The Lounge - CodeProject

An expose on electronic voting (stealing) machines.
http://harpers.org/archive/2012/11/how-to-rig-an-election/[^]

It's quite long. Excerpts:
Diebold, then one of the primary manufacturers of voting machines, had left the 40,000 files that made up its Global Election Management System (GEMS) on a publicly accessible website, entirely unprotected. Diebold was never able to explain how its proprietary tabulation program ended up in such an exposed position. Harris downloaded the files, and programmers worldwide pounced, probing the code for weaknesses. “The wall of secrecy,” said Harris, “began to crumble.”

GEMS turned out to be a vote rigger’s dream. According to Harris’s analysis, it could be hacked, remotely or on-site, using any off-the-shelf version of Microsoft Access, and password protection was missing for supervisor functions. Not only could multiple users gain access to the system after only one had logged in, but unencrypted audit logs allowed any trace of vote rigging to be wiped from the record.

As recently as September 2011, a team at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory hacked into one of Diebold’s old Accuvote touchscreen systems. Their report asserted that anyone with $26 in parts and an eighth-grade science education would be able to manipulate the outcome of an election. “This is a national security issue,” wrote the Argonne team leader, Roger Johnston, using the sort of language that would normally set off alarm bells in our security-obsessed culture. Yet his warning has gone unheeded, and the Accuvote-TSX, now manufactured by ES&S, will be used in twenty states by more than 26 million voters in the 2012 general election.

Johnston’s group also breached a system made by another industry giant, Sequoia, using the same “man in the middle” hack—a tiny wireless component that is inserted between the display screen and the main circuit board—which requires no knowledge of the actual voting software. The Sequoia machine will be used in four states by nearly 9 million voters in 2012.

We use a pencil and a piece of paper.

It has yet to be hacked.

Although I believe many get stolen.

Every man can tell how many goats or sheep he possesses, but not how many friends.

Shed Petition[^]

ChrisElston wrote:
We use a pencil and a piece of paper.

It has yet to be hacked.

What about this[^]? Poke tongue | ;-P

We use pen and paper here in Oregon, and it was hacked, just this very election too.

Some election worker got caught filling in the bubbles, to their personal preference, for voters who had made no choice in a given race. Election officials want us to believe they even caught all the tampered ballots. After all, the culprit used a pencil whereas the voters had used a pen (its valid for the voters themselves to use a pencil).

Its all about money. The election officials don't want to call a re-do because it costs more than spin. And that's just over the costs of re-doing an election. Its gonna be much, much worse with electronic voting, because now one has large corporations with deep pockets against the fair election as a liability dodge. Allowing electronic voting to be poorly done like this is basically legitimizing election tampering.

We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.

What I don't understand is how a simple task such as counting votes could require 40,000 files.
It should be little more than a freakin' abacus.

I was quite shocked at that, too. What kind of f***ing architecture were they using? Obfuscation through complexity? I think most people here could write an open source one in a few hundred lines.

If it's anything like the code base I work with, then it's usually an effective strategy. I have the source code and I can barely find anything... Unsure | :~

I can only imagine it is because each district must be handled differently for the various items that need voting on.

I would hope that the actual code to cast/tally a vote would be a simple as could be.

Welcome to the Lounge