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Bev Harris of Black Box Voting Releases Accenture's Voting Software

Posted by timothy on from the ignore-man-behind-curtain dept.

Gottesser writes with this excerpt from Bev Harris's Black Box Voting: "I have found and posted the actual voter list software used widely throughout the USA (TN, WI, PA, CO, KS...) for Accenture voter registration and voter histories. I located the files on a magnetic backup tape of the hard drive of a county elections IT employee, part of a 120-gig set of discovery files. The Accenture voter registration / voter history software is highly problematic, and has been reported switching voter parties in Colorado, and losing voter histories in Tennessee. Although it is now widely known that Accenture voter list software gets it wrong, just WHY the program misreports voter information so often has never been explained. I am hoping that by releasing this software to the public, it may shed light on what's really going on with our voter registration systems. I also posted a Tennessee file with work orders and release notes which shows the Accenture software has a history of tripling votes in certain ('random') voter histories, going back to 2004. Except it is not random: Other files I discovered prove it is with primarily suburban Republican precincts that votes are somehow being recorded twice and sometimes three times for certain voters in the voter history report, and this didn't just happen in 2004; it also happened in the 2008 presidential primary and in May and August 2010, and according to election commission notes in Shelby County, also in the 2012 presidential primary. Computer buffs, have at it. Much source code exists within the structure because it is built on MS Access. I do not read source code, though I can see some structural problems with the software (for example, it allows political party ID to be set differently from one precinct to another)."

19 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. Good work by Hatta · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Now how long until Harris is sued?

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    1. Re:Good work by MickyTheIdiot · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I am left without mod points now. Dang. This is a -1 Troll post if ever there was one.

      The problem with "e"voting is you are using what has to be a complex technical system for something done for hundreds or thousands of years in a simple way, either by hand counting or counting slips of paper. If you believe in the KISS principle this is one case where the solution might be not to play as the lives of an entire country are to blame.

      Even if you screw up micro controller code and overexposing someone to radiation in the famous incident it's only *one* person, not a country.

  2. "because it is built on MS Access." by cayenne8 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...because it is built on MS Access.

    Well, there's your problem right there....why didn't they use a (real) database?

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    1. Re:"because it is built on MS Access." by gman003 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Because they couldn't figure out how to get MSSQL working, they couldn't afford Oracle, the very thought of "open source" scared the crap out of them (so no MySQL/PostgreSQL), and all the other proprietary databases are (apparently) even worse than Access.

    2. Re:"because it is built on MS Access." by erik+umenhofer · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This sounds like the client had requirements. No consultant in the modern day would go in there and say this is the best solution. They must of been told they had Access already and this was all they could use.

    3. Re:"because it is built on MS Access." by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If it aint broke, don't fix it.

      An aphorism best applied to things that aren't broken.

  3. This will be really interesting by Omnifarious · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There have been a whole lot of election shenanigans in this country and in Canada. And while I don't doubt both parties have done this sort of thing, and do this sort of thing, it seems to be the Republicans who've been the biggest culprits these past 10 years or so.

    Personally, I really like the anonymous electronic voting systems based on David Chaum's digital cash work. They look like they might be independently verifiable by third parties and anonymous at the same time.

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    1. Re:This will be really interesting by cpu6502 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      >>>it seems to be the Republicans who've been the biggest culprits these past 10 years or so.

      In my state (see post below) it was the Democrats that rammed-through these machines. The Repubs/Libertarians were opposed to the e-voting due to ease-of-vote hijacking. So..... why do you think the Republicans are the biggest culprits when they were the ones opposed to the idea? Sources please.

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    2. Re:This will be really interesting by crazyjj · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And will likely vote for him again because...

      ...the alternative is a fucking nightmare.

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    3. Re:This will be really interesting by Mister+Transistor · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Because the alternative is MUCH WORSE. Yes, let's get back to the system and methods used to utterly destroy the US and World Economies, and turned the US from possibly the most admired and greatest nation in the world to the almost universally-hated Pariah it is today.

      They have DESTROYED AMERICA as we knew it. Keep up the good work! The rest of the world isn't quite bankrupt yet.

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    4. Re:This will be really interesting by riverat1 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      ...the alternative is a fucking nightmare.

      Amen.

    5. Re:This will be really interesting by reve_etrange · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I know right? That's why Sweden and Norway are about to default on all their debt.

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      .: Semper Absurda :.
    6. Re:This will be really interesting by amorsen · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Denmark too! In fact, Denmark is so close to being broke that its government bond interest rate has overflowed and gone NEGATIVE!

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    7. Re:This will be really interesting by akeeneye · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Don't forget Germany. A shambles I tell you.

      Government creates freedoms, it doesn't take them away. I'm free to walk down the street without the fear of getting mugged in most places because We The People have pooled our resources via the governnment to make the streets safe. I have the freedom to be unafraid of acquiring a large number of infectious diseases that my parents and grandparents did not have the freedom to ignore, because We The People pooled our resources to fund medical research into these diseases. Like many in the US, I would like our government to invest our resources into creating more freedoms for us.

      Which is not to say that it doesn't have to mend its ways in other areas, such as eliminating the current policy of Never-Ending War.

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    8. Re:This will be really interesting by cffrost · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Voting for a third party is voting for the guy you hate the most.

      Only if one is voting from a swing state; if your state is historically/reliably loyal to D or R (at the exclusion of the other), voting third-party is a smart and responsible thing to do.

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      Thank you, Edward Snowden.

      "Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
  4. This needs mirrors and fast, imo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    For one, the article is /.'d so I cant even read it..

    Second, if what she is alleging is correct then yes, it needs to be spread far and wide on the 'net (and off, too, backed up all over) because letting criminals get away with stealing elections is very wrong.

    Flame me, mod me down, whatever. But to stand by idly and let people that are evil win is wrong.

  5. Re:Accenture wrote it? by Jerome+H · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Could you shed some light to why Accenture is so terrible ? Slashdot's search didn't return any interesting links.

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  6. This made me laugh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I know a bunch of county elections IT people in Colorado since I work in county IT (and nervously checked TFA hoping it wasn't one of our backups that got released). Let me tell you, if you think IT is stressful, add politics and see what happens. To anyone else about to start scrutinizing this Accenture crap: welcome to the party. We have to deal with horrible, over-costed, "best of the worst" third-party solutions on a daily basis because there simply aren't any alternatives.

    Let me tell you: if you were to start an open-source project for vote-counting you would have thousands of fed-up county contributors overnight.

  7. Re:On the dangers of voting machines by Khith · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you're willing to wade through a ton of charts and statistics (well, this IS Slashdot) then check out this longer version.

    https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByJAC-sfXwumdkE4d0Y2eWtURTZ2eDM5RmlLc3ZhQQ/edit?pli=1

    There's been major election fraud to prop up Romney and reduce the vote counts of others (but usually Ron Paul), and this is one of the things that the RNC is being sued over. This is also why Ron Paul has won several caucuses when the primaries (with the rigged machines) said he didn't win. It's much harder to falsify a bunch of people actually showing up to elect delegates.