Hacker Exposes Parts of Florida's Voting Database

Dangerous_Minds writes "Some people feel that elections can be rigged and votes tampered with. One hacker, who goes by the name of Abhaxas, decided to prove that votes aren't secure by exposing parts of the Florida voting database. Said Abhaxas while posting the data, 'Who believes voting isn't tampered with?'"

Comments

Good job on behalf of the hacker

[Cito]

Hopefully this can help finally shed light on voting fraud to stuff the ballots in our election process. I've never been one for electronic voting as it's so much more easily tampered with. And only reason it's pushed so much is due to companies like diebold and the media who push so they can have up to the second voter tallies so they can sound like they are on top of everything when reporting.

It needs to go back to the old way, which wasn't perfect, but was hell of a lot better than electronic voting.

Re:Good job on behalf of the hacker

[tripleevenfall]

Maybe we should re-evaluate the secret ballot. It would seem like fraud is always possible as long as ballots can't be linked one to one with a person. Even with paper ballots, someone can always steal or destroy or fill out fake ones.

Why not just go ahead and make it all verifiable?

When you show up to vote, they print a bar code off on two labels. One goes into the log book next to your name, the matching label goes on the ballot.

Re:Good job on behalf of the hacker

[damiangerous]

Why not just go ahead and make it all verifiable? Coercion. An employer or union boss can easily make sure their people vote the "right" way if they want to keep their jobs.

Re:Good job on behalf of the hacker

[Evets]

why exactly would this help? All ID requirements do is disenfranchise lower income voters. It has nothing to do with protecting vote data.

Re:Good job on behalf of the hacker

[Anonymous Coward]

I am on vacation in Nicaragua, they vote here by registering their cell phone number and calling in their vote, strangely enough the losers have a very difficult time getting contracts, especially if their business is linked to their phone.... secret votes are a good thing, but they need to be secure, thats the part we have gotten wrong.

Re:Good job on behalf of the hacker

[PopeRatzo]

This Ohio Republican representative got his license pulled because he was driving drunk. If the election was tomorrow he wouldn't be able to vote.

He's the sponsor of a bill to require photo ID in order to vote.

The sponsor of an Ohio bill which restricts access to the ballot box was arrested back in April on drunk driving charges while he had a 26-year-old woman in his car and Viagra in his system, according to police reports.

On April 23, an Indiana state trooper pulled Rep. Robert Mecklenborg over for a burned out headlight on a 2004 Lexus he was driving. After failing three separate field sobriety tests, Mecklenborg allegedly refused to take a breath test and was placed under arrest. A blood test later revealed that he had recently taken a Viagra.

Laws requiring photo ID to vote only exist to keep poor people from voting. Let's not bullshit, here. How did the United States last 235 years without requiring photo IDs to vote? How come we haven't had any scandals involving ineligible people voting despite the Bush Administration promising to make it a priority?

If you want to do voter fraud by having ineligible people voting, it takes a lot of hard work. If you want to do it using electronic voting machines, it's trivial. How can you suggest that until we have laws keeping poor people from voting we shouldn't get rid of electronic voting? It's like ignoring the hole in the bottom of the boat because you want to make sure your captain's hat is on straight.

Re:Good job on behalf of the hacker

[damiangerous]

Everyone is not you. A great many people are poor, unskilled, uneducated laborers and often immigrants. They're already easily abused by employers due to lack of knowledge of labor laws, lack of resources to do anything about it and/or fear of repercussions.

Re:Good job on behalf of the hacker

[PopeRatzo]

In Texas a Non-Driver Identification Card is $16 and expires in 6 years. If you are too poor to afford a car to bother taking/passing the driving test you can get just a regular ID.

You can go to senior citizen homes and not find a single photo ID among the residents. To get one, they'd have to get their birth certificate, which might require a trip to their home town if they were born before 1955.

Photo ID voter laws are only meant to keep poor people from voting. If you look through YouTube, you'll find Republicans admitting as much. Then there are the new residency requirements meant to keep students from voting.

This is not about the integrity of elections. Exactly the opposite in fact.

None of this (except the passwords)...

[John Hasler]

...should be secret anyway. The only part of an election that should be secret is how each individual voted.

Re:None of this (except the passwords)...

[compro01]

Why do you need a machine to vote? Why not just pencil in an X next to the candidate's name like they do in other countries?

How is anyone supposed to profit from that kind of scheme?

To make a secure voting machine

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the whole point of these voting machines, make it easier and save time for the users. A punchcard reader/sorta could easily accomplish that. You got physical validity and you get time saving. People can still mail in votes and a database that keeps only people who have voted already (and not who voted for who) could keep track of duplicate votes which puts up a *flag* for that person. If they done it this way, a database breach means little without physical access to the cards or machine.

What about dead people voting fraud and vote coercion for mail in votes? Stricter law enforcement and record keeping as those things already happens i suppose.

Total non-sequitur

[artor3]

So the fact that he was able to access a list of voters is supposed to prove that votes are rigged? How exactly does that follow?

Voter fraud is a non-existent problem. It's a bogeyman used to get people scared so that they agree to more restrictions on voting, which in turn disenfranchises those who might otherwise resist the powers that be. It also serves the double duty of de-legitimizing any political opponents. Don't like the incumbent? Call him an imposter, and that way you can scream hatred and bile against him at every moment, and your supporters won't question it, because you've given them a way to rationalize all the hate.

Re:Total non-sequitur

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, votes are supposed to be confidential.

Second, you don't need electronic voting to get fast results. Canada still uses paper ballots and they have their final results within 24 hours.

Re:Total non-sequitur

[rwven]

The point is that if he hacked in and and got this junk, someone could just as easily have gotten in and altered the data. I don't put it beyond corporations to under-the-table hire hackers to accomplish their end-goals (namely because I've seen it happen), and hacking a voter database is a pretty obvious target.

And that's only the corporation side of things....

Re:Total non-sequitur

[dkleinsc]

Voter fraud is a non-existent problem.

It's not quite non-existent. It's not hard to find residents of Chicago or Philadelphia who were part of political machines that regularly placed fraudulent votes. For instance, a common tactic was (maybe still is) to use dead people's names and addresses.

However, efforts to restrict voting (at least in the US) have far more to do with disenfranchising poor people and black people than they do with any actual risk of fraud. For instance, photo ID requirements, a mere annoyance for middle-class white folks with a driver's license, are an insurmountable burden for members of the underclass that survive on public housing and food assistance. One tell-tale sign here is that the focus is on somebody who shows up to the polls and tries to cast a fraudulent vote, rather than the much easier ways of committing election fraud on a significant scale like manipulating the persons or machines responsible for counting the votes or effectively ballot-stuffing. If you were, say, a secretary of state with ties to a party's political campaign trying to commit election fraud, which would be easier - making a vulnerable voting machine and changing a number in Microsoft Access, or organizing hundreds of thousands of people to go to the polls and fraudulently casting votes?

Re:Total non-sequitur

[Sooner Boomer]

For instance, photo ID requirements, a mere annoyance for middle-class white folks with a driver's license, are an insurmountable burden for members of the underclass that survive on public housing and food assistance.

Pray, do tell, how people that are able to sign up and live off of the public dole, then become too stupid (or otherwise unable) to get a FREE photo ID. Make the photo ID part of the requirement to use these benefits, and you'll cut down on foodstamp fraud too. This whole idea about poor people unable to get ID (which can be verified) is a disingenuous strawman arguement. "insurmountable burden", my ass - just another reason to perpetuate voter fraud!

Re:Total non-sequitur

[Sooner Boomer]

You are being disingenuous...
Republicans are the ones with the strawman argument...

  The whole "I know you are but what am I" arguement doesn't work past the 5th grade.
And I hardly think Chicago, widely known for voter fraud, is a Republican bastion. Want to try again?

Re:Total non-sequitur

[stdarg]

So if we made a photo ID a requirement for public housing and food assistance, problem solved?

I assume there are mechanisms to stop people from signing up for public housing and food assistance multiple times. If no ID is required, how are they enforcing that? Why not use the same mechanisms when it comes to voting?