Will the Next Election Be Hacked? 904
plasmacutter writes to let us know about the new article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in Rolling Stone, following up on his "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" (slashdotted here). Kennedy recounts the sorry history of electronic voting so far in this country — and some of the incidents will be new even to this clued-in crowd. (Had you heard about the CERT advisory on an undocumented backdoor account in a Diebold vote-tabulating database — crediting Black Box Voting?) Kennedy's reporting is bolstered by the accounts of a Diebold insider who has gone on record with his concerns. From the article: 'Chris Hood remembers the day in August 2002 that he began to question what was really going on in Georgia... "It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state," Hood told me. "We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from [president of Diebold election unit Bob] Urosevich...' According to Hood, Diebold employees altered software in some 5,000 machines in DeKalb and Fulton counties, the state's largest Democratic strongholds. The tally in Georgia that November surprised even the most seasoned political observers. (Hint: Republicans won.)
Re:Oh goodie! (Score:5, Informative)
Three words. (Score:2, Informative)
American exit polls have never been that accurate. Their margins of error have come down somewhat, but statistically speaking they have never been "accurate to a very slim margin".
Re:wow (Score:1, Informative)
It's not an ideological issue, you just like it when our side wins, even if it's not the will of the people.
Re:two words. (Score:2, Informative)
Basically, what are you claiming? Demographic changes from the 2000 to the 2004 elections caused the exit poling to be wrong? That doesn't make any sense at all.
Whoa, there. (Score:2, Informative)
1) Exit polling is not affected by demographics, only by those who vote.
2) Christians are not all anti-gay and Republican.
3) Gays had the right to vote then and have the right to vote now.
Re:Three words. (Score:2, Informative)
Two words: Wake up.
Re:Diebold ATMs? (Score:3, Informative)
With a voting machine though, they had to design a system from the ground-up that was supposed to be computationally secure. Needless to say, they suck at it. Badly. It's almost unfathomable how idiotically flawed these things are. Why they even have any kind of networking capabilities at all is completely beyond me. But when you've got the company's founder saying that he was "committed" to delivering Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in 2004, it's not all that surprising. It's far easier to take advantage of incompetence than to try and overtly cheat. So by designing the machines so horribly, the thieves at the GOP manufacture an opportunity to alter votes while making it plausible that the machines were just badly designed.
Naturally, no one will ask why nothing is being done about it, why the flaws just happen to benefit one party in virtually every case, why the people who contracted these bad designs should be allowed to remain in power or why we're still letting Diebold near our voting booths. No, such concerns are far beyond the American people. The American people are good ole "salt of the earth" types, who are unsophisticated and treasure "small town" values, like inbreeding, detesting intellectuals and willfully remaining ignorant of the world at large. Demanding that Republicans put someone competent in charge of eVoting would be "elitism" and catering to those Volvo-driving, latte-sipping leftists, whose ultimate goal is to destroy American society as we know it.
Seriously, if the eVoting catastrophe is solely the result of massive incompetence at Diebold, I'd start a petition demanding that the programmers working there have their credentials stripped and be black-balled. You just can't get incompetence like that without actively trying.
How hard can it be? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:two words. (Score:5, Informative)
Here is an interesting idea for a paper trail (Score:5, Informative)
The interesting thing about it is that it handles both voter privacy and verifiability without requiring encryption of the ballot. Rather than give a poor explanation because of lack of space (the paper itself is 13 pages long), I encourage interested people to read it.
Re: Will the Next Election Be Hacked? (Score:1, Informative)
As much as i agree with the sentiment you are wrong.
Re: Will the Next Election Be Hacked? (Score:5, Informative)
You need to do a bit more research before making your claim.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36425-20 00Nov16?language=printer [washingtonpost.com]
Re:As soon as you have people willing to cheat.. (Score:5, Informative)
That said, the amount of shady crap surrounding Diebold voting machines is fairly ridiculous. Lets ignore the fact that you have a former CEO, who resigned for allegations of corruption, and who was committed to "delivering" an election to one party. As well as drastically skewed exit polling. All in all, you have a slew of voting machines models that lack the most basic security procedures... such as proper, or any, locks. You also have a fairly complicated voting solution that presents a number of opportunities for a compromise.
Ever work an exit poll? (Score:5, Informative)
Why? I can think of a few reasons:
1. It takes time. It usually takes about 10-15 minutes to fill out a good exit poll form. People with less time on their hands - people with steady jobs, people with kids, people who vote in the morning on the way to work, etc. - are much less likely to accept the polling sheet. On the other hand, people with lots of time on their hands - the retired, the unemployed, often younger voters, etc. - are much more likely to fill out exit poll forms. Given that the unemployed are more likely to vote a certain way (generally for the opposition party, whoever that may be), this can lead to skewed data, not to mention other groups.
2. People fill out polls to make a statement. Again, this tends to favor opposition parties, or parties that are less likely to be represented in a region. People like the idea of voting twice.
3. The organization you poll for could determine who answers your questions. Example - "Hi, I'm performing a poll for University X! Could I take ten minutes of your time?" If the person you are trying to poll doesn't like your university's football team, they may not participate. Or, if a poller represents a news organization the person dislikes, a potential pollee (?) may opt out as well.
4. People honestly forget. This doesn't happen so much in presidential elections, to be sure, but on many exit polls people mark their own votes wrong because they forget what proposition x was or who the candidates for a seat on whatever were.
As someone who has worked exit polls before, let me assure you that they're not always accurate and there are a LOT of things that can throw them off.
In any case, though, the CNN exit poll data from 2004 [cnn.com] should make the case for a Bush win, if you go by exit poll data alone.
Re:Three words. (Score:3, Informative)
Was not determined by exit polls.
Oops, let me clarify... (Score:3, Informative)
Shouldn't have left this point so quickly without going for a deeper explanation. My mistake.
People like to show their support for a candidate they feel very strongly about more than once. Those who vote for Incumbents/members of the dominant party are, generally speaking of course, less passionate about the matter - they're happy with how things are. Those who vote for the opposition are more likely (although certainly not always) to feel strongly about the matter and want their opinion registered as much as possible.
"the idea of voting twice" was a misstatement on my part.
Re: Will the Next Election Be Hacked? (Score:5, Informative)
Or was he? Rather than Ohio and Florida, that election came down to narrow wins in Illinois and Texas. Both states were Democrat-controlled and rife [opinionjournal.com] with [slate.com] allegations [washingtonpost.com] of fraud [wikipedia.org]. Did Mayor Daley of Chicago arrange for the dead to vote? Did Johnson's own political machine throw Texas? Like 2004, the answers depend on who you ask.
Re: Will the Next Election Be Hacked? (Score:3, Informative)
RFK's 2004 Election Article is Complete Crap (Score:5, Informative)
In his words:
Why do you need machines? (Score:5, Informative)
Exit poll numbers as preliminary evidence (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. In the 2004 Presidential election, exit poll numbers in key battleground states varied drastically from the actual results. That's extremely suspicious because people often have no reason to lie to unbiased pollsters about who they voted for. According to several statistical experts (who are far more knowledgeable about stats than the average Slashdot poster, and 7 out of 10 people would agree...) the discrepancies were statistically impossible. It was a big, red, flag that something was amiss in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and several other states. Read this statement from Kennedy's first article:
If you have a rational, scientific mind, that's about as conclusive as it gets. It's certainly enough to pique the interest of people like Robert F. Kennedy, who then ask questions like "Was the last election fixed?" and "Will the next one be?" So Kennedy digs around and does some good old-fashioned investigative reporting, he follows the money trail, and lo and behold it leads to disgraced Republican influence peddler Jack Abramoff and several sleazy advocacy groups!
Re:News for Nerds No Longer (Score:2, Informative)
the military is a drop in the bucket compared to what we spend on socialism
Liar [wikipedia.org]. Social services are, indeed, the largest portion of the budget.
But once you disregard social security (And you have to disregard it, because it is taking in more than it is spending, so if you could magically get rid of it you'd lose money, unless you're planning on requiring people to pay into a non-existant program.), defense is about half a trillion, and social services are about a trillion.
Now, half a trillion is, of course, less than a trillion, so defense is smaller, but it's hardly 'a drop in the bucket', as you put it.
Of course, part of that trillion is because the Republican's heroic little 'Medicare reform' sucks money out of both the government and the people's pockets and deposits into 'insurers'.
You do realize that Clinton averaged a budget that was about 1.8 trillion, right? And Bush's have climbed to 2.8? Military spending has climbed from .3 billion to .5 billion, so there's where .2 went, but that means Bush has increased spending by .8 trillion in ways completely unconnected with the military. Yes, Bush has increased spending by slightly more than a third, and only 20% of that increase was for the military.
But go ahead blaming the evil Democrats for spending all the money. I guess they're the reason the debt went up .4 trillion a year under Bush Sr., .2 trillion a year under Clinton, and .5 trillion a year under Bush Jr.
P.S. Reducing the budget to half a trillion dollars would require reductions in military spending, as military spending is (slightly) above that amount, and obviously the rest of the government needs money also.
Re:two words. (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Will the Next Election Be Hacked? (Score:2, Informative)
This only would have mattered if the national election were to be determined by the popular vote. Chicago outnumbers downstate by a long shot -- there'd have to be a lot of dead voters downstate for Illinois to vote for a Republican president.
Re:two words. (Score:5, Informative)
Honestly, it doesn't matter. He could have replaced that claim with "X-type of people don't respond to polls as often as Y-type" (which is almost always true) and his point remains.
Statistical extrapolation can be a wonderful, scientific tool when a couple basic requirements are met: representative, objective datasets and truly random methods. When pollsters and polls fail, it's typically because the analysis lacked these requirements. In many cases, adequately meeting the requirements is impossible. For instance, how do you objectively define people's views on a controversial matter? In other cases, pollsters just get sloppy. For instance, often during elections, pollsters are asked--typically by the ignorant media--to return results before the voting is finished (translation: non-representative dataset). Pollsters who aren't trained properly might also be inclined to interview some types of people more often than others. (non-random methods). And even if everyone involved does everything perfectly, (which itself is nigh on impossible for an operation as large as a national poll) something that everyone seems to forget is that there is still a chance of random error. Even if the p-value is .01 (it is usually .05), that still means that there's a 1:100 chance that the result is wrong due to random variation alone.
The bottom-line is this: the results from exit polling are never more valid than the ballots in the box. Because of the strict requirements proper polling requires, the problem is more likely to be found with the polls rather than the votes--simply based upon the difference in complexity of the math between the two methods alone. (This is one of the few times in history in which Occam's razor legitimately would apply.) Furthermore, if one is willing to accept the possibility of a rigged election (on the basis of the discrepancy, alone), then he or she must also be willing to accept the possibility of rigged polling, which--strangely--is something that nobody ever does.
-Grym
Assuming assumptions? (Score:5, Informative)
If I were a ruder Slashdot poster, I would have responded with something like "Who the fuck are you? The woman who wrote the white paper on this graduated Cum Laude from the University of Utah with a master's in mathematics and has been analyzing poll data for 10 years..." and so on, but rather than resort to an ad hominem attack, I'll just assume that you replied without taking the time to check the sources that describe in vivid detail how the analysis was performed. Here is a link to the pdf [uscountvotes.org] that describes the process that was used. I know reading an 18 page document is not half as easy as just writing a paragraph where you just make random, uneducated guesses about what it contains, but you might want to give it a shot.
Did you read the paper? (Score:4, Informative)
5% chance of that amount or greater of discrepancy occurring due to the random chance of selecting
voters as they leave the polling location."
No, she clearly says that she assumed voters were selected at random (random chance of selecting. .
"When plotted by official vote count or by exit poll shares, we can see what patterns of exit poll
discrepancy are produced by
1. different partisan exit poll response rates (such as the hypothesized Kerry-to-Bush voter
response rate of 56% to 50% that was proposed by Mitofsky to explain the 2004 presidential
discrepancies),
2. vote miscounts, and
3. random sampling error.
There are other factors which influence exit poll discrepancies, not listed above. However, not enough
data has been released by exit pollsters to know whether or not these other factors would affect an
analyses of WPD (within precinct discrepancy) patterns plotted by official vote count or exit poll shares.
Common-sense tells us that such other factors will not significantly influence this analysis, but we do
not know."
Of course, she does not list those other factors, but I would argue they they are significant (of course I only have a degree in Chemical Engineering, so it's not like I know anything about statistical analysis).
Re:Ever work an exit poll? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/dubo
This isn't exactly a secret. You guys have some serious problems on your hands.
Re:As soon as you have people willing to cheat.. (Score:4, Informative)
I'm astounded that given the accusations and evidence that this may have actually happened, you refuse to believe that it's possible! Point by point:
1) I can't speak to Diebold's willingness to fix an election, but you are vastly overestimating the risk involved. The whole company is not at stake here - more likely, if some vote tampering were discovered, it would "come to light" that a single rogue coder inserted the offending code into a routine security patch. This guy alone would take the fall for the bulk of it, that is, assuming rock-solid evidence (it would probably take a copy of the actual offending source code, since all other evidence of foul play evaporates in to the papertrail-less void) ever came to light. I believe people have already shown how easy it is to write a self-deleting virus that would remove all evidence of itself as soon as it did its work. (it's easy enough to make something get rid of every trace of itself even in a bloated mess like Windows; it's child's play when your company controls the design, security, and handling of the operating system, hardware, and software at every step along the way). If I had to guess, I would say that we're talking well under a 1% chance of discovery if most of the knowledge of details was confined to the top tier of the company. Even supposing this was discovered, after offering up a patsy, the company would probably just lose its voting machine business and continue as usual with its other stuff. Diebold was getting along fine before getting into the voting biz, they'll do fine if they're kicked out of it, too. Depending on the price, it could well be a very profitable (risk vs. rewards-wise) decision to throw an election to the highest bidder.
2) I'll agree, I don't know how easy it would be to get coders inside the company to knowingly agree to this level of risk. More than that, I would worry about the possibility of the involved coders leaking the fact that they did this so as to push responsibility up the chain if it looked like evidence was mounting against them. If I was to run such a scheme, I'd make sure to go outside the company for this bit, possibly by going to whoever wanted to buy the election to find someone that they trusted - anyone scummy enough to buy an election knows where to go for something like this. It would be easy enough for a high level Diebold exec to obtain API details to hand over, and any knowledgeable programmer could figure out what to do with them in a little time for the right price. Also, it's possible that the specs for the vote-shifting code could be phrased in such a way that the programmer didn't even realize what they were doing - I don't know how Diebold's software works, so I can't really comment any more on that. One easy way would be to ask a programmer to do a security audit, and prove any flaws by writing exploits for them. They hand over the info happily, assuming the flaws will be fixed, only to have them abused instead.
3) From the article, it appears that the people who installed most of the Diebold patches had no idea what was on them, so probably wouldn't face much exposure. And they did agree to install them, despite being suspicious about what was on them, so I think that point is proven - if given a malicious patch, they would install it.
4) This has been thoroughly addressed before - in some cases, all it takes is altering a single machine a local election result. Even for a national election, the margins are so small these days that a few thousand votes here and there really can shift
Re:RFK's 2004 Election Article is Complete Crap (Score:2, Informative)
The Lincoln and Grant suspensions of the writ applied specifically to US citizens. The 2006 suspension explicitly does NOT apply to US citizens, but only to aliens:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:s.03
Section 7:
(a) In General- Section 2241 of title 28, United States Code, is amended by striking both the subsection (e) added by section 1005(e)(1) of Public Law 109-148 (119 Stat. 2742) and the subsection (e) added by added by section 1405(e)(1) of Public Law 109-163 (119 Stat. 3477) and inserting the following new subsection (e):
`(e)(1) No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.
`(2) Except as provided in paragraphs (2) and (3) of section 1005(e) of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (10 U.S.C. 801 note), no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any other action against the United States or its agents relating to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of confinement of an alien who is or was detained by the United States and has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.'.
(b) Effective Date- The amendment made by subsection (a) shall take effect on the date of the enactment of this Act, and shall apply to all cases, without exception, pending on or after the date of the enactment of this Act which relate to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of detention of an alien detained by the United States since September 11, 2001.
20 Amazing Facts About Voting In The USA (Score:4, Informative)
by Angry Girl of Nightweed.com
Did you know....
1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S. http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/ 042804landes.html [onlinejournal.com] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diebold [wikipedia.org]
2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry. http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0916-04.htm [commondreams.org] http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/ 042804landes.html [onlinejournal.com]
3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers. http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/private_comp any.html [americanfreepress.net] http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/ 042804landes.html [onlinejournal.com]
4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/m ain632436.shtml [cbsnews.com] http://www.wishtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1647886 [wishtv.com]
5. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines. http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004
6. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-connected with the Bush family, was recently caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee. http://www.blackboxvoting.com/modules.php?name=New s&file=article&sid=26 [blackboxvoting.com] http://www.hillnews.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx [hillnews.com] http://www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/000896.ph p [onlisareinsradar.com]
7. Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush's vice-presidential candidates. http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_28/b3689130.ht m [businessweek.com] http://theindependent.com/stories/052700/new_hagel 27.html [theindependent.com]
8. ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the U.S. and counts almost 60% of all U.S. votes. http://www.essvote.com/HTML/about/about.html [essvote.com] http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/ 042804landes.html [onlinejournal.com]
9. Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters. http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm [commondreams.org] http://www.itworld.com/Tech/2987/041020evotestates
Re:Why hack the election? (Score:3, Informative)
The vote of blacks were suppressed in many ways, for many decades. One can say that black votes are still being suppressed, albeit in more subtle ways.
If one reads the book "Why Americans Don't Vote" the academic researchers/authors of that book note that the entire system of voter registration was enacted not to stop multiple votes and voter fraud, but instead to suppress the vote of Pennsylvania farmers. The farmers were a potent and somewhat radical voting block in the 1800s, so voter registration was enacted. This required the farmers to make yet another distant trip to town, which worked to lower the numbers of farmers who voted.
This tactic is still used today to suppress the vote, though the "motor voter" law allowing the public to register to vote when registering a vehicle has softened the impact.
Re:Why do you need machines? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Moral equivalency (Score:2, Informative)
> it wasn't a lie about a war. Although, it certainly was an overly paranoid reading of the facts
That could be a (hugely generous) way of interpreting the Bush administration's leadup to the war, if it were not for the Downing Street memo.
We know the neo-conservatives wished to finish the job in Iraq for reasons unrelated to terrorism long before the September 11th attacks. We know that the CIA had major doubts about any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, whereas the the intelligence unit inside the Department of Defense tended to be much more enthusiastic about playing up whatever intel supported a WMD conclusion, and downplaying intel to the contrary. Oddly enough, the Bush administration gave more credance to the DoD reports than those coming from the CIA, despite the fact that it is the job of the professional spooks at the CIA, not the military, to assess this kind of intelligence. Without the Downing Street memo, a generous interpretation would be that the President was incompetant in choosing to listen to only one set of advisors, and the less qualified ones at that. A more realistic interpretation is that the President already made up his mind to invade before receiving the reports, and he picked and chose those reports which resonated with his plans for action.
The Downing Street memo makes it clear the second interpretation is the more likely of the two. Consider the so-called "smoking gun" paragraph:
"C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."
Now, no doubt the memo was leaked for political purposes by people opposed to Bush. The wording of the memo also makes it clear that the author does not think much of Bush's preparations for war. Nevertheless, short of claiming that the memo is a complete fabrication (which even the Bush administration hasn't stooped to), it is a damning piece of evidence, and makes it very hard to cling to the generously glib interpretation of events.