Kerry Won (1 Viewer)

[steve albino]

Florida Tests Prove Electronic Voting Can Be Manipulated
January 23, 2006
Zachary Goldfarb / The Washington Post
Last May, a Finnish hacker using a device bought for about $200, was able to easily alter the final vote in a Florida test by changing the program stored on the memory card. In four subsequent tests, Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho has proven that the very electronic voting machines mandated by the Bush administration have made it possible to hack the vote.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...6012101051.html?referrer=email&referrer=email
"It dosen't matter who votes. It matters who counts the votes."
— Joseph Stalin
As Elections Near, Officials Challenge Balloting Security In Controlled Test, Results Are Manipulated in Florida System
Zachary Goldfarb / The Washington Post
FLORIDA (January 22, 2006) — As the Leon County supervisor of elections, Ion Sancho's job is to make sure voting is free of fraud. But the most brazen effort lately to manipulate election results in this Florida locality was carried out by Sancho himself.
Four times over the past year Sancho told computer specialists to break in to his voting system. And on all four occasions they did, changing results with what the specialists described as relatively unsophisticated hacking techniques. To Sancho, the results showed the vulnerability of voting equipment manufactured by Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems, which is used by Leon County and many other jurisdictions around the country.
Sancho's most recent demonstration was last month. Harri Hursti, a computer security expert from Finland, manipulated the "memory card" that records the votes of ballots run through an optical scanning machine.
Then, in a warehouse a few blocks from his office in downtown Tallahassee, Sancho and seven other people held a referendum. The question on the ballot:
"Can the votes of this Diebold system be hacked using the memory card?"
Two people marked yes on their ballots, and six no. The optical scan machine read the ballots, and the data were transmitted to a final tabulator. The result? Seven yes, one no.
"Was it possible for a disgruntled employee to do this and not have the elections administrator find out?" Sancho asked. "The answer was yes."
Diebold and some officials have criticized Sancho's experiments and said his conclusions about the vulnerability of electronic voting systems are unfounded.
What Sancho did "is analogous to if I gave you the keys to my house and told you when I was gone," said David Bear, a Diebold spokesman. As Bear sees it, Sancho's experiment involved giving hackers "complete unfettered access" to the equipment, something a responsible elections administrator would never allow.
Questions about the security of electronic voting machines have been circulating widely in recent years. But many of the concerns have been dismissed as the fantasies of Internet conspiracy theorists or sore-loser partisans who could not accept that their candidates simply got fewer votes. Critics have not demonstrated that any real elections have had returns altered by the manipulation of electronic voting systems.
But the questions raised by Sancho, who has held his post since 1989, show how the concerns are being taken more seriously among elections professionals.
http://www.envirosagainstwar.org/know/read.php?itemid=3656

 

[steve albino]

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Published on Thursday, March 30, 2006 by the Columbus Free Press (Ohio) [/FONT]​

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Is the Mainstream Media Finally Getting Half the Rigged Voting Machine Story? [/FONT]​

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman[/FONT][/FONT]​

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] [/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The fact that electronic voting machines don't work may finally be sinking into a segment of the mainstream media. The fact that e-voting machines can, have been, and will be used to steal elections, continues to go unreported. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]At least the corporate media has moved from framing the allegations of e-voting fraud as “conspiracy theory” into reporting epic errors in election results. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Both USA Today and the New York Times have run recent articles on the mechanical problems surrounding electronic voting that mirror much of what happened during the theft the presidential election in Ohio 2004. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]On March 28, USA Today's front page reported, that "Primary voting-machine troubles raise concerns for general election." The story focused on primaries in Illinois and Texas, where all-too-familiar problems include more votes being counted than there were registered voters, and thousands of votes missing from a recount. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Even Texas voters couldn’t ignore the fact that an initial ballot tally in Ft. Worth showed 150,000 votes “. . . even though there were only one-third that many voters,” according to USA Today. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The conservative Republican candidate for the Texas Supreme Court believes he was the legitimate winner in a race he "officially" seems to have lost. Various reports indicate there were vote counts in the election that were, like many in Ohio 2004, simply not credible. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]On March 23 the Times editorialized in support of a unanimous resolution by the Maryland legislature to dump Diebold touchscreens and use opti-scan paper-based systems instead. The move "is just the latest indication that common sense is starting to prevail in the battle over electronic voting," said the Times. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The USA Today article featured a graph showing the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) to install electronic voting machines in key states such as California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ohio. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Yet, the e-voting machines are just part of the digital problem facing U.S. voters. Diebold’s election software packages include what many activists describe as “one stop shopping” for election fraud. Most of the e-voting machine companies also sell software that creates digital electronic voter registration databases. In the Cleveland area, an estimated 7000 voters were knocked off the voter registration rolls when Cuyahoga County Board of Elections adopted the Diebold registration system. The e-voting machine companies can control everything electronically, from voter registration to election day vote recording to final vote tabulation and recounting. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Neither the Times nor USA Today nor any other major national publication has been willing to take the problem to its logical conclusion. None have seriously investigated how these very electronic machines were used to help steal the presidential election in Ohio 2004, or to defeat two electoral reform issues in Ohio 2005, or to swing key US Senate races in places such as Georgia, Minnesota and Colorado in 2002. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]But the fact that these publications are finally acknowledging the obvious, overwhelming mechanical "glitches" with these machines is at least a start. Now that the Government Accountability Office has confirmed electronic voting equipment is easily hackable for mass vote stealing, and now that the Times and USA Today have reported that there are serious mechanical problems, maybe somebody at one of these media outlets will finally come to the obvious conclusion: electronic voting machines are merely high-tech devices designed to steal elections. And that is precisely why George W. Bush is in the White House today.[/FONT]


[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views06/0330-22.htm
[/FONT]

 

[steve albino]

Taken from Roling Stone magazine:

Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House. BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.


Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,''(1) and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.''(2)
But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)



The complete article, with Web-only citations, follows. Talk and read about it in our National Affairs blog, or see exclusive documents, sources, charts and commentary.


http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen

 

[steve albino]

Mexico’s Lesson In The Dangers Of The Paper Ballot
By Greg Palast
for The Guardian, Comment is Free
Monday August 7, 2006
In the six years since I first began investigating the burglary ring we call “elections” in America, a new Voting Reform industry has grown up. That’s good. What’s worrisome is that most of the effort is focused on preventing the installation of computer voting machines. Paper ballots, we’re told, will save our democracy.
Well, forget it. Over the weekend, Mexico’s ruling party showed how you can rustle an election even with the entire population using the world’s easiest paper ballot.
On Saturday, Mexico’s electoral tribunal, known as the “TRIFE” (say “tree-fay”) ordered a re-count of the ballots from the suspect July 2 vote for president. Well, not quite a recount as in “count all the ballots” — but a review of just 9% of the nation’s 130,000 precincts.
The “9% solution” was the TRIFE’s ham-fisted attempt to chill out the several hundred thousand protesting supporters of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador who had gathered in the capital and blocked its main Avenue. Lopez Obrador, the Leftist challenger known by his initials AMLO, supposedly lost the presidential vote by just one half of one percent of the vote.
I say “supposedly” lost because, while George Bush congratulated his buddy Felipe Calderon on his victory, the evidence I saw on the ground in Mexico City fairly shrieks that the real winner was challenger AMLO.
President Bush should consider some inconvenient truths about the Mexican vote count:
First: The exit poll of 80,000 voters by the Instituto de Mercadotecnia y Opinion showed that AMLO bested Calderon by 35.1% to 34.0%.
Second: The precinct-by-precinct returns were quite otherworldly. I used to teach statistics and what I saw in Mexico would have stumped my brightest students.
Here’s the conundrum: The nation’s tens of thousands of polling stations report to the capital in random order after the polls close. Therefore, statistically, you’d expect the results to remain roughly unchanged as vote totals come in. As expected, AMLO was ahead of the right-wing candidate Calderon all night by an unchanging margin — until after midnight. Suddenly, precincts began reporting wins for Calderon of five to one, the ten to one, then as polling nearly ended, of one-hundred to one.

How odd. I checked my concerns with Professor Victor Romero of Mexico’s National University who concluded that the reported results must have been a “miracle.” As he put it, a “religious event,” but a statistical impossibility. There were two explanations, said the professor: either the Lord was fixing the outcome or operatives of the ruling party were cranking in a massive number of ballots when they realized their man was about to lose.
How could they do it? “Easy pea-sy,” as my kids would say. In Mexico, the choices for president are on their own ballot with no other offices listed. Those who don’t want to vote for President just discard the ballot. There is no real ballot security. In areas without reliable opposition observers (about a third of the nation), anyone can stuff ballots into the loosely-guarded cardboard boxes. (AMLO showed a tape of one of these ballot-stuffing operations caught in the act.)
It’s also absurdly easy to remove paper ballots, disqualify them or simply mark them “nulo” (”null,” unreadable).
The TRIFE, the official electoral centurions, rejected AMLO’s request to review those precincts that reported the miracle numbers. Nor would the tribunal open and count the nearly one million “null” votes — allegedly “uncountable” votes which totaled four times Calderon’s putative plurality.
Mexico’s paper ballot, I would note, is the model of clarity — with large images of each party which need only be crossed through. The ruling party would have us believe that a million voters waited in line, took a ballot, made no mark, then deliberately folded the ballot and placed it in the ballot box, pretending they’d voted. Maybe, as in Florida in 2000, those “unreadable” ballots were quite readable. Indeed, the few boxes re-counted showed the “null” ballots marked for AMLO. The Tribunal chose to check no further.



http://www.gregpalast.com/we-dont-need-no-stinkin-recount#more-1473

 

[steve albino]

Dutch Blackbox Voting Pwned



Posted by kdawson on Thursday October 05, @09:55AM
from the playing-chess-at-the-polls dept.


An anonymous reader writes, "In a just-published report (PDF, in English, cached here), the Dutch we-don't-trust-voting-computers foundation (Dutch and English) details how it converted a Nedap voting machine, of a type used in Holland and France, to steal a pre-determined percentage of votes and reassign them to another party. The paper describes in great detail how 'anyone, when given brief access to the devices at any time before the election, can gain complete and virtually undetectable control over the election results.' As a funny bonus, responding to an earlier challenge by the manufacturer, the researchers reflashed a voting machine to play chess. The news was on national television (Dutch) last night and is growing into a major scandal. 90% of the votes in the Netherlands are cast on these machines and national elections will be held in a month." Please create mirrors for the 8.1-MB PDF and post their URLs. You might also try John Graham-Cumming's l8r.org service to tell you when the slashdot effect subsides from any of the mirrors.

http://it.slashdot.org/it/06/10/05/1310235.shtml

 

[steve albino]

US warned of ballot box chaos as elections near



[FONT=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]· Report says 10 states not ready for electronic vote
· Scientist hacks into new polling machine on TV[/FONT]

[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif] Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Friday October 27, 2006
The Guardian

[/FONT] Six years after the emergence of the now infamous "hanging chad" in the 2000 presidential elections, monitoring groups warn that technological glitches and hackers could throw next month's mid-term elections into chaos.With polling day less than two weeks away, a report this week by electionline.org, a non-partisan organisation, anticipates problems at the ballot box in as many as 10 states.
"Machine failures, database delays and foul-ups, inconsistent procedures, new rules and new equipment have some predicting chaos at the polls at worst, and widespread polling place snafus at best," the report says.
The mid-term elections will be the first national test of new voting procedures introduced in the aftermath of the 2000 election debacle in Florida, when it took a month of court challenges and recounts of punch-card ballots before George W Bush was declared to have won the state, and became president.
In the wake of that fiasco, Congress allotted $3.8bn (£2bn) to the states to modernise voting lists and replace the old-style punch-card systems with electronic voting machines by early 2006.
Election officials in more than 30 states opted for touch-screen voting machines that use a series of prompts to guide voters through the ballot. But the new machines have merely reawakened the old anxieties about miscounted votes and deliberate fraud.
In many states, voters will be casting their votes electronically for the first time. The officials at the polling stations may be equally inexperienced, and because such workers are typically elderly and retired, critics say they may be particularly poorly equipped to deal with any technological problems.
Those concerns crystallised last month, when a Princeton professor of computer science, Edward Felton, and two colleagues managed to hack into a new electronic voting machine without detection and install a virus that could alter vote counts - and go on to infect a wider network of machines.
The exercise, which Mr Felton repeated on television, took about a minute to complete. The manufacturers of the voting machine said Mr Felton had ignored newer software and security measures that safeguard against hacking.
However, vote monitoring organisations and computer scientists have grown increasingly wary about the new voting machines, especially those that do not leave a paper trail in case it is needed for future verification.
The rollout of the new systems has been far from smooth. In Maryland, earlier this autumn, voting was delayed for hours across an entire county because election officials forgot to bring in the electronic cards that activate the touch-screen machines.



more...



http://www.guardian.co.uk/midterms2006/story/0,,1932655,00.html

 

[steve albino]

Diebold demands that HBO cancel documentary on voting machines
Film saying they can be manipulated 'inaccurate'


By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
BLOOMBERG NEWS


Diebold Inc. insisted that cable network HBO cancel a documentary that questions the integrity of its voting machines, calling the program inaccurate and unfair.
The program, "Hacking Democracy," is scheduled to debut Thursday, , five days before the 2006 U.S. midterm elections. The film claims that Diebold voting machines aren't tamper-proof and can be manipulated to change voting results.
"Hacking Democracy" is "replete with material examples of inaccurate reporting," Diebold Election System President David Byrd said in a letter to HBO President and Chief Executive Chris Albrecht posted on Diebold's Web site. Short of pulling the film, Monday's letter asks for disclaimers to be aired and for HBO to post Diebold's response on its Web site.
According to Byrd's letter, inaccuracies in the film include the assertion that Diebold, whose election systems unit is based in Allen, Texas, tabulated more than 40 percent of the votes cast in the 2000 presidential election.
The letter says Diebold wasn't in the electronic voting business in 2000, when disputes over ballots in Florida delayed President Bush's victory for more than a month and raised questions about the reliability of electronic voting machines.
"We stand by the film," said Jeff Cusson, a spokesman for HBO, which is a unit of Time Warner Inc.
"We have no intention of withdrawing it from our schedule. It appears that the film Diebold is responding to is not the film HBO is airing."
David Bear, a spokesman for Diebold, said the company bought another firm, Global Elections, in 2002 that served about 8 percent of balloting in 2000, including voters in Florida. The company, which hasn't seen the film, based its complaints on material from the HBO Web site, Bear said.
This is Diebold's second recent defense of its system. On Sept. 26, Byrd wrote to Jann Wenner, editor and publisher of Rolling Stone, saying a story written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., "Will the Next Election Be Hacked?" was "error-riddled" and that readers "deserve a better researched and reported article."
The HBO documentary is based on the work of Bev Harris, the Renton woman who founded BlackBoxVoting.org, which monitors election accuracy. In 2004 the attorney general of California took up a whistle-blower claim filed by Harris against Diebold and settled with the company for $2.6 million in December.



http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/290653_diebold01.html

 

[steve albino]

From Slashdot:
http://interviews.slashdot.org/inter.../1357209.shtml

Ask a "Star" of HBO's Voting Machine Documentary



Posted by Roblimo on Friday November 03, @12:02PM
from the paper-ballots-never-have-software-problems dept.


Herbert H. Thompson, PhD ("Hugh" to his friends), is one of the people featured in the HBO documentary, Hacking Democracy, that Diebold tried to keep from airing. Hugh is a long-time Slashdot reader who called me to volunteer for this interview — on his own, not through anyone's PR department. Here's a YouTube

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from a CNN Lou Dobbs show with Hugh in it. (Find more articles by and about Hugh here. And perhaps check this brand-new MSNBC story about e-voting, too.) Hugh suggests that you give him "your wildest questions about what went on behind the scenes and how safe the e-voting systems actually are." Let's take him up on that challenge, hopefully while following Slashdot interview rules. Note to Diebold and other voting machine companies: We welcome comments and questions from you, same as we welcome them from everyone else. If you feel you are being vilified unfairly by Slashdot readers, please respond and set the record straight.

 

[pete]

It's been seven years since pregnant and dangling chads in Florida caused one of the biggest political rifts in U.S. history. Those faulty Florida ballots also directly led to the passage of federal legislation in 2002 that outlawed punch-card voting machines and allocated billions of dollars in federal funds for states to purchase expensive new electronic voting machines.

Now new questions are being raised about who was responsible for the faulty punch cards in that election. And according to last night's Dan Rather Reports episode, the fingers point to Sequoia Voting Systems, which not only makes e-voting machines that replaced punch cards but also created the punch cards that failed in Florida.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/08/sequoia-voting-.html

 

[steve albino]

Voting Machines Giving Florida New Headache

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/us/politics/13voting.htm?_r=1&oref=slogin

By ABBY GOODNOUGH
Published: October 13, 2007
MIAMI, Oct. 12 — It used to be that everyone wanted a Florida voting machine.

After the history-making presidential recount of 2000, Palm Beach County sold hundreds of its infamous Votomatic machines to memorabilia seekers, including a group of chiropractors in Arizona, the cable-news host Greta Van Susteren and the hotelier André Balazs. One machine ended up in the Smithsonian Institution. Dozens were transformed into pieces of contemporary art for an exhibition in New York.
But now that Florida is purging its precincts of 25,000 touch-screen voting machines — bought after the recount for up to $5,000 each, hailed as the way of the future but deemed failures after five or six years — no one is biting.
“I think we are going to have them on hand for a while,” said Arthur Anderson, the elections supervisor in Palm Beach County, which must jettison 4,900 touch-screen machines for which it paid $14.5 million in 2001 and still owes $4.8 million. “They are probably, for the most part, headed to the scrap pile.”
Across the nation, jurisdictions that experimented with touch-screen voting after 2000 are starting to scale back or abandon it based on a growing perception that the machines are unreliable and concern that they do not provide a paper trail in case questions arise. California will sharply scale back touch-screen voting next year after a review by the secretary of state found it was vulnerable to hackers.
Florida is the biggest state to reject touch screens so sweepingly, and its deadline for removing them, July 1, 2008, is the most imminent. For the 15 counties that must dump their expensive systems, buy new optical-scan machines and retrain thousands of poll workers, hurdles abound.
Six counties still owe a combined $33 million on their touch-screen machines, which most bought hurriedly to comply with a new federal law banning punch-card and lever voting systems after the recount. Miami-Dade County alone must cast aside 7,200 touch-screen machines, for which it paid $24.5 million and still owes $15 million.
Secretary of State Kurt S. Browning is seeking buyers for the touch screens, but he will not even begin to recoup the counties’ losses. Inquiries have come from a Veterans Affairs hospital in Miami, which hoped to convert some of the machines into “learning kiosks” for disabled patients, and the Century Village retirement community in Palm Beach County, which wanted them for condo association elections.
Sequoia Voting Systems, which manufactured some of Florida’s machines, offered to buy them back for a bleak $1 apiece.
“We’re not accepting that offer,” said Sterling Ivey, a spokesman for the Florida Division of Elections. “We can get more for our money.”

So far, Mr. Ivey said, the most likely options are selling the machines to recycling companies that would strip them for parts — from the wheels on the voting booths to the circuit boards — or reselling them to other states or countries through one of the original vendors, Election Systems and Software of Omaha.
“We would expect a number of jurisdictions to be interested in adding to their existing voting terminals as they prepare for the 2008 general election,” said Ken Fields, a spokesman for the company.
Most of the money for the touch screens came from the federal government, and so will most for the replacement machines, which cost about $6,000 each. But with Florida county budgets tightening due to a state mandate to cut property taxes, election officials are griping.
“I think it’s a real waste of money,” said Kay Clem, the elections supervisor in Indian River County. “I don’t have my heart in it, because I think we’re going 30 years backwards.”
Under the state’s new election law, disabled voters can keep voting by touch screen — akin to using an A.T.M. — until 2012. But everyone else will use them only twice more, for the presidential primaries on Jan. 29 and municipal elections next spring. With optical scanning, voters use pens to mark paper ballots that are then read by scanning machines, leaving a paper record for recounts.
The only county that has already switched is Sarasota, where voters last year approved a charter amendment requiring a paper-ballot system. More than 18,000 votes cast on touch-screen machines were not recorded in a close Congressional race in the county last year, raising an outcry that hastened the statewide switch to optical scanning.
Sarasota County’s touch-screen machines are sequestered under court order while an investigation into last year’s election continues. Most of the other counties getting new equipment will ask the state to cart their touch screens away after the presidential primaries.
“I will get them off my hands, one way or the other,” Mr. Browning said.
Like many other county election officials, he said he still believed in touch-screen voting, calling it “a very accurate, secure, reliable system.” He supports the switch to optical scanners, Mr. Browning said, only because the public no longer trusts touch screens.
“If you were to do a very thorough study of problems with touch screens,” he said, “you would probably find that 99.9 percent of them would be traced back to human error.”
Public interest groups almost universally supported the move to optical scanning, which is now thought more reliable than touch-screen voting, if only because it leaves a paper trail.
One problem that could persist is poor ballot design, which was responsible for widespread voter confusion in Palm Beach County in 2000 and possibly for the not-recorded votes in Sarasota County last year. Mr. Browning said the state would revise its ballot design rule in time for the presidential election in 2008.
As for the displeasure of election supervisors, Mr. Browning said it was understandable given that for many this would be the third voting system in eight years.
“After a while, you get a little change-weary,” he said. “Nothing seems to be stable or constant anymore. But I am very, very hopeful that this is the last major change to voting systems in Florida for some time.”

 

[steve albino]

Diebold Voter Fraud Rumors in New Hampshire Primaries
Westech writes "Multiple indications of vote fraud are beginning to pop up regarding the New Hampshire primary elections. Roughly 80% of New Hampshire precincts use Diebold machines, while the remaining 20% are hand counted. A Black Box Voting contributor has compiled a chart of results from hand counted precincts vs. results from machine counted precincts. In machine counted precincts, Clinton beat Obama by almost 5%. In hand counted precincts, Obama beat Clinton by over 4%, which closely matches the scientific polls that were conducted leading up to the election. Another issue is the Republican results from Sutton precinct. The final results showed Ron Paul with 0 votes in Sutton. The next day a Ron Paul supporter came forward claiming that both she and several of her family members had voted for Ron Paul in Sutton. Black Box Voting reports that after being asked about the discrepancy Sutton officials decided that Ron Paul actually received 31 votes in Sutton, but they were left off of the tally sheet due to 'human error.'"

http://politics.slashdot.org/politic.../1635225.shtml

 

[steve albino]

Diebold Admits Ohio Machines May Lose Votes


"Premier Election Solutions (a subsidiary of Diebold) has acknowledged a flaw that causes the systems to lose votes. It cannot be patched before the election and the machines are used in half of Ohio's counties, but they are issuing guidelines for avoiding the problem that presumably contain a work-around. While Diebold initially blamed anti-virus software for the glitch, they have now discovered that the bug was their own fault for not recording votes to memory when the cards are uploaded in 'certain circumstances' — something their initial analysis missed. It would be nice to hope that Ohio poll workers would be tech-savvy enough to make this a non-issue, but they had poll worker shortages last year and might need tech-savvy people to volunteer."

http://news.slashdot.org/news/08/08/22/136215.shtml

 

[Mormon Nailer]

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/03/kennedy/

Farhad Manjoo covered the ohio thing quite a bit for Salon and his subsequent book also deal with it.

His opinion? Wasn't stolen.

 

[steve albino]

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Over at the Submitterator, lbigbadbob points us to this video of a Sequoia AVC Edge touch-screen DRE voting machine hacked to, er, play Pac-man. This was done without breaking any of the tamper-evident seals. Nice work, J. Alex Halderman, University of Michigan, and Ariel J. Feldman, Princeton University! From the project page:

How did you reprogram the machine? The original election software used the psOS+ embedded operating system. We reformatted the memory card to boot DOS instead. (Update: Yes, it can also run Linux.) Challenges included remembering how to write a config.sys file and getting software to run without logical block addressing or a math coprocessor. The entire process took three afternoons.
Why PAC-MAN?
In celebration of the 30th anniversary of the iconic arcade game, we reprogrammed the AVC Edge to run Pac-Man. It uses MAME to emulate the original hardware. (We own the electronics from a real Pac-Man machine.) We could have reprogrammed it to steal votes, but that's been done before, and Pac-Man is more fun!

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/08/23/voting-machine-hacke.html
​

 

[steve albino]

http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0111/evoting.html

The Government has announced plans to dispose of electronic voting machines which have cost over €54m.

"Despite spending at least 51 million euro over the last decade buying and storing 7000 e-voting machines from Dutch firm Nedap, the Irish Finance minister has announced that they are now 'worthless'. The machines were originally trialled in 2002 on three regional elections, but a nationwide rollout in 2004 was put on hold after a confidential report expressed serious concern over the security of the voting machines. According to the report, the integrity of the ballot could not be guaranteed with the equipment and controls used. Several years on, and tens of millions later, it looks like the pen and paper ballot will remain for now."

 

[тхеодоре кацзынски]

"He then said there may be a market for the machines in Irish-themed pubs across the world."

What a country.