“I’ve never heard of Smartmatic. I’d be very concerned about an unknown player with that big of a contract, especially in a place like Venezuela, where fraud is such a big concern,” Johns Hopkins University Professor of Computer Science Aviel Rubin tells the Miami Herald.
“Somebody writes the software in the machines, and then you don’t know what the software is doing. It can pretend to be working all day and then send out the wrong results at the end of the day,” Rubin says.
Source:
Richard Brand, “Untried Fla. vote device to be tried in Venezuela,” Miami Herald, April 20, 2004, as part of package from Rep. Carolyn Maloney to Treasury Secretary John Snow, May 4, 2006.
1.www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/world
2.maloney.house.gov/sites/maloney.house.gov/files (PAGE 9)
3.Letter_to_Sec_Dep_Treasury_CarolynMaloney.pdf
1. What does it say about the American electoral system, and both political parties at all levels of society, when they do not demand state-of-the-art, independent audits of the source code of any software used for voting and tabulation?
2. Why did American electoral officials (at all levels) ignore the warnings of independent computer scientists and other experts who sounded the warning early?
3. How could Americans allow unaudited source code, foreign-made to manipulate elections, into the electoral services market in the first place – let alone allow that source code to dominate a huge share of the electorate nationwide?
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