Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Ohio Investigating Possible Vote Machine Tampering Last Year

Posted by Zonk on from the bit-of-dirty-pool dept.

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 It seems several voting machines listed a candidate as withdrawn from the race when in fact he wasn't. By the time the investigations tracked down which machines had been affected, the candidate's name was back on the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."

7 of 213 comments (clear)

  1. Bad Summary by eli867 · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Bad Summary by fastest+fascist · · Score: 2, Informative

      No, the GP had it pretty much right. To recap, had things been done properly, Perez would have been listed as a running candidate on all machines, which might have cost the other Democrat candidate some votes. However in places he was listed as withdrawn, which in principle should help the running Democrat, who lost despite the error, not because of it. Had the Republican lost, you might wonder if Perez being listed as withdrawn despite missing the deadline had changed the results of the vote.

  2. Related story by TripMaster+Monkey · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    --
    ____

    ~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey

  3. Re:Damn by Kandenshi · · Score: 4, Informative

    Make sure you bring me your receipt showing you voted for my uncle Tony or else your thumbs and you will be spending some time apart.

  4. Re:Overly Complicated by gnick · · Score: 2, Informative

    That wasn't very nice - A voting machine is just an adder. The only trick is that it must add perfectly, be tamper-proof, and make sure that nobody is able to contribute more than once.

    Wait... That does sound kinda tough...

    --
    He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
  5. Ohio Voting machines are officially a crime scene by Geoffrey.landis · · Score: 3, Informative
    Ohio Voting machines are now officially a crime scene.

    Or ARs technica

    --
    http://www.geoffreylandis.com
  6. Re:Heh. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    If they were Diebold machines, all of that is under 10 seconds. You can swap out the memory card without breaking the seals. Wireless networking is often enabled, so you can just sit in the parking lot. (Why in the name of all that is holy do these things have *wireless* capability?) Logging is done using a MS Access database. (Read 'editable without trace'.) Two sets of totals are kept: One for spot checks and one for the final total. They are never compared. If you have a swipe card with the master password, (leaked to the net quite a while ago) you can gain admin access from the touch screen. Difficulty? George Bush could do it.