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E-voting Patches Skew Election?
Whammy666 writes "Wired magazine has an interesting story of how the much-maligned Diebold E-voting machines were allegedly secretely patched before Georgia state's 2002 gubernatorial election. The patches were never certified by independent testing authorities or cleared with Georgia election officials. The election produced an upset which ended in a major upset that defied all polls. A Diebold contractor tells a worrysome tale of how close to a third of the machines were crashing or locking up and how his tests showed the machines producing errors up to 25%. There are no paper audit trails with these systems so it's nearly impossible to check for fraud or malfunction after an actual election."
Voters are fickle. Voting machines you "own" are forever.
... it's in Wired. Not on, say, Fox News. (Although it would have been, no doubt, if it had been Democrats rather than Republicans doing all the screwy stuff.)
Even if every techie in the world knows how screwed up the voting machines are, it's not going to do any good until Joe Sixpack is hearing about it over dinner. I would be willing to bet that right now, the majority of voters don't give a damn what kind of voting machine they use, and of those who do, the majority assume that anything newer and sleeker and higher-tech is thereby more reliable. The number of people who have any understanding of the problem is growing, but it's still tiny.
What I want to know is, why aren't the politicians who have the most to lose from this issue making more noise about it? Since right now it's mostly the Republicans who seem to be benefitting, seems to me every Democratic candidate should be yelling for a major investigation right now. That's certainly what I'd expect if the situation were reversed.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Elections in this, and many other countries, have a long history of fraud. The obtaining of power is so important to some people they will do whatever is necessary to get and maintain it. You can be certain that if there is a way to manipulate results without detection, the temptation will be too great. Countless examples riddle American election history, and yes, from both major parties.
But this is the worst of all. Closed-sourced, buggy, patched (with what? we don't know) after certification electronic voting machines represent power without accountability. Read that again: Power without accountability. That is a recipe for disaster. All you have to do is patch things your way and, voila, you get some "odd" election results that contradict all the polls, but who cares? You're in power now, baby!
This is a huge story, and I'm glad to see Wired covering it. But this belongs on the front page of every newspaper in the country, and on every evening newscast. Why don't we see it there? Ask yourself who owns these voting machine companies. Now ask yourself who owns the mainstream media companies. Connect the dots.
...and for Joe MadDog 20/20 to sell his vote. You don't get a copy of your "mark x for Fred", punch card, or your lever machine results, why should electronic machines be any different. Paper copies leaving with the voter will only breed corruption.
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Harris acknowledged no proof exists that anyone rigged the election systems, but she said, "We'll never know exactly what happened in Georgia because there's no paper trail to verify the votes."
You can't beat the Canadian ballot for simplicity and effectiveness. The voter uses a pen to mark a box next to the candidate's name on a simple, clearly laid out paper card. The voter then places the card in the ballot box. It's basically idiot-proof.
The ballots are fully counted, by humans, within hours of the polls closing. No hanging chads, no electronic errors or confusion. A paper trail exists, so recounts are simple. It's been this way for decades and there have never been any real issues with the system.
What's so hard about that?
Honestly, I don't understand why a pencil and machine-readable bubble sheet are insufficient.
You tell me how "whilst" differs from "while," and I'll stop calling you a pretentious jackass.
- Audit by security researchers reveal serious vulnerabilities
- Diebold downloaded ongoing ballots (a federal crime) during California's last election (not the recall)
- The whole "Rob-Georgia" fiasco that Wired is writing about
- Diebold's executives are uniformly partisan political donors
- Diebold's CEO is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year".
Note that #4 and #5, while annoying, would not actually be problems except for necessary paranoia about #1-3. Voting machines need to be absolutely above reproach, since they are the ultimate instruments of modern democracy.But then again you need them to make your argument.
List all the elections won where they were clearly losing in the polls. Come on, do it. Just like the bald faced lie in this Wire article you point to no major poll (by link please) the backs your claim.
I live in Georgia, Barnes was out because the teachers wanted him out. North Georgia wanted him out - as he was trying to show an unpopular road project down the necks of many people. It was going to be close, and polls showed that. Why do you think Republicans made such a big last month push here? Cleland (D. Senator) was such a flop he didn't have a chance and polls showed that).
What burned the Georgia elections were the obvious attempts by the Democrats playing race politics and such here. The good-old boy network got shown for what it was.
Alabama was close for the same reasons. People are waking up, unfortunately just as they are the Democrats and Republicans start looking too much alike.
Back the article, its all innuendo. "I can't prove it, but I can make it sound plausible thereby making someone else prove me wrong" Sorry, that kind of logic belongs on a play ground.
(fwiw, I vote Libetarian, and no, GW doesn't get my vote in 04 either)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Except we can't, and that's the whole point. It casts doubt on the entire election process. More doubt is cast based on the fact that a member of Party A produced the machines and then another member of Party A won the election even though it was expected that Party B would win.
That's the entire point - we don't know. It makes absolutely no difference what "Party A" and "Party B" are - which some other posters seem to have been attacking the above premise with. All we know is that a result has been produced that does not match the expected result. Further, we know that the makers of the measuring device favored the party that the measure device ultimately declared as the winner. This is suspicious.
So could the results be correct? Of course. Could the be wrong? Well, yes. And there's no way to tell. That is what the problem is. There needs to be a way to ensure that the machines did indeed produce the proper result, and right now, there isn't. Doubt has been cast, and there really is no way to resolve that without "maybes."
Maybe the vote was measured correctly. But maybe it instead skewed the vote - and until that possiblity can be reasonably discounted, a problem exists. (Regardless of which party is doing the cheating - it's still a problem, Party A or Party B.)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Some have stated that Democrats would rig the voting machines, give the chance.
Others have asked for an enumeration of polls that were contradicted by election results, and of course cast doubt on the polls, themselves.
None of this matters a single bit. Three things matter:
1: The CEO of a company that makes voting machines expresses a political preference and a will to see that preference follow through elections.
2: There appears to be no public audit process for code, patches, or patch installation for those voting machines.
3: (and this is the biggie) As a result of 1 and 2, I have very little faith in any results delivered by these voting machines.
NEWS LIKE THIS ERODES MY FAITH IN ELECTIONS IN THE USA. (further)
There is no way that this is anything but bad news.
Voting machines need security and transparency that can satisfy geeks nationwide, or at least let us know where we are, for those who simply can't be satisfied.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
If "Dull" means Serious, Worthwhile Political Discourse devoid of exploitation by a cirus of anchors, pundits, makeupartists, cameraman, reporters, lawyers, judges, etc, etc, then Im glad our elections are "dull".
1) Quagmire? Shouldn't we wait for a year to pass bfore we rush out to use the word Quagmire? Oh and news flash, we won the war, we're rebuilding their cities.
A.) More American soldiers have been killed since Bush announced the end of the war than during the declared war.
B.) Defense analyst in the DOD were among the first to declare the situation a "quagmire". The Bush administration admitted that they had no exit plan. It wasn't until Powel and the State department was given free reign to negotiate with the UN without interference from Rumsfeld, Cheney, or Condoleeza Rice that he was able to get the UN to commit to pulling us out of this quagmire.
C.) Bush is stating that the rebuilding of Iraq will cost the U.S. $87 billion dollars during the next fiscal year. The vast majority of this money is being earmarked to go to Halliburton and Bechtel for services supplied to the troops and in contracts for managing the reconstruction. Both companies are owned primarily by Dick Cheney and other ex-CIA staffers and operatives, such as Frank Carlucci, as well as former Reagan/ Bush the first staffers (Cheney, Carlucci, and Rumsfeld). This may not be a quagmire for those who are in the right club, but it certainly is for the rest of us who will be left holding the bill.
2) Actually lots of WMDs have been found, you just don't want to count _those_ WMDs.
You must watch a lot of Fox
3) Leak? This story is the most idiotic POS the Left has tried so far. Notice how it whimpered away? It had no legs b/c it was shit. She wasn't EVEN a SPY, she was a mid level analyst.
She was a former operative (there all "former" operatives), which is why there is an investigation. It is not against the law to reveal the identities of CIA staffers, so that would not have been much of a news story. It is likely that she was outed by one of the former CIA people in the Bush administration, as they would have been the best positioned to know such details , and by law of averages, as there ore more senior whitehouse staffers that are former CIA (both staffers and operatives) than not. As it is likely that she was in agreement with her husbands claim that there was no eviodence that Iraq had approached Nigeria (or any other African country) in order to obtain uranium, there was a revenge or punishment motive for her not being loyal to the company. It is odd that Bush was so sure that the source of the leak would never be found when he repeatedly assures the American people that we will find Osama Bin Laden and Sadamm Husein. At least we do know where the the culprit is in the case of the "leak".
Read, L