[ale] OT: VoterGA eVoting suit -- oral args on appeal before the GA Supreme Court

[aaron]

On 2009, Jul, 15, , at 12:37 AM, Richard Bronosky wrote:
> I hope the VoterGA lawyers are making the argument that technology
> isn't what is being opposed.

The law suit is not any kind of indictment of computers or information
technology as a whole, but instead targets the improper (actually
incompetent) application of computer technologies to the voting process,
specifically in the way that the current machines fail to meet
constitutional requirements on several points. While it would go beyond
the scope of a law suit to try to specify what a valid and legal
computer based voting solution might look like, the laws imply that
voter verified, human readable physical evidence, like a paper ballot,
is needed for a system to meet the statutory standards.

> That there are technical solutions to
> electronic voting, but they eliminate a single corporation's ability
> to contract exclusive rights to licensing the solution. That is the
> reason the current process is in place. Because there is no money to
> be made in paper ballots or equally reliable electronic voting. Even
> as a die hard capitalist, I can't endorse this method of making a
> buck.

 From my years of activism on the issue I have a thorough knowledge of
exactly how Diebold leveraged itself into a position of total monopoly
control over our State's elections. My view is that it was a heavily
rigged game that led Georgia officials to squander $132 million tax
dollars buying black box voting systems that have now locked them into
continuing to squander millions more of our tax dollars every year to
provide secure storage and transport for the systems and pay off the
insider consultant voodoo certification hacks at the Kennisaw State
"Election Center" plus maintain the proprietary Diebold software
licensing and service contracts. It was a predictable and frequently
repeated case of Corporate Welfare State corruption that inescapably
results from the privatization of public services. This always ends
with the the public need of the many subsidizing the private greed
of the few.  For instance, when a few counties in Utah first started
switching to these high overhead Diebold zero-evidence voting systems,
a budget analysis showed that the cost of running elections doubled,
and that is before adding in the amortized expense of purchasing
the touch screen voting machines themselves.

So I'm fairly certain these incompetent election system designs
are more a result of corporate self interest greed motives than
an intentional effort to commit election fraud. The singular
function of the established structures of corporation is to
eliminate competition and achieve monopoly in total and callous
disregard for any external costs or consequences. Thus you find
Diebold leveraging the protectionist abuses of patent and copyright
and trade secret laws now entrenched in the Corporate Welfare
State to lock out fair market competition.  Thus all the secret,
proprietary software, and secret, insider club "certification"
rituals that have produced a voting system that is incompetent
to the task because it destroys the essential public transparency
required for an election process.

The corporation is even allowed to blockade public freedom of
information access to whatever aspects of it's work for the State
that it declares to be "Trade Secrets", and Diebold has extended
this to include all of the "certification" reports and any listing
of the actual itemized amounts that appear in the purchase and
service contracts being paid for with our tax dollars.

In a similarly cavalier and reckless pursuit of greed, Diebold
expended extraordinary efforts to coral the State into installing
the zero-evidence version of the voting systems by essentially
defrauding the State legislature about the system's ability to
provide a paper ballot audit trail.  The extraordinary effort was
needed because a voter verified, paper ballot audit trail was
clearly specified in the common sense voting system guidelines
generated by the Georgia voting commission that evaluated
potential new election processes in 2001.

Designing and installing zero-evidence systems entrenches and
sheilds the Diebold monopoly at every turn. At the core, the
design removes all accountability from the company for the
accuracy and reliability of their products -- extremely important
when the laws regarding vote fraud and election tampering might
even trump the sacred "Trade Secret" protections! The absence of
evidence also means that public evaluation of the reliability and
accuracy of the systems is impossible, so there is no basis of
comparison for finding superior, lower cost products -- innovation
is undermined and free market competition is eliminated entirely.

We can hope that the VoterGA suit is successful and provides the
means of dismantling the Diebold monopoly.  The challenge from
there, though -- the much larger challenge -- will be designing
a cost effective replacement that salvages the parts of the
computer assisted voting systems that have value (eg. avoiding
over and under voting, addressing needs of blind or disabled
voters) while providing the physical evidence and public
transparency needed to conduct constitutionally legal and
transparently verifiable elections.

peace
aaron







> On 7/14/09, Aaron Ruscetta <arxaaron at gmail.com> wrote:
>> [ A thank you to Bob Toxen for the off list request for
>> information that prompted this post. ]
>>
>> I was able to attend yesterday's (7/13) Georgia Supreme Court
>> appeal hearing regarding the VoterGA law suit.  The multiple
>> counts of the suit challenge the constitutionality of using
>> Diebold's black box, zero-evidence computer systems to
>> conduct our State elections. [ see <http://VoterGA.org> ]
>>
>> Unfortunately, my permission to record video of the session
>> was withdrawn at the last hour based on fabricated concerns
>> that I was not directly employed by a corporate media interest.
>> Quality independent media distributions supporting the free
>> speech of the citizens are apparently not welcome in Georgia.
>> So much for those fraudulent party platforms claiming to
>> support transparency in government.
>>
>> Given that I can't SHOW everyone exactly what transpired
>> in the court room, y'all will have to settle for  my own
>> "no spin zone" review of the proceedings:
>>
>> I felt the VoterGA legal team did a much better presentation
>> of the facts than they did with oral arguments in the lower
>> court. The State's lawyers, of course, could do nothing but
>> trot out their flimsy, worn out litany of customized corporate
>> propaganda -- the exact same steaming pile of half truths and
>> misdirection and misrepresentation that I have watched these
>> Diebold apologists dive under dozens of times -- apparently
>> the only recourse for someone trying to bury or excuse the
>> blatant core incompetence of these proprietary, paperless
>> computerized election systems.
>>
>> A fellow informed observer expressed disappointment and
>> concern that the judges did not pose more questions, given
>> the potentially sidetracking technicalities of the issues.
>> Of course, it may be that the courts are simply more concerned
>> with points of legal precedent. Or it may be that these judges
>> actually possess the common sense to realize that all the
>> banter about system certifications and security codes and
>> memory cards and holding secret software in escrow is nothing
>> but insipid obfuscation.
>>
>> All we can hope is that the members of our State's highest
>> court can muster the simple wisdom to see through all the
>> smoke screens and uphold that, under our State constitution,
>> it is impossible to conduct a legal or legitimate election
>> using systems that are entirely incapable of producing the
>> essential, untainted, voter verified, physical ballot
>> evidence by which the citizens can publicly secure, audit
>> and validate their election results.
>>
>> It will most likely be at least 60 days before the court
>> will announce their decisions.
>>
>> peace
>> aaron
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>
> -- 
> Sent from my mobile device
>
> .!# RichardBronosky #!.
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