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Bev Harris of Black Box Voting Releases Accenture's Voting Software
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)."
Now how long until Harris is sued?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Well, there's your problem right there....why didn't they use a (real) database?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Well, there's your problem right there....why didn't they use a (real) database?
Like Microsoft Excel?
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.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Lord, I wouldn't worry about tinfoil conspiracies, it is straight up incompetence.
Their consultants are terrible, and I mean that in the nicest way possible.
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.
Hey if this is against TOS then by all means, remove it.
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/7659/ESM_2_0_8_23_04_zip__Burnbit_-82116.unk
hopefully that is a working link to the torrent. its 325meg or so in size.
This is SW to maintain voter registration, not collect votes. Just because it is broken and shows a voter voted multiple times in an election does not necessarily mean that the voter actually was able to cast multiple votes or that the (independent) voting method (paper or electronic) was flawed.
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.
... that votes are somehow being recorded twice and sometimes three times for certain voters in the voter history report
To me, this sounds like someone's join isn't all that unique. Let's say you have two voters, Joe Smith, at two different addresses, that both voted. If you join a registration list with a vote list, on first and last name and not address, you actually end up with 4 combinations instead of 2, for twice the votes. Other things to check are overlapping effective/terminate date ranges, and compound primary key fields. Rookie mistakes, but big consequences.
Earlier Anonymous torrent link was incorrect. Here's the one from the site: http://burnbit.com/torrent/204972/ESM_2_0_8_23_04_zip
Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.
Submitted this related article to Slashdot a few months ago. Bev Harris looked into this as well.
To sum up the above link: An interesting phenomenon has occurred in every state of this year's Republican primaries. Votes appear to be flipped away from other candidates in favor of Romney, with a 99% correlation to precinct size. Although votes are "canvassed" (checked) after each primary, the methods used are primarily designed to detect vote stuffing, rather than vote flipping.
This phenomenon has recently been shown to be absent if you can get your hands on poll tapes from individual machines, rather than from voting tabulators (machines that count the totals from the various voting machines).
Voting machines are just scary stuff. More so since poll tapes are not always made readily available. Thankfully, a bill was recently introduced that would require poll tapes from individual machines (not just tabulators) to be made available by the next day following an election.
"Just rammed it through" def'n: any legislation that passes that you don't like.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Highly recommend watching "Hacking Democracy".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVTXbARGXso
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
They built a MS Access DB for the front-end and used SQL for the back-end, this is industry standard for small business clerical solutions and is dirt cheap to do.
Microsoft has a nasty habit of removing functions out of DLL's to provide security, or changing their behavior so code breaks in ways nobody notices. Either you patch and you have a reliability problem, or you don't and get a security problem.
It's very likely the town decided they wanted to that setup because it's easy to exploit.
Where Accenture comes in as being a boatload of fail, is that they didn't build ANY database validation or security into their system. It's RIDICULOUSLY simple to set up several blob's for each site, set up security-per-blob by site logon, set up kiosks under guest accounts in AD that have access to just their blob, have the data aggregate into those blob's, then run a report to tally, and here's the fail part, AND ANOTHER REPORT TO CONFIRM OBVIOUS MISTAKE ON THE ROLLS A MONKEY COULD SPOT ARE NOT HAPPENING!
Voters voting twice, the number of votes on a field being counted several times, data field error checking to ensure valid characters are in a class...the STANDARD stuff. And we aren't talking about egregious or eccentric databasing here, we're talking about plain old simple databasing; field 1 is a name, field 2 is an address, field 3 is a telephone number, field 4 is the representative they wanted to vote for and so on and so on.
If Accenture wants to come clean, give us the design document the were handled to perform the contract, in fact, I'd FOIA that sucker in light of this offense.
IMO Windows has too large of an attack surface to be used for this; you need something with a minimal attack surface that can be updated and set up as needed. You need either Windows Server Core, or Linux. Heck, even Mac OSX would be better suited than XP or 7.
It's basically a bunch of monstrous Access databases. Unfortunately, most (all?) of the VBA code is in databases that have been compiled to .mde files. There's no simple way that I know of to get usable source code back from those, which is unfortunate, since that's probably where most of the damning evidence would be found. However, you can view table definitions and data, form and report designs, queries, etc. Fun fact: you can bypass the initial login by just holding the left shift key as you open voter.mde.
The recommendation and rationale goes like this... The person I trust is not necessarily the person you would trust therefore we need transparency. No system can be secured against its administrators therefore we need transparency over security.
We must be able to verify four things. 1) Who can vote 2) Who did vote 3) Chain of custody 4) Vote count
Failing any of these points our elections are simply staged theater. Right now, we're failing ALL these points. No electronic system can be verifiable. Can't be done. Even under a paper system its difficult to put checks in place and to have mechanisms where a single voter or group of voter can raise a concern (even an honest mistake) and have it taken care of. A botched election is notoriously hard to clean up. Especially because recounts can and have been rigged. Litigating election issues is nearly impossible. The integrity of the election cycle must be maintained so no voter off the street and even most candidates can't get an issue in court with enough time to change the outcome of an election.
Therefore. *Most* Long term Election Integrity activists have come to support this basic starting principal: "Voter Marked Hand Counted Paper Ballots, Counted at the polls, on election night, no matter how long it takes, in full public view before all those who want to witness the count and before the ballots are moved and chain of custody issues arise."
Now. That handles points 3 and 4 but to be honest. 1 and 2 are tricky. They kinda require databases at this point because unlike the pool of poll workers this system don't scale well with the population. Bev's been finding voter histories have been erased in several counties in Tennessee. This is important because if a registered voter hasn't voted in a while then as part of house keeping (the person may have died or moved) they eventually get purged from the voter rolls. So someone(s) in Tennessee is erasing peoples' vote history so they get purged, show up at the polls and can't vote. There's already been some court rulings to handle this. The point is we need to remain vigilant and we need things transparent so we CAN be vigilant. We don't need computers to solve everything. We need the public to relearn how to do their civic duty and to do that civic duty.
I've always found it ironic that people quote the majority of journalists being democrats as proof that they're biased, as opposed to thinking for a moment that the people who spend all day every day reporting the going-ons of the national political scene might have more first hand experience with both sides than most of us and in turn have a more informed opinion than us.
Not saying reporting should be anything but objective, I would disagree with anyone who says it should, I just find it interesting that nobody takes this concept that most journalists are democrats as a possible indicator of something more than their bias.
If 90% of astronomers believed there's no alien life (hypothetically- I don't know what they believe), I would think there's something to it, since they report on the going-ons out there. *points at space*
Indeed. You've been using an eggcorn. By far one of the most common ones in use, but every bit as nonsensical as the others found in this sampling:
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Allow me to play doubles advocate here for a moment. For all intensive purposes I think you are wrong.
In an age where false morals are a diamond dozen, true virtues are a blessing in the skies. We often put our false morality on a petal stool like a bunch of pre-Madonnas, but you all seem to be taking something very valuable for granite. So I ask of you to mustard up all the strength you can because it is a doggy dog world out there. Although there is some merit to what you are saying it seems like you have a huge ship on your shoulder. In your argument you seem to throw everything in but the kids Nsync, and even though you are having a feel day with this I am here to bring you back into reality. I have a sick sense when it comes to these types of things. It is almost spooky, because I cannot turn a blonde eye to these glaring flaws in your rhetoric. I have zero taller ants when it comes to people spouting out hate in the name of moral righteousness. You just need to remember what comes around is all around, and when supply and command fails you will be the first to go.
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My intent isn't to insult, just to encourage people to think about any phrase that doesn't actually make sense.