Election Officials And Crackers Challenge Diebold 219
Rick Zeman writes "The Washington Post is reporting that election officials in Florida have manipulated election results in controlled tests. From the article: 'Four times over the past year Sancho told computer specialists to break in to his voting system. And on all four occasions they did, changing results with what the specialists described as relatively unsophisticated hacking techniques. To Sancho, the results showed the vulnerability of voting equipment manufactured by Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems, which is used by Leon County and many other jurisdictions around the country.'"
Why not do something about it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Steps to stopping the stupidity:
1) Put down (favorite game) when you're off work.
2) Write plan, put something together.
3) Get in touch [senate.gov] with someone with the power to make the (smart) decision.
4) Show off.
Re:Why not do something about it? (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Put down (favorite game) when you're off work.
2) Write plan, put something together.
3) Get in touch with someone with the power to make the (smart) decision.
4) Go to jail because now they can prove you tried to find a way to subvert the system.
Re:The Bush family is the most corrupt ever. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you overestimate the influence of morality. The interest of this family (and their party) has little to do with right and wrong. Despite our president's delusions that the voices in his head are Jesus Christ telling him what to do, that's really not the point.
At some point (hint RR), the federal government shifted from being a organization serving the needs of its citizens into being a multitrillion dollar business. The people running things, both Rep and Dem, are very wealthy and in many instances, particularly in the White House, are ex-CEOs. They are making national decisions based on profit margin, not for us, but for themselves.
For example, it's much cheaper to drill Iraqi oil fields than it is to drill offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. The oil reserves in this country are going to be depleted sometime in the near future and the Bushes, and all their cronies, understand full well they will be out of the oil business if they don't position themselves within the Middle East, which is where we'll squeeze the last drop of crude out of this rock we live on.
This administration has made certain individuals in this country extraordinarily wealthy. There is no way in hell that the people making so much money at taxpayer expense would give that up to something as fickle as a general election. Thankfully, someone's got an eye on them.
Re:The Bush family is the most corrupt ever. (Score:4, Insightful)
Bush family? Sad to say, Abraham Lincoln was more corrupt than all the Bushes combined. With GW, it isn't considered treason to say that the Gulf War II was wrong. In Abraham Lincoln's regime, it would have been. As unconstitutional as W's wiretapping efforts were, Lincoln wiped his arse with the constitution by suspending it completely.
Re:Weak. (Score:2, Insightful)
Volusia county, enough said. Maybe not because of Jeb Bush, but someone there is pulling a little too hard for the Republicans. Of course, the same thing can be said about Democrats in Ohio, but what do you expect when the two major parties in our country are basically scraping the bottom of the barrel in order to look for candidates? Somebody's gotta make it look like people actually want to vote for these guys.
Diebold's ineptitude
See, here's the problem: their secure and successful ATM venture tarnishes their image as "a bunch of inept oafs" as you would, for lack of a better word, "defend" them. "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence" rings hollow when the company has created and deployed a system that has not been broken, and not for lack of being a very juicy target.
You believe Moore's lies and distortions because you want them to be true.
As for lies, which ones are you referring to? Bush admitted that he holds hands with saudi leaders, he explained that it was what was expected of him in their society, "when in Rome...". As for Bush's father meeting with the brother of binLaden, that was apparently enough for the Bush administration to "extraordinarily rendition" a Canadian citizen to Syria for over a year. Maher Arar's crime? Well, we don't know exactly, because just like thousands of other people (including at least one American citizen, Padilla) the Bush administration doesn't bother to charge people with crimes or otherwise justify their behavior. But the man does claim to have been interrogated about his employment alongside the brother of a known Syrian terrorist.
Re:Paper trail is a red herring. (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't. But the original posters' point was that if there is any suspicion of discrepancies/errors/hacking, the "system" (meaning the whole election process) can fall back on a more traditional/reliable method (paper votes).
Paper ballots have their own problems, but in general it's a different set of problems than the ones in electronic systems.
There's one flaw in your argument (Score:3, Insightful)
Note that by "initial cost", I mean the initial 80-100 billion that Bush requested for the war. What's the price tag up to now? 200b? 300b? It's a hell of a lot more. Plus there's the cost of upgrading/rebuilding Iraq's oil production infrastructure.
If this was about oil, it was a damned stupid financial decision.
Re:There's one flaw in your argument (Score:3, Insightful)
Yep, fucked the country over good and half of the voting public willingly bent over for another reaming too.
It wasn't about oil - it was about oil infrastructure. Most of the oilfields in Texas are dry (or too expensive to extract from, even at $70/barrell) but what Texas has a lot of are the companies that build rigs, build pipelines, do geo-petrol exploration, etc. Those companies have made a killing since the Iraqi invasion.
Re: There's one flaw in your argument (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, but you neglect the distinction between who is going to pay for it and who was supposed to profit from it.
The oil companies were supposed to supposed to benefit from it (by means of the distribution contracts rather than by pwning the oilfields per se), but you and your descendents will be paying for the war, yea unto the seventh generation.
(Saw a news story somewhere this month about a new estimate of the war's total costs to the USA running to the amount of two trillion dollars. Cheney and his cronies won't be picking up the tab; they're already getting tax breaks on their record profits, while the national debt goes ballistic.)
Re:The guys in power don't care. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Easy Voting Machine (Score:3, Insightful)
You'll have to wait until the morning after the election to get results, but it's a fair bit more reliable and secure than any electronic system in use today.
You can always use paper ballots! (Score:5, Insightful)
"All votes are made on the same standard heavy paper ballot which is inserted in a standard cardboard box, furnished by Elections Canada. The ballot and the box are devised to ensure that no one except the elector knows the individual choice that was made. Counting the ballots is done by hand in full view of the representatives of each candidate. There are no mechanical, electrical or electronic systems involved in this process."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_electoral_s
Scandalous!
Cheers,
-b
Re:Insanely poor program architecture (Score:2, Insightful)
And yes, he was a supremely corrupt fucker. What's your point?
Re:The Bush family is the most corrupt ever. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Bush family is the most corrupt ever. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What is old is new again (Score:2, Insightful)
No. A handful a fraudulent votes were found in the first Glendening/Sauerbrey contest, but not enough to matter.
Sauerbrey was an underdog who ran a (from a stickly political-game perspective) very strong campain and almost, but not quite, caught up to Glendening. (Registered Democrats far outnumber Republicans in Maryland, so it was pretty much his race to lose.)
Her allegations of fraud proved baseless [washingtonpost.com], and damaged her image enormously. (I'm not saying there weren't irregularities, only that they weren't significant to the final outcome.) In 1998 the Maryland GOP was silly enough to make her their candidate again and she got defeated again.
(For the record, I didn't vote for either of them either time.)
The problem is that a secure system is one that denies access by default. But a democratic (small-d) voting system must allow access to the polls by default.
I don't understand your reference to checksums.
It's nobody's business but my own (and the poll workers) whether I've been to the polls or not. Marking people who have voted in a manner that is publically accessible is a bad idea.