Will the Next Election Be Hacked?

plasmacutter writes to let us know about the new article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in Rolling Stone, following up on his "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" (slashdotted here). Kennedy recounts the sorry history of electronic voting so far in this country — and some of the incidents will be new even to this clued-in crowd. (Had you heard about the CERT advisory on an undocumented backdoor account in a Diebold vote-tabulating database — crediting Black Box Voting?) Kennedy's reporting is bolstered by the accounts of a Diebold insider who has gone on record with his concerns. From the article: 'Chris Hood remembers the day in August 2002 that he began to question what was really going on in Georgia... "It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state," Hood told me. "We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from [president of Diebold election unit Bob] Urosevich...' According to Hood, Diebold employees altered software in some 5,000 machines in DeKalb and Fulton counties, the state's largest Democratic strongholds. The tally in Georgia that November surprised even the most seasoned political observers. (Hint: Republicans won.)

Comments

Re:Oh goodie!

[Entrope]

Maryland Governor Bob Ehrlich, a Republican, ran into stiff opposition after (Diebold?) voting machines caused major problems in the state's primary elections this year. Ehrlich wanted to switch to paper-based methods that were known to be reliable. The opposition was NOT from his own party, but from the state's Democratic majority and career bureaucrats.

Re:two words.

[TopShelf]

It's because typically they don't perform exit polls at all precincts, just those that are seen as particularly close. Thus they may make an election-night projection based upon pre-election polls for the majority of precincts, and exit polls at a select portion. If the results in the precincts that weren't specifically exit-polled turn out differently than expected, then the overall election results will differ from predictions made by those exit polls.

Here is an interesting idea for a paper trail

[Snarfangel]

I just wanted to point out an interesting method of creating a secure paper trail that came out recently (September 28th 2006) by Ronald L. Rivest of M.I.T's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It's called the ThreeBallot Voting System (.pdf format).

The interesting thing about it is that it handles both voter privacy and verifiability without requiring encryption of the ballot. Rather than give a poor explanation because of lack of space (the paper itself is 13 pages long), I encourage interested people to read it.

Re: Will the Next Election Be Hacked?

[ptbarnett]

I'm not saying the Democrats commit election fraud. I'm not saying the Republicans commit election fraud. What I am saying is that at no presidential election before 2000 was election fraud even brought up.

You need to do a bit more research before making your claim.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36425-20 00Nov16?language=printer

Re:As soon as you have people willing to cheat..

[Aqua OS X]

It is true that you can certainly tamper an election that's based upon paper ballots. Heck, in 2001 San Franciscans suddenly found ballot box lids mysteriously floating ashore after the November election.

That said, the amount of shady crap surrounding Diebold voting machines is fairly ridiculous. Lets ignore the fact that you have a former CEO, who resigned for allegations of corruption, and who was committed to "delivering" an election to one party. As well as drastically skewed exit polling. All in all, you have a slew of voting machines models that lack the most basic security procedures... such as proper, or any, locks. You also have a fairly complicated voting solution that presents a number of opportunities for a compromise.

Ever work an exit poll?

[ChePibe]

I have... and our results were off by a quite a bit.

Why? I can think of a few reasons:

1. It takes time. It usually takes about 10-15 minutes to fill out a good exit poll form. People with less time on their hands - people with steady jobs, people with kids, people who vote in the morning on the way to work, etc. - are much less likely to accept the polling sheet. On the other hand, people with lots of time on their hands - the retired, the unemployed, often younger voters, etc. - are much more likely to fill out exit poll forms. Given that the unemployed are more likely to vote a certain way (generally for the opposition party, whoever that may be), this can lead to skewed data, not to mention other groups.

2. People fill out polls to make a statement. Again, this tends to favor opposition parties, or parties that are less likely to be represented in a region. People like the idea of voting twice.

3. The organization you poll for could determine who answers your questions. Example - "Hi, I'm performing a poll for University X! Could I take ten minutes of your time?" If the person you are trying to poll doesn't like your university's football team, they may not participate. Or, if a poller represents a news organization the person dislikes, a potential pollee (?) may opt out as well.

4. People honestly forget. This doesn't happen so much in presidential elections, to be sure, but on many exit polls people mark their own votes wrong because they forget what proposition x was or who the candidates for a seat on whatever were.

As someone who has worked exit polls before, let me assure you that they're not always accurate and there are a LOT of things that can throw them off.

In any case, though, the CNN exit poll data from 2004 should make the case for a Bush win, if you go by exit poll data alone.

Re:Ever work an exit poll?

[cyberon22]

CNN changed their exit polls for a number of states after the election was called for Bush. The numbers you are seeing at that site were not the numbers produced by their polling organization. You can check the link below, or simply Google for "CNN" and "change" and "exit polls".

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboa rd.php?az=view_all&address=132x1293911

This isn't exactly a secret. You guys have some serious problems on your hands.

Re: Will the Next Election Be Hacked?

[john82]

It would seem that seem that RFK Jr and many in the public have a rather myopic memory when it comes to allegations of vote fraud. One would expect that Mr Kennedy would certainly be aware of the controversy surrounding the outcome of the 1960 Presdential election especially since his uncle John F. Kennedy was elected.

Or was he? Rather than Ohio and Florida, that election came down to narrow wins in Illinois and Texas. Both states were Democrat-controlled and rife with allegations of fraud. Did Mayor Daley of Chicago arrange for the dead to vote? Did Johnson's own political machine throw Texas? Like 2004, the answers depend on who you ask.

RFK's 2004 Election Article is Complete Crap

[pudge]

Don't take my word for it. Take the word of the Democrats' own expert who did a lot of the work behind the report RFK was basing his article on.

In his words:

RFK's article is misconceiving, socially damaging and simply wrong---much like his previous one on autism and vaccines. RFK selectively cites the DNC report. More voters supported Bush in Ohio in 2004 than Kerry. There is no scientific evidence that they did not. There were some irregularities (such as the allocation of voting machines), but they were not large enough to change the outcome. Bush won in 2004; Democrats have to admit that he really did if they are to fix their electoral problems much like how an alcoholic first has to admit that s/he has a problem.

Why do you need machines?

[FromellaSlob]

Here in the UK we use old-fashioned paper ballots, hand counted. No tabulating machines, no hanging chads, no technology at all. In a General Election, the polls close at 10PM and the earliest constituencies usually declare their results around 1AM. By 8AM the next morning there are only a few left to declare and the result is known. This is in a country of some 60 million people - there is no reason why it couldn't scale up to the US population. Why complicate things and introduce more potential for fraud?

Exit poll numbers as preliminary evidence

[BeeBeard]

Maybe there's evidence this time? Something that wasn't there every other election.

Exactly. In the 2004 Presidential election, exit poll numbers in key battleground states varied drastically from the actual results. That's extremely suspicious because people often have no reason to lie to unbiased pollsters about who they voted for. According to several statistical experts (who are far more knowledgeable about stats than the average Slashdot poster, and 7 out of 10 people would agree...) the discrepancies were statistically impossible. It was a big, red, flag that something was amiss in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and several other states. Read this statement from Kennedy's first article:

According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)

If you have a rational, scientific mind, that's about as conclusive as it gets. It's certainly enough to pique the interest of people like Robert F. Kennedy, who then ask questions like "Was the last election fixed?" and "Will the next one be?" So Kennedy digs around and does some good old-fashioned investigative reporting, he follows the money trail, and lo and behold it leads to disgraced Republican influence peddler Jack Abramoff and several sleazy advocacy groups!

In a clever twist, HAVA effectively pressures every precinct to provide at least one voting device that has no paper trail - supposedly so that vision-impaired citizens can vote in secrecy. The provision was backed by two little-known advocacy groups: the National Federation of the Blind, which accepted $1 million from Diebold to build a new research institute, and the American Association of People with Disabilities, which pocketed at least $26,000 from voting-machine companies.

For those who don't know how this kind of campaigning works, what you do is create a group with a bullshit name like "Citizens for Truth and Honesty in Government". The name sounds too good to be true. I mean truth...honesty? Who isn't for that stuff? Then the group you just formed and paid turns around and supports your candidacy, your issue, or whatever

Diebold machines were rammed down our collective throat under shaky pretenses and by players who couldn't possibly be more politically biased. Kennedy wants to spread the word.

Re:two words.

[arminw]

Here in Oregon they have no exit polls because there are no polls. Everybody votes by mail with paper ballots. Alternatively, on election day there are special boxes where voters may deposit their sealed and signed ballot envelopes. The ballots are electronically counted, the same way as SAT tests and other such marked forms. Maybe that is a pretty good system for other states to check into.

Re:two words.

[Grym]

I've heard this as an argument against accurate exit polls. Yet I've never seen any evidence or explanation as to why this might be true. Do you have any facts to back this up?

Honestly, it doesn't matter. He could have replaced that claim with "X-type of people don't respond to polls as often as Y-type" (which is almost always true) and his point remains.

Statistical extrapolation can be a wonderful, scientific tool when a couple basic requirements are met: representative, objective datasets and truly random methods. When pollsters and polls fail, it's typically because the analysis lacked these requirements. In many cases, adequately meeting the requirements is impossible. For instance, how do you objectively define people's views on a controversial matter? In other cases, pollsters just get sloppy. For instance, often during elections, pollsters are asked--typically by the ignorant media--to return results before the voting is finished (translation: non-representative dataset). Pollsters who aren't trained properly might also be inclined to interview some types of people more often than others. (non-random methods). And even if everyone involved does everything perfectly, (which itself is nigh on impossible for an operation as large as a national poll) something that everyone seems to forget is that there is still a chance of random error. Even if the p-value is .01 (it is usually .05), that still means that there's a 1:100 chance that the result is wrong due to random variation alone.

The bottom-line is this: the results from exit polling are never more valid than the ballots in the box. Because of the strict requirements proper polling requires, the problem is more likely to be found with the polls rather than the votes--simply based upon the difference in complexity of the math between the two methods alone. (This is one of the few times in history in which Occam's razor legitimately would apply.) Furthermore, if one is willing to accept the possibility of a rigged election (on the basis of the discrepancy, alone), then he or she must also be willing to accept the possibility of rigged polling, which--strangely--is something that nobody ever does.

-Grym

Assuming assumptions?

[BeeBeard]

Holy cow. You made some huge assumptions about what you think was assumed when the exit poll analysis was conducted. Members of The National Election Archive Project, the non-partisan watchdog group to whom the the one in 3 billion figure can be attributed, will be the first to tell you that every single factor you just described made its way into their analysis of the polling data. Yes, seriously.

If I were a ruder Slashdot poster, I would have responded with something like "Who the fuck are you? The woman who wrote the white paper on this graduated Cum Laude from the University of Utah with a master's in mathematics and has been analyzing poll data for 10 years..." and so on, but rather than resort to an ad hominem attack, I'll just assume that you replied without taking the time to check the sources that describe in vivid detail how the analysis was performed. Here is a link to the pdf that describes the process that was used. I know reading an 18 page document is not half as easy as just writing a paragraph where you just make random, uneducated guesses about what it contains, but you might want to give it a shot.

Did you read the paper?

[mosb1000]

"Exit poll discrepancies are considered "one tail significant at the five percent level" if there is less than a
5% chance of that amount or greater of discrepancy occurring due to the random chance of selecting
voters as they leave the polling location."

No, she clearly says that she assumed voters were selected at random (random chance of selecting. . .). Of course, I could tell that she made this assumption without even reading the paper, because it is literally the only assumption you can make with the amount of data they have. She goes on to say:

"When plotted by official vote count or by exit poll shares, we can see what patterns of exit poll
discrepancy are produced by
1. different partisan exit poll response rates (such as the hypothesized Kerry-to-Bush voter
response rate of 56% to 50% that was proposed by Mitofsky to explain the 2004 presidential
discrepancies),
2. vote miscounts, and
3. random sampling error.
There are other factors which influence exit poll discrepancies, not listed above. However, not enough
data has been released by exit pollsters to know whether or not these other factors would affect an
analyses of WPD (within precinct discrepancy) patterns plotted by official vote count or exit poll shares.
Common-sense tells us that such other factors will not significantly influence this analysis, but we do
not know."

Of course, she does not list those other factors, but I would argue they they are significant (of course I only have a degree in Chemical Engineering, so it's not like I know anything about statistical analysis).

Re:As soon as you have people willing to cheat..

[ClassMyAss]

I'm all in favor of the paper trail, I'm just astounded that there are people who think Diebold would 1) fix an election and risk bringing down the whole company, 2) find employees willing to make the code changes and risk jail, 3) find people willing install the changes and risk jail, 4) be able to do it on a large enough scale to make a difference, and 4) be able to keep the entire conspiracy totally silent.

I'm astounded that given the accusations and evidence that this may have actually happened, you refuse to believe that it's possible! Point by point:

1) I can't speak to Diebold's willingness to fix an election, but you are vastly overestimating the risk involved. The whole company is not at stake here - more likely, if some vote tampering were discovered, it would "come to light" that a single rogue coder inserted the offending code into a routine security patch. This guy alone would take the fall for the bulk of it, that is, assuming rock-solid evidence (it would probably take a copy of the actual offending source code, since all other evidence of foul play evaporates in to the papertrail-less void) ever came to light. I believe people have already shown how easy it is to write a self-deleting virus that would remove all evidence of itself as soon as it did its work. (it's easy enough to make something get rid of every trace of itself even in a bloated mess like Windows; it's child's play when your company controls the design, security, and handling of the operating system, hardware, and software at every step along the way). If I had to guess, I would say that we're talking well under a 1% chance of discovery if most of the knowledge of details was confined to the top tier of the company. Even supposing this was discovered, after offering up a patsy, the company would probably just lose its voting machine business and continue as usual with its other stuff. Diebold was getting along fine before getting into the voting biz, they'll do fine if they're kicked out of it, too. Depending on the price, it could well be a very profitable (risk vs. rewards-wise) decision to throw an election to the highest bidder.

2) I'll agree, I don't know how easy it would be to get coders inside the company to knowingly agree to this level of risk. More than that, I would worry about the possibility of the involved coders leaking the fact that they did this so as to push responsibility up the chain if it looked like evidence was mounting against them. If I was to run such a scheme, I'd make sure to go outside the company for this bit, possibly by going to whoever wanted to buy the election to find someone that they trusted - anyone scummy enough to buy an election knows where to go for something like this. It would be easy enough for a high level Diebold exec to obtain API details to hand over, and any knowledgeable programmer could figure out what to do with them in a little time for the right price. Also, it's possible that the specs for the vote-shifting code could be phrased in such a way that the programmer didn't even realize what they were doing - I don't know how Diebold's software works, so I can't really comment any more on that. One easy way would be to ask a programmer to do a security audit, and prove any flaws by writing exploits for them. They hand over the info happily, assuming the flaws will be fixed, only to have them abused instead.

3) From the article, it appears that the people who installed most of the Diebold patches had no idea what was on them, so probably wouldn't face much exposure. And they did agree to install them, despite being suspicious about what was on them, so I think that point is proven - if given a malicious patch, they would install it.

4) This has been thoroughly addressed before - in some cases, all it takes is altering a single machine a local election result. Even for a national election, the margins are so small these days that a few thousand votes here and there really can shift

20 Amazing Facts About Voting In The USA

[intnsred]

20 Amazing Facts About Voting In The USA
by Angry Girl of Nightweed.com

Did you know....

1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S. http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/ 042804landes.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diebold

2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry. http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0916-04.htm http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/ 042804landes.html

3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers. http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/private_comp any.html http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/ 042804landes.html

4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/m ain632436.shtml http://www.wishtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1647886

5. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines. http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004 /03/03_200.html http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/031004Fitraki s/031004fitrakis.html

6. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-connected with the Bush family, was recently caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee. http://www.blackboxvoting.com/modules.php?name=New s&file=article&sid=26 http://www.hillnews.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx http://www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/000896.ph p

7. Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush's vice-presidential candidates. http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_28/b3689130.ht m http://theindependent.com/stories/052700/new_hagel 27.html

8. ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the U.S. and counts almost 60% of all U.S. votes. http://www.essvote.com/HTML/about/about.html http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/ 042804landes.html

9. Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters. http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm http://www.itworld.com/Tech/2987/041020evotestates /pfindex