I don’t have a degree in engineering or programming, but even I could see that you could make a machine with no outside connectivity. Instead I’d give it a USB drive that an electoral official would remove after voting closed and physically transport it to where the registered votes are to be counted.
It seems such a simple solution that it simply boggles the mind that the US, which has for so long touted itself as the bastion of democracy, seems dodgier and more corrupt than a 3rd world dictatorship. I mean at least those guys are up front about it.
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I didn’t think your could get horizontal holds on toasters before
Well, for one, we let each state decide how elections in that state are held, and not every state government wants every citizen to get a vote
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Because you’ll never steal an election that way!
Amateurs.
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Trump seems to be more focused on making America lose in the long run than Bush was, severing its alliances and ties to the rest of the world. I truly hope his actions serve as an incentive to make the rest of the world work together more closely to bring about some economic balance.
I also hope it makes the European Union grow a spine and realise that it is served better in the long run by making alliances with the big neighbour it actually shares a continent with instead of being the lapdog of the bully across the pond, as its been conditioned to be for so long. Morally, it makes no difference at all.
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Not only this, but the remote access software was PCAnywhere which isn’t exactly a bastion of security in the remote access world.
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Because that would make it difficult to tamper with, of course.
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I feel ya, but this is NOT just a problem with the “right wing”. It’s much bigger than that.
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I’ve voted in several different precincts in Michigan over the past 20-ish years, and every polling place used the scantron ballot and reader your poling place uses.
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No, I really don’t. I acknowledged in my post that I may be looking at those years with nostalgia, but that’s due to how awesomely shitty things are going these days.
The list does go on…
Now we can add to it millions of American losing the healthcare they got during the Obama years, a return to preexisting conditions being a reason to deny coverage, the intent to destroy Social Security, immigrant families being split apart, children in camps, departure from the Paris Agreement, trade wars, turning our backs on our allies, a fucking horrible excuse for a human being in the oval office, a good possibility of Russian influence throughout our government, the rise of the cry “FAKE NEWS”, the introduction of “ALTERNATIVE FACTS”, a government actually considering (last I heard) handing Americans over to the Russians for “questioning”, the Puerto Rico debacle (that’s still in a shitty shape) and their total unpreparedness for any upcoming disaster, a rise in the legitimacy of fascism and American Nazis, Trump having sex with a porn star while his wife was pregnant and everyone on the right apparently fine with that, because “reasons” I guess…
So let me clarify… I don’t want either Bush back to run this nonsense better than the current crop of assclowns are running it; and for people that seem to be incompetent, they sure are managing to hang in there like a penicillin resistant strain of gonorrhea.
I would be willing to go back to either Bush era and live through it again rather than be here while everything falls apart.
BUT! That’s not possible. Here we are. The only way out is through. What do we do? If the machines we use to vote on are compromised, then voting alone isn’t doing to do it.
Nah, they sucked. But this sucks more. Back then I could normally face a day without feeling dread as soon as my feet hit the floor. Now it hits me as soon as my eyes open, as I wake up wondering what today will bring.
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Silver lining: if you don’t like today’s hell, tomorrow will bring a fresh one.
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Headline in present tense:
Actual quote says it happened no more recently than 12 years ago
The lie and bad security practices are genuinely bad,. Those machines are probably still in use somewhere and we have no idea what, if anything, may have happened or will happen because of the lies and bad security practices. So there is really no need for a misleading headline. They do not, as far as they admit, currently “ship backdoored”.
It’s done by the individual states, generally for one or more of three reasons:
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to attempt to control costs and decrease the number of annoyingly self motivated (aka politically unreliable) humans involved.
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to provide opportunities for profit to favored individuals and corporations who have made significant contributions to sitting politicians.
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a fetish for modernism, a desire for cool shiny futurism.
In practice, the second factor works out quite well for those involved, the first and third, nope and nope.
My state got mechanical voting machines that punched a paper tape where you could see it, and know that your vote was properly recorded, around 1960 I think. But then around 1990 they were replaced with “modern” unauditable electronic systems (that I am somewhat intimately familiar with) and now we are tied for dead last (along with Mississippi and Louisiana) for having the least reliable voting system in the USA.
Note, we are a thoroughly Democratic Party dominated, machine politics state, and the replacement of the voting machines was done with full knowledge of their weaknesses and exploitability, in a bipartisan consensus led by Democrats.
The headline is wrong. The voting machines did not have a backdoor connection. “Election-Management Systems” had the backdoor. From the linked article:
“Election-management systems are not the voting terminals that voters use to cast their ballots, but are just as critical: they sit in county election offices and contain software that in some counties is used to program all the voting machines used in the county; the systems also tabulate final results aggregated from voting machines.”
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Ironically, the ghost of Diebold is now owned by a Canadian firm that makes optical scan voting machines (Dominion voting systems)
I think Cory could make a plausible argument that election management systems and tabulation machines count as “voting machines” since they are machines that are parts of an integrated system for counting votes. But I do think that Cory’s headline falsely implies to many that the ESS machines that you and I use in voting booth are admitted to contain “backdoors”, and it definitely falsely implies that ESS admitted to currently shipping backdoored machines. I remain mystified why Cory continues to write misleading headlines that are contradicted by his own articles, especially when an accurate description of the circumstances would be sufficiently appalling to generate clicks…
So how do you stop someone removing that USB drive from the port from inside the voting booth, inserting an infected USB drive, contaminating the machine, and replacing the official USB drive?
Instead of trying to make the computer be smart and tabulate the votes, use it in the simplest way possible. Let it do nothing more than provide an easy to use touch screen interface and print out the completed ballot with uniform markings (no more “hanging chad” questions) both in human readable and machine readable (QR code, perhaps) forms. Most voters could then confirm that the ballot reflects their intended vote via a smartphone app.
Have a vote tabulator / ballot box into which voters insert their ballots (face down) in a public, visible location through the whole time the polls are open. Let anyone who wants to observe that it is not tampered with through the day do so (as long as they’re not trying to intimidate voters.) That ballot box will count the machine readable votes. Fall back on the human readable votes, uniformly printed on the paper ballots, as a spot check on the accuracy of the ballot box and in the event of a recount.
The printers can be used in government officials’ offices while they’re not in use on election day. If you went to a big box electronics store like Best Buy, you could probably pick up Android tablets for $100-$200 dollars that would work perfectly fine as the touchscreen interfaces. Alternately you could get all-in-one machines that would be usable both for day-to-day government work and voting duties for a couple hundred dollars.
The most expensive part of that system would probably be the ballot box, and if you want to rely just on the human readable vote and manual tabulation all you really need is a lockable box with a slot big enough to slide the ballot into. Staples has a drop box for about $30 that would probably do the trick. It’s only 3 inches wide, putting a limit on the number of ballots it can accept, but they’re $30 a piece – get a couple of them, it shouldn’t break the bank.
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