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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. ""
This needs to make mainstream press, and DAMN QUICK.
I know this will get modded troll, but the stupidity of the general public is the biggest problem. I mean, people in FL couldn't figure out the chad ballot system... How in the world do we expect them to figure out an electronic system? Security IMHO is really a close number two problem compared to this.
"The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
Yes. Your votes are being scammed to keep the neocon scum in power.
BOO! TERRO
How about some protections for democracy back home first? This is utterly unacceptable.
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice
Does those voting data also tie person with vote? In other words can you "just" rig the election, or can you also keep a full database of people's voting habits?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Next time when they decide to use WS FTP someone should tell them to disable the WS_FTP.LOG files. *shakes head*
In typical slashdot fashion, we must protest this gross error in security the only way we know how - BOYCOTT!! If millions of geeks suddenly stop voting, the elected officials are going to HAVE to listen to us ... right?!
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
I think the safest thing we can do now is to wholly invest in this new technology and pretend the problems aren't there. If we change things around at all or abandon this technology, hackers and terrorists win. Think about that.
Is it too much to hope that our public officials will realize the potential for corruption, fix it (though any of the possible ideas which have been suggested on /.) and move on?
True, paper and pen ballots are vulnerable to tampering and etc, but at least you can recount the ORIGINAL ballots as the voters filled them out. Electronic ballots lack such a safeguard. Unless of course we print out a paper-copy of the ballots to keep in a lock-box just in case the voting procedures are called into question. But then why not just use paper ballots in the first place??
before we worry about the voters figuring out the ballot system, let's worry about how the voters are educated about the candidates in the first place. at least someone with the knowledge to hack the voting system in the first place is educated. their choice for our nations leaders would better suit the technology savvy of us anyway. what are we worried about? the ball is in our court.
peace,
-Grokent
The Commonweal Institute has compiled quite a bit of information (scroll down to the links) about the problems with electronic voting machines.
"So that means if they can pull the information in, they can also send information back into those machines. ""
Mod me down, because I am obviously too dumb to realize that just because the data from a machine makes it onto a server, does NOT mean that you can push data back.
You think, maybe, the voting machine pushes its data to a repository and defined intervals? Maybe? kinda?
teknopurge
We're supposed to have elections that are free and fair. Without a paper trail or other permanent and immutable (practically, at least) record of individual votes cast, how can any election be verified as either free or fair?
--- Submission is feudal.
As the next President of the USA, I promise to make fixing this problem one of my top priorities.
Are you kidding? If the vote is this easy to rig? Congratulations, CmdrTaco, you've been elected!
Practice Kind Randomness and Beautiful Acts of Nonsense.
Great, now we'll have people cruising by with cantennas and VoteStumbler trying to get extra votes in for that black guy from Hackers
Not necessarily. Just because a resource can be read from doesn't mean it can be written to. With proper design...
Oh -- we're talking about Diebold? Nevermind...
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
The mainstream press has been silenced after the Communist party won a landslide victory in the latest presidential election recount.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
The general public and opponents of electronic voting will use this as "proof" that e-voting can never be stable and reliable. I fear that any blunders we have now may severely cripple public perception to the point that the masses won't WANT to e-vote, despite the ease and efficiancy such a system could provide. I also fear that we won't be able to EVER make an unhackable e-voting system - humans are falable creatures, and with something so obvious a target, there will always be attacks launched against it to expose the inevitable weaknesses, with resulting bad press.
...then again, maybe the public will get used to crackable e-votes. I mean, what, 95% of them run Windows unpatched, right?
Every technological setback may end up as another knife in e-voting's back.
The longer I'm a member of the Human Race, the more I believe Apocalypse is a valid solution.
...next thing you'll know, we'll get an actor elected as president.
Thank god the DMCA prohibits the disclosure of this type of info, because if anyone finds out... we'd be screwed.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
The following names were found in the data...
Edgar Neubauer
Prudence Goodwyfe
Mr. and Mrs. Bananas
Humphrey Boa-Gart
Snowball I
As expected they all voted for Sideshow Bob
I've read elsewhere that is it illegal to count votes before the polls close. Would this constitute such a breach?
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:
Don't question the authority. That's the way to go.
BOO! TERRO
Here is another episode where they talk about Electronic Voting. Dan Wallach a professor of computer science at Rice University is the guest. He is the one who wrote a report about Electronic voting
What is wrong with this picture? And if nothing is wrong why can't I edit the Slashdot home page?
Think about this and answer honestly: If the same guy were a vocal supporter of a politician who you support, would you be convinced he was going to cheat? Or would you see it rationally- the man has opinions, just like every other person in the world?
Username taken, please choose another one.
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.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
1.Break into voting machine
2.Change votes
3.??
4.Profit!
Even more interesting is that Diebold would MAKE MORE MONEY if they sold voting machines with add-on printers so you could deposit a paper record of your vote in a separate ballot box! However, Diebold - and the other voting machines companies that happen to be owned by Republicans - OPPOSE this!
Additional revenue from add-on sales like this - and the service contracts that would go with it - are immensely profitable.
So what is going on here?
Also, they insult and ridicule anyone who tries to point out that electronic voting machines that cannot be audited are a problem! Even the hundreds of computer scientists who have spoken out are told they don't know what they are talking about. What IS going on here?
What would be so difficult about adding a printer, and having the voter look over the printout and then deposit it into a separate ballot box? Why are they so dead-set against doing this, even when it would make them tons more money? Are these Republican-owned "businesses" after something besides money?
Don't just complain, act: There is a bill in Congress introduced by Rush Holt, D-NJ. It is called "The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003". It is H.R. 2239. It currently has 29 cosponsors and needs more support. The Summary page is here. The press page is here. Congress is in session again now. Contact your Congressperson and demand they support this bill. It would require a voter-verifiable paper trail.
skkkoooonnnggggkkk ptui
This does not surprise me.
The only way people are going to get a wakeup call is if a group of people got a database of eligible voters from local precincts complete with whatever data is necessary to fake a ballot, go into said precincts, and make it look like some unknown Non-Democrat/Non-Republican party candidates (who wouldn't have won anyways) won the election.
Alternately, it would humor me if some "terrorist" organization used this hole to severely screw up the vote by mass-wiping voting terminals/databases.
BTW: How would someone catch this before it's too late? Most precinct staff are volunteers, and they definitely can't see who voted what...
the general public won't notice.
If someone were to tamper with the things, they wouldn't make it a Saddam-ish, 100% of the vote.
Then again they might get Micheal Bolton to mess up the decimal point.
It's worse than you think. Election Systems and Software, the company that builds, owns and largely runs many of the voting machines used in the US (and 80% of those used in Nebraska) was at one time headed and is still partially owned by Chuck Hagel, Republican Senator from Nebraska - who, surprisingly, won unprecedented victories in his state against an incumbent Democrat governor, winning by the largest landslide ever and taking the majority among demographics that had never voted Republican in the past.Hagel had avoided reporting his ownership, and then the whole trail started to come out into the open. It also turns out that Election Systems and Software was heavily funded by the conservative Christian fundamentalist Ahmanson family.
us geeks will rule the world!
Muahahaha....
Will code a sig generator for food
Do you think that a) the electorate is capable of electing anyone based on intelligent principles, b) that there is actually a choice between any major (even Green) candidate, and c) that we even achieve a simple plurality in elections anyway?
The end result is that we have a minority group of undereducated voters picking between Candidate Number 1 and Candidate Number 1. Where's the practical democracy there? The Libertarians will argue that its all good because at least we willingly choose to be run by an elected, and in some cases, hereditary elite. But if you're using the US as a yardstick for the implementation of democracy (or even capitalism, but thats a whole other story), then you're living under a rock.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Electronic voting systems were flaunted as a way to avoid these problems.
Unfortunately, electronic systems cannot fix these problems because they all stem from the stupidity of some Americans. If they are so stupid as to be unable to follow simple instructions on completing a paper ballot, then their opinion on the "best candidate" is likely to be irrelevant. They are unlikely to be able to pick the "best candidate".
Further, these ignorant Americans will be unlikely to follow the simple instructions for completing an electronic ballot as well. The electronic system might prevent them from selecting multiple political candidates, but they will still, somehow, end up in being unable to select the candidate that they want.
// Voter Validity Checks if voterID is an int
// If it is, then dude, it must be valid!
voterIsValid = KindaVerifyVoterValidity(voterID);
// A switch would be better but the way I
// see it, there are only two candidates:
// the one I want to win and "who cares"
if(vote > 1 && voterIsValid == True){
vote_for_my_candidate++;
vote_for_whoever = GenerateRandomNoise();
}
I call shenanigans!!!
(go home and get your brooms!)
I hate to spoil a conspiracy theory, but maybe they don't like the implication that their machine might be flawed. It's like Oracle telling their customers to also keep a dead-tree cardbox system in parallel *just to be sure*
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
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).
Buy Text Processing in Python
The point in Minority Report was that wood grain patterns are like fingerprints, no two alike. This means counterfeit balls wouldn't work, but it also means the none of the votes are anonymous. This violates one of the basic tenets of voting, that you should not be able to trace the vote back to any specific voter.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
is someone who's not afraid of a $250,000 max. fine and a 5 year max. federal prison sentence to electronically write in Kermit the Frog for president. Seems like it would be impossible change the outcome of even a local election without getting caught if the election wasn't tight, but not that hard if it was.
If you're diabolical enough to want to change the outcome of an election for whatever reason, you could probably find a way to circumvent any elections system, be they paper ballots or mind reading machines from the 24 and a half century. Either by direct bribes to registered voters, or dissuading blocks of voters through disinformation, etc.
As others have said, support the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003 by writing or calling your representative. At least we can try to make it harder for fraud to occur.
I know of a case where numerous wintel-based ATM's got compromised by Nachi because they were years behind in patches. The vendor responsible for the ATM's? Diebold. Sounds like the confidentiality & integrity of any data within this corporation should be called into question. [For confidentiality purposes I can't name my source. It didn't make the news that I know of so I can't provide a link. Sorry.]
akad0nric0
This sentence no verb.
Point is paper is a PITA. However, it is substantially more difficult to compromise a physical ballet than electronic data.
A paper trail is comparatively expensive, but worth its enduring characteristics in recording a vote.
Harris told Democracy Now!: "We now know that the machines that they're making that count the votes are not secure from tampering. And add to that, we've got a situation where everything inside the machines is secret, we're not allowed the see how they count the votes. So this is not an acceptable situation."
I know! I checked out the souce code from the h4x0r3d FTP site. In fact, I even recognize the hardware it was written for! (Atari 800) It was written in atari basic. The offending code looks like this.
35 if gwb algore then goto 40
37 goto 45
40 gwb=gwb+(algore-gwb)
45 goto 10
You can tell by the line numbering that this was put in as an afterthought. Ya I bet those bastards didn't think anyone could still decipher archaic line numbers and goto statements of atari basic, BUT IM STILL HERE HAHAHA!
I, for one, welcome our new Presidential overlord.
Well, it's not a matter of blaming it on Republicans, but on a group of very far-right types who not only are trying to hijack the Republican party, but are trying to silence people (like Bev Harris) who report on this.
Reason Magazine, by no means a liberal nor hysterical magazine, seems to have no compunctions about identifying this as a problem with roots in the right.
But Oracle DOES say to make backups....
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
If the guy ran a voting machine company, and the voting machine company made machines that can't be audited, and then we found on that company's website that they were illegally obtaining data DURING an election...
And if the company - even though it would MAKE MORE MONEY - refused to make an add-on printer so a ballot could be printed, examined by the voter, and put in a separate ballot box for counting to verify that the machine correctly reported the totals...
Well, I might not be convinced he was going to cheat, but I sure wouldn't want to trust an election to his machines.
Remember, with these machines there is NO WAY to know if the machine correctly reported the vote.
SOME of us here work with computers, so we know that sometimes the computers make mistakes. So wouldn't it be a good thing if we had a way to verify what a machine reported?
What if a machine just broke down? Do we hold the election over again, or do we throw out all the votes from that precinct?
This is just a feature that allows anyone who wanted to run for govenor make the process even worse by illegally cheating. This feature will probably get removed because illegal cheating is cheap, while legal cheating is expensive.
Be species-neutral too. Call them Congresscritters.
And he's not making it up, that's what it says on the House website.
"Write Your Representative - Contact your Congressperson in the U.S. House of Representatives."
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Actually, this is one of the times I'd be LEAST likely to suspect election fraud. You seem to forget that any election more attention-getting than local school board is going to be continuously monitored by opinion polling.
If, as you suggest, the landslide was fraudulent, then the election results would have no relation to either the pre-election polls or the exit polling. This would attract an awful lot of attention in the media, and I believe that any fraud on the scale that you suggest would at least be openly accused.
The only place, in my mind, that election fraud would be useful beyond the threat of detection would be in extremely close races -- those that no one has any idea who will win. In those cases, than altering the votes by 1% would still be within the margin of error on even the exit polling, and so wouldn't be immediately suspicious.
"Evil company X is threatening to restrict our rights! Let's all get together to stop--OOOH! SHINEY!!!" -- AC
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
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
In Communist Russ... *beep* ...upload complete.
In Communist America, the computer votes you!
The only way to end war is for everyone to get a piece!
A corrupt presidential candidate who is poised to lose an election suddenly wins when his corrupt brother, who happens to be a governor of a very populous state, "loses" thousands of votes, tipping the election in favor of his brother. the entire world knows about it, yet the corrupt presidential candidate is allowed to take office.
Oh wait...
This page on Diebold's website mentions that "Election results are securely stored utilizing world-class encryption techniques." As far as I can see, that's all they tell you about their encryption. Does that mean it has the same 128-bit encryption as, say, Mozilla? (Which, I suppose, is still pretty darn secure, but probably not "world class.") Is the "world class" bit is just marketing hype? Diebold doesn't say anything, which makes me a little nervous.
And what about their wireless security? You can store votes in a steel box protected by voracious bears, but if they (the votes, not the bears) aren't protected on the way to wherever it is that they count them up, it doesn't make much of a difference. (I'm assuming here that that is what the wireless networking is used for). Is Diebold using WEP, which can be broken in a couple of hours? Unless Diebold has adopted WPA early (which, given their track record on security, I kinda doubt), some schmuck could sit in his car outside the polling place and run a wireless packet sniffer on whatever traffic is being sent.
The way that Diebold seems to be hiding information on its machines' security is disturbing - you'd think that if they had solid software they'd talk a little about it to impress potential customers, rather than just making vague blanket statements. Given everything that's happened, though, that's apparently is not the case.
I produce electronic music and write little games. Have a look.
Maybe the powers that be fear people will demand true participatory democracy when they see the power of electronic voting. If it were made easy and secure, people could vote directly on the issues that effect them, rather than employing politicians look after their interests. I live in California, and yes, ballot initiatives have lead to some wacky laws, but not nearly as many as politicians themselves have made. I don't buy the argument against direct democracy: that voters can't be trusted to lead the country. If people can't be trusted to lead themselves, how can leaders be trusted to do it? Kang and Kodos notwithstanding, aren't politicians people too? By scaring everyone into believing that electronic voting is inherantly insecure, people will never embrace a technology that could give them more direct control over their government. /me removes tinfoil hat.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Diebold's SEC filings show their Chairman / President / CEO to be Mr. Walden W. O'Dell, who has donated $2000 this summer to Senator George V. Voinovich, Republican from Ohio (Diebold's home state). Diebold Inc.'s soft money donations also go to Republicans.
This does not demonstrate to me much evidence that Diebold is "after something other than money", it looks like routine political activity to me. But, while my quick research has neither managed to refute nor confirm your conspiracy theory, I'll pass it along anyway for whoever might be curious.
this is really frightening, and must be stopped PRONTO. The computer may be useful for helping people to fill-out/print the ballot, and for rapid counting. But, as has been said a thousand times already, there must be a paper trail.
Better yet, I think the bureau of printing and engraving should make some fancy counterfeit-resistant ballots, each printed/embedded with a unique serial number in a place where everyone can keep an eye on the process.
After the election, any unused/mismarked ballots must be accounted for. The ballots should have a matching stub with the unique number and what they voted for that the they can take home with them and may at any time go to the county clerk's office to verify that their ballot is still recorded as having said what they thought they said.
If they have electronic voting, demand a ballot and don't go away until you get one. Make sure to make a scene and talk loudly about how you heard the machines were insecure on slashdot and how the situation in Nebraska is fishy and how you won't use the machines becuase they are rigged. If you can get a mob together to go and screw up the machines beforehand, that'd be better.
Seriously, I'v had my fill between corperations and the goverment. When I goto vote next election, if they have electronic machines made by any of these fishy companies with no paper trail, I'm getting a chainsaw and spraypainging "democracy" on the sides, throwing on a nasty nasty chain, hiding it in a trombone case, getting in a buisness suit so I look like a hurried musician, and when I get in the building, I'll start the puppy up in the bathroom or some consealed area, run out screaming "You want democracy, I'll give you democracy!!! Lets do this by paper!" and rip the machines to hell.
Do I care about the prison time? The better question is, what jury on earth is going to convict me? >:) Especially if I proove that my motives were justifyable, there's something fishy going on and the goverment is bieng fishy, denied me a printout of my vote and ballot, and make it a point to tell the jury they don't have to convict me. Plus, I'll make national news for sure, a psycho running into a voting area with a chainsaw and ripping all of the boxes to shreds? You'd bet that it'd get all over the god box.
Sure, I'll take it up the ass a few years in jail and have a felony conviction to ensure that the voting system isn't rigged. Besides, I'm sure it'll look GREAT on a resume!
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Similarly, car salesman never try to push rust-coating, interior protection, or any sort of warranty, because the consumer will then believe that the car is flawed.
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
Ah yes, you've hit the nail right on the head with this one. It is all a part of the vast right wing conspiricy that Hilary Clinton warned us about.
It was started by Ronald Reagan and fellow conspiritors a few months after he won the White House. Reagan and his parterns knew there was a long road ahead to world domination but that it was possible. He know that in order to take over the world, he would need to defeat the USSR and stack the Supreme Court. His vice president, George Bush, was also involved. When Bush became president he continued to stack the Supreme Court with other conspiritors and oversaw the final break up of the Soviet Union. Bush engineered the Golf War so we could build a military presence in Saudi Arabia and be one step closer to the oil in the Middle East.
Alas, Bush was defeated in the 1992 election and the evil Republican plan was put on hold. Bush recruited Newt Gingrich and several others to continue on with the dastardly plan. Newt and fellow conspiritors decided that Clinton must go, the only question was how. They engineered and Republic revolution and take over the House and Senate in the 94 elections. Once they had control of bouth the houses of Congress it was time to make a move on Clinton.
They tried Travelgate, Filegate, Whitewater and finally found something with the potential to stick in Monica. But alas, Monica-gate failed. Alough Clinton was impeached, the impeachment was not successfull and Clinton remained president.
Enraged, the Republicans decided that they would not lose again. The approached George W. Bush several years before the 2000 presidential primary and asked him, along with several prominant neo-cons, to join the conspiricy. Everyone agreed.
The Republicans then commanded as many CEO's as possible to begin moving their companies overseas, where they could afford cheaper labor and evade taxes. Part of the money that they saved could be funnelled illegally back to the RNC and to state Republican parties where they were able to buy votes for George W. Bush and run attack ads against his primary challengers.
Bush emerged victorious in the primaries and then the campaign began to defeat Al Gore. The evil Republicans continued to raise millions of dollars to purchase attack ads and buy votes. When it appeared there was a tie in Florida, George W. Bush didn't break a sweat. It seemed the Reagan and Bush Sr. were correct when they determined it would be necessary to stack the Supreme Court. With evil Republican operatives lead by Scalia and Thomas on the court, the result of the Florida supreme court case went in Bush's favor. Everything was begining to fall back into place.
George W. Bush was ready to begin the process of world domination. To ensure that Bush would win the next election, his cronies began purchasing companies that produced electronic voting equipment. He would fool the US into going electonic after the Florida 2000 fiasco. He would turn the Democrats anger against them to ensure reelection in 2004. The campaign for world domination could commence.
Bush beefed up the Military and sent secret evil Republican operatives to Afganistan to recruit the help of several unwhitting Al Queda operatives who reluctantly agreed to hijack aircraft and fly them into the World Trade Center Towers, the Pentagon and the Capitol Building. The hijackings were to occur on September 11, 2001.
After the hijackings Bush invaded Afganistan. Altough Afganistan was not strategically important to Bush, it would provide the staging ground to test the effectiveness of our military against the defenseless masses.
Afganistan went off nicely, altough there would need to be some improvements made before the second wave of the plan could be implemented.
Two years passed by as Bush rebuilt the military. In that time Bush was also able to engineer a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans so they could in turn line the pockets his cohorts and ensure victory in the next election.
When the military was back u
From Ensuring the Integrity of Electronic Voting:
The integrity of electronic voting in public general elections with secret ballots can be ensured only if the following precautions are taken:
* generate and use paper ballots
* use open computer architecture and open-source software
* prohibit online voting in general elections (except in rare cases)
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
FTP Timestamps are added by the FTP server. the FTP protocol only transfers the contents of the file, and then recreates that file in the native file system. since file modification dates are /not/ part of a file, but part of the file system, this information is NOT PART OF A FILE DURING FTP TRANSFER
this means that whoever put the file there, put it there during the daytime. it doesn't mean the file was transferred off a voting system during the daytime.
that said, i still have concerns about voting machines with a wireless interface.
now let's talk conspiracy theories
Those guys in the IT room. Naked.
Everybody knows the proper way to hack an election is legally through the Supreme Court, not with computers, duh.
What if a several different websites are thrown up, and on election day the people working the polls can tell the voters to go online at home and verify their vote. What website you go to can be determined by what region you live in. Now I know that online polls are not reliable, but if a several different websites where created all with a different polling system, that would make it extremely difficult to hack every system so that the results would be consistent. If any of the online poll results are significantly different it would be time to start asking question.
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
You need to study your Constitutional law a bit more closely.
For about 80 years after the adoption of the Constitution you're correct in your claim that state governments were not bound by the restrictions imposed by the federal Constitution in the Bill of Rights. Indeed, many states had state Constitutions that openly defied the federal BOR, e.g., I believe that the Georgia constitution required all office holders to be "Christians in good standing" (whatever that means).
But then there was a minor spat over exactly what the Constitution actually meant and who it actually applied to... and ever since the end of the Civil War there's been unanimous concensus that the federal BOR applies to ALL levels of government. It doesn't matter if the Alabama state constitution allows a judge to erect a 20' statute of a burning Buddha in his courtroom, the federal constitution prohibits such displays under the 'establishment' clause.
More generally, I find this argument and the judge's argument VERY disturbing because they seem to be rolling back the clock to the days where whites were kings and blacks were out in the fields picking cotton. Nowhere in the Ten Commandments is there any prohibition on slavery. Nowhere in the Bible is there any prohibition on slavery - in fact the Bible often mentions God's chosen people having slaves. If God's laws supercedes the US Constitution, does that mean that the constitutional ban on slavery is unenforceable?
I hasten to add that I have no reason to believe that the OP believes this. I find it very possible that he came across a site that seemed to make a persuasive argument and didn't realize how much was omitted. But I am beginning to wonder if there's an organized group behind this that wants to roll back civil rights.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
People who want more and more power aren't in general Democrats (though times are changing). Democracy is about the dispersion of power and influence.
The $300 million dollar campaign of George Bush was about SOMETHING. They didn't make that cash by having $10 per plate barbecues. They got that money from coporate fat cats.
By the way, you don't get to be a super-corporate fat cat by being fair to your fellow employee and fellow citizen. You get to those positions by well placed daggers (proverbial) in the backs of your peers and the occasional supervisor (when you can manage it). You get to that place by selling as much as you can for as much as you can for the smallest cost (which means it's often shit). You get to that position by laying of workers, slashing benefits, importing foreign identured servants, busting unions and all around just being plain evil.
After a full day of wholesale theft, who do you turn to protect your bounty. Do you turn to Democrats who (used to) believe in a fair society by which you pay for public services according to your means. Those same democrats often provide low-cost or no-charge services that compete with your schemes to fleece every dime possible. Those damn democrats and progressives try very hard to keep large corporations from selling $1,000 toilet seats to the Pentagon.
Or do I give money to Republicans. Not honest ones (though there are few remaining). Rather, do they give money to the neo-cons who have now publicly stated their goal to merge large corporate America and government. Corporate governance (formerly called Facism). If I give them lots of money, they will slash those pesky environmental laws that stop us from dumping toxic waste in rivers. They will allow us to rape the landspace AND WORKERS. They will turn aside when we fleece Americans. They will overturn liability and tort laws by which consumers sue us for selling them faulty dangerous products.
Hmmm... if I'm a greedy evil rat bastard with a contempt for humanity, who do I choose to donate to. Well at $300 million to $30 million, I dare-say that the evil rat bastards have chosen the neo-cons.
Now the rat-bastards are finding ways to dispense with the even more troublesome DEMOCRACY. Voters will get pissed off. After all, once upon a time their was a robber barons paradise that but dangerous chemicals into the milk itself. Then their was a great depression and many of those who counted themselves among the elite few were cannabalized by their superiors. Sent out to the bread lines by the common rabble. But the common rabble could still vote. And they voted for an Roosevelt.
My gosh, didn't that Roosevelt's cousin also pass the first anti-trust legislation. Isn't that they war hero who led a rebellion against the elitist Republican party and subsequently crushed as a progressive. Didn't those victorious Republicans lead us to our paradise of an enslaved population. Damn what will this Roosevelt do????
Of course, Roosevelt brought about the new Deal. Eventually embraced by most (including the Grand Old Party) up and until Eisenhower. The last great Republican warned us upon departure of the Miliatary-Industrial complex and other such corporate mischief. Against he pursuit of war and strife for the benefit of a few fat cats. The same Business-Government environment that brought Adolf Hitler to power and the world to the brink of utter disaster.
Now we sit with a government being literally run by the corporat thiefs. They are governed by a president unelected by the people (like Adolf Hitler). He is determined to de-regulate EVERYTHING. To diminish the people great institution DEMOCRACY to a sham game. Adolf Hitler never stopped elections. And he never stopped winning.
Here and now the Neo-Cons (Facists) are trying to permanently rob America of democracy without robbing us of elections. They fix them through culling voting rolls of so-called "felons" and fix the voting machines to vote a Neo-Con every
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
In the Florida elections thousands of people, mostly black Democrats, were delisted for being felons. The vast majority of these felonies did not take place and were dated up to a milennium in the future. Further, the list was comprised of people who had moved from Texas to Florida. The Floridan Democrats barred from voting were not actually felons, they were locked out as a favor from one Bush to the other.
Nicotine free Amish .sig.
Seems you know something about the next election.
;)
I smell a Diebold employee.
InThane
I am not under the impression that the Democrats are without blame, but I never heard that Dan Rostenkowski commited voter fraud.
The 17 counts he went to jail on were for mail fraud and paying people to do nothing.
Maybe there is a better example? Say in Chicago
So conservativism (limited government) is equated with communism(totalitarian government). I guess the gubment education is paying off eh?
Do you see this administration engaging in limited government, or espousing freedom in any way, shape or form? I certainly don't. How much larger has the budget grown under under these GOP controlled executive and congressional branches of government? How many more laws and repressions of basic constitutional freedom and civil liberties has this GOP instituted? How limited has their role been in "Nation Building", that term so Bush disdainfully spouted to tar Clinton's policies in the Balkans and Africa, and yet exactly the same has he done (poorly) in Afghanistan and Iraq.
You call that "conservative"??? I call them "authoritarian", but certainly not "conservative".
Better check your political compass, buddy.
Cheers,
Maynard
Most of the websites and statistics regarding felon "disenfrachnisement" come from drug and prisoner advocacy groups, like the sentencing project... this makes their statistics suspect from the start. Many of these groups use these statistics to make voting for felons a "racist" issue. Also, some of them consider it "disenfranchisement" if a state does not automatically restore your civil rights after your sentence is served. Personally, I see no problem with making a felon fill out a form to get his voting rights back.
Further, some of the states they cite as "permanently" disenfranchising felons DO have procedures in place to restore civil rights... Florida (where I live) is a good example. Florida is often cited as one of the 10 (some sources cite 14 states) that permanently keep felons from voting... NOT TRUE. Check out this press release from the ACLU
Some states give voting rights back automatically... some have a few hoops you must jump through. Either way, committing a felony costs you. Now, I'm not aware of a single state that does not have procedures in place for restoration of civil rights. If someone wants to correct me, please do so.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
No, no, no. Lets take this one point at a time, because your facts are pretty messed up.
In the Florida elections thousands of people, mostly black Democrats, were delisted for being felons.
The felon list that was compiled for the 2000 election did not "delist" anybody from voting. The list was given to the individual county supervisors, and they were required to verify the names on the list before any action was taken. And even if action was taken, the people were given written notice with a procedure to appeal the decision.
The vast majority of these felonies did not take place and were dated up to a milennium in the future. Further, the list was comprised of people who had moved from Texas to Florida.
The only people claiming that the "vast majority" of the list was incorrect are partisan pundits with an axe to grind. Even so, it is irrelevant. The legislature intended the list to cast as wide of a net as possible to reduce the possibility that an ineligible voter would slip through. There were mistakes on the list, but that does not conflict with its stated purpose.
The Floridan Democrats barred from voting were not actually felons, they were locked out as a favor from one Bush to the other.
This had nothing to do with Jeb Bush or even Katherine Harris. The Legislature passed the law, and a democrat elections supervisor (Ethel Baxtor) contracted with a company to generate the list. Oh, and when the Federal Elections Commission held hearings on the Florida Election, they could not find a single person that was wrongly prevented from voting because of the list.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
In several races with electronic voting machines, there were noticeable differences between pre-election polls and the actual election results. In Georgia, both Roy Barnes and Max Cleland led their opponents until the actual election.
Other Dieboldalical results (from a source found via Google) are here.
Chuck Hagel's opponent wanted a hand-recount, but by the terms of the signed contract, it was illegal for government election workers to review the votes.
Short form: what you describe happened, and you didn't even notice. (Final tinfoil hat moment - did we mention that there was a file named "rob-georgia" containing patches not tested by the state on the Diebold FTP site?)
Speaking as a Voter of San Luis Obispo County who voted in this election, I woul like to clarify that there IS a paper balit which is scaned and recorded. While having the electronic comprimised is a Big problem, there is paper to go back to (for the moment)
As a side note, you can bet I'll be calling the county clerks office tomorrow.
JFMILLER
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do.
It never ceases to amaze me how so many otherwise technically savvy people buy into the notion that hardware is infallible and software is always to blame for "glitches" or "crashes." I would concede that software causes more problems, but the notion that "computers don't make mistakes" is remarkably wrong.
:)
No chip ever made is tested 100%. Test coverage of 99.0% is considered excellent in the ASIC and custom IC design worlds. Many go to fab with less than 95%, sometimes 90% test coverage. So you have 10 million gates on a hunk of stuff you grew and screenprinted with toxic chemicals, with a decent plan to make sure that 99.0% of them can be tested to work as they should. You do the math -- lots will fail, and worse, some will fail occasionally and then resume working. Moreover, we can't really test all posible sets of stimulus -- that would take an incredibly long time in an industry where tester time on billion-dollar testers is doled out in 5s increments (30s is considered unworkable by most fabs, and would still allow us to test less than 1% of all possible combinations of inputs and transitions).
The interconnect between chips is another problem that's hard to measure, but non-zero. Same with passive components (capacitors, resistors) -- they have non-zero non-fatal failure rates. Which is an obfuscatory way of saying they can "glitch" or "crash". Thank Ohm a resistor's reboot time is much faster than Windows or you'd really notice the hardware failures
I don't have time to go into system-wide signal integrity (intractable), fault-tolerance that isn't, metastability, radiative interference such as cosmic rays and alpha particles emitted from local metals, etc. There's a lot that can and does go wrong in hardware.
I'm really kind of reluctant to post this, since as a hardware designer it's cool that I never hear the "you're why my computer crashes" comments that my software engineers suffer. It's also fun to se MS take the brunt of most PC users reliability complaints. In truth, they probably deserve a lot of it, but not the 100% most believe -- hardware does sometimes fail for a microsecond and then recover nonchalantly, as if nothing happened, sort of like when a cat trips or runs into a wall.
everything in moderation
Not quite.
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/florida.ballots/
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
Also, the file contains an audit long of some 1,000 automated voting program events dating back to spring 2000. This file was March 5, 2002 and had dozens of identifiers to prove it, including audit log items. Also, the votes matched the final tally, proportionately, since they weren't all in yet.
Of course, the elections supervisor swears it wasn't her staff that put it on the FTP site, and Diebold swears none of theirs did it.
However, the password on the file was "Sophia" and Diebold has an employee who is a voting machine tech named "Sophia" and the S.L.O. County elections officials told me that Diebold's Sophia was on site on the election day this file was used.
Seems to me highly likely that Sophia put that file on the Diebold web site, and that she did so on election day, since that's the day she was there.
See ya. Bev Harris Black Box Voting
The NORC data did not "count" votes. This was the great con. All they did was note the condition of undercounted ballots:
For example:
"Voter puched the 'Al Gore' punch. Voter emphasized the vote by CIRCLING the punch. Voter further empasized their intention by writing AL GORE on the ballot.
Cannot count as Al Gore because we're not counting."
The Miami Herald did a similar study that actually COUNTED the ballots and found Al Gore the winner.
The true story of the election can be found at www.gregpalast.com. Yes, Greg Palast DOES have an axe to grind. He hates liars and hypocrites. The first two chapters of "The Best Democracy Money" is available their.
To summarize:
DBT Online/ChoicePoint was selected as a high-ball at $2.3 million dollars. The company who had previously did the job charged $5700.
They were supposed to record cross-checking against public databases and verification phone calls. They did none of this. They were instructed NOT TO.
ChoicePoint was instructed to search for similar names and reduced Jack to John etc... It was supposed to create the maximum number of matches provided the individuals.
The County offices were ORDERED to scrub everyone on the list without doing verification because ChoicePoint was SUPPOSED to have done that verification.
" The State of Florida was content with a partial match of four: names( the first four letters were good enough), ate of birth, gender and race. Not even the address or state mattered in the mad dash to maximize the number of citizens stripped of their civil rights."
- The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, p56
Of course you probably listen to Rush. AS if he hastened spent 6 hours a day grinding axes for the last 15 years.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
The very FIRST change in the file, made by Diebold, was to switch it to read-write.
There are also changes in Windows to remove authentication, and they apparently stripped out some of the security features designed for the interface between CE and NT, in order to make it backwards compatible for Windows 98 and 95.
They then represented the Windows software to certifiers as "COTS" (Commercial Off The Shelf) even though it was CE, and therefore customized from the get-go.
My favorite code comment, found in one of the nk.bin files: "We stole this part from some dead guy."
Cheers.
Bev Harris Black Box Voting
All things being equal (they aren't), Bush has done enough damage and the press is bold enough with him that he cannot win relection without: it being handed to him by a blunder of an idiot opponent, or if he steals it through fraud.
We are going into the economic winter of an inevitable Kondratieff Cycledelayed by massive deficit spending. Whatever party wins the next election will take the blame for this.
Based on the momentem of electronic voter machine replacment and the detailed widespread press coverage of the hanging/dimpled chad recount process, if the presidential election is in within 0-5% there will be great hubbub and sevral recounts.
Bush will become president again after recounts play out. The media will be forced to cover the advantages of open source vs proprietary software. It's to short a logical leap for the press not to take.
Durring the mayhem and finger pointing US companies that make software will become the biggest boogie men in the questionable election. Rigged or not, the mistrust of the govt will be enourmous. The stigma will linger and people will understand the software/IP alternitive en-masse for the first time.
When the market/housing/bonds/currency all crash, because the chinese unpeg the yuan from the dollar as late as possible (2007 3/4 as per the WTO) and the yuan springs back hard destablizing everything. (they will do this as sabotage or an economic nuke.) Republicans will take all the blame for the following depresion and the corruption that caused it. (Nothing sucks like a Hoover)
The Republican party will be dispanded, and perhaps a world war (over intelectual property) will occour. Laws on software will radically change for the better in 2012-2015 bringing the US inline with less recent but still new international IP law.
As crazy as it seems, the scarriest thing to me right now is a Democrat winning. Most of these things will still happen but the Democrats will take the blame. Democrats are way to weak to survive a disasterous presidency and will dispand.
Obviously whatever party is dispanded will be replaced, but the populist replacment will take time to accumulate power and the country will swing hard to the left or the right.
Somebody please laugh at me.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
Add to that the ubiquitous "computer glitch" which seems to the the plausible deniability excuse of choice. Do a Lexis-Nexis search with the words "glitch" and "election" and you'll see that many elections have been miscounted by these machines, including many that flip the race to the wrong candidate, even when the contest is not particularly close.
Bev Harris
Black Box Voting
Gun activist posts the Diebold files on new download site: "Make My Day," he challenges the lawyers -- "You are cordially invited to bite me"
He should have gone on to add: "whether or not anybody in the state of Ohio votes for Bush or not".
Tech Public Policy stuff
If any state's votes have to be thrown out over mangled electronic voting machine votes, that'll get the question of electronic voting to the WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING level.
That's what needs to be done.
A little Googling should disclose every county/state where Diebold has deployed.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Well, that's very simple actually. The group of potential leaders you have to chose from in an election are NOT just a random sampling from the population. The choices are almost exclusively, well-educated, reasonably intelligent individuals.
If you look into US history, you will find many many times that a political leader has made a very unpopular decision, that, in retrospect, was the right decision to make. And those aren't rare exceptions, they are regular occurances.
Well, the constitution, through the courts, provide only a bare minium of protection.
No longer would you ever see anything like "Equal Rights" laws being enacted. You would probably also see lots of programs like Welfare end, simply because it has a bad reputation among the majority of the people.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Think about this and answer honestly: If the same guy were a vocal supporter of a politician who you support, would you be convinced he was going to cheat? Or would you see it rationally- the man has opinions, just like every other person in the world?
Indeed; just look at Michael Moore. He's made a lot of noise about the man he calls "Governor Bush", but the problem is, it's very obvious that it's not the democratic process that he's worried about, but rather that his own side lost. Can you even imagine Michael Moore ranting about "Former Vice President Gore"? No, it simply wouldn't happen.