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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.
http://www.blackboxvoting.com i suggest you check it out.
--CRN
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
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
I hope you are kidding but, the 1965 VRA prevents literacy exams, and the USSC has upheld it as Constitutional
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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!
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.
There's plenty of security preventing people from changing the results. Its called exit polling.
You're forgetting that the exit polls declared Gore the winner in Florida, by a pretty good margin. However, the *official* ballots told a different story, mostly because of all the accidental Buchannan votes. So without an audit trail, vote riggers could just say "Gosh, I guess those people reporting their votes to the exit pollers were mistaken or lying."
And a lot easier to forge.
To stuff a ballot box, you need the right paper, ink, and print format BEFORE the election. This creates a paper trail and gives us time to stop you before you do it.
It also requires multiple criminals, which may very well turn state's evidence.
To change purely electronic data, it can be done on the fly, during the election, by one angry man, leaving apparently NO traces, according to the analysis of the machines currently used. And their would be no way to recover the original data.
The original paper ballots can and DO get checked by hand. To really fix any election that has paper ballots, it is MUCH harder than a pure electron one.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The prohibited literacy test applied to a common practice in the South previous to 1965 in which people of color were required to pass a literacy test. These tests often encluded stating from memory all of the supreme court justices from the beginning of the countriy's history, reading Mandarin Chinese newspapers, and anything else they could to prevent people from passing. Even most Ph.d in English couldn't pass these tests.
They somewhat do this in developing countries - they dye your thumb in an indelible ink so you can't vote twice (at least on the same day). Of course, guerillas who don't want anyone to vote tend to cut those thumbs off... and it isn't just so that the peasents can try to vote again
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Actually the fore fathers had in the constitution that only property owners should be allowed to vote. It wasn't because they wanted just rich people voting. It was to prevent poor people from electing congressmen that would steal money from the rich and disturbed to the poor. Its intent was to make sure capitalism exists, rather than the socialist system we are living in today.
Just my 2 cents because the goverment takes the rest!!
Paul
As our friend the Peruvian senator pointed out, in a real democracy the people would have access not only to the raw data of elections but also to the software used to compute the outcome of said elections (amazingly he said this before our 2000 election debacle).
Anyone have any idea what sorts of physical voting mechanisms the Peruvians use to interact with those OSS voting systems?
8 byte key with 1 parity bit per byte (7 bits * 8 = 56). That is what DES uses.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
> Hey! We are not all in Florida you know.
At least in Florida, no one was encouraged to vote the DAY AFTER the election.. the final "unofficial" recount had Gore winning by a wide margin, except for one thing...
Ever wonder how in 2000 there were an unusual amount of "Florida military ballots" that went through the postal system LATE and WITHOUT POSTMARK?
That normally does not happen (especially since mail ballots are sent EARLY and mail can't be routed without a postmark).
Regarding taxation without represention: American citizens in DC are not fully represented, even though they pay federal taxes. Just for comparison, DC's population exceeds that of Wyoming.
Um ... believe it or not, when a certain group of people does something evil, saying "that group of people is doing something evil" does not constitute "bias" against that group of people. It constitutes telling the truth.
Ahhh, fuck it, why am I even bothering? Just go and watch Fox News and be happy.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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
I'll respond to points 2 & 3.
The reason I've been told that one isn't allowed to ask for an ID to vote is that it would be a violation of the Constitution - specifically, the 24th Amendment.
Now, you're asking yourself, "why would asking for an ID violate the prohibition of poll taxes?" Think about the time you got (or last renewed) your driver's licence. It wasn't free, was it? Ta-dah! A poll tax.
So, if you've got to show a photo ID to vote, the state's got to provide a free photo ID. And most states right now are too broke to even think about something like this.
And as far as point 3 - Purging of the voting roles led to big problems in the 2000 election in Florida. Basically, some voters that shouldn't have been purged were purged. When they showed up to vote, they were told they couldn't. Big disaster. I suspect most places would rather have voting roles with ineligible voters (99.99% of whom won't show up to vote, because they've moved or are dead - and if "they" do show up, it's unlikely anyone will find out about it, thus causing problems for the officials running the election) than voting roles missing eligible voters (who will make a huge stink if they show up and are told they can't vote, which will cause a problem for the officials running the election).
You can read about the Florida voting list purge here if you wish, and check the mention in the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights' report here.
If taxes were abolished, then voting would be .... equal. The masses could vote to enrich themselves.
As it stands now, the few are at the wims of the majority. If the Few (rich) are at the wims of the majority (poor), the majority will always think that they are entitled to what the Few have, and take it by means of Taxation, and redistribute it according to arbatrary (meaningless, random) guidelines. Want more, vote for the people who will give you more, while taking more from those that have it.
The only alternative that works is a system of usage fees and voluntary fees. The US government ran for nearly 100 YEARS on this type of revenue.
The moment this system broke was when the masses realized that they could take from others, give to themselves, and considered it a RIGHT to do so.
Taxes should be limited (if at all), because Taxes are a form of extortion, theft by threat of violence. Tell me it isn't so, and I will demand you stop paying taxes and see what happens to you.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
And rather than spouting off your conspiracy theories about the election, how about providing some proof. If a crime was committed, where are the investigations and indictments?
Go here and you can read Greg Palast's version of the story and the evidence he collected (e.g. pages 60 and 61 of the Chapter 1 PDF).
Where is the public outcry?
Good question. Ask the American public.
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.
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.
Ever wonder how in 2000 there were an unusual amount of "Florida military ballots" that went through the postal system LATE and WITHOUT POSTMARK?
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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.