Vote Counting

[OutofDate1980]

E-voting machines vulnerable to remote vote changing | InSecurity Complex - CNET News

"The Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne Laboratory, which is a division of the Department of Energy, discovered this summer that Diebold touch-screen e-voting machines could be hijacked remotely, according to team leader Roger Johnston. Salon reported on it today, noting that as many as a quarter of American voters are expected to be using machines that are vulnerable to such attacks in the 2012 election.

Basically, when a voter pushes a button to record his or her votes electronically, the remote hijacker could use a Radio Frequency remote control to intercept that communication, change the votes, and then submit the fraudulent votes for recording.

The researchers uncovered similar problems with Sequoia e-voting systems in 2009, Johnston told CNET this afternoon. He said he believes the problem exists in all major e-voting systems but has only demonstrated successful attacks on the two systems."

 

[OutofDate1980]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/09/us/politics/09vote.html?_r=1

"He said he also saw signs that computer users in Iran and China were trying to crack the system

 

[Mr Wolfpack]

From Stalin: 'It's Not the People Who Vote that Count; It's the People Who Count the Votes'

(actually in a book by Stalin's secretary)

"You know, comrades," says Stalin, "that I think in regard to this: I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.

 

[OutofDate1980]

Interesting method versus proprietary software.

Belgium Government Open Sources Code Of Voting Machines | Muktware

"A day after the Federal elections were over, Belgium government has open-sourced the code used for voting machines. The move is, however not for sharing and reuse, but for showing that the machines were not fraudulent.

The voting machines used custom built Ubuntu Linux at the core. They had no hard disk but only a few bytes of flash memory. For each election, the version of Linux and names of candidates were loaded from a USB device.
The source code has been made available in this website. The government started using Ubuntu Linux for voting machines from October last year."

 

[OutofDate1980]

Well, if you can't them to vote you, just make sure you count the vote.

The Free Press -- Independent News Media from Columbus, Ohio

"In other words, a candidate for the presidency of the United States, and his brother, wife and son, have a straight-line financial interest in the voting machines that could decide this fall's election. These machines cannot be monitored by the public. But they will help decide who "owns" the White House.

They are especially crucial in Ohio, without which no Republican candidate has ever won the White House. In 2004, in the dead of election night, an electronic swing of more than 300,000 votes switched Ohio from the John Kerry column to George W. Bush, giving him a second term. A virtual statistical impossibility, the 6-plus% shift occurred between 12:20 and 2am election night as votes were being tallied by a GOP-controlled information technology firm on servers in a basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In defiance of a federal injunction, 56 of Ohio's 88 counties destroyed all election records, making a recount impossible. Ohio's governor and secretary of state in 2004 were both Republicans, as are the governors and secretaries of state in nine key swing states this year."

 

[Gmash]

Here in Ohio, the Republicans tried to stop early voting on the last weekend before election day because they know that a lot of African Americans like to vote after church on that Sunday. This got overturned in the courts, and the Republicans tried to take it all the way to the Supreme Court, who declined to hear the case. Unfortunately, this same form of voter suppression has been allowed to stand in other states including Florida. Shameless, desperate, and pathetic. If I was a Republican I would be ashamed of this behavior.

 

[OutofDate1980]

To those that have the option of casting vote by mail, I would choose that method to avoid these "flakey" machines and have a written record of those votes cast.

Political hacks have no shame by definition, especially with the amount of money involved, prior and subsequent to the elections.