…

As we embark on the road to repeal, much discussion has been raised over what the Republican replacement should look like, how we should educate the public on how pre-existing conditions should be handled, etc.

I think I’ve come up with a solution that is pro-market, will actually reduce costs, and — most importantly — will not usurp any individual rights of the people or make the public, insurers, or doctors beholden to the invincible pen of a faceless Washington bureaucrat. Of course, this idea is not totally original (and hopefully, as I claim, mostly common sense); but I think and hope that it condenses the main conservative requirements for health care reform in as few words as are required.

My health insurance reform has four fundamental planks:

1. You (the individual) are free to negotiate any contract you like with any health insurer; in state or out of state, with any coverages you and your insurer agree to.

2. The government will enforce the agreement — as it should in any case that a dispute between two civilian parties arises.

3. The insurance takes effect at the time of the injury/illness and has permanent effect. That is, if you are insured against an illness, and you get that illness, your insurer will cover any and all current and future effects stemming from that illness (within reason, as determined by the courts).

4. Loser pays (tort reform).

That’s it. Even with all the legalese, this reform could be made to fit on a 3×5 index card, and — I believe — solve all of the bemoaned inadequacies of the current health insurance system.

Point 1 implies, first of all, that a private insurer will not be required to cover any individual condition. If they choose not to cover it, the government will not force them to. If you choose not to purchase coverage for it, the government will not force you to pay for it. The first point also allows for individuals to associate themselves for group coverage in any way they see fit.

If, for whatever reason, you don’t like the terms negotiated by an insurer, you are free to take your business elsewhere, anywhere. Any insurer who is too limiting in the list of coverages they provide will find themselves quickly losing market share, so this is a free market solution to providing the types of medical coverage people actually need and want.

However, no private party should ever be forced by a government agency to enter into a contract with another private party, particularly at a guaranteed financial loss.

Point 2 and 3 together speak to portability: if you change companies or decide to fire your insurance company, any future insurers will not need to cover your pre-existing conditions, because your previous insurer already is.

Consider this: imagine you are in an accident which damages your vehicle and your back. Assume it takes 1 week to fix the car and 10 years to fix your back. If you decide to change auto insurance a day later, you do not expect your next auto insurer to fix your broken car — it was damaged while the previous policy was in effect. Why should you be shackled to purchasing coverage from the same health insurer for the next ten years to get your back fixed? Of course you shouldn’t — you already paid for that coverage, that injury already occurred, and at this point, there is no more insurance of any kind — simply the assurance that you will receive what you already paid for and collected on.

I would go so far as to say that you should be able to drop your “injured my back in a car accident” coverage the next day as well (if you actually wanted to); it wouldn’t change the fact that you were insured at the time the injury/illness occurred.

The benefit of Point 3, what (perhaps) makes my reform unique from other ideas out there, is that it enables companies to continue to provide health insurance as a benefit, should they see fit to, because if you decide to leave the company at a later date, you are not limited by any medical conditions you may have developed.

Anyway, please let me know what you think. The argument for coverage of pre-existing conditions is a compelling one, and I think this could provide a totally conservative and easily understood alternative.

If they lost the vote tomorrow using “Deem and Pass”, it would have been a major defeat that would permanently derail their Government Takeover fantasies (or at least for a few more congresses) — and that would be the end of the road for ObamaCare. Waterloo.

The big problem, of course, is that no matter what the House does tomorrow, the only Bill with a chance of becoming law is the Senate Bill. Reconciliation in the Senate would take weeks — and Senator Hatch came out today promising to make it as difficult on House Democrats as possible; and it wasn’t an toothless threat.

Probably the best case scenario for them in their individual election chances would be if the Senate did nothing on the Reconciliation bill until after the election — but that would mean that the House fixes wouldn’t get passed in the House (since they’ll lose seats in November). Worse (for them); drawing this process out for months would certainly cost them even more seats (5? 10? 20?).

So what to do?

Well, what they did was drop the Slaughter Solution, and scheduled the Fix vote before the Senate vote. This could allow some waffling House members to vote yes on the Fix and enter their name firmly in the no column on the Senate bill, which would let them guarantee their symbolic win (even if the Senate bill is going down to failure) in the form of the Fix bill passing — it also lets them face their constituents back home, and keeps some good graces with the Party leadership.

While it would seem that HCR would be dead in that case, remember that Biden can overrule the Senate Parliamentarian — the obvious next step would be to use Reconciliation in the Senate to add the House Fix bill (or as much of it as they can, per Hatch’s threat) and then send that back to the House.

Is that what they’re doing? We’ll know in about 20 hours.

Many countries in the hemisphere have refrained from recognizing Mr. Lobo’s government because it came to power with an election held under a government installed by a coup last June. Washington has argued that Mr. Lobo was chosen in fair elections that had been scheduled before the coup.

On Thursday in San Jose, Costa Rica, Ms. Clinton announced that the United States was restoring more than $30 million in aid to Honduras it had suspended after the coup.

As the official PR team of the Obama administration; I find it interesting that the NYTimes is, on the one hand, admitting that it was on the wrong side of history in dealing with the Honduras issue (by sending Clinton out to lobby for their behalf, resume aid, etc.) while simultaneously insisting that it was not on the wrong side of history by repeating the lie of a coup (or a military coup, as it would helpfully point out later).

Thankfully, Honduras stood tall against the world and won. Hopefully we’ll have the same resolve.

Yesterday was an epiphany.

He is not just willing to sacrifice Democrats in his quest to nationalize the entire health care sector — he is now actively seeking it.

The strategy is as brutal as it is simple: grab as much power as is possible, destroy the Democrat majorities in both houses of Congress, and ride the “anti-obstructionist” unicorn to re-election in 2012. And you know what? It might just work.

That’s why the happiest man in America today is Barack Obama.

Democrats in Congress: be warned. What few of you are actually gullible enough to believe the narrative that 1994 happened because you failed to pass HillaryCare are helpless. As for the rest of you; if you can claw your way past the fear currently (and rightly) gripping you, you will see that the lobbying job that has been promised to you in exchange for your seat won’t look so great in a few years, regardless of whether Obama goes the way of Bush, Zelaya, or Chavez.

There is only one right answer: save your nation, save yourselves. Get out your hob-nailed boot and help us preserve and restore this nation’s status as the greatest bastion of liberty the world has ever known.

You cannot act soon enough.

Let me preface this by saying: it’s not 2011. I don’t want to talk about Sarah Palin — the devil made me do it (or was it Achance?).

Also, before I begin, I’d like to make a promise which I believe should be standard of any pro-Palin diaries: I will not invoke the name of Ronaldus Magnus to make any of my points (perhaps we could nominate this for the title of the “Palin Rule”, if that isn’t already taken).

This diary is directly, or indirectly, addressing the Sarah Palin might as well be Ron Paul meme which has been percolating beneath the surface in various forms for some time now on RedState; but it applies generally for how we (as a community) have been dealing with a phenomenon which is, it seems to me, a totally new and alien experience to many of us within the conservative movement: a popular candidate.

At the risk of belabouring the obvious, popular candidates (by their very definition) appeal to a broader class of individuals; including those who are not quite as adept at playing logic games, interpreting legislative legalese, researching budgetary constraints, telling the ad hominem from the ad nauseum (and so on) as our regular sparring buddies are.

Now, if I weren’t talking about a group to which I belong, I’d point out that what I just said was an example of a perfectly snobbish and elitist thing to say; perhaps befitting of a Democrat or a beltway RINO, but certainly not a lifelong conservative such as myself. We — as both a party and as an incredibly diverse group of people bound by little more than our common notion of religious freedoms, love of country and of our personal liberty and its inherent responsibilities — have probably never felt the need to say such a thing; nor have we likely even thought it. Yet, I feel the need to point it out now because these are precisely the types of defects that I see being typified by the catch-all “Palin-Bot” criticism of a large class of exuberant new/young/naive/whatever supporters of the conservative movement in general and of Sarah Palin in particular.

Are we becoming an elitist movement? I’ll spare you the extra 3000 words of rhetorical fluff that I could have queued up to explore this C- grade conjecture (the answer is no). We seem to be, however, surprised by the development of Palin (though we shouldn’t be, for reasons I can’t delve into without risking breaking my aforementioned “Palin Rule”) and perhaps ill-equipped to deal with it.

Conservatives, as a whole, are not an outwardly superstitious lot. We do not worship at the altar of Government in order to force others to solve our problems; some of us pray, any of us set about to solve them (along with those of our neighbor’s) ourselves. We do not willingly subjugate ourselves to any cult of personality; precisely because it is our subjugation which we struggle against more than anything else in this mortal world. It is, therefore, an anathema to us when we perceive such types of behavior amongst citizens in general (such as leading up to the Coronation of Barack Obama) and particularly within our own political camp (as is believed — by some — to be happening in the groundswell of support for Palin).

For those of you with that concern, let me try to put your mind at ease (hopefully) with a bit of humor: it’s called “widespread enthusiasm for one of our candidates”; and though it’s not something we’ve grown terribly accustomed to in recent years, it’s important to remember that true conservatism is always popular when properly articulated because conservatism has individual freedom and liberty as its core tenets.

OK: so, there are new people coming to appreciate the notions of conservatism. With all respect to Barack Obama’s contributions, Palin did bring a good chunk of them in. To be perfectly frank, Palin kept them breathing during the most absurdly incompetent Presidential campaign in recent memory. Those people that she brought in are still here. That’s not just good; it’s flat-out spectacular.

The job for us, I believe, is to temper (in the metallurgic sense) and refine the undirected enthusiasms of these new people, and not to stamp that enthusiasm out. To draw out the analogy; tempering steel (by applying precise and measured amounts of heat) hardens it for sharpness and to protect it against wear. In our case, it takes the forged thing (be it either the crackling excitement of a new RedStater or the candidate, eg., Palin) and improves it if it is fundamentally solid and destroys it (usually with a spectacular CRACK!) if it is defective.

I believe that we can agree on many of the characteristics which make a conservative leader defective: dishonesty, incompetence, hypocrisy, and weakness; just to name a few. In 2008 and 2009, we saw many of Palin’s faults revealed (both real and imagined); and while stuck in the crucible at a temperature far above that which any politician is expected to endure, love her or hate her, she didn’t crack.

Now, given that faults exist in one of our candidates (and of course no candidate will ever be perfect), our primary goal should not be to teach them, for goodness sakes!

To draw a quick (and embarrassing) parallel, I was once (briefly) excited about the prospects of Colin Powell running for President some day (yes, I know; and yes, I do ritualistically hang my head in shame over that misguided, momentary though it may be — roughly 5 minutes — lapse of all semblance of judgement and reasoning skills; in my meager defense, it was 2002). Regardless, had someone jumped all over my brief delusion and told me that I was being stupid, illogical, or (gasp) a ‘Colon-Hat’ for entertaining that line of thought (and please, save your insults, it just wouldn’t have the same effect now); it would have served not only to damper my political enthusiasm at the time, but probably really irritated me. Besides that; General Powell, distinguished though he may be; would’ve rapidly imploded as a politician and lost my support anyway (probably because he can’t help but be a self-serving panty-waste; with all due respect).

Back to Sarah Palin and her faults. Maybe it’s my Colin Powell moment all over again, but I don’t think she’s a terrible candidate. I think her selection was a tiny, little, island of lucidity for the McCain campaign (not that the stubborn old b******’s ego would allow her to be properly used once she was in the fold) and I think she will one day again be a brilliant candidate for the Republican party. If she runs, and if I’m wrong; then, like the hypothetical Powell campaign, she’ll crumble in her own due course (and in that case, if you’re very lucky, you might even catch me hanging my head in shame).

As for Palin’s (more eager) supporters whom we’ve noticed may have a bit more vinegar than facts (so far)…

We should keep in mind that these people are seeds of conservative thought. Though they come talking about Palin, many of them are enthusiastic about politics for the first time, are espousing their conservative beliefs (and in some cases, other forms of hockey-mommery; which is fine too); and hardly ever bona fide Palin-worship beliefs (it is up to us to be disciplined and realize that someone stumbling into a contentious thread might pop off if they don’t really understand the debates within the debates).

Whether we like the fact that they have chosen Sarah Palin to inspire them or not; and (perhaps more importantly), whether you find that they are lacking the tools needed to properly debate (for example) the details of a questionable pipeline dealing or two; we are the ones who are, ultimately, best able to help them along the way to obtaining those tools.

This is why communities like RedState should exist and should be supported by obsessively politically minded people like us (I mean, beyond the valiant cause of padding Neil’s paypal account, of course).

Now, all of the previous word-vomit buffet aside, let me be perfectly clear: I do not believe that we should let support of any politician in our camp run amok. To the contrary, intense scrutiny from those of us who have taken the time to research and understand these politicians is necessary and desired (although Palin has already met that requirement to my satisfaction, I’ve been fooled before). We must never for a moment forget that these are people who — for some reason or another — desire power over and/or from us, and we should strive to convey the importance of that to anyone who will listen.

Still, I believe that some are going beyond the call of duty to temper (and thereby improve) these enthusiasms amongst our like-minded (though potentially still naive) friends, to the point of seeking to squash them entirely from existence. Is it really necessary to launch into a battle over the nature a bridge funding deal with someone who affirmatively states that Sarah Palin is a good conservative? Or, to cite her brutal treatment of the Murkowsky regime administration (since my intent may not translate well in print: I’d classify that statement as ‘well intentioned ribbing’) as proof of her anti-Republicanism, in response to someone who blithely believes that she’d be a good Republican nominee based on little more than her autobiographical accounts and a personal good feeling about the candidate?

What the Republican party has been lacking for a long time is a charismatic leader who people can rally around and identify with — and it appears that Palin may be that type of person. Now that we actually have one, let’s try to redirect any weird Palin-worship type of energy we see into constructive conservative activism energy.

This involves teaching the flaws of Sarah Palin the human being; but also the promise of Sarah Palin the potential candidate who, to my view, seems to understand and be willing to espouse and govern according to the principles of conservatism (all bridge pork, pipe deals, yahoo accounts, and plane tickets aside).

All clear? Great! Now, let’s go win one for the Gipper in 2010 and stop worrying about whether Sarah Palin would audit the fed, for goodness sakes!

After the local Republican party shut down the primary process and selected the terrible candidate and well-known liberal — and sometime Workers Family Party candidate — Dede Scozzafava to run against Owens; conservative Republicans in that district were left in the unlikely position of having to choose either the Republican or the less liberal candidate (a Democrat) in the race.

Instead, as some of conservative’s front line activists, we RedStaters were quick to embrace third party candidate Doug Hoffman: the one-time GOP primary nominee hopeful, who was locked out of the process without a debate.

Heading into the special elections a couple of weeks ago, Doug Hoffman went from a “divisive” thorn in the side of the Republican establishment, to a veritable champion of the conservative base of the Republican party. Once Scozzafava’s liberal (and not moderate at all) positions became widely known, her popularity (locally and nationally) tanked; and it soon became clear that she could not be elected.

As the vote neared, Scozzafava — no longer able to win — seemed satisfied to play spoiler when Hoffman emerged as the front-runner; at least until she realized that she was splitting union votes away from her favored candidate (the Democrat), and dropped out. Interestingly, it seemed to matter little: Doug Hoffman, with broad national support and a surprising amount of local appeal, was steam-rolling his way to victory in both 2-way and 3-way contests. In what appeared at the time to be a major strategic blunder, Scozzafava’s Republican betrayal (the national party injected hundreds of thousands of dollars into her campaign coffers in an absurd attempt to help her win) did little but validate long-held skepticism of such faux Republicanism (to paraphrase Rush Limbaugh, “she screwed every RINO in the country”).

But then, a funny thing happened; when early returns began flowing in, Hoffman was severely under-performing in some of his best districts. We (RedStaters) watched with interest and dismay as his In-Trade numbers plummeted. It wasn’t long before he conceded defeat. As could have been predicted; Owens, just a few hours after being sworn in, completely backtracked on several of his campaign pledges and voted soon after for the abominable Obama Care bill in the house that he had promised to oppose.

Every election has anomalies; and NY-23 was no different. Hoffman’s terrible performance in his best districts? A technical glitch. More surprisingly, he got no votes at all in several districts. Election officials quickly “corrected” the problems; and, not surprisingly, Owens still won.

It is time to issue a federal subpoena to find out exactly how officials “corrected” the vote.

Why, you may ask?

Because, as we learned yesterday, at least some of the certified electronic voting machines in the NY-23 congressional special election were discovered to be running malicious code (a virus) in the week prior to voting. We now hear word that election officials, According to the report, election officials, after cleaning only the identified machines, took no further action to re-certify other voting machines in the district.

Although the technical nature of such a virus is interesting; it is difficult to adequately explain in article format. For the technical minded, the programming technique (called return-oriented programming) utilized is described here; while the application of this technique is described here (h/t Scope).

For the layman, I’ll simply list a few facts regarding the virus:

1. TheSuch a virus could only have been implanted after the voting machine was installed into the polling centers and the machines turned on at least once.

2. TheSuch a virus was could only be (edit: originally working from the election official’s statement, now disclaimed) implanted by an operative with direct, physical access to the voting machines.

3. TheSuch a virus is eliminated only when power is completely removed, and not necessarily when the machine is “turned off”.

4. TheSuch a virus works not by “injecting” new code into the system, but by confusing the system by piecing together valid code fragments to form a new code (for example, a vote for Hoffman could become a vote for either no one or a vote for Owens; but the attacker is quite limited in their ability to, for example, generate a random number). Therefore, given the exact virus code run on each affected machine, it would be quite easy to reconstruct the true vote. (CORRECTION 11/27/09: given enough time, and a linux based system — such as the one discussed here — a full ‘return to libc’ virus could be implemented. That would give lots of freedom to do all kinds of nasty stuff, including random numbers which would be totally unrecoverable)

While the story certainly begins well (after workers discovered a problem, they were able to eliminate the infection with the help of the manufacturer and the machines were recertified), election officials did something inexplicable: rather than reset and recertify all of the voting machines, they took no further action.

Any curiosity at all into the nature of the virus — for example, by simply asking the manufacturer — would have quickly revealed the facts that I have enumerated above. The perpetrator(s) had physical access to the machines (that is, possibly poll workers or administrators), and an express intent of manipulating the vote. Therefore, without being able to identify the source of the virus, the only reasonable course of action of election officials would have been to immediately perform the power cycling procedure on all voting machines to eliminate the virus and provide outside physical security for all machines to prevent reinfection. As far as we know right now, they did neither.

Which brings me back to my point about that innocuous little technical glitch. The workers reporting vote totals in those districts (in which Hoffman received no votes) apparently didn’t find this information worthy of propagating to the Hoffman campaign prior to his concession; which must, in retrospect, present at least some cause for concern.

Without the code (as point #3 indicates, once power is removed from the machines, all traces of the offending code is permanently destroyed), it is now impossible to reconstruct the true vote total. Not only do we not know which, if any, machines were infected; we can not know what the parameters of the virus were (for example, the percentage of Hoffman votes which were either discarded or became Owens votes could have varied from polling place to polling place), although we can begin to piece this information together by comparing the number of paper signatures at the polling places with the number of votes.

However, the most important thing to know now is how election officials reconstructed Hoffman’s vote total in the districts in which he received no votes, as well as where his vote was initially under-reported.

If the lack of Hoffman votes in those district could have been caused by the virus, then the election official’s reaction and actions taken would indicate whether they were complicit in election fraud. The most likely way that they might have reconstructed the Hoffman vote would be to take the total number of voters and subtract off the Owen’s vote (and some percentage of misvotes), because the actual vote would have either been lost (or even more damning, calculable only with an intimate knowledge of the workings of the virus).

It is vitally important to verify how they came up with the Hoffman vote total — as this could not only implicate those potentially guilty of the fraud — but also whether Hoffman votes became Owens votes or whether Hoffman votes were being dropped and help forensically reconstruct the true results of the election.

As they like to say, it’s not the crime, but the cover-up.

If the Hoffman votes were simply dropped, it might still be possible to estimate the true Hoffman vote from the total number of voters (based on the number of signatures on the paper sign-in forms). Unfortunately, without using properly certified machines or having a detailed record of which machines were infected and (precisely) what they were infected with, it is impossible to say for sure who won the election (whether the tainted total shows Owens by 1 vote or 1 million).

In case you’re interested in learning more about how the system works, here are the voting machine training videos.

Update 1

This was in the original article, but it’s worth pointing out specifically:

In St. Lawrence County, machines in Louisville, Waddington, Claire, and Rossie “broke” early in the voting process on election day. Republican Commissioner Deborah Pahler said that the machines kept “freezing up… like Windows does all the time,” and that they experienced several paper jams as well. The voted ballots that could not be scanned were placed in an Emergency Lock Box and re-scanned later at the St. Lawrence County Board of Elections. Election officials in St. Lawrence County were given no advance knowledge of a potential virus in the system.

Because of the nature of return-oriented programming, freeze-ups are practically expected. Again, without going into too many details, it effectively works by “confusing” the system, so that a function should begin and end at well-defined points in memory; but the machine is placed into a stable “state error” and the attacker constructs a pseudo-function out of many non-sequential chunks of code.

It is quite likely that the machines in those counties were simply running a slightly different version of software than the virus was actually intended to work on, so that those stable “state errors” become slightly less… stable.

Update 2

Also in the original article, a note about the paper ballots also in storage:

The problem is that the slot is readily accessible to the voter (or poll worker) to stuff manually. 10 voted ballots could be deposited in the slot for every one voter… and if the electronic count was compromised, the “paper backup” would be useless.

So, these paper ballots are probably not a “true” vote count, but if ballot stuffing can be estimated from the numbers on the check-in rolls, it would certainly be an excellent thing to look at.

Update 3 (11/21/09 8:09PM)

The response from a former election watchdog (Bo Lipari) is being used by the media to run with the claim that the virus story is a hoax.

Lipari claims that the voting machines could not have had a virus because they run Linux:

There was no virus in the NY-23 machines. How do I know? Well, in the first place, the Dominion ImageCast scanners in question run the Linux operating system, which is nearly immune to viruses due to its inherent ability to lock out programs that lack explicit permission to run, unlike the highly vulnerable Windows operating system.

(Italics mine). The insanity of it all is that this person is obviously ignorant about return-oriented programming — he should become familiar. Linux’s security is based on a concept called W-xor-X, which (though cryptic) simply means that the operating system will not allow execution of code which the operating system has the authority to write to. It eliminates the possibility of user injected code — but that’s not what we’re talking about here. The executed code is not writable (as I’ve said, it’s pieced together fragments of good, non-writable code), so W-xor-X is useless.

The piece doesn’t end there; the “hoax” is further debunked with the following cannard:

Because New York votes on paper, everybody’s vote was counted. When the scanner stopped working, the ballots were removed and counted, so no votes were lost.

(Again, italics mine). I’ve already addressed this here, but I’ll restate it anyway: the ballots could be stuffed at a rate of 10 to 1. While this is unlikely in any fair election, the possibility cannot be eliminated given that the perpetrators were likely poll workers.

Much more importantly, it is incorrect to assume that only the misbehaving machines had the virus.

Given this possibility, a full recount must be performed (despite the possibility of ballot stuffing). Recounting only the malfunctioning machines is NOT sufficient!

Update 4 (11/22/09 6:45AM)

Yet more in the media/blogosphere running with the “no virus” meme based on Lipari’s statement. here, here, here, and elsewhere.

Every “there is no virus” story has either cited Lipari or provides a bald assertion.

By the way, here is the direct link to Lipari’s NY-23 blog entry; and, here is where he discusses the possibility of fooling scanning voting machines (like the one we’re talking about here), for example, in order for ACORN/WFP corrupt poll workers honest citizens to do some ballot stuffing while they’re at the polls.

Update 5 (11/22/09 7:AM)

Required reading: what they told the Hoffman campaign.

Just a few tidbits:

There was no virus in the voting machines on Election Day in the 23rd District or anywhere else. The article is full of inaccurate information and unfortunately quoted a single word from a commissioner who mischaracterized the issue in question.

Question: how was the code “updated” to solve this problem? Did it involve unplugging and replugging in the machine, or not?

And then on the USB ports, which the attacker used to upload the virus:

With regard to the use of USB ports, there is a single USB port on the ImageCast scanner. Pursuant to state Election Law 7-202(t) the port does not permit any “functionality potentially capable of externally transmitting or receiving data via the internet, via radio waves or via other wireless means.” The port is sealed, is not accessible and has no capability for any exchange of information. The scanners do not operate like personal computers. Any device, such as a flash drive, placed in the port will not be recognized.

Essentially, they promise that the USB port cannot be used to support a device able to transmit voter data. Wonderful. Terrific. I hope it’s true (it probably isn’t). Not to beat a dead horse, here, but what exactly could the USB port be used for? Booting the machine into diagnostic code, and/or updating source code. That sounds a lot like the type of port you might need to upload a virus.

Lest anybody be confused, the attacker is unlikely to need to call tech support when his/her USB thumb drive doesn’t appear as an icon on the screen with a cheerful bell sound.

Update 6 (11/22/09 7:20AM)

Here is the compact, more or less “official” explanation of the problem:

The problem was determined to be in the ImageCast source code, which may not be modified without retesting and certification prior to use. But it was possible to modify the ballot configuration file to contain less ancillary text, freeing up a bit more memory and preventing the crash. The Board of Elections approved the configuration file change, the 10 counties which had races susceptible to the bug were identified, and the changes made to the files in plenty of time for the election. Everything worked the way it should have, except for one thing – the process of identifying machines which needed the fix missed some of them, so the modified configuration file was not installed, and, as expected, these machines hung.

It’s a tidy explanation: judge for yourself. Keep in mind, however, that the virus code would likely occupy the portion of memory most easily accessed by people with boots on the ground (in other words, right after where the candidates in the race are defined). The easiest way to test this assertion is to pull a machine out of storage (if power has been removed, it would now be wiped of any presumptive virus) and see if it’s still “broken”.

If it is, and this exact glitch is the only indication of a virus, then you’ve got yourself a reasonable explanation from the state. If not (eg,. it works fine), then it’s indirect proof of the presence of the virus.

Update 7 (11/22/09 9:45PM)

Another nice blog regarding the electronic voting machines. He points out that the configuration tool used by the election officials (both to configure the races and cause the supposed memory problem) is actually not a certified tool, but underestimates (in my humble opinion) the possibility of a virus. On the one hand, using uncertified tools would seemingly make weird glitches more expected and help to validate the official story; on the other (if true, of course), what in the heck were they thinking using non-certified configuration tools?

How would they know that they weren’t unwittingly uploading a virus? Sloppy! But, if the virus hypothesis is in any way substantiated, it would certainly be a huge coup if the configuration utility was the delivery mechanism, as that code surely still exists somewhere.

Technical aside: I haven’t been able to find much in the way of specifications on the Sequoia/Dominion ImageCast, if anyone knows how much system RAM it contains, the size of (or better, a copy of) the default firmware image, etc. please post let me know. I am just having a hard time believing that — from an engineering standpoint — there is so little available memory that an extra few dozen characters of data could crash it (without a pretty egregious coding error).

Update 8 (11/23/09 6:20AM)

At this point, the only new spin out there is that the Gouverneur Times (the folks who broke the story when that election official used the ‘v’ word) is poorly edited, new, and hence, not a real news source (I say, have a sense of humor about it: just because they can’t spell “Governor” doesn’t mean that they were wrong about what the election official said or what meaning that statement portends).

We await to see what the Hoffman campaign does today. I’m thinking the only logical choice will be for them to let it go and gear up for 2010, since practically everyone (the local and national Republican party, the local election board, the media…) is against them at this point; but it would certainly do my heart some good if they were able to use some legal leverage to pull one of those machines out of storage — along with the configuration utilities — and let somebody qualified take a few pokes at it.

Update 9 (11/23/09 5:15PM)

An interesting post from Brad Friedman, whom I had previously linked as one of the virus “hoax” band-wagoners (original post here). The new article was much better (gratuitous mention of -16k votes for the Algore not withstanding); and while he didn’t dump on Lipari’s assessment, the updated piece no longer cites it; and he now comes to the conclusion that a manual recount is warranted (so; sorry, Brad — it looks like you’re actually interested in the same thing that we are: proof of a fair election).

Update 10 (11/24/09 8:45AM)

This from the Watertown Daily Times:

John McCaslin, the radio co-host, asked Mr. Hoffman if he suspected that “somebody tampered with the software to change the votes that were actually cast to give a different result than the voters intended.”

“No, we’re not making that allegation,” Mr. Hoffman said. “I think we have to congratulate the elections commissioners for doing the best job that they possibly could.”

Hoffman didn’t announce whether he was challenging the result yesterday; which means he is now simply weighing whether to force a recount based on what amounts to a mere technicality (the supposedly uncertified configuration software). He won’t get a re-vote based on that.

See you again in 2010, Doug.