I think we continue with this technology simply because companies like Diebold pay big bucks to the politicians to endorse and encourage the purchase of these very expensive machines/software/services. And, if elections can be manipulated to maintain the status quo the better for them.

He was slowly gaining my respect, this might have finally tipped me over, good job Mr Rubin !!!

We continue to play this game because cheating (meaning electronic voting machines) is the only way Republicans can win!

Now we can get a cake with "Avi Rubin finally wised up."

Yes it's good to see movement in this direction in Avi Rubin's thinking, but having taken 4 years in the field to do that as he admits, well, ... we sure hope to radicallly compress the learning curve for everyone else who comes after this!! (within his field he is of course extraordinarily sharp)

I hope Avi will next correct his misstatement in his book where he quotes himself after the '04 election as stating the exit polls were within statistical margins of error. (Not).

Avi Rubin is no doubt a brilliant mind for computers. The problem we face though is not primarily a technological problem, it is a democracy problem, that has subproblems of administration, disabled access, politics, law, and so forth. No single expert has or can master the US Voting Systems, writ large. Some of us can try and come close, but I don't see any alternative to closely affiliated teams that contain computer, legal, political, accessibility, and democracy- advocacy all as components to understand the whole.

Otherwise, our technical interventions in these complex systems (like VVPAT) may not make sense in terms of democracy, which is not Rubin's core area of expertise, so it took him longer than a nanosecond to learn that lesson. We can all learn, and must learn, is the bottom line, to make sure our interventions to rescue the voting system actually have the intended effects and actually solve the addressed problems.

For example, practitioners of audit solutions of 3% or 10% or whatever are still not talking to legal (me) and explaining how we are going to get around the problem of partial recounts being unconstitutional just like in Bush v. Gore in 2000. (audits that change precinct results are functionally equivalent to partial recounts)

I've raised this question again and again and it certainly deserves an answer, because otherwise it appears that the audits will fail legally even if they succeed technically, and right at the worst possible moment (in a disputed election, probably the presidential election 08).

So, all the different types of expertise and wisdom really need to be talking to keep the forces of democracy at pace with the forces of change.

{Ed note: Comment deleted. After several warnings, Brent Turner of the Open Voting Consortium (OVC), has continued to violate the very few rules we have here at BRAD BLOG. Including posting knowing disinformation and using different names to comment. He has posted on this thread alone as both "James Kushner" and "Todd Simkinjs". He has previously posted as "Mort Silverman", "Newman", "Wallace Mckenzie" as well as under his own name in other threads. I'm sorry that OVC continues to work with Turner after repeated warnings and demonstrations that he is unwilling to follow basic rules here and basic rules of decency elsewhere. I can only hope that his atrocious, deceitful behavior does not represent the open voting movement as a whole. --- BF}

There was a time when I thought computerized voting sounded pretty good.

Way back, as they say, “back in the day".

Then, I was riding in my car one lovely 2003 day when I heard Avi Rubin on public radio explain why they were actually a terrible idea, and very insecure".

He was the one who opened my eyes, and voting has been the overriding issue with me ever since. We owe a lot to this wonderful honorable scientist who first told the truth to us and woke some of us up.

He may not have been the first voice, but he was the first voice for me.

It has been 40 years since EVM's started showing up, and they are showing up more and more, and they are less and less secure. So:

How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
Yes, 'n' how many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, 'n' how many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they're forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

How many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
Yes, 'n' how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, 'n' how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

How many years can a mountain exist
Before it's washed to the sea?
Yes, 'n' how many years can some people exist
Before they're allowed to be free?
Yes, 'n' how many times can a man turn his head,
Pretending he just doesn't see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

(Bob Dylan).

It is blowin in the wind but the lawmakers have not yet reached out and grabbed it.

Um, let's see, if it takes a computer expert four years to figure out that a system is bad, and a Presidential term happens to be exactly four years.....

.....maybe we don't want to entrust elections to computers and computer experts?

Can Avi please Call Hillary Clinton who is clearly under the same boldly wrong idea that VVPAT and audits will ever work.

The funny problem everyone seems to miss is that computer technology no matter how secure is never 100% secure (which is why Telephone companies promise 99.99% or reliability at the cost of Multimillons of dollars and still they cannot get it 100%, never can, never will.

MY MANTRA for people enthused about computers:
"Paper, once marked can never be unmarked without whiteout or a sticker."
"A computer program, CD, disk, program, can be manipulated many times without the slightest hint of any such manipulation."

and then I always end with, have you ever had your Microsoft word eat a file you spent hours typing up?
Most people answer YES to this question.

How would you feel it if was YOUR VOTE The computer ate?

I'm pleased with Rubin's admission, but I want him to personally Call Hillary clinton and tell her to stop pretending she has a technology solution to elections.

the only solution to elections is HAND COUNTED PAPER BALLOTS!!! and while he's at it, have him Call Karen Handel, Georgia's SOS who is trying to figure out if DREs can ever work.

{Ed note: Comment deleted. After several warnings, Brent Turner of the Open Voting Consortium (OVC), has continued to violate the very few rules we have here at BRAD BLOG. Including posting knowing disinformation and using different names to comment. He has posted on this thread alone as both "James Kushner" and "Todd Simkinjs". He has previously posted as "Mort Silverman", "Newman", "Wallace Mckenzie" as well as under his own name in other threads. I'm sorry that OVC continues to work with Turner after repeated warnings and demonstrations that he is unwilling to follow basic rules here and basic rules of decency elsewhere. I can only hope that his atrocious, deceitful behavior does not represent the open voting movement as a whole. --- BF}

The TRUTH IS, that OVC doesn't have the answer either and I don't want to waste my taxpayer money on 2 count system, first count is with a computer and 2nd count with an audit.

WHY NOT A SINGLE COUNT system, a paper ballot , hand marked by a voter, put directly into a double locked Ballot box (to remove 100 years of ballot stuffing election fraud, because one of the locks belongs to a citizen group and one of the locks belongs to a government official).

The funny thing is that everyone is so technology savvy, but I suspect Brad and Avi will visit this blog in 4 years, apologize for pushing Optical Scanners, which by the way, any smart technician understands the best a scanner can do to recognize a ballot is 96% (is 4% misrecognition worth the billions we'll pay to replace a DRE with an Optiscan?)

and then what happens on that day you do an audit and the DRE and the Optiscan both show hundreds or thousands of miscounted votes...

you finally revert back to the paper ballot, which by the way 95% of the world's democracies have already figured out.

america, a country who's love of technology has managed to remove any sense of democracy from its people.

i'm a 20 year telecomms and IT professional and I'm a little disappointed it took Avi, and yes, brad, so long to realize that any technology can handle an election.

Whoop-de-do.
Took only 4 years...

We cannot afford this learning curve!

PAPER BALLOTS, HAND-COUNTED, IN PUBLIC AT THE POLLS!

NOW!

Send these links to all you friends and networks:
http://www.chuckherrin.com/paperballots.htm
http://countpaperballots.com/
The Holy Grail:
http://www.velvetrevolut.../Campaigns/PaperBallots/

Phyllis Huster #12, your comment frightened me.

When you wrote, "...you finally revert back to the paper ballot, which by the way 95% of the world's democracies have already figured out," I remembered that we're the only developed country in the world that doesn't have a national health care plan. The ONLY one.

What if we're the world's sole stupidpower?

I've studied the voting debacle for the last four years as a computer programming savvy person also, and I will gladly volunteer to count votes for free on hand marked paper ballots in order to rid this country of the DRE machines. Frankly, I don't trust the paper scanning machines that Rubin approves of either. The voting machine companies still have protection under the law to control these machines. Until Proprietary Software protection is stripped from these hoodlum vendors we will never get sound elections. You can't give the keys to the hen house to these foxes and expect to get a good night's sleep. Have we gone mad?

Yes, it is madness and now we have more. PFAW is now asking it's members to sign a petition and call their Senators and Congress critters in support of a new and similarly flawed bills S.804 Clinton(corporatist) and HR. 1381 Tubbs Jones(what is she thinking). The very first statement in the summary is "PAPER TRAILS that voters can verify on the spot" the second statement is "Fairly allotted VOTING MACHINES and shorter lines", HAH! Have our elected officials lost their minds or is it that the corporate political consultants have completely corrupted our political system and our representatives? How can PFAW, even after Mr. Rubin's remarks, still support this crap? Like you say Brad, "and these are the good guys" It's Madness, yes indeed!

Now another group is misleading their members. Public Campaign Action Fund says in their latest enewsletter;

Democracy Corner: PFAW is Protecting Your Votes

While Clean Elections plays a valuable role in strengthening our elections and our system of government, it's not the only important work happening to keep our democracy vital. We'll be devoting this space in our newsletter to spotlighting efforts of other groups and organizations working to make our elections better.

Today, we'd like to acknowledge the efforts of People For The American Way who, in partnership with several Members of Congress, are working to ensure that when Americans go to vote, they are able to do so free from deception and intimidation, and secure in the knowledge that their votes are counted. Read more about their efforts to ensure a paper trail for electronic voting, make sure every vote cast is counted, and prevent deceptive practices around elections that interfere with our citizens' right to vote.

I was so disappointed that Avi kept saying DREs could be used under certain circumstances. I am happy to see he has "seen the light", minus the Op Scam machines (he needs more educating on that).

Listen to Paul Lehto. His mind and mine are running along the exact same track (scary). I am organizing specialist task forces including legal, computer science, statistical, fiscal/finance, marketing, research, legislative, training and a few other disciplines (mostly local experts, some non-local)to work with SAVE R VOTE in Riverside County as we continue our progress in changing the entire local electoral environment, against the stiffest of resistance by the county Board of Supervisors, the County Executive and the Registrar of Voters, not to mention the vendor (Sequoia in our case).

If we don't organize locally and bring the greatest variety of talent and experinece together and provide them with a vehicle to communicate and produce convincing arguments, then most of America will stay mired in lethargy and ignorance when it comes to the electoral process.

This local process must parallel the national efforts to shepard the lemming politicians who are either truly unaware of what it is like in the field regarding the DREs and the paper "trails" or are being very heavily lobbied by the Diebolds, Sequoias, etc. Or both!

Hopefully we in Riverside will be able to "bottle" our efforts via DVDs and training manuals (like others before us have) and just relating our experience to help others locally, and to provide valuable input to the national debate based on real-world experiences, election after election after election. And our experinece is just a microcosm of what is going on already all over the U.S. Our (election integrity) movement will NOT be denied.

Let's hear it for Avi - he's coming into the light!!

People might want to read the Freedom To Tinker website. Quite a few detailed articles on voting machines and election methodology.

There are still many computer scientists who haven't completely given up on the idea of computer voting although there is strong consensus that the current systems are insecure and unreliable.

... Tel said...

"People might want to read the Freedom To Tinker website. Quite a few detailed articles on voting machines and election methodology."

Yes. Read Freedom to Tinker.

"There are still many computer scientists who haven't completely given up on the idea of computer voting."

Name them and their ideas. They'll either be counting on things that haven't been developed yet... or they'll be the type who don't read Freedom to Tinker.

"...although there is strong consensus that the current systems are insecure and unreliable."

Yes. And any systems that might be developed from current systems will also be, perforce, insecure and unreliable. Read Freedom to Tinker.

Get the touch screens out first, that's the whole idea

As you all know, things do not happen overnight in our Government due to external obfuscation (ala ES&S,Diebold)

If we could eventually get the scanner to tally the votes first for our "instant gratification' type of country we live in today, only as a preliminary (unofficial) result

The vote would not be official until ALL the ballots are hand counted in full, then compared to the electronic count

With a few rules added for the public observing, I guess I would be satisfied.

Then we can all set our goal over to private military contractor spending and not stop on that until 'the grunts are peeling the potatos again' IMO

...the message was loud and clear to me on all of this

someone was trying to talk to David Obey about stopping the funding on the war, he said 'we don't have the votes'

His attitude is that some on the left will never be satisfied, so why bother satisfying them ?
If we never compromise, nothing will happen

Link

He's on our side for now, don't make him the enemy

Link

How about everyone forgetting that the GOP STILL stole 3 million votes nationwide in the 2006 elections?

http://www.electiondefen...polls_vs_vote_count_2006

And another thing I thought was bogus, while everyone was focused on Joe Wilson and the Scooter Libby hand slap, the real story was Cheney and Rove outing Brewster Jennings to make it easier for them to claim "nuclear threat" without any of that pesky old truth getting in the way of their plans to attack more countries.

A treasonable offense at the very least

In comment #16 Chris B wrote: "Have our elected officials lost their minds or is it that the corporate political consultants have completely corrupted our political system and our representatives?"

If you had been elected by means of a rigged election that you'd paid a fortune for, Chris, would you, as an "elected" representative, be willing to allow easily-rigged machines to be taken out of the election process?

Our "elected" representatives know exactly what they're doing, Chris. They are making lots of money, staying in power, and enjoying the way that the defense-related investments in their stock portfolios have doubled and tripled in value every year that Bush has been in office. Things like impeaching Bush & Cheney, stopping the war, or allowing honest elections, are not in their best interests.

Here's David Sirota:
http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0308-20.htm

And here's someone even more outspoken:
http://www.counterpunch.org/murphy03092007.html

If we had honest elections, we might have a chance of electing representatives who put our interests before their own. But only a very slim chance. Anyone affiliated with the major parties is subject to party discipline. The Democratic Party has such strong party discipline that Al Gore was able to order the Democratic majority in the Senate at the time to ignore the rights of Democratic voters and refuse to sign the Congressional Black Caucus petition which could have blocked Bush from taking office and benefited Democrats. Liberal Democrat Barbara Boxer was reportedly almost in tears recounting how much it hurt not to be able to support John Conyers, Maxine Waters, and the rest of the CBC, and to have to help Al Gore smooth Bush's transistion to power. But I don't know of a single instance where they used that unbuckable party discipline to stop Democrats from voting with Republicans.

Wake up, people! Democracies have things like hand-counted paper ballots, ranked-choice voting, proportional representation, and other niceties. We are not a democracy. The U.S. is a tyrannical corporatocracy dominated by the military-industrial complex which selects and bankrolls the candidates that the corrupt two-party system runs, dictates the laws they vote for, and very likely programs the voting machines that it owns through dummy or friendly corporate vendors. It has also stacked the courts, so don't expect much help there either. Only after our Ponzi scheme of an economy collapses, do we have any hope of democratizing our country. And then, only if enough people understand the problem and really want change.

BIG DAN #23

A lot more than 3 million votes were stolen in 2006.

“In the 2004 election, Bush's margin was 2.8%. The 2006 exit poll results as of 7:07 p.m. on Election Night6 recorded a comparable 2% margin among respondents asked for whom they had voted in 2004, 45% Kerry to 47% Bush. This is a strong indicator that the exit poll, on the evening of November 7, was a good sample that accurately reflected the actual 2006 outcome as a whole, or rather what that outcome would have been had the will and intent of the voters been honestly and accurately translated by the voting machinery. The 2006 national vote for the House, as captured by this weighted but unadjusted Election Night exit poll, was 55.0% Democratic and 43.5% Republican, an 11.5% Democratic margin.”

The sample really would have “accurately reflected the actual 2006 outcome as a whole, or rather what that outcome would have been had the will and intent of the voters been honestly and accurately translated by the voting machinery.” if and only if no votes were stolen in 2004. However by clicking on my name above you can get the numbers needed to calculate the votes stolen in 2004 assuming the 2000 vote count was accurate. Running those numbers adds over 9 million more stolen votes to the big picture. Clearly those reportedly shy Republicans were once again over represented in the data even before the force fitting to reported vote counts further increasing their over representation in the data. Of course this calculation too is based on the assumption that the 2000 vote counts were accurate, which is yet another bad assumption. So on and on and on we can go and where it ends nobody knows. Suffice it to say that we can very clearly not trust that our votes are being counted anywhere close to correctly!

Thank you Mark S for bringing up ranked choices. One advantage I can see to using computers in the process is for calculating in an open and verifiable way the results of a Condorcet-style election. I know it is a pipe dream for now, but if we ever do get our elections under control we should hope to have something better than First-Past-The-Post.

In my opinion, FPTP encourages the building of criminal coalitions to gain power, because the winner takes all and it is worth buying every vote you can afford.

A Condorcet-method protects because it allows a strongly polarizing and dangerous candidate to be down-ranked and the compromise consensus is the winner in the worst case. We need to think longer term than we are used to, even if we take full control of our government we must like the framers of the constitution take a view of uncounted generations.

{Ed note: Comment deleted. Brent has been banned for violating multiple rules of commenting including posting knowing disinformation under many different names.}