WV Voting Machines Switching Votes?

[CaptJodan]

Go back to paper and a pencil mark in a circle.

Simple, easy, and difficult to mess up.

I'm rather thankful that in my area, they've been using the old paper-pencil bubble method during my entire voting career. It has the added bonus of actually being capable of being recounted if things fuck up.

[Gil Hamilton]

Proof of the conspiracy you claim is behind it.

Well, OK. Let's not assume a conspiracy. Let's just look at the facts.

1) From a computer science and engineering standpoint, voting machines are very simple devices, where all the processes involved are tremendously simple to program and execute. There is absolutely no reason in a system with ANY quality control that there should have been any errors whatsoever (things that take inputs and put them into columns, and then count them is an class exercise for a comp-sci student, not a challenge for a company that makes ATMs). This is something we've already been over.

2a) If there were errors, it is reasonable to expect that they'd be distributed normally. That is, a person voting for Bush and getting registered as voting for Kerry should happen just as much as a person voting for Kerry that gets registered for Bush.
2b) This was not the case. As cited above, the errors virtually uniformally flipped Kerry votes to Bush.

3) The CEO of Diebold is a max donor to the GOP and is quoted as saying that they'd deliver Ohio for President Bush.

No paranoia, just what happened. With those four things in mind, in all honesty, what would you conclude had happened?

[SirNitram]

I believe it's worth noting that the GOP has been found to be illegally manipulating voter rolls. Link

Yes, both methods were ruled illegal. This is relevent, I believe, because it proves that the group in question is not above breaking laws and the public trust on the subject of elections.

[Tanasinn]

You don't need a company-wide conspiracy to do something illegal, you only need corrupt head honchos ordering uninformed drones to do A or B. That's how most corporate crime goes down, one hand doesn't know what the other is doing.

Whether or not Diebold officials actually worked to commit voter fraud isn't confirmed, but there's evidence to suggest that fuckery occured, and the current administration's laundry list of outright, blatant crime shows that that doing things illegal is not, for them, beyond the pale.

[Gil Hamilton]

My big issue is that the conceit that the voting machine errors are some sort of honest bug. How the hell do you make something that is so conceptually simple as a machine that receives an input, puts it in a column, and then counts the value for each column have a major bug and not only that, bug in one direction?

Button One is mapped to Value A. Button Two is mapped to Value B.
Values A and B start at zero.
Button One is selected and adds +1 to Value A.
Button Two is selected and adds +1 to Value B.
(at the end of the voting period) Output totals for Value A and Value B. Send to polling processing center, which sums all the Value As and all the Values B. Compares which number is bigger.

Booyah.

How hard is that to screw up? Hell, I bet I could go down to the Comp-Sci area of my own school, wrassle up some programmers with free time, and design your system for you and have zero bugs after testing.

[Stark]

The media really seem to have communicated the idea to Americans that an 'electronic voting machine' (a very broad term) is a very complex, failure-prone, difficult to build and difficult to secure concept, which explains why this shit happens. It's just sad that it's not any of those things, but this excuse apparently moves these laughable 'problems' from 'deliberately or negligently interfering with the very nature of American democracy' to 'oh well we shouldn't have tried anyway after all it's so complex and hard'. I think that's why there's no outrage that voting - the fundamental right of the citizen - isn't being protected.

[Darth Wong]

Proof of that? Unless you're suggesting that Diebold is exclusively staffed by criminally minded Republicans?

Proof of the one-sided nature of the errors in 2004?

Proof of the conspiracy you claim is behind it.

You don't need a large conspiracy to do something like this. No need for thousands of people to keep silent. No need for multiple organizations to work in concert. All you need is a few miscreants fucking around with the part of the system that's under their control, in a situation where there are no serious legal consequences for doing so.

You don't seriously buy that bullshit about how the electoral organizations don't have enough funding to make them work properly, do you?

[Patrick Degan]

You have touch-screen machines which exclusively flip votes for Democrats to Republicans being manufactured by a company whose CEO promised to deliver a whole state to George Bush in 2004, in which his machines were heavily integrated into the polling stations.

When it happens once, it's maybe a malfunction (2000). When it happens twice, it's suspicious (2004). When it happens a third time (2008), with the same result as the other two occurrences, and benefits the same party, that's something warranting a criminal investigation.

[Stark]

It literally boggles my mind that this company is even allowed to continue to operate in this way. The voting process is heavily regulated, so why the electoral commission hasn't just said 'fuck you, you're out' and banned their machines from voting places is beyond me. Whether it's corruption, conspiracy or simple incompetence, they're not up to standard and endanger the system.

Unless, of course, you guys don't HAVE an electoral commission?

[CmdrWilkens]

Not sure if anyone noticed this bit:

"When I hollered about that, the girl who worked there said, 'Push it again.' I pushed Obama again and it stayed there. Then, the machine did the same thing for other candidates.

So the guy pushed the correct box...and it worked. That sounds exactly like a small user-error or calibration issue and not some massive case of voter fraud.

[Darth Wong]

Not sure if anyone noticed this bit:

"When I hollered about that, the girl who worked there said, 'Push it again.' I pushed Obama again and it stayed there. Then, the machine did the same thing for other candidates.

So the guy pushed the correct box...and it worked. That sounds exactly like a small user-error or calibration issue and not some massive case of voter fraud.

I don't know about you, but if I wanted to rig a voting machine, I would rig it to only screw up maybe 5% of the time, or less. You don't want to make it too obvious, and a lot of elections have been decided by surprisingly close margins. 1% could easily push certain elections the other way. So if someone notices and tries again, it will probably work. If he doesn't notice, then the subterfuge was successful, and you can tell yourself that you didn't really break the law; the voter was just careless.

[Twoyboy]

Not sure if anyone noticed this bit:

"When I hollered about that, the girl who worked there said, 'Push it again.' I pushed Obama again and it stayed there. Then, the machine did the same thing for other candidates.

So the guy pushed the correct box...and it worked. That sounds exactly like a small user-error or calibration issue and not some massive case of voter fraud.

I don't know about you, but if I wanted to rig a voting machine, I would rig it to only screw up maybe 5% of the time, or less. You don't want to make it too obvious, and a lot of elections have been decided by surprisingly close margins. 1% could easily push certain elections the other way. So if someone notices and tries again, it will probably work. If he doesn't notice, then the subterfuge was successful, and you can tell yourself that you didn't really break the law; the voter was just careless.

Serious question, do the people who had access to the machine to perpetrate the fraud (assuming the previously mentioned miscreants, not a huge conspiracy) have the know how to work this scheme? It appears to be getting quite complicated (not just rigging the machine, but rigging it to only fail sometimes) and it seems to me (with no knowledge of how they work internally) that the allegations of tampering are becoming more and more unlikely with each layer of explanation we add.

[Patrick Degan]

It literally boggles my mind that this company is even allowed to continue to operate in this way. The voting process is heavily regulated, so why the electoral commission hasn't just said 'fuck you, you're out' and banned their machines from voting places is beyond me. Whether it's corruption, conspiracy or simple incompetence, they're not up to standard and endanger the system.

Unless, of course, you guys don't HAVE an electoral commission?

The states have electoral commissions. One state (Massachussets, I think) did ban Diebold machines when they proved unreliable. In reaction, Diebold actually sued in Federal court to try to force the state to accept their machines anyway, on the argument that they had a right to supply voting machines but the state had no right to refuse them. The judge threw the case out faster than their heads could spin.

[Anguirus]

It appears to be getting quite complicated (not just rigging the machine, but rigging it to only fail sometimes) and it seems to me (with no knowledge of how they work internally) that the allegations of tampering are becoming more and more unlikely with each layer of explanation we add.

How is rigging it to flip a vote 5% of the time remotely hard, or any more complicated than rigging it to flip 100%?

I don't know a damn thing about computer programming and even I know that this has got to be INSANELY simple. My pocket calculator couldn't fuck this sort of thing up. Hell, I've got a friend who could probably program a calculator to tally two choices but read one of them as the other 5% of the time in a couple hours, if that.

And everything else aside, from a citizen's standpoint, any voting technology or method that has already inspired a newspaper article with several independent accounts of its unreliability should be investigated immediately, especially considering that this is far from the first time.

[Stark]

Oh yeah, I remember that now - I'd forgotten the specifics however. It's absurd that there aren't higher standards for such basic tools of the democratic system.

[SirNitram]

Serious question, do the people who had access to the machine to perpetrate the fraud (assuming the previously mentioned miscreants, not a huge conspiracy) have the know how to work this scheme? It appears to be getting quite complicated (not just rigging the machine, but rigging it to only fail sometimes) and it seems to me (with no knowledge of how they work internally) that the allegations of tampering are becoming more and more unlikely with each layer of explanation we add.

A study and series of experiments was conducted on just this! Link

Elections and electronic voting machines invite consideration of the following thought experiment. You go to your local voting station, walk into the booth, pull the curtain, and see a well-dressed man standing inside with a little note pad. He asks whom you're voting for, appears to record what you say in his note pad, tells you he'll add your vote to his running total, thanks you, and asks you to send the next voter into the booth.

Whatever objections you have to this voting scenario should be reserved for the more familiar one involving Diebold and other voting machines. It's long been known that electronic machines run proprietary software and don't keep paper records of the votes cast. Similarly, the man in the voting booth also runs proprietary "mental software" whose commitment to honesty we have no way of ascertaining and simply supplies us with the vote total at the end of the day. He's probably honest and careful and, since he seems to be taking notes, his total is likely to be accurate, but would you trust such a voting system?

To the above already widely expressed concerns about electronic voting machines (and the recent misgivings of the Governors of Maryland and New Mexico among countless others), we should add an even more troubling one. This is the now conclusively demonstrated ease with which these machines can be hacked, or, to continue with the analogy above, the ease with which the well-dressed man in the booth can be persuaded to cheat. (Seldom has the title of this column, Who's Counting, been more descriptive.)

New Evidence About Viral Memory Cards

In a paper last month, "Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine," (available at http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/) Princeton computer professor Edward W. Felten and two graduate students Ariel J. Feldman and J. Alex Halderman discussed a common Diebold machine. They showed that anyone who gets access to the machine and its memory card for literally a minute or two could easily install the group's invisible vote-stealing software on the machine. (Poll workers and others have unsupervised access for much longer periods.) Changing all logs, counters, and associated records to reflect the bogus vote count that it generates, the software installed by the infected memory card (similar to a floppy disk) would be undetectable. In fact, the software would delete itself at the end of Election Day.

Even more ominously the memory cards that are used to install this or similar vote-stealing software can act like a virus and infect many other machines if the bad cards are used to amend these machines. This is normal practice with pre- and post-election updates, and no attachment to a network is necessary. Moreover, since memory cards are removed from all voting machines in a given region and inserted into a single machine that accumulates the votes for the region, something worse is possible. "By planting a virus far enough in advance, [a hacker] can ensure that a significant number of machines can steal votes on Election Day" even if he has access to only one or a few machines.

Possibility of Democracy Theft

This last fact undercuts one of the common criticisms of election conspiracy theories, namely that stealing an election would require the cooperation of many people over a wide area. This might not be necessary, but about the contention of any recent major US election having been stolen, the authors write, "We know some people are claiming this happened, but we don't find their evidence convincing."

One of the most interesting aspects of this study is a videotape of an actual Diebold AccuVote-TS machine being hacked. The tape clearly shows the quick installation of the bad memory card (either with a copied key or by picking the machine's lock), the pre-election check indicating that nothing is amiss, the mock mini-contest between George Washington and Benedict Arnold which Washington wins 4-1, and then the print-out showing that Arnold, in an election upset, beats Washington 3-2. There are a number of other types of electronic voting machines in use today, but little certainty that they aren't vulnerable to similar tampering. (In response, Diebold claims that there have been improvements.)

With proprietary software and no independent paper trail, there are unfortunately grounds to doubt election results, especially when they're close. You wouldn't make a deposit at an ATM machine whose screen opened to reveal a well-dressed bank official who thanked you for your check and assured you he'd put it into your account, but who didn't give you a receipt or any way to check your balance. The same holds for credit cards. Your money is important, but so is your right to vote, and you shouldn't have to trust well-dressed men about either. Identity theft is a well-publicized bother; democracy theft is an invisible rot.

The only good news is that it now takes programming prowess to steal elections when all it used to take was the ability to stuff ballot boxes.

In short: One minute, one lockpick or duplicated key, one memory card. Worse, since modern election machines are networked, one man with access to one machine overturns the entire region.

No conspiracy. One guy with a memory card. Hell, since it's a memory card with an autoupdate that doesn't show any problems, you can hand it to a grunt and tell him it's a software patch for an existing bug.

This was proven to work. Does anyone really think these machines are delivering accurate results? Particularly when 634 people results in three thousand votes for Bush?

[Shroom Man 777]

The good thing is that it doesn't need a shadowy cabal of GOP conspirators and that it can be perpetrated by only one person?

Why would your nation choose such an easily-tampered system, anyway? Or was that the whole point of using voting machines?

When were voting machines first introduced?

[Stark]

The most offensive part about the story Nitram posted is NO KIND OF IDIOT WOULD EVER MAKE THEM LIKE THAT EXCEPT DELIBERATELY. Gil isn't kidding when he says university students could make the data more secure than this. There is just no explanation beyond utter criminal incompetence or deliberate malice, and because it's not stamped out instantly it creates the expectation of failure for what should be quite a simple task.

[SirNitram]

The good thing is that it doesn't need a shadowy cabal of GOP conspirators and that it can be perpetrated by only one person?

Why would your nation choose such an easily-tampered system, anyway? Or was that the whole point of using voting machines?

When were voting machines first introduced?

Years and years ago, however, it was in the wake of the 'Help America Vote Act' of 2002, that the percentage of machines leapt from 7.7% to I believe a fourth of the recorded votes in 2004. It was also that time they decided to network them.

Because nothing could ever go wrong or be fraudulent like that.

[Twoyboy]

Thanks SirNitram, I guess I really did think that there would be more safeguards in place than this. And was thinking it would require either some real technological know how or some hacking talent. I'm fucking amazed they could be this blase about it.

[RedImperator]

The good thing is that it doesn't need a shadowy cabal of GOP conspirators and that it can be perpetrated by only one person?

Why would your nation choose such an easily-tampered system, anyway? Or was that the whole point of using voting machines?

When were voting machines first introduced?

Mechanical voting machines started coming into use in the States in the late 19th century, largely in big-city districts. The idea was to reduce fraud by making it impossible to stuff a box full of paper ballots. They also make it possible to count much faster and save the county the cost of printing ballots.

The mechanical voting machines were just about impossible to hack unless you were a machinist, but as they got older they got more expensive to maintain, so we took what seemed like the natural next step: electronic voting machines. And then we completely fucked it up, the way we've completely fucked up just about everything else the Bush Era.

[starslayer]

Just to add to how ridiculously easy it is to program these machines to be utterly foolproof, failing a hardware fault, I decided to write some code that would prompt the user to enter their candidate, and then tally the votes, inform the user when they did something wrong, let them try again, and spit out the vote totals at the end. You know how long it took me? TEN MINUTES. That includes debugging. And I've only taken one basic C++ programming class. And it would really only take me maybe another ten minutes to add a random number generator that would flip the vote one way 5% of the time. This. Should. Not. Happen. I realize the voting machine code is a little more complex, but still.

[Eulogy]

This is likely a rhetorical question, but why hasn't the company had its greasy ass roasted on a spit yet?

[SirNitram]

This is likely a rhetorical question, but why hasn't the company had its greasy ass roasted on a spit yet?

Because, as Stormbringer reminded us, the response to simply pointing out these proven and recorded facts is accusals of being tin-foil-hat loonies.

[Netko]

That is the issue with black box voting - you can never be sure what exactly the machine has loaded on the inside, and without an external way to verify the result you cannot be sure what exactly happened. Now, there are three basic ways that you could fix this, if you're intended to stick with the electronic voting machines:

1. associate the vote with the voter - it would mean the end of the secret ballot concept, but it would allow a voter to check if his vote was recorded correctly afterward (through the Internet or the county office or whatever). Obviously a no go politically and even practically it would have huge issues which make it undesirable (peer pressure for one).

2. force the machine vendors to only use open source software for the machines, with the source posted at public websites and the integrity of the loaded software checked by comparing hashes of it with hashes generated from code compiled from the public source code - the dream solution of the OSS movement. I personally still find it dubious because even if you force a full open source it will run into the hundred of thousands of lines of code for the OS and drivers (the actual voting software, is, as noted, trivial, or relatively trivial if you add some more protections to the basic idea), where an insidious hack could be hidden, and the hash check could be avoided by a clever virus which modifies the state of the machine for the voting and then returns it to its original state just when the election ends. It would require a much more complicated and risky attempt at physically compromising the machine though (or conspiracy, of course) - any hack would have to be done after the preelection hash check.

3. voter-audited paper trail printout - my favorite because its the most failsafe one - when you vote, the machine prints out a receipt from its internal printer showing your vote in plain English, which you then put into the ballot box. After the election, the machine results are used, however a random sample of machines are audited and if major (or even any) discrepancies are shown with the ballot box, the entire site machine pool for that polling station is checked, and the ballot box results used (or the elections repeated at that polling station). You can even get fancy and allow the voter to keep a part of the receipt with an unique hash and password which allows him to check his vote over the internet later without disclosing his identity (beyond the obvious computer forensic approach). It neatly avoids the black box problem, however if you are going with a paper trail, the question to ask is if its necessary to go to the major expense of voting machines instead of using something like a scantron system, or some other pen-and-paper method, which becomes my obvious disagreement for this option.

Anyway, the third option has started to show up in some districts from reports, and that is good, but what is worrying is that anyone is still using the original black box machines, or has even used them in the first place. The above solutions are pretty trivial to imagine for any sort of CS engineer, so its mindboggling that the sort of precautions in 2. or 3. were not used in the first place. The only question is if it was incompetence or an deliberate attempt to make the voting process less reliable and allow the possibility of manipulation.