Topic awaiting preservation: The Theft of Your Vote Is Just a Chip Away

As you might know, more and more elections on all levels in the US are done with new electronic voting machines which leave no paper trail whatsoever...

Interesting stuff that already happened with some of the newer Equipment since 1996: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16474

Analysis of information leaked (sic!) from Diebold, largest maker of the new touchscreen voting machines: http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00065.htm

Are you concerned about a voting process that could be manipulated even by a skript-kiddy, and does not allow for a later validation of the results?

[This message has been edited by MW (edited 07-31-2003).]

There's no doubt in my mind that these sort of thoughts, scenarios.... call them what you may, are considered by those who while themselves would not be king, are in fact the power behind the throne. They do afterall know what's best ... don't they? And as far as conspiracies go something like this would, I think, be blissfully simple. The fewer people involved in a conspiracy the greater liklihood of success and what are we talking about here.... maybe half a dozen or so to manipulate and programme a chip? It reminds me, a bit, of the story out of Los Vegas of a few years ago where the chips used in the slot machines had been manipulated. Same idea basically.

Always remember that just because there's no sign of the conspiracy.. it doesn't mean it's not working. =)

This has very little to do with what I was going to say, but it's rather amusing anyways...

In reference to computerized voting systems (not online though)

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If I wanted to fix an election, not this year, but four years from now, what I might do is quit my job at the University of Iowa and go to work for Microsoft, seeking to insinuate myself into the group that maintains the central elements of the window manager. It sounds like it might be fun, even if the job I'd need would largely involve maintenance of code that's been stable for years.

My goal: I want to modify the code that instantiates a "radio button widget" in a window on the screen. The specific function I want to add is: If the date is the first tuesday after the first monday in a year divisible by 4, and if the window contains text containing the string "straight party," and if the radio buttons contain, at least, the strings "democrat" and "republican," one time in ten, at random, switch the button label containing the substring "democrat" with any of the other labels, at random.

Of course, I would make every effort to obfuscate my code. Obfuscated coding is a highly developed art! Having done so, what I'd have accomplished is a version of windows that would swing 10 percent of the straight party votes from the Democratic party to the other parties, selected at random. This would be very hard to detect in the election results, it would be unlikely to be detected during testing, and yet, it could swing many elections!

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From: http://www.ejfi.org/Voting/Voting-12.htm

What I was going to say is that, even the old fashioned (non-computerized) voting syatem is highly suseptible to fraud...

quote:

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Currently, there are more than 15,000 dead people on active voting rolls statewide [Utah], increasing the potential for voting errors and fraud

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From: http://www.bannerofliberty.com/OS11-00MQC/11-7-2000.1.html (with lots of other voting fraud type things)

Or...

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IT NEVER fails. Probe the deepest, darkest pits of corruption in America and, sooner or later, Hillary C*****n turns up.

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OK, not so much to do with voting fraud in this sentence specifically, but the rest of the page does...


My point being, election fraud is going to be here no matter what, so pick what you like and the least of the neccessary evils and go with it... Meanwhile, time to go home