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How to Hack the Vote and Steal the Election
divisionbyzero writes "Many people have asked for it so that the government will have to deal with it. So here it is: a guide to stealing an election that uses electronic voting machines written by Jon Stokes over at Arstechnica.
From the article:
"In all this time, I've yet to find a good way to convey to the non-technical public how well and truly screwed up we presently are, six years after the Florida recount. So now it's time to hit the panic button: In this article, I'm going to show you how to steal an election.""
Its already been done.
From the referenced url: '"Electronic voting machines also caused widespread problems in Florida, where Bush bested Kerry by 381,000 votes. When statistical experts from the University of California examined the state's official tally, they discovered a disturbing pattern: "The data show with 99.0 percent certainty that a county's use of electronic voting is associated with a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases in support for President Bush between 2000 and 2004."'
'Charles Stewart III, an MIT professor who specializes in voter behavior and methodology, was initially skeptical of the study - but was unable to find any flaw in the results. "You can't break it - I've tried," he told The Washington Post. "There's something funky in the results from the electronic-machine Democratic counties."'
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Folks, if there's gonna be wholesale election fraud, a smart fraudster is going to do it where nobody is looking. Don't expect it to take place in the precincts that make the news for irregularities.
Expect it to take place in places where Candidate X carries 70-75% of the vote.
That is, expect it to take place in places where Candidate X carries 75-80% of the vote.
If you don't want anyone to notice you're doing it, do it where nobody will notice; if the election is close enough (which so many of them are,) your candidate will carry the day.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Yes, you are missing something. The entire article is available. You just have to click through it page by page. The PDF is a convenience for subscribers. You can make your own PDF with just a little work if that's what you need.
In an article that exposes flaw after flaw in the electronic voting system, the one thing that really made my jaw drop is that the master vote tabulation is stored in an Access database. To my mind, Access is crippleware designed for quick-n-dirty solutions on small data sets for people that don't know any better. Putting it into a production application is madness. Madness!
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
Repeat this process for http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information
After about a thousand folks do this, a staffer might actually go print out the story and hand it to their congresscritter in a brief.
I'd also like to ask the Ars Technica people to make an exception for this story and make the PDF available to non-subscribers, as it would really help to disseminate this story to the right people. I'm not really sure how to go about contacting them.
Here's my letter (slightly munged of course by slashdot):
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
If you're not convinced the election has been stolen, check out this excerpt from an article by McNeills:
Res publica non dominetur
Unbelieveably, Diebold actually has an ecommerce site where you can buy all their electronic voting machine products online, including memory cards, security tape, and access keys. I'm really hoping they verify that you're an elections official before they actually ship the stuff to you:
http://www.diebold.com/nasadmk/cgi-bin/desi_cata log.pl?section=9
Here you go - buy a dozen keys, for you and your friends:
http://www.diebold.com/nasadmk/cgi-bin/desi_cata log.pl?section=9&id=163
On a funny/sad note, the front page of their election products site as a glaring coding error (%=rs("newsdate")%):
http://www.diebold.com/dieboldes/
> However, if you leave your personal philosophies out of the equation: what's to say that genocide is wrong, in absolute terms?
Well hell, if you leave personal philosophies out, there's no such thing as "wrong" at all. And if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle! You can argue from the lack of an absolute morality, but you certainly can't deny that personal moralities exist, and are in large part shared by societies. Most moralities are squishy enough to support inconsistencies, but any morality that not only allows, but actually supports glaring contradictions, needs to be reevaluated. Thus does gay marriage create a bigger knot than genocide across the world.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Ok, cracks about my (in)famous lack of humility aside, you have a great point. This article took me a week from concept to execution, and over half that time was spent making the diagrams. Ultimately, I did a little over two days of basic technical research for this (including email correspondence with security experts in this area). I am not an infosec expert and I don't pretend to be--I'm just good at digesting tech info and turning it into a form that a non-specialist audience can grasp.
There are many Slashdot readers who could get up to speed on how to really steal an election in about half a day (or less) using publicly available documentation. The hardware isn't that complex at all, and the vulnerabilities in Windows (for the GEMS server) and WinCE (for the machine) are very well-known.
What I've described here is very, very low-hanging fruit for anyone with real security expertise.
Senior CPU Editor | Ars Technica | http://arstechnica.com/
Using the internet and its almost unlimited capacity to copy data around, I'm designing a system that aims to be simple and trustable.
It's easy yet disturbing. We can obtain a secure system if we remove anonymity. Then it's almost simple, distribute around the vote database and allow anybody to check the results.
In that kind of context, verification is mostly a technicality and could rely on consensus.
To regain some bit of anonymity, there can be a system of reinscription on the electoral list using a pseudo. Simple too, and while the person/pseudo relationship is private, everything else remains public and verifiable.
There are three basic stones in such a system:
* P2P servers
* electoral list
* PGP signatures
Simple, basic, strong.
I'm trying to construct such a system using Ruby on Rails, here is my project: http://leparlement.org/
You can also come discuss security here: http://leparlement.org/security
It's a moderated forum *and* a mailing list. Please, come and test it!
There were lots before OS-X, Not sure how easy it is to find info about them, since they were pre-internet, but they exist, passed mostly by floppies.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Please do not confuse religious fascists with Christians. They might call themselves that, but they are not. There are plenty of decent Christians out there.
Schneier recently wrote up such a proposal using only paper ballots coby Rivest of RSA fame.