[ale] Its over. Maybe

[Jeff Hubbs]

Good thing your saying I'm equating the Diebold machines to the Borg
doesn't "make it so!"  

Just because they're not wired together in field use doesn't mean
they're independent.  Their program is given to them before they're
fielded, and while they're in use, they have potential to read data from
and write data to the little cards; where the cards come from and where
they go is unknown to me.  There certainly could be other forms of
communication taking place of course (ultrasound, IR, RF), but I only
know about the cards.  Therefore, even with just what is visible to me
the voter, the means is in place to get the machines to act in concert
and to redirect that action at will.  

"based on my experience yesterday, [the machines] only record your vote
on a memory-card to be read elsewhere."

Oh, why didn't you TELL us that you were able to sense the state of the
card before you put it into the machine, sense it again after you took
it out of the machine, and relate the changes in the two states to the
votes you cast??  If you had told us that in the first place, it sure
would have gone a long way toward bolstering your...wait, what was
that?  What did you say?  You say you DIDN'T whip out some kind of card
reader right there in the polling place?  For shame!!

Fact is, you don't have any idea if the machine did a DAMN thing to your
card, do you?  And even if you had some way to tell that something in
the card had changed between the time you put it in the machine and when
you took it out, would you have had the means to determine what the
changes signify or if your intent were in fact encoded there somehow? 
Do you even know if your card was anything more than a nonfunctional
prop??  

Funny thing.  I remember the paper cards when I voted before, and damned
if I don't remember that the card was blank when it put it in and full
of holes when I pulled it out, and I even made the holes with my own
hands using a little punchy-like thing on a chain.  And, you know what
else?  I could slip my paper card back into it or any other machine in
the room and damned if I couldn't read back out to you who I voted for
even if I had completely forgotten.  Yeah, there are things that could
break that process, like different ballot geometry on different machines
and so forth, but like I said before, you'd have to have a really,
really grand conspiracy going to pull that off. 

The problem with the electronic voting machines is that with them, the
"conspiracy" that it would take to defraud elections becomes a lot
smaller and a lot more centralized and out of sight.  Interestingly, the
poll workers and election officials who would have been considered the
focus of election fraud and graft in years past, are effectively
divorced from the actual process when  electronic voting machines are
utilized.   Used to be, there would be enough people from different
enough walks of life engaged as stewards of the process that if anything
were untoward in any way, somebody would be bound to squeal.  Now,
they're almost as far removed from the process as the electorate - which
means there can be fewer of them and they can be less educated,
watchful, and moral with no impact on the conduct of the process.

I would love to find out what would happen if someone were to go into a
polling place, pick up his card at the desk, and then try to read it
electronically before and after using the machine.  "He's trying to
figure out how the voting works!  SEIZE HIM!!!"  Again, I have no
indication at all that the voting machines even really do anything more
than paint the screen and react to your fingers.  Who can prove to me
otherwise?

Oh, there's one other thing I noticed.  One traditional hallmark of our
voting system has been privacy.  The voting process has my vote data and
can tell whether or not I have voted, but it hasn't been able to match
up my identity to my vote - until now.  You don't get to pull the cards
out of a big fishbowl or some such before you use the machines.  After
the poll worker pulled my registration form up, she handed it to another
guy who put a card into some kind of calculator-like device and entered
some data.  At the point he handed me my card, it could have had data
linking my identity to the card, meaning that the card could know who I
am.  Once placed into the machine, the machine and the card could then
know who I am and how I voted.  I left the machine and the card behind
like most everyone else, so everyone's identity and their corresponding
votes were likewise left behind.  The possibility clearly exists that
someone somewhere can call up a map of your neighborhood and tell you
who everyone on your street voted for.  

Before you go "I don't care who knows who or what I voted for," consider
that in Germany under the Nazis, the Nazis cared a lot about Jews and it
was easy for the Nazis to identify and round up Jews.  If the US
Government came to "care" for some other group of us in much the same
fashion and with much the same intent, that group isn't going to be as
easy to identify.  Personal attitudes and histories do not fall along
visibly obvious lines of race, skin color, language, or location of home
the way they used to, so the Government might need a way to "x-ray" the
general population using some other distinguishing characteristic.  What
better than the previously unknowable voting record, now able to be tied
to each and every voter?

I think of things like this when I hear rhetoric like "If you don't
support us, you're against us."

Elections require the electorate to place trust in a responsible body to
carry out the elections accurately, accountably, and thoroughly.  Now,
that trust is becoming very, very blind, and the focus of the trust has
moved from the realm of the civic to the realm of the corporate.  



On Wed, 2004-11-03 at 22:05, Jim Popovitch wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-11-03 at 21:25 -0500, Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> 
> > on one hand you have a computer that is used to determine how much fuel
> > to shoot into a car engine's cylinders and the other you have a massive
> > system of computers whose combined output is used to decide who the 
> > President of the United States is? 
> 
> That's a long stretch.  You are equating the Diebold machines to the
> Borg.  Hardly.  Each Diebold machine is independent and just dumps out a
> simple set of metrics.  They are NOT networked together and, as I
> understand it, based on my experience yesterday, only record your vote
> on a memory-card to be read elsewhere.  By concept it is no different
> then a paper card reader, other than hanging-chads are not allowed in
> binary. ;)
> 
> -Jim P.
> 
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