Elections Manipulations Ten-Page Summary
Major Media Report Elections Problems
To verify statements, click on links to articles on major media websites
Join in powerfully making a difference by voting and by spreading the word
The eye-opening excerpts from media articles below reveal major problems with the elections process. This is not a partisan matter. Fair elections are crucial to all who support democracy. Few have compiled this reliable information in a way that truly educates the public on the great risk of using electronic voting machines, which have alarmingly inadequate protections from potential manipulation. You can make a difference by casting your vote at the ballot box and by spreading this information far and wide.
Voting Machines Put U.S. Democracy at Risk
CNN News, Sept. 20, 2006, http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/09/19/Dobbs.Sept20
There is little assurance your vote will count. As we've been reporting almost nightly...for more than a year, electronic voting machines are placing our democracy at risk. These machines time and again have been demonstrated to be extremely vulnerable to tampering and error, and many of them have no voter-verified paper trail. Only 27 states have laws requiring the use of voter-verified paper trails. During the 2004 presidential election, one voting machine...added nearly 3,900 additional votes. Officials caught the machine's error because only 638 voters cast presidential ballots at that precinct, but in a heavily populated district, can we really be sure the votes will be counted correctly? [In] the May primary election in Cuyahoga County, Ohio...the electronic voting machines' four sources of vote totals—individual ballots, paper trail summary, election archives and memory cards—didn't even match up. The [official] report concluded that relying on the current system for Cuyahoga County's more than 1.3 million people should be viewed as "a calculated risk." A 2005 Government Accountability Office report on electronic voting confirmed the worst fears of watchdog groups and election officials. "There is evidence that some of these concerns have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes." Are we really willing to risk our democracy?
Major Problems at Polls Feared
Washington Post, Sept. 17, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content...
In Maryland last Tuesday, a combination of human blunders and technological glitches caused long lines and delays in vote-counting. The problems, which followed ones earlier this year in Ohio, Illinois and several other states, have contributed to doubts among some experts about whether the new systems are reliable. In Montgomery County, the breakdown came when election officials failed to provide precinct workers with the access cards needed to operate electronic voting machines. In Prince George's County, computers...failed to transmit data to the central election office. At least nine other states have had trouble this year with new voting technology. For several years, prominent computer scientists have taken aim at the electronic voting machines. In analyses of the software that runs widely used models of the machines...scientists have shown how they could manipulate the machine to report a vote total that differed from the actual total cast. In the Nov. election, more than 80 percent of voters will use electronic voting machines.
Princeton Prof Hacks E-vote Machine
MSNBC/Associated Press, Sept. 13, 2006, http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14825465/
A Princeton University computer science professor added new fuel Wednesday to claims that electronic voting machines used across much of the country are vulnerable to hacking. In a paper posted on the university's Web site, Edward Felten and two graduate students described how they had tested a Diebold AccuVote-TS machine they obtained, found ways to quickly upload malicious programs and even developed a computer virus able to spread such programs between machines. The machine Felten tested...was the same type used across Maryland in its primary election. Felten and graduate students Ariel Feldman and Alex Halderman...say they designed software capable of modifying all records, audit logs and counters kept by the voting machine, ensuring that a careful forensic examination would find nothing wrong.
Note: The full paper is posted on Princeton's website along with an excellent video demonstrating how election results can easily be corrupted: http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting. Similar and even less secure machines have been used in several previous elections. As there was no paper trail, we have no way of knowing if elections results were manipulated in the past.
In Search of Accurate Vote Totals
New York Times, Sept. 5, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/05/opinion/05tue1.html
Six years after the disasters of Florida in 2000, states still haven't mastered the art of counting votes. The most troubling evidence comes from Ohio. A recent government report details enormous flaws in the election system in Ohio's biggest county, problems that may not be fixable before the 2008 election. Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland...recently adopted Diebold electronic voting machines that produce a voter-verified paper record. Investigators compared the vote totals recorded on the machines after this year's primary with the paper records produced by the machines. The numbers should have been the same, but often there were large and unexplained discrepancies. The report also found that nearly 10 percent of the paper records were destroyed, blank, illegible, or otherwise compromised. Some of these problems may be explored further in a federal lawsuit challenging Ohio's administration of its 2004 election.
Pull the Plug on Electronic Voting
Forbes, Sept. 4, 2006, http://www.forbes.com/home/free_forbes/2006/0904/040.html
You don't like hanging chads? Get ready for cheating chips and doctored drives. I am a computer scientist. I own seven Macintosh computers, one Windows machine and a Palm Treo 700p. So why am I advocating the use of 17th-century technology for voting in the 21st century? While computers are very proficient...we should not rely on computers alone to count votes. The people who program them make mistakes. They are more vulnerable to manipulation than most people realize. A power glitch could cause a hard disk to fail or a magnetic card that holds votes to permanently lose its data. In a 2003 election in Boone County, Ind., [voting machines] recorded 144,000 votes in one precinct populated with fewer than 6,000 registered voters. Consider one simple mode of attack...called overwriting the boot loader. An attacker can, for example, make the machine count every fifth Republican vote as a Democratic vote, swap the vote outcome at the end of the election or produce a completely fabricated result. To stage this attack, a night janitor at the polling place would need only a few seconds' worth of access to the computer's memory card slot. [And] you can't easily discover if they've been tinkered with. It's one thing to suspect that officials have miscounted hanging chads, but something else entirely for people to wonder whether a corrupt programmer working behind the scenes has rigged a computer to help his side.
Activists Sue to Block Electronic Voting
ABC News/Associated Press, July 13, 2006, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics,,,
Computerized voting was supposed to be the cure for ballot fiascos such as the 2000 presidential election, but activist groups say it has only worsened the problem. Lawsuits have been filed in at least nine states, alleging that the machines are wide open to computer hackers and prone to temperamental fits of technology that have assigned votes to the wrong candidate. New York University's Brennan Center for Justice released a one-year study last month that determined that the three most popular types of U.S. voting machines "pose a real danger" to election integrity. More than 120 security threats were identified, including wireless machines that could be hacked "by virtually any member of the public with some (computer) knowledge." Lowell Finley, co-director of Voter Action...said, "We had dozens of affidavits from voters in New Mexico who said they touched one candidate's name, but the machine picked the opponent." In the state's biggest county...touch-screens machines purchased from Sequoia lost 13,000 votes.
A Single Person Could Swing an Election
Washington Post, June 28, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content...
To determine what it would take to hack a U.S. election, a team of cybersecurity experts turned to a fictional battleground state called Pennasota. The experts...concluded in a report issued yesterday that it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines, to change the outcome. While 26 states require paper records of votes, fewer than half of those require regular audits. Republican Reps. Tom Cole (Okla.) and Thomas M. Davis III (Va.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, joined Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.) in calling for a law that would set strict requirements for electronic voting machines.
Block the Vote
New York Times, May 30, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/opinion/30tue1.html
In a country that spends so much time extolling the glories of democracy, it's amazing how many elected officials go out of their way to discourage voting. States are adopting rules that make it hard, and financially perilous, for nonpartisan groups to register new voters. Florida recently reached a new low when it actually bullied the League of Women Voters into stopping its voter registration efforts in the state. The Legislature did this by adopting a law that seems intended to scare away anyone who wants to run a voter registration drive. In Washington, a new law prevents people from voting if the secretary of state fails to match the information on their registration form with government databases. There are many reasons that names, Social Security numbers and other data may not match, including typing mistakes. Colorado recently imposed criminal penalties on volunteers who slip up in registration drives. Protecting the integrity of voting is important, but many of these rules seem motivated by a partisan desire to suppress the vote...rather than to make sure that those who are entitled to vote [can] do so.
Will Your Vote Count in 2006?
Newsweek, May 29, 2006, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12888600/site/newsweek
A report by Finnish security expert Harri Hursti analyzed Diebold voting machines for an organization called Black Box Voting. Hursti found unheralded vulnerabilities in the machines. Experts are calling them the most serious voting-machine flaws ever documented. It requires only a few minutes of pre-election access to a Diebold machine to open the machine and insert a PC card that...could reprogram the machine to give control to the violator. The machine could go dead on Election Day or throw votes to the wrong candidate. Worse, it's even possible for such ballot-tampering software to trick authorized technicians into thinking that everything is working fine, an illusion you couldn't pull off with pre-electronic systems. If it so happens that someone not supposed to use the machine—or an election official who wants to put his or her thumb on the scale of democracy—takes advantage of this fast track to fraud, that's not Diebold's problem. "When you're using a paperless voting system, there is no security," says David Dill, a Stanford professor who founded the election-reform organization Verified Voting.
Jeu 26 Oct - 6:29 par Tite Prout