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BlackBox Voting Tests California Diebold Machines
Doc Ruby writes "The California Secretary of State has invited Black Box Voting to hack away at some Diebold voting systems. The testing is set for Nov. 30, 2005. Evaluations conducted by Black Box Voting in San Joaquin, Marin, and Alameda counties (Calif.) reveal that a critical paper audit component is missing for all absentee and mail-in ballots, and also for recounts. (Black Box personnel were hired by the Libertarian Party to conduct inspections.)"
Unless there is third party auditing at the time of voting, or access to the source code with definitive proof that the shown code is compiled on the machines, and the machines haven't been updated, then it's an exercise in futility.
We want a paper ballot. Sure, we could have a computer voting system, but it has to spit out a paper ballot with my choices marked on it. THAT is the ballot that should be counted, either manually, or with an optical scanner.
If the paper trail that I look at is not the same ballot that is counted, I can't be sure that a programmer decided to print one thing and tally another.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
There is no other way. Period. So what if we look at their source? What are we going to do, take a library to use in some high school election? Any objection to a release of source code is utter lawyer bullshit.
Some people have mentioned that receipts might be valid, however this raises issues of people selling votes (or being harassed). The anonymous paper and pencil system is the best --- while corruption can lead to large numbers of fraudulant ballot papers, if the corruption is at this level, there isn't much that can be done anyhow.
Unpretentious Sydney reviews by unqualified Sydney reviewers
How do you know the source they give makes equals the binary you run?
If there's a backdoor of some kind for someone to specifically tamper with the voting results, that would be BAD, but I'd be surprised. I will not, AT ALL, be surprised, however, holes in the operating system, programs underlying the voting software proper, or so-called "middleware" are chock full of holes that someone could use. For that reason, I am very much against this process.
My suggestion to fix the system: There is nothing wrong with filling out (or sending in, for absentee voting) a paper ballot, which, in my opinion, should be produced with anti-counterfeiting and anti-tampering technologies, similar to those employed in our currency. An electronic system could be used to optically scan and process the votes, with individuals verifying the optical scan, and this information should be entered into a database for any kind of processing that the government needs to do, along with the optical scan of the original paper ballot. Most importantly, however, is this: Each paper ballot should have an attached "carbon copy" of some type that the user keeps, which will come with a special user ID and passphrase that the user can use after the election date to log in to a secure site and verify that his individual vote was counted as he intended. This sort of public watchfulness on the voting process will create a situation in which it will become extremely difficult to alter the results.
While it's true that blackbox voting machines make it easier to rig elections, it doesn't matter if someone is determined to falsify the voting results. Even with purely paper-based voting, they could use the age-old technique of deception and falsify the results and documents. Maybe even put all "wrong" votes in a box and throw them in an incinerator, and make new ones with the right vote on them. Any "conspiracy theorists" could be silenced by force or public ridicule. It's suprisingly easy when you think about it.
What happens when you put a Sony Music CD into a Diebold machine?
Both Diebold and Sony refuse to admit anything is wrong.
There are about as many ways Black Box Voting can mess up this test as there are ways to cheat elections that use these easily programmed voting machines and tabulators.
Computers are machines which we use to manipulate data. Votes are not the kind of data we want manipulated. End of case, electronic voting machines are a bad idea.
The "paper trail" some of these machines produce is not the ballot that is actually counted, it is an auditing tool. In California only 1% of these paper votes will be compared to the electronic vote. Unless the audit is very carefully designed, and some very stringent security measures enforced, there will be many opportunites to cheat, since 99% of the electronic votes will not be compared to the paper votes. Paper trails and electronic votes are much easier to mess with than boxes and boxes of voter verified paper ballots. People tend to notice when large bulky ballot boxes are being messed with, but nobody can see what's happening to their votes inside a memory cartridge.
Voting machine fraud is the least of our problems these days. In the name of making voting "easier", mail-in ballots are becoming the norm. With a mail-in ballot, there is no reliable way to ensure voters are not coerced (by parents, spouses, employers, political parties, etc.). There is no reliable way to ensure the vote was not cast by an imposter, and the few means of verification that do exist can be subverted to compromise ballot secrecy. Vote against the winner, and somehow Code Enforcement receives an anonymous tip to check up on you. The "grave yard precints" will have record turn-outs. "Vote early, and vote often!"
"whereas you'd need some engineers with logic analyzers to really track everything a totally computerized system is doing."
And they couldn't possibly monitor the situation. Are all the voting machines running approved code? Impossible to know. Is the code locked down, or is it being replaced dynamically to cover tracks? Unknown. Is the code, a closed binary, full of triggers and cheats that only activate within certain parameters? Human nature says probably. Have the flash card couriers been tampered with? Who knows. Are the MS Windows machines acting as accumulators tampered with? Shrug. Is the easily modified Access database on the accumulator protected from tampering with Notepad? Impossible. Is there anyone around who is both 1) suspicious 2) knowledgeable enough to spot gross tampering? Nope. Are the vote totals modified when the technicians are called in to fix the machines during elections? Yes, Virginia, they are and it is a fact.
Even paper backups won't work, and here is why: Paper ballots would not be counted unless a recount is triggered when the vote total could go either way because of a minute spread, OR obvious fraud is committed. If one is controlling the vote tallies at a district level, all you have to do, say, if the trigger is 1%, is to make sure the spread is greater than 1% -- and the RECOUNT NEVER HAPPENS. The paper ballots are not manually counted under scrutiny and compared to the computer counted votes.
And this is beyond the maddening fact that Americans don't understand computers, cheating, or how to avoid this mess. The persistent idiocy I always hear from officials or reporters is the "print a receipt to take home with you" concept. Hair. Pull. Out. Receipts are useless! Paper ballots must be printed for each vote, shown the the voter, and placed in a ballot box.
Here's a simple fix for the recount trigger problem: random manual recounts for every election. IF even ONE of the races turn up as fixed, the lid is blown and we go back to hand counts. I can only hope.
Diebold has fought a manual recount system so ferociously that (Occam's Razor) they have indeed fixed elections. Their have been a lot of stories and sources stating that the employees know something is crooked, altho they are afraid for their jobs. Jobs in IT are scarce. The top management is far-rightist and saw it's duty as electing Bush; the details are tiresome.
Notice exit polls are no longer conducted? They "broke" during 2000, so no news organization will have them anymore. This in spite of the fact that statistics don't "break" during only one extremely critical election, and no other. They didn't break, kids, the election totals were altered and no longer matched reality.
Now we have these damned cheating machines in my precinct. I will vote absentee. To stop me, they'll have to "lose" boxes like the last election.
The defunding of public schools has produced a nation of incurious people who can't understand how simple it now is to change election totals to suit those who run the machines.
They didn't break, kids, the election totals were altered and no longer matched reality.
What's ironic here is that in some countries, the exit polls determine the outcome of an election. The voting process itself is more a formality. I think this lends some strong credibility to your comment.
Black Box Voting is complaining that there is no paper trail for the counting of mail-in paper ballots.
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/1303 7.html
"New information obtained by Black Box Voting investigator Jim March shows that mail-in votes in upcoming Nov. 8 elections will lack crucial safeguards. The Diebold "GEMS defect" -- the ability for anyone with access to change vote results on the "mother ship" that tallies and controls election results -- has now been acknowledged by Diebold, but has not been mitigated in most locations, and it is worse for mail-in votes. The GEMS defect has been proven. The risks are significant. Mail-in votes are at exceptional risk because they are counted on a system that lacks protective features found on polling place machines. While the precinct-based optical scan machines made by Diebold produce a results tape, the same machines, when counting mail-in ballots, use a different program and do not store vote tallies on a memory card, nor do they produce an independent results tape. Therefore the defective GEMS program holds the only record for absentee vote totals. "
Hey Black Box dudes - why aren't the mail-in ballots themselves a pretty good paper trail for themselves!?!?
You have to understand, America is like the Titanic. It's BIG. But it's also (I truly believe), the greatest experiment in governance the world has ever seen, and it proves that the framers were dead on with their ideas of how a country should be created and run. It's currently filled with the hubris that only comes from doing in a mere 230 years things that have never been done, seen or even imagined. Our politicians are small people with small ideas and near horizons. Where once 'everybody' here wanted to change the world, we now only want to have the smallest cellphone, the biggest SUV and to have seen Janet Jackson's nipples at the Superbowl. We're nowhere close to what we were at the end of WWII; the shining moral, ethical and industrial light of the free world. It has taken us barely seventy years to squander almost all of that, to the point where now just being governor of New York is to be considered 'Presidential Material'. But we're still the biggest and best thing in the world, and someday this country is going to have a tremendous intestinal spasm and spew out all of the people that say they lead us, and the people that believe them. It won't be soon and it won't be bloodless. It also won't be Al-Qaida, or maoists, or hippies or any of the other enemies-du-jour. It will be entirely homegrown, like the last one, and it'll stick. I just hope I live long enough to see it. Sorry to ramble. On the other hand, maybe you grew up with MTV, and I'm not rambling at all.
The fixed elections in US have become so blatant, one can prove they were fraudulent during 2000 and 2004 from what I have read. As a foreigner living in Finland, I am astonished that Americans haven't been able to get rid of the corruption and blatant fraud in their election systems. What are your Secret Service and FBI doing? Apparently they're part of the system fixing the elections. Who're you gonna call now? U.N.? Well, you threw out the international monitors. NEWSFLASH: You're now officially screwed beyond all ridicule and you need to tell this fact to *everybody* in there. Publicity is the only fix for these sort of fraud and accountability problems. Demand action, answers and investigations, and YOU need to follow up. Jezus Xrist, can't you get these criminals under control? You're the laughing stock of the world, exporting democracies, while failing to uphold your own. No offence, but I pity you.
d they couldn't possibly monitor the situation. Are all the voting machines running approved code? Impossible to know. Is the code locked down, or is it being replaced dynamically to cover tracks? Unknown. Is the code, a closed binary, full of triggers and cheats that only activate...
Guys... it's really not this difficult. Think about it for a second. If the machine prints out a HUMAN-READABLE ticket that the voter can verify and stick in the ballot box, no amount of computerized shenanigans can significantly affect the vote. Then, it's a simple matter of counting up the votes on the tickets (whether automatically or by hand) and comparing that number to the number recorded on the computer.
And that's just a simple system. Far better have been lined out and even discussed at length on slashdot. It can be done.
Diebold has fought a manual recount system so ferociously that (Occam's Razor) they have indeed fixed elections... Their have been a lot of stories and sources stating that the employees know something is crooked, altho they are afraid for their jobs. Jobs in IT are scarce. The top management is far-rightist and saw it's duty as electing Bush; the details are tiresome.
Bullshit. We all hear lots of stories. I want to see evidence to your claims. The whole part about people losing their jobs is such a red herring. There's enough people wanting to know this information that no whistle-blower at Diebold would ever have to worry about getting another job or money for that matter. They'd become an instant hero (with movie rights) and would probably receive vast political and financial support from the great number of people who absolutely hate Bush. Think about it. They'd be bigger than Cindy Sheehan--before she went crazy.
But how about we use Occam's Razor again? The fact that SO many people are looking for tangible proof that fraud occurred and that none has been found leads to the conclusion that no evidence exists--which further leads to the conclusion that no fraud occurred. What's wrong with my logic here?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that some fraud didn't occur (it probably did) or that Diebold isn't a morally bankrupt entity (they're pieces of shit). But making these outrageous claims that fraud, on an unprecedented level, affected the outcome of a national election without any sort of evidence is ridiculous. Not only that, but such accusations are dangerous. Public trust in the elections is paramount in a democracy. You wouldn't want the same kind of accusations being thrown seriously around without evidence if your guy won, would you?
Don't be surprised if your candidates keep losing elections if you (their supporters) keep promoting such ideas. The majority of Americans don't like extremists--and they HATE poor losers. Throwing those accusations without any sort of reliable evidence makes you look like both.
Notice exit polls are no longer conducted? They "broke" during 2000, so no news organization will have them anymore. This in spite of the fact that statistics don't "break" during only one extremely critical election, and no other. They didn't break, kids, the election totals were altered and no longer matched reality.
Maybe you should've paid better attention in STATS 101. Statistics based on unrepresentative samples are worthless. This is a classic problem with statistics.
Nobody is saying that the statistics "broke." It's just that they're inaccurate for one very simple reason: people motivated by different reasons tend to vote at different times. Those highly motivated tend to vote early. Those less motivated vote whenever it's convenient. In other words, the anti-Bush crowd rushed to the polls early in the day, and when polling services extrapolated from this sample set, it got a Kerry win. But later in the day, when the Bush voters showed up, it became clear that Bush was going to win--thus the discrepancy.
What
"Notice exit polls are no longer conducted? They "broke" during 2000, so no news organization will have them anymore. This in spite of the fact that statistics don't "break" during only one extremely critical election, and no other. They didn't break, kids, the election totals were altered and no longer matched reality."
Yes I did notice the story was dropped very quickly. I watched a documentry about Rove the other day (on the Australian TV station SBS). Early in the day of the election, exit polls were not lining up with Rove's "tally room" predictions and everyone was looking glum. At the end of the day the "real tallies" came into line with Rove's predictions and there were smiles all round.
This was explained as a result of a last minute drive to get republicans to the booths. It was also pointed out that Rove's "tally room" was hooked directly to the "real tally room" so thier numbers were simply ahead of the exit polls. Even if I could swallow that, the FINAL exit polls in question were ALL wrong and ALL against Bush. Statistically this is like all the air in the room suddenly accumulating in one corner, yes it is POSSIBLE but Rove somehow predicted the event and was waiting in the correct corner when it happened.
It is not a lack of skilled statiticians in the US media that is a problem, it is the strange lack of interest & indignation by the US public. I am hoping for some intrepid reporter to catch Rice giving the others a blow job, maybe then you guys will impeach the lot of 'em.
Disclaimer: Don't take this post as US bashing, my country also re-elected a pack of smirking liars. It's like a re-run of the 1950's, everyone is checking for terrorist under the bed.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The first poster was paranoid, but you're wilfilly oblivious.
Exit polls have been used the world over to predict election results for decades .
The 2000 and 2004 elections were widely suspected to have been corrupt, and there's a positive litany of discrepancies, sketchy behaviour and incredibly convenient "co-incidences" around the personnel involved and results obtained. Then, after these useful and reliable exit polls disagree strongly with the "official" result, the administration says it doesn't want to do exit polls any more?
Have exit polls returned perfectly usable, useful results for the overwhelming majority of the time they've been used? Yes.
If "exit polls" had suddenly and spontaneously broken in this one case, does that justify not using them in the future? No, because statistical outliers aside, in general they're still very good.
Have we discovered any new maths, or a statistical theory that suddenly proves exit polls are dangerously misleading? No.
Were the exit polls wrong disproportionately more often in districts where Diebold machines were used? Yes.
So we have a single event where the long-working exit polls (which are normally accurate) are suddenly and significantly different from the final official tally. This could be written off as a statistical fluke, but the Diebold and ES&S machines are already suspected of widespread insecurity and/or deliberate tampering, and then when it all hits the media the administration announces it won't be conducting exit polls any more?
Why, when they've been used for decades without problem, are exit polls suddenly considered dangerous or misleading? Apart from, that is, their potential to provide an indication of election-tampering?
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same party. Go back far enough and they were the same party.
They have a nice little system working for their benefit and they don't want anyone else butting in to spoit it with checks and balances.
"I want to see evidence to your claims."
It's on every diebold machine, just fish it out of the bit-bucket.
Insightfull, WTF? Your whole argument about statistics is based on the administration's official straw men (ie: exit polls were taken only in the morning, sampling is not as reliable as the official total). There were at least three sets of numbers, Rove's predictions, Diebold's count and the Exit poll stat's. Two of them were a very close match but they were not the two sets everyone (except Rove) had expected, the explaination is Rove101, stats101 has it's money on the exit polls.
"The majority of Americans don't like extremists--and they HATE poor losers. Throwing those accusations without any sort of reliable evidence makes you look like both."
Off course if I point out your statistician has no clothes I am a loser extremist and it is every American's patriotic duty to hate me. ( The "hate" bit may one day become the definition of "irony" ).
"Not only that, but such accusations are dangerous."
In other words, allowing people to voice concerns when they have no "evidence" is dangerous, therefore it's better to shun them than to answer their concerns. Modern doublethink: Provided you don't live in a cave with suicidal nutcases, it's ok to start a war without sane reasoning.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
What, gradually sinking, in complete denial about it, and the rich are grabbing all the lifeboats?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I'm a computer geek... I hate paper... I automate everything I can get my hands on. But why, why, why, would you take a system that works, with checks and balances, and replace it with one full of holes?
Paper ballots just plain work... I can see who I've voted for. I put it in a box, under the watchful eye of at least 2 independant people. Even more independant people watch as that box is opened and all the ballots counted and recounted... and then recounted again if the margin is close. Then that number is phoned in to the central office, again under the watchful eye of people who know the total. On the other end, yet more groups of independant people add all these numbers up... and poof, we have a new Prime Minister.
(please note that "independant group" and "individuals from several different parties" are pretty much the same in my books, as far as the "Keeping it honest" factor)
Or, we could have a computer ballot... tap the screen, hope that it records who you REALLY voted for.Hope that the card wasn't preloaded with hundreds of votes. Then the magic box magically talks to another magic box... hope that it tells it the right stuff... or that no one intercepts and feeds a fake number.... or no-one knows how to dial in and override results... or that no-one messed with the voting box itself to delete all votes and reset them.... Then we trust the big magic box to tell us the right number... and if it doesn't, how would we know? In several states, a 2-3% swing of the vote is enough to change who is President... and who's going to know? A piece of paper in your hand saying "You voted for X" is useless, because even if that piece of paper has a unique ID that matches up with the magic box database... well, just because it says "Vote#465213 was for Candidate A" doesn't mean that's what it told the big magic box at the end of the line.
There's no outstanding reason to switch to computers... yes, they reduce required manpower, but (at least up here) many election folks are volunteers, so the cost is minimal. And frankly, I'd rather have dozens of independant eyes watching my vote, and watching who counts my vote, rather than trusting democracy to the magic boxes made by people who publicly promised Ohio to Bush.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
http://www.commonwonders.com/
Poll Shock
Off by 40 points, newspaper's predictions may be disturbingly accurate
By ROBERT C. KOEHLER
Tribune Media Services
November 24, 2005
One of the most wildly inaccurate pre-election polls in memory, which was off by over 40 points on some predictions, may prove to be deadly accurate as an indicator of the problems we face as a nation with our voting process -- and democracy itself.
But you won't learn this by reading the Columbus Dispatch, the newspaper that conducted the poll just prior to Ohio's Nov. 8 election. The paper's public affairs editor conceded to me that the poll results the Dispatch wrote about, wrongly indicating massive public support for several proposed constitutional amendments, were, in essence, the journalistic equivalent of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.
"Much like the American space program, both our triumphs and our shortcomings are out there for all to see," Darrel Rowland said in an e-mail. Unlike NASA, however, which did manage to find that faulty O-ring, the newspaper's powers that be don't seem particularly interested in learning how their big public flop occurred. "We'll certainly double-check the poll mechanics," he said, "but see no reason to discontinue a methodology that's proven accurate for decades."
And Rowland's right, as far as I can tell: The Columbus Dispatch's survey of voters, conducted by mail, has historically been a reliable poll; it has been cited for its precision in the scholarly journal Public Opinion Quarterly and is considered far more accurate than telephone surveys. There is no faulty O-ring, in other words; the methodology doesn't need changing.
And that's why there's a story here that must not be allowed to vanish.
The story is about how America votes, and evidence that pandemic chaos and perhaps even centrally orchestrated malfeasance are accompanying the spread of electronic voting machines to the nation's precincts. We know there's cause to worry about the state of our democracy because of the historical accuracy of the Columbus Dispatch voter poll.
Of the five proposed amendments on the Ohio ballot, only the first -- a $2 billion state bond initiative to promote high-tech industry -- was not related to the conduct of elections, and oddly enough its results were accurately forecast in the poll (predicted yes vote, 53 percent; final yes vote, 54 percent). Then it gets hairy.
Issue 2 would have made absentee voting easier in the state. It had lots of high-profile support, and the Dispatch poll predicted a cakewalk for it: 59 percent yes, 33 percent no, 9 percent undecided. The actual result: 36 percent yes, a whopping 63 percent no.
Then there was issue 3, which would have lowered the campaign-contribution limits that a lame-duck state legislature had raised a year ago. Prediction: 61 percent yes, 25 percent no, 14 percent undecided. Actual result: 33 percent yes, 66 percent no.
The results of issue 4, to control gerrymandering by establishing an independent board to draw congressional districts, were only slightly less dramatic. Prediction: 31 percent yes, 45 percent no, 25 percent undecided. Result: 30 percent yes, 69 percent no. And for issue 5, to establish an independent board instead of the secretary of state's office to oversee elections, a 41 percent predicted yes vote shrank to 29 percent, while the no vote ballooned from 43 to 70 percent.
Ka-boom goes the Challenger.
Here's the telling thing. The Dispatch, member in good standing of the mainstream media, has no interest in raising doubts about the integrity of the U.S. electoral system, and so hasn't looked in that direction for an explanation of what voting-rights activist Bob Fitrakis called a polling error of "Landon beats FDR" proportions.
Instead, the paper blames the notorious volatility of statewide referendum issues. Rowland hypothesized "a huge shift in the electorate in the last few
Look, speaking personally as Republican with strong Libertarian leanings (a "Ron Paul Republican"), I voted Bush over Kerry in '04. I'm not all that enthralled with Dubya, far from it, but I hate Kerry's guts.
So I'm not saying Kerry probably should have won Ohio because I enjoy saying it. Far from it, the words stick in my throat. (It looks to me like it was a combination of electronic vote fraud and "disenfranchisement fraud", messing with voter registration rolls and not putting enough voting stations in college and minority areas with high Democratic turnouts.)
The fact is, we had more election-related violence before and during the 2004 election than any other that I can recall (almost age 40). If public confidence in the vote collapses, it'll be civil war within 10 or 20 years no matter WHO is running things.
We have to have fair elections. Period.
Jim March
Black Box Voting
With electronic voting machines, there are no recounts. Asking the computer to spit the answer back at you again isn't a recount. :-)
If you don't trust the first result, and you get a different result from an electronic result, you are really screwed, since you'll never know which was right. (Probably neither
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