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Will the Next Election Be Hacked?
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Oct 01, 2006 08:03 PM
from the privatizing-vote-counting dept.
from the privatizing-vote-counting dept.
plasmacutter writes to let us know about the new article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in Rolling Stone, following up on his "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" (slashdotted here). Kennedy recounts the sorry history of electronic voting so far in this country — and some of the incidents will be new even to this clued-in crowd. (Had you heard about the CERT advisory on an undocumented backdoor account in a Diebold vote-tabulating database — crediting Black Box Voting?) Kennedy's reporting is bolstered by the accounts of a Diebold insider who has gone on record with his concerns. From the article: 'Chris Hood remembers the day in August 2002 that he began to question what was really going on in Georgia... "It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state," Hood told me. "We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from [president of Diebold election unit Bob] Urosevich...' According to Hood, Diebold employees altered software in some 5,000 machines in DeKalb and Fulton counties, the state's largest Democratic strongholds. The tally in Georgia that November surprised even the most seasoned political observers. (Hint: Republicans won.)
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Was the 2004 Election Stolen? 1425 comments
jZnat writes, "In June Rolling Stone ran an article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delving into the statistical improbability that Bush won the 2004 election based on massive amounts of evidence that support a Republican-sponsored election fraud across the country, particularly in Ohio. The GOP used a number of tactics in its fraudulent campaign including ballot-stuffing, denying newly registered voters (particularly in urban and minority precincts) their voting privileges via illegal mailings known as caging lists, inane voter registration requirements, preventing thousands of voters from receiving provisional ballots, under-providing Democrat-majority precincts with voting machines thus creating enormous queues of voters, faulty machines (particularly from Diebold) that skewed results in the GOP's favor, mostly unnoticed ballot-stuffing and fraud in rural areas, and a fixed recount that was paid for by the Green and Libertarian parties that essentially supported the initial fraudulent numbers." From the article: "'Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,' Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me."
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As soon as you have people willing to cheat.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:As soon as you have people willing to cheat.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:As soon as you have people willing to cheat.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:As soon as you have people willing to cheat.. (Score:5, Insightful)
sarcasm start:
let's see.. which one is easier to do and harder to detect:
1 - coordinate hundreds or thousands of people to drag off huge ballot boxes across the entire nation
2 - someone in some central location makes a virus which they have a friend smuggle in and install on all ballot boxes.. or they just press a button in the central office and BAM.. all votes swap from bush to kerry!..
yep.. it's soo much less difficult to do the former than the latter..
end sarcasm..
begin WoW.. oops sorry.. you didnt need to know that.. lol
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Re:As soon as you have people willing to cheat.. (Score:5, Informative)
That said, the amount of shady crap surrounding Diebold voting machines is fairly ridiculous. Lets ignore the fact that you have a former CEO, who resigned for allegations of corruption, and who was committed to "delivering" an election to one party. As well as drastically skewed exit polling. All in all, you have a slew of voting machines models that lack the most basic security procedures... such as proper, or any, locks. You also have a fairly complicated voting solution that presents a number of opportunities for a compromise.
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Maybe.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Or bring the United Nations in on it.
It seems like the main difference between a certain 1st world country and many 3rd world ones is the scale of election fraud, not the type or quality.
International monitors anyone?
UN disallowed from monitoring (Score:5, Interesting)
Can you imagine the government's reaction if Venezuela refused election monitoring?
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Diebold ATMs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Give me a printout! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Give me a printout! (Score:5, Insightful)
This idea is brought up many times, but is inherently flawed. The moment you allow people to take back physical records of how they voted, you open up the possibility (or even inevitability) that people will start selling votes, or start being forced to vote a certain way.
Additionally, if their machines are flawed, it is entirely possible that the printout that you get and the actual vote tally won't be the same anyway. So getting physical printouts really doesn't solve anything at all.
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Re:Give me a printout! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Get it through your think head: (Score:5, Insightful)
wake up folks (Score:5, Insightful)
Raising funds / winning elections. There is a cause/effect relationship here folks. Wake up, smell the roses, elections are just like anything else in america, sold to the highest offer. If that wasn't the case, then fund raising wouldn't be the most critical part of an election campaign.
Here is an interesting idea for a paper trail (Score:5, Informative)
The interesting thing about it is that it handles both voter privacy and verifiability without requiring encryption of the ballot. Rather than give a poor explanation because of lack of space (the paper itself is 13 pages long), I encourage interested people to read it.
good (Score:5, Interesting)
Why hack the election? (Score:5, Interesting)
* Give poor voting precincts ancient machines and very few of them so that people have to wait hours and hours in line to vote. Isn't that what we saw in 2004?
* Dream up a system of "provisional ballots" to placate voters when a voter is "challenged" -- and then never count those provisional ballots.
These tactics are the way the past 2 elections were stolen, and they're profusely documented. Even the huge exit poll discrepancies of the 2004 elections were ignored by the US corporate mass media.
And don't forget the way BBC reporter Greg Palast [gregpalast.com] clearly documented that Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris eliminated more than 90,000 Florida voters in 2000 as "suspected felons" -- with over 90% of those voters being Democrats. But you're read about that scandal in the US corporate mass media, right?! (Not!)
Sorry, the elections are already being "hacked" and it doesn't take an electronic voting machine to do it.
Re:Oh goodie! (Score:5, Informative)
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This issue is too important for political parties. (Score:5, Insightful)
Honest elections should NOT be a political issue. It should be a PATRIOTIC issue.
We need a list of requirements for honest elections and we, THE PEOPLE, need to work with each other to get them implemented.
I don't care if you're Liberal or Republican or Libertarian or Communist or Green. I will gladly work with you for honest elections in America. You may beat my favoured Party, but we should all be able to see that it was an honest election and an honest victory.
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Re:Oh goodie! (Score:5, Insightful)
The reality of the situation is that it's not a Democrat/Republican thing.....it's a power thing. If a Democrat were in office, the Republicans would be shouting vote fraud, etc.
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Re:News for Nerds No Longer (Score:5, Insightful)
Always the conservatives are screaming about "balance." Reality itself is not "fair and balanced." The Republicans are destroying the country, the environment, and the Earth. Not the Democrats. So get over it. The very notion that media needs to be "balanced" is how we got into this position in the first place.
Media is supposed to report on what is happening. Not make you feel better about your political views if they suck, or make you feel as though you're just as good as everyone else if you're not.
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Re:News for Nerds No Longer (Score:5, Insightful)
But IMHO 'cultural relativism' is/was primarily a tool to help you understand the other guy, his roots, motivations, etc, so that you can deal with him. Applying either 'relativism' to your own actions in the real world tends to be an exercise in wishful thinking, and sometimes that can be disastrous.
There seems to be a new (I'll call it) 'Neocon meme' showing up on Slashdot and other net sites, with a couple of notable characteristics:
* This site just has a liberal slant, and you'll shout me down for this.
* The Republicans may have some problems, but the Democrats are just as bad.
* The nation as a whole is politically much different from this site.
Oh, well.
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Ever work an exit poll? (Score:5, Informative)
Why? I can think of a few reasons:
1. It takes time. It usually takes about 10-15 minutes to fill out a good exit poll form. People with less time on their hands - people with steady jobs, people with kids, people who vote in the morning on the way to work, etc. - are much less likely to accept the polling sheet. On the other hand, people with lots of time on their hands - the retired, the unemployed, often younger voters, etc. - are much more likely to fill out exit poll forms. Given that the unemployed are more likely to vote a certain way (generally for the opposition party, whoever that may be), this can lead to skewed data, not to mention other groups.
2. People fill out polls to make a statement. Again, this tends to favor opposition parties, or parties that are less likely to be represented in a region. People like the idea of voting twice.
3. The organization you poll for could determine who answers your questions. Example - "Hi, I'm performing a poll for University X! Could I take ten minutes of your time?" If the person you are trying to poll doesn't like your university's football team, they may not participate. Or, if a poller represents a news organization the person dislikes, a potential pollee (?) may opt out as well.
4. People honestly forget. This doesn't happen so much in presidential elections, to be sure, but on many exit polls people mark their own votes wrong because they forget what proposition x was or who the candidates for a seat on whatever were.
As someone who has worked exit polls before, let me assure you that they're not always accurate and there are a LOT of things that can throw them off.
In any case, though, the CNN exit poll data from 2004 [cnn.com] should make the case for a Bush win, if you go by exit poll data alone.
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Re:two words. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: Will the Next Election Be Hacked? (Score:5, Informative)
You need to do a bit more research before making your claim.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36425-20 00Nov16?language=printer [washingtonpost.com]
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Re:You bring the pitchforks, I'll bring the torche (Score:5, Insightful)
Rigging elections undermines everything this country stands for. It is, in a very real definition of the word, treason. Anyone doing it. Anyone ordering it. Anyone knowing about it and not coming forward. Anyone who has taken an oath to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States, has to take rigged elections as a direct challenge to the authority of that document. As a military person you took an oath to protect the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Someone rigging the ballot box would qualify as a domestic enemy.
That should be one thing we can all agree on. Democrat, Republican, Independent or any other party. Without fair elections we are no longer the United States of America. We are something less.
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