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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?
I thought this was common knowledge? :-) Move along...
Bender: Wait, my cheating unit malfunctioned. You gotta' give me a do-over.
Dealer: Sorry - the house limit is 3 do-overs.
Quitcher whinin' 'bout the digital voting machines. You know as well as I do that the voting machine companies are wiser when it comes to choosing leaders than all you unwashed ignorant masses. (Sarcasm aside, I do hope this makes the national news)
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
Does anybody still beleive that this election wasn't fixed? I mean, really. Of course it'll never be proven, but it's so freakin' obvious. Incompetence can only explain so many problems - I think we've passed that point a long time ago.
And once again - no matter what your political persuasion, you need to demand that your representatives introduce or support legislation that requires a voting machine to produce a paper receipt for each vote, or some equally verifiable and recountable paper trail. Any politician that objects to a fair election needs to be fired and replaced.
>> "What would the robut do? Frame someone!"
Stop whining.
Bush stole the election fair and square. It's our (Americans') fault for not creating a massive landslide against him. The fact that a near plurality of people voted for the wanker created an opportunity for Bush 43, his brother, Kathleen Harris and the Republicans to seize power.
History will show that this election was a coup d'état, and that we were the fools who let it happen.
Want to prevent this from happening again? Andrew Tobias is the DNC treasurer: http://www.andrewtobias.com/, send Andy a message and he will tell you how to get involved.
A new factor has come up in to addition to Stalin's old maxim "He who votes decides nothing; he who counts the votes decides everything."
Something like "Who finds out about corruption is irrelevant; who gets to decide what kinds of corruption are "Serious Stories" versus "Tinfoil Hat" material decides the rest."
Or something like that. Since the media refuses to acknowledge that there are serious questions about legitimacy under electronic voting, pointing out the problems probably doesn't matter any more - any evidence of problems is perforce "nutty conspiracy theory material" and so is a non-starter.
The number of power cycles, 128, is too neat (2^7) to have been random. It's more likely to be a bug in the software than someone actually flipping the switch that many times. If there's a bug in the reset counter, how can I know there's no bug in the vote counter too? (Answer: open source voting machines with a signature mechanism to identify the code the machine actually ran when people were voting).
They found anomolies in 40 machines? How many machines were there in total? Did all of the anomolies favor one candidate or were they seemingly random? Was the constantly rebooting machine having hardware problems? Were the machines with wierd date stamps having hardware clock issues?
I'm not sure why this is instantly regarded as some sort of conspiracy rather than either hardware problems or incompetent voting machine vendors. Folks might want to consider the more mundane potential causes of these problems before heading for their tinfoil hat drawer.
With a bad machine you can just as easily blame the machine as you could someone going in and changing the results.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
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...
I'd rather hunt with Dick Cheney than ride with Ted Kennedy!
Ted Kennedy's car has killed more people than my gun!
-Thanks folks, I'm here all afternoon.
Do you want as many do overs as you wanted recounts until Gore won in FLA in 2000? What was the final tally of recounts there? 3? 4?
I'd rather a recount/do over of past elections in the Chicago area.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
Yes, it's called "pen, paper and sealed box".
It's massively inefficient, which is a good thing in elections. Efficiency only makes cheating easier.
people that voted for Democrates
Voted for him when? Do you mean in ancient Greece?
The only way someone can beat you is by cheating, right?
If there were only one or two instances where people said "Hm, something slightly fishy seems to have happened..." then you'd likely have a point.
But when there are dozens of reports of voting machines not working correctly, and when each and every time the errors seem to be in favor of the party that won... Yeah, I'd say calling shenannigans is justified.
Maybe it'll turn out that the errors didn't actually occur - maybe it'll turn out that the tracking software is fucked, but the votes were counted correctly. Maybe it'll turn out that there was some vast conspiracy. Maybe it'll turn out that the Democrats would have gotten *fewer* votes if the machines had worked properly. Whatever the results, what's important is this:
The machines don't seem to be working correctly when handling a very important task. We need to investigate this, no matter what. It isn't a matter of sour grapes (well, except for some people, maybe) but it IS a matter of finding out what the hell is going on.
Surely you don't think that we shouldn't investigate anomalous situations?
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Something many people here and in other predominantly-left forums seem to be missing is that many Americans truly, honestly believed that Bush was the better candidate. I doubt that your average Republican voted for Bush any more automatically than the typical Democrat voted for Kerry, and yet everyone seems to think that only Republicans were partisan voters. Well, guess what: there are sheep on both sides of the fence. Singling out one group of them will only alienate the bloc of voters you should be trying to persuade.
I voted for Bush for various reasons, but I would probably stand alongside you if a recall vote were held today. The time for partisan sniping is over. We need to work together if we want to make a difference.
As a side note to fellow Republicans, his closing advice is just as valid for us. Contact the RNC and make your opinion known. Write to your representatives and senate and let them know that you disagree with executive branch policies. This is your party: step up and take charge of it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Zell... Miller...
Anybody can join the Democratic party. It doesn't mean they belong there.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The first Ukrainian presidential election in November 2004, which was recognized by most of the world as fraudulent, used such a pen and paper system. Pen and paper does not ensure that elections can't be rigged and I am amazed at how many people seem to think that is exactly what it does.
The ability of the government to control the media, even in the face of the Internet, is astounding. But then, when half of the voting population is willing to believe anything they say, it's really not that hard for them to keep us "on message." What will really be surprising about this story is if it gets any attention in the mainstream media.
European Election Observation Mission, Final Report (pdf format).
Even with all the illegal restrictions that Israel imposed on movement in the West Bank and Gaza and most importantly, Palestinian citizens living in East Jerusalem***, the Palestinian elections have a valid paper trail that can be checked as well as having independent, neutral monitors observe how the voting took place.
Does this mean that the Palestinian elections were perfect? Of course not. No election is. However, they made a good faith effort to have as free and open an election process as possible under the occupation conditions. They allowed the monitors full access to every aspect of the vote including the final vote counts.
One would think that if we're trying to spread the benefit of democratic elections to the world we should first start by taking a serious look at our own election process and bring in outside monitors to help us get a handle on this kind of nonsense. There is absolutely no excuse for these kind of activities to take place other than to manipulate election results.
*Investigation into the 2004 U.S. Election
**Palestinian Monioring Group, Israeli Obstructions of the Palestinian Election Process
***Observer Report, Norwegian Assocation of NGOs (pdf format)
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
That proves it, humans are incapable of using technology such as computers for important events because there's always someone that tries to/does tamper with the technology to tip the balance.
If even the good ole paper ballot can't do it, exactly who thought something as complex (and programmable) as a computer could make any difference ?
Personally I'm not surprised, it was just waiting to happen.
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
A few comments.
The voter should *not* get a "receipt", so that he/she can be paid/blackmailed to vote a certain way. However, the machines should produce a write-only-once piece of human (as well as machine) readable output, such as a paper or plastic card with holes punched or permanent OCR ink markings.
The use of a machine to make selections is OK, but under no circumstances should the "permanent" record of my vote be made on a piece of computer storage media such as a hard disk or flash memory card. That is completely insane.
Our elections MUST have an immutable audit trail, while remaining anonymous. Each voter (or a trusted friend/agent in the case of the visually impaired or otherwise disabled) verifies that the physical record of the vote is as intended, then deposits that record in a container kept under watch by multiple parties.
If the votes are tallied by computers (they're good at that), fine. BUT, a physical record is available for recounts and audits of accuracy.
Anybody wanting a system making auditing impossible must be assumed to be up to fraud. No other interpretation makes sense.
Is it too late? Would a voter initiative for auditable voting simply be rejected by the powers that be already put in place, even if favored by 75% of the public in polls? THIS is the gravest issue facing our democracy now, on which the fate of all other issues hang. It is a coup of horrific proportion. (though corporate financing of election campaigns is a close second to be sure)
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
You've unfortunately fallen into a hole that far too many people do, and it's stolen the thunder out of your argument. This story is about a large number of anomalies in Florida voting machines. You've hyperextended that to "However, I doubt most people *know* the election was fraudulent" and even though I'm of a notion to think that voting machines are a bad idea because of their lack of accountability, I start to tune you out as a conspiracy theorist. There's nothing to say that faults in the voting machines were purposeful, nor that faulty voting machines would have changed the outcome of the election. That's not to say that such things didn't happen, but these are different, unconnected things and the stuff in the article does nothing to prove that they did, so tying them together just shows that you're not using logic properly.
Virg
Something like "Who finds out about corruption is irrelevant; who gets to decide what kinds of corruption are "Serious Stories" versus "Tinfoil Hat" material decides the rest."
You've hit on something very interesting here, and at the risk of an aptly-modded OT ramble, I'd like to expand on it.
Do you ever pay attention to those 'News of the Weird' or 'Offbeat News' sections of your local website / newspaper? While some of it is truly in the oddball category, there is something else going on, and it's much more subtle.
From my perspective, many of these 'offbeat' news stories would fall under another category - "News You Did Not Expect To Hear". That is, the rest of the news is 'safe' news - news that you could have expected to hear, based on the ongoing conditioning by all of the other news you've heard recently. The 'offbeat' news is the unsafe news, that was interesting enough to make it to print, but is otherwise not part of the main program.
For instance, a woman might give birth to a 15 pound baby. This is very unusual, and also quite newsworthy. So why is it tagged as offbeat? Perhaps to prevent distracting the news consumer from the latest strife in the Islamic world?
Color me cynical, but the whole concept of 'offbeat' news seems to be about molding public opinion to the viewpoints of the newsmakers (whoever they are).
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
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.
Is there anyway to vote for "None of the above"?
You don't have to vote in every race in an election. Look at the poll results sometime and you'll see that there will be many more total votes for President in a particular district than for the local school board candidates.
What?
Diebold
.
I think I'll buy "C++ Programming for Dummies" and faxes a quick resume to Diebold
I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven...
Programming Voting Machines isn't exactly designing rockets, you know. When the task is fairly simple, any anomalies require for explanation either an escalating (and unlikely) level of incompetence...or malfeasance. It's not crazy to say: these machines are made to count and for this simple task they fail depressingly often. WTF? Now, given no direct evidence of specific malfeasance that obviously benefits one party over another, conspiracy theories are premature. However, starting to look in this direction based soley on the failure rate is not as crazy as you make it out to be.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
Heres a nice article I wrote on that very issue, and this got mass media publication baby, not just a blog. Ireland removed the voting machines by the way.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
One of the more heinous human tragedies occured on September 11, 1973.
The democratically elected government of Chilean president Salvadore Allende was overthrown in a coup d'etat by General Augusto Pinochet. The new regime killed thousands of dissidents and other "enemies of the state".
The reason? Allende was a Marxist, and the CIA (and by extension, Richard Nixon) were keen to keep Latin America firmly in the American camp during the Cold War, even if installing fascist dictatorships was necessary.
I'm willing to bet anyone here that we'll attempt something similar in the Palestinian territory, so long as we can keep the Israelis from doing it themselves in some wickedly obvious fashion, like firing a rocket from a chopper, or hare-brained assassination attempts.
Of course, we're far more civilzed at home. We rely on factual information reported in an objective fashion to an educated public.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
Is the company who made these machines really that incompetent?
Incompetent is a difficult claim to make, but from my experience, probably the best explanation for why these systems are so poor.
Many of us here work in environments where software is developed with respect to CMMI, security is considered from the beginning in the design, and numerous methods are used to assess, audit and verify the systems performance, reliability and security.
Yet most of the election systems just don't develop software this way. If you are involved in an election systems purchasing project, I would recommend you ask about things like:
- explain your software development methodology.
- what is your CMMI level?
- what is your in-house security audit program?
- how often are your systems penetration tested? by whom? and how?
- what are the security qualifications of your in-house experts? and your consultants?
Without naming names, I am aware of one of the largest election system companies that does not do any of the above. They said they see no need for security audit, penetration testing, security design, etc. The reason? "We use Microsoft operating systems and that is their responsibility to take care of. We apply patches as soon as we get them."
Absolutely unbelievable. I didn't know where to begin to explain the problems in this belief. So please, if you are buying election systems, don't buy systems from vendors like this (and mind you, this firm was one of the larger ones and not Diebold).
While I applaud you for trying to maintain a sane and rational outlook and avoid falling into these conspiracy theories, this issue has far too many coincidences for you to dismiss like that. What would it take for you to change your stance from "no biggie, just a little smoke, no fire" to "fuck me, that's an awful lot of coincidence, maybe I should entertain the possibility that something is wrong here."
Hell, even assuming there's zero conspiracy, just a lot of blunders, should still make you nervous as it still means there's been a perversion of democracy.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Every day almost we hear about another computer exploit, some drive by malware download, another botnet, etc, all so some scumbags can make a few thousand dollars. That's it, a few thou. It's easy enough to understand the motivation, and easy enough to see that they use unsecured computers and peoples naievete to accomplish this task.
Now, just imagine,if the scumware guys OWN the computer that you and everyone else uses. Now imagine the scumware guys are looking at CONTROLLING THE ENTIRE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT by OWNING that computer.
How much is that worth? Really, how much motivation is there to control TRILLIONS of dollars, not thousands, TRILLIONS and the largest war machine on the planet? Do you see any incentive there, or is all this just another series of "coincidences"? Coups don't happen around the world all the time? Where's the magic document from the truth fairies that says the US can never fall to coup plotters?
Now look at the track record so far of what we have found out these folks, how many lies have been drug out of them? How many people have perished based on the lies, how may large corporate insiders connected to the government have profitted immensely?
You can't do the math on this? What's it going to take, them coming on TV and just announcing it? You fail to be able to take into account all the other information out there? This latest is just another large chunk of evidence, look at ALL of it together, what do you see? I see some serious crimes right up into treason,and the probable perps with the clear motive and the clear opportunity.
Well, of course any type of election system can be rigged. The question here is, which system is more transparent. This just in: electronic voting systems, which are made by companies led by Republicans who "would do anything" to get Bush re-elected (look that up on Google), which can be hacked by Howard Dean on a TV show (well, almost, look that one up, too) and which leave no paper trail, are as transparent as Dick Cheney's politics.
The Pen, Paper and Box combo is the most transparent system there is. America, ditch those stupid machines and quit being a high-tech banana republic.
Well, the People's Republic of California used those dumb punchcards for YEARS and nobody every whined about hanging or dimpled chads there. Oh and while we're on the subject, Clinton didn't win the popular vote but happened to win enough electoral votes to get elected. Can we have a do-over for that too?
Let me just adjust my tinfoil hat, ahhhhh there we go.
"nor that faulty voting machines would have changed the outcome of the election"
Try telling that to the QA people for an air traffic control systems or something more serious than life and death, somethinggggg, something like a stock exchange. We have systems across a large chunk of the planet that do a very good job at preventing planes and stockmarkets from crashing. People would also get pretty fucked off if the gazzillion dollar lotteries or even the local bookie had "disconnected anomolies".
Maybe it was "fool play" rather than "foul play" but whoever is in charge of running the election should, at a minimum, step aside until the negligence (or otherwise) is investigated with the rigor a technological disaster desrves.
Even if the GP is making heavy use of a "conclusion mat", nobody has "stolen the thunder", it's just can't be heard over the noise of the media steamtrain as it endlessly wizzes past.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Consider that the chairman of Diebold is a key fundraiser for Bush and publically promised to "deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush". Diebold is known to have a deep conservative culture. If this isnt an obvious conflict of interest, then I'm not sure what is. In this light, the number of voting machine irregularities and ease of hacking the machines raise a lot of questions.
>Extreme Republicans, on the other hand, are most likely in it for personal enrichment.
>They are not going to do something if they will get caught.
What about the ones who think they're not going to get caught?
my password really is 'stinkypants'
You know as well as I do that this isn't so.
I don't know it at all, and I posit that you don't, either. Everything I've read from Black Box has been focused entirely on the machines, without respect to which race or who won. They've published as much about congressional and even city council races as they have about the presidential election. If you have some evidence that they have a political agenda beyond making sure the voting is honest, cought it up. Innuendo is just a waste of time.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
It amazes me how often the term 'conspiracy theorist' is used to dismiss people. The fact is that conspiracies big and small happen all the time. They are uncovered and proven on a regular basis. Whethter it is Richard Nixon, Enron, Arther Anderson, or p2p copyright violators. To think that having a theory on a conspiracy makes you a nut is silly at best. The question is whether there is enough evidence to warrent the theory, and whether the suspected crime makes any sense to have commited.
By definition, to not believe in conspiracies would mean that you don't believe illegal p2p filesharing takes place. So, lets see who seems more logical.
Person A: Believes that a machine who's design should be extreamly simple consistantly makes errors in favor of the group who is most adament about using them indicates likely fraud.
Person B: Believes that illegal p2p fileshareing does not happen.
(Now, if your going to argue that you DO believe that p2p filesharing exists, then you too are a 'conspiracy theorist', and your post becomes totally nonsensical.)
The big "Palm Beach voting debacle" was that Pat Robertson got 3000 votes and there weren't 3000 members of the Reform Party.
What never gets mentioned is that Pat Robertson lives in Palm Beach County and had 1,000 people show up at a paid campaign dinner there not long before the election.
This is about like complaining that George Bush got more votes in Crawford, Texas, than there are Republicans there.
Bush is an idiot, and couldn't personally hack a Diebold voting box even though a chimpanzee could.
But he has powerful backers who don't give a shit about what will happen 50 years from now because they are rich enough to protect their own families and ride out anything bad that happens. Saudi family, "I'll give you Ohio" Diebold, evil Cheney, evil Rove. BushCo has a strong record of cronyism, both as a recipient (those companies he was gifted and failed, the national guard schitt), and as a giver (Energy company meetings, Pharma-friendly health care reform, FEMA's Brown, Harriet Myers, and way too many to mention).
Starting the Iraq war took a single-mindedness to invade Iraq. It took a lot of propoganda, funded by the taxpayers and thought up by Rove et al. It required hammering the CIA for shreds of evidence to support their wish, and ignoring all the analysis that Iraq was NOT a threat to the US. Outing Valerie Plame, lieing to the UN, more propoganda to frenzy Americans into a war fever, lieing about the costs, lieing about the insurgency and the possibility of civil war. More propoganda. Politically based classification and leaks.
This was idiotic. Iraq is worse off than before, and America is worse for the change. We have 17,000 dead and wounded soldiers, the Army is seriously weakened, our great-grand-children will have to pay back the debt for this war. There are now MORE terrorists, with better reasons to hate America and Christians.
Does any of this affect Bush? Rove? Cheney? Fox News? Only if they cared about Americans. Their own families will be fine. Their own families will always have roofs over their heads, excellent health care, and very rich contacts.
Yes, they are idiots, and also crafty. It doesn't take James Bond skills to stage an "elaborate" take over of a US election when the voting machines don't have paper records. Just knowledge of which few precincts to do it in, getting your political contacts to approve the machines, and enough money to the right hands. Which are they missing?
Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.
Most Republicans would rather have a hopefully salvageable Republican administration in charge than a neo-socialist Democratic one. ...the Democrats have become a new socialist party...
The current Democratic party is Socialist, to the extent that they favor using public money to provide services to people that private companies could have provided - like health care, education, construction, retirement benefits, etc.
The current Republican party is Facist, to the extent that they favor using public money to benefit large corporations and their leaders, and they collude with the media to keep the public in a misinformed frenzy.
I'll take Democratic Socialism over Republican Facism ANY day.
$8.95/mo web hosting
The pattern of date discrepancies does NOT look like "pure machine glitch" (hardware issues like a CMOS battery failure or corruption) and also doesn't look like the possible result of an OS bug.
The way they're mostly "clustered" in a limited date period of Oct. 13th - 20th of the correct year says to me "human intervension". It's not "randomized" the way most computer glitches are.
Next: by way of Jeremiah Akin, Riverside County elections staff have said that the PS/2 keyboard port on the back of each touchscreen terminal is used for, among other things, "to change the date and time".
We know from the logs on the serial numbers of the machines affected that the dates were accurate during the "logic and accuracy test" typically performed up to a month before the election.
OK, let's assume the Riverside folks are right about the keyboard being required for manual date/time changes.
Standard practice in the elections biz is to do the L&A then shut the machine down and DON'T mess with it until election morning. This is basic across all voting machines and has been since the lever days going back to the 19th century.
If the date was messed with by a human with a keyboard between the time of the L&A and the time of the election, well...what the holy hell were they doing? Once the keyboard is in you can tweak the boot order in ROM, loading new code off of new media, or maybe individual programs. (We know little about the OS on these but the boot ROM system is basically same as any laptop.)
In other words, it's not that radical a guess to say that somebody was up to something no good and the date weirdness was just a side effect.
If they were doing a very serious hack involving loading new code, it's possible that what they did hosed the date and they needed to reset it by hand...and in 40 or so cases they forgot that part?
Under this hypothesis the range of dates from the 13th to the 20th is maybe the time the "midnight black hat crew" spent touching each machine. The number of days involved is about right.
Again, this is speculation. We need the manuals on these things to understand the date function in detail. And the process by which new code or data is loaded, probably via PCMCIA card.
We need to replicate ALL these various errors and figure out how they happened, what could cause them and whether or not they're "pointers" to deeper problems, whether that's just "bad gear" or somebody actually loading a vote-shaving routine of some sort.
Jim March
Black Box Voting staff
http://blackboxvoting.org/
It's the way the system works.
Democrates have traditionally cheated by multiple voting. When Republicans try to do anything about this they cry 'disenfrachisment'. Hence the continued lack of ID requirements to vote.
Democratic dirty hands also explain the lack of real investigation. Both sides know they don't want their shanannigans exposed.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'