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[Friar]

I just saw this on salon concerning the damned voting machines:

excerpt:

Describe to me how the test was run.

Well, I was picturing that people would go up and touch the touch screen and verify that what they had pressed was registered as a vote. But the way it's run is, they have a test cartridge that they pop into the back of the machine, and it runs a script -- it runs several hundred different voters, like some type of emulation.

Sort of a simulation of what would happen during a day of voting.

Yeah. But the touch screens themselves weren't actually pressed. Nobody got to touch those. So we didn't see what was on them, and we didn't see the input that was put into the machine. All that we saw was the output that came out later. And, I mean -- that's like telling somebody that your calculator can add 2 plus 2, then pressing some buttons behind a screen, and then showing them that it says 4.

more: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/10/15/riverside_voting_machines/index.html

ps: you might need a sub for this.

[leftchick]

1. you can get a free one day pass on Salon...

it is worth the read.

from the end of article...

<snip>But if something bad happened, people might not know about it?

Yeah, exactly: Without a paper trail there's no way to know that. They say there's no known instance of fraud, but they make it so you can't tell if there's an instance of fraud, so that claim doesn't say very much.

Mischelle Townsend told Salon that you were "a young man who had a chip on his shoulder when he came in here." She said that you came into the test with a "closed-minded" attitude and that you didn't want to "listen to the facts."

This is exactly what I expect from her. Instead of responding to my arguments she'll just try to paint me in a bad light. I'm sure she didn't say anything about the fact that the voting kiosks rely on a Windows operating system in order for the results to be read, even though Sequoia and Mischelle Townsend said that one of the benefits of their system is that the results don't rely on Windows.

I fully expect Mischelle to not really address anything I say in my report. I expect her to say I have a chip on my shoulder or I don't listen to facts. I've never seen her deal with anyone who's technically literate in any other way.

[BevHarris]

2. Yes, the L&A test script --

You'll see that in both Sequoia and Diebold, so it's probably in ES&S as well.

In the Rob Georgia chapter it goes into the loony "logic and accuracy" scam they use to convince us that the machines are accurate (though, by downloading Chapter 2 of Black Box Voting http://www.blackboxvoting.com you'll see that they often do NOT count accurately).

The L&A test can be manual (according to Rob, they have you press just one vote!) or "automatic" where the machine runs a test script. Exactly. It's like saying "this calculator works, I'll prove it -- then you don't put in 2 + 2, instead they just show you a screen that says "4"

As reporter Christopher Bollyn said a year ago: It's "the bamboozling of America."

Bev Harris
http://www.blackboxvoting.com
http://www.BBVreport.org