Electronic Voting: Your Worst Nightmares are True 904
jfreon writes "On Democracy Now Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting fame, disclosed (near the end of the transcript) that in the compromised 1.8Gigs off Diebold's FTP site they uncovered "an actual election file containing actual votes on election day from San Luis Obispo County, California". Problem is, the date stamp was 3:31pm - during voting hours! The Diebold system uses a wireless network card. Worse: "So that means if they can pull the information in, they can also send information back into those machines. ""
Information on Voting Machines Issue (Score:5, Informative)
Democracy Now! Another transcript (Score:2, Informative)
Talk to your Congresscritters (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The system is not the biggest problem (Score:3, Informative)
Help fix the problem! (Score:5, Informative)
The idea of EVM2003 is to create Free Software voting machine, and to implement machines that also produce voter-verifiable paper trails (i.e. visually readable printed ballots). We will do a number of security things right, where the commercial companies have done them wrong... they have aimed for "security through obscurity" or "just trust us." As well, part of our requirement is to have fully blind-accessible voting that maintains complete anonymity.
Anyway, I (David Mertz [mailto]) have taken over as Developer Lead recently, and am trying to get the development of the demo rolling. Part of that effort is recruiting some more developers, and splitting the project into several only loosely connected parts. Feel free to contact me--the standard ballot system (in the demo version at least) is being done in wxPython; but conceivably we would choose other languages/technologies for bar-code reading, printing, blind-voting, etc. (my preference is to use Python though, for consistency and rapid development).
Re:Is better than... (Score:3, Informative)
Now all we need... (Score:2, Informative)
is someone who's not afraid of a $250,000 max. fine and a 5 year max. federal prison sentence to electronically write in Kermit the Frog for president. Seems like it would be impossible change the outcome of even a local election without getting caught if the election wasn't tight, but not that hard if it was.
If you're diabolical enough to want to change the outcome of an election for whatever reason, you could probably find a way to circumvent any elections system, be they paper ballots or mind reading machines from the 24 and a half century. Either by direct bribes to registered voters, or dissuading blocks of voters through disinformation, etc.
As others have said, support the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003 [loc.gov] by writing or calling your representative. At least we can try to make it harder for fraud to occur.
Re:Slashdot is a small portion of the public (Score:5, Informative)
Yep. And guess what party that woud be?
From the article:
According to Harris, a study of the campaign contributions made by Diebold and its employees revealed an unusual pattern: Hundreds of thousands of dollars were being funneled to a few Republican candidates with very little to any other party.
Re:Voting machine manufacturer wants votes for Bus (Score:2, Informative)
Just remember that it was the liberal Democrats who were in power at the time of the election, both nationally and in the Florida legislature. It was the liberal Democrats who demanded that pregnant and hanging chads, double punches, and votes for Buchanan, all be counted as votes for Gore. It was the liberal Democrats who argued that absentee ballots from oversea military personnel shouldn't be counted.
Re:Congressperson?? (Score:3, Informative)
And he's not making it up, that's what it says on the House [house.gov] website.
"Write Your Representative - Contact your Congressperson in the U.S. House of Representatives."
Re:Possible reason for the files (Score:1, Informative)
It doesn't mean the machines talked to each other. It means they talked to the server running GEMS (Global Election Management System).
Re:Falicious logic in article (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Slashdot is a small portion of the public (Score:4, Informative)
This clause, however, does:
Clause 2: This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
Note also that it does not restrict state governments in this area at all.
Again, the above clause does. Any law based on religion passed by a state government must be consistent and not conflict with the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. You cannot, therefore, pass a law that says, for example, that you cannot take the Lord's name in vain, as that violates the First Amendment.
This should be obvious but your comments force me to point it out once again. Most laws I could think of based on religion that aren't also based on common morality (ie. "thou shalt not kill") would conflict with the Constitution in some way. You couldn't say the Pope is the ultimate judge of whether a convicted killer lives or dies, for example - that's up to the Supreme Court, according to the Constitution. This clause was partly (or possibly mainly) intended to promote separation of church and state.
Re:Falicious logic in article (Score:2, Informative)
read scoop.co.nz (Score:1, Informative)
Re:That's a good one (Score:2, Informative)
Re: We're trying to spread democrazy? (Score:3, Informative)
> Imperialism is more the kind of thing that Hussein was into, in his conquest of areas of Iraq not populated by people of his nationality.
Oddly enough, the "multi-national" Iraq was a creation of the Western powers, not of Saddam's conquests. During a couple of recent world wars those powers had a nasty habit of promising everything to everyone in the Middle East in order to tempt them into dancing to our tune instead of the other side's, and then giving them a big shaft when the war was over and we didn't think we needed them anymore. (Speaking of which, we've actually tried democracy in Iraq before, and the system ultimately produced Saddam himself after the usual sequences of coups.)
Saddam did try a land grab along the banks of the Tigris, which resulted in the dreadful Iran-Iraq war with its estimated million combat casualties, and of course he tried to annex Kuwait by force. Strictly speaking these were revanchism rather than imperialism, though the practical diffence is dubious, to say nothing of Saddam's claim to be the man for the job.
And to clarify:
> Imperialism is more the kind of thing that Hussein was into, in his conquest [...]
Imperialism does not always involve direct conquest. The Romans were past masters at setting up "client states", i.e. puppet governments that would dance to their tune instead of their rival's, without actually annexing them. Surely no one needs to point out the parallels with what's going on in Iraq. (E.g., the USA claims to be providing Iraq with democracy, but won't let go of the puppet strings even to get the desperately needed soldiers and money from the UN. Don't pretend the USA doesn't intend to set up a "democratic" government that will dance to the USA's tunes and none other.)
Add "client state" to your vocabulary, and go back to hear what that English professor has to say.
Re:Let's not neglect the donkeys (Score:5, Informative)
The 17 counts he went to jail on were for mail fraud and paying people to do nothing.
Maybe there is a better example? Say in Chicago
Re:More headlines... (Score:5, Informative)
Look around the web on site:
here [thenation.com],
here [washingtonpost.com],
here [guardian.co.uk],
here [commondreams.org], and lots more places.
It is clear that the majority intent of Florida's voters was to send Gore to the White House. Furthermore, it is clear that Florida's voting process was seriously biased against minorities, who predominantly vote Democratic.
The only reason why this wasn't discovered during the recount was because the Bush family managed to cut the recount short as long as it was still favorable for Bush.
Or we need to add a new mod of "+1 strong opinion of of a bitter loser."
With Bush as president, we all are losing: we are getting wars, economic problems, huge budget deficits, a failing educational system, rollback of civil rights protections, deterioration of international relations, etc.
It is pretty depressing that Republicans care more about who the President had sex with than about how the country is doing.
Re:Voting machine manufacturer wants votes for Bus (Score:1, Informative)
Oh, like the 2002 election: VNS cites problems with exit polls [cnn.com]
For more on Hagel refer to If You Want To Win An Election, Just Control The Voting Machines [commondreams.org]
Re:That's a good one (Score:3, Informative)
In the Florida elections thousands of people, mostly black Democrats, were delisted for being felons.
The felon list that was compiled for the 2000 election did not "delist" anybody from voting. The list was given to the individual county supervisors, and they were required to verify the names on the list before any action was taken. And even if action was taken, the people were given written notice with a procedure to appeal the decision.
The vast majority of these felonies did not take place and were dated up to a milennium in the future. Further, the list was comprised of people who had moved from Texas to Florida.
The only people claiming that the "vast majority" of the list was incorrect are partisan pundits with an axe to grind. Even so, it is irrelevant. The legislature intended the list to cast as wide of a net as possible to reduce the possibility that an ineligible voter would slip through. There were mistakes on the list, but that does not conflict with its stated purpose.
The Floridan Democrats barred from voting were not actually felons, they were locked out as a favor from one Bush to the other.
This had nothing to do with Jeb Bush or even Katherine Harris. The Legislature passed the law, and a democrat elections supervisor (Ethel Baxtor) contracted with a company to generate the list. Oh, and when the Federal Elections Commission held hearings on the Florida Election, they could not find a single person that was wrongly prevented from voting because of the list.
Re:Voting machine manufacturer wants votes for Bus (Score:3, Informative)
In several races with electronic voting machines, there were noticeable differences between pre-election polls and the actual election results. In Georgia, both Roy Barnes and Max Cleland led their opponents [ledger-enquirer.com] until the actual election.
Other Dieboldalical results (from a source found via Google) are here [ezboard.com].
Chuck Hagel's opponent wanted a hand-recount, but by the terms of the signed contract, it was illegal for government election workers to review the votes [commondreams.org].
Short form: what you describe happened, and you didn't even notice. (Final tinfoil hat moment - did we mention that there was a file named "rob-georgia" containing patches not tested by the state on the Diebold FTP site? [scoop.co.nz])
FUD Alert (Score:2, Informative)
As a side note, you can bet I'll be calling the county clerks office tomorrow.
JFMILLER
Re:More headlines... (Score:3, Informative)
You mentioned Clinton's sexual escapades, now let's talk about Bush's escapades.
I.) Bush LIED about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He's STILL LYING! Not one has been found since the war started, not one was used. American soldiers are dying because of this lie. For this alone George W. Bush should be IMPEACHED! The charge is treason.
II.) Bush said the war in Iraq was about terrorism. Why is it that, when the secret proceedings of the Energy policy hearings Chaired by Cheney were finally extracted from the White House by court order, they showed the Bush team carving up Iraq, months before 9/11? More treason, they were going to go to war with Iraq from the begining, 9/11 was an excuse.
III.) The Patriot act was some thousands of pages long. Do you really think it was written up after 9/11?
IV.) In case you missed it
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/09 /04/159216
V.) Finally, since you mentioned Clinton, what did an affair with an intern have to do with a real estate deal that happened a thousand miles away and a decade before? Did I mention that no charges were brought on that matter because Clinton did nothing wrong?
Re:Voting machine manufacturer wants votes for Bus (Score:3, Informative)
No chip ever made is tested 100%. Test coverage of 99.0% is considered excellent in the ASIC and custom IC design worlds. Many go to fab with less than 95%, sometimes 90% test coverage. So you have 10 million gates on a hunk of stuff you grew and screenprinted with toxic chemicals, with a decent plan to make sure that 99.0% of them can be tested to work as they should. You do the math -- lots will fail, and worse, some will fail occasionally and then resume working. Moreover, we can't really test all posible sets of stimulus -- that would take an incredibly long time in an industry where tester time on billion-dollar testers is doled out in 5s increments (30s is considered unworkable by most fabs, and would still allow us to test less than 1% of all possible combinations of inputs and transitions).
The interconnect between chips is another problem that's hard to measure, but non-zero. Same with passive components (capacitors, resistors) -- they have non-zero non-fatal failure rates. Which is an obfuscatory way of saying they can "glitch" or "crash". Thank Ohm a resistor's reboot time is much faster than Windows or you'd really notice the hardware failures
I don't have time to go into system-wide signal integrity (intractable), fault-tolerance that isn't, metastability, radiative interference such as cosmic rays and alpha particles emitted from local metals, etc. There's a lot that can and does go wrong in hardware.
I'm really kind of reluctant to post this, since as a hardware designer it's cool that I never hear the "you're why my computer crashes" comments that my software engineers suffer. It's also fun to se MS take the brunt of most PC users reliability complaints. In truth, they probably deserve a lot of it, but not the 100% most believe -- hardware does sometimes fail for a microsecond and then recover nonchalantly, as if nothing happened, sort of like when a cat trips or runs into a wall.
Re:That's a good one (Score:3, Informative)
Not quite.
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/florida.ballots/
No, it wasn't an FTP timestamp, it was audit log (Score:2, Informative)
Also, the file contains an audit long of some 1,000 automated voting program events dating back to spring 2000. This file was March 5, 2002 and had dozens of identifiers to prove it, including audit log items. Also, the votes matched the final tally, proportionately, since they weren't all in yet.
Of course, the elections supervisor swears it wasn't her staff that put it on the FTP site, and Diebold swears none of theirs did it.
However, the password on the file was "Sophia" and Diebold has an employee who is a voting machine tech named "Sophia" and the S.L.O. County elections officials told me that Diebold's Sophia was on site on the election day this file was used.
Seems to me highly likely that Sophia put that file on the Diebold web site, and that she did so on election day, since that's the day she was there.
See ya. Bev Harris Black Box Voting
Re:That's a good one (Score:5, Informative)
For example:
"Voter puched the 'Al Gore' punch. Voter emphasized the vote by CIRCLING the punch. Voter further empasized their intention by writing AL GORE on the ballot.
Cannot count as Al Gore because we're not counting."
The Miami Herald did a similar study that actually COUNTED the ballots and found Al Gore the winner.
The true story of the election can be found at www.gregpalast.com. Yes, Greg Palast DOES have an axe to grind. He hates liars and hypocrites. The first two chapters of "The Best Democracy Money" is available their.
To summarize:
DBT Online/ChoicePoint was selected as a high-ball at $2.3 million dollars. The company who had previously did the job charged $5700.
They were supposed to record cross-checking against public databases and verification phone calls. They did none of this. They were instructed NOT TO.
ChoicePoint was instructed to search for similar names and reduced Jack to John etc... It was supposed to create the maximum number of matches provided the individuals.
The County offices were ORDERED to scrub everyone on the list without doing verification because ChoicePoint was SUPPOSED to have done that verification.
" The State of Florida was content with a partial match of four: names( the first four letters were good enough), ate of birth, gender and race. Not even the address or state mattered in the mad dash to maximize the number of citizens stripped of their civil rights."
- The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, p56
Of course you probably listen to Rush. AS if he hastened spent 6 hours a day grinding axes for the last 15 years.
They gave themselves write permissions (Score:2, Informative)
The very FIRST change in the file, made by Diebold, was to switch it to read-write.
There are also changes in Windows to remove authentication, and they apparently stripped out some of the security features designed for the interface between CE and NT, in order to make it backwards compatible for Windows 98 and 95.
They then represented the Windows software to certifiers as "COTS" (Commercial Off The Shelf) even though it was CE, and therefore customized from the get-go.
My favorite code comment, found in one of the nk.bin files: "We stole this part from some dead guy."
Cheers.
Bev Harris Black Box Voting
However, it is illegal to look at paper ballots (Score:2, Informative)
Add to that the ubiquitous "computer glitch" which seems to the the plausible deniability excuse of choice. Do a Lexis-Nexis search with the words "glitch" and "election" and you'll see that many elections have been miscounted by these machines, including many that flip the race to the wrong candidate, even when the contest is not particularly close.
Bev Harris
Black Box Voting
Gun activist posts the Diebold files on new download site: "Make My Day," he challenges the lawyers -- "You are cordially invited to bite me" [blackboxvoting.org]