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The Diebold Voting-Machine Hack
Warm John writes to mention a short article on Doctor Dobbs Journal about the Hack that couldn't be done. "Hacking a Diebold voting machine was the focus of Cigital's Gary McGraw's keynote at SD Best Practices. He discussed 'Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine,' a paper released by Edward Felten, Ari Feldman, and Alex Halderman of the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy. 'The paper details a simple method whereby the Princeton team was able to compromise the physical security of a Diebold voting machine, infecting it with a virus that could change voting results and spread by memory-card to other machines of the same type.'"
if i flash it can i use it as a calculator too?
i support the right to offend.
I'm in your voting machine stealing your election.
Fundamentalism stops a thinking mind.
Man Diebold looks slimier and slimier every passing week, but I'm more disturbed by Joe Demma's, Salt Lake's chief elections officer, response to Bruce Funk's actions. Granted, Funk acted by going around Demma by calling in Black Box Voting to check the Diebold machines, when presumably Demma is supposed to be responsible for that (just my guess as he's the chief elections officer).
However, Demma seems more incensed at Funk because he may cost the state $40,000 for Diebold's astronomical recertification fee. He doesn't seem to be worried that people might not trust these machines. He doesn't seem to care that a state officer was worried enough to call in a non-profit third party to verify the integrity of these machines. I mean, these things could possibly affect the outcome of a vote, the foundation for a democratic republic! But instead of worrying about these machines he's clearly more upset about the $40,000 and Funk not talking to him about his concerns regarding the voting machines.
And of COURSE Diebold is going to tell you the machines are fine and fair. Sheesh, they want to make money don't they?
Isn't it great that chief elections officers have their priorities straight?
Give me a ballot sheet and a pencil any day over these closed, proprietary black box machines.
The Diebold machine used for this article came via private hands. There is no independent verification that the software contained in it is the same as the production Diebold machines used in the vote tallies.
On the other hand, the fact that the memory card is contained behind a door which can be easily picked, or completely subverted by removing screws, is practically criminal negligence on the part of Diebold. Frankly, I'm surprised these things aren't as security-hardened as the ATM's that Diebold makes that are used every day.
"Don't worry about the problems you have in mathematics, I assure you mine are much greater." - Einstein c.1919
Then I don't know what can. We need more information like this to come out because when dealing with elections, the last thing we need--but apparently the opposition wants--is for some kind of shennanigans elecing the wrong person. If electronic voting is ever to be used, it darn well should be open source, and transparent as hell...with two paper receipts (one for the voter and one for the auditors.)
How much more media attention do we need to give these jackasses at Diebold before the person in charge of contracting them goes.. "Hey wait a minute, you guys aren't very good at this ludicrously simple task," and takes a different approach to voting machines that doesn't give ultimate authority to some "company" over whether or not our votes will count.
Meet new people, and kill them.
In Illinois we get a paper printout that you check for accuracy and put in a ballot box; we can actually have a real recount.
That's incredibly weird, considering this IS Illinois, where they say "vote early, vote often," where dead people still have a right to vote, and the last two governors who lost elections went to prison (or will, in the case of Ryan).
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
And no, SpybotSD can't help you.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I bet either someone is going to have 100% votes for Fred Flintstone, or someone is going to have a 60% write in for some person. Both of which could never happen and would do nothing except expose the voting machines as tamperable. I doubt someone is going to be smart enough to make the election look close, but vote for someone on the ballot. The only way a good ol conspiracy vote could happen is if the hacker got a load of money from a candidate. Well I guess that could happen.
God spoke to me.
This entire thing comes down to the ability to pick a lock so someone can replace the flash card. So why not put more secure locks on the devices? The paper ballots that we all love are also stored in locking containers, and as such are subject to the same fate as the Diebold tablets.
There are certain locks that are extremely difficult to pick... that's the solution.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
At this point, is it really that big an achievement to find another way to compromise a Diebold voting machine? How many ways are there to say "this system sucks?"
Why should the EVMs be that complex?
As complexity increases, chances of bugs/corruption etc increases.
Make it similar to the ones used in India/Brazil wherein it did its work without any hassles.
In my viewpoint-
The only issue with an EVM is the un-availability of a paper trail.
That can be easily taken care of. Once the person presses the vote button, let it print out a reciept (which the voter can look and make sure), which the person then deposit in a ballot box.
If issues of corruption occurs, we just have to count the reciepts. The reciept can be made in sucha a way that it is machine countable too.
Thus, the hassles of big ballots and manual counting can be taken out, and still we have the paper trail to use.
Or am I missing something?
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
I found the FAQ interesting. I liked the way they set the tenor of the questions, and included such things as "you weren't supposed to say anything about this!" The research seems pretty clear-cut, and the precautions that the researchers took appears to have been well thought out.
I hope that I underestimate the American people on this (including me), because the next tack that will be taken by Diebold will be, "Well, who in their right mind would want to tamper with an election? Calm down, citizens, this is just scaremongering by the right/left/pedestrians..." Once this is followed up with a suggestion that such might be "fomenting a panic designed to cause a breach of the peace," vague threats of arrest for those involved, and nothing changing.
Well, if nothing else, this voter's going to try his hand at absentee balloting this time around. Just in case...
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
...but it really is a simple, honest question. What is the open-source community doing to present an alternative to proprietary closed-source voting machines? This is a serious question, because I'd like to know if there are efforts in this direction.
a new machine on a Diebold
The paper details a simple method whereby the Princeton team was able to compromise the physical security of a Diebold voting machine, infecting it with a virus that could change voting results and spread by memory-card to other machines of the same type.
It's not who votes that counts, it's who counts the votes.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
This issue is obviously much worse than it would be with a box full of paper ballots; although picking a lock is equally difficult in both cases, it's a hell of a lot harder to change the votes on hundreds of pieces of paper than it is to flip hundreds, thousands, or millions of bits on a memory card. Plus, paper ballots don't have the potential to change OTHER ballots when they're all brought together to be tallied.
The only real solution is to stick with human-readable ballots so that the voter can make sure that what they voted for or against is what actually got recorded, and if there's shenannegans, the results can be audited independently.
C'mon, guys, don't you see a little bit of opportunity here?
Hmmm... I thought I had it...
Dark Reflection
Another hack I would like to see isn't a virus at all. It would involve a deliberate loading of unauthorized software into the machine, perpetrated by a manufacturer's representative, a poll-watcher with an agenda, or a black bag job the night before an election. The result would be the same as what Felton's paper describes: unauthorized alteration of the data on the machine that records the votes.
From everything I have read and everyone I've spoken to about these machines it wouldn't be a hack at all. It would be a demonstration. And possible even a feature depending on who was doing the rigging and who stood to benefit.
These things have got to go.
Sure hackers would be tempted as well, but look at it from a major terrorist network perspective. If they were able to alter the election outcome and prove it (or have it proven), think about the doubt this would cast in all future elections (and possibliy cast doubt on past ones as well if the same tech was used)...and not just for Americans, but world wide. "One man, one vote"....I could see the terrorists laughing as they played video of them voting of a candidate 1 million times or taking down the voting "network" entirely. They wouldn't even need to injure/kill anybody in the process and they would be able to make a major statement.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
>The only way a good ol conspiracy vote could happen is if the hacker got a load of money from a candidate.
The conspiracy begins and ends with the company making these flawed voting systems being a major player in the politics of the currently dominant party.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
But since they're not, they're totally insecure.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
and the last two governors who lost elections went to prison (or will, in the case of Ryan).
Ryan didn't lose an election - he won, all the way up until he (plagued with scandal) didn't run again.
paintball
I'll get mod-bombed right back down to Good Karma for this- but I have to say that I'm not at all sure it didn't happen in Ohio and Florida in 2004. The exit poll numbers, which had previously been extremely accurate in just about every election I'd ever heard of, were way off in those two states on the Presidential race- but the numbers were close enough that everybody focused on recounts instead (where possible).
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Cause after all, what's REALLY the worst that could happen in this election?
How come no one seems to be asking the slot machine manufacturers to make voting machines? They deal with millions - or billions - of dollars a day and seem to be able to account for every single penny accurately. As an added bonus, all they'd really have to do is change the 7's to donkeys and jackpots to republicans... Pull the lever for your new rep! Seriously though - they're the people who should be making the machines...
First person to do this? THat'd be the republicans in the 04 election.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
It isn't enough for computer software professionals to discover problems like this; we need to be able to communicate our results effectively to the non-technical public. Too often we find something disturbing and decend into technical jargon and lose our audience. The Princeton team has done an excellent job avoiding that pitfall and communicating this threat.
Now, if only we could find a reasonably motivated and alert politician to actually act on this.
I get the impression that Diebold is a marketing company, a deal maker, much more than an engineering company. The series of mistakes their engineers have made cause me to doubt that their management is qualified to be supplying product to the voting machine market in the first place.
Problem: open systems are not patentable/copyrightable/proprietary and hence competition can come up with alternatives that are cheaper.
Really, the exploitability is an afterthought (or is it?).
Finally, a Conspiracy Theory that is actually possible, from a technological standpoint.
Now all we have to do is prove that it actually happened.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
All the little openings on those things have seals placed over them, so it becomes quite obvious that the box has been tampered with because the seal is broken. True, some county clerk (or Diebold employee maybe) could probably get a replacement to replace it, but it would be hard to cover the evidence. Now i'm not saying that everythings hunky dory just becuase we know if it's been tampered with. Obviously, if a machine is tampered with, you can't trust the votes. Which means they can't (shouldn't) be counted. Which means that some poeple's votes are getting counted when maybe there was no vote changing after all, but you can't tell and the whole process breaks down, because by not counting any of the machines in a certain area of [town|county|state] the vote is, in effect, altered. Similar to what would happen if someone snuck a few hundred forged ballots into the ballot box.... the count wouldn't be right when compared to the rolls, and they couldn't trust the entire precinct's ballots. So why don't they just modify the software so it doesn't 'read' anything from the card, (and yes modify the boot process if need be)... except maybe space left on it. so it can't pick up a virus in the first place. Bah! i never actually post on /. what am i thinking? I'm just a lurker, grrr
The conspiracy begins and ends with the company making these flawed voting systems being a major player in the politics of the currently dominant party.
I think you are right.
What we need to do is outsource the programming to China.
If you can't have China write the software and trust it... then something is wrong with your process. Because, who writes it should not matter one bit.
Maybe this would get the point across that the software needs a line by line peer review...
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
They circumvented physical security first. You could do the same thing to a paper ballot box and stuff it. Every method will have a weakest link.
If they did this to a Mac and not a Diebold voting machine you sheep would be yelling "Unfair!!!, you cheated!!!"
You, u.s. people, have been SCREWED BADLY.
Does it take someone to say for you to realize it ?
Read radical news here
If this can't finally nail the coffin lid shut ... Then I don't know what can.
I know what can:
An election where such a virus is released into the machines and transfers ALL the votes for the candidates in ALL the affected machines to the Nth "third party" candidate in each partisan race, a pseudo-random one in any non-partisan race, and discards all votes on any propositions.
Let's see 'em certify THAT as the correct election result! B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Welcome to democratic government, brought to you by Diebold(R)!
Please choose a candidate:
(1) The incumbent guy who's against the terrorists.
(2) The weasly other guy who likes terrorists and wants your child to
be gay.
[press 2]
You have chosen option (2), for gay marriage. Are you sure?
[press no]
Please choose a candidate.
[press 2]
Let's not be too hasty. We don't want the terrorists to feel good.
Do you want the terrorists to feel good?
[press no]
You have chosen option (1), for the incumbent. Are you sure?
[press cancel]
This may forfeit your vote! Are you sure you wish to cancel not
voting for option (1)?
[press yes]
Thank you for your participation in the democratic process! Printing
receipt
Sorry! Out of paper.
And here I thought this one was enough to get those damn things pulled.
This entire thing comes down to the ability to pick a lock so someone can replace the flash card.
Now that we know the machine itself is virus-susceptable, the next steps are:
1) See if the smartcard reader code has a vulnerability. (Any bets on a buffer overflow bug?)
2) If so, design a virus that can do the initial infection via the smartcard slot.
Succeed at 2) and you can carry a bogus smartcard in, insert it while you "vote", and infect a voting machine. Since the machines are apparently capable of passing the infection during the post-election vote collection process, you can take over the precinct (either all the remaining machines or the one doing the totals) by infecting one voting machine.
Design the virus to self-destruct after doing its dirty work and you don't even leave tracks.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Ok, so basically whoever can hire the best hackers will win the elections where these machines are used. Unless the winner happens to be bugs bunny.
... paper and pen are cheaper, simpler, and time tested and proven. Plus, a substantial segment of our society still views computer systems with distrust. The goal should be that NO Americans feel there is something shady in the voting process, not just those who are tech savvy enough to understand the issues.
I say this realizing that there will always be people with suspicions, so we have to aim to make that the lowest number possible, which IMO, rules out computerized voting at this time.
"Our morality is good, theirs is repressive."- Partisanship Rule #3
The exit poll numbers, which had previously been extremely accurate in just about every election I'd ever heard of,
Exit polls are generally inaccurate.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
And I'd believe that article exactly why? It's just sour grapes from the old media covering up for an old money bought and paid for election.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Jeez, just use google and search for "diebold ohio". If our free and democratic society can't have an open election process, then we'll have neither. Those high priced calculators are owned by a group of people openly committed to another group of people. No one owns the pencil and paper.
t m [commondreams.org]
g n_letter2_105.php [rawprint.com]
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.h
http://rawstory.rawprint.com/105/blackwell_campai
Ed Felten is also the guy who hacked the MS DLL that "integrated" IE into Windows to remove IE without destroying the OS, proving in court that Microsoft's defense of their illegal bundling, "it was technologically necessary", was a lie. Though Felten was not even a Windows specialist, and certainly didn't have the source code to delete IE cleanly, he was the the key to the court finding that MS had violated their antibundling consent agreement, the key to finding they'd violated their monopoly status.
Now he's the guy proving Diebold voting systems are insecure.
Isn't anyone else in our giant, brilliant "computer science" industry doing anything? Or are they all working for the bad guys?
--
make install -not war
So what you're telling me is that slashdot should hack a bunch of voting machines and make cmdrtaco win the next election?
Pete/Petri "damn, my chainsaw is clogged with 1's and 0's again." --clyde
Listen, pal, DON'T steal my posts. It is wrong. It is unethical. And it is not right. I wish that you would die in a fire.
You little pathetic troll. Seeing from your post history how poor of a poster you are, I think *very* lowly of you. You need to get some special help and leave slashdot. Like right now.
It's really pretty simple. Generally as a public school student I've found out that any product that the government purchases will be the lowest quality possible for the highest possible price.
~= scwizard =~
>Diebold is well known for banking systems, including ATMs
Diebold ATM turned into jukebox
Diebold ATM infected with Welchia
I think the real risk, since memory cards are not likely to be passed from machine to machine during an election, is an infected card passing it's payload to the central counting machine. If the person trying to steal an election knew which precints were likely to be counted earliest they could simply infect one machine in one of those precints and skew the results from every remaining precint. Include a command for the virus to delete itself when it's done and there is no trail.
Compromising Diebold machines seems to be a regular method of swinging elections in Florida ( UC Berkeley )
The white hat community needs to start undermining vulnerable e-voting technologies whenever and wherever possible. Just put a few Democrats into office in the bible belt.
The CEO of Diebold is on record as a dyed in the wool Republican: "Our job is to deliver the election to George W Bush". Problematic for a vendor with so much trust. But once their machines start swinging votes for the other side, they'll soon start adding security.
Can I be in charge of vice...er, I mean vice-president?
Pretty please!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I intentionally lie to exit pollers. I do so because I want to make the mainstream media look like idiots when they make the wrong projections based on incorrect data. And I know that I'm one of many, among a relatively small sample size.
Like all telephone polls and Internet polls, exit polls are self-selecting. The only people that participate are those that WANT to do so. That effectively invalidates the results of the poll: if it is anywhere close to the actual vote, it's by accident.
Exit polls have one purpose: to keep you interested and glued to the television set on election night before the results are official, so the mainstream media can earn revenue for the advertisements they show you while you are waiting.
Don't confuse entertainment with facts.
They aren't necessary. Up until this upcoming election, I've only had to use the lever-flip mechanicals. They've always worked fine. Paper ballots? Fine. Oregon even has them mailed to them. I'm convinced that E-Voting only became an issue because of the whole hanging/dimpled/pregnant chad thing down in Florida in 2000. Personally, I don't want them. However, it seems that we have a hardon for e-voting, so if we do, my question becomes, OK fine, but why are they being supplied using proprietary source, with no vetting of security? Why don't these things leave a paper trail? If anything should be transparent, voting should be. Hence, my question.
I just don't get it. In Australia, we hear stories about vote tampering and security issues regularly coming from the USA, but for us its just a complete non-issue. We do all our voting on paper, and they're hand counted. I don't recall having ever heard about some scandal of suspected vote tampering here, we just have a natural expectation of a fair result. Is that simply because we're ignorant? Maybe. But I'll bet it's because our system has been tested by time, and everything is double or triple checked every step of the way. We don't need punch cards, lever machines or computers, and the instructions are so simple that virtually everyone has the opportunity to cast a valid vote.
So now, most Americans reading this are probably thinking "That'd take weeks to get a result"... well, we usually have a clear result by the evening of election day.
Sure it might cost a bit, but how much has all this nonsense cost the USA? Elections aren't something where corners should be cut for cost savings, they're the foundation of our democracy.
They've provided a roadmap showing terrists exactly how to commit a crime!
They even showed how to pick a lock.
These machines would have been perfectly secure if they hadn't revealed all the secrets! Diebold trade secrets!
They should be thrown in jail for compromising homeland security, and their video should be torn out of their camera and exposed to light, and required to pay for all the voting machines that will now need to be replaced because the secret formula has been compromised!
Nobody should be allowed to post anything on Slashdot until the Department of Homeland Security has approved it first.
Damn! And I thought it was just us humans being spied upon. Now that NASA is wiretapping the universe nobody is safe!
Use a provisional ballot. With Ohio and other states going with these machines, if there is an option to not go Diebold, I'm taking it. At least I know that it's just a bit harder to tamper without there being some evidence for it.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Ahhh yes, the conspiracy theory. You don't offer any counter example. You don't counter the points made in the article. You just yell 'bullshit'. Great argument.
I, for one, have a better explanation. People are dumb. That's the way Bush got elected last time. I will be honest enough to say I voted for Bush in 2000. But I am, at least, smart enough to admit my mistakes. People got their little payouts in the mail. Bush shored up his base. The folks ignored the two trillion of debt he has piled on us, and the quagmires he lied his way into.
No... I do not buy into the conspiracy theory. You don't need to rig elections except through breasd and circuses.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Sure thing. All I'll you need to do is help me find a few dozen people to vote for us.
And make sure they understand we aren't talking any of that weak kneed "one man one vote" stuff. These are some super charged Diebold votes we want to have them cast for us.
But don't go overboard. Two or three per state should do it.
--MarkusQ
Someone infect these machines with a virus that changes votes to Democrat. Those security holes would be fixed up quick-smart!
Blessed are the 1337, for they shall pwn the earth.
Now maybe I've found the way!
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
How can one hack a diebold voting machine when they are open?
Shouldn't these just be considered mods?
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
The comment above was shamelessly cut & pasted from a much earlier post. Seems like she makes a habit of this. Perhaps some kind souls would like to apply some retrospective moderation to this twat...
Sir, some people from princeton managed to rig a bunch of voting machines.
Great, when do they start? That horse isn't gonna bite me is it?
I'm afraid that this crap is going to go on until we really get wacked.
The only upside will be that Diebold will be sued out of business.
The LACK of security in these voting machines makes me sick. I can't believe the US Government is using them. With a voting system this easy to compromise, it looks like votes don't matter anymore...
a Diebold fraud machine with, that's the real challenge. Yesterday's challenge was a toenail clipping and was successfully met in only 9.4 seconds. Today's challenge is...a loogie!
Post copied from here.
Stop modding this douchebag up.
I wish to express, on behalf of all his supporters, our warmest wishes and congratulations to President Arnold on his win over that Washington fellow.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Where are my mod points when I need them? Mod the parent to this UP, please. That's exactly the point I've been making: super easy and not cost-prohibitive to include printed results withn electronic voting machines, so why wouldn't you? Every vote being counted correctly is the foundation of our society, so why wouldn't you take every possible step to be sure it is done correctly? Who is hiding what?
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
This video help explains the Diebold hack to the average layperson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvwnJqLLgK8
Slot machines are tamper-proof.
They can't.
The main reason being that security start in the design phase and cannot be added after the fact. Among other problems, the current systems are based on MS Access and MS Windows, neither of which can be made secure. What are you going to do? Huh? Maybe a code audit and then clean room compilation of the tool chain and then the system. MS doesn't allow the latter, even with the "Shared" source NDAs. It certainly won't or, more likely, can't allow the former.
Face it. It's the end for Diebold's voting machines, they're just trying to pull an SCO now and hang on for as long as possible. The more noise Diebold makes about defending it's voting machines the longer it will take people to look into their ATMs and other devices.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
You vote, even if it doesn't matter, so the corruption is expensive for the corrupt to maintain.
If we had a lot more voter turnout, we would not have these problems of people not being able to vote on the arare occassion when it does matter, because they got kicked off the rolls for not voting.
If over 90% of eligible people voted, it would be a lot harder to point to "surprise turnout" to justify a fraudulent result.
If lots of people actually bothered to decide ahead of time who to vote for, we wouldn't be having wackjobs appointed to local town committees with only 3 votes because noone bothered to fill out the rest of the ballot. Thousands of nutjobs would be denied a place to start their political career.
In short, you vote because it is a pain in their ass when you do.
Someone had to do it.
A free Press would really solve a lot of this problem. That and not having a coup back in the sixties. Yeah, we know, but we have Hollywood, so here's a big jolly grog of stfu. No seriously, our bad, we let the retards out, just give us a little time. We'll get back on the geneva convention, bill of rights, and being a great nation. Or at least make a movie about it.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
So, you're suggesting that the Princeton Center for whatever might have gotten ahold of a machine that someone had already hacked? Yeah, maybe so. Somehow, that doesn't make me feel better about these things.
Oh ... you're suggesting that the flaws identified by the Princeton team may already have been fixed. Possible I suppose, but unless the machine was stolen originally from a back room in the Diebold factory, doesn't that imply that Diebold has, in the past, shipped vulnerable machines? Should that make me feel more secure? Have they been seeking the old vulnerable models out and fixing them?
This may be a case like aircraft safety where really strict, impartial, government monitoring is required to ensure that private industry doesn't screw up. Or we could just go back to paper ballots which are cheap, easy to understand, and auditable.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
You are aware that there were no Diebold machines used during the 2004 election in Ohio, right?
http://www.sos.state.oh.us/News/Read.aspx?ID=102
"COLUMBUS - Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell today halted deployment of Diebold Election Systems' electronic voting devices in Ohio for the 2004 General Election. The decision is based on preliminary findings from the secretary of state`s second round of security testing conducted by Compuware Corporation showing the existence of previously identified, but yet unresolved security issues. Hardin, Lorain and Trumbull counties had selected to use new Diebold equipment this November. Those counties will use their current voting devices in 2004."
Well, if you aren't sure it didn't happen, that proves it did!
Final 2006 "Proof of Global Warming" US Hurricane Count -> 0
- You have a shared secret with the government and that secret is used to to access who you voted for.
- You can set up to have a bogus "secret" show that you voted for someone else.
Problems with that:- Keeping the shared secret a secret.
- Trusting those in the government not to be the ones buying votes/intimidating.
Note: I'm not thinking of any given party or politician here - just the ideal of a voting system that is free from buying/intimidation. Without anonymity, that is impossible.Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
In USA the machine votes for you!
This is a congressional hearing of Clinton Curtis in which he explains how easy it is to write software to rig elections, and in fact has been asked to do so by member of the House Tom Feeney (R). Curtis testifies under oath. Feeney says afterwards he does not 'remember' meeting Curtis.
The media has not been reporting on this; though this apparently happened in December 2004 today is actually the first time I saw this hearing by just browsing through youtube.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
here in brasil we're laughing all the way to our excelent, simple, functional and almost tamper proof electronic balots...
USA's voting system is showing it's age, and crooks are taking advantage of it to grab and stay in power. time for an overhaul, people.
What ? Me, worry ?
I intentionally lie to exit pollers.
Interesting- yet another American who thinks the truth and freedom of the press is something to play around with. You deserve the politicians who are in power- they completely agree with you. Personally, I think honesty about my opinions should always trump stupid little kid games- which does have a tendency to make me unpopular, but at the very least I can go to sleep at night knowing I'm not a liar.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The other guy proved it to me. People are not only dumb, but they are also liars, which explains the exit poll data but leaves me less trusting of my fellow man. This country deserves to lose the war- they're too stupid to know how to win.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
"thinks the truth and freedom of the press is something to play around with"
As opposed to the members of the press itself, who hold Truth and Freedom so high?
As for truth, go back to grade school history and read up on Hearst, the Yellow Press, and the Spanish American War. Or just watch "Citizen Kane" - it's fiction, so probably more believeable for you.
As for Freedom of the Press, members of the Press have interpreted that to mean that they can do or say anything, legal, or illegal, with no consequences. Combined with their assertion that they are the "watchdog" of the government - in effect, a fourth branch of government - we now have a hugely powerful, largely unaccountable body involved in our government, with none of the constitutional provisions that limit the other three. All thanks to idiots like you who somehow believe that the "Press" is going to save you from the Big, Bad Government.
And the soundest sleepers of all are those who lie to themselves.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
So the media is lying when they report on the accuracy of exit polling, but is performing a vital service that shouldn't be gamed when performing exit polling?
Make up your mind - government toadies or Beacons of Truth and Freedom?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
It is Clint (no relation) Curtis's testimony to the Ohio court following the 2004 coup^H^H^H^Helection. In it he testifies under oath how his Diebold superiors tasked him with writing a procedure to flip the votes 51/49, and how nobody would be able to detect the hack except for "maybe an MIT-level computer person" (paraphrased).
Good stuff.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Well, from the looks of it to me- not Government Toadies, but rather right-wing-nut toadies due to people specifically lying to them in the exit poll.
It makes me wonder what would happen if we did require slip-verified electronic voting in this country, and allowed the news to have up-to-the-second networked totals untouched by human hands.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Truth should always trump all other values. In all cases. Lying is a rephrensible sin to me, far worse than merely gaming the system.
Having said that- your repsonse to a lying media is to lie to them more and assure that the media is further from the truth, instead of trying to rectify the lie and create a more accurate system? Now that's sociopathic!
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I'm an OSS fan, but "voter verified" recountability matters, OSS does not.
There is no way for you to independently verify that the VERSION of the OSS software on a machine is actually what you think it is.
You MUST have a system where the voter can verify what their machine thinks their vote is (eg a slip of paper) in such a way that you can reliably recount it by hand (and by multiple people, of course) However, once you HAVE a recountable system suddenly it doesn't really matter how trustworthy the machines are; if anyone suspects anything or it's close you trigger a hand-recount.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
OK, I'll give you that. I get frustrated with it, too. Except when I'm right, of course. ;)
You've identified the problem with your scheme. You have to trust the government. In many countries, they are the ones doing the intimidation. However, I'll grant you that your system is better than the one I imagined in that you've at least reduced the exposure to buying/intimidation. I'd probably even find it acceptable.
I don't know about you, but I get frustrated with the "I can't think of it, so it must be impossible" attitude that people have." :D
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
You mean these seals?
h .cgi?file=/1954/36510.html#
... on Diebold TV:
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-aut
Previously
http://midnightspaghetti.com/newsDiebold.php
http://www.equalccw.com/dieboldtestnotes.html
http://www.votergate.org/
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/7517
http://www.archive.org/details/TheCageBushKerry
~hylas
At least starting from this fall.
Read radical news here
I believe in freedom of the press, even if it is to tell their own lies. But, I'm not naive enough to believe that their version of the "truth" is anything but entertainment. It's all about ratings, and that motivation influences everything from what is reported to how it is reported.
Personally, I think honesty about my opinions should always trump stupid little kid games- which does have a tendency to make me unpopular, but at the very least I can go to sleep at night knowing I'm not a liar.
I don't have any problem lying to an organization that regularly does the same.
How are you so sure that the media is accurately reporting the results of their exit polls? There's no accountability and no way to audit the results. It's no more reliable than me taking a poll, making up numbers, and proclaiming they are accurate.
Exit polls are still abused in the US to influence the outcome of an election that is still in progress. Winners have been declared in states before all the polls have closed IN THAT STATE. And due to the wide difference in time zones from east to west coasts (never mind Alaska and Hawaii), projecting winners of elections in eastern states affects national elections in western states.
Every election, the US mainstream media claims they will be more 'responsible' the next time. And the next time, the desire for ratings compels them to project the winner as early as possible, before their competitor does so and pulls viewers away to another channel.
Exit polls are irresponsible, but the only way that they will end is when no one believes them. And that's why I (and many others) either lie or refuse to participate. It's our way of making the press behave responsibly.
Obviously, the writer of that article never studied statistics. Basically, you use a large enough sample, the results won't skew. You want to bias a certain result, narrow and target your sample.
From all media reports I've read from both sides of the political fence, the only times the exit polls didn't jive with the final count within a statistical margin of error is when computerised voting machines were used in those precincts. This tells me that maybe the exit polls were right & the WP was just pandering to the Powers That Be in trying to calm the great unwashed masses by offering up nifty sounding plausible explanations.
Strange how exit polls were accurate as hell for decades, doncha think? Makes you wonder what changed...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/15/00 9257
Think there might be a connection here, or do I need to get my tinfoil hat relined?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Hehe, well, since there is no evidence supporting government involvement I guess we can place that story in the "corporation says: copying is stealing" department. Incidentally I just found this hilarious video.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
Well, the simplest way is a redundant paper trail. One machine allows the voter to cast their ballot, and it prints out a copy of the ballot that is human and machine readable (it's machine readable only by choosing a font that is very easy for OCR to read). That user than deposits the ballot in a locked ballot box. The ballots in the locked ballot box are counted by a separate machine in the presence of one or more representatives from all interested parties. If desired, any person present can count the ballots themselves (in the presence of others) and force a recount if they disagree with the total counts.
As with your solution, it's not perfect, in that assumes that there isn't collusion amongst the "interested parties" or that there's not some prestidigitator present who won't sneak in ballots during the count. However, I'll point out that even your non-anonymous solution wouldn't perfectly prevent tampering if someone had enough power. Presumably the executing source code has some sort of tamper-proof mechanism in place that might allow some sort of self-deleting virus to show everyone the very candidate they voted for, and yet have different totals from the actual totals. Any mechanism that might defeat the first machine in the description I gave above can be used to defeat the last machine in the description you gave.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Strange how exit polls were accurate as hell for decades, doncha think?
Cite a source?
... DIEBOLD ...
We Can't Prove It
You Can't Prove It
CK.
due to AIDS
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Everyone in the polling place has to be naked. That makes it much harder to slip in a fraudulent vote. In the case that there is a miscount, tests for fecal coliform bacteria are performed. :P
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
It is simply never worth behaving irresponsibly yourself to force others to behave responsibly- it never quite seems to work.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Seriously dudes, lets elect Cmdr Taco or somebody from Slashdot.
It is time for an intellectual to be the president. We've had enough idiots.