Archived Movable Type Content

September 06, 2003

My advice: vote absentee and leave a paper trail

In Ohio, people are starting to question ties between wealthy Republican backers and the electronic voting machines that states are buying by the thousands:

A wealthy businessman helping the Ohio Republican Party try to win the state in 2004 for President Bush also is the head of a company competing for a state contract to sell voting machines.

Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc., told Republicans in an Aug. 14 fund-raising letter that he is ``committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.''

The letter invited guests to a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser at O'Dell's suburban Columbus mansion and asked them to consider donating $10,000 each. The letter went out the day before Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, also a Republican, was set to qualify Diebold, based in Green, as one of three companies eligible to sell upgraded electronic voting machines to Ohio counties in time for the 2004 election.

Two previous BlogWood posts give good background on this issue. From July 9, an American reporter writing in a New Zealand journal makes some startling discoveries:


Two well researched articles (Article 1 Article 2) published in New Zealand paint a frightening picture of what we might be facing in 2004:

Imagine then if it were possible to somehow subvert the voting process itself in such a way that you could steal elections without anybody knowing.

Imagine for example if you could:

- secure control of the companies that make the voting machines and vote counting software;
- centralise vote counting systems, and politicise their supervision;
- legislate for the adoption of such systems throughout your domain, and provide large amounts of money for the purchase of these systems;
- establish systems of vote counting that effectively prevent anybody on the ground in the election – at a booth or precinct level - from seeing what is happening at a micro-level;
- get all the major media to sign up to a single exit-polling system that you also control – removing the risk of exit-polling showing up your shenanigans.

And imagine further that you;

- install a backdoor, or numerous backdoors, in the vote counting systems you have built that enable you to manipulate the tabulation of results in real time as they are coming in.

Such a system would enable you to intervene in precisely the minimum number of races necessary to ensure that you won a majority on election night. On the basis of polling you could pick your marginal seats and thus keep your tweaking to a bare minimum.

Such a system would enable you to minimise the risks of discovery of your activities.

Remember: all the companies that manufacture voting machines in use in the US are controlled by Republicans. Further, these companies use proprietary "closed source" software which makes it difficult or impossible to determine how accurately the votes are tallied.

The allegations in this article are now widely belived to be accurate. On July 25, a BlogWood entry pointed out a NY Times article that seems to confirm many of the problems pointed out earlier.


I wrote about this issue on July 9th, and someone commented that I shoulda had some footnotes to go along with my rant. Well, the NY Times is catching up, and researchers at Johns Hopkins have produced a fully footnoted paper.

From the Times:

The software that runs many high-tech voting machines contains serious flaws that would allow voters to cast extra votes and permit poll workers to alter ballots without being detected, computer security researchers said yesterday.

"We found some stunning, stunning flaws," said Aviel D. Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, who led a team that examined the software from Diebold Election Systems, which has about 33,000 voting machines operating in the United States.

... ...

"With what we found, practically anyone in the country — from a teenager on up — could produce these smart cards that could allow someone to vote as many times as they like," Mr. Stubblefield said.

The software was initially obtained by critics of electronic voting, who discovered it on a Diebold Internet site in January. This is the first review of the software by recognized computer security experts.

And from the academics:

Recent election problems have sparked great interest in managing the election process through the use of electronic voting systems. While computer scientists, for the most part, have been warning of the perils of such action, vendors have forged ahead with their products, claiming increased security and reliability. Many municipalities have adopted electronic systems, and the number of deployed systems is rising. For these new computerized voting systems, neither source code nor the results of any third-party certification analyses have been available for the general population to study, because vendors claim that secrecy is a necessary requirement to keep their systems secure. Recently, however, the source code purporting to be the software for a voting system from a major manufacturer appeared on the Internet. This manufacturer’s systems were used in Georgia’s state-wide elections in 2002, and the company just announced that the state of Maryland awarded them an order valued at up to $55.6 million to deliver touch screen voting systems.

This unique opportunity for independent scientific analysis of voting system source code demonstrates the fallacy of the closed-source argument for such a critical system. Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts. We highlight several issues including unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software development processes. For example, common voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal. Furthermore, we show that even the most serious of our outsider attacks could have been discovered without the source code. In the face of such attacks, the usual worries about insider threats are not the only concerns; outsiders can do the damage. That said, we demonstrate that the insider threat is also quite considerable. We conclude that, as a society, we must carefully consider the risks inherent in electronic voting, as it places our very democracy at risk.

Now, this is serious. Last time, Jeb and his cronies scrubbed blacks from voter roles in Florida and then giggled as the RNC sent thugs into the state to intimidate local elections officers into stopping a recount that was going Gore’s way.

graphic
Rich white wimps whining “We want W”

The Republicans have shown that they will stop at nothing to gain or retain power. Now they have engineered legislation that forces states to “upgrade” to electronic voting systems that leave no paper trail. There is no way for a voter to know that her vote was recorded for the candidate she intended to vote for. In fact, with the revelations that have come out in the last month or so, it is looking very unlikely that votes will be counted as they should be.

Here’s some advice from a computer guy: Vote absentee on an old fashioned piece of paper.

More information.

Posted by Norwood at September 6, 2003 08:55 AM
Comments

cel mai naspa site ever

Posted by: penis enlargement at July 20, 2004 09:44 PM

hmm... good site

Posted by: lesbian porn reality at July 28, 2004 06:46 AM

hmm... good site

Posted by: lesbian porn reality at July 28, 2004 06:46 AM

hmm... good site

Posted by: lesbian porn reality at July 28, 2004 06:46 AM

hmm... good site

Posted by: lesbian porn reality at July 28, 2004 06:46 AM