[EL] American elect

[Bev Harris]

I've recently read that Americans are more concerned about protecting their
hubcaps than protecting their vote. Perhaps that goes for election attorneys as
well.

While election lawyers on this list are ridiculing critics of
AmericanSelect.org, you ignore the point Rick Hasen made about the complete
lack of transparency and questionable (read: "impossible") security problems of
its Internet voting scheme.

A quick aside to Rick Hasen - I was glad to see your article, but the issue is
not "security", it's "transparency". You can never secure a computer against
its own administrator, so that's actually a moot point. The insoluble problem
of Internet voting is that it can never be publicly authenticated. It conceals
who voted, chain of custody of the votes, and the count from the public,
rendering the election nonpublic and controllable by whoever controls the
server.

Whether Peter Ackerman is well intentioned or not is irrelevant. If guessing
about people's intentions was relevant, banks could just stop videotaping
teller transactions. Instead, they could just focus on hiring employees who are
"well intentioned."

Regardless of whether Peter Ackerman is well intentioned, he appears to be
scarily clueless about how Internet voting actually works. He's not the only
one -- I met with Senator Mike Gravel, who is pushing for direct democracy
using Internet voting.

Also at this meeting was M.I.T. computer security expert Ron Rivest. Rivest
explained to Gravel that Internet voting cannot be secured. In a side
conversation with me, Rivest also admitted that it is not and never will be
possible to secure a computerized voting system from its own administrator.

I'm sure that ridiculing imaginary conspiracy theories is more fun than
discussing how the mechanism used by AmericanSelect to control the choosing
process actually alters public ability to self-govern.

Bev Harris
Founder - Black Box Voting
http://www.blackboxvoting.org

* * * * *

Government is the servant of the people, and not the master of them. The
people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right
to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to
know. We insist on remaining informed so that we may retain control over the
instruments of government we have created.



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