[Voterescue] Fw: (CA)Secretary of state casts doubt on future of electronic voting

[Mauricio Ortega]

Should we reply to the email address below with articles outlining just how
prevalent this really is?

On Dec 2, 2007 12:02 PM, Vickie Karp <karp at mail.com> wrote:

>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Angela Stark"
> To: "Coalition For Visible Ballots"
> Subject: Secretary of state casts doubt on future of electronic voting
> Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2007 08:05:41 -0800
>
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: "Angela Stark" <angelastark at ca.rr.com>
> To: "Coalition For Visible Ballots" <
> coalitionforvisibleballots at dacinfo.com>
> Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2007 08:05:41 -0800
> Subject: Secretary of state casts doubt on future of electronic voting
>  Secretary of state casts doubt on future of electronic voting
> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/12/02/BASRTMOPE.DTL&type=printable
>
> John Wildermuth, Chronicle Staff Writer <jwildermuth at sfchronicle.com>
>
> Sunday, December 2, 2007
>
> Electronic voting systems used throughout California still aren't good
> enough to be trusted with the state's elections, Secretary of State Debra
> Bowen said Saturday.
>
> While Bowen has been putting tough restrictions and new security
> requirements on the use of the touch screen machines, she admitted having
> doubts as to whether the electronic voting systems will ever meet the
> standards she believes are needed in California.
>
> "It's a real challenge," she said at a San Francisco airport conference on
> voting and elections. "I don't rule out the ingenuity of some computer
> science student now in the eighth grade," but what's available now isn't as
> transparent or auditable as the paper ballot systems they replaced.
>
> Earlier this year, Bowen put together a top-to-bottom review of voting
> systems used in the state and found that most of the voting machines were
> vulnerable to hackers looking to change results or cause mischief with the
> systems.
>
> Despite loud howls from county voting officials, Bowen decertified almost
> all the touch screen systems used in California, allowing only their most
> limited use.
>
> "When the government finds a car is unsafe, it orders a recall," she said.
> "Here we're talking about systems used to cast and tally votes, the most
> basic tool of democracy."
>
> In the Bay Area, Santa Clara and Napa counties found themselves forced to
> scramble to replace their electronic voting systems. San Mateo County uses
> the Hart eSlate system, a touch screen system Bowen said is relatively safe
> from hackers.
>
> The secretary admitted that she wants to see California's counties use
> optical scan systems in their polling places, especially because most of
> them already use the systems to count mail ballots.
>
> Optical scan systems, where voters mark their choices on a paper ballot
> that then gets inserted into a tallying machine, "are old and boring, but
> cheap and reliable," Bowen said, because the paper ballots make it easy to
> recount the ballots and ensure the accuracy of the vote.
>
> "I want to make sure the votes are secure, auditable and transparent and
> that every vote is counted as it was cast," she said.
>
> Although Bowen's review of the voting systems affected only California, it
> had a nationwide impact, because the same systems are used in many other
> states.
>
> The review "was like a big rock tossed in a pond, which continues to
> ripple across the nation," said Doug Chapin of Electonline.org<http://electonline.org/>,
> the nonpartisan group that sponsored the conference.
>
> While Bowen hoped her decision on the voting machines would allow both
> election officials and voters "to stop worrying about how to cast our
> votes," that hasn't happened.
>
> Battles continue across the voting landscape, with election officials,
> voting machine manufacturers and various citizen activists all arguing over
> the direction the nation's voting rules should take.
>
> "The secretary of state has a strategic plan, and I disagree with it,"
> Steven Weir, Contra Costa County's registrar, told the conference. "Her plan
> is to debase confidence in our voting system," and Bowen has excluded local
> election officials from decisions that affect them greatly.
>
> Local election officials are under increasing scrutiny, much of it from
> people "looking to give themselves a partisan advantage, fair or not," Weir
> added.
>
> "No election system is ever good enough for the candidate who loses the
> election," said John Lindback, director of the elections division for the
> Oregon secretary of state. Changes like the ranked choice voting system used
> in San Francisco are often pushed by people who "didn't like who won the
> last election or the last 10 elections" and are disguising them as election
> reform.
>
> But many of the people most concerned about voting machines and election
> accuracy "are not conspiracy theory nutballs," said Pamela Smith of
> VerifiedVoting.org, which looks at voting problems across the nation. Some
> of the most passionate advocates for change are computer scientists
> concerned that election officials put too much trust in systems that experts
> know are all too fallible.
>
> "It's critical to ratchet down the attack-defense mode" between election
> officials and voting activists to reach their joint goal of making elections
> work, she said.
>
> At least one concern of the electronic voting opponents seems to be
> overblown, though. There has been no record of anyone hacking into a voting
> machine to change election results and only a handful of cases of any type
> of election fraud in the country, said Mike Slater of Project Vote, a
> nonpartisan voter registration group.
>
> Between 2002 and 2005, only 24 people were convicted of voting fraud in
> the entire nation, and most of them mistakenly thought they were eligible,
> he said.
>
> "It's hard to study election fraud in America because there's not much of
> it," said Thad Hall, an assistant professor of political science at the
> University of Utah. "People make stupid mistakes, but fraud is a very
> different beast."
>
> *E-mail John Wildermuth at jwildermuth at sfchronicle.com.*
>
> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/12/02/BASRTMOPE.DTL&type=printable
> **
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Infinite Love is the Only truth, everything else is Illusion.

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