Butthole Bandits 7 and a throwback to Jim Crowe

[Kralizec]

The first election I voted in (EU parliament) was with a machine. I'm pretty sure that every election since I've voted on paper. Voting computers have been used in other parts of the countries for local elections, but the types that were used in the Netherlands so far were banned alltogether a couple of years ago.

If voting machines are potentially unsafe then they should not be used, period. Besides the fact that they're distrusted by so many people should be reason enough not to want them. Spending a little money and some extra dead trees is not an unreasonable expense for a fair and trusted election.

On a different note - over here you can sit on your couch and still receive the papers required for voting from your home town, assuming of course you're a registered resident. I don't understand why people should have to register themselves in order to vote.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Romney's incredibly slim financial interest is in solely in the voting machine company doing well, so his interest is in the machines being invulnerable to tampering. Investing in a company that has invested in a voting machine company is such an absurd thing to see as sinister. Assuming that conspiracy theory bradblog guy is correct about the financial connection in the first place...

“Not only does Solamere have no direct or indirect interest in this company [Hart Intercivic], Solamere and its partners have no ownership in this company, nor do they have any ownership in nor have made any investments in the fund that invested in the voting machine company,” the spokesman said.

So while Solamere does partner with HIG on investments, none of those investments involve Hart Intercivic. HIG may be simultaneously managing investments with both companies, but the investments are kept separate, as required by law. Put simply, Tagg Romney is not an “investor in a voting machine company.”

MY GUY uses a blind trust, it's blind I swear, so MY GUY would never vote on an issue that affects his pocket book because MY GUY uses a blind trust, yeah....

You really think it's plausible that Romney cares about making more money?

[Montmorency]

Romney's incredibly slim financial interest is in solely in the voting machine company doing well, so his interest is in the machines being invulnerable to tampering.

'Romney has no interest in tampering with voting machines because it's not his interest'?

“Not only does Solamere have no direct or indirect interest in this company [Hart Intercivic], Solamere and its partners have no ownership in this company, nor do they have any ownership in nor have made any investments in the fund that invested in the voting machine company,” the spokesman said.

So while Solamere does partner with HIG on investments, none of those investments involve Hart Intercivic. HIG may be simultaneously managing investments with both companies, but the investments are kept separate, as required by law. Put simply, Tagg Romney is not an “investor in a voting machine company.”

Certainly something in need of careful verification.

[Lemur]

Romney's incredibly slim financial interest is in solely in the voting machine company doing well

Yep, nothing suspicious here, so let's get back to the real threat: in-person vote fraud!

Voting machine provider Hart Intercivic will be counting the votes in various counties in the crucial swing states of Ohio and Colorado and elsewhere throughout the country come Nov. 6 — even though it has extensive corporate ties to the Mitt Romney camp, and even though a study commissioned by the state of Ohio has labeled its voting system a “failure” when it comes to protecting the integrity of elections. [...]

Four of the HIG directors, Tony Tamer, John Bolduc, Douglas Berman and Brian D. Schwartz, are Romney bundlers along with former Bain and HIG manager Brian Shortsleeve, and, according to Opensecrets.org, a website run by the Center for Responsive Politics, HIG Capital has contributed $338,000 to the Romney campaign this year. [...]

The Hart system performed “poorly” because unauthorized individuals could gain access to memory cards and “easily tamper” with core voting data, and Hart scored a “zero” on the 12-step baseline comparison because it “failed to meet any of the 12 basic best practices” necessary to have a secure system. [...]

The Project Everest report asserted that the Hart system “lacks the technical protections necessary to guarantee a trustworthy election under operational conditions.” Ultimately, it concluded with words that may prove haunting come Nov. 6: “The vulnerabilities and features of the system work in concert to provide ‘numerous opportunities to manipulate election outcomes or cast doubt on legitimate election activities … virtually every ballot, vote, election result, and audit log is ‘forgeable or otherwise manipulatable by an attacker with even brief access to the voting systems.’ ”

[Strike For The South]

Amusing, but you might want to have a serious think about the implications of private companies holding the keys to our voting process. Imagining plausible conflicts of interest will not strain your brain.

ok then I will also believe that Bill Ayers controls Obamas presidency from his basement

Ghosts, ghosts everywhere

[Lemur]

ok then I will also believe that Bill Ayers controls Obamas presidency from his basement

You're always funny, Strike, but you're not normally dense.

Read up. Consider the problems inherent in handing the keys to elections to private companies. Really, this ain't rocket science, nor is it tinfoil hat land.

People are scummy and will quickly seize any advantage. This is not a Republican or a Democrat thing, it's a human nature thing. You simply do not leave the cookie jar unguarded.

[Strike For The South]

You're always funny, Strike, but you're not normally dense.

Read up. Consider the problems inherent in handing the keys to elections to private companies. Really, this ain't rocket science, nor is it tinfoil hat land.

People are scummy and will quickly seize any advantage. This is not a Republican or a Democrat thing, it's a human nature thing. You simply do not leave the cookie jar unguarded.

The more troubling thing to me is that this system failed the saftey tests and everyone seems apathetic.

I'm not interested in playing six degrees of Romney, the man has money everywhere and could be tied to every major company in America if you looked hard enough. Hell my emaciated 401k probably has investments I would find morally iffy. Romney doesn't know what investments his investments make, nor his son.

But for a moment, let's assume this is true. There is enough democratic power in Ohio to at least call for an investigation on the merits of these crappy machines. So why not? If they are failing election tests, coupled with their supposed handlers, why is this story still on the fringes?

[Lemur]

If they are failing election tests, coupled with their supposed handlers, why is this story still on the fringes?

I don't know that Salon, CNN Money, and Ars Technica are what you'd call "fringe." And apparently many states lack the money to switch away from the private companies. For now.

Ernest Zirkle was puzzled. The resident of Fairfield Township in Cumberland County, NJ, ran for a seat on his local Democratic Executive Committee on June 7, 2011. The official results showed him earning only nine votes, compared to 34 votes for the winning candidate.

But at least 28 people told Zirkle they voted for him. So he and his wife—who also ran for an open seat and lost—challenged the result in court. Eventually, a county election official admitted the result was due to a programming error. A security expert from Princeton was called in to examine the machines and make sure no foul play had occurred. Unfortunately, when he examined the equipment on August 17, 2011, he found someone deleted key files the previous day, making it impossible to investigate the cause of the malfunction. A new election was held on September 27, and the Zirkles won. [...]

In 2008, 16 voters in West Virginia "reported vote flipping on the state's touchscreen direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines. All reported that when they selected Obama, the machine switched their vote to McCain." That same year in seven Texas counties that collectively used voting machines from three different vendors, voters selected the straight-ticket Democratic option only to have their votes changed to straight-ticket Republican.

The errors don't stop there. A similar problem was reported in Craven County, North Carolina, in 2010. A technical glitch in Butler County, Ohio, caused 200 votes to go uncounted in 2008. In Pennington County, South Dakota, in 2009, a computer responsible for tabulating the vote totals from multiple individual voting machines malfunctioned. It added thousands of imaginary votes to the total. (Luckily, the mistake was caught after election officials noticed that the total was inconsistent with the figures reported by individual machines.)

Joe Hall, an e-voting expert at the Center for Democracy and Technology, tells us these kinds of glitches are unsurprising given the decentralized way the United States organizes its elections.

[Major Robert Dump]

I went to vote early today, but got the polling machine mixed up with a Red Box, and when I tried to vote for Obama I ended up getting some Tyler Perry movie about a fat grandma

[Lemur]

This demonstrates why in-person voting fraud is maybe the stupidest idea ever (and why no self-respecting criminal enterprise would use it at scale)

Investigators today arrested a Southern Nevada woman suspected of trying to vote twice this week at two different polling locations.

Roxanne Rubin was taken into custody as she arrived for work at the Riviera hotel-casino, investigators said. Rubin, 56, is a registered Republican who lives in Henderson, according to the Clark County Registrar.

Rubin allegedly cast a vote Monday at the Anthem Community Center in Henderson. Later that day, she tried to vote a second time at an early voting location on Eastern Avenue, investigators said.

When Rubin arrived at the second location, a poll worker conducted a routine database check and found Rubin had already voted. When confronted by the poll worker, Rubin denied having voted and claimed the database used by the poll worker was wrong. [...]

Rubin was booked into the Clark County Detention Center on one felony count of voting twice in the same election.

[Tellos Athenaios]

I don't get this:

As if databases are always right. And why are the feds involved, this is obviously a local matter. And why is this a felony? Who was at all harmed??

And...

I really am amazed that someone would be so stupid as to try to vote twice in this fashion given that Nevada does check identity for just this reason.

In California, however, it is trivial to vote multiple times. All that is needed is for someone go to a polling place, give the name of a valid voter in that precinct, and then sign the roll. No ID is required, and if asked for the request can be refused. The poll worker MUST let you vote.

Given that there is usually about 40% of the population who do not show up, there are good odds you can pick a name from the rolls and get away with this.

Note that the issue of citizenship or being registered doesn't even come into play.

[CrossLOPER]

49.99

I admire your commitment to the cause.

[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.

[Lemur]

Well thank goodness there are Tea Party groups ready to monitor elections and keep things ... uh ... nevermind ...

Yesterday we reported that True the Vote was attempting to place observers at precincts in Central Ohio, focusing on African American districts. We also noted that there might be some problems with the forms they submitted to the Franklin County Board of Elections (FCBOE).

The FCBOE met today and determined that True the Vote had likely falsified the forms submitted for general election observers. The new observer forms, filed over the past few days by True the Vote representative (and Hilliard Tea Party Member) Jan Loar, used candidate signatures copied from a previous set of forms filed in early October

All but one (Scott Rupert, an independent for U.S. Senate) of the six candidates whose names appeared on the original form had withdrawn permission to use their signatures prior to the submission of today’s forms. During the BOE meeting Candidate Terri Jamison spoke up to say her name was “forged” on the latest round of forms.

The form for appointing observers reads ‘election falsification is a 5th degree felony’.

[Lemur]

As I have posted elsewhere, now is the time to talk seriously about voter ID and reforming/abolishing e-voting. Now. Not leading up to a national election.

If anyone in power makes an honest gesture toward vote reform now, I will be impressed.

Before? Not so much.

[Lemur]

An apt graphic:

[Papewaio]

So vote with your money seems to be the way to go.

[lars573]

Makes me so glad that when I vote it's on a piece of paper, that by law I'm required to put into the box myself.

[Lemur]

Florida, online absentee ballot requests, a primary election: What could possibly go wrong?

An attempt to illegally obtain absentee ballots in Florida last year is the first known case in the U.S. of a cyberattack against an online election system, according to computer scientists and lawyers working to safeguard voting security.

The case involved more than 2,500 “phantom requests” for absentee ballots, apparently sent to the Miami-Dade County elections website using a computer program, according to a grand jury report on problems in the Aug. 14 primary election. It is not clear whether the bogus requests were an attempt to influence a specific race, test the system or simply interfere with the voting. Because of the enormous number of requests – and the fact that most were sent from a small number of computer IP addresses in Ireland, England, India and other overseas locations – software used by the county flagged them and elections workers rejected them.

Computer experts say the case exposes the danger of putting states’ voting systems online – whether that’s allowing voters to register or actually vote. [...]

The primary election in Miami-Dade County in August 2012 involved state and local races along with U.S. Senate and congressional contests (see a sample ballot here). The Miami Herald, which first reported the irregularities, said the fraudulent requests for ballots targeted Democratic voters in the 26th Congressional District and Republicans in Florida House districts 103 and 112. None of the races’ outcomes could have been altered by that number of phantom ballots, the Herald said.

Overseas “anonymizers” -- proxy servers that make Internet activity untraceable -- kept the originating computers’ location secret and prevented law enforcement from figuring out who was responsible, according to the grand jury report, issued in December. The state attorney’s office closed the case in January without identifying a suspect.

[HoreTore]

Is there any good reason at all for a single election to be done in a zillion different ways?

Why on earth isn't the US election process standardized yet? How is that so hard to do?

[Lemur]

Virginia man pleads guilty to forging Newt Gingrich primary signatures

A Virginia man pleaded guilty to charges that he forged primary campaign ballots for Newt Gingrich during the 2012 Republican primary, to ensure that Gingrich got on the state’s ballot.

WVIR-TV reports:

In December of 2011 Newt Gingrich needed 10,000 signatures to get his name on the Virginia presidential primary ballot. Adam Ward, 28, collected more than 11,000 signatures according to prosecutors. More than 4,000 signatures could not be verified by investigators.

Tuesday night, Ward pleaded guilty to 36 counts of voter fraud and perjury in Augusta Circuit Court.

[Papewaio]

Shouldn't that be 7k charges.

I know this sounds weird to some but in a republic or a democracy surely vote fraud should be treated equivalent of perjury.

Perjury is lying to one branch of government. Voter fraud is lying to another. Why the soft touch?

[a completely inoffensive name]

The saddest thing about the whole thing is that no rational man would have done such a thing unless he genuinely thought that Newt Gingrich had a legitimate chance of being president in the first place.