Diebold Voting Systems Grossly Insecure 534
Several well-known security researchers have examined the code for Diebold's voting machines (which we last mentioned two weeks ago) and produced an extensive report (pdf). The NYT has a story on the report, which cuts to the bone: '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.'
Ah-ha! (Score:5, Funny)
voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal.
Were they testing these in Florida a few years ago?
Re:Ah-ha! (Score:2, Funny)
Or another one: Maybe with this installed Perot could have had a chance!
Re:Ah-ha! (Score:3, Funny)
the insecure code (Score:5, Funny)
if(bush)
bush++;
else
bush++;
Re:Ah-ha! (Score:5, Funny)
Unlimited voting was supposed to be restricted to the elite voters that have insider privileges.
Expect a patch.
Re:Ah-ha! (Score:5, Funny)
From the Black Adder [dar.net]
Re:Ah-ha! (Score:5, Insightful)
No win32? (Score:3, Insightful)
I would rather have an open-source app running on a open-source OS.
Re:Ah-ha! (Score:4, Informative)
A little worse (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, you should say "the software code (of many companies)...". Each bid winner has used a different system and a different codebase. The Court is slowly replacing older machines, but in 2002, for instance, machines from 1996 running a flavour of DOS were still used. And not all winners were Brazilian companies. The 2002 machines and software were made by Unisys.
Re:At least... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think I would mind mandatory voting, if, and only if, we had a "no confidence" vote on the ballot. Such that, if you didn't like any of the choices presented to you, you could vote to have a whole new slate of candidates put up(e.g. if the "no confidence" choice won, all of the parties have to put up new people and we try again.) God knows I would have voted that way back in 2000.
Don't you realize that ... (Score:3, Funny)
Now turn off your computer, sit there calmly and wait for the soldiers to cart you off as the enemy combatant that you obviously are.
Re:Don't you realize that ... (Score:3, Informative)
Read all about it [gregpalast.com]. [PDF] Get over that.
Re:No, the SC said that ... (Score:3, Insightful)
If an election is "too close to call" which means, "within the statistical margin of error" which certainly applied, the issue is supposed to go to the damn legislature, not the supreme court. The executive and legislative branches elect supreme court justices, not the other way around.
This explains the Republican congress and senate (Score:4, Funny)
I thought it was kinda strange for republicans to have all these easy landslide victories suddenly.
Interesting.
Re:Ah-ha! (Score:5, Insightful)
You cannot attach the name of the voter to the ballot and expect free votes.
here we go again (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:here we go again (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:here we go again (Score:3, Informative)
Diebold accidentally left the AccuVote source on an open FTP site (whoops), which is available here [actrix.co.nz], and Black Box Voting is asking for programmers to review and evaluate the code.
So it's only a matter of time (Score:5, Funny)
Voting Machines = easy vote fraud. (Score:5, Insightful)
A paper ballot and a pen is the only form of ballot I trust. And if they don't count the ballots AT THE POLLING PLACE in plain view of the public BEFORE they ship them off to the court house you can't trust the result.
Paper ballot boxes get tampered with all the time. A machine that most people couldn't understand is NOT going to make voting less prone to fraud. If I can't take apart the machanical voting machine to see if it works correctly and I can't look at the code of a computer program and see if it works correctly then why SHOULD I trust it?
We allready had a major election full of obvious vote fraud(On both sides. Bush was just better at it THIS TIME. Gore was just as crooked just not as effective.) Voting machines are just one more way to cloud the issue. A voting shell game run by slick con men.
DEMAND paper ballots! Demand that votes be counted and posted AT THE POLL. Any thing else is a sham!
Re:Voting Machines = easy vote fraud. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Voting Machines = easy vote fraud. (Score:5, Insightful)
One problem: record low voter turnout. Imagine that you're the only person who can be bothered to vote; do you really want the local election commission knowing how you voted?
OK, granted, that's a silly extreme. However, I live in a state with many counties with tiny populations. I can imagine that the local sheriff is also the election coordinator, and given twenty people in the town with 19 of them at the Blue Party fundraising picnic, I'd hate to have said sheriff know that I was the only one who voted for the Orange Party candidate. Throwing my vote in with the 500 others from the county seems to provide a better measure of anonymity, for better or for worse.
I'm a pretty staunch Republican in a predominantly Republican city. Still, I'd hate to be the sole Communist Party Of America or Green supporter in a small place and be afraid to vote because it could be traced back to me so easily.
Scrutineers (Score:4, Insightful)
Here in Canada (and probably most other democracies) we have "scrutineers" so the general public doesn't have to worry about that. Each candidate sends a representative to each polling station to observe and make sure things are handled properly. It is in the candidate's best interests to make sure the other guy doesn't get any unfair advantage, so as long as there is more than one scrutineer and they aren't colluding (which is less likely the more scutineers there are) the system is secure.
Scrutineers are very effective with paper ballots, but only with paper ballots. They are not equipped to verify an electronic voting system. So yeah, demand paper ballots. Anyone promoting electronic voting is promoting the neutralization of a very important election security mechanism.
Re:Scrutineers (Score:3, Informative)
Ballot Boxes in the San Francisco Bay, 2002 (Score:4, Informative)
I wish I could disagree with this. But elections here in San Francisco are so "irregular" that it doesn't even phase us when pieces of ballot boxes start washing ashore.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/
*sigh* (Score:5, Funny)
Re:*sigh* (Score:2, Interesting)
Although, truth be said, I'd love to see a system where they allow unlimited voting, but only a microscopic percentage of the voting public knows about it. You know, the wrong people. The kind who would "write-in" Johnny Depp as governor....
Kierthos
Re:*sigh* (Score:3, Funny)
Re:*sigh* (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, Diebold laid off a good number of their QA, code integrity staff and software developers in late-2001/early-2002, when this product was under heavy development.
There is no way to do it securily. (Score:5, Insightful)
The only difference is who can commit vote fraud. Now anyone who walks up to the machine can commit vote fraud. Even if all of these bugs fixed, large classes of vote fraud remain. The only difference would be that any random person on the street couldn't cheat. However, any custodian would still be able to re-image the drive. Any programmer at Diebold would be able to embed a trapdoor. In short, anyone with exclusive access to open the machine can cause it to cheat. And this 'best case' is only if they fix all of the bugs.
Thats not a lot better. Even the writers of the paper couldn't make a cheat-proof DRE voting program. If an adversary controls the hardware, they control the software. Fundamentally, any non-trivial computer system is not trustworthy; any system whose security depends on a computer should be transformed where the security no longer depends on the correctness of the computer.
For instance, the only nominally trustworthy computer voting scheme is to have the computer be nothing other than a super-intelligent pencil. The voter uses the computer which prints out a paper ballot. The user observes and confirms the paper ballot is correct, then the ballot is dropped into a box. The computer may record results, but as the computer is untrustworthy, those results are untrustworthy. Now, the security and trustworthyness of the computer doesn't matter.
Every security researcher, including the authors of the paper advocates this scheme, but they are ignored by election officials. This includes the two professors who authored the paper, Peter Neumann, and Douglas Jones from the NY Times article, Rivest---the R in RSA--- and hundreds of others.
See: http://www.verifiedvoting.org/index.asp
This is a secure voting system. Brazil has it (and at a tenth the price). Any system without a printer requires 'trusted hardware' in an adversarial environment. Control the hardware, control the election.
Re:There is no way to do it securily. (Score:3, Interesting)
What about secure coprocessors [ibm.com] running open-source software?
There are still issues involved there, particularly with the loading of the coprocessors. (Distribution of the coprocessors shouldn't be an issue because they can prove their identity if the loading is done correctly.) But I would argue that if one threw enough money and effort at that single step, it could be made open and secure as well.
The other issue is the terminal between the coprocessor and the user. It seems to me that as long as the
Re:*sigh* (Score:5, Informative)
A bunch of people at work were saying the SAME THING YOU ARE. They said their skills were current, had qualifications, and were good at their job. Now, it's 3 months later and they're still outta work.
Sure, I know some people (from elsewhere) that got jobs reasonably quick, but that's because they KNEW SOMEONE on the inside, or had some high connections. I'm not being bitter, they've admitted it to me.
Some people with jobs or in school tend to think that everything is fine-and-dandy for people so long as they know their stuff and look hard. But those people are usually the first to start freaking out that they can't find jobs.
It's a cliche, but in today's market it's not what you know, but who you know.
Re:*sigh* (Score:3, Informative)
I can agree with that. The startup I work for is starved for qualified coders -- but half of what we seem to hire these days are people with unremarkable skills who are old friends with our VP of Engineering. He'll personally vouch for the qualifications of each and every one of them, though.
*sigh*.
Re:*sigh* (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, I know some people (from elsewhere) that got jobs reasonably quick, but that's because they KNEW SOMEONE on the inside, or had some high connections. I'm not being bitter, they've admitted it to me.
*sigh* indeed. There are many, many, many different reasons why someone could be hired over someone else. One such reason is having someone on the inside who can vouch for them. I wouldn't be where I am today if I hadn't done my fair share of "networking" starting back in college. For potentially equally qualified applicants, having someone on your side on the inside counts for an awful lot in most places. And that's just entry level. How do you think people rise to the top.. dumb luck and good resume?
Don't be bitter because someone else is willing the play the game a step further than you are. Step up to it and start networking with people.
Re:*sigh* (Score:4, Funny)
I won't take anything under a totally cool 100k dude.
Chill out man, 70k... geee....
BTW, I learned java *AND* MSCE (whatever) in toootally insane 14 days dude. Top that!
Re:*sigh* (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but that's bullshit. Have you been unemployeed recently? You are aware that the economy is in one of the worst states it's been in since the Great Depression?
There are many qualified people who have trouble finding jobs.
I know a number of well qualified people in a number of sectors who have trouble finding work. This includes Java engineers with over 6 years java experience, Unix admins with 10+ years experience, telecom folks, production managers, office managers, etc. Most sectors of the economy are suffering.
Finding a job depends on networking-- who do you know that can help you get a job. Technical skills are very secondary.
In the SF Bay Area, we're flirting with a 10% unemployment rate in the tech sector. 25% of residents in the Bay Area have been laid off in the last several years. Average job search lasts 8 months.
That is caused by more then the "java in 21 days" problem that you suggested.
Re:*sigh* (Score:3, Informative)
Flaws still unfixed after ***5 Years*** (Score:5, Insightful)
'But Douglas W. Jones, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa, said he was shocked to discover flaws cited in Mr. Rubin's paper that he had mentioned to the system's developers about five years ago as a state elections official.
'"To find that such flaws have not been corrected in half a decade is awful," Professor Jones said.'
Re:Flaws still unfixed after ***5 Years*** (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Flaws still unfixed after ***5 Years*** (Score:3, Funny)
Your time scale is too short. (Score:2)
"We're constantly improving it so the technology we have 10 years from now will be better than what we have today," [Diebold guy] Mr. Richardson said. "We're always open to anything that can improve our systems."
Like making them non-useless?
Re:Flaws still unfixed after ***5 Years*** (Score:5, Informative)
But then I talked to a low-level employee. He was worried because they kept laying off staff, then employing new people. Seems that once a project was "done" (meaning, shipped first version, wrote up your research findings, etc.) they had the nasty habit of laying off the entire team. They would literally hire a team to do a job, then fire them for each project. There was no continuity between versions of software (if there were any), and things tended to languish, while they tried to make a quick buck.
And based on what I was told, this wouldn't be the first time that one of their products was wholly insecure from the get go. Don't get me started on their ATMs piss-poor security features from that time. Things just didn't get fixed until someone got screwed.
PS. I turned down their generous offer of employment.
Do something about it! (Score:5, Informative)
The page is right here [eff.org]. Let the people who can make changes in this area know that this is important!
Re:Flaws still unfixed after ***5 Years*** (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not suprised by this at all. Problems, even very big glaring problems, get stuck in software early on due to naive design decisions, but they persist due to management's unwillingness to either admit the problem is there or put forth the resources to start again from scratch. The result is software that doesn't deliver, cost five times more than if they had started over, and everyone involved feels dirty for having been a part of it.
Does it really matter? (Score:2)
Re:Does it really matter? (Score:2, Insightful)
and no I'm not a Dem
Well...DUH!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Well...DUH!!! (Score:3, Informative)
Why would you trust [acm.org] the CRC?
google (Score:4, Informative)
Well yeah! (Score:5, Funny)
What, you were expecting fairness?
Re:Well yeah! (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, rigging it in a state in which your brother is governor with a supreme court your daddy appointed should be pretty easy...
Aha! (Score:5, Funny)
You didn't read it here first (Score:5, Insightful)
Scottie's Law strikes again (from Star Trek III): "The more they back up the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drains." The simpler the voting system (the less mechanical, electronic, electro-mechanical etc. etc.) is the less open it is to fraud (both officially and unofficially perpetrated) or error (both innocent and culpable).
One more reason I'm glad to live in Canada...
Feature? (Score:2, Funny)
Diebold Salesman: "This is a feature, an unintentional extra for your customers!"
Voting problems (Score:2, Insightful)
CBN2004 (Score:5, Funny)
Reporter: "Mr. Neal, under what platform are you running?"
CBN: "Redhat Linux 9"
Reporter: "..."
Re:CBN2004 (Score:2)
Other inerest groups, including the Anarchists and the Willingly Unemployed Caucus, have called for "More Slack", but this reporter has been unable to determine any consistant policy in the Slackware platform.
In other news...
This is a surprise? (Score:5, Insightful)
At least with the current voting system, while you're there you see everyone being handed 1 ballot, and turning in just 1 ballot. You see the ballot go in the sealed box. There's no secret about what your vote is doing, and no confusion about whether the vote was cast or not, or if anyone is turning in multiple ballots.
Open Source? (Score:5, Interesting)
-j
I'd like to see more than open-source (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd like to see a really verifiable election process; check out http://www.vreceipt.com/ for an example system, which makes it essentially impossible for anyone to change or not count your vote. (It doesn't seem to prevent votes from being added, but that's a much easier problem to solve in meats
Re:Open Source? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Open Source? (Score:4, Interesting)
In France, we have oversee teritories, that can have finished voting 4 hours before it begin in the main land. But their results are secrets as long as every poll station is not closed (for national consultations, local does not have same restrictions). All we have is post vote pools, and they have repetedly demonstrated their imprecision. But the fact we vote on sundays explain perhaps why people don't seem to avoid voting at all cost (except when the weather is very nice
Yay! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yay! (Score:3, Insightful)
Nope.
You see, Diebold's customers for ATM machines -- the banks -- have a vested interest in making certain that no money leaves their hands that isn't supposed to. Even their internal practices and procedures assume the employees to be untrustworthy. So the banks obviously gave Diebold a requirements document that ensures that no money leaves an ATM that isn't supposed to.
OTOH, Diebold's customers for voting systems -- the Republicans (yeah, I know, cheap shot, so sue me) -- have a vested interest in
Not suprised (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's an article (Score:5, Interesting)
It IS interesting to note how many dollars have flowed between Diebold and the Republican party...
Pure Speculation (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow... (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, common voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal
The vending machines here around campus (using a diebold system) were used by almost 600 students to get "free" food... In an audit they detected it... Full text here [dailytexanonline.com]
Old Saying (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people, in comments widely circulated on the Internet, contend that the company's software has been designed to allow voter fraud. Mr. Rubin called such assertions "ludicrous" and said the software's flaws showed the hallmarks of poor design, not subterfuge.
Re:Old Saying (Score:3, Insightful)
It's more than just stupidity; as the article notes, some of these problems have been known -- and left uncorrected -- for five years. It may not yet rise to the level of malice, but it certainly qualifies for utter laziness and gross negligence.
If this were a medical device whose flaws were causing patient deaths and the manufacturer knew about it for five years, stupid would be a rather mild word for the manufacturer.
On the other han
Look at the bright side (Score:3, Funny)
Poor choice of words (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't that a rather poor choice of words when talking about program code? And is hacking an iceberg permissible under the DMCA?
Also read... (Score:2, Informative)
www.whatreallyhappened.com
t ml
http://www.infernalpress.com/Columns/election.h
On purpose? (Score:3, Interesting)
Are Diebold ATMs more secure? (Score:5, Informative)
Just from the above quote, this doesn't sound like the kind of security that any bank would tolerate. Is this a case of lawmakers awarding contracts under duress after being wowed by cool "tecknoligee" in order to avoid being the next "Florida 2000," or is Diebold simply a victim of its own success for having potentially higher standards for commerce than voting?
[sarcasm]
It almost seems like the authentication process to make this work would need something as stringent as, say, a National ID card [privacy.org]...
Ooh, and we could use a Poll tax [wikipedia.org] to pay for the equipment!
[/sarcasm]
Re:Are Diebold ATMs more secure? (Score:2)
Ahh, yes. But if DirecTV has their way, posessing equipment to program SmartCards will be illegal [slashdot.org].
Our time is upon us (Score:2, Interesting)
Smart cards again, huh? (Score:2)
FidoNet handled this (Score:4, Interesting)
The election results were sent to all voters with a list of all the passwords who voted for each candidate. You checked to make sure yours was in the right category.
This is still hackable, though, simply by custom generating for each voter a message with their vote in the correct category, but enough other passwords in the cheating candidate to make sure they win.
Whats the way to handle this properly in a world of PKI and the web?
Secondhand experience (Score:3, Informative)
Actually I think they were only allowed to test machines from two out of four companies. The companies were quite rude about the idea of some external group testing their machines. They would not provide a machine for testing, and actually forbade them from finding one of their machines elsewhere and testing it. They were threatened with legal trouble if they performed an "unauthorized" test and released the results.
They probably had good reason to be so wary. On one of the other machines at least, I believe you could vote twice by zipping the card through quickly or something. I don't recall exactly what you had to do, but it apparently wasn't difficult to learn or accidentally come across.
No Surprise Here! (Score:5, Interesting)
Almost exactly 20 years ago Chase Manhattan Bank tasked my buddy Charles (?) and I to hack thier Diebold branch alarm system.
To our surprise it used a simple lookup table. The mainframe would poll a branch asking about a specific alarm. The server located at the branch would respond with a code for "OK".
THE SAME CODE EVERY TIME!
We cut the telco lines and alligator clipped our TRS-100 (way cool early laptop) and using a BASIC program did a look-up (which my partner wrote a coolie algorithm for), responded "Everything's OK Here!", and went to lunch.
After screwing off for several hours we told our managers that we had spoofed thier branch alarm system.
They traveled to Diebold who swore up and down how great thier encryption was. The Chase guys slid our report across the table and watched the Engineers turn white as ghosts as they read it.
HAHAHAHAHA What a bunch of dumbasses!
The Moral of the Story: Don't trust your security vendors.
Cheers! (:-{)}
Bill
Re:No Surprise Here! (Score:5, Interesting)
In the case of any voting system allowing extra votes, that should be able to be solved by a simple external checksum. If there's more votes in any race than people who passed through the doorway, you've got a problem.
You see why a Republic is more efficient? (Score:3, Funny)
This sounds like a victory for the 'little guy'... (Score:5, Insightful)
I KNOW I'm paranoid, but still...I like to think long-term.
not exactly a surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
So, does it come as a surprise that companies that can't produce minimally secure ATMs can't produce minimally secure voting machines either? Blaming Floridians for "hanging chads" (talk about a broken user interfaces) clearly was only the beginning.
If we want secure voting machines, ATM manufacturers are the last people to go to because they already have proven to be incapable of handling computer security. The only thing they seem to be able to do is make big, heavy metal boxes and pretend that that constitutes "security".
Re:not exactly a surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
If the bank thought they could save money by upgrading ATMs, they would do so, and pocket the extra money. Obviously they don't think so.
Re:not exactly a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
That is all very true, but that doesn't make it any better. To the bank, an occasional $2000 fraud isn't a big deal--it's a little money added on to some fees, maybe they lose the customer that was defrauded, and putting a secure ATM infrastructure in place would indeed be much more expensive. But to the person losing $2000 and spending hours on the phone trying to get the money back and trying to restore their good name, the loss is much bigger than the financial loss to the bank. That is what makes the bank's attitude so callous. In fact, banks should face stiff penalties when fraud does occur so that their financial objectives are brought in line with the harm they cause; then, they would fix ATMs.
For voting machines, the situation is even worse: there is little or no auditing or verification possible, either for individuals or auditors, and nobody loses money from misregistered votes. So, if the ATM vendors reason the same way for on-line voting as they do for banking, the kind of reasoning you applied, then they really don't care at all about security. And that's just what we are seeing. And that is exactly the reason why ATM vendors are completely unsuitable to handle these things: they have already demonstrated that they will optimize for profit, not for security. For creating on-line voting systems, we need organizations that are dedicated to security, not profit maximization.
Paper 1.0 (Score:5, Interesting)
Some criticisms off base... (Score:3, Interesting)
First, a number of the supposed weaknesses they present are not actually exploitable; all of the ones relating to the file systems on the voting machines, for example. They offer no proposals for how an attacker could get access to these file systems or alter the files. It's not like he can just stick in a floppy and get it to run his favorite hacking program. As long as these are closed systems running the designer's software, there is no need for file system protection.
Second, many of the smart-card related attacks present far-fetched scenarios for how a hypothetical attacker could discover the weakness. This is a common flaw among such analyses; working with 20-20 hindsight, the researchers attempt to put themselves in the shoes of an attacker who doesn't have access to the source code but who always guesses right about how things work. It is far-fetched at best to propose that someone could cut the cable to the smart card reader in the voting booth, install some kind of monitoring device, inspect the protocol between machine and card, and then go home and use the data to deduce how to manufacture forged cards. Yet that is exactly what the authors suggest.
In truth, the real weaknesses of the system are the implicit assumption that the source code would be kept secret. Security through obscurity works only as long as the obscurity is maintained. If the code is leaked or stolen, these assumptions are violated and the system becomes insecure.
In this context, then, the real question is whether this is a true and up to date representation of the code that is implemented in the machines. One question I had was if so, why they weren't able to validate any of their assumptions about how poll workers were trained to operate the machines by referring to training manuals or at least verbally contacting some workers. At this point it seems to be entirely hypothetical whether this code is actually being used in any current voting machines, and therefore whether the attacks presented would actually work in the field.
DMCA in action! (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, criminals, terrorists, and anyone else who wants to corrupt the voting process can easily break the password and discover how to mess up the voting.
Now that's the DMCA in action, protecting your freedom! Oh yes, the DMCA is going to be just excellent for technology research and innovation.
For those of you who think e-voting is simple: (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately the idea doesn't work. The reason is that you would need every kiosk (or polling station) to be connected to some sort of network in realtime in order to retrieve ballots, cast votes, and update voter status. The problem with this is that you have now created a network that is vulerable to DoS attacks. It wouldn't matter how you structured your network for performance... the minute someone snips a wire at any given kiosk, you have two choices:
1) make that kiosk unavailable for voting
2) still accept votes at that kiosk, but cast them provisionally.
#1 is dangerous because now I could cut the wires at EVERY kiosk I could find (or packet the network, or whatever) and bring the election to a halt.
#2 is dangerous because the more kiosks I bring down, the more ballots will be cast in which the voterID (which reveals his name, etc) is tied to the ballot. Loss of voter anonymity is unacceptable in American democracy.
So what happens if you just leave all the kiosks offline and give them all a copy of the master voter registration db? Now you've opened yourself up to voter fraud: you could go from kiosk to kiosk, casting multiple ballots as yourself. If you stuck with voter anonymity, and each of those ballots were cast anonymously, how would the final tallying system know that you cast duplicate ballots? How would it know which to throw out?
I'm told Dr. Rubin's grant from the State of Washington was eventually rescinded, I suspect because there's no good way to solve this problem, as well as a few others which I will not go into detail about here.
I have described this problem in the following other Slashdot posts:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=61340&cid=576
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=61875&cid=580
What about post-election auditing? (Score:3, Interesting)
So this raises the question -- what's to keep unscrupulous officials from rigging an electronic election? And equally importantly, what technologies and procedures are in place to detect vote fraud after the fact? Analog elections involve a fairly solid system of observers to prevent fraud. It's not perfect, but it usually works. In an electronic election, who will verify the validity of the code in the first place, and after the election, who will check each and every machine to make sure it hasn't been tampered with? I mention each and every machine because only one machine would be necessary to completely skew the numbers in any given precinct.
Important voting system Q&A: (Score:5, Insightful)
A: The first person that thought they could get away with it.
Hilariously bad. (Score:3, Informative)
Makes you wonder why they don't use ATMs as a blueprint for voting systems.
Does a voting system *really* need Windows 2000 as a base? Or any version of Windows, for that matter?
Hell, *DOS* is an overkill for this sort of application.
Election-Stealing HOWTO (Score:5, Interesting)
Another bunch of guys who cobbled together a report on Diebold's laughable voting machines is available here [scoop.co.nz], complete with plenty of screen shots.
Schwab
In Maryland You can Register Your Dog To Vote (Score:4, Funny)
See Here [papillonsartpalace.com]
Simple Solution (Score:3, Insightful)
When a person votes, the machine should spit out a piece of paper with the voter's choices listed. The voter verifies the paper, then slides the paper into a slot (in much the same way many current voting machines accept the voter card).
In that way, the voting machines can automate the tabulation, and we can avoid any hanging chads; but the paper trail still exists.
Are there any flaws with this?
Now that nobody trusts Bush. . . (Score:3, Interesting)
A couple of my friends are betting on Shrub hitting the 'Emergency' button and instigating a total lock-down of the U.S., suspension of all rights and the firing up of the 800 or so empty but staffed and waiting American concentration camps [sianews.com] sitting idle around the nation. "Night of Long Knives" and all. .
While this IS planned, no doubt, I tend to feel (make that fevrently hope) that we're not quite there yet.
Here's a quote from a recent interview [rense.com] with Eustace Mullins. .
--Keeping in mind that 'Jewish Money' would more aptly be called 'Zionist Money'. Zionism doesn't have the best interests of the Jews at heart by a long shot!
Moderators. . . Please at least glance at the link info before you label this message 'Troll' (it's not. I don't have a deficient ego.) If you can't deal with this stuff, please get your fear levels under control rather than irresponsibly use your mod points. This stuff is here and it affects everybody. Cringing denial won't make it go away. Best to learn what it out there so that it can't hurt you.
-FL
Re:I'll just wait for the link (Score:5, Informative)