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."

Comments

Blackboxvoting is a great case waiting to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

The Supreme Court is always most willing to hear cases when they involve political speech and voting, and this involves both.

Typical...

[Black Parrot]

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.

Re:Typical...

[jjoyce]

I don't think that their systems are faulty. I think they work as designed.

How many precincts in CA use Diebold?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.

Re:Why is the mass media not all over this????

[kramer2718]

Why? Because the mass media has no interest in overthrowing the corrupt big-business driven world of politics. And why should they? All the major media companies are owned by huge corporations who profit by people not being fairly represented. How does that work? Well, if people were fairly represented, then campaign finance reform would happen and businesses wouldn't be able to bribe our elected officials. Yes, I know there's not a direct connection to Diebold voting systems except that Diebold IS big business.

Undprecedented!!!

[ChangeOnInstall]

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".

This is very scary: but... Diebolt will lose

[sjgman9]

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

Re:This is very scary: but... Diebolt will lose

[Nogami_Saeko]

On the contrary...

I rather think the Republicans aren't all that worried about a "Florida happening again". After all, it did get a Republican into the oval office didn't it...

It's odd though, speaking as a Canadian who has always though that although not perfect, the US electoral system had a fair number of checks and balances, it absolutely blows my mind that this sort of un-checked corporate crap isn't being stopped in it's tracks.

It's like 9/11 gave the politicians and big business license to do whatever the hell they want to with your entire country and the economy, and they're screwing it up at a simply astounding rate. "Patriot" take-away-your rights acts, a court denying a "do-not call list" that 50 MILLION people want for the benefit of a few telemarketing lobbyists, big companies trying to patent even the most trivial of ideas... Where does it end?

I mean, this latest info about a company making machines to support democratic elections that has no "unalterable record", easy bypassing (or complete lack) of database passwords, and executives talking about just printing "system check" on the screen without any actual checking being done because the electoral regulations require a full system check before the system begins recording votes.

Frightening, absolutely frightening...

N.

There won't be any stink at all

[roystgnr]

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.

Re:Electronic Voting...

[gaijin99]

That isn't "governance." It's mob rule.

Feh. And other words of disgust. One of the main purposes of the constitution, and the bill of rights, is to avoid the problem of "tyrany of the majority", while simultaniously allowing free and democratic government.

Certainly a free for all democracy, without any sort of "No, you can't use the government to do this" would cause problems. Democracy, in and of itself, is not sufficient. But we have more than just a democracy, and so does every other first world nation. By explicitly limiting the government's power, and by making those limits quite difficult to change, things work quite well.

What we need is more accountability, less secrecy, and greater transparency. A government of a few tyranical types tends to have a half-life of around 30 to 40 years, and when they collapse (and they always do) its not pretty. Look at the Soviet Union for an example of this.

Re:Why is the mass media not all over this????

[Anonymous Coward]

"Ad hominem" - Means against the man, to not attack the argument but the person. There is nothing ad hominem about:
"Because the mass media has no interest in overthrowing the corrupt big-business driven world blah blah blah.

It's not the most eloquent sentence but the point is valid; the large media outlets very obviously have self interest in maintaining the status quo hence, Britney kissing Madonna is front page news while actual documented vote fraud is overlooked.

The irony here is that you then go on to use an ad hominem attack by calling the original poster "adolescent". Simply amazing.

I'll give you a hint: Do not attempt to sound smarter than you are, it's very transparent.

Re:Why is the mass media not all over this????

[kcbrown]

Seriously, is this the best we can do? Of course there are vile reasons behind Diebold's getting away with this, but do you have to resort to this tired, adolescent "mass media loves big corporations loves evil government" schtick to get your point across?

Of course, since mass media is big corporations, the above reduces to "big corporations love evil government", something which has been proven repeatedly over time.

Jesus, do you need us to spell it out for you?

1. Large corporations have a common set of interests and attributes:
   • They want to lock out as much competition as possible.
   • They want their labor pool to be as cheap as possible.
   • They want their customer base to be as captive as possible.
   • They want to be as free as possible to do whatever they want.
   • They are short-term thinkers, so they don't care about the long term consequences of their actions upon their market.
   • They are driven only by profit, so ethics never enters the equation when they decide upon an action, only law (and then, only law that they don't think they can get away with breaking) and profit.
2. Because of (1), they will naturally tend to lobby for roughly the same things, and these things will often be at odds with things that would be beneficial to the general population.
3. The media is owned, and thus controlled, by some of those very same corporations.
4. Because of (2) and (3), no federal-level politician who is unwilling to cater to the needs of the corporations that own the media is likely to win their first election, because you can't win an election if the voters don't know about you. In fact, such a politician would be very unlikely to win for that very reason.
5. You're a moron if you think the media corporations and other corporations don't talk to each other about their common interests.
6. Hence, the only politicians that, in general, can win an election are those who bow to the demands of this country's large corporations.
7. And hence, the politicians will listen to large corporations to a much greater degree than they will listen to the voters directly. Rare indeed is the issue that will galvanize an entire voter population against you if you side with the corporations. Rarer still is such an issue that the voter population hears about through the mass media; because, as I said, you're a moron if you think the media corporations don't talk with other corporations about their common interests.

Call it a "tired conspiracy theory" if you want, but the links in the chain from a to b to c are so strong and backed by so much evidence (circumstantial or otherwise) that you'd be a fool to discount this "schtick" out of hand.

Come up with a hypothesis that does a better job of explaining both what we've been seeing and what we haven't been seeing and is consistent with everything we currently know and I, for one, will sit up and take notice. But until then, this "conspiracy theory" does a better job of explaining just about everything that has been happening than anything else I've seen.

I'm no conspiracy nut. My most valuable tool is the scientific method, and most conspiracy theories are certainly crap. But this particular "schtick" is very different, and I'll continue to use it to explain the goings on until I find a better explanation.

Diebold's CEO is a big Republican Donor

[ianscot]

Salon's article referred to the Cleveland Plain Dealer's earlier story on this:

"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?