Tired of hearing about voter fraud? Check out this documentary about the much more serious and likely issue, electoral fraud.
- Filmed over three years it documents American citizens investigating anomalies and irregularities with electronic voting systems that occurred during the 2000 and 2004 elections in the U.S.A., especially in Volusia County, Florida. The film investigates the flawed integrity of electronic voting machines, particularly those made by Diebold Election Systems, exposing previously unknown backdoors in the Diebold trade secret computer software. The film culminates dramatically in the on-camera hacking of the in-use / working Diebold election system in Leon County, Florida - the same computer voting system which has been used in actual American elections across thirty-three states.
Several of the insinuations made by the filmmakers indicate Diebold is a pretty shady company; the fact that they are trusted to perform such an important task while given such little oversight seems like a terrible misjudgment. At one point they tried to find the people responsible for auditing these "black box" systems, and the hidden camera showed this one guy who was very evasive and said some pretty damning things.
If you watch to the end, the hacking demonstration was pretty surprising. To summarize what it showed, I'll give a little background. Most electronic voting machines hold the votes for a precinct on a memory card, which are then collected up and tabulated by software used by a county election official. For the demonstration, a hacker was given access to the memory card prior to the county's chain of custody; he was able to "preload" an equal number of positive and negative votes for candidates such that the memory card passed the pre-election verification test, while the final count produced by the machines, including the paper-tape trail, was clearly inaccurate. The final tabulation software also flagged nothing suspicious about the memory card. The election official doing the demonstration said that the system gave no indication that the votes were tampered with and had that been an actual election, he would have signed-off on it as being true and accurate. You can read more about the "Hursti Hack" here.
I'm of the cynical opinion that there isn't a significant difference between the two mainstream parties when it comes to most economic and foreign policy issues, but I think this highlights that even if/when there are real significant choices faced by voters, there are simply more mechanisms for subverting the will of the people. I've read that some people say a blockchain type technology could be more secure, but I'm not sure how exactly that would work.
If blockchain-ledger voting was implemented successfully, I think it's the best option by far.I've read that some people say a blockchain type technology could be more secure, but I'm not sure how exactly that would work.
It seems like there are good solutions out there which can still take advantages of technology, it's not like we need to go completely Luddite here. I think corporate greed, laziness, and political corruption are more to blame for these failures. The argument that these proprietary, closed-source election systems need to be secret and untested by local authorities because we don't want any vulnerabilities to be exposed seems really stupid. There shouldn't be any significant vulnerabilities to begin with, and the only way that can be ensured is if there is rigorous public examination of the machines and the code they use. It sounds like there are two groups of county election officials; the corrupt old-guard type that scoff at any problematic allegations, especially if they have a slick Diebold marketer come to them and give them some glossy brochures with a campaign contribution ("legally") tucked inside, they're more than happy to jump on the bandwagon; or, the more skeptical, activist minded election officials which are limited from opening up and testing e-voting machines themselves by federal rules and regulations, and can only choose from a handful of "tested" options approved by the state elections board. I think if the "good" local officials could be empowered to allow for more robust testing of the current systems, as well as open the regulatory door to new options, it would a good step towards a solution. Where I live now, we have touchscreen ballots, although it prints out a paper tape which I can look over and verify the accuracy of before leaving the poll. When I lived in California, they used paper ballots with punch markers, but those were fed into an optical scanner, with the totals being stored on (I assume) a memory card. They're very nearly the same system when you think about it, either the rolls of paper tape or stacks of ballots could theoretically be recounted, but in practice, the memory cards are the only thing which gets tabulated and reported as the official count.
Open-source blockchain code solves all of this. I'd want to see it independently verified by the EFF, ACLU, etc. before trusting it though. It's 2015, there's absolutely no reason I still need to be physically present to cast a ballot. That there is such a large gap still remaining between technology and policy-making scares me.There shouldn't be any significant vulnerabilities to begin with, and the only way that can be ensured is if there is rigorous public examination of the machines and the code they use.
Apparently it's region-locked. It's also hosted on the internet archive, but the video quality isn't the greatest.