Voting Machine investigations
- From: Educational CyberPlayGround <admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: nethappenings@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2004 12:01:47 -0500
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Voting Machine Investigations
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON Nov 3 2004 -- Did the voting machines trump exit
polls? There's a way to find out.
Black Box Voting (.ORG) is conducting the largest Freedom of
Information action in history. At 8:30 p.m. Election Night, Black Box
Voting blanketed the U.S. with the first in a series of public records
requests, to obtain internal computer logs and other documents from
3,000 individual counties and townships. Networks called the election
before anyone bothered to perform even the most rudimentary audit.
Black Box Voting is a nonpartisan, nonprofit consumer protection group
for elections. You may view the first volley of public records
requests here: Freedom of Information requests here
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
----
Diebold Source Code
"Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below
even the most minimal security standards applicable
in other contexts."
http://avirubin.com/vote.pdf
-----------
News Update from Citizens for Legitimate Government November 10, 2004
http://www.legitgov.org/
http://www.legitgov.org/index.html#breaking_news
Diebold Source Code!!! --by ouranos (dailykos.com) "Dr. Avi Rubin is
currently Professor of Computer Science at John Hopkins University. He
'accidentally' got his hands on a copy of the Diebold software
program--Diebold's source code--which runs their e-voting machines. Dr.
Rubin's students pored over 48,609 lines of code that make up this
software. One line in particular stood out over all the rest:
#defineDESKEY((des_KEY8F2654hd4" All commercial programs have provisions to
be encrypted so as to protect them from having their contents read or
changed by anyone not having the key... The line that staggered the Hopkins
team was that the method used to encrypt the Diebold machines was a method
called Digital Encryption Standard (DES), a code that was broken in 1997
and is NO LONGER USED by anyone to secure programs. F2654hd4 was the key to
the encryption. Moreover, because the KEY was IN the source code, all
Diebold machines would respond to the same key. Unlock one, you have then
ALL unlocked. I can't believe there is a person alive who wouldn't
understand the reason this was allowed to happen. This wasn't a mistake by
any stretch of the imagination."
--------------
... growing evidence of
major problems with electronic voting machines This story
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041105/ap_on_el_pr/
voting_problems
from AP via Yahoo, reports that Bush got 3893 extra votes on a single
Ohio voting machine. Other sites, including http://blackboxvoter.org and
http://blackboxvoter.com (two different organizations) are reporting
other descrepencies. One of these organizations, black box voter dot org
(http://blackboxvoter.org) is attempting to investigate these reports
and is apparently filing a freedom of information request for the black
boxes on over 3000 voting machines. Of course evidence is worth nothing
if you don't have a way to open the election to a recount, and there are
now reports that Ralph Nader may be willing to mount such a challenge,
opening the door to rechecking results in as many as 34 states.
Black box voting has asked people who think such investigation should
happen to fax Ralph Nader at 202-265-0092 and ask him to challenge the
election results in New Hampshire. This request was broadcast on the
Randi Rhodes radio show and can be found at her web site:
http://www.therandirhodesshow.com/main.html
----
JACKSONVILLE, North Carolina -- More than 4,500 votes have been lost in
one North Carolina county because officials believed a computer that
stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did.
Scattered other problems may change results in races around the state.
Local officials said UniLect, the maker of the county's electronic
voting system, told them that each storage unit could handle 10,500
votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes.
Expecting the greater capacity, the county used only one unit during
the early voting period. "If we had known, we would have had the units
to handle the votes," said Sue Verdon, secretary of the county election
board.
Officials said 3,005 early votes were stored, but 4,530 were lost.
Jack Gerbel, president and owner of Dublin, California-based UniLect,
said Thursday that the county's elections board was given incorrect
information. There is no way to retrieve the missing data, he said.
"That is the situation and it's definitely terrible," he said.
In a letter to county officials, he blamed the mistake on confusion
over which model of the voting machines was in use in Carteret County.
But he also noted that the machines flash a warning message when there
is no more room for storing ballots.
"Evidently, this message was either ignored or overlooked," he wrote.
County election officials were meeting Thursday with Gary Bartlett,
executive director of the State Board of Elections, and did not
immediately return a telephone call seeking comment.
This isn't the first time that North Carolina experienced this problem.
In early voting for the 2002 general election, touch-screen voting
machines made by a different company, Election Systems & Software,
failed to record ballots cast by 436 voters.
The company said the problem was a software glitch that caused the
machines to believe the memory cards were full when they actually
weren't. Like UniLect, ES&S claimed that the machines flashed a warning
to voters telling them the memory was full but it did not prevent
voters from continuing to cast ballots, something that critics say any
voting machine should do.
This year's lost votes didn't appear to change the outcome of county
races, but that wasn't the issue for Alecia Williams, who voted on one
of the final days of the early voting period.
"The point is not whether the votes would have changed things, it's
that they didn't get counted at all," Williams said.
Two statewide races remained undecided Thursday, for superintendent of
public instruction, where the two candidates are about 6,700 votes
apart, and for agriculture commissioner, where they are only hundreds
of votes apart.
How those two races might be affected by problems in individual
counties was uncertain. The state still must tally more than 73,000
provisional ballots, plus those from four counties that have not yet
submitted their provisional ballots, said Johnnie McLean, deputy
director of the state elections board.
Nationwide, only scattered e-voting problems were reported, though
roughly 40 million people cast digital ballots, voting equipment makers
said.
Kim Zetter contributed to this report.
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