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Voting Machines Vs. Slot Machines
dmh20002 writes "Being a Nevada resident and knowing people who write code for slot machines, I was aware of the stringent measures the state of Nevada uses to vet the security of slot machines. The Nevada Gaming Control Board audits everything about them, both physical and soft, for unintentional and intentional security holes. Hearing the hoopla on voting machines, the contrast was obvious. Slot machines are about money, which is more important than votes, apparently. Now the state of Nevada is looking at electronic voting machines and plan to apply some of the same safeguards. Just applying the Nevada technical standards for gaming machines and vendors to voting machines would be a start, since there don't seem to be any standards for voting machines. A funny/sad sideline is that in Nevada, every year or two a programmer or engineer goes to jail for exploiting slot machines."
We can just put slot machines in voting booths and rather than running on a "Republican" or "Democrat" ticket, candidates can run as "Cherry," "Gold Bar," etc.
Hey, you might even get to vote for three different candidates, or WIN a triple vote.
lysergically yours
Now that was a fun contract. However, yeah, the security restrictions were remarkable.
Ever heard of 'the magic wand'? Or the 'coin whip'? The minute a slot machine with 'new security measures' is released, there are people that break it the very next minute. The way they keep things going? Good surveilence and good guards.
Good luck putting cameras in every voting booth. People won't mind, right??
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
This is, what I call, a "DUH!" moment.
We should have thought of this a LONG time ago.
What is possibly even more disturbing is the fact that our paid officials, you know, the ones that are supposed to be looking out for our best interests, didn't think of this either. Or, and this is something that must be considered, they did and didn't do anything about it.
Book quote that I think applies here: "If god had wanted me to vote, he would have given me candidates"
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Isn't it one of the Nevada rules that convicted criminals can't have anything to do with the gambling industry?
:)
Which would remove nearly half the politicians & lobbyists
Similarly, I should know that some standards and enforcement is in place when I vote. Otherwise, I'm putting my trust in someone I don't know and who has interests that are probably different than mine.
Voting should not be about trust, it should be about results. Any third party should be able to verify results, regardless of their interest.
Only you put the money in in April and are screwed no matter which button you press.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
no matter how valuable your point, and believe me, the parallel you have drawn is striking and insightful, i just can't help myself:
you've permanently fixed in my mind an image of going into the voting booth, pulling the big lever, and seeing three bars with the faces of gw bush, howard dean, al sharpton, etc. spinning before my eyes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You know, this is a really neat example of the kind of thing folks who develop new products should look for -- useful precedents and knowledge from a seemingly tangential field.
Of course, the item about slot machine fraud shows that -- no matter how stringent your precautions are -- if the stakes are high enough, people will try to defraud your system. Some will succeed.
The important thing to keep in mind is that this is just as true for our current voting technologies as it will be for electronic voting.
Honestly, I felt pretty bad after reading about that computer programmer who had two daughters and stole $50,000 dollars. Yes, it seems crazy, but the guy admitted to everything and he had never been convicted of anything, and then all of a sudden he's in jail for at least 28 months. Poor guy, and his daughters -- I'm sure they were quite shocked.
Sometimes, I think justice in the US may be too harsh. It's a bit out of place when you repent, and obviously don't have a record to show you'll continue with crime, but are still left to rot in a prison where raw grunts rape people. Oh well.
Well, at least he made the casino industry quite rich. They must've been happy.
Gambling... The voting system in the US...
They have a lot in common.
A funny/sad sideline is that in Nevada, every year or two a programmer or engineer goes to jail for exploiting slot machines
Engineers tend not to be highly political, but they certainly are greedy. I think the likelyhood of engineers trying to exploit voting machines is a lot lower than engineers trying to exploit what are essentially money-dispensing machines.
It is true that engineers can be used as tools by those who are more interested in rigging elections, but that's also true with slot-machines. The engineer greed factor is still missing.
How about state lottery systems and machines? Almost nationwide, these outfits are audited & controlled to a degree which shows where our real priorities are.
Let's just hope that gambling addicts don't sit at the booths pulling the lever for 24 hours straight...Bush could win again!
While it's worth noting because it shows the potential to cheat even in a closely watched industry (which the voting machine racket clearly isn't), one should note that programmer or engineer (who) goes to jail for exploiting slot machines is trying to cheat the casino. When the casino uses the software to cheat the player ist's a completely different issue.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
From the article:
That study also found the system had a "high risk of compromise."
The state [Maryland] decided to buy the system anyway and Diebold is working on fixes for the security problems identified in that report.
Yea! Way to go Maryland! You know, if I went to buy a new car, and the windshield was broken, the locks didn't work, the engine was hanging by two mounts, and it stalled every 100 miles, I don't think I'd say "oh what the heck" and buy it just because it looked real snazzy and drive it around while the company worked on the problems after the fact.
How idiotically negligent do you have to be to look at a MACHINE THAT WILL HELP IN THE PROCESS OF DECIDING OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT POSITIONS and say "well, it's broken, but we'll buy it anyway"!? People like this need to be jailed immediately. That's absolutely innexcusable.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Then, we'd only be paying off one set of crooks.
Consider this:Silicon Crackers Tackle Casinos or Revenge On the One-Armed Bandit The fact is, in nevada there is a cottage criminal industry which revolves around ripping off slot machines. These are just individuals. Imagine if they were an organization with the resources of a modern political party trying to game the system. Now imagine if the people making the slot machines were contributing to and had a vested interest in that organization.
C:\>tracert life.liberty.pursuit-of-happiness
Unable to resolve life.liberty.pursuit-of-happiness
No wonder with Larry, Moe, and Currly running for office next year...
Why worry? Each of us is wearing an unlicensed "nucular" accelerator on his back.
Sig changed for readability by G.W.
How about bribes? That certainly involves the greed factor!
I work as a programmer in the gaming industry, and there is a lot of security in place, but it all makes since. Before I can work, I need to get a state "gaming card" which says that I've had my background check, and I'm generally not a menice to society. The machines have security in place to know if something is wrong (eprom signatures, various locks). Everything we develop also goes through two or three other independent verification agencies make sure it's all legit.
We're proud of making a secure device (at least as secure as we can make it), and it's in ours and our customer's interest to do so. Most of the security built in isn't necessarily hard to do, but it does take planning, foresight, and desire to integrate it all with the final product.
I hope that a voting machine company can say the same.
The poster notes:
The Nevada Gaming Control Board audits everything about them, both physical and soft, for unintentional and intentional security holes.
And further:
A funny/sad sideline is that in Nevada, every year or two a programmer or engineer goes to jail for exploiting slot machines."
The sideline article notes that convicted slot-hacker Ron Harris was a gaming board official for several years, and that he provided "more than nine hours of videotaped statements concerning questionable activities in the control board and the gaming industry."
Maybe Harris is covering his tracks by spreading dirt. Then again, maybe the Gaming Control Board is dirty. In any case, comparing voting with gambling makes me fear for my country.
-kgj
-kgj
This is a solution from Bartcop.com, and it's both clever and simple. Absentee ballots ARE a paper trail. So if you're worried that voting machines aren't going to count your vote, and won't leave a paper trail which would let election officials catch them at it, vote via absentee ballot and leave your OWN paper trail.
I think the big difference is timing. If the state finds a problem with a type of slot machine then it doesn't go into service. The only person hurt is the machine's developer. If, on the other hand, there's a problem with a type of voting machine then what do you do? You can't just put off an election. The timing of those is usually mandated by law.
Sign the online petition to support HR 2239.
A voter-verified paper trail is the only way to verify that the system is working. Under this system, the machine would produce a paper ballot, which the voter checks then deposits into a locked box. The paper receipts are counted in the event of a recount (unlike our current requirements, where totals from an end-of-night printout can be used, assuming the machines total the votes accurately). The bill also requires a recount in 0.5% of districts chosen at random to verify that the machines are totalling accurately.
Keep the freedom to vote.
Slot machine integrity is not verified solely by government oversight. Individual members of the community also make an invaluable contribution. People like William Bennett, who selflessly use their own funds to check, recheck and check yet again the accuracy of these machines' odds. Here is someone who has a real passion for testing these machines, who has the guts to trust his own resources to the integrity of the system, who is willing to invest the time it takes to make huge random samples, and who has the clout to make sure that any irregularities would be duly addressed.
Without people like this who provide major resources to help the gaming industry and the Nevada economy in general, we would all be worse off. The next time you walk down the Las Vegas strip enjoying the stunning display of neon lights, take a moment to think about the dedicated people that provide the funds to pay for them, and be thankful.
If you look at things statistically, a little money is much more valuable to an individual than his one vote.
Consider first the probability that one vote will actually change the outcome of an election: it's nearly impossible. Odds of 1/10e7 are typical. Mathmatically, a vote is just as bad an investment as a lottery ticket. (Which are, as they say, a "Tax on people who can't do math")
Then consider the real difference choosing a different president or governor will make to your life: not much, really. The two dominant political parties have grown very similar to each other. They'll rarely try to make a significant change (and most changes they attempt will be cancelled out by the other party in the next election). So not only is a vote unlikely to pay off, but that payoff isn't likely to change very much.
Thus, looking at all the possibilities, a rationally self-interested person will not waste his time voting. The hour+ it takes out of your day is actually much more valuable than the tiny chance that the vote you cast actually has a benefit to your life.
This is why explicit selling of votes was criminalized: because if it were legal, the free-market would reveal how cheap each vote really is!
PS. Having computed that voting is a waste of time, why do people still vote? Altruism. They vote not only for themselves, but also to share their wisdom with the rest of the country. And for more selfish reasons- like the feeling of success when your guy wins.
PPS. Several mathmaticians have created alternative voting schemes (different from simple majority) which boost the chance that any single vote will change the outcome of an election. But the public, so far, has rarely been interested.
So government oversight of casino machines is a good thing. Obviously, the solution to our diebold problems is casino oversight of our voting system. You know, ilke some 80-year-old lady can't read the text, so she's escorted to the back room to get some "assistance" by a guy named Tiny... and George Clooney will organize a team of eleven or twelve guys to steal 150,000,000 votes for his father's congress run.
We've already got good voting machines here - they're called Lotto machines. Any wino can walk in with a lotto ticket that he's scribbled on with a piece of road tar, and the machines do a great job of reading the ticket - plus, you get a paper printout for verification - plus, the system knows which ticket went to which store. Audit trails, hardcopy - Hmmm,
But we don't need (or want) all that silly accountability stuff to re-elect Bush do we
Please help, I am sigless - will code for sigs.
I have the perfect solution. To be allowed to vote, enter a quarter and pull the lever, if you get three pictures of George Bushes face in a row then you loose your quarter, if you get any other presidential candidates face in a row you win $10,000 and cast a vote for that candidate at the same time. This is a perfect way to vote and pay of the giant deficit that lunar Bush has created. If your desired candidate's face does not appear 3 times in a row then keep playing. Odds of not getting George Bushes face in a row are 1 in 8,000,000. Good luck and be sure to bring lots of quarters to the next election!
and experience the problem/controversy. You can do a google on this controversy for more info.
My experience went as follows. I stepped in the voting booth. It was a very nice touch screen layout.
1/2 way through making my selections.. Up popped a message that my laptop battery was about to die, and that I'd better plug the machine in, etc. Well, I looked, and it was plugged in.
It turned out that these were not very secure systems at all. The basic platform was Windows on a laptop running non-networked. Storing the data on each machine, to later be combined / counted.
We're a long way from having anything better than punching a card, and eating chads. A hacker could easily do way more damage.
In the above case.... I was at the voting place early. I was #14 in my precinct to vote.
The voting machine scandal should be raised to the level of a public outrage. It's clear that nefarious corporate interests are foisting inadequately engineered products on the state election commisssions, in their usual, cynical, "good enough for government work" way.
In the weeks after the 2000 Presidential election, I wrote a letter to my congresspeople recommending that the system be rendered electronically by individuals who know about safety-critical, high-availability software. Airplane code, gambling-device code, medical-device code, etc.
This is not by any means new technology or new processes. But because the states see a great need, it has become a new scam for brainless, heartless business jerks to exploit.
Write your state and national legislators. Get the laws changed to ensure that the design and implementation of e-democracy includes the same care that is used when re-counting paper ballots.
...they use a security enhancement and validation program which is remarkably unknown to a large part of the computer security community.
It's called "The Soprano Security Management Program", and can be summed up in the following simple decision-diagram:
1) Build a system
2) Make money
3) In case of a situation arises in step 2 which is proving to be detrimental to the main objective of Making Money, two things can be done :
*) Fix bug in system. This is by experience detrimental to the Making Money objective since there will always be bugs, and so this is the wrong decision to make.
*) Find offending individual(s). Apply excessive and lethal violence. Loop to 2.
He got half (7 years) the recommended sentence (14 years, out of a mx of 20) , and will most likely be out on parole in 1/3 the time (approx 2 years).
So lesse, abusing gov't position, and 1/10 the total jail time (2 years out of 20). Sounds about right.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
A funny/sad sideline is that in Nevada, every year or two a programmer or engineer goes to jail for exploiting slot machines.
;)
OTOH, every four years a president gets elected for exploiting voting machines.
Think about electronic breathalizers, for example.
At least for the State of North Carolina, all the elements of an exploit are present:
It would be trivial for an insider to rig the machine such that if the name of the person to be tested matched some internal structure, the readout would always be two tenths below whatever the calibration sample read.
And with that kind of exculpatory evidence on your side, one could drink and drive to one's heart's content and never have to worry about a drunk-driving conviction: just demand a breathalizer test to "prove" your innocence and the case would never make it to court for a closer examination.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
What's to stop the State from taking your received paper ballot, and paying some data entry grunt $5/hour to re-enter your paper ballot as an electronic vote? If the rest of the system is electronic, election officials won't want to have a dual system in place. Perhaps absentee ballots in these new electronic systems will switch to some sort of secure website, telephone voting, etc to even cut out the data entry.
Either way, once part of the system is electronic, the whole process can be questioned.
That guy wasn't just some programmer, he's the same guy who rigged the Keno game out in Atlantic city and got caught.
Keno, as a refresher (and correct me if I'm wrong) is similar to the lottery, except that you have to choose eleven numbers, and in order to be a big winner, your numbers must match the ordering of the pulled numbers.
In fact, it is so unlikely that anyone would match all 11 numbers in order that no one has done it in the history of the game. (Except this guy, who rigged the game).
*ANY* other person who has the same amount of greed and exploits his position to gain his means deserves the same punishment.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
In my experiences with all things electronic, there is a certain amount of error that you just come to expect. Being forced to use a Windows system, I have encountered, on many occasions, all my data simply giving up and failing to exist any longer. In the last election where Florida had to recount their votes, they at least HAD something to recount. What are you going to tell the people of Nevada if the system crashes and their votes are lost? "Sorry, if you voted, we need you to come back?" Personally, I would be more than a little annoyed. Furthermore, no system is fool-proof entirely. Since the computer programmers who set up the system will more than likely know how to manipulate the system, any corrupt government official will try to buy his (or her) votes. The programmers will have all the power, and what was that saying... oh, yes... "Absolute power corrupts absolutely."
...they're pretty much both designed so that you lose no matter what.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
"Every year or two a programmer or engineer goes to jail for exploiting slot machines."
It says a lot about wages for programmers.
I am not familiar with the gambling business, but I know it wouldn't be that hard to alter the slot machine payout ratio from a programming perspective. ~1 line of code, in fact.
I worked in a casino management company in South Dakota, so this experience applies there:
It would be very hard to cheat like that for very long. The programs for the slot machines are on a single PROM, and that PROM is registered with the Gaming Commission after exhaustive testing.
The PROM is installed in the gaming device, and the device cannot be powered up during business hours unless the gaming commission has checked the PROM, watched you put it into the machine, and then sealed it into place with tamper-proof tape that only the Gaming Commission has access to. (They have a little box that they plug the PROM into which tells them if the chip is acceptable or not.)
Furthermore, the Gaming Commission can come by your casino, any time they want, with no prior notice, and have you open the machines to ensure that the tape is still in place, or to pull the chips for testing.
I was paid to watch the per centages paid ouit by the slots and the tables to make sure they were within acceptable range. At one Tribal Gaming establishment that we ran, the machines had a lot of play (1,000+ games per day) and tehy _always_ paid out what they were supposed to. If they deviated, we checked them for mechanical malfunction, and then we looked at staff and guests to see if someone had a new scam going. (The easiest is to request a fill on the coin bucket, and then hand the money to your friend instead of putting it into the machine. But that was very easy to catch, too. And look out at the Tribal Gaming establishments: >$100 is a federal offense, so we called the FBI to take care of any shmucks stealing from the tribe.)
So, if your gaming establishment is having a bad month, tweaking the payout won't help much: Every game was random, and just as likely to pay the jackpot as the previous game.
If, on the other hand, there's a problem with a type of voting machine then what do you do? You can't just put off an election. The timing of those is usually mandated by law.
This is to me the scary side of the recent voting shennanigans.
First, implement flawed voting scheme, but do it slowly so as to keep it under the radar. Once enough people accept it, use it for the next BIG election. A short while later (ie: while still in office), notify the public that the vote didn't work, and the system is broken. Of course, it will take months at the very least to figure out what went wrong, some more months to implement a new voting scheme, etc, etc. Sorry, the election can't be counted, and we'll have to keep the current administration around until things get sorted out.
Does the US constitution or law have anything that deals with a situation like this? Sounds like a good way to stay in power a lot longer than you normally would otherwise.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Ahhh! Sorry about the broken links. Try these functional ones.
The first one again
and the follow up
Thomas
Here's something I was just wondering when I took cash out: Why can Diebold manufacture reliable cash machines that create a verifiable paper trails, but can't make voting machines to do the same? The machine gives me a receipt, and even when I ask it not to give me one, I can hear it printing something inside, related to the transaction.
You should see this one from a mile away.
Life's a beach and then you die.
So, where are the open source voting projects?
:[ ). Rather than spend $6 million tax dollars on voting machines, the state could use free software on machines donated or on-loan from local white-box PC makers or big-name vendors who get to advertize: e.g., "Welcome to the 2004 State-wide elections. Powered by ViewSonic, the clear choice."
Voting is not that hard. A few developers could probably build software that would be useful for 80% of the voting use cases world-wide. And, it would likely be more secure and run on a range of inexpensive hardware.
Such an open source project would be a real social good, a work-around for a part of the software industry that is pretty clearly failing to represent the public interest, and a good demonstration that development of critical systems should happen more in the open.
It would also save money for debt-ridden state and local governments (thanks again, Bush