Reply #72: Klook- VoteHere no Solution

[RedEagle]

Hi, nice to see you involved on the voting issue.

The real problem with non-people verification schemes is the lack of- people. You boil down the ability to audit to an elite few. (Those who know and can check the code)

Even David Dill said he could never back a system that left auditing to an elite.

Democracy= the ability of anyone in the electorate, with normal mental capacities, to recount (audit) an election.

You can't draw people at random out of a crowd and find anyone who can audit schemes like this.

You can't verify that the program being promoted is the one being used- witness all the non-certified programs used in elections now. The average election official simply can't do that.

What appears secure today is not secure tomorrow. One of Murphy's laws, I think.

Honest people may develop the code but it gets placed in many, many hands with lots of access along the way.

There is no way to insure that a Diebold, "double-book" system isn't running.

Look up "Spoofing." Keep in mind that Robert Gates formerly of the CIA and now of VoteHere, supposedly was a CIA specialist in computers. (Don't have that article at hand at the moment) You could spoof the entire validation scheme thing.

Validating a vote is not validating an election. Validated votes are used to validate an election, by hand counting them.

Technology cannot be audited by technology- and that is what we are asked to believe here.

It is NOT too late for November, 2004. This country can do anything it wants to and we can hand count this election if enough people made it a priority. All of Congress should be calling for this election to be only of the presidential, congressional, and state legislative races to be voted on paper ballots with either hand counting or robust auditing of optical scan or punch card ballots. Surely some of that HAVA money could be spent making sure we don't have another Florida, after all, that is what HAVA was supposed to prevent.