NYT: The Big Gamble on Electronic Voting

[DeepModem Mom]

The Big Gamble on Electronic Voting
By RANDALL STROSS
Published: September 24, 2006


Illustration by The New York Times

....From 2003 to 2005, some $3 billion flew out of the federal purse for equipment purchases. Nothing said “state of the art” like a paperless voting machine that electronically records and tallies votes with the tap of a touch screen. Election Data Services, a political consulting firm that specializes in redistricting, estimates that about 40 percent of registered voters will use an electronic machine in the coming elections.

One brand of machine leads in market share by a sizable margin: the AccuVote, made by Diebold Election Systems. Two weeks ago, however, Diebold suffered one of the worst kinds of public embarrassment for a company that began in 1859 by making safes and vaults.

Edward W. Felten, a professor of computer science at Princeton, and his student collaborators conducted a demonstration with an AccuVote TS and noticed that the key to the machine’s memory card slot appeared to be similar to one that a staff member had at home.

When he brought the key into the office and tried it, the door protecting the AccuVote’s memory card slot swung open obligingly. Upon examination, the key turned out to be a standard industrial part used in simple locks for office furniture, computer cases, jukeboxes — and hotel minibars.

Once the memory card slot was accessible, how difficult would it be to introduce malicious software that could manipulate vote tallies? That is one of the questions that Professor Felten and two of his students, Ariel J. Feldman and J. Alex Haldeman, have been investigating....Even before the researchers had made the serendipitous discovery about the minibar key, they had released a devastating critique of the AccuVote’s security. For computer scientists, they supplied a technical paper; for the general public, they prepared an accompanying video. Their short answer to the question of the practicality of vote theft with the AccuVote: easily accomplished....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/business/yourmoney/24digi.html

[Wilms]

1. K&R n/t

[jarnocan]

2. about time-but so far to go KICK nt

[kster]

3. Keep your eye on the prize, NYT got permission to run this story

conveniently a month before the election, People, the NYT and the Government is still allowing our votes to be counted in secret, and this article will not prevent them from doing it.

We need to stay on message, SECRET VOTE COUNTING, Why is NYT first finding out about this, just one month before an election? We knew about this for 2 years.

Princeton, has to tell the NYT what the story is? Doesn't the NYT have any GODDAMN INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST? They have to rely on Princeton University to GET THE FACTS for them, Where are their Investigative JOURNALIST?

THEIR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST wouldn't have had to go to far to find the story, We have been talking about this for years. What a GODAMN bunch of SCARED COWARDS the NYT is.

[galloglas]

4. THEIR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST wouldn't have had

You Said: THEIR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST wouldn't have had to go to far to find the story, We have been talking about this for years. What a GODAMN bunch of SCARED COWARDS the NYT is.

No, not far at all.

Just step out the air lock of the NYTime Vault, and the story would have fallen on his Goddamned pointy head!

[kster]

5. We also haVe a bunch of sissies at the DU, running cover for these secret

vote counting machines, WHO COULD THEY BE? SCREW THEM TO.

[galloglas]

6. Perhaps not sissies. Jus Goddamned infiltrators (see below)

I saw a friend of mine write a beautiful essay last night about her mother's disenfranchisement in Missouri. In response, she was attacked savagely and called a liar.

I wandered past, by chance, and thought :wtf:?

I read, jumped in, defended, posted, even posted most of the MO SoS web site. Still, after about 300 posts, these bastards were claiming this was not GOP Election Theft tactics and Voter Suppression.

So today I popped back to ERD, saw "WillYour"'s post about HR 4844, posted, and asked for advice, (referring to the thread of last night).


Question was basically this:

1)Are these posters infiltrators from Camp Rove???

or

2)Is DU just filled with closet racists and xenophobes?

or

3)Are these people so fucking stupid they can't understand something repeated to them about a million times? And, if the latter, then they were (IMHO) too fucking stupid to vote anyway.



I went on an errand, came back in 90 minutes, and "WillYour" had the infiltrators asses against the wall and had emailed Skinner.

These troll bastards are as thick in DU as McCarthy thought the Reds were in the State Departmart. So I weighed in, with others, and we kicked their asses!


So, I think you probably have infiltrators rather than pantywaists. Particularly since it's about the particular subject above.

Seems "Will"'s thread, and Proud's (of last night), both covered the same subject: Voter ID. One was state, one was federal, #4844.


Long story short is this.

Somebody (a bald, pudgy m**********r who looks like Porky Pig and works at the White House) is scared to death of something. As for myself, I'm sure it is the fear of Brad's "LAVA" act and then HCPBs FOREVER!:woohoo:

So, if these asshole sissies you speak of start that waffling crap, turn up the heat until and torture the living shite out of them, both logically and verbally.


We found tonight, and last, that these evil fuckers can't stand the light. So strobe them until the the infiltrators roll belly up and die. Then scrape their sorry asses off DU and compost them.

Horseshit has always been good for composting!

[kster]

7. OK, infiltrators, I'll go with that, lets watch them, as they bow

to the SECRET VOTE COUNTING MACHINES, for their masters, bunch of
Damn infiltrators. An eight year old would know better than to defend SECRET VOTE COUNTING MACHINES IN A CONTEST OR ELECTION, but these pieces of shit defend it over and over again.

Not only that, these same infiltrators or pieces of shit, will run stories about, voter suppresion and voter ID's, just to distract us from the real issue, the SECRET VOTE COUNTING MACHINES. We got their number!