Polls & Rigged Voting Machines

[howeird]

I usually can't listen to Bernie Ward on KGO for very long because he tends to repetitive rants, and this morning (midnight or so) he was especially annoying with a rambling rant about how there must have been computer hacking involved at the primary because (gasp!) the newspaper polls were accurate in the precincts where there was manual balloting, and off base in the precincts where there were Diebold (which he kept mis-pronouncing) computerized voting machines.

First of all, Bernie, the places which have paper ballots are the ones with tiny numbers of constituents. It's easier to count 12 people than 1200.

Secondly, Diebold (it rhymes with "feebled") got into this game by being a security devices company. Diebold safes have been an industry standard in banks since the Civil War. They are the first makers of ATM machines. They do security at banking levels, where actual cash dollars are at stake, and their polling machines are no more likely to be hackable than their ATMs. Yes, they can probably be hacked on an individual basis, but we're talking hundreds of individual machines.

It's easier to stuff a paper ballot box than an electronic one, anyway.

Third, these are meaningless primaries in states which have no influence whatsoever on the outcome of the nominations. It's a media circus, and nothing more. No one would go to the trouble and expense of hacking the machines for what is basically zero return on their investment.

Finally, people lie. Pollsters are not putting people under oath or sucking the information from them under sodium pentathol trance, waterboarding or Vulcan Mind Meld. It's a secret ballot, Bernie. What people say in public ("sure I'd vote for a black guy") ain't necessarily what they will actually do in the voting booth ("no way am I voting for one of those coloreds, I'm picking Clinton - she's twice the man Edwards is").

Edit Add: I just tried to find the broadcast on KGO's archives - they have a setup where you can play each hour's audio from the current week online, just tell them the day and the hour - and I cannot find the voice or the words I heard. The KGO site is clear that Brian Copeland was on the air when I was listening. If anyone wants to try to find it for me, the archive site is here:http://www.kgoam810.com/Article.asp?PT=Archive&id=49920

Comments

[bovil.livejournal.com]

It's not Diebold anymore, it's Premier Election Solutions. They spun off the business and changed the name after their CEO rather inappropriately talked in 2003 about delivering Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in the 2004 election.

PES voting machines have been shown to be relatively hackable under the right circumstances. It's the counting machines, though, where hacking benefit would really be shown.

The media circus is amusing this time around. Tom Brokaw spanked Chris Matthews (and the rest of the talking heads) hard for their presumption in reporting the NH primary.

[howeird]

Thanks for the PES info - Bernie was trying very hard to make a play on the "death/die" mispronunciation of Diebold, something which would not work with the new name. So shame on him yet again.

I saw some articles showing the hackability of the machines, and as a junior hacker myself I concluded that it's not viable on a scale which would make any difference in a state-wide election. Given the choice between a few possibly altered 100-vote units and 3 million hanging chads, I'll take vote-by-electrons any day.

[unseelie23.livejournal.com]

How to steal an election by hacking the vote (http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/evoting.ars)
How to steal an election (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2006/03/16/GR2006031600213.html)
How To Steal an Election With a Diebold Machine (http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/how-to-steal-an-election-with-a-diebold-machine-200693.php)
How They Could Steal the Election This Time (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040816/dugger/8)

Yes, a fair amount of it is alarmist but at the same time I think trust in Diebold's security is misplaced... if they were security conscious, they wouldn't have made a mistake like leaving their source code on an unsecured FTP server.

[unseelie23.livejournal.com]

Also this (http://avirubin.com/vote.pdf) and this (http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/ts-paper.pdf).

These are both peer reviewed academic analysis's of the Diebold Source Code, so aren't terribly alarmist.

[howeird]

This is all ancient history. The machine in the video (which is the same one in the 2006 study) is a 2002 model, which would have been upgraded and/or end-of-lifed by now. As bovil points out, the ones in service today are by a spin-off company and have a different brand name. The ones I used in the last couple of elections looked nothing like this, and did not have any memory accessible without a torx screwdriver.

As for the diatribe about the number of hands which touches the machine, it's no different from the number of hands which touch the punch cards, and a punch card is orders of magnitude easier to manipulate, and requires no training or intelligence to do so - hence the warped vote in Florida.

[cinchntouch.livejournal.com]

Everyone else has already said what I would say about the voting machines. To be honest, I think there are enough other ways that elections can be tossed that it becomes a virtual cornicopia of concerns.

Bernie Ward! I used to listen to his God Talk show years ago. I finally decided that he was a loud mouth with nothing interesting to say and gave up. I guess I am not a big fan of talk radio.