The nation's top voting machine maker has admitted in a letter to a federal lawmaker that the company installed remote-access software on election-management systems it sold over a period of six years, raising questions about the security of those systems and the integrity of elections that were conducted with them.
In a letter sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) in April and obtained recently by Motherboard, Election Systems and Software acknowledged that it had "provided pcAnywhere remote connection software … to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006," which was installed on the election-management system ES&S sold them.Electronic voting has two computer components: the voting machines (where you cast your ballot) and the election management machines (where the ballots are counted). The security of the voting machines themselves has been pretty much deplorable, and we've known this for a very long time. But the saving grace is that to hack the election you need to hack a bunch of voting machines, and you need physical access to do so. That hakes it hard - not impossible, but hard (read: expensive) and so the risk is mitigated by the real world (im)practicalities of the scenario.
But the election management systems, aye there's the rub. The votes get dumped from the voting machines into the management systems where they get counted and tabulated. And those machines were connected to the 'net.
Ooooooh kaaaaaay. Good thinking.
So riddle me this, Voter Fraud Man. If you wanted to change an election, would you try to gain physical access to maybe thousands of voting machines in key swing districts, using hundreds of accomplices who might get caught (or blab to the PoPo), or would you target a few dozen of remotely accessible (and poorly protected) election management computers where you just change the counted results by a few percent to swing the election your way? After connecting from a jurisdiction that doesn't have an extradition treaty with the USA.
Take your time thinking about it, I'll be right here.
For extra credit, what do you think the password of the PCAnywhere remote access software was?
So we are governed by dumbasses. No, not the idiots who designed and sold this bleeding turkey of a voting system. The ones who bought this bleeding turkey of a voting system.
In a younger and more vigorous era of the Republic, the sellers (and buyers) of this smoking train wreck would have been horse whipped through the public square. Alas, for the decline of the America.
6 comments:
This is my shocked face.
O_o
I was really fine with coloring in little ellipses.
Yup, all because of dumbasses in Dade-Broward who tried to steal an election with a punch machine system that had problems before the 2000 election, the country went whole hog on an even more flawed system.
Fix it.
Require verified identification. Require actual physical ballots kept for 4 years. That is the least of the modifications that should be made. Purple thumbs for voters, and a better way of handling absentee and off-site voting, poll open for a full 24 hours starting at H-hour Greenwich Time everywhere, are the more radical moves that should really be looked at. Voting oversees should only be done at embassies, consulates and military bases, with same ballot system used nationwide for national elections (and hopefully states will follow.) Verify, verify, verify. The time of one party abusing the system should be over.
Sorry for ranting, but when Iraq can run a cleaner election, something is wrong with us.
I think it was before the last election that this subject was looked at. I recall video of a young black guy demonstrating how he could adjust the voting results on these systems. He used an election in Alaska as the Guinea pig for the show and tell, IIRC. There was some sort of group that he was working with to verify this could be done. Prior to this it was just conjecture on their part.
Forget counting systems. That's been a known fail for years. Will, I saw those videos, too. And I checked out these systems back in 1995, when they were new in my jurisdiction. They haven't improved since then.
Where are the voting machines programmed at? They're not programmed individually, by hand. They are programmed centrally. What is their program? How is the programming system secured? It's not. It's the same (or similar) system that counts the votes.
A little fraud in recording each vote. A little fraud in counting the votes. A little fraud in storing the voting records. Eventually, it all adds up to 110% of registered voters voting for Obama, with not one single vote for Romney recorded.
"Those who cast the votes determine nothing. Those who count the votes determine everything." -- Josef Stalin
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