[quote] On November 3, 2005 a committee gutted the "disclosed source code" requirement with an Assembly Substitute Amendment 1. That amended deleted AB627 as introduced and replaced it with ASA1. [/quote]

The thing now is to find out who in the hell was on that committee, and vote them the hell out of office.

Plaster their names all over the place. Get rid of them as enemies of democracy.

That's exactly what they are.

Well, the "Diebold Accuvote-TSX" touch screen voting machine is currently up for certification in Wisconsin. I sure hope that this bill is enough to make sure we don't waste our time looking at this unreliable piece of crap until Diebold adds the verifiable paper trail (if they ever add the paper trail).

I can see why they'd drop the requirement to release source code for the OS (Microsoft is Microsoft), but I still believe it's in the best intrests of democracy that we examine the source code of the apps running on top of the OS on these e-vote machines. Having confidence in our democratic voting process has to trump IP rights of a corruption-ridden corporation.

http://elections.state.w...;linkid=159&locid=47

Sysadmin: Diebold's TSx now has a paper trail. It's such a crappy paper trail that even the disabled groups in California soundly rejected it. One gentleman testified, on Nov. 21, that it has been his dream to be able to vote independently on a touch-screen, but Diebold has made it into a sham.

The paper trail, by the way, uses tiny print with a portion not visible, supposedly features a bar code for recounts, using technology apparently not yet developed. The bar code is something no one else can read, it's proprietary. The paper trail is on a toilet paper style roll that serves to remove voter privacy.

As Jim March says, it's like when you ask a six year old to do the dishes and he really doesn't want to do them. So he leaves grease and gobs of food on them, and you never want to ask him to do them again.

Diebold's "paper trail" is not the only one that removes privacy. So does ES&S's and so does Sequoia's.

Bev Harris
Black Box Voting

Who can fight the effort to fix the voting systems and still call themselves a patriot?

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OT:

New Gingrich actually said the Republicans had a mess on their hands and they had better fix it.

OMG, that's so funny. He started it and now he thinks he can stand in front of the reform group and claim to be a leader for change? What a bozo.

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FireDogLake.com blog is reporting that last night Rep. "Mean" Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio) (who attacked Rep. Murtha on his anti-war stand) said that in a time of war it's sometimes necessary to suspend the Constitution. And, some in the audience applauded.

What is that about?

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If Abramoff is a Zionist Jew and worked with Republicans (very Christian) and met with Mohammed Atta (fundamentalist militant Muslim) on a SunCruz gambling ship, then is this still Planet Earth or are we all on an LSD trip to the planet SomewhereElse?

Bev, #3

Since you brought it up, what would constitute a secure and proper paper trail from BBV's perspective?

My take: Regular inkjet printers now use invisible tracking dots to store dates, serial numbers et c.

With evoting, some coordination between the electronic voting machines and the printers could produce a tape with a superficial indication of the candidates voted for, and more detailed encoded information. The printers would be be proprietary thermal to decrease likelyhood of counterfeiting.

Each vote stored on the machine/memory card is given CRC integrity value at the time the vote is registered, and that value is encoded on the tape. The voter is given a copy of the receipt, providing a third layer of redundancy in case some funny business occurs.

To prevent tampering before the vote even takes place (storing negative votes et c.) would require no less than open source software/hardware, which makes the Wisconsin bill failure a shame.

MarkH #4

Not a good trip by any means - Beware the brown acid!

I was so hoping my childhood state had seen the light and was going to help lead the downfall of Diebold and all!

Just hoping now Diebold doesn't get recertified in california!

Hey Wisconsin's battle ground now, we just need to get through to a few office people and those machines will be toast. (source code--escrow inspection laws)

John, it's time to start showing all the experts over there the banned interpreted code. Lets go for the gut.

Doug E.

re: what's a proper paper trail

It has to be readable, the legal record of the vote, durable, and retain voter privacy.

The most important characteristic of a proper paper trail is what you do with it. Copies need to be made available (without prohibitive cost) to citizens, promptly. There are voting machines that can do that, with a few tweaks that should be implemented.

1. Needs to create a gray-scale digital image of each ballot as it is scanned, with an automatically generated hash mark based on the unique combination of pixels.

2. Hash marks need to be publicly distributed as soon as each batch is scanned, including any batches scanned before the election. (Hash marks don't tell you what the vote is; they can be matched up later by generating your own hash marks of the ballots, which should match the ones created at the time the ballots were sanned.

3. The DVDs or CDs containing the ballot images should be made available to the public as close to real time as possible. For example, if results reports are distributed every hour on election night, the ballot images should be made available at the same time. (reduces time to tamper, increases our ability to oversee.)

Jim March and I were talking about this. We can envision a race for the ballot images by the media, with a contest for whose souped-up computer and independent program can verify the results the fastest.

Note that manipulating the ballot images is a much, MUCH harder task than you think, if they are released in real time. Obviously, the program for the scanner must be public source and verified itself with a hash code.

The whole key is immediacy, the hash code which "freezes" the image that was originally scanned. If the images given to the public aren't exactly the same, pixel for pixel, they'll generate a different hash code. Hash coding programs are standard and any one of us can obtain such standard programs and use them ourselves to check that the images given are those initially scanned --- IF the hash codes are released instantly.

Full access by the public means anyone who wants one should be able to get a copy of the DVD. It would cost a buck or so for the county, I'd be happy to spend ten bucks for the CD.

This whole concept should be credited to Harri Hursti. One day in August I took him hiking at Mt. St. Helens. He trudged up and down a chunk of the volcano, as it burped smoke a little ways away. On the way back, he got this flash. Capture the images, hash mark them to prevent alteration after scanning, distribute them to everyone, make our own free software to independently examine them, count them, and do forensics on them.

Paper trails aren't worth the paper they're printed on if we can't use them, and by "we" I mean WE --- the people --- ALL of us.

Bev, #9

Ok, so I assume this is for marked ballots run through an electronic tabulator?

I have some questions regarding this but I'd appreciate if you could lay out the step by step process, so I don't have to make a bunch of assumptions.

What are the requirements for a paper trail for electronic voting machines that use memory requirements, though? That was originally what I was getting at. And the key, it seems, is a) setting the proper safeguards to assure the memory-resident votes to match the printouts b) make the printouts (and thus the e-votes) verifiable by both humans (superficial indications) and machines (hash codes, crc, et c) in a way that satisfy the law and c) keeping the source code and machines open to public scrutiny.

If these conditions are satisfied, getting the results to the public instantly in a manner which they can verify each vote can be achieved.

Jan. 8, 2006---Voting rules do not matter. I am a victim of fraud under Title 7 USCS C.F.R. 1955.116.
This fraud occurred in Wisconsin. The Courts, federal and state elected officials and news agencies all are aware of this fraud. It is the best kept secret in the USA. When threatened with involuntary commitment to the Winnebago Mental Institution in Wisconsin, I fled to Canada. This is what happened there:
Refugee Reality (U.S. citizen denied Refugee Status; forcibly removed from Canada)
Judith M. Hansel, Ponderosa Hotel, 515 S. Virginia St., Reno, NV 89501
775-786-6820 #222 escapefromamerica@hotmail.com
December 6, 2005

Katrina produced refugees. Some commentators find the word “refugee” distasteful and insist on “evacuee” instead. Webster states that a refugee is anyone who flees a life-threatening situation such as war, famine, flood, hurricane or other natural disasters and who then seeks safety in another community.

In 1951, the United Nations enacted the Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees partly in response to the refugee problems created by World War II. The Convention describes a refugee as anyone who flees persecution because of his ethnic, religious or racial identity or because of persecution for his political opinion. Anyone who seeks asylum in countries that have signed the Convention is labeled a “Convention Refugee claimant.”

When a refugee arrives in a foreign country, there is no guarantee that she will find safety or how long protection may or may not be provided. Refugees flee with their lives and, if they are lucky, a few documents that prove their identity. Every refugee is thrust into an unknown society where a different culture, language and climate exists.

The UN Convention delineates rules for determining who is and who is not a valid refugee. Countries that have signed the Convention have bureaucracies in place to process people who claim to be refugees. Often these countries also have their own immigration rules and regulations. Ideally, this system is just and does not rely on propaganda issued by the refugee claimant’s home country to determine the validity of the refugee’s claim.

Unfortunately, this system does not work if you happen to be a United States citizen who has been persecuted for one of the reasons listed in the Convention and who can prove the persecution with documentation. Citizens of the United States are put through the bureaucratic process and accorded hearings that seem to be run in a fair manner. Fair, that is, until a decision based on lies is issued and a quick trip in handcuffs back to the United States is arranged. Often the time spent waiting to be deported is in a jail.

From 1989 to 1994, forty-five US citizens claimed Refugee Status in Canada. None were granted that status and all were ordered to leave Canada. The more intransigent, such as me, were deported.

U.S. citizens seeking refuge in European countries are also treated in a cavalier manner. One U.S. citizen was recently ordered to leave Norway after she spent 16 months seeking political asylum. A married couple, both U.S. citizens, left Canada upon orders from that government and are now bouncing from country to country in Europe, homeless and stateless. These are Americans whose civil and political rights are supposed to be protected by the U.S. Constitution and government, but who are, instead, running in fear from it.

Since the 1951 Convention, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees has devised an alternate form of supposed safety for refugees called “internal flight.” In this scenario, persons are advised to not return to the region of their country where the alleged persecution took place, but to live in another part of the country which is why I live in Nevada and not Wisconsin. This is a ludicrous policy since the long arm of the government of any country reaches everywhere.

In retrospect, it appears that the U.N. 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees was enacted to give protection to people fleeing Communism. No one, it seems, deemed it possible that citizens of the West might need protection. With the demise of the Communist States, the U.N. now plans to return refugees to their countries of origin as soon as practicable in order to reduce the impacts the refugees have on receiving countries. In other words, with Communist dictators gone from the scene, refugee protection is no longer needed.

The most alarming fact about the U.N. Convention is that it contains no enforcement provisions. Individual governments can decide whether or not a Convention Refugee claimant meets the requirements set forth in the Convention and in its own immigration law. Convention Refugee claimants who are U.S. citizens are regularly denied Refugee Status based on political considerations rather than on the unbiased merits of the case.
Denial of Refugee Status by a government’s bureaucracy can be appealed through that government’s legal system, but this is an expensive and lengthy process. Higher courts can simply refuse to hear a case with no reason given. Although the United Nations can declare a person or a group a Convention Refugee, it has never done so for any American.

The media, either by design or ignorance, does not inform the public of these facts. While corporate media heads are lodged in the sand, (or ordered to keep quiet), those of us who flee persecution are left in limbo. Under international law every government is required to legally repatriate returned refugee claimants. The U.S. government just pretends that we do not exist. Repatriation can be accomplished by the returned refugee herself if she has a permanent address, pays taxes and/or votes. No government involvement is required. Since November 25, 1998, I have paid no federal or state income taxes, do not vote and do not have a permanent address. This has not been easy to do, however being a sovereign nation of one has its own reward---absolute freedom.

Despite the propaganda spewing out of Washington, citizens of the United States have a right to know that some of their fellow citizens are fleeing the United States in fear of losing their lives or their liberty and are seeking asylum in other countries.

re: #10

What are the requirements for a paper trail for electronic voting machines that use memory requirements, though?

that should be "voting machines that use memory cards"

going from

user -> machine -> memory card

would have different requirements than

user -> ballot -> tabulator

or

user -> machine -> ballot -> tabulator

hope thats cleared up.