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Chimp Can Hack Diebold Electronic Voting System
rbuysse writes "A million monkeys can write Shakespeare, but it only takes one to mess up an election. Scoop here." Blackboxvoting is behind this demonstration; there's also a lengthy thread on the Bugtraq mailing list.
Incase of the enevitable slashdotting, here's the movie of the chimp hacking the vote.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org.nyud.net:8090/baxter /baxterVPR.mov
Although it's pretty weak... just a bunch of cuts of a monkey and a computer.
I'm not sure why any of this should be surprising...
Try the US Civil Rights Commission. (Their report on the Florida electoral fraud is available here: http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/main.htm )
#define DRM chmod 000
"I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year."
- Wally O'Dell, CEO Diebold
Tell the truth and you won't have so much to remember.
Read This
COLUMBUS - The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.
It seems to me that someone who makes voting software shouldn't be promising to deliver votes, but maybe it's just me.
-Dan
Their "evidence" of a chimp hacking diebold is a series of poorly cut images of a chimp and a computer????? Come the fuck on now... First, half of the minute video is useless filler text and a picture of smiling chimp, which immedietly jumps to a sequence that could have only been cut by an editor with suffering from ADD syndrome. Seriously, where's that foot icon, because there's no way you could possibly take this story seriously.
But for the inveitable slashdotting it'll receive, I'll summerize: Makers say Diebold works, opponents say it doesn't, que poorly edited movie of monkey sitting by computer hitting stuff, analogous to the new "Baby hitting mouse" AOL 9.0 commercial. The End.
Thank me, beecause I just saved you 5-10 minutes of your life. Use it to get a free ipod or something.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I dunno about you, but I've often seen sales clerks spending a lot of time refilling the paper rolls, dealing with ink outages, paper jams, "Sorry, but do you mind if I don't give you a receipt, it's not working," "Sorry, but the ink is really faint."
: Scantrons are ancient, and work well, with a very low error rate, at least, lower than hanging chads when you've got machines to properly mark the cards in the first place.
Not true. Scantrons have an extremely high error rate, as I've found on the few occasions when I've used them as a teacher. If you don't do any erasing, the error rate is fairly low, but if you erase, the chances that it'll read it correctly are only about 50% in my experience. (The people who sell the Scantron machines claim that they're extremely accurate when they're tuned up perfectly, but if so, then the ones at my school don't ever seem to get a tune up. Remember, this voting technology has to be extremely robust, and it has to be run by volunteers with no technical knowledge and no time for tinkering.)
Find free books.
Like the Open Vote Foundation?
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
"I think the system the grandparent was promoting was using public funds to create a public solution, which still requires buying/paying for tools from the private sector"
:-) The project has been under active development for several years, and has produced a system that's been publicly demonstrated.
Exactly. Please visit http://www.openvotingconsortion.org/. We're a consortium dedicated to creating an open source voting system. The idea, exactly as you propose, is that many commercial vendors can take the open source platform and package it with hardware, training, and so on. Or a particularly motivated (or cheap) organization could run their own election system using internal technical resources.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
You're the one who needs to start using your brain.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Perhaps I'm missing the sarcasm here
Perhaps just a little?
I think Fox earns its reputation because it tries to be bi-partisan, whereas others try (and fail) to be non-partisian. Also by comparision to CBS, NBC, ABC anything looks right of center.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Fair enough, and I agree with you, but take a look at the politics.slashdot.org page and tell me that most of the accepted stories do deal with tech.
I just checked and 5 out of 10 deal with technology in politics. Half. The rest is arguably 100% political news. Granted, I go elsewhere for that too, but the fact is that those rejected stories are nowhere off the norm for the Politics page.
You know what?
After having witnessed the operations of a massive county elections system in one of the largest counties in the United States - King County, WA - which is responsible for over 1.3 million registered voters, I felt that I should add a few comments to this interesting discussion.
What many people don't realize is that there is not 'one single ballot' that fits millions of voters. In fact, in King County alone in this past primary election, there were over 8,000 separate different permutations of ballots. County elections offices throughout the country are responsible for multiple layers of different, ever-shifting data that can include state legislative districts, county legislative districts, municipal districts, library, fire, and utility districts, as well as various voter-approved initiatives and local ballot propositions. Each of these different jurisdictions are often reapportioned or redistricted to add to the confusion.
For example, if a particular city within a certain county were to decide to convert to a district-based system of electing its officials instead of utilizing an at-large method of voting, the number of different ballots could easily go up by factor of ten within that municipality alone.
Worse, occasionally the entire system of voting gets scrapped altogether and you have to completely rewrite the code based upon the most recent changes to election law -- whether those changes come from court decisions or directly from the appropriate legislatures.
These difficulties get magnified with the usage of paper ballots. Imagine going to your print vendor(s) and telling them that they have to print 8,000 different versions of a primary election ballot for 1.3 million registered voters. In 3 weeks. And no screw-ups because you can't change the date of the election. You can imagine how easily such a transaction could be fouled up. You can also imagine the political fallout if it did.
The utilization of private firms to handle the technical aspects of the hardware and software are in due part to leave a trail of accountability. Private-sector vendors are accountable in the sense that they can lose their contract with the elections office if they screw up. Leaving the production of the software to an open-source consortium, while laudable in theory, has no practical use in real life. There is no accountability and with very time-specific deadlines to meet (and with little margin for error), you would be asking for a complete implosion on election day. When voters are looking for who to blame because they didn't get their votes counted properly, they are not going to happy to discover that the error lie with an open-source consortium that is unaccountable for its final product.
Additionally, use of electronic machines significantly reduces the costs of holding an election, as well as reducing opportunities for fraud and disenfranchisement. With multiple internal auditing procedures and data analysis, it is reasonably more easy to detect changes in the software than it is to detect 'accidental loss of paper ballots' or subjective counting of dangling, hanging, dimpled, three-cornered, or two-cornered chads.
Anyways, hope this diatribe helps! Keep up the great thread.