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."
story
I'm much funnier now that I'm a subscriber.
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.
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();
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.
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."
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.
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]
Why would you trust the CRC?
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
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.
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 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?
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
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.
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.
Scalia logic: No batteries necessary.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
if(bush)
bush++;
else
bush++;
2 1337 4 u!
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!
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
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.
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
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/
See Here
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
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.
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.
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.
In the end, I agree with you that mandatory voting is dumb - but it is one of our smallest problems
I don't think I would mind mandatory voting, if, and only if, we had a "no confidence" vote on the ballot. Such that, if you didn't like any of the choices presented to you, you could vote to have a whole new slate of candidates put up(e.g. if the "no confidence" choice won, all of the parties have to put up new people and we try again.) God knows I would have voted that way back in 2000.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
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.
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.
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?!?!
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.
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