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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.)
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.
exit polls.
they have always been acurate to a very slim margin, yet they were off by hundreds of thousands of votes in 2004. think about it - oh wait sorry, the apathy, i forgot.
You'd think with the evidence and coincidences that are showing up, that people may actually think these guys have something it say. Instead, some of you just dismiss it as BS. I'm a card carrying libertarian, and I'm siding with the liberals on this one. There's something fishy going on here, and I think it should be investigated.
I wonder, if the positions were reversed and you felt you were losing your country, would you:
A. Still give a fuck?
B. Be outraged that fellow citizens don't listen to you, just because they have a different stance on abortion?
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!
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.
Absoutely. There will be wide margins in exit polls for Democrats and the Republicans will win anyway. They'll blatantly steal it and dare us to say it was stolen.
See, they've already tested the waters on the "will anyone believe an election is stolen" question. (Whether the 2004 election was stolen or not.) They know the general public will not believe it to be stolen, no matter how compelling the evidence.
So 2006 is a wash.
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.
Actually, a few weeks back, Slashdot covered how Maryland Governor Ehrlich (R) was trying to seek an injunction on the use of Diebold machines.
The reality of the situation is that it's not a Democrat/Republican thing.....it's a power thing. If a Democrat were in office, the Republicans would be shouting vote fraud, etc.
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.
I don't mind the idea of electronic voting, just be sure to give me a printout of my vote in plain english with a tracking number so that I can validate it later on. We cannot just take them at their word on this. This is one of the few cases where I think a paper trail is a must!
The slant is so obvious.
Always the conservatives are screaming about "balance." Reality itself is not "fair and balanced." The Republicans are destroying the country, the environment, and the Earth. Not the Democrats. So get over it. The very notion that media needs to be "balanced" is how we got into this position in the first place.
Media is supposed to report on what is happening. Not make you feel better about your political views if they suck, or make you feel as though you're just as good as everyone else if you're not.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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.
We just don't give a fuck. The Prime Minister of Hungary is caught admitting to lying to the public about the economy on tape and Hungarians are out RIOTING (including tear gas!) in the streets. Our President has all but been caught lying about everything, royally fucking up everthing he's touched in the process, and the best we can muster is Bill Clinton, Richard Clarke, and Cindy Sheehan.
Raising funds / winning elections. There is a cause/effect relationship here folks. Wake up, smell the roses, elections are just like anything else in america, sold to the highest offer. If that wasn't the case, then fund raising wouldn't be the most critical part of an election campaign.
If you have a tracking number, there is the possibility that voters can be bought or threatened into voting a certain way.
I tell you that unless you vote for Mr. X, I will break your legs. You go vote and I demand your tracking number (or I break your legs anyway). I can verify that you voted how I wanted you to.
The best paper trail is for the voting machine to spit out a form/card/whatever with the name of the person you voted for printed/punched on it. Then you drop that into a locked box. Later, that locked box is opened in front of anyone who wants to watch and the votes are sorted and counted.
We have the technology to do that already.
But it seems that having an easily verifiable paper trail is not something that our politicians are interested in.
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.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
I don't care what political party you are in (or which party you hate).
Honest elections should NOT be a political issue. It should be a PATRIOTIC issue.
We need a list of requirements for honest elections and we, THE PEOPLE, need to work with each other to get them implemented.
I don't care if you're Liberal or Republican or Libertarian or Communist or Green. I will gladly work with you for honest elections in America. You may beat my favoured Party, but we should all be able to see that it was an honest election and an honest victory.
newsflash: republicans see democrats destroying the moral foundation of the country, selling us out to international law via the court system, pandering for votes from illegals, wanting to destroy any successful corporation, etc.
The difference is that you see the things you disagree with, while the things you agree with you tend to gloss over. Most right wingers see CNN, NPR, BBC, etc as liberal (while most leftists call them neutral) and most liberals call Fox conservative (while most rightists call it neutral). It's all about hearing what you agree with MOST of the time and letting it reinforce your ideas.
Frankly, Slashdot is going further and further to the left... and while my post count is up lately from trying to point out the lunacy, it's growing very tiring and is pushing me away from wanting to even participate here. It's to the point where the Bush bashing and conspiracy theories creep into non-political stories. I haven't been to kuroshin in years for the same reason. If slashdot wants to turn into the next DU, that's fine... but don't be too surprised when all you have left is a bunch of people preaching to the choir and another bunch trolling.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
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.
No, the Democrats lose because the party has not been able to put up someone inspiring (or hell, electable) since Clinton (Or arguably JFK). Say what you want about Clinton or Regan, they both inspired people, and both convinced the majority of voters (not tiny contestable majority either) to get the job. Bush sucks, but he keeps his job because (1) his opponents have somehow managed to be less appealing than him and (2) the Democrat party has basically become the "oppose Bush" party. No real ideas of their own, no "contract with America" style plan to recapture the votes, just oppose Bush at every turn. Don't get me wrong, if Bush and co keep screwing up that eventually will work, but he probably could have been easily beaten (election fraud or not) if there were some kind of leadership or direction in the Democratic party.
Finkployd
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.
Sometimes it seems to me that the Neocons (I was raised Republican, still hold those values, and consider myself to be a moderate, but in today's spectrum that makes me a liberal. But I still don't want to sully the 'Republican' label.) have taken the liberal concept of 'cultural relativism' and run with it, convincing themselves that 'factual relativism' is real and applicable to the world.
But IMHO 'cultural relativism' is/was primarily a tool to help you understand the other guy, his roots, motivations, etc, so that you can deal with him. Applying either 'relativism' to your own actions in the real world tends to be an exercise in wishful thinking, and sometimes that can be disastrous.
There seems to be a new (I'll call it) 'Neocon meme' showing up on Slashdot and other net sites, with a couple of notable characteristics:
* This site just has a liberal slant, and you'll shout me down for this.
* The Republicans may have some problems, but the Democrats are just as bad.
* The nation as a whole is politically much different from this site.
Oh, well.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Rigging elections undermines everything this country stands for. It is, in a very real definition of the word, treason. Anyone doing it. Anyone ordering it. Anyone knowing about it and not coming forward. Anyone who has taken an oath to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States, has to take rigged elections as a direct challenge to the authority of that document. As a military person you took an oath to protect the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Someone rigging the ballot box would qualify as a domestic enemy.
That should be one thing we can all agree on. Democrat, Republican, Independent or any other party. Without fair elections we are no longer the United States of America. We are something less.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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.
You may be right... there may be nothing to this but paranoia and sour grapes on the part of Democrats that lost.
But with Diebold style machines, how can anyone ever prove otherwise? With no paper trail, this issue is going to come up in every single election. The loser will claim that the election was stolen, and there will be no way for anyone to prove that it didn't happen.
That's why we need systems where the results are open to public inspection/recount and difficult to hack. Paper ballots meet this criteria. Electronic machines with a voter-verified paper trail meet this criteria. Diebold machines do not. Even if we assumed that every person involved with those machines was in fact 100% honest and above cheating, they'd still be unusable as an electoral mechanism, because every election result would be suspect.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
They work fine for you, and I'm sure the exit polls match the results(go lula), but in the first world of the USA, electronic voting just makes it easier to cheat. The CEO of the electronic voting company(Diebold) actually guaranteed a republican win, it's that bad. They have manipulated the people via the press so we now think that exit polling is inaccurate. This ensures there is no oversight over electronic voting - exit polls are the only oversight we have. We use exit polls to determine fraudulant elections in places like Ukraine, but in the United States, we're worse off than Ukraine.
In many ways it's shameful, but politics in the U.S. is fierce and divided moreso than most other countries. The arrogant international attitude you see also applies to domestic politics. It's anything goes here and it's very machiavellian - whatever it takes to win will be done.
Not even talking about gerrymandering. Even if the democrats make significant gains, they will need 57% of popular vote to take the lower house. This should be 50% but due to gerrymandering, democrats have almost insurmountable odds. The U.S. is a banana republic.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
Things to consider:
1) Both the 2000 and 2004 elections were VERY close. They ultimately came down a to a relatively thin margin of votes in select states. So we basically get into an uncertainty situation because we end up having to measure a vote exactly when the technology is rather imprecise (hanging chads, etc)
2) Electronic voting machines did not exist in significant quantities prior to the 2000 election. Given that there's no physical evidence to support the numbers that come out of the polls, it creates a definite sense of insecurity.
3) We have seen ample evidence of deliberate efforts by Republicans to distort the vote. In Ohio there were many fewer polling machines made available to typically Democratic districts. They also gave people registration forms that were invalid, then said they wouldn't accept them. Also don't forget the phone bank jamming scheme in New Hampshire that hamstrung get out the vote efforts by Democrats.
4) Gerrymandering of districts has meant that the margins of victory have shrunk in many locations. You gerrymander by dividing up opposition support accross enough of your own candidates. So you end up with two of your candidates winning by say 5% rather than having one win by 10% and the other narrowly lose.
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The point in 2004 was not whether they were generally accurate or inaccurate, but how could the same methodology be very accurate in some places (less critical states than florida or ohio) and really incredibly inaccurate in only the areas that were pivitol? Is the quality of polling in Mississippi far better than in Ohio?
In his words:
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?
There isn't going to be any more "elections".
If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator. GWB. CNN.com, December 18, 2000
You americans are fucked now... the rest of us will be fucked later.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
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:
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!
Disclaimer: I am not an American. Do not vote in US elections, and never will.
This is (hopefully!) where the US system actually STARTS to work. (Given that it is currently *not* working) The USA has a very good system of checks and balances - currently these are NOT being used and are not working correctly, but it is inevitable (I say) that they will start to work soon-ish.
While it IS true that US non-voters are the most apathetic bunch of losers possible, it will happen that they actually DO become concerned, but only when things get bad for them personally. Within a few (3-5) years from now, the average US worker will start to realise that they are working 10 hours a week more than they used to, but that their standard of living is not improving. This will be entirely due to crazy monetary policy, political mismanagement, Military stupidity, and excessive foreign borrowing.
THIS is when the corruption will be rooted out of the US system, and I predict many thousands of people will go to jail. Not hundreds, but MANY thousands. It might take years for those responsible to be foundout and imprisoned. (And, if the US court system isn't fixed in the meantime, most of the indicted will die of old age before they get a court date.)
Until things actually get worse for average voters (or actually, average non-voters, because they outnumber average voters IIRC) there will be no "political will" to root out the offenders. Sure, the losers of elections will protest loudly, but unless they are supported by a strong electorate, and strong evidence (combined! One by itself just isn't good enough) then the situation will continue as now: The worst democracy money can buy.
The absolute mystery to me, is how the normally sane people of America, have permitted a voting system which does not have a paper component to be implemented. I believe it is all to do with the "housing bubble" which has put so much money into US pcokets that you've all been far too busy buying Hummers, Plasma TVs, Satelite dishes and going out for dinner, to actually see what's been happening to your country.
Pretty soon though, the housing bubble is gonna burst, and that Hummer will cost $300 to fill the tank, and the Plasma TV will suffer burn-in and the Satelite dish will have 27 arab-speaking channels, and 99 Chinese speaking channels, (All you'll be left with in English) is FOX and 195 channels of Sports) and the restaurants will be closed, or feeding you heart-attack food.
THEN and ONLY THEN - will the shit start to hit the fan.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
This is the perfect answer to the "paper voting can be tampered with anyway" point. The current political landscape is a testbed for unfounded moral equivalency. A lie about a blowjob is not the same as a lie about a war, and in the same vein, paper ballot box stuffing is not the same as electronic vote tampering. The latter has far more potential to improperly influence important elections and to undermine the democratic process than its paper counterpart ever did. If you believe at all in the ability of computer technology to make most other tasks simpler and easier, then you have to at least consider the possibility that fixing elections has just become simpler and easier with the advent of the Diebold machines.
No, we're all so wrapped up in which club is the most popular that we don't actually really care how the country runs. Most of us are under the mistaken impression that our system can never go really wrong.
Take you, for instance. I bet you've managed to completely ignore the evidence mounting that Rumsfeld has personally authorized torture, that the war in Iraq was justified by supposed facts that the administration was well aware weren't true, that they leaked the name of a CIA agent for political gain, that there was plenty enough evidence lying around to figure out 9/11 was giong to happen and stop it before it did, that the government has been engaged in illegal spying operations on the American people, and a whole host of other injustices. You cover your ears and close your eyes and shout "Na na, I can't hear you!" like a petulant child while out of the other side of your face you invent all kinds of justifications that you think somehow condone behavior that's blatantly illegal. Not to mention the less flashy corporate corruption inherent in giving all the Iraq reconstruction deals to Haliburton.
At least the Democrats had the decency to be quietly embarassed about Bill Clinton's use of his office for personal gain (Tyson chicken (while he was governer), Whitewater and interns) and his lying on the stand. Republicans get in my face and shout "War is Peace!" "Freedom is Slavery!" "Criticism of the government is unpatriotic!" "Adultery is grounds for impeachment!". Lying on the stand is though, IMHO, but none of the Republicans seemed to be upset about that, perhaps because they didn't want to call attention to a behavior they seem to be so in love with themselves.
Not that I'm all that happy with the Democrats either. They want a nanny socialist state where everybody speaks very softly in order to avoid offending anyone. But I'd rather descend into that than the stick-up-your-ass facism the Republicans want, especially since they to a one seem to be in deep denial about it.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
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.
"Exit poll discrepancies are considered "one tail significant at the five percent level" if there is less than a
.). 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:
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. .
"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).
20 Amazing Facts About Voting In The USA
/03/03_200.html http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/031004Fitraki s/031004fitrakis.html
/pfindex
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
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