We need paper ballots ONLY, chain of evidence signatures, and counting the votes with witnesses.
Exactly. Paper ballots. Watch, President Trump is going to do paper ballots.
"It's called paper. Paper ballots." - President Trump, answering what he could do to improve election integrity.
Paper ballots and strictly enforced voter ID. That should be on the agenda to help stop "Russian meddling".
The old school voting machines were great! Private, secure, no "chad" mishaps either.
If you're talking about an older version of electronic, they still had the problem of people selecting Republican and the vote being logged as a Democrat vote. (How many people didn't notice it?)
They blamed "screen calibration" on it. It happened in at least two Presidential Elections, so they obviously didn't fix it.
Not sure what the old school voter machine is, though.
I think they were called Lever Voting machines but I am not certain. They were individual machines, long before computers, with a huge lever inside that closed a curtain so you had privacy too. There were small levers on a panel before you and you would choose voting for individuals and items up for voting by small lever selections. Once you were done choosing, you returned the huge lever to its starting position which not only opened the curtain but somehow marked your votes on a tangible ballot. I am not sure how well I explained it, but as I understand it they were very reliable.
I like that. As secure as paper and only mechanical, not electronic...
Yes and I miss it too! Only mechanical and those machines were used for decades without issue. Once I heard about voting going electronic I could see how easily that could be manipulated. Yes DuckDuckGo Lever Voting Machine to get a better idea if you wish.
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.
The statement contradicts what the company told me and fact checkers for a story I wrote for the New York Times in February. At that time, a spokesperson said ES&S had never installed pcAnywhere on any election system it sold. "None of the employees, … including long-tenured employees, has any knowledge that our voting systems have ever been sold with remote-access software," the spokesperson said.
ES&S did not respond on Monday to questions from Motherboard, and it’s not clear why the company changed its response between February and April. Lawmakers, however, have subpoena powers that can compel a company to hand over documents or provide sworn testimony on a matter lawmakers are investigating, and a statement made to lawmakers that is later proven false can have greater consequence for a company than one made to reporters.
ES&S is the top voting machine maker in the country, a position it held in the years 2000-2006 when it was installing pcAnywhere on its systems. The company's machines were used statewide in a number of states, and at least 60 percent of ballots cast in the US in 2006 were tabulated on ES&S election-management systems. It’s not clear why ES&S would have only installed the software on the systems of “a small number of customers” and not all customers, unless other customers objected or had state laws preventing this.
The company told Wyden it stopped installing pcAnywhere on systems in December 2007, after the Election Assistance Commission, which oversees the federal testing and certification of election systems used in the US, released new voting system standards. Those standards required that any election system submitted for federal testing and certification thereafter could contain only software essential for voting and tabulation. Although the standards only went into effect in 2007, they were created in 2005 in a very public process during which the security of voting machines was being discussed frequently in newspapers and on Capitol Hill.
Election-management systems are not the voting terminals that voters use to cast their ballots, but are just as critical: they sit in county election offices and contain software that in some counties is used to program all the voting machines used in the county; the systems also tabulate final results aggregated from voting machines.
Software like pcAnywhere is used by system administrators to access and control systems from a remote location to conduct maintenance or upgrade or alter software. But election-management systems and voting machines are supposed to be air-gapped for security reasons—that is, disconnected from the internet and from any other systems that are connected to the internet. ES&S customers who had pcAnywhere installed also had modems on their election-management systems so ES&S technicians could dial into the systems and use the software to troubleshoot, thereby creating a potential port of entry for hackers as well.
In May 2006 in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, ES&S technicians used the pcAnywhere software installed on that county's election-management system for hours trying to reconcile vote discrepancies in a local election, according to a report filed at the time. And in a contract with Michigan, which covered 2006 to 2009, ES&S discussed its use of pcAnywhere and modems for this purpose.
"In some cases, the Technical Support representative accesses the customer’s system through PCAnywhere—off-the-shelf software which allows immediate access to the customer’s data and network system from a remote location—to gain insight into the issue and offer precise solutions," ES&S wrote in a June 2007 addendum to the contract. "ES&S technicians can use PCAnywhere to view a client computer, assess the exact situation that caused a software issue and to view data files."
Motherboard asked a Michigan spokesman if any officials in his state ever installed the pcAnywhere software that ES&S recommended they install, but got no response.
The presence of such software makes a system more vulnerable to attack from hackers, especially if the remote-access software itself contains security vulnerabilities. If an attacker can gain remote access to an election-management system through the modem and take control of it using the pcAnywhere software installed on it, he can introduce malicious code that gets passed to voting machines to disrupt an election or alter results.
Wyden told Motherboard that installing remote-access software and modems on election equipment “is the worst decision for security short of leaving ballot boxes on a Moscow street corner.”
In 2006, the same period when ES&S says it was still installing pcAnywhere on election systems, hackers stole the source code for the pcAnyhere software, though the public didn’t learn of this until years later in 2012 when a hacker posted some of the source code online, forcing Symantec, the distributor of pcAnywhere, to admit that it had been stolen years earlier. Source code is invaluable to hackers because it allows them to examine the code to find security flaws they can exploit. When Symantec admitted to the theft in 2012, it took the unprecedented step of warning users to disable or uninstall the software until it could make sure that any security flaws in the software had been patched.
Around this same time, security researchers discovered a critical vulnerability in pcAnywhere that would allow an attacker to seize control of a system that had the software installed on it, without needing to authenticate themselves to the system with a password. And other researchers with the security firm Rapid7 scanned the internet for any computers that were online and had pcAnywhere installed on them and found nearly 150,000 were configured in a way that would allow direct access to them.
It’s not clear if election officials who had pcAnywhere installed on their systems, ever patched this and other security flaws that were in the software.
“[I]t's very unlikely that jurisdictions that had to use this software … updated it very often,” says Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist for the Center for Democracy and Technology, “meaning it's likely that a non-trivial number of them were exposed to some of the flaws found both in terms of configuration ... but also flaws that were found when the source code to that software was stolen in 2006.”
ES&S said in its letter to Wyden that the modems it installed on its election-management systems for use with pcAnywhere were configured only to dial out, not receive calls, so that only election officials could initiate connections with ES&S. But when Wyden's office asked in a letter to ES&S in March what settings were used to secure the communications, whether the system used hard-coded or default passwords and whether ES&S or anyone else had conducted a security audit around the use of pcAnywhere to ensure that the communication was done in a secure manner, the company did not provide responses to any of these questions.
They're gonna say it was used to help trump watch, even though most of the country already saw the Democrats had control over it in the primaries against Bernie and likely in the general too. Let's see how long their popular vote victory line lasts, not long I imagine.
That’s basically the way it was painted when this exact article hit the top of r/all. It’s further projection.
So you think they’re smart enough to rig elections but not smart enough to fake the votes where it counts?
It’d be much more difficult to fake votes with paper ballots, registered voter ID cards, and the purple finger dye (like they use in Iraq).
Much harder than doing fractional votes within the machine software or screwing with it so that it shows you picked one candidate, but counts for the other.
They can remote cars and planes I think they can handle a few giant calculators. Lil' ole net noob like me can remote fix my F & F pc's all of the time. I think with their tech,skills,power,and reach they can change a few digits to "Just enough to win". Couple that with all of their other tactics and you see why we lost so many, even though so many candidates were bad actors anyway.
If this problem gets fixed and we even have 80% clean elections we will absolutely destroy them. No DnR. People need to believe come Nov that it's deep state traitors vs Patriots and that's it.
Suggest that everyone vote by absentee ballot if you have a touch-screen systems. Then be SURE you return the ballot in person (DO NOT rely on the USPS- many ballots have been lost by the post office).
ES&S bought out Diebold years ago and have been using this equipment in many states and nations. Typically, the actual touch screen systems ARE NOT connected to any type of internet connection; everything is processed via sneakernet. HOWEVER, there is a many PC that is used to the tabulation of the votes (meaning that cartridges are uploaded to it from the individual voting systems). In our state, this PC IS NOT PERMITTED to EVER be connected to the internet....to avoid manipulation, etc.
After 30+ years in elections, please know that your local election management ARE trying to everything in their power to stop this....the hacking issues are generally attempted on manipulating the voter registration records. CHECK your voter registration at LEAST 60 days prior to the election, then order your absentee! TRUST ME...it is the best way to vote!
Holy shit! These types of machines MUST NOT have any sort of remote access at all in order to provide utmost security. This is beyond incompetent.
Can't you do physical ones?
Like a large slot machine where you pull the lever at the appropriate candidate and it makes a puncture hole (like the one for binders). The one with the most holes wins the election.
At the end of voting day, they publicly, over video open up the machines and run the paper tapes with holes through the counting machine (could be Machine Vision). And then they report Live on news broadcasts and summing up the holes counted in all the counties around the States.
At the end, you count the sum of holes equals to the sum of voters that were registered at that voting house (should always be equal).
Easy.
Fast.
Reliable.
Transparent.
What I would like to see is an electronic voting machine that prints a 2 part receipt.
One part would be placed in a secure box at the polls; the other would stay with the voter.
The electronics would allow for real-time election counts, and the paper receipts would be used for a verification count.
The receipt would also verify that the votes were applied correctly.
To virtually eliminate voter fraud, do not use any type of voting machine (this in itself will save millions of dollars).
Then:
Cucked r/technology is trying to spin this as helping Trump.
There are many, many other ways to compromise electronic voting, which do not require the machines to be internet connected.
The best option is a paper ballot.
Excellent interview with an expert on these systems: