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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.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
Is that chimp one of the Diebold engineers?
This is interesting, but why would George W. want to do such a thing?
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
A new denial of service attack is spreading through the wild. It involves hurling feces...
Hey now, is that any way to talk about our beloved president? Besides, we won't know until election day whether that's true.
Electric Monkey Pants
Incase of the enevitable slashdotting, here's the movie of the chimp hacking the vote.
A million monkeys can write Shakespeare, but it only takes one to mess up an election.
I'm a proud Bush voter, You insensitive clod!
Sigs are for the weak.
Final_Results.Mdb
Look for this attatchment on the Electoral College's Outlook Express inbox.
If you think
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.
That's why the liberal media, like Fox, is reporting on it.
Am I the only one who thinks that the only adequate punishment that is gonna put a stop to the Diebold-esue shenanigans is to prosecute the company into the ground and then go after every VP/Salesman who lies about the severity of the problems and the coverup?
This Has Got To Stop!
(Yes... been sitting on the sidelines, but I am about fed up)
Go Getem Ahnold!
I
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
PS...that's not just an ordinary Chimp.
Here is an action photo of the actual hack.
If you think
"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
"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.
Was the monkey name Spank, like Spank, the monkey? Or "l33t |-|4xx0R 5P4|\|"?!
When pressing the touchpad I guess his trainer must have said something like:
NO! Bad monkey, BAD monkey, BAD MONKEY!!!! NO!!!!!....... ARGH! Dam Hackers!
I'm european, you know... in this side of the Atlantic we mark a piece of paper with an X on who we vote. And yes, a monkey can also do it, but at least we don't spend billions in tech just to keep all the monkeys voting...
The crock is you thinking all of the rejected stories had anything to do with "TECH".
The Diebold story is interesting because of the computerized voting angle. Not sure where the "news for nerds" aspect is in the "Iraq Diary" story, or the "Quick exit" story.
If I want to read 100 stories about Iraq daily, there's tons of other sites spewing them out by the ton. I come to Slashdot for tech-related stories.
rather than going 'all electronic' there are not more efforts to have a hybrid paper-computer model, off the top of my head:
- the voter comes to the poll, is identified and is given a paper token with a barcode that contains the polling ID station ID and a sequential number (note that the ID is not humanly readable, important for privacy)
- the voter goes in the box, which has a touch screen and an 'easy' UI, voter inserts the paper token in the box which scans it
- voter votes on the touch screen (make it really easy, BIG buttons, BIG text, whatever)
- machine prints out a ballot with the voter's vote in humanly readable form (say, prints out a 'real' ballot with blackened out rectangles on the relevant candidate(s)) and a 2D barcode at the bottom with the vote in machine readable form including the ID on the 'paper token'
- voter looks at the ballot to make sure it's ok, folds it, comes out, puts the ballot in one box and the paper token in the other. If the ballot is not ok there is a shredder right there inside the poll station and the voter votes again.
========= election over ===========
the paper token are shipped to the central office, scanned (should be very fast via the 2d barcodes) and votes tabulated accordingly; for an additional level of security you can always count the votes via the 'human readable' part of the ballot before shipping them.
If a recount or anything is necessary there are several safeguards with this system:
- you can't have ballot box stuffing, because 1 'token' = 1 vote and if those ID are generated 'well' you could even double check that all IDs make sense, sort of like a 'there are only so many valid serial numbers' there. Multiple votes with the same 'ID' will be discarded.
- you can't have doubts on the voter intent, they'll vote on the screen *AND* look at the paper copy before putting it in the ballot box later on
- if there is really no trust in the computers no problem, you can just look at the 'human readable' portion of the ballot as many times as you want: no nonsense about hanging chads or anything.
this (or something like it) would cover all the bases in terms of fast results (via scanning ballots, ship them all to a central location and do it), paper trail and so on. I really can't understand who in their right mind would consider putting the fate of the election in the hands of MS Access, for crying out loud!
-- the cake is a lie
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"saves vote totals in Microsoft Access"
Hey, at least its accurate advertising
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
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.]
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
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.
"State elections officials also said Wednesday that they are confident they can protect the system from a decidedly lower-tech threat.
:P
Elections administrator Linda Lamone said" that monkeys will be prevented from accessing the machines during the elections.....
The good thing is that even though a monkey can hack the system this still puts the hack out of the reach of the average Republican ;)
Judging by the fact that most people with the time to volunteer for poll work are our 'seasoned citizens' who, let's be honest, aren't, as a group, too computer savvy, I'd be more worried about the scrupulous people with no computer skills whatsoever messing things up.
I know this makes me an ageist asshat, but how in the heck are all these people going to get up to speed on computers enough to ensure a little 'whoops' doesn't toss a whole county or something?
You know what?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"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?
But I guess Chimp hacks Access Database isn't really news.
I clicked on the monkey story, I wouldn't have clicked on any of the others except for the one that says "Turkey", then I would realize it isn't about the yummy bird and close it.
If I wanted to be up-to-date on the war on terrorism, Irak or whatever I would watch CNN, but I want to know about Monkeys so I read Slashdot.
My humble suggestion, stop submitting political stories and start looking for monkey stories. A turkey story would be nice too.
Obligatory monkey story:
I like Monkeys
The pet store was selling them for five cents a piece.
I thought this was odd since they were normally a couple thousand. I decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth so I bought 200 of them. I like monkeys.
I took my 200 monkeys home. I have a big car. I let one of them drive. His name was Sigmund. He was retarded. In fact, none of them were really bright. They kept punching themselves in the genitals. I laughed. They punched me in the genitals. I stopped laughing.
I herded them into my room. They didn't adapt very well to their new environment. They would screech and hurl themselves off the couch at high speeds and slam into the wall. Although humorous at first, the spectacle lost its novelty halfway into it's third hour. Two hours later I found out why all the monkeys were so inexpensive; they all died. No apparent reason. They all just sort of dropped dead. Kinda like when you buy a goldfish and it dies five hours later. God damn cheap monkeys.
I didn't know what to do. There were 200 dead monkeys lying all over my room; on the bed, in the dresser, hanging from my bookcase. It looked like I had 200 throw rugs. I tried to flush one down the toilet. It didn't work. It got stuck. Then I had one dead, wet monkey and one hundred ninety-nine dead, dry monkeys.
I tried to pretend that they were just stuffed animals. That worked for a while, that is until they began to decompose. It started to smell real bad. I had to pee but there was a dead monkey in my toilet and I didn't want to call a plumber. I was embarrassed. I tried to slow down the decomposition by freezing them. Unfortuantely there was only enough room for two at a time, so I had to change them every 30 seconds. I also had to eat all the food in the freezer so it didn't go bad.
I tried to burn them, but little did I know that my bed was flammable. I had to extinguish the fire. Then I had one dead, wet monkey in my toilet, two dead, frozen monkeys in my freezer, and one hundred ninety-seven dead, charred monkeys in a pile on my bed.
The odor wasn't improving. I became agitated at my inability to dispose of the dead monkeys and I really had to use the bathroom. So I went and severely beat one of the monkeys. I felt better.
I tried throwing them away but the garbage man said the city was not allowed to dispose of charred primates. I told him I had a wet one. He couldn't take it either. I didn't bother asking about the frozen ones.
I finally arrived at a solution. I gave them out as Christmas gifts. My friends didn't quite know what to say. They pretended to like them, but I could tell they were lying. Ingrates. So I punched them in the genitals.
I like monkeys.
(DISCLAIMER: I am not the author of this story.)
--- I w00t, therefore I'm l33t.
Because Access functions are already built in to the Windows operating system, the totals could be altered even if a computer did not have Access installed on it...
But Maryland election officials agreed with Bear that no hacking can happen unless the hacker is physically at the computer.
How long until somebody writes a virus/worm/trojan that does nothing on most Windows boxes (other than propagate) and on systems where GEMS is detected then around 8:00pm on election day just go wreak havoc with the election results? No physical access to the GEMS systems is needed. If those machines are hooked up to the internet at any time prior to the election (like to get Windoze updates) they could potentially become infected with just such a worm.
Yeah, I know it's a stretch. Just playing devils advocate...
beowulf cluster of chimps could do.
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
A million monkeys can write Shakespeare...
Perhaps you'd like to visit The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator, which randomly attempts to duplicate Shakespeare's work (don't worry about legal aspects, you can generally assume it's out of copyright).
The current record is 20 letters from "Coriolanus" after 462,060,000,000 billion billion monkey-years. Sent in by Jens Ulrik Jacobsen from Denmark on 31 Aug 2004.
"1. Citizen. Before w ZgJ 8GPxwFnwvG&iX4tKfo("2ny!3Pp..."
matched
"1. Citizen. Before w e proceed any further, heare me speake All. Speake, speake 1.Cit. You are all resolu'd rather to dy then to famish? All. Resolu'd, resolu'd..."
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.
But with proper security you can have an audit trail on the system that's rather non-trivial to hack. This is a system with no redundancy, with no way of knowing if it's been tampered with after-the-fact.
"Did windows just eat the votes, or was it malicious?"
Just what I want to deal with. There are MANY security schemes that could make this bullet-proof, but it's obvious that Diebold should have stuck to ATMs. (Actually, makes me wonder what software THEY run inside... But then, the finance industry is apparently a LOT more uptight than voting districts/boards are).
This reminds me, at the recent ASIMO demonstration that I went to this Thursday at my college, they played a movie. In this movie, they were trying to prove the importance of how the robot looks determines how the public will accept it. And at some point they threw in a picture of a touch screen voting machine and mentioned "Florida" and "elections." I was too caught up in my selective hearing to know why these were mentioned in a video about trusting machines, but my friends and I had a good laugh. After all I have read, I could never trust this failure of a company. They need to fold, tuck their tails and find something else.
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.
I think we've found the culprit
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Why would someone try to do ANYTHING secure with a database engine based on JET... Even personal projects I write, and small business systems are based in SQL Server.
The mere thought of trying to store such important data in an unencypted manner gives me a headache.
One must wonder what the GEMS architenct was thinking using such a ubiquitous data store as MS Access. Honestly, my company will not even seriously consider an application for use if it is based on Access, or even stores it's data unsecured in an MS Access database.
While there are methods for "securing" an Access database, they are based on JET's user system, which itself is not all that secure in the first place.
Might I suggest they rewrite the database core to SQL Server. There would not need to be that many changes to the source code if there are using standard ADO or ADO.Net code. One can quickly create an encrypted database using a statement something like this: Create Database "secure.sdf" databasepassword '' encryption on
Being that this data has the potential for selecting the countries next Presidient, the data should be:
Encrypted
Secured with Multiple Levels of Authentication
Passed on a network invulnerable to snooping (fiber comes to mind here)
Encrypted between the client and server
Coding my way to the next BSOD!
It's like a monitor, except it's a lot cheaper, the resolution sucks, and you can't read Slashdot. All it does is show crappy Real Video type stuff all day. Worse, it's mostly advertisements, and when there's not an ad, people in the programs often talk about or use products anyway, which is basically another form of advertising. On the plus side, I heard companies like Sony and Nintendo sell boxes that you can hook up to a tv screen and play video games. These boxes will also let you watch Star Wars or Lord of the Rings or other DVDs on your tv screen too. Yes the resolution sucks, but the main advantage of watching a movie on a TV screen is that you can get a huge TV screen (42 inches let's say) for a lot less money than what you'd pay for the same size monitor. It's a tradeoff.
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
I mean, really. They practically have a button that says "Press to Hack Election."
I would rather be killed by a terrorist than enslaved by my government.
"Hacked by chimpanzees"
....all the Rs and Ds get in a war with each other and bump themselves off.......
I'm trying.....grunt... groan...sweat..... can't do it!
I just can't figger out anything wrong with that.
%^)
Diebold says...
Even if the system could be hacked, he said, it could only be done by a person with "unfettered access to the system." Bear noted that elections are not just the machines, but also the people who work the elections.
"Quite honestly it's somewhat insulting to elections officials and volunteers," he said to the idea that elections officers would tamper with vote results.
At every election I have voted in, the officials and volunteers are retirees who have VCRs flashing 12:00! They would never know it if some young whipper-snapper was farting aroung with the newfangled high-tech whizbang voting machines, nor will they be able to help anyone if the machines screw up.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
For all the Americans out there, we live in a democracy where "all decisions are made by representatives who act by [our] consent". However, it is incredibly difficult for an elected representative to follow his/her constituent's wishes if they are not informed of which bills they should vote for by their constituents.
A simple letter (here or here or here or here) is one of the easiest ways to inform your elected representative of your stance in regard to certain bills. If you feel strongly enough about fixing the current state of electronic voting in this country, I highly reccomend writing to your elected representatives to inform them of your concerns and certain bills which they should support.
Remember, for a democracy to work as intended there needs to be participation by all of its citizens though voting as well as keeping their elected representatives informed of the citizens wishes.
Also remember that when contacting your representatives a signed, mailed letter makes a much bigger impact than an e-mail.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
... and an infinite amount of time that could create a Shakespearean work.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
but can George W Bush?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
"1. Citizen. Before w ZgJ 8GPxwFnwvG&iX4tKfo("2ny!3Pp..."
I bet the rest of that is just Danish l33t speak or something...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
If you truly had an infinity of monkeys and of typewriters, then it should only take O(1) time for them to produce a work of Shakespeare. Or, for that matter, all of the works of Shakespeare, including the ones he didn't write.
That's all right then; it should be fairly easy to spot a suspicious-looking chimp near a polling station.
The report was fairly critical, but balanced.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
When asked about the chimp hacking their voting machine a Diebold spokesman shrieked loudly, barred his teeth and threw feces at the offending reporters.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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."
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I'm not very concerned because
:-)
(a) By "terrorists", I assume you're talking about al Qaeda. How does al Qaeda gain from the presidential election? Neither Bush nor Kerry is likely to stop hunting them down.
(b) There are lots of groups with more stake in who becomes president and who are better equipped to screw with the election -- either political party, for instance. An activist programmer. A state official involved in the machines. I'm worried about *them* mucking with the election, not with terrorism.
(c) It'd hardly be terrorism to hack a system (producing political influence by inflicting terror on a populace), so from a simple, stupid, logical standpoint, unless someone had already engaged in terrorism, they wouldn't be a terrorist.
Why is this a FOX News issue when all they state the obvious?
Because they're being deliberately misleading. Terrorists "hacking the election" is just not a big concern, but they keep trying to keep terrrorism in people's heads. Terrorism has never been a real top national problem, not on 9/11 and certainly not now. Smoking, car crashes, alcohol -- all of these kill more people and cause vastly more economic damage, and do so on a recurring basis. The only reason people care so much about 9/11 is because of the steady and constant media coverage.
I, for one, would like to hear not at all about Bush and Kerry's war records, little about their stupid "war on terror" initiatives, and more about issues that actually affect American citizens.
May we never see th
Am I the only one who started hearing alarms going off in my head when I read this sentence:
"We probably have the most secure system in the nation," said Lamone...
Translation: "We know nothing about security."
And lo and behold, they're using Microsoft Access. I rest my case.
From the article ...
..."
" He demonstrated how to change vote totals with a six-line program in Microsoft notepad
Is that the programming language for tablet pc's?
--
Why would you trust election officials?
The US (not to mention many other countries) have a long and rich history of election officials tampering with the results. What says that that has suddenly ended in 2004?
A different way than "election officials are corrupt" of framing the issue is to point out that corrupt people who want to influence results will want to become election officials. Especially if there are no checks on their power.
Computers can lie. They can lie The Big Lie. They can lie with a compete deadpan expression, claiming you did X instead of Y. If you ask them to present their documentation, they can lie about that. If you ask to see their code that produces the documentation, they can lie about that.(1) Unlike humans, they will produce perfectly consistent lies, and it's physically impossible to look inside a CPU and RAM chips while the computer is running. All you can do is, you guessed it, ask the computer what those contain, and it can blithly lie about that.
If you take the code to another computer, one that doesn't lie, and scan it, you will get the truth. Of course, at that point, the people making the lying computer will simple move the lies into the hardware, and you won't find anything wrong with the code anymore. You'll have nice clean code on the disk, and a secret chip on the motherboard that alters a known pointer to somewhere else in memory under certain circumstances. And, no, you can't run software to detect this, because...
Computers can even lie to themselves. This is why all DRM schemes keep getting broken, this is why all copy protection gets hacked, this is why I can watch DVDs on Linux and ignore the region code, this is how VMWare works. This is why Microsoft wants 'Trusted Computer' where, in theory, a CPU can be put in 'no lie' mode. But that doesn't exist yet, and it's doubtful it won't be hacked if it ever does.
And, with recent stunts by Diebold, where there have been delibrate backdoors installed, it's rather akin to a company trying to break it's own copy protection, one it designed to look pretty but be broke in a few seconds. The only thing that's saved us so far is that Diebold is completely incompetant.
Computers are perfect liars. Three computers could, in theory, fix that, if run by different companies and using different systems. (If you just have two, how do you resolve differences?) But no one seems to be doing that, and it would be rather expensive to stick three computer screens in each booth to show what each system thinks you voted for.
That said, we want redundency. Non-computer redundency. We want a printer, that prints ballots off, which are then counted, either alone or together with the computer count. That's all anyone wants.
You don't solve real world security issues by having multiple people check the same badge against the same database, and you don't solve voting security issues by simple recording a vote in three computers. You solve in by recording a vote outside a computer. If you're really clever, you make that vote human readable and machine readable via OCR.
1) Of course, Diebold machines run Windows, and if you think anyone can check that code you're dreaming anyway.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Assistant: Maybe we should finally tell them the big secret: that all the chimps we sent into space came back super-intelligent.
Chimp: No, I don't think we'll be telling them _that_.
[Roller skates away, making monkey noises]
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
How can a country place its economic and political future on such a fucked up database/wanna be database application as MS Access? Are you fuckin kiddin me?
Say what you will about the relative scale of the elections in the two countries, one thing is certain - the elections work here. The results are in very quickly, the security protocols surrounding voting and counting are simple enough to be comprehensible and auditable by just about anyone, and the whole thing is done with exemplary transparency.
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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! [Emphasis added]
The classic case of a cashier who trades tickets for money and a ticket taker shows that you can have a trustworthy system even if you don't trust the participants.
Flim-flam. Make it complicated enough and there's plenty of room for skuldudgery. Sure you run checks and balances, but it needs to be simple and obvious enough that it can be trusted without looking any further. In fact if there is a problem it is more likely to be in those checks and balances.
Think Road Runner and Coyote. You do not want a voting system invented by Wyle E. Coyote, Super Genius.
Well, if the chimp was an employee of Primate Programming, Inc., that wouldn't surprise me.
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?
Yeah, I don't think you're explaining it right. The whole mess in 2000 was related to uncounted ballots, and whether we should attempt to count them in the recount. It was determined that we should, and at that point the question was HOW should we count them. Each side (they both had a vested interest) got some lawyers and went to court and it was basically figured out. The thing that happened in the Supreme Court was a bit different, as it related to the certifying of the election results by Catherine Harris over the objections of those who wanted a more thorough recount(and again, they were biased, but that's what elections are about!).
If you saw the movie Fahrenheit 9/11, you'd see that after the court challenges, Gore had more options available to him to protest the Florida results (50% of uncounted ballots were from primarily black districts, and there was... Something, maybe I should watch that part of the movie again). However, he chose not to pursue that, in the interests of unity and of getting on with it, so to speak...
I say this not because any of it really matters, but I feel that your bias is to one side on this issue, and wanted to present the arguments of the other side.
The whole thing basically illuminates the fact that elections are not yet a flawless process. The whole Diebold situation is simply an extension of that. As primarily Linux advocates, this crowd sees imperfections and opportunity for vote falsification, and wants to speak out. A number of people here could manage a project to create a bulletproof system that relied not on people, but on security, encryption, etc...
Synergy is your friend
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?
The voting machines software must be available for public inspection.
The hardware design for voting machines must be available for public inspection.
The assembley of voting machines must be available for representitive public inspection.
The voting machines security must be based on cryptographicly secure systems.
The voting machine once put into service must not be openable, the case must be sealed and no software route to controll the unit in place.
The voting machine must produce a full tally of all votes for any election it has ever been used in when requested by an authorised key holder.
The voting machine must log all administrative transactions, and produce this with all vote counts.
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The electoral volentears know how to handle people voting, a secure system would have to be devised for handling of the votes taken from the machines, possibly a small printer device similarly open to public inspection to convert the data into a human readable form from an early point in the chain.
If anyone wants to add any more to this, comment on how it can be done feel free. There's no way I can have total trust without proof that the names on the list tally up to what the clicks on the screen mean.