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This election page was started to keep abreast of election news preceding the 2004 election. Considering the theft of the 2000 election and the anemic coverage of factors playing part beforehand (and since), it seemed important to start well ahead of 2004 to watch for suspicious activity unfolding - hinting at possible fraud.

When the Election-2004 page was initiated none expected but bits and pieces of paranoid speculation suggesting an all-encompassing conspiracy bent on negating votes contrary to new world order, status-quo, illuminati-inspired, fascist-enforced policies to surface. Of course it’s difficult to read, watch or report on any Bush Family inc. matter without overtones of conspiracy rearing it’s shady head making one feel slimed and in need of a shower.

Contrary to low expectations the games afoot - the con on. News and reports are filling the cracks and crevices of the world wide web. So dramatic and alarming this Cassandra cry that all found are given over to be copied verbatim with no copyright protection, like please take this, spread it around, scream words of warning from the highest mountains just include some credit for the source.

Well props to Beverly Harris who has made available from her soon to be released book BlackBox Voting material restriction free - unlike the source codes for the new generation of voting machines - concerning the players in place making election fraud easier than ever. And props to the John Hopkins Report (Avi Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at John Hopkins, along with computer science doctoral students Adam Stubblefield and Toshi Kohno) and Dan Wallach assistant professor of computer science at Rice University for alerting us to simple gaffs available to manipulate the system. Years of democratic elections in this nation and we’re left with the least secure system of all.

So what's all the fuss over these new techno voting machines? Just demo-whiners screaming cause they can't get back in and whore for their pimps - fucking with Lieberman's loose change? Or is it about republican conspiracy thinking we all forgot about watergate and what scumbags they can be? Or is it about "dull-bya", more specifically his handlers, wishing to silence all that nasty talk about the 2000 elections and have their boy win by landslide in 2004 - mix new voter reform (HAVA) with state of emergency, add oil, and whole bunch of money, and heat over the belly of a frying sacrificial muslim virgin and presto "dull-bya" gets four more years - and illusion of total control.

Seems there is a conspiracy between the voting machine companies, the organizations in charge of overseeing certification of the new machines and the defense industry but that is getting a little ahead of ourselves. Let's start with simple common sense concepts concerning the new touch screen voting machines.

These are touch screen electronic voting machines with no paper trail. No way to verify whatever the machine spits out as the results for an election that decides who governs our cities, counties, states, nation. Like proving the validity of a belief by it's own gospel. I would think such blind faith in this particular sacrament of the sanctimonious democratic process, would be considered ludicrous even by the most devout. "I feel much less at ease than with a paper ballot," said Colin Anderson, 26, voting for the first time on a touch-screen system in Oakland. "I kept thinking, 'God, this is easy and quick, but it sure does require a lot of faith in the technology."' We've all dealt with the possessed and crippled ATM machines, computers, car stereos etc., Electronics is far from divine, but the new move is to buy these "black box" voting machines and trust them to always be magically righteous handing down miraculously accurate vote counts from on high.

There's so much wrong with that assumption it's hard to know where to begin. I suppose we could start with the very concept that rules our nation which is the market driven bottom line, and relative to the capitalist god it's the work of the anti-christ to invest money into product over marketing that might hope to at least come close to it's hype.

So we must understand, absent of any hidden agenda, that these voting machine companies are in business to make as much money as possible and not the best product possible.

These are businessmen we are talking about with diverse interests, that all diverge under one god-ly manifestation - make more money. Business people are in the business to make more money and when they achieve that they need to invest it to make even more money, feed the market, control the market and so it goes, it's the american way, right? I'm not passing judgment on this market ethos pervading society, mother fucker gotta get his, but let's not ignore the larger picture - miss the forest while tripping on fallen trees.

That's what's so great about this species of american business-man/woman it's grown quite predictable, it's simple-minded, Ayn Rand objectiv-ism, republican compassionate-conservat-ism, one-dimensional mantra; give me more - nurturing the baser, more selfish, elements of the american psyche-ism, while promoting stagnant justification-isms.

So it's safe to bet these corporate market junkies who've entered the field did not do so for altruistic aspirations but for the profit potential - control; and profit potential cannot be fully appreciated without keeping costs as low as possible, and low cost, generally, does not equate high quality.

Behler: " We knew basically what they would be testing and the trick was to make sure the machines would pass the testing. So I went and checked a pallet and found it was bad. And I checked another, and another, and I knew we had a problem."

"I was saying, 'This is not good! We need some people that know what this stuff is supposed to do, from McKinney, NOW! These machines, nobody knows what they're doing but Diebold, you need some people to fix them that know what's going on! They finally brought in guys, they ended up bringing in about 4 people.

"When they left, they still did not know why it was still sporadic. My understanding is, after I was dismissed, they came back the following week. That's when they figured out what the real problem was. But they'd already had us do their 'upgrade' on thousands of machines by then."

"If you were to ask me to tell you how accurate I thought the vote count was, I'd have to say 'no comment' because after what I saw, I have an inherent distrust of the machines."

Above is an excerpt from an interview with a tech hired by Diebold to assemble and test Diebold's touch screen voting machines delivered to Georgia just prior to the Nov. 2002 election. click for Full interview

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In fact any honest tech worth his pay, being software, hardware or network would consider placing this much faith in the reliability of equipment such as these touch screen voting machines as just plain stupid.

PCMAG -
An interesting battle is taking shape between Diebold Election Systems and researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Rice University. The Diebold AccuVote-TS electronic voting machine, used in 37 states, apparently has PC-type innards, a touch screen, and a smart card to forestall potential fiascoes such as the 2000 presidential election in Florida.
Researchers have been investigating some source code, ostensibly that of the AccuVote-TS, and have found it wanting. They discovered ways to hack into the system, monitor the progress of an election, vote multiple times, and do all the things that highly motivated, morally deficient people with a political bent have been doing since time immemorial.

I won't claim that Diebold's voting machines are deficient, but I think that building a voting machine (or a medical machine or a space probe) on PC hardware and the Windows operating system is a terrible idea. Give me a microcontroller and burned-in code that can't do anything but what I program it to do, not a general-purpose environment that is universally and routinely hacked. - Bill Machrone

The only sensible reason to use these DRE touch screen machines would be for a fix, the only sensible reason to use these machines without a backup paper trail would be for a fix. The only sensible reason to use machines with no independent audit, no paper trail record, no full disclosure, no paper trail record would be for a fixed election. There it's been said - get it?

That being said, there is no proof that any of these companies are conspiring to fix an election, and I don't need to suggest any such thing, and perhaps these businessmen running these corporations, aside from personal preference and investment, believe the hype and are merely in it for modestly compensated civic responsibility satisfaction.

I am suggesting there is nothing preventing them from fixing an election or them from preventing others of committing fraud with their machines under current state of affairs.

Wait a minute, you say, surely these machines are treated with such high security that guarantee tamper proof performance. Of course they've considered the consequences of security breeches and invested money and resources to prevent anyone from accessing their secret files. Could you imagine what could happen in an election with these electronic voting machines if someone was able to get ahold of the source code, passwords etc., this could open the door to wide spread tampering and rampant voter fraud, the manufacturers would never let that happen, Right?

"When I learned of Diebold's FTP site I was so stunned that I literally stayed up all night. I called everyone I know: Reporters. Computer people. Activists. What can you even say when you see a blunder like this?" — BEV HARRIS

In early February, 2003, programmers for Diebold Election Systems admitted that they had been parking highly sensitive company files on an unprotected web site, a serious security mistake by anyone's reckoning."

So it's not so secure after all, all sorts of people were able to access Diebold's site full of source code, passwords etc., including a file titled 'rob georgia'. The 'rob georgia' file was perhaps just badly named considering the upcoming Georgia elections which makes the blunder quite humorous if you ignore the severity of the lapse of security involved.

This back door at the Diebold site led to an un-chaperoned analysis resulting in the John Hopkins Report which suggests more corners of cost cutting producing low quality product yielding high gains.

For one thing, the electronic voting system could be easily exploited by an individual or group intent on tampering with election results. The researchers pointed to the smart card necessary to use the machine to cast a single ballot. The researchers said it would be easy to program a counterfeit card, hide it in a pocket and then use it inside the booth to cast multiple votes.

"A 15-year-old computer enthusiast could make these counterfeit cards in a garage and sell them," said Johns Hopkins' Rubin. Rubin has conducted other research in the area that makes him feel high-tech balloting should not be conducted in haste. "People are rushing too quickly to computerize our method of voting before we know how to do it securely," he stated.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, many people say the last presidential election was stolen by the Supreme Court. Voting rights activists say the next election could be stolen at the ballot box. Millions of voters will be using electronic voting machines for the first time, and questions about their security are rife. Hundreds of computer scientists say electronic touch-screen voting machines could allow for massive election fraud. Already malfunctioning software has caused confusion or possibly faulty vote tallies in races across the country.
A recent study out of Johns Hopkins University says that Accu-Vote machines are vulnerable to hackers, multiple votes and vote-switching. The machines are built by Diebold Election Systems of McKinney, Texas and used in a third of the precincts where electronic voting is already in place. Diebold also has extensive ties to the Republican Party. Company officials say they don't know whether the code examined by Johns Hopkins researchers was used in actual elections. In response to the Johns Hopkins report, Maryland governor Robert Ehrlich postponed a nearly $56 million contract with Diebold for 11,000 more voting machines. A private consultant is now reviewing the technology behind Diebold's touch screen machines. The proliferation of electronic voting machine contracts comes in the wake of the $3.9 billion "Help America Vote" Act, approved by Congress last November. The legislation requires tougher security, usability and accuracy standards. The act also mandates all voting systems be updated by 2006 and allocates millions of dollars for purchase of new electronic machines.
We attempted to reach representatives from Diebold and from the Federal Elections Commission; neither returned our phone calls. But joining us instead, Dan Wallach, professor of computer science at Rice University, co-author of the Johns Hopkins report, called "Analysis of an electronic voting system;"
Can you tell us what the Johns Hopkins University report found?

DAN WALLACH: Sure. We found several interesting things when we were looking at Diebold's source code. We were focusing on the source code for the touch-screen terminals, not the rest of the system. But what we found was very disturbing. You use the "smart cards"--these are credit card-sized plastic cards--when you walk into the polling place, somebody hands you one of these things, and you shove it into the computer, type your pin [code], and that's supposed to only allow to you vote once.

But the way the computer interacts with the "smart cards" is actually very trivial to forge. So anybody could manufacture the counterfeit cards and the machine would not be able to distinguish the real ones from the ones that you brought in yourself. And that means any voter could cast as many ballots as they’d like. Doesn't take too much imagination to see where that can cause problems.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that one more time. How can they cast as many votes as they want? I think this has hardly been covered in this country, and as we move into this election, people are just beginning to pay attention.

DAN WALLACH: Right. So to be clear, you can make your own smart card. And the smart card that you program yourself, these things, by the way, only cost a couple of dollars to purchase. Then you can program your smart card when the voting machine sends it a message that says, okay, you should be cancelled now, it just ignores that message. Just as long as you can stand there in the privacy of the voting place, you can cast as many ballots as you have time to punch in before you start arousing suspicion. Maybe that means you can cast ten votes, maybe you can cast 20 votes, I don't know how fast you can press the buttons.
AMY GOODMAN: Now what about the criticism of the report by Diebold that you didn't actually have the, what, right source code?
DAN WALLACH: Yes. So this is a very…
AMY GOODMAN: And what does that mean for people who are not computer literate.
DAN WALLACH: OK, sure. So source code is what programmers write. It's in a programming language like C or C plus plus, and in addition to instructions that tell the computer how to work, you can put commentary in the code that explains what you're thinking, what you're planning on doing next. It's crib notes to yourself so you know what you're doing. Well, the files that Diebold left on their website that we were able to analyze have all of their source code to the voting terminal and to other things. And not just-there are dates in there, you can see that with stuff we looked at was dated February, March of 2002 but we have like two years worth of history. We could turn the clock back and see what their source code looked like at any point in that time period.

AMY GOODMAN: And What does that prove?
DAN WALLACH: Well, so the code that we looked at was almost certainly, if it wasn't the real code that was used in the November 2002 elections, it was certainly very closely related to it. You don't just throw something like this out and redo it from scratch overnight. So this code is certainly close enough that there's no way they could have fixed all of the problems that we found in such a short time.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask about the other ways that people could hack the system. You've got the smart cards that could be put in, someone could vote multiple times. What are the other ways?
DAN WALLACH: Ok, so we noticed several different things. Another possibly disturbing -- in an election it's very important that nobody but you knows who you voted for, and that you can't prove who you voted for to somebody else otherwise they could be bribing you to vote in a certain way. The way the Diebold system works, it actually records all the votes on the storage card in exactly the order that they're cast. And they might transmit that across the modem so that way election central can get an early count. Well because they did the cryptography in such a broken fashion, anybody that can listen in on the telephone, and that's not hard to do, can figure out exactly the order in which the votes were cast and who they were cast for. And it doesn't take much rocket science from there to figure out exactly who voted for whom.
So now in addition to people being able to potentially cast multiple ballots, it’s also possible to tie -- to prove ties to who every individual voter voted for. That's obviously a bad thing. Let’s see, what else did we find. Another thing is that we were looking at just the overall quality of the software engineering, we're asking the question, do these -- is there any evidence in the code that these people knew what they were doing when they were developing it. And what we saw was very disturbing to us. We saw code that wasn't even sufficient of such a quality that you might consider making a video game this way. The code was not written in a professional fashion. That's kind of scary to us.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the computer chip being programmed in such a way that no matter how people voted when they went into the voting booth, it would register in a particular way.
DAN WALLACH: One of the curious things we found when you have what's called a ballot image that's the thing that says, Alice is running for this office, Bob is running for that office, et cetera. When you vote for – say you have an election as Alice, Bob and Charlie all running for an office. When you vote for Alice, it doesn't say Alice got one vote, Bob got one vote. It says candidate number one got one vote, candidate number two got two votes, et cetera. So if you can change the order in which the candidates appear on the screen, you might press the button for Alice but really get counted for Bob. We found that could you actually do that. You could get what’s so-called administrator access to one of these terminals, and you could reorder the candidates. And so if one person goes in the morning does that, another person comes later in the day undoes it, then everybody voting that day for Alice might actually have their votes counted for Bob which is not really what they wanted.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think is the most important thing, that voters should understand, and do you think that we should remain with paper balloting? Or noncomputer balloting.
DAN WALLACH: Sure. Computers in the voting place do have some valid uses. A Computer can help prevent you from overvoting, as you're only allowed to vote for one candidate. A computer can warn you if you are about to undervote, to vote for nobody. Computers can help make elections accessible to people with a variety of disabilities.So the computer is not a bad thing. The bad thing is when there's no, what's called a voter verifiable audit trail. What I and many other computer scientists are advocating is that you have the computer in front and a printer in back. After you're done voting, it prints out a piece of paper that says on it everybody who you voted for. And if you agree with it, you press a button it drops into a box. If you don't agree with it, you press another button it gets shredded into confetti in front of your eyes. If you can see that, at that point if you the voter can see this card, read it, it says what you want it to say, then you no longer care what the software is doing. Because you know that that paper ballot will always have your intent on it. And in the event of a tight election it can be recounted either by machine or by hand if it really matters. And we saw it in Florida of 2000 that when it really matters you can have people counting these things by hand, and that's important. Democracy Now with Amy Goodman

As the above findings have been validated by others - to be fair we can't ignore conflict of interest found on all sides of this debate - after all money does make the world go round;

Furor over the (John Hopkins Report) was partly defused when the lead researcher (Avi Rubin) acknowledged this week that he failed to disclose that he had stock options in VoteHere, a company that competes with Diebold in the voting-software market, and was a member of VoteHere's technical advisory board. Atlantic Journal-Constitution

This conflict of interest doesn't seem to much matter consider the following:

Voting Company Reverses Stand: Flawed software WAS used in Georgia and other elections
- There are “kinks” in touch screens

According to an Aug. 4 article in Wired.com: Diebold company spokesman Mike Jacobsen “confirmed that the source code Rubin's team examined was last used in November 2002 general elections in Georgia, Maryland and in counties in California and Kansas.”

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