Slashdot Mirror
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 It seems several voting machines listed a candidate as withdrawn from the race when in fact he wasn't. By the time the investigations tracked down which machines had been affected, the candidate's name was back on the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.
...problem of properly implementing electronic voting machines... There is no proper implementation for an electronic voting machine.There can be proper vote printing machines.
There can be proper vote tabulating machines.
But the same device can never do both properly.
The votes must be inspectable by humans between these steps.
EOT.
These P.O.S machines didn't even have logging turned on. Fraud, no fraud, it'd be impossible to tell.
And while it may take an experienced person to write an exploit, it only takes a "retard" to load it.
Monkeying physical ballots can be done, sure. But you need a lot of people to do it. You need the poll workers, you need the ballot printers, you need the ballot box movers...And all this is for a polling place that may only serve a few hundred people. Now multiply that by the millions of voters in a general election. One person can keep a secret. A hundred? A thousand? Never.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.
This is exactly right. All voting technologies, paper or electronic, will have vulnerabilities. The way to solve this problem is to have enough redundancy in the system that makes it very difficult for all mechanisms to fail, or be corrupted, simultaneously and similarly. We have learned this lesson from building fault-tolerant computer systems, and need to apply it here, too. We also need to include the human element in the fault-tolerant design, as people are also subject to failure and corruption.
For example, you could make a system that has simultaneous redundant and different technologies, such as both electronic and paper trails. Then each of these subsystems could have their information flows be split at the source and channeled through completely different paths to different counters. There could be multiple sets of people with different political allegiances doing redundant counting. With this kind of system failures would be discovered, and could be tracked back to their sources. This kind of redundancy would cost more, but it could be done pretty straightforwardly if it is really what people wanted.
The main problem of course and it is the big one, is that it is not clear that the authorities actually WANT the system to be incorruptible. There are a huge number of power plays that go on in government, and the bigger the election, the more power is involved. There is so much back-room bargaining, lobbying, and cronyism, both within government and between government and big business, that the people in power don't really want transparency and fault-tolerance because it would interfere with their power. Fair voting only helps the little people, not the people who are already in power, and the system can only be changed by the people in power.