HBO - Hacking Democracy
Talesin
Our own little well of hate Join Date: 2002-11-08 Member: 7710NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators
Our own little well of hate Join Date: 2002-11-08 Member: 7710NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators
<div class="IPBDescription">aka: How to steal an election with a single memory card</div>Just because some people haven't seen it, some people don't want to see it, and some people refuse to believe that it's true. In any case, it's up on Googlevideo. And should be watched by anyone of voting age, with any concern about the accuracy of elections in our government, Republican or Democrat alike.
<a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7236791207107726851" target="_blank">http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7236791207107726851</a>
Obviously, Diebold says that it's a fake. Then again, they also say that their memory cards contain no executable code, that their voting machines are secure from tampering (videos are available of them being opened and closed without a trace in under five minutes), and that any previous bugs in their software have been fixed. They are also full of bullsh*t.
<a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7236791207107726851" target="_blank">http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7236791207107726851</a>
Obviously, Diebold says that it's a fake. Then again, they also say that their memory cards contain no executable code, that their voting machines are secure from tampering (videos are available of them being opened and closed without a trace in under five minutes), and that any previous bugs in their software have been fixed. They are also full of bullsh*t.
Comments
"america, the worlds greatest democracy..."
aehmn yes....
good bye
There's a reason there's not a computer scientist in the world that thinks electronic voting is a good idea. One of the first things they taught me in college was how to insert a vulnerability in a piece of code that is undetectable even in the source code.
I watched it last night. It's really chilling.
There's a reason there's not a computer scientist in the world that thinks electronic voting is a good idea. One of the first things they taught me in college was how to insert a vulnerability in a piece of code that is undetectable even in the source code.
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What makes it even worse is the central software is easily obtainable. I've got copies of three different versions, and I didn't do anything more then a simple search.
It's stupid that people believe the producer of the software over people who aren't effected by how well it sells. What would happen if MS said, "No, thats not a bug" to every remote vulnerability?
how many of your rights will they take before you start to stand up for yourselves, and try to effect a change.
[rejoice friends! I hear the chocolate rations are to increase!]
....
*edit*
This is just insane, I cant believe any attempt to defraud the populace could be so amaturish. The only thing I can understand by the way it was carried out, is that;
1. they know your spirit is crushed
2. they want to demonstrate exactly how futile it would be to try and change anything
I guess the question now is;
how many of your rights will they take before you start to stand up for yourselves, and try to effect a change.
[rejoice friends! I hear the chocolate rations are to increase!]
....
*edit*
This is just insane, I cant believe any attempt to defraud the populace could be so amaturish. The only thing I can understand by the way it was carried out, is that;
1. they know your spirit is crushed
2. they want to demonstrate exactly how futile it would be to try and change anything
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There are things we can do. Choose the secretary of state for your state carefully. They have the most control over the elections, and make it known to them that you want minimum requirements of open source software with a voter verified paper trail for any electronic voting machine.
We just got a new secretary of state in California who made these things part of her campaign platform.
The day they do this in may country, I will stop voting.
Which is not to say that there aren't LOTS of weaknesses with our voting system. I fully believe there are. I just don't believe they are stacked to give advantages to Republicans.
Republicans got crushed. Making it hard to believe that there's any systematic effort to cheat Democrats out of millions of votes, electronically. Sorry, but your paranoia would be much more believable had you actually lost the election. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile-fix.gif" />
Which is not to say that there aren't LOTS of weaknesses with our voting system. I fully believe there are. I just don't believe they are stacked to give advantages to Republicans.
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I don't know where this quote originated, but I think it can be applied here. "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence."
Hopefully this will take the partisan edge out of the debate so that we can get <i>everyone</i> to support election reform.
If nothing else, I'd say that if the republicans had won again, an investigation would have been virtually forced into recognizance, and local law would be rewritten to force open disclosure to the purchaser of the voting box inner workings.
Less a 'triumph of democracy', more a 'pacification of the restless unwashed masses'. Especially with Bush now having carte blanche to impose military law as he sees fit, anywhere in the nation.
And Moultano, there's a corollary. "Never attribute to incompetence what can adequately be explained by greed."
Republicans got crushed. Making it hard to believe that there's any systematic effort to cheat Democrats out of millions of votes, electronically. Sorry, but your paranoia would be much more believable had you actually lost the election. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile-fix.gif" />
Which is not to say that there aren't LOTS of weaknesses with our voting system. I fully believe there are. I just don't believe they are stacked to give advantages to Republicans.
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Elections WERE lost. And under very suspicious circumstances, too. Just because it didn't happen this time doesn't mean it hasn't happened before.
in fact we were told doing so was illegal by the nice lady who runs the elections in yolo county. She also told me in the pollworker class that she will make every attempt to resist electronic voting in side of yolo county, I applauded this. We did have an "eSlate" machine for disabled voters, at a cost of 10,000 USD per precinct. Guess how many were slated to use this machine county wide in a county with 90,000 registerd voters?
Ten <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/marine.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="::marine::" border="0" alt="marine.gif" />
Republicans got crushed. Making it hard to believe that there's any systematic effort to cheat Democrats out of millions of votes, electronically. Sorry, but your paranoia would be much more believable had you actually lost the election. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile-fix.gif" />
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This logic just doesn't stack up. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The onus of proof definitely lies with those who claim there is voting fraud going on, and there is lots of evidence that something odd is happening. This needs to be investigated properly so America can again have confidence in its electoral system. You can't simply dismiss the allegations because they aren't demonstratively true all the time.
To someone convinced that the Republican's are stealing elections, all this mid-term proves is that the republicans can only steal close elections. The recent election is not in any logical way proof that previous elections were run properly.
This logic just doesn't stack up. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The onus of proof definitely lies with those who claim there is voting fraud going on, and there is lots of evidence that something odd is happening. This needs to be investigated properly so America can again have confidence in its electoral system. You can't simply dismiss the allegations because they aren't demonstratively true all the time.
To someone convinced that the Republican's are stealing elections, all this mid-term proves is that the republicans can only steal close elections. The recent election is not in any logical way proof that previous elections were run properly.
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"Can only steal close elections"? What do you think this one was? Sure, it wasn't close in the number of seats changing hands, but it was extremely close in terms of the vote totals which actually decided those seats. Two different senate races turned on less than a 1% margin of victory. The tiniest bit of fraud would have been enough to flip both of those races one way or the other, and that would be enough to shift control of the entire senate.
You're asking me to believe that Republicans have managed to find a way to systematically distort vote totals in their own favor, but mysteriously decided that it just wasn't worth the effort this year, and they would go ahead and lose intentionally. Thats simply not believable, given the evidence at hand.
Do we have evidence that our voting has weaknesses, which make fraud possible? Sure. But the only evidence we have that the <i>Republicans</i>, specifically, are the sole beneficiaries of those weaknesses is the fact that Republicans <i>won</i> the last two elections. Well, they lost a close one this time. So now you need more evidence. You need to go find me a voting machine, decompile its source code, and find the line that drops votes for Democrats. Or get me a criminal conviction on the poll worker who inserted a diebold memory card and mnaually overwrote 3000 votes. Or <i>something</i> besides unsubstantiated complaints about a party that couldn't even manage to steal a Senate race that turned on less than 1/3 of a percent.
Put it this way - would you shoplift while the house detective is looking over your shoulder?
Ok, lets take your example to its logical conclusion. The Store detective flags some guy as suspicious, and thinks he might be shop-lifting. So he follows the guy around the store, and doesn't see the guy steal anything. "Ah-hah!", thinks the store detective, "that PROVES he was a shoplifter, because he waited until my back was turned to take anything!"
Thats essentially what you are saying here.
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To clarify, am I saying this proves there WASNT any fraud? No, I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that if you want to claim there WAS fraud, the burden is on YOU to provide evidence of guilt. Not on me to provide evidence of innocence.
No, it isn't proof he is a shoplifter, nor is it proof he is innocent. In the case of a potential shoplifter, it would be wise to not act without conclusive proof. In the case of the foundation upon which democracy is founded, it would be wise to have an impartial investigation into the matter so that confidence can be established and improvements can be made. I mean, nobody has anything to lose, right?
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Sure. I'd be all for an Impartial investigation.
On the other hand, an investigation that starts on the assumption that Republicans are stealing elections isn't exactly what I'd call "impartial". Its important to head into it with an open mind, and a team that really is chosen to be impartial and non-biased.
(True non-bias is nearly impossible to obtain, but you can start by getting as close as possible, and then try to get an even mix of those biased a little one way with those biased a little the other way.)
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->[...]You're asking me to believe that Republicans have managed to find a way to systematically distort vote totals in their own favor, but mysteriously decided that it just wasn't worth the effort this year, and they would go ahead and lose intentionally. Thats simply not believable, given the evidence at hand.[...]<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I pointed out a possible explanation for why this election was not stolen, and you immediately turn around and twist and distort my words, then call me paranoid based on your misinterpreted version of my arguments. Kindly stop doing that.
You seemed rather enamored of the possibility though, and continued to concoct scenarios to explain it. Which would be fine, if you were actually discussing it as a "possibility". But that wasnt the context...the context was one of investigation to find Republican wrongdoing. And so I was asserting that your scenario, while not impossible, was not credible enough to support those claims.
No straw man involved.
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->In Florida, Echoes of 2000 as Vote Questions Emerge
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
SARASOTA, Fla., Nov. 9 — A Democrat who narrowly lost the Congressional race here is seeking a recount after dozens of people reported problems using Sarasota County’s touch-screen voting machines and a significant number of ballots had no recorded votes in the high-profile race.
The Democrat, Christine Jennings, lost to her Republican opponent, Vern Buchanan, by just 373 votes out of a total 237,861 cast — one of the closest House races in the nation. More than 18,000 voters in Sarasota County, or 13 percent of those who went to the polls Tuesday, did not seem to vote in the Congressional race when they cast ballots, a discrepancy that Kathy Dent, the county elections supervisor, said she could not explain.
In comparison, only 2 percent of voters in one neighboring county within the same House district and 5 percent in another skipped the Congressional race, according to The Herald-Tribune of Sarasota. And many of those who did not seem to cast a vote in the House race did vote in more obscure races, like for the hospital board.
More than 100 voters have told the Jennings campaign that their votes for her did not show up on the summary screen at the end of the touch-screen voting process, and that they had to re-enter them. The candidate’s lawyers said they feared that not everyone had noticed the problem or realized that they could re-enter the vote.
“There is a spontaneous combustion of outcry in this county,” said Kendall Coffey, a lawyer who was on Vice President Al Gore’s legal team in the 2000 presidential recount and is now working for Ms. Jennings. “We are determined to do everything we can to make sure that every vote counts and everything we can to get to the bottom of this.”
A recount will almost certainly be conducted because the vote was so close. State law requires machine recounts when the margin of victory is half a percentage point or less, and manual recounts when it is a quarter of a percentage point or less. But it is not clear that a recount can recover a vote that was never properly recorded.
The Florida Elections Canvassing Commission, which includes Gov. Jeb Bush and two other state officials, both Republicans, will meet Monday and decide whether to order a recount. Secretary of State Sue M. Cobb announced Wednesday that she would send a team to conduct an audit of the county’s voting system.
Any recount results would be certified on Nov. 20, said Sterling Ivey, a spokesman for the Florida Department of State. In a manual recount of touch-screen voting results, Mr. Ivey said, canvassers try to determine whether voters who skipped making a selection in a certain race did so unintentionally.
But Rebecca Mercuri, a computer scientist and an expert on voting technology in Hamilton, N.J., who has been critical of electronic voting, said it would be impossible to figure out voter intent in a recount of touch-screen votes.
“If a vote is not recorded electronically inside the machine for whatever reason, there’s no way to go back and recover it,” Ms. Mercuri said. “Chances are that nothing’s going to change, because those votes are gone.”
A preliminary review by The Herald-Tribune found that if Ms. Jennings had won the same percentage of the 18,000 missing votes as she did among counted votes in Sarasota County, she would have won the race by about 600 votes instead of losing by 373.
Ms. Jennings, a banker, and Mr. Buchanan, a car dealer, ran a bitter and costly race to replace Representative Katherine Harris, who left her seat to run for Senate but lost by a landslide on Tuesday. Ms. Harris, a Republican, was Florida’s secretary of state during the disputed 2000 presidential recount, supervising a balloting process widely considered flawed and certifying President Bush as the winner of Florida’s electoral votes.
Mr. Buchanan declared victory early Wednesday and began preparing for his new job, but Ms. Jennings has refused to concede. She has not ruled out going to court, Mr. Coffey said, but she will first wait for a recount to be completed.
Some state officials, including Ms. Dent, the elections supervisor, theorized that many voters skipped the Congressional race because they were turned off by vitriolic campaigning. But Mr. Coffey said if that had been the case, other counties in the same Congressional district would have had similarly high “undervote” rates.
So many voters reported similar problems in the state’s early voting period, Mr. Coffey said, that the Jennings campaign wrote a letter to Ms. Dent expressing concern. He said the results showed that an even larger portion of early voters — 20 percent of the total — did not vote in the Congressional race. By contrast, only 2 percent of voters using paper absentee ballots skipped the race, he said.
Mr. Coffey said Ms. Jennings wanted independent experts to come test the county’s iVotronic voting machines, made by Election Systems and Software of Omaha. Ms. Dent did not return a call seeking comment on Wednesday.
“I don’t think any of us would be satisfied with having the government do the verification,” Mr. Coffey said, “because, honestly, the government appears to be part of the problem here.”
Mike Lasche, a boat captain here, said that when he voted his vote for Ms. Jennings did not show up on the final review screen until he cast it a second time.
“If I had not checked carefully I would have gone on without ever thinking about it,” said Mr. Lasche, 50. “You have to wonder how many people it happened to and may not have even noticed it.”
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I have to wonder though, why did the early votes show a 20% drop-rate, and the later votes less than a 13% drop-rate? I mean, theres a good indication that something is wrong here, but why would a systemic drop error suddenly be cut in half on the last day of the election?
I found the detailed results for that election online, in case anyone wants to examine them.
<a href="http://www.srqelections.com/results/1996_2006results.htm" target="_blank">Sarasota County, Florida</a>
Edit: The full election results are about 1,000 pages long, so I havent looked through them all, but after running through the first 42 out of 157 precincts, there doesn't seem to be any correlation between a precincts drop rate and how strongly it voted for Jennings. They vary from around 6% drop to as high as 20% drop, with no particular pattern.
Definately weird, and disheartening. I can tell you right now, I wouldn't trust my vote to any electronic machine that didn't spit out a paper receipt on the spot, so I could check it myself.[...]
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Thing is, it wouldn't be too hard, from what I know about programming, to fake the paper trail too, at least the initial one printed when the individual one was entered. Simply have the machine print out one thing and do another. That, however, would probably require a virus to be inserted into the machine - which, incidentally, has also been shown to be possible in the past with nothing but a memory card.