Slashdot Mirror
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."
The original country that ignited the passions of democracy was wiped out in a war with Sparta thousands of years ago...
The country that currently champions democracy, well, yeah, we do lack passion.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
It's about how someone will steal the election... It's not our fault that everyone immediately jumps to the Republicans as the theives.
Let's not pretend that Diebold is non-partisan, okay?
To which party is Walden O'Dell (Diebold CEO) a major fundraiser? To which party does Diebold itself make large contributions? Of which candidate did O'Dell say: "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to [candidate] next year", in 2003?
It's not exactly a stretch to guess which party Diebold would attempt to swing the election toward, if given the opportunity. Oh wait, they already gave themselves the opportunity!
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
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
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...."
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.
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!
Misquoted too:
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
I like Yeats' version better.
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: