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

Slashdot is a small portion of the public

[Neophytus]

This needs to make mainstream press, and DAMN QUICK.

Re:Slashdot is a small portion of the public

[bradkittenbrink]

actually, shouldn't we try to keep this quiet? doesn't this mean that we can manipulate elections now without the general public finding out? say goodbye to DMCA, UCITA, etc...

Re:Slashdot is a small portion of the public

[JoeLinux]

We, the illuminati, have been doing this for years...I mean...wait....damnit, I was supposed to log in as anonymous.

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:Slashdot is a small portion of the public

[km790816]

Illuminati? You mean The Stonecutters?

We Do (The Stonecutter's Song)
2F09 - 8th January 1995

Who controls the British crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do! We do!
Who keeps Atlantis off the maps?
Who keeps the Martians under wraps?
We do! We do!
Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star?
We do! We do!
Who robs the cave fish of their site?
Who rigs every Oscar night?
We do! We do!

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.

Re:Slashdot is a small portion of the public

[Thorsett]

Yep. And guess what party that woud be?

From today's Ohio Beacon Journal"

Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc., told Republicans in an Aug. 14 fund-raising letter that he is ``committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.''

Voting machine manufacturer wants votes for Bush

[Eric Ass Raymond]

Don't forget 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.

Boycott

[Ignorant Aardvark]

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?!

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.

Calm down everyone

[Henry V .009]

As the next President of the USA, I promise to make fixing this problem one of my top priorities.

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.

Reading doesn't imply writing

[Hayzeus]

So that means if they can pull the information in, they can also send information back into those machines.

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...

Upon Further Examination...

[The_Rippa]

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

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.

Falicious logic in article

[Angostura]

OK, now there are some pretty serious implications if the files described in the transcript are what they appear to be. However, I have to say, I'm not that impressed by the quality of some of the reasoning:

... you see, a modem is always two way. If you can pull the information in, you can also push it back through the pipeline the other direction. So that means if they can pull the information in, they can also send information back into those machines.

What is wrong with this picture? And if nothing is wrong why can't I edit the Slashdot home page?

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.

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: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