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Worst Ever Security Flaw in Diebold Voting Machine
WhiteDragon writes "The folks at Open Voting Foundation got their hands on a Diebold AccuVote TS touchscreen voting machine. They took it apart (pictures here), and found the most serious security flaw ever discovered in this machine. A single switch is all that is required to cause the machine to boot an unverified external flash instead of the built-in, verified EEPROM."
There are many good reasons to switch to American Idol call-in voting.
1. They still have the electoral college, so it's not like a spam vote will elect the "wrong" candidate.
2. Since the NSA monitors all phone calls, they could track cheaters really easily, compared with this mess we have now.
3. Way more voter participation, you don't have to go anywhere, you just call in with your social or something, etc.
stuff |
my district switched to electronic from lever based. in 2004, at 715 when i voted on lever machines, there was no line, and just about as many signatures in the book. in 2005, the line was out the door and around the corner at the same time. the person in front of me took 5 minutes to use the electronic machine. people knew how to use the old machines, and they were reliable. these new things take the old people for ever to use, and then they complain that they were hard to read...
...For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.
Any company with devotion to a fair and secure voting system would not make such an obvious oversight. If it was in fact an oversight, it shows that Diebold is far too incompetent to be creating voting machines. You would also think that a company in charge of something so important wouldn't show blatant partisanship either. Why are they still employed?
Similes are like metaphors
I thought the biggest flaw was their certification by states for use in actual elections.
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make install -not war
Sorry, I have never seen the point of these machines. Paper ballots are auditable, user friendly, and if electronics is put into the reporting system, can be counted in a few minutes and submitted. Voting machine are a perfect example of a technology fetish at work. It would make an interesting case study to examine the economic and sociological reasones why we sometimes buy technology that we don't need, don't want and further, serves no useful purpose.
If you let all of those other people wake up first there won't be any hot water left for your shower.
I read the internet for the articles.
This article is a little high on the hype. The general rule is that if you have physical access to any computer system you can compromize its security.
Don't you think that a flaw that would allow people to vote multiple times or a flaw in the security by which the voting machine uploads results to the central server or flaws in the central server itself are worse than this.
Gee, we have physical access to the guts of a machine and we can do things to it. I'm not terribly impressed.
more aggressive on this issue.
Electronic Voting machines are not a trustworthy technology. They can be made reasonably trustworthy, but only with significant and constant public involvement and oversight. The core element to this happens to be our requirement of anonyminity for our votes. Being unable to link votes to voters means we must then capture the actual votes themselves if we are to be sure the election is just and true.
Roughly 80 percent of Americans will be using these machines in the coming elections. That should scare the tar out of every one of you, regardless of your political bent.
In 2004, this number was about 30 percent and the problems were so great, we really have no assurance our election results actually reflect the will of the American people, whatever that may be.
Think of it this way. Let's say I'm the voting machine counting votes. You tell me what your vote is, and I update my mental count. Can you see that I updated the count correctly? I could report your vote back to you correctly, yet still maintain a different internal count. There is no way to really know is there? That's the problem we face with electronic votes.
The votes are encoded into states stored on devices nobody can directly observe, other than via the proxy of other electronic technology. Essentially, we are voting by proxy when we vote electronically. Without an accounting in the form of a serial voter-verified paper record, or the use of vote storage that is both human and machine readable, we cannot oversee the election results in a manner that brings confidence to the whole affair.
These machines are general purpose computers for the most part. We all know how easily these things are tinkered with because it's what most of us do! Biggest problems are:
-no direct accountability on elections officials to actually hold a just and true election. Technology can and will be blamed for problems, leaving these folks off the hook for failed / unjust elections. Not good. Where the incentive for corruption and manupulation exists, you can bet it's happening. There is too much at stake for it to be otherwise.
-poor understanding of the core technology differences between paper voting and electronic voting. I summarized it above and have a longer, easy to understand, paper here. Mail it to your legislators along with a request for their position on the matter. If you do the mailing, please also do the request. That forces a response, which helps increase the overall perception of the importance of the issue. http://www.opednews.com/dingusDoug_112604_electron ic_voting.htm
Said poor understanding extends to all of us really, legislators and citizens alike. Too many people consider electronic data processing systems as being better than they actually are. Consider this: If they are so infallable, why do ATM machines deliver receipts? Also, be careful about ATM comparisons. The primary difference between an ATM machine and an electronic voting machine lies in the anonymous nature of voting. ATM transactions are keyed to people, electronic voting records are not --thus the need for a voter-verified paper trail.
What do we need to ask for?
Voter verified paper trails that are human readable, serial in nature and easily handled / processed for recounts. Flimsy, thermal rolls that can discolor from improper storage and or handling won't cut it.
Audits at the precinct level. These can catch abnormalities easily and quickly before too much damage is done. Use the paper record to verify issues and act accordingly.
Strong exit polling. Notice how that is being downplayed now? The reason is simple. In 2004, the exit polls did not jive with the voting records, yet we have been exit polling for a good long time. The differences did not appear in this way until the advent of the electronic machines.
Legislation that reinfo
Blogging because I can...
you suspected correctly. The current rep, Tom Feeney, representing South Florida rigged the US 2004 election election for his post.
http://www.youtube.com/v/7WmC4grXdIk
http://www.house.gov/feeney/
very interesting video. The computer programmer explains what he was asked to do. He gets stupid at the end though and starts rambling off topic, but I blame that on too much time on Slashdot.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
Given taxi meters and electricity meters both have tamper seals, you would have thought that these would have visible tamper seals as well. If in doubt you could even have two tamper seals: one from Diebold and another from the voting commission, in order to ensure that both parties are satisfied with the state of the machine.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
20 Amazing Facts About Voting in the USA
Everyone who says that Diebold is too incompetent to create a secure voting maschine is following the wrong trail.
I beg to differ. I belive this is the worst security flaw yet:
9 202389150&q=hacking+the+vote
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=811282555
If you must!
I think the real question is: How long can I play TUX Racer off of a bootable flash card before the voting officials figure out that something is up?
If you must!
One man's "flaw" is another man's "feature". But really, hacking is not a problem if there is a paper trail mechanism in place.
Is it that hard to put a thermal printer behind a glass shield: a voter can view his vote on paper tape. The current record is hidden when the tape is fed-forward for the next voter.
Random spot-checks can ensure that a machine reported same number of e-votes as paper-votes. Say, check 500 machines at random, if they all function correctly, accept the electronic results for the whole country.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
I got another one you'll love:
Q: Does it run Linux?
A: It does now!
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
These are not flaws, this is intentional and is part of the process of how the criminals in the white house got there and are able to stay there. Democracy ended in this country over 6 years ago.
Because absentee voters get a paper ballot that is not only delivered by a trusted source - the US Post Office - who have a verified date/time stamp - and that the ballots can be audited, traced, and verified - now THAT is a reason to register permanent absentee.
Today.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Here's a depressing comparison, showing the rules surrounding slot machines in Vegas vs. voting machines:
Vegas vs. Electronic Voting Machines
The Nevada Gaming Control Board has technical standards for slot machines. They've had enough fraud over the years that they know what has to be done. Some highlights:
(a) Employ a mechanism approved by the chairman which verifies that all control program components, including data and graphic information, are authentic copies of the approved components. The chairman may require tests to verify that components used by Nevada licensees are approved components. The verification mechanism must have an error rate of less than 1 in 10 to the 38th power and must prevent the execution of any control program component if any component is determined to be invalid. Any program component of the verification or initialization mechanism must be stored on a Conventional ROM Device that must be capable of being authenticated using a method approved by the chairman.
(b) Employ a mechanism approved by the chairman which tests unused or unallocated areas of any alterable media for unintended programs or data and tests the structure of the storage media for integrity. The mechanism must prevent further play of the gaming device if unexpected data or structural inconsistencies are found.
(c) Provide a mechanism for keeping a record, in a form approved by the chairman, anytime a control program component is added, removed, or altered on any alterable media. The record must contain a minimum of the last 10 modifications to the media and each record must contain the date and time of the action, identification of the component affected, the reason for the modification and any pertinent validation information.
(d) Provide, as a minimum, a two-stage mechanism for validating all program components on demand via a communication port and protocol approved by the chairman. The first stage of this mechanism must verify all control components. The second stage must be capable of completely authenticating all program components, including graphics and data components in a maximum of 20 minutes. The mechanism for extracting the authentication information must be stored on a Con
You seem to have put at least *some* thought into the issue, but I can easily envision scenarios by which the points you made in your post would be effectively irrelevant. I will present one such scenario, briefly, here.
First of all, I would would like to say, as an aside, that the United States of America is not, and has never been, a "democracy". It is, in fact, a federal republic. Although this idea may seem to many to somewhat irrelevant to the topic of election fraud, it is relevant in that the federal system, in and of itself, provides easy paths to successful tampering of election results, particularly for the Republican/Conservative faction. The fact that the country has long been divided between relatively conservative rural districts/states, and relatively liberal urban areas is a side effect of the federal system that reinforces this possibility. Also of note is the electoral college, which ensures vastly greater proportional representation for those rural constituencies.
The mechanism I will describe *could* be used by either Party, but the real makeup of the country makes this mechanism far more effective in practice for the GOP.
Now, your assertion that election results, if tampered with, would need to effective mirror the actual voter turnout is not particularly relevant. The actual total number of votes cast is not in question--what *is* in question is the content of the individual votes, themselves.
Say, for example, I was a Republican sympathizer in the last two US Presidential elections, and I had a desire to attempt to tamper with the reported results in order to ensure victory for my Party. What I would do is not to attempt to disenfranchise liberal/Democratic voters in urban areas, but boost the tabulation of conservative/Republican votes in rural districts. Remember that by changing one vote, the effect in the tabulation is effectively doubled, assuming the total number of votes cast does not change. It is highly likely that in a district that has traditionally heavily favored Republican candidates, a slight reduction of Democratic votes and corresponding slight increase in Republican votes will go entirely unnoticed, especially in an environment where extreme partisanism has resulted in somewhat increased turnout for the Republican faction.
Given that there are many more rural conservative districts than liberal urban districts, such a slight change would be compounded by that number of districts where it would be possible to effect that change such that the overall results for any particular state could be changed dramatically. This mechanism would also be most effective in states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida, where the balance, in terms of overall numbers of voters on either side of the aisle is close. Such an effect could easily swing one of these states to one side or the other. Although Ohio received the bulk of the scrutiny in the 2004 election, it is worth mentioning that Pennsylvania was decided by a smaller margin than Ohio.
The election machines used thus far have no *voter verifiable* paper trail, even, as far as I have been able to determine, the TSx series. A paper trail seems to be kept with these machines, but as it is not voter verifiable, it is as easily modified as the results stored in memory. Again, the actual number of changed votes in any particular district could and probably would, be statistically small in relation to the overall number of votes cast.
Even an incompetent programmer would have no trouble writing a routine to accomplish such an end, and the only point of intrusion required is before the point of delivery of the machines to the local election commission. Of course, as we have seen in past elections, the possible points of intrusion are many and varied.
I do agree with you, however, that it is the process that is mostly at fault, rather than the individual technologies.
I'd be flabbergasted if there hadn't already been. Until real fraud in a real election is detected and proven, nothing is likely to change.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
This is why it's important to subvert a country's system of education first, before taking over the rest of the government.
Horace Mann (instigator of the compulsory government school) was much enamored with the Prussian system of schooling, which inspired in the subjects passive obedience to the government (source: Two Hundred Years of American Educational Thought, by Henry J. Perkinson). He thought he could take the good parts of the system without the bad. Haha...
See also John Gatto's Underground History of American Education. Gatto tells us in his works that a Prussian "education" is exactly what we receive in the standardized government school experience.
So remember: The purpose of government schooling is the installation of obedience in the population, so the masses won't mutiny when word gets out that we're being screwed (this story also) in a dog-and-pony-show sorta way.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com