June 27, 2003
The Biggest Scandal Since Watergate -- Bigger
Attention all journalists. Here is your chance to change the world.
There is a huge, ongoing scandal going on that threatens our democracy. With the new electronic voting machines you cannot prove an election wasn’t stolen. There is no audit trail.
Just saying that hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. Imagine how Fox News would react if it knew that some Democrat had stolen the Presidency by manipulating the programming in voting machines, covering his tracks through the lack of an audit trail.
Now consider that Republicans may have already done this, and that unless we can get some inside sources there is no way to prove it.
Here is what we need. First, we need a copy of the computer code these machines use. We need that code studied, taken apart, disassembled, and tested for vulnerabilities. We need a "Deep Throat" on the inside of one of these companies who will, in the name of democracy, come out with the evidence we need to prove someone has been defrauded by the manipulation of the machines.
It is possible to run a free, fair election with an electronic voting machine. All you need is a physical artifact that can be audited. I have proposed a double bar-code reader. Each voting machine prints two small bar codes, one on paper and one on something a little sturdier. The paper copy is left on the tape, while the sturdy copy is ejected into the voter's hand when they finish voting.
Now, you have a read-only machine nearby into which the voter can push this bar code and verify who he or she voted for. The voter doesn't have to check, but they can. Then you have a box, just as we have today, into which the voter must then deposit their bar code.
To conduct a machine recount, you simply run the tapes through a bar code reader. To conduct a "hand" recount, you pull the heavier bar codes out of the boxes and read them manually. It's fast, it's reliable, and it's verifiable.
Compare this to what we have now. Examine the results from 2002, especially in states like Nebraska, home of the man whose company created these machines -- Chuck Hagel.
This is the biggest story since Watergate. It is, in fact, bigger than Watergate, much bigger. If Republicans have been manipulating the machines, as Thom Hartmann alleges, they have been systematically destroying the democratic process we've trusted for over 200 years. At minimum you can already prove that they can't prove they're not doing just that -- which is scandal enough.
Posted by Danablankenhorn at June 27, 2003 10:53 AMI am totally with you on this issue. It’s a huge secret that’s happening right under our lame noses.
Posted by: Mike at June 27, 2003 05:54 PMWhat gets to me about possible vote fraud is that the media renounced exit polls after the 2000 election. The message was ‘yes, it was messed up, and we’re sorry you found out about it’. No concern about the fact that it happened, only about the fact that it became public knowledge.
Posted by: Dan Wylie-Sears at June 28, 2003 09:48 AMCommonweal Institute has an excellent collection of links to articles and resources on this issue, at http://www.commonwealinstitute.org/resources.htm
Posted by: Dave Johnson at June 28, 2003 08:03 PMI am an original thinker and I have not discussed the idea I present here with anyone prior to my comment here. You have heard it first. (a little background: I wrote my first program in 1962 as a reward for winning first in the state in a state math contest. I was a consultant in Silicon Valley where among other things I built CAD systems from scratch as well as doing principle work on Factory Floor Automation, advanced user interface design, and Point of Sales/Sales Order processing systems, and other things.)
What I know to be true is that it is possible to design and build a systematic voting system that can guarantee reliable auditing and privacy of the individual voters.
HOWEVER IN ORDER TO SUCCEED AS ADVERTIZED IT MUST BE SYSTEMATIC AND BASED ON SOLID THEORY. NO AD HOC SYSTEM CAN DO THE JOB. (Period without qualification.)
Here is a proof that no ad hoc system can guarantee results:
1) When a system is ad hoc, it is by definition open ended. That is to say that the number of ways that it can be used is a countable infinity. (e.g. no matter you use it, there is at least one more way it can be used…which what we mean by a countable infinite).
2) The number of ways that parts of the system can interact with other parts is an uncountable infinity. (e.g. Cantor proved the number of subsets of a countable set is an uncountable infinity…a kind of infinity which is larger than an countable infinity.)
3) In simple terms, this means that it is impossible to plug all the holes in the system because the probability of a hole that allows cheating is in fact 100%. This comes directly from the assumption that the constraints on the system are ad hoc. The ratio of the number of ways we can count on the system working divided by the number of ways that we know nothing about its operating characteristics approaches zero (e.g. is smaller than any value greater than zero that we might name.) In other words, we can never know any significant proportion of its possible behavior. Generally speaking, what no person can examine or know of the characteristics of part of a system, than that part of the system will not work to expectations and will behave to some non-zero degree of probability in all ways that it is not constrained from behaving.
4) On the other hand, we know of a number of systems we can count on (pun intended). An example is the decimal system of counting. It is at least as big as our voting system, but we can perform operations such as addition and subtraction on any subset of numbers and this will succeed to our satisfaction. That is because it is not ad hoc, but is systematic. Another real world example of such a system is the way that Unix systems create processes. These processes can never fail within satisfactory limits by stepping on each other because they way they work is systematic and based on solid theory. If it were not for this single design success, none of us would have ever heard of Unix because Unix would have not succeeded and grown into what we know if it today.
Posted by: John Sellers at June 30, 2003 07:10 PM
