Bev Harris of Black Box Voting Releases Accenture's Voting Software 245
Gottesser writes with this excerpt from Bev Harris's Black Box Voting: "I have found and posted the actual voter list software used widely throughout the USA (TN, WI, PA, CO, KS...) for Accenture voter registration and voter histories. I located the files on a magnetic backup tape of the hard drive of a county elections IT employee, part of a 120-gig set of discovery files. The Accenture voter registration / voter history software is highly problematic, and has been reported switching voter parties in Colorado, and losing voter histories in Tennessee. Although it is now widely known that Accenture voter list software gets it wrong, just WHY the program misreports voter information so often has never been explained. I am hoping that by releasing this software to the public, it may shed light on what's really going on with our voter registration systems. I also posted a Tennessee file with work orders and release notes which shows the Accenture software has a history of tripling votes in certain ('random') voter histories, going back to 2004. Except it is not random: Other files I discovered prove it is with primarily suburban Republican precincts that votes are somehow being recorded twice and sometimes three times for certain voters in the voter history report, and this didn't just happen in 2004; it also happened in the 2008 presidential primary and in May and August 2010, and according to election commission notes in Shelby County, also in the 2012 presidential primary. Computer buffs, have at it. Much source code exists within the structure because it is built on MS Access. I do not read source code, though I can see some structural problems with the software (for example, it allows political party ID to be set differently from one precinct to another)."
Re:Good work (Score:5, Interesting)
You means commits suicide by shooting himself once in the heart and twice in the head?
Re:Like Microsoft Excel? (Score:3, Interesting)
You may joke but this was actually suggested in one company I worked at, to replace FoxPro with Excel, after all it is just a table.
I kid you not.
Re:This will be really interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
How about the President of Diebold quoted as saying they were "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premier_Election_Solutions [wikipedia.org]).
If that isn't a obvious Freudian slip indicating their conflict of interest with the Republican party, I don't know what the fuck is. Yes, the Dems liked the idea of e-voting but this was before the Repubs perverted the realization. The Republican party objected, then quickly found a way to get their unregulated business-connected fucktard "partners" to trample all over the process and game the system in their favor. Yeah, letting businesses run wild and do whatever they want is a REALLY GOOD thing for this country. NOT.
What I see so far (Score:4, Interesting)
It's basically a bunch of monstrous Access databases. Unfortunately, most (all?) of the VBA code is in databases that have been compiled to .mde files. There's no simple way that I know of to get usable source code back from those, which is unfortunate, since that's probably where most of the damning evidence would be found. However, you can view table definitions and data, form and report designs, queries, etc. Fun fact: you can bypass the initial login by just holding the left shift key as you open voter.mde.
Re:This will be really interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
It's because whenever I see an article about these problems cropping up, about 9 times out of 10 it's the Republicans who are favored. Now, it could be article bias, but I don't think so. There are many interesting links as well. Diebold's CEO promising to deliver votes to the Republicans is one. But there are others.
Democrats make certain kinds of back room deals with certain businesses. The entertainment industry (for example) is a big one. But Republicans make certain kinds of back room deals with certain other kinds of businesses. The voting machine industry deals feels more Republican to me. Mostly local deals not directly involving the creation of new laws. Democrats tend towards larger scale things that are directly related to political issues.
Pearls of Wisdom from 6+ years in the field. (Score:5, Interesting)
The recommendation and rationale goes like this... The person I trust is not necessarily the person you would trust therefore we need transparency. No system can be secured against its administrators therefore we need transparency over security.
We must be able to verify four things. 1) Who can vote 2) Who did vote 3) Chain of custody 4) Vote count
Failing any of these points our elections are simply staged theater. Right now, we're failing ALL these points. No electronic system can be verifiable. Can't be done. Even under a paper system its difficult to put checks in place and to have mechanisms where a single voter or group of voter can raise a concern (even an honest mistake) and have it taken care of. A botched election is notoriously hard to clean up. Especially because recounts can and have been rigged. Litigating election issues is nearly impossible. The integrity of the election cycle must be maintained so no voter off the street and even most candidates can't get an issue in court with enough time to change the outcome of an election.
Therefore. *Most* Long term Election Integrity activists have come to support this basic starting principal: "Voter Marked Hand Counted Paper Ballots, Counted at the polls, on election night, no matter how long it takes, in full public view before all those who want to witness the count and before the ballots are moved and chain of custody issues arise."
Now. That handles points 3 and 4 but to be honest. 1 and 2 are tricky. They kinda require databases at this point because unlike the pool of poll workers this system don't scale well with the population. Bev's been finding voter histories have been erased in several counties in Tennessee. This is important because if a registered voter hasn't voted in a while then as part of house keeping (the person may have died or moved) they eventually get purged from the voter rolls. So someone(s) in Tennessee is erasing peoples' vote history so they get purged, show up at the polls and can't vote. There's already been some court rulings to handle this. The point is we need to remain vigilant and we need things transparent so we CAN be vigilant. We don't need computers to solve everything. We need the public to relearn how to do their civic duty and to do that civic duty.
Re:How "odd" the percentages match (Score:4, Interesting)
Not saying reporting should be anything but objective, I would disagree with anyone who says it should, I just find it interesting that nobody takes this concept that most journalists are democrats as a possible indicator of something more than their bias.
If 90% of astronomers believed there's no alien life (hypothetically- I don't know what they believe), I would think there's something to it, since they report on the going-ons out there. *points at space*
Re:Good work (Score:5, Interesting)
If your belief is that technology can only make things worse, then you are, by definition, a Luddite.
This is simply untrue. The fact that technology cannot solve one particular problem does not make you a Luddite.
The integrity of voting is built on it being transparent and understood by all. Everything which stands between the average voter and a thorough understanding of the voting process must be eliminated.