This movie is a good introduction to the topic of electronic voting. but it is quite dated and leaves some wrong impressions with the viewer. Since its release (prior to the 2004 elections) there have been several elections as well as numerous studies (to name a few: the Conyers Report, GAO Report of Sept 2005, the Carter-Baker Commission, the Princeton Center Report)which have unanimously found fault with electronic voting accuracy and security. This film leaves the impression that Rep. Holt's bill (then 550, now 811) is the answer to our prayers. Unfortunately, this is not true. In fact, in its reincarnation, its good features are matched by far more dangerous ones which assure that elections will stay out of the reach or supervision of the voters.

After the movie's release, I spent eighteen months distributing it through my free lending library project. In that time, almost 3200 copies of "Invisible Ballots" were distributed.

I no longer send it out, although I still have a thousand copies left. I prefer that people see newer and more up-to-date documentaries on the subject: among them, "Commander "N Thief", "Stealing America: Vote by Vote", "Swing State Ohio", "No Umbrella", "American Blackout", "Eternal Vigilance" and "The Right To Count". (Don't forget the HBO documentary "Stealing Democracy".) If you would like to read a review of any or all of these, you are welcome to visit www.OpEdNews.com and go to the writers archives where the reviews are listed among the other articles and reviews that I have written.

I welcome any correspondence on this topic. It is near and dear to me. Without free, fair, secure and transparent elections, with full citizen oversight we are justifying lowering voter confidence and making democracy nothing more than an ill-fitting hat.

Joan Brunwasser, Voting Integrity Editor, OpEdNews
joan@OpEdNews.com

Just thank one of two thing, The idiots that voted those two in for a 2nd term OR- the rigged electronic voting machines that elected him in.
We will never know the second because conveniently no hard copy was made from said machines.

Its a disgrace that the leader of the democratic world had two elections in which the votes cast could come into question. Lets hope the next one will set a new standard for security and accountability.

quantum, please get some more smarts about how electronic voting works. You have a DRE which records votes. It may or may not produce a paper verifiable voting record. It does produce one final print out with the results for the open-close period of the machine.

Now, the DRE cartridges or memory cards are all taken and put into a tabulator. (This software is already proved to be easily hacked, but that's another issue) The tabulator reads all the cartridges and puts them in a nice database to report the election results.

At no time does anyone verify the paper receipt matches what went into the electronic results. (Don't believe me, how did Franklin county precinct get 4000 extra votes for Bush on a machine that can only record about 300 votes in a day? What happened was a communication glitch as the cart was inserted or something and the data got screwed up... No one caught it until citizens downloaded the official abstract and noticed the huge precinct results. That's right, no sanity checks are EVER performed before they post the winner)

Even during a recount in Ohio, where by law you HAVE to compare 3% of the precincts paper results to final electronic results, THEY refused to do this in any county in Ohio. Sure, counties that used punchcards did do handcounts of 3% for punchcards, but NO county did hand counts for any electronic DREs.

Why do you have to put your head in your ass and say crap like victicrat? Just because your brownshirt fascist-thug party does NOT care about honest elections, doesn't mean that people who do care about honest, verifiable, guaranteed election integrity are losers.

Take your machiavellian logic and go hack your car's brake line.

quantummushroom asked, "1) What about the ballot card? ... It's what gets dropped in the ballot box. What if the voting machine records and the cards' records don't match?"

That's not how it works. Much like your car key, the smart card grants you the ability to use a voting machine. The only thing that card does is signify that you may vote. Before it is ejected from the machine, each smart card is marked as invalid so you can't vote twice. In the normal course of events, the voter returns the used card to a poll worker, who can mark the voter card as valid again and hand to the next voter. [1] Wash, rinse, repeat.

The only record of your vote is on the machine itself. There are no records that have to match up. You, the voter, get no receipt. If the machine catches fire, several hundred or thousand votes may be lost. [2] Gee, it sure would suck if a one or several machines suddenly had amnesia at the end of the day.

One point that I'll mention briefly now and come back to later: Normal voters do *not* get a printed receipt. The internal printer is only used for initial and final tallies [3].

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quantummushroom stated, "2) That sure is a lot of sneakernet work to infect thousands of machines, one at a time." and "3) Where I live, an armed deputy is assigned to almost every polling place."

The machines run Windows CE [4]. They're vulnerable to viruses. [5] All you need to do to infect a machine is to open the side door, "secured" by what amounts to a desk-drawer lock, insert your our memory card, and reboot. [6] This can be accomplished in under a minute. You certainly won't raise eyes until you've used a voting machine for over twenty.

Let's look at two ways to infect thousands of machines:

First, if you already know which machine will act as the accumulator, you don't have to infect thousands of machines. At the end of the night, the memory cards are pulled from every machine and fed to one that adds all of the cards up. Just infect that machine. And then, if that card is taken to the next polling station for accumulation of several polling stations, even more results can be manipulated. [7]

Second, I quote: "A poll worker, election official, technician, or other person who had private access to a machine for as little as one minute could use these methods without detection. Poll workers often do have such access; for instance, in a widespread practice called “sleepovers,” machines are sent home with poll workers the night before the election [8]."

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quantummushroom stated: "4) If a victicrat wins any election in a time of war, I'd certainly suspect fraud."

Strawman argument that has no bearing on Diebold machine security.

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quantummushroom stated: "5) theo47 is correct. Eternal vigilance is the price for liberty."

There's no way to be vigilant while voting with one of these machines because there's no paper trail and no way to guarantee that you voted the way you voted. If the machines break, your vote is lost.

Consider a different model of electronic voting that does offer these things: first off, the voting machine doesn't record any votes. All it does it help you pick candidates. When you're done, hit the print button, which will print out a two-part receipt, of which you keep half. It should be time-stamped, include a way to identify the voter but not reveal their name, and the votes in plain text.

A voter can read it, verify it, put the submission in a ballot box to be scanned later, and take the receipt home. The receipt is a backup, if you will, that could be used if, for example, the ballot box caught fire.

A final thought: Diebold makes ATM's. Do you think they would they use a lock that can be picked in 10 seconds by an amateur [9] on those?

[1] http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/ts-paper.pdf 3.3.2 Voting
[2] ibid. 2.1.2 Denial-of-Service Attacks
[3] ibid. 3.1 Hardware
[4] ibid. 3.1 Hardware
[5] ibid. 4.3 Demonstration Voting Machine Virus
[6] ibid. 2.2.1 Direction Installation
[7] ibid. 4.4 Demonstration Denial-of-Service Attack
[8] Marc Songini. E-voting security under fire in San Diego lawsuit. Computerworld, August 2006.
[9] http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/ts-paper.pdf 2.2.1 Direct Installation