...over the past twenty years, we have let corporations into our polling
places, locations so sacred to democracy that in many states even
international election monitors and reporters are banned. With the
implementation of "black box voting" (the use of electronic voting machines),
these corporations are recording our votes, compiling and tabulating them, and
then telling us the total numbers - and doing it all using "proprietary"
hardware and software that we cannot observe, cannot audit, and cannot
control. If the vote-counting corporation says candidate X or candidate Y won
the vote, we have no means of rebutting that, and they have no way of proving
it. We're asked simply to trust them. From Thom Hartman's book
Threshold pg 210.
Voting machines
are uncertified, unstandardized, often produce no audit
trail, and are made by hard right-wing Republicans. The US is probably the
only country in which election infrastructure is in the hands of private
partisans.
As if that were not enough of a problem, the source code
for these machines is proprietary and is protected as a trade secret, so it
is not available for audit. By accident, some of it leaked out (Diebold's web site was not secured.)
Diebold Source Code!!! --by ouranos (dailykos.com) "Dr.
Avi Rubin is currently Professor of Computer Science at John Hopkins
University. He 'accidentally' got his hands on a copy of the Diebold software
program--Diebold's source code--which runs their e-voting machines. Dr.
Rubin's students pored over 48,609 lines of code that make up this software.
One line in particular stood out over all the rest:
#defineDESKEY((des_KEY8F2654hd4" All commercial programs have provisions to
be encrypted so as to protect them from having their contents read or changed
by anyone not having the key... The line that staggered the Hopkins team was
that the method used to encrypt the Diebold machines was a method called
Digital Encryption Standard (DES), a code that was broken in 1997 and is NO
LONGER USED by anyone to secure programs. F2654hd4 was the key to the
encryption. Moreover, because the KEY was IN the source code, all Diebold
machines would respond to the same key. Unlock one, you have then ALL
unlocked. I can't believe there is a person alive who wouldn't understand the
reason this was allowed to happen. This wasn't a mistake by any stretch of
the imagination."
"On May 6, 2007 the House
Administration Committee reported out a modified bill called HR 811, also
known as the Holt bill. In that bill's markup in committee, it got better and
it got worse in various particulars, if you follow the debate. One way in
which it got much worse is that instead of source code for the computer that
would be given away for any citizen's inspection, they committee put in
language that made the source code a government-recognized trade secret,
available only to "qualified" experts, and then only if a strict
nondisclosure agreement is signed that incorporates trade secrecy laws of the
states, which almost always contain harsh punitive damages and attorneys fees
clauses for violating the secrecy.
This language is particularly ominous. I know of no time before that
an American legislative body has ever tried to pass law to reinforce secret
vote counting. Of course, having a copy of the source code does not tell us
if that code is the same as what's used on election day, nor does it tell us
what the actual voting computers are asked to do on election day. It would
be, of course, illegal for the software to differ, but it is readily possible
to conceal a double Trojan Horse, for example, such that it is highly
resistant to being found. It is not possible to verify that a piece of
software remains unchanged, if it were, the problem of viruses would be
solved since each program could self-verify whether or not it had been
changed. As stated in the classic computer paper "Reflections on Trusting
Trust" the only code you can trust is the code you wrote yourself and know
nobody else has accessed."
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) says electronic voting machines
cannot be made
secure.
Open
Voting Foundation supports solutions for open voting. These solutions
include software using open standard specifications that can be inspected by
the public for flaws and even improved by the public. The software must also
capture and count votes in ways that the voter can verify individually and
would be statistically impossible to tamper with on any significant scale.
Hacking the Vote
Clinton Curtis testimony on elections before the Judiciary Committee.