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Will the Next Election Be Hacked?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the privatizing-vote-counting dept.

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.)

10 of 904 comments (clear)

  1. As soon as you have people willing to cheat.. by QuantumG · · Score: 5, Interesting

    the process is over. It doesn't matter who votes for who, it only matters who counts the votes.

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.
    1. Re:As soon as you have people willing to cheat.. by plalonde2 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Why are Americans such complete and utter *morons* about vote counting? Why do they insist on centralizing vote-counting, one of the most *scalable* problems in civic governance? Instead, form a multi-partisan committee of volunteers fore *each* ballot box. Split up your voting population to keep each box to under 1000 votes or so. Do the count immediately at the close of polling, at the polling place, with the committee and as many observers as signed up in advance (if your party can't muster a volunteer per ballot box, you're not a serious contender in that district).
      If you do it the decentralized way you have to corrupt *a lot* of committees to sway the vote substantially. If you centralize the vote counting (moving ballot boxes, electronic voting, etc) you reduce the number of people you have to coopt dramatically. Clearly, anyone intending to corrupt a vote will prefer centralized alternatives. Anyone trying to demonstrate a fair and just election must prefer the decentralized, hard-to-corrupt model.

    2. Re:As soon as you have people willing to cheat.. by radtea · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      You got modded funny for a reason.

      "I'm astounded that people think the NAZIs would 1) fix an election and risk bringing down the whole party, 2) find police officers willing to arrest Communists on clearly trumped-up evidence, 3) find courts willing to convict said Communists 4) be able to do it all under the glare of national media 4)(again) be able to keep the entire conspiracy totally silent."

      I'm NOT intending to say that Diebold are about to start rounding up all the Jews--although to be honest I think most people of all political stripes are closer to that kind of behaviour than we'd like to admit--but rather that the unwillingness of ordinary people to believe that the Powers That Be would "ever do such a thing" has always been a major weakness in democratic systems. Good democacies and democratic republics have always recognized that their continued existence depends on a balance of antagonisitic powers, and that the system needs to be designed to make fraud and malfeasence as difficult as possible.

      Anyone familiar with human history will be aware that people do exactly the kind of things you talk about all the time. Companies lie about drug side-effects, for example (Vioxx), despite the obvious risks. People are stupid, managers doubly so, and never think they are going to get caught.

      As others in this thread have pointed out, computers are very good at making massive, precise, pre-programmed changes while maintaining certain types of constraint. Anyone who has ever writtten a one-line Perl script to massively change a document will appreciate what I'm talking about, and anyone who says, "Elections can be stolen under paper ballots too" has clearly never written a line of code in their life. Electronic voting makes easy what was once hard--why set fire to the Riechstag when you can change a few lines of code?

      As such, decentralized paper ballot counting is by far the best way to go. In Canada we have scrutineers from each party at polling stations, and paper ballots with electronic readers of one form or another. I leave the polling place knowing that my vote has already been counted by the reader, and that there will be spot-check counts on paper ballots to ensure the reading machine has not been tampered with. It's really not that hard to do.

      --
      Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
  2. Maybe.. by TubeSteak · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Maybe we should take Fidel Castro up on his offer to monitor U.S. Elections.
    Or bring the United Nations in on it.

    It seems like the main difference between a certain 1st world country and many 3rd world ones is the scale of election fraud, not the type or quality.

    International monitors anyone?

    --
    [Fuck Beta]
    o0t!
  3. Diebold ATMs? by kherr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Since Diebold has a crappy track record with electronic voting, why should we as consumers have any confidence in their ATMs? Even if you don't buy that elections have been stolen, there's enough evidence that Diebold is at best sloppy with their design, implementation and support of their voting machines. With a corporate attitude this lax, how can any banking customer feel good about how Diebold treats money transactions? I've noticed Diebold rolling out more complex ATMs with a lot of useless features. It's not a positive trend.

  4. Edison was wrong by CriminalNerd · · Score: 4, Interesting

    When Edison first made an vote counting machine, the patent office rejected his invention citing concerns that could lead to vote tampering and yet, over a hundred years later, we have all of these problems...Maybe we should just GET RID OF ELECTRONIC VOTING until somebody can make uncrackable DRM software.

  5. UN disallowed from monitoring by Tony · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The US government outright refused to allow the UN to monitor the 2004 election. They won't let any monitoring happen at all, no matter what the citizens want.

    Can you imagine the government's reaction if Venezuela refused election monitoring?

    --
    Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
  6. Re:Give me a printout! by Jeremi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You (and probably also the grandparent post) misunderstand the concept. You get a print out from the machine, and you place the printout into the ballot box. The printout is in every way treated the same as the paper ballot you use in traditional systems. The only difference is that at the end of election day, there is a quick tally available electronically. The paper ballots can (and should) still be counted in order to verify that the electronic tally is correct. If there is a discrepancy, the paper tally is used.

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    I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
  7. good by Frostalicious · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I hope one of you jokers does rig the election. Give 100% to somebody, I don't even care who. Then there will be no choice but to deal with the Diebold issue.

  8. Why hack the election? by intnsred · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why hack the election when you can just steal it the old fashioned way?

    * Give poor voting precincts ancient machines and very few of them so that people have to wait hours and hours in line to vote. Isn't that what we saw in 2004?

    * Dream up a system of "provisional ballots" to placate voters when a voter is "challenged" -- and then never count those provisional ballots.

    These tactics are the way the past 2 elections were stolen, and they're profusely documented. Even the huge exit poll discrepancies of the 2004 elections were ignored by the US corporate mass media.

    And don't forget the way BBC reporter Greg Palast clearly documented that Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris eliminated more than 90,000 Florida voters in 2000 as "suspected felons" -- with over 90% of those voters being Democrats. But you're read about that scandal in the US corporate mass media, right?! (Not!)

    Sorry, the elections are already being "hacked" and it doesn't take an electronic voting machine to do it.