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More on the Dangers of eVoting

Posted by michael on from the up-the-creek-without-a-paddle dept.

blamanj writes "A lot of discussion has been focused on the lack of security in electronic voting systems. What hasn't been as widely discussed, is just how tiny the voting manipulations have to be to have an effect. In this months CACM (cite, pdf of original paper is here), some Yale students show that altering only a single vote per machine would have changed the electoral college outcome of the 2000 election. Changing only two votes/machine would have flipped the results for four states."

3 of 339 comments (clear)

  1. Diebold using DES encryption! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Baltimore Jewish Times is reporting that Diebold uses DES encryption in their voting machines, and the key is publically available!
    http://www.jewishtimes.com/2435.stm

  2. Re:On a side note by Dachannien · · Score: 5, Informative

    Except the Vote or Die campaign carries a political agenda along with it. Propaganda and education aren't the same thing.

    I didn't attend the Vote or Die rally at my school (mainly because I greatly dislike P. Diddy, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Mary J. Blige somewhat), but the reports I've heard indicated that DiCaprio fully admitted his support for Kerry during his speech, and Blige's incoherent ramblings were something to the effect of the war in Iraq being bad because it leads to a cycle of domestic violence. P. Diddy at least spread around the criticism by noting that neither major candidate spent much time politicking to large urban centers.

  3. Re:Unrealistic by Jelloman · · Score: 5, Informative
    No voter fraud cases are being in any way instructed by anyone up-top. Most likely, those in positions even close to power don't even consider that the fraud could be happening. Most of the fraud is done by individuals on a lower level.

    The truth lies somewhere in between, I think. It's hard for me to look at something like this:
    An official at Nebraska's Election Administration estimated that ES&S machines tallied 85 percent of the votes cast in Hagel's 2002 and 1996 election races.

    In 1996, ES&S operated as American Information Systems Inc. (AIS). The company became ES&S after merging with Business Records Corp. in 1997.

    In a disclosure form filed in 1996, covering the previous year, Hagel, then a Senate candidate, did not report that he was still chairman of AIS for the first 10 weeks of the year, as he was required to do.
    ... and accept the notion that Sen. Hagel has never once considered or talked to anyone about the possibility that election results might have been manipulated on his behalf.

    From what I've read, it seems many of the employees of Diebold are pro-VV-paper-trail, and the resistance to it from Diebold comes from on high. That, and a philosophical commitment to bad engineering, exploitable vote servers, aggressive lawyers, and closed source (all of which seems to be in evidence), is all the guys up top really need to do. There doesn't have to be any coordination with the parties that manipulate elections, you just have to be committed to giving them the right tools to succeed.