# Oprah's sees her own vote dropped by the voting machine!
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oprahs-sees-her-own-vote-dropped-by-the-voting-machine/470696
**Category:** The BBQ Pit
**Created:** [November 2, 2008, 8:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oprahs-sees-her-own-vote-dropped-by-the-voting-machine/470696 "2008-11-02T08:08:58Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Crocodiles\_And\_Boulevards](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crocodiles_And_Boulevards)
#### Post date: [November 2, 2008, 8:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oprahs-sees-her-own-vote-dropped-by-the-voting-machine/470696/1 "2008-11-02T08:08:58Z")
Amusing, but also sad:
[http://www.ctyme.com/ophra.jtml?p=6603](http://www.ctyme.com/ophra.jtml?p=6603)
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### Author:  [@Crocodiles\_And\_Boulevards](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crocodiles_And_Boulevards)
#### Post date: [November 2, 2008, 8:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oprahs-sees-her-own-vote-dropped-by-the-voting-machine/470696/2 "2008-11-02T08:10:03Z")
Oops, hit the button too soon!
Now if Oprah can’t reform voting, who can?!
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### Author:  [@PunditLisa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PunditLisa)
#### Post date: [November 2, 2008, 10:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oprahs-sees-her-own-vote-dropped-by-the-voting-machine/470696/3 "2008-11-02T10:44:24Z")
I don’t think a perfect voting system exists. If you use paper ballots, you risk the chance that some poll worker will lose/toss/alter them. If you use electronic ballots, you risk the IT person programming in some code to miscount/drop/add votes.
The one Oprah used (and we use here in Ohio) seems to me to be the most foolproof. It electronically counts your vote but also prints out a paper slip so that the vote can be hand counted, if necessary. I’m not sure what else counties/voters can do to help ensure the validity of an election, but if you have any ideas, I’m sure they’d love to hear them.
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### Author:  [@matt\_mcl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/matt_mcl)
#### Post date: [November 2, 2008, 2:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oprahs-sees-her-own-vote-dropped-by-the-voting-machine/470696/4 "2008-11-02T14:25:42Z")
> [@PunditLisa](#):
>
> I don’t think a perfect voting system exists. If you use paper ballots, you risk the chance that some poll worker will lose/toss/alter them. If you use electronic ballots, you risk the IT person programming in some code to miscount/drop/add votes.
It seems to me that it would be much easier to _surreptitiously_ alter a vote count on a computer system than it would be with pencil and paper ballots, where (at least in the case of Canadian elections) you have two poll clerks (nominated by different parties or hired by Elections Canada), the count can be observed by party scrutineers, and the voter places his or her own ballot into the sealed ballot box. I’ve scrutinized the count in two or three elections and I didn’t see a point at which votes could be discarded without someone around to raise a stink.
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### Author:  [@WhyNot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WhyNot)
#### Post date: [November 2, 2008, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oprahs-sees-her-own-vote-dropped-by-the-voting-machine/470696/5 "2008-11-02T15:01:05Z")
Well, the guy with that website sure has found a cause, hasn’t he? My computer’s on a partial strike right now and won’t show videos - has anyone figured out exactly why he thinks a paper verified electronic ballot isn’t verifiable and that “even if those “paper trails” were 100% hand-counted (and they are almost never counted at all, in any case) the hack would likely never be revealed and the “paper trails” would match up perfectly with the hacked internal numbers.”? He keeps saying it, but doesn’t explain \*why \*that is, and I’m stumped. Is it just because people won’t look at their paper slip and make sure it says what they intended?
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### Author:  [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)
#### Post date: [November 2, 2008, 3:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oprahs-sees-her-own-vote-dropped-by-the-voting-machine/470696/6 "2008-11-02T15:16:18Z")
> [@WhyNot](#):
>
> Well, the guy with that website sure has found a cause, hasn’t he? My computer’s on a partial strike right now and won’t show videos - has anyone figured out exactly why he thinks a paper verified electronic ballot isn’t verifiable and that “even if those “paper trails” were 100% hand-counted (and they are almost never counted at all, in any case) the hack would likely never be revealed and the “paper trails” would match up perfectly with the hacked internal numbers.”? He keeps saying it, but doesn’t explain \*why \*that is, and I’m stumped. Is it just because people won’t look at their paper slip and make sure it says what they intended?
It would be no big deal to program the paper to match the vote while throwing some percent of the electronic tally to a different candidate. If the paper is retained to be used to audit against the electronic tally, the fraud, (or, at least, the discrepancy), would be discovered, but in the cases where no paper matching is performed, the fraud would go unreported.
OTOH, any code employed to make that happen should be easily discovered by any competent auditor (although there are ways to obscure it if the auditor is tired), so it seems unlikely to be employed.
I doubt that the web page author has anything like a serious complaint, but I wanted to note that his scenario is techically (if not at all realistically) possible.
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### Author:  [@dgrdfd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dgrdfd)
#### Post date: [November 2, 2008, 3:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oprahs-sees-her-own-vote-dropped-by-the-voting-machine/470696/7 "2008-11-02T15:19:09Z")
> [@PunditLisa](#):
>
> If you use electronic ballots, you risk the IT person programming in some code to miscount/drop/add votes.
An IT person is the person at work who keeps your network and email running. A software engineer or computer scientist would be the person doing coding for a voting machine.
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### Author:  [@WhyNot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WhyNot)
#### Post date: [November 2, 2008, 3:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oprahs-sees-her-own-vote-dropped-by-the-voting-machine/470696/8 "2008-11-02T15:28:24Z")
> [@tomndebb](#):
>
> It would be no big deal to program the paper to match the vote while throwing some percent of the electronic tally to a different candidate. If the paper is retained to be used to audit against the electronic tally, the fraud, (or, at least, the discrepancy), would be discovered, but in the cases where no paper matching is performed, the fraud would go unreported.
Yes, I get that, but what the (slightly rabid) webmaster keeps saying is that EVEN IF a paper trail audit is done, this nefarious scheme will not be revealed. That somehow the paper trail is as hacked as the electronic votes. That’s the part I’m scratching my head about.
The article linked in the OP also links to [this page](http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6369), which contains the following claims:
> [@](#):
>
> The Computer Security Group at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) has released a short, chilling video demonstrating how a single person can hack an election on a touch-screen voting system — even one with a so-called “Voter Verifiable Paper Trail” (VVPAT) added to it — in such a way that it is highly unlikely that the manipulation would ever be detected by either the public or election officials.
> [@](#):
>
> Moreover, the viral hack would not be discovered by pre-election “Logic and Accuracy” testing — in cases were election officials actually bother to perform such tests prior to elections — nor would it likely be discovered even in the event of a complete, 100% post-election audit of the touch-screen “paper-trail” records.
> [@](#):
>
> A 2006 HBO documentary, Hacking Democracy, showed a paper-based, Diebold optical-scan tabulator being manipulated in a mock election which flipped the results reported by the system.
> [@](#):
>
> As the video shows, post-election examinations or audits of touch-screen paper-trail systems hacked in this way, would not easily — if at all — reveal the manipulation.
I just can’t watch the videos right now and wondered if anyone else had.
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### Author:  [@Szlater](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Szlater)
#### Post date: [November 2, 2008, 3:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oprahs-sees-her-own-vote-dropped-by-the-voting-machine/470696/9 "2008-11-02T15:28:58Z")
> [@WhyNot](#):
>
> Well, the guy with that website sure has found a cause, hasn’t he? My computer’s on a partial strike right now and won’t show videos - has anyone figured out exactly why he thinks a paper verified electronic ballot isn’t verifiable and that “even if those “paper trails” were 100% hand-counted (and they are almost never counted at all, in any case) the hack would likely never be revealed and the “paper trails” would match up perfectly with the hacked internal numbers.”? He keeps saying it, but doesn’t explain \*why \*that is, and I’m stumped. Is it just because people won’t look at their paper slip and make sure it says what they intended?
The video shows a way to make the paper printout tally with what the voter intended when the voter checks it, but then _after_ the voter walks away from the booth, the malicious code voids that paper receipt and alters the vote and the new paper receipt matches the altered vote. So, when they examine the paper trail it tallies with the altered votes.
The changes made to the machine by the researchers were not especially hard to do and were actually quite difficult to detect (because the code “knows” when it’s being verified and when it’s actually counting proper votes so acts correctly during verification and only alters actual votes).
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### Author:  [@WhyNot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WhyNot)
#### Post date: [November 2, 2008, 3:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oprahs-sees-her-own-vote-dropped-by-the-voting-machine/470696/10 "2008-11-02T15:43:02Z")
> [@Szlater](#):
>
> The video shows a way to make the paper printout tally with what the voter intended when the voter checks it, but then _after_ the voter walks away from the booth, the malicious code voids that paper receipt and alters the vote and the new paper receipt matches the altered vote. So, when they examine the paper trail it tallies with the altered votes.
>
> The changes made to the machine by the researchers were not especially hard to do and were actually quite difficult to detect (because the code “knows” when it’s being verified and when it’s actually counting proper votes so acts correctly during verification and only alters actual votes).
Huh. So, yeah, not much of a paper trail. I was envisioning something like a paper receipt, which one could read, verify and hand to an election official, who stamps it and puts in in a big box just in case they need to do a manual count or something.
Can you tell I haven’t voted in years? 😃
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### Author:  [@SmartAleq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SmartAleq)
#### Post date: [November 2, 2008, 4:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oprahs-sees-her-own-vote-dropped-by-the-voting-machine/470696/11 "2008-11-02T16:58:40Z")
**WhyNot,** I wrote a [DailyKos diary](http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/9/9/165047/8669/395/592526) re the Sequoia Systems voting machine hacks and the UCSB video. The problem is that any of those machines can be hacked with software small enough to fit on a USB thumb drive and the hack can be tailored to change the electronic vote while still giving a correct paper trail. Since nobody wants to go through the paper trails of millions of votes hand tabulating whether or not they all match the electronic vote and since the voters don’t get a hard copy themselves to take away, which could then be used by outside parties to spot verify whether or not the electronic results seem reasonable and form a basis for challenging the results, it’s tough to establish that fraud has taken place and it tends to get handwaved off as user error.
For being in charge of something so important, these voting machines are disgustingly easy to hack. I can say with no hyperbole whatsoever that any of our computers as well as our home wireless network have infinitely better security than one of those machines. What makes it even worse is that in many states poll workers are allowed to take the machines home over the weekend before the election, thereby placing them in totally unsecured areas for extensive period of time. All you need to hack one is about a minute with a thumb drive and bob’s your uncle.
People can wibble about paper ballots all they like, but it’s goddamned hard to either “lose” hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper (all you have to do to prevent this is to keep an eye on the ballot collection areas and look for people carrying suspicious truckloads of boxes out) or to mysteriously add in more votes. In Oregon we do all elections as vote by mail–the Secretary of State’s office sends out our ballots, which are simple Scantron forms that even morons know how to use, with a secrecy envelope and a bar coded outer envelope with the return address printed on the back. The SoS knows how many ballots are sent out and how many come back. We mark the Scantrons, put them in the inner envelopes and put those in the mailers, with our signatures on the back–no signature, vote doesn’t get counted. We can either mail them in or place them into secure drop boxes at any election office or public library–I always drop mine off because I don’t trust the Post Orifice, nor do I keep stamps around. Most of us smart folk make photocopies of our ballots and signed envelopes, just for our records.
At the election offices, the envelopes with signatures are scanned and verified and an electronic record is made of them and they’re tallied against the records for the mailed out ballots. The Scantrons are removed from the inner envelopes and placed in trays which are fed into the tabulating machines at poll close on Election Day–results are done within a couple hours. The only downcheck to the process is the large amount of paper used, but I can live with that. It’s simple, it’s very hard to gimmick and in ten years we’ve had no significant problems with it. We don’t have issues with opposing parties restricting access to polling places, long lines, restricted early voting hours, inadequate numbers of voting machines, malfunctioning machines, none of it. Why this hasn’t been adopted nationwide I’ll never know.
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### Author:  [@DanBlather](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DanBlather)
#### Post date: [November 2, 2008, 5:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oprahs-sees-her-own-vote-dropped-by-the-voting-machine/470696/12 "2008-11-02T17:09:56Z")
> [@SmartAleq](#):
>
> **WhyNot,** I wrote a [DailyKos diary](http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/9/9/165047/8669/395/592526) re the Sequoia Systems voting machine hacks and the UCSB video. The problem is that any of those machines can be hacked with software small enough to fit on a USB thumb drive.
Small enough to fit on a USB thumb drive? That’s like saying a person small enough to fit in a warehouse.
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### Author:  [@SmartAleq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SmartAleq)
#### Post date: [November 2, 2008, 9:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oprahs-sees-her-own-vote-dropped-by-the-voting-machine/470696/13 "2008-11-02T21:17:14Z")
> [@DanBlather](#):
>
> Small enough to fit on a USB thumb drive? That’s like saying a person small enough to fit in a warehouse.
Well, true dat, but I keep thinking of the darned things as having a fairly small amount of storage on them, but I’ve seen them up to 12GB so I really should rethink my mode of expression! Mostly what I’m trying to convey is “requires no expensive or bulky equipment, one guy in shorts and a t-shirt with ten bucks worth of thumb drive could screw over multiple voting machines in a short period of time.”
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### Author:  [@Dangerosa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dangerosa)
#### Post date: [November 2, 2008, 9:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oprahs-sees-her-own-vote-dropped-by-the-voting-machine/470696/14 "2008-11-02T21:32:04Z")
> [@SmartAleq](#):
>
> Well, true dat, but I keep thinking of the darned things as having a fairly small amount of storage on them, but I’ve seen them up to 12GB so I really should rethink my mode of expression! Mostly what I’m trying to convey is “requires no expensive or bulky equipment, one guy in shorts and a t-shirt with ten bucks worth of thumb drive could screw over multiple voting machines in a short period of time.”
And, thanks to the wonder of the internet - you don’t even need to be able to program the hack yourself. You can just find one someone else has written…
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### Author:  [@Apollyon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Apollyon)
#### Post date: [November 2, 2008, 11:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oprahs-sees-her-own-vote-dropped-by-the-voting-machine/470696/15 "2008-11-02T23:37:35Z")
> [@SmartAleq](#):
>
> Mostly what I’m trying to convey is “requires no expensive or bulky equipment, one guy in shorts and a t-shirt with ten bucks worth of thumb drive could screw over multiple voting machines in a short period of time.”
If the voting machine has a user-accessible USB port (and where “user” does not equal “engineer with special equipment and a key to the safe”) then you’ve got a pretty big problem I think.
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### Author:  [@gonzomax](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gonzomax)
#### Post date: [November 2, 2008, 11:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oprahs-sees-her-own-vote-dropped-by-the-voting-machine/470696/16 "2008-11-02T23:56:07Z")
Every body knows you can make mistakes with pencil and paper,but to really fuck things up, it requires a computer.
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### Author:  [@ParentalAdvisory](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ParentalAdvisory)
#### Post date: [November 3, 2008, 2:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oprahs-sees-her-own-vote-dropped-by-the-voting-machine/470696/17 "2008-11-03T02:40:20Z")
> [@PunditLisa](#):
>
> I don’t think a perfect voting system exists.
I’ve heard this before and refuse to believe it. I have no proof, but I have a feeling that the block is being done by public companies who actually make the electronic voting machines. Otherwise, we would have one perfect machine that is reliable. Intead, we have handful of companies who engineer and program these machines, with each wanting their system and software to be proprietary. This would leave a lot of room for “error” if you ask me. Or a backdoor “option” for a malicious software engineer.
> [@PunditLisa](#):
>
> If you use paper ballots, you risk the chance that some poll worker will lose/toss/alter them. If you use electronic ballots, you risk the IT person programming in some code to miscount/drop/add votes.
We need one machine, and one machine only, developed by the government. Trust that I hear what you’re saying, “trust the government” you ask? Yes. The trust will be earned with the software used, to be open source, for all to view and scrutinize for all aspects of the machine. It cannot be that difficult to implement something like this, but it can be difficult if you’re infringing on the right of the “people” to develop their own machines to sell for a profit in a “free market”. Hence, no real government voting device.
Again, not sure if this is what’s going on, but there’s nothing else to explain why there doesn’t exist one reliable machine that people trust to use. I mean, what system do they use for people to file their taxes? I bet theirs not one systematic error in that process (plenty of room for human error though), yet we all trust that it does what it’s supposed do, and we eFile billions of dollars along with individual circumstances involving complex math on our tax forms, and somehow it works. And I’m sure that the IRS trusts that it’s accurate too.
We need one eVote machine for all fifty states. It might cost money, but better than costing someone an election they rightfully won.
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### Author:  [@PunditLisa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PunditLisa)
#### Post date: [November 3, 2008, 9:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oprahs-sees-her-own-vote-dropped-by-the-voting-machine/470696/18 "2008-11-03T09:43:05Z")
> [@ParentalAdvisory](#):
>
> I’ve heard this before and refuse to believe it. I have no proof, but I have a feeling that the block is being done by public companies who actually make the electronic voting machines.
Ahh, the old right wing conspiracy theory.
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### Author:  [@catsix](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/catsix)
#### Post date: [November 3, 2008, 2:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oprahs-sees-her-own-vote-dropped-by-the-voting-machine/470696/19 "2008-11-03T14:57:08Z")
> [@Apollyon](#):
>
> If the voting machine has a user-accessible USB port (and where “user” does not equal “engineer with special equipment and a key to the safe”) then you’ve got a pretty big problem I think.
The ones in the PA precincts I have voted in are just tablet PCs running the Diebold voting software and mounted on a portable podium that can be folded up for storage. Since they aren’t really anything special in terms of hardware, they have the same I/O as any other tablet PC.
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### Author:  [@SmartAleq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SmartAleq)
#### Post date: [November 3, 2008, 3:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oprahs-sees-her-own-vote-dropped-by-the-voting-machine/470696/20 "2008-11-03T15:44:33Z")
> [@ParentalAdvisory](#):
>
> I’ve heard this before and refuse to believe it. I have no proof, but I have a feeling that the block is being done by public companies who actually make the electronic voting machines. Otherwise, we would have one perfect machine that is reliable. Intead, we have handful of companies who engineer and program these machines, with each wanting their system and software to be proprietary. This would leave a lot of room for “error” if you ask me. Or a backdoor “option” for a malicious software engineer.
You know, people scoff and mutter about tinfoil hats, but it has been confirmed from reliable sources within the company that Sequoia Systems deliberately sent a batch of [defective paper ballots](http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/08/sequoia-voting-.html) to Florida for the 2000 election precisely because they were trying to convince the county governments to invest in electronic voting machines and it was in their interests to “prove” that the electronic (and expensive) machines were “better” and “more reliable” than paper ballots.
> [@](#):
>
> Rather and his producers spoke with several former workers of Sequoia who revealed that in 2000 the company changed the paper stock it used for punch cards to paper made by Boise Cascade and that they knew before the election that the punch cards that Sequoia was producing would cause problems. In fact, pre-election testing by Sequoia showed that the cards were not punching cleanly and that dangling chads were going to be a likely problem in the election.
It is absolutely NOT in the best interest of the American people that for-profit companies whose partisan loyalties may be unknown and undisclosed be left in charge of making, programming and selling voting machines. Period, end of story. [Remember Diebold and Ohio in 2004?](http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.htm)
I like open source, too–there’s something about having your code reviewed and modified by thousands of programmers all over the world who don’t have personal agendas and whose only stake in the project is to make it work better that tends to produce good, clean, strong, virus resistant, efficient software. Any time I’m given a choice between proprietary and open source software I go with the open source every time and I’ve never been disappointed. There’s something about paying fucktons of money to get back buggy, backdoor riddled compromised systems that puts me in mind of being forced to kiss the rapist afterward…
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