Slashdot Mirror
Diebold Voting Systems Grossly Insecure
Several well-known security researchers have examined the code for Diebold's voting machines (which we last mentioned two weeks ago) and produced an extensive report (pdf). The NYT has a story on the report, which cuts to the bone: 'Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts. We highlight several issues including unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software development processes. For example, common voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal.'
voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal.
Were they testing these in Florida a few years ago?
Trolling is a art,
So, can't someone who knows what they're doing write some of these things? This is exactly why jon q public is afraid of things becoming 'technology rich'
I'm not saying that god doesn't exist, merely that he is not necessary - hawking
till I ascend to the Governorship of Louisiana. Start reaching into your pockets, now folks -- Big Daddy's open for Bidness!
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
You would think, with all the qualified unemployed software engineers out there, they could at least hire a few...
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." - Thomas Jefferson
Here the bit from the article that I find most interesting. To have security flaws is one thing. To not fix them even after you know about them is another.
'But Douglas W. Jones, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa, said he was shocked to discover flaws cited in Mr. Rubin's paper that he had mentioned to the system's developers about five years ago as a state elections official.
'"To find that such flaws have not been corrected in half a decade is awful," Professor Jones said.'
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Who in his right mind would trust a closed-source voting system whose binary executable image is not verifyable by CRC???
story
I'm much funnier now that I'm a subscriber.
they run on Microsoft operating Systems...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
pdf in case of slashdotting
google link
Visualize the world of wine
You can't expect a secure voting machine! I mean, how else can [insert current party in power] rig the next election unless the machines are grossly insecure?
What, you were expecting fairness?
Subscribe for free to my show!
Read the story at the Atlanta Journal Constitiution or the NY Times.
That explains why the L337 P4rt'/ swept the last elections....
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
That's just wrong.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
That said, hopefully publicizing the faults will lead to some upgrades to the security of the system.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
I didn't know Microsoft made voting machine software!
Game Overdrive - Gaming News
Anyone who's even briefly perused comp.risks, even before the post-US-Election-2000 debacle, wouldn't be the least bit surprised by these conclusions.
Scottie's Law strikes again (from Star Trek III): "The more they back up the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drains." The simpler the voting system (the less mechanical, electronic, electro-mechanical etc. etc.) is the less open it is to fraud (both officially and unofficially perpetrated) or error (both innocent and culpable).
One more reason I'm glad to live in Canada...
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
For example, common voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal
Diebold Salesman: "This is a feature, an unintentional extra for your customers!"
I only mod up parents of "mod parent up" posts...
There are always voting problems. You can fairly easily falsify paper ballots too with $100 worth of equipment. It is even easier in those areas (like Oregon) where all voting is done through the mail. Although there is no excuse to allow known bugs to stick around, there most likely will always be bugs/flaws in whatever method you use for voting.
Cowboyneal for office!
Reporter: "Mr. Neal, under what platform are you running?"
CBN: "Redhat Linux 9"
Reporter: "..."
"Ask me about Loom"
Any time there is a system, someone will be able to break or hack it. Especially a closed system that isn't open to scrutiny.
At least with the current voting system, while you're there you see everyone being handed 1 ballot, and turning in just 1 ballot. You see the ballot go in the sealed box. There's no secret about what your vote is doing, and no confusion about whether the vote was cast or not, or if anyone is turning in multiple ballots.
Time to start a viable open-source voting-machine project. These guys started something promising, but it looks like development has ceased. Anybody know of a decent, active open-source electronic voting system?
-j
It says in the article that this company makes ATMs. I think I'm going to go get some free money.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
I don't know, maybe a person who would use CRCs to verify anything in a hostile environment?
Considering the fiasco that was the Presidential election can anyone say that they are suprised? This company will make alot of money serving the special interests of some political party. By making it insecure they insure that politicians will again be able to steal the vote from the people, with all the real evidence of this being reported in the British press. Your votes mean nothing even moreso now.
Will encourage all States to do a trial run of these machines for the 2004 election.
that I ran across a few weeks ago: http://www.cronus.com/electionfraud
It IS interesting to note how many dollars have flowed between Diebold and the Republican party...
For example, common voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal
The vending machines here around campus (using a diebold system) were used by almost 600 students to get "free" food... In an audit they detected it... Full text here
Some people, in comments widely circulated on the Internet, contend that the company's software has been designed to allow voter fraud. Mr. Rubin called such assertions "ludicrous" and said the software's flaws showed the hallmarks of poor design, not subterfuge.
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
So where is the good system that follows good software development processes and implements cryptography correctly? Certainly such a system is worth the experts in the field investing in it.
It sounds like we assigned the implementation of America's voting system to the members of the short bus.
It's amazing how quickly we went from having to make entire ballot trucks disapear last election to merely having the same voter from the bush family vote several times. 2004: election year of the vote box spammers!
In practical terms, this means that elections will go from being controlled by corporations to being controlled by script kiddies. Cool! CowboyNeal for president in 2004!
"This is an iceberg that needs to be hacked at a good bit," Mr. Neumann said, "so this is a step forward."
Isn't that a rather poor choice of words when talking about program code? And is hacking an iceberg permissible under the DMCA?
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
I dont understand why they couldnt have some staffers sitting at a desk for people when they show up. The staffers have a box of cards (rfid tags ?) that have each person in their districts social security number. Person goes to the booth, scans their tag which says to the system, ok, 111-22-3333 is voting. The system should allow them to pick a candidate (or candidates) and then once they are done, invalidate their social number. To prevent against people from using fake socials, the system should be preprogrammed with its districts voters social numbers. Thoughts?
www.whatreallyhappened.com
t ml
http://www.infernalpress.com/Columns/election.h
How can such grossly negligent design be produced by someone who wanted such a system to succeed. I do not know why someone would not want this type of system, I only proposed the possibility.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
Just from the above quote, this doesn't sound like the kind of security that any bank would tolerate. Is this a case of lawmakers awarding contracts under duress after being wowed by cool "tecknoligee" in order to avoid being the next "Florida 2000," or is Diebold simply a victim of its own success for having potentially higher standards for commerce than voting?
[sarcasm]
It almost seems like the authentication process to make this work would need something as stringent as, say, a National ID card...
Ooh, and we could use a Poll tax to pay for the equipment!
[/sarcasm]
Finally, the hackers can get someone they like into office. It might even mean the end of the two party system, when mysteriously 300 million (out of 210m) vote for a third party ;o)
Beep beep.
I guess the FBI and NSA will be tripping over each other to get DirectTV's list of people who've bought card programmers. Last week you were just a potential thief. This week, you're a potential anarcho-terrorist.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The only purpose to use completely electronic voting whether by voting machine or web services, is to make it easier to steal elections without the messy paper trail of paper ballots or the need to double punch those unwanted Republican ballots.
Of course there is no security. The idea is to know ahead of time at the central computers how many votes are needed so they can be added in quietly with smoothed data and not the mass stuffed ballot boxes of so many past stolen elections.
David
If they can just add a feature so the dead can vote, they can use it in Chicago.
Can it handle malicious MIDI's?
Anyway, what's the big deal? Once an elected politician gets in office he gets a r00t kit by lobbyist. What's the rub here???
BSD is designed. Linux is grown. C++ libs
"We're constantly improving it so the technology we have 10 years from now will be better than what we have today," [Diebold guy] Mr. Richardson said. "We're always open to anything that can improve our systems."
Like making them non-useless?
sulli
RTFJ.
In FidoNet elections you sent in your vote with a one-time password.
The election results were sent to all voters with a list of all the passwords who voted for each candidate. You checked to make sure yours was in the right category.
This is still hackable, though, simply by custom generating for each voter a message with their vote in the correct category, but enough other passwords in the cheating candidate to make sure they win.
Whats the way to handle this properly in a world of PKI and the web?
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Elections are at basis of democracy it is essential that elections are done properly and fairly or you quickly end up with nothing but a facade, that this has occured it frankly terrifying considering the electoral process may of already been subverted in any number of countries using these systems without anybody being the wiser. If it turns out that they were willfully negligent in designing the system or even worse knew about and ignored the flaws for 5 years they should be charged with treason by every country they've sold to and if they aren't dealt with very harshly I will be rightfully suspicious...
I stole this Sig
Now turn off your computer, sit there calmly and wait for the soldiers to cart you off as the enemy combatant that you obviously are.
If the voting terminal was able to ensure that each voter only voted once, then there would be even less of a secret ballot than there is now. While such assurances could be built without compromising voter annonymity, it almost certainly would not be. If you don't think ballot secrecy is important, just consider the time when Ann Coulter is president. Voting against her agenda would be treason.
Better to handle the multiple voting issue outside the machine.
Information is not Knowledge
Since that won't be happening for few years yet, I'll still be Governer!
But on a more serious note, how did Diebold get the contract in the first place? How can we be sure now that when they do fix the problems mentioned in the report they don't introduce more. Our election system is backwards enough. Do we really need to give more chances for crooked results?
--<Mike>--
Paper ballots are receipts as well as ballots. Electronic voting needs to either provide third-party accountability or stay in the lab. Period. Luckily, nobody has ever tried to tamper with voting results
If the system is insecure, why not have someone boost its ego?
Never mistake "can" for "should".
If recounts came about due to a close race, would they count dangling pointers?
For example, common voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal. ...we can all cast our votes for Linus.
.sig
Maybe punching holes in smartcards would be a nice thing to try.
The Green Party couldn't win. My ass, we're going to win now!!! (Or the socialist candidate I got 96% for in that who to vote for quiz!)
A couple years ago, some guys I knew in school were testing voting machines as their senior project. Basically they did every possible thing they could think of, to see how idiot-proof the machines were. Card in backwards, different speeds, bumps, button-mashing, etc.
Actually I think they were only allowed to test machines from two out of four companies. The companies were quite rude about the idea of some external group testing their machines. They would not provide a machine for testing, and actually forbade them from finding one of their machines elsewhere and testing it. They were threatened with legal trouble if they performed an "unauthorized" test and released the results.
They probably had good reason to be so wary. On one of the other machines at least, I believe you could vote twice by zipping the card through quickly or something. I don't recall exactly what you had to do, but it apparently wasn't difficult to learn or accidentally come across.
...
Almost exactly 20 years ago Chase Manhattan Bank tasked my buddy Charles (?) and I to hack thier Diebold branch alarm system.
To our surprise it used a simple lookup table. The mainframe would poll a branch asking about a specific alarm. The server located at the branch would respond with a code for "OK".
THE SAME CODE EVERY TIME!
We cut the telco lines and alligator clipped our TRS-100 (way cool early laptop) and using a BASIC program did a look-up (which my partner wrote a coolie algorithm for), responded "Everything's OK Here!", and went to lunch.
After screwing off for several hours we told our managers that we had spoofed thier branch alarm system.
They traveled to Diebold who swore up and down how great thier encryption was. The Chase guys slid our report across the table and watched the Engineers turn white as ghosts as they read it.
HAHAHAHAHA What a bunch of dumbasses!
The Moral of the Story: Don't trust your security vendors.
Cheers! (:-{)}
Bill
bamph
In a democracy, we'd have to go to the expense of counting the actual votes. In our brave Republic, our leaders save our tax money by deciding in advance who will win and how many votes they'll get, so we can get back to our bread and circuses. God save the Ki- President!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
So if I point out the flaws in this voting machine do I go to jail (reverse engineering & circumvention) and forever lose my right to vote? (several states do not allow ex-felons to vote)
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
We only inspected unencrypted source code that we believe was used in Diebold's AccuVote-TS voting terminal [Die03] (the "AVTSCE" tree in the CVS archive). We have not independently verified the current or past use of the code by Diebold or that the code we analyzed is actually Diebold code, although as explained further in Section 6.1, the copyright notices and code legacy information in the code itself are consistent with publicly available systems offered by Diebold and a company it acquired in 2001, Global Election Systems. Also, the code itself built and worked as an election system consistent with Diebold's public descriptions of its system. We concluded that even if it turned out that the code was not part of a current or past Diebold voting system, analysis of it would be useful to the broader public debate around electronic voting systems security and assist election officials and members of the public in their consideration of not only Diebold systems, but other electronic voting systems currently being marketed nationwide and around the world. We did not have source code to Diebold's GEMS back-end election management system.
Does anyone else get the idea that this is exactly how they wanted it to work?
Even if they thought it was fully secure, some geek would find a way to exploit it. How can they fix an election in a secure system? Make it bad, and scrap it quickly, before the 04 elections.
George Bush, or my wife's bush. Both have the same right to be running this country right now. (don't get excited Al, if I compare George to the front hole, you are the other hole in the back)
necisary != necessary
Some people, in comments widely circulated on the Internet, contend that the company's software has been designed to allow voter fraud. Mr. Rubin called such assertions "ludicrous" and said the software's flaws showed the hallmarks of poor design, not subterfuge.
They're not evil, just stupid!
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
What's so 'interesting' about their little observation? Their implication that Republicans rigged the Georgia election is based purely on baseless speculation, and is absent of any facts to support their claim. After reading that, I had a hard time taking anything else in the article seriously.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
...but in practice, it could simply be used as an argument FOR centralized, online voting. Please note that the current e-voting system currently in testing is Windows-specific... this could end up being a very bad thing. ("To vote, you must run one of the following operating systems: Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows ME, Windows 98. Other systems are not supported on www.evote.gov at this time. We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause...")
I KNOW I'm paranoid, but still...I like to think long-term.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
We have already known for a long time that ATMs are badly flawed as well when it comes to security. Even the basic technology is completely outdated and insecure: magnetic strips with four digit pins are just an abomination when it comes to security. The solution has been for banks to deny the problem, blame customers, and pass on any losses that result from fraud that they can't blame on customers to other customers.
So, does it come as a surprise that companies that can't produce minimally secure ATMs can't produce minimally secure voting machines either? Blaming Floridians for "hanging chads" (talk about a broken user interfaces) clearly was only the beginning.
If we want secure voting machines, ATM manufacturers are the last people to go to because they already have proven to be incapable of handling computer security. The only thing they seem to be able to do is make big, heavy metal boxes and pretend that that constitutes "security".
I think all of the electronic voting systems have taken it all too far. What they should be doing is creating a nice glossy touchscreen interface that is clear and easy to read, to allow people to create a PAPER BALLOT that is properly marked. The ideal printout would both be human readable and machine readable for easy counting and recounting. Let physical, rather than technical security processes make sure that people put only one ballot into the box that counts, and voters can have unlimited attempts at trying to get the paper ballot to say what they wanted to say.
Now only if the same development team designed their ATMs I'd be sitting on a beach in the Carribean right now. After all, if you can make an unlimited number of votes, why not an unlimited number of transfers/deposits... Hmmm I think I'll deposit $10,000 (don't want to tip off the IRS too fast) again and again and again.
I don't understand the rationale behind casting "virtual" votes. How can you go back and audit the votes? How do you ensure reliability and security?
In Canada whenever I have voted, I have put an "X" in the appropriate spot beside the candidate or question I'd like to vote for. Sure the voting card is then fed (by an elections official) through an automated counter, but the powers that be can always go back and recount the votes, either manually or using the automated counters.
Using this system the results are usually known within a couple of hours of the polls' closing time, and there are no hanging or dimpled chads -- or the possibility of the public at large messing with the system (other than spoiling one's own ballot).
What is wrong with this system? I can't really find too much to complain about -- old fashioned voting cards coupled with technology to speed the counting process.
Don't tell anyone about the problems, then when it becomes known you have infinite votes, call it a feature.
Also introduce a talking chad to help you vote, and notify you when it looks like you're writing a letter.
Scalia logic: No batteries necessary.
Concerning your recent letter threatening legal action, I didn't buy my smart card programmer to steal DirectTV service...
I bought it to steal an election.
Thank you.
"Life's funny sometimes." "And sometimes it isn't." --Cat's Cradle
I know it's been mentioned lots of times. But I can't resist:
Brazil voting system Just Works (TM). Ask Mexico, they used it last elections. Ask Paraguai. Ask here in Brazil. We have more than 100 million voters and still can give results in a matter of hours. And the system is highly secure. Not that I endorse the multitude of problems our political system has, only the voting system (technologically) is very well done.
Flávio Machado
Off the top of my head, here's people that the interface would have to take into account:
The illiterate, or very low reading ability.
People with limited sight.
People with limited or no english reading ability.
People with no experience with electronic interfaces of any sort. Even touch screen, or simple buttons may be confusing for many.
Those who distrust the computer system to accurately record their vote. Some kind of print-out system is a must.
In essence, before such a system should be put into use, it should be tested (perhaps with mock elections of sorts) with people who fit all these descriptions, to figure out how to make a system the easiest and most accurate to use.
-
Why shouldn't voting machines be open source? Who approved these machines?
Free cell phone tracking
But why is it that the tried-and-true paper ballot must be replaced? If most (if not all) countries in Europe can find enough volunteers and monitors to sort and count the ballots, why isn't this possible in the US? Or even pay these people?
"We're constantly improving it so the technology we have 10 years from now will be better than what we have today"
These guys definately deserve $56 million contracts.
The more you overwork the plumbing, the easier it is to clog up the pipes.
The punchcard and bubblesheets are still the best way to do this sort of stuff.
Our problem is, we don't push for the idea of responsible exercise of our franchise.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
I think voting by touch screen is wrong. Electronic voting should be paper based. That is, ballots should be simple pieces of paper that are marked clearly by pen and immediately stuck into a reading machine. The reading machine complains if there are any inconsistencies with the ballot so that the voter can go back to correct them. The paper itself is retained to allow auditing and, in narrow elections, recounting.
Paper-based electronic voting is easy to use for voters, requires far less equipment than other electronic voting, is fully auditable, and is less prone to user error than either traditional paper-based voting or touch-screen voting (neither of which really provides a double-check of the votes).
This is a computer programmed by invisible software. The only record of a vote is a little counter in the guts of the computer program. There is absolutely no way to make it secure. Any system that records votes directly electronically is wide open.
The only difference is who can commit vote fraud. Now anyone who walks up to the machine can commit vote fraud. Even if all of these bugs fixed, large classes of vote fraud remain. The only difference would be that any random person on the street couldn't cheat. However, any custodian would still be able to re-image the drive. Any programmer at Diebold would be able to embed a trapdoor. In short, anyone with exclusive access to open the machine can cause it to cheat. And this 'best case' is only if they fix all of the bugs.
Thats not a lot better. Even the writers of the paper couldn't make a cheat-proof DRE voting program. If an adversary controls the hardware, they control the software. Fundamentally, any non-trivial computer system is not trustworthy; any system whose security depends on a computer should be transformed where the security no longer depends on the correctness of the computer.
For instance, the only nominally trustworthy computer voting scheme is to have the computer be nothing other than a super-intelligent pencil. The voter uses the computer which prints out a paper ballot. The user observes and confirms the paper ballot is correct, then the ballot is dropped into a box. The computer may record results, but as the computer is untrustworthy, those results are untrustworthy. Now, the security and trustworthyness of the computer doesn't matter.
Every security researcher, including the authors of the paper advocates this scheme, but they are ignored by election officials. This includes the two professors who authored the paper, Peter Neumann, and Douglas Jones from the NY Times article, Rivest---the R in RSA--- and hundreds of others.
See: http://www.verifiedvoting.org/index.asp
This is a secure voting system. Brazil has it (and at a tenth the price). Any system without a printer requires 'trusted hardware' in an adversarial environment. Control the hardware, control the election.
Because, needless to say, even if your election officials publish source code for voting software, it's still a bit tricky to be certain that said voting software is actually what's running on the voting machines.
I'd like to see a really verifiable election process; check out http://www.vreceipt.com/ for an example system, which makes it essentially impossible for anyone to change or not count your vote. (It doesn't seem to prevent votes from being added, but that's a much easier problem to solve in meatspace, just by making sure that the number of ballots a polling place's computer submits matches the number of people an observer saw entering the booths)
This is a good analysis, but I think a few of the criticisms are off base.
First, a number of the supposed weaknesses they present are not actually exploitable; all of the ones relating to the file systems on the voting machines, for example. They offer no proposals for how an attacker could get access to these file systems or alter the files. It's not like he can just stick in a floppy and get it to run his favorite hacking program. As long as these are closed systems running the designer's software, there is no need for file system protection.
Second, many of the smart-card related attacks present far-fetched scenarios for how a hypothetical attacker could discover the weakness. This is a common flaw among such analyses; working with 20-20 hindsight, the researchers attempt to put themselves in the shoes of an attacker who doesn't have access to the source code but who always guesses right about how things work. It is far-fetched at best to propose that someone could cut the cable to the smart card reader in the voting booth, install some kind of monitoring device, inspect the protocol between machine and card, and then go home and use the data to deduce how to manufacture forged cards. Yet that is exactly what the authors suggest.
In truth, the real weaknesses of the system are the implicit assumption that the source code would be kept secret. Security through obscurity works only as long as the obscurity is maintained. If the code is leaked or stolen, these assumptions are violated and the system becomes insecure.
In this context, then, the real question is whether this is a true and up to date representation of the code that is implemented in the machines. One question I had was if so, why they weren't able to validate any of their assumptions about how poll workers were trained to operate the machines by referring to training manuals or at least verbally contacting some workers. At this point it seems to be entirely hypothetical whether this code is actually being used in any current voting machines, and therefore whether the attacks presented would actually work in the field.
They use the security through marketing technique, "It uses smart cards it must be secure"
Free cell phone tracking
After over 5 years having to deal with Diebold in a variety of applications I'm not at all surprised. Every time I talk to their tech people they blame everything on the wiring. Sheesh.
Your joke made me laugh. But the sad thing is that it is the whole point of voting machines.
A paper ballot and a pen is the only form of ballot I trust. And if they don't count the ballots AT THE POLLING PLACE in plain view of the public BEFORE they ship them off to the court house you can't trust the result.
Paper ballot boxes get tampered with all the time. A machine that most people couldn't understand is NOT going to make voting less prone to fraud. If I can't take apart the machanical voting machine to see if it works correctly and I can't look at the code of a computer program and see if it works correctly then why SHOULD I trust it?
We allready had a major election full of obvious vote fraud(On both sides. Bush was just better at it THIS TIME. Gore was just as crooked just not as effective.) Voting machines are just one more way to cloud the issue. A voting shell game run by slick con men.
DEMAND paper ballots! Demand that votes be counted and posted AT THE POLL. Any thing else is a sham!
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
It's quite scary, I think, that this was modded "Insightful."
It's quite scary, also, that this is true. Though if I had been there, I would have had a good laugh at the SC saying that, because the idea is just so damn ridiculous. What's wrong with the citizenry questioning the legitimacy of the election? The people have a right to.
-- What I don't have in intelligence, I make up for in a lack thereof.
Whoever bought this system is malfeasant.
It's clear no certification was done at all.
I read and enjoyed the paper, but I was disturbed by one thing. The author(s) kept bringing up the fact that the system was coded in C++ - an "unsafe" language, then suggested that the system should be written in Java or C#.
I've always thought that the only thing that made C++ "unsafe" was unsafe programming and design principles, something that, according to the paper, the Diebold system is littered with.
The bottom line is that the authors should not have bothered to evangelize Java and C# and instead focused more on how they could have made the C++ code "safe". If the primary flaw is design, then no language could save this code from the pits of insecurity.
On the other hand, criminals, terrorists, and anyone else who wants to corrupt the voting process can easily break the password and discover how to mess up the voting.
Now that's the DMCA in action, protecting your freedom! Oh yes, the DMCA is going to be just excellent for technology research and innovation.
No paper ballots. "Just push the button, and the smart computer man will tell us who won."
Hooray!
The voting machine, running Microsoft?s Windows CE operating system, is extremely easy to navigate
I would rather have an open-source app running on a open-source OS.
That's less secure than the Slashdot poll system!
I just checked out the EFF's website, and they have a page where you can read a letter they've prepared about the security of electronic voting systems and the need for open source in that area, sign a copy electronically, and have it sent to your representative. Personally, I'm going to send paper copies, but I can damn well gauruntee that all my representatives in both the House and Senate will be getting copies.
The page is right here. Let the people who can make changes in this area know that this is important!
Narrative
"The people who CAST the votes decide NOTHING. The people who COUNT the votes decide EVERYTHING."
I beleive it was Stalin who said this.
Point is, even if EVERYTHING was SUPER SECURE, the human being who either develops the software, or reports the results is the WEAKEST link in the chain.
As the media recounts showed, if all the counties were recounted by hand, according to existing Florida law, Gore won.
You have obviously never read Bush vs. Gore, but then again, why read when you can listen to the Savage Weiner?
diabolically?
*ba-dum ching!*
Belgium is having 43% of the population voting using computer (not at home) and magnetic card.
On 18 May 2003 we had a mysterious and spontaneous bit inversion on the vote result ElectronicVotingRandomSpontaneousBitInversion.
This problem was not explain by the code poor quality: AvailableVotingCode
Believe it or not, but maybe by cosmic ray did strike the counting computer during election day: RandomSpontaneousBitInversion.
I have documented and translated a few document in English for internationnal reader, you may want to check ElectronicVoting.
Belgian can get more information in french from VoteElectronique. or PourEva.
Trust me... never trust a computer or a computer expert for election result.
Don't let the computer/expert control the election. Information for Belgium in french: http://www.poureva.be/
And this year's voting turnout is: 500%
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
The author of this paper, Dr. Rubin, taught a class at Johns Hopkins University this past spring called Security and Privacy in Computing. I was lucky enough to be in this class. The semester-long project was to design and implement a prototype electronic voting system that solved the problem of "remote poll sites". Basically, the State of Washington had commissioned Dr. Rubin to deliver a system whereby a voter could cast his vote at ANY voting station in the state, and not have to go to his specific poll site. This sounded great: you wouldn't have to lose a day of work so you could vote at the local high school... you could vote at the little kiosk near your office.
9 144
1 851
Unfortunately the idea doesn't work. The reason is that you would need every kiosk (or polling station) to be connected to some sort of network in realtime in order to retrieve ballots, cast votes, and update voter status. The problem with this is that you have now created a network that is vulerable to DoS attacks. It wouldn't matter how you structured your network for performance... the minute someone snips a wire at any given kiosk, you have two choices:
1) make that kiosk unavailable for voting
2) still accept votes at that kiosk, but cast them provisionally.
#1 is dangerous because now I could cut the wires at EVERY kiosk I could find (or packet the network, or whatever) and bring the election to a halt.
#2 is dangerous because the more kiosks I bring down, the more ballots will be cast in which the voterID (which reveals his name, etc) is tied to the ballot. Loss of voter anonymity is unacceptable in American democracy.
So what happens if you just leave all the kiosks offline and give them all a copy of the master voter registration db? Now you've opened yourself up to voter fraud: you could go from kiosk to kiosk, casting multiple ballots as yourself. If you stuck with voter anonymity, and each of those ballots were cast anonymously, how would the final tallying system know that you cast duplicate ballots? How would it know which to throw out?
I'm told Dr. Rubin's grant from the State of Washington was eventually rescinded, I suspect because there's no good way to solve this problem, as well as a few others which I will not go into detail about here.
I have described this problem in the following other Slashdot posts:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=61340&cid=576
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=61875&cid=580
Intercarve Networks, LLC
I thought it was kinda strange for republicans to have all these easy landslide victories suddenly.
Interesting.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
When I was in the eighth grade, our computer teacher wrote a voting program in BASIC to run on our Apple IIs. One of my classmates exploited a security hole (okay, he pressed CTRL-C) in order to examine the source code. He found that our devious computer teacher had written the program so that a vote for Reagan counted as 1.5 votes, and a vote for, um, Mondale or whoever it was, counted as .5 votes.
So this raises the question -- what's to keep unscrupulous officials from rigging an electronic election? And equally importantly, what technologies and procedures are in place to detect vote fraud after the fact? Analog elections involve a fairly solid system of observers to prevent fraud. It's not perfect, but it usually works. In an electronic election, who will verify the validity of the code in the first place, and after the election, who will check each and every machine to make sure it hasn't been tampered with? I mention each and every machine because only one machine would be necessary to completely skew the numbers in any given precinct.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
This is the same software that was actually used in the 2002 Georgia elections.
With suggestions, post Florida 2000, to further expand the roll of electronic voting in the next presidential election, this could be an issue of some concern. You can download the source code ('borrowed' from an ftp server left accidentally open by Diebold) and decide for yourself.
if(bush)
bush++;
else
bush++;
2 1337 4 u!
Do you mean to say that you think that all of the flaws were mistakes?
I fully expect that some of them were intended as 'features' that would only be available to a select few.
If the devices aren't fully open, don't trust them.
If the devices are fully open, don't trust them.
This is a particularly insightful comment!
It is impossible for a vendor to be unbiased, one way or the other!
Perhaps a better system would entail three or more separate voting machines, provided and linked by different vendors. No vote would be submitted until the voting results on all three voting machines matched; from that point any discrepancies have an actual chance of receiving attention.
What am I saying? Accurate vote counting leads to silly things like popular people being elected, not the most competant, like me!
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." - Josef Stalin
It runs on Windows.. another secure choice. Guess they have a long way to go.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= - The Celtic - =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Assuming that the full list is available, "untampered", it may be possible to take a sample, and confirm all details, address, contact to confirm the vote cast...
If too many inconsistencies are found, detection of rigging would hopefully be easier...
Of course, this opens up even more problems - the list taken could be fixed, the persons doing the confirmations could be bribed/... etc.
Why did this paper get published, when Diebold could have filed for an injunction under the DMCA, preventing people from finding out that their system is insecure? :/
You are great player! Present you with points!
Q: But this is America - who would dare rig an election here?
A: The first person that thought they could get away with it.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
They won't have to rely on registering the dead to vote anymore! JAV
Makes you wonder why they don't use ATMs as a blueprint for voting systems.
Does a voting system *really* need Windows 2000 as a base? Or any version of Windows, for that matter?
Hell, *DOS* is an overkill for this sort of application.
Bowie J. Poag
Thats what you get when you outsource a $4/hr coder from a country that cant keep it's lights on.
Bowie J. Poag
As an election judge for 15 years, I know of no machine that can, or that we want to do this. To do such requires that a ballot be uniquely identifiable. Not what you want in an election tabulator.
Catching multiple vote fraud is the responsibility of the Election Judges and we have multiple crosschecks and verifications to prevent this.
Sounds like some politician wants to buy machines from another company, maybe one who owes him/her some money...
Seriously, how much money does slashdot get for every NYT signup? &partner=GOOGLE, yes, I know, but It's getting rediculous. I'll just have to be one of the millions who don't actually read the article and post anyway.
Next we'll hear from you social darwinists why nepotism is actually a good thing. Why just look at the wonderful policy-making coming out of the FCC lately!
I found the Diebold voting machine software here.
http://users.actrix.co.nz/dolly/
Guess what, folks...California is next to join the Government of the Month Club if the recall measure goes through. The Republicans jam through a recall and get one of theirs to replace Davis. Next, the Democrats start a recall drive the next day and get enough signatures from fed up Dems to recall the new guy. The recall petition has enough signatures, the vote to recall is called, the measure passes, the Dems get one of theirs in the Governor's office. Which pisses off the GOP and they start collecting signatures the next day. Lather, rinse, repeat. Welcome to suburban Roma.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Since there are so many problems relating to manual voting (dangling chad anyone), and so many security risks (real or perceived) with voting systems like the one mentioned in the article, why not combine both to achieve the best of both worlds while getting rid of the worst of both worlds...
Use an electronic machine to record your vote. You can have fancy GUI screen that display all the choices a voter has made, confirmation screens ("are you sure these are your correct chocies"), etc. When the voter is happy with their votes, they press a button and out pops a voting card with their choices filled in. Take the card and pop it in the voting box as is normal now. No ambiguous half-filled circles, no dangling chads, no worrying that data in the machine will be lost or untracable.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
ActForChange Petition: Stop the Florida-tion of the 2004 Election
Sponsored by Martin Luther King III and Greg Palast (author of "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy") this petition calls for a halt to computerizing the elctions until the process is shown to be resistant to manipulation, fraud, and racial bias.
Read some of Palast's book (pertinent chapters available on his website) for the hardest-hitting investigation into the 2000 Florida elections. Quite the eye opener as to how corrupt the system, irregardless of who won, actually is. The most shocking part, however, is that the main stream press, still to this day, has never picked up on any of his findings.
Us voters, Republican, Democrat or otherwise, have a responsibilty to see that our democratic process is never again misused so horribly.
Vote Nixon's head in 2004!!
That's not the case at all. If anything, the opposite seems to be true locally. (Local circumstances vary, etc.) The people with experience are getting shut out, but if you have just a bit of experience with exactly the tools that they are using, you're in.
The problem is that you aren't hired by the CEO or Board of Directors, people who put the needs of the business first. You're hired by somebody who may have only been working a few years himself when he was named manager of those 21-day wonders, and one of us coming in with a solid education and a decade of diverse experience will put his job in jeopardy. These people are usually (not always) going to go with the guy who's not threatening, not the guy who can stop the company from running off a cliff.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Another bunch of guys who cobbled together a report on Diebold's laughable voting machines is available here, complete with plenty of screen shots.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I'd think it would be in Diebold's best interest to get these problems corrected ASAP. If vulnerable machines are deployed in elections, someone will exploit them. The stakes in a major political election are so high that the flaws will attract enormous quantities of attention from those with less-than-morally-upstanding intentions.
What I haven't seen mentioned in this discussion yet is that many, many media organizations conduct very accurate exit polls on election days. If there is a sudden inconsistency in vote counts, it will be noticed, and it will be investigated. By the next evening, everyone in America who owns a TV will realize what's going on. I'd imagine that this would induce a bit of an uproar among the populace, and any confidence that people have in electronic voting would vanish immediately. The whole nation would immedately regress to punch-card voting, and would most likely remain there for years to come.
Which would make it kind of hard for Diebold to sell electronic voting machines.
Sounds crazy, but it's true. Read the decision for yourself, the poster is accurately describing the ruling.
Give the openbsd team ( or just theo )BIG BUCKS to make this system for you guys.
Find out who put these clowns in charge of voting. No big surprises there, as corrupt as everything else republicans come near. Perhaps you'd be surprised to learn that some western countries insist that the essential democratic act of voting and having the votes counted fairly, are sacred enough that they should NOT be turned over to some shady private organization such as Diebold, accountable not to the general public but heavily influenced by neocon money. The United States is now a banana republic. All votes processed by the inbred brother in law of El Presidente - how can it possibly go wrong?
But when the voter says that he or she is done voting and pulls the lever (there needs to be a lever for the curtain, since we have a secret ballot), the voting machine spits out a punch card with all the choices neatly punched by computer, which you physically put in the box. Or, it keeps a paper tape tally of each person's votes inside the machine.
You get just as much security as the current system (it really is just the current system, with a different front-end), and virtually eliminate the "hanging chad" problem. The different front-end will reduce voter confusion also (as long as it's well deisgned), and eliminate the "I couldn't understand the ballot" problem.
You'd still have the human element in keeping the integrity of the ballot boxes, and human beings will still be checking the lists to make sure someone isn't listed twice, but I view this as a good thing. Widespread human involvement on a local level is much to hard to hack on a large scale... you might be able to control a district or two, but it would take a lot of work to fix the election of an entire state. If voting machines become pervasive without a human element to check them, then a single flaw could affect every district that uses that particular machine at the same time.... now, that's the way to fix an election!
You want coders, your best bet is to hire an coding shop like mine. They take the job, not some clown off the street. Sure they charge a bit more but they deal with the HR and timetables. Who does the job is handled by the shop not your staff. Your hiring a department not a coder.
You want it cheap, roll the dice like the rest of us.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Here in Canada (and probably most other democracies) we have "scrutineers" so the general public doesn't have to worry about that. Each candidate sends a representative to each polling station to observe and make sure things are handled properly. It is in the candidate's best interests to make sure the other guy doesn't get any unfair advantage, so as long as there is more than one scrutineer and they aren't colluding (which is less likely the more scutineers there are) the system is secure.
Scrutineers are very effective with paper ballots, but only with paper ballots. They are not equipped to verify an electronic voting system. So yeah, demand paper ballots. Anyone promoting electronic voting is promoting the neutralization of a very important election security mechanism.
DEMAND paper ballots! Demand that votes be counted and posted AT THE POLL
2 002/01/07/MN185094.DTL
I wish I could disagree with this. But elections here in San Francisco are so "irregular" that it doesn't even phase us when pieces of ballot boxes start washing ashore.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/
Think about this:
The thousands of people in Florida who cannot stick a stupid pin in a piece of perferated cardboard is the most likely the same group of people who cannot use a computer.
We are so screwed.
Coderz 4 Life
The latest and greatest voting software is based on Windows CE. The code is closed and the cryptographic layer is even more closed (the main software is developed by whoever win the bid, the crypto is added by the Court later). I should know, I managed a team that lost the bid for 2000. The lead developer then led the team that won the 2020 bid.
And what little evaluation was done has not been considered enough by experts to date. The security of the little beasts is probably good, but no one has ever been able to certificate that beyond reasonable doubt.
But then again, yes, they are amazingly efficient and we Brazilians laughed a lot during the Florida fiasco...
See Here
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
I thought of a very interesting consequence of the DMCA recently that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere else. The DMCA can actually be used against itself.
Okay, follow me here. It's no crime to create a word processor that looks exactly like Microsoft Word, as long as it has all things Microsoft removed from it. So let's just say that I hacked out the word Microsoft from the binary, and put in Cardshark instead, making it Cardshark Wordmaker.
Now I encrypt the binary, and add a decryptor at run-time to load it into memory. Now I start selling pirated versions of Word. The only way for Microsoft to prove that it's a pirated Word is by circumventing my copyright device.
Obviously this is example has holes in it, but consider a similar situation where only a small amount of code was stolen, rather than a whole application. How can legitimate software companies be sure no one is stealing their work, without running afoul of the DMCA? You would have to break the law to prove someone else was breaking the law.
This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
At least this way our presidents are not elected by 20% of the population...
(In the end, I agree with you that mandatory voting is dumb - but it is one of our smallest problems)
what is the saying about lies?
You do realize those figures do not count everyone out of a job, don't you? If memory serves, this only includes people actively involved with the dept. of labor.
But the software code (of a brazilian company) is closed source
Actually, you should say "the software code (of many companies)...". Each bid winner has used a different system and a different codebase. The Court is slowly replacing older machines, but in 2002, for instance, machines from 1996 running a flavour of DOS were still used. And not all winners were Brazilian companies. The 2002 machines and software were made by Unisys.
I've had the "privelege" of snarfing down the CVS archive that this analysis is from.
After running doxygen -- a kickass source analysis tool, by the way, if you have it document everything -- I poked around for a while.
1. The ballot station is a WinCE touchscreen doohikey with a smartcard reader and some type of secured (physically, anyway) storage.
2. The station is turned on and reads config information from the storage (who/what's on the ballot, etc).
3. The election is started by an administrator
4. Voter walks up, voter puts in smartcard, voter vots.
5. Vote is recorded on the media. An "audit trail" is, too, but it's just another file on the same
disk with the same information.
6. Voter's smartcard is marked as "used" and ejected
7. Administrator or election worker walk up, put in smartcard, enter PIN, and can end the election / restart the election (deleting all previous votes!) / do a few other things.
Problems with this:
* Smartcards are easy to forge -- especially with the source in the wild, since it includes the authentication passwords for the cards in plaintext!
* The storage is wide open to tampering by folks who can get at it -- there's no reason a simple bait-and-switch (using voting media with modified timestamps) wouldn't be perfectly undetectable.
* Etc -- Download the sources and find your own holes! Then, drive a truck through them! Bonus if you can find a buffer underflow triggered by a smartcard alone....
Malice: Not necessarily
Incompetence: Hell yes. This code was plainly written by underqualified MFC monkeys with no security background whatsoever.
Don't leave your keys in the car.
The state of Diebold's voting machines may be ascribed to stupidity, but I have great confidence that it will be taken advantage of to cheat an election.
Sorry... :)
It would be fun to sing the praises of technology, but when it comes to voting I think you're on to something. The technology we need for large scale, secure elections has been around for a long time -- it's called paper and pen. I fail to see why it need be more complicated than circling a name and dropping it in a box.
Whats the way to handle this properly in a world of PKI and the web?
Given public-key encryption, a user would submit their vote signed with their private key. Their vote could be easily verified against their public key and forging of their vote would require breaking or stealing their private key. To prevent replay attacks, include in the vote a nonce generated for that specific election.
Of course, this doesn't deal with the major issues of verifying the voter submitting the vote is unique and is authorized to vote in that election.
And why do you think Republicans cheated rather than Democrats? You think it is not strange for Democrats to have been running Congress for decades?
I don't know if this has been offered as a solution yet, but the easiest way to verify an election is to keep a paper trail.
When a person votes, the machine should spit out a piece of paper with the voter's choices listed. The voter verifies the paper, then slides the paper into a slot (in much the same way many current voting machines accept the voter card).
In that way, the voting machines can automate the tabulation, and we can avoid any hanging chads; but the paper trail still exists.
Are there any flaws with this?
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
kill all the lawyers.
The method of deriving unemployment statistics has been changed at least 5 times since the 1950's. You are comparing apples to oranges.
Gore most definately did not win a "majority" of the recounts. In fact, he only won under one scenario, and that was if they counted every single "overvote" that included Gore as a vote for Gore.
Your recollection of what was said in that article differed quite a bit from what I remmebered, but it has been a couple of years so I re-read it.
What you say is simply not true. Gore would have won under several scenarios, and the "overcount" scenario is to count cases where people both voted for a candidate and also wrote in their name. While I can understand this being counted as an overvote, it seems pretty clear to me what the intent of the voter was.
Go RTFA.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
One way of maintaining the integrity of a ballot is to have the machine ossue a printed receipt, but the major objection to this is that it allows post hoc determination of who an individual voted for, removing one of the 'tails' of the four-tailed (secret, universal, direct and equal) ballots which are considered the Gold Standard*.David Chaum (one of the original inventors of electronic cash) published a fascinating article about splitting printed receipts into two parts which are both required for the vote to be reconstructed, and handing half off to the voter, and retaining half until the election has been completed successfully. Highly interesting reading, and contains mathematical details and proofs of the integrity of the system.
*Don't get me started about the Electoral College system of electing the POTUS. Deliberately designed by the Founding Fathers to remove the 'direct' and weaken the 'equal' tails...
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
Wouldn't it be nice if Digital Vote Management was as important or "hot" of a topic to the government as Digital Rights Management seems to be? How about a DMVA that puts anyone caught tampering with an electronic vote in the same position copyright infringers seem to be in?
The TRS-80 model 100 is/was a way cool laptop....
The whole thing is stupid, because it should never ahve gone to the supreme court.
If an election is "too close to call" which means, "within the statistical margin of error" which certainly applied, the issue is supposed to go to the damn legislature, not the supreme court. The executive and legislative branches elect supreme court justices, not the other way around.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
there is a company in Omaha, NE that makes macines that do hi-speed counts of paper ballots. They have recently developed touch-screen w that prints a paper ballot.
www.essvote.com
I worked for them back in the early 90s. We were unable to get our equipment certified in Florida then - our biggest competitor at the time (I can't remember their name) was apparently located just down the street from the Sec of State office...
Yes, finally... now I get it.
This is how the village idiot got elected to president...
Honestly though.... this major lack of security in our voting system scares me quite a bit.
----------
word to your moms... I came to drop bombs...
If someone punched the hole for Gore, than wrote in Gore's name on the ballot, according to the existing Florida law, that is a legal vote for Gore.
It's understandable why Bush didn't want the votes hand counted, and why the Supreme Court ordered the count to stop.
Which ballot box do you want to stuff today?
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
I'm waiting for the day when "One more reason I'm glad to live in Canada" becomes someone's sig. After all, it seems to apply to just about every story on /. these days...
The rules depend on what state and sometimes what county, parish, district, whatever...you are in. I live in Texas. All ballots are locked in a ballot box and taken, often by sheriff's deputies, to the county court house. Note in Texas the Sheriff is an elected official often on the ballot his men or hauling in.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
I just called the county Board of Elections, and the gentleman I spoke to said that there are no plans to replace their optical-scan machines with electronic machines, and that he knew of no state-wide initiative to do so. He seemed quite familiar with the issue.
I don't work for them, but Nedap's voting machines are great. :)
Wrong. The only scenario where Gore came out in front is if all undervote and overvotes were counted in all of the Florida counties. The AP predicted that in this scenario, Gore would have won with a margin of 42 - 171 votes.
All other scenarios had Bush as the leader, including counting all overvotes and undervotes in only 6 counties, which is what Gore was asking the Supreme Court to do.
I remember interviewing for a QA position at Diebold last year - what I remember then was that the single SW Tester they had was very overworked and not able to keep up on the basic QA tasks. I don't blame the tester for this - she really wasn't being supported by management. So it comes as no surprise to me that they have let serious security issues slide for as long as they have.
but I can see the writing on the wall
(...)
It's a cliche, but in today's market it's not what you know, but who you know.
As someone who can see the writing on the wall (Good for you), I highly reccommend you start networking now: Contact your friends, old coworkers, business partners now.
Throw a party, host a dining event at your local sushi place, meet for beer, meet for coffee. Have fun, re-establish your connections, and don't talk about work all the time. However, you should become somewhat familiar with their workplace. See if you want to work there. Make sure you are aware of how their business is doing, and if interested, let them know.
It is sometims better for you to leave your job on your own then to wait for your buiness to lay you off.
When you are out of a job, it is sometimes very hard to get people to take you seriously. When you have a job in this economy, it makes you even more employable if you decide to move to another business.
But starting now would be very wise.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
First, "branco" is "white" and its meaning is not "no candidate" but "any candidate", a very different choice. These votes are distributed proportionally among the candidates after totalizing their votes (this is important in elections for National, State and City representatives, where the amount of votes one party gets helps elect candidates from that party - its irrelevant for majority elections, ie, President, Governor, Mayor).
To vote against all candidates one must vote "null", a process the eletronic election made a bit harder. When you had paper, it was just a matter of wtiting anything there. Now you must enter a number for an inexistent candidate and confirm it.
I think that if the total of null votes is larger than 50% plus one, the law requires the whole election to be nullified.
Then again, sounds like a great way to get a free copy of Windows.
Them: You must use Windows
Me: So I have to BUY a copy of Windows to excercise my right to vote?
Them: No, see www.evote.gov/downloads for a FREE copy of Windows.
Neat
Getting in here a little late, but....
I've thought about this before. It seems that publishing all votes in a huge data file (or even in a newspaper) solves this. No voter names are used, of course; the votes are listed by the unique number on the little receipt you get after voting.
That way, any voter can verify that their own vote is correct. Further, anyone with a computer and a vote-counting program can verify that the stated outcome is correct. And people's votes are still private. Maybe only implement this for some minimum vote count (100? 1000?) so votes in tiny elections can't be analyzed to break privacy.
Does anyone see any drawbacks to this? Seriously, I'd like to see this implemented.
ideally, any computer counting system has to come with a paper trail that the voter can verify by eye. I like the system we use here in Wisconsin. It's simple, easy, and fairly hard to spoof. You have a large thick paper ballot, with big writing for people with bad vision. You use a pen in the booth to fill in the arrow next to the choices you want. Then *you* personally carry the form to a reader machine, that accepts the form face-down (so you don't have to show anyone what you marked), and electronically tallies your votes right there, AND drops your paper copy inside in a locked box. The paper copies are kept around in case there's a dispute (If a recount is called for , the paper ballots are used and the electronic counts are ignored. The paper ballots are not disposed of until several weeks later when everyone agrees to the results of the election.)
The machine doesn't tell you who you voted for (that would ruin anonymity, since people are watching), but it does give a green light and a beep if your form was understood, or a red light and a rejection if it was not. If it was not understood( because of, say, a stray pen mark that made you vote for two candidates), then you find out RIGHT AWAY that it was misread, and you have a chance to take another blank ballot, go back to a booth, and redo your vote. This way you never, ever, have to guess the voter's intent if the ballot isn't machine readable. The voter himself gets immediate feedback right at the polling station if the ballot cannot be read.
About the only thing missing that I would like to see is some form of receipt the machine prints, that the voter can rip off, look at, and then hit a "confirm" button before the machine counts his vote. That way if the machine misread his vote, he can see on the reciept that it isn't what he wanted. The receipts would have to be something only the voter sees (to preserve anonymity). If the voter doesn't take the receipt, it should be dropped in a trash box or shredded so the next voter doesn't see it.
The thing about that system is that it provides BOTH an accurate paper trail, and a computerized counting system, that makes sub-tallys at the voting station, and allows for the user to have instant feedback at the polling station. In the infamous Bush/Gore election, the Wisconsin vote was as close a margin as the Florida vote. But it was believed accurate and no recall was called for.
Any fair system cannot get rid of the paper. The paper is the proof, should anyone dispute the results.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Grossly insecure? So what? Computerized voting systems are now being built to satisfy two demands: (1) Political demands following the 2000 election travesty. (2) To have sexy, sleek, fancy-schmancy, modern, greatest-society-in-da-fuckin'-world voting systems.
Security wasn't on the priority list. Even voters will generally prioritize "new and exciting" and "makes me feel better about the 2004 election" over dull, nerdy and frankly citizen-involving aspects like fraud-proofing the new vote systems.
Grossly insecure. Sheesh, you may as well levy a similar charge of grossly insincere against politicians, but that has hardly stopped them from being elected and re-elected and re-re-elected ad nauseam in droves. The voter is responsible for the slimy pieces of shit that fill the ranks of our elected representatives, and we all similarly share the blame for the wholly fraudulent voting systems that are being installed as we speak.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
As this post showed, there's an open source system running on an open-source OS, compiled by and open-source compiler, avaliable on the web. That's already been used in government elections.
Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist
How do you know?
I understand that you know that it doesn't crash. But how do you know that your vote can't be audited, that votes are not being changed ....
It's so bad where I live, the traffic jams have gone away.
As this post showed, there's an open source system running on an open-source OS, compiled by and open-source compiler, available on the web. That's already been used in government elections. Yes, this a repeated post. But as long as the same very valid questions get asked, the same very valid answer will be given.
Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist
Why all the hoopla about e-voting and its many flaws. Here in Oregon all elections and other ballots are ballots by mail. It is easy and simple...and it works. As an Oregonian, I receive a ballot about 3 weeks before election day. I can take my time vote carefully whenever I want in the privacy of my own home and then either mail it in or drop it off at one of the several county ballot drops. It's a wonderful thing. BTW, Oregon has some of the highest voter turnouts in the country...I wonder why?!?!
Sciscoop has a link to the original New Zealand article with a link to the source code of the voting machines.
It can be all computerized as long as it generates a dual receipt paper trail like a credit card. My copy, Their copy, fast electronic count.
It has to be all computerized due to a new federal law requiring that every US polling place have a voting machine with which blind voters can cast a ballot unassisted. A computer voice would read the ballot to you and record you pressing the button at the right time. (Why do we trust the computer voice more than the human poll worker?)
Start Running Better Polls
I'm a strong believer in the free dissemination and *use* of information, and what is discussed below is public domain. (Don't patent it!)
What is clear, is the votes must be signed to prevent tampering by the authority counting the votes. One way to do this is to sign the ballot to prevent tampering. There are two obvious problems if there is one private key doing the signing: 1) the centeral counting authority (Sec. of State) could forge the votes by taking the private key and signing bogus ballots. 2) A voter can vote twice.
What I propose is that each politcal party create 300 million private keys each (in USA) and distribute their *public* keys before the election. On election day, the voter (with help) would take a smart card and go to one political party to get one private key and then to another political party to get another private key (assuming at least two keys and two political parties). They would go to the voting booth and cast their votes and the votes would be signed by the two private keys. The private keys would be thrown away and never used again. The signed ballot would be put in the smart card and then the smart card would be put into a server that stores the votes for that location (and later, sent to the Sec of State). The card is read, and then erased so that it can be used by another voter. The Secretary of State would count the votes, and check the encryption signatures with the public list of public keys distributed by the 2 (or more) parties. The list of public keys and signed ballots can be made publically so that journalists, political parties, and the general public can download the public keys and signed ballots to verify the votes.
The key part of all this is there is no one person who has all the private keys neccessary to vote (except the voter). The two parties would hold the private keys very closely and it would be impossible (i.e. very difficult) to forge a vote -- much less forge many votes.
The other benefit is there is no one authority that counts the votes. Anyone can count the votes.
"...and the results are in:
Bush wins with 2 billi...
Wait a second, who counted these?"
Well, for one thing, you wouldn't want each user to vote with a simple public key; that would let anyone know who voted for whom. There are some very good PKI voting protocols out there, but here is a simple one that prevents at least mass cheating. You could cheat a few people by disconnecting them, but too many people and they would have evidence of vote fraud.
You prove your identity to the voting org (with a registration number or whatever), sign something with your public key to indicate that you requested a ballot, and they blindsign your vote. Blindsigning has the property that the signer does not know the contents of the message.
Then you wait a bit, and submit your vote (through a proxy), and they sign it again so that you can prove you submitted it.
Publishing the list of votes allows people to verify that their votes have been counted, and if it is broken down by some index with high geographical spread, say the last digits of a hash of the vote (to avoid per-county breakdowns), even people with a slow connection can verify their votes. The only disadvantage to this scheme is that everyone would have to know who voted, or else officials could inject extra votes.
Some better protocols use another stage, in which the votes are uploaded encrypted, and then the keys are uploaded later after addition to the static list has been confirmed, that sort of thing. This would be fairly secure voting over the internet, esp if the voting software were open-source and signed by the govt. I'm sure that a security researcher could poke plenty of holes in my scheme, but there are certainly protocols out there which can detect vote fraud.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
A couple of my friends are betting on Shrub hitting the 'Emergency' button and instigating a total lock-down of the U.S., suspension of all rights and the firing up of the 800 or so empty but staffed and waiting American concentration camps sitting idle around the nation. "Night of Long Knives" and all. .
While this IS planned, no doubt, I tend to feel (make that fevrently hope) that we're not quite there yet.
Here's a quote from a recent interview with Eustace Mullins. .
--Keeping in mind that 'Jewish Money' would more aptly be called 'Zionist Money'. Zionism doesn't have the best interests of the Jews at heart by a long shot!
Moderators. . . Please at least glance at the link info before you label this message 'Troll' (it's not. I don't have a deficient ego.) If you can't deal with this stuff, please get your fear levels under control rather than irresponsibly use your mod points. This stuff is here and it affects everybody. Cringing denial won't make it go away. Best to learn what it out there so that it can't hurt you.
-FL
The NZ people were the ones who ORIGINALLY acquired the files from Diebold's FTP site and broke the story.
These other folks by the names of Stubblefield, Rubin and Kohno and Wallach came on the scene a little later; NOW the 'world' hears about this .
"For example, common voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal.' "
Even Slashdot's Poll system keeps users from voting more than once!!
You're talking crap. Go to citeseer and do a search. There are tens of papers that describe secure electronic voting schemes.
Of course, no proprietory voting machine uses any of these schemes, but it is certainly possible.
There are just so many examples of things like this it's not funny. What if the next generation filesharing application required a password to access the files, or even search for them? That's an access and copy protection device, or whatever the DMCA calls it, and it's illegal to break it.
Now what if everyone starts using the password, oh, 'studmuffin'? Everyone knows the password, everyone can (technically illegally) get in...but the RIAA can't get in to prove any of the files are theirs, or they themselves just violated the DMCA.
Of course, the entire concept is even more surreal when you look at DeCSS. The problem isn't that DeCSS isn't legal, possibly it is, possibly it isn't...the problem is that if it's illegal, there's no good reason any other DVD player should be legal...after all, no DVD player manufacturer has manufactured all DVDs! And hence, if DeCSS is deigned to circumvent something, their product is designed to circumvent the same thing, on everyone else's DVDs! Sony DVD players would be okay if they could play only Sony Pictures movies, but they can, without Univeral's permission, play Univeral's movies! I really wish someone had made a movie, encoded it with CSS, and explictly stated that no current DVD player was authorized to play it except DeCSS.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the stupidity of the current uses of the DMCA has overshadowed the fundamental nonsensicalness of the DMCA. It's like banning people from 'being too far to the left of other people', it's just a completely wackjob law.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
from the NYT article :
... isn't this democracy one big vending machine ?
"This isn't the code for a vending machine," he said. "This is the code that protects our democracy."
but
No not really, republicans have been president for decades during the times when democrats ran congress.
That's one side of the situation...
/Mr A. Coward.
The other side is the fact that alot of us who do have jobs tend to be pushed so far we can't wait to get unemployed!
No vacation, lots of overtime, low salary (considering work effort, qualifications and level of responsibility). And often, not a decent amount of respect from the companies. Et cetera.
I'm resigning in 2 weeks, basically to keep my sanity. Yay.
who is a Slashdotter. Trippi posted in the thread about Dean guest blogging for Lawrence Lessig a week or so ago.
Now that's the DMCA in action, protecting your freedom! Oh yes, the DMCA is going to be just excellent for technology research and innovation.
The DMCA was written by people with the same love of democracy and of the advancement of human knowledge as Osama bin Laden has. And most of the people who voted for it can accurately be described the same way.
"People always get the local government they deserve."
E.E. "Doc" Smith
Tech Public Policy stuff
Has anyone considered that these security issues might not be mistakes? Look at who's contracted Diebold to do this -- the same folks who profited from Diebold's botched 'purge' of the Florida voter roles (see all kinds of fun, well-documented stuff here). Follow the money. The ones hiring Diebold have everything to gain from a completely insecure system.
--------
If I can own an idea, does that mean I can legally claim some portion of your soul once I tell you that idea? Or even if you just come up with it on your own? Heck, who needs contracts written in blood...
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
[. .
Please pardon me for not fact checking diligently enough before posting. My bad.
-FL
Avi Rubin is on the board of advisors of VoteHere; they have some not-stupid ideas about making electronic voting genuinely secure. And I think they're willing to make their code public.
...the Bevo Bucks vending machine at the Univ of Texas, with the swipe card system made by Diebold.
Get yer free Snickers bars, then head off to the polling station to contemplate which switch is the best way to vote Republican. All courtesy of Diebold.
Yep, networking is important - it's living proof you can teamwork. However, I have definitely seen more than one case where someone is *clearly not* 'equally skilled' - but the interviewer neatly overlooks that...BECAUSE THE PERSON IS A CRONY. American corporations are sagging under this load of deadwood while at the same time they cut and cut and cut jobs. The 'Old Boy' system is alive and very well - more so now than ever. The bottom line is, however, companies that aid and abet this kind of idiocy end up paying the price by strangling themselves with accidents, crappy products, security leaks, etc. etc. etc.
But wait - this isn't about Micro$oft. *grin*
Slow down there, AC. He agreed that it was true.
Nuke 'em with Open Source. It's the only way.
"A knot!" said Alice, ever ready to be useful. "Oh, do let me help to undo it!"
[. .
Please pardon me for not fact checking diligently enough before posting. My bad.
-FL
A) Ain't gonna happen.
B) I don't want Windows, even if it IS free. Some things are more important than money (like stopping progress-slowing, evil monopolies).
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
" Imagine that a rogue programmer gets access to a few networks of computers in the California special gubernatorial election.
The Techno-Voting Nightmare; Digital Vote Corruption-- First California-- then the 2004 Elections.
Im confused, is it really that costly to just count the votes by hand or machine reader like its done now? whats the advantage of building kiosks that cost (according to the pdf file) $5000 dollars each to make and install, just so you can get the votes counted quicker? Surely one of these $5000 dollar units doesnt count that many votes in an election? Ok so you get the votes counted faster but whats more important - being able to say who won first, or being able to say who really won?
If i see one more touch screen kiosk that lets you access the windows start menu i will smash it in..
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.