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Bekijk Volledige Versie : Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked



Atom 'Smasher'
09/11/04, 11:45
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"God save the queen
and her fascist regime"
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<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/110804Z.shtml
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1106-30.htm

Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked
By Thom Hartmann
CommonDreams.org

Saturday 06 November 2004

When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004),
the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from
Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher
has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but
of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these
same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so
that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a
real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.

"It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.

And some believe evidence is accumulating that the national effort
happened on November 2, 2004.

The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of
votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen
Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available
at [11]http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something
startling.

While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to
produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely
matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from
optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus
vulnerable to hacking - the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them
Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry
and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the
country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and
a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry,
but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where
optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats,
went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went
77.25% for Bush.

Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more
vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered
Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had
earlier reported that county size was a variable - this turns out not to
be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)

More visual analysis of the results can be seen at
[12]http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and
[13]www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm. Note the trend line - the
only variable that determines a swing toward Bush was the use of optical
scan machines.

One possible explanation for this is the "Dixiecrat" theory, that in
Florida white voters (particularly the rural ones) have been registered as
Democrats for years, but voting Republican since Reagan. Looking at the
2000 statistics, also available on Dopp's site, there are similar
anomalies, although the trends are not as strong as in 2004. But some
suggest the 2000 election may have been questionable in Florida, too.

One of the people involved in Dopp's analysis noted that it may be
possible to determine the validity of the "rural Democrat" theory by
comparing Florida's white rural counties to those of Pennsylvania, another
swing state but one that went for Kerry, as the exit polls there
predicted. Interestingly, the Pennsylvania analysis, available at
[14]http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm, doesn't show the
same kind of swings as does Florida, lending credence to the possibility
of problems in Florida.

Even more significantly, Dopp had first run the analysis while filtering
out smaller (rural) counties, and still found that the only variable that
accounted for a swing toward Republican voting was the use of optical-scan
machines, whereas counties with touch-screen machines generally didn't
swing - regardless of size.

Others offer similar insights, based on other data. A professor at the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in Florida the vote to
raise the minimum wage was approved by 72%, although Kerry got 48%. "The
correlation between voting for the minimum wage increase and voting for
Kerry isn't likely to be perfect," he noted, "but one would normally
expect that the gap - of 1.5 million votes - to be far smaller than it
was."

While all of this may or may not be evidence of vote tampering, it again
brings the nation back to the question of why several states using
electronic voting machines or scanners programmed by private, for-profit
corporations and often connected to modems produced votes inconsistent
with exit poll numbers.

Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever since
Election Day.

Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the
radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight,
during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to
hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush
down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear:
Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted
the AP report.

But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal
states.

Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were
rigged.

Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton
campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an
article for [15]The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie
in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.

"Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two
major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating
actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do
and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the
relative turnout of different parts of the state."

He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was
slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all
of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush
was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."

Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as
the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states the
election was called for Bush.

How could this happen?

On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard
Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris,
the Seattle grandmother who started [16]www.blackboxvoting.org from her
living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated
(other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in
Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold
Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in
the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines
that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is
sent to a "central tabulator" machine.

That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.

"In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television,
"you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling
places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling
places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so
it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do
something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient
to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with
all of them at once?"

Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises
people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I
use. It's just a regular computer."

"So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central
tabulator?"

Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program
called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it
into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the
County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting
between them loaded with Diebold's software.

Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test
election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and
waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various
precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000
votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.

"Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold
wrote a pretty good program.

But, it's running on a Windows PC.

So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal
Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk
C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which,
Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the
votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled
"Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a
database program like Excel.

In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one
precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.

"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers
from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give
100 votes to Tiger."

They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the
legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the
progress of your election."

As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And
you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900,
and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.

Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an
election, and it took us 90 seconds."

On live national television. (You can see the clip on
[17]www.votergate.tv.) And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris
said, noting that it would be nearly impossible for the election software
- - or a County election official - to know that the vote database had been
altered.

Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen
Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide.

Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to cause
people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since the
networks would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry. But
the networks didn't do that, and had never intended to.

According to congressional candidate Fisher, it makes far more sense that
the exit polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that
the vote itself was hacked.

And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this hit
him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national office
in the most-hacked swing states.

So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this story
was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted
that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far
uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and
other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to
explain how the exit polls had failed.

But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part.
Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph,
"This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board
as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."

- -------

Thom Hartmann ([18]thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored
Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated
daily progressive talk show. [19]www.thomhartmann.com. His most recent
books are "[20]The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "[21]We The People: A
Call To Take Back America," and "[22]What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To
Democracy."

References

11. http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm
12. http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm
13. http://www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm
14. http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm
15. http://www.thehill.com/morris/110404.aspx
16. http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
17. http://www.votergate.tv/
18. mailto:thom@thomhartmann.com
19. http://www.thomhartmann.com/
20. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400051576/commondreams-20/ref=nosim/
21. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1579549551/commondreams-20/ref=nosim/
22. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400052084/commondreams-20/ref=nosim/

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Jay D. Dyson
10/11/04, 06:25
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On Mon, 8 Nov 2004, Atom 'Smasher' wrote:

> Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked

Read the whole thing and didn't see any evidence. Just wild
speculation and baseless conjecture. Hell, there were countless counties
across the nation in which more people were registered to vote than were
eligible residents, but -- for some reason -- that ain't news.

Why was this politically-motivated nonsense approved for Bugtraq?
The Democrats lost. Get over it already.

- -Jay

( ( _______
)) )) .-"There's always time for a good cup of coffee"-. >====<--.
C|~~|C|~~| (>----- Jay D. Dyson -- jdyson@treachery.net -----<) | = |-'
`--' `--' `------ Burn me up and I'll burn you down. ------' `------'

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Jay D. Dyson
10/11/04, 22:45
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On Wed, 10 Nov 2004, Peter Conrad wrote:

> > Why was this politically-motivated nonsense approved for Bugtraq?
>
> the security of electronic voting machines has been discussed on bugtraq
> before. It *is* a computer security issue and therefore on-topic.

That's all well and good, but this most recent post was just
politically-motivated crybaby bullcrap. I've read horoscopes with more
factual information in them.

- -Jay

( ( _______
)) )) .-"There's always time for a good cup of coffee"-. >====<--.
C|~~|C|~~| (>----- Jay D. Dyson -- jdyson@treachery.net -----<) | = |-'
`--' `--' `------ Burn me up and I'll burn you down. ------' `------'

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Jei
10/11/04, 23:05
On Tue, 9 Nov 2004, Jay D. Dyson wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> On Mon, 8 Nov 2004, Atom 'Smasher' wrote:
>
>> Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked
>
> Read the whole thing and didn't see any evidence. Just wild
> speculation and baseless conjecture. Hell, there were countless counties
> across the nation in which more people were registered to vote than were
> eligible residents, but -- for some reason -- that ain't news.

It would be _major_ news, were it not America where it happened.
Even India managed to hold a secure digital election recently,
without any such major exit poll or other discrepancies happening.

Also note that Americans aren't the only people in the world with
capable intelligence agencies. Teenage kid hackers aren't the only
people who might influence US elections' outcomes, given a viable
chance. You need to consider all the factors.

Digital voting needs to be as secure and reliable as bank accounts
are from an independent (democratic) nation's national security point
of view. A digital vote discrepancy == national bank account discrepancy,
in it's importance, in this regard.

Arguing that vote discrepancies don't really matter, is like a system
admin arguing that system binary checksum discrepancies do not matter.

In any case, it means you're royally f*cked, and although you may wish
to fantasize otherwise, it doesn't change the reality.

You need to know that you're secure, or your security people aren't
doing their job.

// Jei

http://www.infosecwriters.com/hhworld/hh9/voting.txt

Hitchhiker's World (Issue #9)
http://www.infosecwriters.com/hhworld/

Observable Elections
--------------------

Vipul Ved Prakash <mail@vipul.net>
November 2004


This is an interesting time for electronic voting. India,
the largest democracy in the world, went completely paper-
free for its general elections earlier this year. For the
first time, some 387 million people expressed their
electoral right electronically. Despite initial concerns
about security and correctness of the system, the election
process was a smashing success. Over a million electronic
voting machines (EVMs) were deployed, 8000 metric tonnes of
paper saved[1] and the results made public within few hours
of the final vote. Given the quarrelsome and heavily
litigated nature of Indian democracy, a lot of us were
expecting post-election drama, but only a few, if any,
fingers were found pointing.

Things didn't fare so well in the United States. The
Dieobold electronic machines, slated for use in many states
for the November 2004 Federal elections, turned out to have
rather large security holes. Cryptography experts, Avi Rubin
et al, did a formal analysis of the machines and found that
they could be subverted to introduce votes that were never
casted[2]. An independent government-backed analysis
confirmed this[3] and concluded that the Diebold voting
system "as implemented in policy, procedure, and technology,
is at a high risk of compromise."

It is clear, even to a cursory observer, that Diebold
systems are sloppily designed, never mind the sloppiness is
a function of incompetence or intent. The recent controversy
from the "Black Box Voting" security advisory titled "the
Diebold GEMS central tabulator contains a stunning security
hole"[4] has added to the confusion. It claims that a code
entered at a remote location can replace the real vote count
with a fabricated one. This security hole, discovered last
year, is still not fixed says the advisory. In response,
Diebold claims that this is possible, but only in debug
mode, which does little to make people confortable.

What is disturbing to me as a technologist is the
burgeoning public opinion that electronics is an unviable
medium for conducting the serious business of elections.
Over the last year I've seen numerous formal reports and
articles in popular press[5] equating the failures of
Diebold systems with the untenability of electronic voting.
This is rather silly. Diebold systems are not only poorly
engineered, they are also seriously flawed in design. Even
if they were immaculately bug-free, they are so far from
what electronic voting systems should be, that I have
trouble categorizing them as "voting systems". "Electronic
counters" is more accurate.

Various augmentations have been proposed to Diebold systems;
most revolve around parallel paper trails. Verified
Voting[6] for example proposes that a vote be printed based
on the voter's touch-screen selection, so the voter can
touch, feel and verify their vote before casting it into a
traditional ballet box. These votes would then be processed
with an OCR type machine to compute a cumulative result and
the physical votes would be saved so an independent party
can verify the electronic result at a latter date. This is a
reasonable tradeoff -- after all integrity of elections is
way more important than saving trees and time.

While this is the best recommendation for the upcoming
elections, it subtly promotes the primacy of paper and
distrust in electrons. We know that paper elections are no
more secure. The history of vote tampering in paper based
elections is quite illustrious (I'll simply refer the gentle
reader to [7]) and the reason electronics was considered in
the first place was to eliminate such tampering. Verified
Voting recommends that count of the physical votes is to be
considered superior than that of the electronic counterparts
in case of a difference. What happens if the process of this
count is tampered using traditional methods? We are back to
square one.

The central point that I want to get across in this paper is
that the promise of electronic voting is not merely a
quicker, slightly more secure and ecologically enlightened
replacement for paper elections. Electronic voting, if
implemented correctly, could be a major qualitative leap,
not only changing the way in which we approach democratic
elections, but also the the way in which we expect a
democratic government to function.

Cryptographic Integrity

I want to draw attention to the work done by cryptographic
community in the last 20 years to study, formalize and solve
many of the problems of Internet Voting. This area of work
is focused on building election systems that leave behind a
trail of mathematical proofs of the integrity of the voting
process. With mathematical solutions to the common issues of
vote tampering, it becomes unnecessary to trust election
officials and it becomes possible to build voting systems
that are open and universally verifiable.

A voting system for appointing a democratic government has
certain "ideal properties". These are rather obvious, but I
recount them for the purpose of this discussion. First, all
votes must be counted exactly like they were casted.
Altering a vote, or leaving one out from the final tally
must be impossible. Ballot stuffing, ie. artificial
injection of invalid votes must be impossible as well. The
system should reject non-eligible voters, and ensure
eligible users can cast only a single vote. And, finally,
votes must be absolutely anonymous -- even the voter should
be unable to prove the way in which they voted. Systems like
Diebold's depend on large-scale observation to uphold the
ideal properties. Large-scale observation is hard, and once
an act of tampering is done, there is little that can be
done to detect or correct it. The attacks such as the one
described by the Black Box Voting advisory are particularly
heinous, since they compromise the entire election process.

The ideal properties are true in paper elections when they
are implemented perfectly, but the nature of paper precludes
proofs of correctness without compromising anonymity. The
problems are much the same as in the "Electronic Counter"
systems; without correctness proofs, it is largely
infeasible to detect and correct tampering.

Cryptographers have been trying to emulate the property of
anonymity that is inherent to paper when it us used as cash
or votes. The research in the field has led to invention of
several mathematical primitives and computing systems that
not only model paper but go beyond to provide proofs of the
properties they emulate. Techniques like blind signatures,
homomorphic encryption, digital mixes and onion routing have
been used to build systems that provide strong anonymity.

The pioneering cryptographer David Chaum introduced the
blind signature in order to build permit truly anonymous
interaction on the Internet[8]. Since then, they have been
applied to all manner of problems from untraceable
electronic cash to electronic voting schemes. Blind
signatures are a class of digital signatures that allow a
document to be signed without revealing its contents. The
effect is similar to placing a document and a sheet of
carbon paper inside an envelope. When the envelope is
signed, the signature transfers to the document and remains
on it even when the envelope is removed.

In his paper, Chaum hinted that blind signatures could be
used for secret ballot elections. Fujioka, Okamoto, and
Ohta[9] created the first significant blind signature based
voting protocol, which made it practical to use blind
signatures in democratic elections. However, some problems
were discovered in their work, most notably the system's
vulnerablity to a corrupt election authority. I present a
system, dubbed ``Athens'', that builds on their work, but
solves several problems in their model. I also focus on a
real-world election system, rather than an Internet one, and
adopt a pragmatic approach, in that I make use of physical
resources like volunteers and physical infrastructure
usually available for large-scale democratic elections.
Athens also borrows elements and thinking from the
Sensus[10] system and David Chaum's recent work on Visual
Cryptography[11].

Design of Athens

The basic procedure for conducting a democratic election is
fairly standard. The procedure has four tasks: Registration,
Validation, Collection and Tallying. In Athens, these four
tasks are carried out with a few specialized machines and
software, most of which are connected through the Internet.
While Athens employs an Election Authority to oversee the
process of elections, it does away with the dependence on
trustworthiness of one. Athens philosophy is that there are
no truly non-partisan parties; even the Election Authority
can't be completely trusted. The Athens model is closer to a
"game" between contesting parties, such that the only way to
cheat in the game is for all competitors to collude - an
axiomatic impossibility. The Election Authority performs
tactical tasks to optimize the election process, but all
tasks performed by the Authority are open to review by
competing parties.

Registration

Registration is the process of determining eligible voters,
and is conducted by the "Registrar" -- a distributed
authority put in place by the Election Authority. The Athens
registration process involves validating voters (through
traditional means) and registering their "Voter Public Key"
in the "Register." The corresponding "Voter Secret Key"
remains with the voter, magnetically encoded (or bar coded
for cheaper implementation) on a "Voting Card".

The keys are generated through the "Voting Card Creator
Machine". The Card Creator Machine is also implemented as
software that can be used by a voter on their home computer.
It is not hard to imagine Card Creators installed in local
registration offices or even at Kinko's and shopping malls,
where they charge a few dollars for generating a card.
Fairness in design is important, because Card Creators could
compromise the security of the system by storing the key
pairs they generate.

A card creator is mostly an RSA key generator - it needs
computing power of a 300 Mhz PC, and is constructed fairly
cheaply. Once the voter enters their personal information
into the machine, it spits out two cards: one with the
public key, that is handed over to the Registrar and the
other with the secret key and identification information
required by the Election Authority (like the social security
number of the voter.) The second card is known as the
"Voting Card" and is used to validate the voter at the time
of elections. Both cards also contain a large random number,
known as the Voter Id. This is used throughout the voting
process to facilitate lookups in the Register without
compromising the privacy of the voter.

Once all voters have handed their Voter Public Key Card over
to the Registrar, the registration process is considered to
be complete. As with traditional elections, there is a cut-
off date for this process.

On completion of registration, the Election Authority hands
the Register over to all the competitors. The competitors
then check every 1 in 1000 entries (or more according to
their capacity) to ensure that they belong to a legitimate
voter, i.e. it isn't a fake entry inserted by a corrupt
competitor to stuff the ballot. This process is woefully
lacking in elections of today, and a hence a major vector
for election fraud. Mathematics can do little to alleviate
the dangers of registering fake voters, but competitors who
depend on the correctness of the Register and raise funds
for the purpose can easily perform this task. Register
verification would be a lucrative business for independent
professional services organizations, so it is not hard to
imagine such organizations sprouting up to assume delegation
of this responsibility.

The competitors also put the Register on the Internet before
the election so that voters can ensure their voter key is
present in all copies of the Register. When requested, each
competing party provides a digitally signed proof that the
voter is registered to vote, i.e. their key is present in
the Register. The voter, if denied the right to vote, can
take this proof to a court of law. A pre-voting verification
of eligibility limits the kind of fiasco that occurred in
Florida during the Presidential elections of 2000, where a
large number of people were denied vote.

Validation

In most electronic voting protocols, there exists the notion
of the "Validator" - a party that holds the Register and
validates voters during the election. In Athens, the
competing parties, that were handed a copy of the Register
in the previous step, all serve as Validators. Athens,
therefore, is a multi-validator system. It is reasonable to
assume that independents or fiscally constrained parties
would team up and have a single Validator represent them.

Validators are connected to the Internet and run Validation
software, that accepts validation requests over a TCP port.
The Validators are firewall'ed off to accept data only from
certain IP addresses. The Electronic Voting Machines talk to
the Validators via a Proxy. EVMs could theoretically talk
directly to Validators, but the reasons for using a proxy
will become apparent later. The Proxy is operated by the
Election Authority and observed by representatives from all
competing parties.

Validators have their own RSA key pair, the public portion
of which is published widely over the Internet. They also
maintain two lists (other than the Register). This is the
list of voters who have casted a vote and a list of
corresponding validation requests.

Before the commencement of the election, the Election
Authority chooses a a random number which is known as the
"Election Number". The only property of this number is its
uniqueness to the election - it should not have been used in
a previous election. The Election Number is distributed to
all Validators.

Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) used in Athens are quite
unlike Diebold's or the ones used in the Indian elections.
Athens' EVMs are simply "agents" that vote on behalf of the
voter. Each EVM has an Id and a RSA key pair. The public
part of the EVM key is published widely over the Internet.
Communications initiated by the EVM are signed with EVMs
secret key. The elections are considered formally commenced,
when the Validators broadcast the Election Number and their
public keys to EVMs via the Proxy.

The Athens Voting Protocol

The voter enters a private booth and swipes their Voting
Card on the EVM. The EVM reads the secret key and the Voter
Id off the Card. The EVM has a little printer attached to
it, much like a cash register receipt printer, on which it
prints out the Voter Id. It the sends the voter Id off to
the Validators via the proxy to initiate a "voting session"
on behalf of the voter. If the voter has already casted a
vote, Validators return a "proof" of previously casted vote.
The proof and its implications are discussed a little later.
If there's no previous vote, the Validators send a positive
acknowledgment and the EVM asks the voter to cast a ballot.
The voter enters their vote using the on-screen display. The
EVM concatenates the Voter's choice with the Election Number
(EN) and the result is encrypted with a secret key (randomly
generated) using a symmetric cipher like AES. The encrypted
ballot is then blinded. At this point, the EVM has:

[....]

http://www.infosecwriters.com/hhworld/hh9/voting.txt

bkfsec
11/11/04, 01:35
Jay D. Dyson wrote:

>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>Hash: SHA1
>
>On Mon, 8 Nov 2004, Atom 'Smasher' wrote:
>
>
>
>>Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked
>>
>>
>
> Read the whole thing and didn't see any evidence. Just wild
>speculation and baseless conjecture. Hell, there were countless counties
>across the nation in which more people were registered to vote than were
>eligible residents, but -- for some reason -- that ain't news.
>
> Why was this politically-motivated nonsense approved for Bugtraq?
>The Democrats lost. Get over it already.
>
>
>
If you follow the links in the story there are plenty of anomolies that
would be statistically impossible if there wasn't rigging. The Florida
numbers indicate rigging because you can directly correlate pattern
differences between the expected vote and the actual counted vote in
each county. The variable used to correlate this is the type of voting
machine.

Since the counties are distributed throughout Florida, there is no other
explanation for the numbers coming out the way that they did. The
implication, of course, is that someone cracked into the Op-Scan central
tabulator and modified the numbers.

This isn't reaching, it's what's actually there. Feel free to check the
numbers yourself.

The point is that there are questions tied to this. Election legitimacy
is important - at least to progressives it is. Why is that so hard for
you to understand?

Election legitimacy is a non-partisan issue. Unless you want to argue
otherwise, you have no point to make.

-Barry

p.s. I find it interesting that you attack others for being partisan
when you're so clearly partisan you'd have to be blind not to see it.

Rick Crelia
11/11/04, 09:05
Well, it's been a while since I had statistics, but I'd say those
observed deltas for the Op-Scan Precinct table look mighty damn
improbable, especially compared to the corresponding numbers in
the table for the Touch Screen votes:

http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to see that much, nor
to expect a similar pattern of results between the two data sets
given their otherwise strongly shared commonalities. Ok, maybe a
science-oriented person, but definitely not a NASA guru.

I think it's relevant to Bugtraq at least as much as anything
Diebold-related has been before the election. Before, we simply had
a bunch of conspiracy theories about a oddly designed voting system
from a less than forthcoming corporation which tried to cover up the
(now public) exposure of myriad security problems with said system.

Of course, now there's a little more at stake than just conspiracy
theories about big bad companies and crappy software. It's about
the integrity of our national elections. I am a big fan of *lots*
of discussion when it comes to the topic of someone possibly playing
parlor games with the electorate and our political welfare. No matter
which candidate wins an election, the results should be supportable
by a verifiable, immutable audit trail from vote to tabulation. With
the use of central tabulation systems from Diebold and what we know
about them (and did know about them prior to 11/2/2004) we do not
have that sort of audit trail.

--rc

--
*========================================*
Rick Crelia - rick.crelia@oregonstate.edu
OSU Libraries - Dept of Library Technology
Corvallis, OR 97331 - 541.737.8972

p.s.

BTW, your PGP key sig below doesn't match the one on your website, so
I have to assume that this post was from the guy who has presumably
been jacking your sig, according to the note on your home page.


On Tue, Nov 09, 2004 at 10:55:34AM -0800, Jay D. Dyson spake thusly:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> On Mon, 8 Nov 2004, Atom 'Smasher' wrote:
>
> > Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked
>
> Read the whole thing and didn't see any evidence. Just wild
> speculation and baseless conjecture. Hell, there were countless counties
> across the nation in which more people were registered to vote than were
> eligible residents, but -- for some reason -- that ain't news.
>
> Why was this politically-motivated nonsense approved for Bugtraq?
> The Democrats lost. Get over it already.
>
> - -Jay
>
> ( ( _______
> )) )) .-"There's always time for a good cup of coffee"-. >====<--.
> C|~~|C|~~| (>----- Jay D. Dyson -- jdyson@treachery.net -----<) | = |-'
> `--' `--' `------ Burn me up and I'll burn you down. ------' `------'
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.2.6 (TreacherOS)
> Comment: See http://www.treachery.net/~jdyson/ for current keys.
>
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> =2a4A
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Atom 'Smasher'
11/11/04, 09:06
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

On Tue, 9 Nov 2004, Jay D. Dyson wrote:

> On Mon, 8 Nov 2004, Atom 'Smasher' wrote:
>
>> Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked
>
> Read the whole thing and didn't see any evidence. Just wild
> speculation and baseless conjecture. Hell, there were countless
> counties across the nation in which more people were registered to vote
> than were eligible residents, but -- for some reason -- that ain't news.
>
> Why was this politically-motivated nonsense approved for Bugtraq?
> The Democrats lost. Get over it already.
====================

there is a statistically significant deviation that correlates to
particular equipment: this *IS* a technology and security issue *NOT* a
political issue (although there are certainly political implications).

i've gotten quite a bit of hate mail over this, but if there were
allegations that the vote was hacked in favor of kerry (hypothetically,
let's say in a state where kerry's brother were governor) i'm sure there
would be quite a bit of interest among those who now claim that this is
irrelevant, off topic, sore losers, etc.

the issue really is bigger than who won or lost... it's about how the game
is played. as computer security professionals we owe it to ourselves to
take this sort of allegation very seriously *regardless* of what candidate
we prefer.


- --
...atom

_________________________________________
PGP key - http://atom.smasher.org/pgp.txt
762A 3B98 A3C3 96C9 C6B7 582A B88D 52E4 D9F5 7808
-------------------------------------------------

"Never forget that everything Hitler did
in Germany was legal."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr
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Peter Conrad
11/11/04, 09:06
Hi,

On Tue, Nov 09, 2004 at 10:55:34AM -0800, Jay D. Dyson wrote:
>
> Why was this politically-motivated nonsense approved for Bugtraq?

the security of electronic voting machines has been discussed on bugtraq
before. It *is* a computer security issue and therefore on-topic.

Bye,
Peter
--
Peter Conrad Tel: +49 6102 / 80 99 072
[ t]ivano Software GmbH Fax: +49 6102 / 80 99 071
Bahnhofstr. 18 http://www.tivano.de/
63263 Neu-Isenburg

Germany

David Hayden
12/11/04, 03:15
It is not a statistical deviation when compared to the two previous
elections in the same areas. The article simply wrote that off as
probable fraud then too. Hardly objectivism nor computer news worthy. It
also neglected to mention when quoting Dick Morris that the exit poll
sampling of women was way higher than actual turn out, which is why the
exit polls were abandoned as inaccurate... And Dick Morris was the first
one to abandon them. Just as the exit polls were abandoned in 2000 for
the same reason. Unlike phone polling which can verify the demographics
of where it is calling, exit polls are historically not accurate.

Three elections in a row (2000, 2002, & 2004) show those counties voting
in the proportions they did. Computer fraud would require that each
county have a hacker, that these hackers had access to the final numbers
for 3 elections in a row, and that they were able to use similar
proportions each time.

I know a lot of Dems that voted Republican this year, even some in
Florida. They are not a statistical anomaly IMO. Nor is it computer news
worthy. What would be though is to talk about how online vote
registration by groups like Moveon.org caused several counties in Ohio
to have more registered voters than actual people. That was verified
before the election but there was nothing Ohio could do about it because
of how we count votes anonymously. That kind of high tech fraud is
something that needs to be addressed either by different voter
verification (a utility bill can be used where I am from regardless of
the date stamp) or by not being anonymous. Losing anonymity is not
likely so we need to tighten down on the high-tech ways we have of
verifying peoples identity before they are allowed to register to vote.

The article had two overall points.=20
1. People can't possibly have been that Republican for 3 votes in a row
2. Windows can't possibly be seen as the correct place to put votes

Both subjective. Neither computer news worthy IMO. High-tech voter
registration fraud is the bigger story and was unfortunately ignored.
=20

-----Original Message-----
From: Atom 'Smasher' [mailto:atom@suspicious.org]=20
Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 2004 12:54 AM
To: Jay D. Dyson
Cc: Bugtraq
Subject: Re: Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

On Tue, 9 Nov 2004, Jay D. Dyson wrote:

> On Mon, 8 Nov 2004, Atom 'Smasher' wrote:
>
>> Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked
>
> Read the whole thing and didn't see any evidence. Just wild=20
> speculation and baseless conjecture. Hell, there were countless=20
> counties across the nation in which more people were registered to=20
> vote than were eligible residents, but -- for some reason -- that
ain't news.
>
> Why was this politically-motivated nonsense approved for
Bugtraq?=20
> The Democrats lost. Get over it already.
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3 D=3D=3D=3D

there is a statistically significant deviation that correlates to
particular equipment: this *IS* a technology and security issue *NOT* a
political issue (although there are certainly political implications).

i've gotten quite a bit of hate mail over this, but if there were
allegations that the vote was hacked in favor of kerry (hypothetically,
let's say in a state where kerry's brother were governor) i'm sure there
would be quite a bit of interest among those who now claim that this is
irrelevant, off topic, sore losers, etc.

the issue really is bigger than who won or lost... it's about how the
game is played. as computer security professionals we owe it to
ourselves to take this sort of allegation very seriously *regardless* of
what candidate we prefer.


- --=20
...atom

_________________________________________
PGP key - http://atom.smasher.org/pgp.txt
762A 3B98 A3C3 96C9 C6B7 582A B88D 52E4 D9F5 7808
-------------------------------------------------

"Never forget that everything Hitler did
in Germany was legal."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr
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Jake Appelbaum
12/11/04, 07:55
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I think it's obvious something is badly when you have things like this
in the source code of all Diebold election machines:

#defineDESKEY((des_KEY8F2654hd4"

Yes, that's a static shared key for all the machines.

Source:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/10/1172/9052

How much more obvious does it need to be?

--=20
Jake Appelbaum <jacob@appelbaum.net>

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