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I hate to break it to you but I think a lot of people that believe those theories are ON the right wing. Yes, and that Bill Clinton killed over 45 people. The fact is that there are kooks on both sides. That doesn't make the allegation of voting shadiness any less true. http://www.blackboxvoting.com/

you may be suprised that most companies actually donate pretty equally to both sides just to cover the bases.

That is false, and vague to boot. Aboard the clue train, companies can't donate to political campaigns. It's Walden O'Dell (the individual, CEO of Diebold) who runs the company that makes these shady voting machines, is a Bush "pioneer" who's committed to raising $100,000 in bundled donations, and has said publicly that he's "committed to delivering Ohio's electoral votes to the president".

Without that info, this is a meaninglessly paranoid "article".

I can't believe someone modded that troll insightful. Just because the article/Vidal doesn't cite the source of the information, doesn't make the assertion less true, or the suspicion unwarranted.

Sheesh, do you even read Slashdot? Have you any knowledge of what's been done already by Diebold, their internal memos, their swiss cheese code, O'Dell's machinations? Have you checked Black Box Voting to see if it's up or down this week due to a Diebold lawsuit? You think it's meaningless paranoia to discuss the very real improprieties in e-voting implementation?

Personally I like the bit about vote-counting in France. Sounds a lot more advanced (read: secure) than the US way of doing it.

Check out Black Box Voting to find out what is and is not good practice in the world of voting and voting technology (read some of the free online edition of the book by Bev Harris, it's quite interesting). I think online voting falls sqarely in the not good category. It is simply not auditable and is susceptible to too great a number of security risks.

Don't kid yourself: open source is nice, but it doesn't guarantee a fault-proof or secure voting system (suppose somebody installs wrong or malicious software on one of the machines?).

I don't see how this Australian system is any more trustworthy than Diebold, ES&S, or Sequoia's systems (the latter three are all based on proprietary software). There's no voter verifiable audit trail (which is a showstopper) and yet, to read the review in the article, Software Improvements has apparently bamboozled people into trusting their work.

It looks like this Wired article gives an unjustified glowing review to a system whose accuracy can never be tested after the election. It looks to me like the reviewer (like so many programmers) gets caught up in the software being available for inspection.

If someone wanted to rig an election, they'd be wise to do what this Australian firm is doing: go through the motions to gain people's trust and then make sure there's no accountability in the system so nobody can second-guess your results (the firm even talks about how there's no voter verifiable audit trail because it is unneeded and not required by the 1992 voting law). We are fortunate Diebold has been so brazen about propping up President Bush and so hamfisted about stopping the leaked memos from propagating. Their actions give opponents a chance to be heard and say what a good voting system needs in order to be worthy of our trust.

How did this article overlook these glaring faults and conclude these "Aussies [are] do[ing] it right"? Is there some kind of financial relationship between Wired's owners (Conde Nast publications) and the Australian voting company?

Rob: "And then when we loaded the software to fix that, the machines were still acting ridiculous. I was saying, 'This is not good! We need some people that know what this stuff is supposed to do, from McKinney, NOW! These machines, nobody knows what they're doing but Diebold, you need some people to fix them that know what's going on. They finally brought in guys, they ended up bringing in about 4 people...

You'd think that with such troubles, someone might follow standard company procedure and write up a bug report.

"All bugs ever reported have bug numbers," wrote Ken Clark in a memo dated Jan. 10, 2003, pointing out that the whole collection can be found in "Bugzilla." So I went looking for Bugzilla reports from Georgia. My goodness. They weren't there.

Bugzilla report numbers 1150-2150 correspond with June-Oct. 2002, but although hundreds of these bug numbers are mentioned in memos and release notes, I only found 75 Bugzilla reports for this time period, and none from Georgia. Strange. I was looking forward to reading the explanations about how computers can get up in the morning and announce that they have no brain [mentioned on an earlier page]. Aha -- Here's a memo about missing Bugzilla files: It's dated 8 Jul 2002, from principal engineer Ken Clark.

Subject: bugzilla down, we are working on it. "We suffered a rather catastrophic failure of the Bugzilla database," he writes. He warns that recovery of the bugzilla reports "will be ugly" and adds that "there will be a large number of missing bugs."

In a follow up note on July 16, Clark says "Some bugs were irrecoverably lost and they will have to be re-found and re-submitted, but overall the loss was relatively minor."

...among programmers, system backups are a religion. People are fired for not performing a daily backup. Some programming shops back up every shift. Because backups are critically important, expensive automated tape systems are employed to minimize any data loss. By our estimation, almost a thousand bug reports are missing, including all the Georgia bugs.

Bev Harris Black Box Voting

BlackBoxVoting.com is still up. You can read the book online.

There is a significant difference between a work of fiction the Scientology cult sells for money to its members and the internal memos of a company in charge of elections in the United States when it comes to copyright law and the ability for 3rd parties to reproduce those items wholesale. In one case you are likely denying a group the ability to profit from the work itself. In the other -- with a memo -- there is no such damage. (Even if down the line this means Diebold's voting fraud* activities are exposed and so they do not profit from their msideeds).

Nevertheless, FUCK Scientology and its brainwashing cult (which gets people killed or poor or dumb).

You need to host that site elsewhere. Maybe even HavenCo. BlackBoxVoting is far too important for the future of the United States. We can't have it going offline every week.

We were also covered last week in the New York Times and USA Today. For many more details about the Rob Georgia story from WiredNews, download the new Chapter 9 pdf for the Black Box Voting book -- as of this writing, BlackBoxVoting.com is once again taken down, again for a bogus spam harrassment report -- conveniently, within 12 hours of posting this new chapter -- so you'll have to go to a backup site to download the chapter. The BlackBoxVoting.org site is still down due to a Diebold DMCA action.

In Chapter 9, you'll see that Diebold also seems to have lost the bug reports from Georgia and that internal memos show that six or seven patches were done, not just one. This went all the way to the president of Diebold, who at one point yelled at Rob "We don't need YOU airing OUR dirty laundry!"

Nice folks, lovely voting system.

Bev Harris Author of Black Box Voting

Reading the article would do you no good, because, you see, I'm an idiot. I RTFA too, but somehow everytime my eyes saw VeriSign, the voices in my head were saying Diebold. Do dee dum dee doot dee do.

Sorry about that - I'm just still so freaked about the Diebold BS and I want to see more press about it, so I'm projecting Diebold into stories that have nothing to do with them, apparently.

But still, I think we need to take a big step back from the whole electronic voting thing until we can have an unbiased audit of the touch screen machines' security without all the coverups. Diebold is keeping their software versions secret and suing people to keep them from publishing internal memos that show they're ignoring the security issues instead of fixing the problems and showing us their fixed.

All they have to do is have the machines spit out a barcoded ballot that can be machine counted and compared with the data collected by the touch screen machines, and take the master computer off the Internet. They brag about the touch screen machines not being on the 'net, but the main one is. What's the problem with reading the results off the screen and then releasing the data to the press? You can't hack something you can't access.

There's some pretty scary stuff about the whole thing at blackboxvoting.com. And while some may consider this offtopic, I'd like to propose the analogy that if you're having problems with getting hacked through your dial up connection, you might want to hold off on adding a broadband connection until you've secured the first method.

How to hack an election 1.12: Diebold tries to silence incriminating evidence : Diebold, maker of proven-to-be hackable voting systems, plays global whack-a-mole, in effort to scare ISP's into taking down websites with incriminating material. They used the DCMA to shut down BlackBoxVoting.org.

But the incriminating data just keeps popping back up on the Net, and Gun-and-Voting rights activist Jim March calls the bluff and challenges Diebold "Diebold: You are cordially invited to bite me. Bring it on. Make my day.. March has created a legal strategy/toolkit for voting rights activists who want to fight Diebold, a company which has knowingly - for 10 years - sold security-compromised voting technology, and whose CEO, an aggressive Republican fundraiser, has said he is he is committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year. In internal memos published by Scoop, Diebold's officials admit that their voting records database is (and has been for a long time) hackable ( [anyone can] access the GEMS Access database and alter the Audit log without entering a password ) but that this isn't necessarily a problem because It has a lot to do with perception. Of course everyone knows perception is reality. For background to this story, see my summary of Mefi posts on the Voting Fraud story, from this thread. Diebold's funky voting systems are in the process of being Certified, in Maryland and elsewhere, by SAIC, a company convicted of major frauds within the last decade and which has extensive ties to the Bush Administration, the CIA, and which proudly lists DARPA in its annual report as one of its prime clients., and owns Network Solutions, Inc. SAIC has not, it seems, noticed the GEMS database story (see main link). If Diebold systems win certification, we can expect an awful lot of This sort of thing.

Computer security expert Dr. Rebecca Mercuri has some pointed analysis on the subject.

You can join the effort to demand truly secure voting systems at VerifiedVoting.Org

Here's one.
Show him this one, too.

But you can still go to the blackboxvoting.com site.

...until the slashdot effect sets in!

Here is what I have been doing all day:

Reporter: Why is Diebold sending cease and desists?
Me: Because they don't want anyone to see their memos
Reporter: Oh. What is in the memos?
Me: Oh, things about security flaws and using uncertified software and using cell phones to intercept and transfer votes and discussions of how to fake things...
Reporter: Wow. Where can I download these?
Me: At this web site
Reporter: Okay I'm going there now, okay, it's downloading, when I'm done will you give me a guided tour?
Me: Sure. And here is a neat little web page where you just enter any search term and it instantly searches and find you the Diebold memos that match
Reporter: What search terms should I start with?
Me: Try "boogie man" and also "hack" "cel phone" "broken" "fake" and one of my personal favorites, "What good are rules"
Reporter: I'll try that "what good are rules" one. Found it. Gosh, what is he doing? Is that legal?
Me: No.

And so it goes. Excellent plan, Diebold. Yes, shut down a web site, that'll help.

Besides reporters, the memos were downloaded today by the U.S. House of Representatives.

The problem is, no one looks at the paper ballots, even in a recount -- they just run them through the machines again.

In the Diebold memos is a fascinating bit about Volusia County. Diebold machines apparently gave Al Gore MINUS 16,022 votes. Just a glitch, said the news media.

Not quite -- the internal memos show that the programmers couldn't quite explain it, but what they DO know is that two different memory cards were uploaded, card #0 (correct totals) and one hour later, card #3 (all totals correct except for the presidential race). Card #3 has since been misplaced, darn it, no one can find it. And in the memos (triggered by a pesky Florida auditor, doggone those people) as they struggle to come up with a plausible explanation one of them cautions the others to be careful, "you never know when the boogie man is reading these."

You can find this memo and commentary on it at www.blackboxvoting.com and you can find a link to ALL the memos at the activism site, www.blackboxvoting.org

David Allen got the password for a secret teleconference of voting company insiders, plus the head of "The Election Center" which is supposed to represent We, the People, and a lobbyist telling the voting machine vendors to pony up $200,000 in a week for a PR blitz, due to the fact that the industry is in trouble.

Much talk was made about making sure no one in the media found out about it; imagine their chagrin when Scoop Media (that pesky New Zealand web site) had a transcript and the proposal document on the web within half an hour.

In this meeting, the vendors asked if Lockheed-Martin and Northrop Grumman and others could help them with this PR fiasco "like they helped with the HAVA bill." A subtle but rather stunning exchange followed where they all discussed how the defense contractors and procurers (and they named them: Lockheed-Martin, Northrop-Grumman, EDS and Accenture) were the driving force behind the bill for new voting machines, and that it was done specifically for profit motives.

And these were the insiders, folks. I will not be surprised if soon, that pesky New Zealand site posts an MP3 sound track of that meeting.

Bev Harris
Black Box Voting

Everyone should take a look at Black Box Voting which details many of the issues with these proprietary voting machines and the inherent security and privacy risks. Not to mention the lack of accountability in the process.

For months the Diebold FTP sites which distribute updates to the GEMS voting software were open to anonymous access. This software has been downloaded and reviewed by Bev Harris. Also here. If you can find the space and bandwidth, plese mirror these files for further analysis.

Thanks for participating, there was some genuinely useful information in the response that warranted repetition. Since I've been involved in politics locally (helping to run a local man for Congress, other local men and women for city boards, and trying to create a Citizen Police Review Board), I've become more interested in seeing where the various blogs and webboards are on politically organizing to express their views succinctly to elected officials.

Fortunately or unfortunately, (and I believe fortunately) the US allows all people (over the age of 18), even those who aren't paying attention, to vote.

I can think of a few dozen thousand Floridians who would disagree with you here. And I think given the triple corporate threat to our future voting rights from Sequoia, ES&S, and Diebold (as explained by Bev Harris and her website), I can't help but think that our Democracy is at stake. I see very little awareness of these issues amongst the public I've spoken with.

Be aware that much of what you read on the editorial page of the newspaper, or what you hear on talk radio, is spin.

I would amend that to read all, not much, of anyone's analysis of anything is spin. From my experience with a community radio station where I host an electronic/political public affairs show ("Digital Citizen"), I'd say objectivity is a myth. This is how it has always been. My show, Slashdot, your post, and everyone's followups (including mine) are no exception. We can't help but see things from our own perspective, as Molly Ivins put it so well on her recent book tour appearance/debate with Al Franken and Bill O'Reilly.

So here is an example of murky money: You want to help the EFF? Write a big check. It will allow them to do better research, hire more people to lobby, fly to more conferences, print more flyers, etc. Hmmmm, sounds a lot like "providing funds to political campaigns in exchange for laws/policies/etc that benefit the organization", doesn't it?

To me, the amount of influence and money from a single donor seems vastly different in corporate America than with most individuals. Hilary Rosen, former head of the RIAA, was recently tapped to help form a new copyright regime for Iraq. Is anyone from the EFF in a similar position? I doubt it. Which /. reader can afford to give roughly a million dollars to EFF like Enron gave to each of the two major political parties (giving a little more to the Republicans, but both roughly the same)? I know I can't. I couldn't afford $10,000, which I think most people would consider a "big check".

When the public gets together and speaks with a single voice on an issue of national importance, we still can't wield the same power as the corporations. Corporate media didn't report on the recent FCC decision prior to June 2, 2003 when it would have been most informative to US citizens (with one minor exception I'm aware of: ABC overnight news had a brief mention of what the FCC was considering which aired at around 3AM). In 1996, the same thing happened--the mass media was covering Monica Lewinsky, not the Telecom Act. This time the public was organized and when the House bill came around, it did not stop the entire FCC decision and give the public (as FCC Commissioner Michael Copps says) a chance to "tee up" all the relevant questions. I don't know what the right FCC policy should be here, but I know making decisions on that policy before we can study it in depth is a mistake. As NOW with Bill Moyers has reported, the corporate media is in bed with the FCC who is supposed to be regulating them. Which Congressmembers are on this and what are they doing?

Finally, imagine that the

For all the electronic voting information you'll need.

To the best of my knowledge, Bev Harris was the first journalist to get involved, and she brought the story to scoop. See http://www.blackboxvoting.com

Scoop's been involved in this one since about January, but weren't the first to get hold of the files.

Scoop's got a feature page linking to all the updates on the story at href="http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/features/?s=usa coup

It bothers me the way the 'mainstream' media are ignoring the political ramifications of this discovery, and have painted it as simply a case of poor software design. These voting machines have been produced by companies run by hard right politicians, and look like they are probably designed for the purpose of manipulating votes. Combined with the well documented oddities in the past two election results, it appears that they have been rather successful to date. Bush's government has provided massive funding for the purchase of these voting machines by the states, and has removed legal requirements for any sort of paper trail. Unless this is taken seriously, american democracy is dead.

A good place to start researching said privacy concern/ballot tampering is Black Box Voting

Diebold accidentally left the AccuVote source on an open FTP site (whoops), which is available here, and Black Box Voting is asking for programmers to review and evaluate the code.

You're right, they're not Luddites. They're not even a they. She is a publicity agent. What kind of ass writes a story, writes a letter promoting that story ("We have just broken what may become one of the biggest stories on the Internet and we want your assistance and attention."), and then puts the letter on her own web site? Don't get me wrong, I am somewhat suspicious regarding online voting. But if I wanted to warn people about it, I wouldn't link to that shill's site. Just trying to raise the level of discourse and epistemology.

I am afraid that sentiments like yours mask a great deal of indiferrence and intellectual laziness by the pretense of a realistic and 'no-nonsense' attitude.

It is a far-cry from the blanket assertion:

Can any online voting system be hacked? Yes.

http://www.blackboxvoting.com/
Inside A U.S. Election Vote Counting Program
Bald-Faced Lies About Black Box Voting Machines

It is irresponsible, derelict and probably mendacious of anyone advocating the adoption of newer vote collection technologies not to insist on addressing these specific allegations and their evidence. Any proposal which is advanced without a specific redress of these concerns should be considered suspect in motive. Ignorance of the basic issue - and its gravity - is not a possibility.

Also look at This story and the related pages at The Scoop. The most widely deployed system in the US is based on MS Access (!?!), with NO controls for cryptographic storage, trasport, data integrity and/or non-repudiation.

Baaaa, Baaaa! Computers Better! Paper Worse! It's mere superstition by the Sheep-people.

The auditor is expected to rely on the reports and audits provided by the application. The software, Access databases, and vendor-provided machines with the software on them are not supposed to be looked at directly, and have been password protected to prevent such "tampering".

Complaints that these restrictions give an insane amount of control to the vendors have so far fallen on deaf ears. Speculations that said ears have been stuffed with cotton from appropriately delivered bribes lack proof (though not circumstantial evidence), and have therefore not been widely reported.

Before dismissing this story I suggest looking into the background, some of which is on http://www.blackboxvoting.com, and doing research including downloading the online copy of the ftp site and appropriate tools as described in the "boring" link above. (Scroll for the words, "complete online copy".)

Bev Harris' Black Box Voting: Ballot-tampering in the 21st Century has much to offer on this, most notably a chance to preorder Harris' book on the topic. I don't have any connection to her or the book, and I make no money from saying this. My awareness of her comes from reading the website and listening to her radio interviews describing her findings and research. She offers compelling evidence on what has gone wrong with Diebold's machines, Sen. Hagel's connection to Diebold, and how votes get lost. She writes in a manner that is accessible to technical and non-technical people alike. I think this book will be another must-read investigative journalism highlight just like Greg Palast's "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" on the 2000 presidential election in 2000.

The stories posted are a follow-up to an earlier story which had quite a bit to say about evidence that Georgia's off elections were deliberately manipulated.

http://www.blackboxvoting.com/

for the copy n paste challenged users

The good news is that ES&S / Sequoia / Diebold are owned by major GOP campaign contributors, so expect traditional Republicans to be elected, not Bill Gates.

Coincidently, they are also closed source, DMCA protected, and paperless. Have a look.

Oh...and this was the same year they suspended exit poling.

If it does, you should be able to figure out where his votes are coming from and more to the point, who his loyal constituents really are.

Check out this site: Black Box Voting

With the rise of computerized voting systems, there follows a greater opportunity to cheat in elections. In the past election [for congress], voting districts started using computer voting systems. The problem with this is the lack of accountability. The voting machines are not open source [which in itself is not a problem]. However in the last election, there were a couple incidents in which the vendors "upgraded" [or modified] the code after it was inspected by the accounting people.

In addition, in the last election, one of the candidate owned great number of shares in the voting machine production companies of his state. This is a great potential for conflict of interest.

Lastly, hackers found that the binary files and certain voting data files were found on the company's public FTP site. It was improperly configured so that you can upload your own data files to overwrite the official ones.

Anyways, until we get a more secured system that is more accountable, we should not jump into computerized voting.

Read more about this at: Salon.com Hacking Democracy

Before anybody applauds the idea of electronic voting, it would be wise to take a look at the following two web sites, and the links therein:

Notable Software

Black Box Voting

Then feel free to start talking about the merits of a rush to e-voting...

While I am of two minds on the gun-control debate, this snippet of text caught my eye. It's important to realize that our founders considered this one of the MOST BASIC rights that must be guaranteed.

Specifically, they wanted to ensure that the public had the means necessary to overthrow the government established by the Constitution, in the event that it didn't work out as they had hoped. If, for instance, the democratic process was subverted in some way, We The People were expected to take up our arms and restore proper government.

The fact that such a provision is essentially meaningless in an era of billion dollar war machines is a topic for another debate. If only Ben Franklin were still around to help us out with thorny issues like this... *sigh*

And it is just coincidence that the good Senator from Nebraska was previously the CEO of the company that counted the ballots? (No, the previous poster did not pick a hypothetical example.)

Where can I order me up some more "coincidences" like that?

NPR had a story about Black Box Voting, a book about Georgia's electronic voting system and it's problems. All sorts of great info on the website.

Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska (a former conservative radio talk show host) owns part interest (a $1M-5M dollar investment) in The Macarthy Group, which owns a company called "Election Systems & Software". Sen. Hagel was, at one time, the chairman of ES&S. ES&S supplied the voting machines that count approximately 60% of all votes cast in the United States, and they counted all the votes in Hagel's 1996 upset and 2002 landslide wins in Nebraska. ES&S is loathe to reveal the source code. Sen. Hagel neglected to disclose his interest in ES&S on his FEC Personal Disclosure statements, claiming that his interest in The Macarthy Group (a privately held banking company) was exempt as an "exempted investment fund" (a rule which exempts candidates from disclosing their mutual fund holdings). Hagel's financial disclosures (or lack thereof) from 1996-2002 can be found here. Also interesting, in 1996 Hagel became the first Republican to win a Senate seat in Nebraska in 24 years to win a Senate seat helped in part by an unprecendented show of support by the black community who had never before voted republican.

...by getting people to use your easily manipulatable system, and then accepting the highest bribes.

Which seems to be an apt description of how the voting companies are working.

See blackbox voting for lots more on this...

Someone remind me to hit preview next time :(