This 90 minute documentary chronicles Bev Harris and her tiny
organization blackboxvoting.org trying to determine how votes are
counted electronically in the past 2 Presidential US elections.
After watching this, I feel like we are all in Saddam's Iraq.
The opportunity to change election outcomes are unbelievably easy,
and impossible to detect.
I thought I knew quite a bit about this, being in the computer industry,
and reading what was available on-line and reported on David Farber's
IP group back for the last 6 years. But I learned new things from Bev Harris.
- I thought paper ballots read by optical scanners were hard to hack.
I learned all optical scanners have a key card that tallies the votes.
the key card is removed at the end of the voting period, put in a
sealed bag, and taken to a vote tallying computer.
- Key cards from manufacturers like Diebold are supposed to only
contain vote tallies. But they also contain .exe (executable programs)
that can filter, swap, or otherwise modify results.
Even the Diebold engineers swear this is not possible, but it is.
- Actual optical scanners used in real elections were 'hacked' by
putting a simple program on the keycard inserted in those scanners.
No one at the voting place or at the tallying place has to do anything.
They have no way to know if the keycards have been hacked. What is
on the keycard is a secret. In fact all software and how it works is by
law secret and proprietary. No one at the polls, or the board
of elections, or at the tallying place are allowed to know how the
software works.
- Therefore, keycards that are stored for weeks or months before
an election, (or even freshly minted from a vendor and delivered
on voting day) can contain the hack, and no one would ever know.
The vote tally printout signed at the polling place can also be wrong
because the keycard in the optical scanner produces the final local
tally that is signed off.
To make matters worse, Diebold left all their source code
on a public site for years before Bev Harris found it. Anyone from
anywhere with any agenda could find this, and figure out how
to hack in undetected. All they would have to do is get access to
the keycards before the election.
- But wait, it gets worse. The tallying computer has an 'official' looking
front end GUI (graphical user interface) that shows the official results
for an election. The tallying computer reads and adds up the votes
from the keycards. Even if none of the keycards were tampered with,
as the votes are tallied, they are written to a file which is what the
offical front end GUI software references to report the vote. That
file is unprotected and unencrypted. If the file is opened in excel,
the values in the file (vote totals per candidate) can be manipulated
without being detected by the offical front end, and who views it.
If the file cannot be opened by any program on the PC (because it
is in a protected user account with password) it still can be opened
by another program that searches for the candidates name(s) and
modifies the results. And of course, this could be done on any computer
networked to the tallying computer as well.
- Therefore none of the voting machines -- neither the optical scanners
on hardcopy votes, nor the tallying machines, are safe from hacking.
- But you may say to yourself, ok, it's possible. But probable? Nah!
We all want the 'will of the people' to govern our country, right?
heh. Bev Harris actually
went to places like Volusia County Florida, the place where voting
machines counted negative votes for Al Gore in 2000 (-16022 to
be exact) and using the FOIA, demanded to see the voting tally tapes.
in 2004. The local Board of Elections printed out a fresh copy just for them, but
Bev wanted to see the originals. She goes to the county warehouse,
and finds the originals being thrown out in the trash, signed
signatures and all. They compare the results on those tallies
with the fresh ones -- they are off by hundreds of votes. Guess
who they favor.
- It goes on and on. Plenty of action in Ohio in 2004. Then we
get to see the famous flip-flopper Kerry, who claims to have a
battery of lawyers ready to challenge any vote, who folds 12 hours
after the polls close, stating there is no way to win Ohio. Within
an hour after conceding, he speaks
to Cliff Arnebeck, an election attorney in Ohio, and tells him that
the New Mexico optical scanners are rigged for Bush.
Then there are the Ohio recounts.
This is done by first taking 3% of the votes (in Cayahoga County
for example) to see if the voting ratios differ from the final results.
The documentary shows what actually happened in 2004. And
shows the official counters skeptical about the sampling hard
copy votes they got -- there was evidence they were selected
and counted in advance since the votes were clustered in
ways that defied (ahem) random sampling. "We know how to
do recounts. We do 'em all the time" says the Republican
appointed Election Officials...you know the ones working
for Governor Taft?
- Not to pick on the Republicans too much, even though in the '00 and '04
Presidential elections, all the 'irregularities' favored Bush over
Gore and Kerry -- a statistical improbability Bev found that in
some precincts under Democratic control, Diebold had made
friends there as well. Let's keep the status quo, boys.
- So fellow citizens, don't expect elections to change anything.
The country we are pretending to be does not even remotely
resemble the country we are.
Meanwhile, Hail to Thief!
Oh, I'm sorry.
That's fool me twice, shame on _me_.
"
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