Princeton University Exposes Diebold Flaws

[hue]

Say NO to Diebold!!

[2naSalit]

1. Just as I suspected.

Any questions?

No?

Good, now go demand paper ballots. Hand counting may upset those demanding instant results but hand counting will create jobs as well as ensure a fair election.

Class dismissed.

And Thank You, hue!

A Kazillllion recs.

[bvar22]

3. I have questions.

I was fascinated by the video, but am doubtful that this physical manipulation can go unnoticed for thousands upon thousands of voting machines.

I am a volunteer firefighter in our rural district. Our firehouse also serves as a polling station.
Usually, seven machines are delivered the night before an election, and left stacked on the floor unattended until the poll workers show in the morning.

The machines are untended, and guarded solely by a locked door. I CAN see someone getting in, and physically manipulating the machines, even taking some apart to install the code...one time, two times, three times, but eventually, this election burglar WILL be caught by one of our firefighters going to the station at 3AM to obtain equipment for fighting fires.

It is not uncommon for one of us to be at the station working on a truck or our gear at 3AM.
If any of us see an unknown vehicle stop at or parked at our station, we ALWAYS stop and check it out. (An unknown sneaking around our Fire Station in the middle of the night will probably get shot. I don't carry, but almost every other fire fighter does.)
FireFighters, Search & Rescue, and Medical First Responders are ON CALL 24/7. We would catch someone in our house...probably the first time they tried.

AND, this must be repeated thousands of times at thousands of other polling stations.
Individual manipulation of the voting machines by humans on the scene WILL BE CAUGHT,
sooner rather than later. I can't see the above process being successful across the nation without one of these Midnight Burglars being caught.

Again, it would take THOUSANDS of specially trained burglars to affect a single election. No conspiracy involving that many people stays secret for long.

If our elections are being manipulated (and I believe they are), it will be at the Tabulator stage of the vote counting & reporting,
OR by some electronic method that does NOT require the presence of thousands of human beings physically manipulating thousands of machines in the middle of the night.

[2naSalit]

4. these could theoretically

be manipulated prior to delivery and the video states that one altered machine can be loaded with a self replicating virus... I could see that happen without a lot of participants, especially if they come from Diebold in that condition which I can also imagine happening.

I think what they are saying is that it wouldn't take a lot of effort to flip and election, especially if you only need to do it in a few key states.

And then, as you suggest, it could also take place during the following stage.

All I can say is that I sure hope there are a bunch of white hat hackers out there keeping an eye on this crap... I wonder who intercepted what I suspect to have been the Ohio "counter flip" which caused trurdblossom's meltdown on live teevee in 2012.

I only trust paper ballots with lots of bipartisan eyes attending.

[bvar22]

5. Even the replacating virus NEEDS a burgular/hacker to manipulate the 1st machine....

...at EVERY polling place. I don't buy that either.
It would still take hundreds, if not thousands to pull that off.

It would only take a handful to hack the tabulators in any state.
I would focus on the tabulators, and reporting mechanisms,
not a massive conspiracy of hundreds/thousands of midnight burglars.


Now, if I remember correctly, in Ohio in 2004, an "emergency patch" containing secret "upgrades" to the voting machines was delivered and applied the morning of the election.
THAT is the kind of shit that shouldn't work...but does.

There is only one way to have secure, verifiable elections:

1. Paper Ballots

2. deposited by the voter in a transparent ballot box

3.A reputable Exit Poll, or several independent exit polls

3. The Ballot Boxes do NOT leave the polling station until the votes are counted and recounted by a bi-partisan group of observers, AND 24 hour video surveillance over the internet. Chain of Custody rules. No transferring of Ballot Boxes to another location for "counting".

4. The results posted on the polling station door, and again at the precinct.

[2naSalit]

8. I totally agree with

the remedies you suggest. But if it only takes one machine to throw an entire election, I have no doubt that it can will be done... because I'm sure it has happened already and more than once.

[Stevepol]

6. I think this is a quite possible method of stealing an election.

The memory card is the key. Who puts the program onto the memory card? In Clay County KY the people in charge of handling the machines and the memory cards were all involved in the fix. I think there were 8 of them, all Repubs, who managed to stay in the voting area and made sure the votes were recorded in their favor. I don't know how they pulled it off but there are a hundred and twenty five thousand ways the fraud could happen. I don't think they used memory cards, but they could easily have done so. The critical question is who is responsible for checking and approving the machines? Any one of these guys could easily have changed the programming on the machine. Also these memory cards can all be produced with the same malicious programming so that each one of them, when used, would result in the same percentage of "red shift" that the writers of the program desired. You don't have to put in the memory card BEFORE the vote. The memory card could come from the Diebold factory with a program ready to be accessed by a single voter card or memory card. You can also use the corrupt memory cards at the time the supposed vote result is printed out. This is how it was done by Hari Hursti, the Finnish computer expert, with an opti-scan Diebold in the "Hacking America" documentary about ten years ago. Or the memory card as installed at the factory can be programmed to give a consistent percentage shift if a single trigger is entered into the programming by a voter with a voting card. There are a hundred ways this can be done using the memory cards.

All this is actually well-known, has been well-known for years. Yet every time a new study shows this I feel maybe this time people will do something about it, but each time nothing happens. Statisticians know about the "red shift." Beth Clarkson here in Wichita KS knows that the results using the machines show a strange thing: as the size of the voting precincts increases (where voting machines are used) there are suddenly more Republican voters in urban, more populous precincts, not just in the usually more Republican precincts in rural areas, and the Dems are suddenly in the minority everywhere. Thus Kris Kobach, who according to pre-election polling was in a close race with his opponent, ended up winning by 17%. The political scientists will explain such a thing in a hundred different ways but they will never mention voting machines.

I've quit wondering why nobody raises holy hell about it. For the most part, it's because people don't really understand how the thing works and nobody believes some smarty-pants computer expert anyway. They're just talking technical gibberish while I can "see" the machines and nothing happened to them, and besides they are "tested" before and they always give the right results. What could go wrong?

[stillwaiting]

2. This will be one of those issues that 80-90% of Americans agree on, and

the corrupt politicians won't do a damn thing.

We'll have to join forces with the conservatives (and they'll want paper ballots too), and we'll have to protest. Loudly and for a long time.

[Peace Patriot]

7. There is no more important issue than this!

K&R 1,000x!