No mention of electoral fraud in our (NZ) sycophantic media.
This
report is from mainstream US media.
Machine
turns vote for Obama into one for Romney
6
November, 2012
A
Pennsylvania electronic voting machine has been taken out of service
after being captured on video changing a vote for President Obama
into one for Mitt Romney, NBC News has confirmed. Republicans have
also said machines have turned Romney votes into Obama ones.
Hacking
voting machines: Easier than ever imagined
Millions
of Americans are already waiting for hours outside of polling places
to vote for the next president of the United States. All of that
might not matter though, as some security pros say the entire
election can be rigged all too easily.
RT,
6
November, 2012
In
one example, it wouldn’t take much more than ten dollars’ worth
of parts from any RadioShack store to steal and manipulate votes.
It’s called a man-in-the-middle attack and the computer program
that logs the results on electronic voting machines isn’t even
compromised.
“It’s
a classic attack on security devices,” Roger
Johnston tells Popular
Science. “You
implant a microprocessor or some other electronic device into the
voting machine, and that lets you control the voting and turn
cheating on and off. We’re basically interfering with transmitting
the voter’s intent.”
According
to the magazine, anyone from a high-school student to an octogenarian
could corrupt the voting process. Johnston is the head of the
Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory and has
done it himself, even on camera. It wouldn’t be hard for others, he
says, and some fear that that could easily be the case on Election
Day. And with many prediction polls estimating a close contest
between President Barack Obama and Republican Party challenger Mitt
Romney this year, it wouldn’t take much to render the entire
contest corrupted.
On
the website for
Argonne, Johnston says Americans believe too often that election
officials assume — incorrectly — that it takes a computer genius
capable of a nation-state cyberassault or a frazzled,
Hollywood-designed hacker to turn an electronic voting machine on its
head. And while that route is once that can be taken too, it isn’t
the only way to ruin an election.
Insider
threats from election officials or anyone with access to a voting
machine could easily alter contests, and monitors aren’t
necessarily on the look-out for that kind of unauthorized access.
“And
a lot of our election judges are little old ladies who are retired,
and God bless them, they’re what makes the elections work, but
they’re not necessarily a fabulous workforce for detecting subtle
security attacks,” Johnston
tells Popular Science. In the example of hijacking the computer
transmission with a few bucks’ worth of electronics, it wouldn’t
require much more than walking into a polling place and entering a
booth with the right knowhow and intent, and most machines can be
access without even requiring a two-dollar lockpick and a tiny
tension bar. “No
one signs for the machines when they show up. No one’s responsible
for watching them. Seals on them aren’t much different from the
anti-tamper packaging found on food and over-the-counter
pharmaceuticals. Think about tampering with a food or drug product:
You think that’s challenging?” he
asks.
Johnston
has recorded himself demonstrating how a logic analyzer, an Allen
wrench and a screwdriver is all it takes to change votes to register
for one candidate instead of another by using a man-in-the-middle
attack. Although it hasn’t been verified yet, a video posted to
YouTube early on November 6 from an account registered to
“Centralpavote” shows what is reported to be a similar machine
showing signs typical of exactly that kind of abuse —not in a test
setting, though, but only hours before the polls close for real
[VIDEO].
Still from YouTube video/centralpavote
UPDATE:
The machine in question was removed from the polling center in
Pennsylvania where it was initially installed for use on Tuesday, NBC
News confirms, after the video was recorded and uploaded to the Web.
This
Election Day, the touchscreen Diebold Accuvote-TSX will be used by
more than 26 million voters in 20 states, while the push-button
Sequoia AVC machine will be deployed to four states for use by almost
9 million voters. Johnston says purchasing a $10 logic analyzer from
RadioShack is easily enough to snoop and see who any voter intends on
electing, and from there those digital transmissions can be hijacked
and told to mean something else. For experts, though, there are even
other ways to wreak havoc on the polls.
Johnston
says the machines don’t transmit data with encryption, so anyone
with a basic understanding of digital communications can figure out
how a user votes if they’ve accessed the machine with one of those
logic analyzers. Sequoia — the company responsible for making a
good share of America’s electronic voting machines — do encrypt
the results of each vote, though. Well, kind of.
Andrew
W. Appel of Princeton, NY bought a
few used AVC Advantage voting machine made by Sequoia off an online
auction site for only $82 just a couple of years ago. Once they
arrived, he accessed the machine’s innards and says it was easy to
start to see how things worked.
“I
was surprised at how simple it was for me to access the ROM memory
chips containing the firmware that controls the vote-counting,” Appel
writes on his personal website. Despite claims from Sequoia that the
machine wasn’t easily hackable, Appel says,
“The AVC Advantage can be easily manipulated to throw an election
because the chips which control the vote-counting are not soldered on
to the circuit board of the DRE. This means the vote-counting
firmware can be removed and replace with fraudulent firmware.”
In
another study carried out at The University of Iowa in 2003, Douglas
W Jones from the school’s Department of Computer Science found that
any voting machine purchased second-hand — like even those Diebold
machines deployed across a good chunk of America — can also be
hacked with ease.
“It
appeared that the security keys for the encryption used by the I-mark
software were hard-coded into the voting application,” he
found when examining a Diebold Accuvote TS. “As
things stood, their system relied on security through obscurity, so
they must take measures to assure that their code remains obscure and
that no copy of their code ever leaks out into public. I told them
that the moment one of their machines goes to the landfill or is
otherwise disposed of, someone might extract their encryption key and
all of their security claims would become meaningless.”
According
to Jones, even claims made by voting machine companies that their
devices are secure are just that — mere accusations hard for the
layperson to verify without first learning a few things about
electronics, encryption or just how to disassemble the front panel
from an electronic voting machine. Viruses can also be sent to
machines, malwares can corrupt code and nothing sure by pristine, 100
percent out-of-the-box sterility can assure voters that they aren’t
casting ballots on a tampered machine.
“We've
all used ATMs, and most everyone (except my quasi-Luddite self) has
something such as an iPod. Now, have you ever, anytime, anywhere, had
one of these electronic devices switch data input on you?” asks
Selwyn Duke of American Thinking in a recent article. “So
how is it that in our high-tech universe of flawlessly functioning
electronic gadgets, voting machines are the only ones prone to
human-like ‘error’? If there's an explanation other than human
meddling, again, I'd truly like to hear it.”
Given
the post-election discussion on fraud, intimidation, chads and
corrupted computerized tally machines that have come with seemingly
every political contest in recent years, explanations — valid or
not — are expected to be rampant following this week’s vote. If
history is any indication, though, don’t expect these things to
work themselves out before 2016.
Voter fraud in Virginia linked to GOP
During
this year's Presidential election there have been accusations of
voter fraud all over the country. Although the mainstream media
insists it is a huge problem, there have been a few occurrences.
Recently in Virginia, Colin Small was caught trashing completed
registration forms and it turns out Small was working with group
connected to the GOP. Corbin Carson, a journalist with News 21, joins
us with more on voter fraud..
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