[lbo-talk] Was Max Cleland the victim of electronic voter fraud?

Dwayne Monroe idoru345 at yahoo.com
Tue Oct 21 17:14:54 PDT 2003


Guilherme posted:

brazil seems to be using electronic voting uuccessfully. i don't know anything about the system besides an apparent lack of criticism.

**********

Yes, Brazil's use of electronic voting machines has been widely praised as a model for their use elsewhere. I do not argue with the idea of computer based voting, only with its implementation in the United States.

Take note, for example, of the following regarding Brazil from an article found at the following URL:

http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/world/4423781.htm

Electronic voting a breeze in Brazil; U.S. could learn lesson

By KEVIN G. HALL Knight Ridder Newspapers

<snip>

Brazil's electronic voting system relied on technology developed by Unisys Corp. and National Semiconductor Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif. Votes were cast on about 325,000 electronic machines, then encrypted and transmitted electronically over secure lines to Brazil's state capitals. From there, the votes were relayed electronically to tabulating machines in the country's capital of Brasilia for the final count.

<snip>

The excerpt contains important clues as to why Brazil's experiment appears to be successful -

- the devices are Unix based

- results were encrypted and transmitted to central databases for tabulation and verification

The Diebold devices are not only MS Windows based, which is bad enough, but built upon Windows 95 and 98 - versions that are, to put it charitably, less than robust as secure platforms.

Also, a bizarre data card storage system was employed, rather than encrypted transmissions.

Questions of fraud and abuse aside, from a purely tech point of view the Diebold system is a kludge through and through - a slap-dash muck up.

The Brazilians standardized on stable hardware and secure software and took the next logical step of creating a secure method for transferring the data-stream to trusted sites.

Our efforts, in comparison, reek of typcial corporate stupidity and uncreative chaos.

DRM

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