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

Re:The system is not the biggest problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, you're ignoring the main problem. The problem isn't people being stupid and pressing the wrong name on the touch-screen (How would that happen, unless they had no coordination?), but in the actual counting of the votes. Counting the votes before the election is over gives a sign of how the election is going, and allows the people monitoring it to do whatever the wish with it, because they are not being monitored.

Re:Voting machine manufacturer wants votes for Bus

[Eric Ass Raymond]

Ah, yes. Mod me down.

Maybe fewer people will be able to form their opinions on freely available information that way. That's what you neocon/conservatives would like, after all. Just like Britney Spears says:

"Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens."'

Don't question the authority. That's the way to go.

Perhaps high-tech isn't the answer

[pmz]

Unless an electronic voting method can be proven (in the mathematical sense) to be accurate and secure, we probably are much safer from fraud using pencil and paper in a highly distributed voting scheme.

Perhaps a few precincts can be corrupted with paper voting, but the whole nation can be corrupted with electronic voting. What moron puts a wireless adapter on a voting machine, anyway?

Voting is a fundamental exercise in any democratic system. I think being very cautious and conservative is justified, here. Chasing electronic voting for its own sake is simply foolish. It almost seems the push for electronic voting is due only to hungry contractors trying to make a dime for themselves. The 2000 Florida vote is merely a red herring in all this.

Re:Slashdot is a small portion of the public

[snarfer]

That is an interesting comment.

Why would it be "bitter liberal types" who should be worried about voting machines that cannot be audited?

Why shouldn't right wingers also be concerned about voting machines that give you no way to verify who voted for what?

Why is it a "liberal" issues? And why do the right wingers instinctively want these machines?

Curiouser and curiouser!

Re:The system is not the biggest problem

[cpeterso]

I don't understand what PROBLEM these electronic voting systems are intended to solve. Usability? Fraud prevention? Recountability? Non-centralized weakness? For ALL of those supposed problems, these electronic voting systems are WORSE than paper ballots.

The only advantage I see is that the electronic systems can count ballots faster, but we've never had problems with the speed of ballot counting. Ballot counting is easily parallelized across all voting precincts across the nation. In fact, that is a GOOD thing because the counting process is publicly overseen by representatives from all political parties and vote tampering is limited to a smaller set of votes.

Just make your X on your ballot

[Ethelred Unraed]

I really don't understand why voting should be electronic -- it is far more open to large-scale abuse than paper (pretty hard to convincingly fake millions of votes on paper, damn easy to change a block of data).

Speed in counting? Who needs it? It's not like the offcials take office the day after the election anyway -- hell, the President has to wait two and a half frickin' months. Why the rush to have an instantly-countable system?

Furthermore, in many other large-ish countries (such as France, the UK and Germany), voting is still done by making a big honkin' X on a circle next to the name of the guy you want. And no, it's not a bubble form that has to be filled in just right -- just make your damn X as sloppy as you please. No hanging chads, no network to hack, no problems reading it. And they still have the results in by the morning in time for the early papers.

So why have electronic voting again?

Cheers,

Ethelred