Ohio report recommends scrapping electronic voting
By Evan Blass 
posted December 17th 2007 9:32AM
posted December 17th 2007 9:32AM
Like California and Florida before it, habitual swing state Ohio has just issued a report slamming its three providers of electronic voting equipment -- including, of course, renamed Diebold -- and recommending that the 50 counties which use them scrap the machines in favor of a paper-trail-leaving optical scanning method. The report, commissioned by Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, details the ways in which white hat hackers were able to infiltrate the systems, easily picking locks, using portable devices to manipulate vote counts, and even introducing "malignant software" into boards of election servers. Brunner's plan calls for the entire state's voting infrastructure to be overhauled by next year's presidential elections, a move likely to be lauded by touchscreen voting's many critics, but coming "about eight years too late, jerks -- thanks a lot," according to usually-even-tempered former candidate Al Gore.
The solution is not the government doing this. If there's one entity that can be counted for consistently high levels of incompetence, it's the government. And it has problems with malice as much as any corporation.
Do you want whichever party is in charge at the moment producing it's own black-box voting machines for the next election? How long do you think they'll remain in power? I'm betting it'll be a _long_ time -- unless, I suppose, their incompetence outweighs their malice, and the other party pwns all the voting machines.
If you think special-interests dominate the private sector, but the government is composed of upstanding ethical heroes, I'll _try_ to explain it:
Corporate goal: money
Political goal: power
Seeking money sometimes yields power grabs as the most effective path (keep people in office who give you tax breaks, or whatever), but sometimes ROI is better other ways.
Seeking power ALWAYS means power grabs. If they can, they will.
Who do you think wants to hijack your vote worse?
The solution might be open-source. If the source code to the voting machine (and I mean to _everything_ on it, firmware, OS, DB and front-end, as well as the build toolchain, so that anyone can reproduce the actual binary image on the machine, and verify it) was available, then they would have to hide things very well indeed to pull any sneaky stuff. But then again, they'd have to make things secure for that to work, else you air all your security flaws to the world.
You can read all of the more geeky details here: http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/info/EVEREST/00-SecretarysEVERESTExecutiveReport.pdf
It breaks things out into areas of Physical Security, Network and Communications Security, and Filesystem Security. It's a great read for anyone interested in Security as it relates to computer systems.
Electronic voting bugs are all republicans!
:-(
The whole premise of the ohio report is ALL WRONG...
Sure give anyone all the equipment, and all day to do tinkering and testing, one is likely to discover flaws.
BUT!- Can they prove people are walking into the polling places and hacking or gaining access to sway votes? I think they would have a far more tough time proving that.
Basically, the report that lill missy brunner submitted is basically saying that the state of ohio and its voting precincts cannot be trusted in polling it's citizens without being watched over.
I live in ohio and have seen no problems with the new system.
Are you an election judge who is in the thick of it? If not your comments on what you see mean exactly dick.
Even if these things are susceptible to hacking it still won't affect the outcome. All the hacked votes will go to Ron Paul and he will still lose.
All I know is if GWB is re-elected to a third term in 2008, the system is seriously flawed!!
The optical scanners are made by the same company as the touch screen. They each have similar flaws. Get your heads out of your butts and go back to pure paper ballots and hand counts. Hand counts take less time and cost less money.
I dont know if anyone actually picked up on this or not... But I live in Ohio, and the report concludes that the machines can be hacked with as little as a Treo and a magnet... No bullshit... A Treo and a manget!!!!!!!!
Thats funny, last time I voted, the review screen showed different candidates than the ones I voted for... I went back to re-do the votes, and it came up wrong again... I went back again and it finally showed up okay, not one of the people working there could tell me what went wrong... Hackable or not, computer voting machines are a completely horrible idea...
As far as I know there has not been a single incident world wide of anyone hacking an elctronic voting system without getting caught and the vote corrected. Furtheremore there is a papertrail in every other country other than the US from electronic voting machines. It is called a receipt. A tried and tested system used by every retailer in the country. This is an absolutely false asessment by your government. Anyone who believes that a punch card machine is more reliable has to be insane. There is no way for athe voter to check if the vote recorded on the punch card is correct. Also, if there is even the slightest mechanical malfunction the vote is not counted. That means that poor counties, that get the hand me down machines from richer counties, have their votes not counted. If you were wondering how W won again, that is how it works. The antiquated voting methods are being used to falsify your election results. This has to stop.
See my comment below. The best crime is that which goes unnoticed. election fraud is going to continue forever. How many voters, rich or poor, would be able to retrieve their receipts and bring them in for recounting even two days after the election? Unless you get 100 percent retrieval, you will have an invalid recount. And who is going to oversee the counters of those receipts?
I wish I could be more upbeat, but as long as there is big money to be made via politics and political favors, there will be new and better ways to subvert the system. The real answer is to cull the ranks of the dirty by drastically reducing election spending and not allowing retiring or defeated politicians to make off with their huge unspent war chests.
The timeline goes something like this:
Diebold or ESS was the company that printed the paper ballots in Florida in 2000. Someone high up in the company forced the print department to use inferior paper for the ballots for (cat least) Miami-Dade County. This caused those ballots to be mis-registered, thus the hanging chads.
The counties were proceeding with the recounts of the ballots, when GOP backers forced the issue to the courts. The Florida Supreme Court ruled the counts should stop, thus at that moment (with thousands of ballots NOT recounted) giving GWB the win for those counties, thus the electoral win for the county and state. Al Gore appealed to the US Supreme Court which ruled to not to do this or that, but just to send it back to the Florida court. But that effectively ruled in GWB's favor. Gore concedes. Uncounted ballots sit there. Some of them are illegally destroyed before the alloted wait time. Subsequently, many of those officially uncounted ballots were counted by newspaper journalists, which found that had the counting been allowed to continue--chads and all--that Gore would have won the counties still left to be recounted by hand.
The "problem" with paper ballots then led to the effort to nationalize the computer ballot systems, most of which were GOP fund raisers.
THEN came the problems with the electronic systems. And the non-fixes. And the last-minute "updates" by the executives of the company (this happened at least in Georgia).
Diebold's CEO/Chairman in 2004 was also the chair of the Ohio RNC, who promised the vote to Bush. The Sec of State was also on W's reelection committee in Ohio. In Ohio, ,the problem was the misallocation of machines. Rich white areas got more machines than needed, and black areas didn't have enough and didn't stay open to allow those in line to vote. In Cuyahoga counties, the election officials broke the law mishandling votes.
California machines were pushed by the former Sec of State who OK'd San Diego county officials to keep them overnight in their homes, etc. No recounts were done. Nor did he recall the machines or require fixes from the private GOP donating companies. The new Sec of State in California is now the one who is reviewing the machines.
This is all off the top of my head, so I could get details wrong, but you'll get the idea. It started with bogus ballots in a few specific counties in Florida, which caused the chads, which caused the recount, which caused the court cases, which gave W the win.
"Diebold's CEO/Chairman in 2004 was also the chair of the Ohio RNC, who promised the vote to Bush."
He has also been fired. Some serious shit is going down at Diebold. They lost a HUGE contract in Germany for upgrading some banking firm or something in Europe all due to the fallout from Voting Machines.
Again I said it before...I think about 70% of the problems with Diebold come back to the requirements given to them by various states have been poor....to say the least.
Yes, yes and finally my dream came tru... uuugh.
Um, I'm not an American, sorry.
90% of the problems would go away if states would start using electronic MARKING booths. Where you would use a screen to select your choice and it spits out a ballet that is marked with your candidates. That way if you want to check and verify that your candidate was selected it is as simple as checking your ballet. Once you are done you feed the ballet into a OCR machine that uses code that is infinitesimally simpler to audit then these bastard e voting machines. Minnesota has done this for years for people with visual handicap issues. We've had very few issues with it.
Also I use to hack on Diebold for being a bunch of bastards. I found out that part of their problem is they were treating the congressional requests for e voting machines TO THE LETTER. So for people bitching about not having an honest to god paper trail....look at state officials for the reason why its not in place. What it boils down to is that we have retards making policy decisions about technology in the voting hardware. There should be a national mandate that specialized councils should be formed for each state to advise on recommendations, or better yet a requirements be setup nationally on what should be minimum requirements for a device that is taking your vote. IE there NEEDS to be a hard copy paper trail for auditing purposes.
Long live Oregon and our vote-by-mail system!
I wish we could go back to the lever voting machines. I have never heard of any problems with them. They also can run for 50 years.
As the Judge of Elections at our local precinct, I've presided over both old mechanical monsters and new Diebold no-paper-trail electronic machines. Both types of machines are subject to mischief and/or mistakes at various places in the counting chain. The issue is not to eliminate mischief, but to minimize it. So far, the best solution would be to have Jimmy Carter present at every precinct and county vote count.