Cynthia McKinney and the electronic voting debate

[gunsmith]

I trust you Jim, thanks for yer hard work.

just to lighten up a little and to bump, this is a fave of mine from
www.imao.us

Dude, Where's My Votes?
Posted by Frank J. at 06:31 AM | Email This

Man, I was so happy with our win, but then I found out that places like Democratic Underground are arguing that Bush stole the election once again. What? But what about all those votes? Well, Wikipedia even has a page up about how the election was stolen with charts and everything. Is something up? Well, I contacted my local wing of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy who patched me into the national arm of the VRWC. Then I got to talk to two people I shall refer to as Hacker1 and Hacker2. Here is the conversation:

Frank: So, did we steal the election this time?

Hacker1: Yeah, totally. We like rigged all the machines so there was no way we could lose.

Frank: Why didn't you tell me we had it in the bag? I was like totally worried about this election!

Hacker2: Sorry, dude, but we were like told not to spread it around too much.

Hacker1: Yeah, we needed everyone to act like it was close and worrisome so no one would know we like totally hacked it. That Karl Rove is smart, dude; he knows how to run things.

Hacker2: Yeah, Rove is totally evil and totally cool.

Frank: So did you hack voting everywhere?

Hacker1: Yeah, otherwise it would look weird if we only improved in the battleground states.

Hacker2: Rove was completely in charge of all that. He even came in last minute and said, "Give them New Hampshire," and we were like, "Whatever."

Frank: So was it hard hacking the vote?

Hacker1: Sorta, but Diebold gave us easy to follow instructions.

Hacker2: We totally owned all the votes.

Hacker1: Totally.

Hacker2: It was funny to see the Democrats try and cheat the old-fashioned way. They can bring in all the dead people they want to vote, but we'll just change their votes to Republican in the end.

Hacker1: (laughs) I bet you didn't know this, but Michael Moore voted for Bush.

Hacker2: (laughs) He doesn't know it either.

Frank: But aren't people going to find out about this eventually?

Hacker1: Not if we're careful, dude.

Hacker2: First off, we're not going to hand out many landslides. It's going to be a bunch of real close ones so we can say to the Democrats, "Oh, that was so close. You really should try again."

Hacker1: (laughs) We're going to drive them nuts.

Hacker2: Anyway, the VRWC will save money in the future as we cut back on commercials and campaign appearances, but Rove will make sure we don't cut back so much that it looks suspicious.

Frank: Except to the Democratic Underground.

Hacker1: Yeah, there's no fooling those guys. They're on top of everything. Luckily, Rove had a plan for them too.

Hacker2: What he did was get all these mental patients - total schizos - and brainwash them about how evil the Republicans are. Then he gave them internet connections.

Hacker1: Now the schizos that Rove planted totally rule the Democratic Underground discussion forum. They’re the most prolific posters. Instead of getting anywhere on all the evil plans we have, they waste time blaming a Democrat event being rained out on Karl Rove.

Hacker2: Which is stupid because our weather machine is only 60% complete.

Frank: What about bloggers talking about voting malfeasance?

Hacker1: Dude, Rove totally owns the blogosphere. Most of the popular bloggers write only what Rove tells them.

Frank: Like who?

Hacker1: Well, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, half the people at the Volokh Conspiracy, and Scott Ott of Scrappleface.

Frank: I knew it!

Hacker2: The phrase "Axis of Weasels" was all Rove's idea.

Frank: So he controls the bloggers to combat the left-wing blogs like the DailyKos?

(both hackers laugh)

Hacker1: Dude, Rove personally writes DailyKos.

Hacker2: Yeah, he wants to control what the left are whining about.

Frank: Whoa! That Rove is one sinister, evil dude!

Hacker2: Totally.

Frank: Hey, has Rove ever mentioned my site?

Hacker1: Uh... yeah, once. He asked me, "What's this site 'IMAO'?" And I told him, "Remember, it's the one with the moon exploding." And he said, "Oh yeah, it's the stupid site about the angry dog."

Frank: Cool! He knows my site! So, back to the main subject, what's in the future of voting now that we own it?

Hacker1: We'll only keep fixing elections for so long. Eventually we'll dissolve the Democratic party and turn the U.S. into a one-party ruled dictatorship.

Hacker2: That's Rove's long-term plans.

Frank: Neato. Well, thanks for talking to me.

Hacker1: You're not going to publish this, are you?

Frank: Uh... well... er... uh... no.

 

[hvengel]

Jim,

I just had a look at OpenVotingConsortium.org. It took some effort to find the source code for this project as there are no links on the site to the location of the source code. Seems strange to me since the source code would appear to me to be a basic component of what they have to offer. After doing a some googling I found the sourceforge project at http://evm2003.sourceforge.net/ .

Doing a quick look at the evm CVS I found that most of the code had not been updated in 2 or more years. There were a few updates about 3 months ago all of it related to barcode support done by Jan Karrman who is listed on the OVC site as their bar code expert. The last release of any software from this system was dated April 20, 2004.

From a developers prospective the source code base for this project is very small with fewer than 50 source code files none of which where particularly large or complex (the largest I found was less than 500 lines, most were much smaller).

I also found that the developers for the evm project, which include many of the principles from OVC (Dechert, Keller, Karrman, Mertz), have stopped monitoring the forums on the sourceforge system for the project and are using an email list to communicate. The email list is a mix of technical and political threads and digging through the archives to try to understand where the project is currently and where it is going did not yield much useful information. There is even considerable confusion about how to install and run the software and one developer (Karrman) reports that he can't figure out how to get one sub-system to run.

There are 26 developers for this project. The sourceforge activity percentile for the project is 68.97 which is fairly low (this means that there are something like 32,000 projects on sourceforge.net that are more active). My own sourceforge project typically runs in the 98 to 99 activity percentile (the highest so far 99.6) range with only four active developers all working on the project in their spare time and none of them with a Ph. D (there are at least 4 Ph. Ds who are developers for evm).

If I where looking at the project statistics and didn't know where it came from I would walk away thinking that is was in the process of dieing. Looking at the email archives I can understand why this is the case. No one appears to have taken responsibility for leading the project and it is for all practical purposes with out a leader. Until that is corrected OVC is basically a political organization in spite of the fact that they appear to have people that are capable of producing a working open source voting system.

 

[Jim March]

Believe me, I know what you're talking about re: OVC.

They're trying to get gov't money to do a project through the University of California campus system...they have proponents at Davis and Berkeley.

The OVS system is the one now a LOT further along in development, but it's OVC that has built a bigger political structure - also tied to http://OpenVotingFoundation.org

OVS is operating on a for-profit model, "public source" instead of "open source".

Anyways. I was listing all of the "vendors" or anything similar that I am in contact with, to answer any possible questions about my biases. Which is a fair question given how active I am in this.

 

[hvengel]

Well that is typical. Most of those leading OVC are from the public sector (IE. teachers and the like) and their thinking is VERY public sector. "Well we need money from the government to do this". Which is total BS and also a sure way to fail since .gov does not want this to change in the way they are advocating.

Having read their stuff I think they are advocating the correct approach but until they get off their duffs and stop begging .gov for money and start working on transforming their demontration software into a real system they are nothing but hot air. If they had been working on their software for the last 2 1/2 years instead of begging .gov for money they would likely have a system that was ready for real world use and I think .gov would now be there offering them funding to do certification and the like. Instead they pissed that time away waiting for .gov and everyone now knows that they know how to talk but don't know how to get things done.

What really gets to me is that many of these folks have Ph.Ds in things like Computer Science and Information Systems and they can't get their software project beyond a demonstration phase. What gives? If I had been working on this for the last 2 1/2 years (even by myself) there would be a full blown system sitting there ready to go. This is not rocket science and the systems needed to do this are not particularly complex.

Why aren't these teachers giving their programming students class projects that will improve this software? (IE. your class project this semester will be to add this new sub-system to evm - here are the specs) Having looked through the email list archive for the project I see many posts from programmers asking what they can do to help with improving the software and no one even replies. So there are people that are willing and asking to work on this but there is no leadership to direct that energy. I can think of a number of ways to move this forward that would not need one cent from .gov and that would need little or no other funding.

If this software were to be implemented (or something like it) it would set the voting machine industry on it's ear and this would result in huge changes for the better. OVC has missed an opportunity to make this happen in the near term. In addition the fact that they don't have a system that is ready or nearly ready for certification hurts their credibility on the whole issue. If they had such a system it would give them tremendous leverage that they currently do not have since they would then be sitting at the bargaining table with a very strong hand.

Most of those who are actively working in this area are from the left. I do agree with them that the whole election integrity thing needs a lot of work. I don't think that they are right that these machines have been used to "steal" elections but the problem is that with how this is currently implemented you can't prove that it that was not the case either. And that needs to be fixed. But also making sure that only citizens who are actually alive at the time of the election are the only ones voting and that they only vote once. I think this last set of problems are actually more likely to be currently affecting election results since there is evidence of these having occurred in recent elections in large enough numbers to have possibly changed the results. But fixing all of this is important if we are to have confidence in our election process.

 

[Trebor]

Jim, no offense, but you guys really need to start doing better PR on this to get the message out. I've seen some of the press releases you've posted here or linked to and they need to be better. There was nothing as an editor that would grab me and want me to follow up and do a story. They were also hard to understand and read through if I wasn't already familiar with the issue.

Seriously, you guys need to find a PR pro, preferably someone with a background in journalism as well, to help you get your message across.

Edit: You guys are making the logical, intellectual argument. To get people excited about this issue you have to start making the emotional argument, the "Will your vote count? Not if you use electronic voting machines," argument. Then, once you've got their interest, you actually have the facts and documentation to back your claims. (Unlike the antigunners, who only have the emotional argument)

 

[ctdonath]

I think it is worth noting that the official in charge of all the machines in Georgia LOST her bid for re-election.

Not necessarily not what they intended. Republicans were allowed to vote in her run-off election, and were getting excited about doing so precisely because, given that the Republican candidate invariably loses in that precinct, they might as well see to it that the worst & nuttiest Democrat wins. Dem leaders may have decided that she just had to go.

'course, the fact that she punched a cop didn't help maintain her base.

 

[Jim March]

Y'all are assuming way more connection between myself and OVC than I've stated.