Yes it's true that NY law provides for escrowing that source code, but not only as we saw last week in Albany are private vendors ignoring NY's law and trying to rewrite it in their self-interest so as to abolish or minimize the escrow requirement, but even if NY holds to its escrow requirement, that means a few election officials get to see the secret source code under a non disclosure agreement – meaning the public- whose elections these are – recall government of the people, by the people, for the people – never get to know how their vote is being counted. The citizens of New York would never know the very information 92% of the people in the Zogby poll believe they have a right to! And indeed they do: Because once the counting of the vote is controlled by private corporations and the government that contracts with these private vendors to count our votes, one has to ask- what happened to democracy? Where are the safeguards; the checks and balances? What's happened to free and fair elections?
Proprietary intellectual rights are fine in certain situations. I don't need to know what secret recipe Coca Cola uses. But these proprietary rights of corporations have no place in our elections – the mechanism by which a self-governing people preserve their independence. To keep secret the very information that shows me and you how our votes are being counted- deeply offends my patriotism.
Our Constitution is not based on trust. Quite the opposite. It provides a system of checks and balances precisely because it is our duty to stay vigilant and not just trust that the government is doing what it says it's doing. Once the government enters into non disclosure agreements with private corporations- to control and count our sacred ballots- the public is quite literally cut out of its own election process.
There are alternatives which are not being discussed in NY and it's not too late to entertain them. I came down here today in the sincere hope that you will encourage the exploration of some of these more democratic alternatives before New York makes a fool of itself by choosing the same machines the rest of the country has, without the benefit of the excuse of having rushed into its decision.
Personally I am a great fan of the people and believe that adults are fully capable of counting to 300 or 500 or even higher. In most democracies of the world, elections are hand counted. I recognize that there had been ballot stuffing when we hand counted in the last century and that New York installed our beloved lever machines as a response to the fraud that occurred when we hand counted. But there are protocols we could institute today, particularly in the age of surveillance cameras, that could greatly reduce manipulation in hand counting, the most advanced means we know of to preserve citizen oversight and protect the integrity of the count.
There will always be fraud in elections, that is a given. But the level of fraud that can be committed with computerized voting is so greatly enhanced that Tammany Hall will start to look like the good ole' days. It took a lot of people on the ground to participate in the theft of elections when we hand counted. With electronic computerized voting, it takes only a few and on a far more massive level never before possible. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the federal government's technical advisers, have stated that one person is all that is needed to rig an entire state-wide election. (See endnote 3 to the memo to the Governor's office submitted herein, referencing the NIST report, http://vote.nist.gov/DraftWhitePaperOnSIinVVSG2007-20061120.pdf, which found DREs "are vulnerable to errors and fraud and cannot be made secure." "The DRE provides no independent capability to detect whether fraud has not caused errors in the records...... a single... programmer ...could rig an entire statewide election". See also that same endnote for the report of California's Voting System Technical Assessment and Advisory Board (VSTAAB) http://ss.ca.gov/elections/voting_systems/security_analysis_of_the_diebold_accubasic_interpreter.pdf, (confirming the findings of the Hursti Hack, Black Box Report Security Alert: July 4, 2005 Critical Security Issues with Diebold Optical Scan Design (1.94w), 2005, (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
