Skyhunter said:
Visibility does not necessarily mean access. Access to the source code and auditability of the process to insure accuracy does not mean that those overseeing the process have the ability to manipulate the data.
Perhaps "access" is a better word then -with paper balloting, specifically, though, access and visibility are the same thing. If you can see the ballots themselves, you can access and manipulate them. And while I am concerned with fraud (paper ballots disappearing, or fake paper ballots materializing), error is a much, much bigger concern to me. Fraud (by my estimation) claims hundreds or thousands of votes in a Presidential election, whereas error (known fact) claims upwards of a
million.
storing the results in an excel spreadsheet gives not only visibility, but also easy access to manipulate the results on an unprecedented scale!
Excel spreadsheets can - and
are, in this case (actually, I think it's Access databases, but same diff) - encrypted with securtity that would take
weeks for a supercomputer to crack. They are as secure as secure gets. Far beyond what a paper ballot can be.
Much of the issue with electronic balloting, as I've said before, is articulated very well by the name of that site: Black-Box Voting. I'm sure the creator of the site knew what that name meant, but if they had seen the secondary implication and the irony, they would have picked another name. A "black box" is a box inside which something happens
that people don't understand and because they don't understand it, they fear it. The very name "Black Box Voting" says that the site is all about irrational, baseless fear! They may as well have titled the site: "Ignorance and Rhetoric".
People talk about the lack of security in a spreadsheet, but don't think about encryption. People talk about the lack of backups, but don't think about backups! Heck - my dad runs a business off an el-cheapo Compaq pc and I can't convince him to stop using floppy disks (which are horribly unreliable) or back up his files on CD every now and then. But my business has a real-time backup and I do a second weekly backup. It is a simple issue to back up a digital file - just write it to two disks at once (it's called RAID 1, or "mirroring" and costs about $5 for the feature on your motherboard and up to about $100 for a second hard drive).
To simply call BBV's allegations crack pottery is ignoring a glaringly obvious weakness in the current system. Whether or not the results of the last election, or the 2000 election were correct is a moot point.
No. When a site flat-out lies about it's primary issue, there is no other word that can be used to describe it. I had felt it before, but pattylou was nice enough to provide references to fabrications of BBV, to prove it. Now I use the term without worrying about it being considered rhetoric.
Yes, sure, they do every now and then post a legitimate issue (so does Rense!) But just because a site
sometimes gets the issue right, doesn't make it a legitimate site.
BBV has demonstrated that the system is vulnerable. If someone can demonstrate a vulnerability in a security system, it behooves us to fix the problem.
Everyone already knew there are vulnerabilities. BBV added crackpottery to the issue, and that is not helpful.
Trusting our elections to corporations with using proprietary systems that are not audit-able is insanity. Maybe I am paranoid, but I don't trust Diebold to have my better interests at heart! Call me old-fashioned but, I want verification.
When was the last time you used an ATM? Did you notice the nameplate on it?
