Expelling The Cybernetic Trojan Horse:

50 million American voters are scheduled to use electronic-voting machines during our upcoming general election. Nevertheless, the USA's technopolistic faith in e-voting is being criticized worldwide because it's tantamount to wheeling a cybernetic Trojan horse through our city gates that will destroy our democracy while we slumber in indifference [1].

However, resistance to e-voting is growing, and there are signs that a new national consensus is slowly emerging. The sustained public outcry from a coalition of computer scientists and political activists has finally awakened not only California Secretary of State Kevin Shelly but also the election officials in New Hampshire and Maine, who recently -- and very much to their credit -- decided to decertify the use of e-voting machines inside their states.

And this past Sunday, the New York Times Editorial Board pointed out several serious flaws in the secret testing process that is conducted by supposedly "independent" laboratories to ensure the reliability of the various models of e-voting machines [3]. Employees at these labs have disclosed, among their other admissions, that they cannot conduct genuinely independent tests, and that all of their test results probably have been corrupted, because those tests are paid for -- and unduly influenced by -- the e-voting machine manufacturers!

In response, the NY Times has called for the US Election Assistance Commission to reform e-voting's compromised testing process by: (1) implementing truly independent lab tests that are paid for by the US government; (2) requiring public disclosure of both the methodology and the procedures by which this testing is done; (3) developing rigorous standards as to how hardware and software are to be tested, and how already-identified flaws are to be fixed; (4) imposing tough civil and criminal penalties on election officials and e-voting machine manufacturers who try to pass off uncertified hardware and software as if it had been certified; and (5) requiring election officials in all 50 states to prepare mandatory non-electronic backup systems, because their e-voting machines probably will be legislatively decertified before the general election.

Conclusions: We are well past the point where our hard-won democracy can be used as an experimental guinea pig for an inadequately-tested and unproven technology. Paperless electronic-voting machines simply aren't ready for prime-time, and must NOT be used in our general election, because they're inherently vulnerable to: (A) malicious codes; (B) bugs; (C) viruses that can be inserted via the manufacturer's after-market software patches, or through hackers; (D) external remote and internal on-site hacking; and (E) other serious

The Bottom Line: After the USA's 2000 presidential-election meltdown in Florida, the whole world will be watching us to determine whether our democracy is real or a sham, so we can, and indeed must, conduct a better national election this time; therefore, all 50 states must promptly decertify the current generation of paperless e-voting machines, because we already know that their electoral use is presumptively unconstitutional, and it will otherwise subject this presidential election to inevitable legal challenges, followed by embarrassing judicial invalidations in every e-voting state [4].

ENDNOTES

[1] Read numerous articles at this website concerning the unreliability of e-voting machines: Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering In The 21st Century. If the click-on doesn't work, paste this into your webserver instead: http://www.blackboxvoting.org

[2] Read Governor Dean's 6-3-04 CD essay now by clicking on the blue words: Hold Up on E-voting.

If the click-on doesn't work, paste this into your webserver:

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0603-05.htm

[3] Read the NYT's 5-30-04 editorial now by clicking on the blue words: Who Tests E-Voting Machines?
If the click-on doesn't work, paste this into your webserver:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/30/opinion/30SUN1.html?th (You have to subscribe but it's free)

[4] According to the US Supreme Court's holding in Bush v. Gore, which made GWB our President-select: (A) if a state's election is legally challenged and a recount is warranted; (B) the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause requires that state to use the same recount standard in every county to verify the intent of its voters; (C) however, electronic-voting is intrinsically unverifiable by the customary hard-copy recount standard, because e-voting machines lack a paper-printer attachment, so they cannot create a hard-copy record of the voters' intent; therefore (D) the votes that are cast in e-voting counties will not pass constitutional muster, because their voters aren't equally protected if the voter's intent cannot be verified by a hard-copy standard!
Read the US Supreme Court's unedifying 5 to 4 opinion by clicking on the blue words: Bush v. Gore

If the click-on doesn't work, paste this into your webserver:
http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/00-949.ZPC.html

Author: Evan Augustine Peterson III, J.D.