Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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!
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:
- 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.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.
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