Hacking Democracy

How would you feel if your bank refused to issue a bank statement detailing all transactions? How would you feel if your bank's ATMs did not issue receipts? How would you feel if your bank, doing all these things, just said, "Trust us!"

How would you feel if your bank's president was on the record saying that taking away all your money was his personal goal?

That's what we have with Diebold voting machines. (And the Diebold president's "whatever it takes" support of George W. Bush.)

Now Princeton has released a video and report demonstrating how easy it is to steal votes without leaving any evidence behind.

-- and by tampering with only one machine. Watch the video....

Read the report.

Some thoughts around the web....

Endgadget:

While no one's definitively proven that such a scenario has ever actually happened in real elections, vote-hacking remains a distinct possibility, given the state of our electronic voting equipment.

Of course, what Princeton shows is that the fraud is undetectable -- you cannot prove it.

Boing Boing:

Diebold insists that their machines are secure, and that they don't need voter-verified paper audit-tapes that keep a real-time log of the votes cast -- but this latest attack, which requires only a few minutes to execute, shows that America's votes should not be run on Diebold hardware.

--Er, make that "less than a minute to execute...."

Suburban Guerrilla points to USA Today:

Already this year, glitches have occurred in Arkansas, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and West Virginia. Maryland became the latest on Tuesday, when technical problems, human errors and staff shortages led officials to keep some polls open an extra hour.

The fall elections shape up as the most technologically perilous since 2000, election officials say, because 30% of the nation’s voting jurisdictions will be using new equipment. They include large parts of Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, scenes of key Senate races. “If you’re ever going to have a problem, it’s going to be that first election,” says Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services.

And, of course, EFF's legal case against Diebold.

Diebold, Inc., manufacturer of electronic voting machines, has been sending out many cease-and-desist letters to Internet Service Providers (ISPs), after internal documents indicating flaws in their systems were published on the Internet. The company cited copyright violations under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and demanded that the documents be taken down.

Now EFF and the Center for Internet and Society Cyberlaw Clinic at Stanford Law School are fighting back, seeking a court order on behalf of nonprofit ISP Online Policy Group (OPG) and two Swarthmore College students to prevent Diebold’s abusive copyright claims from silencing public debate about voting, the very foundation of our democratic process.

Nothing like a technology company addressing security flaws in its products by deploying lawyers instead of engineers.

Salon offers up this gem:

Diebold spokesman David Bear did not return Salon's calls for comment on the Princeton study. In the past, he has denied that such security concerns are notable.

"[Our critics are] throwing out a 'what if' that's premised on a basis of an evil, nefarious person breaking the law," Bear told Newsweek after the March Emery County study. "For there to be a problem here," he further explained to the New York Times, "you're basically assuming a premise where you have some evil and nefarious election officials who would sneak in and introduce a piece of software … I don't believe these evil elections people exist."

Yes, of course. Noooooobody would ever want to change election results! Right. I suppose all the security on ATMs is pointless, too. Let's just leave people's money in pidgeon-hole boxes. People will take only what's theirs, right?

As Chip Mulligan says:

Scary stuff. So it's a good job that politicians are eminently trustable then, isn't it?

The AP on Ohio.com reports:

About 80 percent of American voters are expected to use some form of electronic voting in the upcoming election, in which the makeup of the U.S. House will be decided, as well as 33 Senate seats and 36 governorships.

Homeland Stupidity notes:

Considering that Diebold election equipment is about as secure as Swiss cheese, as confirmed by numerous reports over the last couple of years, that the company doesn’t care about election security, and that that’s why they were run out of North Carolina, I don’t think it will mean all that much that the researchers didn’t wait for peer review.

...and shares this little ditty that's on YouTube:

Obvious political perspective of this short aside, election fraud is something every voter should be concerned about.