polls are over. Virtually

none were reported in 2002, creating an odd and unsettling silence that

caused unease for the many American voters who had come to view exit polls

as

proof of the integrity of their election systems.

 

As all this comes to light, many citizens and even a few politicians are

wondering if it's a good idea for corporations to be so involved in the guts

of our voting systems. The whole idea of a democratic republic was to

create a common institution (the government itself) owned by its citizens,

answerable to its citizens, and authorized to exist and continue existing

solely " by the consent of the governed. "

 

However, the recent political trend has moved us in the opposite direction,

with governments turning administration of our commons over to corporations

answerable only to profits. The result is the enrichment of corporations and

the appearance that democracy in America has started to resemble its parody

in banana republics.

 

Further frustrating those concerned with the sanctity of our vote, the

corporations selling and licensing voting machines and voting software often

claim Fourth Amendment rights of privacy and the right to hide their " trade

secrets " - how their voting software works and what controls are built into

it - from both the public and the government itself.

 

" If you want to make Coca Cola and have trade secrets, that's fine, " says

Harvard's Rebecca Mercuri, Ph.D., one of the nation's leading experts on

voting machines who writes

at<www.notablesoftware.com " >http://www.notablesoftware.com>www.notablesoftwa

re.com.

 

" But don't try to

claim trade secrets when you're handling our votes. "

 

And the window into who owns whom among the various companies most of which

are not publicly traded is equally opaque. One voting machine company was

partially funded at startup by wealthy Republican philanthropists who belong

to an organization that believes the Bible instead of the Constitution

should govern America.

 

Another is partly owned by a defense contractor, and Arab businessmen

apparently own a large part of a third.

Even the reincarnation of a company that helped Enron cook their books has

gotten into the act.

 

" There are several issues here, " says reporter Lynn Landis, whose writing

about voting machines are available at

> <www.ecotalk.org " >http://www.ecotalk.org>www.ecotalk.org.

 

" First, there's the issue that the Voting Rights Act requires that poll

watchers be able to observe the vote.

But with computerized voting machines, your vote vanishes into a computer

and can't be observed. "

 

To solve this, many are calling for a return to paper ballots that are

hand-counted. It may be slower, but temp-help precinct workers may even cost

less than electronic voting machines (which are a multi-billion-dollar boon

for corporate suppliers), and will ensure that real humans are tabulating

the vote.

 

" Second, " says Landis, " there's the issue of who controls the information.

Of all the functions of government that should not be privatized, handling

our votes is at the top of the list. This is the core of democracy, and

must be open, transparent, and available to both the public and our

politicians of all parties for full and open inspection. "

 

Although Rush Holt is suggesting there be stringent standards, he hasn't

gone so far as to say corporations shouldn't process our votes. But why not?

Most government functions - from our courts to our fire departments -

run rather smoothly, despite carping from the extreme right wing.

 

 

Increasingly, people across America are demanding that like in other

democracies around the world our system of voting should be publicly owned.

 

Another point that Dr. Rebecca Mercuri raises is that the Help America Vote

Act (HAVA) passed after the 2000 election calls for the President to

appoint, as the Act states, " with the advice of the Senate, " members to

" an independent entity, the Election Assistance Commission. " The commission

is then to create " the Election Assistance Commission Standards Board, the

Election Assistance Commission Board of Advisors, " " and the Technical

Guidelines Development Committee " to establish standards and oversee

compliance of the law by voting machine companies.

 

" But the commission has not yet been established, " said Mercuri, even though

billions in federal dollars have been allocated under HAVA for states to buy

electronic voting machines and license their software from

private corporations. " As a result, " Mercuri points out, " there are

currently no meaningful federal standards for voting machines.

 

Many of the machines used in 2002 were built to industry guidelines that

many question and were established in 1990. "

 

And those standards are problematic. For example, in the course of

researching " Black Box Voting, " Harris did a Google search on one of the

voting machine companies, and found it maintained an open FTP site on the

internet apparently through the 2002 election. In it, she located computer

code used to tabulate elections and, apparently, actual vote count files

that could be downloaded or even replaced by any visiting hacker.

 

While corporate bungles or the potential for outright vote fraud are a

concern of many opposed to electronic voting machines, another issue of

concern is the concentration of voter rolls in the hands of partisan

politicians instead of civil servants.

 

In most states, local precincts or counties maintain their own voter rolls.

Florida, however, had gone to the trouble before the 2000 election to

consolidate all its voter rolls at the state level, and put them into the

custody and control of the state's elected Secretary of State, Katherine

Harris, who was also the chairman of the Florida campaign to elect George W.

Bush.

 

Harris, in an act described in disturbing detail in the documentary

" Unprecedented " (<http://www.unprecedented.org>www.unprecedented.org) and in

Greg Palast's book " The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, " spent millions

to hire a Texas company to clean up the Florida list by purging it of all

convicted felons using a list of felons who lived in the State of Texas.

 

As Harris apparently knew, one of the legacies of slavery is that a large

number of African Americans share the same or similar names, and, sure

enough, when the Texas felon list was compared with the Florida voter list

over 94,000 matches or near-matches were found. Those registered Florida

voters about half of them African Americans (who generally vote Democratic)

with names identical or even similar to Texas felons were deleted from the

Florida voter rolls, and turned away from the polls when they tried to vote

in 2000 and in 2002.

 

Now, under the HAVA act, states across the nation are consolidating their

voter lists and handing them over to Harris's various peers to be cleaned

and maintained.

 

Another concern is internet voting. While it may be fine for the straw polls

like the one taken by moveon.org, when the stakes are truly high it's

impossible to ensure the accuracy of internet voting. Imagine if all the

time a voting machine was being used, it also had its back door open and an

unlimited number of technicians and hackers could manipulate its innards

before, during, and after the vote.

 

Activists suggest this is one of the reasons it's dangerous that so many

electronic voting machines today are connected to company-access modems, but

it's an even stronger argument against the very core of democracy the

vote being handled out in the public of cyberspace.

 

Nonetheless, the Pentagon is moving ahead with plans to have a private

corporation conduct internet voting for overseas GIs in 2004, and many fear

it'll be used as a beta test for more widespread internet voting across

the nation. While many Americans think the ability to vote from home or

office over the computer would be wonderfully convenient, the results could

be

disastrous: Even the CIA hasn't been able to prevent hackers from

penetrating parts of its computer systems attached to the internet.

 

To further complicate matters, the last week of February 2003, New York's

Newsday reported that, " Election.com, a struggling Garden City start-up

scheduled to provide online absentee ballots for U.S. military personnel

in the 2004 federal election, has quietly sold controlling power to an

investment group with ties to unnamed Saudi nationals, according to company

correspondence. "

 

While there are unconfirmed reports that the Saudis are no longer involved,

the reality is that anybody from any nation can buy controlling interest of

a for-profit corporation and end up owning part of the apparatus by which

the President of the United States is elected. Even a felon who can't

legally vote in Florida can legally own and control software that runs

voting machines in that state.

 

On most levels, privatization is only a " small sin " against democracy.

Turning a nation's or community's water, septic, roadway, prisons, airwaves,

or health care commons over to private corporations has so far demonstrably

degraded the quality of life for average citizens and enriched a few of the

most powerful campaign contributors. But it hasn't been the end of democracy

(although some wonder about what the FCC is up to - but

that's a separate story).

 

Many citizens believe, however, that turning the programming and maintenance

of voting over to corporations that can share their profits

openly with politicians (or, like Hagel, become the politicians), puts

democracy itself at peril.

 

A growing number of Americans are saying our votes are too sacred to reside

only on " chips, " and that it's critical that we kick corporations out of

the commons of our voting, and that we make sure we have a human-verifiable

vote paper trail that goes all the way back to the original hand of the

original voter.

 

If there are chips involved in the voting process, these democracy advocates

say, government civil service employees who are subject to adversarial

oversight by both parties must program them in an open-source

fashion, and in a way that produces a voter-verified paper trail.

 

Anything less, and our democracy may vanish as quickly as a network of

modem-connected computers can reboot.

 

<http://www.thomhartmann.com>Thom Hartmann is a nationally syndicated daily

talk show host and the author of " Unequal Protection " and " The Last Hours

of Ancient Sunlight, " among other books.