Slashdot Mirror

The nihilism of people like you is the real problem here.

We can't fix a problem if we don't talk about it. People like those at blackboxvoting.org have been warning about election insecurity for nearly 2 decades now and its been talked about here on slashdot for just as long. But now that the general populace is waking to the problem, guys like you are pretending its just politics. Whether you are doing it out of cynicism, ignorance or malevolence, you are the problem. Fuck off.

It's OK to have the machine count the votes, but you need a paper trail. See also http://blackboxvoting.org/ball... That way you don't need to worry about making in hackable voting machines, which is hard.

Ballot images should exist, too.

>Korea has been one of the most corrupt countries on Earth

Is that total corruption, or corruption density? That matters when comparing to much larger countries.

The city and county of San Luis Obispo, CA likely beats them on corruption density. Some things were weird there even before getting really bad.

http://blackboxvoting.org/bbv_...

So you're saying that somehow the DNC generated 3.7 million more votes for Clinton than Sanders?

We often discuss voting machines here. We don't like them.
Smoking gun?

Where was Captain Obvious ten years ago?

She was (and still is) here. Alas, as you mentioned, no one wanted to listen.

Even in a somewhat broken democratic republic, it takes more than the 1% to vote in the 1%...

Unless your election turnout is <1%.

Or, you know - rigged voting mechanisms.

I used to be against the idea of "verified voting," but with the mass adoption of black box voting machines, I think I've changed tack on that one.

Prove that we didn't elect them. Prove that the elections are all rigged. Then I would support, even join such a move.

Until then baring arms against elected officials would just be a subversion of democracy. Who would take their place? Those who fight against the people's will by removing their chosen leaders? That would lead to tyrany for sure.

Until then all there is to do is try to vote for the best lizards we can with lots of facepalms over who our felow citizens keep chosing.

It has been shown that the elections are rigged. http://blackboxvoting.org/ Not all of them, all the time of course. But the big boys can put their thumb on the scale when it matters most.

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/

I can think of lots of ways to hack paper ballots. If you can't, you haven't thought enough.

Oh, you're so clever! Your mommy must be very proud of you.

Jesus H. Christ. Of course there are ways to commit election fraud with paper ballots; as long as there have been elections, there's been election fraud. But none of those ways are as easy or as fast as changing a few thousand votes, invisibly and untraceably, by screwing with all-electronic voting machines and the software used to tabulate the votes.

Making a traditional vote with paper is *very* expensive. Orders of magnitude higher than a security audit that would have patched the backdoor you mentioned.

The security problem with electronic voting isn't financial, it's political and legal. A proper security audit is impossible when the companies that make the voting machines insist that everything be closed-source and proprietary, and get away with it because they buy the right political friends. This has all been thoroughly documented, and until the problem is resolved (which, frankly, I don't think it ever will be) there will be no electronic voting system which matches the security, transparency, and accuracy of paper ballots counted by hand. If this is more expensive, well, as the saying goes, freedom isn't free. A few days' pay for election judges, every year or two, is a cost we should be more than willing to bear.

If you're talking about the electoral college, that and the Senate representation (two per state regardless of the size of the state) was a compromise to keep the big states from completely dominating the small states. That's part of the rulebook and it's necessary.

If however you're talking about electronic ballot fraud, hey man, right there with ya! Google my name with "Diebold" or the like.

Jim March
Member of the Board of Directors,
http://blackboxvoting.org/

You won't get away from it. This is the answer the one you don't want to hear.

No more ignoring these baby steps year after year, oh that sounds reasonable, or this sounds good. Finally when we are a total dragnet because of a few hundred of these 911/DHS/UN/CFR cogs your getting scared because the banksters haven't been arrested yet now the crosshairs are on you.

Now that we have your attention perhaps you'll be more politically active besides just playing group think on /. or voting off the flyers in your mail box at the last moment. Maybe you might want to see the vote counted? Or perhaps you'll learn about jury nullification as the law you re-write or the life you might save might be one of your own by someone equally educated who might one day equally judge you.

that sounds pretty good, but i think this crypto-thing would be better. people are working hard on the crypt to solve real problems

what you describe is pretty good, as it tries to fix problems with throwing the paper votes, but this improves on that a bit.

it's features include
* at the end i can check that my vote is in the published database of votes, which newspapers, etc can verify is added right.
* I cannot prove to anybody else who i voted for (so they can't strong-arm me)
* officials can not throw the votes in the trash, or a river, or bury them, or delete them... if the votes aren't in the published database people will see that their vote is missing.
* they can not scan the votes, keep them in the database, but add it up wrong and publish a wrong total, and then throw the records out. if they add it up wrong newspapers, universities, or any old slashdotter can do the adding themselves and call bullshit.

While I mostly agree with you, I think you lay the blame at the wrong feet.

While I understand the point of things like the UN (to prevent something like WWII from happening again) it, along with all the other international organizations have defrauded the American people of their constitutionally guaranteed rights.

The UN itself has done no such thing. The ones defrauding the US public of their constitutionally guaranteed rights are the elected representatives in the US government, and by extension their financial masters (a.k.a. "donors"), using the UN and other international groups as cover to get what they want. Though given the state of voting in the US (black-box hackable e-voting machines, gerrymandering, overly large constituencies, etc. etc.), the term "elected" might not hold much meaning here.

Cheers,

Yes, e-voting, after a lot of effort can be compromised. Regular paper-ballot voting can be compromised by anyone, skilled or not, with not a lot of effort at all. Any voting system can be compromised. I don't honestly understand why the Slashdot community dislike e-voting that much.

Paper-ballot voting can also be verified by anyone, skilled or not. That is one of the most important parts of an election: that virtually anyone can check on the process.

There are also no chances of accidental errors with paper-ballot voting, while bugs in electronic voting machines are known to have caused votes to be lost in the past.

Furthermore, you're talking as if paper ballot voting is without any protection at all. At least in Belgium,

• all political parties have the right to send a single witness to every voting location
• on the morning of the election, at every voting location someone from the local overseeing committee (both appointed citizens and representatives from all political parties) draw a number from 1 to 9 (using basically a papers-in-a-hat principle), and then every ballot is stamped in the grid location corresponding to that number (mentally divide the ballot in a 3 by 3 grid, and number them from top-left to bottom-right). Any ballot with a stamp in a different location is discarded, and a copy of a "master ballot" with the stamp in the right location is part of the official report of the proceedings
• the containers in which the ballots have to be deposited have to be clearly visible to all members of the overseeing committee at all times, and at the start of the election it is checked whether they are empty (and after that they are locked)
• prior to the start of the voting, the number of available (blank) ballots is counted this is recorded
• at the end, number of remaining blank ballots is counted and this is recorded, as well as the total number of people that voted
• the cast votes are counted with all of the members of the overseeing committee present

There are more things, but in general every step is observed by a lot of different people with different interests, everyone can understand everything that happens and hence also verify that it happens correctly.

Compare that to a computer. Even the average Slashdotter probably has no idea how to start verifying that it works correctly, contains no bugs or backdoors, and that everything was recorded correctly.

Of course, there is a solution: perform electronic voting *with a paper trail*, so that you can always verify the outcome in case of doubt. But for some reason that's not very popular.

election terrorists?
Complete psyop propaganda.

Brad Friedman - http://bradblog.com/
Bev Harris - http://blackboxvoting.org/

These two people are as far from election terrorists as you can get.

The one thing you purposely leave out of this discussion is the broken chain of custody which electronic signals representing votes create.

Your software runs on hardware, hardware which is not checked, because to check such hardware you would have to destroy it by reverse engineering it under an electron microscope.

If you on slashdot listen to this idiot AC, our country is going to keep screwing up down the same path. Officials KNOW electronic voting is rigged, that's why in conjunction with corporate media they can never be held accountable.

Iran is simply trying to emulate the US in how we handle our elections. Kicking out poll watchers and unsealed election boxes is nothing new here. BlackBox Voting keeps a good handle on some of the glaring problems close to home.

"You may be able to argue that a five thousand vote error is a small price to pay for a national election but these errors are certainly inadmissible on a much smaller scale.

A software error resulting in +/- 5000 votes cast is unacceptable on any level, even if it gets drowned out on the national level in the US.

There is absolutely no reason or excuse for software to miscount votes. It isn't rocket science.

I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but this shit just pisses me off. It's a matter of national and local integrity that our voting systems are transparent. Please support blackboxvoting.org if you don't have the time to get involved in a deeper fashion (calling/writing your legislators, etc).

Note: I'm not affiliated with blackboxvoting.org. I just appreciate their work.

The point is... how would you know?

Take a look at Black Box Voting and check it out. A while back, they had a YT video where a hacker was (easily!) able to preload a flash disk with values to rig the vote without there ever being any sign of a problem by the voting machines.

Yes, this is / was Diebold, but unless we use some nice sequential hash algorithms and/or cryptography, along with a verified "clean" starting point, it's not possible to trust electronic voting machines.

Further, the problem is that verifying e-votes and e-voting machines has to be done by a professional programmer and security expert. By definition, this makes verification (and trust) basically impossible for the average person. This means that by operating from authority, programmers and security "experts" could (and have!) certify voting machines and equipment and the general population would have no easy, trustable method to know if they're being hoodwinked.

Sorry, voting machines are a bad, bad, bad idea. As somebody who programs/maintains large databases of sensitive data, I can't say with confidence that I'd even be able to trust an open or OSS solution because of the difficulty in ensuring that the software that's been reviewed is the same as the software that's actually running.

For example, what if your compiler was compromised with a virus, so that the compiler itself produced software that was virus laden?

Sorry, e-voting is too complex. The people responsible for their security are parties of interest, and so by definition can never be trusted. E-voting is a bad, bad, bad idea.

Beverly Harris (at Black Box Voting) is a quintessential example of a modern American Hero. History should remember her with the warmth and love given to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine! I can't say enough how much I respect this average US mom who simply demanded that votes be counted accurately. In so doing, she's changed the world for the better. She's received several hundred dollars from me, and I donate more every year. You would do well to throw $5 her way, and maybe download and use her press pack... it's YOUR freedom at stake!

...or to put it another way, four excuses used:

1) "We have to let the blind and disabled vote privately". This is huge. See, even before Diebold got into voting, they were giving big money to the National Federation of the Blind, who would sue banks that didn't use "accessible" ATM (cash) machines, and then as part of the settlement the bank was supposed to buy "accessible" ATMs made by, you guessed it, Diebold.

Once Diebold got into voting in 2002 they pulled the same scam. The same National Federation of the Blind crew came in and flooded state-level voting system evaluation boards with tear-jerk stories of being able to vote privately for the first time with electronic voting (and an audio track telling them what to push for which votes).

2) A lot of the fiasco in the Florida 2000 race got blamed (mostly unfairly) on bad/old equipment. So the US Fed Gov't poured $3.5bil into voting system improvements in the form of grants to states and counties in 2002. Diebold got into voting in 2002 when the ink was barely dry on this bill (the "Help America Vote Act")...basically, it was blood in the water that attracted sharks. ES&S seriously ramped up production at that point.

3) There are claims that paper can be hacked too, and that's actually correct. What they didn't understand was that in order to do paper fraud you need a lot of people - it's "retail fraud" where each fraudster only affects a small number of votes. You damn well CAN do that but it takes a big corrupt political machine like Chicago in the '60s/'70s, Tamany Hall in NYC prior to 1913, etc. Electronic voting introduces "wholesale fraud" where one guy or a small team hacks a bunch of votes at once.

4) Costs of election processing. See, in the US we don't just have "Democracy", we have gobs of it. We vote for lots of races that would just be appointees elsewhere: "town clerk", judges, a ton of other minor officials. In most states we also vote on issues, bond measures, whether to buy parkland, whether to have gay marriage or not, stuff like that. So we end up with these huge ballots to a point where hand-counting starts to look ugly.

Right now, one fast solution might be to do paper ballots that get scanned, NOT touchscreens, and then once the ballots are fed through the "official count" scanners make by head cases like Diebold, ES&S and the like, we then run them through standard scanners saving graphic images to a hard disk and then to DVDs. Those would get handed out to political parties and activists on election night plus copied up to the web.

That way, anybody who wants to can do a hand-count of any one race or all races, by getting enough people together to count the graphic images. We basically have the existing "black boxes" (because all this Federal testing insanity is now enshrined in law and all these counties have bought junk systems already) and run them through a "white box" consisting of basically Ubuntu, an old P4, a decent hard disk, DVD burner and the biggest scanner SANE supports.

We can get that running in most places by 2010 because this "afterscanner white box" isn't a tabulator. In fact we do NOT want it to have OCR at all or know what's on the ballots, that way it can't be programmed to cheat. So since it's not a tabulator, it doesn't need certification, so it can be set up fast and cheap with off-the-shelf hardware and FOSS software with at most a simple front and and maybe an Ubuntu re-spin customized for this purposes.

Jim March
Member of the Board of Directors, http://blackboxvoting.org/

Two points I'd like to address here, GP and Parent posts...

The problem with accessible government is that no-one's interested. Even where there are dedicated TV channels (e.g. in the UK) hardly anyone watches them. Why's that? Because the work of government is almost 100% pure tedium. No-one wants to watch what happens in committee meeting - even if that's where the laws are actually made, nor do are they prepared to sit through hours of televised debate.

In order for open government to work, it doesn't have to be watched by everybody, or even most people. Most of gov. work *IS* tedium, it's dry, boring, highfalutin stuff. But by making it open to everybody, it's open to the few people that are paying attention, the few that make a difference.

And don't think that it takes more than a few. Take a look at the heroic work done at Black Box Voting - seriously, she's a middle-aged, overweight mom with no particularly special credentials. Google images for Bev Harris - yes that's her - and you'll see what I mean. But she's paying attention and she's making a difference. In my book, she is one of the greatest heroes there are, today, in the United States.

As a private pilot, I recently attended a meeting of my local City Council regarding the handling of traffic and fuel at the local airport. It's a meeting dryer than the Sahara in August, small-time politicians discussing a matter that's fundamentally small-time in a small town, in a meeting where the decisions to be made were made elsewhere. Yet it concerned me enough to speak, to be present, and to be heard. I was not alone. And although 99.99% of the local community didn't care, the fact that I did was enough.

If you want govt. to be as interesting as an episode of Survivor, please, pray tell, don't live in or have influence in my community!

But the laws aren't actually made there, either, except in a few rare cases. The laws are written by lobbyists and decided upon in behind the scenes deals; the committee meetings usually just ratify the deals already made.

Yes, it's a soap opera. And to believe that merely attending a meeting will make a huge difference is naive. It won't. But the meetings are the "action points" - they let you know how hard you have to work, and with whom, in order to coordinate your activities. In my previous example, discussing airport politics at the local city council meeting, do you not think that I'd discussed the issues at hand numerous times with other people involved? Why do you think that I was brought in, except for being known as somebody who's fairly noisy and politically active in my community?

Meetings are for coordination, not for decisions. This is true in business as much as it is true for government. Which is why: always be wary of a meeting for which no agenda has been published - it's very possible you are going to be ambushed.

And in those rare cases, the committee meets in closed session.

Thus, the cry for an open government. For the most part, you *have* an open government, if you are willing to get involved. See example of political hero Bev Harris above for how to do this.

When you realize that the power to influence government is actually wielded by a precious few who are paying attention, you will be stunned at just how much power you really have! Just pay attention, and put in the time to learn the rules of the game.

Whoa, that's a Diebold system ... Diebold is that company whose name turns up on almost any news item related to voter fraud (and similar corruption) in the US, which you can see more clearly at sites like Black Box Voting.org. I didn't know that there was an option for flashing those systems, already purchased by many municipalities, with a friendlier configuration (Free Software should be mandatory for processes like this which can only function with FULL transparency). This might be a viable out for many a local government.

However ... the same problem presented by Diebold's bad code is presented to reprogrammable systems like these. Therefore, as Richard Stallman (among many, many others) advocates, you still need a physical paper trail for FULL accountability. You need those in order to provide the transparency needed to investigate allegations of misconduct, and frankly, despite the increased cost, this is necessary for the assurance of freedom and democracy that it gives. We can't afford not to.

All this talk of recounts ignores what really happened: huge lists of voters destined to be disenfranchised by private Republican contractors, not allowed to vote, as if they never registered. Piles of votes that were never counted, such as a printout found in a dumpster by Black Box Voting, with no good explanation for why it was there, and why its totals didn't match up with the official count. Touchscreen voting with no paper trail and a computer programmer who did work for the Governor of Florida on specific machines and blew the whistle (you can find it on YouTube).

- if only I felt like arguing politics with people who don't listen, I might find the links for you and not post AC.

We have these problems now precisely because Bush stole the election of 2000, and quite possibly stole the 2004 election in Ohio and Flordia (see http://blackboxvoting.org/). There is a very real possibility we NEVER elected these neocons to power, and the mess we see, and the failed leadership we suffer under, was no more democratically elected than the recently deposed president of Pakistan.

BlackBoxVoting.org published an announcement that voting machine vendors are now hiring more support techs, asking people with skills who want to protect democracy from broken voting systems to get paid to do it:

On Sun, 8/24/08, Black Box Voting wrote: From: Black Box Voting
Subject: From BBV: Patriotic Techs - Please apply for voting machine tech temp jobs

Widest possible distribution needed. Please do spread this in blogs, etc:

This post will no doubt produce howls of objection for the vendors that read it. Black Box Voting is encouraging all individuals with a technical background to search and apply for temporary tech ELECTION SUPPORT jobs for the November 2008 election. Hiring is underway for temporary technicians to help with voting machines this fall.

Vendor dependence is undermining the structure of US elections, as described here in the new report by VotersUnite.org:
http://www.votersunite.org/info/ReclaimElections.pdf

We want to see You, the People, enter into the vendor mix directly HOW TO FIND TEMPORARY ELECTION TECH POSITIONS:
In a presidential election year, voting machine vendors will hire and trainthousands of technicians staffed around the country. For example, anywhere that Election Systems & Software has a machine, they are under contract to provide an on-site support tech. Hart Intercivic, Premier (Diebold), and Sequoia also use Election Day support technicians.

Temporary election tech support jobs have been spotted on hotjobs.com, rollouts.com, and local tech temp firms like (in 2006) DecisionOne. The tech services firm may be a subcontractor for the big four voting machine companies.

Sometimes you'll find the positions advertised by your local county. Sites like Rollouts.com have you register in their E-tech database. They search for techs based on skill set and area. There isn't much in the way of a skill set needed for the election projects.

QUIETLY APPLY FOR THE JOBS Anyone with tech skills interested in safeguarding the November election is encouraged to regisster at technical recruiting sites and apply for any election-related projects.

CONSIDER ASKING FOR TIME OFF ON YOUR FULL TIME JOB TO DO THIS. This November, there may be no better way to watch the behind-the-scenes process than to be a stagehand, so to speak. It is not the vendor, and not the government, that has the right to elections information, it is the PUBLIC.

Citizens have inalienable rights to sovereignty over the government they created and pay for. These rights cannot be honored without mechanisms to see all information related to elections, and ultimately, to have control processes that honor citizen sovereignty. That said, it ain't gonna happen this November. Therefore it is entirely appropriate, patriotic, and important, for citizens to apply for temporary positions as voting machine technicians to provide inside public oversight for the process. There will be nondisclosure agreements, which are not appropriate at all for public elections, but it's a reality now that vendors are trespassing on citizen right to know. There may be issues that arise which the public clearly has a right to know. When that happens, a decision must be made.

YOU WON'T BE THE FIRST We have already been in communications with other patriotic volunteers who have successfully obtained these positions in the past, and are doing this for November. THERE ARE ALWAYS WAYS TO DEAL WITH IMPORTANT ISSUES IF THEY ENDANGER THE PUBLIC GOOD. You, the People, are needed on the inside of the elections industry this November. This is a public service bulletin from Black Box Voting. Black Box Voting Tool Kit 2008 - free download here: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/toolkit2008.pdf Empower more election watchdog actions:

On page 48 (or 24 since the PDF has two document pages per PDF page) of http://www.blackboxvoting.org/toolkit2008.pdf they recommend keeping a sequence of snapshots of the web pages reporting the raw results to detect any anomalies.

Now keeping snapshots of webpages to analyze how they change sounds exactly like what Archive.org was designed for. It would be nice if on the night of the election, Archive.org set their refresh (?) rate for those pages abnormally high. Then the data can be used by everyone and not just those who thought ahead of time to take the snapshots.

The last time I checked on HR 811, it had gaping holes in it. So maybe the Slashdot submitter can tell us all what's changed? Or is the original submitter just doing a propaganda spin test bubble for the uninitiated?

Holes, that allowed electronic tabulation devices to manipulate votes in secret. Holes that prevent public oversight.

But, I've noticed on Slashdot, that everyone's so god damn pro OPEN SOURCE (which I like opensource don't get me wrong.), that they don't have their heads screwed on right when it comes to elections, and are too easily manipulated by suggestion of test bubble fascist propaganda.

Using electronic vote tabulation devices

--REGARDLESS OF THE FUCKING OPERATING SYSTEM IS A NATIONAL SECURITY RISK.

The HARDWARE can be SPECIALLY CRAFTED!

And as has already been SHOWN, THE SOFTWARE WAS MANIPULATED TO RIG ELECTIONS. (hit http://bradblog.com/ and http://blackboxvoting.org/ for you with the SHORT MEMORY SPAN)

And you word and punctuation nazi's...Don't talk to me about shouting in all caps, I typed it that way on purpose fucking READ IT! Start fucking listening! Even the USAF is worried about specially crafted chips (at the doping level.) We no longer have time to teach idiots about this shit we need to get rid of it by outlawing it. I fucking been shouting about this for several fucking years now, and watched the whole Constitution, Economy, and DEATHS because of these MOTHERFUCKING ELECTRONIC VOTE TABULATION DEVICES. These manufactures of this shit are domestic terrorists by proxy!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now WAKE THE FUCK UP!

Electronic vote tabulation devices do not belong in elections, it is an abusive use of technology. If you can't understand that then you are corrupt. Especially if you call yourself a technician, sysad, programmer, or hardware manufacture. The only possible way you would disagree is if you are a troll for the fascist corporations who have stolen our motherfucking right to vote!

This show is some of the best investigative journalism I have ever seen.

Hacking Democracy
http://www.hackingdemocracy.com/

I would highly recommend that you and your counterpart from the other party watch it.

In case you aren't able to get a hold of it or watch it, I'll summarize it for you here.

• If you're using touch-screen voting machines, you're pwned http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pwn).
• Optical voting machines, which read or scan a paper ballot, have no internal security mechanisms on the memory cards. The memory cards are inserted into the machines and used to store the total number of votes. These memory cards are vulnerable to tampering both before and after use . Many people remember the importance of ensuring the memory cards aren't tampered with after use (someone can change the numbers). However, it is equally important to prevent tampering before the memory card gets to the ballot machine. Someone could put a negative number on the memory card before it is inserted into the ballot machine so that a candidate will be "in-the-red" before the first ballot is even cast. This is the digital equivalent of ballot stuffing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_stuffing).
• The central tabulation software is also highly vulnerable to tampering.

Please keep in mind that these attack vectors come from election officials. Fraud from voters can be stopped by the people who check the name and registration at the door.

To protect against these attack venues, I recommend that no one person be left alone with any memory cards or with the central tabulation computer. In other words:

• Two people are present when the memory cards are blanked out and made ready for use by the ballot machines.
• Two people physically transport the memory cards to the ballot machines and supervise them until they are inserted.
• Two people supervise the removal of the memory cards and the transportation back to the central tabulator.
• Two people are present when the results are loaded from the memory cards into the central tabulator.
• Two people are watching the central tabulator software/computer at all times.

In short, even thought these machines are highly vulnerable to tampering, I think having a two-person system supervise both the memory cards and the central tabulator should put most minds at ease.

You may also want to check out:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/

I hope this helps.

http://arizona.typepad.com/blog/files/Stonewall_handout.pdf

This was written for the Stonewall Democrats. It includes boilerplate public records text at the end, some examples of dirty stuff seen in public records, examples of screwed-up facilities (with pictures) and more.

This is an example of an after-action report written along these principles:

http://www.bbvdocs.org/sequoia/Maricopa-County-Elections-Report.pdf

I'm doing another right now for Monterey County California for the election of June 3rd '08. Found all sorts of crazy stuff. That should be posted at http://blackboxvoting.org/ in a day or two.

Jim March
Member of the board of directors
Blackboxvoting.org

In all fairness to the /. crowd, I'd say that the best place to ask this question would be the forums of http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ From what I have read of their analysis of previous elections I would guess that they have seen it all before.

First of all, the Republican ballots haven't been counted yet. Secondly, Kucinich ran out of money so not all of the ballots on the Democratic side were counted. Not only that, but the chain of custody for the ballots was severely lacking. It would be alomst impossible to prove fraud when you can't fully account for where the ballots were and everyone who had custody of them. There were lots of discrepencies in the diebold counted places. Simply check out http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ and http://www.bradblog.com/ and you'll see how incredibly bad NH was.

The Republican ballots won't even have started to be counted for a few days. More money was donated to the 3rd party candidate to make the recount (mostly Ron Paul supporters through the Granny Warriors). There were at least two cities in NH that reported 0 votes for Ron Paul, then magically found them the next day when it was pointed out to them that people voted for him there (all by accident, of course).

The fact that the diebold ballots were so far off is very troubling, considering they make ATM's which don't miss a penny and are virtually fraud proof (not to mention there is a paper trail). LHS Associates, who counted 81% of the votes in NH also have an executive who was convicted of narcotics trafficking. It was also LHS Associates who handled a lot of the ballots after the voting was done. They can't use the Fry defense "Don't blame me, I'm a non-voting felon." They're vote counting felons.

Anyone who gets their votes counted through a Diebold machine should get stickers saying "I think I voted."

And you base this opinion on what, precisely?

It would give a few people something to do for the day and you could even take the money spent on the diebold machines to have a little shindig afterwards. I'm sure volunteers wouldn't be hard to find if that was done. I encourage you all to support Bev Harris over at Blackboxvoting.org.

She has been fighting the electronic voting systems from just about the start of things and I myself have made many donations to her cause. She is a true patriot guarding our most sacred right in this country. Please support her cause.

I think we need to rebrand the discussion. What we need is computer assisted voting. Basically, the touch screen just provides an interface where the computer prints out your ballot which you review for accuracy and deposit in the ballot box. Later, ballots can be counted by hand or some type of scan-tron. Tabulations can be kept in both machines and in the event of mismatches, the paper ballot is recounted providing the official count (or if the numbers are far enough off, a re-vote). The scanning process could be observed and run at such a speed that humans can watch the count in real time and with enough people watching the possibility of count errors going undetected would approach 0. This would take care of most of your concerns about magic happening behind the screen. Nevertheless, the source code should still be freely available.

It's not a perfect system but it provides the basis for a system that's pretty much on par with paper. That is, the problems with election fraud we would see would be the same types of problems paper ballots suffer from (ie people voting twice, someone stealing a ballot box, some poll running out of paper).

This is what is in the draft proposal for New York State voting machines (among many other requirements regarding privacy and the disabled etc). But I only found this out recently by clicking on a signature from a slashdot poster. I encourage everyone to take a few minutes and visit http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ and check what sort of voting machines your state has, is testing, or is thinking about getting.

Also, for those new yorkers out there, you may want to visit this page about the testing underway for NYS eletronic voting machines for 2008.

Anyone really interested in this should read about this bill (the "Holt bill") at both http://blackboxvoting.org/ and also http://blackboxvoting.com/. Note that these two sites have very different takes on this bill!!! IMHO, they both have valid points. BBV (.org) has done a great job pushing forward the problems with the current systems and raising the visibility of the issue (and ferreting out some real doosies by Diebold, etc). However, since we're not likely to get anything better for this cycle, people should consider if the Holt bill would improve things. The danger would be that people might assume that "ok, now that we have paper trails all is OK and we can stop worrying about it."

Here in Chester County, PA we had a local house race that went to a full hand recount last year. (Chester County bucked the trend in Pennsylvania and installed optical-scan machines, where a recount is possible.) The original count had the Republican winning the PA house seat by 19 votes, and after a recount Barbara McIlvaine Smith (D-PA 156th) unseated the Republican by 23 votes, which switched control the PA house (by 1 vote) for the first time in around a dozen years to the Democrats.

Groupthink, whether it is led by an admired organization or by an unlawful regime, is not how to exercise our duty of citizenship. We serve our country by sharing our independently derived perspectives with others.

You write: "The 'foundation' of the United States' 'governmental structure' is defined in its Consitution. Is this bill a constitutional amendment? Oh right, it isn't."

You hit the nail on the head. This bill is unconstitutional. Whereas this bill's predecessor, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), danced right up to the edge of unconstitutionality, the Holt Bill crosses the line and alters constitutional checks and balances. There IS a way to do this, as you pointed out, and it's called "Constitutional Amendment." Holt skipped that step and is attempting to enact a change in the balance of power without constitutional due process.

The Constitution clearly assigns the administration of elections to the states, and only when the Bill of Rights is involved has it usurped states rights. That began to change with HAVA, which was somewhat prescriptive about voting methodology. HAVA skated to the line but didn't cross it, for two reasons:

1) HAVA enacted some of its prescriptive langugage using the context of rights for persons with disabilities, which traces back to Bill of Rights interpretations, and

2) HAVA left the actual implementation up to each state by requiring a state planning process.

Not so with the Holt Bill. It marches right in and prescribes how states will administer elections. Skip the Bill of Rights. Skip the state plans. The feds will just take control.

Your contention that this nation was founded not through a structure but through a war and people is incorrect. It took a war to throw off an oppressor, so that we could erect a structure to secure and protect our rights.

The Declaration of Independence is the core document. It lays out the principles upon which we built the Constitution. Three documents: The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights (the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution) have formed the structure that has guided the government that we created in its duty to secure and protect our rights.

Much of our history has involved The People forcing The Government to live up to the principles set out in the structural documents.

Bev Harris
Founder - Black Box Voting
blackboxvoting.org

Before you say "yes, but with optical scan at least you CAN count the ballots," no, you can't. Not in many states. Not without a statistical test that allows a recount. And not without huge fees, except in New Hampshire, where any candidate can get a hand recount of anything, inexpensively. In my state (Washington) it is illegal for an elections administer to hand count ballots if they think there is something wrong. That's called an "unauthorized recount." And in San Diego, citizens would have had to pay over $600,000 to take advantage of California's law allowing citizens to purchase a recount.

Computers count just about all votes now, just about everywhere.

Bev Harris
Founder - Black Box Voting
blackboxvoting.org

This bill changes the very foundation of our governmental structure. It is the structures that have to protect us, not the people. Focus on structure: Does the bill protect your inalienable rights or put them in danger.

Bev Harris
Founder - Black Box Voting
blackboxvoting.org

Black Box Voting is opposed to counting votes in secret. Computers count votes in secret, with a debatable conversation point as to whether, IF they were open source, they would still be counting votes in secret. Return to that in a minute -- I think there is no viable debate as to whether computers with proprietary trade secret software count your votes in secret. They do.

If the government counts your votes in secret, using trade secret proprietary software held in the sole custody of governmental officials, have they not just removed The People's sovereignty? If a government insider or his private contractors control the counting of your vote, in secret, you can only alter your governance if those with custody and/or programming skills happen to be honest. What this means is, quite simply, your system of government will become progressively more corrupt.

Open Source: There are three issues with open source as it pertains to counting votes in secret.

1) It is difficult to enforce open source requirements for subcomponents, like motherboard chips and hardware drivers, since so many are manufactured by foreign corporations

2) It presents challenges to confirm that the software/hardware configuration running on any given day is precisely the same one as people have been examining with the open source software.

3) Even if 1) and 2) were not issues, the concept of citizens being sovereign over their government has generally been interpreted to mean average citizens of average skills. Freedom of Information laws, for example, don't say "expert citizens can review documents" they say "any person." The use of complex configurations of hardware and software for elections imposes worse than a literacy test on citizen oversight.

Forty-five percent of New Hampshire jurisdictions hand count ballots, in public, at the polling place, and even with complex ballots containing many questions and precincts as large as 3,000 votes (triple the U.S. average), they get results completed on Election night.

When viewed not in terms of mechanics, but in terms of the ability of The People to exert sovereign control over their government, a properly administered hand count system provides benefits of public inspection (i.e. freedom of information and contemporaneous 100% audit) and participation by citizens of average skill and experience which cannot be matched by computer voting systems. And, even when all poll workers and counters are paid, properly administered hand count systems cost approximately one-fifth as much to run as computerized voting.

Before you say "you can cheat with a hand count system" -- that statement, repeated often by computer voting advocates, makes assumptions about the procedures. When done correctly, at the polling place, it's difficult to game the system even if the government insiders happen to be crooks.

Whatever we do about elections, it needs to be framed in terms of citizens ability to control the instruments of government that we have created, and citizens right to know.

That's the litmus test, not what mechanics are used to achieve it.

Bev Harris
Founder - Black Box Voting
http://www.blackboxvoting.org

Perhaps problems with the audit protocols could be solved, but there's a difference between "problems" and "unpatriotic heresy." The Holt Bill audits are joined at the hip with unpatriotic heresy. According to Holt:

If you want audits, you must put control over elections under four White House appointees.
If you want audits, you must capitulate to Microsoft and various voting industry vendors and give up the public right to examine the software that controls the vote counting.

- These audits have the EAC, the four presidential appointees, getting in between voters and certification of elections. The bill calls the EAC "The Commission," like something out of a John Grisham novel. It's in there at least 32 times. These audits force the states to go to "The Commission" for approval of their audits. The states have to submit their report to "The Commission" before they can certify their elections!

These so-called "audits" produce false confidence -- no intelligent selection, no attention to red flags, no surprise factor, and no forensic investigations when audits do not match.

Destabilization - The rocket scientists that came up with this audit plan decided to make an untested and complex procedure into federal law. Yes, folks, they want to implement an untested procedure simultaneously in 10,000 jurisdictions at once on a single mission-critical day. You wouldn't open a chain of pizza parlors with this kind of a rollout schedule, yet it's okay for an event that controls the future of the free world.

And hey, GANTT chart, anyone? Next these rocket scientists constructed an audit protocol with a killer dependency in the first step and a fixed, immovable deadline at the end. No precincts can be selected for audit until ALL precincts in the state have committed and published their results. So if one blue-haired lady in any of California's 11,000 or so precincts loses her memory cards, the whole election comes to a grinding halt while she tries to find them.

It typically takes up to two weeks for every precinct and absentee batch to be committed. And that's just when they decide WHICH PRECINCTS to audit. No one knows how long the audits actually take, because these audit protocols have never been used anywhere at all. And there is no mention of what to do when the audit uncovers discrepancies.

The Constitution requires that by a time certain -- a specific day in mid-December -- the presidential election MUST be called. Audit, meet brick wall. Hello constitutional crisis.

There is a difference between something that's got problems and something that is dangerous. This bill is dangerous.

Bev Harris
Founder - Black Box Voting
http://www.blackboxvoting.org

http://blackboxvoting.org/ has the best solution. The machine that fills out the ballot, does not do the counting of the ballots. The ballots are paper ballots with names of candidates and filled circles next to names so they can be read and counted by computers OR humans. The ballots can be filled out by hand, if needed, or by a fancy eletreonick votin' macheenee. After the machine spits it out, the voter can inspect it and verify it before walking across the room and depositing it into the ballot box.

But there is a bigger problem. First, there is no constitutional right to vote in federal elections. Second, we have too may DUMBASSES voting.... voting to line their own pockets, or voting how they are told to vote. It should be HARDER to vote. There should be a citizenship test in order to register to vote.

I like Robert Heinlein's vision -- you want to vote, then you have to serve your country FIRST.

I think it is hilarious... people screamed for eletreonick votin' macheenes. Then they got them, and THEN they discovered that of all the methods of voting, the most reliable (still not perfect) is the old paper ballot.

Is it just me or are we all over analyzing what is effectively a glorified bean counter.

Sure we want it to be secure and transparent which means Open Source has the best option for this to occur. Anything that is closed source should *NOT* be trusted. This includes the platform/OS the system runs on.

And is it *REALLY* that hard to ask that there be a god damn paper trail? I think just about every single person on /. has agreed that a paper trail is necessary. Anyone including Diebold who refuses to make a machine with a paper trail is definitely up to no good and likely WANTS their machine to be insecure in order to allow for vote stuffing/miscounting/false results/etc... I mean its not like it hasnt been done before.

I am not going to try and refute the puerile comments extended in these threads toward the man. The fact remains though that when it comes to the stated criteria: "...when it comes to representing issues Slashdot readers might care about? Eg: privacy, 'total information awareness', Internet regulation and taxation, net neutrality, copyright/patent reform, the right to read, the right to secure communications, the right to tinker. Ron Paul is, actually, your candidate. I'm not a conservative, I'm not a Democrat and will not spend time trying to leverage this candidates "better qualities" it's very simple and doesn't need a lot of exposition. He is among a handful of the trustworthy people in the cess that is the U.S. Congress. If you're of a (open) mind, check him out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAt6Pf7jZjA If you think this man misguided, or sinister and prefer Attilla the Hillary, or Rudy "911" Giuliani or any of these other creatures, then you are simply not understanding the dynamic. The (very) close second is Democrat Mike Gravel of Alaska: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=gravel2008 An excellent elder statesman of resounding integrity. It's not about Left and Right, it's about right and wrong. You're all (most of you anyway) extremely intelligent people, let's please apply some of this rigor to something perhaps more fundamental than technology. p.s. An array of issues that might make this whole point, well, moot... : http://blackboxvoting.org/

I want to see evidence that the system is foolproof !

What? you looking for a paper trail ? BWAAAHAHAHA

The simple, less deadly, less costly answer is.

Paper Ballots Hand Counted

Bradblog
Black Box Voting

WAKE THE FUCK UP!

This was new back in march and november when the assemblies in these states were voting BEFORE the elections. http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
Quit posting shit zonk
you suck

The US has:
Diebold
Cheney & Halliburton
Jack Abramoff
etc.

less access to medical treatment,
The US has a rising percentage of uninsured
because of spiraling costs

more disease,
Yeah.

higher infant mortality,
The US the second highest infant mortality rate in the modern world

lower life expectancy, and in general a much shittier life then you, and me.
Agreed

I for one do feel bad.
I do too, but not just because of worldwide inequality. I feel bad that global outsourcing is not enriching other people in other countries much. I feel bad that corporations are free to pocket vast profits, while escaping tax burdens. I feel bad that the US is sliding downwards instead of managing to pull the rest of the world up. As a resident of the US, I feel guilty that we seem to have an "I've got mine, good luck with yours" philosophy. The free market has costs.

So watch this thread for a tense man on a webcam as I post the link to a report, with photos and video, showing how we found out the identity of one of the Diebold's Internet smear squad. Here it is: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/diebold-PRmachine.pd f

Now, as to what you can find without access to source code:

- In Diebold's GEMS, we found that the software contains a double set of books that allows it to pass spot checks -- i.e. random hand count audits -- while still cooking the books

- In Diebold's GEMS, we found that the MS Access database tables do not bother with referential integrity

- In Diebold's GEMS, we found that you can alter results using either a Visual Basic script or Java Script. This was demonstrated on a real election system and is shown in the HBO film "Hacking Democracy" which is showing all month and is on the "on demand" programming right now.

- In Diebold's GEMS, we found a customized set of programs using interpreted code, which is banned by the FEC

Looking at the ES&S Unity software, which they will certainly claim has been changed, will nevertheless tell us something about the original architecture and how the programmers think. It will tell something about the programming culture. It will tell something about any commercial off-the-shelf software used with the databases, and knowledge about those programs will in turn provide information about the kinds of vulnerabilities these guys were willing to put in a voting system.

It may help to craft public records requests, based on guesses as to what vulnerabilities might still be in the system, and thereby elicit more information. And remember, this is the government. Not everyplace could afford new voting systems, so they have a legacy problem. They have to make new versions backward compatible to some extent.

In a vacuum, even a little opening can cause a rush of new knowledge. Hopefully the Unity programs will provide enough hints we can pry loose more information through public records requests, voting machine inspections, and in legal discovery. It will certainly give us ideas for some questions to ask.

It would help significantly if there were a post either on the home page of blackboxvoting.org, or in the bbvforums.org forums under your name. This way there would be some credible record that this information did truly come from Bev Harris.

Ask and ye shall receive... there's an update on their primary website
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/