[EL] American elect

[Larry Levine]

I am reminded here of the comment I made a few minutes ago about reforms and
reformers who become wedded to the notion that they are about to save the
world only to find out later that the world doesn't really want to be saved.
This whole American Elect thing may be the wackiest one yet. It adds up, in
my estimation, to "I don't like the way things are now so I'm going to come
up with something that pushes the boundaries of the law and turns the
electoral process on its head no matter what the outcome." I start with an
innate distrust of anyone who thinks they know better than everyone else.
And listening to the advocates of AE, that's what I am feeling. One thing is
certain: it will help either the Dems, the Reps, or neither. Oh, yeah,
there's another certainty - some people will be attracted to it because they
just love sticking sticks in the spokes. If it wasn't this it would be
something else.
Larry

-----Original Message-----
From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu
[mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Bev
Harris
Sent: Friday, November 11, 2011 11:04 AM
To: Smith, Brad
Cc: law-election at UCI.EDU
Subject: Re: [EL] American elect

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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