Black box voting

[ciphergoth]

SoCalDem has done a statistical analysis...on several swing states, and EVERY STATE that has Electronic Voting but no paper trails has an unexplained advantage for Bush of around +5% when comparing exit polls to actual results. In EVERY STATE that has paper audit trails on their E-Voting, the exit poll results match the actual results reported within the margin of error.

Comments

[juliet]

I still fail to understand why they can't just use paper & pen. The US population is about 5 times greater than ours, so even counting at the same rate they could have a result within about 30 hours (& there is, of course, no reason why they shouldn't just get in more people to count).

Actually, I do know why it is: because it would require more people & thus be more expensive, & apparently electoral officials are paid v little in the US. [sigh]

Mind you, I *really* don't know how the fuck states have managed to get away with unaudited black-box voting machines.

[juudes.livejournal.com]

Surely, if the Democrat lawyers could prove anything, they would go to court? Or not, if they were also fiddling figures (just not to the same extent as the Republicans). SURELY they wouldn't be allowed to get away with this, if it was at all provable?

Or am I just very, very naive?

[lovingboth]

I was wondering how long it would take for this to come up. Will someone have the resources to start suing - and would the courts do anything?

I do note a touching faith in exit polls in several of the articles. Our general election in 1992 should mean they don't trust them so much - a combination of shame reluctance to admit to voting for The Evil One and bad sampling (so much easier to do your exit polls where there are more voters, rather than in the countryside) can easily mean you get the result 5% wrong.

Oh, the shame, the shame

[webcowgirl.livejournal.com]

It's all just too depressing and I feel really disempowered these days. However, in keeping with Tom Tomorrow, might I recommend these scariest Halloween costumes, from my local alternative rag. To some extent it does show that people believe there is a problem ... I don't know why the dems didn't move harder on this. *sob*

[selki.livejournal.com]

See http://www.evoting-experts.com/ (http://www.evoting-experts.com/), an e-voting blog, includes a link to this account of an election judge which shows how easy tampering with DREs could be in real-life situations (Timonium, MD): http://avirubin.com/judge2.html (http://avirubin.com/judge2.html)

Also see http://www.blackboxvoting.org/?q=node/view/78#breaking (http://www.blackboxvoting.org/):

a request filed in King County, Washington on Sept. 15, following the primary election six weeks ago, uncovered an internal audit log containing a three-hour deletion on election night; “trouble slips” revealing suspicious modem activity; and profound problems with security, including accidental disclosure of critically sensitive remote access information to poll workers, office personnel, and even, in a shocking blunder, to Black Box Voting activists.
[...]
The central servers are installed on unpatched, open Windows computers and use RAS (Remote Access Server) to connect to the voting machines through telephone lines. Since RAS is not adequately protected, anyone in the world, even terrorists, who can figure out the server's phone number can change vote totals without being detected by observers.
The passwords in many locations are easily guessed, and the access phone numbers can be learned through social engineering or war dialing.