Ohio Investigating Possible Vote Machine Tampering Last Year 213
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 It seems several voting machines listed a candidate as withdrawn from the race when in fact he wasn't. By the time the investigations tracked down which machines had been affected, the candidate's name was back on the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."
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.
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?
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.
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- 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.
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.
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For a ballot stuffing scenario, however, you need a lot more people because of the physical nature of the crime. To borrow your example; any moron can physically rob a bank, and a skilled individual can electronically loot the same amount of money; b
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You seem to claim its more likely that one retard exists that can stuff a paper box, than that one hacker exists that can hack an electronic election. However, you don't understand scalability. It takes at least one retard in every paper voting site, or at least each paper voting site that matters, to stuff a ballot box. Probably there are far fewer box stuffing retards that the
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You seem to claim its more likely that one retard exists that can stuff a paper box, than that one hacker exists that can hack an electronic election.
This missing point here is that there are lots of retards.
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There's a reason I differentiated between an editing attack and a swapping attack. In order to perform a swapping attack on paper ballots, you need to carry great stacks of ballots with you (i.e. cubic meters of them).
I'm pretty sure that plugging in the connector would take lo
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* You can't pre-stuff the box with your fake votes.
* You can't 'swap the ballot box'.
* You can't add more than one votes without being detected since observers can count how many people vote.
Furthermore your evaluation of electronic voting
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If they are hand-generated ballots, yours are going to stand out a touch. On the other hand, there will be lots of spoilage. I'll give you this one, absent serial numbers or other mechanisms that can be used for external validation.
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How many seconds does it take to "misplace" or otherwise disappear a batch of paper ballots?
"Not counted" works just as well as the missing entries, etc.
None of it is actually at all "secure" in the normal sense of the word. There's more secure means- and if you're going to
do something like this, one should pick more as opposed to less. Unfortunately, for the electronic ballot system makers
they've been in a race to the bottom, trying to out cheap (and by that, I mean lack of quality) each othe
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.
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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
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Nothing, nothing at all.
However, population size is increasing. Ok, a lot of people don't vote (for reasons that escape me...). Assuming the option of making voting compulsory, which I am in favor of (after all, a lot of people ended up dead last century making sure we could, its a tragedy that so many people don't even seem to be aware of what happened...), then you'd very quickly have a system close to the breaking point.
All we need is a secure and reliable electronic
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Please post as something other than AC to make me feel I should answer your question.
Since you are using the internet, and visiting slashdot, I assume you aren't a technophobe, so get with it, get an account or uncheck the 'Post Anonymously' box. Then I'll debate.
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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.
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Would you mind cloning yourself a few million times so you could get this implemented?
Seriously though, I like. You should send the idea to your representative.
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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.
Let's see....
Health system = millions of uninsured, outrageous costs, inconsistent care with no coordination
Financial institutions = scandals, bailouts, housing bubble, credit crunch
Currency = check current exchange rates: need I say more?
Transportation systems = Think abou
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I wasn't talking about how well those systems are run. I live in the UK, where we pay that nasty, socialist national insurance, and have health care assured free at point of provision, no matter what ails us, and regardless of previous health conditions. Apparently this means we also breed terro
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Replace corporation with Universities
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Perhaps, but university graduates end up working at the major corporations, so we are ultimately talking about the same people.
I'm an academic myself, one who is finding that academic success bizarrely doesn't mean an escape from low wages, so I wouldn't personally be convinced that academia is any assurance of moral and ethical superiority. We all have to pay bills...
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Re:Heh. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Heh. (Score:5, Funny)
Just sayin...
Never leave a paper trail (Score:3, Interesting)
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If that level of logging isn't on by default, then the voting machine manufacturers are even more incompetent than I thought. And that's saying a lot, because I doubt they could fasten their own shoes with velcro.
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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)
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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
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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
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One problem with this would be that the voter who cast the ballot could still be forced/coerced into proving that they voted in one way, or another. However, the government couldn't create a massive database of who voted how. The other problem would be in having voters cr
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The closest I ever got to totally secure software was writing in the online user manual for my open source project 'if you run this software as root you are batshit insane...'.
I took it out though, as I have to be respectable these days...
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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.
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A properly developed voting system is not farfetched, it's the security that's the issue, and the companies currently making voting machines seem to be extremely bad at making verifyiably secure machines.
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A properly developed voting system is not farfetched, it's the security that's the issue, and the companies currently making voting machines seem to be extremely bad at making verifyiably secure machines.
Not just verifiably secure, but verifiably unbiased. This can't be done without inspection of the entire system, which is much simpler for most paper ballot systems.
My personal preference for electronic voting would be a computer that lists the vote options in a clear manner (not always possible with a paper system and some of the votes that happen in the US), tabulates the votes locally, and prints out an election ballot that is both machine and human readable. The person votes, verifies the printout, h
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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
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Oh, I think they've made them completely reliable. In a way that humans never can be.
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.
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Oh, since it doesn't tell you what was actually going on in this race, and who was running for what, see
this article [dispatchpolitics.com] to know what's going on here.
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Its getting really ugly and if they cared half as much about the welfare of Ohio as they do partisan politics... things wouldn't be so bad.
Elections need auditability (Score:2)
Elections need to be auditable.
Related story (Score:4, Informative)
Ohio (Score:4, Interesting)
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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.
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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.
and
d. You can vote over the internet.
I'd love to verify my vote and I'm not really afraid of voting over the internet. However both cases expose you to possible coercion and a great deal of the computers are infected with malware and should not be trusted to do anything that you don't want stolen or manipulated.
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Yet this "kind of attack" is not an actual attack on the voting system itself, it is a personal attack on you. You call it "very real" yet provide no statistics that this doesn't already take place, or if it did under the system outlined previously, whether the
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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?
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.
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If you want to know all about Ohio politics... (Score:2)
Read this. [wikipedia.org]
Then this. [moldea.com]
And finally, this. [freetraficant.com]
This guy is still getting voter support while he's in jail for mob related crimes.
Remember that Star Trek:TOS episode where everyone was a cheesy mobster? That was filmed in Ohio. They did it to save on costuming and sets. I'm sure of it.
Ohio Voting machines are officially a crime scene (Score:4, Informative)
Or ARs technica [arstechnica.com]
Doesn't fucking cut it. (Score:2)
In the 2004 elections around 3 million voters were denied from voting because of registration abuses. That is around 2.5% of the total voter turnout and more than the percentage Bush won in 2004 with. 5.2 million people are ineligible to vote because of their legal history. (The USA has biggest prison population on the planet, relative to population size).
It should be required by law that if any kind of irregularity exceeds 0.5% of
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Yeah, you'd have to throw out that whole Constitution thingy to federalize election standards. Each state can determine how their representatives to the electoral college are chosen. That should stay that way, we are a Republic of somewhat independent states.
It is currently philosophically or politically stylish to erode state's rights in the face of debacles like Katrina, and Florida's voting issues, but that erodes an essential balance of power proposition in our government. I like being able to hold
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Make that the USA has biggest prison population on the planet period [nytimes.com]. Larger than China, larger than India.
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.
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Everyone I know that voted for Perot did so with Bill Clinton as their second choice. He was what every Democrat longs for, a moderate Republican that isn't pro-war and anti-choice. That he's also what Republicans say they are but aren't (fiscally conservative), didn't seem to bring any over to him, at least of the voters I know.
Summary incorrect (Score:2)
The reason for the withdrawal was to prevent vote splitting with a second candidate and prevent a 3rd candidate from winning. With the 1st candiate still in the race on some machines, the vote splitting may have occured and the 3rd candidate may have enjoyed the benefit (and did win).
The machine error may have played some part in deciding the election.
So... (Score:2)
Having spent 25 years in Ohio, it sure sounds like business as usual to me...
Ohio and Florida.. WTF ? (Score:2)
They should reduce their electoral votes until they get their shit together.. give em to Rhode Island and Delaware.
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since the machines are technically not designed to count backwards, someone tampered with the machine to give Gore negative votes to start with.
Re:Damn (Score:5, Informative)
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At least he HAD a grandson... (Score:2)
The election guy sounds like a complete moron.
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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
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I fail to see why it is so difficult to create a reliable voting machine. It's an adder... computer have been doing this since they were first conceived.
Exactly... if the software is really so simple, then, just why do the voting machine companies call it proprietary and refuse to let anybody inspect their code or their machines? Sequoia just threatened the state of New Jersey with a lawsuit if they let an outside lab access to a voting machine to test it [wsj.com] after about 60 Sequoia voting machines across the state seemed to malfunction during the state's Feb. 5 primary.
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The problem isn't creating a reliable voting machine. That's trivial. What's hard is creating a voting system (of which the machine is only a small part) that can be verified to have been reliable without having to assume anything about the reliability or accuracy of any part. The only feasible way of doing this so far involves keeping a record independent of the machine's counts. That, frankly, is the basis for every method of financial audit ever created. And it works. I dealt with systems in a casino tha
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Each machine could be "calibrated" by a a bi-partisan calibration group who would pre-determined a particular sample number and voting order (equal of course). Each machine could then be validated by comparing the pre-determined sample against what was actually recorded. After that, look for absences in or additio
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Wait... That does sound kinda tough...