It seems we have evolved far enough into Star Trek future techno-visions to bring to fruition stagnant - intellectually primate - dreams of ugly days gone by;; Reform to the Dark-side.

Even in a weak economy there's still a strong market in the speculative trading of lost souls. This election season will show George Dull-Bya setting records in collection of campaign donations, from many of the same interests that cry for corporate welfare assistance- talk about a spent pussy.

And as typical in this administration, they search out the worst case scenario and make it the model all should follow; Texas' - next to the bottom in the country for education - program is now being used nation-wide under the diress of fed money carrot .

Washington loves the way California has become the bitch of the insurance industry and thinks all other states should tongue that ass.

And for election reform, the state which called to attention that some corrections were required, the state that illegally restricted the voting rights of thousands of minorities, the one state more obvious than the rest that proved it should clean up it's election system or get out, is now the model for nation-wide election reform. The very practices that made such a sham of the 2000 election won't be corrected but spread like a disease nation-wide.

In fact one of the players in marketing touch sreen voting machines for ESS' (election systems and software of Omaha) the iVotronic, is the former secretary of state of florida Sandra Mortham, who brought in Choicepoint's DBT to rid the state of undesirable voters.

Last week newly-elected California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley announced he is creating a task force to advise him and his voting systems certification board on touch screen voting security and paper trail issues.

Other task force members include: Mark Kyle, Undersecretary of State (chair); Mischelle Townsend Registrar of Voters, Riverside County; David Dill, Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University; David Jefferson, Computer Scientist, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Jim Wisley, consultant to Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson; Charlie Wallis, Departmental IT Coordinator, San Diego Registrar's Office; Robert Naegele, President, Granite Creek Technology, Inc.; and Shawn Casey O'Brien, Executive Director, Unique People's Voting Project.

Not mentioned in the supplied list of task force members - Mischelle Townsend's county already uses touch screen voting machines and has been sued for it. - David Jefferson, besides his LLNL credentials also is tied with Compaq working on Election Servers and Digital Internet Exchange, thinks voting over the internet a good idea. - Robert J. Naegele, National association of state election directors voting systems board and sits on Election Center Voting Systems Accreditation Board with David Jefferson.- Charlie Wallis- IT tech coordinator San Diego County Registrar’s office who has announced they were going to touchscreens voting machines.

Charlie Wallis - Today's San Diego Union-Tribune features an excellent story about San Diego County's plans to spend $25-$30 million on new, touchscreen voting machines that do not have a voter-verified paper audit trail. The county's efforts have been slowed because of doubts being raised about the security of such voting systems.

New Voting Systems Assailed - Computer Experts Cite Fraud Potential

Dan Keating
Washington Post Staff Writer - As election officials rush to spend billions to update the country's voting machines with electronic systems, computer scientists are mounting a challenge to the new devices, saying they are less reliable and less secure from fraud than the equipment they are replacing.

Prompted by the demands of state and federal election reforms, officials in Maryland, Georgia, Florida and Texas installed the high-tech voting systems last fall. Officials in those states, and other proponents of electronic voting, said the computer scientists' concerns are far-fetched.

"These systems, because of the level of testing they go through, are the most reliable systems available," said Michael Barnes, who oversaw Georgia's statewide upgrade. "People were happy with how they operated."

In Maryland, "the system performed flawlessly in the two statewide elections last year," said Joseph Torre, the official overseeing the purchase of the state's new systems. "The public has a lot of confidence in it, and they love it."

But the scientists' campaign, which began in California's Silicon Valley in January, has gathered signatures from more than 300 experts, and the pressure has induced the industry to begin changing course.

Electronic terminals eliminate hanging chads, pencil erasure marks and the chance that a voter might accidentally select too many candidates. Under the new systems, voters touch the screen or turn a dial to make their choices and see a confirmation of those choices before casting their votes, which are tallied right in the terminal. Recounts are just a matter of retrieving the data from the computer again. The only record of the vote is what is stored there.

Critics of such systems say that they are vulnerable to tampering, to human error and to computer malfunctions -- nd that they lack the most obvious protection, a separate, paper receipt that a voter can confirm after voting and that can be recounted if problems are suspected.

Officials who have worked with touch-screen systems say these concerns are unfounded and, in certain cases, somewhat paranoid.

David Dill, the Stanford University professor of computer science who launched the petition drive, said, "What people have learned repeatedly, the hard way, is that the prudent practice -- if you want to escape with your data intact -- is what other people would perceive as paranoia."Other computer scientists, including Rebecca Mercuri of Bryn Mawr College, say that problems are so likely that they are virtually guaranteed to occur -- and already have Mercuri, who has studied voting security for more than a decade, points to a November 2000 election in South Brunswick, N.J., in which touch-screen equipment manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems was used.

In a race in which voters could pick two candidates from a pair of Republicans and a pair of Democrats, one machine recorded a vote pattern that was out of sync with the pattern recorded elsewhere -- no votes whatsoever for one Republican and one Democrat. Sequoia said at the time that no votes were lost -- they were just never registered. Local officials said it didn't matter whether the fault was the voters' or the machine's, the expected votes were gone.

In October, election officials in Raleigh, N.C., discovered that early voters had to try several times to record their votes on iVotronic touch screens from Election Systems and Software. Told of the problems, officials compared the number of voters to the number of votes counted and realized that 294 votes had apparently been lost.

When Georgia debuted 22,000 Diebold touch screens last fall, some people touched one candidate's name on the screen and saw another candidate's name appear as their choice. Voters who were paying attention had a chance to correct the error before finalizing their vote, but those who weren't did not.

Chris Rigall, spokesman for the secretary of state's office, said that the machines were quickly replaced, but that there was no way of knowing how many votes were incorrectly counted. excerpts from - Dan Keating Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 28, 2003; Page A12

NEXT >