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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.
It's plausible that an admin or tech installed it for convenience at certain trouble customers and current execs just weren't aware. It doesn't mean they lied. This was 15-20 years ago. Pretty common practice.
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
Personally, I'm not as worried about Oregon's voting computers as I am the potential for fraud across the far weaker link - all of Oregon votes by mail. All it would really take is a properly-bribed postman or two to collect a few spare ballots (and discard a few ballots from parts of his route that vote heavily for The Other Guy), a handful of pencils, a roll of stamps, and a few cohorts willing to help you 'vote'. The voter would never know that anything was amiss.
(there's other ways that mail-in ballots are open for fraud, but this is one that comes to mind. The envelopes are unique, big, and easy to pick out.)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
"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."
WTF are you babbling on about magasnowflake? The list of things that republicans terrified of brown or poor people do to suppress the vote is long and well documented.
"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."
Citation please, mister expert on every voting process in the world...
Should we worry that this company thinks it is ok to routinely tell blatant lies about their security related practice?
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.
They went back to machine graded multiple choice exams on paper. And then they invited in millions of ghost voters to screw up the voting counts.
{o.o}
I TOLD YOU SO GOD DAMN IT.
Why would you assume they wouldn't install a backdoor? WHY??? Changing election totals gave them trillions of dollars in tax cuts and complete power.
Don't talk about open-source replacements. Any solution with electrons will be hacked and controlled. Go back to paper, the way Canada does, or did before the Tories rammed e-voting in. I wonder why, I wonder.
Personally, I would be more concerned about a properly bribed election official or two losing votes in a voting machine or even worse, a voting machine with remote access https://www.newsweek.com/elect....
This article from Vox highlights one of vote-by-mail strengths which is that it is very distributed and hard to tamper with at large scale. It's second strength is that is a fair process making voting accessible to anyone who is registered to vote. No need for polling places or special times and days, only a voting deadline of when your vote must be in an order to be counted. https://www.vox.com/policy-and...
of course, if you want to steal an election, here's your how to: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018...
"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.
It's a well known open secret that liberals routinely bus "voters" around on election day...
If by "open secret" you mean bullshit, then you nailed it.
The story is very misleading, and I suspect that is on purpose.
I've spent about two decades working on election technology and voter registration data and could write volumes about it. None of that matters though because this is just another propaganda piece meant to reinforce false beliefs of a certain segment.
They put PCAnywhere on the MANAGEMENT systems on a few customer's systems. This was NOT on voting machines.
Folks do need to realize that this risk pretty much requires internet access and requires firewall access rules that allow it. This is not some huge risk and is easily mitigated by your standard network firewall configuration. Your home router would be sufficient to prevent unauthorized access using PCAnywhere. Big woop.
So why did the story change? Because, it wasn't part of the normal systems sold back in 2000-2006 and somebody remembered that in a few cases PCAnywhere was used to provide support for some selected customers and pointed that out to the people making these statements. Then, presented with evidence contrary to their original statement, they tell the truth and modify their statements.
Where this is something that needs to be fixed and PCAnywhere removed from the systems in question, there is very little real risk.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
and yet after spending millions of dollars on dozens of investigations, no one has found any significant voter fraud in recent memory.
We have a secret ballot. There's no way to catch these because we don't bother verifying that the people voting are who they say they are. This is like not recording any server logs and saying your server can't possibly be hacked because the logs don't say it was.
We have no way of knowing how bad the voter fraud problem is because we don't have the tools to look for it.
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,"
You mean to tell me some corporate spokesdrone would LIE to a reporter and not until their feet are held to the fire by legitimate legal power would the truth come out??!!
Shocked, I tell you. I am shocked.
Reading up on verified paper voting trails. (=My personal wishlist item for verifiable elections) reveals some disturbing stuff from 2016's election:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/paperless-pennsylvania-can-swing-state-verify-2016-vote-n660266
"Even benign breakdowns of aging equipment — 43 states have machines that are more than a decade old ", i.e. states with voting machines from before 2006, the new standards didn't come in until 2007 and ESS only removed this software on machines made AFTER 2007.
You claimed it was 15-20 years ago, but the article says 2007 was the time they removed them and then only for new voting machines sold.
"when Pennsylvanians go to the polls to elect a new president in a month, more than 80 percent of them will be using machines that don't have a paper-backed audit."
Let me guess, Pennsylvania was polling strongly for Clinton yet elected Trump by a slim and plausible margin.
"Hillary Clinton leading by up to 12 points in Pennsylvania..."
(From Wikipedia after the article)
Trump wins Pennsylvania by 48.18% to 47.46%...
I'm guessing that this is odd.
2012, strong Obama, 2008 strong Obama, 2004 kerry, 2000 Al Gore....
Yeh right, and now you can't even verify it because you didn't have a paper trail to verify against.
FFS,
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.
It's not just the ID itself, but the supporting documentation.
A new copy of my birth certificate costs $50, or I have the option of traveling 2000 miles to get a free copy at the county's offices.
The USPS is not a guaranteed delivery system. A mailed-in ballot cannot be guaranteed to have been filled out by the voter, nor delivered on time, nor delivered without having been manipulated on transit. It's a terrible way to cast a vote.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
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.
All it would really take is a properly-bribed postman or two to collect a few spare ballots (and discard a few ballots from parts of his route that vote heavily for The Other Guy), a handful of pencils, a roll of stamps, and a few cohorts willing to help you 'vote'.
All that, and you've change 0.02% of the vote.
Yes, there rarely are elections which are that close, but you wouldn't know this is one of those situations beforehand.
Intercepting vote-by-mail from the voter is hard because it's so distributed. You'd need a lot of people involved in your conspiracy. Instead, you'd alter the vote it in the election offices, where you need far fewer people....just the guy who patches the software on the tabulators. However, that's the same with traditional voting systems.
Basic gov't-issued photo ID is free at every state DMV that I know of. How can anyone function in life without an ID anyway? It's a myth that there's a large population of legal citizens that don't have an ID.
California offers a fee waiver now for basic ID.
"The voting management systems are the machines that actually count the votes!"
Not on the ES&S systems being described. It's not your fault for not knowing that since they conveniently left those details out. The point is to reinforce the myth that the elections are rigged against you when you lose.
What law was broken?
How many different governments had their hand in this cookie jar?
The solution to multi-party corruption is not different politicians. The solution is limiting what those politicians can do.
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.
So, are they saying the electronic voting machines, the scanner machines... or are they talking about the systems that the votes are uploaded *to*?
The last would make the most sense... and why change individual votes, when you can change the uploaded vote data files, and thus change the totals, via that one system?
This damn well ought to be jail time for the CEO.
You have (thus far) written nine posts claiming "NOTHING TO SEE FOLKS" but have provided zero actual data or citiations, just your personal assurances. Can you provide a link to any source that supports your assertion here?
This alleged "fact" is not found in any of the reporting on this that I have seen such as original New York Magazine story, updates by Motherboard, The Verified Voting watchdog project, etc.
You wouldn't be, y'know, just making stuff up now, would you?
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Basic gov't-issued photo ID is free at every state DMV that I know of.
Not Minnesota. You heed to have a qualified disability, verified by a medical professional:
“The fee for a Minnesota identification card is 50 cents for a person who is either: developmentally disabled as defined in Minnesota Statutes, section 252A.02; physically disabled as defined in Minnesota Statutes, section 169.345, subdivision 2; or has serious and persistent mental illness as described in Minnesota Statutes, section 245.462, subdivision 20, paragraph (c).”
source
On your other two points, 100% in agreement. No ID=No bank account=no job=no car=no renting=no [basically, anything]. I just can't fathom being a functioning adult and not being able to scrape together $50 to get an ID card. But I guess if I were in that situation, the ability to vote would probably be pretty low on my priority list.
Voting equipment is already required to be certified by the states the buy/use them.
The logical entity to take this on is the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), formerly the Bureau of Standards.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
I have no problem with the state providing a free basic ID to everyone.
I'm not the one making extraordinary claims. The idea that PcAnywhere being installed on a management system 15 years ago has fuck-all to do with anything is the extraordinary claim that requires evidence, and there is none.
I'm not defending electronic voting by the way. It's a horrible idea.
Yes, and that was done in 2002 with the Help America Vote Act.
https://www.nist.gov/itl/votin...
The misleading was on the part of E&S when they consistently lied about remote software being installed. You're all over this article defending their deception : do you work for them?
No, they don't. They verify that the name you gave them is a registered voter. And that's all they do
Actually, they verify name and address, and that you have not voted yet.
Btw, think voter ID is gonna fix it? Guess what you need to produce a fake id? Name and address.
It's a well known open secret that liberals routinely bus "voters" around on election day
If this was actually happening at a large scale, it would be easy to catch and result in a lot of convictions. Yet there have been 0 people caught transporting false voters.
In-person voter fraud is extremely rare. Those that do it and are caught are not all members of one political party. In fact, there's been slightly more Republicans caught doing it in the last few years, largely because of false claims like the one you make here.
What's really racist is the idea that minorities are just incapable of getting an ID.
My step son turned 18 & never got an I.D. He didn't drive (or fucking work) so he never bothered. He wanted to vote. Getting all the documents together & getting him to the office to get a state I.D. was quite challenging. His dad had no idea where his birth certificate was so we had to get a copy. Without a car & financial resources, we would not have been able to do it.
When we needed a marriage license I had no birth certificate. I had to go quite a long way to pay for a copy of it. I had a valid license, a passport, but no, they had to have the birth certificate. No public transportation would get me there & there was no way to get it for free.
So it does not matter if your a minority or the color of you skin. What matters is the resources or the lack thereof. Voter I.D. laws & voter registration purges absolutely & veritably suppress the vote. That & lack of funding in poor areas helps a ton to keep the poor from voting. 2 hour waits only to find you're no longer registered. Florida 2000.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
Exactly. Impossible for someone without resources.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
Doesn't help if you can't get the documentation.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
Back in 2001 I got laid off and was *this* *close* to getting a job with these bozos.
I was *also* in the final interview, pre-offer stages to take a job with Adelphia at their headquarters in backwoods Pennsylvania (apologies in advance to any readers from Coudersport. I'm sure it's very nice, and i would have likely enjoyed living there, but i also would have preferred to be employed.)
<whizzzzz> multiple. bullets. dodged.
If you're gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough.
You must be one of them socialists!
Totally joking, I'm completely on-board with that idea. Unfortunately there are certain demographics that are worried about "illegals" coming here and getting IDs then stealing everybody's jobs and milking the system for free money.
"You think they can steal dollars and not change votes? Even when basic security measures are not taken? Even when you don't even put the printed audit trail on the voting machine?
Seriously?"
I'm in favor of going back to mechanic machines with hand-counted ballots but I suspect you would protest at having to wait a few days to learn the results of such an election. I also suspect that no matter what level of security is implemented in electronic voting that you would still dream up an excuse for how an election was stolen when it didn't turn out the way you wanted.
The fact is that election equipment is very expensive and rarely used. It would be absurdly expensive to implement a secure electronic system that would last 30-40 years and remain secure, not to mention the level of expertise required at every polling place in the country for the 12 hours they are used every 4 years.
but a very small number of votes have swung local elections.
Very small numbers of votes have swung elections at all levels. But again, it is extremely rare that the election is actually that close and you won't know it is that close ahead of time.
So you assemble a very large army of conspirators, and get caught because the more people, the more leaks.
Or you assemble a very small number of conspirators, over and over again until the election is that close. But doing it over and over again makes it far more likely that you will get caught.
Or you assemble a very small number of conspirators and affect one election....and don't change the result because 99% of the time the result isn't narrow enough.
Or you take the money you would use to assemble your conspiracy, and donate it to the politicians. Thus getting the actual policy results you want no matter the election results. As and added bonus, it's legal.
"Poor people shouldn't vote."
What the actual fuck, dude. Also, you do realize that the majority of people that voted for Trump were poor, right?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
State dependent. Here they require a photo id. Oddly, no one seems to have problems getting one, despite the agitation otherwise.
I'm pretty sure $30 for an ID is not the biggest problem out there. It's a molehill. You want to see a real mountain? Look at your housing market. Stop making mountains out of molehills. Otherwise, people will treat you like the cis heteronormative Caucasian privileged boy who cried wolf.
Or how about "discovering" hundreds of ballots, 6 weeks after the election, in an election decided by 261 total votes?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
...wouldn't be willing to risk his job, pension, and jail time to change a few votes? Totally worth it.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Also, even if it weren't overly hard to get the documentation (and I'm not saying it isn't), the voter ID folks are playing the margins. If they can prevent a small number of Democrats from voting in a few states in a close election, they can pull off an upset victory like Trump's.
That's why the Russians targeted black voters with fake "Black Lives Matter" groups either misdirecting potential black voters or telling them not to bother voting. And it worked in places like Michigan and Winsconsin. Along with voter ID laws that similarly suppressed the black vote enough to tip the balance.
The Electoral College allocation of extra votes to small population states is a problem too. But that's in the Constitution and hard to change. Voter suppression enjoys no such protection, and needs to be fought if you believe in one-person, one-vote.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Btw, think voter ID is gonna fix it? Guess what you need to produce a fake id? Name and address.
Woldn't be a magic bullet, but it would still help. It would require election fraud to be better organized, farther ahead of time, and involve more people in the planning. Much bigger risk of getting caught.
In-person voter fraud is extremely rare.
You can't know that. All we know is how often people get caught - and they only ever get caught by the winning side. Chicago machine politics has been Chicago machine politics for far more than a century.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Bullshit. If you're incapable of getting a couple hundred together for an id, you don't have your shit together enough that you should be voting.
That's not what US law says. Everyone has the right to vote.
There's no systemic oppression keeping people down.
Some of the people implementing this voter suppression have been pretty open about it, especially when they were among friends and didn't realize what they said would be public. But their actions speak louder than words.
If you're legitimately discriminated against, it means a big payday. People who claim discrimination and oppression, or such on others behalf, do so out of ignorant sentimentality, or rationalization of poor life decisions.
If you honestly think that all discrimination in the USA leads to a 'big payday' you are sorely deluded. Possibly terminally deluded if you were a minority.
We have no way of knowing how bad the voter fraud problem is
Such a convenient lie to believe.
Not a lie. We have a very good indication that physical voter fraud so low to be considered nonexistant. Physical meaning someone votes twice or someone is litterally stuffing paper ballots. We have good systems to track the first, and physical monitoring to protect against the second.
Electronic fraud is a lot more difficult to know. It could be small across the country. It could be very significant in localized locations. Presumably, persons with the know-how to do electronic fraud would know how to do so stealthily. From that perspective, it is very difficult to know for sure how bad the problem is.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
If not then FUCK YOU for being a fascist cockgobbler.
Even when proposals are made to require ID and to make it free, or free to those who say they can't afford the nominal fee, the Democrats say it's racist.
Apparently it's too onerous for someone to go and get an ID, and that it's disproportionately onerous to certain races. Yet they're perfectly fine with requiring every person to buy health insurance. And they're perfectly fine with requiring extensive background checks for purchasing firearms.
Whatever your position on the matter is, it's clear that the Democratic party's position is entirely duplicitous.
The DNC is fighting to keep dead people on the voter rolls. They're fighting to keep people who live in other states on the rolls in their former state.
They don't want you purging the voter rolls of people who have died or people who have moved to another state. They don't want you verifying that the person voting is the person they claim to be. Why?
Require an ID to vote. Make it free or cheap to get (and free for anyone who bitches and moans, I guess). If someone tries to vote without one, give them a provisional ballot and count it only after they satisfy ID requirements. It's not hard. We have the infrastructure in pace to do it (DMV offices, post offices, any place you can register to vote, etc.). Yet some people are against taking basic steps to secure the integrity of our elections. The SAME people who have been screaming for over 18 months that the election was "hacked".
People without addresses can get mail delivered to a nearby post office and held for them. It's called "general delivery". Ask your local postmaster about it. All you need is a zipcode.
You can do most things by mail. If you have no documentation, you just need a witness to vouch for you in front of a notary, court clerk, whatever. "This person is known to me." You can then start to bootstrap your life with a new SSN, new ID, etc.
No, it's not easy. No, it shouldn't be easy to establish someone as a citizen from nothing.
If you don't have your life together on a basic level and want to vote, then go cast a provisional ballot and get back to us when your shit is in order. We'll count the ballot then.
While *you* may claim that, *you* have provided no evidence.
Further, if anyone has voting high on their priority list but somehow couldn't get their shit together in time for the election they can cast a provisional ballot, get their shit together, and then have it counted.
Go back to *reddit* with your *markdown* trash.
The Electoral College allocation of extra votes to small population states is a problem too.
That's not a problem, it's by design. It's specifically done that way to prevent populous states from taking the reins of the whole nation. This is supposed to be a nation of mostly sovereign states with a limited federal government.
However much you think a person in California, Florida, or New York deserves representation, the STATES of Wyoming, Alaska, and Vermont deserve representation.
That's not what US law says. Everyone has the right to vote.
That's not what US law says. States govern their own elections.
There's no way to catch these because we don't bother verifying that the people voting are who they say they are.
This is simply not true, there is verification.
No, there isn't.
You need a name and an address to vote. That's it. It doesn't have to be yours.
The DNC is fighting to keep dead people on the voter rolls. They're fighting to keep people who live in other states on the rolls in their former state.
:citation needed:
. Sigh.
You can't know that. All we know is how often people get caught - and they only ever get caught by the winning side. Chicago machine politics has been Chicago machine politics for far more than a century.
Because of statistics, we can assume that it is rare. Besides, most humans can't keep secret. If it has been there as such a large scale (big group of people involved in the fraud), it would have been out long ago. Thus, fraud of in-person voting is rare.
2 hour waits only to find you're no longer registered. Florida 2000.
Thing is, it's no longer 2000 and you can instantly check your registration status online by plugging in your first name, last name, and date of birth. I concede that would still require things like planning ahead, turning off the TV for a few minutes, and so on. The Supreme Court has been clear that people have a right to vote without substantial burden, not without any burden at all.
Yep. A substantial burden like not having the resources to obtain your birth certificate. This problem has nothing to do with 2000.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
That's not a problem, it's by design. It's specifically done that way to prevent populous states from taking the reins of the whole nation
No congress is designed that way as a feature. The ec was set up to handle the logistics of an entire nation voting before electronic communications existed
Out going to where? Norton's server? NAT affords you some security here by limiting firewall connections to OUTBOUND only, outside traffic cannot initiate a connection unless you have port forwarding turned on, in this case for PCAnywhere.
You see, the ISSUE here is that you can get out, but ONLY when somebody initiates the connection from the inside. Just having PCAnywhere on your system does NOT make it immediately exploitable. PCAnywhere does not just broadcast it's existence and getting IN though a NAT connection is not possible without some other issue in play.
So behind a NAT, this is pretty much a non-issue, unless you have some other security problem such as a compromised router or another server that has some compromise that allows remote access. I'm not saying that doesn't happen, but I am saying that the risks of that happening are significantly less given that nobody is going to put such systems on the internet directly, unless they are idiots. In which case, PCAnywhere is the least of your worries.
Then you suggest that unauthorized physical access *might* be an issue? Again, IF that's the case, PCAnywhere is the very least of your worries because you are an idiot about security in the first place....
Then there is the whole, It wasn't part of the standard package and only installed on a handful of systems to enable remote support (likely for those who paid extra for this level of support).
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
> I'm in favor of going back to mechanic machines with hand-counted ballots but I suspect you would protest at having to wait a few days to learn the results of such an election Allow me to introduce you to the high-tech notion of the scantron form.
You're an ID-10-T and a moron.
The voting management systems are the machines that actually count the votes!
Where would you like to put your hack? Somehow on the 1000+ individual voting machines in a county that folks walk up to? or the one ring (machine) that rules them all that actually counts the votes?
And it could be something fairly small.... On each race, for every vote for party x, adjust 5% of votes on party x down by one and party y up by one. Enough that a landslide would still ring true, but a typical 5-10% spread election would be shifted without notice... could even add logic that if the actual election is really close (under say 3%) - make no adjustment! That way there is no scrutiny in the system.
You are suggesting these systems where hacked via PCAnywhere that basically *requires* local access to initiate the connection. Given your scenario is hypothetical and obvious requires more than just some on line script kitty level hacking to compromise the system, but includes the requirement of having unauthorized administrative and physical access to the systems in question, I think you have overlooked some much bigger security issues.
Then there is the AC posting calling someone a moron angle. Got to love the irony of that... LOL
Sure, sure, lots of things are POSSIBLE... A magnetic storm and cosmic rays could alter the vote count too, but without evidence that it actually happened you cannot somehow claim that it did. So let's dispense with the hypothetical musings and concern ourselves with reality and what we can prove. There is no reason to think the vote counts where messed with after they where cast.... (Although there IS evidence that illegal votes where cast and counted... Like by dead people via mail in ballots and such).
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Yep. A substantial burden like not having the resources to obtain your birth certificate.
Putting aside what "not having the resources" would literally have to mean and how hard it is to find actual people actually limited to that degree, your scenario I addressed was people standing in line on voting day only to find out they were no longer registered. Since they previously had been registered, by definition they already had gotten through any "life is hard" issues like that.
in a case like this I'm willing to chalk it up to malice. After all, you just have to control who counts the votes...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
that wants e-voting without a paper trail. Always in the name of fiscal austerity...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It's a myth that there's a large population of legal citizens that don't have an ID.
The myth is that it's legal citizens that the Democrats are protecting here. It's a lot more difficult to get that ID if you're here illegally, or if you're dead. It would be a horrible burden on e.g. Chicago machine politics - they'd have to get people into jobs in the DMV offices and everything!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
That's not a problem, it's by design. It's specifically done that way to prevent populous states from taking the reins of the whole nation.
Nope. That's the point of the Senate.
Electoral College votes are 2 for Senators plus one for each member of the House. Since number of Representatives are based on population, the Electoral College does not protect small states. They get the 2 votes every state gets from Senators, and then the small states get far less votes from number of Representatives.
There's two things skewing the Electoral College at the moment. #1 is the winner-take-all nature of most states mean only the states that are closely-divided are relevant. And, btw, those are not small states.
The bigger issue is we stopped expanding the House of Representatives in the 1910s, and you can't go below one Representative. So currently small states are over-represented in the House even though it is not supposed to work that way. To get back to the ratio of population-to-Representative we had in the 1910s, we'd need more than 1000 Representatives instead of 435.
I don't have time to look up the name
Translation: My google showed that he was transporting legal voters to the polls, so I need to keep it vague and sinister-sounding.
is they know about the voter fraud yet even the Republican establishment works to hide Democratic voter fraud
You realize that this statement is slightly less plausible than all the "crisis actor" claims anytime there is a shooting, right?
Republicans are literally changing laws to manipulate the ballot in North Carolina to favor their Supreme Court candidates, but they'd totally pass at an incredibly easy opportunity to annihilate the Democratic party.
You're getting played.
There's also a history of voter laws being used to block black people from voting. But that was a long time ago and the parties have really mixed it up since then. I'm pretty sure there's plenty of idiots voting both ways, but in the same sense that ANY paperwork or regulation is viewed as harmful to business, people argue that ANY paperwork or registration is harmful to getting people to vote. And yeah, every election people are turned away in some states because they never registered, or failed to update, or their state was being an asshole.
Chicago now offers a Chicago ID card for just this purpose. The right wingers oppose it: guess why.
I'd worry more about the voting machine company, but yep, this lets the locals the votes. Whoever knows the passwords can sell the passwords. Or give them away to get their candidate elected.
There've been a lot of weird and close elections in the last 17 years. Far too many.
In California, I don't have to show ID, but I do have to give my name and address and it has to appear on the rolls. Sure, this can be abused but it is not easy to abuse it. If someone else appears to have voted with my name then I will have a provisional ballot and an investigation will be raised. I have not heard of any widespread voting abuse based on this. Usually though I vote from home with a permanent absentee ballot, which I have to sign.
To affect an election you need a more wholesale approach to this. That means more than a few people here and there getting away with you, you would need to find thousands of people who are registered but who do not actuallly vote and then get thousands of people to engage in pretending to be those people, and then not get caught. Of course, there are those losing politicians who claim this happens, but that's just typical sour grapes since no evidence of this ever turns up.
There is a problem here to be sure, mainly because election commisioners (in every state) are far more concerned that things run smoothly rather than that they run accurately. I wish they did a better job with accuracy, I wish they would not announce the winners before any absentee or provisional ballot has been counted. I wish it was like Australia where you are required to vote by law if you are eligible so that elections aren't decided by the 25% who are the most devoted to their parties.
There is already almost no voter fraud, period. ID checks are ok on their surface - however for some people this is a major inconvenience. The snag is that those people are by and large not republican. They don't drive, they cannot take time out from work to spend all day getting a voter ID. And yes all day, or have you not seen news recently about people spending all day in line because the Real ID act is clogging up the DMVs.
It would be nice if we could meet in the middle. But both parties seem solidly entrenched in their beliefs that the opposite party are treasonous fraudsters. We really can't have a functioning democracy with this level of hatred towards those with differing political views.
That was the result of a state's regulations not being effective. Any reason to believe state electoral commissions will be better? (Trying to repost as a real person - wasn't logged in before!!)
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.
It is well known that there are perfectly legal get out the vote efforts that certain people complain about because the voters are black. This is especially true in the rural South, of course.
Guess what? In the rural South, the voting booth is probably placed in a small rural town. But the voters who vote in that voting booth may be miles away down dirt roads. A black church takes it minvan and makes some trips, picking up 8-10 voters, often elderly who cannot drive themselves.
The local who lives in town sees this minivan filled with bona fide legal voters filing into the voting center and panics because "Oh, no, those people are not my neighbors. Why are they voting here?"
Well, they are neighbors. But people who are too racist to ever stroll down the road to mingle with people who have darker skin have trouble considering the question in a rational way.
The "busloads of illegal darkies voting" meme is never going away until we have many fewer racist whites in the this country. The actual facts are easy enough to establish. But when the conclusion was built on a foundation of irrational racist hatred, facts and logic are not going to persuade.
They should give those people provisional ballots rather than turn them away. Voting is a right and it should not be removed by a mere volunteer poll worker.
You were born yesterday. WBush DoJ pushed this issue. They found maybe a dozen instances in the entire US of A.
The are lots of red states with perfectly capable right-wing Attorney Generals that would love to find examples, because evidence would be valuable in the courtroom when justifying stringent voter ID laws. The reason the ACLU wins so many lawsuits is actual evidence is conspicuously lacking.
Fraudulent voting happens about as often as people die from lightning strikes. If that were not the case, then Republican AGs are surely the most incompetent attorneys who ever lived, all of them, for some reason. Is it more likely being a Republican causes actual serious brain damage? Or that the voter fraud is rare?
It is not just the supporting documentation, but having the right supporting documentation at the right time to unravel the Gordian Knot.
Need an ID? You need to prove who you are, so you need a birth certificate. How do you get a birth certificate? You need to prove who you are -- they do not give that stuff to just anyone in the post-9/11 world. But if you have a printed bill from the county water department sent to your name at an address that is evidence. Oh, wait! You are the spouse who does not handle the money, so your name is not on any bills. I guess you can change a bill, and collect that evidence next month...
These things can be worked around, but it is very easy to get wrong the first or second attempt.
And when we are talking about rural voters, it might be a 2 hour bus trip to the county seat, 4 hour round trip. If you make a small mistake, you may have to make this trip 2 or 3 times. If you are working poor, can you afford to take 3 days off work to get all the paperwork right? Oh, and the actual fees are sometimes possible to waive, but that is more paperwork.
This all adds up.
That is the beauty of purging rolls aggressively. Life may not have been hard 10 years ago, but maybe life happened and you no longer have a copy of your birth certificate.
Voters are bused, but both parties. It's a service for many people who can't drive. However the myth is that those ineligible to vote are being bused in to vote fraudently, and no evidence has ever been shown to support this. Especially the arrival of legitimate voters by bus is not evidence of fraud.
Mostly voter ID seems to be a hot button issue for those who assume that there is rampant piecemeal voter fraud. Of which there is no substantive evidence of this happening. Wholesale voter fraud should be a much more serious concern.
Note that the arrival of busses is not evidence of voting fraud, it is a common occurence to bus in valid registered voters who don't drive and who otherwise wouldn't bother showing up. So a part of "get out the vote" by both parties includes offers to shuttle people over for free. Ie, church buses, vans, etc. Now I'm sure that seeing a stream of black of hispanic voters filing off of a bus frightens some people, but it's not evidence of fraud.
Oh, I'm sure there are fake/exaggerated news stories on Brietbart or Infowars all about this, so it is reasonable to assume that someone who saw that news might think it was legitimate and have trouble looking up the details.
I have noticed that the documentation for Real ID is pretty extensive. It's more like a passport than for a driver's license.
For myself, i went a couple of decades with an SSN "card". Which is just typing onto card stock, no security measures whatsoever, certainly not "proof" of anything. One job accepted me when I brought in the larger 8x11 paper that the lost ID had been punched out of. When I finally got around to getting a replacement it took a few hours of standing in line. Note especially that a social security number or card is not intended to be used as a means of identification, even though so many places use it as such.
And being able to vote is one of the most fundamental rights in a democracy. It shouldn't be abridged lightly.
I agree that there is an advantage in allowing less populated states from being pushed around, but it should also go both ways, populated states should not be able to be pushed around by low population states.
The method that the states were formed in the past have a great impact on the electoral college today. The historical reasons for a state don't necessarily apply today. California is a large state because when formed it was assumed that western states would have relatively low populations; but today it has the largest population.
And the notion of sovereign states in a loose federation is an outdated notion here. The states in the US don't have boundaries related to social, cultural, or ethnic divisions, they don't even have good geographic borders. The states are much more like administrative districts today.
But the whole idea of the electoral college and the reasons for it are outdated. The states that have winner-takes-all-electors screws up the results too often. I'd much rather presidential candidates campaign in the entire country rather than playing some political board game.
You can't claim "voter fraud is rare" when there is no way to detect successful, systemic voter fraud of this nature.
You don't need to prove voter fraud is a rampant problem in order for it go be a good idea to take basic steps to limit the possibility of it.
Requiring people to show they are who they say they are when voting is a bare minimum step.
Do you support checking IDs when someone tries to buy alcohol or a firearm?
Do you not install security updates until after your shit gets attacked?
SIGH. GOOGLE IT.
voter roll dead
voter roll moved
but maybe life happened and you no longer have a copy of your birth certificate
Or maybe it's Maybelline. Again -- anyone can come up with angels-dancing-on-heads-of-pins hypotheticals. There's a reason we don't design policy around stuff like that. Show it's actually happening in the real world with any degree of regularity, and we'll have something to talk about.
Obama had the house and the white house. There is obviously a lot of vote machine rigging, and the republicans are much better at it than the democrats. But Obama did nothing. Wanted to build a consensus.
Nice fellow, that Obama.
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.
Or maybe it's Maybelline.
Correct. It is you making stuff up out of whole cloth.
It has been shown to happen with regularity, with hard evidence, under the bright lights of a courtroom. The ACLU has done this multiple times.
Yet the same evidence-free arguments get trotted out again and again and again.
Now, what "regularly" means is different things to different people. If it is even a few thousand people or a few hundred who used to vote but cannot anymore, what justifies making it harder on them even very little? If the claim is voter fraud is a problem, it would sure be nice to see more examples within the state than can be counted on two hands.
We have two claims being made by the very same people: (1) There is a lot of voter fraud. (2) It is impossible to find more than a very few actual examples of voter fraud because the dog ate my homework. I am sooooo impressed.
You can't claim "voter fraud is rare" when there is no way to detect successful, systemic voter fraud of this nature.
Proving a negative is hard. There have been investigations that have turned up nothing. That's not proof that nothing exists, but it's raised the bar above your hand wave. Can you provide criticism of the methodology of, for example, Trump's Commission on Voter Fraud?
in order for it go be a good idea to take basic steps to limit the possibility of it.
Unless your implication that there's no cost to such a process is false. Those who oppose voter registration claim that there is an uneven burden placed on some members of society. That may not be the case, but if so, please explain why it's not so.
Do you support checking IDs when someone tries to buy alcohol or a firearm?
Alcohol is moot, but your point regarding firearms is fair. My understanding of the reluctance to insist on ID is that voting is such a fundamental right and so necessary for the proper functioning of Democracy that _anything_ that even looks like interfering with the right to vote (such as by making it harder for some to do so) is off-limits. But that seems to apply equally to the right to bear arms which does require ID.
Do you not install security updates until after your shit gets attacked?
Citizens have rights. Your PC does not. You're also assuming that there is a possible attack in the face of investigations that have shown that there isn't and that the cost imposed by 'patching' doesn't weaken a fundamental right.
But, as I said before, the comparison with ID for firearm purchase is sound and persuasive.
(caveat, I'm not from the US so there's a good chance I'm missing something)
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I agree we should get rid of all of those racist white democrats.
It happened to me in 2016. I had to use a provisional ballot. Here in Nevada if you don't vote in 2 federal elections they remove you from voter list.
Here in Nevada it is illegal for an adult to not have state issued ID on their person at all times. If you cant afford an ID(Homeless) The state will gladly waive the fee for you to get an ID. This is why I feel its racist to say that certain demographics cant get an ID. You're basically saying they're too stupid to do so. And that's not Fair or Right to the people.
Basic gov't-issued photo ID is free at every state DMV that I know of.
AFAIK its only free to the indigent. But that's the same thing. I've known a lot of homeless people here in Las Vegas. My late uncle was homeless most of his life. It was a choice as it is for most of the others here. They would rather get high and drunk than get a job. They panhandle(and some make damn good money) And could easily get enough money on their walk to dmv to get an ID. But most don't need it as they already have ID and bank cards. If you don't believe me next time you're in vegas, get off the strip and talk to some locals, hell even talk to the homeless. many of them are rather friendly.
I can tell you don't actually know any homeless people.
Why not just stop all the racist policies and lies? Is there something about racist white republicans that floats your boat?
It has been shown to happen with regularity, with hard evidence, under the bright lights of a courtroom. The ACLU has done this multiple times.
Awesome -- in that case, it's in the public record and you should be able to provide citations. After you do that, I suspect it will quickly become clear that the "it" you're referring to has little to nothing to do with your original claim about people who (1) had their birth certificate, (2) registered to vote, (3) were later purged from the rolls, and (4) in the meantime had lost their birth certificate, and (5) at that point were somehow unable to get a duplicate. Looking forward to it.
The point is that there may be reasons someone does not have a birth certificate.
To get an official birth certificate in this post-9/11 security theater world in the great state of my birth, I need to get send a request with a notarized signature. To get a notary to notarize my signature, I need a gov't issued ID. To get a gov't issued ID, I need an official birth certificate. It is possible to unwind the Gordian knot, but it requires effort of which forms to fill out with which kind of evidence to get things rolling. It is not obvious or easy how to do this to approximately everyone, although it is possible, of course.
In fact, a proper registered voter may not have ever had a birth certificate or state ID and have been voting for decades. What do they do to re-register if they were purged from the rolls? It has been proven in court that people who are legal voters for decades lack state ID. Are you denying as much?
And voters in Wyoming, Alaska and Vermont do get representation. Proportionally in the House, and way disproportionately in the Senate. To say that limiting them to proportional representation in Presidential elections would somehow deprive them of representation is pretty disingenuous. Especially when you start getting the EC 'overruling' the popular vote. You can't sustain a democracy that way. It's just never been a problem before - because the country hasn't been so divided politically between rural and urban voters before.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
To get an official birth certificate in this post-9/11 security theater world in the great state of my birth, I need to get send a request with a notarized signature. To get a notary to notarize my signature, I need a gov't issued ID. To get a gov't issued ID, I need an official birth certificate. It is possible to unwind the Gordian knot, but it requires effort of which forms to fill out with which kind of evidence to get things rolling. It is not obvious or easy how to do this to approximately everyone, although it is possible, of course.
For the handful of people in your state that actually have an issue like this, maybe the resources all these activist organizations are spending trying to eliminate ID requirements for voting would be better spent helping those people get IDs. Just a thought.
It has been proven in court that people who are legal voters for decades lack state ID. Are you denying as much?
And there we have it -- in three exchanges, the big bad boogeyman that supposedly has been proved in court over and over has diminished from people who were once registered to vote, were deregistered, and who now physically can't get the documentation they need to get reregistered, to "people who are legal voters for decades lack state ID." Bye bye, goalposts.
And there we have it -- in three exchanges, the big bad boogeyman that supposedly has been proved in court over and over has diminished from people who were once registered to vote, were deregistered, and who now physically can't get the documentation they need to get reregistered, to "people who are legal voters for decades lack state ID." Bye bye, goalposts.
If you actually understood what you just wrote, you would notice that the goalposts did not budge a nanometer, at least your comment completely fails to demonstrate as much. Perhaps you are confused by the idea that someone who has voted for decades, who registered under less stringent rules, might get pushed off the voter rolls and now has trouble re-registering? If you were familiar with the actual applicable laws at all, it would not be confusing at all.
The likely numbers of people who fall through the cracks, reasonable people can disagree. But I have never seen any evidence at all to support the conclusion that the alleged voter fraud is a bigger problem. In fact, the more I have tried to find any evidence, the more certain I have become that there is a lot of suspicions based on flagrant racism, and voter fraud is probably very very rare.
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You do realize that people move to different states, right?
I was born in a state on the West coast. I now live in another state on the East coast. A new copy of my birth certificate has to be issued by the county where I was born. Which is on the other side of the US. The state where I currently live will not issue me a copy of my birth certificate, because I was not born in this state.
Busing legal voters to their polling place.
The thing to remember about Project Veritas is they edit everything they release. Because lying to you sells very well.
They can also GTFO thank you for your time.
Because Democrats oppose voter ID lockstep, we have solid evidence that voter fraud massively benefits Democrats. QED.
Of course, that's changing in California where they're just giving illegals the right to vote. Of course, once they're in the privacy of the voting booth, they'll only vote in school district elections. Of course they will.
I expect opposition to voter ID to mysteriously vanish once enough places legalize voting by illegals.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You always have the option of taking your own advice. Unless you are a craven coward, of course.
I'm to the left of center I suppose. I don't think convicts should lose their right to vote. This is a Jim Crow law remainder. Don't let them people vote on that thing that put them in prison.