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HBO's Hacking Democracy Available Online
prostoalex writes "HBO's controversial special 'Hacking Democracy' on issues with Diebold voting machines is now available in full on Google Video." Covered earlier on Slashdot, the documentary seems to have gathered quite a bit of heat from Diebold in addition to the one that didn't air.
What's the legal status of that video being there?
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
Great documentary.
Despite the fact that I have very little faith in the electoral process in the USA, and no confidence at all in the election results - what I still retain faith in is the way that US citizens will not stand idly by, while democracy is stolen from them, whether it be by design, or by mistake (it's immaterial really, either way).
The important thing is that the US system of checks and balances permits citizens to kick up an almighty stick about the systems which count (or fail to count, or alter, even worse!) their votes.
The only question in my mind is this: can the citizens of the USA kick up a big enough stink, and fast enough, to produce a fair election in 2008. Somehow, I doubt it, sadly.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Of course, ATMs are capable of providing a paper receipt and the accuracy of ATM actions are routinely audited by average citizens with a vested interest in the accuracy of an ATM's tabulations.
Voting machines are much harder. See with ATMs there's trust on all parts except the final operator. The ATM trusts the bank fully and does whatever it says. The bank could lie to the ATM and say you had no money, or tell it you had money you didn't. However they have no reason to do that since the amount they could steal that way is peanuts and they'd be shut down over it. So what it comes down to is you can trust the owner of it, you just need to make sure the person using it can't break in and steal money.
Not the case with a voting machine. Here you can't really trust, well, anyone. The person who controls the machine might very well want to change the results so you have to have a system to keep them from doing that. It's a much harder problem.
It would be somewhat analogue to why encryption works for SSH but not for copy protection. With SSH you are trying to keep everyone out except for trusted parties. You trust the server, it trusts you (if you authenticate). All the people who should have keys. However for copy protection you want to keep everyone out, even the person who you are giving the software to in the end. You want them to have use but not access. Well it doesn't work like that, the key has to be there somewhere and thus the encryption is mostly just for show.
So that's actually part of the problem here. Diebold just kinda decided to apply their ATM design to voting machines, but that doesn't work because voting machines are a much harder problem.
>> the accuracy of ATM actions are routinely audited by average citizens with a vested interest in the accuracy of an ATM's tabulations.
it's really too bad that average citizens don't have any vested interest in the accuracy of a voting machine's tabulations...
Yeah, those silly Democrats. They're not happy if Republicans steal an election with paper ballots, they're not happy if Republicans steal them with electronic ballots. How do they want you to steal them, eh?
Well, if you ask me, the deal is that the Bush machine is getting ready to pull some fast ones tomorrow, and they expect they're going to have some peculiar "upsets" that need to be explained away, so they're sending folks like yourself around to soften up the crowd in advance. But hey, some people think I'm paranoid.
Aw, poor baby. You might lose some karma.
Alright people, there should be no talking for 1 hr 21 min 57 secs after the post, or else you didn't WTFM!
True, unless you are one of the people who already noticed it was posted to Google before Slashdot posted it.
I was in the educational videos last night watching the "Physics for Future Presidents" lectures. (great stuff!) I noticed the Dibold video in my search results. That was some pretty hot stuff and covered some pretty blarring problems including official records in the trash and other serious descrepancys.
The memory card hack was the most impressive with the test of the system with 8 votes. 2 for and 6 against votes cast in the test with the memory card hack. The offical results show serious problems with the result showing 7 yes and one no in the official verified total.
My hats off to the lady who started it all.
The truth shall set you free!
This is exactly the point the parent was making! It's turning into 'If we Dems don't win, then the election must have been a fraud! It's the only explanation!".
It doesn't matter how people vote or how many safeguards are put in place, if the dems lose this one then you'll hear the "Video the Vote" people apologizing that they were not vigilant enough to stop all the crimes they know were being committed. You didn't see it, we didn't record it, there is no proof, but it happened and you should be outraged!!.
I don't think you're paranoid, I think you're a sheep baah'ing with the rest of your herd.
No, he would lose karma. You may not have noticed, but slashdot isn't exactly (or in any manner) a safe place to criticize the floundering democratic party. *SHOCK!!*.
I'm not saying that there is never any corruption, but you act like bush has minions at every voting station actively working against those who would vote against him. Are you so blinded by partisan stupidity that you believe there aren't just as many rabid bush haters doing the exact same thing? You are not on the "right" side, you're just on the one that decided to look feeble and play the victim card as their strategy.
So the demonstration at the end showed how this could work - they voted in a fake election. They had six votes for "Yes" and two votes for "No". They put in the hacked memory card and it produces the initial printout which shows zero votes for no and zero votes for yes. After entering in the votes through the machine it comes out as seven for "Yes" and one for "No" (so I guess they had -5 "No" and +5 for "Yes" on the hacked card).
Just to set the record straight;
The vote was can the machine be hacked?
6 no votes were cast and 2 yes votes were cast.
The pre count showed no votes cast for either option and no votes cast.
After the count (optical scan) the official verified result was 7 yes and one no.
My question is - why did the initial printout show zero votes?
The initial votes on the card were zero..
The important question is.. How did the final count get altered?
Answer.. The card that does not contain a program actualy does contain a program. That program altered the result. Re-watch the film. The card contains much more than just the poll totals which is denied by the manufacture.
I would hope the machines would format any card at the start of an election and then write the encrypted count totals to the card and nothing else except a checksum and the machine ID number.
The truth shall set you free!
It's been proposed, and even implemented. Not popular with the election officials due to expense and maintenance hassle.
"Auditing of any sort" is one thing. Auditing packaged such that the states' election officials are willing to actually buy it is a different matter.
Almost as much as fraud, is that you can hit one button and vote a straight party ticket (at least here in NC.) What ever happened to knowing were a candidate stands on the issues? Doesn't the constitution state that votes will be cast for the CANDIDATE of your choosing, not the party? Also, here in NC write-ins aren't allowed in partisan races. You have to choose Rep or Dem or nothing at all. The only non-partisan race that I saw was for "Soil and Water Conservation District Manager". We can bitch about voter fraud all we want, but until you are allowed to vote for anyone you want, it's not a fair election.
I remember as a kid, there were some kids that were obsessed with "cheating" to the point that playing with them was nearly impossible. At a certain point I realized (often as they were redefining the rules of the game as we were playing it) that they had the slogan, "Either I win, or you cheated..." Technology can be scary, but elections have had a "fudge-factor" since they were created. The best way to win an election is to keep it from being really close. Typically that's based upon good ideas, not on blaming the voting machines. --Ray
http://www.beanleafpress.com
Liberal speech isn't necessarily anti-American speech, unless ytou buy into the whole neocon bit of 'Only we can save the Republic. You're either for us, or you're with the terrists'.
I stand behind the nation, not the bozo who happens to hang out at 1600 Pennsylvania. According to law, it's just a temp job, and eventually he'll be gone...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Yeah, and the Republicans are really good at that one. You got to hand it to them, whenever they're under-fire they go on a really strong counter-attack (kind of like this one).
Bullshit. You don't have documentation of that.
Now this at least actually happened. Against the long litany of sins in Ohio in 2004, against the use of hired thugs to interfere with the vote count in Florida in 2000, you can point to this one mindless prank.Hardly. But they cheat so well! Or at least, the new breed of Republicans do... give 'em one or two more elections and maybe we can forget about the rest of them.
To quote an interview with Steven Freeman:
I'm glad you're not the kind of moron i was by trying to impersonate to entertain myself. ;)
As you said, Bush will certainly be gone at some point, however, that will not in any way stop USA from being one badly retarded democracy. What I'm referring to is the very dirty way political campaigning is done, probably to some extent on both sides. Removing Bush won't remove the basically flawed concept of e-voting and the extra fraudulent elements that have been in the air lately, neither will it eliminate the horrible voting experience of standing in a line for hours that some people seem to go through. Same goes for that pathetic excuse for a judicial system and the presence of corporate interest national decision making.
- The "safeguards" in place border on the non-existant at this point. No one who understands those DRE machines thought they were a good idea.
- I would not believe the 2004 election was stolen were it not for
- the patterns in the exit-poll data discrepancies
- the huge number of conventional election corruption techniques deployed in Ohio.
In other words, you can spin, spin, spin all you want, but there's a reality-based world out there, and some day the truth (if you will excuse the expression) will out.You ask an excellent question. Would folk be outraged if their candidate had won?
...)
I'll venture a guess. If the Democrats had won amidst the same widespread reports of electoral fraud, many of them would suffer the same bias and belittling of outrage that many vocal Republicans have demonstrated.
Anyone want something like a percentage comparison? Just how many more or fewer Democrats would be assholes and hypocrites about a rigged election that served them versus Republicans? Homey don't play that. If you're curious and you think it's important, you're a fool. It's called sectarianism. It's called an "Us v. Them" mentality, and it is destructive.
(... hundreds of Slashdot readers immediately start trying to perceive me as being from their favorite whipping boy opposing party
Every one of you that's taking a side and rabidly generalizing about the standard opposing party is failing to realize that they're being used. Do you think "Dems blow!"? Or maybe "Damned Republitards!"? You are a tool, controlled with psychological forces seeded by greedy and self-serving players, amplified in an ugly dynamic between our innate tendencies and media pandering. You have failed to question the system. You fail it!
The truth is that every candidate is different, that there is a wide variety of (actual, not professed) platforms, regardless of party affiliation, despite all this damned gravity of conformity and majority voting pulling politics to these polar ideological centers of mass.
If I were on the winning side of an election, I'd be perfectly fine with supporting electoral reform that ensured accurate counting of each and every vote. Is it because I'd be so gracious? Does that really matter? What matters more is that I'd have the goddamned foresight to realize that nobody's political position is safe from electoral fraud and it wouldn't matter anyway if your fucking country were on a rocket sled shooting down the chute of corruption into a dystopic authoritarian septic pond of a future.
Securing the vote can only help. Regardless of your team's color.
openvotingconsortium.org
verifiedvoting.org
(And if we can get well-working electronic voting instated, we'll be one step closer to implementing a method that helps to combat the ills of majority voting.)
Are you so blinded by partisan stupidity that you believe there aren't just as many rabid bush haters doing the exact same thing?
Wow. If people doing the same thing on the other side, there is no problem? The problem is that people are able to do this in the first place! Which party is doing it is completely immaterial. (especially to me, I don't even live in the US)
Put it this way: I trust "Hacking Democracy" about as much as I trust Diebold. I really wish Moore hadn't brought us the trash-umentary genre. There's enough bullshit to filter out there without these people adding to it. Unfortunately, I suspect that many people--in their quest to bury Diebold--will overlook the obvious bullshit and let it by just because they happen to agree with the motives.
The ends do not justify the means.
The thing is you can't possibly deny that, say, Diebold Accuvote machines aren't pieces of swiss-cheese as far as vote security is concerned, and you can't possibly deny that the management of the big electronic voting companies (Diebold and ES&S) have a known Republican bias -- both of those points are tremendously well documented. The one and only thing you can possibly deny is that maybe those two points weren't put together to steal the 2004 election -- except that there is that nasty little problem of explaining away the peculiarly large exit-poll discrepancies that correlated with the use of those voting machines.
Hence, I vehemently deny your accusation that this is all Democratic spin, and I reiterate that this is just an attempt at Republican counter-spin.
El wrongo... if you really believe that (and I find it unlikely that you really do) you're not paying attention.
Well, at the moment it's a little hard to believe that, because all polls seem to agree that most people are sick of the Iraq war, and annoyed at the Bush regime's handling of it. The American people can be a little slow on occasion, but they do catch on eventually (you know, "some of the people some of the time" and so on, as was once said by a man who doesn't deserve to be associated with the current crop of people calling themselves Republicans).
What is so hard to believe about Karl Rove engaging in an internet astro-turf campaign? Wouldn't it seem weird if he didn't try something like that?
In any case, I'm not suggesting that every conservative voice on slashdot is necessarily a hired Republican-sock puppet. What I am saying is that there's a surprising number of folks doing mindless reiteration of the same pretty lame talking points, like "Oh the democrats do it too!", or "oh polls are so inaccurate", or "oh you're just a tinfoil hat conspiracy nut like those 9/11 truthies!" Those folks, I find, shall we say, suspicious.
It must be biased. We just don't realize that The Democrats Do It Too (so it must be okay).
In any case: if anyone is so whacked as to still be reading this: don't get so wrapped up in the "the elections are rigged!" business that you don't bother voting. Yeah, they're rigged, but none of us know how badly they're rigged, and if it's just a finger on the scale (and not a two-ton weight) we need all the legit voters out there we can get.
The USA used to be considered by the greatest democracy of the world.
The obvious erosion of democracy, the strong evidence of tampering with eletions, the lying about evidence in the USA in order to start a war has a horrible effect not only in the US, but globally.
One of the latest example has just recently happened in Hungary, where the re-elected socialist Prime Minister said on tape for the inner circle of his party that while in power, they were "lying day and night for the fucking country", they "fucked up the country as no other country has been fucked up in Europe", he admitted to feed even the EU with false numbers.
Once the speech went public, it triggered outrage of the voters, which lead to weeks of demonstrations, demanding the resignation of the Prime Minister. The disgraced Prime Minister has refused to resign, he and his supporters happily pointed out, that all politicians in all country lie in order to win the elections.
It's obvious, that if the Bush government had a different record, the Prime Minister of this new democracy would have had much more difficult time to stay in office, claiming that "all piliticians lie - even in the world's greatest democracy".
It's ironic, that while Mr. Bush is trying to export freedom and democracy with weapons in Iraq, his actions at home and the increasing irregularities of democracy in the USA, as documented in the excellent HBO program, spread exactly the opposite around the world.
Well okay. As long as you promise not to drown the facts in another "he said/she said" shouting match.
Oops, too late.
I think the Democrats are too timid to cross the street without a helicopter, the idea of them committing election fraud on the scale that the Republicans have been getting away with is completely laughable.
Even if it were really the case that the Democrats were just as slimey as those damn Republicans, then what? Would everything suddenly be okay? Oh wait: if you thought that were true, you might feel too apathetic to bother going out to vote. Is that the concept here?
Hm... so those specs of dirt over there justify the wallowing in the mud over here?
*phffft*. There are so many things wrong with this kind of thing, I don't know where to start. (1) You don't think Democrats internally reexamine their positions? You can turn-around without stumbling over some monday-morning quarterback explaining their grand scheme to get out the word, get out the vote, and really win one next time. (2) These people very, very rarely have a grasp of the possibility that the Democrats really have been winning: it is now eminently possible to win the vote and lose the election. The idea that The Democrats just won't shut up about election fraud is ridiculous: Mark Crispin Miller has been arguing that they're in denial about how bad the problem is, and he may well be right.
What do they have to worry about? That's the mantra of a large percentage of Americans. Probably the same ones who, over the past couple of decades, in survey after survey, say that Americans have "too much" freedom. These are the people (and companies) that scare me. Not the Republicans.
In 2000, the Democrats said that the Republicans stole the election because of the confusing butterfly ballots and that we needed a new and modern way of voting. Now that we have it,
Yup, just that like that guest I served in the restaurant yesterday. He complain there was no sauce on the steak, so I took it back and gave him a new one with sauce but this time no fries. But guess what: he still complained. Sheesh, there's no pleasing some people.
Look, everyone agrees the old system was hopeless. Does that mean we have to accept whatever crap we are offered as a replacement? The main complaint with the voting machines is really very simple: the results are unverifiable. Even if no other actual problems were found (although they have), this really should disqualified the Diebold machines. It is a very simple point, very easy to understand, and very easy to understand the importance of. If you don't get this, you are not smart enough to vote.
The fix is well known: keep a paper trail. Now here's the hard part: That does not mean a return to badly designed paper based mechanical voting. Got that? Yes, I know the word "paper" is involved in both but don't be fooled by that. Really: they are still not the same thing, and they do not share the same problems. Trust me on this, or better still, just think it over for two seconds.
So the only question left is why would anyone oppose the fix, except if they stand to gain from errors and/or manipulation that the fix would prevent?
sudo ergo sum
Bullshit. You don't have documentation of that.
Did you notice, by the way, that the only actual fraud in 2004 the HBO documentary FOUND was 200 votes stolen FROM Bush in the "troublesome in 2000" Florida precinct they went after first?
(Of course this is still consistent with the theory that, in 2004, the Republicans knew how to rig things untracably and the Democrats had to do their cheating in a tracable way.)
But I'm happy to see the R's take all the heat on this one. That way the D's will be SO paranoid about having things yanked out from under them that they may actually be willing to sign on to a bill that attacks ALL forms of vote fraud - even the ones massively in their favor - if it fixes the potentially overriding "black box voting" problem.
Meanwhile, the bulk of the R officials believe that the Ds do most of the cheating and derive most of the benefits. (And that, even if they were being used in the R's favor, the blackbox hacks are now both blown and available to all parties.) So they'd perceive such a bill as being in their favor.
For the rest of us, eliminating ALL cheating, computerized or otherwise, is in our interest and what we want.
Right?
I think that documentary was brilliant:
- Democrats see the Republicans stealing the elections.
- Republicans see the Democrats stealing the elections.
- So both of them work for cleaning up the process.
Which is exactly what *I* want. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way