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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.""
I agree that this is perhaps THE most pressing issue right now for Americans, but is it really ethical to distribute this kind of information? At what point do you take responsibility for what you post, and NOT diseminate information that, in the wrong hands, will cause what you are trying to prevent?
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
1. Make sure head of company that supplies voting machines is a vociferous supporter of your party ...
2. There is no step two
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
All germans, please sign this petition:
_ petition.asp?PetitionID=294
http://itc.napier.ac.uk/e-Petition/bundestag/view
It currently has 13748 votes.
Thanks!
Are you the RIAA, going on about "stealing" intangible concepts that cannot be stolen? You can't steal an election, any more than you can steal music.
-- The Diebold P2P Network Team
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
It's the only way to be sure...
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
Can we use this to create a CowboyNeal option in the next election.
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
Since you cannot validate the correctness of the election either way, I'd opt for the path which fixes the situation.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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
(libertarian party coming out as first) and get the system fixed subsequently"
If you really want election reform you have to make it in the best interest of the the Dem/Rep party. The best way to do that would be to have a third party victory. As long as someone in the Professional Politicians Club get's elected, the powers that be don't care about voting accuracy. They have no reason to.
We are all just people.
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.
The best thing that can possibly happen for this country and secure elections would be for Buggs Bunny to win 100% of the vote in at least one, preferably multiple districts. Until people see these results come in on election night, they'll never believe that it can really happen.
Ideally, for the layperson you would simply explain that each pricinct's votes are stored in a small database, and that it can simply be edited with a piece of software commonly included in Microsoft's popular Office suite. Then, show a screenshot of access with the GEMS database opened, highlight the vote tally for some candidate, and explain that you simply click in the box and change the number. Then explain how it would be impossible to know what the vote count could be due to the lack of paper...relate it back to punched ballots (just save the ballots and recount em if necessary), optical scanners (again you have the ballots and usually there is a paper log that prints each vote as it is scanned), etc.
All of that is understandable to even the layperson. Most people understand what Microsoft Office is. Most people have heard of a database and understand thats how businesses store all their information. Most people have seen a spreadsheet and a screenshot of someone editing an access database looks almost the same.
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.
Here's my prediction. The control of the House of Representatives in the coming election (which is after all, the most important thing, considering it would give Bush's opponents subpoena power to investigate all the sleazy crap he's pulled), will come down to one extremely close race. This close race will be decided, after a recount, and the Republican candidate will win by less than .01% of the votes.
It will be a virtual repeat of the 2002 and 2004 elections. You see, all this nail-biting, down to the wire, razor-thin margin bullshit gives the idiots who watch TV the feeling that, well "it MUST be legit because it was so darn close" and "if there was anything crooked going on, they'd win decisively".
Wednesday, the 8th of November, we will hear how the "values voters" pulled together at the last minute and despite the fact that all the exit polls showed the Dems winning by a huge margin, the Republicans yet again pulled a miracle out of the hat and retained power. Rush Limbaugh will explain that all the prayers of the good Christian Conservatives is what turned the tide.
Because of the clear crookedness of our electoral system (and did you notice that the regions that the Republicans pulled their upsets in during the last elections were the ones that had Diebold machines?), it is probably too late to expect elections, op-ed columns or clever blogs to make a damn bit of difference.
No, I'm afraid it's going to take people, lots of people, in the streets, being decidedly ill-behaved if we're going to keep this nation anything like the beautiful experiment that the Founding Fathers produced. If the principles of the Enlightenment are going to survive, we're going to have to act the way the heroes who created this country acted: badly. Civil disobedience and mass demonstrations, general strikes and boycotts. There's going to be some fighting before this power-grab by the Authoritarian Right who have masked themselves as "Conservatives" will end.
Despite my general laziness and particular enjoyment of online games like Eve-Online, I am prepared to fight, and if necessary, die, for my country. Even if it means that it will be other Americans that I will have to fight to protect the United States of America.
It's going to take a tamper-proof margin of victory in 11 days if this sleazy little tin-pot dictator in the White House and the crooked pricks who are pulling his strings are going to be stopped. It's the only chance we have to put a little oversight on these bad actors.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Well, you know the old rule: "keep your friends close, and your enemies closer"...
Stallman wouldn't want to execute Raymond too early; it would just precipitate a civil war. You know, BSDers blowing themselves up in LUG meetings, contamination of the Cheetos supply, and caffeinated-beverage shortages. You know, basically all the worst parts of the Bible.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I remember election night in 2000, I was watching CBS I believe. They called Florida for Gore.
The influence of the provably biased media on elections as they are occurring should be a shameful thing to us and disallowed. I know people who were standing in (a long) line in Florida and heard it'd been called for Gore and so didn't bother to vote (for either candidate) after that - talk about sanctioned disenfranchising.
(c/o Matt Blaze)
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
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/
Which is that we don't have an independent media anymore. Rupert Murdoch is as likely to be a whistle blower as Karl Rove is.
Unless we have a real free press, with real media outlets (read: TV, radio, internet, magazine, newspaper, etc.), then we don't have a democracy.
Personally, after watching 911mysteries and other films on related topics, and reviewing the scientific facts for myself, I'm convinced that we already live in 1984, and the only solution is the bloody ugly one that Thomas Jefferson and most of our other founding fathers completely supported.
You did mention the "liberal" media, so you touched on it, but really, when 3 channels are quoting each other with created facts by obvious pundits who are clearly party members.....
You don't have freedom of the press anymore, and it's game over for democracy.
It's been that way since Kennedy got whacked, and on a related issue, that was also our last real election.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
You know, cynicism is addictive, but it's not attractive. You can't think of a single thing that would be different about this country if Al Gore had won the 2000 election?
Would we be at war in Iraq? No.
Would we be running up record deficits? Probably not.
Would we have slashed public services to provide tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans? Hardly.
Would we be torturing people in secret prisons?
Would September 11th have been pumped up into justification for a global war against 'Islamofascism?'
Yes, both sides are pretty deep in the pockets of corporations. Both sides are often self-serving at the expense of both their stated ideals and the good of the country. Neither side is offering up solutions that really satisfy me. But to say there is "no difference" is just whiny, and promotes the sort of apathy that corrupt systems thrive on.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
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/
" China and India, the two most populus countries in the world, had high population growth, but now that their economy has dramatically improved their birth rates are dropping."
Do you actually have a reference to support this or did you pluck it out of your....
Amoung others Foreign Policy magazine had an article on this. Unfortunately as their online archives is subscription based and I don't have a subscription I can't provide a link. I have to admit though you pointed out something I left out about China, that China has a one child one couple policy. And while rural areas don't directly feel the economic boom in China more and more people are moving from the countryside to cities. Wish I could find one article from "Foreign Policy" but they had an article on one of the fastest growing cities in central China that said thousands of Chinese are moving to every day. This releases some of the economic pressure on rural areas. As for India, farmers are experiencing hardships with many committing suicide. They don't have open access to the industrial nations such as the US and EU, and the US and EU can import into India agricultural products relatively cheaply. That's a big reason the WTO meetings failed in Europe this summer. Because the EU wouldn't talk about opening their markets to imports and the massive subsidies the EU gives to farmers the Indian representative walked out.
If China and India weren't benefitting from an economic boom then neither would be able to finance the US national debt, and China and India are the biggest buyers of US Treasury bonds and notes respectively.
FalconShould there be a Law?