Posted on 12/20/2005 9:28:57 AM PST by ConservativeMind
A FINNISH security expert has proved to the supervisor of elections in Leon County Florida that it is a doddle to hack Diebold voting machines.
Harri Hursti took part in a fake election in Leon County using what Diebold calls unhackable technology.
At the beginning of the test election the memory card programmed by Harri Hursti was inserted into an Optical Scan Diebold voting machine. Hursti had pre-loaded the memory card with plus and minus votes.
The eight ballots were run through the optical scan machine. Correct results should have been: Yes:2 ; No:6 However, just as Hursti had planned, the results tape read: Yes:7 ; No:1
To be fair to Diebold, the Hursti Hack requires a moderate level of inside access, however it does not require a password and it is the same level of access given thousands of poll workers across the USA.
More here.
That's what we do in Toronto (not sure about the rest of Canada) and it works fine. Paper ballots if a recount is needed and results moments after the polls close.
I would have to disagree. democrats want to go back to paper ballots and chads because it is easier for them to steal elections.
But, is there any verification of identity? Or can someone just walk into a polling place and claim to be someone else? Is absentee voting permitted? G.I.G.O.
>>The ballots are then placed in a special box that tallies the votes electronically when they are inserted.
And how are the boxes controlled? How can you prove that each ballot in the box corresponds one to one with a valid voter? Can you prove chain of ownership?
>>In the 18 years I have lived in Oklahoma I have never heard of any election being contested because of a voting irregularity.
Perhaps there's simply less reason to commit fraud in Oklahoma. In places like California OTOH, I doubt your system would help. No set of rules will assure fairness if people don't follow them; no technology will help if the inputs are corrupted.
We have to show ID in Kentucky.
I don't know about that. The system works fine if you are a Liberal. They always seem to win in Toronto, no matter how corrupt they are. Smells like vote rigging to me, surely people can't be THAT stupid and actually vote for them, could they? /s
This is bad stuff.
I doubt there is any technology that can't be hacked, and no 'inside' ballot stuffing that can be stopped.
> Well, then call it a defeatable ROM card.
No, I will not. Neither will I call a cow a reindeer.
By definition a read-only-memory (ROM) card is just that, "read only." Comprende? It can't be changed. It's what it is. The Diebold machines come with these cards installed
The Swede, by the description provided, used a PROGRAMMABLE-read-only-memory (PROM). Any hardware programmer can change these cards at will.
Get with the program.
The old Mobile Couty voting machines (which Alabama is making us throw out in the name of uniformity) basically had a set of buttons, you pressed your selections, and then it recorded the vote to a cartridge. When the election ended, you just plugged cartridges into a machine and it counted it up almost immediately.
However, Alabama has now signed a contract with Diebold, and they are going to require us to have optical scan ballots, which I think is a mistake, I don't see why were being made to fix what is broken when we have a system that actually, is better than optical scan ballots period.
They are called election boards, usually Democrats.
I think most election scams, double voting, dead voting, etc, come BEFORE anyone enters the polling booth.
Noses. Make the ink brown in color.
That way, the hacking decribed here couldn't happen. ;-)
Toronto is a city where nearly half the population was born outside Canada and the immigrant communities generally credit Liberal immigration policies with their ability to settle here. Like any big city in North America (and we're 4th largest BTW) it is the seat of the media and elitists. This translates into a liberal mindset, but far from exclusively. None of this has anything to do with how votes are counted. Our elections commissions are run by electoral bodies with representation from all parties and takes great pains to avoid any leanings one way or another. As a poll worker (and I've been one) I have absolute authority to eject any party observer from a polling place if they say much more than "Hello" to a prospective voter, and the cops on duty are more than happy to oblige. Please don't take this personally, but the shenanigans I see regularly in US elections, not to mention the idiocy of having one party control a state's election commission utterly astounds me. Our national liberal mental illness aside, we take the integrity of our electoral process very seriously.
No thanks, I don't want some government schlock to know who I vted for. Private paper ballot, just like on survivor, but without the damn camera.
I don't think there are any election scams here though, because there is a very specific process of how the machines operate, basically, while it is theoretically possible to put a rigged cartridge into a machine, people in line would know that you're doing it
The whole optical scan thing means that we'd be bringing paper ballots back into Mobile County, and when paper ballots are involved, it is much easier to cheat, particularly the optical scan concept which is, fill out a mark with a pencil on a ballot and run it through a machine. Just like punchcard it could easily be manipulated, as some cards could be run through, some not, extra cards could be on hand, etc. Personally, I think our current system is safer, even with the lack of a paper trail.
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