Blackboxvoting.org Raises Vote-Audit FOIA Request

aacool writes "Blackboxvoting.org has raised the largest Freedom of Information request in history. At 8:30 p.m. Election Night, Black Box Voting blanketed the U.S. with the first in a series of public records requests, to obtain internal computer logs and other documents from 3,000 individual counties and townships. Networks called the election before anyone bothered to perform even the most rudimentary audit. Among the first requests sent to counties (with all kinds of voting systems -- optical scan, touch-screen, and punch card) is a formal records request for internal audit logs, polling place results slips, modem transmission logs, and computer trouble slips."

Comments

Ohio and Florida

[StudyOfEfficiency]

I understand made use of electronic voting machines manufactured by Diebold. Their CEO pledged to do whatever was in his power to swing the election towards George. Interesting... Plus the exit polls seemed to suggest a different winner.

Re:Ohio and Florida

[wcrowe]

People lie in exit polls. There are people in certain ethnic groups, cliques, etc. who maintain one public persona, but who cast ballots a different way in the privacy of the voting booth. This is true of both sides, but particularly of the left.

This is it, folks. Donate!

[lawpoop]

Blackboxvoting.org is a non-profit supported by donations. Screw the FSF and the EFF. Give your money now to these guys and shine the light on the roaches.

What are the possible consequences?

[Tlosk]

Assuming that enough fraud is uncovered that it could have swung the election the other way, what recourse is there? Would we have to rehold the election? Or could the current winner be undone?

Re:What are the possible consequences?

[Glendale2x]

Assuming that enough fraud is uncovered that it could have swung the election the other way, what recourse is there? Would we have to rehold the election? Or could the current winner be undone?

What should happen, if there was fraud, is to invalidate the election and schedule another one. In the new election, throw out (or make illegal) whatever machines were used to create the fraud. Plug the holes and do it right. You can't declare anyone a winner if any fraud was involved without holding a new election. Yeah, it would be a pain in the ass, but it would be the right way to go about fixing it.

The biggest can of worms in the world

[Andr0s]

A most... daring move, I have to say. The very perspective and magnitude of task such as doing independant audit of complete US presidential elections is... staggeringly humongous. I am afraid that the blackboxvoting.org does not posess facilities, technology and manpower to handle the avalanche of raw data that might hit them as the result of this request - obviously, to do a proper audit, they'd need to start from individual ballots... all 110+ million of them, plus all the disqualified ballots, duplicate ballots, questionable ballots?

In the aftermath, I am afraid that, if the audit indicates there are irregularities or foul play involved in the elections, reply might simply be 'It is counting error on your end, you don't have capacities for competently performing an audit of this size.' Besides, I just might think not enough of Americans will actually care.

Bottom line... I sure do hope the audit works out. I sure do hope it proves elections were rigged (being from a former communist eastern european state myself, I saw a number of those :). But I'm afraid it'll be a wasted effort.

We failed America

[exmet paff dexx]

Every Slashdot reader knew going into this election that the Diebold machines were unaccountable, had no unalterable audit logs, no paper to subpoena, no WORM media to recount from. They are rewriteable and they are in the hands of the GOP. Now, suddenly, only two states have a vote count which is wildly divergent from the exit polling. Those states are Ohio and Florida. They were polled entirely by Diebold machines.

There is no accountability, no log, no going back. And it's OUR fault. We knew, and we didn't take action. We KNEW this would come.

It's not about who votes. It's about who counts them.

Favourite quote

[TheRaven64]

I R'd TFA this morning (UTC). My favourite quote is:

The central servers are installed on unpatched, open Windows computers and use RAS (Remote Access Server) to connect to the voting machines through telephone lines. Since RAS is not adequately protected, anyone in the world, even terrorists, who can figure out the server's phone number can change vote totals without being detected by observers.

Fishy?

[riggz]

It seems fishy to me that the two states with computerized balloting and no paper trail, had Kerry winning in the exit polls, but the outcome was decidedly different. In fact these two states had the highest discrepancy in exit poll vs. final poll numbers.

Touch Screen Voting

[whiskeypete]

The election yesterday was my third experience with the new-improved voting machines. And for the third time, I walked out of the booth wondering if my vote would really be counted.

After tapping my choices with a stylus -not really that easy for a left-handed-choice-tapper on a right-handed machine, I had to re-do a lot of them- I pressed the vote button. And the screen flashed something like "vote recorded" and then it went blank.

There was nothing to drop in a ballot box, nothing to show me that the machine was really hooked to anything, and of course, nothing that anybody could re-count if there was a question of fraud.

The friendly octogenarian on duty assured my that the it was all run by computer and that we didn't need a paper trail, since they could recount the computer records if they needed to do a recount. And since it is impossible for hard drives to die and memory chips to fail...

Yeah, it probably worked this time but the empty feeling I had as I walked out of the polling station left me strangly envious of those days when I could look at my punch card to make sure that none of the chads were hanging.

national security

[acvh]

Don't be surprised when these requests are denied on the grounds that providing this information would compromise our ability to prevent vote fraud. (my head spins just typing that)

The radical right now control the White House, the Senate and the House. Some of the senators voted in last night make Barry Goldwater look like Ted Kennedy. This faction will not allow anyone to look behind the curtain.

What I don't get...

[Coppit]

One thing I find worrying is the disparity between pre-election polling and exit polling compared to the actual results of the election. Pre-election polling had Kerry winning Florida but losing Ohio, and exit polling had Kerry winning Florida and Ohio both. (All the other exit polling predictions were accurate.)

I also find it surprising that Florida was so clearly for Bush given how tight it was last time. (Maybe retirees care more about terrorism and Iraq than I thought?)

Much of Ohio uses Diebold voting machines, which leave no paper trail. Early in the campaign, Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell, a GOP fundraiser, promised to deliver Ohio to Bush. :(

Question: If someone committed fraud, would it be better to make it a decisive victory in order to avoid scrutiny?

These guys should start with the big counties in states such as Florida and Ohio that seemed to turn out contrary to prediction.

Re:They do?

[MindStalker]

Mentioning the gay marriage thing I find it amazing that a state like Mississippi which voted to ban gay marriage by huge majority still had a comparably close race for president. So it must be something else.

Re:They do?

[iwadasn]

They only mirror the results because CNN adjusted them to remove this little embarrassment.

If you saw the exit polls when the polls actually closed (9-10 oclock or so) they favored John Kerry by a significant (2-4%) margin. Only later (around 1:00 am) did the exit polls start to drift towards the actual numbers reported by the polls.

Where did these numbers come from? Were there more exit poll results reported at 1:00 AM? It seems odd that this little discrepency was silently corrected once it was determined who would "win". I'm not a conspiracy thorist, but presumably the exit polls that were inaccurate at 10:00 when the polls closed should still be inaccurate this morning, but that is not the case.

Something odd happened here, don't accept cnn's exit poll numbers.

Re:They do?

[jedidiah]

The god given right of evangelical xians to impose their views on everyone else and meddle in people's lives. The American religious right is basically a resurgence of the Puritan mentality of many of the early settlers. They chose to come here not to escape persecution in their home country but to have a place that they could control.

This is why the Pilgrims left the Netherlands where they were obviously free to practice religion as they chose. They left because they didn't want their children influenced by the progressive Dutch mentality of the time.

Re:They do?

[drew]

But here it seems that the Deibold machines did their jobs. I stil don't trust them but I'm not going to dispute the results.

I'm not so sure about this. I've heard enough stories about people hitting kerry on one of these touchscreens only to see it say bush when it asked them to confirm their votes. And I've heard them from a variety of places and states. Of course even a paper trail wouldn't help us in this case unless the voter took the time to look over the choices made by the machine. It's possible that these stories are the exceptions rather than the rule, but they still make me wonder.

Personally I liked the ballots that we used here in Boulder, Colorado. Big printed paper ballots with a square next to each option. You fill in the square with a blue or black pen. It's about as easy as you can make it, and I know exactly how my votes got counted. On the downside, they take longer to count (as of noon today only about 5% of Boulder's precincts had reported in) but personally, I would be perfectly happy to wait until the Friday after election day to see the results if it meant I wouldn't have to worry about whether my vote counted.

Re: Illegal!

[multimed]

At least from what I've read, the Ohio law says that if the margin of victory is less than the number of provisional ballots, then they must be counted. Regardless of concessions and whatever else happens, to not count them would be breaking the law. We can argue and fight and do whatever we can to change election laws for 364 days. But on election day, we must follow the laws in place on that day as closely as possible. Any successful effort to change the rules during or after the fact are infinitely more destructive to the republic than putting one candidate into office.

As far as taking a lot of work, while Ohio has a lot of punchcard ballots (70%?!?) they do have a uniform criteria in place to determine whether a "hanging chad" is valid or not, unlike Florida 2000.

Re:They do?

[jc42]

The machines give roughly the same answers as the exit polls. That's a crude measure, but it implies that there wasn't widespread fraud.

Funny; I've already seen a lot online discussing the inaccuracies in the exit polls. NPR had a program on the topic a couple hours back, where the exit-poll reps admitted that they overestimated the Kerry vote by 5% or more. They seemed especially bothered by the fact that so many polls were off by roughly the same amount.

They didn't quite say it, but one obvious suspicion was a systematic 5% (roughly) error in counting the votes.

The other obvious suspicion is a systematic bias in all the polls. But it's more difficult to see how this might happen, given the wide range in political stances of the polling organizations.

One, uh, "interesting" thing I ran across a few weeks ago was a discussion of a growing difficulty that pollsters have in the US: There are a lot of states now using proprietary electronic voting equipment that can't be audited or examined by outsiders. It's essentially impossible for a pollster to estimate the bias introduced by such equipment and add it to the poll estimates. And, of course, if a poll turns out different from the final vote tally, it's a huge embarrassment to the polling company.

It was interesting hearing them discuss this problem openly. It was as if they just accepted the bias of the equipment as a given that we all know about. Their problem is that they couldn't poll the machines and determine their biases, which makes for a large unknown in their calculations.

Well, it'll be interesting to see what blackboxvoting discovers, if anything.

We've All Lost the Right to Vote

[drekmonger]

Diebold and friends have in all likelihood stolen the most important election of our lifetime. We never know for certain, because the real results of the election may have deleted forever, with a few presses of a backspace key.

Others have already said the obvious: the exit polls don't match up to the Diebold tabulations. The record number of new voters all casting ballots for an embattled incumbent seems incredibly unlikely. In my mind, this portents a new era in American politics: the most cunning cheater always wins. And with the Republicans gaining more and more ground thanks to Diebold and other dirty tricks, they'll be the ones in the best position to cheat.

We can be certain that the Republican's new electronic apparatus will entrench itself further and grow in sophistication--unless it is stopped right now. Diebold will be emboldened by this victory, and the people Diebold put in power won't lift a finger to stop it. In few short years, even the Supreme Court will probably be stacked with men who essentially owe their jobs to Diebold.

The media is filled with cowards will we now shift to the right in response to the wind. If the Diebold story doesn't make huge headlines now, then it never will.

What difference does it make it you can get record number of people to the polls if an evil nazi-nerd can push a button and erase all those votes?

Reform of the election process should become everyone's #1 issue. Protests of epic proportions are needed, because as of right now, all the suffrage gained since the dawn of the Union is in peril.

Right now, no one aside from Diebold has the right to vote. Not even the white landowners.

Re:They do?

[Winkhorst]

Funny how their moral umbrella covers sex but not mass murder. It'll be interesting to see if the Chileans follow through on their threat to arrest Bush when he gets off the plane under an international arrest warrant for the latter.

Public vote database?

[jdreyer]

Seems to me we could fairly easily do a pretty good job of verifying the vote. Here's how we'd handle a single vote for a single community of voters (whether a precinct or the whole country):

1. Each vote gets stored in a database, and voter information gets stored elsewhere in the database, but no connection is made in the db between vote and voter
2. Every voter gets handed an electronically signed copy of his vote and the database index of his vote
3. After the election, the database becomes public and freely redistributed

Here are some consequences:

1. Using any copy of the database, anyone can add up the votes themselves
2. Any voter can verify that his vote was counted by looking it up with his index, and can prove his vote to a third party by using the signed copy
3. Anyone can proofread the list of voters for dead or otherwise illegal voters, e.g. by comparing with other databases like phone books
4. Your vote remains secret unless you choose reveal its key

There are a few problems with this; for one thing I don't know if whether a given person has voted is supposed to be public information; for another it would be hard to look for illegal voters. But I think this is a big improvement over the black box we have now!

A single hacker could have fixed the election.

[Mal Reynolds]

Electronic voting fraud is more than possible, it's inevitable. Did it occur in this election? Unless a group with a lot of skill can get unlimited access to each sort of machine and acquire the source code used in the machines for this election (not the old Diebold source that was leaked), we will probably never know.
As for fraud, it wouldn't have to be a conspiracy at all. A conspiracy means a group of more than one. Yet in a case like this, a single coder with access to the voting machines, say, someone working for Diebold, could throw an entire national election.
If the code were self modifying and obfuscated it could be very difficult to detect. Especially as the Diebold code used in this election has never been publicly scrutinized and may never be. And as the system is running Windows, it will have nearly endless areas in which an illicit bit of code could be inserted.
This single hacker could write a very small bit of code with any number of tests and checks to insure it only ran during an actual election. It could also have tests to insure it only skewed votes in districts with little oversight. I've only given it a moment's thought, but I've come up with a few good tests, I'm sure a bit of thought and intimate knowledge of voting procedures could devise even better ones.
Most obviously, these systems certainly have clocks, so the illicit code could wait until November 2nd. Then it could check for very complex schedules of events that only occur during an actual election. For example, the machine being turned on for many hours, yet only being asked to record a vote once a minute or less, on average.
A simple test like that could get past most quality assurance testing efforts. Most tests would fail to activate the hidden application because QA testers usually run through a testing process much faster than actual users (voters) use the machines. The hidden application could combine those tests with a bunch of other tests.
The illicit code could be designed to only skew the voting when the votes for a certain candidate (Bush) were overwhelming. Meaning it would never skew results in the districts strongly the other way, or districts with close finishes. So the districts with most of the monitoring would never have their votes altered.
But in each strongly republican district, this sort of check would change the tally to give Bush just a slightly larger percentage of votes than were actually cast.. I suspect few people would give a moment's thought to Bush winning a strongly republican district by 65% instead of 60%.
Yet skewing results exclusively in strongly republican districts could shift state-wide election totals by a percentage point or more. A close election such as those seen in any number of states this year could be stolen by just such an effort.
The system could have further checks to insure it was never activated when being tested or monitored. It could wait to skew results until it was uploading data back to the source. That source machine could have an otherwise innocuous vendor setting that the illicit application would recognize as the trigger to skew results.
Such a system could even potentially print extra paper receipts to cover its tracks in the case of a cursory audit. But that would probably not even be necessary. Because recounts cost candidates a lot of money. And I can't imagine a democratic candidate paying for a recount in an uncontested, heavily republican district.
This is not some nightmare scenario, if it hasn't happened yet, it is bound to happen sometime. Only by returning to some sort of user fulfilled ballot can we prevent a single hacker from fixing a national election.

Re:They do?

[mdfst13]

I don't have any personal knowledge of how Diebold's machines work, so I'm not going to make any claims. I will point out that the Las Vegas Gaming Commission was asked to review the various election machines under consideration in Las Vegas and rejected the Diebold machines for security reasons. These were serious professionals skilled in detecting ways to compromise machines and without an ideological ax to grind.

Personally, I have serious issues with any election method that does not admit the possibility of a human readable ballot that can be recounted in the case of a mistake. In other words, as far as I'm concerned, if there isn't a paper ballot involved, I am unsatisfied with that method.

All that said, shouldn't we be waiting until *after* the audit to argue? Personally, I think that auditing the machines is a *good* thing. I just wouldn't hold out high hopes that it will say anything that Kerry supporters want to hear.

I suspect that the Kerry/Edwards campaign will wait until after the audit as well. They have until December 13th to protest the vote results. If the audit confirms the original results, that will be a good time for Kerry to renew his call for reconciliation and unity.

Re:They do?

[schmaltz]

Kerry lost largely on high voter turnout for those who opposed him on moral grounds, especially gay marriage.

Which is strange, considering that Kerry was and is against legalizing gay marriage. Ah, hey, were you one of those Republican trolls who stood outside Democratic precinct polling places, falsely claiming Kerry wanted to legalize gay marriage?

Republicans taught us more ways to lie and cheat this past election season.

Re:They do?

[demachina]

The U.S. does it all the time though they usually topple the guys government first or in the process. Maybe the instant they arrest him they just say he is obviously no longer a head of state.

Manuel Noriega is still rotting in a Federal prison. The story of his unprecedented trial of a head of state on drug trafficking charges.

Saddam is of course sitting in an Iraqi jail under U.S. authority.

The U.S. pretty much grabbed the president of Haiti and put him on a plane to Africa, against his will, while he was still Haiti's President while U.S. backed rebels were closing in on him. Its most books it might be called kidnapping a sovereign head of state.

I don't remember the exact sequencing but I think war crimes charges were laid against Milsoevic while he was still Serbia's head of state.

It is kind of sweet being America since you can have a double standard on everything.

I think you have completely missed my point...

[IBitOBear]

No matter what the truth, no matter what you said before or how valid your position, the instant you say "300 years of opression" we stop listening and thinking about your position.

Talk about how things are today. Talk about how they must be better tomorrow. Give numbers. Provide passion. All of that is good, and it works. You'll at least have a chance of getting your message across.

But say "300 years" and it all flys out the window, you might as well have stayed home.

This is not a "racest position" this a statement of well understood cultural bias. I am comming right out and _telling_ _you_ what that alien thing is that seems to secretly unite white men of european dissent. This is what is happening in our minds behind that inscrutable and perplexing white-man-grin. That is what is passing between us when we do that glance-around as you are speaking. It's what is happening behind-the-scenes when you get that strange feeling that you are losing your audience. Honestly and truely.

I'm a pragmatic liberal white male, a truck-driving pusdo-redneck, a homosexual, and a European mongrel of the most pervasive kind. I am a prime example of one of your greatest potential allies in the white establishment(*), and even _I_ cannot force my self to keep listening when people talk about "historical injustice". I have been pre-programmed to tune that out, and that programming runs almost impossibly deep. What chance do you think you are going to have with an old-south good-old-boy.

For two thousand years "western culture", or the men in it anyway, have been weened on "suck it up" and "take it like a man." It's _engrained_ in our cultural psyche. Take. Own. Conquer. Belittle and discard the weak. We are raised to devalue *ANYONE* who compains about past injustice. Just watch any two white boys, age 12, pick on a third and you will get the picture.

Really.

I'm just trying to tell you something here.

Watch some "hick comedy" sometime. "(She|They) are talking about *that* again" is the gal-darn _refrain_ of every white male complaining about "them" no-matter _who_ "they" happen to be this time.

Most of the glass ceiling that women and minorities run into is simply a loss of audience. Like magic, there are certian things you can say or do that turn your words to "blah blah blah" _instantly_. When you do those things that make any particular people stop listening to you, you lose the power to influence those people. If you want to get anywhere with us, you have to cut that out.

Why do you think that the white-male media always trots out King's "I have a Dream" speach? It was by no measure the most intellegent or insightful thing he said. He was much deeper and more eloquent later in his mission. But it is a powerful image and it unremittingly looks forward. We are *programed* to respect that. Read a press release some time, any press release, but especially one from a company who has "had a bad last quarter."

I'm not telling you your wrong to _feel_ the ways you feel. I'm just trying to tell you that when you *say* it you are shooting yourself in the foot.

The word "injustice" is almost enough right there, but "historical injustice"? Please. You might as well put on floppy shoes and a clown nose. There has been virtually no _historical_ _justice_. The "injustice" is just background noise. Everybody, every ethnic people, every cultural group, every political class, was screwed for "their turn" in european/western history.

You will *NEVER*, no matter how you "[call] a spade a spade", find your ideas or solutions have fallen on fertile ears when you cast your argument in terms of reparations of *ANY* sort. The very mention of the idea _salts_ _the_ _earth_ you are trying to sow.

There has never, in all of recorded history, been a conclave of white european men gathered together discussing "reparations" for the socally injured, where that conversation did _NOT_ end in a chuckle of "yea, sure, any day

OSCE

[Tom]

These are the guys who have massive experience in observing elections. Their report is due later today, but from what has leaked through, I expect it to be damning.

Some things the observers from OSCE said:

* In some areas, they (as official observers!) had less access to the polls than during the elections in Kasachstan.

* The computer systems in many places were less secured than in Venecuela.

* A polish observer said the polls in Serbia(!) were easier to watch and more transparent.

That's a bunch of slap-down from professionals with years of experience. The US has, election-wise, officially fallen to the standards of a third-world country.