Study shows US electronic voting machines vulnerable

[Judi Lynn]

Study shows US electronic voting machines vulnerable

By Thomas Ferraro
11 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The nation's three most commonly purchased electronic voting machines are all vulnerable to fraud, a study released on Tuesday found.

The study also concluded, however, that steps could be taken to reduce the chances of hackers breaking into these systems and undermining the integrity of state and national elections.

"These machines are vulnerable to attack. That's the bad news," said Michael Waldman, executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School.

"The good news is that we know how to reduce the risks and the solutions are within reach," Waldman said.

The Brennan Center Task Force on Voting System Security, an initiative of the Brennan Center, conducted the study, which it called the most comprehensive study of electronic voting machines to date.
(snip/...)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060627/us_nm/votingmachines_dc;_ylt=A0SOwj5sLqFE0zABvggWIr0F;_ylu=X3oDMTA5aHJvMDdwBHNlYwN5bmNhdA--

[Lerkfish]

1. right, just like microsoft repairs vulnerabilities and they're fixed....

until the next one crops up.

[IndyOp]

2. Good coverage of the Brennan report! Now I just wish

they'd post it on the Brennan website! There are already several reports there - including an interesting-looking one on voter databases. I would like to see the new one!

:redbox: Brennan Center for Justice http://www.brennancenter.org /

[Lost4words]

3. N O? R E A L L Y?

I am shocked , shocked I tell you!

[Canuckistanian]

4. Once again, they miss the point

The problem isn't with hackers, which implies some illegal tampering by the public.

It's a more obvious problem of governmental and institutional fraud.

Still, it's good to see this article in Yahoo. I dont' really care about the reason the machines get banned, I just want them banned.

[JudyM]

5. Kicking and voting it up on Yahoo. nt

[RCinBrooklyn]

6. One day this on-going story will make the news.

[mopinko]

7. the good news is bad news

this is bad. if they are proposing a "fix" they are not on our side. sounds like just a damage control report. acknowledge the problem, assure people you have the fix. nothing to see here folks, move along.

[Peace Patriot]

8. What they are most vulnerable to is INSIDER HACKING by the Bush-friendly

corporations that own and control the TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code that run these machines. TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code CANNOT be made secure. It CANNOT be fixed. It CANNOT be patched up. It CANNOT be adequately mitigated with a paper receipt or ballot. It is INHERENTLY non-transparent. Non-transparent elections are NOT elections. They are tyranny! And every day that Bush is in office--"selected" by non-transparent, TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by his good buddies at Diebold and ES&S--he and his junta prove the tyranny of the "election" system that they were empowered by.

You only have to look at what they are DOING to know that they weren't elected! Voting down the renewal of the Voting Rights Act, and spending a week on a flag-burning amendment. I mean, come on.

This is the coup that the Anthrax Congress pulled off--engineered by its biggest crooks, Tom Delay and Bob Ney (abetted by Bilderberg 'Democrat' Christopher Dodd): the CORPORATIZATION and PRIVATIZATION of our election system. This was their INTENTION with the "Help America Vote for Bush Act" of 2002: illegal, private, secret, corporate voting counting! They flooded the election system with nearly $4 billion badly needed by Halliburton, but diverted to the purpose of padding Diebold/ES&S's pockets and corrupting election officials from one end of the country to the other. With this Act--and also the lavish lobbying it permitted--they bribed, enticed and bullied election officials in every state to RUSH the purchase of these crapass, untested, insecure, extremely insider-hackable, non-transparent and expensive electronic voting systems. They INSISTED that these privately run voting systems DIDN'T NEED EVEN A PAPER TRAIL (let alone a real paper ballot). They INSISTED that they HAD TO BE RUN on TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY vote tabulation code--code so secret that not even our secretaries of state are permitted to review it. They permitted SECRET industry "testing' of the machines. They permitted partisan vendors! And here they are:

DIEBOLD: Until recently, headed by Wally O'Dell, a Bush-Cheney campaign chair and major fundraiser (Bush "Pioneer" right up there with Ken Lay), who promised in writing to "deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush-Cheney in 2004";

and

ES&S: A spinoff of Diebold (similar computer architecture), initially funded by far rightwing billionaire Howard Ahmanson, who also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon Foundation (which touts the death penalty for homosexuals, among other things).

Diebold and ES&S have an incestuous relationship; they are run by two brothers, Tod and Bob Urosevich. These are people who "counted" 80% of the nation's votes in 2004, using "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY programming code, with virtually no audit/recount controls.

This election system cannot be fixed. It must be thrown out! And those who purport to repair it without acknowledging its utter and complete CORRUPTION and NON-TRANSPARENCY are pulling your leg.

Software patches and "security measures" and "paper trails" are NOT ENOUGH! Good people may seek these things in order to somewhat MITIGATE this entirely corrupt, non-transparent method of electing Bushites, but, if they do not acknowledge the non-transparency--the WRONGNESS of secret vote tabulation software--they are merely trying to KEEP corporations IN THE PICTURE as the PRIVATE controllers of our elections and their results. They are trying to undermine our election reform movement, which demands 100% PUBLIC VOTE COUNTING--vote counting that everyone can SEE and UNDERSTAND. No more secrecy! No more corporate control of our elections! No more TYRANNY!

Waldman says "we know how to **REDUCE** the risks." (emphasis added). He says that's "the good news." What utter crap! Should we "trust" corporations to "reduce the risks" to our health or to the environment, of their greedy, out-of-control profiteering? Neither should we "trust" corporations to "reduce the risks" of stolen elections created by TRADE SECRET corporate vote counting! "Reduce the risks" of SECRET BUSHITE VOTE COUNTING???? And that's the "GOOD" news???? Can these people HEAR themselves? There will be no "good news" until we...

...THROW DIEBOLD, ES&S AND ALL ELECTION THEFT MACHINES INTO 'BOSTON HARBOR'!

-----------------------------------

The "good news" is that we, the people, still have a window of opportunity to get rid of these machines through pressure at the state/local level, where decisions about voting systems are still made, and where ordinary people still have some influence. The "Help America Vote For Bush Act" did NOT mandate electronic voting; it merely bribed, bullied and corrupted election officials with its billions in funding and lavish lobbying. PAPER BALLOTS, hand-counted at the precinct level (the best, most transparent, verifiable method of voting) is still a legal option. Canada does it it one day. (But speed shouldn't even be consideration--only accuracy and verifiability!). The machines--in addition to everything else--will be a huge financial drain on our election system and on taxpayers forever more, due to on-going maintenance, servicing and upgrade costs (the hidden costs--which also INCREASE the security problems!). We need to DUMP these machines NOW, eat the cost, and RESTORE OUR RIGHT TO VOTE!

[Peace Patriot]

10. Mopinko has the right idea-it's DAMAGE CONTROL. Keep the corporations

in charge of our election results, keep their TRADE SECRET vote tabulation code in place, claim that the "good news" about the Bushites' election system coup is that it can be "fixed" with security patches and (essentially worthless) "paper trails," and undermine the movement for REAL vote counting by issuing fancy reports about this "serious" problem that they have looked into. What humbug!

Any "think tank" that really believed in democracy would have its professors dumping these election theft machines into Boston Harbor themselves--literally--to save the rest of us the non-Thoreauean jail terms that we would be punished with! We can't dump the "tea" into the "harbor"--literally--because we would be called "terrorists" and the bad guys would put us in Guantanamo Bay and throw away the key. The ESTABLISHMENT has to do it! The lawyers, the scientists, the well-healed think tankers, the New York Timesters, the NPRists, the old-fashioned conservative (real) Republicans, and the Democratic leaders who are benefiting from the tax cuts! THEY are responsible for this fascist coup, more than us ordinary citizens are! And if they have the least bit of ethics and morality left in their crooked souls, they will do the job!

But don't hold your breath! Go on down to your local board of elections and country registrar, and DEMAND TRANSPARENT VOTE COUNTING--while you still have the chance! The grass roots movement at the state/local level, for PUBLICLY VISIBLE vote counting, may well be our ONLY CHANCE to save our democracy and our country. And for godssakes think LONG TERM like the bad guys do! This is not going to be repaired in a day. We may have to endure another Diebold Congress before we start making real headway in restoring transparent elections. Monitor the elections; gather evidence; join a voters' rights group; urge absentee (paper ballot) voting in the meantime (lots of good reasons to--it's an ordinary citizen protest against the machines, and, if enough people do it--and many are--the machines will be obsolete; then we can work on getting rid of the central electronic tabulators); and never give up on your right to vote. NEVER! It is EVERYTHING. It IS our democracy!

[In Truth We Trust]

19. Paper ballots and Hand counts...Nothing more, nothing less!

I lvoe you Peace Patriot. You are exactly right on every count. Transparency. Never give up....Ever!

[iverglas]

25. heh heh

PAPER BALLOTS, hand-counted at the precinct level (the best, most transparent, verifiable method of voting) is still a legal option. Canada does it it one day.

Canada does it in about one hour.

Oh, you were including the voting part. ;)

When the doors are tiled at the end of voting hours, the work begins immediately, because everybody's starving and tired and irritable. The job starts with counting unused ballots, sealing them up in separate envelopes, counting other odd ballots (ballots that had to be replaced for voters that ate them, whatever) and sealing them up, and then moves on to counting out the ballots in the box, after dumping them out on a table and showing the empty box around to the party workers. The poll worker picks up each ballot, announces the name voted for, holds the ballot up for the parties' scrutineers to see, and stacks them in separate piles. Scrutineers can challenge any ballot as being marked with an identifiable mark (a way of people collecting the payment for voting the right way, when the mark is seen by the party's scrutineer), not marked, double-marked, etc. Running tallies are kept by another poll worker (and by the scrutineers), then each pile is counted after the ballots have been divvied up. Everybody makes sure their counts agree. The poll worker seals those ballots up in envelopes. The party workers sign all the seals, and the final statement of all the info from the counts, and get a copy of the statement, and bolt for the door to report back to headquarters and get to the party party. The poll worker puts the box of stuff in his/her car and drives it to the constituency Elections Canada office. It's tedious and often takes longer than it seems it should, but more than an hour would be only if something went quite wrong.

An official ballot from the official elections.ca site; our neighbours probably won't get the jokes, but damn we're funny up here. ;)



Anyhow -- I just always want to say *yes* it is possible, and it works, and you deserve it too!

(We're actually moving toward an electronic form of voting, but it involves a paper ballot, a scanner, and retention of the paper ballots for manual counting if the need arises.)

[hootinholler]

9. "The good news is that we know how to reduce the risks"

REDUCE the freaking risks? Hey! WALDO! We can *eliminate* the risks by passing out pieces of paper that everyone marks the choice on, and then we all get together and count them.

Reducing the risk is unacceptable.

-Hoot

[Copperred]

11. DEMAND 100% TRANSPARENCY AND NONPROFIT

THERE IS ONLY ONE SOLUTION TO OUR VOTING CRISIS


100% OPEN SOURCE NON-PROFIT VOTING SYSTEMS THAT ARE VERIFIABLE AND FULLY TRANSPARENT

KEYWORDS: OPEN SOURCE AND NON-PROFIT

IF THE CODE IS NOT OPEN FOR INSPECTION ITS NOT A FREE AND FAIR ELECTION

[DELUSIONAL]

12. Any honest Tech rep/IP professional/Computer Engineer will

tell you that.

In fact kids with computer knowledge will tell you that.

The computer engineers I know are really vocal about the potential (and real) vote fraud that can happen using computers for voting.

Plus the fact that many computers are connected to the world via a modem -- will really set the engineers and other computer professional on a long rant . . . .

It is great to see this is the mainstream media -- thanks for posting this.

[Fiendish Thingy]

13. If you cherish democracy, rate this story 5 stars NOW!

This is a MSM story on election fraud folks! Go to this link and rate the story 5 stars!!!
EVERY DUer who cares about electoral integrity needs to rate this story!!!
I want to see a string of "Done!" posts of DUer's who have rated this story!
If you can DU goofy polls on flag burning, Rush Limbaugh, etc., you can rate this story high and keep it on Yahoo's front page/most recommended.

[PATRICK]

14. Credentials on top of OLD incomplete

news. This is media reporting and institutional blindness in a rut. If a law school can't wrap it's archaic brain around the innate problems of private software and mutability in every step of the invisible process then was it wasting its money just about re-releasing old newspaper reports already slanted to the threat of pimply hackers screwing around with voting cards? This is where we were years ago and they just get to the point of saying "Hey those top three vendors you guys are pushing all have the same flaws!" Sheeesh. And I like how they qualify "fixes" to say "most" of the problems they cover in limited fashion will be eliminated.

We are trying to fight this crap off in New York and I fear local "friends" like this will provide the same fatal, incomplete, misdirected expert report that many lawmakers will be rely on. How will this report measure up against the more complete, realistic and simpler documents provided by activist organizations? They won't even think to compare. It's all about fixing the complex virtual goo, paper trails that in cases of unclose elections will never be checked and- most importantly of all- getting their hands on all that mandated money while putting their elections in the hands of corporations.

[PATRICK]

15. Something occurred to me

it seems of all the groups most charmed by digital snake oil- which is what Bush crony e-voting is- the heavy preponderance is lawyers. For the life of me, except for the near invisibility of fraud litigation in voting, I can't see why that mindset, over and above corporate lawyers thinking, is so totally blind to the implications and predictable abuses, the PLANNED abuses of this electronic shell game. In all the circle of choice in these matters it is the lawyers(including politicians with law backgrounds) who make the largest decision making group, not computer savvy people.

What is it? Is it as bad as doctors being car mechanics or something? It isn't just bad will or even a bias toward trusting corporate entities. The blinkers are really on solid.

If the computer people had a bias in the early years it was involvement and no knowledge of political fraud. Shrug and trust and faith in their technology until they became convinced by the software revelations and easy hacks to just open their eyes. Now they have no say. The news media as usual slept walked through our many alarms settling on a "compromise" derived from corporate pitchmen and complaintsthat were watered down. So to the media it is all about paper trail, hacking and fixing the software- ignoring everything else including the smoking elections themselves. As far as this new study goes it merely get the news media to shake off their yawns and repeat that same old compromised line as if it were "new", simply daring to add(but not connect the dots) the name of the main three vendors being pushed by HAVA.

Have we even got Holt himself into the real danger of the process?

[redqueen]

16. voter-verified paper ballot

nothing less will do

[kath]

17. Voter-verified paper ballot, COUNTED AT THE POLLING PLACE, with

observers from all parties - like they do in Canada. (oh but wait - there's no huge profit for corporations if only paper ballots are used! Can't have that.)

If machines are used (even WITH a VVPB), there must be RANDOM audits (hand-counts) of some precincts to assure that everything is on the up-and-up.

[redqueen]

18. Indeed! Thanks for adding that!

:thumbsup:

Seems strange that we're so busy trying to implement 'Democracy' elsewhere, when our leaders obviously don't give a damn about protecting it here!

[Botany]

20. Paper ballots now!

these flaws were not accidents ..... they were designed into the machines.

[Wilms]

21. K&R n/t

[orleans]

22. (what a relief the whole problem is going to be fixed)

:sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm:

[Demeter]

23. A Single Person Could Swing an Election (Vote Fraud)--WaPo

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/27/AR2006062701451.html?referrer=email


A Single Person Could Swing an Election
Electronic Systems' Weaknesses May Be Countered With Audits, Report Suggests

By Zachary A. Goldfarb
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, June 28, 2006; A07



To determine what it would take to hack a U.S. election, a team of cybersecurity experts turned to a fictional battleground state called Pennasota and a fictional gubernatorial race between Tom Jefferson and Johnny Adams. It's the year 2007, and the state uses electronic voting machines. Jefferson was forecast to win the race by about 80,000 votes, or 2.3 percent of the vote. Adams's conspirators thought, "How easily can we manipulate the election results?"

The experts thought about all the ways to do it. And they concluded in a report issued yesterday that it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines, to change the outcome.

The report concluded that the three major electronic voting systems in use have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities. But it added that most of these vulnerabilities can be overcome by auditing printed voting records to spot irregularities. And while 26 states require paper records of votes, fewer than half of those require regular audits.

Republican Reps. Tom Cole (Okla.) and Thomas M. Davis III (Va.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, joined Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.) in calling for a law that would set strict requirements for electronic voting machines. Howard Schmidt, former chief of security at Microsoft and President Bush's former cybersecurity adviser, also endorsed the Brennan report.

"It's not a question of 'if,' it's a question of 'when,' " Davis said of an attempt to manipulate election results.

WHEN IS NOW--THE REAL QUESTION IS WHEN ARE WE GOING TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT?

[Apollo11]

24. Washington Post article

Interesting article. Especially interesting that the Washington Post actually published it.

Some very weird spin in the article. Like apparently if you care about the accuracy of election results, you must be "left".

And the quotes from the machine marketing guy about how elections are secure. Secure my ass!

I saw this article was also posted on the DU Topic Forum on Election Reform.

Personally, I don't like how Election Reform is all pushed onto one of the Topic Forums.

There's a danger it could be seen as a "ghetto" for weirdos who are obsessed with conspiracy theories.

I think this issue (electoral integrity) should be front and center of DU: LBN, general discussion, politics, everything ...