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View Full Version : And more on voting machines...


Judy G. Russell
October 29th, 2006, 08:21 AM
Sunday, 10/29, NY Times online: "The federal government is investigating the takeover last year of a leading American manufacturer of electronic voting systems by a small software company that has been linked to the leftist Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chávez."

Geez.....

ktinkel
October 29th, 2006, 01:01 PM
Sunday, 10/29, NY Times online: "The federal government is investigating the takeover last year of a leading American manufacturer of electronic voting systems by a small software company that has been linked to the leftist Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chávez."Well, at least that could probably be counted on to balance out any hanky-panky by the people who control the Diebold operation! <g>

I sure hope the states run away from these flawed systems before 2008.

Judy G. Russell
October 29th, 2006, 01:57 PM
I sure hope the states run away from these flawed systems before 2008.You and me both... All of NJ's 21 counties will vote with electronic machines this year... and not one of them has any kind of paper trail.

Lindsey
October 29th, 2006, 10:15 PM
Well, at least that could probably be counted on to balance out any hanky-panky by the people who control the Diebold operation! <g>
LOL!! My thoughts exactly!

But getting serious: the truly insidious thing about the systems that are implemented in altogether too many places is that there is no way to assure that the elections are completely above-board. That is corrosive in a democracy. The election process needs to be completely transparent, so that people can feel confident that there are controls in place to prevent any attempt to subvert the election, and that if something does slip through the fence, an investigation can bring it to light.

Whether or not any election has actually been stolen at this point is not the central problem. The real problem is that those assertions can be made and that there is no way to disprove them.

--Lindsey

ktinkel
October 30th, 2006, 09:33 AM
The real problem is that those assertions can be made and that there is no way to disprove them.No argument there! This topic is bubbling to the surface; perhaps we will get to it yet. (The list of urgent things to take care of is growing fast!)

Lindsey
October 30th, 2006, 11:20 PM
The list of urgent things to take care of is growing fast!
Ain't that the truth! :(

--Lindsey

sidney
November 2nd, 2006, 04:06 PM
Ars Technica has been having a series of in depth articles on electronic voting machines. This one, Primary and early e-voting problems point to gathering storm (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061101-8131.html) is perhaps the most sobering yet, with information based on the results from the primaries leading up to next week's elections.

It is a long article, but here are some what I think are notable factoids from it:

The million voters in Cuyahoga County, Ohio used the Diebold AccuVote TSx in the May 2, 2006 federal primary. Key results of two independent investigations commissioned by the county Board of Elections include:

The machines' four sources of vote totals — VVPAT [voter-verified paper audit trail] individual ballots, VVPAT summary, election archive, and memory cards — did not agree with one another.

87 rolls of paper printouts from the voting machines (their paper audit trail) have gone missing. Another 40 were damaged either by crumpling or because the printing wan't legible.

Here's a direct quote from the article:
I've been further informed by the founder of ESI that there were around 60 different copies of the final vote database (an unencrypted Access database, if you recall from my election article (http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/evoting.ars)), and that there was no naming convention in place to enable officials to tell one from the other. When ESI asked for a copy of the vote tally database for auditing purposes, the response was (and I'm paraphrasing here), "Which one?"

29 AccuVote machines went missing after the election and had not turned up as of the time the article was written. Also missing are 812 voter-access cards (which voters place in touch-screen machines to cast their ballot), 215 card encoders, which program the voter-access cards, and 313 keys to the voting machines' memory-card compartments, where votes are stored.

Note that the Princeton group that came up with the proof of concept virus for the Diebold machine did it by reverse engineering a single machine that they obtained.

60 Board of Election employees took touch-screen machines home a weekend before the election to test a procedure for transmitting data on election night

In at least 79 precincts the number of voters who signed the poll books didn't match the number of ballots cast. In one case investigators found 342 more voters than ballots.

The article makes a really scary point to anyone who wants to say that it may not be as bad as it looks because it is probably just technological screwups rather than malicious manipulation of the vote:

To sum up, if we randomly assume that deliberate vote manipulation was not a factor in any of the problems surrounding the May 2nd primary in Cuyahoga County, then here's what's scary: all of the technical and procedural breakdowns outlined in these two reports happened on their own, over the course of a relatively low turn-out election, without any help from bad actors. Can you imagine if deliberate wholesale fraud were thrown into this mix, especially in the context of a high-turnout, hotly contested election?

The article also links to Avi Rubin's blog where he talks about a security report finding new vulneribilities in the Diebold machine, including the ability to vote an arbitrary number of times using Post-It notes if the voter is left unattended. Undetectably biasing the results to any candidate is a little more complicated, requiring a screwdriver and a few minutes with the machine, even if the memory card is sealed in place.

It isn't just the Diebold machine. Sequoia machines can be voted multiple times (http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/44823.html) by reaching around the back and holding in a yellow button.

And that's just highlights. Read the full artice at the link I included at the beginning of this posting.

-- sidney

Judy G. Russell
November 2nd, 2006, 09:38 PM
And that's just highlights.Oh. My. God.