I love it how now whenever a Democrat doesn’t win, the first thing they tend to do now is to claim that someone rigged the electronic voting machines. I suppose Diebold had a specific interest in seeing her lose, right?
Get over yourself, Cynthia. You made an ass of yourself in March, and you lost your seat because of it.
I’m really tired of this shit. Does everyone have to be a sore loser nowadays?
I know the above link is a blog, but I haven’t been able to find a transcript of the speech she gave this morning that I heard on the radio. If anyone else knows of a more reputable link, I’d appreciate it if you could post it for me.
This statement is slightly incongruous with your sig. And coming from McKinney, this behavior isn’t surprising. It really fits right in with what we know about her character.
I think everyone who loses an election should make a stink until we do something about the problems. The winners should, too, but you know, it’s harder to make a stink when it can hurt you. I don’t blame them for that.
No kidding. Why is this being generalized to “democrats”? Cynthia McKinney also hit a security guard. Do all democrats hit security guards?
And, um, is it really ridiculous to have concerns about electronic voting machines? It strikes me as a bit servile, and way out of keeping with what I think of as the American character, to assume that those in power will take care of things when there’s no way to check up on them.
Well, if some folks are too damn lame to use a punch or mark voting system…
God I’ll be glad when that whiny bitch is off the airwaves. If you want truly horrifying, she later broke into a Pink protest song. It was stupendous in it’s awfulness.
It’s being generalized to Democrats because that has become the perception, that Democrats cry “voter fraud” every time they lose. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not.
What exactly are the problems with electronic voting machines?
Because it all comes back to programmers/engineers with poltical agenda or just plain buggy design? What makes that problem any different from a counter looking at punched ballots and counting with his political agendum, or simply making mistakes?
Or maybe someone on the “other side” might have influence in adding extra votes electronically? What makes that any different from the “other side” stuffing 10,000 phony paper ballets instead of 10,000 electronic ones?
It looks like both systems “suffer” from similar problems to me. The difference is, you can eliminate buggy or politically motivated coding/engineering by having other contractors or government agencies review the design. You can never eliminate the possibility of politically motivated or errors in the counting.
Further, if the ballots are digitally signed (as I would expect any half-way decently engineered voting system to be), it makes it all but impossible to stuff the ballots electronically. This can be done with the same sort of PKI encryption technology that protects your bank numbers online, and secure government documents.
The problem isn’t with the electronic ballots… its with the paper ones. Its bothersome to see so many technophobes in positions to make those sort of wild, accusations.
I disagree. There’s no audit trail in many of these machines (something you would also think would be standard). Not only is fraud harder to detect, it rapidly becomes impossible to determine where the fraud occured or even if fraud occured. There is also the level of effort required, manufacturing and stuffing 10,000 paper ballots is a huge undertaking. Adding 10,000 votes electronically takes no more people and no more time than adding 1 vote.
Absolutely, look at the recounts in Florida in 2000, or the accusations from various Democrats over the legitimacy of Bush’s victory in Ohio in 2004. Regardless of whether they have legitimate gripes, it has become what the public expects.
This is akin to complaining about officiating after a sports team loses a game. Regardless of whether or not the officials actually made mistakes, the losing team looks like a bunch of sore losers. The thing is, the democrats have had some crushing loses and they’ve complained about the officiating, so they look like sore losers. I imagine if the Republicans had lost those elections in similar fashion, and said similar things, they would now have that stigma instead.
This is the sort of news story that only serves to perpetuate that image. She’s embarassing the Democrats, and empowering the Republicans. I suppose that depends on your political leanings as to whether or not that’s a good or bad thing.
I disagree. The whole point of PKI is that I can unequivically prove the source of the ballot when its used to digitally sign it. Voter fraud would require a lot more than just openning a table of the ballots and adding 10,000 to the candidate you want to win. It would require access to the private keys (which I’m sure would be kept quite securely and punished quite severely if it were found to be compromised, and certainly would leave a trail when it was compromised), or illegal access and use of a voting machine. I think it would as easy, if not easier, to forge 10,000 paper ballots or gain illegal access to legitimate ones than either of the above scenarios.
If they’re not digitally signing the ballots, or using similar digital fingerprinting technology, then I would agree there is a problem and many heads should roll.
Here’s a blog article with some links summarizing security problems with Diebold machines.
The reason I have been deeply concerned about the current crop of voting machines for some time started with the reports of gaping security holes before the 2004 election. Specifically, the vote counting was done with a Microsoft Access database with the security options disabled, meaning anyone with access to that computer could change everything:
If true, that isn’t a subtle computer hole exploitable by only the most brilliant hackers, that’s a complete lack of security. I wouldn’t run a website with that level of security. Internal memos from Diebold apparently confirmed the findings, and indicated that they’d known about the security problems and simply covered them up instead of fixing them.
McKinney is a nutburger and a moron, but that doesn’t change the fact that everyone should be concerned about the security and validity of the current voting machines being used, even if your party is currently winning elections. Electronic voting can be done securely, but there is a lot of evidence that it isn’t being implemented that way right now.
I have no problem with a well-implemented, well-reviewed electronic voting system. Believe me, I’m by no means a technophobe. I’m a computer science student at MIT, for Christ’s sake.
However, the current systems out there are anything but well-implemented. The insecurity and design flaws in the most popular vendor’s (Diebold’s) systems are unbelievable. They are most certainly not using any sort of encryption for vote verification or auditing. There essentially is no audit trail.
These systems are still in use, although many states are getting the idea and scrapping them.
There are a number of sites out there with more information:
As I said, I have no problem with a well-implemented electronic voting system. I think such a system would be immensely more secure than paper methods. But what’s out there now is not well-implemented by any stretch of the imagination. I wouldn’t trust these machines to run a student government election.
As I said, I agree that the system you’re describing is quite secure. But it is nowhere close to what’s out there now.
Here is an article providing a detailed description of how to change the vote tally in an election and erase the evidence from the audit trail of the software that manages Diebold’s Accuvote machines.
The author managed to figure all this out because Diebold left a ZIP containing the source code for their applications on a public FTP Server. :rolleyes:
I don’t think that’s necessarily as insecure as they make it sound. If its only stored on one computer, with no network access, then you have to have physical access to it. This keeps anyone who has no way to even get into the same room from having access to the computer. Further, they mention “janitors” having physical access… so? We have janitors in my office too, I don’t worry abotu them gaining access to unencrypted, unsecured sensitive information on my computer, because the computer itself has its own security.
But you have the same problems with paper ballots. Anyone who can get into the same room with them could change a few, or drop in a few. Physical security is a problem in the case of both electronic and paper ballots. If you can’t trust the people that are supposed to have access to the computer, how can you trust them to count the paper ballots?
The two aren’t remotely comparable. Giving a single person the ability to change every vote in an entire county in a minute or two without any sort of record is quite different from someone being able to tamper with a few physical ballots. To change the results of an entire election with paper ballots requires a lot more time and effort, and will leave a significant amount of evidence.
This is not an issue of trust. Election workers should not be able to change election results, period.
I’m failing to see the issue here, from the article itself it says:
It does look like there might be a security hole, but I’m not seeing how it would affect the outcome if you can still run a detail report on the data in the table that can’t be tampered with. Maybe I’m misunderstanding.
And coming from McKinney, this behavior isn’t surprising. It really fits right in with what we know about her character.
