Posted on Sun, Jan. 15, 2006 Paperless voting opens door for election stealing
fgrimm@herald.com
Ion Sancho worries about an inside job.
Sancho, Leon County's supervisor of elections, allowed a couple of computer scientists to try hacking into his voting system last year. With the same access as one of Sancho's election workers, the scientists were able to switch around votes willy-nilly.
''I'm positive that an eighth-grader could do this,'' computer science professor Herbert Thompson told The Miami Herald after he redirected 5,000 votes from one hypothetical candidate to another.
In another test last month, Sancho's employees staged a mock election. They voted 6-2 ''NO'' -- that Finnish computer expert Harri Hursti couldn't hack their system. The vote count registered 7-1 ``YES.''
`NO EVIDENCE'
''The most amazing thing,'' Sancho said, was that the scientists erased all signs that they had tampered with the computer code. ``There was no evidence that anything was wrong unless you counted the paper ballots.''
The key words here: paper ballots. Sancho had refused to join the rush to the paperless touch-screen systems that Florida's larger counties embraced after the 2000 hanging chad debacle. Leon County voters mark a paper ballot to be scanned and counted by computer.
Diebold, the manufacturer of Leon's optical scan system, roundly denounced Sancho, suggesting he had slipped the hackers the company's secret computer code. The scientists countered that they had plucked the code off the Internet.
The company did boast that Sancho's hackers failed to penetrate the system from outside the office. But Sancho found it ''very, very disquieting'' that one of his workers could steal an election.
If Ion Sancho is worried, South Floridians should be terrified.
Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and 12 other Florida counties use touch-screen computer systems that may well be vulnerable to intruders. Who knows? Florida's Secretary of State's office, which ought to be hiring its own hackers, has left security concerns up to private vendors.
Touch-screen systems leave no paper trail. If someone suspects that ballot boxes had been cyber-stuffed, elections officials have no way to know. In huge urban election offices, just one crooked employee with an offshore banking account could fix the vote. And some elections -- $50 million bond issues or local approval of slot machines -- are worth stealing.
Best of all, from a crook's perspective, once an election's hacked, the evidence disappears into cyberspace.
Pressure is mounting for Florida to follow 25 other states and require a paper record. The coming solution will be $1,000 printers attached to each touch-screen voting machine.
SECRET PROPERTY
But printers hardly fix the dilemma at the heart of high-tech voting. Sancho points out that the computer codes remain the secret property of the manufacturers. Private, for-profit, heavily politicized corporations -- with lobbying corps staffed by former public officials -- wield proprietary control over the operating system behind Florida's elections.
''In smaller jurisdictions, the voting machine vendors run the entire election. They lay out the ballot. They count the votes. It's entirely legal,'' Sancho said.
Sancho, who is not registered with either political party, came into office in 1988 on the heels of the state's greatest election fiasco (until the 2000 presidential election). On Sept. 2, 1986, scores of Leon County's old lever machines failed. Levers didn't line up with candidate's names. Levers jammed. Levers broke. Thousands of votes were misdirected. Voter registration cards were found scattered in an empty field.
Since, Sancho has been downright militant about verifying votes. And keeping vendors and politics out of the actual vote counting. But he said, ``I'm afraid that profits have been placed ahead of accountability in Florida elections.''
If Ion Sancho is afraid, South Florida should be terrified.
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New Zogby Poll: 52% of Americans Support Impeaching Bush for Wiretapping
By a margin of 52% to 43%, Americans want Congress to consider impeaching President Bush if he wiretapped American citizens without a judge's approval, according to a new poll commissioned by After Downing Street and conducted by Zogby International.
"The American people are not buying Bush's outrageous claim that he has the power to wiretap American citizens without a warrant. Americans believe terrorism can be fought without turning our own government into Big Brother," said AfterDowningStreet.org co-founder Bob Fertik.
Read the results and print out a one-page flyer summarizing the various polls that have been done on impeachment:
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/polling
Tell the media to cover this news:
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/1084
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Bush on Trial in New York This Weekend
Is the Bush Administration guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity? Even raising this question has been ruled out of order and out of bounds in the U.S. today, but on January 20-22 in NYC an unprecedented citizens Commission of Inquiry will ask -- and seek to answer -- exactly these questions and alter the terms of debate about this government.
Internationally-known expert witnesses and whistleblowers from the US and UK will testify in five areas: war, torture, global environment, global health (AIDs and reproductive rights), and the administration’s response to Katrina. Witnesses and judges include former commander of Abu Ghraib prison Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, former British ambassador Craig Murray (quoted today by Al Gore) who exposed US use of torture in Uzbekistan, Scott Ritter, Dennis Brutus, ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern, Dahr Jamail, Guantanamo prisoners’ lawyer Michael Ratner, David Swanson, Katrina survivors, former US diplomat and retired US Army Reserve Colonel Ann Wright.
Indictments from the Commission’s first session were delivered to the White House on January 10 by a delegation including Ray McGovern who told the press: "Back in the '30s the Germans hunkered down and hoped that Hitler and the Nazis would just go away. They didn't do the kind of thing [we are doing here]. Unlawful wiretapping and spying, Iraq and the torture and detentions, and on and on. This can't go down unopposed." Ann Wright on the Tribunal: "These are indictments that will ultimately bring down this administration."
The Commission is open to the public. Friday/Saturday sessions are at Riverside Church, Sunday session at Columbia Law School. More info:
http://www.bushcommission.org
Demand that Republican Senate Leadership Let the Truth Out
President Bush has said over 100 times that Congress was shown the same pre-war intelligence he was. Senator Kennedy submitted an amendment in December to an intelligence bill asking the White House to turn over to the Senate Intelligence Committee the President's daily briefings, beginning with the last term of the Clinton Administration and ending on first day of the war in Iraq in 2003. In response, an anonymous Republican Senator blocked the bill and is still blocking it. <FONTFACE="VERDANA, sans-serif? Helvetica, Arial,>http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/6818
Email and phone these three members of the Republican leadership and demand that they have the hold taken off the bill:
SENATOR BILL FRIST, Phone: 202-224-3344, Fax: 202-228-1264
http://tinyurl.com/2dnol
SENATOR MITCH MCCONNELL, Phone: 202-224-2541, Fax: 202-224-2499
http://mcconnell.senate.gov/contact_form.cfm
SENATOR PAT ROBERTS, Phone: 202-224-4774, Fax: 202-224-3514
http://roberts.senate.gov/e-mail_pat.html
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Stop Alito! (An alert from Progressive Democrats of America)
Judge Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court poses a grave threat to the nation. President Bush's nomination of Third Circuit Judge Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court poses grave threats to numerous progressive values. Unlike recently appointed Chief Justice John Roberts, Judge Alito has an extensive paper trail documenting the right-wing political agenda that he has actively advanced, not only as a high-ranking official in the Reagan Administration, but also as a judge.
E-MAIL YOUR SENATORS:
http://tinyurl.com/8qfag
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"I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today --my own government."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Former Vice President Al Gore criticizes the current Bush administration and the National Security Administration domestic surveillance program at Constitution Hall in Washington January 16, 2006. The event was organized by the Liberty Coalition and the American Constitution Society. REUTERS/Evan Sisley
Full Speech: The Raw Story | In Martin Luther King Day address, Gore compares wiretapping of Americans to surveillance of King
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