[ale] Its over. Maybe (DRE specs and accumulation processes)

[aaron]

On Thursday 04 November 2004 13:37, Michael Still wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Nov 2004 03:14:25 +0000, aaron <aaron at pd.org> wrote:
> > On Thursday 04 November 2004 05:14, Michael Still wrote:
> > > Ok... I need to clear some things up..
> > ... and a clarification / correction  of your clarifications

[snip] 
> > Each precinct does drive the DRE PCMCIA cards to the tabulation center,
> > but
> > FIRST they read all the cards for the precinct into one DRE machine that's
> > been designated as the "accumulator" system and is equipped with a MODEM. 
> > 
> 
> Ok the modem system is used only for tabulating votes in a quick manor
> so as to make the major networks happy.. the official certified vote
> is via the driven in cards.

Supposedly, for each county wide tabulation, each PCMCIA card can (and will) 
only be read into the County Central Tabulation system ONCE, regardless of 
whether that was done by remote connection Modem from the precinct or by 
short connection Modem at the County tabulation center. 

I am not sure if they do a second, county wide comparison tabulation of the 
PCMCIA cards for the final "certifaction" processes.

> > > If his car crashes and burns up then the votes can still be read from
> > > the diebold machines from one of at least two other long term storage
> > > devices.
> > 
> > This is not correct.  Besides the PCMCIA card, there is no other complete,
> > independent, long term DRE vote data processed and retained by the voting
> > machines. The DRE machines have a single ballot memory space, but that is
> > cleared at the beginning of each voter session, so it is obviously not
> >  "long  term".  The systems do store an internal flash memory record
> >  of all the voter actions on the touch screen,
> >  but this is basically a compact list of the X/Y
> > coordinates touched by the voters. While the data can be used to re-create
> > the ballots and votes, it is not a complete or independent record.
[snip] 
> I beleive that you are incorrect here.  From talking with one of the
> big cheese's at the KSU Electronic Voting Center (or whatever its
> called), he said that they have redundancies specifically for the case
> of losing the cards in route to the tabulating center by having
> storage in the Diebold machine itself.

My information on the nature of the internal DRE storage is correct and comes 
from information and Diebold documentation provided by Roxanne Jekot, who has 
done extensive (as in years of) research on the DRE machines, tabulation 
processes and, as much as possible, the proprietary software. I have 
presented this information in testimony before involved committees of the 
2004 Georgia General Assembly, and it was never bebutted by reps of Diebold 
or the Secretary of State's office.

The only complete, tabulated vote counts for each DRE are on the PCMCIA card. 
The only "back up" is the internal flash memory recording of the touch screen 
activities of the voters, which could theoretically be used to recreate the 
ballots and rebuild the voting data. There is no third, long term accumulated 
record at all. 

>  I do not think he had reason to lie to me.

Actually, they have every reason to lie to you. If they lie successfully, as 
KSU Computer Department head Brit Williams did when he helped Cathy Cox 
bamboozle the Georgia Assembly into buying into the paperless Diebold DRE 
monopoly against the recommendations of the Assembly's own voting system 
research committee, then Brit Williams and Kennisaw State keep getting 
$500,000 of our tax dollars every year to continue marketing the Diebold 
corporation to Georgia while performing pointless, redundant "certification" 
procedures on their secretive systems without full access to the source code. 
If the public is deceived into thinking these machines are functional and / 
or secure, then the public demand for valid, HAVA required paper audit trails 
and Open Source Software will go away. 

DRE voting systems which provide a voter verified paper audit trail (as is 
required of any DRE machine used in Nevada, the nation's second state wide 
DRE implementation), the need for KSU's involvement vanishes because any 
voter can certify that any DRE machine is functioning and counting properly 
at any time, regardless of who manufactured the machine or what software and 
operating systems are running on it.

Tracking the corporate voting system involvement, NASED history and political 
agency activities of KSU Professor Brit Williams is a quick course on 
questionable ethics and conflicts of interest surrounding these voting 
systems. It also fully explains how Georgia got stuck with these corrupt 
systems and why KSU is on Diebolds  corporate welfare gravy train. BTW, Mr. 
Williams now serves on that 15 member, Federal E.A C. advisory panel I 
mentioned earlier.   [ I have a lot of the NASED / Williams / Cox / Georgia 
history outlined in my testimony paper to the 5 (of 18) International Fair 
Elections commission members that examined Georgia's voting processes last 
month (and whose final report strongly recommended Voter Verified Paper Audit 
Trails). Copies of both are available on request.]

> Also, he indicated that the storage of the votes in the system was not
> as simple as a coordinate system of X's and Y's.  I would not trust
> anyone to tell me what the specific data storage system was unless he
> had seen the source code to the system (which this guy has).

It's not a matter of seeing the source code, though versions of the Diebold 
code have been obtained and examined by my sources as well.  {That's how we 
learned that the ZERO SUM routine that is supposed to scan the systems at 
start of day and insure that there is no resident data and no votes are 
pre-loaded on the PCMCIA cards consists of single statement: printf("000000") 
].  It's also a matter of the physics. There's just not enough Flash in the 
boxes to store much more than the basic touch screen activity. The X / Y list 
is my own simplified description of what gets stored and only serves as an 
analogy, but I do know that the Flash memory record it is NOT a complete, 
independent, data base format copy of the data that is collected, processed 
and stored on the PCMCIA card.

Just the facts, ma'am... at least as I have been able to ascertain them.

peace
aaron