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E-Voting Firm VoteHere Discloses October Break-In
linuxwrangler writes "In the ongoing saga of electronic voting 'security,' eVoting company VoteHere is the latest to reveal that they were the victim of a computer break-in. According to VoteHere founder, Jim Adler, the concern isn't about their source code which they plan to reveal 'eventually,' anyway, but is about the possible release of salary and other HR data. Astoundingly, the 'hot poll' associated with this story has (as this is being posted) 28% of respondents saying they would trust their vote on the internet and 41% saying 'not now, but maybe soon.' Feel free to cast your vote." Reader nSignIfikaNt points to the Assocated Press' article as carried by CNN.
Problems with voting are clear and simple proof that fascist dictatorships are the only way to go.
E-Communism and E-Oppression would be far more successful, no doubt.
CC Licensed Serialized Story and Podcast: Ingenioustries
Neato! I caught this story right when it went on slashdot's main page, 0/3 comments and got the vote tally, we can safely say that this is pre /. effect. Now, I think I know which way most slashdoteers are going to vote, and we've already seen vote skewing here when a sig told people to vote no on Verisign all through September and October (it got around 5000 votes at the end of the month as I recall), let's see how slashdot affects a slightly larger traffic/voting site:
/. effect:
So here are the current vote totals, pre
24692 Responces
27% Yes
41% Not today, but maybe soon
29% Never (Likely to spike? Let's see!)
2% None of the above
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
Why should we trust their voting systems without auditing?
Why don't we make a very small linux distro that works with small puters with touchscreens and make a secure voting system.
Just to bite our thumb at them.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
can you really trust voting results/percentages of an e-voting firm that was hacked?
I'm not trying to troll here...but hear me out: People simply don't trust electronic voting...as a geek this makes me very sad, because voting is something that could and should be more automated.
Now, ask yourself, why is it that people don't trust comptuers?
Answer: Microsoft's abhorent trackrecord with regard to security has an awful lot to do with it. It's not the only factor, but it is *huge*.
All these windows bugs do effect us linux geeks: The perception of computers in general has suffered greatly.
--
Join Jihad against slashdot's editors. Join anti-slash
The linux hacker
So what, your telling to vote on the internet to tell them that I dont want to vote on the internet? Quite astounding indeed...
Speaking at Defcon 12 - Credit Card Networks Revisted: Pen
Let's ignore hacking and break-ins. Those are too easy. Vendor bugs are bad enough. There have been bugs that cause automatic medicine dosers in hospitals to give out too much medice and almost (or completely) kill a paitent. I'll go vote for candidate Ham Sandwich, but how do I know some bug won't cause every vote for his oppoent, Mr. Mayor, to be counted 100 times? These things just seem to happen more and more.
So what WILL have me trust it? Let's set it up like a slot machine is set up. It has it's software burned into some ROM. It should be thouroughly tested by independant labs, the code should be available for me to look at, and I should be able to read the ROM chip after the elections are done so I know that it's got what it's supposed to on it (not that many people would do this, but it should be an option). When I'm done voting, it should print out a paper punch ballot that I can look at to see that it voted the way I told it to. The voting commisions can use the electronic results, but a random 5% of all districts every election should check the electronic counts against the paper ballots to make sure nothing weird is going on there. And most importantly of all (and like a slot machine), YOU SHOULDN'T BE ABLE TO CHEAT. Shock it with 10,000,000 volts to make sure it doesn't mess up and let me vote twice. Punch it and kick it and do anything possible (and then some) to make sure it still functions correctly, just like a slot machine. Slot machines go through all that because they might be responsible for millions of dollars. My vote should be worth more than that, and there for should have TOUGHER standards behind it.
In short, I don't trust e-voting. The only way I'd LIKE to see e-voting is that you choose your candidates on the computer, then it prints out a punched ballot (with names and all, so I can see it did things right) that I turn in, and THAT'S my ballot; the machine is nothing more than a ballot punching tool and holds no results of it's own. I should be able to do it all by hand if I want. This is the only way I'd like to see e-voting, and the description above is the only way that I'll accept it.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Someone probably rooted their linux mail server with a cracked account, and took the code for their app in the process.
Anyone want to bet they are in violation of the GPL, and we might just see the code itself under posted to the net any day now?
-- lk t lv ll th vwls t f wrds. T svs lts f tm t wrt bt ts pn n th ss t rd nd mks m lk lk cmplt dpsht.
Internet voting is a very bad idea.
People have died (are dying) for this right.
To have it taken away by a successful technocrat is unacceptable.
Real paper ballots that need to be counted and can be stored
(and found in some deceitful persons trunk)
are much better than the arguments that will emerge after every single election
when even a hint of hacking (cracking) has appeared.
The poll has apparently been closed already. Not sure what to make of that, but perhaps yet another political slant. At least CNN isn't as imbalanced as Faux News.
Anyway, on the substantive issue of reliable voting, computer security is NOT a done deal. This networking stuff is great in many ways, but there's a big problem when everything is connected together. You hack into one part of the system, and you've exposed various other parts to attack. The old idea was to make a secure perimeter with firewalls and DMZs and so forth, and you could keep something safe inside, but that's called the "eggshell model" now--turns out to be relatively easy to breech and you still need strong security for EVERY machine with ANY sensitive information on it. Someone in the office took his notebook computer home for the weekend, and you can never tell what Trojan backdoor is inside your network now.
Of course, the BIG threat here is abuse of power. No one needs to be protected from weakness, but powerful people often want MORE. Not an independent event--that greed is usually part of how they got there in the first place. Consider the recent example of Arnold in California and the selection in Florida in 2000...
If our votes are to have ANY meaning, they must be protected, and it is very clear that some people will play ANY game that will win more power. Voting machines as secret slot machines? Would you trust Las Vegas THAT much?
Simple. Print the ballots. Let the voters LOOK at what the ballot says, and save it. It's convenient that the machine can also report the results quickly--but NOT convenient that any computer can be hacked.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
the concern ... is about the possible release of salary and other HR data.
Mobilize the national defence! The management salary figures have been compromised!
What, vote tampering? So?
What is Timothy thinking with linking 2 article to a common slahdot story?
How can the other editors post a dupe?
What has happened to slashdot!
Where will the dupes we all depend on come from now?
For those who aren't familiar with the Anti-Slash mandate, here's the extract from their FAQ:
When Natalie Portman of the hot grits party is elected.
"I have no problem debating the merits of electronic voting with anyone, but breaking and entering is not an appropriate forum for technology debate," Adler said.
They're trying to paint the opponents of black box voting as electronic terrorists. Transparent to us, but it'll work on the sheeple.
~~~
The EFF is organizing a petition to encourage IEEE to set trustworthy standards for electronic voting. Read about it and join the petition here:
http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/IEEE/
"EFF supports the IEEE in taking on the issue of setting standards for electronic voting machines. We also support the idea of modernizing our election processes using digital technology, as long as we maintain, or better yet, increase the trustworthiness of the election processes along the way. But this standard does not do this, and it must be reworked."
Slashdot Moderation: From positive to terrible in 2 "insightful" posts.
I questioned whether it was Alanis Morrisette-like irony or real irony that a company charged with securing internet voting had their servers hacked and also alluded to the possibility that the 2004 presidential election will make us all remiss for the stability of the 2000 elections.
It was actually one of my better submissions. It was funny and yet pithy. It had pith. Real pith.
...
But this submission is ok, I guess...
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
From the little I hear about US elections (and let's face it that's gonna be all the cock-ups & bad press) I wasn't aware that people a) voted much, or b) had much faith that the votes were fairly counted and apportioned anyway...
Then again, perhaps I need to find an alternative to Michael Moore as my sole window into US POlitics.
"It is the prerogative of fools (or noobs) to utter truths that no one else will speak."
Why the love affair with "technology assisted" voting? What is wrong with the good old paper "secret ballot" that is counted by hand. Canada can do it. Australia can do it (and actually invented the "secret ballot").
No chance of dodgy software. No hanging chads. Automatic audit trail. Either number the candidates in your order of preference (automatic runoff style / preferential) or simple tick the person you prefer (or hate the least).
Securing HR data and salaries is basic, basic stuff. I would have some sympathy if Joe Schmoes Pizza barn had there salary and HR data compromised, after all they make pizzas, IT is way down the line for these people.
But lets face it, if you want to manufacture eVoting technology then securing the network is a crucuial part of that technology.
If THEY can't secure there own HR and payroll data then how am I supposed to trust them to handle evoting competently?
If Bush is reelected next year with this technology, he'll be happy to announce that he won with 194% of the votes.
Aren't many of the companies in the e-voting business heavily funded and/or backed by Republican interests?
Republicans in the U.S. will basically do anything to preserve power. Let's not forget that Katherine Harris, the Florida Secretary of State charged with making sure the Florida election process was fair was the Florida co-Chairperson of the Bush Electtion team.
She swears she put the interests of the voters ahead of Bush's. She is now a congressperson contemplating running for Senator (thanks Jeb!)
Also, a cousin of Bush's, working at Fox News and head of the projection team charged with calling the states callled George Bush Jr. 5 times the evening of the election.
He swears he didn't give Bush any information. That wouldn't have been "Fair and Balanced", would it?
<hides from Fox legal>
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
...they'll ask:
"Hey, did you vote for Arnold this time?"
"Yeah, man. Six times!"
The only valid reason I've heard of for e-voting is to purely speed up the counting of the votes, so that the result of the election can be known much quicker than via hand counting.
Commonly people seem to assume that this means replacing paper votes, or rather, more specifically, replacing an auditable paper trail.
So we have a additional-efficiency model verses a replacement model.
For some reason, the model that has been adopted (and maybe encouraged by the "US" governement aka GWB) by these E-voting companies is the replacement one. Who knows why, although the conspiracy theorists would suggest Florida 200(? - I'm Australian, don't know exactly when the last US election was).
Of course, as all slashdotters know, under the replacement, electronic only model, security and accountability are a lot harder to do. All these e-voting security stories, such as this one, are evidence of that.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
The future of E-Voting to be decided by an E-Vote.
About fifteen years ago, when last I checked, there were many dead people voting in Philadelphia - however, it was found that roughly as many dead people voted Democrat as Republican, so neither party bothered to invalidate the vote.
It is also only within the last few decades that states have inacted laws to keep campaigners away from voting booths where they could "help" people choose whom to vote for.
Voting in the United States has long been wrought with fraud and inaccuracies, and as long as that fraud is equal on both sides, the system has worked.
Now, if there were more than two viable parties, then it might be a problem. But since there aren't, I will consider my vote as secure electronically as it is non-electronically.
Isn't it painfully obvious that any for profit company will be wide open to corruption when stakes this high are involved? Even in the absense of corruption the drive to keep costs down and profits up means tons of security gliches like this. After all, all too often by the time $hit hits the fan the boys in charge have already deployed their golden parachutes.
Why does everyone assume a private business has to or should be involved anyways? I'm not saying kicking private interests out would solve all the problems, but it would certainly help.
That said, until people stop voting based on what TV tells them to this is all moot. I know ardent supporters of George Bush who depend on government programs he's actively trying to eliminate. People don't vote rationally, and I don't see any reason why they're going to start.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
is there any? e-voting aside, it'd be nice to know how it was done for the rest of us interested in securing our networks.
The real problem with internet voting is not that people could hack it. That is an important concern (more that someone could hack voters' PCs, rather than the vote talliers), but it is not the most important. Vendor hacks/bugs could be circumvented by open source. Supervision wouldn't be much harder than it is with current voting systems.
There are a couple more important concerns. One is social engineering... most people have no intuition for computers, and this opens up an avenue of attack much worse than the whole Florida butterfly ballot scandal. Second, the possibilities of coercion, blackmail, bribery etc go WAY up if you can watch someone, or grab server logs, or use a remote desktop, or the like.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Brought to you by the makers of WEP and WPA...
I, for one, welcome our new President, Kevin Mitnick.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Now, what many of you might not know is that the VoteHere source code has been used in entrapment attempts. Specifically, with me, and I documented the entrapment effort at the time. Pure retaliatory crap designed to find a way to get activists to shut up.
Next, it is not surprising they will try to link it to the Diebold files. But that's bullshit, too, and here's why:
The FTP site wasn't hacked, it was sitting there. Look in any user manual and you'll see the address.
The memos weren't hacked either, they were obtained with an employee ID number.
Now, are you ready for this? I've had dealings with both the Diebold memo leaker and this supposed "VoteHere" hacker. The second person is NOT the same as the first, and I find it extremely interesting that VoteHere is trying to claim it's the same person. I am dead-certain it's not.
This "VoteHere" hacker tried to dump the VoteHere source code on me; it was simply dumb; first of all, VoteHere was supposed to be going public with its source code, so who in their right mind would want to steal it. I certainly didn't want to touch it.
Then this "VoteHere" hacker agreed to a telephone interview with me. He made some claims about who he was, but was unaware that I had additional information from inside sources that would allow me to test the veracity of his claims. The first question I asked was a test question; he put me on "hold" and then came back and offered a lame-ass guess which immediately caused him to fail the ID contest.
I believe this is going to turn into an entrapment scheme. Some activist somewhere is going to get nailed, probably that's already in the works. That's because they were running around offering this honey pot and, unfortunately, some naive activist probably bit on it.
By the way, I asked the supposed "hacker" point blank how hard it was to hack into a company that specializes in encryption. Every time I asked a tough question, he had to put me on hold and go ask someone what to say. His answer was totally unconvincing.
The voice on the phone was quite distinctive, and matches another voice I've heard on the phone. I will be only too delighted to share what I know with the authorities. Just hope I get an honest cop.
The timing on this is very interesting. The chairman of VoteHere, Ralph Munro, is former Washington State Secretary of State and a few things are starting to pop in relation to the use of unauthorized voting software under his watch, and an ethics complaint that's being filed, or has been filed.
I'll be on the Mike Webb Show at 11 p.m. tonight (Pacific time) and will discuss this at more length.
Bev Harris
Black Box Voting
So, in this case, if for some (non-apparent, to me, at least) reason we really, really need paperless voting, the proper framework would look (as an extremely naive first pass) like this -
Potential vendors are made aware that some unknown number of elections, districts, machines, and people would be audited via unknown means.
Potential vendors would be forced to put up a large bond that would be forfeit if a flaw was found that compromised the voting record. (Yes, I mean the whole record - these are infallible counting machines, right? Operator error would be a contractual issue to hash out.)
Any dispute between government purchasers and vendors would be decided via arbitration in full and complete view of the public which is employing the machines, no exceptions.
Anyone who wished to vend would be welcome to.
I will bet you there will be takers. I know I'd be excited to at least have a shot at this.
I forget what 8 was for.
If you think internet voting is unreliable, you really shouldn't trust internet polling. There is no authentication to make sure the poll isn't being spoofed.
Some years ago the provincial government here in Ontario decided to force the six municipalities that made up Metropolitan Toronto to amalgamate. The municipalities decided to hold a referendum. An widely publicized internet poll was conducted predicting that the public would vote strongly in favour of amalgamation. When the referendum was held, the public voted 4 to 1 against amalgamation.
I can't remember exactly how wildly off the poll favoured amalgamation. I think it was something like 2:1. So, the poll was off by a factor of 8. Wildly off.
Voting is one thing that should not be automated. Sometimes simpler (and manual) is better.
The cake is a pie
Because someone who can't read or doesn't have arms will sue them under the national disability law. Now you can sue anyone for almost anything and win.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Is that it was a secure Linux network guarding an internal Windows network. So much for that always-secure bullshit posturing Slashbots love to put up all the time (never mind the breaches of Debian, GNOME, Gentoo, and the two break-ins at GNU/FSF...go ahead, biased mods, mod me down for stating simple facts).
Bev Harris is one of the leading activists on this issue, and has written extensively on it in various forums. I don't think she's technically that strong, and I was quite surprised to see her name here on SlashDot, but she knows a lot on this issue. Didn't know to include a link to her well-known Web site. I think this is the correct URL: http://www.blackboxvoting.com/
Someone should mod her comments up even higher.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
GNAA is dying. No big loss there.
Honestly, as much as I'm concerned by this and "e-voting" in general, I'm really glad that they're willing to say that they were broken into. Furthermore, it's good that they were planning on disclosing the source code, even if they never really put forth a definite date.
E-voting has a lot of problems and the way it's being executed has just as many, but this is definitely a step in the right direction when compared to the problems of Diebold.
Where the internet would be useful is in making registration and obtaining absentee ballets easier. I work a lot of hours, as do most of us, and find registration a pain. It's rediculous to have to register months before an election. I was buried in work and found out late at night it was the last day to register for the last Presidential election. If we could register on-line and obtain ballets it would definately make things more accessable. Verifying identification is an issue but most aren't checked for ID as it is and none of those are verified. As far as electronic voting, I'm against National ID cards but most of us have drivers licenses with magnetic strips. An ATM system that uses those as verification could improve security. The system would only use the drivers license to access an electronic form. It would record that the individual voted but not which form was used. Any system can be hacked. The only way to largely avoid that is to network the voting machines at each location by firewire. An electronic count could be sent but would have to be verified by a verbal number given over the phone by some one at the polling location. A print out of totals could act as a third verification. It doesn't prevent tampering before the fact though. One possible way to avoid pretampering would be to have name order assigned on the day with more than one person required as in nuclear sites. Any pretampering would not know which name was being represented by any given code number. No system is foolproof but there is a fair amount of tampering already. Can you say Florida?
So a company that can't secure its own corporate network is charged with creating a secure means of people to vote in elections?
Next thing you know, they'll get someone like Paula Abdul to be a judge of other people's singing talent.
Oh, wait.
27% Yes
40% Not now, but maybe soon
Fucking idiots. That's about all I can really say in response to this. I'm just too disgusted for words.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
A funny thing here is that you can't anonymously make the Brewsters Millions choice: NONE OF THE ABOVE! For that you have to walk up and publicly say you want to be taken to the vote counter to register your empty vote, you get to see the number of votes cast go up by your one.
You really see you actually voted, in as much as I trust any voting anyway...
'I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds'
Boy, these guys have a lot of nerve. The guy at VoteHere claims that the break in might be politically motivated. ("We feel that it may have been politically motivated,"Adler said.) But when asked to elaborate, he defers and says he doesn't want to politicize the situation. ( "I don't want to necessarily politicize this," he said. "This is just a crime.")
Waaa??
So he impugns activists pointing out flaws in his system, then claims to be taking the moral high ground. And the cowardly reporters don't even question him about this blatant double-talk. Shame on VoteHere. Shame on MSNBC. Shame all around. When people lie, they need to be called to the mat for it.
As somebody that worked as an Inspector for my area (that is, the person present and in-charge of a voting site) back in 2002, let me tell you: if more people volunteered and got to see what a chaotic mess ballot-handling is *now* most of them would be all for computers.
The Inspector position requires a grand total of *two hours* of training, during which we sit watching a few lectures and quick run-throughs. That includes everything from what time you show up, how to set up booths, all the way down to tallying votes after the poll closes and where to bring the materials afterwards. Officials working with an Inspector can show up for training but don't have to. This means that at any one polling place, you might have *one* person that *might* know WTF is going on and *might* be there.
My location alone had problems with volunteers not paying attention, marking things wrong -- we at one point were HUNDREDS of votes off in the tally because of one person screwing around -- misplacing things...people showing up and trying (almost successfully) to intimidate pollworkers into letting them vote twice or without an ID...there's no doubt in my mind that half my team could have easily been bribed for very little money, as they were only there to supplement their income.
Overall, the day was a real eye-opener for me. The assumption that having it all done by hand means it's being controlled by professionals, or that public "paid volunteers" are automatically going to be more trustworthy than a trained force is from what I saw simply inaccurate...anybody certain that it's a great setup needs to spend a day volunteering as Inspector to find out what things are *really* like before assuming computers are inherently less reliable, believe me!
there's democracy in action!
REPORT ALL OBSCENE MESSAGES TO YOUR POTSMASTER
Bev, you might want to consider changing the "Big Story of Today" section of your website to include a reference to this story.
When Diebold got their source stolen, it was a big deal. Why? Because it's shitty software whose correct operation is impossibly to verify. VoteHere, on the other hand, isn't worried about the leak of their source code, because even if someone found an exploit in it, everyone would know right away, because their system is designed to expose fraud, rather than conceal it.
Of course, security problems at electronic voting companies are always an ominous sign, but at least VoteHere had the forethought to realize that security is bound to be breached somewhere in the chain from development to election, and designed a system that's armored against it.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
neato post, i guess.
we get that you have secret special info and that you will be presenting said info on secret special info talk show, however, would you mind too terribly much detailing the same here?
this entire blathering post smells like that guy on the bus who is kind enough to explain how stephen king murdered john lennon.
"Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts." - Henry A
I have to take issue with the claim that voting should be difficult and difficult to count quickly. The objective of voting security is to prevent fraudulent voting, not to slow down the process. If we wanted, we could mandate that all votes must be impressed on wet clay with a wedge, baked in a kiln and allowed to cool before being turned over to the polling booth. This would slow things down but do nothing to increase security. Speed is irrelevant; what's needed is 3 elements: privacy, transparancy, and verifiability. Privacy means that each individual vote takes place without being observed by anyone else. Transparency means that everybody gets to see the votes being counted, if they want. Verifiability means that each individual voter can verify that his/her vote was recorded correctly, and also that the count happened correctly (i.e all valid votes were counted and all invalid votes were not). If all these criteria are met, there's no reason not to vote electronically.
63% of Slashdotters chuckled at the Article without even reading it while 12% of Slashdotters (hardcore geeks) called it a travesty of justice and vowed to take MS' offer of tracking hackers for fun and profit. 10% of Slashdotters (black hatters) were searching for new exploits and the methods the original black hatters used while 8% of Slashdot trollers posted Goatsecx, Nigga, FP's, and similar posts. 5% of anonymous posters were part of the previous 2% of Slashdotters. And finally 2% of Slashdotters didn't give two rats asses
MoFscker
Some years ago the provincial government here in Ontario decided to force the six municipalities that made up Metropolitan Toronto to amalgamate. The municipalities decided to hold a referendum. An widely publicized internet poll was conducted predicting that the public would vote strongly in favour of amalgamation. When the referendum was held, the public voted 4 to 1 against amalgamation.
I can't remember exactly how wildly off the poll favoured amalgamation. I think it was something like 2:1. So, the poll was off by a factor of 8. Wildly off.
Where does the factor of eight come from? If the online poll was 2:1 for and the referendum was 4:1 against, then the actual numbers were:
Online: 2/3 for, 1/3 against
Referendum: 1/5 for, 4/5 against
If we assume the online poll attempted to accurately predict the outcome of the referendum, then the number of votes for was off by a factor of 10/3 = 3.3 and the number of votes against was off by a factor of 12/5 = 2.4. Multiplying these numbers gives a factor of eight, but since the two factors are not independent that makes no sense.
Such disrepancies show that either the online poll sample size was woefully inadequate (by an order of magnitude) or somebody stuffed the poll.
Oh the poll is there, but... oh this is great... it doesn't appear in some browsers. I went there with Opera 7.0 and got almost plain text. On a hunch though I told Opera to identify as MSIE 6.0 and *Wow* what a difference.
Graphics, ads, and a poll. Amazing! That means the site has been deliberately designed to look bad in Opera. Possibly others too.
Heh!
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I also believe that E-voting is not ready for the mainstream. However, I was wondering does anyone know for certain the environment they were using. I doubt it was MS because if that was the case, then it would be mentioned in the articles. However, the OS is not mentioned in any of the articles regarding this.
and do something about it. Are there any open-source voting initiatives out there that are getting critical mass? A quick search on SourceForge and Google didn't turn up anything that's far along - do /. readers know of anything that I overlooked?
Dead people vote overwhelmingly Democrat now.
Motor-voter registration (renewing your driver's license automatically registers you to vote) came into effect nation-wide years ago. And in many states, all you have to do, if you find that it's election day and you haven't registered, is show up at the polling place with ID and sign an affirmation that you are a legal voter in that election district.
How much easier does it need to get?
Sean
It's what they left behind that matters.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.vote here.net
The site www.votehere.net is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4/Windows 98
Many of the posters are making the same mistake. They are accepting the false notion that electronic voting systems solves more problems than they creates. In the 2000 US Presidential election I actually used a touch screen. I liked it, I thought it was cool. A bunch of names appeared with boxes, I touched one box, all the others disappeared, I thought good feedback and pressed the next button. I left my polling place on a nerd high. In the following days my opinion completely changed. What if my county had some problem and a recount was necessary. Bits are too easy to manipulate on a large scale. What if a hard drive picked a bad time to die? A personal phobia, I had one die an hour before an important demo. The more I thought about it the more I liked my counties old voting system. They hand you a piece of paper and a pen. You fill in boxes. You return the paper and pen and watch the person drop the paper into a locked box. The papers are removed in a secure environment and fed into a machine for electronic counting. If something goes wrong the papers are also human readable. Electronic counting, yes. Electronic voting, no. It doesn't really solve the problem, it creates too many new ones.
Web voting is a bad idea because now we have even more opportunity for wrong doing since the voting is not taking place in a secure environment. Who is standing behind that voter watching the vote?
Well without getting into it to deeply, my problem with voting at least in the san fran metro area is that some idiot decided to place ALL the fucking voting places in the god damn bario, gheto, and tenderloid, and they make it a royal pain in the ass to get to the poll place! (FYI the tender loin is a netoriously dangerous district of san fran). They also have some developmentally retarted people working for them, registering to vote at least in them parts is somehow an excuse to get spammed by the jeduciary deparrtment from every tom dick and hary lawyer out to make a buck. In the US in general it's an enormous hastle to vote or not: Lets see first I have to reg then find the pole then go to the pole, gime a break! Not to speek of some of the inane things put onto a ballet (For example: In s.San Fran they held a generall vote to vote if they need stop signs on certain corners).WTF is up with that shit? NO!
Fuck voting in person I'll take a fucking evote any motherfucking day of the god damn week
While being able to examine the source code is better than not being able to see it, I believe it was Ken Thompson at Bell Labs back in the late 1970s who proved that you couldn't trust anything you didn't write--not even the compilier.
Open source would allow us to find the most obvious nefarious schemes, but we still wouldn't be totally safe, unless we were the one to build the system from the ground up, including writing the original compilier in machine code to ensure that any compiler that we were to use didn't modify our code.
Basically, anytime any other human is involved, we can't trust it completely.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...
Christ, no wonder, they were using IIS! I mean, damn! That's almost as bad as using RedHat or something else insanely insecure, by default.
I use Windows where appropriate and/or support it for my clients. Same with Linux (which I usually tend to upgrade to a more secure solution).
Why don't they clue in, do the research and finally stumble accross the solution... Look here team, we found this site and this is the ultimate solution! It's called OpenBSD!
www.openbsd.org
Comes stock without bloat and a lot less 'hype'.
Overly Critical Guy is a known troll and this is a troll post. Please mod accordingly.
That poll doesn't seem to have been affected much by the hordes of /.ers voting no:
Would you trust your vote to the Internet? * 27808 responses
Yes.
25%
Not today, but maybe soon.
40%
Never.
32%
None of the above.
3%
There is a rise of 1% for the no's from 6 hours ago
There's nothing wrong with e-voting; I would gladly cast my vote online. Using the normal techniques of secure computing (HTTP-S, encryption, etc) once you get over the issue of being able to identify unique individuals online I see no reason why they can't cast their votes online. There is no reason why it shouldn't be more secure (apart from being cheaper to operate)
And the fact that all companies making those electronic voting machines are active supporters of the Republicans doesn't bother you?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Do you really think that there would be that much difference if the developers were Democrat supporters?
I used to think there was a difference, until I was taught the concept of "Safe Harm" legislation. Here is how it works: I write a bill to increase school funding for poor districts, "Safe Harm". Then I set an overall budget that doesn't increase funding for schools. The "Safe Harm" clause means that current funding can not be reduced for other areas, so since we can't reduce school funding to wealthier schools, the poor schools get the same amount of funding they did before. If I reduce the overall funding level, it means that I actually reduce funding for the poor schools, since I can't reduce the funding to the rich. Ah, but that was the fault of those dirty (fill in the party of your dislike), who reduced the funding I would have given your schools. So sorry. And if you change schools to military bases, you have see the same thing happen for the other side.
And that, my friend, is how you can pretend to support causes, and not actually change a thing. There are a whole lot of loopholes out there that do the same.
In short, no, it doesn't bother me. I don't see that much difference in actual results between both parties (ignoring the rhetoric on both sides). Besides, I'd suspect that there are more Democratic hackers out there willing to counter-balance the influence of the Republican control of the machines.