Nonviolence And Electronic Voting

We just came back from hearing Arun Gandhi speak as part of the Campus Community Book Project on nonviolence as he learned it from his grandfather, Mohandas K. Gandhi. He spoke of the culture of violence and how much of we do perpetuates it, even passively. Anger is like electricity, his grandfather would say, it must be channelled in the right direction to do good. Nor can peace just stay within—it must go from thoughts to words to deeds to values.

Out in cyberspace, a civil disobedience campaign is going on which I think M.K. Gandhi would be pleased with. A writer named Bev Harris has been researching the perils of electronic voting systems, well-known to computer security experts as posing high risks for corruption and fraud. In particular, she was investigating the biggest manufacturer of these systems in the U.S., Diebold Election Systems, and was appalled by the woeful lack of security in their systems, not to mention the lack of any auditable duplicate paper printout trail from the votes. She posted on her website internal memos from an email list archive of Diebold’s which document a pattern of mismanagement and technical failure.

Naturally, Diebold was incensed by this, and sent Harris a cease-and-desist order to take the memos off her website, on grounds of copyright violations. But the genie was out of the bottle, and many people started mirroring the memos, beginning with students at Swarthmore College. Diebold followed up with more cease-and-desist orders, but they aren’t catching up with the mirrorers. And today, the students turned the tables. They filed suit, with help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, against Diebold to block their cease-and-desist orders on grounds that publishing the memos constitutes fair use because of the importance of the memos to the public debate over electronic voting.