HEADS UP: Scariest Article 'O the Week

[WilliamPitt]

Watch Out For Voting Day Bugs

By Dick Thornburgh and Richard Celeste
Monday, August 28, 2006; Page A15

For many years election officials have kept the machinery of American democracy running in the face of sometimes overwhelming difficulties. But this November's elections will pose unprecedented challenges to them.

For many jurisdictions, the 2006 elections will see the first large-scale use of electronic voting systems. Many organizations have learned the hard way that deployment and use of new technologies on a large scale virtually guarantee big surprises and unintended consequences: sudden system crashes, corrupted data or painfully slow systems. The usual remedies are to develop, test and evaluate small-scale prototypes before committing to organization-wide upgrades in technology, and to keep both old and new systems running for a while so that failures in the new system do not paralyze operations.

...hahahahahahahahahahahahaha...more:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/27/AR2006082700566.html

[acmavm]

1. Yeah, wasn't that a lovely thought to wake up to on a Monday morning.

I just went and took a shower after I read it around 4:00 a.m.

But then I thought hey, they're at least printing a sort of warning about what we can expect. That's more than the MSM has done in eight years of hijacked elections and crooked political dirty trick.

[liberal N proud]

2. Why NOW? - Why did they wait until 2 months before the election to report

this problem to the American people?

Experts have warned on this for nearly two years, yet the effort was pushed full speed ahead on a national basis. It is a little late to do anything about but bend over at this point. Please pass the KY.

[NMMNG]

54. Here you go

I gave you two--you're going to need the extra.

[acmejack]

3. So they have an excuse if we don't buy the rigged results.

"Oh, wait it must be an unexplainable machine error!"

[bananarepublican]

51. What excuse will they come up with for 'exit poll discrepancies'?

Has Halliburton won a recent no-bid contract to do the exit polling on election day? Without purple fingers, how will we know for sure?

Anyone who... changes the vote, suppresses the vote, or, otherwise interferes with the electoral process - by, let's say, privatizing it - is a total-f*cking-TRAITOR!!!

[jus_the_facts]

4. Just used Sequoia machines in the last property tax vote last month.....

...for 5 years they failed all across the ballots in N.E. La...with the e-machines they ALL passed this time....a FUCKIN' MIRACLE. :eyes: :nopity:

[dogday]

5. Who was it suggested we

throw the machines into the bay as a revolutionary tactic like the Boston tea party? Symbolic reference....

[EFerrari]

7. I believe that was Peace Patriot. n/t

[Lars39]

8. I've mentioned sledge hammers before...

Good Morning,Agent Mike! :hi:

[dogday]

Someone else said

Magnets... Big ones will screw up a computer..... Wasn't me Mike :hi:

[stepnw1f]

30. I Remember... I Say Torches and Pitch Forks

then a good tar and feathering.

[lonestarnot]

9. Boston tea parties all over U.S. What if there is no harbor?

[EFerrari]

23. Nearest body of water? No body of water -- nearest bar?

:P

[lonestarnot]

25. Brilliant suggestions!

My preference is a pool with a bar! :toast: :beer:

[Sydnie]

37. we could drop them in the FAA barrels at the airport ...

all of the potentially harmful liquids if there is no harbor handy. Yep, that should do it!

[EFerrari]

47. LOL! There you go.

:)

[Norrin Radd]

52. Ha! Good one.

Those must be some stinky barrels.

[EFerrari]

6. No kidding. We're being double teamed. NYTs says DREs

are "confusing" for blacks, Hispanics and low income people. Yeah, right.

And, the WaHo says, it just glitches! Not to worry.


Our free press, keeping democracy safe.


Looky here (NYTs article): http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=2479095&mesg_id=2479095

[marions ghost]

10. overpriced junk...taxpayer rip-off

Would you buy a model of car that worked this well???:::
.....

"What problems might crop up on Election Day? Software or hardware problems could render a significant number of voting machines inoperable when they are first turned on. An unexpected sequence of voting inputs on touch screens might cause machines to lock up. Or the cards that voters use to activate voting machines to accept their votes might not work properly. Or voting machines might be inadvertently loaded with the ballot for a neighboring precinct.

Jurisdictions need to come up with contingency plans for such November problems, if they haven't done so already. One possible example: Make preparations to fall back to paper ballots if necessary.

Other problems might include machines that appear to work but then yield an erroneous electronic vote count. Systems could lose votes because they continue to accept them after their memories are full, or because they have incorrectly reset themselves in the middle of the day as voters are attempting to vote."
.......snip (quoted from the OP link above)

And these glitches don't even take into account the vulnerability for software tampering :mad:

[EFerrari]

13. Voters' fall back position: Do not accept results that cannot be verified

No more "trust us" elections.

We know exactly how far we can trust Republicans with our vote, don't we? We don't need to learn that lesson again, right?

[jmowreader]

18. I'm not buying this "memory full" excuse

These machines store text files--lists of the candidates and issues in the election, and the number of votes each received.

Let us assume that, in a properly designed election database, every ballot cast is a separate record. At least that's how I'd set it up. If there are a hundred choices a voter needs to make--in an election this big you're looking at water commissioners and other races where people win office on $250 campaigns--and four choices per race, you MIGHT come out with a 10k record per ballot. And that's if you're running Access or something else that's a memory hog.

Let us also assume that the county elections board is a bunch of cheap bastards and are allocating one polling location per 25,000 registered voters. If all of them vote, you are sitting on a 250MB database. (If you really ran precincts this big you'd be pushing that "everyone in line at closing time gets to vote" statute to its limits because the last person in line would vote on Friday.)

Now we'll be a little more reasonable and say each polling location has to handle 1500 voters. That's doable. You're still allocating 10k per record, and we'll say that this is a good patriotic precinct that gets 70 percent turnout. This precinct would be looking at a 10.5MB database.

There are people here running Linux on 386s they bought at pawn shops, and that are so old they have to buy computers at yard sales to scavenge for parts, that have enough free disk space to handle an eleven-meg file.

There are people here who have cell phones that have enough free flash-memory space to handle that file.

And let's be more succinct: DRE electronic voting systems are multiuser computer systems--essentially, small mainframes--running with the very best technology (and very worst software) the American computer industry can put together in the Year Of Our Lord 2006. ALL of those machines can deal with an eleven-meg text file, and they can do it RAM-resident. None of this phony "going to disk every two voters" crap.

I don't buy the memory-full excuse because memory is dirt cheap and, for text files, unlimited in capacity today.

You shouldn't buy it either.

[Dick Diver]

19. 25000 10K Records

would require a 2.5 GB database, for data (excluding indices and other control information) only.

[Stand and Fight]

24. These machines are in precincts...

There is not a single precinct in the US in which that many people are going to vote.

[jmowreader]

34. Right you are...

I was being overly optimistic to prove a point: there's no damn way you can run out of memory on a computerized voting system based on 21st-century computers, assuming that you bought the system with any memory in the first place.

Now understand: if you based the whole EVS effort around old IBM Series/1 minis you could easily run out of memory. This is 2006. It would cost more money to try to find a Series/1 and clean it up than it would to just go to Office Depot or someplace and buy a new machine--which won't run out of memory when people vote on it.

[boise1]

27. Does a single vote, even with many candidates/issues, come close to 10k?

That's a fairly substantial amount of data.

[jmowreader]

32. It shouldn't hit 1k

10k was a far-outside guess based on three concepts:

it's possible to have a lot of initiatives and things on the ballot, which would make the record large

the programming in these election computers isn't very good; sloppy monster programs tend to produce sloppy huge data files

and

if they encrypt the records they'll get big quick

A ballot that's got 100 possible choices--that includes each candidate, yea/nay on referendums and so on--shouldn't ever come close to 512 bytes in length if the database was written correctly.

[jmowreader]

29. And you have HOW MANY GB on your hard drive?

I have a relatively-ancient 30GB hard drive in my computer. A 2.5GB database would fit on this drive twelve times--and most of the databases I have worked with write every new record straight to disk.

Over at Best Buy they have 300GB drives. Right on the shelf. Two and a half GB is going to just rattle around in the bottom of that drive; it'll barely mark the surface of the unit.

During the voting period you shouldn't be reading out of the database at all, you should be just writing to it. It's a big file, yeah, but any computer on the market today can handle it easily.

[marions ghost]

20. I get what you're saying...

though I am no computer whiz. In other words these are not big databases at each precinct, so the idea that you could run out of memory is false.

So what's behind claiming that voters could find "memory full" problems--just an excuse to trot out when they want to cover some other glitch?

It's scary to me to think that the people operating these precincts would have about as much computer ability as I do...but I think that's often the case, from the stories I've read. Diebold probably likes people running precincts to have limited technical skills--they can control the whole process better that way.

[jmowreader]

31. Yeah, it's a real convenient cover for other problems

Like the fact that their programmers can't code their way out of a wet paper sack.

This is the thing: All this talk about DREs and spaghetti code and all this other shit neatly conceals the fact that we're just dealing with a database management system. That's it and that's all and people have been building SECURE databases for decades. Fuck, man, even Diebold can build an unhackable database--they made their name by building the best banking equipment on the market. It's not EASY to build a solid database, but people do it every day.

I'll tell you something else: anyone who knows how to set up the security shit in any good database could create a solid, unhackable computerized election system in about a month. It's not, as they say, "rocket science" to do this. Come to Charlotte, go to any bank's IT department, grab one of their database specialists and have him code the system. Go to an insurance company. Go to the Pentagon. Get a GS-7 programmer from the National Security Agency or the CIA, someone who cuts code for internal use, and have him build the system. I don't really care if the guy taps phones for a living. And I am not overly worried that the thing is "open source"--in fact, it might be better if it wasn't; opening the source makes it easier for the guy at the Republican Party who deletes the Democratic votes from the server to do his job. What I care about is that the computer has no removable storage--no floppies, no CD-ROM--the computer doesn't have a USB port or a modem, and that the system locks each record as it's entered into the computer so it can't be altered. I also want to know that the database accurately calculates all of the votes entered into it. Those things are more important than opening the source. Open source doesn't mean readable source, and Diebold's election system programmer is the king of spaghetti code.

[marions ghost]

36. hmmmmmm.......

so you would NOT agree with computer expert Chuck Herrin (isn't he located in NC?) that we should not trust voting to these vulnerable e-voting systems? He does not feel security and performance can be achieved right now, and we should go back to paper ballots for the foreseeable future:

http://www.chuckherrin.com/archive.htm

Chuck can explain this a lot better than I can.

[jmowreader]

56. I partially agree with him

Every electronic voting system on the market, as we speak, is compromised for a couple of reasons: they're completely proprietary systems, and they're written by companies with ties to the Republican Party. Take Election Systems and Software, Inc.: it's owned, or at least it was when it developed its proprietary system, by a gentleman named Charles Hagel. You know Hagel today as one of Nebraska's senators. And yes, the election that sent him to Washington was tabulated on machines he made.

Do I believe you can make an electronic voting system that's usable and reliable? By that, do I mean "can you make a multiuser, multisite database-driven computer network that isn't hackable, runs fast enough to not piss the users off, generates hardcopy of every ballot cast, and accurately tabulates the ballots cast on it?" Field trip time: go to any chain retailer in America and look at the point-of-sale and order-entry systems. That setup is far more complex than a voting system because the retail systems talk to the inventory database in the back office, which isn't on the same computer as the POS/order entry system, on a real-time basis. Those systems work well. You CAN NOT tell me that it's possible to make an absolutely reliable computer system to run a store, and that it's simultaneously not possible to make one to run an election. No. I'm not buying that shit.

However, I don't think a private company can make one at all. The current EVS are made by Republicans for Republicans. I would have a contest for America's public universities. There are fifty public university systems; certainly one of them has enough of a computer science department to be able to build a application, using an off-the-shelf DBMS as its core, that will run an election correctly.

[Virginian]

50. Some of the machines also record a timestamp and every

keystroke.

In my precinct we had over 4K names in the book. We had an excellent turn out in 2004 of around 2800 voters. We had bond issues and changes to the state constitution on the ballot along with the candidates. We only had 6 machines. Lines were long. I would say we kept the machines busy 89% of the time the polls were open.

My busiest time was around 10:30 in the morning when I had about 1,000 people waiting to vote.

We did not have any problems with exceeding capacity in my precinct. We could have used more machines to speed up the process.

[deaniac21]

21. Or the sun not rising....

[boise1]

11. "fall back to paper ballots if necessary"?

"Falling back" isn't the correct term for returning to the only fair, bug-free system!

[marions ghost]

15. yeah...you MIGHT consider "falling back'...LOL

--how much are you willing to bet that most precincts in Dem districts will not have followed this lackluster recommendation at all?

[warrens]

12. Unintended?

That's a real giggle.

[kentuck]

14. Petitions should be drawn up all across the nation...

ready to call for re-call and a re-vote if there are any questions about any election. They should be ready for signatures on November 8th...

[EFerrari]

16. We should simply plan to do it . We ALREADY have questions

about elections conducted on these machines.

[im10ashus]

38. Do you think if I show up wearing a Guy Fawkes mask...

...they will make sure my vote is properly cast? B-)

[EFerrari]

46. It's going to be a free for all this year. I don't even know if your

attire would be appreciated. New machines, new voter reg database. The volunteers are being replaced by contractors.

But, tell you what, wear it here at DU and we'll make sure you get full attention. :)

[Ian_rd]

17. Your "haha..." a reference to 818181818 by chance? Nice.

That was in Comal County, TX where I grew up.

For those that don't remember, three comal county Republicans all won their respective elections with a total of 18,181 votes. If you string these totals together and turn the numbers into letters you get "ahahahahahaha ...."

Surely someone was laughing that day.

http://demopedia.democraticunderground.com/index.php/18181

[LSK]

22. Dem Candidates MUST pay attention to EXIT POLLS

and be PREPARED TO FIGHT RESULTS that differ from the exit polls and in surprise results.

[EFerrari]

26. The thing is, I don't think the candidates can fight this fight.

Or at least, they can't do the heavy lifting. Their whole career is then exposed to a world of hurt. Not conceding immediately might be all we can expect from them.

We have to do this. We have to prepare to hit the ground running. It's our election, our vote, after all. :)

[blm]

35. It can't be fought by a candidate AFTER - It needs to be a party effort to

secure the vote BEFORE the first one is cast.

Exposing the vulnerability of the machines to rigging in front of the nationwide audience would be a great start.

[EFerrari]

41. The party isn't investing. This will have to be done by people. n/t

[im10ashus]

39. I will be keeping an eye on CA's 50th in the meantime.

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Hearing_in_California_on_whether_Congress_0828.html

This could be a watershed moment in how elections are validated.

[EFerrari]

42. You and me, both.

This case will set out a marker, won't it? :)

[im10ashus]

43. It looks like it just might.

They are expecting a decision tomorrow.

:scared:

[EFerrari]

45. I know. I hope LandShark has ice water in his veins

or something nice and chilly. Margaritas. You get the picture.


lol

We'll be fine. Watch.

:)

[im10ashus]

48. I am being optimistic.

:-)

[mod mom]

28. Co-authored by the last Dem Governor to serve Ohio. Voting is sure getting

attention in the news now. It's about time!

[EFerrari]

44. Yes, it is! Here's to hard work and results!

:toast:

[Marr]

33. Sure, they'll lie us into a war- but they'd NEVER rig an election!

:sarcasm:

I've actually met people who accept the fact that the Bush Administration lied us into invading Iraq, but they will not even entertain the notion of GOP vote fraud. Very strange.

[im10ashus]

40. K&R!!!

:kick:

[Warren DeMontague]

49. That article smells like an exceedingly weak attempt at a snow job.

Dancing ever-so-effectively around the main issue, here.

"Other problems might include machines that appear to work but then yield an erroneous electronic vote count."

Kaff! Sure, gents. Ignore the five THOUSAND pound elephant in the middle of that fucking room.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

53. Yes, notice no suggestion for workable solutions like paper ballots that

can be recounted, in case 10 times as many votes as registered voters are recorded. Just "watch out for 'glitches'". No mention of some of the easy solutions.

[Warren DeMontague]

55. Or no mention of the fact that the MAIN problem people have with these

deals is the seeming ease with which they can be deliberately rigged to steal an election.

I've noticed that elsewhere with these "official" analyes of EV- paper trails and other security measures are all geared around "accidental errors"- never a mention that someone might (perish the thought) actually intentionally use these things to try to steal votes.

[EFerrari]

59. Same day, NYTs published an article saying DREs are

"confusing" for black, Hispanic and low income people. :eyes:

Why do they even bother? Anyone who is paying attention knows they're full of it.

[marions ghost]

57. No, it's there,

--but only listed as a "possible example" of a contingency plan.

from the article:

"Jurisdictions need to come up with contingency plans for such November problems, if they haven't done so already. One possible example: Make preparations to fall back to paper ballots if necessary."

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

58. "Fall back to paper ballots" sounds like "let's have ballots there in case

the machines short out on election day" rather than "let's ensure we use them in all elections so that they are there to be counted in case of apparent funny business" but I suppose they COULD have meant that.

[marions ghost]

60. I interpret it even

more negatively...like "you might want to have paper ballots there just in case, but don't worry about it...paper ballots means we are going backwards remember"....(subtle message there)

It should say --that all precincts will be well-supplied with enough paper ballots to take care of any and all machine failures that can be imagined. It's pathetic to make it optional.

The state elections boards have sunk a lot of public money into this e-voting boondoggle. They are never going to say we've all been ripped off. Too much loss of face. They'd rather let the ship hit the pier than do anything proactive because that means they made serious mistakes, costing taxpayers even MORE money. And on a less benign note, for all too many of them, evoting is "helpful" (Kenneth Blackwell comes to mind, but there are others). It's anybody's guess how much local corruption is supported by the election system, but it's significant.

We need serious citizen watchdog groups in place for monitoring elections.