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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
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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...
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.