quote:As Elections Near, Officials Challenge Balloting Security By Zachary Goldfarb The Washington Post Sunday 22 January 2006
In controlled test, results are manipulated in Florida system.
As the Leon County supervisor of elections, Ion Sancho's job is to make sure voting is free of fraud. But the most brazen effort lately to manipulate election results in this Florida locality was carried out by Sancho himself.
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.
There's a hybrid touch-screen voting machine out there-- you simply touch your choice, and when you finalize it, it punches your vote onto a old-fashioned card and drops it into the locked container to be counted.
quote: What Sancho did "is analogous to if I gave you the keys to my house and told you when I was gone," said David Bear, a Diebold spokesman. As Bear sees it, Sancho's experiment involved giving hackers "complete unfettered access" to the equipment, something a responsible elections administrator would never allow.
quote: Harris recruited computer expert Herbert Thompson, and on Feb. 14, 2005, in Tallahassee, Thompson met with Sancho and tried to crack the Diebold system remotely. The first attempt failed. On a second attempt, by directly accessing a computer where the votes are counted in a final tally, he manipulated returns. They used a local high school election for the experiment.
posted
In this case, the system can be hacked by anyone with as much access as a poll worker.
quote:The Hursti Hack requires a moderate level of inside access. It is, however, accomplished without being given any password and with the same level of access given thousands of poll workers across the USA. It is a particularly dangerous exploit, because it changes votes in a one-step process that will not be detected in any normal canvassing procedure, it requires only a single a credit-card sized memory card, any single individual with access to the memory cards can do it, and it requires only a small piece of equipment which can be purchased off the Internet for a few hundred dollars.
One thousand two hundred locations in the U.S. and Canada use Diebold voting machines. In each of these locations, typically three people have a high level of inside access. Temporary employees also often have brief access to loose memory cards as machines are being prepared for elections. Poll workers sometimes have a very high level of inside access. National elections utilize up to two million poll workers, with hundreds or thousands in a single jurisdiction.
Its nothing like the Diebold spokesman says. Of course, Diebold (and other) electronic voting machines have also tabulated literally millions of incorrect votes (whether through unintentional or malicious error), and those're just the ones that have been caught. Try reading the Black Box Voting book.
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posted
As I see it, the biggest problem is the inability to do a manual recount should one be required.
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Keep in mind that this hack can be totally undetectable without a manual (hand) recount.
Given that for a smart operator there would be no indicators a manual recount was needed, I'm not sure that's the biggest problem. I remain suspicious of electronically counted voting, period.
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Don't they understand that the harder Diebold (and legislators) push for a system without manual recount options, the more suspicious voters get?
Just about every voter has used an ATM or bought gas with a card at the pump; printouts ain't tough to do. If there's a reason they can't be made, tell us that reason. otherwise, quit dodging the issue and revamp the machines.
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I want a system with the following means of recording:
Double printout: one for the voter, one that stays in the machine, like in a cash register. I used to not like the vote-buying potential from takeaway receipts, but at this point I fear inaccuracy more.
Write once technology - probably a tape that uses laser pitting. Something that cannot require a change during the voting day. Must be written at the same time the printout is.
Local hard drive.
Central database.
Make sure all happens at once. Use the three electronic copies to compare, and trigger a hand recount if they don't agree.
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posted
I'd settle for a scantron-like printout each voter can look at before depositing in a ballot box, which is later read into a machine that displays both the last ballot's votes, the previous total for all races, and the total after the ballot's votes in all races have been counted, with a fairly high rate of randomly sampled hand-checking to make sure that things are proceeding correctly. After the totaling at each counting location, the totals that need to be forwarded are read off the screens and forwarded.
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I'd like it if each voter could go up to the voting booth (in this case, a guy with a legal pad), whisper their choice in his ear, and he could write it down.
Oh, wait, we're trying for something more sophisticated, huh? Well...he can be a cyborg, I guess. With eye lasers.
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No offense fugu, but Dag's just sounds cooler Like something Tom Cruise would have to suspend himself from a ceiling in Langley to try to crack or something.
Seriously though, you'd think massive redundancy and the ability for a hard copy manual recount if necessary would be a given in any machine designed to be part of something as important as voting.
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The big reasons I like mine are, all the "transport" is hard copy, and the original ballot is hard copy (just with a computer aiding in filling it out, to help make it more readable to another computer). That makes it far harder to tamper with results.
Its a way of using computers to speed up the tallying and reduce unclear ballots without letting in all the other problems computers have. There's no reason to need the computers for the rest of the stuff, that's just frills.
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posted
The old kind of vote tampering is (largely) prevented against by modern polling techniques, except in the case of widespread corruption, which could presumably overcome just about any preventative techniques.
Particularly given public reporting of totals at a very local level -- many of the discrepancies in electronic voting have been caught due to extreme undercounts in a precinct. Since ballots aren't sorted by who was voted for and collected in a central place, losing a large number of votes for a given candidate requires losing a large number of votes in an area that candidate is strong, something quite likely to be noticed.
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posted
But much more likely to be noticed if an off-site record (one harder for a local corrupt organization to tamper with) is kept as votes are tallied.
It's much harder to maintain a multi-jurisdiction conspiracy.
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Very secure system Dagonee. I wish that someone with your attention to detail and your level of integrity was in charge of designing our voting machines.
Also good points fugu13.
The security of Paper ballots AND any election is only as secure as the local polling workers. In Bush's first election there was a scandal locally about a Poll worker who took home absentee ballots. Of course the worker returned ballots the next day - but were they the SAME ballots, without changes?
So much stuff happened in Florida - I witnessed at least some of it. I really believe that Bush didn't win either time. Not that we can do anything about it now.
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I'd settle for the electronic machines in my example transmitting a count to a central location -- however, that count would merely be used to detect discrepancies and trigger recounts, all official totals would be from the machine-aided hand counts.
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quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: It's probably insanely expensive, though.
If we can afford to pay more than a million per for 'smart' bombs and then spread them 'all over' Iraq and Afghanistan, then we should be able to afford the cost of guaranteeing our vote to be counted accurately. IF those in Power want to be sure of having fair elections.
It's all about priorities, and power. As long as the count can be manipulated the ones in power can be assured of staying in power, so the integrity of voting machines certainly will not be a priority. And those in power, behind the curtain, will do whatever it takes to stay in power.
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quote:Originally posted by fugu13: I'd settle for the electronic machines in my example transmitting a count to a central location -- however, that count would merely be used to detect discrepancies and trigger recounts, all official totals would be from the machine-aided hand counts.
I'd vote for a simple paper ballot and a hand count, if that's what it would take to get honest elections and every vote counted.
Sure it might take days to count the ballots, but y'know what - we don't NEED to have an instant total. Let them do Exit Polls, if they want an instant total estimate. Then let's count every single vote to be accurate and sure.
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Like something Tom Cruise would have to suspend himself from a ceiling in Langley to try to crack or something.![[Frown]](frown.gif)
