Electronic Voting: Your Worst Nightmares are True

jfreon writes "On Democracy Now Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting fame, disclosed (near the end of the transcript) that in the compromised 1.8Gigs off Diebold's FTP site they uncovered "an actual election file containing actual votes on election day from San Luis Obispo County, California". Problem is, the date stamp was 3:31pm - during voting hours! The Diebold system uses a wireless network card. Worse: "So that means if they can pull the information in, they can also send information back into those machines. ""

Comments

Information on Voting Machines Issue

[snarfer]

The Commonweal Institute has compiled quite a bit of information (scroll down to the links) about the problems with electronic voting machines.

Help fix the problem!

[Lulu of the Lotus-Ea]

I posted a comment on a related thread mentioning the project I am involved in, EVM2003. We had a slightly rocky start, as project do, but things are underway.

The idea of EVM2003 is to create Free Software voting machine, and to implement machines that also produce voter-verifiable paper trails (i.e. visually readable printed ballots). We will do a number of security things right, where the commercial companies have done them wrong... they have aimed for "security through obscurity" or "just trust us." As well, part of our requirement is to have fully blind-accessible voting that maintains complete anonymity.

Anyway, I (David Mertz) have taken over as Developer Lead recently, and am trying to get the development of the demo rolling. Part of that effort is recruiting some more developers, and splitting the project into several only loosely connected parts. Feel free to contact me--the standard ballot system (in the demo version at least) is being done in wxPython; but conceivably we would choose other languages/technologies for bar-code reading, printing, blind-voting, etc. (my preference is to use Python though, for consistency and rapid development).

Re:Slashdot is a small portion of the public

[missing000]

problem with that is it is likley that DIEBOLD also knows this and is willing to sell this info to different political parties and lobby groups.

Yep. And guess what party that woud be?

From the article:

According to Harris, a study of the campaign contributions made by Diebold and its employees revealed an unusual pattern: Hundreds of thousands of dollars were being funneled to a few Republican candidates with very little to any other party.