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Sotto potete leggere due
articoli americani che raccontano il voto elettronico le elezioni, i
buchi del sistema, i dubbi di brogli.
Con la partecipazione della EDS
Election Data Service, confusa con la EDS (Electronic data Service),
che da noi con la sua divisone Italia SpA, ha ottenuto l'appalto dal
MI.
pummarulella
agosto 06
DA :
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/06/05/election_security_2006.php
Election Security 2006 di
Steven Hill
June 05, 2006
Steven Hill is
director of the Political Reform Program of the
New
America Foundation
. Portions
of this article are excerpted from the author’s new book, 10
Steps to Repair American Democracy.
Part I of a two-part series. Part II will outline a forward-looking
agenda for how to secure the vote in the United States.
Will your vote
count on Tuesday? As we head into another election season—with
control of Congress potentially up for grabs—ongoing concerns about
voting equipment and election administration continue to worry fair
elections advocates. Recent headlines have added to previous fears,
but there are also signs that effective advocacy is paying off.
Last month,
The New York Times and
other news media reported on a new
security glitch
uncovered in election equipment manufacturer Diebold Election
System’s ATM-like touch-screen voting machines. Voting technology
experts have called it the "worst security flaw ever"—any person
with basic knowledge and a minute or two of access to a Diebold
touch screen could load virtually any software into the machine and
disable it, redistribute votes or alter its performance in myriad
ways without being detected.
"This [security flaw] is worse than any of the others I've seen.
It's more fundamental," said Douglas Jones, a University of Iowa
computer scientist and veteran voting system examiner for the state
of Iowa. "In the other ones, we've been arguing about the security
of the locks on the front door. Now we find that there's no back
door.”
Incredibly, media reports withheld some details of the vulnerability
at the request of elections officials and scientists, partly because
exploiting the security hole is so easy that providing details would
give a roadmap to a potential hacker.
Elections officials in several states scrambled to limit the risk.
In Pennsylvania, respected state elections chief Michael Shamos,
previously a supporter of touch-screen voting, ordered the
sequestering of all Diebold touch-screens. California and other
states invoked emergency procedures. Meanwhile, problems with voting
equipment sold by Diebold's main competitors, Sequoia Voting Systems
and Election Systems and Software, popped up in numerous states,
including Oregon, Texas, Colorado, Illinois, Florida, New Jersey,
Washington and New Mexico.
Election Data Services
estimates that, while some states are still in the process of buying
voting equipment, touch-screen machines will be used by 34 percent
of counties in 2006, up from 10 percent in 2000. But only seven
states will use devices that print a paper receipt of electronic
votes from touch-screen machines—known as a “voter verified paper
audit trail” or VVPAT—with more than a dozen states still pushing
legislation to require paper records. This trend is extremely
worrying to election security advocates. Some cause for comfort is
that 50.2 percent of counties will use optical-scan machines that
read hand-marked paper ballots (up from 41 percent in the 2000
election), since at least optical scan systems have a VVPAT—a paper
ballot that was marked with a pen before being scanned by the
machine.
Traditional paper ballots marked by pen and counted by hand, which
some touch-screen opponents nostalgically hearken back to, will
account for only 5.7 percent of counties in 2006, down from 11.7
percent of counties six years ago. But on the positive side, use of
punch-card voting equipment, which was badly discredited during the
2000 presidential vote count in Florida, has declined from 18
percent of counties in 2000 to just under 4 percent.
Two steps forward, one step back? It’s hard to say whether we are
making progress or not, mostly because the powers-that-be appear
uncertain about what actually represents progress. This was
painfully obvious at the Voting Systems Testing Summit in November
2005, which marked the first time that representatives from all the
different camps involved with or concerned about election
administration—top federal regulators, vendors, testing
laboratories, state and local election administrators, computer
scientists and fair elections advocates—came together in one place.
Most striking was that no one could articulate a comprehensive
inventory of the many problems, much less a blueprint for the
solutions. Instead, there was a lot of finger-pointing and excuses.
At the summit, one expert made the staggering claim—which no one
bothered to dispute —that the U.S. provides more security, testing,
and oversight of slot machines and the gaming industry than to our
nation's voting equipment or election administration. Clearly, the
biggest threat to the integrity of our elections is that no one
seems to be steering the ship. There is no central brain or team
that has a handle on all aspects, developing best practices or a
roadmap that states and counties can follow. Tragically, while
Congress has appropriated $3 billion for buying new voting
equipment, the money is arriving before the necessary standards to
ensure that it isn’t wasted are in place. This hardly resembles the
world’s greatest democracy in action.
Looking at the bigger picture it’s clear that the entire regimen of
public-private infrastructure for running elections in the United
States, where for-profit vendors sell proprietary equipment to
counties and states in a quasi-regulated market, is going through
yet another round of convulsions. It's like watching an antiquated
bridge creaking and groaning under the strain of traffic, wondering
when it will give way next. Any sensible person favoring the
fairness and integrity of our elections should be concerned. Yet
that concern also must be kept in perspective lest it spiral into a
paralyzing paranoia.
There are a number of positives to point to in an admittedly chaotic
situation. Election security activists are more mobilized than ever
and they are having an impact in a myriad of ways. They have raised
the profile of these issues to the point of a national crisis. Their
efforts, once considered the actions of fanatical gadflies, are
being increasingly cited and even joined by respected election
bureaucrats like Pennsylvania’s Michael Shamos. Former President
Jimmy Carter and Secretary of State James A. Baker III—yes,
that
James Baker, the Bush family's
consigliore
in the disputed 2000 presidential election—were co-chairs of the
bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform which warned in
their 2005 final report that “software can be modified maliciously
before being installed into individual voting machines. There is no
reason to trust insiders in the election industry any more than in
other industries.”
Advocates’ increased credibility has resulted in real action, with
two governors deciding to take matters into their own hands. New
Mexico's Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson pushed through legislation
mandating paper ballots throughout the state. Maryland's Republican
Gov. Robert Ehrlich in February called for change after a Johns
Hopkins University study found Diebold’s software was open to
attacks from hackers, followed by seeing a 10-fold jump in the cost
of maintaining and storing the sensitive electronic machines.
In another sign of progress, election security advocates led by
Voter Action, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, have found the
necessary resources to begin filing lawsuits as a way to block state
and election officials' efforts to use touch-screen equipment. So
far, lawsuits in nine states have been filed, with the embattled
terrain becoming tenser and increasingly high-stakes. Diebold
lawyers are not taking this lying down. They have retaliated against
whistleblower Stephen Heller, pressuring law enforcement officials
in Los Angeles to send him to jail for allegedly leaking documents
exposing that Diebold was using illegal, uncertified software in
their California voting machines.
As a result of all this furious activity, a consensus is emerging
from top to bottom that the system is broken, even if there is not
yet a consensus about what to do about it. But increasingly even the
more mainstream experts acknowledge that for the 2006 election, the
creaky bridge continues on a shaky foundation.
Heading into the 2006 election, fair election advocates need to
remain vigilant, particularly in the handful of close races where a
swing of a small number of votes could change an election outcome.
Longer term, activists must turn their efforts to a more visionary
agenda that will ensure fair, free, safe and secure elections in the
21st century
DA :
http://www.globalproject.info/art-2605.html
Friday
November 5th, 2004 13:33
Outrage in Ohio: Angry residents storm State House in response to
massive voter suppression and corruption
by David Solnit
Hundreds of angry Ohio residents
marched through the streets of Columbus—Ohio’s Capital—this evening
and stormed the Ohio State House, defying orders and arrest threats
from Ohio State Troopers. "O-H-I-O ! suppressed democracy has got to
go,"they chanted. After troopers pushed and scuffled with people,
nearly a hundred people took over the steps and entrance to the
State’s giant white column capital building and refused repeated
orders to disperse or face arrest. People prepared for arrests,
ready to face jail—writing lawyers phone numbers on their arms,
signing jail support lists and discussing non-cooperation and active
resistance (linking arms, but not fighting back).
A freshly painted banner held on the steps read "ONE
VOTE DENIED = DEMOCRACY IN TROUBLE! 100’S OF 1000’S OF VOTES
SURPRESSED = DEMOCRACY FAILED" articulated the crisis. An
unprecedented massive grassroots voter registration and get out the
vote effort and widespread opposition to Bush went up against the
massive coordinated Republican effort to suppress, intimidate and
possibly steal millions of votes. In addition to the voter
suppression and intimidation is the fact that Bush campaign co-chair
Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell is in charge of the election
and vote counting. But much deeper questions about fundamental flaws
in the system hang in the air.
STOLEN ELECTION?
CNN’s exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53
percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio’s male
voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Investigative reporter Greg Palast
in an article today titled "Kerry Won" details how the deciding
states, Ohio and New Mexico, if all votes were actually counted,
would have gone to Kerry. Palast explains, "Although the exit polls
show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards,
thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. The election in
Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called
"spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the
vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded." But that is just a
piece of it.
TESTIMONIES OF DISENFRANCHISEMENT
The Ohio state House takeover was the culmination of an eight-hour
long afternoon of protest at the state capitol by Ohio student and
youth groups (The Columbus and Toledo Leagues of Pissed Off Voters,
and Reach Out-Bowling Green) together with Columbus residents
followed by a 300 strong 6pm march led by the Central Ohio Peace
Network. The earlier speak-out featured a litany of people who
experienced or witnessed voter suppression, intimidation and
disenfranchisement before and during the election. Thousand of Ohio
voters had been disenfranchised by partisan poll challengers,
intimidation incidents, polling places opening late, lines up to
four and five hours long -- often in the rain.
Here are a few of their stories:
Holly Roach of Toledo, Ohio spoke of her 74-year-old father, Frank
Roach and her 89-year-old grandmother; Hazel Thompson requesting
absentee ballots in early October. Hazel Thompson is homebound and
Frank Roach had been scheduled for heart surgery on November 2.
Absentee ballots never arrived. They were told by the County Voting
Commission that they could not vote with either regular or
provisional ballots, because they had already requested absentee
ballots and Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell had issued a
directive forbidding provisional ballots by people who applied for
absentee ballots and not received them (including some US service
people recently returned from Iraq). A lawsuit late in the afternoon
of November 2 by a voter in Lucas County led to a late afternoon
order by Judge David Katz of the Northern District of Ohio
instructing the Ohio Secretary of State to immediately advise all
county boards of election to advise polling precincts in their
counties to issue provisional ballots to voters in this situation.
Evan Morrison, a young get out the vote volunteer,
told of polls opening late. One poll at Glenwood Elementary in
Toledo, OH opened more than half and hour late.. During that time,
from 6:30 to after 7AM, more than 50 people left without having
voted. An hour and a half after the polling site opened, the
Republican election official said they had run out of pencils,
bringing voting to a halt. Evan ran to the store and bought a bunch
of number 2 pencils out of his own pocket so voting could resume.
Voting continued until 11AM, by which time up to 100 more people had
walked away.
Suzie Husami, a University of Toledo student said in
a press conference that her voter registration was challenged by
Republicans along with 35,000 other mostly newer registrants. She
received a letter from the Board of Elections reading: "NOTICE OF
HEARING Pursuant to Ohio Revised Code Section 3503.24: your
registration is being challenged. The reason stated as the basis for
this challenge is that you are unqualified to vote because you are
not a resident of the precinct where you can vote. A hearing has
been set at the above stated place and time. You have the right to
appear, testify and call witnesses and to be represented by an
attorney." The letter was addressed from Paula Hicks-Hudson,
Director of the Toledo Board of Elections. Although the challenges
to her were thrown out in court the day before her hearing—three
days before the election, many people who received such letters were
likely discouraged from voting.
Alli Starr, also a get out the vote volunteer,
described how, 25 minutes before polls closed in Toledo, Ohio,
Republican challengers were harassing voters at the Mott Library,
Central City polling station, a low-income African-American
community. Observers said that they believed these challengers had
repeatedly called the police producing absurd stories in order to
intimidate voters. One of the Republican challengers was recognized
as Dennis Lange, a prominent local business owner who owns
Pumpernickels Deli & Cafe. Mr. Lange aggressively tried to push back
African-American community members who were poll watching and voting
at the site. At one point more than four police and sheriffs
officers, including undercover officers, were witnessed at the site
for no apparent reason.
PRE-ELECTION VOTER SUPPRESSION
But even before election day, the Baltimore Chronicle reported
November 1 that "Through a combination of sophisticated vote
rustling—ethnic cleansing of voter rolls, absentee ballots gone
AWOL, machines that "spoil" votes---John Kerry begins with a
nationwide deficit that could easily exceed one million votes."
Troy, Michigan Republican State Rep. John
Pappageorge, a Michigan Bush campaign Co-Chair, was quoted in July
16 edition of the Detroit Free Press as saying, "If we do not
suppress the Detroit vote, we’re going to have a tough time in this
election." Blacks comprise 83 percent of Detroit’s population, and
the city routinely elects Democratic candidates by substantial
margins. The British Broadcasting Company has also disclosed a memo
to top Republican officials in Florida identifying voters in
predominantly black precincts for possible challenge.
The secretaries of state, usually the chief election
official at the state level, in four battleground states--Michigan,
Missouri, Florida, and Ohio have all taken top campaign posts for
Bush and have been accused of manipulating state election laws to
restrict voter access on behalf of Republicans. Ultra-right Ohio
Secretary of State, J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Ohio
Bush campaign, together with the Ohio Republican Party are at the
center of this nationwide effort to steal the election through voter
suppression, intimidation and corruption. In the months leading up
to the election, Blackwell attempted to require that registration
applications that were not posted on the correct weight paper be
cancelled. His efforts to suppress the vote have continued.
Blackwell sought to restrict access to provisional ballots: he
challenged of the validity of over 35,000 new voter registrations in
the state (recently thrown out by a Federal Judge): he issued
unclear directives regarding the right of ex-felons to vote.
"In state after state, Republican officials and
operatives are working to deny American citizens the right to vote,"
charges Wade Henderson, executive director of Leadership Conference
on Civil Rights (the country’s largest civil and human-rights
coalition). Miles Rapoport, former Secretary of the State of
Connecticut and President of the nonpartisan public policy
organization Demos, said, "As the election approaches, chilling
reports continue to surface of major efforts to prevent people from
voting. Legions of partisan challengers’ are being readied for the
polls on Election Day; Latino registrants in rural Georgia are being
targeted; and tens of thousands of new Ohio registrants have been
challenged. All appear to be organized campaigns. These
anti-democratic activities must be stopped."
TOUCH-SCREEN VOTING
Additionally, the new touch voting machines being used in 29 states
and the District of Columbia, have been widely criticized by
elections officials and computer scientists and as susceptible to
hacking and malfunction.
Election
Data Services,
a consulting firm, predicted 29 percent of voters would use
touch-screen machines on voting day.
According to the November 3 Globe and Mail, "several
dozen voters in six states — particularly Democrats in Florida —said
the wrong candidates appeared on their touch-screen machine’s
checkout screen, the coalition said. In many cases, voters said they
intended to select John Kerry but when the computer asked them to
verify the choice it showed them instead opting for President Bush,
the group said. Roberta Harvey, 57, of Clearwater, Fla., said she
had tried at least a half dozen times to select Kerry-Edwards when
she voted Tuesday at Northwood Presbyterian Church. After 10 minutes
trying to change her selection, the Pinellas County resident said
she called a poll worker and got a wet-wipe napkin to clean the
touch screen as well as a pencil so she could use its eraser-end
instead of her finger. Ms. Harvey said it took about 10 attempts to
select Mr. Kerry before a summary screen confirmed her intended
selection."
On November 9, 2003, the New York Times reported: "In
mid-August, Walden W. O’Dell, the chief executive of Diebold Inc.,
sat down at his computer to compose a letter inviting 100 wealthy
and politically inclined friends to a Republican Party fund-raiser,
to be held at his home in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. ’I am
committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the
president next year,’ wrote Mr. O’Dell, whose company is based in
Canton, Ohio. That is hardly unusual for Mr. O’Dell. A longtime
Republican, he is a member of President Bush’s ’Rangers and
Pioneers,’ an elite group of loyalists who have raised at least
$100,000 each for the 2004 race. But it is not the only way that Mr.
O’Dell is involved in the election process. Through Diebold Election
Systems, a subsidiary in McKinney, Tex., his company is among the
country’s biggest suppliers of paperless, touch-screen voting
machines. Judging from Federal Election Commission data, at least 8
million people will cast their ballots using Diebold machines next
November. ... Some people find Mr. O’Dell’s pairing of interests --
as voting-machine magnate and devoted Republican fund-raiser --
troubling."
Co-founder of the Citizens Alliance for Secure
Elections, Susan Truitt said today, "Seven counties in Ohio have
electronic voting machines and none of them have paper trails. That
alone raises issues of accuracy and integrity as to how we can
verify the count. A recount without a paper trail is meaningless;
you just get a regurgitation of the data. Last year, Blackwell tried
to get the entire state to buy new machines without a paper trail.
The normally-reliable exit polls, virtually the only check we have
against tampering with voting machines that have no paper trail, had
shown Kerry with a lead. A poll worker told me this morning that
there were no tapes of the results posted on some machines; on other
machines the posted count was zero, which obviously shouldn’t be the
case."*
NATIONWIDE RESPONSE
Across Ohio, demonstrations were held in Toledo, Cleveland, Oxford,
Athens and Cincinnati. Throughout the United States on both election
night and November 3 people erupted in protest -- some involving
1000’s of people -- with marches, direct actions, civil
disobedience, and vigils. Marchers in San Francisco smashed bank
windows. Rallies were held in at least 40 cites and likely many,
many more. Many of these actions were planned in advance, advertised
with flyers headlined, "NOV 2: VOTE! NOV 3: MAKE IT COUNT!"
Most of the actions planned by groups were to take
place regardless of the election outcome and were focused more on
the deeper issues of democracy, not empire; healthcare, not warfare;
and education, not occupation. The day of action was initially
called for by the Beyond Voting network, whose call for actions read
in part, "When your government has troops stationed around the
world, lets big corporations write the rules of the global economy
and pushes racist policies that promote fear, undermines civil
liberties, and rips off working people, you are living in an EMPIRE!
Empire is as system of global control that combines international
aggression with domestic repression to create a deeply undemocratic
world. REAL DEMOCRACY means we the people have direct control over
the decisions and resources that matter in our lives. Real democracy
means that we make the decisions that impact our neighborhoods,
workplaces, schools and the state of the world we hand off to our
children. This year the world is counting on us to expand the
election year debate beyond Democrats versus Republicans to the
larger issue of whether the U.S. will be a Democracy or an Empire."
Two other networks, This Time We’re Watching (a
project of the League of Pissed Off Voters, the Truthforce Training
Center and the Ruckus Society with many other groups) and No Stolen
Elections (Global Exhange, Code Pink, United for Peace and
Justice,labor organizers and others) had also begun to prepare a
people power response for November 3. No Stolen Elections publicized
a pledge of action to stop a stolen election, but on election night
they chose not to call on people to take to the streets. The
Election Protection Coalition an umbrella group of volunteer poll
monitors that set up a hotline and planned to monitor and make
public voting irregularities. They may have missed one opportunity
to make a difference when Ralph G. Neas, president of the People for
the American Way which helped form the coalition, said to the
media,"Overall, the problems of outright voter intimidation and
suppression have not been as great as in the past."
The massive grassroots participation and activism --
the highest levels of activism since before the Iraq invasion -- are
hopeful. But electoral work and single-issue campaigns without a
broader systemic analysis are a recipe for disappointment or
failure. Moveon.org has reportedly not returned press calls for two
days after the election, perhaps because they had naively thrown all
their hopes with Kerry and lacked a deeper vision or longer term
strategy.
The League of Pissed Off Voters was one of the most
hopeful efforts within the massive grassroots efforts to unelect
Bush. Catalyzing activism around the election among youth, especialy
youth of color, they had a vision of building power and organization
beyond the elections using creative tactics and rooting themselves
in hip hop and youth culture. Other local grassroots efforts like
Ithaca, New York’s Bush Must Go Coalition, used the energy of
anti-Bush election to build their organization and campaigns that
had started before and will continue after the election -- and after
Bush is gone.
Let’s be honest. Kerry would have been an improvement
to Bush and sent a much better signal to the world, but he is more
reactionary than Nixon; a pro-war, pro-corporate capitalism
millionaire who wants a more multilateral approach to wars and US
empire building. It’s also an important to remember what makes
deeper changes in the world is movements and communities and people
power, not politicians. And if we step back and look at things
globally, Bush and his gang are fringe extremists whose empire is
overextended, and lacks any global legitimacy while we are part of a
global majority, an ever growing movement of movements that is
creating common sense alternatives that will undermine the empire
from below.
David Solnit volunteered with the Mobilization for
Democracy Not Disenfranchisement and local anti-bush groups in NW
Ohio in late October/early November and is the editor of Globalize
Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World
* Quote from the Institute for Public Accuracy
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