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."

Comments

The problem with this kind of story is ...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

... 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.

This is a disaster

[FunWithHeadlines]

"She said the practice of patching systems after they've been certified opens the possibility for anyone -- from Diebold employees to local election officials -- to install malicious code on a machine that could alter election results and then delete itself to avoid detection."

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.

A quick review of known Diebold problems

[frankie]

Most of this is discussed in detail at BlackBoxVoting. Bev Harris has a /. account; she'll probably have lots to say.

1. Audit by security researchers reveal serious vulnerabilities
2. Diebold downloaded ongoing ballots (a federal crime) during California's last election (not the recall)
3. The whole "Rob-Georgia" fiasco that Wired is writing about
4. Diebold's executives are uniformly partisan political donors
5. 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.

It doesn't matter if Democrats would do it, too.

[dpilot]

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.