Slashdot Log In
Ohio Investigating Possible Vote Machine Tampering Last Year
Posted by
Zonk
on Wed Mar 19, 2008 02:46 PM
from the bit-of-dirty-pool dept.
from the bit-of-dirty-pool dept.
MozeeToby writes "The Columbus Dispatch is reporting on a criminal investigation currently being performed in Franklin County Ohio. It seems several voting machines listed a candidate as withdrawn from the race when in fact he wasn't. By the time the investigations tracked down which machines had been affected, the candidate's name was back on the ballot. Normally, we could dismiss this as confusion or a mistake on the part of the voter(s) who noticed it. In this case, the person who first noticed the discrepancy was Ohio Secretary of state Jennifer Brunner. Further compounding matters, the Franklin County Board of Elections had disabled virtually all logging on the machines to speed setup of the ballot. Naturally, the county board remains skeptical of these accusations."
Related Stories
[+]
IT: Ohio Study Confirms Voting Systems Vulnerabilities 91 comments
bratgitarre writes "A comprehensive study of electronic voting systems (PDF) by vendors ES&S, Hart InterCivic and Premier (formerly Diebold) found that 'all of the studied systems possess critical security failures that render their technical controls insufficient to guarantee a trustworthy election'. In particular, they note all systems provide insufficiently protection against threats from election insiders, do not follow well-known security practices, and have 'deeply flawed software maintenance' practices." Some of these machines are the ones California testers found fault with last week.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Skeptical? (Score:5, Insightful)
We seriously need to toss this crap in a landfill and go back to paper. Any idiot can figure out a paper system, and the system should have that sort of transparency.
Heh. (Score:3, Interesting)
The fact remains that people who don't understand the issue have no basis for commenting on it. If there are reports of ballot tampering, and the machines are set up without logging (how is this even fucking possible in a supposedly secure system?), there is no way in hell that any non-technical user should be able to get away with being skeptical...If someone told them the goddamn machines were running Halo 3, they wouldn't have any way of te
Re:Heh. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not saying that the current electronic systems are a good idea though.
The primary flaw of the currently available voting machines is that they are all proprietary. This means a company has a commercial interest in hiding flaws, and is more likely to push out a device with flaws (or fight to prevent their discovery), if they convince themselves that fixing the flaws isn't worth it, in view of the profit reduction that would result.
We need a voting machine system which is impartial, and not run as a for profit exercise.
I think the best method would be to set up a consortium of major technology corporations to create the voting machines, and have them run it as a tax break, with rental fee's going to charities, not to the corporations themselves. After all, they have all the smart people working for them, and if profit is not a factor, and no single company has control, the system is less likely to be flawed.
Before anyone starts foaming at the mouth about big companies I say this. They already run your health system, your financial institutions, your currency, transportation systems, and your food supply. It's not such a big leap.
Plus, co-operation is already happening with software technology.
Parent
Re:Heh. (Score:5, Interesting)
They aren't? How many man-seconds alone with the ballots does it take to change the result of a paper election by editing the ballots? How many cubic meters of stuff do you need to carry to swap in forged ballots? Now how about electronically stored ballots?
Parent
Re:Heh. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry to say it but any retard can stuff a paper ballot box. It takes an experienced hacker to hack an electronic election.
Personally, I feel that an electronic voting machine should print out a serial numbered, easy to read paper ballot that you have to drop into the box before you leave. Now you have the best of both worlds. If the electronic numbers do not match what is in the paper ballot box, investigate. Each serial numbered ballot should have a corresponding electric vote. Now to steal this kind of election, you'd need to stuff the ballot box with votes that are actually in the machines memory. Not impossible to hack, but much more difficult that hacking either a paper or electronic system alone.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
- it was quick to tally the results because it was done electronically
- but in the case of suspected fraud (like the main article) it was easy to go back and review the ballots. Like a paper receipt at a store provides proof of purchase, the voter ballots provided proof of how each person
Re:Heh. (Score:5, Insightful)
And while it may take an experienced person to write an exploit, it only takes a "retard" to load it.
Monkeying physical ballots can be done, sure. But you need a lot of people to do it. You need the poll workers, you need the ballot printers, you need the ballot box movers...And all this is for a polling place that may only serve a few hundred people. Now multiply that by the millions of voters in a general election. One person can keep a secret. A hundred? A thousand? Never.
Parent
I have to agree with the puppy on this one. (Score:5, Insightful)
More correctly stated, any "retard" can stuff a ballot box
It's like saying that any "retard" can rob a bank but it takes a skilled hacker to electronically loot your accounts. It is just wrong. It is far easier to secure a physical object because people have far more experience with doing just that.
Archer seems to be postulating a perfect scenario for electronic voting. Just read TFA and the others like it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Heh. (Score:4, Insightful)
Pardon the pun, but paper ballots leave a huge paper trail. They're physical objects; they exist, and therefore it is much harder to make them disappear than it is an ephemeral digital record.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Paper is cheap, paper is reliable. Paper doesn't require a ton of training or big fancy machines. Paper doesn't require we put our trust in anyone.
The problem with the technical systems is that they're complex, far far far more complex than they need to be. The more complex you make them, the more likely you are to have bugs, the more likely you are to have fraud, and the less likely you are to have someone who
Bullshit. (Score:3, Insightful)
No. You do not understand "security". It is possible to have a representative from each candidate WATCH the ballot box to make sure that it is not "lost".
Even if someone is watching the computer, there is no way for them to tell if ballots are being "lost" or changed.
Why? What's wrong with pen and paper?
Counting
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Please explain how a distributed pen and paper system breaks as the number of voters increases.
While you're at it, explain why you'll respond to someone who posts under a pseudonym with no real connection to his identity but won't respond to someone who posts as AC.
Re:Heh. (Score:4, Interesting)
I have a pretty good idea where you'd begin.
Of course, the security would still depend on the standards being defined by a group of people familiar enough with crypto to come up with a robust and reasonably secure standard for doing all this, but at least by requiring independent verification, this significantly reduces the likelihood of vendors being bought off successfully without getting caught, and by allowing vote counts to be verified independently after the fact against all of the counting servers, this significantly reduces the ways in which blocks of votes can get "lost" by corrupt election officials.
Parent
Re:Heh. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Heh. (Score:5, Funny)
Just sayin...
Parent
Never leave a paper trail (Score:3, Interesting)
You can't make this stuff up... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unbelievable. It's like they're trying to make the machines as unreliable and untrustworthy as possible. I know that the problem of properly implementing electronic voting machines is not a simple one by any means, but this is just plain ridiculous.
Re:You can't make this stuff up... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I know that the problem of properly implementing electronic voting machines is not a simple one by any means, but this is just plain ridiculous.
See... that's just the thing. I don't think it would be terribly difficult. I've been writing software for about 6-7 years now, and I don't think that there should be a huge issue coming up with standardized, secure voting machines that leave some form of detailed logging or trail of votes.
I think the main roadblock to it isn't technology or money or lack of decent workers, the real problem is outlined here. Politicians have a knack, whether intentionally or not, for getting into this kind of thing an
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
We need to get over uninformed thinking, and move to a VERIFIABLE system. Whether it's paper or plastic or silicon, all votes must be made public (with individual privacy protected by code numbers or some similar mechanism). With the voting results in full vie
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And hopefully criminally negligent. I'd like to see more people go to jail for these mistakes, intentional or otherwise.
Re:You can't make this stuff up... (Score:5, Insightful)
There can be proper vote printing machines.
There can be proper vote tabulating machines.
But the same device can never do both properly.
The votes must be inspectable by humans between these steps.
EOT.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There can be proper vote tabulating machines.
But the same device can never do both properly.
The votes must be inspectable by humans between these steps."
This is exactly right. To elaborate, vote printing machines are good, because they can validate input, warn voters when there may be an error (e.g. filling out a ballot but skipping the top race, which is usually not the voter's intent), can provide multi-lingual ballots, and can provide spoken prompts to assist t
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Bad Summary (Score:2, Informative)
A pretty minor mistake (if you ask me), but the big deal is that all the machines are supposed to have exactly the same ballot. And they didn't. That's bad.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Elections need auditability (Score:2)
Elections need to be auditable.
Related story (Score:4, Informative)
Ohio (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
A secured voting system? (Score:4, Insightful)
a. Your vote can be cast without anybody else knowing who you voted for.
b. At any point in time after you cast your vote, you can verfiy that your
vote is counted with the candidate you voted for.
c. The government can "verify" that you voted.
d. You can vote over the internet.
e. Only one vote per citizen.
f. Any cheating is immediately detected.
g. others where needed and appropriate.
I'm wondering if some kind of one time pads could be generated by all parties involved, combined togther with public key cryptography, that would allow such a system.
It boggles the mind that more effort and resources are put into making sure the government gets their tax returns than whether the voting system works or not.
Why should I vote again?
Re:A secured voting system? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Vote for #{my_candidate} or you are fired. Signed, your boss"
Or, husband, wife, mother, creepy guy standing outside the polling place, etc.
Parent
Re:A secured voting system? (Score:4, Insightful)
You have a task that gathers data from many sources, and needs to verify the identity of those sources. Many people and groups will try to attack, corrupt or undermine that data. Furthermore, any verification in place to detect and prevent such attacks can also be considered vulnerable, but ALSO gets saddled with a deadline as laws in many states prevent recounts after a brief timespan.
The "attacks" could be purely technological -- (subvert the software), all the way to social (have poll workers set up certain locations in a way that delays people who are waiting to vote in areas that tend to be against your candidate).
People speak of the importance of a paper trail, but that merely diverts the point of vulnerability. How do we detect that a recount is needed in the first place? Who is doing the recount? How do we know it is any better than the first count?
Parent
Re:A secured voting system? (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, you could make a system that has simultaneous redundant and different technologies, such as both electronic and paper trails. Then each of these subsystems could have their information flows be split at the source and channeled through completely different paths to different counters. There could be multiple sets of people with different political allegiances doing redundant counting. With this kind of system failures would be discovered, and could be tracked back to their sources. This kind of redundancy would cost more, but it could be done pretty straightforwardly if it is really what people wanted.
The main problem of course and it is the big one, is that it is not clear that the authorities actually WANT the system to be incorruptible. There are a huge number of power plays that go on in government, and the bigger the election, the more power is involved. There is so much back-room bargaining, lobbying, and cronyism, both within government and between government and big business, that the people in power don't really want transparency and fault-tolerance because it would interfere with their power. Fair voting only helps the little people, not the people who are already in power, and the system can only be changed by the people in power.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ohio Voting machines are officially a crime scene (Score:4, Informative)
Or ARs technica [arstechnica.com]
Summary is very wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Did the submitter or editor even bother to read the article. The controversy is that the candidate *did* withdraw, but his name was left on some ballots. for those who can't click:
Basically, same way Perot caused Bush #1 to lose in '92.
Re:Damn (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
At least he HAD a grandson... (Score:2)
The election guy sounds like a complete moron.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
An adder is generally either used by a single user who wants accurate results or by a group of users who all want the same accurate results. Further, adders are generally designed as general-purpose components that will be used in hundreds of different applications - making one that output 3 for 1 + 1 would simply be a poor business decision when it was noticed rather than an effective attack against some specific application.
In contrast, voting machines are specific-purpose devices that are *always* used
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Wait... That does sound kinda tough...