Letters to the Editor
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Where are the real IT firms?
How many people use Diebold or Sequoia software on their computers? Are these even IT companies? I never heard of any of them until they started making crappy voting software. Where is IBM, EDS, or Cisco? Are there no real IT companies, fluent in network security, that are interested in this market?
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How do they know
Voting industry reps ... say that no machine has yet been hacked during an election.
I have heard similar statements before and always have the same question, how do they know. Unlike hacking networked systems where the goal is not only to get in but to take over the computer where the fact that it is taken over leaves permanent clues, I would assume the normal goal of vote machine hacking is to let you candidate win. If the hack was simply to get on, increase the vote count of the candidate you want by N votes (and perhaps decreasing the vote of other candidates by N votes so the totals add up), how could they tell a hack occurred?
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bidalah
Voting machine companies like Diebold entered the market by purchasing companies that specialized in that market. They often come out of the ATM market and postal equipment field.
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Of course you have used Diebold ATM machines!
And they work fine. If anybody ever manages to hack into them, you do not hear about it. It is very likely that the losses from these machines are very small, because the banks insist on it, as they should. So why the problems with voting machines? Think about it.
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The arsenal of democracy includes voting machines
Still wondering why we gave up on the old lever machines. Oh yeah--getting parts and getting them serviced was becoming difficult because they were aging.
Don't build new ones. Don't just frigging make it happen, as we care about the validity of our voting process soooo much.
Can anyone imagine the equivalent Pentagon press release? "The US military will stop flying the B-52 because nobody will sell us spare parts."
Good grief.
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"We tested your cabin roof. It wasn't watertight,"
says Matthew Bishop in effect.
"Voting industry reps criticized the attacks as not having been realistic; they say that no machine has yet been hacked during an election."
Or, in other words, there's no problem because it hasn't rained yet, and the cabin never leaks when it doesn't rain.
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Red Team Report is specifically a minimum baseline of problems
The Red Team reports are quite clear that they were on the verge of documenting more problems when their time ran out for the study, and this is by no means an exhaustive list, it's a minimal list.
One weakness of the Red Team report, perhaps dictated by the politics inherent in the Secretary of State's necessity to keep "working relationships" with local officials, is a complete failure to meaningfully address the risk of insider fraud or coverup of error, which is far higher than the risk of outsider fraud, for some simple but powerful reasons: The government gets all of its money and power from elections, and yet purports to count the votes in trade secrecy via their chosen favorite corporate vendor, and these elections determine 100% of the government's legitimate power and taxing authority. It's like being able to write your own paycheck in secret and nobody being able to know if you took too much or not.
Secrecy invites corruption. To think that nobody on the inside would cheat when successful cheaters BECOME insiders (i.e. incumbents) or their friends and thereby set or influence future election security policy is irresponsible and naive in the extreme. To think that election cheating is mere "conspiracy theory" is like having an extremely attractive spouse (since America is attractive) and thinking nobody would EVER try to cheat with him or her. And remember, the method of cheating would be to instruct a computer to adjust numbers, the evidence would not exist and/or be kept trade secret, and most of all since computers do as they are told without regard to law, ethics or morality, it's like your attractive spouse has a computer chip in their brain that simply CAN'T SAY NO.
If your spouse had such a computer chip in their brains for purposes of freely consenting to instructions given, would you trust your spouse? Then do you trust American democracy to the same computers?
Not even Nancy Reagan could stop such a scheme with "just say no" because computers aren't afraid of jail or censure. As Daniel Schorr said, the most corrupting power is power exercised in secret. Just like the secret vote counting on electronic machines -- literally no election official has any personal knowledge of the true count.... unless they are rigging it. The magic numbers just pop out of the optical scan machines or touchscreens and we're all supposed to fall down and worship them. And if someone as intelligent as Farhad Manjoo can dream up any plausible explanation for those numbers, it's good as gold. But such plausible explanations, of course, will cover not only legit elections, but many illegitimate elections as well.
We can no more have computer security in elections than our own laptops can be made secure from OURSELVES or their admins. The government has an enormous conflict of interest in administering the very elections that determine its legitimacy, and our government "servants" have determined that somehow they can hide the vote counts from the people, who are the citizen masters/employers/taxpayers at the point of voting. That is, when we vote we are acting actually as the RULERS of this country, selecting our servants, unlike other times of the year. And servants can never legitimately hide information from their employers. The system of voting has been corrupted absolutely to the core.
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Why Worry?
These are all honorable men-WHY WORRY?
The current administration are Christians, well educated, and Patriotic-Why Worry?
Sure the machines could be tampered with and elections which presently appear legal could be hijacked-but these are all honorable men-Why Worry?
Just look at the big smile on the President of the United States of America-Why Worry?
The President would not be so happy if things were going BADLY-
WHY WORRY???
THIS IS THE "GREATEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD" with a Democratically elected government of patriotic leaders. Corruption happens in other countries-not here-WHY WORRY?