Had I voted for Bush I’d need to shoot the guy I buy drugs from…
-XT
It can be done with a hotel minibar or office furniture key and a USB flash drive. Once the program is written, and I believe it has been, if it leaks into the rest of the world, then it becomes trivially easy to do it.
Trivially easy to do to a Diebold machine? Maybe. Hell, from what I’ve seen, I’ll even say probably. The problem here is still one of volume, there are tens or hundreds of thousands of machines in each state, the sheer logistics of hacking any sizable percentage of them without being detected somewhere along the line strikes me as highly unlikely. And before someone brings up the fact that Florida Had a vote difference of about 500 votes in 2000, and that changing 250 of them would not be a very big undertaking, that margin of victory was completely unprecedented, by an order of magnitude. I looked it up and posted it in another thread a few months back, the closest vote in Fl. since WWII before 2000 still had a difference of 50,000 votes. Those are the minimum kind of numbers you’d have to set out to change if you hoped to successfully change the outcome of an election (and I think that for you to plan to be successful without a doubt you’d need to change two or three times that many). Doing all that-without being detected in any way, shape or form by anybody- is a task that would require dozens if not hundreds of people, and it just doesn’t seem to me to be a likely scenario.
You wouldn’t need to hack all of them; just the ones with a tendency to go Democrat. And since those precincts tend to get fewer voting machines anyway – to make folks give up and leave after being told they need to wait hours to vote – that makes the job even easier.
Just because you don’t think it’s feasible doesn’t mean it isn’t.
The converse, of course, is also true…and to my mind at least, more plausable. YMMV.
-XT
Again, you don’t have to hack all the machines. Just certain significant ones. Say, ten to twenty in one state. It’s very possible. I’m certainly not saying it was done, I’m saying that it’s quite doable. But they’re such crap as it is, it’d also be undetectable, and the hacking you do may be lost in their general tendency to blow up. In Ohio, blow out one machine in each of ten precincts, and everything goes to Bush. Or Kerry.
Whoa! You need to break into each voting machine? Physically?
Here I was thinking some nerd could do it from his momma’s basement. Now we apparently need the Mission Impossible crew to visit a few hundred voting machines and alter them without being detected even once.
Frank, the 2004 election/poll discrepencies were widespread and impacted numerous states with a variety of voting machines and expected outcomes. A small team hitting two dozen machines, and changing the vote enough to matter, will be completely obvious.
:rolleyes: Yea! And we can use the black helicopters to get from one polling place to the next in no time!
I just don’t think that hacking a couple dozen machines would be anything but a waste of time. Even “closely contested” elections usually have a difference of tens of thousands of votes, you’d have to plan to switch that many or the whole thing would be a waste of your time and a huge risk. I have to get to the dentist right now, but when I get back I’ll try and dig up what I said about this before, see if you find my logic compelling.
I don’t get how there could be long lines at polling places anyway, unless there were new ID regs or anything (in NY, it’s illegal to even ask for any kind of ID at the polls; you show all that when you register). The Big Hulkin’ Gray Machines o’ Freedom are alloted by population, and while each electoral district is supposed to consist of about 750 households, bigger precincts get more machines. The Board knows exactly how many people voted at each machine and district and allots machines accordingly. Other places don’t do this?
While I also shudder at the apparent hackability of these machines, I’d like to know exactly when the hackers would do it. In NYC each machine has a table in front of it with staff; even as inattentive as we occasionally get, nobody could wander from machine to machine doing his mojo without getting arrested.
If there’s any tampering done with the machines before they arrive, we find it out when we open them, since they have the total number of votes cast on it before they arrive.
Even if we set aside the issue of tampering, there’s still the issue of glitches and non-conspiratorial fuck-ups.
OK, I found what I posted before. It’s about Florida in 2000 and the likelihood of an organized conspiracy:
Frankly, the size of the conspiracy required continues to be, to me, the biggest argument against widespread, organized tampering. It just doesn’t see possible to pull it off without being detected in the fishbowl world of modern American politics. Of course, if anyone presents proof of widespread, organized tampering, then I will of course admit that I’m wrong on this issue (but I’ll be right too, because they wouldn’t have gotten away with it. 
). What I want most of all is an honest election.
If these things are networked to a central location, all it takes is 1. That’s the big issue with electronic voting when there’s a network involved. Once one system is compromised they’re all compromised.
This seems relevant: How to steal an election by hacking the vote
That’s my little baby, Spaz. All you need to do is compromise one, and you can chain-compromise many. It just depends on where you are in the chain of events. For example, there was a unapproved, stealth-upgrade to the Diebold boxes in Maryland just before the election. What if I was one of those techies, and had a little present, as I traveled from machine to machine? Or what if I got access to just one of the machines, with a virus, before the techies got to it? Bam. All gone.
Or, what if I wanted to compromise, say, Democrat heavy regions? A little effort, and you can visibly crash them. “I don’t know, it just locked up.” and destroy the records of a poling location.
Or, even, access just one in a region that reports early, and spread the virus from it to the tabulating software. Blow it out, modify it…
Once you get physical access, the machine is in the hands of the hacker. This access can happen before, during, or after the election. The specific schemes vary, some depending on collusion, some on probability, and some on outright criminality on Diebold’s part. (We can’t verify the code, we can’t be sure it isn’t effed up, and from the way the machines behave, I’m pretty sure it is. (Though perhaps not on purpose. It’s just seriously effed up.)
That’s why the paper trail is essential. And open and viewable code. So we know that when a vote is recorded, it is recorded properly. It’s not hard to design!
And none of these techniques will be any less effective than the voter invalidation techniques in Florida. Even the hardest case, where I have to get ten people to physically do it, during the election? I can crash ten voting machines in heavily Democratic regions late at night, wipe their records. Not a problem at all. 1,000 people using one machine over a day? Yeah. Easy. Heck, I just have to make the votes off those machines unreliable, find a way to make them report 800,000 votes, that works just as well. Knowing it’s WinCE, I’m pretty sure I could pull that off from the restricted input, might not even need to pry open anything.
Criminal as hell, but I know exactly how I’d do it.
hah! You’re hannibal? Small world… I’ve been reading ars for like 10 years.
You deliberately put less machines in a heavy democratic voting area. There were areas last election with 7 hour waits to vote.Many just went home.
My wife and I have been poll workers for many years. Last presidential election after the polss closed they told us to go home. They had people for the final tallies. My wife was presinct chair. She has never been sent home before the final count was finished.
Add that to removing names from the polling sheets before the election. Changing poll locations at the last minute and you have people who are more interested in winning than a fair election.
This is certainly a lovely way to handle a completely obvious tampering.
My plan, using the old mechanical machines everyone loves, is to go into a polling place after hours with a bunch of sledge hammers and bash the machines into junk. See how insecure the old methods are? Fixing the election with them is like taking candy from a baby. I don’t even have to know a thing about how they work.
Seriously, how dumb are the Canadians? Any idiot could “hack” a ballot box by stealing the thing. At least our electronic machines require a bit of skill to tamper with. Sheesh!
I’m trying to figure out whether or not that actually deserves a response.
That’s funny, because I see the most opposition to non-verified electronic voting coming from the communities that are more familiar with technology than the average person. I’ve got a background in Unix systems and network security, and I’m uncomfortable with it.
Your confidence is entirely unfounded. I - just one person - could put my employer most of the way out of business in less time than it took me to type this post. What makes you so certain that it would require a vast conspiracy to change votes? You may consider that a request for a cite.
As that article I linked to above rather succinctly puts it;
If you’re not familiar with the mechanisms of vote-stealing or the problems with the Diebold machines in particular, that article presents a clear explanation in non-partisan layman’s terms. Sorry Dio.
Huh. Just missed the exchange between spaz and E-Sabbath. Good article!