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Diebold Audit Released, BlackBoxVoting.Org Shut Down
Chris Soghoian writes "The State of Maryland requested an audit of the Diebold electronic voting system by SAIC, after a report released by Johns Hopkins University and Rice Researchers (disclaimer: I'm one of Dr Rubin's students) noted several security issues. A condensed, from 200 to 40 pages, and censored version of the report has been released online (PDF link). The report notes that 'SAIC has identified several high-risk vulnerabilities that, if exploited, could have significant impact upon the AccuVote-TS voting system operation.'" However, Diebold says Maryland are moving forward with installation with "new security features" included, and elsewhere, Badgerman points out "Diebold has shut down blackboxvoting.org, apparently with copyright claims made to their ISP. But you can still go to the blackboxvoting.com site."
The Supreme Court is always most willing to hear cases when they involve political speech and voting, and this involves both.
Pending: your vote is now the property of Diebold, Inc. Any attempt on your part to ascertain the disposition of your vote is hereby declared to be in violation of federal law, e.g., the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
You have the right not to vote. Any vote you make can be used against you in a court of law. The judge presiding in such a court of law may be appointed by Diebold, Inc., and need not require a jury, but if a jury is summoned, it need not be a jury of your peers.
By acting to vote you consent to our determining whether your vote is valid, and in the event it is judged not to be valid, you consent to our voiding your vote and further voiding your right to vote in the future.
You furthermore acknowledge that owing to storage and bandwidth limitations that Diebold, Inc., may experience, your vote may be digitally compressed in a way such that your true intent in casting the vote may be lost. If such an eventuality should occur, your vote may be determined using statistical data derived from any source we deem appropriate or convenient.
You have the right to protest if your vote is cancelled, altered, or in any way modified as the result of such action on our part, however, you hereby acknowledge that in such an eventuality, Diebold, Inc. may determine that your right to vote is deleterious to democracy as implement by Diebold, Inc., and therefore may be considered to be an overt act against the national security of these United States.
You have 10 seconds to comply.
God Bless America.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Are we going to have to check the bit bucket for hanging bits?
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.
incorporating encryption into the electronic transmission of election results
You mean to say that initially they were not going to encrypt the results? That would have been fun. Just pick up the transmission, change a 'few' select votes and send the same signal.
Thats SURE to be accurate.
The abuse of copyright-based ISP intimidation to stifle political speech could not be clearer. Let's hope the ACLU can find time to address this.
And look, dieboldsucks.com has already been registered!
How else can I add one option at the end of the ballot:
__X__ CowboyNeal
I don't see how anyone will accept electronic voting systems as insecure as this. Diebold should be as open in security vunerabilities as many open source projects are and support full public disclosure along with prompt patching.
This totally need to be crammed down every voting American's throat. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Ernie Eves is wishing Ontario had some of these.
SAIC's independent review states, "While many of the statements made by Mr. Rubin were technically correct, it is clear that Mr. Rubin did not have a complete understanding of the State of Maryland's implementation of the AccuVote-TS voting system...The State of Maryland's procedural controls and general voting environment reduce or eliminate many of the vulnerabilities identified in the Rubin report."
SAIC's report continues, "Rubin states repeatedly that he does not know how the [Diebold] system operates in an election and he further identifies the assumptions that he used to reach his conclusions. In those cases where these assumptions concerning operational or management controls were incorrect, the resultant conclusions were, unsurprisingly, also incorrect."
This wont be an original thought by any means, but... why, exactly, isn't it sufficient to provide voters with a pen and a piece of paper with the election's title printed on it and a space for the candidate's number? This works very well and is very cheap. The only problem is incomprehensible writing, but it can be argued that non-disabled people who can't lookup the number of their chosen candidate (provided in the booth), or remember it from advertisements, and write it clearly should not have their vote counted in the first place.
All these mechanical and electical contraptions used in the US just seem so unnecessary.
if implemented properly, could revolutionise governance in general - pity it's being so badly implemented thus far. If voting were faster and cheaper it could be involved more regularly in all manner of decision making processes. I simply cannot believe that someone would implement such a critical system on any Microsoft platform, especially when there's plenty of alternatives out there. QNX comes to mind. Mind you it is no surprise to me that a company who chooses to start behind the 8 ball by making such a poor choice in platforms is subsequently found to show a disregard for security in general ('compromised' servers, serious flaws, etc.). I hope they're enjoying 'whack-a-mole' because you can bet that for every site they manage to take down, 10 others will pop up!
The use of an open source system will never be approved, as the people in government are controlled by corporate ties (this includes both major parties, mind you). Diebold will eventually be allowed to setup their systems in every precient across the nation, and this crackable system will be cracked, and the wrong person(s) (ie, the one the people did not vote for) will be "elected". The only thing that could possibly stop this is something that could get you thrown into a camp in Cuba... I think that thing is "revolution"...
C:\>
I think most here would agree that electronic voting systems are a waste of time without a physical audit trail, but as far as the public's concerned, hi-tech is better...as long as I have a nice GUI where I can go File>Vote>Undo I'll be happy to click and then shuffle out of the voting booth with a confident but bewildered smile on my face.
She's done a fair amount of research on electronic voting systems.
I bootleg Fizzy Lifting Drinks.
They're right around the corner from where I work in Lanham, MD.
Just a tiny little outfit in an industrial mall. A handful of techies trying to make a living. Cut 'em some slack.
Noone forced the states to buy a substandard machine, and it shouldnt be up to John Hopkins to do any audits.
Yes, but with a conservative majority that has already shown it is willing to disenfranchise thousands of voters in a presidential election, I doubt the Supreme Court would be very kind to blackboxvoting.org, especially considering linking to Diebold's voting system source code with respect to the DMCA.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
The meme for the 21st Century seems to be "if your product is faulty, abuse IP laws to squash anyone who mentions it", rather than, say, fixing the damn problem.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Everyone knows that it's the job of the surpreme court to choose the president!
No, this is the perfect case if they want to repair their reputation after the 2000 Presidential election. It would send a message that they're for fair voting.
If they got a DMCA take-down notice or another C&D letter, they should submit it to Chilling Effects.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
I wonder how many precincts in CA plan to use the Diebold system, with its well-known cracks, in the upcoming Gubernatorial Recall election.
With a broad field of candidates splitting the vote, and the field-leader taking the race, small margins could easily swing the election - which means a small number of compromised precincts could swing the election.
And with no human-readable audit trail, if you thought the stink over the Florida Presidential results was bad you ain't seen NOTHING yet.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
boo hoo. can't change election laws after an election.
Salon had an excellent article a couple of days ago discussing this as well. See the article here.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
The problem really stems from the fact that as soon as you mechanize the process, you have essentially hidden it from direct scrutiny (it's almost encapsulated). There is a layer of technical junk between you and the actual results.
And what is worse is the data is physically very sensitive (easy to destroy or tamper with). The fact that the information is drawn from many sources (all across the country), means a lot room for any sort of problem.
Unfortunately, any electronic voting system will probably never be open source. I do not think the government will show that kind of trust.
I think these voting machines may end up forcing recalls, albeit electronically, even though the Supreme Court clearly wants to prevent that kind of precedence (for good reason).
Let us not forget that the supreme court had a hand in the bullshit that happened in the link in my sig.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
Just read this quote from a Diebold press release that is being refuted on blackboxvoiting.com:
"The thorough system assessment conducted by SAIC verifies that the Diebold voting station provides an unprecedented level of election security." (emphasis mine)
Unfortuantely, in this case, blackboxvoting is quite wrong, and Diebold press release is entirely correct. You see, the word "unprecedented" doesn't necessarily mean "good". It means "without precedent". The level of security offered by these voting machines is most certainly "without precedent".
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
This comment was copied from another one posted earlier.
We are f**ked. If a political system is so broken that it can't keep this from getting through then... well...
We are f**ked.
I really am an IT Auditor for a living and this is exactly the kind of work I do (although I mostly work for Utility Companies like water or electricity) and I know how these reports are created. There is HUGE pressure to "build assurance".
What that means is that you find an risk that is not addressed by a suitible control - and try to find a control - something, anything, that you can call a control to cover that risk. That's all fine and good, but what it means is that the risks that actually make it into the report are the really big, bad, completely unaccounted for ones. Put another way, for every risk that gets in, three didn't that a normal person would have thought should have.
Long and short, I write reports like this for a living and this is way, way, way worse than it looks.
OK Dieboldt, do you really think that suing computer scientists will give you any good PR?
Look, your voting software has more holes than swiss cheese. We are willing to help you, but there are some requirements you must follow.
1) your voting machines must have a printer attached
2) the votes must be counted electronically, optically, and by humans
3) if the printout doesnt match whats on screen, then remove the machine.
4) the paper ballot is the final record.
Look let the computer science community improve your software. We all want the election to go through in an error-free way. No one wants a florida to happen again.
But, if you fight this tooth and nail, you will have no fiercer enemy. Ignore the Slashdot nation at your own peril
But you can still go to the blackboxvoting.com site.
...until the slashdot effect sets in!
--Xandu
6,000,000,000 people placed type-in votes for an independent candidat known as "I.P. Freely"
"I.C. Weener" of the Cryoget Washington Head party and "Amanda Hugenkiss" tied for second with exactly 42424242 votes apiece.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Redundant, this was posted much earlier by a registered user.
With all the problems with electronic voting, punch-card voting, hanging chads etc, why even use machines for vote counting? Why not just have paper and pencil and hand-count?
Federal elections in Australia with a population of 20 million are run this way with no problem.
Before you say, "but America has many more voters", well, they can also have many more vote counters.
Now how is a 15year-old like me supposed to get a vote in if the systems aren't flawed? Anywho, if someone has enough energy to exploit the system then maybe they deserve to be heard. On the other hand, maybe they should focus that energy towards more constructive tasks.
-Tim Louden
The problem is when you have a typical US ballot with city, county, school board, tax levies, initiatives, state and national races all being decided on one election day and one huge ballot (which is different from precinct to precinct because the district boundary lines don't all coincide). Just printing those things is a huge burden, and counting them with anything other than optical mark-sense gear is a task of Floridian scope. Unless you want to issue voters umpty-ump different ballots for the various races, you're stuck with a mess. Using umpty-ump different ballots is a different kind of mess, just a little easier to count by hand.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Yes, but with a conservative majority that has already shown it is willing to disenfranchise thousands of voters in a presidential election
Do you know how many justices concurred on the Bush v Gore decision?
...we're screwed. I mean all kinds of screwed.
Not just "they messed up my vote" screwed, but entire-election-results-legitimately-contested screwed.
The problem is that they're raising the margin of error by an unknowable amount. No matter which party wins in the 2004 Presidential election, the loser will easily be able to argue that the voting system was highly flawed and vulnerable to foul play. It will be a replay of 2000, except worse.
Using a system that's known to be insecure for national elections... it's just a guaranteed disaster. We'll have another election settled in court, and the populace of the U.S. will become even more polarized.
Yeah, you could have...just before this article went up!
you got some press in the Folio Weekly here. ThinkTank
from the "Maryland is moving ahead with the installation" link, one thing the webpage says maryland will do is "Change default passwords and passwords printed in documentation." Does anyone really need to be told this? If you're so illiterate in computers that you need to be reminded of this, you need to call in a person who reads /. :-)
I think we should all click the "contact" button on www.Diebold.com and tell them that we are contacting our Senators and representitives.
For the elections to be so obviously and openly rigged is to make sure that there is no dissenting opinion available. The Communists and Facists regularly skewed and falsified election results to prevent anyone from actually challenging their methods and agendas. Which, I might remind you all, was mass murder, wholesale pilliaging of national treasuries and imprisonment of dissedents. Fact is, Americans already have accepted the Fascist philosophy now being touted as "patriotism". Call me a nut, but thats what we are looking at. If Bush wins, I will consider this to be the end of the United States, and I will make serious efforts to leave the country. It would no longer be worth my time, effort or loyalty if the Fascists win another election.
And these men ARE fascists people, in every sense of the word. You think there would be any "open source" after that? This administration has already made little noises about Linux and BSD being "hackers" operating systems, there have been several years worth of propaganda about "freeware" being something only criminals use to steal and sabotage. You can damn well bet that it would be outlawed, or at least, brought under private control of some sort where it would be rigidly controlled.
Can you say heil SCO? Whether or not they actually have a claim, which they don't, it would only take a few lines of obscure law written into some other peice of legislation to change all that. It would be nothing for the fascists to declare something to be criminal or subversive and use that as an excuse for a major crackdown on the information industry.
But nobody really cares, as long as they can have their Hummers and Porches and Rolex watches.
Stupid Humans.....
...But you can still go to the blackboxvoting.com site.
;-)
Yeah, we COULD go there, if the site hadn't been slashdotted to hell.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
What would happen if a real election went through where these things were used, then after the fact it was discovered that there was tampering? I guess it's too much to expect to have a punch-card backup plan.
FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec
NY Times article
Washington Post article
I live in Maryland and people just haven't been concerned about this. It is really a shame but no one even knows about this. The local press should have run a lot harder with it. All it would have taken was a couple hundred voters to call in and this problem would have gotten a lot better fix. Oh well, we'll be able to tell if Bush wins the state (>70% Democrat) there was something going on.
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 move the development of the demo along.
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
I've been researching this stuff for three years now. VERY scary shit. About Diebold: http://www.bartcop.com/diebold.htm About ES&S: http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0131-01.htm A Diebold machine is hacked, step-by-step and an election rigged here: http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00064 .htm
Congressman Rush Holt's bill:
http://holt.house.gov/display2.cfm?id=6282&type=Ho me
Contact your Congressman here:
http://action.eff.org/action/index.asp?step=2&item =2754
A personal letter from Bev Harris I just received:
I like what I'm hearing. I'm not decided on what to do, but as far as mobilizing thousands, we need mirrors on the memos, and here is an update you may find interesting.
Please, send, tell or distribute this as widely as possible, including to blogs, your email list, and the media:
An update from Bev at Black Box Voting:
Diebold, of course, demanded shut down of http://www.blackboxvoting.org (see London Inquirer article, "Diebold takes down blackboxvoting.org" http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11743 ) because we published a link to another web site. More on this here http://www.blackboxvoting.com , and you'll find the letter from the Diebold attorney http://www.thoughtcrimes.org here -- and for a small hoot, please notice that the letter, which is not copyrighted, INCLUDES THE LINK (three times) which they object to, and therefore republishing the letter telling people not to publish the link actually serves to publish the link.
We're working on replacing the site. Here's what I've been doing for two days now:
REPORTER: Why is Diebold sending cease and desists?
ME: Because they don't want anyone to see their memos
REPORTER: Oh. What is in the memos?
ME: Oh, admissions by their top programmers about security flaws and using uncertified software and using cell phones to intercept and transfer votes and discussions of how to fake things...
REPORTER: Wow. Where can I download these?
ME: At this web site http://211.117.160.48:8000/s/lists/index.html or this web site http://www.smashthetrifecta.com/diebold-memos-1.ht m
REPORTER: Okay I'm going there now, okay, it's downloading, when I'm done will you give me a guided tour?
ME: Sure. And also, go to this article for an easy-to-read primer: http://salon.com/tech/feature/2003/09/23/bev_harri s/index.html and also, here is a neat little web page http://new.globalfreepress.com/mnogosearch/search. cgi where you just enter any search term and it instantly searches and find you the Diebold memos that match
REPORTER: What search terms should I start with?
ME: Try "boogie man" and also "hack" "cel phone" "broken" "fake" "vaporware" and one of my personal favorites, "King County is famous for it" (I live in King County)
REPORTER: Here's one: "What good are rules" -- Gosh, what is he doing? Is that legal?
ME: No.
And so it goes. Excellent plan, Diebold. Yes, shut down a web site, that'll help. Besides reporters, the memos have now been downloaded by the U.S. House of Representatives.
Postscript: Today, the SAIC report came out evaluating Diebold. It summarizes:
FAILURE TO MEET THE MINIMUM STANDARDS SET FORTH BY THE STATE OF MARYLAND
Information Security Policy and Standards indicates that the system is vulnerable to exploitation. The results of a successful attack could result in voting results being released too soon, altered, or destroyed. The impact of exploitation could lead to a failure of the elections process by failing to elect to office, or decide in a ballot measure, according to the will of the people. The impact could be a loss of voter confidence, embarrassment to the State, or release of incomplete or inaccurate election results to the media.
AND HERE IS THE DIEBOLD PRESS RELEASE, which doesn't match: "The thorough system assessment conducted by SAIC verifies that the Diebold voting station provides an unprecedented level of election security."
If you see the above, it means your r
Distribute and arm 1,000 geeks with smart cards, Wi-Fi sniffers, and other tools and the landscape of politics may be slightly different the next day.
I'd love to see some *real* work get done at last. What better way than to get a Jolt-infused programmer who is used to doing 14 hour stretches who's tired of copyright, IP, DMCA, patent abuse. Guess what? Our canidate doesn't need to listen to your corporations! We can get him or her, or one just like them with the swipe of a card, or the sniff of a packet.
Be careful, kids. You don't want to fuck with the guys who can own you at the drop of a hat. We'll see how Diebold does without it's massive conflicts of interests holding it's hand.
See you in 2004!
the ACLU were the ones fighting for Diebold and for the death of paper voting.
and you who bitched about punch cards... feel pretty smart now, do you? at least with punch cards, the only thing stopping you was the moron voter.... now, we have the moron system running things.
holy crap... New Zealand, here i come.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
You could go to the blackboxvoting.com site, now you have to wait a day for them to recuperate.
Trying is the first step towards failure.
but he'll be elected to quite a few city counsels.
Asscendancy of CowboyNeal Predicted. Webcast at 11.
From the Fox News article
Regarding the 160 pages redacted from the 200 page report, State Budget Secretary James C. DiPaula Jr said: "The best security is for you not to give a road map to the people who want to do harm," DiPaula said.
That's what the lack of a human-readable audit trail avoids: those pesky "ballots" that people might want to recheck for accuracy. The Diebold systems might not be any better than hanging chads, but you can be sure they'll seem better because there won't be any way to remeasure the results and get a different number.
Well, you could... until it got slashdotted. (oopsie.)
[insert witty comment here]
Er, well, you used to be able to. Not anymore, now that Slashdot got its teeth into it.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
I love your work. Please contact my buddy Karl R. about a repeat in Florida in 2004.
Thanks
"Tex"
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Please submit that lawyer's request to chillingeffects! We need examples like this to show how recent copyright changes are allowing companies to censor critics.
Let's say we got a secure electronic voting system working that people could use over the internet, maybe it mapped to your social or something. Well, now you don't have to wait till election day to vote on stuff. Should we go to war? Let's vote on it. Should we raise taxes? Let's vote on it. It could pave the way for something that has never happened before in history -- a true rule by the people.
c-hack.com |
I say get the guys that did temptation island to do the voting system
<voice type="radio" disposition="overexcited">
Lines are open right now boys and girls, to go to war with iraq, just sms 'war' to 1800 votenow...to say no to the war, and vote george bush out of the whitehouse, sms 'screw bush' to 1800 votenow
</voice>
How cool would it be...you screw up in govt, within 30 minutes you get your marching papers and the 'wildcard' entry gets a go.
In Oklahoma, they use paper cards. There is a broken line with each of the canidate choices. You complete the line to make your selection. THe ink is magnetic, and you put it in the reader and it counts it electronically. It works quite well, is nearly fail safe, and is fast. I don't know why more states don't do something similar. Its kinda like best of both..
And the report itself continues:
Dead on. If this isn't a case of the DMCA being misused I don't know what is. Have you contacted them to suggest it?
-- MarkusQ
Sure we could do that, but do you think that the elected party would really want the people to rule as they wished? It may seem like a dream to us, but those who control the money would view it as a nightmare. No longer would they have so much control, because now rather than bribing the currently elected party ( let's say 'funding' for political correctness, shall we? ;) ) their is nothing they can do to prevent their bullsh*t bills from being thrown out, and nothing to help keep them running the country by twisting laws as they see fit.
And so we go, on with our lives
We know the truth, but prefer lies
Lies are simple, simple is bliss
Sue everyone who disagrees with you, lie, and make half statements. When that fails pull cheap legal tricts to get your detractors silenced.
No I'm serious, it's been working so well for SCO and the RIAA why not try it here. After all its only democracy thats at stake.
I don't know about you but I trust them more already.
Thanks everyone for helping Diebold shut down another expose site!
Its not a bug. Its a feature!
A system where votes were printed to a machine-readable piece of paper, verified by the voter, then deposited in a secure box, would be simple and secure. By printing votes you create a self-verifying system -- voters can check their vote is correct, and an audit can easily verify that votes were recorded as voters intended. Management of the printed records would be just like the ballots we already are using, but without the reliability problems of punch-card systems. Tallying could be done mechanically, as a barcode could accompany the printed text.
The whole system is very simple. Even if they just used an ATM style of security (printing to an internal paper log) they would be far superior to Diebold. But using logic is difficult in this case, because Diebold is clearly making absurd claims, and it's difficult to refute absurdity.
EVM 2003 is trying to create a complete open source voting system (not just machine). I wish them the best of luck. This is more than just philosophy about copyright and IP, it's the defense of democracy from those that want very much to take away even the slight accountability that currently exists. They've already made it into office with one fraudulent election (2000), and very possibly kept control of congress with another (2002, with many states being won with unverifiable votes that didn't match up with predicted results).
> But you can still go to the blackboxvoting.com site.
You dweeb! Look what you have done... You can't now...
Well, the blackboxvoting.com seems to be out. try the cache: www.blackboxvoting.com/+%22blackbox%22+%22voting%2 2&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:QjRzU6sKDlgJ
Electronic voting machines, without paper audit trails and control of exit polls would go a long way in letting those in power control close elections. The only check against widespread election rigging is that races where independent polls show a clear winner can't be rigged without danger of exposing the conspiracy. It just happens a lot of races in recent elections are very close, for some reason, and rigging a few has been enough to tip the balance of power in the Senate and presidential races in particular.
Its just conjecture but its quite possible that the Republican administration, with their heads bent by 9/11, are acting in concert with elements in intelligence or defence to keep the Democrats out of power in Congress because the Democrats are perceived as too weak to defend America from its enemies which are now behind every bush. They might well have rationalized to themselves that it was OK to destroy the most fundemental underpinning of freedom in America in order to defend America.
During these tumultuous times its quite possible the Bush administartion and its allies have decided to do whatever it takes to maintain control of the Presidency and Congress, which will eventually lead to control of the judiciary. We could well be witnessing the end of the last pretense of Democracy in America. If the Reuplicans maintain control of the congress and the presidency in 2004, you may as well stop wasting your time voting after that.
It also quite suspicious Democratic senatorial candidates keep dying in plane crashes. Mel Carnahan in 2000 and Paul Goldstone in 2002 whose seat was subsequently won by a Republican tipping in the balance of power in the Senate.
Just look at the string of disturbing visible Republican power plays, the Clinton impeachment, the Florida debacle, redistricting in Texas and Colorado, the California recall and the possibility the California energy crisis was rigged by Enron and its allies in the White house to create turmoil in one of the last remaining Democratic strongholds. You can easily envision the possibility the Republicans are engaged in a no holds barred campaign to seize and hold power.
@de_machina
In that case, they may as well make an amandment:
We the corporations of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Profit, establish monopoly, insure domestic compliance, provide for the common interest, promote our welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
[it's a joke people]
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
A number of CA counties use the touch screen machines, but the big holes are on the servers, not the voting machines. Those who use OCR ballots are also just as vulnerable because the back-end servers are the same.
There was an article on the Blackboxvoting.com site about how time stamps on files found on the Diebold FTP site indicate that Diebold downloaded vote counts DURING an election in Santa Barbara (??) county. For those who are unaware, it is against the law to count votes before the polls close.
So... part of the evidence suggests that employees of Diebold BROKE THE LAW by counting votes before the polls closed. No wonder Diebold wants to keep things secret.
So... this brings up a question. If I obtain a document indicating that a company broke the law, can that document be suppressed by saying it's copy righted? If so, that's a BIG problem.
Seven.
Kind of makes you think twice about those lifetime tenures, doesn't it?
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
What's amusing is that these companies could make more money selling voting machines with printers attached than they do with their current line.
Printers are cheap and totally NOT the issue. How much does a couple of thousand printers cost? A million bucks with a fat markup? Chicken feed for these people.
They will make a heck of a lot more money by rigging elections and putting people in office who will perpetuate the scam. Diebold also sells a lot more things to the government than voting machines.
The president of Diebold has personally promised to deliver the state of Ohio to Bush in 2004. If that's not conflict of interest, I don't know what is...
Oh... and the other voting machine company -- partly owned by Sen. Chuck Hagel, another prominent Republican.
Conflict of interest? Noooooo....
Great, I live in Alameda County, CA where I remember Diebold machines being used in the last election. Now we have the recall coming up, so I guess we will just have to have some kind of blind faith that our votes are counting. I suppose if the results are other than to be expected from this more liberal area, it will raise some eyebrows.
The horrible thing is, that this is really far below the general public's radar. I find it extremely amusing that we had a court battle over how reliable punch cards are, when electronic voting may be far worse.
The problem is that the general public is very computer illiterate, and have been pretty much been conditioned to accept bugs and viruses as normal. At the same time, strangely, computers seem to be viewed as infallible.
It is very importaint for Democracy that people are able to be able to see and verify that their votes are counted.
My previous experience with the Diebold machines left me more puzzled than anything. Where was my vote counted, on the card that I put in the machine, in the machine itself, or both? Were the votes transmitted via phone, wireless, or physically transported to a centeral location? I don't know for sure, and I'm sure regular people off the street were more puzzled. Then again, maybe the thought never crossed their mind.
Stop the Machine! (Famous '60's chant)
Force the use of paper backup systems.
Dump them overboard, Boston Tea Party style.
Anyone here know a good place (other then Google) to find the laws regarding a citizen's rights to inspect an election process ? I'm curious, because I'm a resident and registered voter of the great state of Maryland. By the way, I'm a bit surprised my the state's reactions... JHU is especially highly regarded here...
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
Now hackers can use this to get rid of Bush and put in whoever is willing to part ways with the DMCA and the Patriot act.
Faux News election night:
"And the results are in for the popular election, Jane"
"75 million votes for..wait.. who the fuck is Lawrence Lessig?"
"I would say he's our new President, Steve."
Next year, in all the states that have Diebold machines, just watch an overwhelming victory for Dubya--while non-Diebold states are middling at best.
Without a paper trail, they can forge with impunity instead of just "not counting" votes.
Anyone who doesn't think there was something fishy in Florida 3 years ago is a blind idiot.
Rights? We don't need no steeenking rights!
With Diebold claiming 'copyright' on everything, and shutting down sites that are asking for inspections, I doubt they'll let anyone inspect anything. They want to keep people in the dark.
Until these machines start prining paper receipts, there's NO WAY your rights will be protected.
Diebold makes (at least) two systems: AccuVote-TS (touch screen) and AccuVote-OS (Optical Scan).
I live in Boston, where we had a City Council primary yesterday. Boston has just switched to the AccuVote-OS system. Here's how that system worked:
I voted on a PAPER BALLOT by shading an oval with a black marker (any color but red will do). Then I fed my ballot into a box about the size of a personal laser printer, which (presumably) scanned it immediately and kept it. The box had what looked like a modem cord hanging out of one side.
I am NOT comfortable having my vote disappear into a system driven by code that is not available for public scrutiny. But I feel better about this than about the touch-screen Diebold system being discussed by most of these posts, because it uses paper ballots that could be re-counted if necessary.
Here's a good place to start: http://www.sos.state.md.us/sos/admin/pdf/overview. pdf
the ACLU tries to get the recall election stopped on the premise that punched card voting machines, which actually leave some evidence of how a person voted, are disenfranchising some voters. Presumably, it will be a lot fairer if everybdy is disenfranchised by the universal adoption of electronic voting machines that leave no trail whatsoever.
As we rush headlong into the upcoming recall election, I feel the need
/evoting.f law.ap/index.html
to express my concerns about the new electronic voting methods being
used in Alameda County. I have long been a proponent of electronic
voting, but I am worried by some aspects of the current system.
The last statewide election (November, 2002) was my first experience
with the Diebold electronic voting machines, and I was profoundly
disturbed by some obvious security holes I saw in the new system.
I am most concerned by the lack of a voter verifiable audit trail. After
voting in the last election, I was shocked to realize that I had _no_
receipt - no tangible evidence - of my vote. The old punch card system
had a serial number on every ballot. Once the ballot was handed in, a
stub with a matching serial number was torn off the ballot and returned
to the voter as proof of voting. This provided a direct link between
each voter and their ballot. I have regularly kept my stubs from
previous elections, and had assumed I would receive some sort of paper
receipt when I cast my vote in the last election.
I have also recently read several stories about shoddy programming and
lax security in the Diebold voting machines that could lead to easy
manipulation of votes.
"The researchers went through every line of code used to control a
voting machine made by Diebold Election Systems of Ohio, US. They
reported finding serious bugs that could allow one person to cast many
electronic votes."
- http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 93987
"We found significant security flaws: voters can trivially cast multiple
ballots with no built-in traceability, administrative functions can be
performed by regular voters, and the threats posed by insiders such as
poll workers, software developers, and even janitors, is even greater."
- http://www.verifiedvoting.org/article_text.asp?art icleid=71
Similar stories:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/07/25
http://news.google.com/news?hl= en&ie=ISO-8859-1&ed ition=us&q=diebold+voting+fraud
While Diebold claims that the bugs have now been fixed, I know that no
piece of code will ever be perfect. Based on my own technical and
programming experience, I am concerned by the fact that Diebold refuses
to make public the actual software code used to tally votes. How can we
trust that the numbers are being added correctly if it's being done in a
'black box'?
During the last election, I saw a number of problems with my polling
site that could have allowed for easy voter fraud. Most glaring was the
lack of ID check before voting. Because of the layout of the site,
people had to stand in a long line _after_ signing in. The line was in a
hallway that could be accessed from several outside sources. An
unscrupulous person could easily have walked up to the end of the line
and voted without signing in. (There was a poll worker at the front of
the line who gave us the 'smart card' to vote with. However, she did
nothing to verify that I was actually eligible to vote - I could have
easily walked up to the end of the line without any question.)
I thought that moving from punch cards to electronic voting would
_increase_ my faith in the system, but the opposite has proven true. I
could understand not providing a copy of the ballot in the days of punch
cards, but in an era when my lunch order at McDonald's comes with an
itemized receipt I see no reason to expect less with my vote. Without a
verifiable paper trail, the voting process is open to a much wider range
of secret manipulation. It's as if a whole level of security has been
removed from the voting process.
I ask that Alameda County consider instituting an audit trail similar to
that specified in the 'The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility
Act of 200
No. Hell no. It proves the system works. Judges are disconnected from the political process that appointed them and are free to make good law.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
The memos were sent to me by an insider, and I just got them 2 1/2 weeks ago.
This is important, because one is similar to software piracy (though debatable, because they are under some obligation to protect things if they want to call them trade secrets, and no one in their right mind would want to pirate this system, called "junk shit" by their own technicians, to resell it.
The memos, though, are just internal communications that were leaked, and once leaked and public, which they certainly are by now, when used only for fair use reasons in the public interest, the legal issues are quite different.
and you'll be happy to know they can do this by land line modem, wireless modem or cell phone.
Found this on DemocraticUndergound.com...
ES&S, the nation's largest voting company, is owned by the Omaha World Herald Company and has solid ties to the Republican Party. Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) was the past president of American Information Systems, the company that counted the votes in his first election.
The current Chairman of VoteHere, the leading worldwide supplier of Internet voting technology, is Admiral Bill Owens, a former senior military assistant to both Secretaries of Defense Frank Carlucci and Dick Cheney. Ex-CIA director Robert Gates, who was caught up in the Iran Contra scandal, also sits on the VoteHere board.
The new kid on the block is Populex, which is creating an electronic voting system for Illinois. It has on its advisory board, Frank Carlucci of The Carlyle Group.
The boards of many of these companies are dominated by top donors to the Republican Party, former high ranking military officers, and several ex-CIA directors. The CIA directors include: James Woolsey, Bobby Ray Inman, and John Deutch, and as mentioned before, Robert Gates and Frank Carlucci. The CIA, it should be remembered, has a decades-long track record of assisting in the brutal overthrow of democratically elected governments around the world.
The reports deal strictly with the flaws in the current electronic voting system. I know for a fact that there is no operating system that cannot be hacked in one way or another. With that in mind, one needs to remember that there are external systems that can help secure. Examples of these are using firewalls and access lists on standard computer networks. There are several things that need to be taken into account when it comes to security. 1. Security at the user interface. (sitting at the machine) 2. Ability to access the machine remotely. 3. Transmission medium. 4. Level of encryption used. Security at the user interface should be a relative easy fix. Ability to access the machines remotely can also be fixed easily. All it takes is using a dedicated fiber backbone, or using encrypted channels. Transmission medium must be considered in conjuntion with the second and fourth point of consideration. The last is where my personal expierence comes into play. I know of no cellular phones that use 128bit encryption. I also know that it takes a long time for a very strong computer (read a beowulf cluster) to crack a good encryption algorithim. Using something like double encryption with different size keys goes a long way. Pair that with using multiplexed signals and you have gone further. You can label me a troll all you wish. Hell I don't care. I do know that I can use proper security measures and secure any os from the outside. I could even do this over wifi (wouldnt want to do to bandwidth considerations though). I agree that a paper print out would be a good additional step, but you can rest assured that if someone really wants to protect this data, it can and will be no matter what the limitations of the actual voting machines limitations are. Dont believe me, email me. Alan.Dike@us.army.mil
Stop signs are only Suggestions
...when those who generalize about the egregious conflicts of interest in today's incestuous corporate-controlled government are torn down and ridiculed as conspiracy "theorists" for no good reason.
It has turned into an anti-populist, anti-democratic bias and left average people standing still while we are force-fed LIES and (gasp!) conspiracy theories dressed-up as intelligence and foreign policy: Iraq's WMD, Cuba's "bioweapons", etc. etc. The (frightened) wealthy WASPS conspiracy theories are myriad and oh-so-credible when they come to us over the cable news.
Meanwhile plausible and actual threats like N. Korea and Al-Queda are left to fester.
FWIW, those words you quoted are as accurate as any, and they point out the current despotic tendencies in corporate America; Conspiracy theories may or may not apply, but with the way we're headed I don't give a damn about their *intentions* when the results are so awful. People are waking up, and they're tuning-out the rhetoric and labeling being used to divide and dismiss them out of hand. It's time to put corporations under the microscope and start to divide THEM.
They should look into the law about this and take appropriate measures.
Firstly, for a DMCA notice to be valid, certain terms are required. IANAL, so I can't tell you whether this is compliant, but really that's just a formality. Even if it is not valid, they'll simply send another one.
However, in response to a correct DMCA takedown notice, the accused can send a counter notice. From chilling effects
"In order to ensure that copyright owners do not wrongly insist on the removal of materials that actually do not infringe their copyrights, the safe harbor provisions require service providers to notify the subscribers if their materials have been removed and to provide them with an opportunity to send a written notice to the service provider stating that the material has been wrongly removed. [512(g)] If a subscriber provides a proper "counter-notice" claiming that the material does not infringe copyrights, the service provider must then promptly notify the claiming party of the individual's objection. [512(g)(2)] If the copyright owner does not bring a lawsuit in district court within 14 days, the service provider is then required to restore the material to its location on its network. [512(g)(2)(C)]"
To keep it down, Diebold would have to sue the people behind BlackBoxvoting.org. This will be embarrassing since they will have to claim that the incrtiminating evidence was created by them.
IIRC, they are involved in building voting machines as well, so obviously they want to hurt Diebold (not that Diebold doesn't deserve it, apparently).
Not to mention that SAIC is in bed with Bush and the CIA. They're the LAST people who should be connected with voting machines in any way, shape or form.
That idiot David Kay they have over in Iraq acting as "Mr. Fixit" for Bush's lies about WMDs was or is a bigwig at SAIC, IIRC.
It just doesn't get more obvious than this. Why not have Bush's right-wing Christian Zionists just hire Israeli commandos to strong-arm people entering the voting booths?
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
If you're suggesting that the voter doesn't get a printed receipt, but instead the machine prints out their voting slip, they check it, and post it into a black box, then what's been won over manual voting? (i.e. bits of paper and pencils - thankfully still the way things are done in the UK, but our government is keen on doing the e-voting thing too...)
Like others, I've come to the conclusion that e-voting is a fundamentally less safe practice than manual voting.
--
..will die, bold.
And the list of examples of how the DMCA etc are NOT being used to quieten dissenting voices is where?
Why is it that many people who claim to support standards have such atrocious spelling and grammar?
Salon is about as far from "mainstream" media as... well, as slashdot.
The FEC voting standards (http://www.fec.gov/pages/vssfinal/vss.html for the 2002 edition) that Diebold claims to be certified to state in numerous places that the storage of votes must protect the anonymity of the voter. (2002 spec 3.2.4.3.2, 1990 spec - not online - 2.3.2, 3.2.4.2.5, 4.5.) Now we have this SAIC/Maryland report that says: a) Page B-18 "We found no evidence that data was encrypted". b) Page B-20 "The individual ballots however, are stored sequentially". Who's fooling who? Unencrypted, sequential ballots have zero anonymity!
"in August, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that Walden O'Dell, the CEO of Diebold, is a major fundraiser for President Bush. In a letter to fellow Republicans, O'Dell said that he was "COMMITTED TO HELPING OHIO DELIVER ITS ELECTORAL VOTES TO THE PRESIDENT NEXT YEAR."
The internal memos from Diebold (they get referred to from Salon) show a shockingly cavalier chief engineer 'managing' the security concerns of various clients, steadily resisting the idea of even password protecting the .mdb file (.mdb file!?!) so that just anyone couldn't overwrite audit logs. Nothing overtly political in those memos, though, thank God.
Still -- how does it affect the credibility of any (new, or old) voting system for the people overseeing it to be acknowledged partisans? Imagine a Florida 2000 in which there were no physical records, and in which the systems that counted votes were frighteningly insecure and had been programmed by a company headed by a partisan figure. We already had more than enough partisan elements there -- the brother who happens to be governor, the Supreme Court justice who has a wife on Bush's transition team, the different standards for counting absentee ballots in different counties, and so on.
The thing about those memos is, they really show the states to be one more relatively uninformed client of an IT company. They'll buy the FUD of the Diebold person as long as he sounds assured enough, you know? Even when it comes to something as obvious as "I double-clicked the file of votes and it opened with no password, is that bad?" Which is all the more reason to be sure you're dealing with someone who has no conflict of interest, right?
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
See http://www.sunspot.net/news/local/bal-md.voting25s ep25,0,5876424.story?coll=bal-local-headlines
An interseting quote from Budget Secretary James C. "Chip" DiPaula Jr. "Let's talk about security," DiPaula said. "The best security is not to give a road map to people who would do us harm."
Hmmm, maybe he should read a bit more on the subject.
Do you have a link for that promise? I'd like to show it to my step-dad who thinks GW is the "most honest president we've had in the past 30 years."
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
and you will see where their loyalty lies.
photosMy Photostream
and this just in - george w. bush received 100% of the votes! this is a great day for america!
in other news, dissent has been outlawed and people without flags on their cars are being rounded up and shot.
america, still the land of the fee! i mean fear! i mean free!
I find it very interesting that the State of Maryland redacted almost anything of value from the report that it released. In contrast, the Department of Justice redacted only 1 line from the Carnivore report. The voting report as posted tells very little about what was really found. Perhaps there should be some public call for the unredacted version. Maybe the Baltimore Sun can do a FOIA request.
The SAIC team specifically excluded the procedures for voter identification, registratoin, etc., from their report. That is unfortunate. One of the biggest problems in Maryland is that you can vote without providing any kind of identification. No driver's license, voter registration card, or anything else.
Let's suppose you are a pollster for one of the major parties. You get a list of the registered voters for the other party. You call and ask questions like, "Do you plan to vote?" and "Whom do you plan to vote for?", just like any other poll. However, what you are doing is compiling a list of those that don't plan on voting. You then get a bunch of people to go to the various precincts and vote as those people. If you do it early enough, even if the real person does actually show up, it won't be until after the fakes have already voted for them. You can cast lots of illegal ballots that way. If the real person does show up and is told they have already voted, they can prove their identity and cast a provisional ballot, subject to investigation. If there are only a few of those, it probably won't affect the outcome and there won't be any investigation. If for some reason, there are a lot of those, it will throw the election results into chaos and probably force a new election. The liklihood of anyone getting caught is almost nil because of the lack of identification, surveillence cameras, or anything else that could be used to ensure that only those leagally registered can vote, and then can only vote as themselves.
Here's one.
Show him this one, too.
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
Thanks
There is a war going on for your mind.
So... this brings up a question. If I obtain a document indicating that a company broke the law, can that document be suppressed by saying it's copy righted? If so, that's a BIG problem.
That's the claim Scientology used to sue Keith Henson, and how he ended up in Canadian "exile".
Keith was a vocal critic of Scientology, claiming their internal manuals were a manual for criminal activity and medical fraud, and their activities had already cost a number of lives, sometimes under conditions that could be interpreted as premeditated murder. He tried to bring this to the authorities to prosecute them for their actions, partly by a publicity campaign about their activities, which included calling attention to excerpts of leaked copies of the (copyrighted) documents in question.
At one point he participated in a netnews discussion of one of the excerpts - in which another poster had quoted such an excerpt. Keith's reply included the snippet in question (about six steps into quoting previous postings which included it in the postings THEY quoted).
The Scientologists used this to seek, and obtain, a large damage award for copyright violation and an injunction against further "infringement" on their copyright. Keith violated that injunction and was cited for contempt, and is currently on the run (in Canada last I heard) as a result of his continued refusal to knuckle under.
Note that this was just under the basic copyright laws, without any recourse to the DMCA enhancements. Courts are very hard on those who ignore their rulings rather than obeying them unless/until they are recinded or overturned.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Hey - Go to
http://www.verifiedvoting.org/
And DO something about this!!!
Go to court and see if you can stop the thing on that argument..
Why should I want to STOP it?
I just want the vote count in elections to accuartely (enough) reflect the actual votes of the qualified voters. (By "enough" I mean so that the outcome is the same as if it were perfect unless the election is nearly a tie.)
IMHO the electoral system is SO corrupted - and has been since AT LEAST the introduction of electronic tabulation - that the resluts represent the choices of the political machine rather than the will of the people.
This is VERY dangerous. The purpose of elections is not to "be fair". It is to predict the outcome of civil wars well enough that the losers will not be tempted to stage them, thus stabilizing the government.
If corruption of election results becomes large enough to swing the balance of power, AND this becomes known, it is no longer convincing. Then it becomes solely a matter of time until some losing side decides to give the alternative a try.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It isn't the password thing in particular -- it's the fact that the chief engineer of a company that sells electronic voting systems is spending more time massaging the perceptions of his clients than he is making sure those clients have anything like a secure system. His attitude is basically "Whatever we can say to reassure these people, sell 'em on that argument." The banking industry wouldn't accept that level of schmoozed explanation for a security problem, and we ought to be holding our vote counters to something like that higher standard. If you and I can erase or alter the audit trail in that file without even using a login of any sort, what sort of integrity does this process have? When there's a controversy, who're you going to ask -- the CEO of the company, who's vowing to deliver electoral votes for partisan reasons?
And I agree that MDB passwords would be nuisance level security, but so's anything at some point. I happen to know my medical records are protected, within many clinics, by a handful of similarly low-level security systems -- file cabinet locks, some Access (clinics tend to track stuff in local MDBs), and stuff like that. Makes me feel better than if the janitor can go in and edit things without going out of his way, personally.
Right now if your visit to the rehab clinic gets spilled to the public, whoever slipped faces a steep (max $500,000?) fine under HIPAA. Apparently our vote counters aren't feeling anything like that sort of pressure, to judge by Diebold.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
First of all Judges shouldn't be making laws. They should be interpretting them. Secondly, if the system works, why are the people does the Supreme Court so blatantly disregard the Constitution on a regular basis?
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
Greetings all. So far all the information that has been presented here has been useful. That's good. But I think we've all overlooked one other issue with this electronic vote system: immunity & privacy.
While in the United States, you're not scared of the currently 'lawfully-elected' dictator shooting you because you didn't vote for him in the election, it's still considered to be a sacrosanct 'right' that you and only you know exactly how you voted. You can tell the exit-pollers anything you want, but voting itself is anonymous.
My state recently obtained "anti-Florida" electronic voting machined (ie, touch-screen) even though we had been using push-button electronic machines for 15+ years (Diebold, btw). These new touch-screen machines (I didn't bother to check manufacturer, hindsight is 20-20) were 'unique' in my mind because of one of the features they had: Smart-cards.
The process I used to vote using these machines is as follows:
1) State your name to the represenative of the County Clerk. (No identification is required, but that's a different issue entirely)
2) Take a form that has your Name, Address, and SSN on it to a second clerk in the voting room. They enter your information onto a computer terminal connected to the County Voter Registration Database (somehow). This is to verify that you are indeed registered to vote in this county. They call out a number (I'm assuming a voter number, but it uniquely identifies you).
3) Recieve a smart-card which just downloaded something from the terminal used to check voter-numbers.
4) Insert smart-card into voting machine.
5) Select from presented options.
6) Save your vote onto the smart-card.
7) Give this smart-card back to the clerk and go about your business.
Now... What here seems like a vote-tracking system to you? The voting terminals were all connected back to something via Ethernet, and my votes were saved off-device. Now, I talked with a friend of mine who says you can get smart-cards to cough up their information, without encryption, if you do something right. Steal a crate of those cards (or loose them, as is oft in my state) and the information recorded on them (most likely voter number and votes cast) and bam! You know that I voted against Joe Schmoe.
Like I said earlier, in the US, this isn't a big problem, killing your opposition isn't smiled upon... but what about imprisoning them under the Patriot Act?(more info: read about the Alien and Sedition Acts...Congress overturned those, haven't touched PATRIOT)
I spoke with a poll-worker about this issue (vote-tracking, not getting oppressed) at the recent election (using the traditional voting machines, I might add), and she expressed concern as well, stating "You seem to have a different perspective on this, probably because you are more familliar with the technology". Meaning? The county clerks have no idea what they're implementing, just that they're implementing an electronic system, which obviously can't cause hanging-chads...
Will the intelegencia ever be consulted, or are we doomed to be legislated and regulated by politicians who don't have time to learn about a subject? Sinclair Lewis once wrote a book entitled "It Can't Happen Here", but if this continues unchecked, it just might.
May You Live in Interesting Times
BaronJ
-- Now we see the violence inherent in the sysadmin
Aye.
What it really comes down to is that: resolution.
Capitalism, in the eyes of many, is a more efficient solution to the problem of running civilization as everyone gets to vote with their dollar.
(True) democracy is exactly the same principle, but isn't feasible as everyone would need to hit the voting booths quite often. A republic is the governmental form of compromising democracy to make it realistically workable.
Capitalism sucks in a number of ways. You have the folks that can cheat the game to ensure that the best product doesn't win. Lots of folks feel abused by companies. Not everyone is bad, but most don't care about the consumers that prop them up as long as they still get the consumer's dollar.
On the other hand, democracy, just like capitalism, has these same problems. Representatives play the public relations angle, lie, cheat, steal and deal under the table to get what they want. Like the corporate world, politics isn't all bad, but many of these people just don't care about the people who voted them into office.
Corporations aren't going to magically be nice and politicians aren't suddenly going to be responsible. The ONLY way to solve both problems is for the people to involve themselves in these matters. These are just the facts: when given power, people will run with it. Government is a tool, but is not a replacement for the carpenter; it must still be wielded with an attentive hand.
Like most solutions, a split between the two is probably the most reasonable. Don't depend on the government to make your life peachy and don't expect that corporations do well when left alone.
The people are the answer, folks. Quit being lazy.
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
If that's true, he needs to be killed. I'm dead serious. We've tried to fight this crap with free speech and they abuse copyright law to shut us down. We try to fight it by going to the press, and the press ignores it. We try to fight it in the courts, only to find the courts as corrupt as the players. No, my fellow Americans, the ONLY way to fight this fight is to kill. Kill this person, and those of his ilk. Strike them down, that they may not mistake their result from it's cause. Kill this man, so his peers will know that in America you may be able to buy the government, but you can not fool the people. We won't have it. We'll kill your sorry ass. The only way corporations will care, is if the people running the corporations fear for their lives. It's too safe to hide behind a corporation. IF you get caught, the corporation gets busted, while you pocket all the money. Look at enron, look at all those companies. The only way to change this is to kill the people running these companies. Only a personal attack on the people making these decisions will work. It's time to kill the wizards behind the curtains. Before you think I'm too extreme, answer this - where is J Clifford Baxter, Where is Charles Dana Rice, Where is James Daniel Watkins, where is Jake Horton. http://www.bk2k.com/bushbodycount/enron/bodies.sht ml
It's time. It's almost too late. the PEOPLE need to rise up.
Who else, besides Diebold, make voting machines? Are they just as questionable as Diebold?
Is the other company's CEO/Board impartial? Are the other companys just as bad, better or worse than Diebold?
My $0.02 would be for assistive voting equipment where the machine produces a voter verifiable token that is auditable for at least a few years.
I used to work for a computer manufactuerer who had a number of computers installed at a Diebold facility and I occasionally had to assist a Diebold engineer with problems.
It was frustrating. The computers were interfacing with ATM style machines and polling some sort of data from them. The concept was not difficult but sometimes there were strange results. I'd ask questions about how the serial port (or modem or whatever) was connecting to their machine. Questions about protocols for instance and he would not tell me because it was confidential information! It would be something like "What baud rater are you using?" and he could not tell me but then he would ask me what baud rate I'd recommend!
I think that for years their security has had as much to do with obscurity as it has had to do with real security!
Did anyone notice that one of the recommendations made in the .PDF file was to "discontinue use of an FTP server for distributing ballots."
Incredible... I can't believe any state would use an FTP server to distribute a ballot.
Don't come crying to us next election when all of the candidates are mysteriously replaced by either:
1. Cowboy Neal
2. I'm using a Diebold automatic democracy stifling machine, you insensitive clod!
3. Cowboy Neal
4. Cowboy Neal
or 5. Cowboy Neal
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
http://www.clevelandfed.org/about/BODclev.cfm
Diebold has the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank.
Robert W. Mahoney, retired Chairman and CEO of Diebold, is a Class C member of the Board of Directors.
3 Class A members represent banks.
3 Class B members represent businesses, but are chosen by the banks.
The 3 Class C members are intended to represent the public interest.
Diebold's main business is building ATMs for banks.
You do the math.
(Just to make things more fun, note that another Class C member of the Cleveland FRB BoD is the CEO of Cox Financial Corporation (but it's not a bank!)
Yes, you are right, it was 7-2. Hardly party lines.
And yes, you are also correct--the justices should only be interpreting the constitution in cases of judicial review, and issuing judgements in other original jurisdiction cases. Do you see a constitutional violation in Bush v Gore?
At the level of the Supremes they very much should be making law. That's their whole reason for existance. As for "disregarding the Constitution", you're going to have to come up with examples that are more concrete than "they disagree with me, so its unconstitutional!"
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
They're also free to make bad law.
Hi. My boyfriend (from Rio) told me about the computer voting system they used in Brazil's recent presidential election. Portable machines (with no internet connection) that compliled results & burned to a CD. These CDs were carted (by heavy security) to a central location where the totals were all tallied. (Don't know what software or OS they used for the machines.) From most accounts, the system worked extremely smoothly and was very accurate.
I just voted in Louisana's local elections by absentee ballot using an Electronic Voting Machine and didn't even give the little bit-bastard a second thought....
.... just something to make California Politics seem sane.. };-P
Louisana Politics