computer experts/voting machines question pls

[historian]

Is it possible, do you think, for some intelligent dem hacker to get into the machines to see whether they are being manipulated??? Stupid question I know but i cant bear the thought of slime being re elected.

[MrSoundAndVision]

1. not without being AT the machine, locally connected to it

These machines are not on the web yo, the results are probably phoned in to the state election office. One would have to be at the machine, at the telephone poll, or at the election office, or hacked into the election office which would probably be the best way to do it because so many stupid state IT guys think Windows is secure...

[historian]

2. please

pls pls say you are thinking about it ... i need to sleep nights.

[slackmaster]

4. I don't want to go to pound-me-in-the-ass prison

Hacking a voting machine is not something a sane person would do.

[MrSoundAndVision]

5. No

I believe in democracy my comrade. Read "The Portable Thomas Jefferson" sometime, and you'll see that democracy is not to be stopped. It's just that the people are afraid to lead.

[MrSoundAndVision]

3. or you could just be...

a senior programmer at Diebold and with one line of code....or one ram card....or one little, teeny-tiny boolean value....check out the obfuscation coding completition sometime to see how easy it would be to embed such a line of code virtually undetected.

Oh, and KUCINICH FOR PRESIDENT!

[htuttle]

6. If Richard Stallman wins the General Election in a surprise upset...

...then it will be pretty obvious to everyone that the machines are not secure.

Just saying...

:evilgrin:

[MrSoundAndVision]

7. Yeah I'm hoping that if indeed...

these machines are easily hackable, some installs Tim Thomerson as the winner (you know, Jack Deth from the Trancers movies?).

[w4rma]

8. Not really. Code could be in the day before and out the day after voting.

And out of the thousands? of machines in use, only *one* would need to be hacked. It would even be pretty tough to determine the likely target since that target could be in a state previously thought somewhat safe (like California which currently plan to use Diebold machines for the 2004 elections).

Note that the machines aren't locked up in a vault. Many times they sit in some storage room of a local public school while not being used.

[ParanoidPat]

11. Or worse yet, sitting unprotected in unlocked cases in the.....

.....lobby of a school student center!
From CBS NEWS.com

On Edit; Do they teach computer science at Georgia Tech? :evilgrin:

On Super Tuesday, E-Voting Jitters

SAN JOSE, Calif., March 2, 2004

(AP) Electronic voting made its debut in cities and towns from Maryland to California on Tuesday as election officials beefed up security for the record number of voters expected to cast E-ballots for the first time.

Scattered technical problems were reported in the early hours as voters in 10 states, including California, New York and Ohio, went to the Super Tuesday polls to choose a Democratic presidential nominee and decide primary contests for congressional and state races.

One Maryland polling place had to switch to paper ballots Tuesday because its new electronic voting machines didn't work. State elections supervisor Linda Lamone said technicians expected to have the problem fixed quickly.

<Snip>

Voters also had to start out using paper ballots in Georgia's Effingham County. Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Secretary of State Cathy Cox, said county officials apparently forgot to program the encoders — devices used to tell ballot access cards, which voters insert into the machines, what ballot to display.

A security issue also arose in Georgia.

Georgia Tech student Peter Sahlstrom said he found 10 Diebold terminals sitting unprotected in the lobby of the school's student center Monday. Sahlstrom, 22, photographed the machines in their unlocked cases.

<More>

[EV1Ltimm]

9. no.

i remember seeing the source code a while back and it's storing the votes in an access (mdb) file. the program sitting on top of the mdb will most likely store date and time directly to the mdb at the time of the vote. if anyone were to edit the vote in the mdb directly, there would be no way to audit who changed what and when.

i'd imagine there's only 2 reasonable ways to access the voter data and skew it... either in the source or at the backend where the votes are collected... both of which won't leave an audit trail. any skewed results would most definitely have to be an inside job.

:tinfoilhat:

[Kelvin Mace]

10. The only possible way...

is to get hold of a machine in the middle of the day and take it apart in the presence of forensic hardware/software pros. You then have a good chance of spotting monkey business, but in order to catch bad software just not recording correctly, you would have to know the actual votes of the folks who used it.

David Allen
Publisher, CEO, Janitor
(also, MCSE, MCP, ASE, A+, and CSM)