Under oath: Computers can be rigged to fix election -- The Radio Patriot

[bsteadman]

Under oath: Computers can be rigged to fix election

The Radio Patriot
Andrea Shea King
11/9/2012

Excerpt:

My friend Kitty Myers wrote:

I first saw this on DW Ulsterman, who wrote: “Apparently from testimony following the 2004 election, this computer programmer makes clear UNDER OATH, of how easily it would be for an organization, be it Democrat or Republican, to “flip” the election outcome via a rather simple code. – a code this programmer himself easily manufactured.

This is further confirmed at the 3:10 of the video where the programmer notes how the entire system can be “hacked” to control the final voting outcome.

Tin hat stuff? Perhaps, but given how so many political experts were proven so wrong regarding the 2012 presidential election, and how particularly in the crucial swing states the final vote came out considerably less for Mitt Romney than much of the polling data was indicating, gives pause. Serious pause. See for yourself:”

View the complete post, including video, at:

http://radiopatriot.wordpress.com/20...-fix-election/

[bsteadman]

US elections, rigged and computer codes. ELECTION FRAUD!

PostModernProgramming
Amy Adams
5/20/2012

Excerpt:

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Clinton Eugene Curtis, a computer programmer from Florida, testified before a congressional panel that there are computer programs that can be used to secretly fix elections. He explains how he created a prototype for Florida Congressman Tom Feeny that would flip the vote 51%-49% in favor of a specified candidate.

This happened all the way back in 2001 but you might not have heard anything about this claim unless you searched for it. I’ve seen a Wired News report on this topic and a few local Florida newspaper stories but otherwise, no real media coverage has been provided. Crazy, right? You’d think claims of election rigging software would be splattered all over the news in a sensationalist style a la Weinergate. But no, as it turns out, our news media prefers to point out voting fraud in other nations but not here at home.

I’m not arguing in support of the claims Clinton Curtis makes and I’m not dismissing them. I’m merely pointing out that major news outlets did not cover this story ten years ago. Something this newsworthy – coming from the same state the Bush/Gore election hinged upon – was ignored. With potentially national implications that seem obvious to me, I’m shocked ten years and two elections have gone by with no media mention of these allegations.

How many voting polls now use computer programs for voting? Whether Curtis was right about the alleged voter fraud at the hands of Rep. Tom Feeny is irrelevant. The potential for this kind of software to exist is enough to warrant skepticism on the reliability of computerized voting machines. The lack of media attention on a congressional panel hearing about such fraud is even more frightening.

Mr Curtis a Software programmer who worked for NASA, Exxon Mobil & the US Department of Transportation in a sworn-oath deposition testifies that US elections are rigged by inserting software into the voting system. The timing of this deposition was just after George W Bush being re-elected president of the United States. We are not surprised that this never made it into the main stream media.

Mr Curtis goes on to name US Representatives who attempted to pay him to rig their election vote counts.
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View the complete post at:

http://www.postmodernprogramming.org...election-fraud

[bsteadman]

Foreign vote-machine firm hires U.S. spinmaster

New hire has long history of denying concerns over veracity of voting systems

WND
Aaron Klein
6/6/2012

Excerpt:

SCYTL, a Spanish-based international company that recently purchased the leading U.S. electronic voting firm, yesterday announced it is hiring an electronic voting industry veteran, Michelle Shafer, to direct the company’s communications initiatives.

Shafer has a long history of putting positive spins on widespread concerns over the controversial voting systems she has represented as spokeswoman over the years.

Shafer will be leading the branding, marketing, government affairs and communications initiatives for Scytl’s U.S. subsidiary, SOE Software.

In January, SCYTL, based in Barcelona, acquired 100 percent of SOE Software, the leading software provider of election management solutions in the United States.

The company previously has faced questions about the security of its electronic voting technologies, which are now set to be deployed in 900 U.S. jurisdictions via its U.S. subsidiary.

The firm already provides balloting for overseas U.S. military and civilian voting in nine states along with elections technologies in several districts.

Concerns have also been raised about SCYTL’s ties to the Spanish government and to international venture capital firms.

The press release announcing Shafer’s hiring stressed she possesses hands-on electronic election experience through her work as a subject-matter expert for U.S. Department of Defense contractor CALIBRE Systems during the company’s work for the U.S. Federal Voting Assistance Program.

The release noted Shafer served as a New Voting Technology Expert during an Election Assistance Mission to Switzerland for the Oct. 23, 2011, elections and worked as a polling station adviser for the December 2010 elections in Kosovo.

Entirely missing from the press release was the work Shafer did for much of her career – how she served as spokeswoman over the years for two highly controversial voting companies that faced major questions over the veracity of some of their voting systems. It was Shafer’s job to explain away the problems.

In December 2005, Shafer became vice president of communications for Sequoia Voting Systems after nearly a decade working for election technology provider Hart InterCivic in various marketing and communications positions.

In 2004, Wired.com reported on widespread problems for top e-voting brands across the nation made by Hart InterCivic, Sequoia and other firms.

In Florida, for example, 10 touch-screen voting machines failed at precincts in Broward County.

Voters in Florida and Texas complained about calibration problems with touch-screen machines. Problems occurred when voters touched the screen next to one candidate’s name and an “X” appeared in a box next to another candidate’s name, reported Wired.com.

Reported Wired:

Other problems included e-voting machines that appeared to record votes correctly when voters touched the screen, but indicated a different selection on the review screen before voters cast their ballot. In some cases voters had to redo their ballot five or six times before the correct votes took. …

Voters in Palm Beach County, Florida, reported that when they went to vote on Sequoia machines some races on their electronic ballots were already pre-marked before they started voting. They had to ask poll workers to assist them in removing the selections from the ballot so they could start with a clean ballot. In some cases they weren’t successful in doing this.

In Texas, voters casting straight-party tickets reported that machines cast ballots for candidates outside of their chosen party. For example, if a voter chose to vote straight Republican, rather than automatically marking all Republican choices on the ballot, the machine marked some Democratic choices.

As spokeswoman for Hart InterCivic, Shafer insisted the problems that occurred in Texas with her company’s machines were caused by voters rather than by the machines.

“It’s not a machine issue,” Shafer said. “It’s voters not properly following the instructions.”

Sequoia faced problems of its own. The company gained notoriety in the 2000 presidential election after its punch cards were at the center of the “hanging chad” controversy in Florida.

Sequoia was charged with supplying poor quality punch-card ballots to Palm Beach County, Florida.

On Aug. 3, 2007, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen withdrew approval and granted conditional reapproval to Sequoia’s optical scan and DRE voting machines after a review reportedly found “significant security weaknesses throughout the Sequoia system” and “pervasive structural weaknesses” which raise “serious questions as to whether the Sequoia software can be relied upon to protect the integrity of elections.”

In 2008, Sequoia’s e-voting equipment was blamed for allowing thousands of fake write-in votes. D.C. election officials pointed to a defective computer memory cartridge in Sequoia’s system for creating “glitch.”

Shafer was quoted as saying “there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the database.” She added, “There’s absolutely no problem with the machines in the polling places. No. No.”

In the run up to the 2008 presidential elections, Florida’s Sun Sentinel newspaper reported on “problems with accuracy, phantom votes and other issues –involving Sequoia Voting Systems machines.”

The newspaper related that Shafer, as Sequoia’s spokeswoman, couldn’t explain why the machines didn’t sort ballots properly during recent tests.

“The 400C and the Insight optical scanners which are used in [Palm Beach County] are tried and true,” Shafer said in an email to the newspaper. “They have been used for years throughout the country without issue.”
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WND reviewed scores of other examples of Shafer attempting to explain the voting problems with her company’s machines.

View the complete article at:

http://www.wnd.com/2012/06/foreign-v...to-ease-fears/

[bsteadman]

Hacking voting machines: Easier than ever imagined

RT
11/6/2012

Excerpt:

Millions of Americans are already waiting for hours outside of polling places to vote for the next president of the United States. All of that might not matter though, as some security pros say the entire election can be rigged all too easily.

In one example, it wouldn’t take much more than ten dollars’ worth of parts from any RadioShack store to steal and manipulate votes. It’s called a man-in-the-middle attack and the computer program that logs the results on electronic voting machines isn’t even compromised.

“It’s a classic attack on security devices,” Roger Johnston tells Popular Science. “You implant a microprocessor or some other electronic device into the voting machine, and that lets you control the voting and turn cheating on and off. We’re basically interfering with transmitting the voter’s intent.”

According to the magazine, anyone from a high-school student to an octogenarian could corrupt the voting process. Johnston is the head of the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory and has done it himself, even on camera. It wouldn’t be hard for others, he says, and some fear that that could easily be the case on Election Day. And with many prediction polls estimating a close contest between President Barack Obama and Republican Party challenger Mitt Romney this year, it wouldn’t take much to render the entire contest corrupted.

On the website for Argonne, Johnston says Americans believe too often that election officials assume — incorrectly — that it takes a computer genius capable of a nation-state cyberassault or a frazzled, Hollywood-designed hacker to turn an electronic voting machine on its head. And while that route is once that can be taken too, it isn’t the only way to ruin an election.

Insider threats from election officials or anyone with access to a voting machine could easily alter contests, and monitors aren’t necessarily on the look-out for that kind of unauthorized access.

“And a lot of our election judges are little old ladies who are retired, and God bless them, they’re what makes the elections work, but they’re not necessarily a fabulous workforce for detecting subtle security attacks,” Johnston tells Popular Science. In the example of hijacking the computer transmission with a few bucks’ worth of electronics, it wouldn’t require much more than walking into a polling place and entering a booth with the right knowhow and intent, and most machines can be access without even requiring a two-dollar lockpick and a tiny tension bar. “No one signs for the machines when they show up. No one’s responsible for watching them. Seals on them aren’t much different from the anti-tamper packaging found on food and over-the-counter pharmaceuticals. Think about tampering with a food or drug product: You think that’s challenging?” he asks.

Johnston has recorded himself demonstrating how a logic analyzer, an Allen wrench and a screwdriver is all it takes to change votes to register for one candidate instead of another by using a man-in-the-middle attack. Although it hasn’t been verified yet, a video posted to YouTube early on November 6 from an account registered to “Centralpavote” shows what is reported to be a similar machine showing signs typical of exactly that kind of abuse —not in a test setting, though, but only hours before the polls close for real [VIDEO (embedded in original article].

UPDATE: The machine in question was removed from the polling center in Pennsylvania where it was initially installed for use on Tuesday, NBC News confirms, after the video was recorded and uploaded to the Web.

This Election Day, the touchscreen Diebold Accuvote-TSX will be used by more than 26 million voters in 20 states, while the push-button Sequoia AVC machine will be deployed to four states for use by almost 9 million voters. Johnston says purchasing a $10 logic analyzer from RadioShack is easily enough to snoop and see who any voter intends on electing, and from there those digital transmissions can be hijacked and told to mean something else. For experts, though, there are even other ways to wreak havoc on the polls.

Johnston says the machines don’t transmit data with encryption, so anyone with a basic understanding of digital communications can figure out how a user votes if they’ve accessed the machine with one of those logic analyzers. Sequoia — the company responsible for making a good share of America’s electronic voting machines — do encrypt the results of each vote, though. Well, kind of.

Andrew W. Appel of Princeton, NY bought a few used AVC Advantage voting machine made by Sequoia off an online auction site for only $82 just a couple of years ago. Once they arrived, he accessed the machine’s innards and says it was easy to start to see how things worked.

“I was surprised at how simple it was for me to access the ROM memory chips containing the firmware that controls the vote-counting,” Appel writes on his personal website. Despite claims from Sequoia that the machine wasn’t easily hackable, Appel says, “The AVC Advantage can be easily manipulated to throw an election because the chips which control the vote-counting are not soldered on to the circuit board of the DRE. This means the vote-counting firmware can be removed and replace with fraudulent firmware.”
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View the complete article at:

http://rt.com/usa/news/voting-machin...tion-hack-088/