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Top Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States (vice.com)
Kim Zetter, reporting for Motherboard: The nation's top voting machine maker has admitted in a letter to a federal lawmaker that the company
installed remote-access software on election-management systems it sold over a period of six years, raising questions about the security of those systems and the integrity of elections that were conducted with them. In a letter sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) in April and obtained recently by Motherboard, Election Systems and Software acknowledged that it had "provided pcAnywhere remote connection software ... to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006," which was installed on the election-management system ES&S sold them.
The statement contradicts what the company told me and fact checkers for a story I wrote for the New York Times in February. At that time, a spokesperson said ES&S had never installed pcAnywhere on any election system it sold. "None of the employees -- including long-tenured employees, has any knowledge that our voting systems have ever been sold with remote-access software," the spokesperson said. ES&S did not respond on Monday to questions from Motherboard, and it's not clear why the company changed its response between February and April. Lawmakers, however, have subpoena powers that can compel a company to hand over documents or provide sworn testimony on a matter lawmakers are investigating, and a statement made to lawmakers that is later proven false can have greater consequence for a company than one made to reporters.
The statement contradicts what the company told me and fact checkers for a story I wrote for the New York Times in February. At that time, a spokesperson said ES&S had never installed pcAnywhere on any election system it sold. "None of the employees -- including long-tenured employees, has any knowledge that our voting systems have ever been sold with remote-access software," the spokesperson said. ES&S did not respond on Monday to questions from Motherboard, and it's not clear why the company changed its response between February and April. Lawmakers, however, have subpoena powers that can compel a company to hand over documents or provide sworn testimony on a matter lawmakers are investigating, and a statement made to lawmakers that is later proven false can have greater consequence for a company than one made to reporters.
If your electronic voting booth runs a commercial operating system then you have already failed to secure your systems.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The Man finally figured out that stealing money is for chumps. The best crime is to steal the whole country.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
But removing dead people from the voter roles is racist! Somehow. According to liberals.
There's so much wrong with the voting system in the US that worrying about remote access software on machines that weren't even Internet connected is way at the bottom of the list. (People have physical access to the machines anyway. If you want a more dangerous attack vector: there you go.)
It's not even at the top of the list of problems with electronic voting. Who cares if the machines are hacked? It's not like you can verify the results anyway. Maybe hackers could change results. Maybe there are bugs so that certain votes are silently dropped or changed. Who knows. It can't be audited anyway.
And all of this pales to the fact that we don't even bother checking if the people voting are who they claim they are! No other nation in the world lets you go in, say "oh yeah, I'm a registered voter" and then just trusts you on that. But we do.
There are so many things wrong with the US voting system that remote access software is just not a worry.
"provided pcAnywhere remote connection software ... to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006,"
The same PCAnywhere that was so egregiously exploitable that Symantec - Symantec of all companies, gave out free copies of version 12 to users who owned literally any prior version no matter how old it was? THAT is the product that was being utilized on voting machines?!
It has become abundantly clear that any company selling technology-based solutions to the government which can successfully win a bid should under no circumstances be allowed to do the job.
But removing dead people from the voter roles is racist! Somehow. According to liberals.
No whats racist is that they seem to only remove "dead" people that are black, with no notification, 6 months before the election, and then oops turns out those people were still alive but it's too late for you to re-register because election day is today.
And all of this pales to the fact that we don't even bother checking if the people voting are who they claim they are! No other nation in the world lets you go in, say "oh yeah, I'm a registered voter" and then just trusts you on that. But we do.
You've never actually voted in the USA have you? They generally do verify your identity at the poles when you go to vote.
and yet after spending millions of dollars on dozens of investigations, no one has found any significant voter fraud in recent memory.
but the right has demonstrably suppressed minority and democratic likely voting through stacks of well documented dirty tricks including bogus voter purges ( based on matching first and last names alone, as if those never are shared ), removing polling places, reducing machines in those voting places, etc... not to mention gerrymandering voting districts past any semblance of rationality.
"No whats racist is that they seem to only remove "dead" people that are black, with no notification, 6 months before the election, and then oops turns out those people were still alive but it's too late for you to re-register because election day is today."
Except that never happens, it's just agit-prop for people who won't bother to check it out. Voter roles are culled based on specific criteria, usually based on voter inactivity. There are exactly zero verifiable instances of just black people being removed from the voter roles. Those stories are aimed at very stupid people with confirmation bias.
Also, provisional ballots exist for folks who show up to vote and discover their names aren't on the list (for whatever reason). They are given provisional ballots to use and then their eligibility is determined after the fact.
What's really racist is the idea that minorities are just incapable of getting an ID.
We are subjects, and we have no control.... if we ever did.
What's really racist is the idea that minorities are just incapable of getting an ID.
I support voter ID, but a California driver license costs $35. A California ID card (drinker's license) is $30. At the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are those for whom this is too much of an expense. Demanding payment in exchange for the privilege of voting is an illegal poll tax. Either change the Constitution or offer free IDs.
Republicans have been trying to protect our voting system for years with a simple ID check.
Democrats have been violently fighting this because they know that almost all voter fraud favors them. The whole race baiting issue is exactly that: "You can't protect our voting system! That's racist!"
The only racism here is from the Democrats.
Now with their retarded Russian panic they're looking like total morons, stuck between wanting illegal voting but needing to blame someone for losing anyway.
Voting machines decide who gets a huge amount of power in our government. Backdoor access via a software package whose source code had been leaked and exploited, leading to the manufacturer recommending that it be removed, is huge goddamn deal.
It's a well known open secret that liberals routinely bus "voters" around on election day thanks to the fact that all you need to vote is know the registered voter list.
What you describe is illegal. I must assume that at least a small percentage of these frauds are caught, so of course you can provide some documentation of convictions for this, right?
I should note that one of the first things DJT did after he became president is to start a committee to investigate voter fraud. It has been disbanded recently, and I am not aware of any reports from this committy. Why? I think I can make a pretty good guess.
Even more of a reason to dump those voting machines.
People pretty much have to trust paper and pencil. It's something everyone understands and trying to spin some conspiracy of how someone "stole" the election is pretty hard that way.
That gets way easier with a tool that few people understand, even fewer can audit and only a handful actually get anywhere close to actually auditing it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Careful, you might not like what you find!
If we start really looking at these voting machines, we'll soon uncover the Diebold CEO's comments promising to deliver the 2004 election to George W. Bush (specifically Ohio, which they did, and which deviated from exit poles with huge sample bases- by a whopping 6% -- a wide enough margin to trigger new elections in other countries like the Ukraine, but mysteriously not in Ohio). It is likely we'll find many state and local elections have been "stolen," and probably one or two federal and even presidential elections (2004, 2016) where the results may well have been changed (but we'll never know--except by noting abnormal deviations from exit poles like in '04--since there's no audit trail. About the only results we can trust is where the margin of victory was sufficiently large to make such shenanigans impractical (2008, 2012).
Republicans not liking democratic outcomes date back to at least the 1990s when they impeached Clinton, and certainly include 2000, when they stopped a recount they would have lost (as was widely reported outside of the United States when the recount eventually happened, but strangely the US media was either quiet, or buried the story on page 12). 2016 isn't an aberration, it's part of a wider pattern, the only difference is this time they accepted help from a foreign adversary to achieve their goals, so desperate were they to stack the supreme court with their own ideologues for another generation.
Paper ballots with machine tallying combines the most of the best features of both systems and is cheap, logistically simple, and auditable. It also scales with license or technical limitations. I live in a state which uses that system and if turnout is heavy at the polling place they just set up another row of cheap pop-up voting booths, doubling the polling place's throughput for less than a price of a single voting machine.
Of course one man's bug is sometimes another man's feature.
I'm convinced that the reason these machines are so popular despite their cost, insecurity, and logistical burden is that they enable political parties to manipulate election results, not by hacking, but simply using the bottleneck they represent to generate long lines in precincts unfavorable to them.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I'm in the center, and I am seeing BOTH sides being ridiculously incalcitrant here. Democrats bitch that any voter ID proposal is bad before even looking at it, and Republicans complain that voter fraud is rampant despite the total lack of evidence. Never mind both sides being hypocritical and creating gerrymandered districts.
I think we should let everyone eligible be able to vote. If they don't have an ID or someone to vouch for them, then create a provisional ballot. It may slow down the counting, but I'd rather it take months to decide the winner than to disenfranchise someone. I also think college students should vote if they're living 2/3rds of the year in the county, and I think that ex convicts should vote also if they've served their time, and I think armed forces serving over time should be allowed to vote.
Voting is every citizens right and duty and no one should stand in the way of it. That's the top priority, and I don't have issues with voter ID if it doesn't get in the way of anyone of any political persuasion from voting.
You can't claim voter fraud is not rare when lacking a shred of evidence. It is simply dishonest. It is not my job to prove how rare unicorns are, but the person who says unicorns are everywhere. AGs have looked and looked and they cannot find more than a rare isolated example here and there.
For example, there is a consistent complaint that surely dead people are voting. Gee, it is the twentyeffinfirst century and it would be easy to detect that with computer technology if it were non-rare. No body looks into that because everyone with a brain knows the truth.
If you could figure out how to prove there was significant amount of voter fraud, there is a rightwing PAC out there who will write you a seven figure check for the evidence, I guarantee it. Put you money where you mouth is, and quick your day job for a year to serve American democracy. And get rich, too.