Well, Rendell ...?

02/23/2005

It's been a week, now, since the defective voting equipment which caused so many problems and cost so many voters their right to vote in three Pennsylvania counties last election was 're-examined' in Harrisburg.While those from the citizens' group who petitioned the Commonwealth and paid the $450 dollars for the procedure were excluded entirely from the meeting, others there reported that even the president of the UniLect company himself failed to make the touchscreen he was attempting to demonstrate work. Mr. Gerbel did a lot of 'joking', and was forced to retract some of his false claims about his product, but he was never really able to demonstrate that his product would be good enough to trust with the public's votes. By PA law, the $450 fee was originally intended to cover the cost of three experts at $150 each, but only one person was hired, and that person (1) hasn't yet been proven to be capable of assessing computer security in a sufficient manner, (2) wasn't the choice of the people, and (3) will want to pretend that he hadn't been mistaken in approving the defective system previously. It is an obvious conflict of interest that the same person who had originally, erroneously approved the flawed, DOS-based, paperless system with a failure-prone touch-screen design was used again to re-evaluate that system.

It's not easy for people to admit mistakes, and errors of this magnitude are inexcusable. Michael Shamos has attempted to seem credible in pointing out that the system isn't voter-friendly and that it requires improvements, but his claim that he'll insist upon upgrades to software on processors which can no longer accept such updates merely reflects ignorance of the problem, if also a late-dawning awareness that this poorly-designed, badly-made equipment is not suitable for use as-is. The UniLect Patriot system didn't fail merely because the Election Director in Mercer (forced to resign after last November's election) didn't program it properly. The programming failure applied to only 13 precincts there, but 41 precincts there had severe problems, ranging to undervotes of an outrageous 70 - 80% in some areas. That's 7 or 8 out of every 10 voters whose votes were thrown away, unrecoverably, by the faulty DRE voting system.

Those machines failed from the start there, going down at the beginning of the day, and calls from desperate pollworkers went unanswered for hours. Yes, the people responsible for supervising the election process, including that beleagered county's commissioners, were obviously not competent, but their failure wasn't the only one involved.The UniLect Patriot system doesn't need to be hacked, or mismanaged by those without the skills to operate processor systems: it's badly made and excessively susceptible to failures anyway, even when properly managed. The decision to buy that expensive lemon was based on the unwarranted approval of it by the Commonwealth of PA. There was no examination of the software, the hardware, the testing, or the testing results pertaining to the UniLect Patriot. The state merely accepted the misleading claims of the vendor without question.

Mercer's decision was also based on the deception of Beaver County's commissioners, who recommended the lemon they'd bought without ever revealing that the UniLect Patriot system had caused the undervote rates to soar there immediately upon its implementation.The pretense by Michael Shamos in demanding that UniLect turn over the source code fails in consideration of the fact that he has no way to verify that the software they send would be the same as found in the faulty systems, and even if it were the same, there's no evidence that he would be able to find any, much less all, of the potential problems with that code. It's unlikely that Michael Shamos has the integrity to admit that he was wrong to approve of the paperless DRE system the first time, even though the problems with DOS were known to others at that time. He will most likely merely attempt to pretend that a tiny code bandaid would somehow stop the arterial hemorrhage of vote losses known to occur with use of the UniLect Patriot equipment. That's why someone other than Michael Shamos - someone with genuine expertise in the field of computer security - should have been selected to evaluate the equipment. In fact, the law calls for three experts to be involved, not merely one who can as an individual be more vulnerable to being influenced inappropriately.

That's also why Secretary of State Pedro Cortés owes it to the people of the afflicted counties, among others, to decertify this equipment and prevent its further use in Pennsylvania, regardless of Shamos' equivocations. Does Ed Rendell believe that he requires faulty voting systems to remain in office? Does he want to see the votes of Pennsylvanians continue to be discarded without any possibility of a recount? Watch this space ....