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Voting Machine Manual Instructed Election Officials To Use Weak Passwords (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: An election security expert who has done risk-assessments in several states since 2016 recently found a reference manual that appears to have been created by one voting machine vendor for county election officials and that lists critical usernames and passwords for the vendor's tabulation system. The passwords, including a system administrator and root password, are trivial and easy to crack, including one composed from the vendor's name. And although the document indicates that customers will be prompted periodically by the system to change the passwords, the document instructs customers to re-use passwords in some cases -- alternating between two of them -- and in other cases to simply change a number appended to the end of some passwords to change them.
The vendor, California-based Unisyn Voting Solutions, makes an optical-scan system called OpenElect Voting System for use in both precincts and central election offices. The passwords in the manual appear to be for the Open Elect Central Suite, the backend election-management system used to create election definition files for each voting machine before every election -- the files that tell the machine how to apportion votes based on the marks voters make on a ballot. The suite also tabulates votes collected from all of a county's Unisyn optical scan systems. The credentials listed in the manual include usernames and passwords for the initial log-in to the system as well as credentials to log into the client software used to tabulate and store official election results.
The vendor, California-based Unisyn Voting Solutions, makes an optical-scan system called OpenElect Voting System for use in both precincts and central election offices. The passwords in the manual appear to be for the Open Elect Central Suite, the backend election-management system used to create election definition files for each voting machine before every election -- the files that tell the machine how to apportion votes based on the marks voters make on a ballot. The suite also tabulates votes collected from all of a county's Unisyn optical scan systems. The credentials listed in the manual include usernames and passwords for the initial log-in to the system as well as credentials to log into the client software used to tabulate and store official election results.
That's how we do it here in California, which has the fairest and most secure elections in the country.
You are welcome on my lawn.
In Russia they use paper ballots, and the number of people through the door is about 1/3rd of the total claimed vote count.
When a candidate wins that Putin doesn't like, he cancels the election due to ballot stuffing (because they didn't stuff enough ballots in to rig the vote, they have to cancel it due to their own ballot stuffing!).
You also need the structures in place to verify the count, verify the votes correspond to the people who voted and so on.
Once you decide to put party before country, and manage to seize power over the judicial processes that control the election you are lost.
You end up with elections run by the people who are running for election (Kemp in Georgia), decided by partisan judges (like Kavanaugh), with news outlets telling lies they know are lies. (Fox News).
Greetings from the rest of the world. Here in Finland we do in fact have to provide ID upon voting, and we do not have to to register to vote because your ID is checked against a list of eligible voters upon arrival to the voting site. However, social services also funds the cost of the ID for those who cannot afford it (which is why essentially everyone in Finland has an ID). This being the case, the ID requirement does not prevent anyone from voting regardless of income status. This point is often conveniently left out in the american discussions over voter IDs when the 'pretty much everyone else does it' -argument is presented because from what I've seen so far, voter ID proposals in the States don't have provisions for providing an ID for people who can't pay for it, and that's the crux of the problem.
Voting is such a fundamental right that it should never be gated behind a financial barrier of any kind, wouldn't you agree?
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead