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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.
An oxymoron.
The only thing a e-voting machine should be used for is printing a paper ballot.
Count the paper ballots.
Anything else means you have to trust the voting machine, or the people who verified the voting machine.
(You have to make sure that there are no hidden things in any of the chips, the software, any memory card that comes into contact with the machine, the network that the machine is connected to, etc. Seriously, who can possibly think that a E-voting machine with a Sprint data card in it is secure?)
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
could be made 100% secure, foolproof, etc., it should still not be used
simply because of the PERCEPTION of what happens to your vote in electronic voting
it is a black box. your votes go in, sausage comes out. meanwhile, a piece of paper has no secrets. it stays in a box, it can retallied. it can be messed with and falsified and burned, sure. but not with such ease and not in so many quick secret and immensely powerful ways electrons or magnetic marks on a disk can be messed with
all nations should use paper ballots, doesn't matter how rich they are. joe schmoe needs to touch and feel and smell his vote. voting machines and electronic voting represents a black box system, and therefore represents too much fundamental distrust. distrust undermines the legitimacy of democratically elected governments in the eyes of the people
it is not good enough that joe schmoe vote in absolute security and privacy and integrity. joe schmoe must also BELIEVE that. but in an irreducibly black box system, distrust is inescapable
electronic voting is the greates threat to democracy, ever. no ideological system or intolerant set of beliefs can undermine faith in democracy more than a method of tallying votes that the technofetishist loves, but the general populace views with suspicion
you don't need to say "gee whiz" when you vote
we need to end electronic voting, in the name of strengthening democracy
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Is very simple, and in fact I used it Today! - The Paper Ballot. I marked my choices, and turned it in. Voters in NJ should demand paper ballots, issue solved (sort of).
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
The thing is, I don't think that everyone DOES know. I sincerely HOPE that they don't know, because no one is COMPLETELY OUTRAGED about it, and seriously, I think this should be a "people in the streets with torches and pitchforks" kind of issue. There simply seems to be zero public interest in this (and by "public" I of course mean the non-Slash-reading public) and it boggles the mind that some public figure hasn't jumped on this and made it a platform.
Lets change your bet a little bit. The 7 minutes are 2 days before the election. You get private time with the ballot box, I get private time with the voting machine.
What can you do to the ballot box that wouldn't be noticeable 2 days later and still affect the vote?
I was an election judge for Boulder County in 2004. Part of my duties as the head election judge for the precinct was to make sure that there was noting in the ballot box and seal it. From that time until I handed the box to the county officials, it was not left in the presence of any single person, so nobody would have 7 minutes during the election day.
You can't stuff the ballot box 2 days before the election with nobody being able to notice.
**THAT** is what they are complaining about. The machines were left in publicly accessible areas for days before the election. Replace one of the chips with that 7 minutes, and it would take a very detailed examination to notice the problem.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
encouraging and aiding voter fraud by fraudulently registering voters multiple times, fake voters, etc?
And if you actually look into it beyond fox news and the "sources" that they quote, you may find out that it is legally required by a voter registration group such as ACORN to submit every single registration form that they receive, regardless of if they think it is valid. They are allowed to mark ones that they believe to be invalid, so that they will be further inspected by actual officials, but to my knowledge, no one has questioned the accuracy of their markings. The issues with false registrations are mostly being found as cases of the person collecting registrations attempting to hit quotas to prove that he/she is actually working. Molehill, not a mountain.
False registration is the first step in voter fraud, is it not?
It could be the first step, but it isn't necessary for voter fraud (as some other replies around this thread suggest, there are plenty of ways to mess with democracy).
As for this particular method, are you suggesting that people going to show up with fake ID's to match the false registrations that they submitted? Seems a bit more involved than designing the machines to falsely provide results.
Outside of that, I have recently realized an issue of concern regarding our electoral process... some people have realized that many minorities who are legal citizens of the country and should be allowed to vote aren't being allowed to vote because they lack ID that is accepted at the time of voting. The problem is that while the Democrats are fighting to get these ID laws removed, they aren't really acknowledging that false registrations in conjunction with no ID required would completely undermine our voting system. We still need to find a way for all citizens to vote though (preferably not a solution involving ID's with RFID chips, GPS tracking or whatever else is remotely possible).