Black Box Voting

“Those who cast the votes decide nothing, those who count the votes decide everything.”—Joseph Stalin

Progress in the fight for voter-verified paper ballots! Green states (17 as of May 2005) have passed legislation requiring paper ballots, 2 light blue are awaiting governor signatures. Dark blue states (18) have proposed legislation but not as yet enacted, and 13 states and D.C. have no proposed legislation. See VerifiedVoting.org for more details.

Write Congress:

Support the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2005 (H.R. 550) and, in the Senate, S. 330, the Voting Integrity and Verification Act of 2005. Click here for more info.

VelvetRevolution
Campaigns, news, and forums about voting reform at this lively site.

Nationwide Election Incident Reporting System
State-by-state official reports of voting glitches, problems, and irregularities. Interactive map details more than 40,000 incidents.

by Mike Flugennock

National Ballot Integrity Project
Advocacy, informational and educational projects around computerized voting issues. News, state-by-state forums, and opportunities for involvement.

the Free Press: Election 2004
Links to extensive and ongoing coverage of Ohio voting irregularities at this Columbus-based alternative news source.

A Stolen Election?
David Corn
Nov. 29, 2004, Comment, The Nation

Election Science Institute
Improving the American Election Process
(formerly VoteWatch) Election monitoring organization invites citizen participation while working with county election officials to build transparent systems.

Investigate the Vote
Features a 35-minute documentary, VoterGate, accessible through RealPlayer and QuickTime. An informal citizens’ group based in San Luis Obispo, CA, dedicated to calling attention to voting irregularities and brainstorming ideas for action.

Solar Bus: Election Justice Center
Your home for updated information on the fight for democracy in America
Great links to current news, articles, and web sites working on voting issues.

ElectionArchive.org
Investigating the accuracy of elections
“. . . a scientific research project whose mission is to objectively investigate the accuracy of elections in America through the creation and analysis — for the first time ever — of a single database containing precinct-level election results for the entire United States.” Number-crunchers’ venue. Volunteers are needed from all over the country—click on over to see what you can do.

VerifiedVoting.org
Action-oriented site includes updates on legislation, latest news, what’s happening in your state, and what you can do. A pivotal resource.

VotersUnite.org
A non-partisan national grassroots resource for fair and accurate elections!
Meticulous state-by-state, county-by-county citizen documentation of voting problems, anomalies, and irregularities in Election 2004. Excellent activist resource.

Where’s the Paper Trail for Each Ballot Cast?
Interactive simulated electronic voting demonstrates exactly why a verifiable paper trail is needed.

VoteScam: The Stealing of America
A book that took 25 years to write, by James and Kenneth Collier. First published in 1992 and immediately banned in major chain bookstores, yet so far selling 30,000+ copies by word of mouth. The first 5 chapters are available here, with a link for ordering the book + video. VoteScam “comes face to face with the Supreme Court Justice who buried the vote fraud evidence; the most powerful female publisher in America, who won’t permit her newspapers and television stations to expose vote rigging; the Attorney General who jailed Jim Collier rather than expose the truth; and a cast of weak-kneed and corruptible politicians, lawyers, and newspeople who are entangled in this massive crime and are yet to be held accountable.”

Rebecca Mercuri’s Statement on Electronic Voting
Founder, Notable Software, and a leading computer security and electronic vote tabulation specialist
Notable Software is a consulting firm specializing in custom interactive multimedia, computer forensics, security and expert witness testimony. Click on the links on her very intelligent web site for further insights and valuable expert information regarding "computer glitches" in the 2002 elections, general problems with electronic voting, and many links for further information. She completed her doctoral dissertation in 2000 on “Electronic Vote Tabulation Checks and Balances.”

America Violated: Encyclopedia of Computer Fraud
An illuminating summary from Democratic Underground, with many many links, of evidence of ballot-tampering by Republican-controlled computerized voting in the 2002 elections. “Election 2002 resulted in dramatic, STATISTICALLY IMPROBABLE DEVIATIONS from the FINAL polls in KEY states. These were ALL to the detriment of the Democrats.”

American Coup: Mid-Term Election Polls vs Actual
An analytical comparison of the 2002 election results with last-minute polls. “The Republican Party experienced a pronounced last minute swing in its favor of between 4 and 16 points. Remarkably this last minute swing appears to have been concentrated in its effects in critical Senate races (Georgia and Minnesota) where it secured its complete control of Congress.”

July 27, 2003: A very long list of links to mainstream media articles about the July 23rd JHU report, below, that Diebold electronic voting machines have easily-corruptible programming that allows vote rigging.

“The software that runs many high-tech voting machines contains serious flaws that would allow voters to cast extra votes and permit poll workers to alter ballots without being detected”--NYT, 7/24/03

Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud, Experts Say
John Schwartz
The New York Times, July 24, 2003

First mainstream media mention of the voting-machine flaws that were first exposed by Bev Harris and a team of Democratic Underground sleuths.

Analysis of an Electronic Voting System
Tadayoshi Kohno, Adam Stubblefield, Aviel D. Rubin, and Dan S. Wallach
Johns Hopkins University, July 23, 2003

Abstract: Recent election problems have sparked great interest in managing the election process through the use of electronic voting systems. While computer scientists, for the most part, have been warning of the perils of such action, vendors have forged ahead with their products, claiming increased security and reliability. Many municipalities have adopted electronic systems, and the number of deployed systems is rising. For these new computerized voting systems, neither source code nor the results of any third-party certification analyses have been available for the general population to study, because vendors claim that secrecy is a necessary requirement to keep their systems secure. Recently, however, the source code purporting to be the software for a voting system from a major manufacturer appeared on the Internet. This manufacturer’s systems were used in Georgia’s state-wide elections in 2002, and the company just announced that the state of Maryland awarded them an order valued at up to $55.6 million to deliver touch screen voting systems.

This unique opportunity for independent scientific analysis of voting system source code demonstrates the fallacy of the closed-source argument for such a critical system. Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts. We highlight several issues including unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software development processes. For example, common voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal. Furthermore, we show that even the most serious of our outsider attacks could have been discovered without the source code. In the face of such attacks, the usual worries about insider threats are not the only concerns; outsiders can do the damage. That said, we demonstrate that the insider threat is also quite considerable. We conclude that, as a society, we must carefully consider the risks inherent in electronic voting, as it places our very democracy at risk.

“Bigger than Watergate”:

How to Rig an Election in the United States
Includes Detail and Screenshots of an Election Hack: Inside a U.S. Election Vote Counting Program
Sludge Report #154—Bigger Than Watergate
C. D. Sludge, July 8, 2003

This is long and complicated, but important. Some people don’t think it’s that significant, others don’t really understand it because it is rooted in fairly technical computer issues, and some question the appropriateness of having broken the story to an obscure New Zealand news site (the link here is to a copy at truthout). This commentary at Democratic Underground helps to answer questions about the significance of the story, some of the technical aspects, and the fact that the article never comes out and says that there is solid evidence that the votes were actually tampered with—it is revealing the fact that Diebold Corp. has provided zero security to keep election officials from writing in whatever they want—and provides evidence of coding irregularities that smell strongly of tampering. The entire base of 40,000 records is available for public scrutiny through links in the article.

System Integrity Flaw Discovered At Diebold Election Systems
by Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting
Scoop, February 5, 2003

Yesterday, technicians and programmers for Diebold Election Systems, the company that supplied every single voting machine for the surprising 2002 results in the state of Georgia, the company that is preparing to convert the state of Maryland to its no-paper-trail computerized voting, admitted to a file-sharing system that amounts to a colossal security flaw.

“Technology transfer for updates!” This is among the benefits in the Diebold PowerPoint sales presentation given to the State of Georgia. Easy updating—too easy, apparently. . . .”

Diebold Election Systems, which builds the AccuVote machines, both optical scan and touch-screen, was parking files on an unprotected public Internet location. Not a few files—thousands of files; election files, hardware and software specifications, program files, voting program patches—and sometimes, files with curious names.

Though the address is obscure, whistleblowers found the FTP site using a simple Google search. A Global Election Systems web site [since discontinued] contains a list of links like “History,” “Press Releases,” “Staff” and—amazingly—“FTP.”

The FTP button gave total access to anonymous users, allowing anyone to download or upload to the motherlode. The FTP site contained no copyright statement, asked for no user name, put locks on no directories. Visitors (or vote-riggers) from anywhere in the world could simply walk in the front door. . . .

Updated 5/25/05