Electronic voting: Is the fix in?

After concerns and criticism that electronic voting systems are unreliable, untrustworthy, and too secretive with their source code, the federal government is stepping in to put those concerns to bed — or at least to put the average American to sleep on the issue.

Wired reports that a software library for electronic voting machine software is being developed as a part of an initiative of the brand-new U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

The library would be maintained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, yet another agency in the ever-growing-in-size federal government.

The U.S. Election Assistance Commission was developed after the created 2000 election crisis, "to improve the integrity and efficiency of elections".

"The EAC will eventually ask all voting companies, even those that produce counting software for punch card machines, to submit their software.

"Soaries called the library a major step and praised the vendors for their willingness to increase the transparency of elections."

This does nothing to "increase the transparency of elections". The only thing this will accomplish is to ease the concerns of the few Americans who actually were rightfully worried about the wisdom of utilizing computerized voting. The library will be used by counties only to verify that their systems are an actual certified copy of the software from the vendor.

It doesn't address, at all, the many problems with the software that is certified by the companies. Problems which, last year, led a study by John Hopkins and Rice Universities to conclude that the biggest of those companies had produced software that was so riddled with security holes that it couldn't be fixed; the software would have to be rewritten, starting from scratch.

In addition to that study, an analysis was done by Bev Harris of blackboxvoting.com, in which she demonstrated how Diebold's Gems system could be easily hacked and the ledger from which the voting results were taken could be changed, without the attacker leaving a hint of evidence.

These serious problems with electronic voting software took on an even more ominous tone with the comments of one of the companies CEOs.

In August 2003, the Cleveland Plain Dealer quoted Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell as saying that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year".

In an attempt to calm fears about the companies software, the state of Maryland hired a software security firm to prove the efficiency and security of the system their state intended to certify. The independent analysis led to William Arbaugh, a University of Maryland assistant professor of computer science who participated in the test, grading the system an "F". He added that he was "really surprised with the totality of the problems we found. Just about everywhere we looked we found them".

Now that the question has been raised in the minds of the public about the integrity of such systems, the "fix" is in. Widespread media exposure will be given to the fact that we have a new system in place to ensure "transparent" elections. Copies of the software will be stored in a special library that will be used for comparison to ensure that county election system certifiers will have a "certified", authentic copy of the same flawed software.

As has been pointed out by Philip O'Halloran, there are countless ways malicious code can be hidden in election software.

For example, software can be written in such a way as to cause election equipment to cast extra votes for a certain candidate, and only during the busiest hours of the day.

In addition, software can be written to react to certain behavioral factors, such as a voter casting a ballot for both candidates in a contest. These behavioral factors could act as a triggering mechanism for built-in, election-stealing sub-routines. Finding such anomalies can mount to looking for a needle in a haystack, given the thousands of lines of computer code in these systems. With computers and their software, the possibilities for fraud are virtually endless.

Further exacerbating the problem, are the manufacturers' policies of secrecy. The Hopkins/Rice study was of a version of the software that had been posted on the Internet by mistake — not a copy supplied by the vendor; the state of Maryland hired a research team to perform their study — without the blessing of Diebold.

There are also questions about the transference of the sensitive data through insecure phone lines, i.e. Diebold's GEMS system, we understand, connects via telephone to "receive software updates". What kind of "updates"? How can we know that it isn't receiving a modification of the ledgers?

In light of all of the evidence that casts doubt upon the abilty of computerized voting systems to guarantee secure elections, the statements of governmental leaders that the software will be stored in a new NIST library, appears to be nothing more than window-dressing. And the chilling words of EAC chairman DeForest Soaries suggest that the ruling elite are selling their fraudulent computerized voting systems to the American public.

"'(The companies') acceptance of our request to submit their software begins the process that assures the country that we will have (a) higher level of security and therefore confidence in e-voting than we have ever had before,' Soaries said in a press conference."

There is no way to guarantee the integrity of an election system when the source code of the software is written in secret and remains a secret during its use.

It is this observer's belief that such systems are designed for the purpose of hijacking the elections, as the U.S. moves further toward becoming a socialist democracy.

Recent efforts to get the state of Florida to adopt such miniscule safeguards as a paper trail verification system so that a recount would be possible, have failed. On Monday, a federal judged tossed out a lawsuit by Florida Rep. Robert Wexler, saying that the state has "no legal obligation" to provide voter-verifiable paper trails for electronic voting machines.

The only sure way to guarantee a truly transparent election, is to utilize old-fashioned paper ballots, placed in transparent boxes to avoid false bottoms. Then, the whole process must be opened to monitoring by trusted members of the community.

Until this is done, Americans can assume that their elections have been entirely hijacked by a small number of people at the highest levels of power. The most significant holes in election systems, are not the ones that were found in the punch card ballots of the 2000 election.