get away with it. This would include appointed officials accountable only to their party, and to the Governors who gave them their jobs.

I have been following the curiously quiet controversy regarding audit-proof electronic voting machines for a couple of years. Aside from a few who are paid to say otherwise, I know of no computer professionals who approve of voting machines that create no paper audit trail, and most I have spoken with consider such systems to be absolutely unacceptable.

The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003, HR 2239 introduced by Rep. Rush Holt, D- NJ, would mandate the use of humanly-readable paper ballot print-outs to create a reliable audit trail for manual verification of electronic vote counts. In my opinion, this piece of legislation is the ONLY meaningful political cause or issue in the United States today. Please return to these websites after you read this letter, and consider putting some real time, effort, and money into backing HR 2239:

http://verify.stanford.edu/evote.html

http://holt.house.gov/issues2.cfm?id=5996

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:HR02239:@@@L&summ2=m&

Earlier this year I completed my own Oracle Database Administrator training, six months of intensive study designed to prepare the student to install, configure, operate, and maintain databases for Fortune 500 companies, major financial institutions, etc. It is reasonable to say that I understand how database technology works, and the Diebold vote counting process uses exactly that, an ordinary database running on Microsoft Access.

I have reviewed the Scoop article quoted and linked to below, and in my opinion, the Diebold electronic voting system was designed, on purpose, to enable tampering with election results. There are no meaningful security features of any kind, and the marginal security measures possible with the Outlook database were disabled by Diebold.

"Hacking" the Diebold system to alter election results, requires no special skills or tools. The article in Scoop, plus a "For Dummies" MS Access manual, would provide all the information any election official would need, to safely and reliably alter election results.

I will presume that the people who designed the database architecture for the Diebold voting system were not casual amateurs. If this is so, the creation of multiple duplicate tables, for use in building different reports, can only be explained by a deliberate choice to enable election officials to alter election results and get away with it. The concept of "keeping two sets of books" applies exactly to the way the Diebold database is designed, and there is no legitimate reason for it: The second and third copies are not backups and have no "redundancy" or "load balancing" function.

The VNS national exit polling service was quietly discontinued a couple of years ago, and no meaningful explanation was offered: Voter News Service representatives only said that their results were "unreliable", due to an unspecified "breakdown". Exit polling is used by international election observers, to verify that votes are being counted properly.

Please consider contacting your Congressional representatives, to tell them that you will make or withhold a campaign contribution on the sole basis of their support or otherwise of HR 2239.

Please forward this to anyone you think may be interested.

Thank you,

Steve Kinney

From the Scoop article, at:

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00065.htm

(this site is frequently down due to very heavy traffic; if you can not get in, use this mirror site: http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/insideUSvote.html )

Inside A U.S. Election Vote Counting Program

Tuesday, 8 July 2003

Article: Bev Harris

[...]

GEMS receives the incoming votes and stores them in a vote ledger. But then, we found, it makes another set of books with a copy of what is in vote ledger 1. And at the same time, it makes yet a third vote ledger with another copy. The Elections Supervisor never sees these three sets of books. All she sees is the reports she can run: Election summary (totals, county wide) or a detail report (totals for each precinct). She has no way of knowing that her GEMS program is using multiple sets of books, because the GEMS interface draws its data from an Access database, which is hidden. And here is what is quite odd: On the programs we tested, the Election summary (totals, county wide) come from the vote ledger 2 instead of vote ledger 1. [...] If she asks for a detailed report for some precincts, though, her report comes from vote ledger 1. Therefore, if you keep the correct votes in vote ledger 1, a spot check of detailed precincts (even if you compare voter-verified paper ballots) will always be correct.

[...]

One can overwrite the "admin" password with another, copied from another GEMS installation. It will appear encrypted; no worries, just cut and paste. In this example, we saved the old "admin" password so we could replace it later and delete the evidence that we'd been there. An intruder can grant himself administrative privileges by putting zeros in the other boxes, following the example in "admin." [...] Using this simple way to bypass password security, an intruder, or an insider, can enter GEMS programs and play with election databases to their heart's content.

[...]

Then, we deleted all the references to Evildoer and, because we noticed that the audit log never noticed when the admin closed the GEMS program before, we tidily added an entry for that. Access encourages those who create audit logs to use auto-numbering, so that every logged entry has an uneditable log number. Then, if one deletes audit entries, a gap in the numbering sequence will appear. However, we found that this feature was disabled, allowing us to write in our own log numbers. We were able to add and delete from the audit without leaving a trace.

[...]

As you can see, the audit log appears pristine. In fact, when using Access to adjust the vote tallies we found that tampering never made it to the audit log at all.

More info on election rigging and electronic voting may be found at:

http://peacedeland.org/evote.html

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