[ale] Its over. Maybe

[James P. Kinney III]

On Wed, 2004-11-03 at 22:11, Jim Popovitch wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-11-03 at 22:00 -0500, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> > If some underhanded, nefarious subterfuge were to occur that migrated
> > 1/10 of the Bush vote to Kerry, then the outcome would have been
> 
> Ok, but how could that occur within the Diebold equipment?  As I see it,
> the above could only occur by corrupt election officials, something that
> clearly existed under the paper ballot system and will probably always
> exist.  Faulting Diebold for that make no more sense than faulting the
> manufacturer of the tables that the electoral staff sit at.

Diebold designed the equipment and wrote the software that runs on it.

Diebold also provides "technical assistance" during the election as well
as running the final tally system. I'm not sure of the article title
from www.blackboxvoting.com but it surfaced on /. a while back. It was
about a code test that happened with the tally software that allowed
arbitrary dial-in access with no loging (all access used the same login
and password) and a 2-key sequence that would "massage" the data stream
into 2 branches, one real count, the other a "test" count, and the final
displayed count was the test count. The real count became "hidden" and
was eventually discarded.

There have always been corrupt officials and their always will be. The
old lever machines were studied laboriously to verify that they would
work until a failure occured. The failure would not cause the total loss
of records.

I keep thinking about the sweet old people working the elections and how
many of them are really not technophiles. I watched a woman take a
ballot card and stick it the card reader/wiper/unknown device and press
a few buttons, frown, and do it again. Did she destroy the data on the
card? Did she double vote something?

I'd be happy with a touch screen that produced the serial numbered punch
card which was then fed into a card reader for final verification. The
card producer and card reader should be made by two, completely seperate
companies. The votor gets a serial numbered stub that says they voted
(but not for who or what) and that also has a counting machine timestamp
and serial number and ballot count code (i.e. ballot # 3009 for the
day). Every hour, the counted ballot cards are fed into a second machine
and a second count is made to back up the first machine. The second
machine can be made by the touch screen company. As long as both machine
counts are the same, fine. If the is a descrepancy, then the cards for
that time slot can be recounted. All of the controlling software should
be developed with the idea of "fully auditable code" so there are no
surprises. I would prefer to see that auditable nature extend all the
way to the silicon and copper but it would be better if different
platforms were used for the touchscreen and counting systems (Mac and
Linux, Linux and OpenBSD, Freedos and Amiga, etc).

 I also want to see some group like the program team at NASA write the
code, not some profit hungry private company. 
> 
> -Jim P.
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-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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