Florida Voting Machine Logs Reveal Anomalies

boot1780 writes "Having 'successfully sued former Palm Beach County (FL) Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore to get the audit records for the 2004 presidential election,' Black Box Voting reports that the 'internal logs of at least 40 Sequoia touch-screen voting machines reveal that votes were time and date-stamped as cast two weeks before the election, sometimes in the middle of the night.' Besides the date discrepancies, they claim to have discovered countless other errors and anomalies, including a case of one voting machine being 'powered down 128 times during the election'." Given the findings here, can we have a do-over?

Comments

No National Voting System?

[abscissa]

Free market voting?

In Canada we have a national voting system. Voting is the same wherever you go, no matter what part of the country you are in. Each person writes a little X on a piece of paper next to the cantidate of his choice, then you put it in a box. There are serial numbers on the ballots, so if any ballots are missing, duplicated, or anything else is funny, there is a way to tell. (Not tracable, though, -- ie you can't tell who voted for whom.)

There are no computers in national elections and there is a paper trail that can be recounted as many times as anyone wishes. And results don't take weeks to come in either... or months for that matter. We always seem to have our Prime Minister and government chosen within a few hours after the polls have closed...

Re:Devil's Advocate...

[phoenix.bam!]

Black box voting is non-partisan. They are fighting for open voting. They are not trying to prove that Bush stole the election (Although they might do that during their investigations) they are trying to show that the black box voting machines are going to kill democracy.

FDR

[qwyeth]

I wonder, do you consider FDR to be the "jackass" who failed to stop Pearl Harbor?

Now that you mention it, FDR, along with General Marshall, General Gerow, Admiral Stark and Admiral Turner, did fail to stop the attack. It was strategically obvious that Pearl Harbor would be the target when (and if!) the Japanese attacked... On December 5, 1941 FDR received the decrypted Japanese declaration of war, and he did nothing about it. The message was never sent to Admiral Kimmel and General Short, the commander in chief & commanding general, respectively, of the pacific fleet. Our jackass-in-chief FDR wanted to go to war on the 'moral high ground,' in the eyes of the public.

But that'll never make it into high school history books. History is written by the winners, and it's common knowledge that we were taken by surprise, and that FDR was (overall) a really swell guy.

Guinness Voice: Brilliant!

[TPS Report]

It amazes me that the voting box companies, who are paid disgusting amounts of taxpayer money to develop these things, can't figure out how to code properly. Yes, I know Sequoia is the company discussed in the article, but Diebold has 80% of the voting market. So if they can't do it right as the market leader, I'm afraid of what will be found when/if someone demands a code audit on the Sequoia stuff.

Diebold :

(Support Guide - Review) (pdf):

4.4 Key management and other cryptographic issues with the vote and audit records [...] the audit logs are encrypted and checksummed before being written to the storage device. Unfortunately, neither the encrypting nor the checksumming is done with established, secure techniques. [...] (Recall that we have already discussed the lack of cryptography in other potions of the system.) [...] All of the data on a storage device is encrypted using a single, hardcoded DES [22] key: #define DESKEY ((des_key*)"F2654hD4"). Note that this value is not a hex representation of a key, nor does it appear to be randomly generated. Instead, the bytes in the string "F2654hD4 " are fed directly into the DES key scheduler. [...] from the CVS logs, we see this particular key has been used without change since December 1998 [...] ...

In June 2005, [Kevin Shelley, the California Secretary of State], reported that when given access to Diebold vote-counting computers, Bev Harris- a critic of Diebold's voting machines - was able to make 65,000 votes disappear simply by changing the memory card that stores voting results for one that had been altered. Although the machines are supposed to record changes to data stored in the system, they showed no record of tampering after the memory cards were swapped. In response, a spokesperson for the Department of State said that, "Information on a blog site is not viable or credible."

... [insert completely awed silence here]
.
I think I'll buy "C++ Programming for Dummies" and faxes a quick resume to Diebold

Re:Devil's Advocate...

[TPS Report]

TRANSPARANCY is the key

No, actually, the key is F2654hD4. :)

Quote:

All of the data on [the Diebold] storage device is encrypted using a single, hardcoded DES key:

#define DESKEY ((des_key*)"F2654hD4")

Note that this value is not a hex representation of a key, nor does it appear to be randomly generated. Instead, the bytes in the string "F2654hD4 " are fed directly into the DES key scheduler... from the CVS logs, we see this particular key has been used without change since December 1998 ...

rofl.

Re:Take back our elections

[jc42]

[D]o you consider FDR to be the "jackass" who failed to stop Pearl Harbor?

The main quibble here is the use of the word "the", which implies uniqueness. If you read the histories about the Pearl Harbor attack, you'll find that there's general agreement that there was widespread incompetence all along the US chain of command. They pretty much had the evidence in the hours before the attack, but a combination of failure to understand and failure to believe the evidence led to the disaster. But it wasn't one person's failure; it was failure of the entire system to use the information that it had.

This is similar to our current situation with 9/11, Katrina, the Iraq war, etc. George Bush isn't the sole "jackass" responsible for any of these. It's a systemic problem, with incompetence combined with corruption at all levels.

One of the clearest examples is the admission that they had tapes of the perpetrators' conversations days and weeks before the 9/11 attacks. But they didn't have enough translators fluent in Arabic to get them translated in time. This problem existed despite several decades of growing problems with Arabic-speaking radicals, including the earlier bombings of embassies, the Cole attack, and the earlier attempt to bomb the World Trade Center. Anyone competent saw the need for more Arabic translators, and there are at least a million Arabic-speaking Americans who could have been hired.

Further incompetence is shown by the fact that there aren't nearly as many Arabic-speaking Americans willing to do the job now. The widespread anti-Arab attacks and discrimination of the past few years have made sensible Arabic speakers very wary of getting involved with the US government. If you want a clear example of why, google for "Sibel Edmonds". Her story isn't an anomaly; it's a good example of a government agency attacking and driving out out of the people who could have done the most to help. There are a number of other similar stories.

But there isn't a single "jackass" responsible for this. It's a systemic problem that can't be solved by replacing just one high-up jackass.

(The widespread "English only" attitude of Americans is also part of the problem, but that's a different issue.)