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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.
"Dacek said Wednesday that she fears that critics of the new voting system may try to physically sabotage the machines."
Wow. That's so..... scaremongering.....
Gentoo Sucks
Sure we trust the election officials, but do we trust every contractor or tech who might work on those systems? Especially as Diebold seems so lax in checking backgrounds that people with convictions for fraud, blackmail, and embezzlement have access to their code. I'd bet that their contractors are even less subject to appropriate background checks.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
However, most of the rejected stories you listed have nothing to do with technology; they merely describe political news or events. I think the bias Slashdot has toward "news for nerds" is appropriate; we can get our pure political news from other sources.
When I'm reading slashdot, I'm looking for info about tech trends and social impacts therefrom, nothing more.
Although very questionable, and highly inflamitory, the above quote would provide better evidence of a corporate conspiracy (much more likely) than a conspiracy by the Republican party.
"Quite honestly it's somewhat insulting to elections officials and volunteers," he said to the idea that elections officers would tamper with vote results.
I say "Quite honestly, it's somewhat insulting to the voters," to the idea that the voting public should naively disregard the human factor and that temptation/corruption/bribery "just don't happen."
Never underestimate the power of money, especially in large, unmarked bundles.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
Isn't it basically unconscionable that the actual process of elections be a for-profit venture? While the military may buy hardware from outside vendors, it does so because certain problems require such specific, high-level technical knowledge and manufacturing know-how which they don't posess in-house. A voting system is, at it's core, a system of adding numbers together that any first-year comp sci student could create. Why is something so basic to the legitimacy of our government being given to for-profit ventures with closed systems?
At the government's disposal are hundreds of public universities with some of the brightest minds in the country, many of whom would gladly work on implementing the great american open-source voting system. Even if these graduate students and professors were paid market rates for their work, it would still be much cheaper than what Diebold systems are costing the US. There is also no competitive advantate go keeping the system closed-source... so what if Austrailia decides they want to run their elections on our software? We've proud of other countries copying our constitution and systems of government, why not our systems of elections too? Especially if they improve it, and give those improvements back to us? What, are we suddenly going to be exporting less consumables to them because they have more legitimate elected officials?
The ______ Agenda
Dacek said Wednesday that she fears that critics of the new voting system may try to physically sabotage the machines. She pointed to a recent incident in which a poll judge had to be ordered to return a voting machine that was used for demonstrations at an suburban folk festival.
Does anyone else find it rather strange they are worried about the "critics" and not the ones who seem to be in a big hurry to get these insecure systems in place? In my mind, the critics are the ones trying to stop a possible hi-jacking of democracy.
This reads like a AM radio talk show host comparing protestors at a convention to terrorists.
The idea that elections can be entrusted to the Diebold corporation is wholly absured when you consider that democracy is an activity of the people, for the people and by the people. Of course the results will be and ***SHOULD*** be questioned; that's the whole point of a democracy. That's why an open source voting system is and should be the only way to do computerized voting; it's open to scrutiny by anyone and everyone, and such it is, eventually and ultimately, beyond scrutiny when the final vote is out.
The open source community should produce as soon as possible an effective, secure, and open source voting system that's ready for reliable usage. It's one thing to criticize Diebold, it's another thing to question an elected official why an open source solution that's proven and secure and anyone can know the ins and outs of is not implemented and another obscure, closed, and highly questionable one is entrusted.
1-2: Handled by millions of point-of-sale terminals already. This is no large feat of engineering that needs to be reinvented.
3: 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.
4: He walks out of the booth with it, and right up to the ballot box, just like we do currently. No big deal, and after that, he can have proof he voted, but the card with the actual votes on it is in the box.
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I wouldn't be amiss to a mis-vote called whenever the election was indeterminate with a known (low) level of error. Like, 0.01% or less (or some other number, that one was pulled out of thin air). To cover error in the system.
Automatic revote.
>Judging by the fact that most people with the time >to volunteer
You only need to take one day off work to do it.
What's your real excuse? It's not your age, it's the fact that you really aren't interested.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
What Diebold clearly don't understand (or care about) is that while trust in the election officials has always been very important, never before could one single person change all the votes in seconds leaving no evidence! Its like being able to stick your coat hanger through a stack of 50 million punch-cards and have the chads disappear into thin air. But that's not even half of it - they just assume that it can only be done with physical access to that machine - how can they be sure the data is secure on its way to the machine? What if its already been compromised? With a system as complex as the average computer you have allot of exits to cover. At least with paper it would take an army of people to fake 50 million ballots, with computers it could potentially take a few lines of code and an opportunity. Its not even in Diebolds interests to secure things like verifiable election logs, because, if something does screw up Diebold certainly wont want you to know. This is why we call privatisation "The short-sighted or externally lobbied greed of a government in which an enterprise requiring only better management is aquired by worse management who take all profits and place them in a tax haven or a yacht."
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That's the plain and simple of it. No one has ever been able to demonstrate that they'll save money during an election, nor that they're anywhere close to being secure. Diebold's machines are black-box proprietary and it's essentially impossible to determine if someone (say, a bought-and-paid-for Diebold exec) has tampered with the results.
I used to work with county and city elections. No machines were used, just a supervisory staff of elections officials and a horde of volunteers. All voting locations would count each box of ballots twice, each time by a different person, and if the tallies weren't exact they'd go through the whole process again for that ballot box. This would continue until two separate individuals got the same count for the box.
Afterwards, all of the paper ballots would be boxed and stored in a secure location in case it became necessary to do a recount. And again, all recounts were done by box, twice, and any discrepancies meant starting over from scratch for that box.
This wasn't a terribly expensive way of doing things. The primary cost was in printing and mailing the ballots (for mail-ins). The elections sites themselves were run by volunteers, and the supervisory staff was already paid for. Fraud was rather difficult to pull off on the part of the volunteers and the entire process was 'open source'. Individual citizen groups could demand to have a representative sit in on the recounts, as could any political party that was running a candidate.
Why, exactly, are we dumping a system like this for Diebold machines? It makes no sense at all unless someone is specifically looking for a way to fuck up the elections in their favor, or in favor of whomever happens to be paying them off.
And don't tell me that this system can't be scaled; that's bullshit. The system I'm speaking of here was used on the city, county, and state level. If it can be done by one state, it can be scaled for any state, and it's the STATES who run the elections, not the federal government.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?