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Bruce O'Dell is a self-employed information technology consultant with more than twenty five years experience who applies his broad technical expertise to his work as an election integrity activist.
His current consulting practice centers on e-Commerce security and the performance and design of very large-scale computer systems for Fortune 100 clients. He recently spent a year as the chief technical architect in a company-wide security project at one of the top twenty public companies in America, led a multiple client projects for compliance with new credit card data security standards, and has designed secure "virtual cash" e-commerce protocols. In 2007 he was invited to testify on computer voting security issues to the Texas and New Hampshire legislatures.
He lives just outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, and shares a love of good books with his wife - and her beautiful garden, with their talkative cat.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, January 25, 2008 LHS, New Hampshire and the Primary and Recount
What is astonishing to me is that NH continues to use precisely the same Diebold Optical Scan model -1.94w - on which Hursti first demonstrated his insider attack.Last autumn, Hursti presented the details of that exploit in person to the New Hampshire State House Subcommittee on Election Equipment - and yet the state still decided to keep running its elections on precisely that model of Diebold equipment!
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 19, 2008 Computer security expert who testified to NH Legislature, holds State accountable
What I regret is that it did not have to be this way. I bet the good people I met on the New Hampshire State House Subcommittee on Election Equipment last fall might very well feel the same way. And it could still be different in November - not just in New Hampshire, but in Minnesota where I live, and across the country. But will we demand citizen oversight of secret vote counting in time to make a difference?
(38 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 10, 2008 UPDATED Obama-Clinton: remarkable opscan v. handcount results
UPDATE: the previously reported relationship between Obama and Clinton votes, has been corrected. The inverse relationship is not precise to four digits - but remains extraordinarily troubling.
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 21, 2007 Holt's HR 811, A Deceptive Boondoggle -- 10 Blunders to Fix
HR 811 Rush Holt's Bill To Clean Up E-Voting perpetuates major blunders of the past. Radical surgery to simplify it can salvage it, particularly by removing the provisions that will line the pockets of the "I.T" experts who will benefit from it as-is.
SHARE Tuesday, November 7, 2006 Fate of the Republic
I've been meditating on our country's fate as I work with my friends here in Philadelphia, birthplace of the American Republic - which is today in its day of greatest jeopardy.
(7 comments) SHARE Friday, October 27, 2006 "Open Source Voting Considered Harmful"
I object in the strongest possible terms to the notion that it is possible - much less desirable - to establish a fail-safe computing infrastructure for voting based on "open source" software.Can we swallow our collective technical pride for once as a profession, and just say "no" to such an utterly inappropriate use of technology?
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 26, 2006 Pull the Plug on E-Voting, Part 2
The whole system of computerized voting here is so far removed from standard best practices for info technology that I can only conclude that,far from being the product of accidental defects or stupid sloppiness,the vast array of security vulnerabilities found in every type of e-voting equipment that has ever been independently examined can quite plausibly be seen as deliberate features introduced to subvert the voting process
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 25, 2006 Pull the Plug on E-Voting
Part one of two. Software is inherently untrustworthy...How do so many of my colleagues get such a fundamental issue so wrong? Although computer technology can seem endlessly complex, the fundamental issues are simple enough...voting by computer may be inherently untrustworthy and in practice poorly crafted, overpriced, prone to breakdowns and wide open to subversion - but at least it's less accurate than counting by hand.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 24, 2006 An Exit Strategy for Electronic Voting
Voting systems are national defense systems (!) deserving the highest level of protection. Undetected compromise of our nation's voting systems is equivalent to our being invaded and occupied by a foreign power, since the American people lose control of their lives and destinies in either case - except that "coup by covert election manipulation" occurs under the reassuring guise of business as usual.