Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Politics, emotions and technical issues: To vote or not to vote, looking at both sides Yesterday, I talked to a few technical people who have been involved with the electoral process. I inquired about the things they have done in audit of the software and the machines and after digesting what they said I wrote the post last night. Basically their message was that they were comfortable that the possible flaws in the system had been removed and with the removal of the fingerprint capturing machines from the process, they were capable of saying that it would be quite difficult to cheat in the upcoming process, even if the possibility of a very tricky and novel Trojan horse could not be eliminated. Thus, I concluded and wrote that we had to go and vote. This is still my opinion based on all of the technical details given to me by various people in the last two or three days after it became known that the sequence of votes could be easily determined using a shareware program, which could be downloaded by anyone for free from the Internet. I was taken aback by the strong reaction today by political parties, most of which had decided not to participate. I had thought the discovery of the problem with the sequence was also a victory, that would give voters more confidence in the system and would drive out the vote.I also found that most comments in my post were against the participation by the opposition in the upcoming elections to the National Assembly. In fact, I was also surprised that nobody ( Not one!) in the comments supported my idea of going to vote, which was (and still is) based on technical aspects. Today I also talked to a political friend, discussing the issues and I think he put it very well from his point of view, in the following fashion: Imagine you have been involved with some tough political negotiations. You don't trust the other side and you are trying to get things to be as positive as you can for your side. You give and take for a while, you win some and lose some. For the last year and half (and three elections) you have seen hundreds of millions of dollars spent on voting technology which you disagree with, but you have come to believe only a few things about. One of the few things you believe in, because you have been told with a straight face, time and time again, is that it is impossible to know how people voted: the vote of each person is absolutely secret. Then the following things happen in sequence (and it is not a pun): 1) You are told by a group of technical people which you don't even know) that this is not the case. The sequence of votes is easily known by inspecting the hard drive. They not only tell you, but proceed to show it and prove it in front of the international observers and the CNE. You bring this up and the reaction from Jorge Rodriguez, President of the Electoral Board is: Impossible! Smartmatic, my people, my technical people, have all told me this is simply not possible. This is simply an attack on the CNE, you people are trying to boycott the whole process. A meeting is held in which the technicians prove it to the point that it can not be denied. 2) Another meetng is held with the head of the CNE, showing him the evidence that the sequence can indeed be known. On the advice of his technical people he offers: We will erase the hard dives within 72 hours of the vote removing all evidence and traces of it. You go back to the technical people and they laugh at you. First they tell you, the machines have a UBS port, so, at each polling station anyone can simply copy everything and have the information, you simply can not have control over 27,000 voting machines for 72 hours. Second, there is no truly reliable way of erasing the information on disk.Any reformatting, rewriting or erasing of the disk leaves traces of the earlier information and basically the only possibility is to destroy the 27,000 hard dives. 3) You go back and tell this to the Head of the CNE, who once again shows his ignorance of these matters. At this point he offers to disconnect the machines, which certainly does not sem to help much as even if they are disconnected they keep the sequence which can be used later to know the votes. 4) Finally you get him to accept the removal of the fingerprint machines. This eliminates the correlation unless somebody at 27,000 voting tables keeps a precise record of the orderof each voter. This seems acceptable, until the annoncement is made publicly and the same guy who promised the world, says this is simply a concession to lower abstention and threatens that even if they are being graciously removed in this election, they will be there a year from now for the 2006 Presidential election. At this point you give up. You simply can not go on accepting that this guy is running the voting process. Forget it, we are out. How would you feel, he says? I understand, this has become emotional, political and even personal. There has been lie, after lie, after lie and manipulation after manipulation. These guys can no longer accept this. And that is why they made their decision. It is a political and somewhat emotional decision. But, I still think that technically, there was sufficient guarantees from opposition technical people to assure us a fair electronic voting system. But the cheating and deceit (and ignorance!) on the part of CNE President Rodriguez has been truly unbelievable. He lied and he used hundreds of millions of dollars to violate the law and the secrecy. And apparently, nothing will happen to him. Such are the ways of the revolution. So, here we are, four days to go. We still don't know if Primero Justicia will or not go. But I get the feeling it does not matter. The level of confusion and mistrust on the CNE is such that I appear to be a very miniscule minority that thinks that we should go vote. I understand them, but I suspect that unless all parties withdraw and the international observers back that position, not voting may even be a more damaging alternative to voting. Obviously, if I have no candidates, I will not vote, but it just does not feel right. We shall see. 11:44:28 PM    comment []

Most parties to withdraw from election over problem with secrecy Accion Democratica has announced that it will withdraw its candidate from the upcoming Assembly elections due to the security loopholes still in place. Reportedly Primero Justicia will announce the same soon. Only Nuevo Tiempo, the party of Zulia Governor Manuel Rosales, who would win easily in his state, may keep its candiadtes in the upcoming election next Sunday. Two sources are confirming Primero Justicia is withdrawing.Proyecto Venezuela has also withdrawn. MAS has indicated it will participate in the election. This evening, with half an hour to go until the press conference of Primero Justicia to announce its position, there are indications that they are now leaning towards participating again. 1:10:37 PM    comment []

US Congressional delegation not allowed in Venezuela despite invitation In a typical mystery of this Government a US Congressional delegation was not allowed in the country, the trip had been arranged by the Venezuelan Embassy in DC and had a scheduled meeting with Hugo himslef. The bipartisan delegation simply turned around and left. 1:37:02 AM    comment []

Without fingerprint machines, it is time to go and defend your vote, I will Before the developments of the last few days I was going to vote. For a very simple reason: you gain very little by not voting unless everyone in the opposition decides not to vote. What is clear is that if the CNE had not decided to back down on the use of the fingerprint grabbing machines, everyone would have called for voters to abstain, because in contrast with the observation missions that came for the recall referendum, the two currently in Caracas, the one from the OAS and the one from the EU have been saying in private what the OAS and the Carter Center never said in the recall vote. And they are applying pressure and it is showing, by now the CNE is absolutely embarrassed by their cynical two-faced behavior and they know these observers can’t be fooled and they are here to stay. The negative side Numerous problems remain. Besides the “morochas” or twins, which will allow the Chavez coalition to get a larger percentage of Deputies in the Assembly that their votes should give them, there is the electoral registry, with its fake data, duplicity and migrations that nobody can fix. Then there are little details like the President of the Electoral Board Jorge Rodriguez suddenly appearing to become objective in the presence of the observers, threatening to fine all those Government officials appearing on campaign literature or advertising, forgetting that he had allowed the ultimate unfair advantage: the presence of Chavez’ face on all of the ballots representing Chavez’ MVR, its twin party UVE and others supporting it. There it is, on the ballot itself, the ultimate unfair advantage that Rodriguez claims is absent from the process, approved, sealed and ratified by the CNE, under protest form the opposition parties. And the international observers have taken notice Electronic voting in the past This will be the fourth process in a row in which electronic voting with the Smartmatic machines and the Cogent fingerprint machines is used. In each case, there are four basic components to the system: The Smartmatic voting machine, the tallying system, the transmission and the fingerprint machines. The Smartmatic machine is a windows based machine with all of the file systems of windows, the same processes, controls etc. It has USB ports, can transmit and can print. The Cogent AFIS system is really a software system that looks at certain characteristic features of fingerprints and matches it with a database, it comes with hardware like the fingerprint reader and a laptop made by somebody else, mostly IBM. The tallying system is just a piece of software that adds the votes according to the characteristics of the electoral process going on, i.e., it is not the same for a recall vote than for a more complex election for city councilmen or Deputies. Recall Referendum: Despite claims to the contrary, for the recall referendum the software was never tested or audited. Despite promises that there would be no transmissions between the voting machines and the servers during the day, there were not only transmissions all day, but in some cases more material was transmitted in one direction than the other. There were supposed to be 120 “hot audits” the night of the recall, only 30 of them took place. (Curiously the vote against Chávez won in these, although statistically it is not meaningful). There was a “cold” audit a few days later under circumstances that leave a lot to be desired. The fingerprint machines did not work well everywhere. In some locations they were not used, in others they were used by choice of the voter. Governor and Regional elections: The only improvement made was that the machines were connected to the network only at the end of the day. However, the totals were printed only after the transmission took place. The fingerprint machines worked rather well. In fact, the suspicion is that the Government used them as a real time exit poll, which combined with the data from the recall referendum petition allowed them to know where they were doing well, where they needed to go and get the voters out and where to concentrate resources. The Current elections: A group of technical people was allowed this time to look at the machines and their software. They first looked at the machines. Each vote becomes a file in the Windows system, with three dates and times which correspond to its creation, modification and last save. All three of these are erased and using a randomizer certified by Microsoft, each vote is saved in a different location of the memory. In this manner all traces of the sequence of the votes was supposed to be lost. However, the technicians noticed that if you used the type of file system tools, free in the Internet, that are used for file examination and recovery on an NTFS disk drive, you could locate a file that had a fourth date and time stamp associated with each file and thus the sequence of voters could be known. If you then correlated this with the orders in which people used the fingerprint capturing system, then each vote could be exactly matched to each person. Of course, the CNE and Smartmatic technicians and officers had always denied the possibility that this could be done. Last Wednesday in a mock up vote in Caracas, in the presence of the international observers, ten people voted and the technicians afterwards told each person which votes was his or hers, And as they say “the you know what hit the fan” and the rest is now history. (Even afterwards the President of the CNE denied this possibility with virulence). But for once, political parties were united, either the fingerprint machines were eliminated or they would all withdraw. That is what is called a good way to abstain, all or nothing. The President of the CNE offered then to disconnect the fingerprint syetm, but under pressure from the observers and the fear that the world would know the truth about Venezuelan elections (recall three elections, including the recall vote were done with this very faulty system) forced the CNE to yield the use of the fingerprint capturing machines on Sunday. (Some parties are still doubtful of participating now). The technicians also checked and tested all other aspects of the software without finding any possibility of changing, altering or manipulating the results. This system is now activated by the use of three keys or passwords, one of which is in the hands only of the opposition. Thus, an opposition member has to be present to activate it. Tallying and transmitting the votes: The technicians also looked at the process of printing, tallying and transmitting the votes. In the previous processes, the tallying was performed and to the surprise of the technicians, the machines not only send the totals, but also send the contents of each one of the votes. This may seem weird at first, in Venezuelan elections many parties may support a candidate and there are circuits, like the one where I live, where there are two candidates to vote for. Now, according to Venezuelan law, a party may change the candidate it supports up to five days before an election, by that time all voting machines are out in the field, thus the program can no longer be changed. Thus, all votes have to be transmitted so that if this happens events like a person voting twice for the same candidate do not take place. Once the votes are tallied, the machine is made to print the totals for each candidate in a record that has a number (000) that certifies it as being pre-transmission. Once this is printed the machine is connected to the network and the transmission is allowed to begin and after that everyone present can get a copy of the tally, which will now have a different number (001). At this point, the witnesses do a tally of the paper ballots in 45% of all voting centers, another new feature that was not available in previous electoral processes. The law says 100% of the paper ballots should be counted, but this will not be done. The rule of law is not the CNE's strength. Can there be cheating electronically? Yes, it is possible to be at a polling station with no opposition witness, transmit first and then manipulate the results before the tally is printed. This would obviously be the opposition’s fault. But there are 27,000 machines out there. But the point is that the process has been cleaned, checked and certified sufficiently that with the withdrawal of the fingerprint machines the process should be more transparent, fairer and cleaner than it was a week ago. The absence of the fingerprint machine has many advantages besides eliminating the possibility of reconstructing the sequence: it removes the fear people have of the Government knowing how they vote and losing their jobs, contracts or otherwise being the victims of another Tascon-like list. Besides this, the Government will no longer have the real time exit poll that will allow it to mobilize voters where needed, paying them and driving them to vote. Either they mobilize everyone or else. Of course, there are thousands of fake ID cards and corresponding voters out there and many other tricks in the Electoral Registry. But, we should not become like the Chavistas that we want to win everything and hold all positions. To claim that we have been cheated we have to vote. The Chavistas appear to be a majority at this time, but they are not a happy majority, they do not like the way problems in Venezuela are not solved while Chavez seems to be trying to solve everyone else’s problem, while neglecting ours. Both sides are not motivated, so that if the opposition can have less abstention, the Chavismo may be blocked from grabbing TOTAL control of the National Assembly. This should be our goal at this time and with the removal of the fingerprint machines it is doable. If in August’s regional elections abstention was 80%, you can bet it will be much larger with fewer local leaders to motivate the voters. Additionally, the whole campaign has been lackluster for both sides. Thus, next Sunday I will be there. I do not believe in any plan to have an alternative other than to have held a separate election and count how many we are. Nobody can count how many people go or not to church. If you want to call for abstention do it, while mix religion and politics? Some people do not even like to go to church or may not be seeing doing so. It is simply too late, in my opinion, to start to improvise. It is time to vote, or not to vote, there is still a little freedom in this country for this and for now, you have a choice. I have made mine. I will vote and in the evening I will go help count and will make sure my copy of the tally sheet has a 001 at the bottom. Hopefully, most of you will do the same, no matter what your political ideas are. It’s called democracy and as long as it has a chance, we should also give it a chance. 1:29:23 AM    comment []