[Dean's World] Dave Price: Why Hugo Chavez Must Be Kept Away From U.S. Voting Machines

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Dave Price:
Why Hugo Chavez Must Be Kept Away From U.S. Voting Machines
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1143959964.shtml


   In an [1]earlier post, Dean mentioned a Venezuelan company linked to
   Chavez has purchased a U.S. election machine company. This is far more
   important than most people realize.
   MIT mathematicians using Benford's law have essentially proved Chavez
   stole the last election, in which Chavez faced recall. They calculated
   that the odds of the voter tabulations given happening without
   tampering were about 100:1.
   [2]Benford's Law is basically a way of looking at the number of things
   in lists. It's a statistical law that says in a random sample of
   tabulations, a certain percentage should begin with the number 1, a
   certain percentage with 2, etc. The Venezuelan election tallies were
   way out of line with what the law predicts.
   Doug Schoen, from Bill Clinton's polling firm, was pretty [3]blunt:

     Schoen has little doubt what happened. =E2I think it was a massive
     fraud,=E2 he told me. =E2Our internal sourcing tells us that there was
     fraud in the central commission.=E2 This was not the first time he
     has encountered such things. =E2The same thing happened in Serbia in
     1992, by [President Slobodan] Milosevic. He did it again in the
     local elections in 1996. As a result, hundreds of thousands of
     people died. Had he been caught [in this fraud] in 1992, this would
     not have happened.=E2

   How could this happen, when the Carter Center monitored the elections?
   Well, [4]the answer is in the software. The Carter Center auditors
   caved into demands by Chavez' people to use their own random number
   generator to select which voting centers would be monitored rather
   than the Carter Center's; one can guess the selection probably wasn't
   actually very random. And the voting machines themselves allowed
   two-way communication, meaning their totals could be altered from the
   central computer. This could have been caught by monitors at those
   machines, but if Chavez' people knew which ones were monitored, they
   could easily have simply avoided tampering with those particular
   machines. No fraud was detected at the time, and so the elections were
   given the Carter Center's stamp of approval. It was only some time
   later that statistical analysis showed it was extremely unlikely that
   the election tallies were accurate.
   Think about that: not only was the election stolen, it was certified.
   That's quite an accomplishment, when you consider it. Despots like
   Saddam Hussein might have won 99.9% of the vote, but none ever managed
   to win the veneer of legitimacy that Chavez has acquired.
   Dean's right. Having this subtle, effective tyrant anywhere near our
   voting machines is a serious threat to American democracy. We
   shouldn't take this lightly.
   The whole point of electronics and software is to manipulate
   information. That makes them great tools for lots of applications, but
   assuring election integrity is not one of them. If you value your
   democratic rights, demand your election officials use paper ballots
   that can be manually recounted and whose physical integrity and chain
   of custody can be confirmed.
   Again, I really can't emphasize enough how important this could be. As
   a software developer, I can tell you there are a million ways to
   sabotage something like this; very bad things happen merely by
   accident all the time. Trust me when I tell you that you wouldn't want
   an absolutely honest programmer anywhere near your election results,
   let alone ones who may already be complicit in one stolen election.
   Our most important freedom is the freedom to choose our leaders. And
   the price of keeping that freedom secure, as the saying goes, is
   eternal vigilance.

References

   1. http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1143875868.shtml
   2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benfords_law
   3. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/baroneweb/mb_040820_3.htm
   4. http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=3D110005586