[ale] Re: Vote Today - Message from Marie

Greg runman at telocity.com
Tue Nov 5 16:08:29 EST 2002 


Great.  
I was really surprised also.  The state per se does not have a great track 
record with projects put out to bid (car driver insurance & the DFAC system 
come to mind immediately).  Dunno why with all of the brains in Atlanta 
alone.  Mr. Field Coordinator did not tell me that there are paper ballots, 
either, as was posted earlier, so I honestly have no idea whatsoever what the 
system is for counting votes.
<FONT face=Arial 
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Through out 
all of the posts one question remains unanswered; How do you write in a vote 
???
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<FONT face=Arial 
color=#0000ff>Greg
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style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
  <FONT face="Times New Roman" 
  size=2>-----Original Message-----From: Dow Hurst 
  [mailto:dhurst at kennesaw.edu]Sent: Tuesday, November 05, 2002 3:56 
  PMTo: runman at telocity.com; ale at ale.orgSubject: Re: [ale] 
  Re: Vote Today - Message from MarieJust found out from my 
  boss that yes, KSU CSIS Dept. was the architects of the system.  I know 
  the chair, Merle King, and he is a dedicated honest person.  I have a lot 
  of respect for him since he has treated me well here at KSU.  I'll ask 
  and see if the code is available or could be made available.  I was quite 
  surprised to hear about KSU's involvement since there is a lot of reputation 
  on the line.DowGreg wrote:
  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]
To: ale at ale.org
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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Systems Support Specialist    Fax: 770-423-6744
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