[ale] Its over. Maybe

[Sean Kilpatrick]

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On Wednesday 03 November 2004 10:00 pm, Jim Popovitch wrote:
| Further in the same report SAIC states:
| 
|    "This Risk Assessment has identified several high-risk
|    vulnerabilities in the implementation of the managerial, operational,
|    and technical controls for AccuVote-TS voting system. If these
|    vulnerabilities are exploited, significant impact could occur on the
|    accuracy, integrity, and availability of election results."
| 
| In short, the Executive Summary of the SAIC report supports my argument
| that it's NOT the black-box that you need to worry about, but rather the
| integrity of the electoral staff.
| 
| Reading the SAIC report, referenced in the URL you provided, makes me
| feel even better about the Diebold product.


I absolutely agree with Jim that the integrity of the electoral staff
is paramount -- at the county level, where the precinct totals are
collected, added together, and sent on to the state.
But I would like to gently suggest that this is Georgia. News stories
over the past two years suggest that it is easy to bribe low level
factotems at all levels of the state and local governments.
(The numerical data that follows is taken from this morning's AJC and
only includes the vote totals for Bush and Kerry. The AJC doesn't want
to even admit that the Libertarian Party exists.)

Some vote totals:                Next three biggest counties:
Cobb:      226,449                 Chatham:    79,498 
Dekalb:    217,891                 Clayton:    70,253
Fulton:    279,424                 Henry:      63,641
Gwinnett:  210,389                 Total:     213,392
Total:     934,153

Grand Total:   1,147,545

     or 38.3% of 2,992,718 votes tallied for Kerry and Bush.

This year things weren't all that close in Georgia, where Bush
carried the state with more than 500,000 votes.  But look at
Pennsylvania, where Kerry carried the state by only 121,458 votes,
just 2% of the total vote. (Two percent of the vote in Georgia
on Tuesday was about 60,000.)
Nearly all of that plurality came from Philadelphia and its
immediate suburbs, which is only four or five political 
jurisdictions (I think).  IF Pennsylvania's factotems are as
easy to bribe as Georgia's, then only one election clerk in each
of five county registrar's offices has to be bribed to take a smoke
break for 15 minutes and let someone else gain access to the
terminal that accesses the SECOND database in the Diebold system.
How much would that cost? In Georgia I doubt it would cost more
than $25,000 per bribe.  IF the race had been really close in Georgia,
THEN for an estimated $125,000 the voting systems of the five
largest counties might be compromised. Jiggling 60,000 votes out
of 900,000, would be easy. It's only about three percent of the
total.
Another example.  Look at Wisconsin, where the voter turnout was
considerably higher (as a percentage) than here in Georgia. Kerry
carried the state by less than 12,000 votes out of 2,966,057 cast.

And that's why these closed source, electronic voting systems scare
me. Without a clearly defined and easily checked audit trail, it
is too easy to steal a close election. 

Sean

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