It seems that for the Sierra Club, reason and science end at the edge of the environment. They are now touting a product for Internet voting from a company that simultaneously claims that they have a product that is “a revolutionary mobile voting platform designed to securely cast votes in elections across the globe.” while running a Contest awarding $230,000 to actually accomplish that “In this Challenge, we are asking Solvers for help in overcoming the significant obstacles that stand in the way of bringing safe, secure, and easy voting to people worldwide.”
Two articles this week on cyber risks, one refuting Colorado’s Secretary of State on online voting. Another articulating the risks of hacking electronic voting in general.
Are Larry Wilkerson’s concerns justified? Without sufficient audits and recounts, we can never be certain. As he tells us, history tends toward cheating whenever it is possible.
Our position is that paper ballots and optical scanning followed by sufficient security, audits, and recounts is the optimum system available. Yet, in Connecticut we need stronger security, audits, and recounts to achieve justified integrity and confidence in our elections.
What could be more patriotic in our narcissistic social-media age than posting a picture of yourself on Facebook with your marked ballot for president? Show off your support for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) or former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Last week, a federal court in New Hampshire struck down that state’s ban on ballot selfies as a violation of the First Amendment right of free-speech expression.
That might seem like a victory for the American Way. But the judge made a huge mistake because without the ballot-selfie ban, we could see the reemergence of the buying and selling of votes — and even potential coercion from employers, union bosses and others…
In late June a respected source published a non-peer-reviewed article: The case for election technology Which despite its title is actually a marketing piece disguised as science, not for election technology but for electronic voting, including Internet voting. The case actually made is for skepticism and peer-review.
That skepticism is well addressed in posts by Jeremy Epstein and E. John Sebes: How not to measure security andA Hacked Case For Election Technology
An independent report by the state auditor general found Florida’s voter registration database flawed.
Susanna Randolph, one of the candidates running for Alan Grayson’s 9th district congressional seat, sent a letter today asking Attorney General Loretta Lynch to launch a Department of Justice probe into the state’s voter system.
The election system is particularly vulnerable because it involves a combination of state, local, and federal government agencies with their own systems, software, hardware, and security protocols. Often, government departments are running old “legacy” computer systems that are extremely vulnerable to malware and hacking; and even if they have new systems, these are often put into place without a comprehensive security audit and performance review.
Who exactly is in charge of securing these overlapping networks isn’t always clear in government either.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker wants to replace their election watch dog agency, apparently because it investigated his campaign.
Yet Wisconsin’s Governor may not be that far ahead of Connecticut’s. Like Wisconsin our watch dog agencies were joined and weakened several years ago by Governor Malloy to “cut costs”. How is that going for us? It seems that the Governor is not out to do away with them, yet there has been some questionable attacks, just as the watchdog is working on investigating the Governor’s last campaign,
“Paper receipts are the obvious answer,Florida gave recounts a bad name. But there is something much worse than a recount: the utter inability to recount votes, and reconstruct voters’ true intent, in light of a serious computer error.”
Actually slightly worse and even more suspicious might be having paper ballots and being barred from using them to verify elections.
