Reply #8: Herrin argues in terms everybody can understand....

[marions ghost]

For the rest of Chuck Herrin's statement to the NC legislature, go to:

http://www.chuckherrin.com/paperballots.htm

Raleigh, NC 12/12/2004
My name is Chuck Herrin, and I'm going to start with something that you might not want to hear. --snip--
I've been following the electronic voting issue for a while now. I had been telling people for a long time that electronic voting was a bad idea, but as usual, no one really listened. --snip--

I am as big a computer geek as they come, and I hold multiple high-level industry certifications in the areas of networking, engineering, auditing, and security, and I am here today with one message. I want paper ballots.

There is no reason for computers to be involved in our electoral process. They have not solved any problems, but only created new ones. This is not surprising news to anyone involved in the tech industry, nor is it a surprise for criminals. --snip--

Before we started using computers, it was unthinkable that you wouldn't have a piece of paper that could be used in the event of a recount- now, when there's a request for a recount, all we hear about is bitching because somebody has to hook a printer up to the machine! And do you know what you get when you recount inaccurate results? A paper copy of inaccurate results.

Have we lost our frickin' minds? We don't even have paper receipts, much less ballots! And it's not just the touchscreens - that's something else that a lot of people are missing. You have to take a step one level back in the tabulation process to the computers that actually do the tallying. That's where votes from touchscreens, as well as optically scanned AND absentee ballots come together to be counted. Don;t get me wrong - these touchscreens suck- but the problem is bigger than just that. Lemme tell you about just one of these systems. It's the General Election Management Software, or GEMS, made by Diebold. You know Diebold, the folks who hired felons, the ones that make ATMs but say they can't put printers on voting machines?

These GEMS machines run on that most "secure" and stable operating system- Microsoft Windows. Mostly Windows 2000. GEMS is designed to work with Office - it says so on Diebold's site. These machines are connected by modem pools, network connections, or the Internet, and they receive the vote data from the reporting precincts, where it is then "counted". If you would like to see the security of this software, I'd like for you to go to www.chuckherrin.com/hackthevote. I will walk you through how easy it is to change tens of thousands of votes, then show you the time stamped reports and audit logs to prove that it doesn't leave a trace. It's so easy, it's not even really hacking.

Anyone who has used MS Office has done this before. It's incredible, and Diebold and elections officials have known about it for years. Internet memos reveal that being able to change votes in the backend databases "have gotten people out of a bind," and Gaston County, NC and King County WA are specifically mentioned as having done it in the past. This is known criminal activity, that has gone without action, for years. In my first demo of changing votes in a fictional election, I was able to change 11,963 votes in a couple of minutes, and in my second, called speed-hacking the vote, I changes over 1.6 Million votes in 6 minutes, while generating 3 timestamped "official" reports and audit logs showing no trace of wrongdoing. Computers made this possible. Computers enable criminals and those with evil intent to do more than ever before. Before we started using computers, you couldn't hack paper ballots at a distance. Well, now you can. (more)