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Diebold Voting Machines Audited by California
Panaqqa writes "Diebold must be wondering what else can go wrong. Considering their arrogance in the past, their comeuppance is truly well deserved. The State of California's source code review [PDF] of the Diebold voting system has been released. Additional reports will be made available as the Secretary of State determines that they do not inadvertently disclose security-sensitive information. One wonders what it will take to convince voting machine manufacturers not to do things like hard coding passwords as '12345678.'"
how after all the many serious screw-ups and warnings that Diebold has had in the past couple of years, this report shows they still didn't do anything at all to improve the situation.
I often wondered how managers and CEO's that don't even have a clue get given companies to control. This level of obvious incompetence makes me wonder even more.
Voting machines are a technical non-solution to a non-existing problem. Counting votes by hand in public view is almost as fast, has much fewer things that could go wrong with them, and is intrinsically open to public scrunity like no machine system can ever be. Plus, it's cheaper. It works in Denmark, it should scale perfectly well to the US.
They'd never sell a single one. No bank would accept an ATM that couldn't accurately track the thousand or so transactions that they see each day, or that anyone could gain control of by typing in a few keys followed by "12345678".
And yet somehow (through much campaign cash, etc.) they managed to convince politicians that all that stuff would be too hard and unnecessary in voting machines, despite the technology already being available from the same company. That it's not hard to count accurately millions, even billions, of dollars in transactions each day, but that it's too hard to simply increase by one the count in the proper register to greater than a few percent accuracy. And despite numerous security incidents, they are still fighting tooth and nail these simple things.
I'm not convinced electronic voting is necessary...but I'm wary of any politician that keeps trying to tell me there's no need to increase the security of such systems. Unless they say they're OK with their own banks using that kind of security, voting shouldn't use it either.
It's a step in the right direction, but really, is an audit even needed?
This is like building a nylon tent to hold your valuables, then performing an audit to evaluate the strength of its zipper. The entire concept is idiotic from the start.
There's a simple solution to voting machine security: use paper ballots. The machines can help you fill them out, but the result should always be a paper ballot which is the authoritative record of your vote. Simple, easy, secure. Why isn't this being done? Who knows, but it's clear the concerns of the people in charge are something other than correct vote counts.
I can almost imagine that being a deliberate ploy. "
I'm sorry your honour, but one of our programmers (no longer under our employ) hard coded a weak password in complete disregard of coding standards. Regretably, the weakness of the password has enabled certain parties to guess what it is, and thereby subvert the electoral process. But it's not our fault."
Hanlon's Razor be dammned. In cases like this we should start assuming malice unless they can prove stupidity beyond any reasonable doubt.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
If you believe this is nothing more than pure incompetence, then you too have been fooled. This level of incompetence is usually indicative of strong intent that Hanlon's razor will be used by others to essentially protect the perpetrators from punishment for their immoral and/or illegal activities. This is just another way to game the system.
Didn't you even bother to read the sentence you quoted yourself. Fortify was used to find areas to investigate manually. These tools do have many shortcomings, but they do also find many legitimate problems. Using them to find starting points for manual investigations you might otherwise overlook is exactly the right way to use them. Believing them to produce a laundry list of actual problems is, as you pointed out, not.
Voting machines are a technical non-solution to a non-existing problem.
Agreed.
Counting votes by hand in public view is almost as fast, has much fewer things that could go wrong with them, and is intrinsically open to public scrunity like no machine system can ever be. Plus, it's cheaper.
Wrong on faster and cheaper. As the recount in some Florida counties showed in the 2000 US presidential election.
Voting on paper is fine, but the paper should be mechanically counted. Hand counts should be a last resort when the machines are unable to read a vote or are malfunctioning.
Look it up. Ballot readers are compromised as easily as the original machines.
An ideal arrangement is to have a printed ballot as the official ballot, and a supervised hand-counted count which is the OFFICIAL count. Then, the original voting machines can also perform an electronic tally themselves, and this electronic tally can serve as a check for the hand count. If the two differ significantly, something has gone wrong, and an audit must be performed.
If the media want to report the electronic tally as a preliminary result, let them. Simply declare that only the hand count (which can be supervised) is official.