The Georgia Supreme Court has upheld a lower court decision affirming the state’s right to use touch-screen voting machines.
Check out the full opinion from the Court, if the mood grips you.
The ruling, written by Justice George Carley, found the use of touchscreen voting systems does not severely restrict the right to vote.
{ 69 comments }
Ox makes a good point!
With all due respect and appreciation for the Supreme Court of Georgia, I am deeply disappointed in the decision today to reject the challenge to touch-screen electronic voting machines.
Like many Georgians, I am concerned about the integrity of the voting process. Outside of one’s faith, an argument can be made that the right to vote is the most sacred secular right a free person enjoys.
Certainly Justice George Carley is correct when he observes that no balloting system is perfect. No reasonable person would argue that premise. However, Justice Carley in citing the 2000 presidential election as an example validates the point that a verifiable backup system is needed.
With deep respect, many Georgians will suggest, and I agree, that the 2000 presidential election demonstrates the exact need for a backup paper system to establish the integrity of the voting process. Consider this: without a verifiable backup system for each individual vote, how can the American people have confidence in the electoral process?
I assure Georgia that if I have the honor to serve as Governor, our state will have a system for voting which provides a verifiable backup system to address any legitimate questions that might arise after an imperfect voting process.
I do not mean to suggest that our high court was wrong on a strictly legal basis. Rather, my point is that the state has an obligation to provide an absolute, verifiable, and trusted system for counting votes, especially when there is a problem or crisis. Many reasonable Georgians have appeared at countless meetings with state officials to express their concern. Instead of listening to the people, working with the people, and trying to find a verifiable paper-based backup system, certain state officials decided to go to court.
I promise Georgia that an Oxendine Administration will not go to court. Instead, we will work together as a state and find a common sense solution to this important issue.
-
John Oxendine
If Ox really wanted to make a difference in this instance, he should run for SoS instead of governor.
if handel supported paper ballots, ox would be against it.
Is his lips moving?
Yup, his lips are moving.
I was talking with my attorney about this. She is a former judge, and we both seriously considered working with Walker on this case. We both agreed (and still do) that it was critical to put in the argument that there is a constitutional right to vote (one of the un-inumerated rights). We would have DARED the court to rule no one has a constitutional right to an accurate vote, but rather voting is more a privilege like driving on the public roads.
Walker never listens LOL.
Karen Handel made the same promise when running for SOS.
Neither they nor the courts can be trusted to do the right thing.
When the courts define their role as the protector of the “State’s
important regulatory interests” over the interest and rights of the people… hope for the status quo to deliver a better day is hard to come by.
I know of a candidate for Governor that I can actually trust to try to deliver on the promise of a truly auditable voting system and that is John Monds.
So are you saying that the court should be activist and not follow the law as set forth by the legislature?
Just askin…
This is the same court that said “… requiring signatures is not a requirement, merely a manner that the state’s use…” At least with this opinion, I see they found their thesaurus.
The divided powers and branching of government gave us the Judiciary that was designed to be the last protector of individual rights and to hold the other branches in check… the modern courts, as this opinion states, see themselves as protector of “State’s interests.”
Daniel,
What’s the cost to replace the machines? Is it worth the cost to get the perceived benefit? Should the money to replace the machines be better spent on something else like roads, water, education?
-Phase them in, just like they originally did with these.
-As each replacement is needed, each machine doesn’t last forever.
-Don’t waste our money on inferior products to begin with. This issue was brought up way before the first machine was purchased.
Yes, it is worth it. When politicians say “Don’t worry, trust me.” I don’t.
I’m sure others have more to say.
SCOGA made the right call here. At the end of the day, no voting mechanism will ever be prefect, but the electronic systems are FAR more secure than their paper-based cousins, and introducing paper into these systems only WEAKENS their integrity – not strengthen it.
Jeff
Are you saying an ATM machine should not spit out any paper? It seems we could have a paper trail and a system to verify your own vote. The banking world has been doing this for a long time.
you are given a chance to verify your vote before you cast it. A printout only introduces a far easier route to compromise the system.
I was asked to verify my vote in the last election. I did, seeing that everything was ok, hit “send” (or whatever the last word was, I’m blond, so I don’t remember the exact terminology) – then the system locked up, and they had to reboot my system. The poll workers claimed that my vote was tabulated, but I’ve always wondered.
Now, in the presidential election my vote was not a deciding vote by any means… but in my husband’s last election, which he lost by 1 vote, it could have been. If the system locking up had happened in his election I would have been fit to be tied!!!
A simple paper receipt would certainly have set my mind to ease.
Jeff
The same is true with an ATM machine, but I can double check for mistakes after the transaction which I cannot do with a vote.
But with a paper system, at least you know when something is wrong. What would be the indicator that something was wrong with an electronic vote count? Would we ever even know?
Even with a paper trail, you would still NEVER know whether it was doing it right. It could still print out a copy of your vote and then record it wrong as it transferred from the card to the reader.
People used to tolerate 10% failure in the mechanical punch cards. Now we complain because the failure rate is lower but it’s electronic, so it must be suspicious.
The system we tested, spit out a receipt, to be verified by the voter, then to be placed in a locked ballot box. Then randomly the machine vote total could be matched to the count total in the box. This is not too much to ask for.
Jeff,
Call your bank and tell them you only want the balance reported on your bank account statements, since you have no need for any itemized listing of debits and credits… better yet, tell the bank they don’t even need to keep a record of them at all… then when you suspect something wrong, they can re-supply you with the balance again and say “see it’s the same… you can trust us.”
This makes some sense, except for the large quantity of paper ballots that would need hand counting with literally tens of offices to count. Even with the mechanical punch ballots, they used optical readers to scan them. Scanning the printed ballots introduces another area where something could be wrong (e.g., a speck on the paper throws things off)
And in a precinct with 20,000 people and 30 races, do you try to get it perfect or just within margin of error?
When you do an audit, you don’t have to do them all. You spot check randomly, unannounced.
Plus if I’m over a polling place, I wouldn’t wait for an official state audit… I’d perform a random internal audit periodically as well.
I don’t have a problem with scanned ballots. You can still do random audits/hand counts, whatever you want to double check, because you have an original document filled out by the voter.
Scanning makes it fast, audits make it pretty secure, and paper makes it verifiable.
It may not be perfect, but we would know how imperfect we were (and could choose to deal with it). With this electronic ballot, it’s like sweeping it under the rug. If we can’t see it, it must be OK.
How hard would it really be to make the paper print out, that goes into the locked box, have not just a readable printout that we can verify, but a bar code for easy counting by scanning if the need arise?
What weird form of logic are you using that this could possible be true in this universe?
Providing physical evidence as a backup system WEAKENS integrity? What?
because paper is FAR easier to compromise.
For example, if you introduce a printer, a person only needs to be able to crack the print code to change entire outcomes, because people will assume the paper is correct. Whereas without the paper, you must compromise the entire system, with ALL of its redundancies.
Does get pretty funny though that people who want stronger elections want to go back to the most easily – and widely – compromised elections system known to man.
This is about as sound of reasoning as the people who claim that 9-11 was an inside job.
If there is a discrepancy between the two it is proof that something was tampered with, or the system is compromised. That is the point.
Do it right, and no one would ever know – defeating the whole purpose of the printer.
Heck dude, *I* have made programs print one thing and do something completely different – it aint exactly that hard to do.
In fact, here’s a blatant example:
int x = 2;
int y= -1;
Display: “Pick a number between 0 and 10″;
Input: y;
Display: “You chose: ” + x;
(Will ALWAYS display “2″, even though you may have input any of 1o numbers OTHER THAN 2.)
Jeff, I will repeat myself.
If there is a discrepancy between the two it is proof that something was tampered with, or the system is compromised.
If you print “something different” on a paper trail, you have created an inconsistency which would flag the election as having been tampered with.
How can you possibly not understand that? Really?
Jeff
Not true if you create a pin number that is known and created by the voter. The voter could than use that pin number to access the vote they cast to double check. The paper is only relevant for double checking your vote not used for any security purpose. Trust me in electronic banking we dealt with this issue years ago!
The solution’s really simple. Open source.
… and Fair elections!
That also makes it FAR easier to compromise. To be successful, this particular code needs to be guarded like the code to launch nuclear weapons – and just as redundant, with just as many failsafes built in.
All: One thing to remember on this issue, for those that didn’t know: Back in 2001-2003, when these systems were first going online, I was one of the ones verifying them onsite prior to them becoming official voting machines. In fact, at least three of the guys I worked with/for then STILL work for the Center for Elections Systems right now – at and least two of those men I would trust with anything short of the physical life of myself or my family.
No it doesn’t. The only way we know if there are vulnerabilities is if independent QA is done on the source.
No, the way you find vulnerabilities is to test each machine out the dickens – which we did back in the day, and I assume is still done with each new machine. (I also would hope that existing machines are sporadically put back through the same tests, just to make sure nothing has happened to them since original testing.)
Internal testing. Why shouldn’t they be transparent? How do you know there aren’t vulnerabilities you missed?
grift, he doesn’t.
He has an inflated belief in the infallibility of computers and programmers, which many of my peers in the IT world possess.
His solution is called security by obscurity. If publicizing your algorithm makes it insecure, it was never secure in the first place.
“If publicizing your algorithm makes it insecure, it was never secure in the first place.”
Bingo, Doug.
See, we aren’t always on opposite sides
To be fair… when I publicize my algorithm… I do get a little insecure too… but, that’s what alcohol is for… right Icky?
Anyway, I thought we were talking about the need for a truly auditable voting machine.
grift:
Because a solid programmer will run “idiot testing” as well as in house testing. In other words, LITERALLY get someone off the street to come in and test your system – AFTER you’ve already had your programming team and random in-house people go in with the intent of breaking the system.
At my last programming job, this was SOP before we released a new program. We’d have the entire IT team as well as the COO go to a local coffee house with our laptops and TRY to break the system – doing things to it we knew it was never designed to do. We didn’t know this, but apparently we were each using different browsers as well (ours was a web application) – further increasing the rigor of the testing.
The only flaw with my reasoning is that I expect people to also do this level of testing – which admittedly isn’t always the given I speak of it as. That said, I know that at least those initial tests that I was a part of were to that level – not only did we do basic tests and stress tests, we were told to throw anything at it we could think of, and we got pretty dang inventive!
Doug:
Under your reasoning, we should post the launch codes to every nuclear weapon in the US arsenal on the front page – above the fold – of every major newspaper in the country every time they change.
After all, if publicizing that information makes nuclear weapons insecure, they were never secure to begin with…
Jeff,
Your previous employer is likely out of business by now if that was their testing method. You do not test software by having 4 people doing random things to it in a coffee shop with the COO. You test software with test plans that cover all the code and test both expected and unexpected results.
It further demonstrates that you do not know the slightest idea about what you are spouting off about as you should know that a password is not an algorithm, it is data.
Cyber security is an extremely complicated discipline that is well above my and clearly well above your skillset. Faking online is difficult because there are a large number of people who are tech savvy enough to catch you.
Doug,
Actually, my former employer is a decently large “small” business in the Macon area – and I’m quite sure that if I gave the company names or the CEO/COO’s names (father/son team there), you, Erick, and quite possibly quite a few people statewide would recognize their names – they have hosted Saxby twice that I know of, once while I worked there and once after I left.
Our testing then was designed with rigor – we tested EVERYTHING, with the express goal of finding ANY bug – actual or potential.
Furthermore, the machines do not have passwords – their algorithm IS their security.
Why do you not see that the basic tenet of security vs transparency applies here as well?
You can be EITHER completely secure OR completely transparent, but you can never be BOTH at once.
Jeff,
If knowing the algorithm breaks the security, it is not secure. Read any literature on security. Look up the concept of Security Through Obscurity. It does not and never will work.
You can’t get much more open than a paper ballot.
I’d love for there to be a paper trail. When my grandkids ask who voted for all the debt suppliers, I can whip out my voting receipts and declare myself not-guilty.
Stands to reason that you’re only voting for the losers in the bunch. The winners always spend more than we have.
You are 100% correct.
Though I’m confident that the losers shall be vindicated, eventually.
In case you all have never seen these:
Serious one
Princeton University shows how easy it is to do and demonstrates how vulnerable our current voting machines are.
Funny one
Voting machines inadvertently reveal the winners before Election Day. Candidates vow to go on campaigning and wait to concede on Election Day as tradition dictates.
We can have fun with this topic. However, the public deserve open and fair elections and a process to help that it remains so.
Turkeys must be flying because I agree with byteme: Oxendine should have run for Secretary of State because as Governor he would have no responsibilitiy for the state voting system. Both are elected constitutional officers and the Secretary of State DOES NOT report to the Governor.
I wonder where does Oxendine plan to find the $50-60 million dollars to fund a replacement of the voting system?
Does anyone out there pontificating about replacing the system for a receipt actually know what is involved in getting a Federally Certified Voting System installed statewide in 159 counties?
A stopped clock is correct at least twice a day.
We already use ScanTron for provisional (and absentee I think?) ballots, so everything is already organized and ready to go. We probably need some more scanners, but that isn’t nearly as expensive as the touch screen machines.
How can Oxendine promise that Georgia will not go to court over elections issues? Once again his lack of understanding of the Georgia governmental hierarchy is troubling.
As Governor he would has no authority over state initiated litigation or the Attorney General. Both are elected constitutional officers and the AG DOES NOT report to the Governor either.
Those that follow legalise should recall that often Thurbert Baker would not cooperate with the Governor regarding litigation. You would think either that a “would be” Governor would know this basic information when making promises he can not keep, OR he knows it and is lying to the ignorant public….
As an average American I couldn’t really give a rat’s ass about what were the points before the court. And as a blogger who has no problem finding out what’s really going on I can’t believe the people who want to discuss theory when the horror stories abound, both with the laughable technology and overpriced machinery as well as the human element (a.k.a. criminal element) with paper ballots. Together with the voting irregularities, the anomalies with the totals which were statistically impossible, the “Butch and Hoppy Show”, the “seals that don’t seal”, ect… When nobody is getting arrested common sense would seem to suggest that the crooks are running the asylum. And I’ll say the same thing I’ve said all along: Computerized voting without a paper trail via private corporations with connections to politicians is something a first grade kid could easily determine ain’t on the up and up. And yet we have “experts” who “aren’t aware” of any problem. What a sick joke.
1) Educate me Gamefan what private corporations with connections to politicians do you speak of?
2) Tell us what company provides the voting machines in Georgia?
3) Give us of the name one statewide computerized voting system with a paper trail that is federally certified….just one!!!
The former head of elections for Georgia is going to work for the company that supplied the state’s $75 million electronic voting machine system.
Kathy Rogers, director of the secretary of state’s elections division, resigned Nov. 30 and has accepted a job with Diebold Election Systems, manufacturer of Georgia’s voting machines, according to several state officials. Rogers apparently will serve as a liaison between elections officials throughout the United States and Diebold.
http://www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org/article.php?id=6428
Robert Simms, Georgia’s Sec. of State’s Legislative Liaison and former lobbyist with Massey & Bowers (Diebold Election Systems lobbying firm in Georgia), continues the spin against election reform, transparency and accountability. Simms describes the status of election reform bill H.R. 811 “The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act” from the biased perspective that the voting machine industry has successfully inculcated in many election officials nationwide.
H.R. 811 mandates creating a paper ballot for every vote cast, allowing for meaningful recounts and audits of questionable election results. Georgia’s current voting system was deliberately designed to create no physical evidence, no paper ballots to document a voter’s intent. The big lie promulgated by opponents of fair elections is that H.R. 811 requires continued use of touch-screen voting machines, where the bill actually allows paper ballots to be used with optical scan systems. No official from Georgia’s Secretary of State office has ever acknowledged this fact since the bill’s introduction.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLFetoTO3zk
Georgia’s State Election Board, chaired by Secretary of State Karen Handel, votes to use tax dollars to officially oppose Congressman Rush Holt’s Bill H.R. 811, a bill that would substantively stop computerized election fraud.
Diebold Election Systems and their anti-democratic supporters are laughing all the way to the bank as taxpayer money will be used to lobby against transparency and fair election systems standards that would prohibit paperless touch screen voting systems. In Sarasota, FL, Cobb County, GA, and many other locations, these systems have demonstated that are completely un-auditable and incapable of running meaningful recounts, let alone return intial results that are believable and match exit poll data.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eAgFlPG76E
This is not correct, Diebold does not own Premier Elections Systems, they were sold to ES&S.
Karen Handel has only one vote on the State Election Board.
Where do you propose Georgia finds the $50-60 million to replace the system with a yet to be developed federally certified paper verifiable system.
Again who sells this non-existent system?
Q: Again who sells this non-existent system?
A: I guess nobody sells a non-existent system. If they did it would no longer be non-existent.
“This is not correct, Diebold does not own Premier Elections Systems, they were sold to ES&S.”
That depends on what your definition of “is” is. I would generally tend to believe the accuracy of the articles as of the date the articles were written, although you are correct in that these Corporations are definitely playing the corporate shell game. Of course one of the main reasons, many believe, is that “Diebold” has become a dirty word.
If you really want a credible voting system in thhis computer age let the “Lottery” people set it up. They don’t seem to have any problems.
They also give a paper receipt.
The current system of voting is efficient, thorough, and fair. What Oxendine and others advocate is a system similar to what they had in Florida or better yet what they had in Minnesota…
Honestly, do we need hanging chads in Georgia?
Thank Goodness that the Supreme Court upheld our system of voting today or who knows what would happen…
As you know, I’m not an Ox supporter at all, but this posting isn’t fair either.
Guys, those Diebold election machines are basically Windows terminals running a Microsoft Access app. SERIOUSLY. If you feel satisfied with their systems integrity, the I have a check from the Finance Minister of Nigeria for you.
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/voting_machines.png
Paper printouts (with random checks against the electronic counterpart) are an an absolute no-brainer. To argue against this you would have to be technologically illiterate… or just happy with recent Georgia election results and assuming that any corruption is working in your favor. I think it’s very its very telling that every politician anywhere near the SoS race promises to impose a paper trail, and then once elected promptly drops the campaign promise.
Here’s an 8 part series on the subject.
http://www.velvetrevolution.us – Cyber Security expert Stephen Spoonamore discusses electronic voting vulnerabilities.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyByZx5GEaw
They also have this open letter:
http://www.velvetrevolution.us/Campaigns/PaperBallots/
I agree with most of what they said. Some points are dubious, however.
I don’t know anything about the group, I just Googled it. But a lot of these folks tend to ignore one of the prime ingredients, which is you have to arrest and convict the occasional scam artist or vote stealer, which occur at many different levels. If someone can identify a 100% clean election I’d like to know about it. I don’t think one has ever existed. So where’s the outrage and where’s the orange jumpsuits? Heck, they even have museums with old wooden ballot boxes containing hidden trap doors, ect…
It’s a good point. It doesn’t matter how fool-proof you make the machinces, if you aren’t willing to take fraud seriously and punish it to the extent of the law, then it seems rather moot.
Comments on this entry are closed.