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Ohio Investigating Possible Vote Machine Tampering Last Year
MozeeToby writes "The Columbus Dispatch is reporting on a criminal investigation currently being performed in Franklin County Ohio. It seems several voting machines listed a candidate as withdrawn from the race when in fact he wasn't. By the time the investigations tracked down which machines had been affected, the candidate's name was back on the ballot. Normally, we could dismiss this as confusion or a mistake on the part of the voter(s) who noticed it. In this case, the person who first noticed the discrepancy was Ohio Secretary of state Jennifer Brunner. Further compounding matters, the Franklin County Board of Elections had disabled virtually all logging on the machines to speed setup of the ballot. Naturally, the county board remains skeptical of these accusations."
These morons can't even program their VCRs and they're skeptical of tampering? I vote at a place where the people running the polls were alive when the results would have been passed using goddamn pony express, and they say the same crap here.
We seriously need to toss this crap in a landfill and go back to paper. Any idiot can figure out a paper system, and the system should have that sort of transparency.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Further compounding matters, the Franklin County Board of Elections had disabled virtually all logging on the machines to speed setup of the balot. Because we all know what a vastly time-consuming task turning on logging during setup must be.
Further compounding matters, the Franklin County Board of Elections had disabled virtually all logging on the machines to speed setup of the balot [SIC].
Unbelievable. It's like they're trying to make the machines as unreliable and untrustworthy as possible. I know that the problem of properly implementing electronic voting machines is not a simple one by any means, but this is just plain ridiculous.
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The problem isn't really that the candidate got screwed -- he actually did resign form the race, but he missed the deadline after which the ballots were supposed to be finalized.
A pretty minor mistake (if you ask me), but the big deal is that all the machines are supposed to have exactly the same ballot. And they didn't. That's bad.
Dated myself...Should have said, "Can't even program their DVRs."
The fact remains that people who don't understand the issue have no basis for commenting on it. If there are reports of ballot tampering, and the machines are set up without logging (how is this even fucking possible in a supposedly secure system?), there is no way in hell that any non-technical user should be able to get away with being skeptical...If someone told them the goddamn machines were running Halo 3, they wouldn't have any way of telling.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Actually, his kids, grand kids and great grand kids are all pretty average. One of his great grand kids owns a furniture store and 3 warehouses. See the current issue of Discover Magazine - has Einstein's photo on it.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Just fucking have a system that takes your vote, prints out 2 pages one you keep for your records, the other scanned by a bar code reader and but in a lock box. How fucking hard is that????
Some French flying machine?
Skeptical? Sure... they should be. But shouldn't they be able to answer a question like this definitively one way or the other?
Elections need to be auditable.
If you're not yet completely convinced that the electronic voting currently being rolled out is a craptastic idea, here's a little story on how a simple malformed URL can get the online voting registration page in Pennsylvania to yield other voters' registration files on demand.
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We have corrupt politicians, corrupt corporations, corrupt government officials. Voting is a big farce as it is, without introducing tamperable electronic voting into the mix. I've always said, your vote does NOT count. Corporate America chooses all the major political positions in this country. When you get down to the local level, small to medium-sized cities and sometimes counties, you are ok. Anything bigger than that, though, it is all about corporate interests. This country is run by the oil and pharmaceutical industries, with defense contractors close behind. They buy and sell their way into whatever position they can get to further their own interests and fill their pockets with more taxpayer dollars.
If you want to know what the situation is really like, listen to Rage Against the Machine and Public Enemy. Rage puts it best when they say "What? The land of the free? Whoever told you that is your enemy!"
I hate my state. On election night of the last election we almost immediately found a district near me where they had registered more voted for Bush than existed in the whole county. Gotta love when they're obvious.
I fail to see why it is so difficult to create a reliable voting machine. It's an adder... computer have been doing this since they were first conceived.
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
The other participant "The grandson of Al Capone" never actually existed, and the only person who could have fathered said mythical grandson was Capone's only kid: Albert Francis Capone. That poor kid later changed his name to "Brown" and his entire criminal record consists of one arrest for misdemeanor shoplifting.
The election guy sounds like a complete moron.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The candidate fucked up
And? That doesn't change the fact that the ballot was fucked up as well.
The areas where these shenanigans "might have" occurred = upper class mostly white (to the tune of 95-98%) areas like Hilliard, where the richies flee to escape all the wonderful "diversity" of Columbus. In other words, these are mostly Republican voters anyway.
Maybe I'm wrong (please feel free to correct me if I am), but is it not possible to create some kind of secured voting system based on methods of cryptographic techniques that would allow the following properies of a voting system...
a. Your vote can be cast without anybody else knowing who you voted for.
b. At any point in time after you cast your vote, you can verfiy that your
vote is counted with the candidate you voted for.
c. The government can "verify" that you voted.
d. You can vote over the internet.
e. Only one vote per citizen.
f. Any cheating is immediately detected.
g. others where needed and appropriate.
I'm wondering if some kind of one time pads could be generated by all parties involved, combined togther with public key cryptography, that would allow such a system.
It boggles the mind that more effort and resources are put into making sure the government gets their tax returns than whether the voting system works or not.
Why should I vote again?
Even if someone is watching the computer, there is no way for them to tell if ballots are being "lost" or changed.Why? What's wrong with pen and paper?
Counting and validating paper ballots is simple. As is protecting them. They are PHYSICAL objects. People have lots of experience in keeping physical objects secure.
Read this.
Then this.
And finally, this.
This guy is still getting voter support while he's in jail for mob related crimes.
Remember that Star Trek:TOS episode where everyone was a cheesy mobster? That was filmed in Ohio. They did it to save on costuming and sets. I'm sure of it.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I think we need to vote like they did in Greece, instead of clay shards though colored marbles green for yes red for no. you would vote for and against the candidates. This way it would be a zero sum contest;
total marbles handed out for candidates = candidate (1) + candidate (2)... + candidate (n).
If the mass and volume of the marbles in consistent to a negligible fraction one could weight or volume displacement as a easy check against mechanical and manual counting.
Or ARs technica
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Agreed. Even if the candidate messed up (and that's what he pretty much did) then why the hell his name was off on some of the ballots and was present on the others ..?
... Further compounding matters, the Slashdot editor Zonk had disabled virtually all spell-checking on the machines to speed posting of the article about a "balot." Naturally, the Slashdot readership remains "sceptical."
Too little, too late has been things "done" about voting irregularities.
In the 2004 elections around 3 million voters were denied from voting because of registration abuses. That is around 2.5% of the total voter turnout and more than the percentage Bush won in 2004 with. 5.2 million people are ineligible to vote because of their legal history. (The USA has biggest prison population on the planet, relative to population size).
It should be required by law that if any kind of irregularity exceeds 0.5% of the total voter turnout or half the difference between the opposing poll questions (between candidates or yes/no answers), then the election result is null and void. Otherwise, it cannot be said that the election was fair. If there is one thing there shouldn't be a shadow of a doubt about - it is elections.
Electronic voting is one area where things shouldn't be hacked together in a Microsoft or shitty phone software style. Election software should live up to the standards of NASA and/or nuclear power plant software, but ideally electronic voting should not be used, because otherwise it is impossible to provide a secure, relatively tamper proof election system which is also transparent to the voters in a way that the average person could verify the results if they wanted to. Shit hacked together in Visual Basic gives plausible deniability to those who say the election wasn't stolen, just glitched. Electronic voting is an overengineered solution: you have to design a computer from the ground up to serve as a voting machine and it requires advanced mathematics, advanced engineering to understand how the system works. The average person will never be able to verify if their vote was counted in a fair manner or not. Electronic voting machines are the worst things that can happen to the voting process, because it makes voting black box. There is no committee to watch whether you've inserted your voting sheet into the ballot box and ensure the ballot box wasn't tampered with. To do the same in case of electronic voting, the voting committee members would have to have a phd in computer science, hardware chip design and physics, apart from a lot of other involved fields. The voting machine would have to be in a Faraday cage and power should only be supplied to the machine when someone is actively voting. The voting machine is the ballot and the ballot box combined into one. This causes problems.
It is easier to do faster than light travel than to use electronic voting in a democratic manner. We didn't figure out FTL travel yet, but we have a better shot at it than electronic voting.
Not being sure whether an election was democratic is worse than a terrorist attack on the scale of WTC happening every single week.
Maybe the election problem was a honest mistake, but the point is that you cannot exclude the possibility of tampering. Laws, democratic rights and actions of the government should be viewed from a defensive viewpoint. "How can this law be abused? What is the damage potential of an action on this right?" Because, it is possible that this voting glitch was a honest mistake. The next one won't be, as soon as unscrupulous people learn how to exploit the lack of public outcry coupled with an insecure voting scheme.
Also, a constitutional amendment should be passed placing elections bigger than the scope of a state in the hands of the federal government (or a federal elections commission with clearly accountable personnel). It is necessary to standardize the voting procedures. You can't have 50 states voting in 50 different ways in a national election. Strict penalties should be created for those who try to tamper with voting results, either due to negligence or intentionally. While I don't agree with the death penalty, the harshest possible punishment should be used for voting fraud and currently in the USA it is the death penalty. Voting fraud is a covert overthrowing of the legitimate democratic order of a country. It should be treated as such.
To sum it up, "oh, a glitch, how funny", doesn't fucking cut it.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Adder? I didn't know that those snakes were that versatile!
I cannot believe we are STILL talking about electronic voting. Al Gore lost 8 years ago. Get over it. We bank online, fill out our taxes and even buy our clothes and music online but suddenly voting electronically is some kind of demonic practice. The problem (is there really is one) is poor implementation not a flawed concept. If you don't like one particular implementation of electronic voting, build something better and sell it to the county where you live. I am so sick and damn tired of people screaming about voter fraud and electronic voting problems because their guy lost.
Just one more thought: Since we do not tie ballots to a particular voter id, what would keep an unscrupulous poll worker from stuffing the ballot box?
I think the solution to this is not less technology but more openness. How bout every vote (paper or electronic) have your voter id number on it next to your vote. Then you can log in after the election and pull up your vote and SEE what you did. That's real verification. Anything less is limp dick masturbation.
Did the submitter or editor even bother to read the article. The controversy is that the candidate *did* withdraw, but his name was left on some ballots. for those who can't click:
Basically, same way Perot caused Bush #1 to lose in '92.
Do you have ESP?
This mythical "retard" who is somehow a management/distribution savant?
... and be caught doing so.
More correctly stated, any "retard" can stuff a ballot box
It's like saying that any "retard" can rob a bank but it takes a skilled hacker to electronically loot your accounts. It is just wrong. It is far easier to secure a physical object because people have far more experience with doing just that.
Archer seems to be postulating a perfect scenario for electronic voting. Just read TFA and the others like it.
The reason for the withdrawal was to prevent vote splitting with a second candidate and prevent a 3rd candidate from winning. With the 1st candiate still in the race on some machines, the vote splitting may have occured and the 3rd candidate may have enjoyed the benefit (and did win).
The machine error may have played some part in deciding the election.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
"I don't know of any way that could happen. It would take the great-grandson of Al Capone and the great-grandson of Albert Einstein working in collusion to pull this off." - Dennis White, Director of the Franklin County Board of Elections
OMFG, how old is this guy? Capone and Einstein? This guy is so old he thinks Desktop Publishing means working from a really small California Job Case. And he's there to safeguard computerized voting systems? Only one thing to say: FAIL.
BTW Dennis: A 15 year old with a +100 IQ, a master key (blank from Home Depot and template from the Net) and a properly configured SD card and you are completely pwned.
How many other dolts like this guy are watching are out elections? I suspect too many.
Having spent 25 years in Ohio, it sure sounds like business as usual to me...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
With locals telling voters that he'd pulled out of the campaign, when he hadn't. What were they so afraid of?
The guy HAD withdrawn (in order not to play spoiler for ihs party-mate), and he was listed anyway on some machines, siphoning enough votes to tip the election to the candidate of the other party.
They should reduce their electoral votes until they get their shit together.. give em to Rhode Island and Delaware.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
Yep, Ohio does it again. Some politician sees pretty screens on a machine and buys it. This is right up there with Ohio's coin gate. Until this state gets it's head out of its ass it is a lost cause
If your bank machine messes up, you know by the time of your next statement... at the latest... and if the bank makes an error you've got a good chance of getting your money back.
If your voting machine messes up, you'll probably never know, and there's no way to get your election back.
Nice job relying on your firefox dictionary.
The biggest problem in the last few US elections has been the blocking of votes cast by those likely to vote Democrat.
This can happen by denying registration, or deregistering anyone with the "wrong" profile, or by selectively locating low quality voting machines in districts that are likely to vote the "wrong" way.
mention him in something about voting fraud and you get +5 informative?
/. look?
/. You practically make it out that we are all loons and that is not the case. Hell I am just so damn glad this place didn't buy into 9/11 conspiracies
How lame does that make
Cuyahoga County is so heavily democratic its not even funny. The only reason the problem came up is the guy withdrew after the ballots were done. Lets see
Places with the most public voting irregularities?
All the Florida counties were democratic and voted that way.
Cuyahoga County is, guess what...
You guys and the moderators who vote them do a great disservice to
Sometimes I am embarrassed to say I read this site
I think the only word to describe that is 'Terrifying'. I'm utterly horrified. I knew there was some corruption and double-dealing, but I didn't realize it goes this far. I want to believe in my country, but things like this keep coming up. I'm afraid of seeing a new Bush crony in office. If this keeps up, I'm afraid that we'll declare war on Iran, reinstate the draft, and the next thing I know I'll be patrolling streets in Tehran, hoping that nobody tries to bomb me. But most of all, I'm afraid that there are people out there, desperate to enforce their view of America on me, on my countrymen. What liberties will our 'representatives' take away in the years to come? How can we make the public aware?
This sig is neither interesting, nor humorous. Including meta-humor.
Florida investigating how to do it again this year.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
I actually heard this brought up a couple days ago, when I went to get a haricut. Who should end up sittting next to me but the former director of the Franklin County Board of Elections Damschroeder? (I didn't even realize he lived near me, guess I'll have to go egg his house at some point.) In his eyes, the idea of switching to paper was moronic, because "it's will cost way too much money" and "there's no secruity concerns, never have been".
Somebody mentioned this, and he said it was all a figment of Bruner's imagination, and that the machines were perfectly fine. This kind of attitude is what really bothers me about this whole thing. It's the damned elections, people damn well should be concerned about even the appearance of a problem!
Fuck Ohio
Ziiiing! That was a good one. lol!
I live in Franklin county and vote in every election by mail. Of course I have no idea if my vote is counted (I do seem to have a knack for picking the losers). I like the mail in voting because I get to take my time with the ballot, I typically look up each candidate on google and in the local paper, read their positions on their websites, and check out what some of my friends are saying about them. I'm insulated from the idiotic emotional adds of the last few days before the election date, typically my ballot is in the mail two weeks before the big day. The only thing I dislike about it is that I have no way to check that my ballot even arrived at the county election board, much less whether it was correctly scanned. I do keep a photocopy of my completed ballot until the next election cycle, but this is more to remind me when a friend asks who I voted for in a particular race, or as evidence if it turns out there was a problem.
The thing about local elections is there are many races where I have never heard anything about any of the candidates. If I were to try to do this in a voting both without the internet I would end up either not voting for these races or flipping a coin. Add to this that the ballot propositions are written in the most cryptic sinister sounding language ( my impression is that they run it through a couple of cycles of Google translate with a few foriegn languages before putting it on the ballot).
As others have said, the possibility of vote buying is not a reason to deny me the right to verify my vote, rather it just means we need to make sure that this is a heavy felony with the harshest allowable punishments. I have trouble believing someone could buy enough votes without it becoming known to the authorities and public. I have no trouble believing that a motivated hack could figure out a way to manipulate the vote on an electronic machine without leaving any trail at all (Why can the logs be disabled??).
All your votes are belong to us....
And so the question comes up, why are we even buying voting machines from a company bought up by a Venezuela company that has been linked with Hugo Chávez?
U.S. Investigates Voting Machines' Venezuela Ties
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
Those of you yammering about how much better paper ballots are must be too young to remember the election in Miami, FL where they found 6 ballot boxes filled with votes dumped in some random warehouse by someone.
Ha! I laughed and laughed. Stupid southerners. Things like that don't happen here in Ohio. Ha Ha.
Yes, Ohio. Well, Franklin County, if you must know.
Read the article? No. Should I?
I'm an Election Day Tech in Ohio and this past Primary, every precinct was forced to carry paper ballots in case someone wanted to vote on paper instead of the machine. Out of 5 precincts, roughly 10 people wanted to vote that way. This cost our county an additional $20,000 just to do the paper ballots.
Jennifer Brunner wants to get rid of the voting machines in the worst way.
Doesn't anyone think it's just too convenient that Jennifer was the only one to find this problem out?
The voter cards are all encoded with the same ballot in November since it's a general election.
How could hers have this problem and not her husband's if they both had the same ballot?
This is just her way of making the voting machines look bad so she can get rid of them. What a waste of tax payers money. Each machine costs around $6000 each.
The paper optical scan ballots also have probelms. Before the election, the optical scanner failed on 3 test runs. Why don't we just try to improve the machines instead of scrapping all together?