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. ""
Slashdot is a small portion of the public (Score:5, Interesting)
Question (Score:4, Interesting)
Kjella
Re:The system is not the biggest problem (Score:1, Interesting)
OSS (Score:3, Interesting)
True, paper and pen ballots are vulnerable to tampering and etc, but at least you can recount the ORIGINAL ballots as the voters filled them out. Electronic ballots lack such a safeguard. Unless of course we print out a paper-copy of the ballots to keep in a lock-box just in case the voting procedures are called into question. But then why not just use paper ballots in the first place??
mod me down (Score:4, Interesting)
Mod me down, because I am obviously too dumb to realize that just because the data from a machine makes it onto a server, does NOT mean that you can push data back.
You think, maybe, the voting machine pushes its data to a repository and defined intervals? Maybe? kinda?
teknopurge
Could someone verify (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Voting machine manufacturer wants votes for Bus (Score:5, Interesting)
Additional revenue from add-on sales like this - and the service contracts that would go with it - are immensely profitable.
So what is going on here?
Also, they insult and ridicule anyone who tries to point out that electronic voting machines that cannot be audited are a problem! Even the hundreds of computer scientists who have spoken out are told they don't know what they are talking about. What IS going on here?
What would be so difficult about adding a printer, and having the voter look over the printout and then deposit it into a separate ballot box? Why are they so dead-set against doing this, even when it would make them tons more money? Are these Republican-owned "businesses" after something besides money?
Will anyone do anything about it now? Nah... (Score:3, Interesting)
The only way people are going to get a wakeup call is if a group of people got a database of eligible voters from local precincts complete with whatever data is necessary to fake a ballot, go into said precincts, and make it look like some unknown Non-Democrat/Non-Republican party candidates (who wouldn't have won anyways) won the election.
Alternately, it would humor me if some "terrorist" organization used this hole to severely screw up the vote by mass-wiping voting terminals/databases.
BTW: How would someone catch this before it's too late? Most precinct staff are volunteers, and they definitely can't see who voted what...
Re:Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Supposedly the connection is one way, so they cannot "rig" the election, per se. An article I had read earler said that it was only summary information, tallies, of the votes, not each individual vote, that was uploaded. The article posted here isn't clear on the subject.
But either way, it is very illegal to count votes while the poles are still open, regardles of whether or not you can tie each vote to each person.
Re:Voting machine manufacturer wants votes for Bus (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Slashdot is a small portion of the public (Score:4, Interesting)
Frankly, either way it's scary.
But the rampant security issues, rather than one carefully managed secret hole, indicate that the first option is much more likely.
Democracy IS over in the USA (Score:3, Interesting)
The end result is that we have a minority group of undereducated voters picking between Candidate Number 1 and Candidate Number 1. Where's the practical democracy there? The Libertarians will argue that its all good because at least we willingly choose to be run by an elected, and in some cases, hereditary elite. But if you're using the US as a yardstick for the implementation of democracy (or even capitalism, but thats a whole other story), then you're living under a rock.
Re:Voting machine manufacturer wants votes for Bus (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The system is not the biggest problem (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Interesting)
Honestly, it would be good to have hackers...and I mean real good hackers, not script kiddies, change the results of a large election to a party like one of the above just to show the real danger to having machines like this wide open.
While I don't normally advocate the breaking of laws (and I love white hat hacking), something dramatic does need to happen to wake some ordinary people up. Of course, this isn't really all that different from the 100,000 dead people who voted for JFK in 1960, but who is counting.
Systemic problem at Diebold (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The system is not the biggest problem (Score:2, Interesting)
(A) Vote (using some electronic voting machine)
(B) Get an on-screen summary of your 'VOTES' after you've completed and get the chance to OK.
(C) Once OKd, get a print out of same in both plain text and machine-readable bar codes
(D) Make final OK to record vote (Paper matches screen)
(E) Drop the print out in a 'ballot box'
Vote counting would consist of the voting machines doing a semi-instant count. Further validation would be taking those hard-printed receipts to a non-networked tally machine.
Check the results from both. Do they match? If not, use the paper tallied results as those would have been validated by the voter as being accurate.
But really, it doesn't require much more than an IQ of 70 to learn how to use a punch-card ballot -- AND make sure the chads are completely removed...
Re:Slashdot is a small portion of the public (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Voting machine manufacturer wants votes for Bus (Score:3, Interesting)
Reason Magazine, by no means a liberal nor hysterical magazine, seems to have no compunctions about identifying this as a problem with roots in the right.
Re:OSS (Score:4, Interesting)
Because one of the hottest debates in a recount is over disputed ballots. One only had to see the whole hanging chad / pregnant chad bullshit in Florida to grasp this concept.
Imagine this: the voters get clean laser printout with their selections. The voters verify the selections and put them in the box. A week later, a recount is issued, and wow! No disputed ballots! It's all there in plain toner.
Of course, the ballots would probably have a barcode to be used for recount, and some 1337 haxor could alter the barcode while printing out the proper selections, causing the recount to be skewed. But if the recount is thorough, then eventually someone will count the printed-out selections, and spot the discrepancy.
Re:Voting machine manufacturer wants votes for Bus (Score:5, Interesting)
And if the company - even though it would MAKE MORE MONEY - refused to make an add-on printer so a ballot could be printed, examined by the voter, and put in a separate ballot box for counting to verify that the machine correctly reported the totals...
Well, I might not be convinced he was going to cheat, but I sure wouldn't want to trust an election to his machines.
Remember, with these machines there is NO WAY to know if the machine correctly reported the vote.
SOME of us here work with computers, so we know that sometimes the computers make mistakes. So wouldn't it be a good thing if we had a way to verify what a machine reported?
What if a machine just broke down? Do we hold the election over again, or do we throw out all the votes from that precinct?
This was California (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:mod me down (Score:5, Interesting)
The connection is a plain old modem connection (as mentioned in the article). By its very nature it's able to receive information in addition to sending it. Hopefully the machines won't accept any modifications to the vote record, but this does establish that an previously unknown channel, open during an actual election, is available. It doesn't necessarily mean anything wrong was occurring, but it does mean that it's possible for something wrong to happen. For something as important as our democracy, I demand the highest levels of security. Trusting a private company with strong political ties to do the right thing seems stupid.
Hmmm, I'd really rather not have my voting machine sending its vote information to a private company in the middle of the vote. Again, as mentioned in the article, by law you cannot count the votes until the polls have closed. Making the numbers available to an outside party isn't allowed. (This is, of course, why there are exit polls instead of the networks just hooking up to the poll computers for up to the minute totals.)
How to create honest and fair electronic voting (Score:4, Interesting)
More headlines... (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh wait...
Re:Slashdot is a small portion of the public (Score:5, Interesting)
From today's Ohio Beacon Journal [ohio.com]"
Scaring voters away from democracy (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Voting machine manufacturer wants votes for Bus (Score:5, Interesting)
Diebold's SEC filings [sec.gov] show their Chairman / President / CEO to be Mr. Walden W. O'Dell, who has donated [opensecrets.org] $2000 this summer to Senator George V. Voinovich [senate.gov], Republican from Ohio (Diebold's home state). Diebold Inc.'s soft money donations [opensecrets.org] also go to Republicans.
This does not demonstrate to me much evidence that Diebold is "after something other than money", it looks like routine political activity to me. But, while my quick research has neither managed to refute nor confirm your conspiracy theory, I'll pass it along anyway for whoever might be curious.
The absolute best way to fight this is; (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously, I'v had my fill between corperations and the goverment. When I goto vote next election, if they have electronic machines made by any of these fishy companies with no paper trail, I'm getting a chainsaw and spraypainging "democracy" on the sides, throwing on a nasty nasty chain, hiding it in a trombone case, getting in a buisness suit so I look like a hurried musician, and when I get in the building, I'll start the puppy up in the bathroom or some consealed area, run out screaming "You want democracy, I'll give you democracy!!! Lets do this by paper!" and rip the machines to hell.
Do I care about the prison time? The better question is, what jury on earth is going to convict me? >:) Especially if I proove that my motives were justifyable, there's something fishy going on and the goverment is bieng fishy, denied me a printout of my vote and ballot, and make it a point to tell the jury they don't have to convict me. Plus, I'll make national news for sure, a psycho running into a voting area with a chainsaw and ripping all of the boxes to shreds? You'd bet that it'd get all over the god box.
Sure, I'll take it up the ass a few years in jail and have a felony conviction to ensure that the voting system isn't rigged. Besides, I'm sure it'll look GREAT on a resume!
Re:Voting machine manufacturer wants votes for Bus (Score:3, Interesting)
Ensuring the Integrity of Electronic Voting (Score:2, Interesting)
The integrity of electronic voting in public general elections with secret ballots can be ensured only if the following precautions are taken:
* generate and use paper ballots
* use open computer architecture and open-source software
* prohibit online voting in general elections (except in rare cases)
FTP timestamps? (Score:3, Interesting)
this means that whoever put the file there, put it there during the daytime. it doesn't mean the file was transferred off a voting system during the daytime.
that said, i still have concerns about voting machines with a wireless interface.
Re:Why bother? (Score:4, Interesting)
In case anyone is interested, a more academic (footnoted, reseached by an actual historian) account and analysis of American Fascism is available http://www.cursor.org/stories/fascismintroduction
Please read this article and tell others about it if you care at all about where this country is headed.
verify the votes (Score:2, Interesting)
Fed. BOR applies to state and local governments (Score:3, Interesting)
For about 80 years after the adoption of the Constitution you're correct in your claim that state governments were not bound by the restrictions imposed by the federal Constitution in the Bill of Rights. Indeed, many states had state Constitutions that openly defied the federal BOR, e.g., I believe that the Georgia constitution required all office holders to be "Christians in good standing" (whatever that means).
But then there was a minor spat over exactly what the Constitution actually meant and who it actually applied to... and ever since the end of the Civil War there's been unanimous concensus that the federal BOR applies to ALL levels of government. It doesn't matter if the Alabama state constitution allows a judge to erect a 20' statute of a burning Buddha in his courtroom, the federal constitution prohibits such displays under the 'establishment' clause.
More generally, I find this argument and the judge's argument VERY disturbing because they seem to be rolling back the clock to the days where whites were kings and blacks were out in the fields picking cotton. Nowhere in the Ten Commandments is there any prohibition on slavery. Nowhere in the Bible is there any prohibition on slavery - in fact the Bible often mentions God's chosen people having slaves. If God's laws supercedes the US Constitution, does that mean that the constitutional ban on slavery is unenforceable?
I hasten to add that I have no reason to believe that the OP believes this. I find it very possible that he came across a site that seemed to make a persuasive argument and didn't realize how much was omitted. But I am beginning to wonder if there's an organized group behind this that wants to roll back civil rights.
Re:Voting machine manufacturer wants votes for Bus (Score:4, Interesting)
The $300 million dollar campaign of George Bush was about SOMETHING. They didn't make that cash by having $10 per plate barbecues. They got that money from coporate fat cats.
By the way, you don't get to be a super-corporate fat cat by being fair to your fellow employee and fellow citizen. You get to those positions by well placed daggers (proverbial) in the backs of your peers and the occasional supervisor (when you can manage it). You get to that place by selling as much as you can for as much as you can for the smallest cost (which means it's often shit). You get to that position by laying of workers, slashing benefits, importing foreign identured servants, busting unions and all around just being plain evil.
After a full day of wholesale theft, who do you turn to protect your bounty. Do you turn to Democrats who (used to) believe in a fair society by which you pay for public services according to your means. Those same democrats often provide low-cost or no-charge services that compete with your schemes to fleece every dime possible. Those damn democrats and progressives try very hard to keep large corporations from selling $1,000 toilet seats to the Pentagon.
Or do I give money to Republicans. Not honest ones (though there are few remaining). Rather, do they give money to the neo-cons who have now publicly stated their goal to merge large corporate America and government. Corporate governance (formerly called Facism). If I give them lots of money, they will slash those pesky environmental laws that stop us from dumping toxic waste in rivers. They will allow us to rape the landspace AND WORKERS. They will turn aside when we fleece Americans. They will overturn liability and tort laws by which consumers sue us for selling them faulty dangerous products.
Hmmm... if I'm a greedy evil rat bastard with a contempt for humanity, who do I choose to donate to. Well at $300 million to $30 million, I dare-say that the evil rat bastards have chosen the neo-cons.
Now the rat-bastards are finding ways to dispense with the even more troublesome DEMOCRACY. Voters will get pissed off. After all, once upon a time their was a robber barons paradise that but dangerous chemicals into the milk itself. Then their was a great depression and many of those who counted themselves among the elite few were cannabalized by their superiors. Sent out to the bread lines by the common rabble. But the common rabble could still vote. And they voted for an Roosevelt.
My gosh, didn't that Roosevelt's cousin also pass the first anti-trust legislation. Isn't that they war hero who led a rebellion against the elitist Republican party and subsequently crushed as a progressive. Didn't those victorious Republicans lead us to our paradise of an enslaved population. Damn what will this Roosevelt do????
Of course, Roosevelt brought about the new Deal. Eventually embraced by most (including the Grand Old Party) up and until Eisenhower. The last great Republican warned us upon departure of the Miliatary-Industrial complex and other such corporate mischief. Against he pursuit of war and strife for the benefit of a few fat cats. The same Business-Government environment that brought Adolf Hitler to power and the world to the brink of utter disaster.
Now we sit with a government being literally run by the corporat thiefs. They are governed by a president unelected by the people (like Adolf Hitler). He is determined to de-regulate EVERYTHING. To diminish the people great institution DEMOCRACY to a sham game. Adolf Hitler never stopped elections. And he never stopped winning.
Here and now the Neo-Cons (Facists) are trying to permanently rob America of democracy without robbing us of elections. They fix them through culling voting rolls of so-called "felons" and fix the voting machines to vote a Neo-Con every
Re:Slashdot is a small portion of the public (Score:2, Interesting)
Stalin said it best (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why bother? (Score:3, Interesting)
First of all, conservatism (in the present day usage) has nothing to do with the size of the government and everything to do with the extent that the government interferes in private business matters.
Second, the current "conservative" government of the United States has increased the size of our government and increased government spending, even if you eliminate the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most of this spending increase is going to domestic intelligence gathering ("homeland security"), which, if I am understand correctly, means spying on American citizens, invading thier privacy, and interfereing in thier personal affairs.
Thirdly, I'd never be so stupid as to think that the current leaders of the Republican party would understand what Conservatism meant to an actual conservative [si.edu].
dipshit.
Re:Why bother? (Score:3, Interesting)
This sounds like a pretty good description of a neo-conservative. I'm pretty sure the "F" word is right on. Note, I'm not saying all Republican's are neo-cons. Rather that the party has been high-jacked by Neo-Cons.
MSFT and Republicans dead in one global blow (Score:5, Interesting)
All things being equal (they aren't), Bush has done enough damage and the press is bold enough with him that he cannot win relection without: it being handed to him by a blunder of an idiot opponent, or if he steals it through fraud.
We are going into the economic winter of an inevitable Kondratieff Cycle [gold-eagle.com]delayed by massive deficit spending. Whatever party wins the next election will take the blame for this.
Based on the momentem of electronic voter machine replacment and the detailed widespread press coverage of the hanging/dimpled chad recount process, if the presidential election is in within 0-5% there will be great hubbub and sevral recounts.
Bush will become president again after recounts play out. The media will be forced to cover the advantages of open source vs proprietary software. It's to short a logical leap for the press not to take.
Durring the mayhem and finger pointing US companies that make software will become the biggest boogie men in the questionable election. Rigged or not, the mistrust of the govt will be enourmous. The stigma will linger and people will understand the software/IP alternitive en-masse for the first time.
When the market/housing/bonds/currency all crash, because the chinese unpeg the yuan from the dollar as late as possible (2007 3/4 as per the WTO) and the yuan springs back hard destablizing everything. (they will do this as sabotage or an economic nuke.) Republicans will take all the blame for the following depresion and the corruption that caused it. (Nothing sucks like a Hoover)
The Republican party will be dispanded, and perhaps a world war (over intelectual property) will occour. Laws on software will radically change for the better in 2012-2015 bringing the US inline with less recent but still new international IP law.
As crazy as it seems, the scarriest thing to me right now is a Democrat winning. Most of these things will still happen but the Democrats will take the blame. Democrats are way to weak to survive a disasterous presidency and will dispand.
Obviously whatever party is dispanded will be replaced, but the populist replacment will take time to accumulate power and the country will swing hard to the left or the right.
Somebody please laugh at me.
Re:Slashdot is a small portion of the public (Score:3, Interesting)
But usually, when Google generates its front page, it can also generate some cross-links to other articles. Therefore, if you have even access to a small media website with a news page, posting a similar article or headline may be what does it.
So here's my advice:
Go out, gather what independant information you can, and then submit it to you local newspaper. Then see if it comes out closer to the national news, or even on Google.
Also, it might not hurt to "Search Google News" for "Electronic Voting", and then follow the first link you find...
that's a very good idea (Score:3, Interesting)
If any state's votes have to be thrown out over mangled electronic voting machine votes, that'll get the question of electronic voting to the WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING level.
That's what needs to be done.
A little Googling should disclose every county/state where Diebold has deployed.