The Danger of Touch Screen Voting

[Garth Vader]

Originally posted by MikeH


Might as well make it easy then?

Seriously this is the third or fourth time recently I've been stunned by "Oh well it'll happen anyway" reactions from American posters to things like this.

That's what gets me about this. I realize that most of the population doesn't vote, but the people here are usually more informed and interested in stuff like this and they don't even care about the integrity of their system

[Dinner]

Garth: Honestly the system is pretty good as it is and most people I know don't even feel we should move to a touch screen system. There's just more things that can go wrong.

[MikeH]

So why are so many places changing? How are people protesting it?

[Q Classic]

who is this company? someobody ought to nail them for using such a poor design from the get go. access?

i certainly hope my district hasn't purchased any diebold machines...

[chequita guevara]

Do you really want to know?

Originally posted by Q Cubed
who is this company?

Well guess what. The executives of this company (Diebold) have given quite a bit of financial support to a candidate who thinks that ONLY CHRISTIANS SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO VOTE!

http://markcrispinmiller.blogspot.com/

[Q Classic]

that makes sense. after all, this country was founded by xians, right? silly silly xian fundies.

[Garth Vader]

Originally posted by Oerdin
Garth: Honestly the system is pretty good as it is and most people I know don't even feel we should move to a touch screen system. There's just more things that can go wrong.

Well give what happened in 2000, and that people keep complaining about Chicago is everything good?

But I agree there are more things that can go wrong with the touch system.

[Gatekeeper]

I voted yesterday in a local tax opt-out issue. Later that night, I put together the front page of the paper — you wanna know how many registered voters actually went to the polls? 27 percent. Yep. Only 5500 or so out of 21,700 actually voted.

Y'know what's really aggravating. The people that didn't vote are the first ones to ***** and moan about damn near everything. Well, bub, where the hell were you on Election Day? It takes five minutes to vote around here. FIVE MINUTES.

Gatekeeper

P.S. We don't use touch-screen voting around here. We use fill-in-the-oval papers that are then scanned by a computer.

[chequita guevara]

According to the first article I linked, optical scan systems have the lowest number of errors.

[Q Classic]

reviving this.

does anybody want to mirror the diebold memos to piss them off? particularly after they castrated swarthmore?

http://www.why-war.com/features/2003/10/diebold.html

i love some of the excerpts.

“If voting could really change things, it would be illegal.”

--kerry martin, diebold employee

http://chroot.net/s/lists/support.w3archive/200009/msg00109.html

[MikeH]

Great!

[Q Classic]

i've uploaded it to my uchicago site.

haven't asked for permission, so i don't know how they'll take it if they find out.

http://home.uchicago.edu/~mhwang/lists.tgz

[Jack_www]

Re: The Danger of Touch Screen Voting

Originally posted by chegitz guevara

"[W]e need to make sure the press never finds out this because we don't want them to know we have a problem."

"We just didn't want a document floating around saying the election industry is in trouble, so they decided to put together a lobbying campaign."

Walden O'Dell, the CEO of Diebold, is a major fundraiser for President Bush. In a letter to fellow Republicans, O'Dell said that he was "COMMITTED TO HELPING OHIO DELIVER ITS ELECTORAL VOTES TO THE PRESIDENT NEXT YEAR."

The problem is this: the touch screen voting systems that California and many other states aer planning to use have a MAJOR security flaw. The data isn't secure. Anyone can go in using MS Access and change the voting results. In fact, if you know what you're doing, you can do it over the internet!

The story is here. You'll have to go through an advert to have access to it. Do it. Your democracy depends on this info getting out.

How can you do it over the internet when it is not connected in any way to the internet?? That is just silly that they would do something like that. You and your cosiperacy theories. If you think the machines are do bad and since you want communism, why dont you do something with the voting machines . . .

But I doubt that will ever happen.

[Jack_www]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
According to the first article I linked, optical scan systems have the lowest number of errors.

That is the system that LA county hear in California will be switching too in the March 2004 election. But I think that punch card systems can still be used if voters are educated and the machines are cleaned. I dont know what is so hard to check you punch card ballot before you put it into the box to make sure you voted for the right person. It is so easy to do and does not take that long.

[chequita guevara]

Re: Re: The Danger of Touch Screen Voting

Originally posted by Jack_www


How can you do it over the internet when it is not connected in any way to the internet?? That is just silly that they would do something like that. You and your cosiperacy theories. If you think the machines are do bad and since you want communism, why dont you do something with the voting machines . . .

But I doubt that will ever happen.

Not my conspiracy therories. Even Newsweek has picked up on this story and there's an article running in MSNBC now. The security flaws are massive and real.

BTW, the machines aren't on a secure network, but connected over phone lines, which means, also to the internet.

Black Box Voting Blues

http://www.blackboxvoting.com/

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/

Joe Conason's Journal
Why aren't Republicans more disturbed by the threat of computer cheating?

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Oct. 27, 2003 | Newsweek looks into black-box voting
This fall, at every venue I visit to sign books and talk about politics, at least one worried citizen asks whether I believe rogue computer software can steal the next election for the Republicans. Others nod, murmur, and wonder aloud: What can we do about this threat to democracy? Why should we vote or encourage others to vote when the system can be gamed? How do we convince the mainstream media to cover this crucial story?

Web journalists have been probing the real and potential problems of electronic voting most notably on Black Box Voting.org and Black Box Voting.com, the Web sites Bev Harris runs, and in Salon -- but it is true that major media outlets have devoted little attention to the possibility that future elections could be untraceably rigged. Today, Newsweek tech reporter Steven Levy examines that dire prospect in the magazine's Nov. 3 issue. As he explains:

"After you punch the buttons to choose your candidates, you may get a final screen that reflects your choices -- but there's no way to tell that those choices are the ones that ultimately get reported in the final tally. You simply have to trust that the software inside the machine is doing its job ... The best minds in the computer-security world contend that the voting terminals can't be trusted."

And although Levy refers to "conspiracy theories" buzzing around the Internet, he lends some credence to suspicions focused on the Diebold company, whose CEO Walden O'Dell is a partisan Republican and Bush fundraiser who says he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president next year."

Bolstering such concerns are the findings of top computer-security experts such as Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins and David Dill of Stanford. Rubin, who was given a copy of the Diebold voting computers' source code several months ago, has declared its protections against fraud to be worthless. Dill told Newsweek that the risk of a stolen election is "extremely high."

The sickening irony of this situation is that it developed from congressional efforts to preclude another fiasco like Florida 2000. Now Rep. Rush Holt, D.-N.J., has proposed legislation that would require a separate printed record of every computerized vote so that recounts can be audited with a paper trail. But Rep. Bob Ney, the committee chairman, opposes Holt's Voter Confidence Act. Ney happens to be a Republican from Ohio. But why aren't Republicans -- many of whom fret incessantly about "ballot security" in black and Latino neighborhoods -- more disturbed by the threat of computer cheating?