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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

[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.

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.

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!

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.

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