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Vote Tabulator Security Hole Exposed
Doc Ruby writes "Black Box Voting has exposed a security hole in Diebold machines that tabulate votes collected from electronic voting machines. A code entered into the tabulator's user interface duplicates the "secure" counts into an insecure count which can be changed, and counted instead. The "double books" vulnerability and exploit were reported to the manufacturer over a year ago, and confirmed, while major customers (California and Washington states) were notified shortly thereafter. In spite of some revisions, the latest version of the software remains insecure. Diebold voting machines running GEMS version 1.18.x are vulnerable, running in about three dozen states. Although the software is widely deployed, and scheduled for use in shortly upcoming elections, risk mitigations are available, mostly protocols restricting physical or network access to the machines. Other auditing/accountability measures for ensuring only trusted access to the system are recommended."
For all the banter that goes on here, we all know how this is going to turn out. Everybody bitches and moans about it, and the mainstream press runs toned down stories. In the mean time, people who know what's going on continue to look like crazy conspiracy theorists. End result: The public won't know or won't care until a massive mistake is uncovered after the person enters office and everyone realizes that they've been living under the authority of a false representative. Of course, that's provided said person doesn't pass a law to protect people in his situation once they're discovered.
Heh, why not just use email like the article earlier today?
Boxing Equipment Reviews
Let me know when a candidate named "Diebold Sucks" wins 15% of the popular vote.
...just how many of these "holes" or rather bugs were intended to be features.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Technology is a wonderful thing.
But come on. Are we so ADHD in this country we can't vote on paper and wait for real people to count them? Yes, there will be mistakes... but at least if a recount is needed, there's a paper trail.
If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time (or in this case, an opportunity) to do it over?
Can it be? A free PC!?
It's COUNTING for chrissakes!
What the fuck is the purpose of that link? I clicked on it thinking I was going to see a list of these three dozen states, but instead I find a site that has absolutely nothing to do with three dozen states.
Lemme guess. This is all about how the Republicans are going to steal the election... Again.
Oh Please.
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
That this election is going to be utterly f'n rigged and even more of a controversy than the last one...
I can't believe they're actually trusting some random company with handling and counting votes. What makes this company so secure? I've personally never heard of them, and I'm sure most others haven't either, so why should I trust them?
I don't understand how you can go from traditional voting and in such little time completely switch to electronic methods. Case in point, these exploits that were found. Find one exploit and the whole thing is done for.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
I'm starting to get confused; If you can sue McDonalds for coffee, or just about anyone for not protecting me from myself - why hasn't someone taken Diebold on in court?
Coming up later on News at 11; Diebold machines found to be insecure. This and a shocking expose proving once and for all that water is wet.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
Is anyone else suprised by how bad diebold's coders are? I mean seriously. I know microsoft can't make their products secure, but they have millions of lines of legacy code and compatability issues. This isn't an excuse, but building a secure system from the ground up should be pretty straight forward, honestly.
Security should have been the top priority the whole way through, but apperantly it wasn't. Pretty amazing, IMO.
And wtf, they can't fix a bug in a year? They're not going to have it fixed by Nov? Jesus, what is it with these people.
Also, this is kind of boring. Anyone involved in the RNC convention or the protests around here?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
One of the suggestions for "Diebold" is "Diablo" Accident? I think not...
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
I mean, how hard is it to add, subtract, and print a total? It's isn't rocket science.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
So let me understand. Entirely by accident, if you enter a specific code at the machine, a transparent and highly successful process takes the existing collected data and makes a duplicate of that data which can be altered and fed into the combining and counting process.
Someone must have REALLY misspelled an important constant, no? I mean, what are the odds? When I screw up, the code usually just fails to compile or takes out the vm. Someone needs to find the guy who "accidentally" did that and get him to buy lottery tickets for all of us.
wow.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I say we just have a Slashdot poll to determine who will be president, and with all the people signing up for Slashdot accounts my UID would be considered low. Sounds good to me.
So who is "trusted" enough to administer the system? I assume that this really means "dont let just any old voter near it", but can you trust the sysadmins, the guys who move the machines, the voting site admin people, etc.?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Say it ain't so.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
Vibrator Security Hole Exposed?
yaw, me so sorry!
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/?q=node/view/25' (SQL Injection vulnerability) You'd think that people who knew so much about what's wrong with Diebold security would do their own homework first. Not to let Diebold off the hook but we all have our due diligence to follow. Kudos to putting the pressure on Diebold but let's try to lead by example shall we?
Not defending them, but Diebold makes a LOT of ATM machines..
So many, you have most likely used one, if you use an ATM in the states..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Why is it so hard for these people to implement Write-Once Read-Many? Burn the vote(s) onto optical media and be done with it. When the media fills up, replace it and transport the media (you made three or more copies of the same disk, right?) by different routes accompanied by security officers. Look Ma! No network!
This business of sloshing this incredibly sensitive data around on networks is completely irresponsible.
Doesn't avoid the issue of having a "central tabulator" designed for manipulation, but you can easily design a tabulator (or better, multiple independent tabulators) that you can prove to be free of back doors, given that the source is available.
Who, me? Jaded??!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Public officials: If you are in a county that uses GEMS 1.18.18, GEMS 1.18.19, or GEMS 1.18.23, your secretary or state may not have told you about this. You're the one who'll be blamed if your election is tampered with. Find out for yourself if you have this problem: Black Box Voting will be happy to walk you through a diagnostic procedure over the phone. [Contact information here.]
Public officials: If you have these versions of the software, the votes can be tampered with by this simple procedure. Black box voting will be happy to give you a short course in how to rig your election.
Reminds me of the official corruption in Daily's Chicago - which was the "City that Works" largely because ANYBODY could bribe the officials equally.
By exposing this flaw and showing every election clerk who asks how to cheat, Black Box Voting is insuring that the vulnerable software WILL be used to cheat, and that elections WILL be rigged until the audit trails are installed and used.
I can think of nothing that will create a bigger push for audit trails on electronic voting than showing every election official in the US how to stuff the ballot boxes at this wholesale, vote-tabulation level. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I other news, the novel innovation of marking "X" on a piece of paper found invulnerable against this exploit. Film at 11!
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Sure, it's horrifying to see that someone could cheat, and most likely someone will try, but the polls have both parties monitoring, counting, and watching the process. Announcing the fact that the machines aren't fool proof or perfect is a wonderful thing for the process - aka more eyes will be watching and helping protect our election process.
These problems will be fixed, but there will always be voter fraud (ie dual voting - The paper found that 68 percent of the dual registrations are Democrats, 12 percent are Republicans, and 16 did not claim a party).
Official results of the 2004 presidential election, once all votes have been 'counted' by voting machines:
Since these numbers are within the margins of error, Bush is not going to need the Supreme Court this time.
It sounds like something from a Mastercard joke:
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
I'll probably be modded down for suggesting this, but here goes:
... the DMCA and others. Then, being the moral geeks I'm certain we are, we let everyone know what we did and let them reverse it... won't we.
Let's use this. Let's use this - as a method of civil disobedience. Well, not entirely civil, but certainly disobedience. Let's FORCE this to get noticed. Let's all "Vote RMS" for president, in all of the states that it's an option. One of three things will occur: One, people will realize they need a printed backup for recounts. Two, this becomes big news and the organizations that are supporting Diebold will have major issues. Three, RMS becomes president for a day, and enough other geeks elect themselves to office that they can remove certain inconvenient laws
Well, instead of corporate "donations" and state "recounts", we'll have these insecure voting machines to blame for rigged elections. Great.
USE
OPEN
SOURCE
SOFTWARE
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Check out Diebold's page on their election junk. Check out the part that says:
Every Vote counts.
Click on the Eagle to find out more.
Then laugh.
It's obvious who will win this election. We will have a vote, then the threat level will be raised on November 3 to RED and citing DMCA-like Acts dubya will hold onto presidency for another four more years.
Why can't the Texas village call back it's idiot???
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
By 'mistake' they mean leaving test code in.
Way to freak out and fly off the handle, though.
Yeah, but the /. paranoia generator would try to make the connection that they are in bed with each other.
If you've been following this, and RTFA, you'd know this is an extremely complicated situation, both from a technical standpoint, and a management one. There are hundreds of people at various levels of local government, contractors, Diebold, temporary agencies, printing companies, and other entities that have, as a matter of course, various levels of access to the voting infrastructure, including the GEMS software itself.
That isn't to say that we shouldn't answer these questions - DEMAND answers - and do EXACTLY what we should be doing, which is holding officials responsible for our elections accountable in every way. But must we attribute exclusively conspiratorial ulterior motives to this, straight away? This isn't about Bush or Rove or Cheney or Ashcroft. It's about the integrity of ALL of our elections, under all circumstances. Don't pretend that only one side wants to win.
Back in 2002, Miami-Dade had an election using touch-screen voting. In some circumstances there were more votes than registered voters, and in at least one instance an entire day's votes in one machine were "accidentally" erased. No paper backup means the votes were lost in the ether.
Since each state is responsible for operating the voting process, you'd think that Jeb Bush (the Governor) and former Orlando Mayor and now Secretary of State Glenda Hood would have been outraged. Jeb's reply was "why can't Democrats learn how to vote?". Glenda Hood's response was "that doesn't mean that we need to have a paper trail." She has this big bug up her ass that printed receipts would cause a repeat of the 2000 debacle when in reality the 2000 debacle was 100% caused by the old punch cards being difficult to scan. A paper printout would simply be a way to recount votes that aren't up to speculation by the person doing the recount (i.e. they know exactly which votes are cast.)
P.S. Diebold Sucks!
------
There's a fine line between cuddling and holding someone down so they can't get away.
While a lot of people will say that screaming about insecure voting machines is a bunch of FUD, I think there is a legitimate reason to be far more scared of insecurities in digital voting than in the traditional kind. The nice thing about paper/punchcards/crayon is that the scale of fraud is limited by the physical nature of the medium. It's tough to dispose of a lot of votes without anyone noticing a precinct is missing, and it's difficult to make much of a differece forging individual ballots. The problem with electronic voting is that like every other industry that's gone digital (accounting to spreadsheets for example), the scale and efficiency of mundane tasks is amplified by many orders of magnitude. It's tough to make much of a dent in an election by registering under ten names and voting ten times. It's easy (if you have an exploit) to to click once to change 10,000 votes in a manner that looks utterly plausible. So for all the talk of just giving red meat to the media to have another thing to panic about, I'd say why the heck can't we force Florida to print paper reciepts?
In other news, all public election officials are being rounded up by the Bush campaign and taken to New York for a week.
I asked this before and am going to ask again.
Why do we insist on using voting computers which are reprogrammable. These are all Von Neumann architecture machines. As computer scientists we should be able to find a more appropriate architecture for voting. Something where the code is not alterable, something where the counts are not chanegable.
Think about it. And if you dont understand the question then learn about computing architecture. There are computers other than the multi purpose kind. They tend to be single purpose and far more efficient at their designed jobs.
I wonder what would happen when "U'liq M'Diq" gets half a million votes (Shamelessly stolen from SNL)
got sig?
"He does look a bit Oompa like, even if his Loompa is a bit off-kilter."
Diebold has a huge investment in this and sees dollar signs well into the future if their machines become the standard. Just think about how long the mechanical machines have been around. Diebold wants that kind of longevity for their product.
I am not against a company making money, far from it. However, making your money off the most important process in America cannnot be ethically supported. I left telling the Diebold guy that I enjoyed toying with him. He was left with a chagrinned look on his face, knowing that the road ahead is gonna be tough.
I was not willing to return and pay another entrance fee to bring materials back to prove this guy wrong so do me a favor- if you are planning on going to the MD State Fair, take along some materials to back up your arugment and take some potshots at the Diebold guys.
Venezuela was the victim of one of the bigges frauds in its history, thanks to the electronic voting machines provided by a company called 'Smartmatic'.
1 7. htmt tp://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/8/20 /131240.shtml7 04/158551.htmlv oting-project/Ju ne.2004/0259.html
Americans (and the rest of the world) should learn about what just happened in Venezuela; The real chances to prove than there was a fraud are minimal.
Here are some articles you can red to get more informed about the problem:
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/84715
http://news.phaseiii.org/article3109.html
h
http://www.wjla.com/news/stories/0
http://gnosis.python-hosting.com/
Hopefully things like this will never happen in the US.
Jose Vicente Nunez Zuleta RHCE, SJCD, SJCP
Ok so you present a login where the user enters a voter registration number. You show a list of canidates. You double click. Type "yes" to confirm. Increment a number in the database and set that voters "HasVoted" property to true.
After a 10th grader finishes that project, have a real coder step in for 15 minutes, throw in a little encryption and all you've got to do is run this bad boy on a palm pilot locked in a box and chained to a desk. When the votings done, ship the locked up palm pilot off to some goverment facility where the data will be merged into a master database.
Wheres the challenege? I feel like I could make THE BEST VOTING SYSTEM EVER in one weekend and make it rich off government contracts...
http://brandonbloom.name
several hundred times.
In other countries were the election is likely to be bungled and/or falsified UN observers are often called in to verify the authenticity of the results.
I think concerned citizens should demand the UN make sure that we have fair and free elections.
I suspect that a large part of the problem is that your vote doesn't really count anyway, unless you happen to live in a marginal seat. America is more a two party state than a real democracy.
For that matter, use this email! Early bird gets the worm http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-8f4191c0b8-dd12e91 420-e99ddd1927
Shameless self promotion
With all the security holes exposed in the electronic election gear it should be easy to hack them in such a way that any abuse can be made visible.
Log incidents, put them online and show the world that some very powerful people have a strong interest in these pieces of machinery being insecure to such an extent that the election becomes a joke.
Expose the vulnerabilities and use them to make it impossible to use to the advantage of those who have a strong interest in influencing the outcome of the election.
Why is having a voter-verified ballot so hard? Here is how to do right:
1) Voter selects what to vote for
2) Computer punches holes in a paper ballot, _and_ prints a barcode representing the votes on the ballot.
3) Counting machine reads optically, and checks barcode.
See? It's simple! The person can't walk out with the audit trail; if the ballot isn't presented on the way out, it's not counted. We already have optical reading systems; the barcode removes any reasonable chance of error.
100% accurate, can be checked by hand, can be done [relativly] cheaply, you can fall back on paper if the computers go down. Why aren't we doing this?!?!
Ok, I know the answer, but I don't have to like it.
--
Complete an offer, get a free Orkut invite, Gmail invite, and a copy of The Core Media Player Pro, to boot!
Don't tell anyone we have endemic corruption in the US political system! They might start gettting ideas and, gasp, start voting for other parties, or worse, get off their ass and really try to make some changes.
Shit, I'm an Anarchist, I'm for world revolution and all that, but at this point I'd be pretty fucking content with a government that doesn't put its citizens in what amount to concentration camps for smoking a fucking doobie. I mean come on!
What I really don't get is why so much of the right wing supports all the roll backs in civil liberties. Do you remember the clinton years? Ruby Ridge and other incidents should worry the hell out of you because there will be another Democratic Administration sometime, even if it isn't '04.
A blog about stuff.
I want the info. Who should I contact ? Is this a cash only transaction, or do they trade for presidential pardons too ? I half wish this info was widely leaked,and the election is obviously tampered with. I would like to see them explain away the Fuck Bush / Screw Kerry ticket gathering 193% of the eligible votes.
And Diebold is headquartered in Ohio. I'm not saying it doesn't look and sound bad (and will agree it probably IS bad, and represents at the very least a conflict of interest on its face), but Diebold is a corporation located in Ohio. Executives at various companies routinely make political statements to the effect of helping candidates win geographic areas. Walden O'Dell didn't literally mean he was going to rig elections to "deliver" Ohio to Bush. (Unless of course you believe that he would unabashedly make such a statement and intend just that.) Do you think that a company with 13000 employees is going to happily and knowingly produce systems with the sole purpose of rigging elections? With all the talk about Diebold, you'd think that's their entire reason for existence. As voting systems become modern, can we agree that at least some company or companies will be involved with their creation? And that the persons who work within these organizations can and will have political views?
I'm sure someone like O'Dell saying something like that is just delicious fodder for people who think Diebolds reason for being is to hand elections to radical right wing fanatics. Please. He's a Bush supporter, as almost all corporate CEOs are. He, and everyone else, are going to try to work to make sure the candidate they want is elected. What if, for the sake of argument, he was a moderate socialist, and ran Diebold? What then?
Do you believe he's specifically and literally planning on rigging elections, and subverting the entire democratic process?
There's a javascript demo of the Diebold Election System on the Diebold site.
e n1.html
Guess what? In Safari 1.3 at least, it doesn't work.
(Try voting for one candidate on each ballot, then on the next page, you appear to have cast no votes, confirmed by 'review').
Try it here: http://www.diebold.com/dieboldes/OnLine_Demo/scre
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
It has been discovered that Paper(tm), a voting system planned to be widely deployed in the coming elections, suffers from numerous vulnerabilities.
A security assessment taskforce has found that the system, in which a stylus is used to infuse chemical dyes onto a thin cellulose-based wafer, is vulnerable to a Denial Of Service attack in which the wafer is exposed to heat until fully oxidised. This renders the results unreadable. Furthermore, the wafers are unencrypted, which makes them vulnerable to replay and other man-in-the-middle attacks. Another attack involves exposing the wafers to lateral force until they are compressed, rendering them easier to dispose. This is known as the 'scrunch-it-and-trash-it' attack, which was made famous in the underground hacker classic Election, starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon.
Members of the security community are said to be flabbergasted at the general level of public apathy towards these vulnerabilities, which the taskforce has given its highest threat rating.
In other news, all public election officials are being rounded up by the Bush campaign and taken to New York for a week.
I have never met Bev Harris. But I know Jim March personally. I can assure you he is NOT a Democrat trying to protect us from The Vast Republican Vote-rigging Conspiracy.
But please DO continue to propagate the idea that it's the Republicans that are rigging the elections. While my impression is that the Democrats are the big offenders in this business, like Jim (and most right-thinking, left-thinking, or just plain thinking people) I believe that honest elections are a must.
If it takes the spectre of the Republicans making all their other vote-rigging schemes moot to get the Democrats off the dime and pushing for auditible electronic vote-counting, that's just fine.
Once we have the basic counting mechanism fixed we can go after the other ways to cheat: Graveyard votes, motor-voter & permanent absentee fake voter mills, illegal voters (aliens, incarcerated felons, non-residents), multiple registrations (often massive), "assistance" for handicapped, blind, or elderly voters, intercepted absentee ballots, and polling-place commuting, just to name a few of the larger scams.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
1. You don't write test code to be hard to remove.
2. Once reported, you don't leave it in for a year.
3. Once public, you don't claim months of work to remove it.
It may have started as test code, but someone went to a lot of trouble to bury it. A company like this doesn't have a few guys each working from home sending finished code libraries up to the boss. Code goes through review processes, it sees auditors, and it gets stored.
this isn't the result of someone leaving in a line like:
if(keySequence == "rigthevote") voteCount.replaceWithHackable
-- just my opinion here, but commenting something like that out wouldn't be a multi-year issue.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Many Diebold ATM systems are unpactched Windows XP installs with a internet connection and no firewall.
Unpatched, using the internet, and no firewalls?!? Are they fucking mad? Someone may have already written a worm that hacks into these machines and just gives them all the money! Magnetic stripe cards could be duplicated and passwords keylogged, and sent over the internet! That's pathetic!!!A huge scandal is exactly what this Diebold fiasco needs, and nothing is going to happen until it does. Every ambitious local journo in the country should be assiduously courting sources in the local elections offices. Eventually someone will Watergate it. That's the only way it's going to change.
I know this because I was once an investigative journalist. You would happen upon a story that seemed so shocking it was unbelievable, and when you asked around, everyone involved would say "Oh, yeah, that's right, everyone knows about that".
In one case (abuse at a psychiatric hospital) there were 600 documented allegations of abuse which had been investigated. Not one had been upheld, because the evidence of psychiatric patients was held to be unreliable. When we exposed it, it became national headline news for several days and resulted in year long government inquiry and, finally, change.
But everyone already knew about it.
Diebold is going to blow up horribly and sad to say the sooner it does the better. People are not interested in potential vulnerabilities, only post-facto scandals.
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
"Perhaps it's just a coincidence that the sudden rise of inaccurate exit polls happened around the same time corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots..."
Unfortunately "...if any of [it] is true, there's not much of a paper trail from the voters' hand to prove it..."
"Back when Hagel first ran there for the U.S. Senate in 1996, his company's computer-controlled voting machines showed he'd won stunning upsets in both the primaries and the general election. The Washington Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel's "Senate victory against an incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November election." According to Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.com, Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many largely Black communities that had never before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska."
"Six years later Hagel ran again, this time against Democrat Charlie Matulka in 2002, and won in a landslide. As his hagel.senate.gov website says, Hagel "was re-elected to his second term in the United States Senate on November 5, 2002 with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska."
"What Hagel's website fails to disclose is that about 80 percent of those votes were counted by computer-controlled voting machines put in place by the company affiliated with Hagel. Built by that company. Programmed by that company...."
Call/write to your local news station. Upon checking Google News, only /. is covering this press release so far. The more informed people are about this, the more likely they are to complain. You might want to call your local congresscritter, too.
This isn't the type of esoteric security vulnerability that only nerds are going to understand. Your average voter will grasp the issue pretty quickly.
When trying to alert people to the problem, you may want to mention that there are serious concerns that Venezuela may have suffered electronic election rigging in the recent Chavez recall election.
Why vote? The Electoral College is the group who will actually determine which of the candidates is elected. That is, which ever candidate pays the most money to have the members of the Electoral College to buy their votes.
For example, if everyone in the country voted for candidate A and the Electoral College wants candidate B (or if candidate B pays the most money) to be elected, then, candidate B will win. I can't prove this is true and you can't prove it is false because the votes are secret, which aids the Electoral College immensely.
Oh come now, you do realise that the Electoral College is just as corrupt as any other agency who has that much power, right? If not, you're extremely naive.
Voting is a waste of time. Get rid of the Electoral College and I will be the first in line to vote.
The main difference is Bush has managed to start 2 wars since he took office, and dearly wanted to start a few more, but Iraq turned out to be a little too pesky.
No more wars. I'm not sending my son or daughter to die in an Army that our commander in chief refused to serve in. Oh right. He was in the air national guard. I think.
And how do I know your palm pilot app counted my vote correctly?
Yes, a program that counts selections from a finite list is incredibly simple. I'm sure you could do a better job than Diebold -- it truly is a 10th grade coding project -- but that isn't the standard.
Unless your palm pilot is hooked up to a printer that produces a record that is both scanable and human-readable so the voter can verify the result before consigning the record to the ballot box then you haven't demonstrated a secure voting system at all.
Um... not that adding a printer makes it that much harder. So your point that this should be really simple still stands.
The enemies of Democracy are
If anyone wants to watch a really good documentary about the 2000 election, and the security of the 2004 election. I recommend a documentary called "Ballot Battles" on the Discovery Times Channel.
In part of this documentary. a woman who is against electronic voting machines (who isn't a computer expert) was googling a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, and she stumbled apon all the firmware and source code to all their voting machines, she downloaded it, and filled 7 CD's and brought it to a computer security expert, and they were shocked about the poor coding of the voting machines operating system. With this information, she was able to easily hack the voting machine, and was able to teach an 8 year old to do it too.
it's a really good documentary, check it out.
unfortunatly, i don't know when it will air again, i just checked the TV schedule and didn't see it anywhere.
You can't test a program or system of any complexity with some code in, pronounce it "good", and then take out some of the code.
Its new code at that point. Which is perhaps why its left in. If they take it out, then they have to re-test and re-certify.
But fundamentally, it shows that Diebold is, at best, incapable of understanding what it takes to produce this kind of code. It sounds like a bunch of junior programmers coding under the "direction" of a mid-level programmer.
What I'm surprised at is the local government accepted binaries from the vendor without (a) having full access to the source code (b) a mechnism to ensure the source code they audit matches the binaries in the machine.
When you think about it, the whole thing reeks of a company looking to make a quick buck and local governments too stupid to understand that they lack the expertise to judge this kind of software and make an intelligent decision about deploying it.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
To which party is Walden O'Dell (Diebold CEO) a major fundraiser?
Turn that around, and you're right on target...
Did you have a link that shows fraud? Or are you saying fraud was unlikely? The links you post, especially the latter, show a well designed system.
The worst are full of passionate intensity
And the best lack all conviction...
But I suspect that that is always true - the best are by their nature capable of empathising with people on both sides of a question, and capable of seeing the logic on both sides. Hence they find it hard to be passionate.
True passion, I fear, probably comes from ignorance stoked by fear and testosterone.
But seriously, did anyone else shiver when they read that?
...wasn't a violent coup? Or do you think that a lone nut killed him, then another totally unrelated lone nut killed that guy as well?
I think violence plays a lot bigger part in our domestic politics (with bigwig insiders) than most folks want to be comfortable with. RFK and just sorta lately wellstone come to mind as well. Not to mention a heap of big dotmil guys who all apprently had "accidents" during the previous bent ones reign.
The content of the paper card listing the voter's choices should be in native language; OCR on a limited set of data is quite accurate -- no need for barcodes. Also, you don't want to be punching holes, simply print out the voter's choices on a card so that the voter can verify that the program has understood the vote properly. Barcodes and other non-human-readable items can be used to circumvent voter verifyability.
Is because you keep an eye to make sure it isn't stealing your money, and the bank is watching to make sure it isn't stealing their money.
Who's watching the votes? Who's ensuring these machines are doing what they are supposed to do? That's really the question here.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
The problem is everybody stops at bitching and moaning. Are you folks waiting for some miracle to strike the public on the head and feed them the truth? It seems to me, the next step is to educate the public. The media won't do it so the ones who bitch and moan should.
Put together a single sheet of comment describing in layman's terms what the problem is and how it can be fixed. Put said flyer on a website and tell everyone. Ask interested visitors to print 100 copies of the flyer, stand in a corner for an hour and distribtue the copies to passersby. the cost should be minimal for each individual, the impact should be high as more and more people are made aware of the problems.
How simple is this? Take a look.
Optical readers have been around for decades. Folks, it doesn't take rocket (or computer) science to solve this problem. Just a little pen on a little chain.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Please Moderators... how bout some humor!
Well we have always had to trust "the guys who move the machines, the voting site admin people". Just because it is electronic doesn't change the trust part of it.
Creative Demolition
If only an enterprising hacker would change the voting results on Nov 2 so drastically that the results cannot stand. In this manner, the public is alerted to the dangers of voting without a paper trail, and it prevents actual (i.e., surreptitious) tampering by oh, say, Walden O'Dell. Relying on such a patently unsecure system is not an acceptable option.
To every Sec of State that decided voting without a paper trail was acceptable (much less preferable): you are fired.
So what really needs to happen is someone to rig the election... what do you think would happen if Bush got 500,000,000 votes in the state of Montana? :)
=Smidge=
Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything. - Stalin
No one is watching the central tabulation servers. That makes it an even bigger deal.
BTW, "the paper" you cite, Xinhua, is the official organ of the Chinese Communist Party - surely an expert in rigged elections.
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Dude, that source you cited didn't support you at all! He pretty much says that it has increased productivity, just not as much as mechaninization of manufacturing did in the thirty years prior. There was anything about making your life more simple or more complex, and he didn't say a single thing about a PDA!
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Going to diebolds election systems page, on the right there's an image of an eagle and headline saying "Every votes counts. Click on the eagle to find out more". As if they were pretending to be contributing to a democracy.
Well, as of 6:30ish pacific time today, that link is a dead end.
J
What if there's a terrorist event close to the election, and the Ridge who cried "wolf" told us not to worry? If just 1% more city dwellers than suburbanites or rural voters left town on Election Day, Bush could win on the differential. Then what could we possibly do, especially after we complained about Bush plans to postpone an election?
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Zach Exley, the director of special projects for the MoveOn PAC, is going to the Kerry campaign to become its director of online communications and organization.
-----
But Exley didn't need to bring much. According to another Kerry adviser, there were already so many back-channel relationships between the two organizations, Exley's presence to foster more was unnecessary. "As soon as it was clear Kerry had the nomination, we began coordinating. It's all done through the DNC and the AFL-CIO, which is financing many of the other groups out there running anti-Republican advertising. We will sit on conference calls, but we won't take part. We just take notes, then confer with our folks inside the DNC. That's the way it's done."
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Where is your proof that the Swift Boat Vets and the bush campaign are working together?
"If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."
"I feel like God wants me to run for President. I can't explain it, but I sense my country is going to need me. Something is going to happen... I know it won't be easy on me or my family, but God wants me to do it."
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Yes, if O'Dell had said he was committed to delivering Ohio's electoral votes to Kerry, it would be an evil Democrat conspiracy.
But he said BUSH. It's an evil Republican conspiracy. Why don't you care about that? Why do you hate America?
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If O'Dell ran a dairy in Ohio, his committment would be negligible. But he runs the vote tabulators for Ohio, which have been demonstrated to include an obvious security flaw that allows the votes to be cooked. Why are you covering for this sleazy subverter of democracy? Do you work for Diebold, or for Bush?
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as the last year America had a free election?
But if this is REALLY the land of the free, then why don't we allow those who REALLY trust the friggin' Diebold machines to use them, and those who prefer things that can be audited (recounted in Mr. Newsmedia-speak) use punched cards/marks on tablets, whatever.
We have the technology to put marks on paper. No, really, I'VE SEEN IT. Diebold even makes one!
I believe they call it an Aye-Tee-Em...
Feloneous
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
Three are purely speculative, one is about supposed problems with the elections that had nothing to do with the voting machines, and the last is about how the machines actually do provide a voter-verified paper-trail. While voter fraud may or may not have occurred in Venezuela (frankly, it's a little hard to trust most of the news out of Venezuela for the last few years), if it did happen it almost certainly happened the old fashioned way.
(I lived there during the second election of CAP, and I remember finding with a few friends of mine a ballot box lying in a ditch about a week after the election.)
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
Ah, quoting the American Spectator, which quotes an unnamed "another Kerry advisor".
The Washington Post reports that a longtime Bush lawyer has quit his campaign after his advice to the Swifties was revealed. He doesn't even appear in this otherwise illuminating graph from the NY Times.
The Swifties themselves were first hired by Nixon for dirty tricks against Kerry, when Nixon was threatened by the truth about the dirty war he was running with concientious soldiers like Kerry. They served the country both under command in the field, and back home to end the vicious war. Who do the Swifties serve?
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Besides, the chads in 2000 were sleight-of-hand, with differences in the few hundred to few thousand votes. Somehow they distracted us from the systematic disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of black voters by mis-classifying them as felons. The story I read on the topic, link lost, but easy to find on google, made it seem deliberate. But even if it wasn't, it was badly WRONG. Malfeasance or Misfeasance, take your pick. Both are cause for impeachment. Instead, the person at the top of the process is a Party Hero.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Funny, you completly ignored my first point. Why is that?
Second, yes he quit. Did anyone in the kerry campaign quite of their ties to 527's?
Third, why doesn't one of the 527's that support the DEMS run ads saying what you have? Could it be their is next to no evidence to prove the ties to the bush campaign?
You like Kerry so you are willing to say what he is doing is OK, other feal the same about Bush. It is either OK for both sides or Wrong for both sides.
I, having read the 1st adm, understand that such restrictions on speach should not be allowed and think such restrictions are very dangerous.
http://invisibleballots.com/
3 2
http://www.torrentreactor.net/torrents/view_228
Here.
If you don't have anything nice to say, shut up you stupid prick.
If your first point was that Exley has left MoveOn to work for Kerry, I will address that. Moving from the publicly sympathetic, yet outsider, MoveOn organization to offer Kerry help, doesn't allow Exley to direct MoveOn from inside Kerry's organization. When you have evidence that he does that, try again. For as much contempt as I have for Cheney, for example, I don't think he's directing Halliburton from the White House. I think he's directing the White House as a representative of Halliburton. The sequence of events, not just the association, is essential to coordination.
The Feingold/McCain law that created these so-called 527s has all kinds of unconstitutional restrictions on personal expression. People are free to say whatever they want, unless they damage others with lies. Why shouldn't I be able to talk about how Bush is a liar on TV a few weeks before the election, despite that law's prohibition? Corporations are less free, and the funding and control of corporations by political people and organizations must restrict that abuse of finance and media. Especially as Bush didn't even repudiate the Swifties at all, except to mutter something about the entire category once their dirty work splashed back on him. I think it's interesting that you haven't addressed my point on *that* - where are MoveOn.org's "lies" about Bush, that are parallel to the proven lies from the Swifties?
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From the poem "Things Fall Apart" :
Actually, the poem is titled The Second Coming.
IOW, a legal advisor is more important to the Swiftboat Vets then the head media guy is to moveon?
* Harold Ickes Is A Member Of DNC's Executive Committee And Head Of The Media Fund And Chief Of Staff To America Coming Together. Ickes "Admits That He Occasionally Tells The Kerry Camp What He's Up To, And He Insists It's Perfectly Legal."
(Jim Drinkard, "'Outside' Political Groups Full Of Party Insiders," USA Today, 6/28/04; Paula Dwyer, "Why 527 Is The Dems' Lucky Number," BusinessWeek Online, 7/28/04)
* Bob Bauer Of Perkins Coie Is Legal Counsel To Both Kerry Campaign And America Coming Together (ACT).
(Jim Rutenberg And Kate Zernike, "Veteran's Group Had GOP Lawyer," The New York Times, 8/25/04)
* Kerry Campaign Paid Bauer's Law Firm, Perkins Coie, $360,244.28 For Legal Services And Other Expenses.
(Federal Election Commission Records, http://www.fec.gov, Accessed 8/5/04)
* Joe Sandler Is General Counsel To DNC While Serving As Legal Counsel To 527s MoveOn.org And Moving America Forward.
(Jonathan Groner, "Power Punch," Legal Times, 4/26/04)
* Erik Smith Is The Media Fund's Executive Director And Worked With Steve Elmendorf, Kerry's Deputy Campaign Manager, On Dick Gephardt's Presidential Campaign.
(Jim VandeHei, "Kerry Expected To Emerge From Battle Stronger Than Ever," The Washington Post, 3/3/04)
* Minyon Moore, A Kerry Campaign Consultant, Serves On Executive Committee Of America Coming Together.
(Glen Johnson, "Kerry To Press 'Environmental Justice,'" The Boston Globe, 4/22/03; Lisa Getter, "Kerry Aided By 'Illegal' Soft Money, GOP Claims," Los Angeles Times, 4/1/04)
* Media Fund Ad Consultant Bill Knapp Hired By Kerry Campaign.
(Thomas B. Edsall, "Shifting The Money So The Votes Will Follow," The Washington Post, 5/11/04)
* Kerry's New Mexico Caucus Director, Geri Prado, Is Leading ACT's GOTV Effort In That State.
(Michael Finnegan, "Kerry's Low Profile May Cost Crucial Latino Votes," Los Angeles Times, 5/3/04)
* The Dewey Square Group Provides Political Consulting Services For Both Kerry Campaign And America Coming Together (ACT).
* Kerry Campaign Has Paid Dewey Square Group $194,936.48 For Political Consulting And Other Expenses.
(Federal Election Commission Records, www.fec.gov, Accessed 8/5/04)
* America Coming Together (ACT) Has Paid Dewey Square Group $51,808 For Political Consulting And Other Expenses.
(Political Money Line Website, www.tray.com, Accessed 8/5/04)
* At Least Four Kerry Advisors Are Associated With Dewey Square Group: Michael Whouley, Jill Alper, Minyon Moore And Joe Ricca.
(Glen Johnson, "Kerry To Press 'Environmental Justice,'" The Boston Globe, 4/22/03; Dewey Square Group Website, http://www.deweysquare.com/, Accessed 2/5/04; Peter Grier, "How Kerry Turned The Corner," Christian Science Monitor, 2/5/04; Glen Johnson and John Aloysius Farrell, "Kerry's New-Look Campaign Relies On A Few Key Players," The Boston Globe, 1/9/03)
* Michael Meehan, Now A Communications Advisor To Kerry, Was Hired By NARAL In 2003 To "Oversee Its Vastly Expanded Soft-Money Operation." His Hiring Was "Billed As A Two-Month Leave From His Job As Political Director Of NARAL."
(Carol Beggy and Mark Shanahan, "Names," The Boston Globe, 11/21/03; Chris Cillizza, "NARAL Plans Big '04 Effort," Roll Call, 5/8/03)
Why? Because the loser has to concede to the fact that he has lost. We do not force the loser to lose, the loser allows the winner to win. "I lost in a fair fight. Better luck next time." The concession speech is just as important to democracy as the acceptance speech.
If a loser of an election disputes the results and the winner cannot defend the vote count, then the loser has every right to appeal to other means--in most countries, violence.
In the last American election, the loser disputed the vote count. The winner could not defend the results, so the loser appealed to other means--the Supreme Court.
The fact that there was no outbreak of violence (at least of any significance) was not due to the voters' acceptance of the count. It was due to the voter's acceptance of the Supreme Court as the final word in American government. The loser accepted the Supreme Court decision and allowed the winner to win. The voters (some begrudgingly) accepted the decision.
But please note: the last disputed election had something that the next one will not: chads--a paper trail--transparency. Win or lose, everyone had the hope that eventually, the truth would be known. It may take days, weeks or months to determine, but the truth would be known. The system would work.
Ignore conspiracy theories. Ignore corporate donors. Ignore programming loopholes. The threat of the next disputed election is the notion that even if the election is honest, even if every vote is counted, even if the outcome truly matches the intent of the voters, the loser will be able to dispute the outcome and the winner will not be able to defend it.
Imagine the turmoil if after the last election, over a million of the punch ballots had gone missing. That is what these systems offer. It does not matter who wins this fall. The loser will dispute the result and the winner will not be able to defend it.
As counter-intuitive as it may seem, Bush may be the most likely candidate to suffer from the paper-less voting system. If Kerry wins, I do not believe Bush will have much of a case for vote tampering as the systems are being used primarily in districts controlled by Republican party members. If Bush wins, it is very likely that the results would be thrown out altogether for the sake of another election. The anger pent up by Democrats in the last election fraught with claims of 'unfair' would be mild in comparison to an election that lead to charges of treasonous fraud. Nixon was impeached for election tampering and all he did was spy on his opponents.
Many comments have offered ways to counter the threat of the new systems and most them are good. Yes, it is helpful to point out the possibility of fraud. Yes, it is helpful to write/call representatives demanding change. Yes, it is helpful to create more transparent technical solutions (yes, open source is one option, but not the only one). In the meantime, the best way to ensure that 1.) your vote is counted, 2.) your vote can be recounted, 3.) your vote will not be disputed is to ask, NOW, for your absentee ballot. It is exactly the reason that both the Republican and Democratic Parties have started a "get out the absentee vote" campaign in areas where the new systems are being installed.
If the Supreme Court does not ask for a recount, they may look to the absentee ballot as the measure of voter intent. The next President may be elected by the voters that do not even show up.
How is this.
* Harold Ickes Is A Member Of DNC's Executive Committee And Head Of The Media Fund And Chief Of Staff To America Coming Together. Ickes "Admits That He Occasionally Tells The Kerry Camp What He's Up To, And He Insists It's Perfectly Legal."
(Jim Drinkard, "'Outside' Political Groups Full Of Party Insiders," USA Today, 6/28/04; Paula Dwyer, "Why 527 Is The Dems' Lucky Number," BusinessWeek Online, 7/28/04)
* Bob Bauer Of Perkins Coie Is Legal Counsel To Both Kerry Campaign And America Coming Together (ACT).
(Jim Rutenberg And Kate Zernike, "Veteran's Group Had GOP Lawyer," The New York Times, 8/25/04)
* Kerry Campaign Paid Bauer's Law Firm, Perkins Coie, $360,244.28 For Legal Services And Other Expenses.
(Federal Election Commission Records, http://www.fec.gov, Accessed 8/5/04)
* Joe Sandler Is General Counsel To DNC While Serving As Legal Counsel To 527s MoveOn.org And Moving America Forward.
(Jonathan Groner, "Power Punch," Legal Times, 4/26/04)
* Erik Smith Is The Media Fund's Executive Director And Worked With Steve Elmendorf, Kerry's Deputy Campaign Manager, On Dick Gephardt's Presidential Campaign.
(Jim VandeHei, "Kerry Expected To Emerge From Battle Stronger Than Ever," The Washington Post, 3/3/04)
* Minyon Moore, A Kerry Campaign Consultant, Serves On Executive Committee Of America Coming Together.
(Glen Johnson, "Kerry To Press 'Environmental Justice,'" The Boston Globe, 4/22/03; Lisa Getter, "Kerry Aided By 'Illegal' Soft Money, GOP Claims," Los Angeles Times, 4/1/04)
* Media Fund Ad Consultant Bill Knapp Hired By Kerry Campaign.
(Thomas B. Edsall, "Shifting The Money So The Votes Will Follow," The Washington Post, 5/11/04)
* Kerry's New Mexico Caucus Director, Geri Prado, Is Leading ACT's GOTV Effort In That State.
(Michael Finnegan, "Kerry's Low Profile May Cost Crucial Latino Votes," Los Angeles Times, 5/3/04)
* The Dewey Square Group Provides Political Consulting Services For Both Kerry Campaign And America Coming Together (ACT).
* Kerry Campaign Has Paid Dewey Square Group $194,936.48 For Political Consulting And Other Expenses.
(Federal Election Commission Records, www.fec.gov, Accessed 8/5/04)
* America Coming Together (ACT) Has Paid Dewey Square Group $51,808 For Political Consulting And Other Expenses.
(Political Money Line Website, www.tray.com, Accessed 8/5/04)
* At Least Four Kerry Advisors Are Associated With Dewey Square Group: Michael Whouley, Jill Alper, Minyon Moore And Joe Ricca.
(Glen Johnson, "Kerry To Press 'Environmental Justice,'" The Boston Globe, 4/22/03; Dewey Square Group Website, http://www.deweysquare.com/, Accessed 2/5/04; Peter Grier, "How Kerry Turned The Corner," Christian Science Monitor, 2/5/04; Glen Johnson and John Aloysius Farrell, "Kerry's New-Look Campaign Relies On A Few Key Players," The Boston Globe, 1/9/03)
* Michael Meehan, Now A Communications Advisor To Kerry, Was Hired By NARAL In 2003 To "Oversee Its Vastly Expanded Soft-Money Operation." His Hiring Was "Billed As A Two-Month Leave From His Job As Political Director Of NARAL."
(Carol Beggy and Mark Shanahan, "Names," The Boston Globe, 11/21/03; Chris Cillizza, "NARAL Plans Big '04 Effort," Roll Call, 5/8/03)
No, those are your words. In my words, leaving an organization to run another one doesn't leave you control of the old organization, or show that the new organization ran the old one: Exley of MoveOn -> Kerry. While a lawyer moving from Bush -> Swifties -> Bush shows the mutual coordination. Even if that coordination was small, what about the rest of the people in the NYT graph, which shows the obvious integration of the organizations? What about the creation of the Swifties organization by Nixon, and their continuing relationship to the Republican Party? Hey, Anonymous Coward, how about debating to get at the facts, rather than selecting only the convenient facts to suit your unsupportable argument?
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W's strategy is good but poorly executed. Kerry's plan doesn't make sense. Bush is, at the moment, the least bad choice.
Well, it's good to hear that the supporters of Bush think the same of their "choice" as the supporters of Kerry. Or maybe its just depressing.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Lawyers can have more the one client, hell most non corp lawyers do have more than one client.
It's not shocking and you should know better.
(1) expressing disagreement with someone is not intolerance
(2) my sig is a paraphrase of the dictionary.com definition of liberal ; specifically definitions 1a and 1b.
(3) the intent of my sig is to provoke the question: "Given the definition of the word 'liberal', how has our society reached a point where the word is mostly employed as an insult?".
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Absentee Ballot Forms for ANY US State are available here: http://www.fec.gov/votregis/pdf/nvra.pdf (Single PDF file that includes every state.) See: http://www.fec.gov/votregis/vr.htm
Why? Because the loser has to concede to the fact that he has lost. We do not force the loser to lose, the loser allows the winner to win. "I lost in a fair fight. Better luck next time." The concession speech is just as important to democracy as the acceptance speech.
If a loser of an election disputes the results and the winner cannot defend the vote count, then the loser has every right to appeal to other means--in most countries, violence.
In the last American election, the loser disputed the vote count. The winner could not defend the results, so the loser appealed to other means--the Supreme Court.
The fact that there was no outbreak of violence (at least of any significance) was not due to the voters' acceptance of the count. It was due to the voter's acceptance of the Supreme Court as the final word in American government. The loser accepted the Supreme Court decision and allowed the winner to win. The voters (some begrudgingly) accepted the decision.
But please note: the last disputed election had something that the next one will not: chads--a paper trail--transparency. Win or lose, everyone had the hope that eventually, the truth would be known. It may take days, weeks or months to determine, but the truth would be known. The system would work.
Ignore conspiracy theories. Ignore software companies. Ignore programming bugs. The threat of the next disputed election is the notion that even if the election is honest, even if every vote is counted, even if the outcome truly matches the intent of the voters, the loser will be able to dispute the outcome and the winner will not be able to defend it.
Imagine the turmoil if after the last election, over a million of the punch ballots had gone missing. It does not matter who wins this fall. The loser will dispute the result and the winner will not be able to defend it.
As counter-intuitive as it may seem, Bush may be the most likely candidate to suffer from the paper-less voting system. If Kerry wins, I do not believe Bush will have much of a case for vote tampering as the systems are being used primarily in districts controlled by Republican party members. If Bush wins, it is very likely that the results would be thrown out altogether for the sake of another election. The anger pent up by Democrats in the last election fraught with claims of 'unfair' would be mild in comparison to an election that lead to charges of treasonous fraud. Nixon was impeached for election tampering and all he did was spy on his opponents.
Many comments have offered ways to counter the threat of the new systems and most them are good. Yes, it is helpful to point out the possibility of fraud. Yes, it is helpful to write/call representatives demanding change. Yes, it is helpful to create more transparent technical solutions (yes, open source is one option, but not the only one). In the meantime, the best way to ensure that 1.) your vote is counted, 2.) your vote can be recounted, 3.) your vote will not be disputed is to ask, NOW, for your absentee ballot. It is exactly the reason that both the Republican and Democratic Parties have started a "get out the absentee vote" campaign in areas where the new systems are being installed.
If the Supreme Court does not ask for a recount, they may look to the absentee ballot as the measure of voter intent. The next President may be elected by the absentee voter.
How many votes are expected to be processed by the Diehard machines ?
Check out my PHP Url Validator
guh, how hard is it for a machine to simply do number_votes_kerry += 1 or number_votes_bush += 1 anyway?
I was going by presidents, like the Brittish system. George Washington was the first president named George, Bush senior was the second, George W. Bush was the third Bush named George.
If Kerry is a Skull and Bones man, what does it matter who wins?
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It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Are you forgetting "The Carbomite Maneuver"?
Coincidentally, this Star Trek epsiode is about the mischievous son (Balok) of a powerful galactic entity, who uses a puppet to frighten the Enterprise crew. There's also mention of Tranya, a refreshing beverage similar to the kool-aid imbibed by the Jonestown cult in the late 1970's.
When they say it's the same old story, time immemorial, they really mean it's the same old story. Go ahead and MOD me down, it's fun.
Stuff that matters.
Sorry - but I hate to be a conspiracy theorist - BUT WHO DIDN'T SEE THIS COMING?
Dubya manipulated the election in every state he could in 2000 - Florida and Texas.
Does it really surpirse you that dubya would manipulate this election in every state he has access to? Please.
If you don't believe me, do a google for alex jones, or just go to infowars.com. Sorry for not linking it - its midnite and Im tired.
If you're correct, why did so many people absolutely refuse to allow a recount to happen?
Anyone who was sure they had won would be happy to have a recount.
Yes, this has been pointed out several times.
The examples you cited where a Kerry campaign worker moved to a 527 group, in an executive role in both, sound illegal to me. Thank you for pointing them out - they should be held accountable, and they should change the law before doing that. The examples where someone move from the outside, in, don't seem either illegal or unethical - or entirely avoidable. Of course these laws and principles apply to any party or 527 group.
Now how about accounting for that presumed bit of parity where MoveOn.org has lied in ads about Bush? Coordinating the truth might be illegal, and of course that matters in the politicians whose careers are entirely made of laws. Coordinating lies is not only illegal, but entirely unethical, and games a system already so burdened that it can't stand the weight of such tactics.
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Lawyers have "conflicts of interest", in which they are prevented from engaging. The noncoordination rules of 527 laws create those conflicts for anyone working for both a party or its candidate, and a 527. Lawyers have even higher ethical standards to which they are required by law to adhere. Having these two clients in a revolving door is *more* illegal for lawyers than for other consultants.
I don't like it, I don't like it's effects, and I'm not surprised that Bush lawyers ignore the law. You also know better, and aren't shocked either. It's disturbing that you excuse it.
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These receipts can be provided by anybody to verify their vote was tabulated correctly, and provided by them at their option for exit poll tabulation and watchdog monitoring.
You can't be serious! This is what they did back in the day of Jim Crow. See, when you vote you get a Blue card if you vote one way, and a Red card if you vote another. God forbid you showed up to work the next morning with the wrong colored card.
The Internet said, "the geek shall inherit the earth".
And now that hackers control the vote, the meek geeks have begun the takeover.
I excuse it due to the 1st adm. The text follows
.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
They don't put real time reporting requirement in place and they allow corps to dump in millions but they try to restrict what the citizens of the US can do. Look up who is paying for all the parties at the DEM and GOP conventions. Tens of millions of dollars are changing hands and it is all legal. But if I want to run an ad with my personal money it's wrong.
That ain't right. CFR isn't about reforming the system it is about making sure those in power stay in power because change isn't good.
Elections Canada is charged merely with the tabulating of votes, it's not a partisan position such as it is in many states (especially Florida). Having representatives of each party scrutinize each vote ensures fairness, whereas the Diebolds are "black boxes" with no assurance of anything at all.
The Swift Boat Vets:
Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is registered with the Federal Election Commission as a so-called 527 organization and is not affiliated with any party, Knght Ridder explained. It got off the ground with a $100,000 donation from Texas homebuilder Bob J. Perry, who happens to be a prominent Republican donor as well as a friend of O'Neill.
Retired admiral Roy F. Hoffman, chairman of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, told Knight Ridder that the first TV ad, which ran for one week in Ohio, Wisconsin and West Virginia at a cost of $550,000, got so much national news attention that it generated the additional $400,000.
-----------------
To that end, Soros has given millions to three liberal-leaning organizations that also want to a Bush defeat: $10 million to America Coming Together, which aims to mobilize voters; $2.5 million to the MoveOn.org voters' fund, which places anti-Bush advertising; and $300,000 to the Campaign for America's Future.
He also has pledged $3 million to the Center for American Progress, a think tank led by John Podesta, chief of staff to President Clinton.
This election year, Soros has spent about $4 million, more than any other individual, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit Washington-based group that tracks political donations.
MoveOn has spent roughly $17 million on ads since it started running its "misleader" campaign against Bush last year.
NEW YORK (AP) - George Soros' dream is President Bush losing in November - and so far, the billionaire philanthropist has donated nearly $13 million to independent groups that also want to turn that vision into reality. "I'm merely putting my money where my mouth is," Soros told The Associated Press.
I think this country is not ready for electronic voting in any form, regardless of a 'paper receipt'. So what if you have a paper receipt? It doesn't mean the vote you cast is representative of what is printed on the receipt.
I think the best way to handle this is the most simple and best solution: Go Back To Paper Ballots. Period. Ditch the machines. Do it just like the previous poster who mentioned Canada, with representatives from both parties watching the counts, manually, by hand. So what if it takes time. What is more important, time or a fair election with an honestly elected president?
You all are looking at this the wrong way. Except for one guy "I know who I'm voting for, several hundread times". DING!
the technologically elite of this country long held as technicians, coders, underlings..etc finally have the ability to bypass the entire country and elect someone we want. Hell we could get cmdr taco in office now. WE HAVE TO POWER TO SWAY AN ELECTION!
Diebold is using a loosely put together system that seems to have intentional backdoors and runs on MS Access. What more do you need an ethernet port on the front?
Forget fixing it, forget sensational stories. Let's just make someone we want win the election by the only means avaiable to us. hack the system!
Isn't that deja vu?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Having gone to these "elite private schools" in NYC and Connecticut, having an uncle who went to 1-12th grade and Yale with the elder George Bush and who was his roommate, I have to say that the idea of a Connecticut/Yale/Tory/whatever conspiracy is simply amazingly unlikely.
A lot of the people in these schools aren't that smart (though there is a pecking order academically, all of them have their share of the less-smart (or don't-care) legacy-types). Pretty much the primary determinator of who goes to these schools is who a) can afford it, and b) wants to. After those are passed, then legacies, academics, and other factors (attempts to provide a somewhat diverse enrollment, etc) are considered. Most have (through various scholarships, foundations, etc) a moderate percentage of "disadvantaged" students.
A classmate of mine was another of the Bush crony's kids: Doug Baker, James Baker's (former chief of staff to G.H.W. Bush) son. (This was 1977-1980.) Not shall was say one of the sharp ones in the class (hardly), but a good football/lacrosse player and partier. At my 15th reunion (1995) he had become a lobbyist (what a shock). Others I went to school with include JFK. Jr, David Duchovny, and various sons of very well-off businesspeople. There was a sizable contingent at boarding school from Midland TX around 1980; sons of oil men and the like (many of them like Bush, transplants following the money).
My uncle went to day school with G.H.W. Bush, then to boarding prep school, then to Yale with him. In prep school they were roommates at one point. Both flew in WWII, but my uncle was in P-51's over Germany, and unlike Bush didn't go back to Yale. He continued to live in CT (New Canaan), and was a stock broker and staunch Republican for many many years, was Chief of Police in New Canaan after got tired of hunting and fishing in retirement, etc. When G.H.W. Bush was running for re-election, Frontline interviewed my uncle about Bush's school days. One of my uncle's comments: Bush was an idiot. Almost all of it (including the idiot comment) was edited out. Today he's an independant who REALLY wants to see W go down in flames. He supported Dean in fact.
Which brings me to the comments I'm replying to. While in theory there could be a conspiracy by some nebulous east-coast preppy elite, the reality as I see it from having grown up and gone to school with many in Bush's circle is far more simple and easy to swallow - the Bushes (and most presidents, with the odd exception like Clinton) are from rich families, and those families have connections to other rich families, and draw on them for their closest advisors and supporters. A lot of these people get into prestigious schools, colleges, and jobs via family connections and history (legacies). Not everyone in these schools does, in fact it's probably a minority nowadays, but it was and still is common in many of them if not most.
These people are rich, they go to school mostly with other upper-middle-class or rich people, and they form friendships for life with the people they went to school with (and often with others of similar backgrounds, which is hardly unique). This applies to the majority of politicians, especially at the upper levels. It takes money and even more so connections to get to elected office, especially high office (and promises for a lot of back-scratching).
This isn't to say that none of them do bad/questionable things - hardly. Many do. But as others I'm sure have said here, never attribute to malice (or conspiracy) what is adequately explained by stupidity (or just plain normal social class cliquiness (sp)). Honestly, these people _aren't_ smart enough to pull such a huge conspiracy (let alone for so long) off.
p.s. While I attended these schools and have a long family history associated with them, I was not one of the "rich" kids or legacies - my mother was director of development at one (which got us in, free I think), and the other I went to not as a legacy, though my father and grandmother did pay for it. I'd be considered probably one of the middle/upper-middle class students with a family tradition of prep schools.
welcome our new Diebold Sucks overlord.
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
Well, I suspect what would happen would be that there would be a huge outroar, the Montana state courts would immediately nullify the election result...
...then the Supreme Court would rule this was illegal and hand Bush the election (again)...
Allow my to put on my tinfoil hat and ask, what the hell is corrupt about motor-voter?
And you're ignorant if you think that only Democrats do underhanded tactics like this. Allowing felons to vote might be illegal, but so was the Florida trick of listing people as felons who weren't, to keep them from being allowed to vote.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Never ascribe to incompetence that which can be explained by malice. Here it looks like we have malice masquerading as incompetence. Oops, we made a mistake! Oops, we inadvertently introduced a bug and your canditate didn't get the 900 votes that should have gone to him in this very close election. Tough that the end result is that he lost by 380 votes and there's no way to recount that. Hehe. Oops, our "felons" list excludes a lot of law-abiding citizens who never, ever would have voted for us. We are sorry for the mistake and sorry that they can't vote.
John Titor said that the US civil war would start in 2005, kind of 2004 - And someone asked what day, he replied something to the effect of "A day people remember".
He also said there would be a Mad Cow epidemic (which people poo-poo'd as not possible) and a few weeks ago the British press said that Mad Cow appears to be able to spread via the blood supply. Hhmmm.
multi-seesion live cd?
First session has the (minimal OS) and vote software, supplied by election authority. If you want to go the source route to binary route on each machine, ask the Gentoo people.
Every vote then gets burnt to disk as well as a paper receipt printed.
For the paranoid, encrypt the disk and have special cd readers which do hardware crypto on the i/o to it.
Any problem - reboot the sucker (recompile ?), keep voting.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
Just rig the friggin' elections and stop complaining the other party did it 4 years ago.
:)
Beat them to their own game!
H4c| D4 w0r1d !!!
Forget the voting machines. Any known vulnerabilities in their ATM machines?
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Serious question: What would happen if after the election it was proven that there fraud? Say that one got 50% of the votes and the other 75% of the votes. I asume Diebold is not THAT stupid and nor are any of the candidates, so the fraud will probably much harder to prove.
Will there be a re-election? Will there be a "well regulated militia" to keep the state secure?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
For many years now Bruce Schneier has been writing on this topic extensively and since I share his views I decided to put together the most relevant excerpts from his excellent Crypto-Gram newsletter and let them speak for themselves. If you really want to get up to speed on this topic, this is what you've been looking for.
Crypto-Gram: September 15, 2003 :: News:
Crypto-Gram: October 15, 2003 :: News:
Crypto-Gram: December 15, 2003 :: Computerized and Electronic Voting:
As an outside observer (I am British) who does not really understand your system, could somebody explain part of it to me. From what I have read so far, the November US elections will be tallyed in a number of States using a system that is known to be flawed. This flaw is of such magnitude that the result in each of those states is likely to be contested by one or the other of the parties involved (the looser). I know I would if I had invested millions in getting elected. Each query will result in a court case (where?) which will take time to resolve. Meanwhile, who runs your country? What effect would this kind of fiasco have on your stock market? Maybe I am not an outside observer after all, because what kind of effect would it have on _my_ stock market and my investments, such as they are!
I might not be a wit, but at least I am more than half way there.
To bad you cannot stick to facts. No one ever prevented a recount and in fact the recounts proved Bush would have won under any possible scenario. The Democrats were not arguing for a recount, they were arguing to manipulate the election process so that only those votes that went in their favor would be counted. That is precisely why they lost all legal challenges.
The country that currently champions democracy is called FRANCE.
Democracy includes not invading other countrys: the right of self-determination of the peoples.
Pfff. In your face, USofAns
This whole thread really makes me wonder. What is the big deal with electronic voting machines if not the ability for individuals or authorities to alter electional results at their own likes?
Haven't computers been primarily desingned to _manipulate_ data?
Anyway. Let me try to give you a different view of the whole thing.
I volunteer in one of the major European countries electional system. Anybody here, who has the right to participate in elections may also volunteer to help with counting the votes, this being the first level of trust. Regardless of your politcal opinion, you may make sure that the election is properly done. Although our country has only one third of the inhabitants the US has, I think it is well comparable.
We use the old style cellulose/chemical ink type of ballots, where voters have to clearly mark their preference with a cross or any other sign that seems appropiate (check-mark, smiley, whatever). This is _very_ hard to tamper with, in order to fake an election, you will have to make a whole lot of original ballots disappear and inject your own, this under the eyes of a team of at least three people watching every step you do. Plain old paper & proper markings are the second level of trust.
We sure look at the voters. If in doubt of their identity, we ask for proof of identity (sometimes Mr. X wants to vote as Mrs. Y, has happened before). A machine, no matter how well it was designed, will never look at people and check ID if in doubt.
We don _not_ give people proof of what they voted for, because elections - at least in my country - are secret, so 'dad' won't be able to ask for proof of which party 'mom' voted for. If people can't remember where they made their cross, they are simply out of luck.
Ballots are inserted into the voting box one by one with two volunteers watching. Of course, the voting box is locked during the election process.
Immediately after the election, the team of volunteers (usually 5-7 per location) starts to count the votes manually. Counting is a public thing, so anyone can come into the room and watch how it is done. We ourselves count, recount and sure have an eye on what the other volunteers in the team are doing. Equals: Third level of trust.
After counting, we immediately phone back the results to the elections office. The ballots are kept for recounting, any ones that are uncertain, we vote wether they count or not. If in doubt, they don't count. The results of this (per ballot) vote are noted on the back of the ballot.
What's the downside of this procedure? It is _not_ slower than using electronic devices. It is almost 100% tamper proof (isn't this one of the primary goals of any electional system?). Well, using paper causes high cost, you will need to print and distribute several million ballots just in time. You will need many people to help with the election. So what? As long as enough people volunteer, it can be done.
Whats the upsides? First of all, it works quite well. Elections have a clear result, we never had to ask a court (!) for clarification. If an election was ever unclear, it would have to be _repeated_. Everybody here agrees that involving courts into the electional process greatly disturbs that balance of powers - it is just a no-go. Also, we can hardly ever run into an unclear situation, because we don't punch tiny holes into cards, we actually trust voters to be able to _clearly_ mark their likes and if they can't, they are out of luck and their votes won't count.
The biggest advantage of the plain old paper elections is, that they are free of commercial interests as they should be. Also, it is _not_ the state that actually does the work in the electional process, it is the voters themselves as they do have greatest interest to produce accurate results.
So, looking at the mess, the US electional system is in, I really wonder why your current government (!) insists on using electronic voting devices. I also remember that it was never elected by the people in the first place, to my understanding, the last election would have had to be repeated. Maybe this time, they just want to make sure that they are 'properly elected' and another PR desaster is avoided.
What really needs to happen is for Ralph Nader to get 80% of the votes for Bush in any district with an insecure Diebold machine. Let Mr. Nader's candidacy do us some good for a change.
This is scary as hell! What's to stop Jeb Bush from putting henchmen into the precinct houses and tampering with the counts?
There were already enough dirty tricks in FL last go round with state troopers patrolling polling places and purposely confusing ballots. It just got a lot easier for dirty politician to doctor an election. It's a sad day for democracy.
Nah, see, that would make it look like Nader tied to rig the election.
If you're going to frame somebody, might as well frame someone who deserves it. If Bush gets twice as many votes as there are people in the entire coutry in one state it would be very hard to ignore the fact that it had been tampered with.
The only hitch is the scenario iamplasma posted... which is the most likely outcome. (That, and blaming the whole thing on terrorists rather than the manufacturer of the equipment!)
=Smidge=
A democracy was not demonstrated to scale beyond a few thousand people. This is far different of saying it does not scale.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
>The country that currently champions democracy,
I'd hardly call a country where you only have the choice of two people already picked out for you a place of champion of democracy.
Before someone mentions "Nader", the Republican party funding Nader to pull votes from the Democrats shows you how much they think of the third person to vote for.
Electronic voting is GOOD.
Few people looking after the elections is BAD. Lack of accountability is BAD.
Take a look at this post.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
But this really can't be explained by stupidity.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I have only flown planes with zero electronics (Schweizer 2-33). So I am not an expert on the workings of small powered aircraft. Couldn't an EMP F up the function of the magnetos, and cause loss of spark and engine failure?
I know an EMP can mess up an alternator. Aren't the mags just like small alternators?
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
No one ever prevented a recount and in fact the recounts proved Bush would have won under any possible scenario.
Wrong. The recounts proved that under any of the scenarios Gore requested that Bush would win.
If they had recounted the whole freaking state as they should have in the first place, then Gore would have won.
Just because Gore was a fuckwad about how he wanted the recount doesn't excuse the fraud and outright treason which is all that lead to Bush currently holding power.
Incipient Alzheimers, perhaps.
Come on, discuss, do not moderate.
/some/ black mayors. Did you have any black governors in the last 40 years?
I would rather have you prove me flamebait, but you can't.
My point was: there was no black president; there was no black governor.
Come on, prove me wrong, get a black guy voted in the f'ng primaries and I'll get back to you.
I will offer you one closing argument. (Score:-1, Flamebait)
by hummassa (157160) on 2004.08.31 9:21 (#10116689)
Who is the black man who was elected president in the last 40 years?
Better: which black person was allowed to run for president in the last 40 years?
Ok, you do have
If so, how many, how many terms? If said number is > 0, divide it by 500 (number of governor terms in the last 40 years?) and give me a percentage. Now compare it with the percentage of black people in the USofA.
Ok, rinse and repeat for the last 20 years (allowing a 20 year period for the racial thing to "settle"... notwithstanding the LA riots were in '92).
The prosecutions rests.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
We agree on all that. I find it fascinating that you and I, neither moderates, and surely in disagreement on many government policies, potential and real, are in complete agreement on the primacy of people and our freedom to act and express in America. Another way to tell that the problem we have is neither left/right, Democrat/Republican or any other poltical brand. People are in a war against corporations, where the humans are second class citizens, and corporations have all the advantages. When I choose a president in a couple of months, I know which one will be harder to defeat in that war, who represents the arrival of the corporate machine government. And which one merely includes some corporations in his constituency, and therefore is easier to confront in winning the war for the humans.
--
make install -not war
You just keep thanking god, and we, the majority on the coasts, will keep making the money that's always propped you up since you massacred the Indians. Just remember that we don't need you brain-drainees so much now that the Cold War is over, so when your pickups are trudging through the next Dust Bowl, searching for the last gallon of gas, don't come whining to us about how we've moved on. And keep your apocalypse stories away from our Button.
--
make install -not war
I don't see anything wrong with having a Judge on site to monitor the election process instead of the guy that runs the machine with no legal bindings or any laws that restrict him from taking bribes! Even hiring people to hand count the ballots is a better idea than and all electronic system with no paper print out whatsoever. There will never be a 100% secure way to vote but the least we can do is put forth all of our effort to make it as foolproof as possible.
If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up. - Comedian Mitch Hedberg R.I.P. 03/30/68-2/24/05
Um, unless I missed something in the news, California has a REPUBLICAN gov. In fact, I believe he's speaking at the RNC... admittedly he's only slightly more republican then Kennedy... but for some reason, the RNC doesn't want us normal people to focus on the gay marriage ban that bush has pushed with every ounce of strength.
/.?
As far as NY, NY has a republican gov. AND NYC has a republican mayor. You might have heard of him? Very wealthy guy, could buy and sell
Bitching creates a lot of noise, voting creates change (albeit slowly). get off your ass and vote. The last presidential election was decided by 35% of the (total) population. That's not right. Register to vote, and VOTE people, perhaps if people stopped whining about their votes not counting, and actually voted some of these red and blue states would switch colors. As the guy from hardball said on Bill Maher, go vote, not for the person, but for where you want America to be in 20 years. If you are happy with the go it alone cowboyness of GW, then by all means vote for him. if you believe that exporting our jobs, and importing foreign products is good for us, then vote for him. if you want someone who will work with our allies and treat the rest of the world with respect (not just the parts that agree with us) then vote for Kerry. Just *VOTE*. Think about where you want to be and then act accordingly. It takes a lot for Americans to wake up, but once we do. Watch out. I'll refrain from preaching as to which way you SHOULD vote, but for god's sake vote.
That's exactly what needs to happen.
The electoral college can be used to expose this corruption without changing the effective results of the election.
Somebody "connected" needs to hack the vote of a non-swing state and throw it to the inevitable winner by an enormous, impossible amount. This wouldn't change the election outcome because that candidate was going to get those electoral votes anyway.
One problem with the enormous, impossible vote totals is that the election officials would probably disregard them and go into some ad-hoc backup mode. So another option would be to put in plausible numbers, but anonymously communicate them to a journalist in advance.
All of this would be highly illegal and incredibly risky but I think it would get the point across.
The article says it's a two digit code. If it's decimal digits only (hell even hex) you have a pretty good shot at brute forcing it.
The tricky part is finding the "secret area" of the screen.
XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-U
There's a quickie ad I want to see put together, but I don't know flash. It would be like follows:
Screen made up like a voting screen:
Do You Trust Electronic voting? (O) Yes
(O) NO
with an overwrite of the vote count count. Motion of various hands voting. 8 'yes'es, and one 'no'. With each vote, the on-screen count increments properly.
Finally a pair of hands come in and do a 'spock-pinch' motion (kinda like ctl-alt-del, but touching the upper and lower right corners and the middle of the left. A happy face appears in the middle of the screen, and one finger touches about an inch to the right of the happy face. The happy face disappears.
The hand then touches 'no', and the vote count rolls back, to 8 'no's and 2 'yes'es..
Screen-over: 8/10 'hackers' surveyed don't trust touch-screen voting. Guess why?, and perhaps a pointer to black-box-voting.org
Anybody up to it? I'll host it, if you are willing to do it (I can get bandwidth at near wholesale).
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
For me the most frightening aspect of this whole thing is its absence from major news outlets. Go ahead and Google for "diebold e-voting machines" or words to that effect. Down on page 4 of the results you will find some old articles on CBS and MSNBC and others. Site searches pull up nothing about the hack. My guess is that the "real" news organizations think Bev Harris, who is behind blackboxvoting.org, is a crackpot. But given that this is a HUGE story if it is true, I would expect them at least to ask their own questions and address it one way or another, rather than just ignoring it.
that we actually live in a direct democracy instead of a representative one
I'd settle for representative democracy if we still had it, but we live in an oligarchy. Elected representatives represent the interests of the people who give them the money to convince the public to vote for them.
And it's about time (that a woman runs for prez... even if its Hillary :)
/all/ dumped in the primaries AFAIR. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
But: none of those you mentioned actually ran for president, did they? They were
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
No black independents, too, isn't it?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I'd seriously reconsider China's Most Favoured Nation status!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
The judges who are voted in might be well-inclined to someone accused of helping them get in. For judges who get appointed, it's a bit more indirect, but I'd expect that the people who appointed them (and are, uhm, 'friends' of of the vote-tamperers) would probably know how to get their ear.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
And I guarantee: there is no right man, and they never do what they say they'll do.
But that aside, my (original) point was: if the large black minority can't even put up a black candidate, and if women generally don't vote for a woman, they are deserving to be darwined.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Seriously, *someone* should be able to haxor in and get the source, to find that lovely 'secret location' and childish code, and then spread it across the US. At the next election, use that nifty 2-digit code for a good cause. At the very least it will generate media attention when they rush to close it.
Do it.
Im pretty tired of you "republic" types tossing this nonsesense about.
You are *BOTH* a representative republic *and* a Democracy -- they are not mutually exclusive. Your Representatives are Democratically elected to administer your Republic. See? That so hard?
Now, if you wanted to say you are not a *direct democracy* you would be correct.
I dont think anyone is suggesting that you are a direct democracy...
What's an "investigative journalist"? You mean like those guys who read things of the newswire?
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
No, I mean like the guy who spends a year knocking on doors and tracking down people who don't want to be found.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0003164/
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
We need someone in a non-swing state to go in and punch in number_of_people_in_precinct * 2 votes for the guy who's going to win anyway, alert the media, and run like hell for Canada. And pick someone running locally in a unopposed slot, give them 1 vote instead of what they really got.
We need to have people tampering in obviously detectable ways, without changing the outcome of the election.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I assume you know the outright manipulation available with electronic voting (www.blackboxvoting.com) that resulted in the first Republican governor of Georgia in 130 years; but, you probably haven't read the book "Votescam" (www.votescam.com), the story of a regular Joe who made a serious run for office in Florida in the 70's, lost, and wanted to know why. The latter will give great insight on your media theory.
You are incorrect about living in a direct democracy. When is the last time you voted on legislation? You vote on a person to represent your vote on legislation - a representative democracy - a Republic.
Now, throw in money (greed) and power (control) in your theory, mix in a little drama from the recent Disney movie "Antz" - remember the barroom scene when the grasshoppers didn't want to go back to teach the ant Z a lesson for standing up for something?
Mandible (lead grasshopper) explained very clearly why one little ant is such a big deal: there's billions of them compared to the very few of us.
In spite of the interesting flamewar which followed my post, with some factual merit on the other side, there's no examples evident of MoveOn.org lying about Bush, in or out of coordination with the Kerry campaign. While the media is awash with examples of the lying Swift Boat Veterans coordinating with Bush's campaign. Flames are in the eye of the beholder (paralysis rays, too), but this "Troll" business is merely the bleating of goats afraid of a little bridge to the 21st Century.
--
make install -not war
Don't believe everything you read...most legitimate organizations fighting against these machines distance themselves from her conspiracy nutjob fantasies.
Bev Harris (aka BJ Dudley) is a "literary publicist" who steals money from her clients and does not do the work(1). An "author" who uses other people's work and claims it as her own and whose idea of solid evidence in her "book" is pasting something she sees written anonymously on an internet message board(2). A master at figuring out ways to profit from other people's hysteria, she'll tattoo a "donate here" button on her forehead if she thinks it will get her a buck(see her website). A stalker who brags about hiding in the bushes with a tape recorder to harrass various voting machine company employees(3). A litigation-happy work-avoiding scam artist who is constantly looking for a way to sue someone (ANYONE) to get rich (or at least get some attention) and drag herself out of her overweight-aging-bored housewife lifestyle(4). A liar, a thief, and suffering from severe paranoia (mostly due to the fact that she is constantly screwing over her friends and associates), she has a history of accusing members of her own BBV movement of betraying her during amusing meltdowns on public internet message boards(5)(8)(10)(11).
Her most blatant attempt of profit oriented sleaziness to date has been filing a 'Qui Tam' lawsuit against Diebold in a state she doesn't live in while simultaneously accusing (and viciously attacking) everyone in her early organization of doing the same and pronouncing a Qui Tam as something she wouldn't "soil herself" with(6)(7)(9).
Before deciding to harrass Diebold and riling up the extreme leftist internet message boards to fund her "work avoidance" lifestyle, Bev tried to make money from the sex scandal surrounding Bill Clinton. I give you, the Clinton Cigar presented by Bev Harris:
Original page archived on the web:
http://web.archive.org/web/19991112034903/http://w ww.talion.com/cigar.htm
Posts in various newsgroups by Bev Harris herself hawking her product:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=author:talion%40 ix.netcom.com&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&start=20 &sa=N
The sources below are all message board posts on various sites by Bev, her associates and former associates. I could go on digging up more for days, but this should really be enough for now. These are the same places that Bev used as "sources" in her book, so it must all be true:
1 - posted by former right-hand associate, Roxanne Jekot:
http://bartcopnation.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_to pic&forum=2&topic_id=308296#308409
2 - posted by former friend, co-author and publisher, David Allen:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboa rd.php?az=view_all&address=104x1960084#1989451
3 - posted by current head sycophant, Andy Stephenson:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboa rd.php?az=view_all&address=104x2177642#2177657
4 - http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboa rd.php?az=view_all&address=104x1938773
5 - posted by former friend, co-author and publisher, David Allen:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ appears to have been taken down by The Man. Hmmm...
And that's why we no longer live in a Representative Democracy. We live in an Oligarchy. Our so-called representatives represent the interests of the wealthy people and organizations who give them the money to convince us to vote for them. We are peasants. Karl Marx or someone called religion the opiate of the masses. Nowadays it's consumer goods. We are peasants with cell phones and cable TV.
Allow my to put on my tinfoil hat and ask, what the hell is corrupt about motor-voter?
OK.
Step 1: Pick up a stack of registration forms at any of a number of government agencies. (They will give you BOXES of them if you ask. Just say you're running a registration drive. It helps to look like you're in the same party they are - which for low-level bureaucrats in the DMV means sloppy clothes and long hair, not a neat haircut and a snappy business suit.)
Step 2: Fill out a bunch of them for imaginary people and mail them in.
Step 3: When the election papers come, check the box for permanent absentee status on each one and mail it back. (I think you can now combine that with Step 2 but I haven't checked lately.)
Steps 4-N: At each election from then on, vote your batch of fake voter ballots for whomever and/or whatever propositions you want.
They don't check. If nobody happens to be looking at the rolls closely you don't even have to invent a few thousand apartment numbers for your house. B-)
(Somebody DID notice, though, that one address in Berkeley had several thousand voters. Last I heard they were still voting, too. B-( )
And you're ignorant if you think that only Democrats do underhanded tactics like this. Allowing felons to vote might be illegal, but so was the Florida trick of listing people as felons who weren't, to keep them from being allowed to vote.
The law REQUIRED the rolls be purged. The purging process, as with any process operated by a human bureaucracy, made errors. The process also gave those improperly excluded plenty of notice and time to correct the matter before the election.
Until you can provide some solid evidence that there was more to this than the normal level of error of such a program, I will continue to interpret such griping as sour grapes from a pack of losers.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Until you can provide some solid evidence that there was more to this than the normal level of error of such a program,
You are being a hypocrite, since your description of the motor-voter 'scam' is also just as attributtable to "the normal level of error of such a program".
I will continue to interpret such griping as sour grapes from a pack of losers.
I'm not a democrat nor a republican. I wish niether Gore nor Bush had won. I just don't tolerate lying (which is why I'm neither a democrat nor a republican), and the Florida 2000 fiasco, and the subsequent explanations for it, are filled with the kinds of slanderous lying (on both sides) that utterly piss me off. The truth of the matter is that they had a shitty vote recording system in place, that had a certain margin of error, and the problem is that the margin of the vote was smaller than the margin of error inherent in the system, so the outcome is (and always will be) unknown.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I don't know about you guys, but I hope they hack this one so that Nader wins. Then watch the excriment hit the rotary blade cooling device
Vote by mail and your vote will count and leave a paper trail.