What It MEANS To Be A HACKER-Election Reform-Fraud & Related News-Wed 2/20/08

[kpete]

Voting Machines Play Chess & Lie About Election Results-Election Reform-Fraud&Related News-Wed 2/20/08

"I became even more convinced that all of these 'machines' (that were all in fact computers) needed to go if we were to have transparent and verifiable elections."

Old-Skool Hacking Not Dead Yet, Graying Dutch Hacker Explains
By Bruce Sterling February 19, 2008

From 2600 magazine, Winter issue - #4, 2007

(http://www.2600.com)

What it means to be a hacker

by Rop Gonggrijp

My most recent confrontation with what it means to be a hacker started in March of 2006, after I went to vote for the local council of Amsterdam. At the polling station, I had to use a brand-new electronic voting machine that the city was renting from a company called Sdu. In fact, Amsterdam had contracted the entire election as a turnkey service, Sdu was even training the poll-workers. This "voting machine" was in fact a computer with a touch screen running Windows. To make maters worse: inside each computer was a GPRS wireless modem that sent the election results to Sdu, which in turn told the city. I had not been blind to the problems of electronic voting before, but now I was having my face rubbed in it, and it hurt.

............

Fast forward to 2006 and the local elections. I was angry because I felt my election had been stolen: there was no way to observe a count, one just had to believe that this wireless-equipped black-box Windows machine was counting honestly. I knew a little bit too much about the risks associated with computer technology to go along with that. I wasn't the only one that was angry: my longtime friend Barry came home from that March 2006 election with the exact same story that I had come home with: trying to reason with poll-workers that clearly felt that only the medically paranoid would distrust such a wonderful shiny box. When we met later that day we vowed to not only get mad, but to do something about it.

.............

During the next year and a half we managed to get the attention of the media. (((Believe it or not, this has always been a hacker specialty.)))

We claimed that the Nedap 'machines' were computers and not 'dedicated hardware' (as the manufacturer claimed) and that they could just as easily be taught to play chess or lie about election results. The person selling these computers in the Netherlands wrote wonderful long rants on his website, and in reaction to our claim he said he did not believe his 'machines' could play chess.

So we caused a true media frenzy when we got hold of a Nedap voting computer and made it play chess. (We also made it lie about election results.) There was a debate in parliament, during which the responsible minister promised to appoint two committees. That next election, an international election observation mission studied the problems with electronic voting in the country which until then had always been the example country for uncontroversial e-Voting. In their report, they advised that this type of voting computers "should be phased out" and the two committees also wrote very harsh reports about how these 'machines' came about and how they should not be used in the future.

........................

more at:
http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2008/02/old-skool-hacki.html

Election Reform, Fraud, & Related News, Tuesday 01/15/08


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[peacetalksforall]

1. Is it all about expectations? Did the Dutch expect to have an honest vote

and persisted until they knew what was going on and then got it right?

While we expecte to have a stolen vote and simply close our ears and eyes and are ok with it? We do open our mouth to talk sports shopping serials celebrities crime.

Let's go Dutch.

Duers excluded from inferrences.

[rumpel]

2. VT: Vote-by-phone system available

Rutland Herald

February 20, 2008

For the presidential primary on Town Meeting Day, every polling place in the state will be equipped with an option for Vermonters who have difficulties filling out their paper ballots.

Using vote-by-phone technology, voters who have a hard time marking a paper ballot, especially those who are visually impaired, will be able to use the telephone keypad to mark their presidential primary ballots, Vermont Secretary of State Deborah Markowitz said Tuesday.

"In Vermont, there are an estimated 83,000 voting-age citizens who live with disabilities; 3,000 of them are legally blind," Markowitz said. "The vote-by-phone voting system is accessible and easy to use."

http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080220/NEWS01/802200397/1002/NEWS01

[kpete]

3. Thousands of Students March 7 Miles To Vote

Thousands of Students March 7 Miles To Vote
By: Nicole Belle on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 7:15 PM - PST More pictures available here

Burnt Orange Report:

Early voting starts today in Texas. In Waller County, a primarily rural county about 60 miles outside Houston, the county made the decision to offer only one early voting location: at the County Courthouse in Hempstead, TX, the county seat.

Prairie View A&M students organized to protest the decision, because they felt it hindered their ability to vote. For background, Prairie View A&M is one of Texas’ historically Black universities. It has a very different demographic feel than the rest of the county. There has been a long history of dispute over what the students feel is disenfranchisement. There was a lot of outrage in 2006, when students felt they were unfairly denied the right to vote when their registrations somehow did not get processed.

..............

So what are the students doing?



1000 students, along with an additional 1000 friends and supporters, are this morning walking the 7.3 miles between Prairie View and Hempstead in order to vote today. According to the piece I saw on the news (there’s no video up, so I can’t link to it), the students plan to all vote today. There are only 2 machines available at the courthouse for early voting, so they hope to tie them up all day and into the night.


more at:
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/02/19/thousands-of-students-march-7-miles-to-vote/#comments

[truedelphi]

4. SHAME! SHAME! SHAME! n/t

[tbyg52]

5. This isn't the first time they've tried to suppress the student vote at Prairie View, is it?

Yep, I remembered right:

Rock the Vote cites many examples of attempts to attack student voting rights. In 2004 near Prairie View A&M (a historically black university located in a majority white county in Texas), District Attorney Oliver Kitzman publicly declared, “it’s not right for any college student to vote where they do not have permanent residency,” and threatened to prosecute students who tried to register to vote.

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/12/31/wilson

Total BS, of course:

In his letter to the attorney general, Ellis spelled out the requirements necessary to vote in Texas: A person must be a resident of the county at least 30 days prior to the election; be a U.S. citizen; be at least age 18; be properly registered; not be a felon who has not completed his sentence; and not be mentally disabled as determined by a court.

"The law, I think, is very clear on the subject," Ellis said Wednesday. "Students have the right to vote where they go to school."

http://www.votelaw.com/blog/archives/001098.html

[Joe Chi Minh]

6. Wow! isn't that brilliant?

[tbyg52]

7. TX: Elections Administrator J.R. Perez Surprises Election Commission By Resigning

From Fort Bend County (DeLay land):

Fort Bend County Elections Administrator J.R. Perez surprised members of the county Elections Commission by tendering his resignation on Tuesday.

The board accepted his resignation during a closed meeting that the commission had called in which, one participant said, it’s possible Perez would have been asked to resign had he not done so on his own.

Perez, who did not return a call seeking comment for this story, has been at odds with members of the county Commissioners Court off and on for more than a year. At issue had been his dislike of the county’s Hart Intercivic eSlate voting machines, and appeared to anger some commissioners a week ago, when he told the court he favored scrapping the county’s $4 million eSlate voting system in favor of a system that would make use of paper ballots.

Before the meeting, Perez told FortBendNow he doesn’t believe the county will be able to handle anticipated high voter turnout during the March 4 primary. He made similar statements in KTRK-TV reports, which appeared to fuel some commissioners’ angst.

More:
http://fortbendnow.com/pages/full_story?article-Elections-Administrator-J-R--Perez-Surprises-Election-Commission-By-Resigning%20=&page_label=home&id=18630-Elections-Administrator-J-R--Perez-Surprises-Election-Commission-By-Resigning&widget=push&instance=home_news_lead_story&open=

He's been trying to get us paper (for his reasons, not mine, but that's OK) for over a year while the commissioners sat on their rear ends (the same commissioners that purchased the paperless wonders against the will of the people in the first place).

He's all over the local network affiliate news right now - at least he's making noise on the way out - good for him!

[sonias]

8. k&r for that one

You know DeLay is back in Fort Bend now too.

We'll see how that works out for them.

Good for Perez, he had enough respect for himself not to stay on after he'd done his best to fix their problem. You know the saying, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.


Sonia