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Ohio Study Confirms Voting Systems Vulnerabilities
bratgitarre writes "A comprehensive study of electronic voting systems (PDF) by vendors ES&S, Hart InterCivic and Premier (formerly Diebold) found that 'all of the studied systems possess critical security failures that render their technical controls insufficient to guarantee a trustworthy election'. In particular, they note all systems provide insufficiently protection against threats from election insiders, do not follow well-known security practices, and have 'deeply flawed software maintenance' practices." Some of these machines are the ones California testers found fault with last week.
The only people who are motivated to manage voting booths are the elderly who haven't got anything else to do and people who are totally wrapped up in their own candidate's campaign. The first doesn't care who wins the election, so long as their retirement benefits aren't touched. And the latter has so many ways to defraud the election, it's not even funny.
Whether you set up the process with electronic voting or you use old fashioned paper slips, someone somewhere can either cause votes to disappear or have extra votes sent to a certain candidate. It doesn't matter what system is in place.
Even with the most secure and trustworthy electronic voting booth, you're still going to lose all the data if, say, a giant meteor came crashing down on it, crushing it. Maybe something not quite as heavy is needed.. An "out of control" truck, perhaps?
I think we've seen sufficient evidence that Diebold has been inhaling deeply, if you will. And we, as a relatively technology-savvy audience, are acutely aware of the potential for disaster -- just imagine, if you will, a virus that infects just voting machines. Personally, while it pains me to say it, I think we should stick with the solution we use here in New Hampshire: good ol' SAT-like ballots. Darken the oval next to the candidate's name, and you're done. The Machine will either accept it, or reject it (in which case you do a new ballot, and the old one gets destroyed). Simple, easy, accountable. Yes, being able to use a computerized voting machine for tabulation is incredibly seductive, but voting is already something inherently prone to attempts at manipulation. Let's not introduce yet more potential, shall we?
Whilst I have no faith in electronic systems, I do know about pencil-and-paper elections, having taken part in several in the UK and been on UN election monitoring missions in Kosovo and Ukraine.
It is perfectly possible to make pencil-and-paper elections secure against the malpractices you suggest, as well as many others that you haven't thought of but the election designers certainly have!
Even if the entire system were corrupt, in terms of every single person involved in running the election being involved in a conspiracy, there's no way they could hide what they're doing from observers.
Now, in civilised parts of the world people don't always make use of all their observation opportunities. For example, in the UK the candidate can watch the ballot box being sealed, make a note of the number on the seal, and check that the same seal is still on the box when it is opened later at the counting hall. But we don't bother - we trust the officials, and we've been working for something like 17 hours with another 4 or 5 to go so we take the opportunity to have something to eat whilst the ballot boxes are being shifted around. But, if there were any suspicion that the election officials tampered with the boxes in their cars, we could do this check.
Oh, and as we all said goodbye to each other when leaving Kosovo the first time we were all calling out "bye, see you in Florida!", including the Americans.
The only way someone could truly guarantee the validity of any results coming from a voting machine is if the machine used analogue electronics or was hard-wired to the voting program. As long as general-purpose computers are in use in this environment, no matter how difficult they are to open or how resilient the OS is, rigging an election by tampering with the voting machines will be possible. In my opinion, security should not be sacrificed for the convenience of being able to change the program.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
This is the exact reason that a take-home election reciept is a bad idea. Which is why most voting systems don't have it... not just the tyranny of the employer, but also the undue influence from peers & family. (Can you imagine how long I'd be sleeping on the couch if the wife knew who I voted for last time?)
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
... or do you not trust ATM machines?
Trillions of dollars are transfered via electronic means, perhaps even more than that if you define a time line.
The only difference here is the anonymity of the voter, who they voted for. Where security dealing with verifying a qualified voter before they vote and that they only vote once, should be no more an issue as when it was when it was all paper.
The fact that this electronic voting problem exist at all, but also full scope across all machines tested really does identify just how manipulative corrupt the political system really is.
I don't see what all the fuss is about. When your only choice is between the Democrats and the Republicans, who gives a crap whether the machine you vote on is rigged? It's like being offered a choice of getting thrown in a shark tank or a piranha tank.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
The fact that the US cannot come up with a definitive "voting tabulation method" tells you that the whole thing is crooked from the git-go. And even if we did, we'd still have (at least) fifty different electoral commissions for national elections. Why is it so difficult to comprehend a system that tabulates votes and leaves an audit trail? But what's even more reprehensible is that the majority of Americans don't even consider the integrity of our elections when voting - or do they? The US has one of the lowest turnouts in the Western world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout). Democracy at its best.
www.itjerk.com
Your vote counts! Just not necessarily who you wanted it to count for.
The concept of a "winner takes all" system is that the losers must suffer the tyrrany of the winners. How is that so much different from a dictatorship? You are still under tyrrany, and in some ways it's worse -- it's the tyrrany of the majority, which means of course it's much harder to effect changes since you'll have the majority against you.
So where is the freedom in all of this?
Having said that, a good friend of mine has fought mightly against the electronic voting system, and I would say her contributions have finally borne some fruit! But that really does not address the deeper issues in the flaws of how the entire political process works and how we might fix these fundamental flaws.
But not to worry, for I have found the solution...acckk!
(something just killed me)
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Loss of car
... and being the candidate's officially appointed observer is a good excuse, so each candidate can have someone watching inside each polling station for any bad goings-on. Your putative "informant" might be able to gain entry to the polling station but wouldn't be able to watch people marking their ballots, as there would be too many other people watching them in turn.
... and the system has thought them up, and has safeguards in place ...
What would the impact be of a carbomb going off in one of the vehicles transporting the ballots? If a district were known to be heavily in favor of a certain candidate, wouldn't the destruction of those ballots negate their votes?
Depends.
Round here, in a local election there are three ballot boxes for my ward, and they are probably transported to the count in two cars. The loss of any one of those boxes would clearly invalidate the election. Whether the election would have be run again in the entire ward, or just in the area(s) for the lost box(es) I don't know, but I think "the entire ward" would be a good guess.
For a parliamentary election, there are around forty ballot boxes for this constituency. If one box were lost, and that box held, say, 1,500 ballots, and the count of the remaining boxes gave someone a majority of, say, 4,000, then the result would be clear without that box. Otherwise I expect that again the entire election would be re-run.
(A car transporting me to a polling station, of which I was in charge, in Kosovo broke down. I finished the journey sitting in the back of the van that our armed guard was driving. A novel experience for a Brit - most of us can go through life never seeing a real live gun, and having one a few way away from you is a bit weird.)
Publicity for false election day
Dunno about the American South, but round here that's something I'm pretty sure would go through the courts, with a re-run of the election a possible outcome.
Company pressure
There's no way you can have an "informant watching the polls" in a propery run election. Everybody in the polling station needs to have a good excuse
Now, this sort of buying / forcing votes is possible with postal votes - your crooked employer could lean on his employees to request postal votes and then hand over the ballot papers. There isn't an answer to this, which is why we (my party) really don't like postal votes very much, other than for the traditional good reasons (housebound etc).
(This sort of employer pressure was thought to be widespread in the Ukraine election that was re-run because of the various complaints. I went to the Boxing Day re-run (a novel way to spend Christmas away from my family) and we were told that the employers hadn't applied any pressure the second time round, basically everybody involved had decided to stop trying to cheat and to hold a clean election.)
if we can't actually verify that each vote is registered
Do you mean voters who don't make it onto the electoral register? Yes, that's part of the wider system rather than polling day security. There's two theories about natural safeguards here:
(a) candidates will make efforts to get everybody onto the register
(b) actually it probably doesn't matter that much, as someone who can't be bothered to get onto the register is quite likely also somebody who can't be bothered to vote, so who cares.
And there are plenty more ways of gaming elections you haven't thought up yet
Neither the deomcrats nor the republicans represnts my political views -- Libertarian. Besides, there are other political parites -- they simply don't get any coverage, because the Democrats and the Republicans conspire to keep all other parties shut out of the political process. Not to mention the media itself, which also is part of that conspiracy.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
What's the problem? Nobody votes anyway...
why is it so very gorrammed hard to follow the method used in india (http://techaos.blogspot.com/2004/05/indian-evm-compared-with-diebold.html)? is that so very difficult?
i think it's pretty clear that american manufacturers of e-voting devices are either unforgiveably incompetent or deliberately introducing devices with obvious non-security. i'm not sure which prospect i find more troubling, but to be honest, what i find even more troubling is the fact that the media largely appears to be ignoring the matter.
ed
If elections continue, picket the polling stations. It may give enough bad press they will decide not to do it again. Or sadly, it may just get totally ignored. But at least it gives the people going in to vote some thought
I can't really see where this matters. Two groups of lying thieves, take your pick. It's kind of like George Carlin says, "It's their club, and you ain't in it. It's the same club they beat you over the head with."
The Tea Party is just the GOP with a bag over its head.
About a year ago I worked the election using these very machines in Ohio. The old people, who led the precinct, had absolutely no idea what they were doing; thank god, there were 4 other precincts voting in the same location that we were. They were trying to follow all the prompts and guidelines but they did half of them wrong. I'm pretty sure that one of the machines didn't get on to the final ballot, and we definitely screwed up a couple times on the machines that did. To be completely honest, it wouldn't have been hard to maliciously alter the machines, if you actually tried. We were screwing up right and left without any ill intent; imagine the results from someone that was trying too. It seemed like Diebold's philosophy on security was just to make things seem as complicated as possible to deter the oldies from trying anything rash. Any idiot should have seen that these machines were hardly secure or even user friendly.
In their defense, this condition is rather common for most small firms (as well as many larger ones). As one used to working in an aggressive private industry regulatory environment, I'd suggest that these election firms become aware that their current process is not capable of sufficiently handling its security requirements and establish an industry body, or expect significantly more aggressive Federal intervention.
The vote is not important. It is who counts the vote that is important. The republicans, like O'Dell, GW Bush, karl rove, cheney, abrahamoff, tom delay, have known that for quite awhile.
What does the security of the machines matter?
Aren't the voting results returned by phone? And isn't the Administration even now working diligently to get the big Telcos immunity for doing anything they ask them to do - or anything they think of themselves that the Administration likes?
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
"The next best thing after a two-party system is a one-party system."
Voting is about POWER and taking that POWER away from the little group of multi-billionaires (who has no real need for "democracy", or whatever you want to call it), that control the planet.
Unless "voting" is done in such a way that it makes an indelible, permanent, and irrevocable record that everyone can see and confirm, and everyone is powerless to change, there is no democracy. It is just wishful thinking as much as religion accepts future realities based on hope.
The Billionaires control the media, censorship is rampant, soon the Internet will become just another marketing ploy.
I fucking hate Ohio. Mainly because it has the the most and the worst asshole cops in the free world. But also because they defrauded the 04 election and handed the country to Bush for a second raping session. Thirdly because it is populated with idiotic hicks who pretend to be Southerners and think that's actually the cool thing. Lastly because of Columbus, where I stopped tired and hungry. I left tired, hungry, and enraged. What a stupid city, what a stupid state, get the fuck out OHIO. Nuke it.
Voting machines are never networked, so there's no way for such a virus to propagate.
The votes aren't tabulated on a computer until after the paper ballots (which the machines spit out after each individual vote) are counted against the electronic counter. In effect this electronic counter is more of a guide-point for the paper counters, so if your results deviate from it you probably need to recount the paper ballots.
One of the great features of the machines used in my office is that it allows even the blind to vote. How would you accommodate them via your SAT-like ballots? Would they have to trust someone to darken the correct circle for them? Wouldn't you rather trust an impartial machine to do this for you?
Aside from all that, you make excellent points. Let's keep going into the future kicking and screaming. ;-)
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle
We keep track of voters by their polling place, so in the unlikely event that a box of votes from a certain polling place were to be blown up, abducted by aliens, or what have you, we would simply contact the voters of that polling place to recast their ballots. Yes, it really is that simple.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle