[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

[Fwd: Re: [Fwd: What is Boulder County trying to hide?]]


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Fwd: What is Boulder County trying to hide?]
Date: Sun, 08 Aug 2004 12:06:10 -0600
From: Lou Puls <lpuls@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: lpuls@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Organization: Museion
To: Name Withheld@xxxxxxxx




Hi [Name Withheld], I appreciate your response, but I hope you look further into this. Al and his CAMBER group have been an important part of our multiple-party, non-partisan CVV group which convinced the Commissioners to reverse their hasty and ill-advised decision to have unaccountable and unrecountable paperless digital voting machines. What they DID approve is a vast improvement (and admirably user-friendly for producing the ballot that you WANT counted).

However there is NO accountability that the ballot actually gets counted in case of any error, malfunction, unauthorized post-certification software change, attack by malware, computer crash, or (GASP) fraud. There is no change as far as a REcount, i.e. Paul Danish would still lose by the SAME four (machine-counted, not hand-recounted) votes as he did years ago, even after taking it to court. Even though we have a hard-fought paper ballot, it is NOT the ballot of record to be recounted by state law - THAT is the digital "record" in the machine. If there is ever a legitimate need or question requiring a recount, it will NEVER be known if a true recount could have changed the results.

There is an unhealthy movement to privatize and make secret our election process, with a lack of accountability that would NEVER be tolerated in any other vital transactions. The fraudulent handling of Florida's 2000 voter list was deliberately masked by the chad controversy, disenfranching UNTOLD tens of thousands of valid votes - that list is still largely in effect, now reinforced by highly questionable and completely unaccountable digital voting machines.

Al's test was his only way to show the vulnerability of only ONE of many highly-objectionable parts of the Hart-InterCivic (of Texas) system, giving each voter a traceable, identifiable and permanent serial number of their vote. Only open-source, not proprietary and secret, software could ever (someday) hope to allow a trustworthy assurance that the vote is truly anonymous, counted, and recountable. Until then only a paper ballot of record can be considered trustworthy and accountable, and in our county the ONLY way I know of to approach that is to personally place an absentee ballot on election day in the 33rd street ballot box. Otherwise we haven't ANY assurance that our vote matters. State certification of the Hart machines is a complete joke - for instance we will never know if the latest Windows Server 2003 patches were installed, preventing SOME of the many security bugs made public on the Internet after theft of the entire Microsoft encryption module.

Please go to CVV our website www.coloradovoter.net if you are concerned that we should someday move toward trustworthy elections.

Sincerely,
Lou
[Name Withheld] wrote:

Lou,

This all comes as a surprise to me. I voted early last week, and I was
surprised and pleased at what the new "computer-voting" system in
Boulder consists of. All it does is use a computer to print out each
voter's ballot individually.

I know Al Kolwicz, and if his complaint is valid, it appears to me as
if the Republicans are going out of their way to get the new system
discontinued, which makes me suspicious. Do they REALLY believe
that voters are so "stupid" as to INTENTIONALLY not follow directions?

Ah, me.

[Name Withheld]