[ale] Re: Vote Today - Message from Marie

[Greg]

I just voted and specifically looked for those items which came up in
previous posts.

First, the second instruction says to "Touch the vote you want to change to
undo it and then vote again." or some such thing to that effect.  Seems ok
to me, but intuitiveness is in the eye of the beholder.

Second, the clerk at the door was not keen on the lack of paper ballots.  I
asked about recounts & was told that they would just take the totals out of
the machines again ... "just like the first vote"  ... "yup".  "So a recount
is somewhat impossible, huh ?"  "yup"  After admitting that he was just a
simple clerk, I was jokingly advised to take it up w/ the State Secretary of
State (hehe, redundant, huh?).

At this time a Field Coordinator (according to his ID - looked like a MS
drone to me) told me in reply to several of my concerns that 1) they had
batteries in the machines in case of power failure.  I did not ask as to
whether they were AAA or D batteries.  Hopefully they were not the little
CMOS batteries, though I have replaced only one of this type in my entire
life.  2) the vote is recorded in three places, one including flash memory.
OK, so any mistake is now multiplied times 3.  I get it.  Redundancy = =
accuracy  3) In reply to my asking if I could see the code, I was told that
the code was audited by Kennesaw State University to comply with Federal and
State specs.  I am hoping that the KSU folks that reviewed the code were
code knowledgeable in some if not many respects and instead were not the
Political Science Dept. folks.  Mr. Field Coordinator did not answer the
question, but what can you expect in dealing with anything touching politics
?? (ok, I'll say it "or M$").

At this time I left before asking any further questions, since my doctor
told me my blood pressure is starting to get problematic (& I a wee lad of
39).  I left feeling as if this was an expensive piece of crap system w/ no
redundant and independent check on it.  I would rather have the cards and a
chad problem if it came to that.

As to another point in a post; so why not ask to see the code ?  Sounds like
a worthwhile project to me.  I mean, did not taxpayer money fund this ?  I
wouldn't buy a house or car without looking it over and software should not
be any different.

If there is a tight race with plenty of discord, I am sure that all of the
concerns & issues expressed on this forum will move to center stage in the
media.  On one hand I wouldn't mind seeing the idiots who hoisted this on us
get roasted in the national media, but on the other hand I would hate being
tarred with the same brush just because I live in GA.  The SAT jokes are bad
enough.


Greg Canter



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joseph A Knapka [mailto:jknapka at earthlink.net]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 05, 2002 1:32 PM
> To: Irv Mullins
> Cc: ale at ale.org
> Subject: Re: [ale] Re: Vote Today - Message from Marie
>
>
> Irv Mullins wrote:
> > On Tuesday 05 November 2002 11:35 am,  Matt wrote:
> >
> >
> >>As soon as whatever you vote with/on is removed from your view, there is
> >>ALWAYS the potential for corruption to occur.  Why not just
> have a little
> >>faith in the process that's being used and get on with your
> lives.  If you
> >>feel the process is so flawed, don't use it.  Make them work a little
> >>harder by having to actually fabricate votes rather than just changing
> >>yours.
> >
> >
> > There always has been, and will continue to be, vote fraud.
>
> Not necessarily. In "Applied Cryptography", Bruce Schneier outlines
> cryptographically secure protocols that prohibit votes from being
> changed by anyone other than the caster, prohibit ballot-stuffing,
> ensure that every vote is properly counted exactly once, and possess
> a number of other useful properties. With such an implementation,
> it would be impossible for even the programmer who writes the
> code to alter election results, since any voter can execute
> a cryptographic challenge against the results to ensure that
> their vote is correctly counted, and no one without an unreasonably
> huge amount of computing power would be able to alter the results
> without being detected.
>
> If we're gonna use electronic voting, we ought to do it right.
>
> -- Joe
>
>
> ---
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>
>


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