Hack the vote

[bascule]

http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/

How ridiculous

[renderman]

Re: Hack the vote

Are we surprised?

[bascule]

Re: Hack the vote

Are we surprised?

Surprised? No

Scared? Yes

[Gadsden]

Re: Hack the vote

Bah, it is only voting. If it changed anything it would be banned. Besides, OUR country would never slide down a slippery slope, that is only other places.

[klepto]

Re: Hack the vote

The mainstream media won't report on this at all.

[Beginner]

Re: Hack the vote

Yep. Saw that coming as well.

[INIT_6]

Re: Hack the vote

The mainstream media won't report on this at all.

I just saw this on news at the air port coming home from texas. It was on CNN.

They didn't go that far in depth but they did say they can be hacked.

This is funny. I guess we all will be voting nude. Strip down touch your toes and spread them. make sure we don't get any virus.

So they need to re-design them. Then give out proto-types to hackers. See if they can hack them in a real world setup. Maybe instead of memory cards they can use wifi 802.11abgifds or blue tooth.

I am sure a computer eng. Can make it so no one can hack it in a real world setup. by not using a smiple lock to protect the mem card. Have it so the mem. card has a hash what has to match the os hash. Or even a hardware checksum. I am sure they can use the same box just modify it so it will work.

[Deviant Ollam]

Re: Hack the vote

I am sure a computer eng. Can make it so no one can hack it in a real world setup.

absolutely. you don't even have to be a computer engineer... here's how you make voting 99% accurate.

use fucking paper and ink based ballot machines like we have since the beginning of goddamn modern time. make a machine that allows a user to choose their vote, review their vote, modify it or correct it if need be, then locks in their vote. the vote should be recored on a voter-verified paper trail. the paper vote then passes out of sight and the machine is ready for the next voter.

the way that you make this "hack proof" is with the use of election monitors, non-partisan (or balanced-partisan) volunteers, etc. you then count the votes in a huge-ass public room. the counting room should have long, stark tables and plenty of lighting. around the poll workers (who do the counting) should be numerous (but not over-crowded) election officials and more non-partisan monitors. the whole room should have an entire wall that is see-through glass or plexiglass... and on the other side of said glass should be press, the public, or whomever the hell wants to stop by and see the votes being counted.

this isn't fucking hard. Jimmy Carter organizes election monitoring activities in third world nations all the time. do you guys all realize that the U.S.A. is the laughing stock of the world when it comes to elections because, in this as in many other things, we're a nation that runs around swinging the club of technology as we look for a non-existant problem with which to strike it.

voting was doing pretty fine until idiot election boards decided that it needed to be "modernized" with advanced machines. people are free to disagree, and i'd absolutely love to hear their take on it, too. of course a technological voting system could be made that's very, very secure... the same way other things are made secure. you open source the entire thing from start to finish and peer-review the shit out of it. but this still doesn't get around the key issue which is a pitfall in many aspects of our lives... the forced insertion of a "technological solution" into a situation that didn't require it.

[Nikita]

Re: Hack the vote

...... but this still doesn't get around the key issue which is a pitfall in many aspects of our lives... the forced insertion of a "technological solution" into a situation that didn't require it.

I swear I fall in love with your logic more and more, Well said. I would however be in favour of supporting a % of those vote counters to be elected based on a jury duty similar nomination. But then again that runs a risk of exploitation as well.

[renderman]

Re: Hack the vote

I agrre once again with Deviant that it seems to be a problem of 'finding a problem for the solution'.

Up here for our Municipal elections it's an optical read ballot. Fillin the bubble for who you want to vote for, take it to the election worker and they slide it in (face down) to the reader machine which also contains the locked box. It gives you an electronic tally, but also has a paper backup for hand votes.

Federal elections are even easier. Ballot is a 3X5 piece of paper. Draw an X through the circle of your choice. Take back to the desk and deposit into the box. There are enough workers and areas that each box only has a couple thousand votes.

I know that the US elections vote for everything from Dog catcher to President on the same day, so things don't scale well, but there has to be a better way than what Diebold, ES&S have come up with. I find it hard to believe that a company like Diebold, who's primary industry is self serve Kiosks and ATM's could be so dumb as to make the litany of basic security errors they have since HAVA came out.

Yes I'm in a different country, but what happens down there, has a great effect up here, particularly if such machines are ever considered up here.

[Deviant Ollam]

Re: Hack the vote

I find it hard to believe that a company like Diebold, who's primary industry is self serve Kiosks and ATM's could be so dumb as to make the litany of basic security errors they have

the main problem, as i see it, is accountability. with the banking industry, there is strict accountabiltiy. if an ATM dispenses money incorrectly or financial records get fouled up, the supplying vendor would get raked over the coals and have their accounts terminated. they'd be tarred and feathered on the stock exchange. hell, their incompetence may even be actionable in our litigation-happy nation. that's an account to supply a private industry.

when supplying things to the federal government (even state and local governments, sadly, are not much better in a lot of cases) there's almost no process for public input and post-contract review. while our defense establishment may take the cake (and is really in an entirely separate sphere of "vendors who fail to deliver") the notion of "establish a contract then throw money at it" permeates our government at many levels. large government deals (starting in the 1980s and continuing up to now) are almost impossible to disassemble or revise once they are established. the notion of "technological momentum" becomes a very key aspect of the problem societies face in this regard (read Thomas Hughes or Jaques Ellul for terrific examples of the phenomenon of technological momentum)... once a huge bureaucracy and logistical support mechanisms are in place, amost nothing can uproot a government program.

if you're talking about a technology-based program, it's even worse since the intial overhead of invested captial and training is then used as justification for "trying to stick with it" even if a system is hopelessly broken or fails completely. say a new computer database for the FBI costs $100 million dollars to build, deploy, and train staff, etc. imagine within months of its debut, the press starts publishing stories about how it's a total mess. intelligence officials leak comments or speak even on the record about how it can't manage files or transfer data and how clerical staff is working overtime down in basements (where all paper records have now been transfered) just to keep field offices running at about 70% of the efficiency and capacity they had before.

the government then has two choices...
1. scrap the entire new system and go back to the paper records for now. down the road, hire a better company to build a database for $50 million and spend $25 million to get it up and running
2. allocate an addtional $200 million to "fix" the database (repair to be done by the original, incompetent company who didn't get it right the first time) and then slip an additional $10 million per year to this company over the next decade or so as part of a "maintenance" contract.

i'd bet you dollars to doughnuts that the government would be more likely to spend the extra funds under option #2 just so that they don't look like they "wasted" time and money on the initial effort.

i forsee similar situations if diebold machines are deployed across a huge number of voting districts. once a foot is in the door, it's monumentally harder to get rid of bad technology in the government world. best to keep fighting harder and harder nowadays to ensure that most districts never reach that point.

[Thorn]

Re: Hack the vote

absolutely. you don't even have to be a computer engineer... here's how you make voting 99% accurate.

use fucking paper and ink based ballot machines like we have since the beginning of goddamn modern time. make a machine that allows a user to choose their vote, review their vote, modify it or correct it if need be, then locks in their vote. the vote should be recored on a voter-verified paper trail. the paper vote then passes out of sight and the machine is ready for the next voter.

the way that you make this "hack proof" is with the use of election monitors, non-partisan (or balanced-partisan) volunteers, etc. you then count the votes in a huge-ass public room. the counting room should have long, stark tables and plenty of lighting. around the poll workers (who do the counting) should be numerous (but not over-crowded) election officials and more non-partisan monitors. the whole room should have an entire wall that is see-through glass or plexiglass... and on the other side of said glass should be press, the public, or whomever the hell wants to stop by and see the votes being counted.

this isn't fucking hard. Jimmy Carter organizes election monitoring activities in third world nations all the time. do you guys all realize that the U.S.A. is the laughing stock of the world when it comes to elections because, in this as in many other things, we're a nation that runs around swinging the club of technology as we look for a non-existant problem with which to strike it.

voting was doing pretty fine until idiot election boards decided that it needed to be "modernized" with advanced machines. people are free to disagree, and i'd absolutely love to hear their take on it, too. of course a technological voting system could be made that's very, very secure... the same way other things are made secure. you open source the entire thing from start to finish and peer-review the shit out of it. but this still doesn't get around the key issue which is a pitfall in many aspects of our lives... the forced insertion of a "technological solution" into a situation that didn't require it.

My parents have volunteered as election officials for over 30 years and I've even volunteered on several occasions, although it's been 20+ years since I've done so.

I can tell you from first hand experience that there is a need for a technological solution, simply because counting and tallying thousands of paper votes is nothing more than drudge work. Yes, it is important work, and yes, the democracy literally lives and breathes by it, but drudge work it is. And like any other drudgery, the mind numbs while doing it, and that's when mistakes creep into the process. However, the machines such as the devices cited in the Princeton study are pure crap, and are decidedly not the way to go.

In this area, many towns have adopted a good compromise. Ballots are marked in a way similar to SAT type tests. In the booth, a black mark is inked by the voter next to the name of the candidate or ballot item. The voter then takes the ballot to a public area and feeds the ballot into a voting machine under the watch of an election official. The machine tallies the votes of the various elections, sends the ballots into a locked and sealed box, and counts on an LCD the number of ballots submitted. At the end of the election, a paper tape issued the counts on all the ballots, and the results recorded for each vote. Since the ballots are physically retained, if there is any question of any kind, a hand count can be done. Routine testing and auditing before and after elections make sure the machines are functioning properly.

One other thing people, if you care at all about the process, don't just bitch about the poor design of the machines, GET INVOLVED IN THE WHOLE PROCESS. Volunteer to be at the polls. Ask the local party of your choice about becoming an election official. Run for office like Justice of the Peace. (JPs are the overseers of the election system in many places.) If you think there's voter apathy, wait until you look at the behind the scenes of the election system. There's even more apathy about actually doing the work that makes the whole thing run. Besides, you'll actually meet other people who are passionate about exercising their options as free citizens (although you may not agree with their politics!) It is the surest way to prevent machines like the junk cited above from getting into the system in the first place.

[Gadsden]

Re: Hack the vote

It is a very good point about ATMs. Diebold has NO problem making those auditable.. but not the voting machines. This leads me to believe two things:

A) Someone thinks Democracy is not as important as Capitalism.
B) Those someones are up to something.