Snafu briefly halts electronic voting in Denton County
03:26 PM CST on Tuesday, October 31, 2006
By BRANDON FORMBY / The Dallas Morning News
Rhonda Harris had done her research, chosen her candidates and Monday night headed to her city’s early voting polling location listed on the Denton County Web site.
But a snafu with a server for the county’s electronic voting system – and lack of a paper ballot for Ms. Harris’ precinct – made The Colony woman decide not to cast a ballot.
“I know I can go back tonight and vote, but I don’t think any outage is acceptable,” she said.
Ms. Harris’ complaint came on the same day that Tarrant County Democrats filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging electronic voting and its lack of a paper trail.
Read now.
From Jim Soper:
If you want to know if a voting machine has active WiFi (wireless), you can use a laptop or some handheld devices such as a PDA or Cell Phone.
Better would be to get a directional WiFi locator, because it can tell you not only if WiFi is present, but what direction it’s coming from.
I asked a hardware techie friend of mine, and he suggested buying the following device: Hawking – HWL1 – 802.11b/g WiFi Locator
It’s $25
It’s listed at TigerDirect.com
Neither my friend nor myself has actually used this, but I think I’ll get it or something similar in the next week.
Okay, this CAN’T be good…
Spotted on 10/19, by an eagle-eyed Wonkette reader: The Mid-Atlantic Shredding Services truck making its way up to the Cheney compound at the Naval Observatory.
Fun fact: Mid-Atlantic Shredding Services has been contracted by the Secret Service for our Executive Branch’s record-not-keeping needs.
October 31, 2006
COLUMBUS—With a major GOP federal court victory, the Ohio 2006 election has descended into the calculated chaos that has become the trademark of a Karl Rove election theft, and that could help keep the Congress in Republican hands nationwide.
Through a complex series of legal maneuvers, and now a shocking new decision from the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the GOP has thrown Ohio’s entire process of voting and vote counting into serious disarray. The mess is perfectly designed to suppress voter turnout, make election monitoring and a recount impossible, and allow the Republican Party to emerge with a victory despite overwhelming evidence the electorate wants exactly the opposite.
Avi Rubin wrote:
I just posted a blog entry about a new report out of UConn that I
think is of similar magnitude to the Princeton report, only this time
the subject is the Accuvote AV-OS (optical scanner).
Avi
_______________________________________________
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
UConn VoTeR center report: Diebold AV-OS is vulnerable to serious attacks
A powerful new report was released yesterday about the Diebold AccuVote
Optical Scan voting terminal (AV-OS). This is a thorough and independent
security analysis of the machines that will be used in Connecticut to count
votes on November 7. It is based on hands-on experimentation with the
system, and is thus more like the Princeton study of the Accuvote TS than my
team’s earlier source code analysis. Like the Princeton team, the UConn
researchers had no access to any internal documentation from the vendor, no
source code, or any other information that would have given them an
advantage over a random attacker who happened to get access to the machine.
Everything they needed to know to perform the attacks was done by reverse
engineering the system and observing its behavior. The evaluation was done
as part of an evaluation on behalf of the state of Connecticut. They should
be commended for not only allowing, but for requesting this study. The
report published on their web site explains the attacks in enough detail to
be convincing, but some low level details are reserved for another copy of
the paper that is only available from the authors by request.
The authors show that “even if the memory card is sealed and pre-election
testing is performed, one can carry out a devastating array of attacks
against an election using only off-the-shelf equipment and without having
ever to access the card physically or opening the AV-OS system box.” The
attacks presented in the paper include manipulating the count so that no
votes for a particular candidate are counted, swapping votes for two
candidates, and reporting the results incorrectly based on biases that are
triggered under certain conditions.
The attacks in this paper are cleverly designed to make a compromised
machine appear to work correctly when the system’s audit reports are
evaluated or when the machine is subjected to pre-election testing. Besides
manipulation of the voting machine totals and reports, the authors explain
how any voter can vote an arbitrary number of times using (get this),
Post-it notes, if the voter is left unattended.
The attacks are possible because of serious security vulnerabilities that
could have been prevented with proper security design. For example, if a
serial cable is connected to the AV-OS, an attacker with a laptop can easily
obtain a dump of the memory card contents. The dump is obtained in cleartext
because the system performs no authentication of any computer that is
connected on that port. The dump can be very useful for an attacker, for
example, to reconstruct the password and audit records associated with the
memory card. The communication between the voting machine and the GEMS
tabulation system is unencrypted and unauthenticated. Instead, they use a
CRC as a checksum. In our 2003 report, we identified this as a weakness in
the Diebold Accuvote TS because CRCs are easily broken. The authors of the
new report show how to spoof the GEMS server to the AV-OS, which forms the
basis of many of their attacks.
The authors also validate some of the attacks presented earlier by Harri
Hursti. They report that the executable code on the memory cards (!!) can be
changed so that the counter values change.
Reading this report was a hair raising experience for me. Diebold has
clearly not learned any of the lessons from our 2003 report, and it is
startling to see that their optical scan ballot counter is as vulnerable to
tampering, vote rigging, and incorrect tabulation as the DRE. The big
difference, of course, is that optical scanners can be audited. Ballots
counted by hand can be compared to the totals of the AV-OS, and machines
tabulating incorrectly can be identified. This report highlights the dangers
of trusting any component of a voting system that is software based, and the
importance of widespread random audits. With optical scan technologies, we
can have a secure election even if the systems cheat, due to the opportunity
to audit and perform recounts. With DREs, we are left with whatever results
the machines compute.
I strongly urge everyone to read this new report out of UConn.
http://voter.engr.uconn.edu/voter/Reports.html
The state’s system has safeguards, lacking in other states, to allay worries of fraud and malfunction.
John Reinan, Star Tribune
Linda Mickelson hopes to go home early on election night — say, around midnight.
That’s a better deal than it sounds. Mickelson, deputy auditor in Grant County, usually gets to bed about 4 a.m. on Election Night after counting more than 3,000 votes by hand.
But on Nov. 7, for the first time, Grant County residents and every other Minnesota voter will cast their ballots on computers. And although concerns about electronic voting have been raised across the United States, Mickelson and other Minnesota election officials say they’re confident that voting machines across the state will function just fine on Election Day.
1. Many candidates (including John Hall http://www.johnhallforcongress.com/node/133) are set up to allow Home Phoning. If you have Internet access and a separate telephone landline, you can make calls from your own home. Go to the candidate’s website and follow the directions.
2. People for the American Way, 149 Fifth Avenue (21st/22nd Streets), 7th Floor, Monday through Thursday, from 6-9 p.m. to help candidates in several competitive local races. They will also be open for phonebanking on Saturday 11/4 and Sunday 11/5 from Noon to 5 p.m.
3. Tenant PAC for Andrea Stewart-Cousins for State Senate (Yonkers district): Monday-Thursday 10/23-10/26; 10/30-11/2; Monday 11/6 and all day Tuesday 11/7, 11 Park Place, Suite 814 between Broadway and Church Street in lower Manhattan. Contact 212-577-7001; mmckee@tenantspac.org
4. MOVEON
5. CITIZEN ACTION
6. The WORKING FAMILIES PARTY
7. ACT NOW
8. The Democratic State Senate Campaign Committee is calling for State Senate candidates Monday to Thursday, 6-9 p.m. Graybar Building, 420 Lexington Avenue at 43rd Street, Suite 360. Please do not just drop in; call Keith Powell at 917-836-1745 beforehand to ensure a slot.
**********************************************************************
CAMPAIGN OPPORTUNITIES
1. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4th.
Volunteer Bus to Yonkers, New York to campaign for Andrea Stewart-Cousins. Two years ago, Andrea lost by only 18 votes. This year, we can help her win! Call Steve Strauss at 212-222-2796 to sign-up!
2. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 5th.
Trip to the Hudson Valley, New York to campaign for John Hall. Call Lynn Max, (212) 666-3129.
3. SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5th.
Tabling for our candidates and voter registration on Broadway. Call Steve Strauss at 212-222-2796 for location and times.
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ELECTION DISCUSSION: WHY VOTE?
A discussion with Mark Crispin Miller, NYU Professor of Culture and Communication and author of: Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them)
Wednesday, November 1st 7:00 PM Judson Memorial Church 55 Washington Square South
For more information contact: angad@judson.org 212 477 0351 http://www.judson.org/
SANTA ANA, Calif. – Orange County’s top prosecutor Monday defended his delay until a week before the election in outlining charges filed against a dozen people accused of switching registered Democrats to Republicans without their knowledge.
The registration fraud cases were filed last Tuesday, and at least three of the defendants were arrested on Wednesday and Thursday. The arrests were revealed last week by Orange County’s Democratic leadership.
At a Santa Ana news conference, District Attorney Anthony Rackauckas, who was joined by Secretary of State Bruce McPherson, denied that politics played a role in relation to revealing details about the case.
More Repub pre-propaganda, this time from the Wall Street Journal….
Republicans See Edge From Early Voting
Democrats Question Specific Claims and Believe They Are Catching Up With the Trend
By JOHN D. MCKINNON and ERIKA LOVLEY
October 31, 2006; Page A4
WASHINGTON — Down in the polls and with their majorities in
Congress at risk, Republicans say they have some good news in early-voting statistics that suggest their voter-turnout machine is providing an edge in some tight races.
If the trend holds, it could mean that early voting is growing — and continuing to benefit Republicans, who exploited the practice in the 1990s. Experts say early voters could be a bigger factor this year when overall voter turnout could be lower than in 2004, a presidential-election year.
This year, though, Democrats contend that Republicans are exaggerating their successes so far, by highlighting a few races, while ignoring problems they are having in motivating their troops around the country. Democrats also questioned several specific Republican claims, while noting their own early-voting numbers show they are starting to catch up with their rivals in early get-out-the-vote efforts in battleground states such as Iowa.
