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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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.