Butthole Bandits 7 and a throwback to Jim Crowe

[Greyblades]

I admire your commitment to the cause.

Again, Who the heck pays for porn anymore?

[Lemur]

I wish the voting machines would just hurry up and tell us who won.

Diebold, then one of the primary manufacturers of voting machines, had left the 40,000 files that made up its Global Election Management System (GEMS) on a publicly accessible website, entirely unprotected. Diebold was never able to explain how its proprietary tabulation program ended up in such an exposed position. Harris downloaded the files, and programmers worldwide pounced, probing the code for weaknesses. [...]

GEMS turned out to be a vote rigger’s dream. According to Harris’s analysis, it could be hacked, remotely or on-site, using any off-the-shelf version of Microsoft Access, and password protection was missing for supervisor functions. Not only could multiple users gain access to the system after only one had logged in, but unencrypted audit logs allowed any trace of vote rigging to be wiped from the record.

The public unmasking of GEMS by an average citizen (who was not a programmer herself) served as a belated wake-up call to the world’s leading computer-security experts, who finally turned their attention to America’s most widely used voting systems. Damning reports have since been issued by researchers from Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Rice, and Stanford Universities, the Brennan Center for Justice, and the Government Accountability Office (none of them institutions hospitable to “tinfoil hat” conspiracy theorists).

[Tellos Athenaios]

Microsoft Access??



Never was the phrase "nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure" more appropriate.

[drone]

Don't forget, Diebold makes ATMs, so they should know how to secure these machines properly.

[Tellos Athenaios]

ATMs are not really the pinnacle of security. At least software tends to be off the shelf components (i.e. Windows du jour, plus connection with the bank's DB) and stuff never gets patched, plus runs outdated standards. For instance a late 90's ATM almost certainly uses outdated crypto.

[Lemur]

Yeah, and then there's the issue of screen calibration. Which should be a no-brainer. But when you combine corrupt businesses with incompetent local election officials ... why, nothing can go wrong!



Now, as geeks, we can all look at that and say, "Screen calibration. Duh." But for the seventy-year-old in the booth? Gah. Double-gah. Triple-gah.

As I said to Strike elsewhere, we need to re-work electronic voting from the mother-loving ground up. Or toss it in the rubbish bin for a while. Something. Anything. The flaws, incompetence, and vulnerabilities in e-voting as currently implemented are intolerable.

[Lemur]

And damn those dirty Democrats for trying to tamper with the ... uh ... nevermind ...

An election worker in Oregon is facing a criminal investigation for allegedly altering multiple ballots to benefit Republican candidates.

In a press release on Monday, Clackamas County spokesperson Tim Heider said that 55-year-old Deanna Swenson had been “relieved of duty immediately after the alleged ballot tampering was discovered.”

Swenson, who was registered as a Republican, was accused of filling in a Republican straight ticket on ballots where voters did not specify a choice. [...]

“At this point, it is unclear how many ballots the employee at issue had access to, or what will be done with those ballots,” the sheriff’s office said on Monday.

At a Monday emergency meeting, officials in Clackamas County announced that the altered ballots would not be counted. Since ballots were anonymous, disenfranchised voters would not be given a chance to re-cast their votes.

[drone]

Yeah, and then there's the issue of screen calibration. Which should be a no-brainer. But when you combine corrupt businesses with incompetent local election officials ... why, nothing can go wrong!



Now, as geeks, we can all look at that and say, "Screen calibration. Duh." But for the seventy-year-old in the booth? Gah. Double-gah. Triple-gah.

A true geek would have pushed Jill Stein, to see if Obama gets checked. If yes, calibration issue, if no, nefarious software.