> Internet Vote Fraud: Means, Motive, and Opportunity
4 January 2005, 00:26
As a skeptic, I’m torn on this one. The rallying cry of the skeptic is, "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence." But which claim is more extraordinary - that massive vote fraud occurred, or that it didn’t?
I’m reluctant to be labeled a "tin-foil hatter," but after giving it a lot of thought, it seems pretty clear to me that the claim that it didn’t occur is by far the more extraordinary. Consider the stakes, and the incentives; consider the (mostly valid) stereotype of politicians’ ethics; given the opportunity to cheat, wouldn’t it be rather naive to suppose that they (any of them, from any party) wouldn’t gleefully do so? Wouldn’t it, in fact, be hopelessly pollyanna-ish to assume that every person with the opportunity to cheat in their candidate’s favor would be able to resist the temptation outright, let alone to avoid rationalizing their actions as being in the country’s best interests?
The software for these electronic vote tabulating machines is proprietary, so its security is not open to public inspection or verification. The reports from "independent testing agencies" show that security of these machines is not even tested before they are certified for use in elections. They have modems set up for dial-in access, and at least for Diebold GEMS machines, it has been conclusively demonstrated that once access is gained through a network or modem, the vote totals can be untraceably changed by anyone with minimal knowledge and widely available commercial database software. It’s risky to generalize from a sample of one, but given my experience in the software industry I’d be very surprised if any of Diebold’s competitors are any more secure.
For most touchscreen voting machines, there are no paper records, except for those printed out by the machines themselves based on whatever vote totals they have in their databases - i.e., if you try to audit a hacked machine you will only be given the altered totals and will have no way of ever finding out that the results have been hacked, even in a hand recount.
In this specific case, doing what Triad did to Ohio’s vote-tabulating machines before the recount, even if explicitly authorized by the county election officials, was in fact a direct violation of Ohio’s election laws; and furthermore, those laws state that any violation of that section of the code is "prima facie evidence of election fraud," so whether or not the intent was malicious, whether or not any vote totals were changed, the actions by definition constituted election fraud under Ohio law. Since it was done across many counties, it constitutes massive election fraud.
Even if one persists in believing against all inclination that Ohio’s 2004 presidential election was not "rigged" or "hacked," one has to admit that the opportunity was there for the taking, and that leaving an opening like that for future elections is not a good idea. One productive thing I think we could all agree to do, while we’re sorting out whether this election was really stolen or was settled fair and square, is work on making sure in future elections there’s not even the shadow of a suspicion that the process could have been "gamed" in any way.
I can think of one way to do that: pass a federal law requiring uniform, transparent, bulletproof, tamper-proof election and vote-counting standards nationwide. Preferably, defining election fraud as an act of Treason. A constitutional amendment guaranteeing every U.S. citizen the right to vote might be nice, too.
Of course, it would have to be Congress who passed any such law, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that many of them got into office with some help from the time-honored tradition of good old-fashioned, low-tech ballot box stuffing. So I won’t hold my breath.
As a skeptic, I’m torn on this one. The rallying cry of the skeptic is, "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence." But which claim is more extraordinary - that massive vote fraud occurred, or that it didn’t?
I’m reluctant to be labeled a "tin-foil hatter," but after giving it a lot of thought, it seems pretty clear to me that the claim that it didn’t occur is by far the more extraordinary. Consider the stakes, and the incentives; consider the (mostly valid) stereotype of politicians’ ethics; given the opportunity to cheat, wouldn’t it be rather naive to suppose that they (any of them, from any party) wouldn’t gleefully do so? Wouldn’t it, in fact, be hopelessly pollyanna-ish to assume that every person with the opportunity to cheat in their candidate’s favor would be able to resist the temptation outright, let alone to avoid rationalizing their actions as being in the country’s best interests?
The software for these electronic vote tabulating machines is proprietary, so its security is not open to public inspection or verification. The reports from "independent testing agencies" show that security of these machines is not even tested before they are certified for use in elections. They have modems set up for dial-in access, and at least for Diebold GEMS machines, it has been conclusively demonstrated that once access is gained through a network or modem, the vote totals can be untraceably changed by anyone with minimal knowledge and widely available commercial database software. It’s risky to generalize from a sample of one, but given my experience in the software industry I’d be very surprised if any of Diebold’s competitors are any more secure.
For most touchscreen voting machines, there are no paper records, except for those printed out by the machines themselves based on whatever vote totals they have in their databases - i.e., if you try to audit a hacked machine you will only be given the altered totals and will have no way of ever finding out that the results have been hacked, even in a hand recount.
In this specific case, doing what Triad did to Ohio’s vote-tabulating machines before the recount, even if explicitly authorized by the county election officials, was in fact a direct violation of Ohio’s election laws; and furthermore, those laws state that any violation of that section of the code is "prima facie evidence of election fraud," so whether or not the intent was malicious, whether or not any vote totals were changed, the actions by definition constituted election fraud under Ohio law. Since it was done across many counties, it constitutes massive election fraud.
Even if one persists in believing against all inclination that Ohio’s 2004 presidential election was not "rigged" or "hacked," one has to admit that the opportunity was there for the taking, and that leaving an opening like that for future elections is not a good idea. One productive thing I think we could all agree to do, while we’re sorting out whether this election was really stolen or was settled fair and square, is work on making sure in future elections there’s not even the shadow of a suspicion that the process could have been "gamed" in any way.
I can think of one way to do that: pass a federal law requiring uniform, transparent, bulletproof, tamper-proof election and vote-counting standards nationwide. Preferably, defining election fraud as an act of Treason. A constitutional amendment guaranteeing every U.S. citizen the right to vote might be nice, too.
Of course, it would have to be Congress who passed any such law, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that many of them got into office with some help from the time-honored tradition of good old-fashioned, low-tech ballot box stuffing. So I won’t hold my breath.
Can anyone think of a better way?