Thanks to STOP George for posting the Princeton University vote stealing demonstration at YouTube. Make sure everyone you know watches it. Email them the link. This is heartbreaking.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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This will keep it in the top pages of all of the categories.
My dream would be to see this one of the most viewed videos of all-time.
Also, go to that Fox video (linked at my diary and at YouTube) so that we can make this seem more non-partisan.
Thanks, BooMan!!
AFTER you complete the list of action items above, you can go straight to the Princeton web site and get the download the high quality version of the video to burn to DVD for your friends and acquaintances who are not computer literate or who are not connected to the net or who have dialup connections.
Herr Rove has done it again.
Can you think of a bettter, more innocent-looking way to call off the elections?
I can’t.
AG
the shit needs to hit the internal fan — NOW!
because frankly, I can’t think of a better way to imminentize the eschathon as far as the Cheney Crime Cabal is concerned than calling off the elections.
Think about this for a second. They call off the elction, and what happens? Those of us on the left who are mad as hell and not going to take it any more suddenly see their outlet for change removed. That’s a lot of us. I can also easily see our counterparts on the right going ballistic, some because they are deprived of their chances to reinforce Dear Leader’s rule and vote their pet projects (enforced heterosexual marriage, mandatory gun ownership, whatever) into being, some because they have become just as disaffected as we are and are ready to start over and try again.
Now that’s a lot of pressure. What happens when pressure builds up and has no regulated outlet to let itself out? It makes its own outlet, and it’s almost impossible to predict where that outlet is going to be, but wherever it is, it isn’t going to be pretty, and it isn’t going to be good for the Greedy Old Party.
I could be wrong about this, but even though the American people seem by and large to think it’s OK to have their freedoms taken away from them in the name of a little temporary security, I don’t think they’ll swallow any kind of line about how not being able to vote is a blow against terrorism or necessary to keep America safe or whatever.
My guess is they’ll find some other contingency plan for cheating. RFK Jr. outlined something like 14 different ways the GOP manipulated the elections in 2004 in his Rolling Stone article. This is only one of them.
Fox News has picked up this story and had the Princeton research team on the air demonstrating the hack.
Yes, you heard that right. That Fox News, the house organ of the Republican Party, has picked up this story.
Check out STOP George’s diary on this and then watch the video. (I am only posting a link to the video in deference to those who are still stuck with dial-up, rather than embedding the video on the page.) Then get together with any naysayers, doubters, and right-wing trolls of your acquaintance and watch their heads spin trying to explain this one away.
Hopefully this story will grow legs in the coming weeks, especially since Robert Kennedy Jr. is apparently getting ready to launch a major lawsuit against Diebold et al. We may not be able to get all the voting machines in the country pulled by Election Day, but if enough people know that these machines aren’t trustworthy hopefully they’ll demand paper ballots.
Thanks.
I wish that I could watch it. Ahh, dial up.
I just watched the video and I am on dial-up. It takes a lot of patience to download and a lot of time. I just read a book while it downloaded and then replayed it just fine.
It was no surprise to me since I have always been one of the tin-foil hat girls who thought they did this in 2004. But, it is a good video and makes it’s point clear and easily understandable to all.
The most heartbreakingly pathetic aspect of this is that any one of a hundred thousand modestly competent programmers in the U.S. could do this, IF THEY COULD GET A MACHINE TO TEST IT ON.
The real travesty is that these machines have been perpetrated upon us in total secrecy – secret ‘[in]security testing’ and ‘corporate trade secrets’ software and no independent testing allowed.
And another huge tragic and pathetic matter is that certain people hid their heads in the sand while asking for PROOF OF FRAUD.
I don’t need any fucking ‘proof’ other than that the internet is crawling with computer viruses concocted by “script kiddies” with a cheap or pirated piece of Micro$lut software and Google. It doesn’t take a Princeton whiz kid to do this and do it WITHOUT LEAVING A TRACE.
The machines are so easy to rig, they will be rigged. To require ‘proof’ that they have been rigged is like requiring proof that hyenas will eat rotten meat.
The polls and statistics DO support the assertion that these machines were A PART of a LARGE MULTIFACETED SCHEME to screw the American people out of their choice for representation.
I say click on the video NOW. And pay attention for the ten minutes it takes. Tell all your friends. Download the video to show to your friends. Burn DVDs for the computer illiterate or unconnected.
Anyone STILL in denial who dares to call themself a Democrat or progressive should be squirted heavily with the circular firing squad squirtgun until they are thoroughly soaked.
:O
(and I’m pretty convinced it did) just the possibility that it could happen so easily should send up warning flags, set off klaxons and make alarm bells ring all over the place.
I have often said that I would be OK with electronic voting if there was a way that was secure, verifiable to the public, used peer-reviewed (i.e. open source) software, generated a paper trail, used off-the-shelf hardware, was tested just as thoroughly as any commercial application (including subjecting it to black-hat hackers with cash bounties for bugs found) and just in general was designed properly to maximize convenience to the voter while minimizing the potential for fraud. I don’t think such a system exists yet (and if it does I don’t think it’s deployed anywhere), so until it does exist I’m voting permanent absentee.
I thought I had read one time that someplace like Australia or New Zealand wanted to go to computer voting. Before they did, to insure integrity of the computer program the government put up the program on the Internet to see if anyone could hack it and after a long long time where it appeared to be unhackable the country then went to computerized voting system.
I don’t think such a system exists yet
Even if such a system as you describe did exist, it would have to be kept in a locked vault in a large glass room surrounded by armed guards between elections and travel by armed guard in a glass paneled truck to and from the polling place, at least. Reprogramming the machine is its vulnerability, and no amount of testing of a piece of software or the hardware that it runs on will provide the physical security necessary to prevent reprogramming it.
I believe that e-voting in a secret ballot election is inherently, irretrieveably, unsafe. Those with special knowledge of the machines and software AND special access to the hardware will always be able to hack an election.
And believe me, I am no techno-nay-sayer, in general. I consider myself an expert in secure computing systems, and I can see no way to accomplish acceptable levels of security. The first rule of secure systems is that PHYSICAL ACCESS to the machinery and software ALWAYS allows the defeat of any security measures you may be able to put into place otherwise. The need for a trusted individual human or trusted humans cannot be completely removed.
The acknowledged need for a voter verifiable paper trail for these machines shows that the convenience is not worth the effort and money required to use them. A much cheaper and easier to use voting system with a much better verifiable paper trail has existed for centuries – it’s called paper ballots and ink with open counting sessions, where all interested parties can participate in or view the physical counting process.
Furthermore, even with an e-voter verified paper trail, it is possible to just print out another roll of fake votes from one of the machines and replace the voter verified paper with newly printed hacker verified paper. This type of ballot box stuffing is at least less easy if you have to replace a whole stack of paper ballots than if you merely have to replace a single roll of tightly rolled up machine paper.
I would rather wait a few days for results that I have some minimal level of confidence in than to know a probably fraudulent result that night, or even to know a preliminary fraudulent computer-counted vote that then has to be challenged to a manual recount of the voter verified paper trail.
Sure, old-timey ballot boxes can be ‘stuffed’, but the techniques for doing so are known and do not require special technical knowledge to detect or to defeat.
Vote absentee ballot if you have machines of any kind at your polling place that supposedly ‘count’ your vote.
I don’t understand your comment, but I think that’s because we’re coming at right angles to the problem. I don’t think the system should be kept in a locked cage somewhere under heavy guard. Rather, I think it should be out in the open. All of it. Design it so it can be used with a mouse rather than a touchscreen and you can put any computer you could buy from Dell or Gateway or the lcoal white box vendor to use as a voting machine. In addition, the voting software would be loaded onto the machine from a cold boot from removable media (you could do this even without a hard drive in place) and the cryptographic hashes from each of the programs and data files that make up the system would be sent separately from the CD/DVD in a sealed envelope — with the envelope being sealed with the seal of the Secretary of State, or Registrar of Voters, or whoever handles the voting in that particular jurisdiction.
In addition the MD3 hashes and the software that they were generated from would be available to the public so they could verify that what they used to vote was what was actually loaded onto the machine. More transparency is the key, not more security through obscurity.
Do I think that there is such a thing as an unhackable system? It’s doubtful, just as there isn’t really any such thing as an unbreakable crytpgraphic system. The idea is to make it secure enough (or unhackable enough) that the time and effort you would have to put into hacking it would not be worth the trouble. In the case of swiping an election with such a system, the more effort someone would have to put into to hack the election, the more things that could go wrong in the effort, and the greater the chance of someone being caught hijacking the election.
You will notice I said I am using paper at the moment. Paper has many advantages, but it’s not hackproof. Ballot boxes get stolen, fraudulent ballots get cast, and just because people have been using paper ballots for so many years, they have found ways to hack the system. I am just not quite ready to say “Never under any circumstances am I going to support electronic voting;” this is because I’m a technophile, because “never” is a very long time, and because I’ve done enough thinking about this sort of thing that I can see advantages to an electronic voting system that paper doesn’t have, and while I’m not ready to embrace electronic voting just yet, I’m also not ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
(I suppose it would help to state that the system I have in mind would merely assist the voter by printing out the ballot, filled out for their inspection, thereby circumventing the possibility of hanging chads, improperly filled-out ovals, and the like. The system would be capable of counting the ballots by using a scanning technology similar to the one used in supermarkets; but the key would be that the system would produce a ballot which could, in case of dispute, be counted by hand.)
Hmm, you did make me think, but I’m still not convinced.
First, I do believe that if an e-voting system is used, the code and all that should be public, etc. My comment concerning having the machines locked up between uses still stands on its own. The physical access required to tamper with hardware firmware and software is what must be avoided in that case, too.
Notwithstanding hashing algorithms, etc., I can still write code to circumvent it, though it would be harder to do so. Loopholes exist in every possible scenario, loopholes which could only be detected or circumvented by people like us with special knowledge. When the keys to the kingdom are placed in the hands of ‘experts’, the system is de facto opaque to the voting public. What is there in such a process to prevent a massive fraudulent takeover by the technical elite? With educational opportunities being systematically exterminated, the not too distant future may see complicated knowledge consolidated into the hands of fewer and fewer people. The harder you work to implement more and more sophisticated technical ‘security’ solutions, the worse this problem becomes.
I already acknowledged that plain old paper and ink is a ‘hackable’ system. That doesn’t mean we should adopt a new system that is hackable on a much larger scale and by fewer people using highly technical skills that the average Jane or Joe can’t understand.
When it comes time to challenge an election where fraud may have occurred, Joe and Jane understand “The Democratic sheriff drove off with the ballot box in his trunk and wasn’t seen for two hours – and when he arrived late at the central counting location with the ballot box, it had 525 ballots for the Democrat and 2 for the Republican, when the precinct is known to be heavily Republican”.
Contrast that with the need for complicated hashing algorithms and such – “Folks, the 527 votes should be discarded because the machine that they were cast on failed to achieve the proper result from a complicated hashing algorithm.” Which case would you rather try to prove to a county judge or a county supervisor of elections? Which would you think that the citizens would be more outraged over? To whom would you attribute the faulty operation of that electronic voting machine – the HW mfr, the tech who set it up, the inevitable decay of silicon components, or the piece of dust on the bootable CD? How would you know who or what did it? Where can you place the culpability?
Also, it is at least as easy to abscond with or alter vital paper documentation in the e-voting scenario as it is to do the same with ballot boxes containing paper and ink ballots. And comparable to the case of an insecure ballot box, I could also download all the votes back into a physically insecure e-voting machine in a matter of minutes and no one would ever know the difference. So why bother spending millions and millions of dollars on an ‘upgrade’ that is no more secure than what we have, and probably less?
I do not believe that plumbing deeper and deeper into the depths of technical solutions will help us in the end. If you will look at it from a purely practical POV, I think you will agree with me. 🙂
VOTE ON PAPER!
Maybe neither of us is going to be convinced of the other’s position. I am willing to concede that today, in the short term, in the here and now, we should not be using the electronic voting machines that exist today. There are just too many questions about them. In fact I said in a comment somewhere else here on BT that if the Democrats around the country were smart they would start getting the message out that no Democrat should use a machine, and that they should demand a paper ballot at the poll, and it doesn’t matter how badly the lines back up or how long it takes, they need to stay in that line and get that paper ballot.
But I am not willing to concede that there is no electronic voting system of any type, anywhere, ever, that will be both easy and secure enough to use with confidence. Just as a f’rinstance, take a look at the Open Voting Consortium, which has a solution very much like the one I have in mind. Read over their FAQ, try out the sample ballot and see how it works. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than what’s out there now, and I think most of the objections you raise could be addressed adequately given sufficient impetus to adopt such a system.
OVS is a computer assisted paper ballot, which essentially replaces an inkpen with computer printed ballots, which can then be scanned for a tally. This is really an Optical Scan voting system, as opposed to an e-voting system of the type featured in this diary. If you want to talk about this type of system, I’ll be glad to do so. My specific comments above are in reference to the particular type of voting system in the diary (a DRE).
Optical scanning systems of the OVS type are currently used all over the country and also have been used for massive fraud in recent elections. When a computer counts the votes, and the immediate results are considered official until challenged, the problems will continue, imo. There is too much time to retroactively print out new ballots and hide the fraud between the ‘official’ computer count and the challenge process. Barcodes are reproducible just like any other printout.
A slow and thorough openly visible human hand-count, on election night, with multiple humans making and comparing tallies until agreement is reached, is still my choice.
Of course, one can always say that since we don’t know what the future may hold, we can’t make assumptions about our future positions on a given issue, so I ‘never say never’ also.
Well, I actually thought I was talking about a system much like this for the last two comments, so I probably just wasn’t making myself clear. I do think I said, though, that the system I had in mind just created the ballot for the voter, then assisted in their tabulation. Like you, I don’t want the votes kept on the machine with no paper recourse. I think there should be a verifiable, physical ballot involved. This just sort of speeds up the process of counting those ballots.
If the counts are done at the polling place after the polls close on ballots taken directly from the ballot box, and only then are the results transmitted from the poll to the county registrar’s office, and from there to the Secretary of State’s office, I personally believe the chances for fraud are minimized. You could also count every single ballot by hand, but this is not 1804 where we have small voting precincts and few issues. In this day of multiple races with multiple candidates, plus multiple other ballot issues, it seems that placing the burden for counting the votes on poll workers who already have spent twelve hours in a sometimes stressful job for which they are paid a minimal amount of money is just begging for human error to enter into the equation.
Again, I hasten to state that I would not want to see such a system put in place until it has been thoroughly tested at least as well as a release candidate of an operating system. (Considering the bugs one still finds in Windows, preferably better.) This testing, however, would have to include not only the software and any hardware involved, but the social system in place around the voting system as well. If a group of black-hat hackers figured out a way to hijack an election by “social engineering” (i.e. lying) their way into sufficient access to a machine during an election to rig the election in spite of recommended safeguards, I would want to know about it.
I am sometimes known to talk past and around portions of other people’s comments, so if I have done so here, please forgive me. We are on the same side, we want many of the same things, and we agree that the voting system that was hacked by the Princeton folks is wide open to fraud. And we will both be voting in the next election on paper ballots marked with inkpen that will be hand counted.
I still think hand counting is the bottom line best way to do the job, and I certainly don’t mind if it takes a few shifts of ballot counters to reach final totals. If it takes a week to do it right, a week should be taken, imo, though I doubt that even in the most heavily populated precincts with the most complicated ballots it would take that long. And who ever said that huge precincts were such a great idea, anyhow? Make the precincts into manageable chunks. Also, a law might need to be passed requiring employer’s regular pay for one day for citizens who volunteer for elections duty in order to attract more counters.
No techno-geeks should be allowed in the counting room, though. Pocket calculators should be disallowed, and only chalk on slate (the 1804 kind, not the fancy new dry-erase boards) should be used to tally votes. No ballpoint pens either, just quill and ink, please.
Having said that, and being a somewhat reasonable and agreeable fellow most of the time, and in spite of the fact that you’ve totally dismissed some lines of argument that I consider important, I think I could compromise on my absolutist ‘1804’ position and entertain some of your excellent ideas for improving the current methods. Almost anything would be better than Diebold machines.
OK, you made me laugh, you made me think, and we’re running out of margin space. And I think we can both agree on a few points:
we will both be voting in the next election on paper ballots marked with inkpen that will be hand counted.
Almost anything would be better than Diebold machines.
only chalk on slate (the 1804 kind, not the fancy new dry-erase boards) should be used to tally votes. No ballpoint pens either, just quill and ink, please.
And make sure the votes are tallied on vellum. Nothing but the best for the voters of this country.
VELLUM! YES! Now you’re thinking proper ‘1804’, friend!
I found it gratifying that the Princeton folks took their credibility and looked into these machines. Now we know there are at least two doors to hack these things, and I bet you could insert a virus with the voter card one is given, just by palming it and inserting one that had a virus on it. But I would have to know how the software worked. But we know now that the modem connection and these little thumb drives are definite hooks into the system. AND THERE IS NO REAL TEST THEY CAN DO – witness the demo! Without paper ballots there is no real test at all!
And I TRULY TRULY thank these guys from Princeton. For some reason, election fraud was linked with tin foil hatness. When it should have been linked with “YES OF COURSE IT WAS HIJACKED!!!!”