Slashdot Mirror
Video Shows Easy Hacking of E-Voting Machines
Mike writes "The Security Group at the University of California in Santa Barbara has released the video that shows the attacks carried out against the Sequoia voting system. The video shows an attack where a virus-like software spreads across the voting system. The coolest part of the video is the one that shows how the 'brainwashed' voting terminals can use different techniques to change the votes even when a paper audit trail is used. Pretty scary stuff. The video is absolute proof that these types of attacks are indeed feasible and not just a conspiracy theory. Also, the part that shows how the 'tamperproof' seals can be completely bypassed in seconds is very funny (and quite disturbing at the same time)."
Seriously? Quicktime? For god's sake, I would expect that an institution dedicated to higher education would understand the importance of using open standards.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Even though l3wdd00d might get 100% of the votes in the Presidential election, the fact that he is only 16 will be disqualifying.
That is why I always early vote. It is on paper where I vote and that stands a better chance of getting counted correctly.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
good call. i was reading about the early voting the other day -- i think i'll be doing that.
"If for any reason you're not satisfied with our service, I hate you."
don't have to worry about it any more - the site has been effectively slashdotted :-)
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in the mud. After a while, you realize the engineer enjoys it.
The interesting thing here is that I would expect one of two things. Either physical security should be taken seriously, in which case a 'tamperproof' seal should be just that (not hard to design) or an assumption be made (not unreasonably) that physical attack against the machines is unlikely and easily preventable.
A supposedly tamper-proof seal which can be circumvented shows either a cynical disregard for physical safety (ie "we know it's a threat, so we'll put in a seal to make people think we've taken it seriously") or another TSA-style "theatre" solution (ie "we don't think it's a threat, but we'll let people believe that it is, and that we've done something about it").
Both of these interpretations are disturbing. However Hanlon's Razor ("Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity") may of course apply.
Is crushing a suspect's child's testicles illegal?
John Yoo: "No, [if] the President thinks he needs to do that."
The real question is, is this more difficult to spoof than the current paper method? Anyone can fake a paper ballot, it is a small subset who can carry out these electronic attacks, although the consequences of this smaller subset's maliciousness could be worse.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
ok...I haven't watched the vids because I am at work, but how can a paper trail fail? I mean if I get a receipt that I am going to then put into a voting box, I should be able to check it to make sure I voted for the people I said I was going to vote for...if it is wrong, I should be able to change my vote and print another receipt.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
... hosted on an .edu server?
This can't end well.
I'm downloading now, will convert to mpeg4, and post a torrent to mininova (if the server doesn't melt before the download completes).
Schrödinger's cat is not amused—maybe.
Slashdotted already? Anyone have an alternate link?
"That is why I always early vote. It is on paper where I vote and that stands a better chance of getting counted correctly."
Don't be so smug. Early voting gives those who would deny your vote more time to tamper.
Let's say you mail in your ballot 2 weeks ahead of time. They are collected and sorted by precinct, and then held until election day to be opened.
Just sitting there.
And then someone drops some of the ballots from certain precincts in the shredder - you know, the ones that vote overwhelmingly for one party? Not enough to cause a lot of suspicion, but enough to make a difference in a tight race. Now, not only is your vote gone, you don't even know it - the tampering happened before election day. AND, even if it is discovered early enough, they won't know exactly WHO got screwed, so you won't get another shot.
E-voting makes it easy for small numbers of people to tamper on a large scale. That doesn't mean that good old fashioned vote rigging has disappeared. Spam hasn't eliminated junk mail, has it?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Even if your 1 vote is counted correctly, a compromised voting machine farm can render it negligible in terms of effect.
Nah, it shows you how good those paper voter verified paper trails are!
In scenario 2, the careful voter, the voter checks the screen, then checks the printout, then notices the printout is incorrect and gets the vote voided and recast.
But if he was a careful voter he'd raise a stink about how the screen was correct, and people would notice that the machines record the printout differently than the screen shows. There would be investigations, accusations and stuff. It would be videod.
Likewise the careless voter, the machine doesn't know is the voter is careful or careless, so it only takes a few careful voters to screw up the attack no matter how many careless voters there are, who don't double check the paper trail.
Scenario 3 & 4 are so obscure as to be worthless (requiring the voter vote but then leave and nobody noticing the machine doing stuff).
What this video really shows IS JUST HOW DAMN DIFFICULT IT IS TO FOOL THE PAPER AUDIT TRAIL.
if it wasn't for the whole.. not wanting to tie the vote to the person.. i would suggest moveing the election schedual around and put the ballat as a page on IRS tax forms.. it has to be filled out to file them.
the IRS takes it's job seriously.. if you pay taxes you vote..
but then people seem to want each vote to count but also don't want any names attached to the votes..
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Wrong. It doesn't have a better chance to be counted unless the election is close enough that absentee ballots could theoretically change the results. That doesn't happen very often. Most of the time the ballots are stored unopened for several months until they are sent to the shredder.
where were these guys two elections ago? The horses have long left the barn. The hacks in place now are likely protected by the DMCA.
'brainwashed' voting terminals?
I already assumed the voting public was brainwashed to begin with.
Funny thing is, I looked this up and the very first link led me one of those "controlled media" websites. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23415028/
Haven't watched this, but was told about it:
http://www.uncountedthemovie.com/
I am disillusioned enough with the voting system after the last two elections that I couldn't bring myself to watch it. The state of our "vote" only depresses me.
BTW - Is anyone really surprised by TFV? We knew about these vulnerabilities for years.
I mentioned tinker-toys once in a post - now I'm modded down for life.
It was three elections ago - the DMCA was Clinton's doing, not Bush's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA
I find it somewhat amusing that the captcha in a thread about vote hacking is "certify".
Here's the goods:
Full 100mb version: http://www.cs.ucsb.edu.nyud.net/~seclab/projects/voting/ucsb_evoting_attack_dl.mov
Compressed 10mb version: http://www.cs.ucsb.edu.nyud.net/~seclab/projects/voting/ucsb_evoting_attack_dl_small.3gp
Posting to YouTube after download finishes...
because people also don't want to be profiled for their electoral choices.
for all we know, we already are. in general, it is my understanding that many political activists are already being watched.
furthermore, i'm all for revoking a lot of these churches' tax exempt status. like Carlin said, "If these churches are so interested in politics; let them pay the same price of admission as everyone else."
"If for any reason you're not satisfied with our service, I hate you."
Here is a mirror of the big file: http://porksteak.com/ucsb_evoting_attack_dl.mov Will leave up as long as possible.
this.
i like the idea of early voting, paper trails, etc., but you make a good point.
i live in a predominately republican state (georgia) and despite a little interference from the 23-percenters that would interfere to get mccain eleceted, they might vote the other way this time.
"If for any reason you're not satisfied with our service, I hate you."
Uploaded the low-quality version to youtube, here's the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzYUkXG7Occ
(Currently processing, it'll be done soon).
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
If you're content for the future of elections to be like the past, I suggest you just cut to the chase and move to a dictatorship.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
DMCA takedown in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 ....
Correctness matters. Mercy matters more.
In my opinion, for a modern democracy to work the vote must be mandatory, secret and universal.
This way, no one can pinpoint who voted for whom, thus avoiding temptations of vote buying (at least some of them).
No sig for the moment.
Part I:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWDEZqqqBHE
Part II:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moEsgdzZ19c
ucsb evoting attack
Schrödinger's cat is not amused—maybe.
We need verifiable results, so why aren't we demanding End to End voting systems from our governments?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
(And granted I can't get to the article so it may discuss this) so what? This has been proven. There have been a dozen stories on this. What are they doing about sharing the information with policy makers? It's great that we read this and become angry. But we don't create the laws*. Are they trying to use the school's considerable clout to get in front of the state Legislature? Congress? If not, then it's a neat hack and that's it.
* And I don't want to hear, "Well we elect the people who do." I've written to my Congressperson each time one of these stories comes up and I get a form letter back. I have no clout. UCSB does.
Bark less. Wag more.
I think that any voting software should be open source. If we're to trust our votes to machines, then the software running them should be in an open box, not a black one. Perhaps then we wouldn't have to read about the security holes; we could find point them out ourselves.
Until they get this shit fixed, vote on paper. Even if it is an absentee ballot.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I find this comment slightly surreal, and honestly believe only an American could have written it.
Democracy is not a commodity that you can have even though your neighbour doesn't. It is more like peace, or sanitation : everyone has it or no-one has it.
To respond to a demonstration that your democratic system has a very serious problem by saying 'Hey, I reckon I got my vote counted' is, well, bizzare.
Open sourcing voting machines makes sense, but... can't we take it one step further? Why not open source the whole government?
At least hosting yourself you have some control over any DMCA notices. Look at how the Scientologists have gone after critical youtube videos recently.
that we can't figure out a more relevant form of voting to appeal to a larger contingent of the American populace, maybe more people, more easily accessing voting methods, would allow for a more viable collaboration of opinion in regards to the election of our National officials. But I digress, the super delegate and the Electoral College make my point m00t.
"This is the value of a summer spent and a winter earned"
Youtube links for videos:
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWDEZqqqBHE
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moEsgdzZ19c
Nathan Friedly
I thought early votes were treated like absentee votes. I.e., they're not even counted at all. Once the vote is closed, and the vote tallys are computed, only if the amount of absentee and early votes exceed the lead do they bother counting those votes?
(After all, if there were 500 absentee/early votes, and the guy won by 1,000 votes, those absentee votes don't really count for much. The only thing they can be used for is determining if a recount is needed because the margin of the lead ends up lower than the possible counting error...).
Or are early votes counted, but not absentee ballots?
it is my understanding that many political activists are already being watched
Isn't the technical term actually 'terrorists'? I'm not even sure whether I'm kidding anymore.
which is totally what she said
While I understand the need for secrecy due to corruption sending brute squads to people who voted for the wrong candidate... secrecy also conveniently allows for corruption of the vote since there is no way to audit a vote back to an individual who can say, "no, I didn't vote for that person." It also allows for multiple votes from a single participant since you cannot analyze votes and determine if the sources are unique or duplicated.
I believe this makes democracy a bit impossible in the long run.
Personally, I prefer voting to be public, open and auditable. If we get to the point that dictators are shooting people with the wrong opinion, it would be good to know... it might actually reinstate proper support for the second amendment.
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
I believe you are generally correct, but some jurisdictions have bought into early/mail voting in a big way. For instance, I believe Oregon (or was it Washington?) has pushed it so hard that 50% of the votes are by mail.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
*sigh*
i know, right? the line has been blurred.
"If for any reason you're not satisfied with our service, I hate you."
I mean... only a fool would believe that the electronic voting systems are tamper-free, even with all the added physical security measures.
It's more important that an elections official is aware of the possibility of these hacked firmwares and then takes the necessary actions to submit their code to experts to evaluate the validity of the vote casting.
POST-evaluating the e-vote machines (the electronic equivalent of recounting!) is as important as the voting itself. If someone has hacked the system we can always know at a later time.
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
thats the way i feel.. it shouldn't be reqired to be secret who someone votes for - do i recommend makeing it easy for people to seach for people who voted for X? no.. but to look at person A and say he voted for X is fine..
if nothing i was just thinking using the IRS tax forms for people as the ballot.. say the last page is the ballot - it isn't tied to the tax form but you must submit it completed with your taxes - IRS looks if form is filled out they take it and throw it in the box - then they proccess your tax filings.. if it isn't filled out they send it back to you.. if you failed to file they come after you like normal.. and it means you didn't vote..
they take all the ballots from the box and count the votes.. the only way it can be tied to you is the person who takes the ballot from the forms and puts it in the box.. they would know.. and if they decided to mark the ballot then it would be followable..
but in reality it seems better than the crap we have now aka dead people voteing - people voteing multiple times..
the IRS is already equiped to handel alot more information from every single person - this would be a trivial ammount.. ontop of that thoughs who pay taxes - though who actualy support the government get to have a say in what happens.
i started paying taxes at 14.. i couldn't vote for 4 years.. that is taxation without repersentation.. i paid taxes and had no say in them when i feel i should have.. and on the flip side thoughs who don't pay have no repersentation.
should we allow people from other nations who don't support our community to have a say in how it is run? (take that how you will)
people need to grow spines and realize they need to stand up for what they belive - not.. lets hide everything.. point fingers - and say someone else will fix it
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Any system, I mean any systems is open to fraud. The term 'Ballot box stuffing' pretty clearly indicates even a paper system is not 100% safe but at least, for the most part, wide scale fraud is pretty damn hard when you would have to run around from precinct to precinct stuffing boxes with the names of the recently dead (or what have you).
Electronic stand alone systems with removable media (CD's flash drives, ..., ... what have you) and ones that print a small receipt into a lock box (for multiple audit streams) is as safe and efficent as anything else...
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
Voting must be designed to be transparent rather than auditable. In a proper democratic election, you can observe the whole process if you want. The only bit you can't observe is when other people actually mark their ballots, but that doesn't create a corruption opportunity, because you can observe the ballot being issued to the voter and the voter putting the ballot into the ballot box. Whatever the voter did with the ballot, it is still just one ballot and will be counted publicly.
Voting systems where you can't observe one or more of the following steps are corruptible and should not be used in a democratic election: Issuing the ballot to the voter, collecting the ballot (punched cards are collected inside the voting machine: not observable), keeping the votes until the counting starts and finally counting the votes. With electronic voting systems, you can't observe any of these steps. Even paper audit trails don't solve the problem: The audit trail must remain secret during voting, so it stays in the machine, which means you can't observe it continuously until the votes are counted.
A piece of paper per voter and a couple of hours for counting votes in public: Is that really too much to ask when you elect the most powerful person in the world?
Agreed, but with the caveat that if voting is madatory, there is an option for "None of the above"
i fully agree.. but that would count as a vote - which means you can show that everyone had their say - and certian people didn't talk twice+
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
I'm going to opt for the Starship Troopers plan. Voting is not mandatory, and most taxpayers aren't even allowed to vote... until they demonstrate that they have some concern for the greater good of the society in which they would choose to cast their vote. Secrecy is fine, but I'm not certain it's required (though surely beneficial). and no, I've never seen the movie
Never let a mediocre career stand in the way of a good time
In California, Giuliani and Edwards both dropped out less than a week before the primary election date, and Romney dropped out the 7th. Many Californians cast their absentee ballots a month in advance of the election date. After all votes were counted there were over a million votes (out of about 9 million total) for candidates that weren't even running.
I'm not claiming this single state could have altered the final nominees of Obama and McCain, but I am making a point about why one might not want to vote (too) early.
The Florida Panhandle scheme was dirty and wrong.
But the claim that voting machines were the result of the "Democrat Political Machine" seems far fetched in the extreme. When I looked into the history, it appears that their implementation was a long and complex process, aided in significant ways by many Republicans, and more importantly, built and programmed by companies with staunch Republican allegiances. So. . , what are you basing your assertion on?
-FL
Before I even read all the comments, may somebody please explain to me WHY it is necessary to e-vote in the first place, regardless of the system????
I keep finding articles explaining how e-voting should be made better, but not even one explaining WHY a country which is still voting on paper only should ever bother to pass to e-voting. I mean, even in the best ideal case, pretending there are no tampering issues, e-voting requires much more competence from the booth staff to make it work. Whereas any bozo who went to primary school and can find his way to the booth CAN count ballots, add them up or check that the sum was correct.
To alter paper-voting elections enough to make a difference you must have many more people who make a mess (by malice or incompetence it doesn't really matter) than to obtain the same result with e-voting, isn't it?
If so, what the F**K does a country really gains with e-voting which justifies the effort and makes it worthwhile to ignore all the tampering issues?
To respond to a demonstration that your democratic system has a very serious problem by saying 'Hey, I reckon I got my vote counted' is, well, bizzare.
Or they're simply stating that the system isn't broken because no one can know their vote wasn't counted and anything else is FUD and speculation?
Of course, not that it matters. In my state of Wisconsin, there are people who are well known for vote buying and fraud since our Governor refuses to pass a law requiring voter to show a photo ID when voting for authentication. (odd how the government requires photo id to authenticate people at all kinds of places but not for something as important as elections. Who could possible want such an important system without strong authentication?)
Likewise, I hear our neighbor Illinois, is famous for their passion of voting that even the dead turn out in droves to vote !
Idiot-proofing and tamper-proofing elections is not rocket science.
What are the facts?
1) GUIs have a lot of code, and are thus easier to crash and and easier to hack.
2) Elections are one of the most intensely competitive and expensive processes in this country. They determine who gets power.
3) There is a lot of incentive to try and sway elections. Politicians who know their motives are the purest rationalize deception by saying, "If you don't win, you can't institute your policies."
What's the problem?
1) Idiots mis-vote because they claim to be unable to understand the ballot.
2) Tampering with paper ballots or electronic tallies.
The solution:
1) Use the rich, informative GUI interface to assist idiots in selecting the candidates they wish to vote for.
2) At the end of the vote, they can press a button and get a receipt that links them to a serial number on a ballot, if they wish.
2) Have the computer on which the GUI is running generate both a machine-readable and human-readable paper ballot. The machine code should be easily decipherable by a human.
3) Run the paper ballot through a ballot scanner. The ballot scanner internally maintains and also sends an electronic tally of votes to a central location.
4) The ballot scanner nor the central collection location have any GUI. The code on the ballot machines and the central collector would be certified, like flight software is certified (see DO-178B).
This way, you have both an electronic tally and a paper trail. In case of dispute, both would exist.
...asked a couple weeks back, "How can nerds make a difference in November?"
In the US we have a collection of folks called "TV News". They rely on delivery of titilating information to collect ratings upon which their advertising revenue is based. Without this, they have no function and many many people will be out on the street looking for work.
A significant source of information is elections. Everyone in the US wants to know who won because the elections (local, state and national) are referred to as a "horserace" and everyone wants to know the results of the "race". Races have winners, after all and the results are known immediately. This is the conditioning of the US voter and has been that was for well over 100 years.
So the TV News reports on election results. These results have to be timely and interesting. Titilating would be better, but that only happens in the run-up to the election. On election night it is all about the winner. There has to be a winner and it has to be announced before people go to bed. Otherwise, the TV News would be no more relevent than the newspaper where they can read about the winner the next morning. So in order to get the advertising revenue, there must be a winner announced before everyone goes to bed. The deadline there is pretty much midnight on the East Coast.
This means the West Coast has 2 or 3 hours to report the results of their election. Since most of the population is in the Eastern and Central time zones, they have five or six hours for their results which often works out even with more primitive voting machines. It has served well since the first TV News reporting of election results in 1960.
What happens if the West Coast doesn't report in time? The TV News folks are well aware of the time issue and use exit polling and surveys to fill in the gaps so there can be results no matter how long it really takes. This means they are reporting on a guess rather than an established fact. This led to the CBS News reporting of Gore as the winner in 2000 around midnight. Within a couple of hours they had corrected it, but many people went to bed knowing "their horse" (Gore) had won the "race". Obviously, they were stunned when they found out that the election had been stolen from their man. It could be nothing else because CBS News announced the winner before they went to bed.
If the US were to move to a system like other countries where real results were announced a couple of weeks after the election you would find the TV News still reporting results the night of the election. It would be based on exit polls and surveys. Sometimes it would be correct and sometimes the election would be "stolen" because the other candidate would have won. It would be this way because without the announcement of the winner the TV News has no relevance and would have no ad revenue.
You better get used to the idea that the US needs something where real results are available immediately. My guess is that there would be riots in the streets this year if the evening of the election Obama was announced as the winner and then a week later, after counting the votes for real, McCain was announced as the actual winner. Do you think that would be fun? I seriously doubt the the state government (esp. the police forces) think it would be.
So how can we make it work? And work quick enough so the TV News has reality to report rather than just some made up fantasy?
You can choose "none of the above" by voiding the ballot: just cross out all of the candidates
That way, you still fulfilled your civic obligation of voting, while expressing your discontent with the existing options.
No sig for the moment.
Yes, in an election where there are 50,000 votes that are not counted correctly, making sure your vote is properly counted goes a long ways towards making sure that your vote is counted properly.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
In the American presidential system it's the electoral vote that determines the winner and not the popular vote, or have you all forgotten that Al Gore won the popular vote by HALF A MILLION votes in 2000 and still lost the presidency.
Given that these gaping holes exist with the voting machines that will be in use for the election, would one of those independent election monitoring forces that the U.N. sends to third world countries even approve of the U.S. voting results anymore?
Just watch .. All the old machines will be printing "George Bush" on the 2009 Election Ballot
Go go Gadget Nailgun!
I've been googling, but coming up short. What are my rights as a registered voter? Can I walk into a polling station and demand a paper ballot instead of an electronic vote?
The main reason for moving to a secret ballot is to reduce the effects of vote buying due to it begin (theoretically) unable to confirm (although there are discussions as to why this is not perfect). It would arguably be worse for democracy for your employer to make it known that anyone who does not vote for his preferred candidate will be fired.
Not in Minnesota (and other states, I imagine). Our absentee ballots are counted at the end of the day at the precincts, and the record of voted/did-not-vote is recorded.
That doesn't get your ballot back, but there is a record to track.
I wrote a paper on that form of teh franchise years ago. The only problem is that it requires and ongoing, large scale war to provide enough veterans to keep the franchise from devolving to an oligarchy. It wouldn't work today because the percentage of veterans in society is quite small compared with the population. And you can't really try to include other "equivalent" service, because whoever chooses what constitutes an equivalent has a lot of power. Look at the exemption that orthodox Jews get from the compulsory military service in Israel.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I simply do not understand the purpose of electronic voting machines. Is it to ease the counting process? Speed up the returns? Provide more accuracy? All these things sound fine if you can trust the machines. But since we can't, how can it ease the counting process when we have to recruit clerks and stewards to do meticulous recounts? What good is it to speed up the returns when recounts force us to wait for days or even weeks before we can be sure of the outcome? What good is accuracy if people don't trust the results anyway? Give me a plain, simple paper ballot any day.
Proverbs 21:19
I'd like you all to know that I'm voting for Robert'; DROP TABLE candidates; DROP TABLE votes;, because he represents the change we need!
"I find this comment slightly surreal, and honestly believe only an American could have written it.
Democracy is not a commodity that you can have even though your neighbour doesn't. It is more like peace, or sanitation : everyone has it or no-one has it.
To respond to a demonstration that your democratic system has a very serious problem by saying 'Hey, I reckon I got my vote counted' is, well, bizzare."
Or perhaps, when faced with a situation he can do little about, he is doing what he can. Your reaction seems a uniquely European one, in it's automatic assumption that the writer is greedy and cares for nothing but himself, i.e. a typical American.
I'll repeat what I said above - don't be so smug. Scratch the surface of ANY "democratic country, and you'll find a lot of un-democratic practices under the surface. Democracy is like beauty - everyone thinks they have more than they really do, and everyone has at least a little ugly in them.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
That is why I always early vote. It is on paper where I vote and that stands a better chance of getting counted correctly.
In my district, (the company formerly known as) Diebold still "counts" the paper ballots. According to BlackBox.org, there easy ways to tamper with these machines as well.
/. Comunity being a Paid Election Support Worker would be a way to get personally involved in safeguarding against this type of hacking. According to previous BlackBox.org posts, all voting maching contracts come with an Election Day Support Contract. Diebold etc. are required to hire on site technicians for each polling station. These techs are to setup the machines, ensure that they are not tampered with, trouble shoot any voting/printing snafus and take down the machines after polls close. Bb.org feels these jobs are the "front line" for ensuring fair elections. These jobs are hiring in your area right now! P.S. You might want to leave MOST of your experience OFF of your resume, since this is a very low paying temp job, and most everyone here would be considered vastly over qualified.
For the
Ernie Dambach
"It is no small thing to celebrate a simple life -Tolkien
The following attack takes place between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m.
Your "Atheism" is misspelled.
I work as an "Election Judge" every election (they used to call them "Poll Workers". Each year the county hires hundreds of average people, gives them a couple hours of training, and they are the ones who set up the machines, check for ID's, handle the list of registered voters, etc.
Me, I'm a "Machine Judge." I get to the polling area in the morning of the election, the machines are already there, unassemblede. I check the seals, and set up the machines, activate the machines for the voters during the day, get the results out of it at night, take the results to a central location.
Low paying? Not where I live. I get $250.00 for the couple hours training and working on election day at one precinct, which is not bad.
It's well looking into. Take a paid vacation day, get $250 over that, and be the one who protects the democratic process (at least at the precinct you are at).
They need geeks who are computer literate. You should see some of the geezers try to set up those voting machines. It's sad.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
A vote cannot be both mandatory and secret, as the only way to confirm somebody has voted is to attach a name to each ballot that comes in.
On a paper ballot, they COULD have a "reciept" that is submitted seperatly, but it would still require some means of connecting it back to a ballot (should somebody submit a fradulent reciept)
Electronically, it's the same situation. In order to track that you have voted, it would need to wait until your vote has been submitted and then attach a name/id to that specific session to verify that the correct ID is traced back to the correct ballot.
. . . will tamper with e-voting machines when the Democrats and their activist "Progressive" wing have a long, rich history of registering dead people, illegal aliens, and ex-felons?
Posted AC because this question does not conform to established /. groupthink protocols.
I've always wondered... Various state lotteries have little machines all around being run by people with minimal education and training. How is it possible we can't produce a secure machine to handle our votes?
...and that's how we got Cowboy Neal for President!
>I thought early votes were treated like absentee votes.
Depends on locale.
In mine, there is a distinction between "early" and "provisional" ballots.
Early ballots are always counted, and encouraged by the Recorder's office for logistical and economic reasons. Provisional ballots are used, such as when a voter shows up at the wrong polling place. These are counted only when the total number of provisional ballots would make a difference on some ballot question.
If there are 3,977 provisional ballots, and the closest question on the ballot has already won by 277,591 votes, the provisional ballots aren't counted. Do you disagree with this policy?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
VoteHere had a solution to that, which was a tracking barcode on the ballot which a voter could use to check whether her ballot got scanned at the counting station. Cryptographic High Magic kept the ballot from being linked back to the voter, barring extensive collusion or some edge cases(*). This was field tested in one small county in Washington State, where it met with a lawsuit because state law does not permit any unique marking on a ballot at all and specifies "absolute" secrecy. King County, the big county that includes Seattle, decided against going with that system.
(*) The system limited the information you could get from someone's tracking code to "it's somewhere in the hundred ballots of batch N". Fine, except if processing is broken down by precinct, and if the precinct has only a few dozen people in it (common in Washington), and if only a fraction of those vote absentee, then the vote won't be lost in a batch of 100.
.... to post this on an election day. I voted, but I used the paper ballot (and scanner) route rather than the touch screen voting. Where I vote, you have a choice of which method to use, and I always prefer the one that will leave a paper trail.
Of course, if you do a write-in candidate (which I frequently do) it kicks the whole ballot out. Presumably these are tallied separately, but who knows if these are ever counted?
Demonstrating their concern for the greater good of the society by going out to kill people, you mean. I would find it more reasonable that people who had been through such a thing would be too psychologically harmed to be trusted with the vote.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
How does this help when they'll be tampering with all the other votes cast at the normal time? Your vote being counted won't make a difference, but all votes being counted correctly will.
Both parties have merged to form republi-Crats under Pelosi's lead the "opposition" gave Bush a present of a nice spying-on-its-own-citizens-without-a-warrant on July 9 (thanks Obama).
... until I convinced him I would buy in quantity and then they came f-a-s-t.
Ordinary people are flat broke or heading that way fast. Even those who saved their pennies for that rainy day will soon see those pennies devalued to a tenth in buying power.
Since around 1998 the corporations are the only ones who get laws for their benefit here in the USA.
Now (see Google antitrush and DOJ) the gov't is preying on the corporations that have money since lawyers must feed somewhere.
A small bag of apples is 4-dollars heading to 8-dollars fast.
eBay economy is picking thru our national trash for treasure and have ya noticed the quality of sellers there is WAY DOWN (an evangelical pleaded with me bout the biblical floods last spring why he couldnt ship a lousy hard drive
Everyone is hurting unless they had rich parents like Obama who worked for an oil company or married wealth like John McCain.
Voting. Vote for what? Both are more of the same.
Restricting the franchise to those who've served in the military, a la Starship Troopers, is fine - just provided that government elected by the military has no authority over the rest of us.
Giving the vote to every subject to the government's rule is democracy. Giving the vote only to those who have chosen to serve the government is dictatorship.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
So when these machines actually do get hacked on election day, and verifiable albeit anonymous fraud occurs, perhaps those with the power will declare the election results null, and retain power. It would be much the same as if the elections had been suspended.
Trying very hard here not to invoke Godwin.
Imagine across the land, hundreds, even thousands of geeks tamper with these machines. Imagine Homer Simpson winning his sixth state in a row on election night. That would be an effective way to demonstrate these systems vulnerabilities, or at least, a hell of a lot better way than posting on Slashdot.
The average voter doesnt know or care about these issues. But if fraud were perpetrated on a scale so large it couldnt be covered up, they would.
It can be go tiem now plees?
'That is why I always early vote. It is on paper where I vote and that stands a better chance of getting counted correctly.'
You actually believe votes matter in U.S. elections? How quaint.
'furthermore, i'm all for revoking a lot of these churches' tax exempt status.'
How are you going to do that? Congress has no authority to make a law with regard to churches. Its the whole freedom of religion thing, it cuts both ways.
'In my opinion, for a modern democracy to work the vote must be mandatory, secret and universal.'
Absolutely not. Not voting is a vote in itself. I refuse to cooperate in the corrupt rigged election process for canned candidates that do not represent anything that could be construed as a choice even without election rigging.
Not voting is a form of protest. It's the 'if you don't vote you have no right to complain' morons who make sure that protest is ignored. The truth is that if you help to perpetuate the current corrupt, flawed, and unworkable system then YOU have no right to complain about the results.
that's not my point, really.
it's just that some of these churches seem keen on getting involved in politics. and for those that do, they should lose their tax exempt status.
that's all i'm saying. i know they don't all do it, but some do.
"If for any reason you're not satisfied with our service, I hate you."
Giving the vote to every subject to the government's rule is democracy. Giving the vote only to those who have chosen to serve the government is dictatorship.
Actually, by Aristotle's definition, a state where only a subset of the population can vote is either an aristocracy or an oligarchy.
No sig for the moment.
It can be both mandatory and secret by this simple way:
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Months before the election, you go to the voter registry and get your voter card issued/reissued. This card has your picture, your signature and your thumbprint and is hard enough to counterfeit for it to be considered a valid id by banks and the like. This card is also a proof that you are in the national voters registry.
On election day, you show up at your assigned voting location, which is in a closed public area (usually a school or a public library).
Here, before they allow you in, they check your thumbs (see below for the reason) and your voter registration card is verified against the list of voters of your district. This list comes in a "book" form where they have a copy of your voting card, including the picture.
Once he/she finds you in the list (and checks the picture to see that it is indeed you), an election official crosses out your name from the list and allows you proceed to the next step.
At the next desk, you are given a paper ballot for each election happening that day (president, state governors, local and federal deputies, etc)
With these, you step into a booth where thereâ(TM)s a number of black crayons. You use these to cross out the symbol of the party you are voting for on each ballot (or write in another name if you are so inclined).
You leave the booth with your ballots folded twice and drop them into the designated transparent boxes.
And finally, your thumb is painted with an enzymatic liquid that makes the skin in your thumb go red-black in about 30 seconds (the color fades away 3-5 days later).
Then you can go home, feeling happy about fulfilling your civic duty.
note: Each one of these steps is verified by a representatives of each political party, national and sometimes international observers.
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What country is this, you may ask, with such a sensible electoral system? Why your third-world neighbors here in Mexico!
While I will admit that its not perfect and we still get voting irregularities (system works great in the cities, less great in the rural areas), I am sure it beats a lot of systems used in the US.
No sig for the moment.
'The main reason for moving to a secret ballot'
The main reason for moving to a secret ballot is to reduce the risk of reprocussions based upon your vote. Be they from your employer, the guy who paid for your vote, a political party, or government, or the cia, insert other parties who would do this at the drop of a hat here.
It really doesn't matter though. If you can't trust the government to conduct a fair election then it doesn't matter if the ballot is secret. And with our corrupt government the elections are about as blatant a farce as the former elections for Saddam.
In other words, it's pretty easy to gain access to the voting machines.
you seem to have missed the general consensus that if mandatory voting were to be adopted, "None of the above" would of course be an option. In this way participation is encouraged, but no one is actually required to endorse the republicats or the democrans.
Your current president was not elected to his first term. Maybe he would have been, ultimately, but he wasn't. It is ABSOLUTELY AMAZING that Americans didn't make a bigger deal out of that. Maybe if you'd dwelled a little longer in the past, your country wouldn't have elected the man to a second term.
A nice postscript to the upcoming criminal tampering with voting machines, which the GOP will again undertake, would be if it turns out that many folks had secretly set up their own camcorders (or whatever equates such) to record the post-voting activities around their local voting machines, and captured evidence of tampering. I don't personally expect the race to be close enough to matter, but the corruption which allowed the last two elections to transpire the way they did has not just conveniently vanished. Folks in Ohio and Florida, particularly, should keep their eyes open.
Watched? The ones who protested at the RNC were arrested and charged with terrorism.
Which is still separate and distinct than refusing to participate in our present government as a form of protest.
I am not merely protesting the R's and the D's. At this point I am protesting the system itself.
Yeah, the machines are delivered the day before election day to the polling places (firehalls, schools, etc) by moving companies. Election Judges swear oaths enforceable under rule of law. Moving companies or anyone else who happens to wander in to where the machines have been left, well, no (but you don't have to swear an oath to be found guilty of tampering with election materials, of course).
That's pretty much SOP around the country.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
'Yeah, the machines are delivered the day before election day to the polling places (firehalls, schools, etc) by moving companies. Election Judges swear oaths enforceable under rule of law. Moving companies or anyone else who happens to wander in to where the machines have been left, well, no (but you don't have to swear an oath to be found guilty of tampering with election materials, of course).'
Sounds like gun laws. Those who are doing criminal acts don't especially care how many laws there are against what they are doing. Especially when the guy they are rigging the election for has the power to pardon.
Ignoring the movie (hardly Heinlein cannon), I seem to recall in the book that the vast majority of "veterans" prior to the human-bug war were little more than janitors and laborers in hazardous environments. A possible modern analog would be having the Army Corp of Engineers be responsible for 99% of all national infrastructure and disaster rebuilding. In turn all the majority of veterans did was build/repair roads. This of course assumes nationalizing all non-private construction is "a good thing".
I don't know about angles, but it's fear that gives men wings. -Max Payne
I've always thought that an e-voting system should also provide a public database of all votes - showing SSN/vote. This way anyone will have the ability to check if their vote was tampered with, while still largely maintaining their anonymity (as identifying information for SSNs aren't usually easily available).
Just wondering how you can so easily reconcile the notion of "democracy" with "mandatory".
I'd say the right *not* to vote is an inherent democratic right.
And yes, I do realise that such behaviour upsets the secrecy of the other participants.
But a system where the needs of the individual are made subservient to the needs of the many, per default, without any consideration whatsoever... somehow it doesn't sound so democratic to me.
Hugo.
Maybe that's the idea. The more computer literate somebody is...the more likely they might try to rig the machine. ;)
My ballot in a small midwestern city is going to have:
1 Presidential Race
1 US Senate Race
1 US House Race
1 State Senate Race
1 State House Race
1 Secretary of State Race
1 State Attorney Race
6 State University School Board Races
X State Judges races
2 City Commissioner races
2 Local School board races
Y Other local officials (Register of Deeds, County Sherrif)
Z State and local proposals.
Why (and how) would the IRS be able to coordinate this for every jurisdiction under US Control?
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JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
Not quite, there is no requirement that the government service be strictly military service. It happens that the protagonist ended up in the Infantry, but the diplomatic corps (read, state department) is also government service. The biggest barrier to entry was the application process where applicants were actively discouraged from applying. However, if someone persisted through the application process they were guaranteed a role. Not the role they necessarily want, but some role. After a tour of duty of some number of years, barring special circumstances, a person was able to retire from service and be a citizen.
I prefer a different form of democracy espoused in a different Heinlein story. Voting in favor of a thing commits you to working on that thing. If you vote to go to war and that vote passes you report to the recruiting center the next day and are given your assignment. Heinlein only gives the war example, but I think it could be expanded to include other large-scale projects that commit the nation to a direction.
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JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
they can handel the tax code for the diffrent areas this is a small taks compared to the diffrent local taxes within the state..
if by IRS you thought i ment just the feds.. i ment both the fed and state.. each would handel their own parts of the election ballot..
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
As it is now, each school district has (can have) their own ballot. The state Department of Treasury probably can't handle that either. And if you go lower than that you have the problem of communities without income taxes and you end up back where we are now: Each district handles its own voting and the numbers get accumulated up the chain.
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JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
You remind me a bit of a coworker that proposed a Selective Service model for Congress - if you vote, your name gets entered into the pool of people who are eligible, and selection means compulsory service. It would solve the problem of lifetime politicians as well as discouraging people who won't risk the responsibility from voting.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
i still think it wouldn't be that hard to shift the resources we have now for voteing and cover the work.
could it happen over night? no.. government doesn't work that fast..
could we do it in a year.. i think so if people supported it - and while not perfect i do think it would be better than what we have now..
everyone should be required to vote.. even if it is a "none of the above"
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
'it's just that some of these churches seem keen on getting involved in politics. and for those that do, they should lose their tax exempt status.'
I hate the involvement of churches and religion in government as much as anyone I promise. But the answer is not to fail to respect the right to practice religion without fear of prosecution. Even if part of your religion requires you to attempt to control secular matters. Tax exemption of churches isn't a privilege. The IRS seriously violates constitutional law with regard to churches already.
That said, there is something of an answer. The answer is to make it a criminal offense for a politician to listen to churches. Let churches tell their congregation what they will or encourage them to vote how they will. Politicians on the other hand should be held to a strict separation from religious lobbying and from voting based upon a religious principle. The second would be hard to prove but would at least make politicians watch their step.
Here in Oregon they mail you your ballot about 2 weeks before election day and you can fill it out and turn it in at your leisure as long as it's returned by 8:00 PM on election day. It works for me.
In Oregon 100% of voting is by mail. We get the ballots in the mail a couple of weeks before election day and can fill them out and mail them in. They have to be at the elections office by 8:00 on election day, postmarks don't count. I usually turn them in at the county elections office since it's only 6 blocks from my home.
In Washington there is a lot of vote by mail but I don't think it's 100% yet.
An honest question - doesn't the scenario I proposed bother you? This is old school, low tech vote fraud - it's the same as ballot boxes disappearing in African elections. I'm not saying it's happening in Oregon per se, but there's so great a potential.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Well, I see your point but there's always some risk no matter what system you use and ultimately much depends on the integrity of the people involved. The checks and balances in place should certainly detect missing or too many ballots and they also record a chain of custody. Observers from the public are allowed to watch all steps of the process (in my county they've had as many as 50 observers at once). In my 36 years of voting in the state (vote by mail since 1998) I don't recall any issues around that kind of election fraud and this being Oregon I'm confident it would have come up if it had happened to any degree. The ballots are processed day they are received at the elections office. They compare the signature on the outer envelope to the signature on the digitized image of voter registration card and if it's OK they tally it and add the unmarked inner envelope to the pile of ballots to be counted. Later they remove the ballots from the inner envelope and stack them so they're ready to be run through the scanner (they may still hand count in the 3 counties with less than 2,000 population). They don't actually count the votes until after 8:00 pm on election day. The thing I worry about most is an authoritarian family forcing all members of the family to mark their ballot a certain way but I've never heard of that happening either. I do wish they would do audits of a statistical random sample of the votes to validate the election but that costs money the state or county is not willing to spend in the absence of evidence it's necessary.
Personally I usually hand deliver my ballot on election day or the day before (you should see the lines of cars dropping off ballots for big elections) not because I distrust the process but because I like the luxury of taking my time to research and ponder the races and ballot measures and I kind of like doing that anyway. What can I say?
e-voting was pushed through in 2000, with a Republican controlled house, a Republican controlled Senate, and a Republican president, immediately after a manual recount of paper ballots was thwarted by a desperate appeal to the Republican majority of the Supreme Court.
They needed a better way to rig elections, with less chance of getting caught. They came up with paperless computerized voting. With a paperless system, there could be no annoying recounts. With computerized voting, the whole system could be rigged by the programmers, so there was no chance of anyone getting caught doing anything illegal at a polling place or a county election office.
The only people who don't want that is, of course, everybody else.
If a Counties Election Authority works as a team against the system then there is no voting system that can or ever will guarantee perfection. Voting systems as a whole will always be based on knowledge, accuracy, cross verification, and trust.
I've been in the election systems hardware and software industry for 7 years and let me be the first to say that there is no perfect answer, just lots of better ones.
What I really want to know is who the heck is responsible on the federal and state level for certifying vote tabulation equipment for use and exactly what the entire certification process entails. Counties are only aloud to purchase equipment the federal and local state government allows them to. How can good election equipment come from a certification process that is probably created by people who are (a) not security experts in every degree and (b) not election officials with years of experience handling live elections.