Ah, the pretense of fairness. Remember the good ol’ days when election fraud was a given and no one tried to hide it? Well, it’s baaaack!
We’ve posted numerous items about the ease with which electronic voting machines can be hacked. What possible reason could someone have for not wanting to ensure a fair election? I wonder what it could be…
Why doesn’t the GOP want Ohio’s voting machines tested?
Ohio Republicans have blocked a proposal to test electronic voting machines prior to the 2008 presidential primary.
By a 4-3 vote, Republicans on Ohio’s State Controlling Board blocked Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner’s proposed $1.8 million unbid contract for voting machine testing. Brunner had already set aside the $1.8 million for the test. Her specific request to the Controlling Board was a waiver for competitive bidding. Her office had hoped to complete all testing by November 30, 2007.
A former judge, Brunner is successor to the infamous J. Kenneth Blackwell, who helped engineer the theft of Ohio’s electoral votes for George W. Bush in 2004. Brunner won election as a reform candidate, vowing to guarantee the public access to the polls—and an accurate vote count—in 2008.
The New York Times has now joined that consensus, calling for an outright federal ban. “Electronic voting has been an abysmal failure,” the Times said. “Computer experts have done study after study showing that electronic voting machines, which are often shoddily made, can easily be hacked. With little effort, vote totals can be changed and elections stolen.”
Apparently, the Ohio GOP is not anxious to have a state study add to such conclusions.
This next part is un-fucking believable.
Both Brunner and Hoke stressed the lack of security measures now used at Ohio’s polling places. The issues of so-called “sleepovers” used in some Ohio counties, like Hocking, were cited. This practice involves often untrained poll workers to take hackable voting machines home with them the weekend before an Election Day.
I’ve said this before, but programming for a voting machine isn’t rocket science. It’s amazingly simple compared to so many other programs. So, if it isn’t secure it isn’t because either
1) the programmer is totally incompetent (a company the size of Diebold can afford to hire top quality people).
2) No checking of the design nor testing of the final product was done.
3) It was deliberately written to not be secure.
4) Assuming 1 and 2 are true, as soon as the problems were verified, they should have thrown the best programmers they could find at it to fix all bugs and add layers of security to the program and hardware. Since that didn’t happen, one can only assume 3 is true.
Don’t forget, it’s pretty hard to impossible to crack an ATM’s system and programming, and that’s orders of magnitude more complex than a voting machine. And isn’t that Diebold’s primary business? If they can make ATMs secure, why can’t they make far simpler voting machines secure. Or are they implying their ATMs aren’t secure?
Don’t forget, it’s pretty hard to impossible to crack an ATM’s system and programming, and that’s orders of magnitude more complex than a voting machine. And isn’t that Diebold’s primary business?
That is a fine point Uncle Dave.
#32 – Uncle Dave,
Excellent points all. And, I think you’ve come to the correct conclusion as well. In Hacking Democracy, they even point out that the data cards that are removed from the machines at the end of the day actually have an executable on them. What the hell is that doing there? The CF card from my camera doesn’t need one.
Nightstar, with punch card ballot, a poll worker can just put a needle through a stack of ballots.
Optical scanning of paper ballots, then hand recount sounds like a good idea. Even just a hand count isn’t bad.
32, 33, 34…
1. DeVry…
2. They are getting to much money for WHAT the product is.
3. they are probably getting just as much form OTHERS, NOT TO, make it work.
4. You could use a 486 DX 50 to do this job. After the voting, you pick up the Box, packup the rest, and take the BOX to the main Vote counters. DUH… NO one has access to the Hardware or insides, UNTIL then.
I THINK, between many of us…that we could digg up a programmer that would work out the WHOLE thing for less then $40k per year, and probably have it finished in 1 summer…If not less.
Can I ask 1 thing… HOW can I get this contract??
I’ll even go out and learn GWBasic…Just to do it.
I don’t think Greg Palast should be taken seriously after his bogus story about vote machines in Florida during the 2004 election. He basically said these districts have lots of Democrats and voted for Bush, which is unlike what happened in Pennsylvania’s Democrat districts, and the difference is because of optical scan ballot machines being used in Florida. I think this was a deliberate lie on Palast’s part, who probably searched through all the nearby states’ voting patterns, then used Pennsylvania as it was the best he could do.
#20, jz,
it was the Florida Supreme Court that tried to steal the election for Gore and was stopped by the U.S. Supreme Court
Not true. You forget that the Federal District Court agreed with the Florida Supreme Court and then the Fourth Court of Appeals also agreed with the Florida courts. It was only the US Supremes that ruled otherwise and even then Scalia played his card by declaring his opinion even before the court had a chance to consider the case. Say it all you like, the Supremes overstepped their authority and fixed the Presidency.
In 2004 the Republicans played the Fear card and Anti-Gay card to the hilt. Kerry was the better man then and still is today. That started wearing off in 2006 and look for all Republicans to be running scared in 2008.