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Inside Electronic Voting Machines
Alien54 and several other people wrote in about a couple of stories published in a New Zealand webzine: an examination of an electronic voting system, and some less interesting political speculation about it. Diebold voting systems are in fairly wide use, and apparently provide zero security to keep election officials from writing in whatever election totals they want.
We should have a slashdot poll about this. :)
And then rig the results.
Well, at least they don't cheat... right?
Diebold voting systems are in fairly wide use, and apparently provide zero security to keep election officials from writing in whatever election totals they want. :)
Obviously the ones used in Florida
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This is going to be in place for the '04 elections in the US. Czar Ashcroft said something about "Streamlining the process to protect our freedoms."
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[tinfoil_hat]In the near future we will be given ballots containing RFIDs which will tie the voter to the vote. mwahahahaha![/tinfoil_hat]
Trolling is a art,
Suddenly hanging chads aren't so silly anymore...
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
It's not a bug, it's a feature!
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
http://www.blackboxvoting.com i suggest you check it out.
--CRN
Some would also say that is the case with slashdot's voting (moderation) system. Closed, and opaque, with a half-dozen superusers overruling everybody.
I wonder why the editors never notice this hypocrisy.
Diebold voting systems are in fairly wide use, and apparently provide zero security to keep election officials from writing in whatever election totals they want.
So? There are traffic laws in place that prevent no one from speeding if they want to, yet people would scream to high heaven if they weren't allowed to break the laws there by technology limiting them to the speed limit. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Look, the republicans are not smart enough to fix an electronic voting machine and the democrats would fix it so that the votes were split between 3 different right in canidates.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Can you drop ship them to every voting precinct in the U.S. and send the bill to 1600 Pennsyvania Ave.? Thanks! GWB ps- is a check from Halliburton ok?
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
It should be required that machines use open-source code, and some mechanism be provided for public inspection of the machines to verify the code hasn't been altered, some sort of checksum mechanism.
This should be of no surprise to anyone familiar with Diebold. You may have noticed that these guys are the makers of bank ATMs, among other banking and security equipment. Most of these ATMs, especially the older ones, use only 56bit encryption. 128bit is available in the form of a ridiculously expensive chip which also costs a few hundred dollars labor to have a tech come out and stick it in. Most banks, being the biggest cheap-skates in business, are unwilling to spend the money for these upgrades so, many of the ATMs that you regularly use likely have 56bit encryption at best.
The short story is that they were all very flashy and glitzy, but all had severe problems with security and/or usability. We eventually decided to run a pilot program in last year's off-year election and try out 5 of the most promising machines in a real-world election. The final winner will be used across the state in 2004.
No more hanging chad, but I think we are going to have a whole new set of problems to deal with.
...just require a literacy test prior to voting. I fail to see how anyone who can't read can responsibly vote.
I mean it. We require licenses to do all kinds of things, why not at least require a literacy standard for voting?
A little informative website running on eDemocracy http://www.fipr.org/eDemocracy
There are two kinds of egotists: 1) Those who admit it 2) The rest of us
Oh, and war with Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, etc.
But don't worry. It's for your protection.
the Alien54 link is bad, it should be http://radiofreenation.net/
... to tabulate the votes of the supreme court? Those are the votes used to selec..., er elect the pres...
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Heh :)
I reckon you should probably have put tabs in, but oh well.
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I don't know if I am supposed to do this but I am sure I will find out soon enough... ;)
Text:
Bigger Than Watergate!
How To Rig An Election In The United States
Column: C.D. Sludge
07/08/03: (Scoop) The story you are about to read is in this writer's view the biggest political scandal in American history, if not global history. And it is being broken today here in New Zealand.
This story cuts to the bone the machinery of democracy in America today. Democracy is the only protection we have against despotic and arbitrary government, and this story is deeply disturbing.
Imagine if you will that you are a political interest group that wishes to control forevermore the levers of power. Imagine further that you know you are likely to implement a highly unpopular political agenda, and you do not wish to be removed by a ballot driven backlash.
One way to accomplish this outcome would be to adopt the Mugabe (Zimbabwe) or Hun Sen (Cambodia) approach. You agree to hold elections, but simultaneously arrest, imprison and beat your opponents and their supporters. You stuff ballot boxes, disenfranchise voters who are unlikely to vote for you, distort electoral boundaries and provide insufficient polling stations in areas full of opposition supporters.
However as so many despots have discovered, eventually such techniques always fail - often violently. Hence, if you are a truly ambitious political dynasty you have to be a bit more subtle about your methods.
Imagine then if it were possible to somehow subvert the voting process itself in such a way that you could steal elections without anybody knowing.
Imagine for example if you could:
- secure control of the companies that make the voting machines and vote counting software;
- centralise vote counting systems, and politicise their supervision;
- legislate for the adoption of such systems throughout your domain, and provide large amounts of money for the purchase of these systems;
- establish systems of vote counting that effectively prevent anybody on the ground in the election - at a booth or precinct level - from seeing what is happening at a micro-level;
- get all the major media to sign up to a single exit-polling system that you also control - removing the risk of exit-polling showing up your shenanigans.
And imagine further that you;
- install a backdoor, or numerous backdoors, in the vote counting systems you have built that enable you to manipulate the tabulation of results in real time as they are coming in.
Such a system would enable you to intervene in precisely the minimum number of races necessary to ensure that you won a majority on election night. On the basis of polling you could pick your marginal seats and thus keep your tweaking to a bare minimum.
Such a system would enable you to minimise the risks of discovery of your activities.
Such a system would enable you to target and remove individual political opponents who were too successful, too popular or too inquisitive.
And most importantly of all, such a system would enable you to accomplish all the above without the public being in the least aware of what you were doing. When confronted with the awfulness of your programme they would be forced to concede that at least it is the result of a democratic process.
How To Rig An Election In The United States
So how would such a system actually work?
Well one way to run such a corrupt electoral system might look like this.
- Each voting precinct (or booth) could be fitted with electronic voting systems, optical scanning systems, punch card voting systems or the more modern touchscreen electronic voting machines;
- At the close of play each day the booth/precinct supervisor could be under instructions to compile an electronic record of the votes cast in their booth;
- They might print out a report that contains only the details of the total votes count fo
"Then we can get to work on helping the rest of the world with their troubles."
Maybe if you looked outwards more, at countries who can already run a fair election for example, then p'raps you could get around to helping us all out much quicker!!!
The Brazilian government converted to fully electronic voting in 2000, deploying over 400,000 kiosk-style machines. Although our elections are often compared to those in the US, they are actually quite different because the voters cast ballots by using numbers assigned to each candidate (this is necessary because of a high degree of illiteracy here).
o n/2000/nov/13/194.htm). There is also an informative website: Brazilian Electronic Voting Forum by Amilcar Brunazo Filho.
Concerns regarding accuracy of the self-auditing systems caused the legislature to mandate a retrofit of 3% (some 12,000 machines) to produce a paper ballot that the voter could peruse and deposit in a box for recount (the first large-scale use of the "Mercuri Method" -- described more fully here "A Better Ballot Box?").
These paper-trail machines were successfully used during the October 6, 2002 election, and it is hoped that their other machines will eventually be retrofitted as well. Further discussion on this subject can be found in the article: "The importance of recounting votes" by Michael Stanton (originally published in Portuguese as "A importância da recontagem de votos", on the website of the Agência O Estado de São Paulo, November 13, 2000, http://www.estadao.com.br/tecnologia/coluna/stant
Any computer data can be quickly and easily changed. The best solution I can think of is to print out two paper receipts for each vote, one to go to the election commission (for manual recounts) and one to go to the voter. Each receipt would contain a random code which the voter could then type in on a web site to verify their choices have not been changed. Of course, most people wouldn't bother to verify, but it only takes one person to catch vote fraud.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
The only solution I can suggest for an all-electronic voting system would require extensive use of cryptography. Every voter would have to register a public key and every vote would be cryptographically signed. This would require a database of public keys outside of any political influence and it would also require that voters keep their private keys secure, both of which are enormous problems.
Given these drawbacks, an antequated punchcard system doesn't seem quite so bad...
Yeah, there's a security flaw in the voting program. Yeah, they didn't configure their servers correctly. Yeah, their math is funky...
And the Republicans did it?
Give me a break...
There's so little difference between politics and jihad lately...
There's plenty of security preventing people from changing the results. Its called exit polling. If the vote tallies are wildly different from the scientific exit polling done by independent 3rd parties, then I'm sure a full investigation would follow.
They could certainly be abused, however, in smaller state and local elections where a small handful of votes can make a huge difference.
The US military wants to make sure that US servicemen/women overseas can vote. That's not a bad thing and there is a US law that requires this.
But there is a bad thing - the system they are promoting runs on MS Windows - including Win 95/98 - using Internet Explorer (5.5 and up) and Netscape.
Somehow they have in their minds that if they run HTTPS and require anti-virus software that the machines will be secure enough so that votes made through those machines won't be buggered.
Oh, and did I mention that the voter registration occurs through the same machines and same web-browser/https mechanisms?
Seems to me that this is a recipie for disaster - I don't consider any operating system safe from tampering, particularly none of the MS products. And these machines will likely be shared by many people, configured by DHCP (itself a security risk), perhaps with programs being loaded over insecure nets from insecure file servers, and crossing the internet via web proxies, "transparent" web caches, WCCP, and who knows what else.
This could make Florida 2000 look like a picnic.
I live in Florida. We had electronic voting earlier this year for our local elections (Tampa).
So long as the data from the electronic machines is still available for a recount and no easier to tamper with than paper, I fail to see how this is really any more of a problem.
Just let the pagerank pigeons make the choice.
Could the results be any worse than what we have now?
and apparently provide zero security to keep election officials from writing in whatever election totals they want.
This would have saved the Florida election officials so much time in the 2000 elections.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball(TM)
Make a public domain design&software for a voting machine. Get five companies to build them. No one company can rig the election.
My only big design point is Dual Receipt, like a credit card transaction. Fast electronic count, paper count for them, paper count for me.
Start Running Better Polls
Their article is interesting, but a bit misguided IMNSHO. First they harp on the three sets of ledgers. Well what's the big diff. They say that this somehow allows more leeway to fudge, well actually it doesn't. The fact is that you have to know that there are three sets and exactly which sets of reports get their data from which sets (a very lame attempt at security thru obscurity?). Having a single ledger means that you only have to go to a single place to mess with things.
But the biggest problem with there report is that they spend a lot of time talking about essentiallly one issue, that the tables are available for anyone with the password to edit and manipulate. There doesn't seem to be any type of tiered access and because they use access, a TRUE audit trail can not be created.
I would think that a voting system would be important enough to warrant the extra time to create a custom DB that audits absolutely everything to a file/table that can't be touched by anyone but the app (e.g. only the app can add rows and rows can never be deleted). I assume that Diebold was able to use Access because it made their bid lower and the company that actually had a decently secure system was underbid.
I smell a voter's lawsuit, oh to be a lawyer.
See for example Switzerland's first vote via the Internet passed successfully
and
American expats will be able to vote in the 2004 US election over the Internet following the launch of a new experiment.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Three years later, and it seems that equipment manufacturers have managed to blithely ignore every bit of it. And apparently, so have the people purchasing the stuff.
This story is only of interest to democratic countries.
Using purely electronic voting for anything other than informal polls and amusement is very, very dumb. Besides the potential for tampering, there is also the potential failure of the machine in general. ( How'z about a nice big lightning storm hitting and frying all of the machines in a polling station through a power surge. What'll you do, have the election over again? ) After all, one US judge said that the constitution does not state that election results have to be accurate. Just that they *tried* to have a fair election. Funny that he did not define *tried*. If you want to use electronic type systems, it needs to print / punch out a paper ballot of some sort that the person feeds through a reader that displays how the ballot was marked ( to make sure the machine punched it correctly ) then they deposit it into the ballot box, And they keep a numbered receipt that shows who they voted for in each race. The paper ballots are then machine counted a few times to ensure accurate counts. ( Get the same count each time they are checked ).
I went to Diebold's voting machine site, and they seem to be proud that Georga's using (or going to use) their machines. Anyone want to call Georgia and let them know that the 'encyrpted' passwords can be cut and pasted between Access databases to add users who can change votes?
How many installations do you think are using the default password?
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
We conclude that it's easy to tamper with the votes because they are kept in different "rooms" and allow "anyone" to "walk in and out" and change as many votes as they like in the "rooms" because you cant possibly be in two "rooms" at once and keep an eye on them.
Ya, right that's your problem right there. Different "rooms" can really screw things up when we're counting votes. Remember to lock your doors and windows people!
Fortunately, as someone who has served as an election judge (working the polls) in Minnesota, I can tell you that these concerns are a little overblown. We use the optical scan machines here, and we submit the precinct detail report (list 1 for those who read the article) to the county electronically and in paper format (3 copies). Additionally, we have all the paper ballots that were filled out by the voters carefully stored in the machines during the voting period, and then mailed to the county in sealed envelopes and signed by all the election judges.
Not only is the written process pretty fail-safe, but I worked an election where there was a discrepancy between our ballot count (kept as people vote) and the machine count at the end of the day. We hand-counted all the ballots (they were bubble test style, so no hanging chads or dimples) to make sure the count was accurate. Even if someone had hacked the voting machine, there was little chance for them to bust into the voting machine to steal or alter the ballots.
Additionally, although some nefarious person could hack the machine, I have no idea when they would. Most polling places have a team of election judges present from the time the machine is unlocked until after the results have been transmitted. Judges are not supposed to linger near the voting machine for any length of time. Certainly it's important to implement appropriate safeguards in the software (such as the automatic numbering system that was disabled for the log file), but chances of election fraud due to machine tampering are pretty darn low.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
You know, where exit polling showed the guy elected won, not the guy selected.
More here.
The biggest delay is in the manufacturing and installing of the triple DES 128 bit encryption boards to install. Most ATM service providers have already changed it so that any new ATM has to have the new board installed, and existing ATM's have to be upgraded also. With ATM's becoming more popular, and are popping up nearly everywhere(We have 12 ATM's in a town of 5,000). Makers of the hardware encryption boards are backed up, and the ATM vendors aren't hiring enough bright people to get the work done.
Most banks are rushing to get security features like this in place, because these are the things that government bank examiners have field days on. Don't blame this on the bank, this is out of their hands.
Yeah, their freedom to loot our treasury, make war worldwide, and reward their rich buddies.
It did seem funny that republicans in many races made remarkable surges on election day. I wonder why exit polls were suspended during the 2002 election?
photosMy Photostream
Then again, it would only take one fraudster to falsly claim their vote had been miscounted.
Also, any system that lets the voter check their vote also lets someone forcing them to vote one way or another to verify that they've done as commanded.
I'm already not so sure I trust our current election system, and from what I've seen of computer security breaches, I would never trust a computerized system. Cheating aside, it would only take one malicious cracker, a bad hard drive or two, a broken communications line, a power failure, or any one of countless possible catastrophes to ruin the credibility of an election or make it impossible to vote. And there would be no hard copies to recount.
This could potentially increase the proliferation of democracy as voting should become easier, more reliable and cheaper to administer, if handled carefully.
((lambda x ((x))) (lambda x ((x))))
November 2002, Comal County, Texas - A Texas-sized lack of curiosity about discrepancies: The uncanny coincidence of three winning Republican candidates in a row tallying up exactly 18,181 votes each was called weird, but apparently no one thought it was weird enough to audit. Conversion to alphabet: 18181 18181 18181 ahaha ahaha ahaha.
Meanwhile, each of the 3 winning candidates of the 2002 Texas elections was quoted as saying: 81 81 81 81 85 85 85 85 815 815 815
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
*choke*
*wheeze*
bwahahahahahahahahahahahah
*gasp*
Wait, these things are already in use?!?
*thud*
Remember, when the double dip occurs, the plebians might start arguing to impose taxes on the annointed wealthy. We can't let them hurt their betters!
Politicians here have to spend lots to get the dead to vote... but they manage to turn out year after year. How failful to their citizenry after they're gone...
http://www.blackboxvoting.com/
for the copy n paste challenged users
(From the article - emphasis mine)
At the county office, there is a "host computer" with a program on it called GEMS.
GEMS receives the incoming votes and stores them in a vote ledger. But then, we found, it makes another set of books with a copy of what is in vote ledger 1. And at the same time, it makes yet a third vote ledger with another copy.
The Elections Supervisor never sees these three sets of books. All she sees is the reports she can run: Election summary (totals, county wide) or a detail report (totals for each precinct). She has no way of knowing that her GEMS program is using multiple sets of books, because the GEMS interface draws its data from an Access database, which is hidden.
What's next? NASDAQ running off of Access?
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
ssh george@vote.gov -p 2943 ..
gore4.vote
Password:
Last login: Tue Jul 8 19:13:54 on goatse.cx
[vote:~] george% ls -a
.
gore.vote
gore2.vote
gore3.vote
bush.vote
gore5.vote
[vote:~] george% rm gore*
[Process completed]
We don't need literacy tests to bring back Jim Crow and clean thousands of Black people from the voter rolls. All we have to do is hire ChoicePoint and "Leave the Scrubbing to Us!(tm)"
IAALS.
Why not implement a "paper trail" through punching holes in a metal plate using a laser. Each machine would encode their votes in metal, which would be hard to falsify (the holes will have clear characteristics). The metal plates can then be removed from the machines after voting and kept available for recounts, if needed. Optical scanners could even automate recounts.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
That was my reaction too. Holy living fuck
sulli
RTFJ.
I found this gem on alternet:
While we may look at hacking or intentional fraud as one of the only (or few) potential abuses WRT electronic voting, we might forget about structural abuse like we've seen in Florida. It makes me laugh when someone comments on a vote saying "the people have spoken". We should just roll dice instead..."What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I was one of those reporting this story. What wasn't mentioned was that the source code availability, at
They mention that there is some corruption of some files, and offer
and some are password protected, and recommend:
Personally, as someone who also does configuration management, I found the Motherlode in Vol 2: cvs.tar, which does, indeed, have the entire cvs source code tree. Note that it is damaged, and about 1/3rd of the 72M of code won't untar (though I suspect that someone with a good familiarity with the format of tarfiles might recover some).
I *also* found a comment in the archive
AVTSCE/TSElection/ResultFile.cpp:
> Modified ElectionArchive to allow user to see all ballot results files
> that match the election-vcenter-dlverion, thereby allowing restoring of
> results from different 'machines'.
Now, there may be a good reason for this...perhaps in testing...but it's not coded as a debugging function, and looks to be in the live code, in what records the tallies.
mark
I don't know about elsewhere but in California, there are many weak points in the voting system.
1. Voter registration is nothing more than filling out a postcard with name, address and political party. No ID needed. Easy to create "fake accounts."
2. When you go to the polls. They don't look at your ID. In fact, they are not allowed to ask for ID. Easy to fake as long as you know some voters or previous voters in the area.
3. Voter rolls are not regularly purged so people that have moved or died can still vote. It has actually been reported that dead people have voted. Voter fraud not paranormal events.
So why doesn't the government attempt to do anything about this? My cynical side says that there are reasons for both major parties to leave this alone for their advantage.
--- I'm Green Hornet's sidekick not Inspector Clouseau's!
It's not a dead horse, jackass. It's still happening.
Believe it or not, this was one of the ways the southern states kept blacks from voting. The other was a land ownership clause, and since few blacks were anything other than sharecroppers(and sharecroppers didn't own the land they worked), they were disqualified.
Please help metamoderate.
Actually, I thought they had a king
No a God... now, bow to me you insensitive clod!
It's possible for you to change things, but only if you pick up your phone and call your representative's office.
[o]_O
teamhasnoi's post is not a Troll, however. Insightful or Interesting maybe, but not a Troll.
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Radio Shack. You've got questions...we've got blank stares(TM).
You need to read the PNAC document, "Rebuilding America's Defenses", then tell me this this is a dead horse.
What was released today is just the tip of the iceberg. Bev said it is just 10% of what is to follow.
If we cannot trust the integrity of the vote, then our system will collapse. Democracy is based on trust and openness.
photosMy Photostream
I made you all look bad and read the article.
On the one hand, the article is full of bias. To me it doesn't read like a piece of journalism. It reads like some geeky programmers got there hands on this thing and they published the article. They want it to be Watergate. If it was Watergate there would be no reason for them to say so every 3rd paragraph. It would just be.
Towards the end there is also a very liberal anti-conservative slant to it. A good piece of journalism has no slant in either direction.
So anyone that reads this article and is not sold is forgiven.
That being said.
This entire issue makes two very strong cases (and it doesn't even try).
1. The need for the software in voting machines to be open source.
I am not one to push open source software. I don't see why it should be required in the government, schools or any other place.
But the voting booth is different.
Force the electronic voting booth companies to make there software open source. If they do that then there isn't a state in this country that will have to spend one silver dime on an outside company to audit there software.
Geeks the world over will be more then happy to do it for them. I can think of no better (and democratic) way to ensure fair elections.
2. This is a really good anti-DCMA argument.
Thing is this. The DCMA basicaly says that it is against the law to break encryption. So if it is against the law to break encryption, then there is no need for strong encryption.
Case in point, this article is based out of New Zealand. It links to a page that is loaded with zips (all key code encrypted) that contain (I suppose, I haven't downloaded and looked yet) source files and documentation.
Now in the US I don't think I have broken any laws mearly downloading those files. But once I break that easily broken zip encryption I have (they linked to a site that will do just that).
At that point I have broken a law.
So if there is something to keep under wraps then Diebold can do so quite easily. They can DCMA any website linked to those files. Hell they can prosecute anyone that has opened them.
Evidence Of Motive
This is probably the easiest part of this puzzle to get your head around. The motivation of the Republican Party in general and the current administration in particular to gain ever greater amounts of power - by whatever means possible and damn the consequences - is evidenced most recently in the Supreme Court's partisan appointment of George Bush Jr. as President, the attempt to recall California Governor Gray Davis, and the Ken Starr investigation and attempted impeachment of President Clinton.
Evidence Of Opportunity
Republican connected control over the major election systems companies in the United States has been thoroughly researched.
If the Republicans have such a strangle hold on fraud, why do other parties ever get elected? Especially, why would the Republicans ever give up power in higher positions like President or Governor? From a scientific and Slashdot geek point of view I conclude that this article is highly biased.
--- I'm Green Hornet's sidekick not Inspector Clouseau's!
Well we know hat everyone is worried about the immediate flaws with these systems, and should anyone be surprised. This is par for the course of, throw something together, make a happy fun sales pitch, have them buy it, and then fix the bugs on their dime while running up costs.
But that is not what I'm *really* worried about. What's got my knickers in a twist is that someone is going to get a cause of sour grapes.. and then there is going to be allegations of 'cyber-terrorist' hacking to undermine the US electoral system.
I'm not even going to go into the more conspiratorial parts now. As of right now.. its a slow motion train wreck. I hope someone remembers this post when it happens. (or forgets it if it donest:)
#include "kiwi.h"
class vote
{
unsigned long person1;
unsigned long person2;
public:
void cast( unsigned int identifier )
{
switch ( identifier )
case 1: person2++; break;
case 2: person2++; break;
default: break;
Thank god politician are technically handicapped and thus can't code...
Hate me!
well then you bleeding hearts better find another way to argue your point, because the masses dont' give a shit about your whining any more. It's really sad.
There is no constitutional problem with electronic voting. The 15th amendment of the consitutions protects every citizens right to vote. Electronic voting machines do not interfere with this right.
... Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires."
/.'ers need to quit your bitching and just exercise your right to vote.
There is not constitutional right to having your vote counted fairly or acurately.
In the words of Supreme Court Justice Scalia "The Constitution just sets minimums
So all you
Exit polling was suspended in the 2002 election. The company that does the polling said there was serious problems with its methods, just days before the vote.
BTW, their calls were good during the 2000 election and they were using the same system for the 2002 election. Why the change?
photosMy Photostream
The more tax you pay to the government, the more votes you get. People who pay no taxes should get no votes.
It is similar to the way a corporation works. If you invest in the corporation, then you get voting power in proporation to the shares that you own. If you don't invest in the corporation, then you don't get a vote. Those who give their property to an entity deserve to have some say (in proportion to the amount of their property given) in how their property is used. (I would love to tell the fed that they can't send any more of my money to Israel!)
I am sure this is going to get modded down, for there are many people who can't conceive of any kind of charity outside of the vote-buying, income-redistribution schemes implemented through the deadly force of government. There are droves of politicians who are all to willing to use those who think that government is an effective means of charity or making things more "fair" for their own political gain. Case in point: prescription drugs for senior citizens. The Repulicans and Democrats are in a cat-fight as to who can better pander to the senior citizens. Why would the "smaller government" Republicans want this? Well, they may be wrong-headed about all sorts of things but they're not stupid! The old people vote like no one else does, and that means there is simply far too much political power in that plan for Republicans to stay true to their principles.
Score -1: Rambling
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Look, the republicans are not smart enough to fix an electronic voting machine and the democrats would fix it so that the votes were split between 3 different right in canidates.
Take a gander at this article from the Hill.
Chuck Hagel is the Senator from Nebraska. 80% of its ballots are done electronically. It just so happens that Hagel owns a stake in the company(ES&S) that produced those voting machines. And he failed to disclose as much too.
Searching Google for more information turned up this confidence building bit:
"ES&S's machines are not tampered with. I've seen them in action. They are, in fact, buggier than hell. The software running them is not very stable code, and that's why there is so many problems with the machines."
next time post it as an "anonymous coward" instead of a blatent "IAM A KARMA WHORE"
Electronic voting machines are a bad idea. There is NO reason to use them for general voting.
By electronic voting machine, I mean a machine with a display that allows you to select candidates and keeps the tally electronically. You the voter directly interact with this machine.
Ultimately there is no way to be 100% certain that the machine is doing what you want. The only real backup is a paper trail for a hand recount. These machines don't offer that. Result: the machine can make up numbers and you'd be hard pressed to tell.
Okay, so the machine can print out a verification receipt that you also file. That solves the problem. Of course, then what has the machine gained you? The voter still needs to verify that the printout says what it should (and what do you do if it doesn't?). This just adds an unnecessary double check that voters have to worry about.
You might as well just initially fill out a paper ballot and have a machine scan it. Machine scanned paper ballots can be simple for voters to use, simple for machines to scan, and simple for a hand recount. If a machine doesn't like the ballot it can reject it and a poll staff person can explain the situation ("The machine rejected your ballot. I can force it through, but one or more of your votes might be thrown away. Or I can shred this ballot and give you a new one. If you like, a poll staff member can help you fill out the new ballot.") This is exactly the situation here in Madison, Wisconsin and it works great. The ballots are really simple (there is a two inch arrow with a one in gap in the middle pointing to each candidate's name with, you just fill in the gap on the arrow pointing to your choice). It's easy to fill out. It's trivial for a machine to scan (it's like the fill in the bubble tests, but with much larger, easier to read fill in areas). The big arrows are trivial for a hand recounter to check. You can do occasional random hand recounts to verify that the automatic tabulators are working correctly.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Check out http://www.fec.gov/hava/hava.htm A google news search today shows several states using the above as reason for updating their system to electronic voting.
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.
The DMCA does not make it illegal to break encryption. I wish people would stop saying this - the DMCA is evil enough without invoking boogeymen.
The DMCA does make it illegal to break encryption that is used by a copyright owner to prevent "unauthorized" access to their copyrighted work (or to "traffic in" a device designed break that encryption). Which is still utterly idiotic, but is not the blanket evil you make it sound.
[TMB]
The point is that the software has been clearly set up with an eye towards making it easy to mistabulate results but still pass spot checks. Sure, you can trivially do the same with one ledger if you design it right, but 3 ledgers is the specific design, which tells you exactly what to look for in the files on the ftp site for evidence that specific uploaded files represent attempts to tamper with the vote.
Remember, the key is not to come up with good ways to produce a tamperable system, it is to find out whether our real system has actually been tampered with. (And if so, then where, when and by whom.)
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00064 .htm
there is a link where you can download the software files if you want to reverse engineer the software, and see what is going on....
There are a number of stories on this on the site: Here are the essential link for the download files as seen at http://users.actrix.co.nz/dolly/ Please note the the story above gives links for zip file repair tools, as well as zip file password recovery tools. Use these tools witgh appropriate caution.
TO: Computer Security Experts and True Supporters of Democracy
For an explanation about what this is about... and how you can help see... README.txt
The content here arrived as 7 CDs and so this is how it is presented.
There's a lot of data contained on those CDs not all of it was readable.
as the readme txt says,
Diebold - the board of which is made up of nine Republican donors - ran the election in Georgia in November 2002 during which sitting Democrat senatorial and gubernatorial candidates were unseated in a huge swing not shown up in pre election polling.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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.
Digital Citizen
The Diebold website is no longer up and running, but it was open to the public and operating at the time of the mid-term US elections in November 2002. Several stories about this peculiar and insecure website can be found at:
http://www.blackboxvoting.com
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
right...at least that's what the polls tell us. jackass.
If you have dead people voting, then the non-electronic systems aren't perfect. What we can do is realize that both are flawed and just work at improving the systems.
We could have some hasing system to track where and who votes while still keeping privacy. Other stated ideas are open source code. What about using state-school run voting servers? Just having series of mirrors that politicians can't touch. There are many possibilities out there, so lets refine instead of announcing its failure.
- it's Floriduh. Okay? Everybody get it straight.
See slides or more details.
You might want to look at some of the implementations of electronic voting machines that are being used successfully before you pass judgement on the entire idea.
Harris County (Houston, TX) is now using this system for their elections.
I had the opportunity to provide "tech support" for these systems during the 2002 elections. I had literally no work to do and was paid for training and being on call.
I don't know if you can find detailed technical specs on the website, but the system seems secure enough (fraud prevention wise) to me.
Just as an FIY, Harris county did not use the modem option. All the machines were taken to a central location where the votes were tabulated.
Sometimes people think of developing countries as behind the developed ones in everything and it's just not true. For instance: here, in Brazil, we have the best technology in oil (petroleum) exploration in deep sea waters. Our program for use cane sugar alcohol as fuel instead of gas in very efective technologicaly. There was a *lot* of pressure to shutdown this project by oil companies and actualy was almost supressed the last 10 years but there's projects to bring it back.
Faith can move mountains. I prefer dynamite.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0302/S00052 .htm
with more horror stories to boot. note that the system was unsecured during the 2002 election cycle.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
During the 2000 election mess, Canada just happened to have an election. We found out our results about 15 hours after ballots were closed.
This isn't a troll about Florida, etc. but rather a comparison. America uses punch cards and fancy voting machines and all that stuff.
Canada, OTOH has a piece of paper. With some names on it, and circles next to the names. you put a mark (check, X, your initials, whatever) next to the person you want to vote for. If there's a mark in more than one (and not just a small pencil mark like a dot. Something that actually looks like you meant to vote for more than one person) or no marks at all, the vote is thrown out. Everything is counted by humans.
So, why is it that they're looking for new fancy ways to (screw up) voting, when countries like Canada managed to use circa 1868 technology and have a more efficient (based on 2k elections) system?
Where did the perception that replacing a practical solution with a technical one erased all need for the practical precautions associated with that solution?
"We used to keep personnel files in a locked cabinet in a locked room, but now we just keep them on a SMB share with a null password."
"We used to keep voting half-way honest through careful ID and ballot controls, but now it's just Diebold's problem."
What gives?
-Peter
http://holt.house.gov/issues2.cfm?id=5996
and contact your congresscritters...
skkkoooonnnggggkkk ptui
California's Secretary of State, Kevin Shelley, is currently inviting comments on implementing e-voting...
http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/taskforce.htm
The present proposal is to defer requiring a paper trail until 2007. If you're in California it's important to let him know what you think.
Another case of Crack Smoke Republicans doing something half-assed and claiming the higher ground. With a baseball bat you can crush any dimbulb, and crush'em good you should.
First money grubbers, second sycophants -- has that money grub in Iraq going these days Carlyle-Halliburton-KBR? I'm sure Diebold Crack-smokers invested heavily in the major players. With a little bit of Crack from CA-SA-Carribean you too can be a player.
Try to reconcile these comments with how the system is secure with the system that was described by Bev Harris... It is full of strawmen. I think my favorite part is that they'll keep it secure by never allowing patches to be applied to the Microsoft Windows OS.
- begin here -
Security in the Georgia Voting System
Britain J. Williams, Ph.D.
April 23, 2003
Introduction: The State of Georgia replaced all voting systems statewide with a computer-based voting system. This system, known as a direct recording electronic (DRE) voting system, was first used in the November 2002 election. This voting system, described in the next section, is computer based. As a result, questions have been raised regarding the vulnerability of the system to attacks by hackers and persons attempting election fraud.
Overall security of any computer-based system is obtained by a combination of three factors working in concert with each other. First, the computer system must provide audit data that is sufficient to track the sequence of events that occur on the system and, to the extent possible, identify the person(s) that initiated the events. Next, there must be in place well defined and strictly enforced policies and procedures that control who has access to the system, the circumstances under which they can access the system, and the functions that they are allowed to perform on the system. Finally, there must be in place physical security; fences, doors, locks, etc.; that control and limit access to the system. This article describes how these factors are incorporated into the election system in the State of Georgia.
Overview of the Georgia Voting System: The computer-based election system deployed in the State of Georgia is classified as a direct recording electronic (DRE) system. The components of the system consist of the following:
Standard personal computers running an executable module known as GEMS, Global Election Management System. This system, called the GEMS computer, is used to define the election, enter the candidates and questions, and format the ballots for the voting devices. This computer also accumulates the votes after the polls close and prints various reports and audits.
Touch-screen voting stations are used for in-person voting.
Optical ballot scanners are used for absentee and provisional voting.
Each county election office in the State is equipped with a GEMS computer. This computer is used to define elections and format the ballots for both the touch-screen voting stations and the absentee (paper) ballot scanners. The system also produces files that can be sent directly to a printer to print the absentee and provisional ballots.
When the election definition is complete, the GEMS system produces PCMCIA cards, also called PC memory cards, which are used to program the touch-screen voting stations and the ballot scanners. One card is produced for each voting station and ballot scanner.
While still in the county warehouse the voting stations are arranged by precinct and the PC cards are inserted. In the days just before the election a series of tests called Logic and Accuracy tests are conducted. These tests are designed to confirm that the voting stations have been properly prepared for the election and that they correctly register all votes cast. These tests are open to the public. At the completion of the Logic and Accuracy tests the voting stations are sealed and delivered to the precincts.
On the morning of Election Day the Precinct Manager and Assistant Precinct Manager break the seals and prepare the voting stations for the election. The first step in this process is to print out a 'zero totals tape'. This tape verifies that no votes have been recorded on the voting stations prior to the opening of the polls. As the voters cast their ballots on a touch-screen voting station their choices are recorded on the PC memory card. The absentee ballots and provisional ballots are processed through ballot scanners and their votes are r
We require licenses to do all kinds of things, why not at least require a literacy standard for voting?
Because voting is a right, not a privilege.
"Literacy tests" have historically been used to swing elections by disenfranchising certain groups opposed to those in power.
The classic example - and the one that resulted in such tests being kicked out by the courts - was their use to keep freed blacks (and poor whites) from voting in the south after the Civil War / War Between the States. (The tests, and their administration were, of course, bogus. Like requiring the voter to read a headline - and giving the black/poor-white voters a Chinese newspaper.)
While we're at it, are you ready for a "Public Affairs Test" before you can write about politics? A "Comparitive Religion" test before you can go to a church of your choice? Or similar bogus tests before you can buy a gun, travel, own property, send a letter, address a crowd, defend yourself in court, and so on?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The authors go on to brag that they can add an unlimited number of users by the same procedure. They don't seem to realize that given write access to the database, this is an obvious outcome.
In other news:
What I've read so far does not inspire confidence in these authors.
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".)
Mechanical voting machines don't even require power to operate. Isn't that a novel idea? Meanwhile, just about anyone who wanted to could ensure the failure or improper reading of an electronic voting machine.
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
Ultimately, the government protects your private property, so you don't have to. You can then spend that time creating wealth.
First of all, without the military, another country could invade and take all your stuff.
Secondly, the government also provides a structure of laws which allows you to focus on building a business without having to worry about other people stealing it or squatting on your land. Laws related to intellectual property were originally written for a similar reason. Civil laws ensure that disputes can be settled without violence.
Thirdly, your taxes fund the infrastructure of the country, which allow you to get to work and communicate. Some of these projects are too large for any commercial venture to tackle.
After that are some services of lesser importance and more subtle effects:
Government programs that help the poor reduce crime, which also allows you to focus on attaining success (instead of protecting yourself).
The FDA (for example) releases you from the burden of researching the conditions of every farm or dairy you might buy from.
The government also provides financial programs to reduce the risk of starting a business. Bankruptcy laws, subsidized loans, and FDIC are examples.
There are certainly many other examples.
I would certainly agree that the tax codes need work and that government can be wasteful. I can also agree that some of above examples may not currently be efficient. But, those are implementation issues. It is much more likely that the existing system can be refined, than a libertarian utopia created.
Any self-made businessman got where they are today (if done legally) with more help than hinderance from the government. Again, we all help pay for it, because it could be any of us next.
Is there any reason NOT to prohibit elected officials from owning stock or otherwise have vested interest in companies that are responsible for elections?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Now we have big flatscreen computers - backlit screens with huge fonts and a color behind each candidate's name. There's no curtain, no closet, and the screen is aimed back where anyone in the room can watch you vote. This not only hurts people who want to vote against what most in their community support, it lets the old ladies who run polling places keep their own unofficial tally of the results (if they want to). That would facilitate fraud, wherein you just keep up with your preferred candidate and then go vote a few extra times if you notice he's falling behind.
Additionally, I have personally met our county registrar, and deal with her on a regular basis in matters not related to the government. She's not qualified for the job, and wouldn't know a case of computer fraud from a hole in the ground if it ever happened on her watch.
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
I live here so I voted in the last election using the diebold "system". It's the most BLATANT phony vote system you can imagine. There is ZERO way to account for the tally, any "official" can slide in a disk and change the results, there's no way for any local poll watcher to verify a count, because all you can do ishave the machine run it's same program again, so if it's been monkeyed with, you'll get the same monkeyed results. I made an offical protest after I voted, it lead to nothing, just an exasperrated and computer illeterate older lady poll official who couldn't understand why I wouldn't trust the machine,how it could be tampered with, then she transferred me to some person at the other end of a telephone who insisted the machines were fair, accurate and honest. I disputed that, said there was no proof, there was no proof of the vote that any poll watcher could verify, and I demanded the code, of course refused. I just wanted there to be an official protest, so I did it. Before we had a plain wooden box, paper ballots, you could look inside the box at poll opening, verify it empyty, sit there at poll closing time and watch the count. the potential for verification is VERY high with such a system and good ole mark I human concerned eyeballs. I like computers, but I got no use for these "systems". And I remember BEFORE I voted, a big Drudge headline about large numbers of "irregularities" showing up during the vote in georgia, I came back from voting and that story POOFED off his page and there was little of it at any other big georgia sites like ajc.com. That's some JUICE to be able to do that, and yes, biggest upsets since civil war reconstruction, defying all pre and post polling, so much so all the news orgs stopped even reporting the polls or that story.
That election was RIGGED, and it was the test case for nation wide rigging, that's my opinion, and the test worked, 99.999% of the people just sucked it up. To be fair, there was a big anti barnes vote over the flag issue, but still... too many races had completely bogus results. And BOTH PARTIES have endorsed these "systems", which means they are "in" on it at the top party levels.
It's a JUNTA. The vote was marginally useful before, now it's about useless.
can be heard here.
Look for Audio from May 09
There is more on Black box voting on this page.
photosMy Photostream
Thank you, thank you, I'll be in town all week
I live in Australia, where people vote with pencils, piles of paper, eyeballs, and telephones. Thanks to massively parallel processing we usually know who's going to form the next government by bedtime on election night. The first-past-the-post tallies are invariably known on the night, but the winners are decided by a rather complicated algorithm to avoid the Nader effect, so the closest electorates take weeks to count. The government has to get its legislation passed by the senate, which uses an even more complicated algorithm, and often takes a month to determine.
But it doesn't matter. Really important politics, such as abolishing slavery, liberating women, banning alcohol, or providing public funding for education, happens over decades or centuries. Even on such an immediate issue as building a dam on the Franklin River, political debate took years. Urgent decisions such as going to war would usually be decided the same way by any party that might win an election. Voting machines gain only speed, while only accuracy counts.
Ooooo ahhhhhh jackass, wow.
Your tired refrain is just that: tired.
"Three of the largest voting machine vendors in the United States have convicted criminals in high positions, according to Mercuri. "Sequoia, ES&S, and Shoup all have top people that been convicted for bribery of election officials or insider trading," Mercuri told AFP, adding, "How can it not be a criminal enterprise?" From this story.
I've looked around for the original interview, but was unable to find it. Jeff Rense runs a cool site, but he publishes everything, so it's definitely Caveat Lector in those waters.
Anybody?
-FL
Ever wonder how in 2000 there were an unusual amount of "Florida military ballots" that went through the postal system LATE and WITHOUT POSTMARK?
. html
r y
Next election will be even more corrupt for military ballots. Military personnel will vote online in 2004
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/126504_vote14
The company that has been contracted to provide this service was just bought by a group of Saudi investors.
http://www.newsday.com/business/ny-bzelec0227.sto
"Election.com, a struggling Garden City start-up scheduled to provide online absentee ballots for U.S. military personnel in the 2004 federal election, has quietly sold controlling power to an investment group with ties to unnamed Saudi nationals, according to company correspondence."
You wanna see how computerized voting really works?
Go here:
http://www.cntrybob.com/Fun/Voter/voter.html
Why bother to vote at all. Just resign yourself to fighting a revolution. If you value freedom and democracy.
1. Experimental online voting system gets somehow /.ed
2. Result: Cowboy Neal elected President of the World by default
3. Profit!
Remember - life *will* find a way...
Electronic Voting Machines in India FAQ
As far as I know they were introduced more than 5 years ago. It is a technology developed indigenously.
Actually, from a New Zealand perspective,(make that a human perspective) the article is balanced. From a rather twisted American perspective where the moderates are considered left wing, I guess it just might look skewed...
OK, I've voted in a few Canadian elections, and I'm still confused at the massive desire to have all sorts of gizmos and gadgets involved in voting in the States.
A printed ballot and a pencil to mark an X and you're done, paper trail (literal) included.
sig fault
As with most solutions to problems, what is the problem here?
People taking too long to count?
In australia we still vote on paper using numbered candidates and we never have any hassels.
This aint rocket science.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
How do you think Bush got in? He's gonna love it when everybody is using them!
http://users.actrix.co.nz/dolly/
These are some of the actual files involved in the Diebold voting scandal. Download them before some takes the site down.
And what is the file called rob-georgia.zip ???
Read about it here:
http://www.talion.com/lies.htm
Microsoft provides "Zero Security" as an enhancement to the Windows family of operating systems as well as popular software packages such as Internet Explorer and Office. Interested parties can enroll in Microsoft's Zero Security Internet Campaign and help architect the Zero Security Internet of the future, where "everyone can look at anything they want (TM)"
This has an interview with one of the poor blokes responsible for setting up the machines, and downloading untested patches to them so they could be shipped out.
He describes the typical "there's a deadline" software nightmare, of placing untested patches on untested patches, and of machines that were broken in a different way on every reboot.
Embarrassing enough if you're a dot-com. Horrifying when you're running an election.
We keep getting hung up on the technical and security issues involved in electronic voting, but we keep forgetting what it would be replacing. Hand counts are not accurate, and machine counts have problems. The reason "hanging chads, etc." should be disregarded is because if they aren't, people will be hand-counting. Machines may have flaws, but everyone is biased, whether we like to admit it or not. I think working toward a better solution for electronic voting is exactly what we need to do.
Where have the journalists gone?
Journalism isn't supposed to show any bias at all.
Period.
A good journalist has his own views, but what makes him a good journalist is that when he writes his stories he puts those views aside. His work ethics and his personal ethics are two different things.
The bias in this article is the writers insistence of shoving in our face how evil this is at every turn.
Thing about watergate is, the article that broke it never once compared it to watergate (- said with tongue in cheek, it isn't supposed to make sense). The person writing the article should put the facts in front of us and let us decide if it is evil or not.
I stand by what I said. It is a biased article, but it still makes a good case on open sourced software for electronic voting machines and the evils of the DMCA.
Scoop is a left wing site that posts a non stop stream of anti right wing conspiracy theories, this is just another rabid conspiracy theory from the whinging left, political bullshit.