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Deathblow To a Voting Machine
SiggyRadiation writes "According to their newsletter (my English translation here), the Dutch group that 'doesn't trust the voting computers' has won a round against the industry and the civil servants that seem hell-bent on reintroducing voting machines — NewVote, made by SDU — that the Dutch minister of the interior has suspended. Apparently SDU provided 5 slightly different samples of its machine to the Dutch version of the NSA (well... the very humble Dutch version anyway) for testing purposes. Of those five, four machines emitted radiation in such a way that the votes cast could be monitored. SDU's NewVote received its final deathblow when it became clear that the one machine that stayed within the radiation limits used a green-on-red color-scheme for its screen. And that would be a small problem for the 4% of all men that cannot distinguish between red and green."
Observer: "Looks like somebody voted for Dammechien Peteersrotmensenpoepjespiestnaaktgeborenzeldenthu
My work here is dung.
the one machine that stayed within the radiation limits used a green-on-red color-scheme for its screen.
Santa Claus has been rigging the elections! You sly old elf!
In fact, during the general assembly elections of november 2006 a lot of counties decided to revert to old-skool paper and pencil voting because of the same issues. Wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl has done some excellent work!
Yes, this is a blow, but in the end, electronic voting will overcome the shortcomings and the missteps and become they way to cast one's ballot. While there are presently insecurites and faults in the machines those will eventually be minimized so that they become more reliable and less fallible than traditional voting methods (which of course are less than infallible --but many don't want to acknowlewdge that.)
One of the many good points Rob made during his talk at last year's 23C3 in Berlin was to call the things voting computers as opposed to voting machines. Machine is associated with a simple, understandable and verifiable piece of gear, while computers are very complex, difficult to understand even by experts and unverifiable. Although the commonly used term (in Dutch) was machines, too, they exclusively referred to computers, and within a fairly short period of time everybody called them that way. In a way this was their first major success. Funnily enough, when they - much later - got hold of an actual device, the label on the back said voting computer, too: that's what the manufacturer had called them all along, internally, that is.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
I remember reading about this in a Neal Stephenson novel (Cryptonomicon) some years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking I guess thats what they mean by "radiation", and wikipedia seems to confirm it.
"Of those five, four machines emitted radiation in such a way that the votes cast could be monitored."
Some tin foil would solve that problem.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
"NewVote received its final deathblow when it became clear that the one machine that stayed within the radiation limits used a green-on-red color-scheme for its screen. And that would be a small problem for the 4% of all men that cannot distinguish between red and green."
Good heavens. As a a person with good old-fashioned red/green colourblindness I assure you that this statement is false.
There is no way that 4% of men can't distinguish between red and green. There's some difficulty in some circumstances, but a green on red colour screen on a voting machine would almost certainly be readable. They'll use high-contrast hues.
The vast majority of red-green colourblindness results from a cone deficiency. In some circumstances it's difficult to make out some differences, but if I see a red shirt, I know it's red and not green. Green lettering on the red shirt would likely be completely readable.
However, I seldom see purple. Usually it looks blue to me.
The "Wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet" protesters has been manouevred into a corner by the industry and the state. The group's principal argument has always been this:
"Voting machines (without a paper trail) make it impossible to verify the fairness of an election"
In addition, they have gone to show how election results could be manipulated, and how cast votes could be read from outside the polling station. The protesters have had a lot of success getting a number of machines removed from the elections, and they have certainly managed to put the issue onto the political agenda and the public debates. However, with all this media coverage, they are failing to state, re-state and re-re-state their principle argument: that there is a fundamental problem with using voting machines. I have never heard one of their spokespersons state that fixing these small problems with the computers is not enough, and is basically a side-issue. The machine's proponents have taken this opportunity to turn the fundamental problem into a side-issue.
The press, politicians (who want to use voting machines) and the voting machine manufacturers jumped on the issue, stating: "You are right, there's an issue with certain machines but we'll get it fixed". When the machines get fixed, the protest group's role will have been played out. Any subsequent complaints about the fundamental issues with voting machines will be dismissed by the public as whining from a group who are just looking for any excuse to go on protesting.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
It doesn't take someone colour-blind/deficient to realize that green text on a red background is one of the fugliest and unpractical colour schemes one could possibly come up with. Why not try teal on light-brown next time guys? Oh I got one: orange on yellow. That will totally enhance the quality of any application. Seriously.
"Deathblow: When someone kills you not because of who you are, but for other reasons entirely"
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
It's nice to see that someone cares about the secrecy of the voting process, but I would think that integrity in the vote count itself would take a much higher priority over this issue.
In some remote way, it reminds me of the military's concern long ago (and largely before my time) over the use of IBM Selectric typewriters, as the RF emissions (i.e. coils and motors starting and stopping, a primitive spark-gap transmitter in a sense) from the mechanisms could be detected and reconstituted into what was being typed from a short distance away.
ahref=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TEMPESTrel=url2 html-3260http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TEMPEST>
a few years ago this was a big deal and everyone was worried that the government was going to use radiation emitted by CRT monitors to reconstruct what was on the screen, people even made special fonts that minimized this by blurring and breaking up the edges of glyphs.
then LCD's became cheap enough for just about anyone to buy.
i wonder if these machines use a CRT monitor
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I love technology as much as the next guy, but what's wrong with paper voting? Canada uses it, it scales nicely, there's a perfect record of who voted for what, with a nice X right there. You can track ballots in, and ballots out. Nobody knows who put the X on the paper.
Pushy sales jobs make me nervous, and these things are being hawked like a $500 used car.
..don't panic
I for one welcome our zombie voting machines overlords.
Shakespeare poems - infinite monkeys with infinite time.Computer tech support - a few trained ones working from 9 to 5.
We want them gone because their integrity and reliability are in question, not whether they meet the "ADA" (or equivalent in other countries) requirements or that voter privacy might be violated.
In fact, having a machine that specifically reads voter responses for the purpose of comparing them with the machine's reported voting results might be an EXCELLENT thing. If the tally's don't match, we'd know something was afoot.
If someone can tell who you voted for, your vote is completely worthless and should not be counted at all.
A union leader or employer could demand that you vote for a certain candidate and verify that you obeyed. Someone could offer you money to vote one way or another, paying up after the vote has been verified--and people complain about votes being "bought and sold" now. A person may indicate one way on an open petition to avoid being ostracized, but can vote his true feelings on a secret ballot. This is a cornerstone of free society.
FairTax baby!
Who cares about the votes anyway, once elected, not ONE politician will remember what he said to get in his place..
Democracy is a myth.
Won't wotk ever, since the only way to have time to become a succeful politician is to be rich enough (or famous enough, kind of the same more than often) so he can be known.
So the best we can have is either oligarchy or dictatorship....
And about ideas, people only want to hear 'less work and more fun...'
They'll make the modifications, and it will be back by the next election.
/.
Never let the truth get in the way of a sensational headline
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
in the last election, the result for president only last 2 hours. And we have 115 million people voting. Since 2000 we have 100% eletronic voting sistem.
A Dutch citizen group "Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet" ("We do not trust voting machines"), released a report performing a secuirty review of the the Nedap/Groenendaal ES3B voting systems. Chapter 6 (page 14) covers "Compromising emanations" (i.e. TEMPEST). The Nedap machines are DRE systems, but are not a traditional touchscreen. They use an electromechanical touch sensitive full-face ballot interface (similar to the Shouptronic). However, the TEMPEST issues were not related to the input features, but rather the small LCD screen used to verify votes. Similar to many optical scan voting system readers.
While the subject of compromising emanations is one that deserves attention, ultimately what allowed relevant information to be interpreted from the emissions was that a major political party's name contains an accents, an extended ASCII character (Christen Democratisch Appèl) resulting in an emissions variation, something less likely to be a serious concern in the United states.
"Radiation"
Do not think your standard definition for radiation. Think more like spurious emission. It doesn't mean the voting machine runs on Plutonium... These types of emissions are released at some level from all electronic devices. It only becomes a problem when the emissions escape the device housing.
Report
Check out the full report. It's a pretty interesting look in this one particular voting machine.
"Death Blow: Where someone tries to blow you up, not because of who you are, but for different reasons altogether."
http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheLittleKicks.htm
"But this one goes to 11!"
"humble version of the NSA"???
Do your homework before making such a claim, the AIVD (and previously the BVD) are very heavy agencies, that carefully maintain their "boyscout" image...
If you would know what you were talking about you would not say this...
When you put voting in machines you take it from the voters. period.
The USA military doesn't code our hi-tech weapons with Al Qaeda does it? (even back when we were allies) For voting, both "sides" of the political conflict can not be totally excluded nor can you be sure that they are.
BILLIONS of dollars are at stake and LIVES are at stake. This is proper motivation to exploit any system. No man-made and man-operated system can be completely foolproof (unless we find a way to remove the fool from the man.)
A magic black box takes your vote and counts it-- that should sound STUPID to anybody who isn't mystified by computers and knows they don't just magically work.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I wonder why this was modded -1, Overrated? Does the moderator not know that terahertz actually can see through walls? Too lazy to look it up in wikipedia? That water will actually block it? No mod category for "-1, disagree"? Maybe they are European and want to make their own selves look better? Didn't realize that something can't be overrated if it's not rated yet at all? Apparently I'm on somebody's "foes" list.
Why don't we make a reality TV show out of the election?
Think about it. You get the candidates on TV, mebbe have them compete somehow. Have some experts in politics and government ask them questions that the candidates must answer. We can even have them tour the country making public appearances to try and gather support!
And here's the best part: The people actually get to vote for who gets to be President! Just send a text message to 1-800-VOTEUSA and choose your favorite candidate!
Imagine the ratings!
Does anyone know whether electronic ink displays are subject to EM snooping? Given the low refresh rates, I would wonder whether there's enough there to read.
The AIVD's budget is a tiny fraction of the NSA's budget. They're good at what they do, but their scope is limited.
>There's some difficulty in some circumstances, but a green on red colour screen on a voting machine would almost certainly be readable. They'll use high-contrast hues.
Green on Red with high contrast hues?! It may be readable by 4% of men, but 90% should get a splitting headache, and the remaining 6% will most likely end up having seizures.
In relation to the country they have a very realistic budget, and they use it well...
To call them humble shows a total lack of understanding of the organization.
And that would be a small problem for the 4% of all men that cannot distinguish between red and green
My dad is one of those one in 25 men who can't tell red from green. My Uncle was, as well. I remember when I was a little kid I had some board game with red and green squares; land on red you did one thing, green you did another. I played my dad and uncle and got mad, thinking they were trying to cheat. They just couldn't tell the difference.
My dad got a ticket in Arizona for running a red light. It seems the light was installed upside down; men like him go when the light on the bottom is lit, not being able to tell red from green.
He's still pissed about them changing stop signs from yellow to red, forty years later. See, with tis type of color difficiency a stop sign is almost invisible any time there's vegetation. Imagine how many accidents there would be if all stop signs were green!
I'd like to see a bright yellow outline around stop signs, with the lettering in bright yellow, just so I didn't get hit by one of these guys.
Whoever designed these red and green machines is incredibly stupid! Almost as dumb as you web designers who use absolute values for your teeny typefaces; there are a lot more geezers than red/green color deficient men.
Oh, and before one of you politically correct dimwits harass me about "he" and "men", women can't get this type of seeing problem, although men get it from their mothers. I'm safe, but my sister's boys were in danger of getting it.
My car is neither simple, understandable nor (by me) verifiable, although my computer is, at least as far as I'm concerned; I built the damned thing! However, you can't diagnose a car's problems without a very expensive piece of equipment. I can fix about any malfunction on your PC. But a car? Hell, I can't even change my own oil any more!
From the dictionary:
A computer is a machine, regardless of what you or Rob says or thinks.
I used to think that voting was relatively constant over the years. That is, until I did a paper on it last semester. "voting as we have for the last few centuries" turns out to be totally inaccurate. Our voting systems have constantly been evolving over the past few centuries. I mean drastically. For a long time, the states of the US didn't even have a secret ballot. Voters stood on the steps of the court house and declared their vote to a recorder (vowing that they hadn't voted before in another town).
There have been many variations between where we were then, and where we are now. There will be more changes in the future. Hopefully each time will be a step forward, and not a step back.
(I lean toward electronic voting with VVPAT, and IRV or Condorcet. Not to mention mandatory random audits)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Why not use the RFID chip in my new national ID card to serve as the tracking method for voting? If that isn't secure enough, we could use Patriot Act warrantless wiretaps to listen for anyone talking about voting twice. If we catch anyone, send them to Gitmo to be water tortured until they tell us how they did it. Then that person's name (say 'John Smith' for example) would be placed on a national "Do Not Vote" list and there would be no recourse for getting his/her named removed. Simple, effective, and uses existing technology. Why are this voting machine companies trying to re-invent the wheel?
Why not just throw it in with the hundreds of receipts you already save for income tax?
Remember, it's ELECTRONIC ink - that doesn't leak :-).
:-), but the actual energy involved in a refresh is also lower so the overall potential to pick up EM is lower.
In all seriousness, though, I suspect you're right. Not only is the refresh rate of these displays low (so no use for B&W films
However, without anyone testing I would not assume to be right yet. Leave the chicken wire and the tin foil hat in place for now..
Insert
This provides us with the advantage that the the party which employs the best techs wins. So we would then end up with government officials that can tell the difference between a person who knows what they are talking about and a buzz word compliant idiot.
This will hopefully filter down to remove people from the industry who create the loopholes in the first place by not knowing proper/secure coding practices. Which will in turn require better techs to crack thus making the whole e-Industry more robust and secure. (Or is this a wild pipe dream?)
Electronic voting does not have to be this hard!!! People can use a vending machine - why don't we make voting machines like them?
It's simple: you have 32 buttons and a single, old-fashioned red LED display. Each of the 32 buttons can hold a few lines of text. Then, you display instructions on the main screen, and change the buttons accordingly. So when you vote for "Bob Smith", the BIG button you put says "Bob Smith". Why are we screwing around with this? Let's do things the old-fashioned way: with dedicated hardware.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
All right. Can someone please explain why is it neccesary to have a COMPUTER for a function that's equivalent of picking 1 option out of option matrix of 0-255 (or whatever)?
You could have laughably simple programmable logic to do that, which could be exhaustively audited for backdoors and whatnot. Using something like CE is equivalent of using a flamethrower inside your home to kill a bee..
I design electronics for living so please use all the big words you like..
And for the summary.. This is a deathblow? Because they identified some problems? It's no longer possible to take faults into account and make a new version? Boohoo?