Vote Machine, how might I hack thee?

Let me count the ways!

With Updated Proof of Stolen Election 2004

As a statistician and a scientist, I believe beyond the shadow of a doubt that the presidential election of 2004 was stolen. 

Herein I give the proof.

Consider this page an overview of the issues surrounding electronic paperless voting machines, hacking voting machines and central tabulators, and statistical analyses of election data concerning the stolen presidential election 2004.   Use this for the skeptics that say it can’t happen here and if it did it would have been reported.  Both are wrong.    Link to it, copy it, spread it around as far as you can.

I will not be going into all the other ways the republicans stole the vote by disenfranchising black people, supplying too few machines to democratic precincts, etc.  For that analysis I suggest a couple books and a bunch of websites at the end of this page.

Qualifications:  My name is Greg Black. I am a statistical analyst by training and trade. I have 28 years of experience designing and developing statistical systems, and analyzing complex statistical data.   I have also ran a small PC diagnostic and repair business for some years, so I know a little bit about the hardware inside these machines.  And finally, I have programmed in a number of computer languages from COBOL to C++, so I know a bit about programming computers as well.

Three Questions

The three questions about the stolen election of 2004 now apply.  To any that believe the issue is worth considering, contemplate these questions:

·        Can an election be stolen here in the USA?

·        Do we have smoking guns? 

·        What is the proof?

Could it happen here in the USA?

As a patriotic American, I would have said no, it cannot happen here.  But there is a sad thing about facts.  They are what they are, and no amount of belief can make them not facts. 

I first became involved with this issue on November 5, 2004.  I had been disappointed with Bush finally getting elected for the first time, but since the Supreme Court had not appointed him this time, I conceded that he was now finally an elected president, and therefore my president, like it or not.

But on November 5, 2004, I heard the first newspaper reports of votes being switched from Kerry to Bush on the voting screen, right there in front of the voters.  I remember going into my boss’s office exclaiming, “They’re doing it again.  They’re stealing this election too!”

For the next month and a half, I and my fellow patriot Leann Innmon scoured the Internet researching the issues.  This resulted in our first analysis of the stolen election published on WhatReallyHappened.com as “Protest Stolen Election 2004”.  On google, this is page is still #3 out of 2 million plus pages published on the subject (look for stolen election 2004).

So, when I first looked at this between November 5, 2004 and Mid-December, 2004, I knew that the election had been stolen by a combination of vote-swapping software and an outright changing of the vote totals.  The anecdotal evidence combined with the statistical evidence was simply overwhelming.

But how?  How could it be done?  I knew it had been, but I wondered how? 

In my mind at that time was the idea that in order to steal a national election like this would take a large group of people working in a number of states all colluding together to pervert the vote outcome.   Such a huge conspiracy could not easily be maintained. 

But I was wrong. 

Due to all of the different ways you can hack these machines, all it takes is one person, or perhaps a handful of persons to pull off stealing a presidential election.

So now, two years later, I have the answer to “how”.  I had known that the election was stolen, but the nagging question of “how” was unanswered.

So, in the section entitled “Vote Machine:  How might I hack thee” is the “how” that I was looking for.   It is ridiculously easy to hack the machines in a wide variety of ways.

So, here is my original research published in 2004, appended with the “how”.  In the sections on smoking guns and on statistical proof, I include only data that were available in the period between November 5,2004 and mid-December, 2004.  I do this to illustrate that all the data necessary to determine the election was stolen were available to the press at that time. 

So, you wanna know how to hack them?  Let’s go!

Question 1:  Can an election be stolen here in the USA?

The fact is that every independent organization that has looked at the issue of electronic paperless voting machines comes to the same conclusion, that the electronic voting machines are wide open to being hacked.

The GAO describes that machines can record votes for the wrong candidate, that access to a single machine allowed access to all machines of that type, and that it was possible to alter both individual votes and entire vote counts easily.   http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05956.pdf

These machines are so vulnerable that, according to U.S. News,  “a single person could change the results of an election”.  So, it does not take a huge conspiracy, or even a group of people to steal the election.  All it takes is a single person with knowledge to change the election results.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/27/AR2006062701451_pf.html

And here is the actual report:

http://www.brennancenter.org/programs/downloads/SecurityExecSum7-3.pdf

Now, I know that none of you would want to hack the vote machines.   Those of us who are patriots would never consider it.  However, there are immoral or amoral (are the same to me) people out there that put party over country.  

I see the attitude of “party over country” as rampant amongst republicans, even the Joe Blow Republican voters.  Do you ever wonder who these 30% of people who still believe that Bush is doing a good job?  They are the uninformed mass of Republicans that believe any kind of crap that Bush says, and attribute all bad things coming out of the white house to either the “Liberal Press” or “Partisan bickering”.  They get their news from Rush Limbaugh and Fox news to that they are never challenged with the reality that the rest of us live with.  After talking to republicans for 6 or 7 years and asking them about being a republican, I have determined that you cannot convince a republican of any fact that is negative for the republican party, even when you have deficit numbers from the “President’s Budget for 2006” to show them.  They still believe it when FOX or Rush tells them that the deficit is going down.

But, if we are going to discuss the vote fraud that occurred, we have to consider what an evil person would do, not what a moral person would do.

Mr. Nefarious

Now, say you were a Nefarious Ner’Do’Wel who did not care about anything but power and greed, and you were willing to kill democracy itself to get what you want.    We patriots have a hard time understanding that but the evidence is overwhelming that these foul creatures do exist.

Vote Machine, how Might I Hack Thee?  Let me count the ways.

So, where would Mr. Loki Nefarious start?

Actually the easiest way, and one that has to be mentioned is to own the machines, allowing you to install malicious software right at the factory. 

This is not an idle speculation.   All three of the top voting machine companies have strong ties to the Republican Party.  And the CEO of Diebold vowed to “deliver” Ohio to Bush well before the votes were cast.  It’s pretty easy to do if you own the machines.

Here is data on the ties to the Republican Party.  The dollar contributions of the corporate devils that own these machines are at the bottom:

http://cronus.com/electionfraud/

In addition, the voting machine companies claim that the programming they use is “proprietary”, and that they do not have to show us the voters how they work.  As the Daily Show described it, you vote, your vote goes into the machine where “things happen”.  And that is all we get to know as taxpayers and citizens.  We are not allowed to see how our votes are counted. 

http://www.slate.com/id/2086455/

Even slot machines are regulated more than our vote machines.  There, the government inspects the internal code, unlike the voting machines.

http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2006/Mar-27-Mon-2006/news/6527933.html

And, after you have sold the machines, and they have been ostensibly inspected, you can go by and install a “patch” to help your Republican buddies.  And is it not by accident that felon Senator Bob Ney made sure there was no paper trail like there was in 2000.  With a paper trail, we could prove the vote was hacked by actually counting the paper votes.  No way, Jose!  That would look too much like an actual democracy.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11717105/robert_f_kennedy_jr__will_the_next_election_be_hacked/1

So, assume that Mr. Nefarious has access to the vote machine, but only for a very short time.  

Here, they show you that not only can you hack the machine if left alone for 1 minute, but you can upload a VIRUS that will infect all the other vote machines in similar nefarious ways.  Oh, and don’t worry about that key you need to open the machine.  Any mini-bar key from a hotel room will open the lock:

http://www.brennancenter.org/programs/downloads/SecurityExecSum7-3.pdf

And the easiest way of all to steal the election, just change the vote totals on the central machine. We also know that the software for all of this is based on the Microsoft Windows operating system, and by simply altering an ACESS database, you can change voter totals at will.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00065.htm

And here is a fun demonstration with a serious discussion of the issues involved after.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00198.htm

http://www.dcnet2000.com/~neural/Voting/VotingFraudExample.html

Blackbox voting has shown it can be hacked by inserting a pre-loaded memory card.  About security, one expert exclaims: "It's not that they left the door open. There is no door. This system is 'open for business.'"

http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/5921.html

Also, Open Voting consortium has found that the entire operating system of the Dieblod machines can be change with a simple switch on the motherboard.

http://openvotingfoundation.org/tiki-index.php?page_ref_id=1

Then they talk about the voting machines that have wi-fi cards installed.  Yep, think about that.  Here you have a voting machine with a wi-fi card which connects it to the Internet.   And this guy confirms my fears as to what that means. 

All you need do to hack these machines is cruise down the street with a laptop that has wi-fi, and find the IP address of the machine.  That’s right.  Any computer science major with said laptop can hack the election, and then install a virus if he wanted to infect all of the machines like that one.

This guy also gives a real good overview of the myriad of vulnerabilities from a theoretical level.

http://www.arstechnica.com/articles/culture/evoting.ars

Oh, and did I tell you that these machines run a primitive version of WINDOWS that is vulnerable to all 75,000 known WINDOWS vulnerabilities.  (Bless you BradBLog!)  That’s right, 75,000 ways to hack the machines.

Not only does BradBlog have that, he has posted the 200 page report on Diebold security problems in its entirety to his site.  Mr Nefarious is getting happier all the time.

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=3731

Security?  We don’t need no stinking security!  Here are step by step instructions on how to get past the security.

http://www.equalccw.com/dieboldtestnotes.html

A few keystrokes in ACCESS software, and you get to change election.  Here are step by step instructions on how to change the vote totals using ACCESS.  Remember, Diebold has two sets of access files (like two sets of books in accounting), so Mr. Nefarious has to change both sets of books.

http://www.chuckherrin.com/hackthevotedemo.htm

Here is a description of the Diebold internal vote tally systems, complete with another set of instructions on hacking the access databases.

http://www.equalccw.com/dieboldtestnotes.html

Here is a research project where the intent was to simulate the hacking of the vote.  This is interesting from the theoretical standpoint.

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~dwallach/pub/hackavote2004.pdf

And you definitely want to read the historic Hursti reports From BlackBox Voting on hacking the machines.  I liked it when he had the vote machine ask “Are we having fun yet?”

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BBVreport.pdf

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BBVtsxstudy-supp.pdf

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BBVtsxstudy.pdf

Ok, until 11/3/2006,  when blackboxvoting.org published this, my favorite hack was driving around with a wi-fi laptop.  But this is just too sweat!  All you have to do to hack the Sequoia vote machine is push a yellow button in the back , touch the screen in a certain place, and you can vote as many times as you want.

http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/44823.html

And, Diebold has installed three different sets of “books” and has installed backdoors in the software to allow machines to be hacked:

http://whatreallyhappened.com/biggerthanwatergate.html

The Diebold machine is the poster child of insecure voting systems because they have been shown to be hackable in a number of different ways. 

Here are some words that we should all bear in mind from Newsweek.

"If Diebold had set out to build a system as insecure as they possibly could, this would be it," says Avi Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer-science professor and elections-security expert.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12888600/site/newsweek

But, of course, building an inherently hackable machine was exactly what Diebold intended to do. 

Consider that Diebold makes ATM’s that track every penny and are totally secure.   These methods to hack the machines were put there purposely, so as to allow for some excuse other than factory installed malicious software to explain what happened to the machine vote counting software.  These machines were designed to be hacked.

And Diebold is not alone.  All of the machines have severe security flaws as described in the above references.

Yet the voting machines that they built can be hacked at least a dozen ways from sideways.  These machines are less secure than slot machines.  AND, there is no way that a company that makes ATM’s can say they don’t know any better. 

http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2006/Mar-27-Mon-2006/news/6527933.html

Conclusion:  It is not only possible, but actually easy to hack these voting machines in a variety of ways and steal the election. 

A SINGLE PERSON CAN STEAL THE ELECTION! 

See, this was the part that bothered me about the stolen election 2004.  I thought it would take a massive number of people and that somebody would come forward. 

But now we know that a very small group, yea, even a single person can hack the election and steal it.  Does anybody else out there have a problem with our voting machines being wi-fi equipped?

A quick note:  Everything in the article from here on down were known back in November and December of 2004.   The reason that you never heard it was that the corporate media had and still has a blackout on the entire issue of the stolen election 2004.   Again, I am limiting my data from here down to what was known at the time in order to demonstrate that you cannot trust the corporate media to tell you about the government that they own.

The corporate press is complicit in the stolen election 2004.  Had they not had a media blackout on the issue, had they reported on the most sensational story of the century, the people of the United States would have risen up and demanded a new election.  So, word to the wise.  Read or watch the corporate media only to find out what news they are allowing the country to hear, but do not trust them to examine the government or do the muckraking that is the hallmark of functioning press in a democracy.  The corporate media will only tell you what they want you to know.

Question #2: Do we have smoking guns?

Smoking Gun #1   Computer “glitches” change votes from Kerry to Bush

The first set of smoking guns are the computer “glitches”.

Let me make something immediately clear.  As a computer programmer that has programmed in a number of languages from COBOL to C++, I can assure you that computers do not do things that they are not told to do.

Computers do fail, get bad spots on the hard disc and such. However, to believe that a computer is going to do something other than what it was told to do by a programmer  is ludicrous. Remember that.  Computers do not do anything without being told to do it by a computer programmer.

A large number of people in a number of states reported seeing their votes change from Kerry to Bush right in front of their eyes!  (Do we hear a similarity to the McKinney race here?). 

In Broward County, Florida, the machines would choose Bush when you touched the Kerry button. I call this the “thug” configuration because the machine doesn’t care if you know it stole your vote.

https://voteprotect.org/index.php?display=EIRMapCounty&state=Florida&cat=02&tab=ED04&county=Broward

I went to the EIRS (Election Information Report System) hotline website and pulled the data for all problems that were “machine malfunction”  into an excel spreadsheet.  I then went through row by row to identify the cases where the votes were being switched right in front of the voter’s eyes.   I then tabulated them by State and County.

Now, the N of cases was pretty low in 2004, because most people were unaware of the machine problems and, more important, most people were not aware that there was a hotline you could report the problems to.  (2006 data will be far richer, as tens of thousand of vote fraud activists have spread the word about the machines.)  However, even with a low N of cases, the location of the supposedly “random glitches” are pretty tell tale.  So, I pulled the data from the EIRS website based upon the report having “machine problem” (called “glitch” by the corporate media), classified them by the type of problem and came up with the following table:

I got 1460 cases, but I could only classify 1263 easily.

The column labels are pretty self explanatory, but I must point out that the “Rep to Dem” column includes cases where folks saw the vote machines switch their votes AND cases where the machine would only allow Republican votes.  “Bad Ballot” refers to places where the machines wouldn’ except ballots, ballots wouldn’t line up, etc.  “No vote” is where the machine would not allow the person to vote.

I would like to point out a couple things about this table.

There was 1, count it, 1 case where somebody reported that the “glitch” change the vote form Bush to Kerry.  There were 0 cases of Bush to Other or Rep. to Dem.  So, the theory that these are just “glitches”

AND, I must point out that 99.999% of the idiosyncratic, unexplained computer “glitches” that happened in the election was in one direction: benefiting G. W. Bush.  

If these immense number of flaws, problems, etc. were truly random “glitches”, you would expect a 50-50 split in the total effects of the “glitch”. Instead, what you have is that 99.99% of EVERY SINGLE COMPUTER “GLITCH” that happened WAS IN THE DIRECTION OF BENEFITTING G. W. BUSH!   As a statistician, it is pretty hard to swallow that purely random events went almost entirely in one direction.

And, let’s look at where these “glitches occurred.

A huge number of “glitches occurred in Ohio and Florida.  In order to steal the election, Bush had to steal both of these states.  More on that below.

Back to the top.

The following is a short list of the non-vote swapping computer “glitches” for a sampling of the types of problems that occurred in 2004. I give only a sampling here, as anybody with a net connection can find thousands of pages of similar incidents. (At the end of this site will be a list of other websites that were and are prominent in keeping this issue alive.)

Smoking gun #2  - Computer “glitches” deliver more votes than voters

In this section, I am going to give a short list of some of the impossible numbers, like more votes than registered voters, more absentee votes than ballots, etc.

So here is a short list of impossible numbers. Note that this is just a sampling.

The data here can be verified in the Conyers report “What went wrong in Ohio” form the House Judiciary Committee.

Congressman (John Conyers), of the House Committee on the Judiciary, has detailed a number of questions about voter fraud to Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell. He has yet to see a response. Here is the report

http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/files/Conyersreport.pdf

In his letter, he describes, among other things:

Precinct in Perry County: with fewer than 400 voters reporting 489 votes.

Precinct in Lexington County: with 350 voters reporting 434 votes.

Precinct in Monroe Township: with 266 voters reporting 393 votes.

Perry County has an incredibly high level of voter registration (91%). Of those, there is an extremely high percentage of registered voters with no voting activity before, and no signature on file. Of that group, an incredible 3100 registered on a single day in 1977!

There is a pattern of extremely high numbers of votes for third party candidates in democratic precincts.  (See the table above with “Kerry to Other”)

Franklin County had  638 voters and they recorded a whopping 4,258 votes for Bush!

Representative Conyers was too polite to point it out in his letter, but Franklin County reported 4,258 for bush and 260 for Kerry. That’s pretty good turnout for Bush from 638 voters. Here is the MSNBC story about it:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6418513/

Stepping out of the “It was known in 2004 mode”, I must interject two minor facts here about Ohio.

First, on election night of 2004, Secretary of State Blackwell’s office redirected the vote counting and reporting from servers in the secretary of state’s office to servers run by republican operatives using software developed by republican operatives.  That way, they controlled not only the counting of the votes, but also the reporting of the votes to the public.

The only motivation for doing the would be so that they could alter the vote counts.

Does running our election results and the reporting thereof on hardware and software owned by republican operatives even come close to passing the smell test?  If it were democrats doing this, the republicans would scream bloody murder!

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2553

The second fact that could not have been known at the time 55 of the 88 counties in Ohio have now “accidently” or “mistakenly” destroyed the voting records even though the records were supposed to be preserved due to several lawsuits, and state and federal law.  That’s right, a full 62.5% of the Ohio counties have destroyed the voting records ACCIDENTALY! 

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2730

Back to what was known in 2004.

Another quick fact that does not pass the smell test, and was known in 2004:  On election night, 2004, Warren County announce they had received a message from the FBI detailing a terrorist threat, and then proceeded to take the voting materials to an undisclosed location to be counted in secret.  The only problem is, there never was an FBI warning.  Why would they claim an FBI warning that didn’t occur in order to change the vote counting location and count the votes in secret?  I can only think of one reason to count the votes secretly under these conditions, and that is to change the vote totals.

Smoking gun #  3 - Computer “glitches” deliver NEGATIVE votes

And, my personal favorite computer “glitch”, how about a machine that reports a NEGATIVE 25 million votes for Kerry. That’s right, a negative 25 million votes.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200411120011

The machine was in Mahoning County, Ohio, where there were also reports of vote switching as well.   The following link has a good summary of various vote machine problems elsewhere as well.

http://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1529

From the EIRS data I analyzed above, Mahoning county had by far the greatest number of vote switching reports in Ohio: