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More E-Voting Software Leaks Surface
Christopher Soghoian writes "Sound like something you've seen before? Wired News reports that the software which runs Sequoia's AVC Edge voting machines has been accidentally placed on another company's publicly available FTP server, although this time it's the binary, rather than the source that's been leaked. Machines running this software were used in California's Riverside County for the 2000 presidential election and for last month's California gubernatorial recall election. The system also has been used in counties in Florida and Washington state."
How do you "accidentally" put software on a public FTP server ... this is ridiculous. Makes me glad to not be an American :)
This sentence no verb
This wouldnt be a problem if they used OSS to vote. The problems could be caught and fixed before a vote...and nobody has to keep the info secure.
Bottles.
Earlier today I posted the lists.tgz archive of Diebold's damning mailing list exchange to Freenet, as has been requested repeatedly in threads related to the electronic voting issue.
L d0 68BtICKg/lists.tgz
The key is:
CHK@sgOjWAy4g-0bf0m5biyqnEzWloENAwI,OXw8OfHPfsm
If I can obtain the AVC Edge binary, I will do the same with it.
Let loose the DMCA notices, boys. It won't do you a damned bit of good now.
The company was NOT a USA company
Tech Public Policy stuff
Why the hell are all these problems cropping up? Voting is simple enough, add one to the vote counter of a candidate/issue, like this:
vote++;
(WARNING: The code above is probably owned by SCO too, so just to be safe, I'm mailing a check for $699 tomorrow morning)
Is this really so hard? I'm working on my own OSS voting program. You can see the early version at herrvinny.com. It supports multiple choice (you can select several options together, or just one option), write in, no choice, etc. Anyone in UW-Madison want to help me test it, let me know.
Anyway, from my experiences writing this program, it doesn't seem so hard. And my program is done in Java, so all you little Java == SUV people out there are just plain wrong, the program works great.
Anyone have a mirror of these files? I'll mirror them myself, and we can play a game of keepaway with Sequoia just like with Diebold.
Maybe I'm over simplifying the issue, but am I the only one that thinks the only way e-voting of any kind is trustworthy is if there is a paper record of the vote?
Why not use an E-Voting machine to generate a paper ballot of some sort that could be read by scanners? More or less like a punch card ballot, but generated by a machine with multiple language support and all that good stuff. People get to _review_ their ballot before they put it in the box (giving them faith in the system), there won't be any hanging chad or bufferfly ballots (the interface would remain as a touchscreen), and most importantly, if you needed to do a recount, you'd have _paper_ records.
I'd trust this a little bit more then some software designed by a corporation with special interests to worry about.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Wired had a rather telling story about this the other month: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/bagscan.h tml?pg=1