Posted on 11/29/2006 11:14:22 AM PST by lifelong_republican
"...These machines must go. There is no way to know if one's vote is accurately accounted for..."
(Excerpt) Read more at sun-sentinel.com ...
Misdirection perhaps? They did just win several close elections with these machines.
What do you do for a living? Are you a salesman for printed optically scanned ballots or something?
Even if an ATM manufacturer wanted to make a dishonest ATM, there wouldn't be a whole lot it could do. If the ATM was programmed to respond to a $20 withdrawal request by withdrawing $100 and paying out $20 (dispensing the other $80 when the programmer punched in a secret code) it wouldn't take very long for people to realize what was up. When someone shows up at the bank with a receipt that says they withdrew $20 and a bank statement that says they withdrew $100, the fraud will be discovered.
Many existing voting machine designs have zero protection against insider fraud. To be sure, it's impossible to provide much protection if all insiders are dishonest, but a well-designed system can be constructed so that even one honest person will provide a substantial check against fraud. Unfortunately, none of the major vendors seem interested in doing so.
Secret ballot is the only way to prevent vote buying and vote coersion. A person may have Kerry bumper stickers on his car, and a Kerry sign on his laws, but that doesn't mean that he can't decide at the moment of truth that he just can't support the guy. The decision is his alone--even if all his relatives and coworkers are Democrats, they cannot pressure him.
To really check a machine, it must be possible to ensure that all code and parameters used by the machine are the "official" versions, and that they are not altered during voting. To have any meaningful security, it must be possible to write-protect the media, read it in its entirety without running any code therefrom, conduct the election with the media still write-protected, and then read it out again (still write-protected).
Not difficult to design a machine that way, but does anyone?
How do you know the under vote rate wasn't undercounted in the past and a better count is available when its electronic?
I would assume it should be relatively easy to run a diagnostic program by a third party developer both before and during an election on a spot basis to insure against tampering that could certify the machines working as expected.
Then we are forever doomed to vote fraud.
Unless one provides methods to ensure that the people casting ballots are who they say they are, and provides sufficient punishment to discourage ineligible people from voting.
How do you ensure that the machine is actually running the software it's supposed to be? Even years ago, many boot sector viruses would patch the "sector read" routine so that a request to read the boot sector would return a copy of the legitimate one, and such games continue with things like the XCP rootkit distributed by Sony. If hardware isn't set up to prevent stealthing, it may be very difficult to ensure that machines aren't running fake software.
In auditing we call it "black box" test. You run data through and see that the results are what is expected.
In this case a program could be created that mimic's voting and runs data through that should yield a predetermined result. This and other diagnostics could be designed, tested and reported on to insure the machine is operating properly.
Black box testing for software cannot detect backdoors which the author has deliberately concealed from such testing. Anyone who thinks that such testing protects against insider attacks is at best naive.
How would someone gain access to an isolated machine in order to access the backdoor?
Diebold's machines have cheap locks for which keys are readily available (I don't know which particular cheap lock they use, but for many types of cheap locks there are only a few dozen different keys; some are packaged such that a case of locks will contain one of each different key). In many election offices, it would not be difficult for a member of the party in power to get access to the machines prior to the election.
Unless all hard drives and flash are removed from the machines and read out without running code from them prior to the machines' being used for elections, it will be difficult to detect well-designed stealth cheat-ware. I don't think the machines are set up to facilitate such verification, and doubt anybody does it.
If done well, such a hack would be undetectable after the fact except by doing magnetic-domain analysis on the system's hard drive or by examining the hard drive of a compromised system before the cheatware had an opportunity to remove itself.
If you don't realize that the electronics are unreliable, vulnerable, needlessly complex, exhorbitantly expensive, inconvenient for the voters, unauditable, and, as the General Accounting Office of the United Stats Congress has noted in an official report, unsuitable for use in elections, you need to consider the subject more carefully. If you imagine that previous election manipulations would justify additional ones, or even those which are significantly worse, you aren't doing your duty as a citizen. Your haste in launching invective toward others whom you don't really know seems paranoid, especially when you substitute it for understanding of the issue being discussed. Should you really fear and despise so many Americans just because you don't agree with them even on totally unrelated issues? Would you insist that the earth must be flat in the event that anyone you could imagine would be from a faction separate from your own says it is spherical?
Just flick a few bits.. And puff and know ones the wiser.
An old uncle Joe Stalin dream come true.
-The more complicated the plumbing, The easier it is to stop up the pipes.-
Scotty - 2184
As is paper.
vulnerable
as is paper
needlessly complex
To a computing-illiterate moron perhaps.
exhorbitantly expensive
They're cheaper.
inconvenient for the voters
Inconevenient only to imbeciles - convenient for people who know what a PC is.
unauditable
LOL! They're more auditable than paper.
as the General Accounting Office of the United Stats Congress has noted in an official report, unsuitable for use in elections
You're going to have to cite this preposterous claim.
Would you insist that the earth must be flat in the event that anyone you could imagine would be from a faction separate from your own says it is spherical?
You've lost all coherence - which was a shaky area for you from the get-go.
LOL
Can you keep a Straight face spreading BS like that?
You work for one of these Co.?
(I had reported that the undervote rate went from 700-800 to 4,000-5,000 with the electronics.}
You said:
"How do you know the under vote rate wasn't undercounted in the past and a better count is available when its electronic?"
The way this is known is that, historically, the undervote rate ranges from 1-3%. The paperless electronic system to which I refer caused undervote rates to soar to as high as 70-80%.
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