[ale] OT--- The voting issues

[Irv Mullins]

On Tuesday 05 November 2002 10:36 pm, you wrote:
<snip>
> I talked to a tech from Diebold about the software. They know that since it
> is Windoze it is unsecure, and unstable. The security (if you want to call
> it that) is that (A)It is hard to get your hands on one of the voting cards
> with the encoder. (B)Even if you did get one and get it encoded, you would
> have to break into the kernel with it by somehow rebooting the machine or
> making the machine read a program that it is not looking to read, with all
> that if you got in finally and registered 1000000 votes for Joe Schmoe (L)
> when the close out procedures are performed (which is before transmitting
> results) the poll manager would see it, and that machine would be pulled
> and audited by Diebold. and (C)You would have to be at the machine for a
> long time. We were averaging 4-8 minutes per voter.

This is quite true, and at the same time totally beside the point. 
No one is suggesting that hacking into *one* voting machine is 
a practical way to sway an election. For exactly the reasons you 
mention. 

Equally true is this: with a mechanical voting machine, the builders of 
that machine have no way of predicting or discovering which lever 
is going to correspond to a specific candidate. So there's no way to usefully 
skew the results at the time the machine is built. 

With electronic machines, it is not only possible, but easy, to read the 
captions on the screens, buttons, etc. So it would be quite possible 
to include a routine in the OS which does absolutely nothing to affect 
any vote *until* one of the candidate's names hashes out to equal, say,
"William Gates III". Then, and only then, do votes for opponents get tossed 
out. 

This code could reside in voting machines for years without being 
detected, because they would appear, and would in fact, be working 
perfectly. 

"In a stunning upset, political newcomer Gates has been elected by 
a landslide....."

Irv




---
This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be 
sent to listmaster at ale dot org.