January 12, 2008 at 04:58:59
Princeton University Reveals How the GOP Steals Election
by Len Hart Page 1 of 2 page(s)
http://www.opednews.com Unless something is done, the GOP will steal the next election as well. Unless something is done, this series of primaries means absolutely nothing. The fix is undoubtedly in. Unless something is done, the GOP will walk away with another stolen election, another GOP nincompoop will foist upon the nation his personal and vainglorious ambitions of empire. The Military/Industrial complex is licking its chops and theocrats are lining up to play Torquemada.
The following video was produced by Princeton University. It explains precisely how the votes are stolen and will be stolen again.
Princeton Study Exposes Diebold Flaws
Princeton tested an AccuVote-TS which it obtained from a private party. The experiments were designed to determine whether the machine could be hacked under "real election practices", realistic scenarios in the real world. Princeton found the machine vulnerable to a number of "extremely serious attacks" that "undermine undermine the accuracy and credibility of the vote counts it produces." In other words, DieBold machines can be hacked and most have been.
Princeton points out that computer specialists are skeptical of Direct Recording Machines (DRE), essentially general purpose machines running specialized election software. The biggest flaw, according to Princeton, is that DREs are dependent upon the "correct and secure operation of complex software programs" In the real word, that simply does not happen. Ominously, DRE failures most likely go undetected.
Main Findings The main findings of our study are:
1. Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss. We have constructed demonstration software that carries out this vote-stealing attack.
2. Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute. In practice, poll workers and others often have unsupervised access to the machines.
3. AccuVote-TS machines are susceptible to voting-machine viruses - computer viruses that can spread malicious software automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre-and post-election activity. We have constructed a demonstration virus that spreads in this way, installing our demonstration vote-stealing program on every machine it infects.
4. While some of these problems can be eliminated by improving Diebold's software, others cannot be remedied without replacing the machines' hardware. Changes to election procedures would also be required to ensure security.
...
Abstract This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities - a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine's hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures.
--Ariel J. Feldman, J. Alex Halderman, and Edward W. Felten,Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine
Video, links and more at:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_len_hart_080112_princeton_university.htm