Fwd: Turkey Day editorial: No thanks for stuffing elections with machines

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Mon, 28 Nov 2005 12:41:30 -0800 (PST)

Fwd: Turkey Day editorial: No thanks for stuffing elections

with machines

 

 

A bit late, but informative, especially for CA voters concerned about

what R. Bruce is up to today....

 

--- " update " <update wrote:

 

 

> Turkey Day editorial: No thanks for stuffing elections

> with machines

> " update " <update

> Thu, 24 Nov 2005 10:47:32 -0800 (PST)

>

 

 

 

> By Bev Harris, Jim March, Kathleen Wynne - please distribute to

> your lists as desired.

>

> -----------------------

>

> From We, the People to our public servants: This isn't what we

> ordered. Send it back.

>

> WHO COOKED THIS TURKEY?

>

> It's about the size of an elephant, and it took a long time to

> cook. Preparations began in the 80s when some Texas powerbrokers

> went on an acquisition spree, converting the elections industry

> from diverse locally-based mom & pop businesses into a handful of

> firms peppered with criminal indictments and salted with

> political connections.

>

> THE ROASTING BAG

>

> Elections officials had to be bagged up and propagandized. A

> privatization advocate, the Council of State Governments, was run

> by Abe Frank, who became a founding director for The Election

> Center in 1990.

>

> The Election Center, which has been run by former used computer

> parts salesman R. Doug Lewis since 1994, undertook the task of

> organizing and training local elections officials.

>

> At the same time, vendors flexed their influence in the

> pay-to-play National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS)

> -- You pay your fees, you get your face time. Secretaries of

> state, who often aspire to run for governor, cozied up to the

> very people who -- literally -- can make that happen.

>

> THE RECIPE: INGREDIENT LIST

>

> - ONE SIX-MEMBER FEDERAL ELECTIONS COMMISSION:

>

> The FEC makes the rules for voting machine certification, the

> so-called " 1990 " and " 2002 " FEC standards (which have been

> removed from the FEC site, but can be found here).

>

> The FEC left themselves a loophole. They never codified the FEC

> standards into regulations, so that the force of law cannot be

> applied to force voting machine makers to comply. The FEC

> standards are " voluntary guidelines " .

>

> - TWO TESTING LABS, HUNTSVILLE ALABAMA BRAND

>

> Test how ripe they are before using: Jam a pocket calculator

> halfway into a banana, see if they'll certify it as a voting

> machine for the right money.

>

> Three labs were authorized, but vendors chose to use only the

> Huntsville brand -- Nichols/PSInet/Metamore/Ciber, a series of

> companies that repeatedly passed the hot potato to a tester named

> Shawn Southworth, and handed another portion of the testing to

> Wyle Labs' Jim Dearman.

>

> These labs were supposed to do source code and functionality

> reviews, but here's the catch: They are paid by the vendors.

>

> The testing labs are called " ITAs " for " Independent Testing

> Authorities " but there is nothing independent about them.

> According to Shawn Southworth, in a taped interview conducted by

> Black Box Voting, the labs don't like to write anything negative

> in the reports because the vendors don't like it, and they're

> paying for it.

>

> - One Voting Systems Panel from the National Association of State

> Elections Directors (NASED). This panel approves the voting

> machines after the ITAs recommend approval. They are supposed to

> check over the ITA's paperwork, after which they assign a " NASED

> number " signifying Federal certification.

>

> The NASED panel sometimes issued cert numbers before reading the

> reports, and has routinely certified systems with " not tested "

> and " untested " notations on the recommendation forms.

>

> NASED got some operational support via cash donations from the

> big vendors, and apparently never saw anything odd in the fact

> that two old ladies and a gun nut from Black Box Voting were

> running circles around the ITAs, exposing hard-core voting system

> defects like the GEMS defect and fundamentally flawed memory card

> architecture that the ITAs forgot to mention.

>

> These defects were subsequently confirmed by reports commissioned

> by the secretaries of state of Ohio and California, causing ITA

> labs and their apologists to offer this excuse:

>

> " THE FEC STANDARDS WERE TOO WEAK. "

>

> Not.

>

> You don't need to be a computer scientist to understand plain

> English: Both 1990 and 2002 FEC standards prohibit something

> called " interpreted code. " The Diebold memory card architecture

> relies on interpreted code, executing logic on the memory card by

> passing memory card code through -- drum roll, please -- the

> interpreter.

>

> You also don't need to be a computer expert to understand that

> another item forbidden in the FEC standards, " nonstandard

> computer language " is being used. Diebold decided to make up its

> own language, calling it " AccuBasic. " Only Diebold uses it, no

> one else in the world. Apologists for the ITAs explain that the

> AccuBasic language is similar but different to the C++ computer

> language. That's like saying German is English because the

> languages are " similar. "

>

> But the FEC standards are deficient in some areas. Here's

> something that doesn't take a statistician to figure out: The FEC

> standards set a failure tolerance so low that 10 percent of the

> voting machines are allowed to fail on the first day of use.

> Would you buy a TV set if you knew there was a 10 percent chance

> it would stop working the first day? Hello? This is good use of

> taxpayer money?

>

> The NASED voting systems panel appears to have gone rogue years

> ago and their certification oversight ability is being stripped

> from them and given to the new Election Assistance Commission

> (EAC) -- which isn't functional yet.

>

> That hasn't stopped the California Secretary of State from

> inviting many of the most problematic members of the NASED voting

> systems panel in to an invitation-only meeting on Nov. 28 and 29

> to help California set " best practices. "

>

> - Add to the mix: Various academics and " experts " who were

> supposed to be checking this stuff out.

>

> Even the best of them (Dr. Doug Jones of Iowa and Dr. David

> Jefferson of California) didn't want to get too vocal about known

> problems, especially early on. Others like Georgia's Brit

> Williams and Florida's Paul Craft cannot possibly explain their

> unabashed cheerleading of systems which have now been proven to

> be defective.

>

> There were a small number of notable exceptions: The outspoken

> Dr. Rebecca Mercuri who has been telling it like it is since

> 1989.

>

> HAVA: WHO ORDERED THIS TURKEY?

>

> The Help America Vote Act was lobbied in by defense contractors

> and manufacturers looking to make a buck on the backs of U.S.

> taxpayers. (Documentation: See Black Box Voting book, chapter 16)

>

> Demand a Hold on HAVA -- Megan Matson of Mainstreet Moms

> Operation Blue(MOB) has the right idea: ?Hold on HAVA.? The

> National Alliance of County Officials (NACO) wants to extend the

> HAVA deadline, at least until standards are set and adequate

> funding is available. The Election Assistance Commission, charged

> with supervising HAVA, is months behind its own deadlines.

>

> IS ANYONE GOING TO BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR THIS TURKEY?

>

> The Election Center and NASED ignored ITA ommissions the size of

> the national defecit for 10 years. When this became undeniable,

> after the work of ordinary citizens to expose the flaws,

> secretaries of state at first commissioned independent studies,

> from the SAIC, RABA, CompuWare, and recently Steve Freeman.

>

> These studies became inconvenient, however, when they confirmed

> the GEMS defect, the memory card executables, and numerous other

> critical defects. So people like Ohio Secretary of State Ken

> Blackwell simply hid the reports, while California whispered

> suggestions into Diebold's ear, encouraging it to quietly resolve

> the issues. There was no investigation, and no one has put either

> the vendor or the ITAs under oath to question how this came to

> be.

>

> Vendors like Diebold knew nobody was watching the store, so they

> acted like a pack of Goths sacking Rome.

>

> To criticize Diebold is to critique the WHOLE SORRY HOUSE OF

> CARDS who all act like they were members of the same happy club

> -- and in fact, they are. People from one part of this structure

> typically relocate to other segments.

>

> - Indicted vendors become election officials (Lance Gough, Chicago).

> - Convicted felons who were vendors become elections consultants

> (John Elder, Diebold ballot printing.)

> - Regulators become vendors (Ralph Munro, Bill Jones, Sandra

> Mortham, Lou Dedier).

> - State elections officials become convicted felons (Ark. sec.

> state Bill McKuen, Louisiana elections director Jerry Fowler).

> - County elections officials vacation with vendors (Los Angeles'

> Conny Drake McCormack, Diebold's Deborah Seiler).

> - Political powerbrokers become voting machine lobbyists (former

> DNC chairman Joe Andrew, now Diebold lobbyist.)

> - County elections officials hire PR firms and lobbyists who work

> for the vendors at the same time (Riverside County/

> Sequoia/O'Reilly PR; Ohio Association of county election

> officials share their lobbyist with Diebold)

>

> The interchangability of elections officials, regulators,

> lobbyists, indicted personnel, and vendors is a gigantic set of

> Tinker-Toys.

>

> That's why companies like Diebold have been so protected. If

> Diebold goes down, people might look too closely, causing the

> whole thing to collapse in scandal.

>

> - At Black Box Voting, we've been told that we need to leave

> these TinkerToy Turkeys a graceful way out.

> - We are told that it is rude to tell it like it is.

> - We are told that the situation can't be fixed if we are

> politically incorrect.

>

> That's probably true, if you leave this to legislation. But We,

> the People, can never again leave it up to others to fix our

> broken election system.

>

> At some point, we've got to hold this turkey's feet to the fire.

> Now all the people who cooked this turkey are jockeying for

> position in the free pass line.

>

> Is that what we want? Do We, the People, really need to be that

> polite to those who took away our ability to oversee our own

> elections? Have we become a nation of bootlickers, cowed to

> politeness before the very people whose corrupt practices invaded

> our most fundamental right?

>

> What our public servants brought to the table was not what we

> ordered. Send it back.

>

> Now have a happy Thanksgiving!

>

> Black Box Voting

>

> Permission to reprint granted, with link to

> http://www.blackboxvoting.org

>

> -----------

>

> Black Box Voting is a nonprofit, nonpartisan 501c(3) elections

> watchdog. We are fighting for your right as a citizen to view and

> oversee your own voting process. Our focus is on increasing your

> access to the elections process, obtaining crucial public records

> to document what is going on in elections, and exposing

> procedural problems that corrupt the integrity of the election.

>

> Black Box Voting is supported entirely by citizen donations. You

> can support this important work by clicking here:

> http://www.blackboxvoting.org/donate.html or by sending to 330 SW

> 43rd St. Suite K, PMB 547, Renton WA 98055Black Box Voting

>

 

 

Mark Hull-Richter, U.S. Citizen & Patriot

U.S.A. - From democracy to kakistocracy in one fell coup.

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0416-01.htm

http://verifiedvoting.org http://blackboxvoting.org

 

 

 

 

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