How to rig an election- Source code revealed.

In My Humble Opinion
1

I grabbed this off of another site. The poster was the author of it.

Just trying to get the word out.

2

This isn’t particularly new information. Ever since kiosk/internet/phone voting has been proposed the IT, programming, and civil liberty communities have been shredding every proposal. I wrote a short essay on it for a CS Ethics class and the arguments boil down to this:

  1. Open: The election system is based on the principle that everyone can watch the process. From registration to the final count. The companies offering thier systems are keeping thier systems closed. The more eyes watching the more mistakes are caught and the harder it is to cheat.

  2. Verifiable: The voter has to be able to verfiy that thier votes were accounted for properly. So does the government. For most systems this simply requires adding a reciept printer. In the event of a technical failure, these votes can be counted and verified by hand.

  3. Secure: The voter should be able to vote knowing that thier vote was counted, but is also not tracable to thier identity. This is why phone and internet systems have not caught on, you can’t verify who is on the other end. Tapping phones is childs play and internet activity is only moderately difficult to track and alter.

  4. Cost: Many first world countires still count votes by hand, the two month delay between election and innauguration accounts for this. Canada has a full hand count within 2 days. Its arguable that there isn’t any need to update when the old system works just fine.

3

They’re programming it in Access !!! :smack:

4

Australia also counts votes by hand, and in my experience the overall result is usually pretty well determined by late at night on the day of the ballot, or very early the next morning. True, the results in some very close electorates might not be known for a couple of days, but for the most part everyone knows the overall result very quickly.

I’m not luddite, but i’ve always been a bit worried by the possibilities for election-rigging or basic error in computer voting systems. What i think should happen is that the machines should spit out a small printout every time someone votes. The voter can check the printouot to make sure it accurately reflects his/her decisions, and then place it in a voting box. These printouts could be kept by the authorities in case there are concerns about technical failure or procedural irregularities arising from the use of computers.

5

The whole problem with the electronic voting, and just reporting in general, is that it is too easy to leave a backdoor in the program. And as we all know, anything can be hacked.

6

Any security expert can tell you, the only truly unbreakable cipher is one-time pad. Everything else can theoretically be broken. All it boils down to is a cost-benefit analysis.

7

I disagree. Not on the issue of cost-benefit.

A one time pad. =needs to be defined. If you leave your info up via. windows, ftp you can/will be eaten.

Any thing is crackable. Goes right to the source. You need to get the program’s attention, linux, windows, whatever. Once it responds the rest is doable. (sp)

Test me. I am not a hacker. It is all able to be traced, and broke down.

8

Try google or do some research on “one-time pad.” It is a way that secret agents used to encode sensitive information. The reason behind that is the encryption key is never used more than once.

9

I did and have heard of it before.

LINK

In everything the potential for a crack exists. Even if it has not been found yet. (the weakness can always be written into the code.)

10

Why am I locking this thread?

  1. You provided the entire article instead of a short exerpt and a link.
  2. Your post had links that provided instructions on how to carry out illegal activity.
  3. You gave no opinion of your own on the matter.

Even if you hadn’t messed up on the first three points, the thread should have been posted in MPSIMS.