Slashdot Mirror
Election Officials And Crackers Challenge Diebold
Rick Zeman writes "The Washington Post is reporting that election officials in Florida have manipulated election results in controlled tests. From the article: 'Four times over the past year Sancho told computer specialists to break in to his voting system. And on all four occasions they did, changing results with what the specialists described as relatively unsophisticated hacking techniques. To Sancho, the results showed the vulnerability of voting equipment manufactured by Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems, which is used by Leon County and many other jurisdictions around the country.'"
.... or is it second? We'll never know, because there's no paper printouts yet. Damn corporate America, interfering in our democracy!
To err is human, but to really foul things up it takes a computer.
After all - people have been trying to rig results for a long time. But this just makes it so easy for one person to potentially change the outcome of an election....
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
Almost looks intentional since the one corner is curved.
"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain." (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032138/quotes)
7 _F.shtml).
North Carolina had the same problem with their voting machines (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20051130/112120
The only new thing here is the current state finding Diebold non-compliant.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Windows XP + network connection + data held in an *Access DB* and then transferred by memory card with no crypographic checksum.
If I prepared work like that for a client, I'd expect to get chucked out by security.
I'll also note the following:
a) Diabold say that a paper trail is not needed for security, but provide one on their own ATMs. Apparently independent verification of election results is less important then $$$ transactions.
b) Both local and remote vulns have been demonstrated on their voting machines, but the ATMs have not been pwned.
c) Diabold refuses to let the source code be reviewed, and chose to run on Windows XP so neither the program or the OS of the box can be verified safe.
d) Diabold machines can have the vote totals rewritten on their memory sticks as they do not cryptographically sign or encrypt the totals. That's plain text on a card that can be removed from the machine and has a standard file format.
e) Diabold security is fucked whether or not they put the same code they have tested on the box. With tested, verfied boxes they cannot add XP security patches for known flaws after te verification date (and if there is one thing worth keeping an 0-day for...). If they do add security patches etc then we are trusting closed source biaries to be added to election counting machines without the possibility of review. One bad actor and the elecetion is up for grabs.
No thanks. I'm not usually a conspiracy theorist but is is as if they were designed to be broken into.
Would a BSD box with one simple program, output to the framebuffer, a results paper trail and a constant SSH tunnel to the FEC be that hard? *sighs*
Fuck Diabold.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
is this a what (paid)members see? may be its being shown to everyone by mistake? I always wished hard to find out (without paying any money of course) how do they inform the paid members of an slashdot story about to be released early... Wishes _do_ come true is it?
BAIN http://www.devslashzero.com
Seriously, if someone has the knowledge of the system you just proposed, why not take the long shot and propose to work for the gov't and put that together? Not only would you be able to demonstrate how insecure Diebold's system is with a tiny PDA that can read/write their memory sticks, but you'd also be able to demonstrate that you can't do that to yours. At least not on the fly with a PDA.
Steps to stopping the stupidity:
1) Put down (favorite game) when you're off work.
2) Write plan, put something together.
3) Get in touch with someone with the power to make the (smart) decision.
4) Show off.
If they did we'd have this problem fixed by now. We've know they were insecure for years now; ever since the accidental release of diebolds e-mails detailing backdoors and holes that were not patched. Who remembers that security researcher who went before congress and said specifically that his code, which was to illustrate a backdoor into the machines, was used to hack the elections in ohio? I forget his name.
:X...
o ry/Contents.html
Fact is, CEO's and friends of voting machine companies get into power. Why? Guess. It isn't the 20% of the vote they need to swing; it's the 6% after they've divided everyone on the issues. Voting laws and policys are consistantly broken, and is anything done about it? The answer lies in the question; Has anyone been taken out of power yet? Dictatorship only works if people are divided; if they stand for something and stand by it for hell or high water.
And I might, just might give credit to the guys who said "well, it's stil the will of the people" if it weren't for that they can't prove their position since there's nothing for them to count. The election board can't even tell them who voted for who so they can go around asking people.
Of course, the best way you can tell the government you don't like what you're doing is to decide you stand for something and stand for it tall. I personally chose the constitution; it ain't perfect, but it's something everyone can agree on. Of course, ever since the civil war and reconstruction the constitution's layed dormant. To make a long story short, if you want to get rid of the current government, the best way is to simply stop working for them; stop giving them your money. How do you do that? Well, basically the 14th amendment set you up to be a federal citizen by the name of a "U.S. citizen" and social security turned you into a corporate legal fiction so that income tax, which worked only on corporations, now works on you. How do you get out? You rescind your federal citizenship, declare your citizenship of your state as it was before reconstruction, rescind your birth certificate (to remove proof of being under the 14th), rescind your social security (to correct your status as a soverign instead of a corporation), then begin rescinding everything else; drivers lisence, fishing lisences, gun lisence, any contract with the federal government and it's munincipal corporations (read; the states are corporations). You can get a non-binding play-ID from the SS office if you want to get a bank account, for example. Then you simply stop paying income and social security taxes, atwhich point you stop giving the government 30% of your income and begin working to reinstate lawful government in your state via holding elections and office and organizing locally. More to the point, if enough people do it quickly enough, the federal government will have about 10 trillion in debt to pay off, and no way repay it back which means a massive collapse.
The price? Reading a few books; learning how history, governments, and legal documents work. Mabye $500 in books total. A good place to start is here:
http://www.usa-the-republic.com/revenue/true_hist
Do a find for john ainsworth and ed wahler on this page
http://mp3.rbnlive.com/Stadt06.html
They've been preparing a book and an organization to do this on a massive scale. The book comes out in march-ish along with the publicisation of the startup and they hope to do it state-by-state.
is this a what (paid)members see? may be its being shown to everyone by mistake? I always wished hard to find out (without paying any money of course) how do they inform the paid members of an slashdot story about to be released early... Wishes _do_ come true is it?
... for the record - no change whatsoever so its not related to being or not being a subscriber.
My subscription had lapsed, and I saw the funny title, so I used it as an excuse to get another subscription
However, the small title area probably explains why so few people have seen this submission
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
My impression is that the Bush family is the most corrupt family every to have political power in the United States. These are people who believe that they are more than 100% right, and that other people don't matter.
It does not surprise me that Jeb Bush's state is involved in voting machine vulnerabilities. Quote from the story "... vendors such as Diebold have too much influence in the administration of elections, a view that resonated with Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, the founder of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition."
The president of Diebold said he would deliver the votes to Bush. And he did.
I wrote short reviews of books and movies about the corruption, but I only barely touched the surface: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government. Note that, although Michael Moore's manner of expression is sloppy, other authors supported his main points in the movie Fahrenheit 9/11. For example, George W. Bush does hold hands with Saudi leaders, his father was at a meeting with a brother of Osama bin Laden on the day before 9/11, and so on.
It looks like a new viewing option.
I'm not sure what the grey ones are - possibly articles in other sections that wouldn't otherwise make the front page (as someone else suggested).
Have a look at your preferences - there's a new part in the front page section that lets you choose whether or not to display the grey bars, or whether to show the full stories for all, grey bars for all, etc.
Advanced users are users too!
The voter doesn't take the paper with him, as you say that would ruin the whole anonymous ballot thing. The voter gets the paper, looks at the human readable output to verify that his vote was correctly recorded, and drops the paper into a ballot box on his way out. If the paper shows that his vote was incorrectly recorded, he can ask an election official to remove his vote from the machine, destroy that paper ballot, and try again.
The election officials keep the paper ballots, machine printed recepts that is, so that in the event of a dispute they can be hand counted. Since, theoretically, every voter looked at their recept and verified that it recorded what they truly intended to vote for, if someone hacks the machines and falsifies the votes recorded there, the paper ballots get the final say in the event of a dispute.
It also gives you a good indication of where the falsification of the electronic votes got started since you can say: hmmm, district 123 shows 4000 votes for candidate X on the computer, but the paper ballots only show 1000 votes for candidate X, who messed with the machines in district 123?
Essentially we're keeping the old paper method of vote recording as a backup in the event that its suspected that someone hacks the machines.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
This is my idea for a voting machine. It depends for its operation on the idea that when a current is passed through two solenoids in series, both armatures will pull in. The machine itself has two units: the voting booth unit and the presiding officer's unit, linked by a cable. When not being used for an election, the machines would be made available for public scrutiny.
The voting booth unit {VBU} has a large rotary switch, a pushbutton and a meter with a green zone. The Presiding Officer's unit {POU} contains a power supply, and a column of non-resettable electromechanical counters, all but one of which are covered by a metal plate. This plate is fastened in place with a wire with an aluminium seal bearing the Returning Officer's mark. The counter readings before the start of the election are recorded on a paper label affixed to the underside of the cover plate. There is also a switch labelled "CHARGE" and "VOTE".
Each voter is issued with a unique, identifiable token -- a postcard with their name and address on it. The voter shows the token {Token One} to the Presiding Officer, who first spoils Token One and then moves the switch on the POU to "CHARGE" as the voter steps into the booth. The Presiding Officer then moves the switch to "VOTE". The voter has now traded Token One for a second token, all of which are absolutely anonymous, identical and indistinguible from one another: Token Two is an electrical charge stored in a capacitor contained within the VBU.
The voter spins the rotary switch to their preferred candidate, checks that the meter is in the green zone and depresses the voting button. The VBU capacitor is discharged through the coil of one of the concealed counters in the POU. One terminal of each of these counters is commonned together; the current through any one of the candidate counters also flows through the master counter, and returns to the other plate of the capacitor. The charge in the capacitor is soon exhausted, and cannot be replenished unless the Presiding Officer moves the POU switch to CHARGE. The voter then has the option to move the rotary switch to a different position so as to conceal their preference -- or to leave it there to advertise their preference.
Every voter has a receipt to show that they have voted {the spoiled Token One} but once a vote has been cast, the only record of that vote is the fact that the master counter and one of the candidate counters have advanced by one place. There is thus no way to link a voter with their vote. The master counter is in view of {and the counting mechanism is within earshot of} the PO, who can thus confirm visually and aurally that a vote has been cast {or separately, manually record a "no vote" if the voter leaves the booth without voting for any candidate}. All the candidate counters are concealed until the close of polling, when a few minutes' worth of mental arithmetic will reveal the true count. By virtue of its simplicity, and the fact that it has been subjected to public scrutiny, we can take for granted that the mechanism is behaving as it is supposed to; the Returning Officer need only inspect the tamper-evident seals to determine whether the result is valid or compromised.
{In case the above constitutes a patent claim, I hereby licence it for use royalty-free in all applicable jurisdictions, in the hope that it will be of service to Humankind}.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Especially since Smith was acquitted.
I think these are the stories that are usually on the right, after 'Your Rights Online', it usuallys says (1 More), and the stories that don't usually appear on the main page will now take up a line of text.
I like it, there's often stories in those '1 More' links that are very interesting, and they are hidden from view until you actually go and look for them.
Runnin' On Empty
You believe Moore's lies and distortions because you want them to be true.
Diebold is a fine example of how the small-mindedness of some people manifests itself. Particularly, it shows that proprietary softare and oafish business practices are next of kin.
But it has nothing to do with President Bush.
You defend Moore's dishonesty, but tout Diebold's ineptitude as evidence of President Bush's alleged corruption because his brother is governor of Florida?
That's some strained reasoning.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
This was one of Michael Moore's weakest points.
That's funny, it was strong enough of a point for the Bush administration, they had a citizen of Canada "renditioned" to Syria for more than a year for working with the brother of a known terrorist.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Well, I *am* a paying customer (witness the star by my ID, though it's more of a token of support than an insatiable desire not to see ads), and I haven't seen them before. I'm guessing they're a new feature.
Although, it's weird, because I don't see how this story relates to the one it's "attached" to in any way.
Oh well, guess we'll find out at some point.
I thought it might be a way of displaying "active" topics from subjects you hadn't subscribed to in your preferences. Certainly they all seemed to be articles worth skimming to decide if they're worth reading in detail.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Is anyone else disturbed by the racist tone of this story?
There's an organization called the Open Voting Consortium whose mission is "the development, maintenance, and delivery of open voting systems for use in public elections." They are directly opposed to the shenanigans that Diebold has engaged in.
Problem is, they spend their donations on actually developing the system, not in paying off Congressmen to give them lucrative exclusive contracts. Still, one can hope that it changes someday. (And donate to support the effort...)
In the end, there are better ways from the standpoint of guaranteeing a secure election than demanding or not demanding a single hardware vendor to do this or that.
A standard should be set for the ballot and the voting software's capabilities, and then several companies' equipment set up at every station. In fact, if these all generate a standardized paper ballot, then the counting process could (and should) be completely divorced from the voting process, perhaps even an additional vendor could deal with this task. Increasing the number of vendors perhaps increases the risk that one will act in bad faith, but decreases the damage one such vendor could do. I mentioned in a post in an article some time ago how this kind of setup could help guarantee correct results without devolving to random manual recounts, by simply requiring all machines to produce a machine-and-human readable ballot, with these ballots machine sorted and counted. Should there be any question of whether the sorting machine is correct, one must only flip the ballots like a flipbook and watch the line in question, any improperly sorted ballot will be easily caught. Should there be a question of the counting machine's integrity (this would be hard to do, since a stand alone counting machine should be unable to know what is being counted at any time) then a different counting machine could be substituted. This leaves incompetence and malice in the human component, and with oversight from independent election observers, the risk of the latter can be reduced. Counting ballots before sorting and comparing the total to the grand total of sorted votes will cut down on chances of the former causing someone's stack of votes to be accidentally lost.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Now I just wish the "1 More" counters said "since when"? I read several sections when I realize they update, but sometimes there'll be "3 More" for days, but not always the same 3 articles.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
"All that proves is that the screen and the piece of paper say the same thing. How do either of those relate to the actual value recorded as the vote?"
It doesn't. But the original posters' point was that if there is any suspicion of discrepancies/errors/hacking, the "system" (meaning the whole election process) can fall back on a more traditional/reliable method (paper votes).
Paper ballots have their own problems, but in general it's a different set of problems than the ones in electronic systems.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Even at full capacity, it would've taken 10-20 years of taking all of Iraq's oil profits (or it may even have been total net sales...) to pay for the initial cost of the war. Iraq's oil fields aren't running anywhere close to full capacity due to initial damage from the war and constant ongoing damage from insurgent activity.
Note that by "initial cost", I mean the initial 80-100 billion that Bush requested for the war. What's the price tag up to now? 200b? 300b? It's a hell of a lot more. Plus there's the cost of upgrading/rebuilding Iraq's oil production infrastructure.
If this was about oil, it was a damned stupid financial decision.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It's since you last looked at that section.
cat
Canada's national election happens to be tomorrow.....
y stem#Non-partisan_election_officers
"All votes are made on the same standard heavy paper ballot which is inserted in a standard cardboard box, furnished by Elections Canada. The ballot and the box are devised to ensure that no one except the elector knows the individual choice that was made. Counting the ballots is done by hand in full view of the representatives of each candidate. There are no mechanical, electrical or electronic systems involved in this process."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_electoral_s
Scandalous!
Cheers,
-b
No it's not, yes that's right, but no it can't.
I think you're reacting to a misreading of the term "paper trail". The official ballot has to remain tangible, because it makes a chain of custody possible. That means paper (or punched metal, or whatever). Electronic ballots are subject to a range of tomfoolery that make the process unsuitable for chain of custody, recounts, and the all-important public trust.
The electronic ballots get counted first, naturally, and sent in. That makes getting unofficial results very quick, suitable for our instant gratification-based world. But the official count is done, by hand or machine, with the paper ballots which were printed out and (presumably) were individually verified by the voter.
Any discrepancy between the paper ballots and the electronic ones triggers a recount. If it's really bad, say a 1% difference, you bring in the accountants and lawyers.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Electronic voting machines and their makers never fail to amaze me. I mean, voting's a big deal, right? Elections are supposed to be honest, the results are supposed to be untampered, and we're supposed to come out with a real winner chosen by the people, no matter who we're electing for what position. Voting is practically the backbone of our democracy, and one of the most influential ways that we can speak out in our towns and in our country... And yet, for some reason, most if not all voting machines appear to be almost designed to be hacked, if they aren't defective outright.
Here in my own county, residents are very concerned about the coming elections that will be held here for county positions. Electronic voting machines will be deployed widely - I don't believe they're Diebold's, but that's not the point - and elected officials have already been cited as asking their associates off the record to find ways to crack these machines. I shit you not. The story has been mostly swept under the rug, but somehow I don't think that these guys are out to stress test these machines, given the far from spotless reputation of Madison County's upper management. The machines in question leave no paper trail whatsoever, and are practically a mirror image of Diebold's machines in functionality and security. In other words, they're fancy piles of electronic garbage designed to produce the same.
This bothers me a great deal. It really makes me just want to stick with old fashioned paper voting, or simply drive the point home by defacing one of these boxes on election day with a third-rate off the shelf hack. Preferrably both, if possible. It's ironic that the single greatest threat to the advancement of society today is the advancement of high technology. Broken tech and rigged voting machines threaten our democratic process, while robust surveillance threatens our privacy and freedom, and yet people just eat this stuff up. It's sick. Not to say that the advancement of technology is evil, but in some cases it's application would appear to be extremely counterproductive to our society and the preservation of the basic values of our country...
You said, "The bin Laden family is HUGE, with a large number of brothers, of which Osama is a black sheep who has hardly had any contact with anyone."
I have personal experiences that influence my opinions concerning this. For several years I would go to a gym at night and work out, perhaps 2 or 3 times a week, for at least an hour and a half and often 3 hours.
I met sons of very wealthy Saudi families at the gym. Working out is very boring, and people sometimes take a break and talk. Often we would have extensive conversations. This was long before 9/11/2001. I wasn't involved with a woman friend at the time, and the Saudis, who had been sent by their families to study at the university here, were never very well accepted in the U.S. culture. So, we both had plenty of time to talk. I talked with other gym regulars, of course, not just Saudis. (I've never known anyone with the name bin Laden.)
It is true that Osama bin Laden is just one of 53 children of his father, and the only one who is publicly a terrorist. However at the gym I developed a sense of how Saudis feel, although they were always polite and, being Arabs, never stated their feelings in a completely open way.
My sense is that Arabs don't like to see other Arabs killed. The U.S. government has been in the business of killing, or paying to kill, Arabs for decades. Remember, that is one of Osama bin Laden's major complaints. (The other is that he didn't like U.S. government weapons in Saudi Arabia.) Most U.S. citizens have very little awareness of the violent actions of their government, I've discovered, and would be surprised to learn how much of their money has gone to kill Arabs, or help kill Arabs, even long before the first U.S. government-Iraq war.
I never met a Saudi who was anti-American. Obviously, if they existed, I probably wouldn't. However, it seemed that Saudis were often against the habitually violent policies of the U.S. government.
Remember, 15 of the 19 people who attacked on 9/11 were Saudis. Although the U.S. media often tries to trivialize this fact, those Saudis gave their lives for their beliefs.
The Bush family believes they are friends with Saudis, particularly the man who calls himself Prince Bandar, and whom the Bush family calls "Bandar Bush". For reasons too complicated for a Slashdot comment, it is extremely unlikely that Bandar likes George W. Bush, or even George H.W. Bush. In spite of the fact that Bandar acts friendly with the Bush family, and holds hands with George W. Bush while being filmed by national media, I think that Bandar is not actually deeply friendly. He is only pretending to be friendly to advance his own agenda, a tactic that has worked extremely well.
The point of this is that Saudis often have feelings which seem sensible to them but which may seem unreasonable to U.S. citizens. Several members of bin Laden's family, not just Osama, gave money to causes that they considered pro-Arab. Those causes were sometimes anti-U.S. government. In general, people who seem to know about these things have said that there has been considerable sympathy inside the bin Laden family for Osama's actions.
I'm resolutely against violence. I'm resolutely against any government acting in secret. I love the United States intensely. However, I recognize that many people will agree with the sick logic that says that, if the U.S. government kills Arabs, Arabs can attack the United States.
What's really amazing/frightening to me is how long it has taken for the mainstream media to pick this up. The tests done by Harri Hursti for Leon County were conducted and reported back on December 13th, 2005! The Post waited until a slow news day over a month later to report on it. Since then, there's been a whole slew of additional activity on the voting machines front. For more details, see the original blackboxvoting.org article.
--Paul
Disclaimers: I have been working with the good folks at TrueVoteMD.org to get the d*mned things banned in Maryland, my home state; I'm also a plaintiff in a lawsuit in Maryland that seeks to force the Maryland State Board of Elections to follow exsting state law and get rid of them.
What Sancho did "is analogous to if I gave you the keys to my house and told you when I was gone," said David Bear, a Diebold spokesman. As Bear sees it, Sancho's experiment involved giving hackers "complete unfettered access" to the equipment, something a responsible elections administrator would never allow.
So, they're saying that a hacker without physical access would never have been able to get in and that it was only because they were allowed to touch the physical unit that they could make it do such things. That's great security. I guess we shouldn't worry about all those military computers tucked away in heavily-guarded military bases. Since no hacker could ever gain physical access to the boxes, they're totally secure!!
Jory
I agree completely. Take, for example, the manner in which Joseph P. "Bush" made millions from insider trading and stockpiling of liquor during prohibition, supported appeasement of Nazi Germany, and stuck a deal with Joe McCarthy to help his son's senate campaign.
Then there's the way that John F. "Bush," after a Senate career buillt upon the tacit support of Joe McCarthy, was elected--without a majority of the popular vote--President in 1960, despite allegations of voter fraud in Texas and Richard Daley's Chicago. After delivering an inaugural speech plaigarized from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. ("...it is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for the country in return."), he made several attempts to assassinate the president of Cuba, began US involvement in Vietnam, and, after repeated humiliations by Nikita Khrushchev, allowed construction of the Berlin Wall.
His younger brother, Edward M. "Bush," got drunk one night and drove his car into the sea, leaving a female passenger to drown, and promptly calling his lawyer, then going home for the night, leaving the submerged car undiscovered until the next morning.
Ted's nephew, William "Bush" Smith, had a medical career plagued by allegations of rape and sexual harrassment, including several lawsuits settled out-of-court.
Replace "Bush" with "Kennedy," and I agree with your assessment. Unprecedented corruption? Hardly.
...and then they'll give you a flying pony for being a good citizen.
This was a work of art until the last paragraph. Try not to diminish your impact by overexplaining. Thanks for a great post, anyway.
Hell, if your enemy is playing that game, better to play it back. If someone was stealing my shit, I'd start breaking into their house too.
As part of a spot-check quality control process, however, it is pretty damn foolproof.
You make it a requirement to, on the day after the election or whenever, go back through say 1-5% of the total machines in any county or city, plus any machines with exceptional results, and read all the paper vote results off the internal record, and compare to the electronic copy. The results should be identical. If they aren't identical for any sample, throw a red flag and freeze the results, and then go compare a much larger sample, and if necessary test them all by reading out all the paper results in the area.
Basic statistics indicates that for large enough numbers, even spot checks of a few percent will almost certainly catch any attempts to do widespread (i.e., statistically significant) manipulation or fraud within the computer mechanism.
No single level of security at any level can possibly catch all voter fraud. You have to check redundantly, you have to check at multiple levels (computers all agree, but 2x as many recorded votes as registered voters, anyone?). It is possible for multiple levels of checks to make it very very hard for any conspiracy to statistically affect the results.
In the 20th century, dictators managed to get elected thanks to their understanding of the full power of radio or television. In this new century, the wide adoption of riggable and unaccountable election systems will become the tool of choice for all dictators wannabes.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Yes. I got here through a grey bar link. I agree it sucks, the whole thing looks like some articles are randomly reduced to such mini-announcements.
Now going and looking for an option tou switch them off...
C - the footgun of programming languages
So we are voting for the best hacker? .;;
There's something eerie about a man named "Oswald" replying to the post above...
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
In all fairness, you could use paper ballots in the New England states, which don't vote for all that much. You might only vote for 5 offices in any given year.
In 2004, here in Columbus (Franklin County, Ohio) we voted for 57 different offices, judgeships, city/county/state initiatives and referenda. If you multiply that out by the 590,000 votes cast, then you see why electronic balloting is a necessity.
Yeah, it's retarded. I almost missed this article, then thought... wtf is that? Is Slashdot rendering pages wrong in Firefox again?
I worked with a guy a few years ago that got wrapped up in this, um, er, philosophy. He actually got the HR department for a fortune-500 company to stop witholding social security from his paycheck on the basis of a poor reproduction of a letter on congressional letterhead from a Congressman with these unique ideas. About 9 months later, he gets word from HR that not only are they resuming witholding, but complying with a garnishment order to recoup not only the witholdings in default, but penalties and interest as well. If HR hadn't ended up looking like complete idiots in this case, I'm pretty sure they would have let him go, but I'm sure the embarrasment on their part tied their hands.
Lo and behold, he's dismissed about a year later. Last I heard he was serving time for trying to meet with a supposedly 14 year old he met on the internet who had in fact been an undercover police officer in a chatroom. Wish I could get you to talk to him, but I'm sure he can't take phone calls these days...
A Brazilian was telling me that Lula, the president of Brazil, is corrupt. I asked him, "How many innocent civilians did Lula kill?
I can't think of any weaknesses in this system that can't be overcome with pretty simple measures (e.g. keep public cameras on the paper vote boxes at all times to prevent tampering when the employees take them to the warehouse).
I also don't understand why it was not in place from the beggining, other than not having coughing up enough money to fund it 100%. If that was the case then why not wait a few years longer until we have a proper system in place (e-voting + paper backup)?
Basic statistics indicates that for large enough numbers, even spot checks of a few percent will almost certainly catch any attempts to do widespread (i.e., statistically significant) manipulation or fraud within the computer mechanism.
And made even more powerful by focusing on the states where votes are close.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://energybulletin.net/12125.html
Not just firefox.. konqueror too
Anyway, how much of a suspicion of errors, cracking or other discrepancies would it take to get authorities to cough up the cost of a manual recount? In the last US presidential 'election', for the first time ever exit polls diverged greatly from the tallies reported by the polling sites. Nor did the US fulfill its own (and the UN's) requirements for an open and fair election. Neither of those set off a recount.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
What they really need is a secure voting system. One that requires positive identification of the voters, cross checking to make sure they only vote once, a paper trail - with incremental checksums. They can do it with lottery tickets, why not with voting? Purple dye people's thumbs too.
The only real question is - is the Diebold system more secure than what we had, which was very insecure and subject to known corruption? I think we all know we are not there yet to a secure system. One that ensures that even the stupid can cast a vote.
Don't tell me that none of you ever read Harry Harrison's famous "The Stainless Steel Rat for President" http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0553276123/qid=11 38052026/sr=1-18/ref=sr_1_18/102-5041110-1773764?s =books&v=glance&n=283155. explaining how to rig an electronic voting system (for the good of the people, though...) 1 38052026/sr=1-11/ref=sr_1_11/102-5041110-1773764?s =books&v=glance&n=283155 by the same author (Soylent Green). I find it fun that these techniques float slowly north to G.WLand.
See, I have been living the last few years down in sunny MX, which, in its best days, always reminds me of "Paraiso Aquí", the subject of this book. In the others, though, it reminds me of "Make Room! Make Room!" http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0425023907/qid=1
On the other hand, rigging elections has always been my country's most popular sport (i'm from Corsica....), so that I am nobody to comment.
If you have not read that book, do it, it quite worth it, and funny too...
It's a Proud and Lonely Thing to be a Stainless Steel Rat....
Bush family? Sad to say, Abraham Lincoln was more corrupt than all the Bushes combined.
:)
It is from historic point of view meaningless and erroneous to compare the governance between two people coming from different centuries. Worldview, Democracy, rights and ethics evolved enormously since the 19th century, we are talking of a time where it was considered normal (anyway in most of Europe) that 'normal(>90%)' people are not considered 'able' to vote.
The point is do not compare Bush with Lincoln, but Bush with it's contemporaries. Considering this, it does not mean the conclusion would be different at all,
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Again, if the electronic tallies are not sound, then they are a waste of resources to set up and maintain. There are ways to mess with a paper ballot election, but we should go back to paper-only until Diebold and company are out of the way.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Paper and electronic ballots each have points of weakness. Doing both hedges our bets, since the techniques for messing with them are mostly orhogonal. Having the voter look at his ballot removes any chance for the ballot making machine to skew the results. Counting them both makes it really hard to hide local trickery or incompetence.
Exit polls are not credible. They rely on people telling a reporter something, and the reporter getting it right. It's more likely, especially in a contested race or a blowout, that only people who think that they will agree with the reporter will talk to one.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.