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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.)"
Paper trail: the magical words. In Montréal, Québec, the recent municipal election is being contested. Mark-sense ballots were counted by machines, but ballots are kept in sealed boxes after being run through the machine (by the elector). Right now, the ballots are being recounted by hand in the courthouse.
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.
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I, for one, don't care if they want to. This is about my country, my democracy (I know not a true democaracy, blah blah blah). If they want to sell products that ensure no cheating in elections, people need to KNOW, not assume, KNOW, that it is a system beyond reproach. It's about my democracy not some stupid companies profits.
Androk
Recently, the state of Connecticut sent mailers to households inviting voters to demo electronic voting machines, and fill out a survey. I decided to attend the one held at a local branch of our state university. There were only three machines to try out. One was a Diebold machine.
On the two non-Diebold machines, I was allowed to vote a sample ballot as if the vote were real. The Diebold demonstrator, however, kept tight control over the Diebold machine, allowing only limited public interaction.
I did see something very interesting about the Diebold machine. Something I didn't like at all. The "proctor" explained that during a real voting session, the voter would get a smart card from election officials, insert it into the reader on the voting machine, vote, then turn back the card. The stated reason for the card was to prevent one person from voting multiple times while standing at the machine. However, the proctor was re-using the same card to restart the session as each new person stepped up. When I asked about this, the proctor claimed that during a real voting session, no-one would have access to a multi-use card. I asked her if that was a promise, but she didn't have an answer.
Here's the link to the specific post detailing their request
If the editors are listening, it might be worth fixing the
That little mistake puts the issue in a wrong light.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Why are they using machines to count the votes ?
/fetched by the administration.
Here in Germany the voting process is 100% transparent.
The whole country is divided into ~400000 pieces. In each of these pieces, a votingplace is established. Each votingplace is maned by 7 citicens (volunteers prefered. vacant posts are filled by selecting random citicen.).
The voters vote through making a cross on a piece of paper.
After the vote, the whole voting comittee counts the votes two times. After that, the votes are sealed in a bag. The result and the votes are then given to
During the whole process, _every_ citicen has the right to be on place and controll the work of the comittee.
The whole process is FAST:
Usually it only takes ~1 hour to count the votes.
Voters don't need complicated instruction manuals (everybody knows how to use a pen, right ?)
The whole process is reliable:
It is very hard for a political party to man a whole comittee.
As every citisen has the right (and many make use of their right) to be on place and to controll the work, falsifiing is extremely hard.
Because we have a clear paper-trail, every vote can get re-counted.
Ever tried to use a machine when there is a power-outage ? Pens work without electricity.
The whole process is CHEAP:
No expensive machines.
Volunteers & citicens don't get paid.
Let's make a few points clear here.
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1) The Libertarian connection happened as a result of California Election Code 15004, which reads:
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The county central committee of each qualified political party may employ, and may have present at the central counting place or places, not more than two qualified data processing specialists or engineers to check and review the preparation and operation of the tabulating devices, their programming and testing, and have the specialists or engineers in attendance at any or all phases of the election.
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So we (Black Box Voting) approached the California Libertarian Party to team up and do up-close inspections of these voting machines, or at least explore what's possible under 15004. They hired us at a buck a day. The main result: we ended up with listings of installed software and drivers that make it obvious Diebold wasn't obeying a court order to shut down networking drivers that weren't necessary. We've complained to the California AG's office about this and Diebold's cross-connection of the San Diego central tabulator box to the Internet (also banned by both the same court order and state regulation). More details at:
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth
This upcoming "test hack" at the California Secretary of State's office is another matter entirely.
This all started when we (Black Box Voting) hired Finnish security consultant Harri Hursti to help out in a "test hack" in Leon County FL where the county elections official (Ion Sancho) was worried about all this "Diebold" controversy.
What Hursti found was pretty wild. In short: before the election, all the precinct memory cards are prepped from the central vote count box with the ballot and candidate data...normal enough. But the cards are also prepped with interpreted BASIC code loaded into all the memory cards to control the output of the summary counter printer at each precinct. Worse, if you mess around with that code loaded first at the central tabulator, you can make that end-of-day-printout read whatever you want...put in a vote-skimming routine, false numbers, whatever. Nothing in the system at the central or precinct ends checks for hashes or whatever to see if the BASIC code is legit. Said code can be date/time sensitive so that the machines will still pass Logic&Accuracy testing before or after the election. With the paper trail at the precinct dickered with, you can use the other major hack available - altering the central database of votes to match the precinct report paper. Not hard - the central database of votes is written in MS-Access so either load a commercial copy of Access and tweak by hand, or load/type a Visual Basic script to monkey with the JET database engine (the "Access back end") on autopilot.
Net result: one thoroughly "pwned" election.
The full report:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BBVreport.pdf
Since then, *nobody* has tried to duplicate the Hursti results. If they're true, Diebold would have to do a nationwide recall and the Federally approved testing labs (Ciber Inc. in Huntsville AL and a division of Wyle also in Huntsville) would need a visit by people with badges, guns and search warrants.
After the preliminary report on the Leon County hack was released but before the final report linked above, Bev Harris and I formally asked the California Secretary of State's office to check out the issues Hursti found, under yet another obscure clause of the California elections code, 19202:
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Any person or corporation owning or being interested in any voting system or part of a voting system may apply to the Secretary of State to examine it and report on its accuracy and efficiency to fulfill its purpose. The Secretary of State shall complete his or her examination without undue delay
"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.
A few excerpts:
Nevada asked the Gaming Control Board to take a look at voting machines. After that review, Nevada went to a paper trail in 2004.