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Damning Report On Sequoia E-Voting Machine Security
TechDirt notes the publication of the New Jersey voting machine study, the attempted suppression of which we have been discussing for a while now. The paper that the Princeton and Lehigh University researchers are releasing, as permitted by the Court, is "the same as the Court's redacted version, but with a few introductory paragraphs about the court case, Gusciora v. Corzine." What's new is the release of a 90-minute evidentiary video — the researchers have asked the court for permission to release a shorter version that hits the high points, as the high-res video is about 1 GB in size. See TechDirt's article for the report's executive summary listing eight ways the AVC Advantage 9.00 voting machine can be subverted.
http://coblitz.codeen.org/citp.princeton.edu/voting/advantage/advantage-insecurities-redacted.pdf
California ordered a review of all the machines used in the state last year. They would give access to university security labs to one manufacturer's machines at a secure location. I mean the machines were held in cages over night and there was controlled access for only the researchers, etc.
They were asked to evaluate the machines.
UC Santa Barbara did ES&S, and their analysis is here.
They also have a short video on the subject, here it is on youtube
In short, all the machines were utter crap. The "seals" can by bypassed by bending some plastic. The locks can be bypassed with a screwdriver. Plus the software is susceptible to viruses, and they managed to make the machine vote for whoever they wanted. Even though all the machines have the VVPT (voter-verified paper trail).
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
Check the map.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
My state uses optically read paper ballots. I think it's the best of both. It can be machine read, but the paper ballot is still there to double check or recount. Is it really that hard to fill in a bubble with a #2 pencil?
"That's quite a lot of fud with not much to back it up with."
damn lameness filter, the 9 megabyte pdf is not FUD, it was a court ordered analysis of the voter system used in new jersey. http://coblitz.codeen.org/citp.princeton.edu/voting/advantage/advantage-insecurities-redacted.pdf
NOTE REGARDING REDACTIONS. As paragraph 1.1 and Appendix L explain, this research was conducted pursuant to a Court Order by the Hon. Linda Feinberg of the New Jersey Superior Court. Sequoia Voting Systems filed a motion alleging that certain parts of this report contain protected trade secrets. Plaintiffs dispute Sequoia's contentions. Judge Feinberg has expressed her intention to preserve Plaintiffs' objections until the time of the hearing when she will rule on the merits of Sequoia's claims of trade secret. We are confident that the Court will then permit release of the full, unredacted report. In the interim, the Court encouraged us to release the report with redactions. Paragraphs 19.8, 19.9, 21.3, and 21.5, as well as Appendices B-G, are redacted in this release.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Pretty much 20 minutes into the video, it describes how a poll worker can simulate activating the machine so that everybody in the room believes it is active, and the voter will notice nothing suspicious, yet the vote cast is not counted. The activation chirp is played, and the correct light display when the voter picks the candidate, and even says "vote counted thanks you", when in reality, no vote has been cast. Unbelievable. It's obvious that a malicious poll worker could absolutely use this to his or her advantage and deny people votes.
There is also the not-at-all-a-small-issue of anonymity. Your voting mechanism must ensure that a particular account number (i.e. a voter's identity) can be used at most one time per election. And you have to record what it was used for anonymously so that what was done with the account literally cannot be traced back to the account holder.
Most of the common credit card fraud-prevention schemes (such as date/time stamping every transaction) violate this. Not really a surprise, since the credit card system is designed to enforce accountability, the antithesis of anonymity (the whole purpose of anonymity is to avoid accountability).
Fundamentally, anonymity is about removing traceability information, and fraud prevention is about maintaining it. These are both core requirements, and they directly work against one another.
"why bother with rigging the voting machines...it seems this year a simpler method has been found, with Acorn registering everyone they can, dead, undead, fictional or alive"
This is, as the poster must be surely be aware by now, not what happened. What actually happened is that a few ACORN employees got lazy and filled out fake voter registrations using the. names of athletes, characters from fiction, etc.). ACORN found out, fired the people responsible, and identified the bad registrations to the authorities when they turned them in. They were required to turn them in by law, as it is illegal to not hand in any voter registration forms due to the obvious potential for abuse if the registration organization is allowed to be selective about which registrations to submit.
Because ACORN identified the suspicious registrations, and because the government agencies that process the registrations validates them, there were likely few or no fake voters actually registered to vote.
And, of course, Micky Mouse, etc., is not going to show up to vote.
So the fraud was not the creation of fake votes, but of ACORN (and to a degree the voter registration agencies) getting their time and money wasted by a few former ACORN employees. Given that ACORN hired 13,000 people and generated 1.3m legitimate registrations, the number of bad registrations reported so far is surprisingly small (a few thousand is claimed).
For actual voter fraud, you'll have to look elsewhere. Like, say, electronic voting machines, caging, etc.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!