Hacker News Reader

Comment by amalag | Hacker News Reader

I don't give a rat's ass about social media manipulation. What I care about is voting machine manipulation.

Don't forget about voter roll manipulation as the votes of millions of legitimate voters, most of them visible minorities, are thrown out on spurious grounds.

At first I thought this was worrying comment.

Then I saw this entire subthread was a brilliant meta-comment showing how spurious rumors are spread through social media.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/22/electronic-voting-m...

>On Nov. 6, polling places across Maryland will still use Diebold AccuVote touchscreen machines that don't produce paper ballots.

So the entire voting mechanism is handing off to Diebold without a possibility of an independent audit, but you think it's a "brilliant meta-comment" on "social media rumors".

Please see the links provided on that article including studies by Princeton where they say they could hack the Diebold machine in 1 minute.

Do you doubt that voting machine manipulation happens? Programmers of the machines have testified in Congress that they built rigged machines. Exit polls vary dramatically from vote counts almost exclusively when machines are used.

The very idea that 20% of votes are moved through closed-source machines run by Republican friends should be enough to make everyone assume that the votes cannot be trusted.

If these people have testified in congress to this, then it must be public record. Please cite your source.

YouTube is full of them. I'm at work and can't check, but if you search for "diebold programmer rigging" I bet you'll find some.

This looks like it might be one of the ones I'm referencing, but as I said I cannot check 100% right now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4aKOhbbK9E

~20% of the votes will go through machines. Both Diebold[1] and Tagg Romney own a huge number of the machines, specifically in important states like Ohio.

The US elections have been rigged for at least 12 years. This much is obvious. They will be rigged this year, too. But to what extent?

[1] Or whatever they call themselves now.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/romney/votingmachines.asp

And Diebold? Who used to have a CEO committed to G. W. Bush's presidency? Is that also false?

Are you suggesting that CEO's of companies involved in the production of voting equipment should not be allowed to have an opinion of candidates?

No, that's not at all what I'm suggesting. Walden O'Dell was a top fundraiser for George W. Bush. He also ran the machines that elected him president. He is obviously legally allowed to do all of this, including having an opinion (though I do not believe it should be legal to raise funds for a candidate and also run the machines that count the votes).

What I'm saying is: Anyone who builds voting machines should not be taking sides. Especially financial sides. It's a clear conflict of interest, where the result is that I cannot possibly trust the machines to do what they say.

The people building them are Republicans. The machines are closed, proprietary devices. They cannot be trusted. Hence, we must assume they are rigged.

The code running these should be on github and the binaries should be cryptographically signed to ensure it's the correct one.

If you don't trust the hardware the software is useless.

Honestly, don't think voting machines should be outsourced period.

The problem is really the mechanism of voting, it needs to be verifiable and the machines need to be assistants in the process, not black boxes. I think some more thought has to be put into it to make systems which assist the voting process, but not make closed proprietary systems.

Having equity in some company that makes and sells voting machines does not prove a vast conspiracy of voter fraud.

I mean, if this were true Romney would win. What's the point of rigging machines if you can't swing the swing states in your favor?

So, you trust closed source voting machines?

The way I see it: It's effectively illegal to prove the machines are fraudulent as they are proprietary machines and are closed source. So, given that they are run by partisan companies and we have absolutely no method of verifying their inner workings:

Don't we have to assume that the machines can't be trusted?

Analogy time. If one left a partisan alone with unsealed boxes of ballots, I would think they would be considered spoiled (correct me if I'm wrong). I agree with you that leaving the electronic ballots in a partisan's computer with no mechanisms to detect tampering should similarly be considered spoiled.

A strong paper trail seems to be the answer. It doesn't matter what the hardware and software tries to do if the machine has to produce a paper record (checked and approved by each voter) that is spooled for later checking against the electronic total.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com