Diebold election insecurity systems

May 17, 2006

This article was contributed by Jake Edge.

It would seem obvious that protecting the integrity of election results would be the paramount goal of a company that provides voting equipment, but a recent report (PDF) indicates otherwise. BlackBoxVoting.org released a report by Harri Hursti last week that documents extremely serious flaws in the design of touchscreen voting terminals from Diebold Election Systems that could lead to an unscrupulous person or organization having complete control of the software on those systems.

An attacker with physical access to the voting terminal can permanently change the programming of a terminal in a way that is difficult or impossible to detect. With a PCMCIA memory card, phillips-head screwdriver, and 5 minutes of time, any portion of the software that runs on the terminal can be modified. It is not just the voting application that can be replaced; the operating system and even the bootloader can also be changed via this mechanism.

No tamper resistance or detection mechanisms are included in the terminal hardware making it impossible to tell whether it was opened to access the PCMCIA slot. There is no cryptographic or other authentication of the code that is to be loaded, just some very simple integrity checking (checksum or CRC presumably) of the binary. Evidently, Diebold decided to make field upgrades simpler at the cost of providing little to no protection against abuse.

It is well understood by security experts that preventing physical access to computers is the first step in securing them. Unfortunately, election officials and polling place workers are not typically security experts and the access to the terminals is not strictly limited. In fact, they are regularly taken to polling places (schools, churches, etc.) or to the homes of polling place supervisors several days in advance of an election. In addition, because the bootloader code can be modified, a clever attacker could install code that survived any number of software upgrades, waiting to be activated at the proper time. Diebold even conveniently provides an external switch, accessible to a voter, that could be used to trigger the dormant code.

This is not the first time that Diebold security has been found to be woefully inadequate and, once again, the company does not seem to understand the problem. A spokesman for Diebold, David Bear, had this to say:

For there to be a problem here, you're basically assuming a premise where you have some evil and nefarious election officials who would sneak in and introduce a piece of software, I don't believe these evil elections people exist.

Bear tries to deflect the criticism by claiming that it is only election officials who could make these changes, but there are actually a huge number of ways that it could happen. Simply showing up at the county clerk's office in an official looking Diebold uniform would probably be enough to get access to the machines in many areas.

Unfortunately, it is not just Diebold that misses the implications of this kind of threat; various election officials, many of whom spent a great deal of taxpayer money buying Diebold voting equipment, also downplay the threat. Several elections, including a primary last Tuesday in Pennsylvania, are going on as scheduled using the equipment, seemingly without any concern that the terminals could have been tampered with.

For the most part, this is a hardware problem: the Diebold terminals were not designed to be tamper-proof, instead they were designed to be easy to access. This is something for the various advocates of other voting technologies, including open source voting, to consider. Having the source code to the binary that is supposed to be installed is not sufficient, there needs to be some way to ensure that it is the software that is currently running. Having a way to resist tampering with the hardware and to detect attempts to tamper with the hardware are also mandatory for any voting system.

There seems to be a great deal of resistance to the idea of having a paper trail that can be verified by the voter as a backup system, at least from the voting equipment vendors, but this would seem to be the most sensible check on the proper functioning of the equipment. It still provides the instant gratification of vote counts that seem to be required, but also allows for an auditable recount should one be necessary. The lackadaisical approach to security and the resistance to an auditable paper trail might lead a cynical person to believe that those in power like things exactly as they are.

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to post comments

Diebold election insecurity systems

Posted May 18, 2006 2:13 UTC (Thu) by glennc99 (guest, #6993) [Link] (2 responses)

I actually participated in an election in Ohio this month, and I can tell
you that 'auditable paper trails' (which Ohio mandates) are still going
to be useless.

The Diebold machines in Ohio are required to use the 'optional' "print
the ballots into a sealed canister" function. Unfortunately, none of the
voters actually look at the printout as it goes in, so if there *was* a
hacked firmware that deliberately mis-counted and mis-printed the
votes, odds are very good that it wouldn't be caught.

In my precincts, exactly *1* voter, a law professor, examined the ballot
closely. He caught the fact that for a certain race, the title of the
position was combined with the name of the candidate in such a way that
the printed tape truncated the name. The truncated name did not match
his idea of what the name of the person he voted for should be.

Diebold election insecurity systems

Posted May 18, 2006 6:51 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]

Agreed -- very few people will control the paper-ballot. But even if only say 1% of the voters glance at the paper-ballot, the odds are pretty high that phony software that say changes 5% of the votes will get caugth.

On the average, that would mean that once every 2000 voters someone observes a paper-ballot coming out with something other than what they voted.

A better system would be for the machine to print the receipt, which the voter then folds and puts in an old-fashioned ballot-box. Requiring the voter to handle (even if only fold and insert in ballot-box) the paper would probably increase the chanse that voter glances at the paper by a factor of atleast 10.

Need for auditable reports

Posted May 27, 2006 3:38 UTC (Sat) by nealmcb (guest, #20740) [Link]

The most vexing problem I see is that even most advocates of paper ballots don't recognize the problems with the security of the tallying system, and don't demand auditable reports. We even have laws to require audits of elections (one of which I helped pass in Colorado), but the equipment doesn't produce any sort of report that can be meaningfully audited by hand counts of paper ballots. See

http://www.coloradovoter.net/moin.cgi/ManualCountAudit

for more info.

Who reconciles the paper trail with electronic tallies?

Posted May 18, 2006 4:08 UTC (Thu) by scripter (subscriber, #2654) [Link] (3 responses)

I would rather use the tried-and-true low-tech solution that we've used in my area for years. Lower purchase costs. Lower maintenance costs. No problems with faulty software. Not as many problems with faulty hardware (since there's no battery, no power supply, no capacitors, diodes or transistors). Fewer ways to hack the machine itself.

However, normal people tend to have a positive image of "user-friendly" high-tech touch-screen voting.

I live in Utah County, Utah where they've spent HAVA money to purchase Diebold machines. This wasn't originally the plan, due to concerns with the publicized insecurity of Diebold equipment. However, cost is a major consideration, and the county got a better deal by purchasing equipment at a cheaper, state-negotiated price -- Diebold equipment.

Recently, I spoke with an employee of the county clerk/auditor office. He told me that there is a paper audit trail with their Diebold machines. I asked if there is a process in place to spot-check the paper trail and reconcile it with the electronic tally. Apparently, this was a new idea to him. Having the ability to audit bank finances wouldn't be of much use if no one ever actually did the audit, and it's no different with electronic voting.

A paper trail is a good start, but useless unless there is a process in place to verify the electronic tally.

Who reconciles the paper trail with electronic tallies?

Posted May 18, 2006 17:50 UTC (Thu) by diakka (guest, #10310) [Link] (2 responses)

Maybe each person that votes would receive a slip of paper with a secret validation code on it. Later on, all the codes with the corresponding votes could be posted to a website. Each individual could verify that their vote without revealing their identity. Granted, this system wouldn't be perfect. Fake validation codes could be generated that wouldn't get checked by anybody. Probably someone out there has thought up a more intelligent system, but this seemed like the most obvious one off the top of my head. Essentially the reconciliation would be paralellized and would put the responsibility to the individual citizens.

Who reconciles the paper trail with electronic tallies?

Posted May 18, 2006 20:22 UTC (Thu) by kweidner (guest, #6483) [Link]

That approach is vulnerable to vote selling and other ways to pressure voters. A proper secret ballot is supposed to ensure that the people who voted have no way of proving that they voted a certain way.

Also, what's the procedure if people claim that the posted vote doesn't match who they intended to vote for? How many (unverified) complaints would be necessary to force a new election?

I think the old fashioned way of sticking pieces of paper in a ballot box still works best. A touchscreen system could still be useful for filling out the ballot and printing it, especially if it's a more complicated vote than a single check box. Automated scanning or an internal tally could provide a preliminary result, to be confirmed by manual count.

Who reconciles the paper trail with electronic tallies?

Posted May 18, 2006 21:10 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link]

> Maybe each person that votes would receive a slip of paper with a secret
> validation code on it.

Or maybe geeks could realize this isn't a problem that can be solved with technology. Seriously. Me or half the readers here could design a open source secure voting system and spec the hardware to run it on in a way it would also be virtually tamper proof. Except for one small problem. It would make zero difference.

In the end it isn't who votes, it isn't who votes for who. It is who counts the votes that matters. I live in Louisiana, I understand these things. When the dead in New Orleans rushed to the polls in 1996 at the last minute to put Mary Landriau into the Senate, it was generally admitted that massive fraud had occured, but the Democrats hung tough and threatened to 'shut down the Senate' if there was any sort of investigation and she was seated; where she remains today. A few nerds waving around hash codes to add further proof of the misdeeds would have changed nothing. Political problems are solved politically, not with technology. The only solution that would have worked would have been a few Republicans with a spine, but since that isn't likely to happen in our lifetimes.....

The root of the problem is a failure of trust in the people running elections in major urban areas. Which is why nothing will be done regarding installing secure voting machines. Democrats run almost all of the major urban machines and like being able to pad a percentage point or two onto their totals and want nothing to do with some technology that would hinder that. Being able to ALSO crank up their moonbat base with conspiracy theories about Dibold is just gravy.

Note that I am NOT accusing Democrats of being less moral than Republicans on this issue, it is just the facts on the ground that happen to give them both the ability to pull off the fraud in the first place and by being able to dominate the MSM message keep most people from realizing that EVERY major documented case (most historians now admit Kennedy/Nixon was crooked enough to have changed the outcome of TX and IL) of actual voter fraud in the last seventy five years has been committed by their side. If the circumstances so favored the Republicans they would certainly abuse it and DO sometimes commit other questionable acts to help boost their numbers.

Which brings us back to how do we get elections we can trust? Self government doesn't require perfect elections, only ones honest enough that people are willing to be bound by their results. I'm afraid the answer to that isn't technology either, the problem is with thee and me. We keep right on allowing politicians to take us for granted instead of holding them accountable. If government is broken it is because WE broke it.

Diebold election insecurity systems

Posted May 18, 2006 5:41 UTC (Thu) by kirkengaard (guest, #15022) [Link]

" There seems to be a great deal of resistance to the idea of having a paper trail that can be verified by the voter as a backup system, at least from the voting equipment vendors, but this would seem to be the most sensible check on the proper functioning of the equipment. It still provides the instant gratification of vote counts that seem to be required, but also allows for an auditable recount should one be necessary. The lackadaisical approach to security and the resistance to an auditable paper trail might lead a cynical person to believe that those in power like things exactly as they are."

I have even heard designers of these systems suggest that beng able to regurgitate the same answer twice is sufficient to an auditable recount. After all, what you want is to get the same count twice, right?

When did repeatability replace accuracy?

Diebold election insecurity systems

Posted May 18, 2006 6:53 UTC (Thu) by kitsilano (guest, #14833) [Link]

"I don't believe these evil elections people exist."

Hey, you have to do with real human beings, not with angels. I can remember 3 cases of election fraud in modern direct democratic Switzerland in the last few years. If you do not pay attention, it will be abused. Such a statement of an "offical" is frightening and states that they simply do not care.

Diebold election insecurity systems

Posted May 18, 2006 6:56 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]

This is incredibly naive:

In other words, the combination of hardware and software used to control voting (and thus government) is simple and straigthforward to manipulate in a way that is hard to detect. But it's not a problem because everyone is going to be nice and not do that.

That's not reassuring. It's a lot like shipping a firewall with a backdoor-password known to 5000 people, and then when it's discovered claim that its not a problem, because those 5000 people are all going to be nice.

Responding to security-problems with "everyone is going to be nice and refrain from taking advantage of this vulnerability" is not what you want to hear from the vendor of the software/hardware that literally holds the keys to the government of the worlds last remaining superpower.

Diebold election insecurity systems

Posted May 18, 2006 7:06 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (8 responses)

I'm still a fan of completly paper-based systems. You get the piece of paper, you tick some boxes, you place it in the box.

Later they empty the box on a table and sort them. It doesn't take much longer to get a result and it's a lot harder to mess with.

Diebold election insecurity systems

Posted May 18, 2006 13:50 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (2 responses)

Later they empty the box on a table and sort them. It doesn't take much longer to get a result and it's a lot harder to mess with.

Hungary has a quite complicated election system, however, at the last general election, the 99% results were in within four hours. This task can be massively parallelized - I think at most 800 people voted at a single place, there are two votes per person, so there're at most 1600 votes to be counted (of course, in rural areas this number is usually around 400-500).

Bye,NAR

Diebold election insecurity systems

Posted May 19, 2006 14:07 UTC (Fri) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link] (1 responses)

And, I'd imagine, the more people you have counting votes, the harder it is to game the system. You'd need more people cooperating to rig the vote.

Diebold election insecurity systems

Posted May 25, 2006 9:05 UTC (Thu) by arcticwolf (guest, #8341) [Link]

It's done the same way in Germany - and one interesting thing about the elections is that when votes are counted, everyone can walk in and watch the whole thing. So if you believe that there's going to be tampering and that you're not going to be accurately represented... just go and watch.

Not many people actually do, of course, but when I helped out with elections, it was not at all uncommon to have at least one interested bystander.

As for results... the first projections that are made available 5 minutes or so after voting closes are usually pretty accurate already (so you'll get an idea of who won and who lost), and final results will be available the next day. And personally, I think a delay of one day is a trade-off that's more than acceptable when the alternative is a state of constant worry (at best!) that the elections might not be all that meaningful after all.

The problems with paper ballots

Posted May 18, 2006 14:50 UTC (Thu) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link] (3 responses)

First there's the problem of just printing up all the ballots ahead of time and getting them right. Then there's the issue of each district will have different ballots. And so on and so forth. And this is apparently a fairly large problem.

Then there's the problem of what if the person is blind or impared (my 80 year old father has problems holding a pencil...)? Or what if the person can't read?

Then there are validity problems - what if the person accidentially checks two boxes on the same race without noticing it (the butterfly ballot in Florida in 2000 is a poster child for this). What if they don't check any box - that may or may not be intentional? And so on and so forth.

I totally agree that a paper ballot is the best way. And computers can be used to trivially fix all the above problems. And they should ONLY be used to address the above problems. The final output should be a paper ballot - as you say, it's a lot harder to hack. And as others on this thread have stated, if you require the user to take the ballot, fold it and put it in a box, then they may actually check that the thing says what they mean it to say.

Some nice side effect:
- the computer generating the ballot can tally the vote as it goes along, making for a nice quick count
- you can make the generated ballot easy to read by computer, so (re-)counting the ballots is also easy.

I get the impression that the election officials are sick and tired of it, and that's driving a lot of this. I can understand not wanting to deal with paper ballots anymore. Also, all these election officials have already purchased these crappy systems and they don't want to have the egg on their face and admit that this was a bad purchase - so it's a face saving thing. They also literally don't have the money to buy different sytems.

But at some point everyone has to admit that the systems are broken (and clearly now with Diebold). Whoever approved them in the first place was an idiot. But I also see somethings that make me believe that these people want to make it easy to hack, which is really *really* disturbing. They don't want any kind of audit trail or anything that makes verifying this easy. It's like they want to cheat at this thing.

Anyway, enough of a rant now...

The problems with paper ballots

Posted May 18, 2006 18:07 UTC (Thu) by AJWM (guest, #15888) [Link] (2 responses)

Or what if the person can't read? Then there are validity problems - what if the person accidentially checks two boxes on the same race without noticing it

In the first instance, that person probably shouldn't be voting -- they're hardly making informed choices. In the second, if they're not taking the voting process seriously enough to pay attention to detail, then their vote shouldn't be paid attention to either.

Horribly politically incorrect attitudes, sure, but personally I'd rather live in a country whose government is elected by thoughtful voters than one whose government is the result of a popularity contest.

The problems with paper ballots

Posted May 19, 2006 2:50 UTC (Fri) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link] (1 responses)

In the first instance, that person probably shouldn't be voting -- they're hardly making informed choices.

I was implying they were blind or visually impared. The computer could read the ballot to them audibly (via headphones), with large buttons on the screen, maybe with the persons picture on it (apparently Brazil uses something like that). Or with a braile reader connected to the computer.

But even if they truly cannot read, this is no barrier to watching or listening the news, etc and understanding, probably better than you do, the issues and making an informed decions. Wise people who can't read aren't just characters in books. My father-in-law probably reads at a 3rd grade level, but he definately pays attention and can argue the issues with me 7 days a week and twice on Sunday.

And as far as an uninformed choice goes, I expect that label applies to probably the majority of the people voting, especially in down-ticket races. Quick in the last election, name who was running for state representative in your district from the major parts - what was their history and stance on various issues. What about county commisioner (or city council or whatever). I'd wager 95% of America goes into the voting completley clueless about this stuff.

In the second, if they're not taking the voting process seriously enough to pay attention to detail, then their vote shouldn't be paid attention to either.

Did you see the butterfly ballots in Florida? They are a case study in confusing/poor design. It's entirely possible that Bush won Florida in 2000 because people mistakenly voted for Buchannon or various other combinations of stupid design.

I (with a college education and clearly paying attention and motivated) am sometimes confused with the idiotic and plain stupid ballot designs our local election officials come up with. Often it's 3 or 4 different pieces of paper, with different formats - some double sided or some not.

Computers have a place in this system and can make things better. But the current implementations are not doing any of these things. They are all a joke and lead one to the conclusion that either our election officials are all crooked, or all idiots, or quite possibly both.

Yes this will probably allow a less informed voter to vote - but they're doing that now anyway. And with the way the voting machines are setup, I'd rather have an uninformed voter than a rigged election.

The problems with paper ballots

Posted May 19, 2006 22:33 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

It's entirely possible that Bush won Florida in 2000 because people mistakenly voted for Buchannon or various other combinations of stupid design.

You can state it even more strongly. It is a near certainty that that happened. It may not be obvious to people who don't have a good command of statistics, but it's inescapable to those who do.

We've reached a level of polling technology where the exit polls (and even telephone polls) are more accurate at measuring who voters want to win than the ballots are (and hundreds of times cheaper!). You may remember that in 2000, several news organizations reported with certainty that Gore had won, and had to retract that when the official counts came in in Palm Beach County Florida. That's because the exit polls asked voters who they thought they voted for, while the ballots showed who they actually voted for, and those were different.

To those who didn't follow or don't remember the statistics in question: Arch-conservative independent presidential candidate Buchanan got way more votes on that ballot than independents usually get and than Buchanan got in similar counties. The same voters who voted for Buchanan also voted for the liberal Democrat senate candidate. And the ballot was designed so that a mark next to Democrat Gore's name was also a mark next to Buchanan's name.

The same inconsistencies could be seen in several other races on that ballot.

There were easily enough miscast votes to make the difference in who won Florida, and the vote was close enough among the rest of the states that that made the difference in who won the whole election.

Diebold election insecurity systems

Posted May 18, 2006 19:35 UTC (Thu) by tnoo (subscriber, #20427) [Link]

I completely agree. Actual people of different parties counting paper
slips in one room is hard to tamper with.

If high-tech is needed: the technology for a secure, auditible voting
system is in daily use: ATM (automatic teller machines, Bancomat). It
prints out a paper trail per default.

tnoo

Diebold election insecurity systems

Posted May 18, 2006 8:06 UTC (Thu) by job (guest, #670) [Link] (2 responses)

Not only are the machines not designed to be secure against tampering in any way, but the really scary part is that the company behind it was majority was/is owned by a policitian.

What amazes me is that the citizens of the USA lets these things pass. I haven't seen any coverage of this in american media, except some web sites. Where are the big public outrages? Or is democracy there in a bad shape anyway, with low voter turnout etc., that this is not considered a problem?

Diebold election insecurity systems

Posted May 18, 2006 21:52 UTC (Thu) by hazelsct (guest, #3659) [Link] (1 responses)

Indeed, not only a policitian, but one who wrote he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president [Bush] next year [2004]." You don't have to be a foaming-at-the-mouth conspiracy theorist to see that this is at least a massive conflict of interest.

Diebold election insecurity systems

Posted May 19, 2006 8:45 UTC (Fri) by donwaugaman (subscriber, #4214) [Link]

Whether a conspiracy theorist or not, it is a good thing to get the facts right.

Walden "Wally" O'Dell is not a politician, nor is he or was he a majority stockholder of Diebold. Until sometime last year, he was CEO of Diebold, and a "Pioneer" for George W. Bush's 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns (someone who organized fundraising events which bundled together campaign donations from himself and others of at least $100,000).

These facts, by the way, make things look rather worse for Mr. O'Dell, as (1) a CEO has a lot more possibilities for shenanigans^Winfluencing company operations than a stockholder, even a majority stockholder and (2) being a donor rather than someone standing for office gives rather more freedom of action.

Frankly, the scariest thing about the whole voting machine thing to me is the way that our elected officials, particularly at the state and local levels, have either been bamboozled by voting machine sales guys into ignoring security or just don't care about problems with verification of the vote.

Of course, if they've been fooled by the voting machine companies, it would behoove those of us who understand computers and the issues to educate our elected representatives on what those issues are. And at the local level, our input can make a difference.

That's Harri Hursti

Posted May 18, 2006 8:21 UTC (Thu) by aspa (guest, #4299) [Link]

please correct the spelling.

Diebold election insecurity systems

Posted May 18, 2006 11:38 UTC (Thu) by copsewood (subscriber, #199) [Link] (1 responses)

I stood in recent local council elections in Coventry, UK, a city with about 200,000 population. Here we use a paper ballot, which involves a couple of hundred local government officers counting for a couple of hours after the polling stations close. It's pretty tiring for all concerned to be up until 2AM before you get a result and having to work the next day. But the integrity and observability benefits far outweigh this cost for this kind of application; everybody knows someone who knows someone who is directly involved in this count. The point isn't just about whether the system can be audited by a team of PHd level experts. Our low-tech counts can be and are observed by many people with a basic education and more. This doesn't require that those with a more basic education have to trust "the experts", whom we all know are just as likely to be corrupt as anyone else.

In parts of the UK, we have had recent and publicised corruption problems arising from a pilot expansion of postal voting in a few areas. The problem here is that when you have a vulnerable person visited by an activist, or with an activist relative, there is very little confidence that the voting was either done by the voter or done in secret. In my view postal voting for general political representatives should only be available for those who really can't vote in person.

I'm entirely in favour of extending Internet voting for consultation purposes and for elections within specialist organisations, e.g. trade unions or credit unions. Here the integrity and observability issues can be sorted out where the stakes are not so high, and the cost considerations are more dominant.

One interesting proposal for machine voting is that the machine counts the vote, and prints a paper ballot that the voter checks as being correct, who puts it into a traditional ballot box. The machine count is announced to the candidates at the start of the count, and a sample of the paper ballots is counted manually from each box. If the result is very clear and the samples show a similar proportion of voting for each candidate, then the result can be announced based on the mechanical count and everyone can go home sooner. If the vote is very close, then all the paper ballots still have to be counted. You still need to employ enough people to be able to count the close paper ballots within this system, but for a whole city where it would be very exceptional for results in more than 3 out of 15 wards to be close, this would be just as verifiable and observable, but would reduce the overall cost.

U.S. Civic Responsibility

Posted May 20, 2006 13:29 UTC (Sat) by jmmans (guest, #34995) [Link]

Of course, one problem in the United States is the low level of civic involvement in such things as elections. We assume "professionals" will take care of these things and there isn't really a tradition of lots of volunteers being available for this task. Most of the election day volunteers at my polling place are senior citizens who probably couldn't handle the papers and see well enough to process a hundred paper ballots with scribble marks on them.

Maybe it's time to stop legitimizing voting in the first place?

Posted May 18, 2006 16:56 UTC (Thu) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link] (1 responses)

http://members.aol.com/vlntryst/2nbnb.html

reductio ad absurdum, as usual, goes too far.

Posted May 19, 2006 7:53 UTC (Fri) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

The linked 'dialogue' is so full of straw men it is absurd. No-one
running for office can honestly deny seeking the power of that office;
however they certainly *can* (and usually do) legitimately promise to
exercise that power in the public interest.

However it is impossible for the public interest to be a matter of
absolute consensus in every case, and it is the obligation of the
citizens of a democracy to expose and oppose the inappropriate exercise
of democratic power.

To suggest that to vote is to *mandate* and legitimise whatever use or
abuse of power an elected official chooses to make is merely to fall for
the arguments that elected officials make when they are caught abusing
their power. Opposition to governments in order to limit such abuse from
within and outside the formal political structure, is an honourable and
ancient task. The political structures of democracies provide for it by
separation of powers, different tiers of government, and (in most
democratic polities, and usually informally) by the representation of
multiple political parties within the institutions of government.

It is the *obligation* of the citizen of a democracy to oppose the abuse
power, whether the power was obtained legitimately in the first place or
not.

When the structure of institutions supports it, it is logical (and
possibly most efficient in terms of effort) for the citizen to use the
institutional means of opposition. That includes voting and seeking
office. When the structure of the institutions does not allow this, or
prevents it from being effective as in the baroque, effectively two-party
system of the USA, it is of course necessary for opposition to proceed
outside the political institutions as well.

To suggest that to abandon democratic institutions is the only legitimate
path for those who oppose the abuse of governmental power is absurdly
narrow-minded. Democratic institutions exist for exactly that purpose,
after all.

Diebold election insecurity systems

Posted May 23, 2006 19:36 UTC (Tue) by johnwin (guest, #4711) [Link]

"Simply showing up at the county clerk's office in an official looking Diebold uniform would probably be enough to get access to the machines in many areas."

Witness the recent credit card fraud at Shell garages in the UK, where the skimming devices were installed in credit card terminals simply by a chap who turned up and said, "Hi, I've come to service the credit card terminal".