Overseas ISPs Blocked From US Voting Website

An anonymous reader writes "The US Department of Defense is blocking many of the world's major Internet service providers from giving access to the web site of the Federal Voting Assistance Program, which allows registered American voters to vote from abroad. The Pentagon is blaming the risk of hackers, but Democrats Abroad aren't happy."

Comments

No opinion on TFA...

[aelbric]

...however, I would think the Republicans would be up in arms about this. After all, isn't the military the largest portion of the voting public abroad? And don't they overwhelmingly vote Republican?

Re:No opinion on TFA...

[crow]

My guess is that the military networks aren't being blocked, but civilian ones are, so the military (Republican) vote will come through fine, but the civilian vote (more Democratic?) won't.

Re:No opinion on TFA...

[Frymaster]

so the military (Republican) vote will come through fine

but is the military vote really republican?

the christian science monitor today is running a story on anti-bush troops in iraq. give it a read -- and remember that the last time the u.s. was involved in a major land war a lot of the vetrans and enlisted men wound up developing strong anti-war stances... john kerry, for instance.

Re:No opinion on TFA...

[lynx_user_abroad]

... I would think the Republicans would be up in arms about this.

It worries me no matter who they are predicted to vote for. Consider:
The basis for democracy is that, in exchange for an opportunity to vote freely and fairly, we all agree to accept the result of the election, even if the candidate of our choice does not win the election. Reasonable people are willing to accept this bargain on the basis of the elections being free and fair.

The subtle upshot of this, which many people miss, is that an election can be rigged even without compromising a single vote.

An election is definitively won by a candidate when the number of votes received by a candidate exceeds the number of votes received by his next-nearest competitor plus the margin of error. This was the crux of the problems in Florida in the 2000 election: initially the amount of uncertainty in the vote counts exceeded the difference between Bush and Gore. What ensued was a remedial process to reduse the uncertainty through re-examination of ballots, lawsuits, and ultimately courtroom decisions.

It's interesting to note that no part of this remedial process was under the control of the voters. Clearly, you wouldn't want it to be under the control of anyone, but it explains one strategy for rigging an election under circumstances where it's too risky (or you simply have no means to) swing how the voters will actually vote. Control of the remedial process can be leveraged into control of the election itself, but only if the difference between the two candidates is small enough. Or, put another way, only if the uncertainty is large enough. Anything which raises questions about the freeness and fairness of the election process introduces uncertainty.

So, yes I'm a little concerned that some uber-hacker will root the electronic voting machines and change a few votes, but I'm a lot more concerned that confidence in a whole lot of votes will be lost simply because some uber-hacker could root the machines.

I'd lump this article in the same category. Every time I hear a story about how the election process is being skewed one way or another, I can't help but think it's because someone has already rigged the remedial process in their own favor, and all they need to with the election now is enough people questioning the initial tally.

Which is not to say I think we should stop discussing the vulnerabilities of the system, but rather to point out that we need to do more than just discuss them; we've got to ensure that the vulnerabilities are corrected. We need to send a message (from both sides of the political spectrum) that we believe our candidate can beat the opponent in a fair fight, and we won't stand for any of this crap which makes the election appear to be untrustworthyi, if for no other reason than because it calls into question the legitimacy of an election we clearly won.

I have my favorite candidate. I accept the possibility that the other candidate could win. I am of the opinion that if the wrong candidate gets elected, he could prove very bad for this country, but I don't think either/any candidate is so horrible that the damage couldn't be pretty much undone by electing the 'right' candidate in another 4 years.

But if we wind-up with an untrustable election system (no paper trail electronic voting, Internet vote casting, selectively disenfranchised voters, etc.) we might never see the chance 4 years down the road.

So I'm predicting now that the 2004 race will be close (no brainer) but I'm hoping there won't be another 2000-style fiasco in the vote counting. If there is, I hope we will all look at the resolution process with a very skeptical eye, a critical eye, an eye to the possiblity that the November vote may have already been rigged.

And that holds true no matter who wins in November.

Re:No opinion on TFA...

[overunderunderdone]

but is the military vote really republican?

Read the headline: "A Strident Minority". The same article mentions this statistic: 56% of the military is Republican. One would assume there are some independents that lean (R) as well, and with an over representation of rural southerners in the military there is probably a fair number of Democrats more along the lines of Zell Miller than John Kerry. Sure you can find a statistically significant group to write an article about. Those (maybe 25%?) that opposed the war but end up over there are obviously going to be alienated & further polarized by the experience, thus the "strident" part of the title. Democrats can try to mine this 30-40% for a few extra votes, they have an opening for some counter-intuitive outreach, but the Republicans are still going to work hard to try and get this demographic to the polls in November.

Re:No opinion on TFA...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

A Military Times survey last December of 933 subscribers, about 30 percent of whom had deployed for the Iraq war, found that 56 percent considered themselves Republican - about the same percentage who approved of Bush's handling of Iraq. Half of those responding were officers, who as a group tend to be more conservative than their enlisted counterparts.

Not sure what "considered themselves Republican" means -- presumably all the registered R's, plus independents who lean strongly that way. Anyway ... From my time in the service (1987-1997) I'd say the numbers are very different for officers and enlisted. The officer corps is strongly conservative and Republican, and becoming more so all the time (and I consider it deeply unhealthy for the nation to have an officer corps that subscribes overwhelmingly to any particular ideology, but that's a matter for another time ...) while enlisted personnel follow roughly the same split (1/3 D, 1/3 R, 1/3 other) as the rest of the country. The article pretty much says this:

Among officers, who represent roughly 15 percent of today's 1.4 million active duty military personnel, there are about eight Republicans for every Democrat, according to a 1999 survey by Duke University political scientist Peter Feaver. Enlisted personnel, however - a disproportionate number of whom are minorities, a population that tends to lean Democratic - are more evenly split. Professor Feaver estimates that about one third of enlisted troops are Republicans, one third Democrats, and the rest independents, with the latter group growing.

This isn't surprising, since officers tend to come from much more priveleged backgrounds than do enlisted personnel.

I also suspect that the numbers vary by service, with the Marines being the most conservative, the Air Force being the most liberal, and the Army and Navy -- largely by virtue of being bigger, and therefore more diverse -- being somewhere in the middle. I'd be interested to see hard numbers on this one of these days.

WTF??

[Malfourmed]

Let me see if I get this straight...

The US government has set up a website to help overseas Americans to vote.

But it's blocked access to that website by overseas ISPs, the ISPs that overseas American voters would need to use to access that site.

But wait! It's okay - only the big ISPs are blocked... just the ones most American voters are likely to use.

And all this to prevent the site from being hacked.

I guess they had to destroy the global village in order to save it.

This is not a voting site

[alatesystems]

This site provides information about voting absentee. The summary and title makes it look like they are letting people vote online, and I almost flipped out before I RTFA.

I know others won't RTFA so I wanted to throw that out there. I hope they never allow voting online, as this is the most sacrosanct privilege we have and I don't want anyone to have the ability to intercept my or anyone else's vote.

It's not a big problem to drive to the nearest school to punch a few buttons and hit "cast vote".

Chris

Netcraft results

[Masker]

The purpose, from the article:

"The goal is to make it more difficult for hackers to deface and/or hijack the website," said Lieutenant Colonel Ellen Krenke.

Well, Netcraft says it's running Solaris 8 machine running Sun-ONE-Web-Server/6.1.

How about putting the webserver up on Trusted Solaris and locking down the webserver to have fewer privs, like no write access (enforced via MAC, mandatory access controls) to the pages that you're worried about getting defaced?

But, teh intarweb isn't the only way to get info for overseas voting. From the article:

"In the meantime, overseas voters can contact their embassy or consulate, use the FVAP toll-free number or contact their local election official or secretary of state via telephone or the internet for more information on obtaining an absentee ballot," said Lieutenant Colonel Krenke.

Overseas? Find an open HTTP relay...

[YetAnotherName]

You can google for open HTTP proxies, or even just visit this site. Pick one in the US, set up your browser, and away you go. Paraphrasing John Gilmore, the Net interprets regionalization as damage and routes around it.

I use this technique to visit Japanese idol sites that disallow non .jp addresses. Slower, but better than not getting any, er, "eye-candy."

Re:disturbing sub-text, did you notice?

[Dahan]

Doesn't it bother anyone that the ***DoD*** (as opposed to the agency which "owns" the site) has the physical ability -- let alone the brazenness -- let alone the legal authority -- to do this?

No, because I read the whole article, and saw the part mentioning that "The US Department of Defense ... runs the Federal Voting Assistance Program." The DoD is the agency that "owns" the site.

And this whole thing is much ado about very little. The website is just a place where you can get info on how to vote absentee and download an absentee ballot request form. People have been voting absentee long before this website was around, and they can continue to do so. Your local US Embassy will have the ballot request form, for example (and they'll even mail it for you free there). Also, most (perhaps all?) states have their own absentee ballots that you can apply for.

typical government...

[Kr3m3Puff]

I love the governments response... Block overseas ISPs for overseas voters and then if you RTFA, you will see the government response to that is to have them call a Toll Free Number. Why would the government have a toll free number in the US for overseas voters?! Don't they know that when you call from overseas the numbers aren't toll free. In France, you have to totally dial the number another way and in fact, most Toll Free Numbers don't allow international terminations without special provisioning. I can only assume they have done that.

Yes, Virginia there are Americans who don't live in America!