FIrst here's a memo from Diebold, ya know the company whose CEO promised Ohio's votes to Bush a year ago:
To: <support@gesn.com>
Subject: RE: alteration of Audit Log in Access
From: "Ken Clark" <ken@gesn.com>
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 09:55:02 -0700
Importance: Normal
In-reply-to: <ODEFIJCCLAAIGHHAOEJIKECACCAA.nfglobal@earthlink.net>
Its a tough question, and it has a lot to do with perception. Of course everyone knows perception is reality.
Right now you can open GEMS' .mdb file with MS-Access, and alter its contents. That includes the audit log. This isn't anything new. In VTS, you can open the database with progress and do the same. The same would go for anyone else's system using whatever database they are using. Hard drives are read-write entities. You can change their contents.
Now, where the perception comes in is that its right now very *easy* to change the contents. Double click the .mdb file. Even technical wizards at Metamor (or Ciber, or whatever) can figure that one out.
It is possible to put a secret password on the .mdb file to prevent Metamor from opening it with Access. I've threatened to put a password on the .mdb before when dealers/customers/support have done stupid things with the GEMS database structure using Access. Being able to end-run the database has admittedly got people out of a bind though. Jane (I think it was Jane) did some fancy footwork on the .mdb file in Gaston recently. I know our dealers do it. King County is famous for it. That's why we've never put a password on the file before.
Note however that even if we put a password on the file, it doesn't really prove much. Someone has to know the password, else how would GEMS open it. So this technically brings us back to square one: the audit log is modifiable by that person at least (read, me). Back to perception though, if you don't bring this up you might skate through Metamor.
There might be some clever crypto techniques to make it even harder to change the log (for me, they guy with the password that is). We're talking big changes here though, and at the moment largely theoretical ones. I'd doubt that any of our competitors are that clever.
By the way, all of this is why Texas gets its sh*t in a knot over the log printer. Log printers are not read-write, so you don't have the problem. Of course if I were Texas I would be more worried about modifications to our electronic ballots than to our electron logs, but that is another story I guess.
Bottom line on Metamor is to find out what it is going to take to make them happy. You can try the old standard of the NT password gains access to the operating system, and that after that point all bets are off. You have to trust the person with the NT password at least. This is all about Florida, and we have had VTS certified in Florida under the status quo for nearly ten years.
I sense a loosing battle here though. The changes to put a password on the .mdb file are not trivial and probably not even backward compatible, but we'll do it if that is what it is going to take.
Ken
From: owner-support@gesn.com [mailto:owner-support@gesn.com]On Behalf Of Nel Finberg
Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2001 11:32 PM
To: support
Subject: alteration of Audit Log in Access
Jennifer Price at Metamor (about to be Ciber) has indicated that she can access the GEMS Access database and alter the Audit log without entering a password. What is the position of our development staff on this issue? Can we justify this? Or should this be anathema?
hmm a way to alter the audit log you say??? why certainly they wouldn't do such a thing....
"Harris, author of Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century, said that her group recently obtained records from the King County primary election six weeks ago and discovered that three hours had been deleted from the audit log. "The audit log is like the black box in an airplane," she said. "It automatically generates reports of who got access into the system and the different types of actions they took. So when you have an audit on election night that has had three hours deleted, you've got to raise your eyebrows." "
yer right, i'm sure they'd only do this in the primary election....right? I mean just ignore the complaints of pollsters saying the machines deleted some votes and ppl complaining they picked Kerry/Edwards but at teh confirmation screen it showed Bush/Cheney....
_________________ "There are better things
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NOVEMBER 05, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Electronic voting machine problems caused more than 4,500 votes to be lost in one North Carolina county during Tuesday's general election, and gave U.S. President George Bush more than 3,800 extra votes in an Ohio county, according to reports by The Associated Press.
In the Ohio incident, a glitch in e-voting machines made by Election Systems & Software Inc. caused Bush to receive an extra 3,893 votes, more than five times the votes actually cast in the precinct in question.
_________________ "There are better things
to talk about
Be constructive
Bear witness
We can use
Be constructive
With yer blues
Even when it's only warnings
Even when you're talking war games"
Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2004 7:44 pm Posts: 8910 Location: Santa Cruz Gender: Male
I have a feeling that's all just BS.
Although, I dont doubt that there were issues with the electronic voting, either real fraud or computer glitch, I dont believe those above messages are real. Here is how those Diebold systems work:
When a voter casts their ballot using the Diebold touch screen system, the ballot selections are immediately encrypted and stored in multiple locations within the voting station. When stored, the order of cast ballots is scrambled to further insure ballot anonymity. The image of each and every ballot cast on the voting station is captured, and can be anonymously reproduced on standard paper should a hard copy of ballots be required for recount purposes. Once voting concludes at a precinct, a printed election results report is printed as a permanent record of all activity at each voting station. This printed record is used to audit the electronic tabulation of votes conducted during the election canvas process, when final, official election results are reported.
Here are the details about remote access vulnerability through the modem connecting polling place voting machines with the central vote-counting server in each county elections office. This applies specifically to all Diebold systems (1,000 counties and townships), and may also apply to other vendors. The prudent course of action is to disconnect all modems, since the downside is small and the danger is significant.
The central servers are installed on unpatched, open Windows computers and use RAS (Remote Access Server) to connect to the voting machines through telephone lines. Since RAS is not adequately protected, anyone in the world, even terrorists, who can figure out the server's phone number can change vote totals without being detected by observers.
The passwords in many locations are easily guessed, and the access phone numbers can be learned through social engineering or war dialing.
ELECTION OFFICIALS: The only way to protect tomorrow's election from this type of attack is to disconnect the servers from the modems now. Under some configurations, attacks by remote access are possible even if the modem appears to be turned off. The modem lines should be physically disconnected.
We obtained these documents through a public records request. The video was taken at a press conference held by the King County elections chief Friday Oct 29.
The audit log is a computer-generated automatic record similar to the "black box" in an airplane, that automatically records access to the Diebold GEMS central tabulator (unless, of course, you go into it in the clandestine way we demonstrated on September 22 in Washington DC at the National Press club.)
The central tabulator audit log is an FEC-required security feature. The kinds of things it detects are the kinds of things you might see if someone was tampering with the votes: Opening the vote file, previewing and/or printing interim results, altering candidate definitions (a method that can be used to flip votes).
Three hours is missing altogether from the Sept. 14 Washington State primary held six weeks ago.
_________________ "There are better things
to talk about
Be constructive
Bear witness
We can use
Be constructive
With yer blues
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Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 12:51 am Posts: 15460 Location: Long Island, New York
VoiceOfReason wrote:
ps.
NOVEMBER 05, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Electronic voting machine problems caused more than 4,500 votes to be lost in one North Carolina county during Tuesday's general election, and gave U.S. President George Bush more than 3,800 extra votes in an Ohio county, according to reports by The Associated Press.
In the Ohio incident, a glitch in e-voting machines made by Election Systems & Software Inc. caused Bush to receive an extra 3,893 votes, more than five times the votes actually cast in the precinct in question.
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 3:58 am Posts: 2105 Location: Austin
Bush did not actually recieve any of those votes in Ohio. They do an official count in a couple of weeks, and those votes will be subtracted from the total. The votes are actually on there, it is the counter that was fucked up. But I guess conspirsts need something to talk about for four more years, so keep it coming.
I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.
Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. At 1:05 a.m. Wednesday morning, CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. The exit polls were later combined with—and therefore contaminated by—the tabulated results, ultimately becoming a mirror of the apparent actual vote. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.
So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know.
Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, "An Election Spoiled Rotten," November 1.]
Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.
The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called "spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49 percent, don't you believe it ... it has never happened in the United States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The television totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote.
Whose Votes Are Discarded?
And not all votes spoil equally. Most of those votes, say every official report, come from African-American and minority precincts. (To learn more, click here.)
We saw this in Florida in 2000. Exit polls showed Gore with a plurality of at least 50,000, but it didn't match the official count. That's because the official, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, excluded 179,855 spoiled votes. In Florida, as in Ohio, most of these votes lost were cast on punch cards where the hole wasn't punched through completely—leaving a 'hanging chad,'—or was punched extra times. Whose cards were discarded? Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black folks. (To read the report from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, click here .)
And here's the key: Florida is terribly typical. The majority of ballots thrown out (there will be nearly 2 million tossed out from Tuesday's election) will have been cast by African American and other minority citizens.
So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again. Because unlike last time, Democrats aren't even asking Ohio to count these cards with the not-quite-punched holes (called "undervotes" in the voting biz). Nor are they demanding we look at the "overvotes" where voter intent may be discerned.
Ohio is one of the last states in America to still use the vote-spoiling punch-card machines. And the Secretary of State of Ohio, J. Kenneth Blackwell, wrote before the election, “the possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state’s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity.â€
Joined: Mon Oct 18, 2004 2:16 am Posts: 1213 Location: Greenwich CT
Now I wanted Kerry to win just as much as the next person. But I think its a little weak trying to come up with conspiracy theories about voting machines. Not everything you read about the exit polls is going to be correct, just like the polls themselves arent totally correct. People need to stop looking for reasons why bush shouldnt be president, and just unite behind our president, and support our country.
And if you think that the election results were altered to let bush win, then you probably think that the kid from the "mikey likes it" commercials died from eating Pop Rocks and drinking coke together. Or maybe that Marilyn Manson is the friend from Wonder Years....
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Joined: Mon Oct 18, 2004 1:03 am Posts: 24177 Location: Australia
Why don't you just vote with a ballot slip (that's paper) and a pencil?
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Joined: Mon Oct 18, 2004 2:16 am Posts: 1213 Location: Greenwich CT
vacatetheword wrote:
Why don't you just vote with a ballot slip (that's paper) and a pencil?
Tooo easy? Makes Sense? Has a paper trail? Nothing to write conspiracy theories about after your selected person loses? Seriously though, in the US the election has become a tv event. And they woudlnt be able to do election night coverage, because it would take too long to hand count 115,000,000 ballots.
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Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2004 10:51 pm Posts: 14534 Location: Mesa,AZ
Think the 3.6 million vote lead was fraud? Sorry, but this is clearly different from 2000.
With the electronic machines, there is absolutely no way to tell whether or not there was fraud, which is why the machines shouldn't be used yet.
Paper ballots, on the other hand, might be able to be tested if they actually count them. Obviously, they haven't done a recount yet, so the charges of fraud are just based on bitterness and conjecture.
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It's so funny that people dismiss this as conspiracy, when the fraud charges are based on HARD EVIDENCE. Any time you have private companies controlling the machines that determine the winner of an election, and those companies have open ties to a specific party, you have a big problem. Especially when those companies refuse to release their code. You can program these machines to do whatever you want, and no one is able to see the programming. These machines are hooked to 10 year old server technology across the open Internet, can you say easy target? Do some research on your own, don't just believe what some idiot on TV says (or some idiot on a message board for that matter).
Apparently, it's not just conspiracy theorists worried about "irregularities."
House Judiciary Committee letter to GAO regarding voting machines wrote:
November 5, 2004
The Honorable David M. Walker Comptroller General of the United States U.S. General Accountability Office 441 G Street, NW Washington, DC 20548
Dear Mr. Walker:
We write with an urgent request that the Government Accountability Office immediately undertake an investigation of the efficacy of voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election, how election officials responded to difficulties they encountered and what we can do in the future to improve our election systems and administration.
In particular, we are extremely troubled by the following reports, which we would also request that you review and evaluate for us:
In Columbus, Ohio, an electronic voting system gave President Bush nearly 4,000 extra votes. "Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes," Associated Press, November 5.
An electronic tally of a South Florida gambling ballot initiative failed to record thousands of votes. "South Florida OKs Slot Machines Proposal," Id.
In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots could hold more data that it did. "Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes," Id.
In San Francisco, a glitch occurred with voting machines software that resulted in some votes being left uncounted. Id.
In Florida, there was a substantial drop off in Democratic votes in proportion to voter registration in counties utilizing optical scan machines that was apparently not present in counties using other mechanisms. http://ustogether.org/election04/florida_vote_patt.htm
The House Judiciary Committee Democratic staff has received numerous reports from Youngstown, Ohio that voters who attempted to cast a vote for John Kerry on electronic voting machines saw that their votes were instead recorded as votes for George W. Bush. In South Florida, Congressman Wexler's staff received numerous reports from voters in Palm Beach, Broward and Dade Counties that they attempted to select John Kerry but George Bush appeared on the screen. CNN has reported that a dozen voters in six states, particularly Democrats in Florida, reported similar problems. This was among over one thousand such problems reported. "Touchscreen Voting Problems Reported," Associated Press, November 5.
Excessively long lines were a frequent problem throughout the nation in Democratic precincts, particularly in Florida and Ohio. In one Ohio voting precinct serving students from Kenyon College, some voters were required to wait more than eight hours to vote. "All Eyes on Ohio," Dan Lothian, CNN, November 3, http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/blo ... og/index... ..
We are literally receiving additional reports every minute and will transmit additional information as it comes available. The essence of democracy is the confidence of the electorate in the accuracy of voting methods and the fairness of voting procedures. In 2000, that confidence suffered terribly, and we fear that such a blow to our democracy may have occurred in 2004.
Thank you for your prompt attention to this inquiry.
Sincerely,
John Conyers, Jr. / Jerrold Nadler / Robert Wexler Ranking Member / Ranking Member / Member of Congress House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on the Constitution
cc: Hon. F. James Sensenbrenner Chairman
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