Slashdot Mirror
Programmer Built Vote-Rigging Demo for Florida Politician
Syre writes "therawstory reports that a programmer named Clinton Curtis says in a sworn affidavit (mirror) that he developed prototype vote-rigging software at the request of then-Florida state representative Tom Feeney. The affidavit has been turned over to the House Judiciary Committee, of which Feeney is now a member. Should we call for inspection and disassembly of all the voting machine code to see if it contains any of these secret vote tampering functions he was asked to include in his prototype?" A follow-up interview is available. A point to emphasize: he's not making any claims of actual fraud occurring in the Florida elections.
Goverments have been overthrown for less than this.
-Dipster
...as programming the american public to be a bunch of scared sheep to vote for you.
They can be hacked. News at 11. Maybe we should have another election. We can all put a red marble in a jar for GW and a blue marble for JK. The perfect infallable voting system.
The trouble with blogs, is that no-one writing them has the time to follow up these stories. If a mainstream journalist breaks them there's a chance (albeit not much of one in the present climate) that they'll keep digging away, and uncover a Watergate-style conspiracy (which isn't to say that this is necessarily one of those).
But if Woodward and Bernstein were bloggers, they'd've been happy to publish the skimpy information that started their investigation -- smug that they put one over on the press -- and let the whole thing degenerate into a partisan "Nixon Sucks!" style-flamewar.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Wow, a conspiracy theory about conspiracy theories. Impressive.
Legitimate things like this go on all the time. It is commonly referred to as "white hat" hacking, as we all know. That may not be the case here, but it sounds more to me like the programmer is disappointed with election results and wants to pretend he's a whistleblower.
They're not required to validate the allegations.
Simply reporting that allegations exist and specifying that some of these allegations are in an affidavidit is responsible journalism. That there are allegations is a point of fact. When a tornado hits a trailer park, journalists are not required to look for a second opinion or go into background as to why that trailer park seems to attract tornadoes.
www.kitchengeek.com -- Nosh for
This infuriates me for a different reason - the lack of vision of law-makers. I cant believe voting machines are not force to have open source code. I said personally many moons ago this would happen and ...
Its the only way to defraud fake conspiracy theories and protect peoples voting rights. People desserve to know exactly how their vote is being processed. Is mankind that stupid. Do we want revolutions and rebellions because people are too stupid to make voting (a fairly important task to be fair..pff) transparent, honest, whatever you want to call it..
The more I look the more I'm convinced that the USA is slipping into a 2nd world mindset. I believe the decline of Rome began like this.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Folks, we need paper ballots. Counting them by bubblesheet scanner may be acceptable, but we need that paper trail.
If there was fraud in Florida, that's our opportunity to spread the word: that kind of fraud could be prevented by paper ballots.
Paper ballots are cheaper and more reliable than electronic machines, but the huge savings in money is nothing compared to the transparency, the paper trail and the difficulty in committing fraud that only paper ballots can deliver.
See what I've been reading.
Nicely written up here.
Like all good conspiracy stories it will be almost impossible to prove. It's the magic bullet all over again. I expect this to become American lore just like JFK's assassination conspiracies.
It is astounding to me that this country always manages to produce stuff like this. In my unscientific way it only leaves me to conclude that America is nuts - one way or another.
""I can't believe the Democrats were stupid enough to allow [this]," he says. "I can't imagine anyone going to a bank and not getting a receipt. But yet we have our voting machines that way....
This is a misleading comment. What does he mean "the democrats allowed this"? The republican party has been in control of both houses for sometime now.
And the democrats HAVE been trying. In fact, a group of democrats proposed a bill called the RECORD Act of 2004, which had a stated purpose: "To amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require a voter-verified permanent record or hardcopy under title III of such Act, and for other purposes."
It strikes me as really odd that machines like that could even exist.""
Seems odd to me too... perhaps the republican-owned voting machine companies, or the republican Secretaries of State in Ohio and Florida could shed some light on why hese machines were created / purchased?
$8.95/mo web hosting
But if someone claims that a tornado has roared through their trailer park, destroying it, shouldn't the reporter at least go out to the trailer park to see if there's any damage at all? The bottom line is that in journalism, as in most othr things, the lines of demarcation are blurry. When it comes to what is a fact vs. what is an allegation, and what you treat as a fact vs. treating it as an allegation and what kind of allegation is supportable (and reportable) vs. that which is not, the reporter needs to do more than simply report an allegation.
I could claim that I flew like Superman above the Vatican and used my X-ray vision to see the Pope eating babies. I could make a press release to that effect, too. The bottom line is that my allegation should not be taken seriously, nor should it be reported.
The real trouble with today's press is that they (a) too often report rumor, allegation. and spin without checking as to whether any of these is likely and (b) they fail to follow up saying that the rumors, allegation, and spin were false and castigating the person spreading it for misleading the public. And, even though I'm on the blue side of things, I acknowledge it happens on the left and on the right. In this case, at least the person alleging the story is willing to sign an affadavit. It still doesn't mean that the press should simply report the allegation without doing further legwork.
That is all.
Let's bury this Carl Sagan canard once and for all. I'm so tired of hearing it.
The scientific method does not require extraordinary evidence based on the type of claim being made. Period. Every claim is evaluated on the same basis. If a scientist accepts less than complete data because they are sympathetic to the theory or theorist, they are in error. Likewise, if a scientist rejects a claim that has been independently verified enough that the results fall outside of the realm of chance, they commit an error.
In this particular case, I do think it wise to learn more facts before you come to a conclusion. In the general case, you should not require any more evidence from an extraordinary claim, or any less evidence from an ordinary one. Every claim should be evaluated without regard to emotional attachments! That is the scientific way of doing things, anything else is not science.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
It doesn't matter, electronic voting without a paper trail is inherently unsafe.
I just don't understand you americans. I have undergrad studies in electrical/electronic engineering and I am currently mastering in comp. sci. I guess I could be considered an expert in electronique machines. If this was happening in my country I would be sending letters to my government and urging my peers, all experts in the domain, to give their opinion to the government. I am sure they would agree with me that we could say that our expert opinion is that electronic voting can't be done securely without a paper printout. I would make an expert only petition to support this claim.
Data in computers is very volatile, it can be changed on a large scale, in seconds without leaving a trace behind. It is invisible to the naked eye. The problem is not that fraud is that more likely with electroninc machine, the problem is that it is as easy to change a million vote on a computer, than it is to change one, you can do it in advance by putting some kind of malware in the system and you can do it without leaving a trace behind.
With paper ballots changing a million votes would requirer, that you physically destroy/modify ballots. It would take time, it would leave traces of evidence behind and it be much easyer to monitor the ballots to prevent fraud because you can see them with your eyes.
Were experts in the US ever surveiled about security of electronic voting? I would like to see the results.
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=239735 (video)
/10/internet_buzz_on_vote_fraud_is_dismissed/
Doug Chapin, a nonpartisan election analyst, finds the claims to be baseless. "There were no problems that would lead me to believe that there were stolen elections or widespread fraud," he said.
"There was no overwhelming reason to cast doubt on the outcome of this election," seconded Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, the campaign manager for Al Gore's 2000 campaign. "George Bush got more votes this time."
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/11
Much of the traffic is little more than Internet-fueled conspiracy theories, and none of the vote-counting problems and anomalies that have emerged are sufficiently widespread to have affected the election's ultimate result.
Kerry campaign officials and a range of election-law specialists agree that while machines made errors and long lines in Democratic precincts kept many voters away, there's no realistic chance that Kerry actually beat Bush.
''No one would be more interested than me in finding out that we really won, but that ain't the case," said Jack Corrigan, a veteran Kerry adviser who led the Democrats' team of 3,600 attorneys who fanned out across the country on Election Day to address voting irregularities.
''I get why people are frustrated, but they did not steal this election," Corrigan said. ''There were a few problems here and there in the election. But unlike 2000, there is no doubt that they actually got more votes than we did, and they got them in the states that mattered."
''I think it's safe to say that on the votes that were cast in Ohio, Bush won," said Dan Tokaji, a law professor at Ohio State University who is working with the ACLU to challenge Ohio's use of punch-card ballots. ''If the margin had been 36,000 rather than 136,000, we would have seen another post-election meltdown."
http://www.sacbee.com/state_wire/story/11436220p-1 2350492c.html
All three said their networks had set up investigative units to review any claims of voter fraud or problems with electronic voting technology this year, but that nothing significant had appeared anywhere to affect the election's outcome.
"A lot of the allegations we've looked into, they're just not true," Shapiro said. "Believe me, I'd love a juicy story about the election as much as anybody. Florida was a great story, but it's just not there this time."
As for exit polls, often brought up in the context of electronic voting, here is one expert's view:
I think the important thing about exit polls is they show us why people won and the dynamics of the race. The mistake most people make is they see polls as a horse-race, but they are actually the explanation of what happened.
The polls may have been wrong about who won, but they were right about explaining why people voted the way they did. If you don't have polls, you allow the elites and candidates to interpret the elections in their own interest. Polls, in many ways, are crucial to democracy.
If you look at previous elections, you can see that exit polls are always different the day after the election. Exit polls ultimately are always right, though they are never right originally. This is because polls have to be weighted with the actual vote to be completely accurate. The vote, of course, can't be factored in until the election is completed. If the exit polls are not "corrected" in this way, then the analysis of the election will always be flawed. So after the polls have closed, exit poll
I don't have to prove it wasn't stolen. We assume that the LOCAL stewards of our election process, i.e., the same counties who have ALWAYS been the stewards of the process, are managing it properly. And I know that until you can personally inspect every line of source code in every Sequoia, ES&S, and Diebold machine, you just won't believe they're not somehow rigged.
Why do people so believe that the election just MUST have been rigged, retarded comments from Diebold's CEO notwithstanding? Can't people just deal with the fact that Bush won? Why can't people envision a world where, Bush & Co. aside, Republicans legitimately win elections?
Further, there has been fraud and errors in EVERY election since the beginning of time. Granted, electronic systems make it easier, but we trust proprietary electronic systems with so much, why was it just so outrageous to assume that electronic systems could be made accountable for voting? When HAVA passed and mandated consistent electronic systems, there weren't any secret ulterior motives.
Also, see this post for a very small sampling from people who have more at stake and vested in this process, including on Kerry's "side", who agree that the election simply wasn't stolen (and no, they're not conceding because they were "forced", or for "the good of the country" - they conceded because they lost).
Jaeson, my problem is that every time slashdot or a blog posts yet another sensationalistic story whose implication is clear, NO ONE mentions the only things that can actually SOLVE this problem, i.e., the proposed legislation I referenced. It is always focused on the past, rather than on the future. What purpose does it serve to think that the 2004 election was stolen, when the Kerry campaign, and its 3600 lawyers, or the European election monitors, or the DNC, or voting experts in Universities (not sociology students with an agenda at Berkeley), don't think it was?
Why don't we just concentrate on something we can all agree on, which is making the process accountable? Do you really believe local election officials are secretly and surreptitiously rigging the elections? Hell, there weren't even that many electronic systems used in 2004. But there sure as fuck will be in 2008, so let's fix it, eh? The election was not stolen, and it was not rigged. There may have been localized instances of fraud (on BOTH sides, in some cases, and not necessarily all electronic), but it was NOT enough, still, to alter the outcome of the election.
Why is that so hard to accept?
I don't think this would be enough because it is very hard to prove that the binaries used are from the sourcecode provided.
a paper printout is necessary.
Sorry, we had forgotten that
Republican == "Upstanding, never lie, cheat or steal, or in any other way do anything wrong"
Democrat == "Lieing Commie pervert bastard who would do anything to anyone, just because".
Or maybe there are some good people with different points of view that arrive at them honestly on both side of the equation, and some that dont on both side of the equation.
If you believe the former, then *why* didnt those lieing cheating Democrats win this last election?
emt 377 emt 4
I know itegrity isn't exactly popular anymore, so people forget why it was useful.
"The appearence of impropriety is improper."
Observers can't tell the difference between something that appears like it might be dishonest from something that actually is without very careful investigation, which takes a lot of time, and effort. So, don't do anything that could appear dishonest if you're not dishonest.
What he should have done is send a letter from his office to the major newspapers in his area describing his misgivings with electronic voting, how he's been unsatisfied with scant media attention, the lack of government action, his plan to address these problems, and how exactly he expects his plan to work. Send letters to the stations in the major tv markets he'd be fine with going to, expressing his interest in discussing the matter with them.
He needed to do something publicly to announce his development of a thermonuclear weapon for fascism. He did it in secret, unless he did create some public record and people are only finding it newsworthy now (!!), it's too expensive to trust him now. What ever unfortunate punishment he recieves he absolutely brought on himself. And he may have ment well, but he deserves it. This spectical, the finger pointing, the end of his career, that's the price of not having integrity.
I strongly disagree that this claim is extraordinary.
There is absolutely nothing extraordinary about the claim that somebody might want to steal an election. The fact is that government contracters do a hell of a lot of stealing in plain sight, by hiring influential lobbying firms to steer business their way, or to move legislation and regulation in a way that is specially favorable to them. An election is worth a lot of money.
Nor, unfortunately, is there anything extraordinary about the claim that somebody might want to discredit a politician he didn't like with a story that can't definitively be proved. There is enough ill will that any kind of accusation will "stick" in the minds of plenty of people.
My own personal policy on stories like this is to keep an open mind. There needs to be a proper investigation of this accusation. At the very least, Mr. Feeney deserves to have his reputation cleared if this is manufactured.
Of course one possible (or perhaps even the most likely) outcome of such an investigation is that nothing can be proved. In which case we should extend Mr. Feeney the benefit of the doubt. However, this points out the big flaw that everyone here knows and that practically nobody in the general public knows: the electronic voting systems that are currently in use cannot be verified against tampering.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Oh, you know that for sure, do you? There's more than one way to skin a cat, and I've seen very credible evidence of voter intimidation, voting machine irregularities, disparities in equipment between rich and poor counties, and many other little pieces of puzzle that seem to fit together and show that a great amount of fraud occurred. Was the election stolen? Well, I can't say for sure. Apparently you can. Thanks for that tidbit!
So, are you going to support the bills, or still fantasize about how the election was stolen?
You honestly believe that there was 3.5 MILLION votes worth of voting fraud? Or more than 150,000 votes worth of fraud in Ohio? And that the DNC, the Kerry campaign, the election monitors, the 3600 Kerry campaign lawyers, all just did nothing about it?
Of COURSE there was fraud and errors. Just like in EVERY election we've ever had! But the point is, everyone who matters, ESPECIALLY the entire DNC and the Kerry camp itself, didn't think there was any "fraud" that would even come close to being a "story", much less changing the outcome of the election. Remember 2000? Why wouldn't the same thing, multiplied by a factor of ten, have happened in 2004, in terms of media coverage, lawyers scouring through records and votes, etc?
Funnier still is your mention of "disparities" between rich and poor counties - that's the EXACT thing that HAVA is designed to FIX! You know, HAVA, that thing that is mandating *electronic voting machines*? I guess they just can't win. No matter what, you'll think that the big, bad, evil Republicans stole the election to further their goals of warmongering, lining pockets, and kicking pussy cats.
Oh, give it a rest. The whole reason we have e-voting at all is because a bunch of people like you threw an equal fit of hysterics after 2000 and DEMANDED them, screaming apocalyptic cries about the End to Democracy(TM) if we didn't get them.
God Himself could come down and personally count the votes and you'd just accuse Him of being a pawn of the Religious Right.
Let me tell you your real issue: You just can't comprehend that your ideology might be rejected by a majority of Americans. The American's are Stupid argument isn't getting a lot of traction, so you're retreating into the "it's all a conspiracy" mode.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
So what if they're no longer under their control? They don't need to actually control the machines to rig the elections. All they need to do is implement hidden features for all the candidates, so that only someone who knows about them can trigger them.
1 /1 7/1525203
And who said corporations were evil? That doesn't mean you should trust them to count your votes. Maybe you should indeed wonder why (or perhaps even whether) Diebold ATMs are much more secure than their voting machines.
Just because Kerry doesn't think the elections were stolen doesn't mean they weren't. Maybe you should wonder, indeed, why Kerry still has 50 million in campaign contributions and none of those people are investigating the scandal.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/1
Claiming that 'oh, lots of people are probably looking into it' won't cut it. As for the reports you posted, they don't address the concerns that started the scandal. I don't care whether you think of me as a 'sore loser' or whatever, because I know I'm right, just as much as you think you do.
You move into an apartment. Everything checks out fine. But that winter, you realize that your apartment doesn't have central heating, just a fireplace. Now, you bug your landlord that your apartment needs central heating, as the fireplace is not only a fire hazard, but it only heats up your living room effectively. You make do with the fireplace for the winter.
The next winter, your landlord pulls out the fireplace and puts in central heating. But there's a new problem. The heater not only doesn't work, it belches carbon monoxide into your apartment. You complain to your landlord, and he replies "Oh give it a rest. The only reason you have central heating is because you threw a hissy fit of hysterics last winter and DEMANDED it, screaming apocalyptic cries about freezing to death if you didn't get it."
You see the problem? Yeah, people like him demanded e-voting, but giving the people an e-voting system that is so fundamentally flawed as to not even allow a manual recount is worse than what they had before. Maybe they were a little naive in assuming that any e-voting system would conform with the concepts of good UI design for mission-critical applications (eg: ABMs), but you can't blame the public for the sorry state of voting machines by saying "you asked for this!"
For the record, I'm in Canada, and I'm happy with our paper voting system.
A man who can't pronouce "nuclear arsenal" shouldn't have one -sig ends here.
Well, you know nothing "for sure". I know beyond any reasonable requirement that the 2004 election wasn't "stolen". Does that mean there was no fraud? No. What it means is that people who have devoted their LIVES to this, people who believed that getting Bush out of office was the most important task of their lives, who worked for various Democratic organizations, Kerry's campaign, in volunteer and paid capacities - thousands of lawyers, observers, and experts - as well as independent election monitors, non-partisan legal and voting experts, and scholars from the most respected voting projects at prestigious universities (like the MIT-Caltech Voting Project), don't believe the election was stolen. And they know a LOT more about this than you or me. Like I said, if it makes you feel better to think it was stolen, or that it might have been, or pretend that it's really that nebulous and that we "just don't know", be my guest. We DO know, and the people who count know - even ones who REALLY despise Bush and all that Republicans and conservatives stand for - therefore, the election was not stolen.
You mean you don't have access to any copy of the source code, let alone every revision of a system used to determine elections? In that case the spec needs to be rewritten and the bank accounts of those responsible for making such a cretinous decision examined for evidence of taking bribes. This is one of the points where the "are you stupid, are you corrupt, or don't you care about doing your job" question needs to be asked, since there does not appear to be any other options available.
Forget the shiny new technology, if the entire voting process is not open to scrutiny it is open to abuse. A few jobs with a quick and nasty software company in a marginal electorate is not worth the potential for abuse. Perhaps a Federal election organisation running free, fair and consistant elections (two out of three is not good enough) like you see in other countries is the way to go - instead of things being down at the state or county level. There are a lot of countries that have built on a combination of the USA and Swiss election systems over the last century that may be worth looking at.
Here's the google links to the search for Ukraine voter fraud. They state that the primary evidence for fraud was the US and Western nation paid exit polls data.
e +voter+fraud&btnG=Search+News
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=Ukrain
I realize it's tough spinning your way out of your leader endorsing exit polls as proof of fraud just last week. You'd think after stealing an election, he'd have the good sense to stay off the record regarding how accurate he thinks exit polls are... but that your problem, not mine.