Use to be a “tree hugger” could only mean one thing: a person supportive of protecting our only source of food, water, air and shelter (aka the physical environment).
But now?
The Conservative Party candidate in a closely-watched upstate New York congressional election has accused the activist group ACORN of trying to steal the election for his Democratic Party opponent — a claim that even Republican election officials are denying.
(
NY conservative blames ACORN ‘tampering’ for loss to Democrat, Raw Story, 11/19/09)
Guess we can add an ACORN supporter to that “tree hugger” label … oh, and count me in!
But there’s more to this story.
The above quoted post points to this news story, VIRUS in the VOTING MACHINES: Tainted Results in NY-23 from The Gouverneur Times that discusses (as the title says) a problem with the computerized voting machines.
These types of problems have been hi-lighted by (primarily progressive minded) folks for over a decade now, and I agree these issues present concerns of an extremely high magnitude.
It’s time to go back to hand counting ballots.
When a mistake is made in a hand counting it is a localized event. One or two vote counters, either through honest oversight or malfeance, return counts that don’t reflect the actual ballots.
The important point here is that any systemic attempt at stealing an election requires a conspiracy of such size that it would never stand a chance of being kept secret.
Computerized voting is quite different. Through simple computer code manipulation many or all voting machines can, either through honest mistake or malfeance, return bad counts WITHOUT the need for more than a few people being involved! Much more difficult to trace and highly unlikely to see a conspiracy collapse.
Call me a tree hugger … I like our only source of food, water, air and shelter (aka the physical environment) and ACORN (weasel Welch not-withstanding … good to swap spit with Hoffman, ain’t it?). I also like open, honest and fair elections.
Investigate the machines. We know there was a problem there!
As a computer science professional, I’m well aware of the risks of machine voting. However, let’s also remember that the technology can be very useful for people with disabilities — which is why many of the big mainline disability organizations have been pushing the federal voting regulations.
We might want to refocus our discussion on what is necessary to make voting machines safe and secure. I’d argue that it starts with a voter verified paper trail (those paper ballots you can recount at need), and also with knowing exactly what computer code is running on the machines. Unfortunately, to get to this point, it will require hard work, from all parts of the political spectrum, to craft new election procedures and policies — combined with appropriate technology — to make it all work.
After all, our current systems aren’t foolproof, but they have lots of checks and balances to try to keep them relatively clean and honest, with better and worse results at times (think Ohio and Florida for some recent failures). Clean, honest, fair elections that all citizens can participate in always needs to be our goal. And the current generation of voting machines aren’t getting there. Hopefully we can all decide that it is important enough to work together on this topic.
Hello people, I would like to chime in here. My name is Gary Beckwith and I am a member of Vermonters for Voting Integrity (VVI), a group of activists that have been following Diebold in Vermont for many years, and working to improve the security and integrity of our state’s voting sytem.
Everyone should know: the machines we use in our state are NOT secure. Because we have no audits on our system, the election results could be wrong, and we would never know it. In fact, because we have no audits and the programming code on the machines is proprietary, it is literally as if we are giving our ballots to Diebold and letting them count them behind closed doors. There could be an unintentional computer bug or an intentional hack and we would never know.
Expert studies like the Brennan Report (written by the heads of security for both Microsoft and Lawrence Livermore Labs) have concluded that the machines have serious vulnerabilities, and random audits are essential. Other states have taken these precautions.
Our group VVI has been advocating for the use of random audits for years. Mysteriously, Deb Markowitz has dragged her feet in the effort for audits. At first her office stated that audits are unnecessary and we should just simply trust Diebold. She even sent the state’s Director of Elections to participate in a public debate against us, advocating that we shoud blindly trust Diebold, and the concerns of the experts are unwarranted. Recently, after public pressure, she started to have a few hand-picked audits. But these audits are very weak. They do not comply with the Brennan Report recommendations, and only offer a small chance of finding potential errors in the machine counts.
Other Secretaries of State have taken the lead. In Pennsylvania, they saw the security probems and banned the machines we use completely. In California and many other states, mandatory random audits have been adopted into the procedure for every election, as recommended by the experts. While other Secretaries of State have taken these steps, sadly Ms. Markowitz has missed years of opportunity to be an advocate for people who want to vote and have confidence in their election system.
I must add, with some dismay, that that Deb has shown a history of making misleading statements to the public about Diebold’s machines and their security. In fact we have a recording of her on the radio making blatantly false statements about the Diebold machines we use.
As a left-leaning progressive independent who usually votes Dem, this has not been easy for me, to see my Democratic Sec. of State acting like this. It just doesn’t make sense.
At this point of the primaries, I feel (and most of the members of Vermonters for Voting Integrity agree) it is important for people to know about Deb’s history with Diebold, and her apparent lack of concern for the integrity and security of our voting system.
While we are a firmly non-partisan group, focusing only on the system itself and increasing its security. However we feel compelled to give Deb Markowitz a failing grade in respect to running our election system. Whether or not this is a sign of an overall weakness or character or lack of integrity, it is up for you to decide. But it should be noted, her responsibilities in regards to the election system are perhaps the most important responsibilities she has had, and on this she has failed. We hope the Democratic Party chooses a candidate for Governor who will be looking out for the people and voters of Vermont, not the corporations like Diebold.
We currently have a petition demanding random audits on all elections using Diebold’s optiscan system. Please consider signing the petition here:
http://www.petitiononline.com/…
We encourage people to learn more about Vermont’s election system and the Diebold machines that count our votes. You can check out our website, Vermonters for Voting Integrity, get our newsletter, etc. here:
http://vtvoters.org
Regards,
Gary Beckwith