| A Quick Fix For Electronic Voting Vs A Democrat Hack Job |
A Quick Fix For Electronic Voting
E-Voting Failures in the 2006 Mid Term Elections PDF
| New from National Issues - Federal Legislation | |
| By New York Times Editorial | |
| January 16, 2008 | |
| When Americans go to the polls in November, many will likely have to cast their ballots on unreliable paperless electronic voting machines. If the election is close, the country could end up with a rerun of 2000's bitterly contentious and mistrusted count. In an effort to avoid another such disaster, Representative Rush Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, plans to introduce a bill this week that would help address the weaknesses in electronic voting. Congress should pass it without delay. The flaws of electronic voting machines have been thoroughly documented by academic studies and by voters' experiences. The machines are far too vulnerable to hacking that could change the outcomes of elections. They are also so prone to mechanical error and breakdown that there is no way to be sure that the totals they report are correct. In some cases, these machines have been known to flip votes award votes cast for one candidate to an opponent. The solution is for all votes to be recorded on paper records. Voters can then verify that their choice has been accurately reflected and the paper record can be used as a backup for the electronic machines. Whenever votes are tallied on electronic machines, there should be an audit of paper records as a check on the electronic results. If the paper totals do not match the electronic tallies, something has clearly gone wrong and the tally of the paper ballots can be treated as the official one. |
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Facts about my Voting Machine Voting Machine Demonstration
Computer scientists report on the ivotronic
Software Analysis of the ivotronic PDF
Guilford County Test Procedure Ivotronic Coding Forms Birth of the Ivotronic Casting Votes in the Auditorium Vote machine operation problems
Voting System Virus Vulnerability Company that makes this crap California Cracks the voting machine code wide open
ARIZONA DATABASES FOR ELECIONS RELEASED TO DEMOCRATS!
Our judgment is that the password mechanisms on the iVotronic are poorly conceived and poorly
implemented. The consequence is that the passwords by themselves do not do a good job of
preventing unauthorized individuals from accessing critical system functions.
(BACKDOOR PASSWORD?)
Finally, these passwords can all be bypassed using a special type of PEB, called a Factory Test
PEB. When a PEB is inserted, the iVotronic machine queries the PEB to ask it what kind of PEB it
is, and the PEB returns a single byte indicating what type of PEB it is. A Factory Test PEB
identifies itself by returning a special single-byte value. This special value is hard-coded into the
iVotronic code. Anyone who knows the special single-byte value, has access to a PEB and is able to
program the PEB could construct a PEB that identifies itself as a Factory Test PEB. When a Factory
Test PEB is present, all password checks are bypassed: in places where the user would normally
need to enter a password, the password check is bypassed, the machine functions as though the
correct password had been entered, and a log entry is appended to the event log as though the user
entered the correct password. This undocumented backdoor poses a risk of unauthorized access to
critical system functions, because it provides a way that a malicious individual could bypass the
password checks by tampering with a PEB.
Casting Votes in the Auditorium
In elections employing electronic voting machines, we have observed that poor procedures, equipment failures, and honest mistakes pose a real threat to the accuracy of the final tally. The event logs kept by these machines can give auditors clues as to the causes of anomalies and inconsistencies; however, each voting machine is trusted to keep its own audit and ballot data, making the record unreliable. If a machine is damaged, accidentally erased, or otherwise compromised during the election, we have no way to detect tampering or loss of auditing records and cast votes.
Here is an example with a problem with the touch screen firmware. It had a big problem. The firmware problem had not been resolved for a county in that they were not informed there was a problem. A fix was available but the county election officials were not informed. (Two problems here, firmware counts votes wrong, firmware is fixed but not put in machines that had bad firmware). So if I or you voted in this county I vote would have not been counted or counted for someone we did not vote for!
On Thursday, October 24, Al Marcheski had informed me that ES&S knew there was a problem with the firmware . I later learned that Jackson County , North Carolina had the same problem with their equipment several days prior to our problem being discovered. The firmware in their equipment was changed and their problems resolved. Had
ES&S been aware of the firmware in use in Wake County and acted immediately when the problem in Jackson County was corrected, Wake County would not have experienced the problem of votes not being recorded.
The states which use the ES&S iVotronic affected (with firmware versions either 8 or 9, with or without a so-called "Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail") are as follows:
This is interesting!
The federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC), which oversees the federal testing and qualification of voting systems in the U.S., rebuked ES&S after an episode of Dan Rather Reports revealed that ES&S touchscreen machines were being assembled in a Manila sweatshop factory . The report also revealed that 30% to 40% of touchscreens sent to the factory for assembly in ES&S machines had cosmetic and electronic problems and that a Florida county returned more than 1,000 ES&S touchscreens in 2003 for calibration problems. (((The latter caused the machines to think users were touching one part of a screen when they were actually touching a different part -- a problem that can cause a machine to mis-register a voter's selections.))) (Lets not forget they love to use recycled parts, which I think could cause these same problems to show up again over and over)
StoryReports.com Story Reports Blog
Are unexamined ballot definition files accurate and trustworthy?
A little-known but crucial moving part in election software is the ballot definition, prepared relatively close to the time of an election. This is unique programming for each election, defining all the races and candidates for each precinct. Faulty ballot definition programming can thwart accurate electronic vote tabulation of DREs and optical scanners. "Every voting system includes a key component, called the ballot definition file (BDF), that is never subjected to an outside review. Given that BDFs determine the way votes are recorded and counted, the lack of independent oversight of these files is a major security vulnerability," writes Ellen Theisen.
(Webmaster comment: This ballot definition file that is not subject to review seems to be an easy way for county officials or anyone to skew, fake, steal etc the election results. This is an amazing security flaw, it is not subjected to any review which means the vote count can be flipped or anything. How can anyone in their right mind think when voting on an electronic voting machine their vote is safe and will be counted correcty?)
Then there are variables. Ellen Theisen said that no professional would attempt to write election software without using variables (like the 'x' in an algebraic equation, a variable can represent different things at different times). Once variables are in the code, it can be tricky to remember what and how they operate. She said that reading someone else's code is not terribly easy. In fact, rereading 100 lines of code she wrote herself, with good notes, is not always easy, she said.