Xiphias Gladius ([info]xiphias) wrote,
@ 2006-11-01 10:43:00
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Entry tags:politics

What do people know about Professor Michael Ian Shamos? I was just talking to Sec. Galvin's office, and they mentioned that Prof. Shamos is involved in their oversight and testing procedure. Looking up his papers, I see that he's got a lot of publications and experience with electronic voting and oversight, but, reading one of his papers, it seems. . . well, his writing doesn't really inspire me with confidence.

http://euro.ecom.cmu.edu/people/faculty/mshamos/paper.htm

That's one of his papers. His arguments are things like, "Well, China manages to steal elections even without electronic voting, so why should we be worried about people stealing elections WITH electronic voting?"


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[info]adrian_turtle
2006-11-01 03:59 pm UTC (link)
Right. I think I've seen something like this before. Insecure systems don't commit fraud, people commit fraud. (Nu? This means we should have insecure systems?) Referring to your previous post, I think you're unduly optimistic in thinking Massachusetts has less than the usual human proportion of scoundrels. Where fraud is easy, and the stakes are very high, some people will conclude it's worth it.

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[info]xiphias
2006-11-01 04:17 pm UTC (link)
Well, I wanted to make myself sound less paranoid than I feel.

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[info]unquietsoul5
2006-11-01 04:34 pm UTC (link)
I'm not sure if that's possible.... each day we get closer to the election, the more I feel that it will be one big scam job.

From what I'm hearing... if they really think they know who's won by the end of election night in most of the states, you can be pretty sure someone is fixing the votes, as the number of absentee votes being sent in this year is HUGE... to the point where the state of Maryland evidently ran out of absentee blanks as of the end of last week....

Those all need to be counted by hand. No way they will count everything by the end of Nov 7th.

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[info]yehoshua
2006-11-01 04:34 pm UTC (link)
I've been unimpressed with Prof. Shamos's arguments before, which seem to be very slightly more nuanced as a whole than you paraphrased them. I'd cook them down to "There has always been election fraud, and the benefits of being able to use touch-screen electronic voting machines outweigh these concerns in most situations." He seems to assume that most poll workers are well-meaning, neutral observers, not partisan apparatchiks who have been planted deliberately to tamper with elections, at which time the automation makes it simpler to steal an election than the old paper ballot stuffing routines.

Fundamentally, I think his problem is that he's an optimist about humans and their tendency to do good, and I think optimists are basically delusional whackos who should be locked away for their own protection.

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[info]xiphias
2006-11-01 04:48 pm UTC (link)
Slightly more nuanced? But that WAS one of his arguments!

"It has been asserted that adding paper trails to DREs allows prompt detection of all of the possible intrusions discussed above. It is based on the mistaken belief that paper records are in some way more secure or free from tampering than electronic ones, which is not the case.

"On March 20, 2004, a presidential election was held in Taiwan. The winner by 29,518 votes (out of over 13 million cast) was the incumbent, Chen Shui-bian. To achieve this result, the Central Election Commission had to declare 337,297 ballots as invalid, more than 11 times the supposed margin of victory. The voting method was by paper ballot, and there weren’t even any DRE machines to blame. Surely if the voters could rely on the paper ballots to be counted properly this result could not have occurred."

Okay, Taiwan, not PRC.

Frankly, I think that, just maybe, if you're dealing with an electronic security issue, it might be a good idea to work with people who, y'know, deal with electronic security.

I've noticed that the more time someone has worked as a sysadmin, the more they're against touch-screen voting. This says something to me, y'know?

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[info]temima
2006-11-02 12:30 am UTC (link)
"I've noticed that the more time someone has worked as a sysadmin, the more they're against touch-screen voting. This says something to me, y'know?"

Hell, I just have hung around sysadmins, and touch-screen voting makes me queasy.

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[info]cheshyre
2006-11-02 12:50 am UTC (link)
FYI, I did a little digging and posted some excerpts to [info]riba_rambles in a post I called Famous Shamos.

It's long-winded, but the short version is I don't like nor trust the guy.

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