Slashdot Mirror
Virginia Ditches 'America's Worst Voting Machines'
Geoffrey.landis writes: Computerized voting machines are bad news in general, but the WINVote machines used in Virginia might just have earned their reputation as the most insecure voting machine in America. They feature Wi-Fi that can't be turned off (protected, however, with a WEP password of "abcde"), an unencrypted database, and administrative access with a hardcoded password of "admin." According to security researcher Jeremy Epstein, if the machines weren't hacked in past elections, "it was because nobody tried." But with no paper trail, we'll never know.
Well, after ignoring the well-documented problems for over a decade, Virginia finally decided to decommission the machines... after the governor had problems with the machines last election and demanded an investigation. Quoting: "In total, the vulnerabilities investigators found were so severe and so trivial to exploit, Epstein noted that 'anyone with even a modicum of training could have succeeded' in hacking them. An attacker wouldn't have needed to be inside a polling place either to subvert an election... someone 'within a half mile with a rudimentary antenna built using a Pringles can could also have attacked them.'"
Well, after ignoring the well-documented problems for over a decade, Virginia finally decided to decommission the machines... after the governor had problems with the machines last election and demanded an investigation. Quoting: "In total, the vulnerabilities investigators found were so severe and so trivial to exploit, Epstein noted that 'anyone with even a modicum of training could have succeeded' in hacking them. An attacker wouldn't have needed to be inside a polling place either to subvert an election... someone 'within a half mile with a rudimentary antenna built using a Pringles can could also have attacked them.'"
The vendor specs no doubt call for fully (and publicly) audited replacements, right? It's like the (false) Russian space pen story .. how can every 3rd world country have figured out the ink/thumb solution that costs nothing while we spit into the wind with Billions?
Where was Captain Obvious ten years ago? Why is there no outrage over "trivial to hack" and "we can never know"? Little else is as sacrosanct to our system of law and government as the integrity of the electoral process. That those who knew better were unable to get attention focused on this problem until now is deeply troubling.
electronics, and to a lesser extent voting machines, just exponentially increase the amount of attack vectors
of course you can still fake votes with paper voting, but then you are talking about a crazy conspiracy involving delivery trucks and teams of people. it's a lot harder to hide
rather than one well placed hacker
the poorest democracy and the most advanced democracy should all vote the same way
the overriding point is legitimacy: people have to trust their vote counted. replacing paper and pencil with a black box of gears or electronics does not engender trust
this is far, far more important than getting results a couple hour earlier
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As a Fairfax county resident, those machines haven't been widely used in years. Most people get scantrons. The machines are mostly just for blind people and the non-english speakers, because they have audio out and can read the ballots in multiple languages. The last time everybody used them was 2004, which coincidentally was the last time the state voted for a Republican president.
I read the internet for the articles.
America needs to ditch the world's worst voting system.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
> But the 'voter id laws' of states like Texas
> a) don't let you vote at all,
O Rlly? Prett sure I voted.
>b) make it illegal to use state funded college ID or an out-of-state Driver License to prove your identity even if you happen to be a College Student living in Texas for 9 months of the year
Yes, if you've lived in Texas for nine months, and want to vote in Texas elections (claiming the benefits of Texas residency) you should get a Texas ID. You can instead choose to vote by mail in your home state. Voting for the same candidate twice, in two different states, is frowned upon.
> c) make it very difficult to prove your ID and COSTLY in both time and energy.
Dropping your ballot in the mailbox is SO difficult and expensive. The mailbox is all the way outside! Damn you libs are lazy MFs. (No ID required for voting by mail.)
If you choose to vote in-person, it's convenient that you ALREADY needed to have yoir birth certificate handy to register for school, because yes you will need it if you want to stop by the DMV to get your FREE voter ID (only needed if you don't have a DL, other state ID and want to vote in pereon).
The issue isn't the $10. You don't simply fork over $10 and get an ID; you need some proof of identity, like a _certified_ birth certificate. Don't have one? They're not free either. Moreover, you often need a government issued ID to get a certified birth certificate. That's a bit of a catch-22, right? The solution varies by state. Sometimes you can use a combination of utility bills, W-2s, car registration, bank account, etc. The first requires a permanent residence. The second requires a real job. The latter two probably required a photo ID in the first place. Almost all states allow an attorney to request a certified birth certificate, but attorneys aren't free either. The situation of not having a real job, permanent residence, and certified birth certificate is probably totally foreign to /. users, but there are a non-trivial number of (usually poor) American citizens in that situation, but they still deserve the right to vote.
Now, some states try to avoid this mess. E.g. in WI the non-driver IDs are free if you need one to vote. Also, if you don't have the documentation you need, you can fill out a form and the DMV will take care of everything -- at least in principle. I don't know how well it works; the WI DMV is already stretched kind of thin.
I have mixed feelings about all this. Voter fraud is simply not a problem in the US. (Yes, some idiots filled out fake voter _registration_ forms last election because they were paid to fill out lots of registration forms. That's not voter fraud since no fraudulent votes were cast.) Voter ID laws are there to make life difficult for poor people who tend to vote for Democrats. End of story. What's the upside? Because of the political angle, voter ID laws have lead to organizations assisting poor people to get ID cards. I don't know how effective the organizations have been, but the people who get an ID probably benefit.
You do realize that even the most rigorous ID check in the world wouldn't have stopped an election from being subverted if these machines were used, right?
I'm tired of hearing biased party hacks and online wingnuts rant about "voter fraud" and what must to be done to stop it. The fact is, it's very hard to swing an election using ID-related fraud, and there's no evidence to indicate it has ever been a real problem or might have swung an election - and don't bother with that rabid reply with links to an example, it might possibly have happened once or twice in some insignificant local race somewhere, but that's completely irrelevant when at the same time WE HAVE STEAMING PILES OF SHIT LIKE THIS MACHINE BEING WIDELY USED MAKING IT TRIVIAL FOR SOMEONE TO ALTER EVERY SINGLE VOTE CAST IN ANY MANNER THEY WANT!!! So spare me the crap about ID laws being essential to combat fraud, those shouting that the loudest somehow managed to say nothing about the glaringly obvious potential for major fraud with electronic voting machines, despite those vulnerabilities being fully pointed out at the time by various security experts. Those detailed reports were completely ignored by the same folks claiming to be so concerned now.
The real agenda behind voter ID laws is insultingly obvious.
She got caught. Good. I want to see prosecution of people who commit voter fraud. But are you assuming that there must be hundreds or thousands of people who did the same thing without getting caught? Enough to materially affect the election? Seems like a big stretch to me.
I want to see the people who think it's okay to disenfranchise entire groups of people because they're not likely to vote your way get prosecuted. There is absolutely *no* excuse for the voter ID laws they are putting in place today--it's like jim crow laws, you're just trying to exclude people who won't vote for you. It's reprehensible and in a civilized society it would be criminal.