More attacks on voting

[Aeson]

The best argument for why Romney almost surely isn't doing anything wrong here (other than the obvious, "there's no evidence he's doing anything wrong here") is that the last thing you'd do if you were going to subvert a process like this is invest in the company. It wouldn't help, it would only make it more conspicuous.

[Zevico]

I don't think Romney is doing anything wrong, but the arguments Zev makes are all wrong. Presidents have done things which put them at risk of being impeached before, there have been examples of voter fraud and tampering with votes before, and electronic systems have been compromised by small groups of people (even as small as 1) before.

Well I agree with you on the obvious point.

What I'm saying is that a person who owns an unspecified amount of shares in company A and does not appear to have -any- right to appoint company A's directors has very little control over company A's directors and business decisions, still less the decisions of company B, majority owned by company A. Further, both Company and Company B have other shareholders and other interests. Those other shareholders and directors may not have an interest in criminal conspiracy. Put simply, Romney lacks the legal power to get what he wants done at HIG Capital. He's just one shareholder in a $8.5bil company. Maybe that's a lawyer's argument but this is after all an article about his legal shareholding and the conflict of interest it might pose. It's worth pointing out that unless you're a major investor capable of appointing your own team of directors-and Romney isnt--you're not going to find too many people to break the law for you. Even your own team may not be want to do that. They have their own lives to think of.
(Where company A is HIG Capital and company B is Hart Intervic.)

Anyway I'm of two minds. You might be right.

[kentonio]

Possible, but no evidence of same has been displayed or which has been proffered, at least of which I am aware.

Unspecified vulnerabilities and unspecified issues. Get to the specifics, man.

In the Hacked Democracy documentary they uncovered some extremely interested vulnerabilities in the system, including a highlight where they altered the code on one of the cards that tally the results, so it returned whatever results they chose. Give it a watch if you're genuinely interested in the subject.

Here's a report from a team at Berkeley who did their own study.

Since many of the vulnerabilities in the Diebold system result from deep architectural flaws, fixing individual defects piecemeal without addressing their underlying causes is unlikely to render the system secure. Systems that are architecturally unsound tend to exhibit “weakness-
in-depth” — even as known flaws in them are fixed, new ones tend to be discovered. In this sense, the Diebold software is fragile.

Data on the memory cards for the optical-scan machines is unauthenticated

The connection between the voting machines and the server that contains the vote-counting software is unauthenticated

The memory card checksums do not adequately detect malicious tampering

The audit log does not adequately detect malicious tampering

The memory card “signature” does not adequately detect malicious tampering

Buffer overflows in unchecked string operations allow arbitrary code execution

Integer overflows in the vote counters are unchecked

Votes can be swapped or neutralized by modifying the defined candidate voting coordinates stored on the memory card

Multiple vulnerabilities in the AccuBasic interpreter allow arbitrary code execution

A malicious AccuBasic script can be used to hide attacks against the optical-scan machine and defeat the integrity of zero and summary tapes printed on the optical-scan machine

The touch-screen machine automatically installs bootloader and operating system updates from the memory card without verifying the authenticity of the updates

The touch-screen machine automatically installs application updates from the memory card without verifying the authenticity of the updates

Multiple buffer overflows in .ins file handling allow arbitrary code execution on startup

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/200...-releases-sou/

I'm not going to get into pointing fingers at who might have done what, because there's no evidence to prove it. I will however again point out that having members of the election boards openly affiliated with political parties, and buying voting machines from companies who are prominent donors to the political parties, does not exactly help reinforce the notion of a fair and transparent system.

[Dinner]

Alternatively, when there are very real problems with the electoral system, it's very easy to call it all a conspiracy theory to discredit those asking questions. Considering the software has been proven to be vulnerable to tampering, and the machines are in many cases left with the election officials for several days before the election, I think it's fair to say there is real cause for concern

Just another reason to use only real paper ballots which people have filled out by hand. That way if there is any question there is an actual physical record and it is a lot harder to fake 50,000 physical ballots then to electronically alter totals. The desire to have such an independent paper trail is why California requires all voter to fill out a paper ballot using a pencil but lets the ballots be counted by a machine. That way if there is a dispute a hand recount can be done. Dozens of states don't do that though and it is entirely electronic thus leaving the problem of no physical record should vote tampering occur.

[Dr Strangelove]

How about this- you go into the booth, you enter your vote on a touch screen then you get two paper copies of the vote. You review the paper copies, then one you place in a ballot box, the other you keep for your records.

[MrFun]

In most cases, a shareholder with a low percentage shareholding in a company could no more affect its decision-making process than Joe Blow off the street.

Also, a shareholder does not have any control over the day to day running of the company. All he can do is appoint directors (with the concurrence of the majority of shareholders). Here it seems that, via a separate company, HIG Capital, in which they have a "substantial holding" the Romneys indirectly have a stake in the financial success of a polling machine company. It is not clear what this "substantial holding" in HIG Capital is--2% or 50% or anything in between could be substantial. For starters, I'd like to know what his "substantial holding" in HIG. Obviously the lower the holding the less any financial stake and indirect say in the running of HIG Capital Romney has.

In any case it is said that this poses a 'conflict of interest.' On the one hand he's running for President. On the other, he supposedly has an interest in orchestrating a vast criminal conspiracy to fraudulently win the election, never mind the incredible risks that would involve. That would be recklessness of a kind that would never wash. You can't have conspiracies of this scale: simply put, word leaks out. You know the saying: two can keep a secret if one is dead.

Now apply that to a criminal conspiracy enveloping HIG Capital, its employees, and then also Hart Intervic and its employees, right down to the Hart Intervic engineers who make these machines, as this conspiracy appears to involve asking them to make deliberately faulty machines and risk their own careers for the sake of a paycheck, all so a man whose shareholding is twice removed from their company can win a Presidential election. That's pretty darned unlikely.

And lastly, it's pretty damned unlikely to suppose that anyone would seriously engage in such a conspiracy in a democratic country where Presidents and their staff can get impeached for committing serious crimes.

Okay. This makes sense.

[DaShi]

What? Your post may have been crazy, but Zev's post still doesn't make sense. He's basically saying that people don't commit crimes because they are afraid of getting caught.

[Joseph]

I had a 401 account until June of this year, when I drew it out. I had no ideal where my money was invested. A Frim did it for me. I did loose 2/3 of it in 08 and when I drew it out, it was at -50% of what it was worth in July of 08.

Joseph

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

...

[Ming]

What it all says is that Mitt Romney, with the help of his family and Bain Capital connections, is more than willing to try to take the White House through illegitimate and highly unethical, if not specifically illegal means.

Stalin or Hitler would be proud of such blatant propaganda