You can listen to this newscast in its entirety online at www.fsrn.org.
Join us Thursday and Friday as we bring you two exclusive documentaries.
One takes a look at contemporary Maoist India.
The other chronicles the centuries-old struggle for indigenous rights in Colombia.
That's Thursday and Friday on FSRN.
Our regular newscast resumes on Monday, the 27th of November.
From KPFK in Los Angeles, this is Aura Bogado.
And this is radio station WBAI New York, where the time is 7 o'clock.
Time once again for Off The Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could they would.
Bum diddly bum for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood, bum diddly bum.
Bum diddly bum.
And we're being encouraged by the Pergamos Off The Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening.
And boy do we have a lot of people here tonight.
I don't know what the occasion is.
Usually the show before Thanksgiving is kind of a skeleton show,
but I think we have more people here than ever.
Let's see, Jim, I see you over there.
I'm here, skeleton and all.
All right, how about that.
Arseny, welcome.
Hello there.
I don't know if your microphone's on, though.
Hello there.
Your microphone's a yard away from your face.
I think that's part of the problem.
Why don't you move it a little closer?
Yeah, it's all about the microphone and radio.
Now, try that one more time.
Hello there.
Yeah, that's better.
All right.
Redbird.
Good evening.
I'll get to you in a second.
We've got Bernie S. down in Philadelphia.
I like this Thanksgiving togetherness.
It is, isn't it?
It really is.
And over on the other side of the room is Not Kevin.
Hello.
And a couple of voices from the past.
Well, Phil, we've seen you recently from Make Magazine.
Yes, hello.
And, boy, I haven't heard this voice in a while, Jeff, from years ago.
Yes, I'm back.
And I love the changes.
You've got new equipment in here now.
The sidewalk's done downstairs.
Didn't we move and somehow you found us?
Yes.
We'll talk about that later.
But nice to see you again.
In fact, we saw you on Thursday at the Steve Rambam presentation.
Yes.
Rambam.
I was about to say Rambo, not Rambam.
I'm sorry.
It's spelled Rambam.
I keep doing it.
I'm sorry, Steve.
I know you're out there listening.
Rambam.
I'm trying.
I'm really trying.
We came to the HOPE Conference, and it wasn't over until last Thursday night.
So we felt – I mean, you did it in New Jersey of all places.
We did it.
That's a calling card right there that everybody in Jersey has to attend.
I have to say it was a windswept night, much like tonight actually.
Raining, windy, very hostile conditions.
I was very surprised.
I thought maybe we'd get a few dozen people at the most, and that place was packed.
Standing room only.
And not much of that either.
No.
And Steve went on for three hours.
He did.
Three hours without a break.
Three scintillating hours.
It was really something.
It was a great talk.
I've heard nothing but good things about it.
The audio is online already.
If you go to hope.net or hope6.net, I think they're both the same place now.
And just look at the panels.
You'll see a new one for Privacy Is Dead, Get Over It.
And you'll hear all three hours there.
We'll have the video available pretty soon.
But I want to thank everybody just for getting together, especially Arseny.
You set this all up.
You're welcome.
Over at Stevens.
And I understand the people at Stevens were pretty happy with you too.
Yeah.
I mean, part of the audience was Stevens students.
And then we had the dean too.
Yeah, the dean was there.
The dean showed up.
We were all kind of scared.
I didn't know who he was.
So he was all like, oh.
He knew who we were.
Yeah.
No, and I heard he got a pretty good response.
And all the people I thanked thanked me.
So it was good.
That's good.
We brought a bit of hope to Hope Oaken.
I'm not going to get expelled.
That's good.
That's always good.
And Bernie, you came all the way up from Philadelphia to witness this event.
I did, over many leaf-covered train rails, which apparently is a big deal as far as delaying trains.
But I was really impressed with the turnout.
And everything was really interesting.
And I'd like us to do more of this kind of stuff before the next sort of like—
What, have our speakers arrested so we have to reschedule them?
Exactly.
Or if we can't arrange that, just have speakers that can't wait for Hope to do another presentation.
I don't know if Stevens or other venues might be receptive to that.
But it was so good.
I'd like to see something.
I would like to not have to wait every two years for a scintillating presentation.
Well, that's a good point.
It was the first time we ever had a Hope event in a different state and not during the Hope conference.
I was just going to say, Stevens is always open.
So if anyone thinks that they have something to talk about—
What do you mean, it's always open?
Well, I mean, it's always open for people to come and talk.
There's a lot of room and the facilities are decent.
And, you know, there's room.
They usually never say no, except the times they do.
That doesn't sound like today's society, always open and willing to hear what people have to say.
It's a good place.
What kind of school is that?
No, but it was great.
And I really got to thank them, plus all the people who showed up.
It was great seeing such a good turnout.
And Steve was very happy with it as well.
And, yeah, we're looking forward to 2008, the next Hope conference, whatever it might be called.
Maybe we'll have other talks before then if we can figure out how.
Okay.
The other thing we did on Friday, a bunch of us went over to—what was the name of that place again?
That community college?
Hostos Community College.
Hostos Community College.
I'm sorry.
I'd never heard of it before.
It's in the Bronx.
Oh, I've heard of it.
And I'd certainly never been there before.
It was easy to get to.
We didn't know this last week how easy it was to get to.
Just hop on the No. 4 train and get off and ask the person inside who will tell you the wrong directions.
But then that will lead you to somebody else who will tell you the right directions.
And you'll find the place pretty quickly.
It was a demonstration of electronic voting machines and scanning software and an opportunity to hear presentations.
Actually, I'd like to play just a little bit of one of the presentations that showed you how nice this kind of thing can be in the future.
It's got one of these Sunday morning talk show sounds to it where, yes, American industry is busy working to make our lives better.
Let's take a listen to what the people had to hear in this video from Diebold.
Nice patriotic music there.
If your optical scan voting unit becomes inoperable at any time during the day, notify the election office immediately, but do not stop voting.
Simply turn your ballot box to the side and unlock and open the upper emergency compartment door.
Once voters finish, have them deposit their ballots in the emergency compartment.
When your voting unit becomes operational again, close and lock the emergency compartment door and allow voters to insert their ballots into the voting unit as before.
Any ballots in the emergency compartment will be processed when you close the polls.
Once you've allocated time and after the last voter has voted, you're ready to end the election.
First, check the emergency compartment for any ballots that need to be counted.
Turn your ballot box to the side and use the ballot box key to open the lower emergency compartment door.
Once you've got your ballots in the compartment, then close and lock the door.
People, it's your voting unit.
Once you've got your ballots in the emergency compartment, unlock and remove the emergency compartment door.
Once you've got your ballots in the emergency compartment, you're ready to end the election.
Unlock and close the emergency compartment door and allow voters to insert their ballots into the voting unit as before.
People, it's your voting unit.
Once you've got your ballots in the emergency compartment, then close and lock the emergency compartment door and allow voters to insert their ballots into the voting unit as before.
The results report will automatically begin to print.
When the report is finished, sign on the spaces provided at the bottom of the report.
And a lot more people showed up.
And apparently the one in Queens, which we didn't mention, which was on the night that our last show was, had a much bigger turnout.
And for those of you who've missed the opportunity to examine the prospective voting machines for New York City and New York State,
I discovered at the hearing that they're going to have two more demonstrations.
Oh, really?
At least two more.
One in Brooklyn, one in Staten Island, hopefully one in Manhattan.
And the deadline for picking a machine has been pushed back.
So there will be another public hearing to follow them as well.
So if you have objections or preferences, you'll be able to voice your opinion.
Well, there were four different machines there that we could play with.
And by play with, I use the term very lightly because we couldn't just get in there and mess around with them.
The guys were watching over us.
But I think it was enough for us to see where the potential weak points were and just how the system actually looked, how various systems actually looked compared to what we're used to.
Here in New York, we still use the big mechanical clunking machines.
And we were playing around.
You'll hear this in a little bit.
They actually found out who we were because we told them.
And once they found out that radio people were in the audience and not only that but hackers, they tried to get on our good side.
They really tried hard to fall over themselves, giving us their cards and just answering our questions.
They were nice people.
They were nice people.
But, you know, I got to say I was not that inspired with confidence looking at just the way the machines looked.
The D-BOLD machine in particular, which was a scanning machine, you've got this big paper ballot.
And you're supposed to fill in.
When you take a test in school, you fill in the little bubbles.
And, well, Jeff, you work in a school.
It's pretty similar to that, right?
Yeah, we call it Scantron.
Scantron.
They call it – what do they call it?
They call it something else.
I have it written down here somewhere.
It's the D-BOLD…
Opti-Scan.
Was that it?
Yeah.
Pretty sure.
Okay.
I'm sure.
Okay.
Anyway, it's programmed to look at the ovals where you put the marks in.
It's programmed to look for black or blue ink or, I guess, a pencil mark as well.
But the interesting thing is if you mark it in red, it will not register.
That's right.
It will not register because apparently the corners of the little bubble are also red.
So it might scan that and think that's a vote.
Do you have that problem?
It's much less of a limitation than having to use a number two pencil.
Well, it is.
So anything is an improvement.
That's true.
But still, not being able to use red, it's just something people should know.
I don't know if people know that.
I don't know how many people carry red pens in the first place.
AccuVote, that's it.
AccuVote scanner is what this is called.
What do you call it?
Opti-Scan.
Okay.
I'm sure that's a word too that they use.
It's the same thing.
So they had these sample ballots out there and they were demonstrating this in the other room.
And what I found interesting, all the names on the sample ballot were made up.
For instance, running for governor in New York was William Sullivan for the Republican Party.
And Stephen Massimilian was the Democratic candidate.
They're not made up.
They were given to each vendor by the Board of Elections.
Are you saying there's a Stephen Massimilian out there somewhere?
I'm saying these probably are employees of the Board of Elections and they did this to avoid lawsuits.
Okay.
Well, there's all kinds of interesting names on there.
The most interesting one I found was Lynn Stewart who, listeners to BAI, might recognize that name as the lawyer who was accused
and found guilty of spreading secret information to Al-Qaeda members apparently by defending her client.
It's a very controversial case.
The name Lynn Stewart is on this ballot too as a communist running for lieutenant governor, which is just as interesting.
That's all I'm going to say as far as that goes.
So I found humor in just looking at the ballot itself.
But the interesting thing here is that, okay, they were very proud of the fact that you didn't have to mark the entire bubble.
Now, Jeff, when you do a test in school with those OptoScan, whatever you call them, you have to fill in the whole bubble, right, with the pencil?
It's best if you do, yeah.
Okay.
But how tolerant is it if you just put a dot?
Well, what happens a lot of times is they'll erase and fill in something else, and then it'll register both and mark it wrong.
Ah, I see.
In this case, what happens is they're very proud of the fact that a simple dot will register.
So what I asked them was, okay, so if someone puts a dot there, a really tiny dot that maybe they don't know, and then they fill in another one, what's going to happen?
Is it going to look at the bigger dot and say, yes, that's the one they meant, not the smaller one?
And the answer is no, it's going to kick it back.
Which sounds okay until you realize that when it kicks it back, what it does, it prints in a little tiny two-line LCD screen the reason why it's kicking it back.
And the reason in this case will be what's known as an overvote.
So imagine your grandmother at the polling place, and she puts in the form, scans it in, manages to get it fed in properly, and it kicks back and says, overvote.
And I just picture this process taking a very long time for a lot of people because every tiny little mark theoretically can be registered.
So what's a better alternative?
Well, I don't see anything wrong with what we're using right now.
I mean, I'm no Luddite, but I think the mechanical voting system in New York works.
I mean, they say – you'll hear this in the question I ask in a few minutes.
They say one of the biggest reasons is to cut back on lines.
Okay, I've never seen a line, but then again, maybe I vote in a place where not many people go.
It seems to me lines are going to exist here because people are going to be very confused.
It's going to take a very long time.
But apparently the mechanical machines are just as prone to error, for instance.
And they're old.
They're much more difficult to maintain.
Sometimes old things work better than new things.
It's just looking at this, it just – it seemed cheaply made.
It was all made out of plastic.
And, you know, when you work with computers and technology, you can tell a good rugged machine from something that's cheaply made and can fall apart.
And I just got the latter feeling from looking at that.
Jim?
Well, let's go back a little and give a little bit of an overview.
Yes.
There are two sorts of machines that we're up for consideration.
One is the optical scanning type machines.
Now, in this – and keep in mind, in New York State, the law says that everyone has to be presented with a full ballot, a ballot that lists every office and every candidate.
Now, in the optical scan machines, the ballot is printed on heavier stock and it itself is the thing you mark.
The other family of things we're looking at are touchscreen voting systems.
DREs?
Known as DREs, digital –
Direct recording electronic.
Thank you, Darrell.
I knew it was something that I couldn't remember.
Those we'll talk in a moment about.
We're going to spend very little time on them because we hate them and for good reason.
Speak for yourself.
Maybe some of us like them.
Oh, my God.
Well, we're going to find out.
I hope not.
But anyway, the optical machines, there are two of them presented.
And as you say, the Diebold one has the circle.
But the Sequoia one, the Optech Insight machine, was interesting in itself because of its differences.
Unlike the Sequoia machine, it doesn't have an area per se, a round bubble to mark.
It has an arrow on the side pointing to the name or names of the candidates or to yes, no on a proposition.
And the arrow is not whole.
What's printed is the point of the arrow and the tail feathers of this arrow.
And you are to color in the shaft with your dark pen or pencil.
And then it's read by the optical scanner.
And as you say, there's a lot of problems.
Well, actually, it's a feature.
Marks that are blatantly out of area are not read, which is good if you circle the name of the candidate you want.
Well, you know, then they have to go back to the Chad problem, which is they have to interpret your intent.
Right.
So the only problem now is if you miss the arrow, if you mark two arrows.
And yeah, the only way to do it is you feed it into the machine.
The machine tells you what's wrong.
In the case of Sequoia, they give you a printout.
Then you can read whether you've undervoted or overvoted and at what point the error is.
I think this is a really good system.
Yeah, but you're adding so many steps.
You're adding a printout or you're adding having to feed something into a machine.
It's like you're working over a copy machine.
But the alternative is to use a paper ballot where it's getting counted later on when the voter has already gone home and there's an error and there's a discrepancy and you can't get the input from the voter.
But how do you know it still is getting counted the way that it says it's being counted later on?
That's the thing nobody seems to know.
But this is the thing that you've been asking for the whole time is to have an accurate paper trail.
And you're literally marking the ballot and then that's being saved.
And so you have a paper trail where the voter has actually marked what's being saved.
It's not just the printout.
Well, I mean I like marking the thing and seeing what you mark.
But the whole process of feeding it, having it spit back for different reasons, everybody – OK.
How many times have you voted and you don't want to vote for the damn Supreme Court justices?
So you leave that blank.
Well, now you're going to have it spit back at you and you're going to have to feed it again after you verify that you really don't want to do that.
And then, OK, supposing there's another race you didn't vote for a candidate.
It's going to do it again for that.
You're going to be there for 10 minutes just on a normal election.
That's with understanding it all.
It just seems like a half-assed way to organize the whole thing.
That's not even taking into account possible security holes.
That's not really the issue here.
The issue with the scanning is just it's cumbersome.
It seems cumbersome to me.
We haven't yet even mentioned the ballot marking devices for people who either are handicapped or are afraid that their markings will not be read correctly.
These are a severe hole in the system in that if you need audio assistance because you're blind or whatever, it's difficult, cumbersome, and time-consuming to use these things.
Well, I mean that's one of the selling points.
And that's a good selling point because it is something that provides access to handicapped people or to people reading in different languages.
There's no question that's a good thing to add.
I'm questioning the way it's being done.
It just seems very cumbersome.
Now, Bernie, you had something to say?
Yes, Emmanuel.
Adding to the cumbersome and nebulous nature of all this is the Sequoia electronic voting machines that Jim had just mentioned.
Apparently the software, the firmware for these machines was written by a company in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.
And that caused a lot of concern with some people in our current administration because our two countries are not in good terms, at least at the government level.
And this is closed-source software written in a country that our government has used with great suspicion.
So that's another thing to wonder about.
Let's listen to another piece from the presentation.
This one talking about one way of actually sending in the totals to the central election headquarters.
If you're not transferring results to the election office via modem, go ahead and unplug the power cord.
Via modem.
Now, NotKevin, you noticed something interesting on the machine itself.
You noticed an Ethernet jack.
Oh, yeah.
And what happened when you asked the technician about that?
He profusely denied that it was an Ethernet jack and that it was not connected to anything but inside the hardware.
But it was labeled access.
Labeled access.
On the front of the machine with a big Ethernet.
Well, okay, so what purpose did it serve then?
I don't know.
Apparently for expansion to other hardware devices.
It seemed like they were trying to get us to believe that at no time did this do anything involving modems or computers or Internet.
And here we clearly hear them saying, if you're transmitting it by modem, so which is it?
Well, wait one moment.
What you're playing is the tape that they made for poll workers in the state of Mississippi.
Okay.
In the state of New York, the board of elections, in fact, at the hearing I was at,
went to great lengths to assure people that these machines would not have any sort of wireless or wired connection out of the machine during the election.
So that's just because they're in New York, not the machines themselves.
You're saying this is something that the state decides.
Yeah.
Okay, that's not what they told us.
They said the machine cannot do this, will not do this.
Right, I know.
It does it in some places.
Yes, Redbird.
So we have two arguments going on here.
One is which?
At least two.
Right.
Well, at least two.
So regardless of whether or not you think this will be easier for people to use, there obviously has to be a lot more accountability within the electronic voting machine realm.
Whereas, you know, the software that runs the machine really has to be audited.
And probably the best way to go about this is to make it open source, literally, because the companies are not going to be charging any less or any more for the devices if the code gets out.
I mean, what's the big deal?
You're buying the device from the vendor, Diebold, and they're selling you the hardware and the software that comes.
And this is something I cannot understand why they refuse to let people look over their code because we're talking about counting votes.
We're talking about ways of sending the information.
And if there are problems with that, we need to know about those.
And there are problems with that, which we're going to get into in a little bit.
You mentioned the cost.
It turns out one of these scanning machines cost $5,500.
And the DRE machine that they were selling in Ohio with all the bells and whistles in their words cost $2,050.
And I certainly would like one of those.
They didn't know how to sell me one.
I asked, look, I want to buy one.
How do I buy one?
I want to play with one of these things.
And they have no idea.
They said, well, talk to this guy or talk to the board of elections, all sorts of fun answers like that.
Here's a slight small piece on the ease of use for people in New York City and why we need these things.
While you're setting that, let me just expand a little bit on the things that you saw in the video.
One, you saw real live poll workers there.
Okay?
Were they having any trouble handling the system?
Did they look scared?
No.
They can handle this system very well with a minimal amount of training.
I think that's critical, especially to the volume of precincts that you have in this jurisdiction.
Critical, critical, critical to the decision that the board of elections will make are two things that we oftentimes skip over because everybody wants to look at the box.
Everybody wants to look at what your DRE looks like or what your optic scan looks like.
But critical to any successful election are one, training, and two, voter outreach.
And because of the number of jurisdictions that we've installed in the United States in the last five years, we are expert at helping the city do that.
We have training materials available for you in the form of videos like you just saw, in the form of print curriculum.
We have voter outreach, an entire menu of things for you to choose from, including assisting you getting in touch with your local media outlets to be sure you get spots, the free spots that are available for public education, etc., etc.
Because the key to the success of your first election, let's face it, you're going through a paradigm shift in New York City.
You're moving from a lever voting machine that is very near and dear to the hearts of most New Yorkers into a totally foreign form of voting.
And that's a paradigm shift.
And we think we can help you to a very large extent get through that paradigm shift as painlessly as possible.
And that's by helping you reach your voters to make sure they understand what they're going to encounter when they get to the polls the next time after you make that change.
And to be sure that your poll workers are trained so that you don't get the calls in Election Central at 630 in the morning saying, hello, my poll is not open, I'm ready to vote.
Because that's the call we don't want to get.
And we want to make sure that we help you with that.
So those are two critical, critical issues.
Critical, critical.
I love sales guys.
It's just, it's really funny.
Yeah, so that was part of the presentation there.
And they have a handout, which I think is really kind of cool as well.
New York deserves a voting solution that is simple.
You vote, and your vote counts.
Imagine that.
You deserve an optical scanner.
Boy.
Well, you know, some people, including some people in this room, think it's a good thing.
And, you know, I don't know.
I guess maybe our listeners can help us decide that.
But who here has actually used one of these machines for voting?
Nobody?
Nobody's used one.
Yes, Bernd, have you used one?
No.
Well, I was denied using one here in Philadelphia.
That one type of de-balled machine.
But what was more concerning to me is I voted with a paper ballot two weeks ago.
And according to the receipt that I got, and looking up on the Internet, like I'm sure some of our listeners did,
my vote has still not been counted.
Amazing.
That's a whole other issue then.
Yeah, you gave out, in fact, a URL where people could see if your vote actually was counted.
And the serial number of my receipt.
So we could all track it together.
And it hasn't been recorded.
Amazing.
I used an electronic voting machine, if that's what you're asking.
But none of these models.
No, I'm talking about this specific one.
Because this is the one that I played with the most.
Or didn't really play with.
These seem a lot better than the ones that I used.
Again, I'm sure they're better than the electronic ones because you have a sense that you're actually marking a piece of paper.
And that's a good thing.
But just what you do afterwards seems completely imbecilic.
It really does.
Because you have to make sure it fits properly in.
And odds are it's going to kick back.
There's going to be all kinds of questions, confusion.
I don't know.
I think it's a lot more simple than you're making it seem.
And I think the implications for the security of the vote are a lot better with having actual ballots that people have marked by hand.
But what is the biggest problem that has ever happened with the mechanical machines that we have used here in New York?
I mean, you are obviously doing – unless they aren't registering at all.
Well, I think that's actually been a problem in the past.
I think that's been reported as one of the problems is that people vote and their votes aren't counted because of a mechanical failure.
I haven't heard of one.
If that exists, I'd like to know about it.
But I have not heard of those kinds of problems.
Jim?
Just a couple of quick things.
The federal government with the Help America Vote Act has essentially mandated that we have to pick in New York State either a DRE or an optical scan machine.
And secondly, the board of elections at that hearing came up with an interesting tidbit.
This past election, they had approximately 136,000 machines.
Nine of them broke.
Nine.
Nine out of 136,000 of which kind?
Of the mechanical lever, pull it across, pull it back when you finish voting type.
Sometimes simplicity is the best way.
But my argument is that the mechanical machines are just as much of a black box as the electronic voting machines.
I don't see that.
I don't see that.
And we'll get into why because obviously with the film.
Did you see the Hacking Democracy film?
Yeah, of course.
Yeah.
And you can say that with the packaging?
No.
They definitely can't be modified as easily as a software can be modified.
There's no source code for one thing.
No, of course not.
But if we get over the problems that we have with the electronic voting machines, which is allow the software to be audited.
Do you think that's going to happen with companies like Diebold?
It's something that the government has to say.
This is required before we use your machines.
Okay.
Let's hear a couple more selling points.
Whether you vote early in person or on election day, the Audimark system is an easy-to-use, flexible, and totally private way to vote.
I'm truly excited for the citizens of Lake County.
Letting our voices be heard through the voting process is at the heart of our democracy.
And that right extends to all Americans.
For more information or for…
And I'll just go ahead and move forward.
This is something that I just downloaded from the Internet and a suggestion that I would make to the Board of Elections in New York City,
that you'd put this kind of thing on your website as well.
This is an example of a layout that we would suggest in a four-election district polling site.
This shows that you would only need one of the ballot boxes, one marking device.
And here, in this instance, you'd have about 16 privacy booths.
Again, virtually eliminating lines.
There were some questions earlier regarding security.
We've worked on the design of transport units.
So, in the event of a situation where you have a poll site that has four election districts,
with two of these transport units with these dimensions, about four feet tall, about five feet long, and 28 inches wide,
and these have been working with our engineers on designing these,
you'll be able to move all of the components necessary to conduct an election in a poll site that has four election districts.
It gives you a secure place to transport your ballots.
It gives you a secure place to transport the ballot boxes themselves,
with the ballots locked inside the ballot boxes when they are returned.
It provides a place for the poll worker to have a secure environment for storing their ballots during the course of the day.
And the ballots can be locked up and taken out in booklets of 50 ballots at a time,
so that you have good control chain of custody.
I think that what Dr. Diekmann and I had to say today was very important.
I'm actually kidding.
What's really important is what our customers have to say.
Sabino Piemonte is an assistant election director in the city of Boston.
Three years ago, they switched from lever machine to optical scan.
He said, coming from lever machine, I really appreciate the overall ease of this system.
It was easy for our voters and our poll workers to adapt to, and at the same time, it reduced lines at poll sites.
But what I really like the most is the end-of-the-night reporting.
We're generally done by 1030 on election night now.
Another thing is that our budget for elections is less today than it was when we started three years ago.
We've got a minute left.
Okay, and we have more time than that, but...
We're done.
There are three things that we want you to remember.
All right, three things.
The solution that we're proposing is simple for the poll worker.
It's simple for the voter.
It's cost-effective to buy.
It's cost-effective to maintain and operate.
You'll be able to use it for 15, 20 years.
And it allows the voter to create their own paper trail.
Thank you.
Yes, it's more than three things, so hopefully their voting software is better at counting than they are.
But Arsena, yes.
He said that it's simple, but if you look at this ballot, it looks like the engineers that designed the machine also designed the ballot.
Whoa.
But you get the ballots in the mail beforehand, don't you?
No.
So what? Why not?
No, because then you could steal somebody else's mail and grab it.
Absentee ballots are identical.
No, no, no, not these.
You get them to read.
You could get the ballots to read, right?
Oh, sample ballots.
Yes, sample ballots.
So it shouldn't be anything that's hard.
What did you find complex about it?
Well, first of all, there's like a million billion dots all over it because they give logos to every candidate.
And there's like little stars and circles and all this crazy stuff.
They do that in New York State.
That's what a New York State ballot looks like.
I guess ballots look different in different states.
The New Jersey ones are probably twice that size.
Jeff.
Yeah, well, it's interesting that the Republican is now A, and it's an eagle.
And the Democrat is a star.
When did they change it?
Well, I don't know.
That might be something.
These are just cheap little...
I mean, you could have found an elephant in a donkey.
No, it's been that in New York State for at least 30 years.
Yeah, I think this is something we can't blame on Diebold.
I think this is something that the state just does.
The state did that?
Yeah.
Okay.
And interesting, I looked under communist.
I know a Thomas Turner.
Do you?
Yes.
Oh, you might want to show him this.
It's interesting that he's enlisted in here like this.
But what's interesting for me looking at this, and Bernie S will remember this as well, I managed to pick up at one of the Dayton conventions
an old Florida County voting booth with the folding, the butterfly ballot.
And it is interesting.
I do bring it into school every election period and share it with the kids.
And they actually get to go up and look at this thing and see just how confusing it is.
I will say this.
This is a lot bigger.
This is five times the size of that sheet that they had set up there.
This is not as confusing, especially if you get it ahead of time and get to read it.
But it's interesting.
They're going to have a stack of these things.
You can take one and fold it up and put it in your pocket.
And they have to go through a whole big thing of filing a discrepancy report whenever somebody does that because the amount of pieces of paper aren't going to be the same at the end.
You don't have that now.
But there's going to be a lot more control at the polls than you have at the central.
What kind of control?
How are you going to have control over something like that?
You go to the poll worker.
They verify your identity in their big book of voters.
And then they give you one single sheet.
It's not a big deal.
You spoil it by overvoting.
Then you get a second sheet.
You lose track of the sheets pretty quickly all that.
My other question was do you keep those or do they take them, the ballots?
The ballots you're supposed to feed into the machine.
Hopefully that's the end of it.
It falls into it.
Why can't the machine count it and then give it back to you as a receipt?
Why would you want it back because then they don't have a paper trail?
No, because you have it then.
This is actually something that some people asked us.
Why not create a receipt?
Receipts are very bad ideas for one very good reason.
You could sell your vote.
You can prove to your employer or abusive husband or whoever that, yes,
you in fact followed their commands and voted for the person that they ordered you to vote for.
So that's something that is pretty important, not to have those kinds of receipts.
That's always been the—
But if you don't have a receipt, then they have to do some kind of recount.
But they have the recount with the actual filled out pieces of paper with the marks on them.
I mean it's a lot hard to forge all of that.
What if you lose half of the papers in your 50-sheet batch?
Well, then that's different.
But it's at least as reliable as counting it by hand,
which is something that a lot of the people here have been—
Also, in that last piece, they're often finished by 1030 at night.
I think they're finished by 1030 at night in the old system.
At least I don't recall them.
When there are close races and all kinds of controversy, yeah, it takes longer.
But I'm hearing returns at 9 o'clock from many places.
Usually it's 95 percent done by midnight, if not earlier.
And what have we there?
Why are you showing me pictures?
I just thought I'd—
This is radio.
What's the point of showing me pictures on the radio?
No, I'm going to show those of us who weren't at this some of these machines.
My friend Tom is here, and he took pictures of these things.
So we can see the rough size of it.
Unfortunately, our audience can't.
No.
Also, not Kevin, you discovered something rather interesting playing with this machine.
Not actually playing with it because we couldn't get the necessary device,
but there's all kinds of little locks on these things, locks that don't exist today,
or they do now on these machines.
But what did you notice about those locks?
When I immediately looked at the machine, I saw this one little lock,
and I remember from the Fifth Hope Convention at the lock-picking table,
a laptop lock that could be picked with a Bic pen.
A Bic pen.
And it was the exact same lock.
So I went to the d-bolt guy, and I was like,
do you know this lock can be picked with a pen?
And he just looked at me with this drop-jaw look,
and he didn't say anything for a while, and he's like, no.
But you end up with the same physical security problems with these machines
that you'll end up with any machine, even the mechanical voting machines,
which has the lever in the back, right?
I've never seen a lock that can be picked with a Bic pen.
No, but it's the same sort of security implications
that you have with the mechanical voting machines,
the machines that you love where the poll worker actually has to go to the back of the machine
and pull the lever so that you can vote,
just so that the voter can't do it twice.
If somebody were to knock him out and do that, yeah.
Right, so if someone were to knock the poll worker out and pick the lock
and open the machine while he's there, then the same thing would happen.
But this is something you can do behind the curtain, is my point.
The locks are right there.
The lock is right on the front of the machine,
but you can't be seen with the privacy curtain.
And apparently behind this lock is the memory card
that holds all the ballot information.
You pop this thing open, you pull that out, the whole machine's down.
And all the votes are not counted.
Okay, last section here.
This is where it gets kind of interesting with a few back-and-forth questions
with various people who are in attendance.
Not that many people asked questions.
I was one of them.
But I think, what, four people asked questions?
Well, you didn't come in at the start.
Every vendor took questions.
This is for the D-ball.
We just have the D-ball presentation here.
Yeah, that's about how many for each vendor.
Wow.
I think there should have been a lot more time.
And they also closed an hour early, which kind of annoyed me.
But let's listen to this back and forth.
Everybody knows that your GEMS product has been raked through the coals
by Bev Harris, Jim March, and everybody else.
So to cut to the chase, how separate can this ballot scanner be from GEMS software?
Can this scanner work without GEMS?
Post-election, I know that you have to use GEMS to set up your ballot definitions.
The global election management system software is our election management software.
And we thank our critics who have made it clear to us that we needed to be very,
very stringent in the security that we put into the layers of that software.
We have added several layers.
That's not my question.
My question is, can the scanner be used without that?
No, this operates off the GEMS election management system software.
When the county, when the jurisdiction buys our system,
they obviously have to have a management system software to operate it,
just like Unity software operates another system,
just like another operating system operates a system.
I'd like to not waste time and focus my question.
Sure.
I know you need GEMS to set up your ballot definition.
Can you limit the use of GEMS to that?
And is GEMS installed inside the scanner?
Is that how you get your ballot?
No, GEMS is not in the scanner.
The scanner makes use of the ballot station software.
There's two sets of software that runs every system,
the management software and the ballot station software.
I think you've answered my question.
Sure.
The scanner can be used without GEMS in post-election activities.
But if I could just supplement the great stuff that Bob's just said,
our critics have really done us a great benefit.
Wait, wait, wait.
That's your time, not my time.
Would you submit your scanner to a hacking test, free and open,
Harry Hurstie and anybody else in the world?
In fact, we invited Harry Hurstie, the Secretary of State in California,
invited Harry Hurstie to attempt to do what he said he was able to do in Florida,
and Mr. Hurstie declined because he said that,
under the circumstances of operating under normal election procedure,
that his attempt would fail.
Is that a yes?
We've already done it, ma'am.
Yes.
Okay.
Why do ballots jam?
We saw in the last election that ballots jamming in scanners was a primary problem
all over the country with every vendor,
and someone who just tried your scanner in the other room said the ballot jammed.
Is that a problem that can be fixed?
It's not a problem to overcome at the polling site.
Anybody who tries to sell you an optic scan system
and says we have now made the jam-proof scanner would be lying to you.
So I'm not going to tell you we have a jam-proof scanner.
But keep in mind that the path that the ballot goes through is a four-inch path
so that there is always ballot out the back or ballot out the front.
The LCD panel will tell you jammed ballot in reader, ballot read or ballot not read.
So when the poll worker remedies the jam,
they either know that it's a voted ballot or a not voted ballot
so they know whether to drop it in the ballot box or resubmit it through the scanner.
Hi.
Emmanuel Goldstein with WBAI Radio.
A question for you guys, two-part actually.
I've been using mechanical machines all my life and never really had to wait very long.
In your opinion, what is the biggest problem with those mechanical machines we've all come to know and love?
With the optic scan machine?
The mechanical lever machines.
Oh, well, what I think is wrong or what the HAVA team decided to write into statute had to be corrected?
There's a DEBOL position on it.
Why do we need to replace these machines?
DEBOL doesn't have a position.
We sell voting machines.
The new legislation required you to replace your old voting machines.
We're here offering you a solution that does meet the standard.
We don't have a position on lever machines.
Well, one of the differences that immediately springs to mind is that with the old mechanical lever machines,
there's no source code that we don't know anything about as far as how it works.
I'm sure you guys saw the film Hacking Democracy.
It's on HBO.
Sure.
And it was demonstrated with this very machine how somebody was able to manipulate a program on the smart card,
which I don't think we got into here, and actually change the way the votes count, and there was no way to detect that.
Is there a position you guys have on that?
Yeah.
Yeah, there's certainly a position on that.
The election director in Leon County, Florida, that invited the individuals in, gave them the keys to the machines,
gave them the codes to access all of the things, let them plug an outside source into the unit, should be fired or arrested.
This guy just manipulated the smart card.
He had no access to the actual machine or anything like that, just the smart card.
No, no.
No, he had access to everything.
And my final part of the question, we organize a convention every couple of years.
It's a bunch of hackers come and play with machines.
We tried to get a de-bolt machine, and you guys didn't call us back.
Maybe in 2008 we could get a de-bolt machine.
Hey, that's not my call.
But I think that if you agree to do it in an election environment to make your attempt, we'd certainly agree to it.
Who would we contact?
Mark Radke, just go on the de-bolt website.
He's our public relations director.
Okay, thank you.
I'll give you my card.
Okay, and they all ran up and gave us their cards at that point.
But yeah, we kind of put them on the spot there, but we had to because we tried.
We tried to get a hold of one of these machines for the last conference.
Now, I think it's very interesting how he kind of deflected the question of the previous person who asked if they would be open to a hacking test
and how he said that this other person declined because under an election environment they could not crack the machine.
Now, what is an election environment?
It's where they basically have control over what you do.
And what I told them afterwards, I said, you know, okay, imagine that everything is perfect here in the United States, but what about some other country?
I would like to be a corrupt government with these machines.
Can you help me?
Can you give me these machines and let me be the corrupt government and see what I can get away with?
And they didn't seem so enthused about that.
I'm not sure that the woman's line of questioning was even relevant to any particular solution.
Well, the gem software is –
Well, I mean the solution is not to have proprietary software running on these machines.
The solution is to have open auditable software and the ability to go into any polling place and literally, you know, either check some of the binaries that are being run,
have the software being run on read-only removable memory cards that anyone can go in and, you know, check some of that binary.
Now, just to give you an idea though about the craziness of gem software, which is the software that is used to actually tabulate the votes,
it is possible – and this is demonstrated.
I'll give you the URL for this.
You'll see exactly how it's done.
But basically, there's auditing.
There's all kinds of logs that get written when you run the software and make any kind of change.
It looks really, really nice, really good, really secure.
However, if you enter the program, if you open up the database using a different application, well, guess what?
The logs don't get written to you.
You're able to change all kinds of numbers and those numbers do show up in the totals.
Now, okay, we have auditing that will protect us from this.
So let's say we have 10 election districts and we audit two of them and we count every single vote and make sure that they match.
Well, they match.
But you know what doesn't match?
When you add them all together.
And since nobody ever audits all of the election districts and then adds up all of the numbers to see if they reach the total, that is not caught and it is demonstrated.
I'll give you the URL.
We made a tiny URL of it, tinyurl.com slash yejrxb, yejrxb.
This is a video by a guy named Jim March.
And let's just start some of it.
You can hear how it begins.
Welcome to this demonstration of the Diebold Gems VoteTally product and just how bad its security is.
Okay.
Well, the audio is kind of low.
But basically you can see what this guy does, what he clicks on, and how he's able to completely manipulate this software.
So that's what that woman was concerned about.
And I think a lot of people after seeing the documentary.
Jim?
Just a word about that woman.
Her name is Teresa Hummel.
She has a website, whereisthepaper.org, which is an excellent source for anything about voting machines, vote hacking.
I'll give it to you again.
Whereisthepaper.org.
No apostrophes.
Just put it all together.
Arsene?
Well, you were talking about the video that Jim March, right?
Basically, he just opens the database file in Access and changes it.
And then the gem software doesn't mind.
The gem software looks at the numbers and says, yeah, these are the numbers.
But there's no correlation between the individual districts.
They don't add up to the numbers and nothing catches that.
Now, this can be fixed.
But it just shows you how not having something open to public scrutiny can lead to disaster.
It may have already led to disaster.
Something like this software-wise technically can be fixed, right?
Absolutely.
But is this a problem that is necessarily inherent to electronic voting machines?
It's electronic to inherent voting machines that do not allow people to look at the source code and play with them and figure out what could be abused.
Right.
But the same kind of scams can happen with elections that have to be added up by hand, right?
Well, I challenge you to find something that can be so thoroughly manipulated.
Well, it's not easy to demonstrate it.
You can't demonstrate it and put it up on Google Video or YouTube or something and demonstrate it.
But the same thing can happen with a hand-counted election.
Okay.
How would you, if you had complete access to a mechanical machine, how would you do something like this where you could add a thousand votes for a different candidate and not be caught?
No, but they're added up at some point, right?
You record the log on the odometers or whatever in the mechanical voting machine and somewhere they're added up.
And nobody knows where they're added up or maybe some people do, but nobody looks at them being added up.
And why can't the same thing happen?
Well, it just seems like you're not surreptitiously doing something on a computer screen that nobody will really be able to tell what it is you're doing.
Right.
Well, if everything was monitored, if the use of gems was monitored, if the use of whatever calculators to tabulate the votes or whatever they use was monitored, then this couldn't happen.
And that demonstration that you're referring to is invalid anyway.
What I'm saying is, yes, the software has to be open source.
It has to be auditable.
It has to be accounted for.
And it's not.
And it's not.
These specific problems, I don't think, are necessarily inherent to electronic voting machines.
Well, they're inherent to these ones.
They're inherent to the ones that are being used now because gems is used in a lot of places.
DBALT is used all over the place.
And the reaction when this video came out was to threaten the guy that did it as if he wasn't supposed to try and hack their machines.
And I think that's exactly what we should be doing.
We should be hacking their machines.
We should have complete access to them.
I remember the guy's response when I asked him, OK, what's your position on the case where somebody was able to manipulate the smart card?
He said the guy who gave them access should be arrested.
The guy who gave them access is a hero.
He's the one who showed them how something could be manipulated.
And that's exactly what we need to know, Jim.
Now, they were willing to give a machine if you were willing to hack it in a secure election environment.
Essentially what this means is with poll workers watching your every move.
Our fear is not only of rogue hackers going in and tampering with the machines.
Our fear is with the poll workers, all right?
I'm sure 99.9, extend it as far as you want, are fine.
It's not that hard to get some malcontent or malfeasant person in there who, for one reason or another, is willing to open up a machine and tamper with it, introduce rogue source code.
And that's the danger here.
We want to make sure that that's impossible.
We're going to try and take a couple of calls in the time we have left, 212-209-2900.
But we heard in one of the pieces how election poll workers are supposed to, in the event of a jam, look at a little LCD screen and it'll say vote counted or vote not counted.
If it said vote not counted, you feed it through again.
Hey, you know what?
What if they don't feed it through again?
Then my vote's not counted.
The way it is today, I pull that little red lever and I hear the bell.
My vote's counted, at least if the machine is what it's supposed to be.
And if it's not, then it's something a whole lot more insidious.
You're there as your ballot's being counted, which is what's nice about—
You're looking over their shoulder, making sure that I don't—
Well, you would be there because if the question is with your ballot and you're feeding it through and it's not going through, I'm assuming that a competent voter would be watching the person.
Well, in the video, I only saw a poll worker.
I didn't see a voter.
Jeff.
Emmanuel, can't you only be sure that when you pull your lever, all you did was really ring a bell?
No.
I can't be sure of that.
Okay.
And you're right.
I can't be sure of that.
But for that kind of fraud to be going on, it just seems like that would be found pretty quickly.
It doesn't have to be fraud.
It could be a mechanical malfunction.
It's the same issue.
The mechanical voting machine that you're using is as much of a black box as these electronic voting machines.
I think what will show up is a whole bunch of blank votes in a district, and that's something that would get attention.
Let's take a couple of calls from our listeners because we only have a couple of minutes left.
And guess what?
We're not on next week.
I'm sorry to say.
Special Pacifica programming will be here next week.
But hopefully, it will be on in two weeks.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Speak up.
Hi.
We got to move on.
Sorry.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Please be prepared.
Okay.
That's not prepared either.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hello?
Yes.
Go ahead.
Hi.
Oh, God.
Speak up, please.
Yeah.
Hi.
Didn't this happen during the Bush election like a long time ago?
Lots of things happened.
Yeah.
Lots of things.
Not very many of them directly related to this.
Thanks, Rebel, for that comment.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hi.
Hi.
What's up?
Hi.
I'm calling from Florida.
Florida.
Well, what a bastion of voting activity down there.
Right.
So, it's good to hear you.
I was in New York for a long time, so I really miss you all and miss BAI.
But I can listen to you online, so I was just catching you.
It's been a long time since I listened to your show.
There is an ongoing thing now in Sarasota where, using the touchscreen machines, 18,000 people
supposedly voted for other candidates on the ballot but didn't vote for the most significant
one.
So, that's going to go probably all the way to the Supreme Court, maybe.
There are big suits about that.
I hear what you're saying, particularly your expertise is in the software and computers.
But any system can be corrupted, and any technology can be used one way or the other.
And there's this sort of lingering paranoia that's evident in the conversation in all
of us about what's going on in our past elections.
I'm not sure if it's paranoia so much as just knowing that with computer systems, you can
get away with a bit more if there aren't oversights.
Right.
I understand that.
But, you know, the fact that thinking like there's going to be a poll worker who might
do this, or there's going to be somebody who might...
If you get a receipt, somebody's going to demand to see that.
There's all of this stuff around what could happen with things.
And my point is that, you know, there does need to be attention paid to a system, but
we are in a context in which there's active discouragement about voting.
There's discouragement about making it easy to register to vote.
You know, the whole question about lines, well, we have days off to literally go shopping,
but we don't have a holiday to go vote.
So we live in that context of where, as I said, I think that we're being actively discouraged
to vote.
And so all of these things, I think, can and necessarily be looked at, the details of what
you're talking about, but we need to move in a direction of a rather radical electoral
reform.
And I'll stop there and listen.
Okay.
Well, we don't really have time to respond to those points, but we do want to hear what
our listeners have to say.
I wish we could take more phone calls, but we're only on for an hour.
OTH at 2600.com is our address.
And, of course, we're going to be following issues like this in the future.
Jim, did you have any future activities taking place in the city?
I just want to let people know that there will be two more demonstrations, according
to the Board of Elections, one in Brooklyn, one in Staten Island, hopefully one in Manhattan.
And there will be another public hearing on this.
We'd love to know about it.
Or check their website, vote.nyc.ny.us.
And, of course, this is something that's taking place all around the country, in fact, all
around the world.
And please let us know what you learn.
Good night.
I'll be your mirror, reflect what you are, in case you don't know.
I'll be the wind, the rain and the sunset, the light on your door, to show that you're
home.
When you think the night has seen your mind, that inside you're twisted and unkind, let
me stand to show that you are blind.
Please put down your hands, cause I see you.
I'll find it hard to believe you don't know the beauty you are, but if you don't, let
me be your eyes, a hand to your darkness, so you won't be afraid.
When you think the night has seen your mind, that inside you're twisted and unkind, let
me stand to show that you are blind.
Please put down your hands, cause I see you.
I'll be your mirror.
I'll be your mirror.
I'll be your mirror.
I'll be your mirror.
I'll be your mirror.
Ah yes, WBAI New York 99.5.
Hey, let me ask you WBAI listeners, if you are a professional, how can you let those
guys heckle you?
You know those black guys will heckle you even if you are on the screen.
Off The Hook, the second best program at WBAI.
Soon to be number one, or?
Yeah, he's coughing there.
Yeah, you're listening to WBAI New York, you know.
And you know, have a good holiday tomorrow, and celebrate the right things.