Slashdot Mirror
Hardware Hacking a Voting Machine in 4 Minutes
goombah99 writes "Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org has acquired an actual Diebold Acu-vote ballot scanner. Rummaging through King County's trash, she managed to get her hands on some of their tags and seals. She has since demonstrated a successful penetration of the seals without breaking them ... all in under 4 minutes with no training or technical skills required. There's a nice how-to with photos over at Verified Voting New Mexico." More from goombah99 below.
"The demo is particularly relevant in light of the recent experience in Ohio in which there were large discrepancies between the electronic record and the paper trail, and also since many counties still permit the machines to be taken home by individuals before voting day (as a means of distributing them to precincts). These 'sleepover' machines were involved in the contentious narrow-margin San Diego Election, and are in continued practice in many states. Moreover, it's common practice for counties to contract out deliveries to third parties, such as in New Mexico where in one election, unlicensed delivery drivers took the machines on an unauthorized field trip and only got caught when they crashed the delivery truck after a stop at Hooters. The good news here is that the penetrated Diebold system in the photo essay is an optical scan system. It's not a touchscreen electronic voting system, so there is a paper trail. What hack really shows is that without mandatory random spot checks on the paper ballots, these may be as potentially vulnerable as the touchscreen direct recording electronic voting systems. It's perhaps worth noting that the open source voting system being developed by the Open Voting Consortium features a 100% reconciliation of every single paper ballot with an independent electronic record."
no really, if thats your idea of democracy you can keep it
signed
191 Non US countries
My initial concerns about these voting machines was someone obtaining one through other means than stealing one from the government and then creating trojan software for it. I mean, if other people can buy these ... then they can study them and learn how to hack them. On the converse, if we can't study them, how do we know the government isn't rigging them?
... but instead my opinion is now that we may be trying to use something that shouldn't be used at all.
So there was this interesting catch-22 where you couldn't let them into the general population for fear of a trojan being created and inserted into a group of normal ones on election day. But you also can't trust your government. Especially not the current one in the United States and considering the voluntary resignation of the Diebold CEO, I think we should at least ask for third party verification of these machines. In fact, I for one consider Black Box Voting to be a champion protector of my right to vote for publishing this information. You might not feel as strongly about them but had I not read two articles from them, I would still be ready to use a voting machine in the next presidential election.
Black Box Voting had me convinced these machines were at least a liability and at best a luddite's fear. After reading this quick "how-to" about these machines, my perception is no longer that we need to define how these machines are bought, sold & handled
Product created with shoddy security features. Get rid of Diebold and hope the market brings a new contestant into the ring for the much sought after prize of the American public's voting machine contract!
The Diebold Acu-vote has failed as a product that requires the utmost security. I am a dissatisfied consumer and I sincerely hope every citizen of the United States agrees with me.
My work here is dung.
I, for one, welcome our new fictitious digital overlords?
I hate Diebold and electronic voting as much as anyone else, but has there been any attempts to figure out exactly how easy it is to rig fake paper votes? There's a lot of effort put into showing the weaknesses of electronic voting, but what are the weaknesses of paper voting and how do they compare against e-voting?
It is not needed.
We geeks love to bitch about solutions in search of a problem; is there a clearer example?
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
So it's easy to compromise the security of a Diebold voting machine -- news? This has been going on for a while in one form or another ever since Diebold got into the business. I'd have been more shocked if they would have found that you couldn't force it without breaking the seal.
If states/counties are smart, they'll avoid Diebold like the plague and stick to the old voting systems until a virtually fool-proof system can be designed and built. In the meantime, this won't have much effect on voting, since fewer and fewer people vote all the time.
BTW, that website with the detail is a trociously put together.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Seriously, it seems like the voting system is just shoddy, not specifically corrupt. But the shoddyness sure does help the corruption.
If only people thought their vote mattered, they might be concerned about this.
I don't have an anger problem, I have an idiot problem
I've watched illegal immigrants walk in, show NO form of identification, register, and vote in much quicker than 4 minutes.
She has since demonstrated a successful penetration of the seals without breaking them ... all in under 4 minutes with no training or technical skills required.
I don't see why there's not more outrage about this. Do people not understand that every liberty that we have (and used to have) stems from the ability to vote, and have your vote counted?
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Their idea of a security update probably will amount to a flashy new star-shaped sticker over the rim of the case that says "Now with new tougher security action! 25% more secure than our previous model!"
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/ 31/1646246/
I'm thinking it may be time to start securing the balloting machines....just maybe?
To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion...
... would be to tamper with the seals on a few voting machines used in an election and see if anyone even notices. Based on my experiences here (the aforementioned San Diego, where technology-adept voters were helping poll workers reboot the machines and reinstall the software because the program was in RAM and the batteries ran down while the machines sat unpowered for days before the election), nobody'd even bother to check.
I'm sure some pundit on Fox will talk about how doing this just "tells people how to fix elections," like videogames teach to kill, the internet teaches how to make bombs, etc.
imagine what someone with alot of knowledge and a little time could do I wonder how many different groups of people will be trying to mess with these things lol, imagine one machine getting 'adjusted' by like 10 different people all in a row who don't notice each other... kind of comical but really seems to just be another wall going up in the way of real democracy... unfortunately I don't have any really good better suggestions so not much else I can say
If Democrats win in the fall elections, and these machines are still being used, will there still be an uproar?
I'm doubtful.
What I wonder is: why is it secured in the first place?
No really, why should a memory card containing results need to be secured with a coverplate? It's the contents of the card that matters. Can't the authenticity of the card's content be ascertained without needing it NOT to fall in wrong hands? Is there no encryption used, no message authentication? Is there no protocol whereby officials at least sign off on a print-out containing the count, and some checksums? Wouldn't there need to be no need to secure the card itself? I mean, the machine (and it's RAM), obviously, but the card should only contain a copy of the results - a copy that will be in tomorrows papers anyway.
The fact that someone (at Diebold even!) saw the need to put a coverplate in front of the memory card speaks volumes as to the system's design assumptions. That the machines are left with people overnight only makes things much, much worse.
And that website's "web 2.0" ajaxy slidey photo thingy makes me dizzy and kinda nauseuous..
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Diebold. 1906 sent you a telegraph. They want their crappy security back. Seriously though, shouldn't we be worried about accountability here? Put biometrics into the machine. Make someone digitally sign it out (scan a finger print or something). From the moment it is signed for, audit every action taken on it. Void the machine if there is a secuirty breach. Not that my idea matters, smarter people than I who are closer to the issue have raised these concerns. I can't wait to vote 6,000,000 times for Alfred E. Newman in the upcoming elections.
--Always, I mean never..., No I mean always check your references.--
Joke aside, isn't it illegal to go through people's trash (although perhaps mostly unenforced?) I though even cops need search warrant to go through suspect's trash can.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Here's a ridiculous idea.
Have the voters fill out a scantron-type ballot. And then have the voter/user feed that ballot through two different voting machines made by two different manufacturers.
This way there would be a paper record and two, seperate databases to compare to each other.
This would double the effort (or perhaps square it at best) for hacking and would allow manual recounts from random sample districts to test the accuracy of the two machines.
My Computer Music Tutorial Videos
Is there a page for contributing to her legal defense fund, or am I getting ahead of myself here?
But I think there is an assumption that the people running the polls will not allow a team of hackers to sit there at the Diebold machine prodding and prying at it, soldering logic boards onto it, and all the other funky stuff they've been doing to Diebold machines to make them mess up. I could just drive a truck into it, that would be even easier than hacking it!
A couple of untrained 54-year old women from Black Box Voting bought $12 worth of tools and in four minutes penetrated the memory card seals, removed, replaced the memory card, and sealed it all up again without leaving a trace.
/sarc
54 years old AND women.
This just goes to show that there are a great number of things that should not be computerized/network connected etc. /.ers (particularly those of us in the states). Do you ever feel like you're strapped to a chair with a wet towel over your head surrounded by people who can't tie their own shoes without managing to injure themselves?
Just as one should not have an internet accessible refrigerator "mom! someone hacked the fridge again and turned the cooling off! Oh god the smell!!"
One should not have electronic voting machines. Seriously, why the hell do we need electronic voting other than that a great deal of people were, excuse my honesty, too goddamn stupid to understand how to use a paper ballot.
Another case of the ignorant masses rising up, bitching about how things are "too hard" and overcoming those of us who can follow simply printed instructions with their sheer moronic numbers.
Fellow
Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little.
Although I may not be too happy with how easy it is to tamper these machines, we must also think... how easy is it to tamper hard paper ballots? Counterfeit them and place more in the slot? I do not think that just because somebody sits down and spends the time figuring out how to hack it means it is in danger. The average Joe cannot do anything... Plus, you spend the time figuring it out and somebody will be suspicious. Maybe put alarms in the machines? Then it would be harder to hack than a paper ballot.
If fixing an election was the objective, why bother with removing a memory card? Wouldn't it be easier to get a few people together and go to precincts known to vote one way or another and just break the plastic "security" tags? When the count comes up you can raise a fuss about the tags being broken and having the votes discounted.
$sys$droids
The site referenced is so crapped up with "Web 2.0" junk that it doesn't work. The picture links result in a neat animated effect in which a translucent rectangle grows. Then it disappears without displaying the picture, at least in Firefox 1.5.
If you have something important to say, use standard HTML. Especially if it's something important enough that it should be archived. Using "TiddlyWiki" with images on Flickr means your site will not be archived properly, and many search engines won't even index it with all that Javascript.
In Soviet Russia machine cast your vote for you... wait shit that happens here too
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Impressive. They hacked a Diebold voting machine in less time than it took me to work out how to navigate their photo-story!
Try viewing it without JavaScript (e.g. like those of us with NoScript). Look at the source -- OMG.
That now qualifies as the most atrocious use of JavaScript I've ever seen - Jesus, render this garbage on the server. Feeding some oddball marked up nonsense to the browser, yielding a circa-1997 page, seems a little...unnecessary.
So my vote goes to the guy back by Giganto Corp instead the guy backed by ReallyHuge Co. Big deal.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
The problem with diebold voting machines is that they rely on the security of a horribly formatted article (secured by the horrible formatting) to ensure noone will read how to access their smart cards....
Noone writes jokes in base 13!
The seals! They do nothing!
You can open the lid on one of these things?
Doesn't that mean they can be owned without having to muck around with the card? Admittedly more difficult to pull off, but feasible nonetheless.
What's the point of the security tag if you can open up the box?
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Not always.
In India, the introduction of EVMs reduced the election expences by a magnitude of 10.
Also, since there is a huge potential number of votes (upto 500 Million), it can reduce the time taken for the counting by a huge amount.
Another point to be taken to consideration is that there was a lot of invalid votes (when people unknowingly pressed the marker between two candidates in the ballot) esp in places where illetracy is abound. In some places, the invalid votes was more than the difference of votes beween the winning and second candidates. The EVMs meant that invalid votes are no longer an issue.
Also, there was an issue wherein a group of people will barge in a polling booth, and stuff some hundreds or thousands of ballots to the ballot box and run out. This invariably caused either
(a) wrong counts or
(b) re-voting in that booth.
Now this is no longer an issue since there is a time limit between votes and if too many votes come in, it goes in to lock mode(i dont know whether the second option is used now, but the first one is still there - time limit is around 20 seconds or so).
So I guess, it is needed, in many enviornments.
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
I've seen plenty of mistakes trocier than that.
Oh, absolutely! The Republicans would never shut up about it.
Of course, that even assumes that we'll have an election in 2008.
Or even better, it assumes that the apparent tamper-permissiveness of these machines won't become an excuse not to have elections in 2008.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Indeed.
Us Canadians use plain old paper ballots, and are able to count them all within a few hours, even after a federal election. The votes are the paper trail.
I'm reminded of the election in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
...laura
It's kind of like television. You are not the networks' customer. The ad companies are the customer; you are the product that is sold to them. Everything else is just flim-flam designed to keep you in front of the tube.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Cuyahoga County and the rest of Ohio were not using Diebold electronic voting machines in 2004's election. Why did the OP choose to mention Ohio's 2004 election in connection with Diebold then?
Actually, it is needed. The entire Florida deal showed that (as has all the frauds that have been committed over the eons i.e. Chicago). We do need to make voting more fraud-proof and easier. Votes do count.
the real problem here, is that this appears to be being rushed like there is no tomorrow (makes me wonder how the different the election will be from the exit polls). Even more so, the lack of paper back-up makes me wonder what is going on. And finally, the fact that the closed BB companies are the ones pushing the lack of paper really makes me nervous. After all, this is where they would make a killing each and every election. In fact, Diebold pushes paper for every ATM transaction. Why not for every vote? That is irrational on their part (and the other closed source voting machines that all push this).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
A decent hacker should be able to do it in under 30 seconds.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
We trust these same individuals to count our paper votes by hand or fed into a machine? Why?
Just like the freedom of speech (which brings with it the tolerance of things you hate) the freedom to vote brings the acceptance of an imperfect system. Every useful tool can be used destructively. Don't blame the box, chads, or whatever - by the time you can guarantee a totally fair election there will be no need to vote. How we vote is a simply a reflection of our society. So, you can hack a voting machine...
What if I break a tamper evident seal on a machine when I cast my ballot? Are all the ballots on that machine discarded? Are all the voters who used that machine called up and asked to vote again? Wha?
OK, so here's the theory.
Electronic voting machines can be designed to be easier to use and more accessible to people with disabilities than traditional voting machines. Blind people can connect a pair of headphones and have their choices read to them. People who don't speak English well can choose a different language such as Spanish or Korean or whatever. Touchscreens may be easier to operate for people with physical disabilities. The order of the candidates can be randomized for each voter, so alphabetical sorting doesn't affect the results (I believe Oregon chooses a random sorting order for the entire election, while California prints several different versions of the ballot with the candidates sorted differently in each version).
Using a computerized system to obtain each person's vote is NOT a bad thing, and can be very beneficial.
Also, using a computerized system to count the votes is also not a bad thing, since it can yield results much faster than manual counting. Indeed, I'm sure votes on paper balllots are machine-counted almost everywhere already.
The problem is this: we cannot and should not rely on a computerized system exclusively. We must have a way to verify what people really voted for. The solution is quite simple, though. We could have computerized voting machines with an instant count, with a paper trail. It works like this:
You have two machines. The first has a touch screen with a user-friendly interface. It presents your options in whatever language you prefer, and receives your votes. It prohibits you from entering invalid selections, such as selecting two candidates instead of one. Your votes are presented to you on the screen for review, with an option to go back and correct any mistakes. Finally if you are finished, the machine prints your votes on a paper ballot, in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. You take this paper ballot, and review it for accuracy. The machine you just used erases any record of your vote in preparation for the next voter. Your vote is not counted at this point.
You then take this paper ballot, and feed it into a second machine, which counts your vote and securely stores your ballot. These ballots can be counted by hand later, and compared to the computerized count. If the counting machine isn't counting votes accurately, the problem can be easily detected, and the ballots counted by hand.
If the first machine isn't printing the ballots correctly, the problem can be detected by the voter, who reviews the paper ballots before submitting them to the counting machine. If the voter sees an error, he/she can report the mistake to an election official, who can shred the ballot and let the voter vote again.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
12XU
So... if you have physical access to the machine, you can take it apart and alter it to hack into it(yes, that is what they did. RTFA).
How is this news? The same can be said of any computer system.
You have to at least operate under the assumption that these machines are audited before and after the electoral process, just like the ballot boxes were... if not, then *there* is the flaw in the system. The flaw isn't "hey, I can open this computer and alter it to change how it functions", it is "I can open this computer without anyone else knowing".
Because the counting is being done "in public", in the sense that there are several people around during the count, several people with different backgrounds, with differing party affiliations, all under oath (at least in my country, I have no idea whether it's different in the US).
If, on the other hand, we let a single voting official take these machines with them, to their homes, over night, without any surveillance whatsoever, there goes your last bit of accountability.
I really wonder why the states can put together lottery systems that is secure, fast, flexiable, and can not make a voting system? The lottery system has terminal all over place. It uses secure paper to print your selections on, and instance feedback that your entry has be received.
I'm not a lawyer, but I think these instructions should immediately be posted to sites hosted outside the U.S., so that Diebold can't get an injunction to shut the site down under the DMCA, and so they'll have less reason to take legal action against the poster, since doing so won't erase the evidence.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
If the SSN, home address, home phone, etc. of all the legislators who voted for the machines were placed on the memory card (and the officers of the companies that made them), then you can be damn sure the machines would be tamper proof and there would be a well documented chain of custody of each machine as well.
Better, yet put all their pension money in an Swiss bank escrow account and place the number in the memory card. Then things get serious.
Good security is possible. My guess is that the Diebold machines, rather than being some diabolical plot, are just a sloppy product designed for the government feeding trough. The whole e-voting thing is a windfall for these companies. It is mandated business.
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
Actually, it is needed. The entire Florida deal showed that (as has all the frauds that have been committed over the eons i.e. Chicago). We do need to make voting more fraud-proof and easier. Votes do count.
No, we don't need electronic voting. At best we need better ballot-making machines.
Florida showed us we need to generate paper ballots better, which is what voting technology has been all about until electronic voting came along. Punch ballots are ancient technology, one of the first machine-readable forms of balloting. It's an outdated method that has been eclipsed by machine-readable marked ballots such as optical scanning. Even with that, the failures in Florida came primarily from not maintaining the machines properly such as dull punches and catch basins full of chads making it harder to punch through.
If we want to use touch screens for a more user-friendly voting experience, fine. Design a better user input system and then have it print out a ballot that is scanned separately and can be hand-checked on recounts. Receipts are a meaningless placebo for voodoo tabulation by the Master Control Program which then announces the winner of an election and this is not verifiable or trustworthy voting. I don't need to see it fail to have no faith in it, just as I don't need to see an electrical fire started by exposed wires to know it's a possibility.
As for voter fraud, I challenge anyone to cite concrete examples of problems. There has been and is election fraud, where those in power rig the results. That's what happened in Chicago in the 1960s and Ohio in 2004 and Mexico this year. Voter fraud is the straw man being used to institute election fraud.
Check out the image.
That is the question. And, considering the declining number of people voting every election, the rising number of complaints about the elctronic systems being used to tally the votes, the complaints about the butterfly ballots, the delays in counting the votes, the political maniuplations OF the votes when a dispute happens, the public seems to be getting ready to say, "To hell with the whole system!"
.01% of that too much to ask to put into place a secure election system? How about siphoning off some of that pay hike the Congress just voted itself for this instead?
And that's bad.
Very few people trust the election system as it now stands on a national basis. There is NO national standard, NO overwatch that is politically independent and NO way to VERIFY the states that are using the electronic-only voting methods.
The gaps are obvious: we need a national standard for the voting process; one that allows verification of EVERY vote on a papertrail basis; we need an independent overwatch OF the voting process; and we need an electronic voting system that is far more secure than the one that is currently being used.
And the probability of that happening amounts to one Big FAT CHANCE.
The excuses? It costs too much, it will take too much time to put into place, it violates State's Rights, there is no way to keep the politics out of the system and no system is completely secure.
How much are we willing to spend to defend our shores from attack? Is
With regards to State's Rights, this is for a national election. Sorry kiddies, doesn't apply as far as standards of the systems themselves go. You still have control of WHO votes and that's where the REAL power resides, so STFU. Keeping the politics out of the system? Well, there's no easy fix for that, but making the election review board similar to the Supremes, but with a requirement of 4 and 4 from each party and only 1 being appointed by the LAST sitting Prez might work... subject to Congressional approval and all that, of course. And secure? Well, nothing is ever totally secure, but we should be able to do better than a four-minute, no-break-the-seal-non-techie-hack!
Lee Darrow,
Chicago, IL
It's wrong to compare the security of a computer voting machine to other computers. It's better to compare the voting machine's security to the paper ballots they replace.
If any granny can hack the box while supposedly voting, using $12 worth of tools bought at a grocery store, then it's not as secure as paper.
Yes, any computer that you have physical access to you can hack, but can you hack a payphone to cough up its coins in 4 minutes??
Security of a voting machine must be at least as solid as security of a vending machine. Modern vending machines prove it can be done; fitting the same security into and onto a voting machine is just a matter of engineering.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
Nuts. You're saying rather than forcing people who want to steal elections into doing things that are blatantly obvious, clearly illegal, and easily recognized as improper by the casual voter, we should let them steal the elections quietly without bothering anyone? If they have enough goos to threaten the entire electorate (including the police, judges, etc.) than they've already won and the vote isn't going to matter anyway. All secret ballots are doing here is making it easier to steal elections and harder to catch the people who do it.
--MarkusQ
Visit their mock-up at http://user.it.uu.se/%7ejan/voting-project/ballot2 .html and the result of your balloting as I walk you through the vulnerabilities.
And the strange thing (to me) is that it's all unnecessary:
And, best of all, the solution (pen and paper, boxes and X's) has already been developed. There's no need to raise $1.5 Million to fund the development of this solution, or spend my nights in the run-up to the election going over the source code looking for vulnerabilities when I should be considering real issues.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
There's lots of good posts. I'm glad we geeks are talking about this important issue.
I spoke briefly with Bev Harris recently. See below.
I'm at work, so I need to make this brief. Just four points.
First, the two pillars of our democracy (United States of America) are private voting and public counting. We adopted the Australian Ballot (aka secret ballot) a while back. Things like electronic voting and forced mail voting (e.g. 100% vote by mail) take away the secret ballot. Here in Washington State, our constitution says we need a secret ballot. Disagree if you want. There's lots of ideas. Like voting receipts and no more secret ballots. But please start by changing our laws. Meanwhile, any attempt to take away the secret ballot (private voting) is unconstitutional.
Second, there is no technical way to have an electronic voting system which both preserves the secret ballot and the public vote count. If the ballots are secret, then there's no verifiability, meaning no public count. If the system is verifiable, then there's no secret ballot. You can have one or the other, but not both. Electronic counting, as with the precinct-based optical scanners, can be done constitutionally.
Third, currently the most reliable way to vote in the USA is to use a voter-correctable precinct-based optical scanner (PBOS). Sorry, I don't have the cites handy (my bad), but dig a little and you can find the research on this. Brennan Center, GAO reports, MIT Voter Project, etc. The basic idea is that you mark a ballot and feed it into a machine. If there's a problem, the machine spits the ballot back out, giving the voter a chance to correct the problem. Yes, these machines need to be better designed, open source, yadda, yadda. But before anyone proposes a better system, please work to understand the best system currently available. (Thank you for your patience.)
Many juridictions have wisely moved away from touchscreens and other DREs and adopted PBOS systems with a low-cost, verifiable solution for disabled voting. TrueVoteCT.org just had a huge win. And Voter Action sued and got the touchscreens in New Mexico replaced with PBOS systems. (Please visit both orgs and give them cash. Activism is not cheap!)
Fourth, and lastly, Bev Harris made an incredibly important point: Our elections have to be understandable for all the voters. Blackbox Voting has spents years digging and researching. I've personally spent 2 years learning all that I can about elections, voting, and these systems. I'm a computer geek and I readily admit that I had to work pretty hard to understand stuff. Bev has a lot of contact with experts, computer scientists, security dudes, etc. Her point is that we cannot rely on those sage gurus to weigh in on our election systems. We all need to understand how our democracy works. Not just the wonks. That means our election and voting systems must be simple and straightforward.
(PS- I saw Bev during King County Washington's "logic and accuracy testing" of our new Diebold AccuVote TSx touchscreens last Tuesday. You can read "Report: Testing of Diebold AccuVote TSx" on my blog, on WashBlog, or on dailyKos. Please holler if anyone has questions. I'll do my best to reply in a timely fashion.)
Breeching the box visibly results in federal investigations, people going to jail, etc.
Better to swap the cards invisibly with cards already loaded with your favorite party's votes from people found in the obituary section.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
pfftt ... every one of them is vulnerable from the main screen ... up up down down left right left right A B select start - whamo ! you're in !
Confusion around poorly worded (and technically 'illegal' because they violated state law, even though the democrats 'accepted' them.) paper ballots almost certianly caused voting irregularities in Bush's first election.
Majority Democrat districts, that polled as being won by the democrats were 'won' by Bush.
This was one of the original reasons why electronic machines were pushed.
Of course, there are smart ways to do it and "diebold" ways to do it.
A lot of Republicans pushed to have machines made by a company that strongly supported the Republicans(by support I mean cash and lots of it.)
So we get republican voting machines that any smart, untrained person can manipulate instead of machines that actually do what they are supposed to.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
It saves money!? Great!
Democracy isn't worth the price of paper ballots anyway.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Well, the "solution" to everything from this administration has been to "privatize" it...that is, to contract it out for fraudulent overbilling, embezzling, and plain not getting the job done -- but receiving the taxpayer's funds in payment anyway. The clear solution is to quit "privatizing" everything
Voting population of Canada Vs. Voting population of USA. Not that I'm disagreeing with you, we just have 10x the amonut of people.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
DIEBOLD'S VOTE-TALLY SOFTWARE
V.5.0i - 9/17/03
http://www.equalccw.com/dieboldtestnotes.html
REQUIREMENTS: Windows-based PC with 150megs free disk space and 128megs RAM (minimum). You also need MS-Access2000 or a later variant in order to severely circumvent the passwords and security - the whole point here is that MS-Access is basically a "hack tool" and once used, there's NO security on this "high security voting product" whatsoever!
Well, will people relize it's not a problem with the way we vote it's a problem with the voting system in general. First of all, More people watch the superbowl than vote. Second, for example montana has 3 electoral votes. It doesn't matter whether 51% or 99% of the people vote for a particular canidate, if it's the wrong one it's not going to matter anyway because california has 50 some odd votes.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. ~Albert Einstein
In Egypt, they use the word "customer" interchangably with "sucker"/"easy picking", probably due to how shop owners view clueless customers.
Just remember, customer = sucker.
like me, who have been trying to clean up the vote since before you were born, had just as much an issue with the hecked paper ballots as with the machines. You see, we DO understand technology and using computers makes it EASIER to hack elections. It has nothing to do with age or luddism, it has everything to do with paying attention to political reality over a long time period. It was the younger "wow, we got to computerise everything!" crowd thaty pushed this shit. You dweebs can't take a dump without a computer, that's how retarded and incompetent you are.
;)
Here, go google "jim collier" and educate yourself to see what's been going on for a long time. Diebold is just "oooh, new shiny" pushed by the "computer generation". And BTW, you WERE warned about this prior to the 2000 elections,BY the "old fogies" in active political circles, yet most of you tards were all in favor of it. Don't believe it? Go back and LOOK at some of the forums where it got discussed. The older folks who have been around longer clearly said it was a bad idea, but we got told "no worries, it's just new comnputers! Embrace it!"
meh, idiot kids...
The second reality is, if you keep voting in/supporting/thinking there's some huge difference between the D and R party, that somehow you will "moveon" to better things, you will keep having a government made up of the two cooperating criminal gangs.
Yes you will, so stop arguing about it. Been proven over and over again, go read some damn history!
There WON'T be any meaningful political change until support for BOTH those parties dries up completely. OR, go ahead and be naieve and work for one of them..then wait a few years, see what happens. All they do is divvy up which of your rights they want to shaft you out of a and that's it. Both are in the pockets of the big lobbying corporations. Yes, your precious D party is too, get over it and "moveon" away from them as well. Crooks and liars. Same as the R party. Crooks and liars.
You'll also find that older people have more knowledge of politics, are more active as a group, are certainly better at basic geography for the most part, and can clearly see when tech is a big fat waste of time and suitable only for extracting cash from naieve children, such as spending most of your spare time and dollars on anime or videogames or downloading screeching sounds for your equally ridiculous iPod or similar piece of overpriced consumer brainwashing crap. You get taken daily and can't even see it happening!
In other words, get the hell off my lawn punk, pull that damn baby diaper pin out of your nose it's completely stupid, yes, you are going to regret those tats some day, and you're an idiot not fit to drive ever and yes, I probably did "do" Ur mom, while you were taking a nap in your crib and drooling!
So lollerskates to you. Clean up your room.
Yes, there are 10 times as many people in the U.S.
This is a logistical issue only. You have 10 times as many ballots to count, so you need 10 times as many people to count them.
...laura
Gee, too bad that word has already been defined in the public consciousness as the antonym of “communism.”
Ain’t that a shame. Let me know how your pro-commu-- err, I mean, anti-privatization thing goes, will ya?
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
No one can tell the difference between a rigged election, an error, and an unexpected outcome. All of those are known to have happened.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
You have also to penetrate them also? Won't anybody think of the seals?
You can make the process of voting, the counting of the vote, secure, you can introduce all the technical and physical security you want.
But the vote is *already* subverted by a social engineering attack which is practically unstoppable; media coverage of politics.
This subverts democracy at the earliest stage; right where the voter forms the desire to vote one way or another.
If you think this is bullshit consider advertising.
Billions of dollars, shekels, yen and pounds are spent on the advertising of products. Does it work? Well I think that it would be foolish to assume that its money wasted.
If advertising works for things like consumer products, foodstuffs, whiteware etc, shaping the way that people spend their money, why wouldn't it work for shaping the way that people spend their vote?
A vote is just an item of currency that everyone has just one of and gets to spend it every so many years. Shaping voting patterns is exactly the same as shaping spending patterns.
Problem is, without a crack-down on media presentation of politics its impossible to stop this kind of subversion. And if that were to happen, what would be the point in having a democracy in the first place?
I don't think that democracy can exist in the modern world. A better term for what we *call* 'democracy' would be 'mediacracy'.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Has anyone found any independently verified evidence of any of these digital voting devices used in an election won by a Democrat?
--
make install -not war
Not always.
In India, the introduction of EVMs [eci.gov.in] reduced the election expences by a magnitude of 10.
Also, since there is a huge potential number of votes (upto 500 Million), it can reduce the time taken for the counting by a huge amount.
You cannot put a price or time on democracy. This isn't a corporation, cutting costs should never be on the table when it comes to voting.
Which means you have 10x the amount of people available to count them. So it makes no real difference.
I'm not "whimsically dismissing" anything. I'm saying point blank that unless I can verify that my vote was counted correctly/i> and you can verify that your vote was counted correctly, and so on, we are at risk of falling into in the worst case scenario of totalitarianism.
Break it down. If you can verify your vote (and a thug is using this against you) you are no worse off then you are with a vote that you can't verify, since you can always just do what the thug asks. This has the same result as casting an unverifiable ballot that the thug's coworkers can modify. But the advantage that you overlook in the voter intimidation situation is that it can't be done without the voters knowledge. Thus the voters have the oportunity (and the motivation) to do something about it, instead of just going quietly to slaughter like good little sheep.
What, pray tell, are these other mechanisms that give the same protection with no risk to the voter?
--MarkusQ
Cool link, I knew approximately how India’s electronic voting machines worked but had never seen a picture.
Obviously it would be much cheaper to use such a beautifully simple electronic device as that instead of a full-blown general purpose computer, but how would it yield net savings against the paper-and-sharpie method, aside from requiring less volunteer labor to tally the paper ballots at the end of the night?
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Non-computer types often ask me what "virtual" means. I tell 'em it's the opposite of "canonical"; canonical means real and virtual means fake.
So something that's virtually free is not really free, etc.
Until someone does this in an actual election, and then announces that they've skewed the results (and they'd better do it anonymously, or jail awaits them), no on in power is going to pay any attention. Reform only happens after actual problems get the public upset.
I keep reading about how these machines are insanely easy to hack. Surely the next election will be determined by the patriotic hackers of america? Apply yourself people.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
Diebold ATMs aren't exactly the most secure devices either. It's the bank it's attached to that implements all the security, from where it's installed to how the device indicates transactions that have occured.
Besides, you're FDIC insured. You'll never know if an ATM has been successfully hacked because it's no skin off your back (although an OUT OF SERVICE sign may get taped to the front of it).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Also, since there is a huge potential number of votes (upto 500 Million), it can reduce the time taken for the counting by a huge amount.
The thing about countries with lots of peoples votes to count, is there are lots of people to count them.
It should in fact require less people per vote on average to count them (economies of scale).
This is getting close, but its still too difficult to deal with a modchip. Someone stick "007 Agent Under Fire" in there and get a softmod working.
"Product created with shoddy security features. Get rid of Diebold and hope the market brings a new contestant ..."
A product created with shoddy security features being widely used....and hacked....what a concept *cough* Windows *cough*.
Don't blame me. I voted for Kodos.
Here is San Diego, the people counting the votes try and make the system
not only count correctly but appear to count correctly.
They use an optical system to read ballots marked by the voter.
Random batches (about 5% the last time I checked) are selected
for hand verification. In other words, the hand count the votes
and then check what the machine came up with.
Also for a small number of randomly selected precents, they hand
count every vote. (All batches for all machines.)
All ballots are kept for a certain amount of time. If you want to
question the count, there is a procedure where you can get a
recount of just about anything you want to.
The ballot is the piece of paper. The machine helps count the ballots,
but it's the paper that counts.
Now it is possible to tamper with a machine. If you don't change the vote
too much you have a small chance of getting caught. Tamper with many machines
and the chance of discovery increases.
So the counting process is fairly secure. Maybe not the best, but there are enough
checks in the system to convince me that it's working.
The real problem is that there are no validation process perfomed on the voter.
You can signup to vote in 50 different voting locations if you want. You could
even sign up to vote usign 50 different names in the same location and the poll workers
could not question your ablity to vote.
I could even get my three year old daughter a voter registeration and take her down
to the polls. As long as I say that she's eighteen the poll workers can't question it.
And if she votes absentee, they won't even get to see her, so she can learn to vote early.
A real problem here has been with people signing up large groups of people who cannot legally
vote (illegal aliens for example) and getting them to turn out on election day.
Also there is the problem with corrupt election's officials "finding" enough absentee ballots
to throw the election to their party. (See Washington State's governers race for example.)
Technology is not the problem. Checks and balances can be build into the system to detect
any tampering with the machines. There are much bigger problems with other parts of the system.
The savings is manifold, I guess -
1. Reuse of EVMs across elections. - Dont need to print ballots and have the associated security apparatus in place every election.
Also, this is used in all elections - from small district level elections to nationwide one.
2. Result obtained in 3-4 hours per booth - Dont have to keep the security system in operation for the entire 30-40 hours (the average time taken for counting of ballots in pre-EVM days) 30-40 hours ~= 4-5 days.
3. Results obtained in a day - The whole commerical activities of the country grinds to a standstill during the days of counting. So savings happen implicitly if the results are obtained in 3-4 hours.
4. Payment of the people to count the votes (maynot be explicitly there, but does happen in round about terms of govt work getting stopped due to election work etc).
Maybe more ways are there, but I can think of only this much.
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
It's a perfectly cromulent word!
Need I say any more?
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
But the Inian system is simple, cheap, scaleable, and almost tamper proof. How can you make a profit with that?
Anarchists never rule
In any place where these machines will be used, hackers should organise to hack these machines and reverse the number of votes received for each candidate e.g. last = first etc. Once Ralph Nader is the next US president, I'm pretty sure everyone will agree that paper based voting has some undeniable merits.
The whole retaining tab thing is just there for cosmetic purposes: to make it seem secure. It also does prevent a card-swap by anybody who has casual access to the device.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I'm late to the thread, but would there be a problem with this scenario:
Use Diebold or whatever computerized machine.
After you confirm your intentions and commit, a receipt would be printed. (maybe two - one for the person to take home?)
You confirm the printout and drop it off with an election official.
Random precincts and/or areas that contest the results could manually count the printouts versus the computer results.
If the printouts don't jive, something is either up with the machines *or* officials are corrupt.
I'm not so sure we can just say "We shouldn't use computers for this". If we could guarantee that the machine was 100% accurate and unhackable, then it would make a lot of sense. I think the problem is getting close to that 100% mark and there are probably ways to do it. I can guarantee that humans have never been 100% accurate and have never 100% honest on a national scale.
They really should just have a change statistics button on the side of the machine, that will ensure nobody actually breaks the machine when they go in for their 3rd and 4th votes.
I fear the Y2038 bug
People can secure machines and information systems as much as they want, but like everything else, it will fall with time. I think theoritically everything is unsecure in some form or fashion. People can be proactive about it and secure their servers but even if they are high grade servers with the most late breaking hardware and developed software, some guy can break into it eventually. Why? Humans evolve, and servers don't. It probably won't be some teenager in his basement, it would actually probably be a group of phd software programmers and server administrators hired by some person or group. Maybe not even the other canidate but some other 3rd world party who wants to corrupt us by getting some wild canidate into office. Or their canidate. Even secure hosting servers and my Information Technology Site suffers from the occasional bleep in security hole. Its unavoidable. So with that in mind, It would be a treacherous disaster to put our country's future into a "secure server" or macine.
Wonder if the person checked to see if Diebold place code to make sure republicans win? Now that would be a scandel? Maryland passed legislation not to use Diebold but to have scanners instead. Nice job :)
FYI electronic voting is not common in the US. Only a few high priority states use electronic voting, the rest use good old paper ballots.
option to spoil a recount?
In school, I wanted a scanner to test different marks. IE as clear of lead mark that would trigger the reader, and a non lead marker that looked like a pencil mark. IE on a question that I knew it was A) or C), I mark C to be read by the machine, I mark A to be read by a human, you get the results back if the correct answer was A, then you protest the machine grading, and get it corrected to right. Of course if C was right, the machine would have read only it, and just hope no one double checked the scoring on that question.
only Voting condition I could think of to take advantage of this, would require thousands of people to double mark the same precint, demand a recount their, throw into doubt all counts, could cause havock...
From a happy sort-of democracy, to the worst government money can buy: America you've come a long way since 1776.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
there are some places, e.g, the US Southwest and Indian reservations where ESL is common. This also may still be true in some ethnic neighborhoods in the North Eastern US.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
In principle, size of the population doesn't matter. It's irrelevant if you have 500 million or 500 billion votes to count, as long as you have the same percentage of the population doing the counting. All the other points are valid however, but I'm pretty sure that the politicians in India are already carefully studying how their American compadres are rigging the system. You may find that the political views of the assorted intelligence of Bengalore and Hyderabad will find a promising place into the political system of India pretty soon.
Why do people care so much if somebody else knows who you vote for?
Why not impliment a system where you can verify your vote?! Better yet in the process of verifying your vote it also asks you to consult with several people who live in your neighborhood to validate their vote as well. Something as simple as this pleaes ask this person at this address if they have validated their vote Y/N? You don't need to know whot hey voted for just that they checked their vote was recorded acurrately.
That way not only can you know your vote was recorded accurately but there are things put in place to assure you that nobody is creating "fake votes" off people that don't really exist (or no longer exist)
Bush must have shares in Diebold or something.
Diebold have been the butt-end of so many serious security failures its not funny any more. Its obvious they don't have a clue about security and aren't likely to get a clue anytime soon judging from their ongoing record.
Why are we still using this company's products? How many more times are the government going to allow Diebold to screw up?? Is there no-one else that makes a better system?
I was told the last time we had elections that we'd not have them. Now this cycle I get the same 'there won't be elections.' Please. remove head from ass, and tin foil from head.
I had 15 replies. And I get this one, "I'll be pissed either way' But who are YOU?
Give me a break - in SF, you got a few militant vegan punk-hop lefties who remove your bumper stickers.
/. account and I'm not so much of a coward :-)
I live in TN and work for a bunch of neo-cons - I had been on the job for 2 days and had a ball-peen hammer power-ding two spots on my driver-side door. Over a 6 month time, my rear fender's been dented at the top corner (where the side meets the rear - almost impossible to pull out the dent) with a similar hammer and a crack has been put in my windshield (first when I started working there and again after I replaced it). And the only sticker I have is critical of Enron and Dubya.
I vote for people, not party politics - I'm not even a "liberal" and these t'baco chewing red-necked brown-shirts are bullying me because I'm critical of incompetence. The Enron/Bush thing is one of the best examples of how bad cronyism is in America today.
Good people who call themselves "Repulicans" should be throwing Bush and Cheney into prison. But you will not believe how many "good" people in TN talk about how liberal reporters should be executed for treason, liberals like me (btw - I'm not, I'm just critical of incompetent power, Democratic or Republican) should be put in jail and tortured et cetera - and all this said is punctuated with a "God love'em."
I partake of both partisan media camps - Listen to the rhetoric on both sides - I'm totally believing the violent potential of the GOP before I expect a bunch of peace-pop eating Democrats to seriously shoot me for being critical of incompetence. Criticize the Democrats, and I get more debate. Criticize the GOP, I get threatened, I get my car vandalized, I fret over my job's longevity.
If I did not artfully dodge my political criticisms of the current holders of power, I'd be without a job, possibly without knee-caps to facilitate my bi-pedal mobility.
My name is Thom - I haven't yet created a
Scaremongering is an extremely common form of political discourse, and by no means limited to Australian politics; hell, it's probably less rampant here than in American politics - this is, by and large, a fairly peaceful country, and there hasn't been an attack - military, terror-related or otherwise - for a couple of decades AFAIK. The scaremongering usually relates to welfare/healthcare, workers' and students' rights, civil liberties, taxes, nothing spectacular.
We have a pretty-much two party system, the juggernauts being Liberal, actually liberal-conservative, and Labor, who are centre-left, with a bunch of small to medium special interest groups (Greens, One Nation, Libertarians et al.) who occasionally win a parliamentary seat here and there.
I can't vote here as I'm not a citizen, but I did work at a polling station two federal elections ago, and I can tell you there was a decent proportion of deliberately spoiled ballots, which effectively do get counted as 'none of the above,' or votes for smaller special-interest groups like marijuana legalisation activists, religious 'family values' outfits, etc.
You'd think that DieBold would have installed something that would start beeping, flashing, or explode after you open the top on the case or pull the memory card.
As a poll worker in San Diego, I really hope those cards don't explode.
Seriously though, there are far easier and legal ways to to game the elections than tampering with the machines (like emotional/slanderous ads or putting issues on the ballot to affect voter turnout). It's still also easy to vote provisionally to invalidate another persons votes regardless of voting technology. The risk/reward ratio is way out of whack, though.
I personally don't like nor trust Diebold, but I do trust the voting system (checks, procedures, balances, people) enough that I'm certain an election won't be thrown in San Diego without a proportional risk (jail time) of the fraudster(s) being detected and made an example of. Just like parity memory, we know enough checks in place to detect fraud, but not necessarily correct it.
I urge all U.S. Slashdot readers who are concerned about electronic voting problems to get involved in the process and actually work an election to help protect the vote. Constructively complain to election officials after working an election if you still believe that the process isn't secure enough. If you don't get involved in the process, your rants are as worthless as an armchair quarterback during a football game.
They were replaced by the punch card "chad" type, which were rarely if ever recounted (we saw what happens when recounted). Just run through a card reader and the result read off. "Funky" cards were put aside.
Here in Dade County and under the benign gaze of our holier-than-thou Miami Herald pseudo-newspaper, the computers would always "break down" while counting! Their big day, and they break. Bad boys. After one or two hours the count would resume. ;-) ;-) ;-) One time a "system" candidate (so badly steamrolled it could not be fixed), and who was losing per partial results, smilingly noted, "the machines are down, let's wait for them to start again." ;-) ;-) ;-)
With paper ballots we have seen
stuffed boxes,
boxes lost, stolen, dumped into lakes,
pre-marked ballots*,
uncounted ballots
secret counting (OH 04)
Google "Battle of Athens" for fun in 1940s TN.
Not to mention of course after-life voting, multiple voting, less booths at some precincts and more that apply to all methods.
"They" find a way to cheat and steal. When crooks are outlawed, only outlaws will be crooks.
*in the 04 OH election (some) people were given pre-marked ballots; upon complaining they received another marked ballot!
Would Renton's Bev Harris get any sort of positive response whatsoever?
That bitch is crazier than a batshit sandwich. She's got absolutely no evidence that this there's ever been a problem. I thought her 15 minutes of fame were up.
Spending her time rummaging through the trash? *shakes head*
Where convicted felons can't vote but they can be involved in the development and production of voting machines! If you wan't a kleptocracy just keep on going down that path.
What about putting the machines in evidence seals? That would make it a lot harder to get access to the machine in the first place. Also, if evidence seals can be used in a court of law, they should also work for voting procedures.
Security's improving, I see. So is the hax0r minimum requisite competency at "clever 8 year old with script" now, up from "trained monkey" back in '04?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I ran one of the polling sites in San Diego where the EVMs were used this year, and I was one of the people who had these machines sitting in my place for a week prior to the election. I agree that having this equipment sitting in my house isn't ideal, but I don't personally think it means the end of fair and safe voting:
To the credit of the people coordinating the election, procedures in San Diego were better than in most other parts of the nation. My voting machines were given to me and taken from me by armed police, and the regulations regarding seals and paper trails were well defined. I won't rule out some kind of dark police conspiracy either, but I'll admit that I thought about how I could modify the election results, and there was no viable method. Not without, say, the budget of a politician
That's a very interesting paper. Thank you for the link. I've printed it out and will try to digest the algorithm. Looks I may have to amend my "cannot be done" position to merely "shouldn't be done". Haha.
Seriously, I'd want to two things when considering the system Chaum proposes. First, I'd want to see it in action. The devil's in the details. Second, I'd want to see a list of pros and cons. One pros he lists is having a uniform means for handling normal and provisional ballots. That's a pretty good benefit. (I'm serving as a poll worker again this year. Rules and handling of provisional ballots are pretty complicated.)
A group of people with dedication could destroy each of these machines very quickly after polls open, so minimising the number of lost ballots.
Which is better? You may NOT pick a third option:
(1) Computer "voting" systems that can produce a total vote in five minutes but be rigged by one party to produce a false result.
(2) Paper ballots marked with an "X" and counted by hand, which take days or weeks to count but are recountable verifiable.
Why is it Americans would willingly accept and incorrect and fraudulent vote count than an accurate paper count simply because it's faster?
*Two* months will pass before the "elected" president takes office after voting day. Why, then, is it such a rush to reach a final and incorrect total? Paper ballots may take days or even weeks, but they can be recounted and checked for fraud.
Once the person is sworn in, you have to live with that decision for four years. Do you really want to give up your entire democracy just because you're too lazy to spend a few hours counting paper ballots?
He thought stickers on cars 'work'
Majority of his company is republican
He is democrat
They made everybody remove political stickers from all the cars
SURELY - this stupid rule meant more potential republican stickers were blocked than democrat ones - so this would be a 'good' thing.
And how would he/she prove that claim was true? Just asking, not saying it's impossible. Oh wait, here is the method:
One week before election day, the person posts a message to any publicly acessible place (such as a newsgroup, but surely there are better alternatives which give more trust for being more verifiable) containing one or more hash of the following sentence (MD5, SHA-1, whatever):
"In state X, county Y, candidate A will have exactly 1144 votes and candidate B will have exactly 905 votes because I will have rigged the election. A week after the counting, I shall reveal this message to prove this claim. Cryptographical hashes of this message have been posted one week before election day at alt.foobar.org"
One week after the election, the person unleashes this message and then everyone can verify the hashes and conclude that at least one of the following is true:
(1) The person is very lucky at doing predictions
(2) The person can predict the future and should play the lottery
(3) The person has cracked all of those hashing algorithms
(4) The person has in fact rigged the election
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
You could could still nerver perform this attack in practice because you can't just walk into a voting area and start disassmebling the machine without people noticing!
This is like saying all house locks are vulnerable to attack because you can break them open with a crowbar.
Blow up the polling station as the polls close.
I've seen ballot boxes you could drop an envelope full of explosives into.
If you are suicidal or don't mind getting caught, you can eliminate an entire precinct, which can be enough to turn a local election.
Although it won't stop this particular scenario, I recommend:
Electronically-assisted paper ballots:
The voting machine prints out a paper ballot. This ballot is smudge/chad-free, printed in your language plus english, and has only the elections you are entitled to vote for on it. If the ballot is spoiled for any reason, you ask for another one and try again. If it looks good, you then take that ballot and drop it into a vote-counting machine. The vote-counting machine keeps a running total, which is then sent via modem or other means to voting HQ right after the polls close. Within minutes, you have a 100%-of-precints-reporting preliminary results. Later, at voting HQ, all precincts are re-counted by a different vote-counting machine from a different vendor using different vote-counting hardware and software. A large random sample of precincts then get partially re-counted by hand to see if the partial hand-count results and machine results are statistically close enough. Discrepancies, if any, are investigated.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The voting machine spits out a paper ballot with your vote already marked on it. Until you take that ballot and drop it in the vote-counting machine, it doesn't count.
Technophobes and those who cannot for whatever reason use the electronic machine are free to use an umarked ballot and a marking pen, with the caveat that the machine may reject it or worse, misread it, if it cannot read the vote.
The latter scenario is what some counties have successfully used for decades. Adding an electronic vote-casting machine prevents mismarks and helps the blind, illiterate, and others who have difficulty marking a paper ballot.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Actually, it matters a great deal whether or not the election is actually rigged. In every election, there is a huge amount of money at stake. An elected official can control the spending of billions of dollars. So there is a huge incentive to rig elections. Hence, if there is any possible way that the voting can be rigged, we can be sure that is is rigged.
"You have two machines. The first has a touch screen with a user-friendly interface. It presents your options in whatever language you prefer, and receives your votes. It prohibits you from entering invalid selections, such as selecting two candidates instead of one. Your votes are presented to you on the screen for review, with an option to go back and correct any mistakes. Finally if you are finished, the machine prints your votes on a paper ballot, in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. You take this paper ballot, and review it for accuracy. The machine you just used erases any record of your vote in preparation for the next voter. Your vote is not counted at this point.
You then take this paper ballot, and feed it into a second machine, which counts your vote and securely stores your ballot. These ballots can be counted by hand later, and compared to the computerized count. If the counting machine isn't counting votes accurately, the problem can be easily detected, and the ballots counted by hand."
You've basically described what the Open Voting Consortium (http://www.openvotingconsortium.org) has implemented and is promoting. Go help out!
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
I never claimed to have come up with the idea. ;-)
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Problems solved.
Methinks "mediocrity" would be more accurate. As noted elsewhere,
This seems a very fitting description of how the US election process is being handled...
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."