HAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH !!! Thats fucking rich !! A goddamned demorat/
progressive sqealing like pig under the gate about fraudulent votes.
LMMFAO !!
Maybe Newt,like Al Franken, can find a few hundred paper ballots in
the trunk of his car to help put him over the hump. LMAO !!
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090105102841AAEQN32
http://biggovernment.com/cjohnson/2011/12/21/hacking-the-iowa-caucuses/
The hacking collective known as Anonymous has allegedly targeted the
Iowa caucus’s voting machines.
According to the Associated Press, there are two tools that the
“hacktivists” could use to create some chaos. The first is a “denial
of service” request, which sends thousands of requests to a website
server and makes it useless. The second is a SQL injection, which
inserts a code into a website’s software, thereby exploiting its
vulnerabilities and forcing it to execute the hacker’s code.
It wouldn’t be the first time that SQL insertions were used to try to
rock the vote. In Sweden’s elections in 2010 a voter tried to insert
an SQL insertion in the vote by hand-writing. Presumably a hacker
could try something similar at the Iowa caucus.
There are other worse examples of SQL insertions being dangerous. In
2010, Washington D.C. conducted a pilot project to allow overseas and
military voters to download and return absentee ballots over the
website. The city made the system open to the public for only three
days, but that was just enough time for J. Alex Halderman, a professor
in computer science at the Univesity of Michigan, to expose some of
the systems flaws. Within 36 hours of the system going live, our team
had found and exploited a vulnerability that gave us almost total
control of the server software, including the ability to change votes
and reveal voters’ secret ballots,” Halderman wrote.
Alas, were such an attack carried out in the Iowa caucus, it wouldn’t
be the first time an SQL inserted caused great harm. The Royal Navy’s
website was attacked in that manner by a Romanian hacker.
In Iowa, part of the problem is the centralization of the system which
makes it vulnerable to attack. Most caucuses Iowa use secret ballots
which are cast on paper. Some, in the past, have even used a show of
hands. The results are then sent via computer or phone to Iowa GOP
headquarters were they are tabulated by a computer and announced. It’s
there at, and en route to headquarters, that the vulnerabilities
persist.
There are presumably quite a number of ways to defend against this
kind of hacking. The first and most obvious is to have the
decentralized results posted at the precincts. Bloggers or others
observers could go and post those results online and compare them to
past elections. If there are shenanigans at a particular precinct it
could be more easily detected without the risk of corrupting the
entire process. Voters at each polling place could be required to show
identification and those without identification could be provided it
way ahead of time. This would stop insiders or outsiders from stealing
the process.
Both of these reforms are unlikely to happen for two reasons. The
caucuses are creatures of the parties, which rely on them to prove
their relevance. The more centralized the process, the more the
parties have relevance in the state. There are quite a number of Iowa
consultants who rely on their ties to the GOP or Democrats to help
candidates “deliver” Iowa. Voter IDs won’t do politically either.
Given the number of old voters who lack any sort of ID this might
induce hyperventilating by those worried about voter
disenfranchisement.
Those ostensibly most worried about such disenfranchisement—the
political left—has long disliked electronic voting machines. The
reasons for this are two fold: electronic voting makes it less likely
that local pols (or poll watchers) can steal elections and they often
harbor a conspiratorial fear that voting machines are rigged against
the people.
When Micah White, founder of the Occupy Wall Street movement, was a
student at Swarthmore College he posted a series of stolen internal
company memos that exposed flaws in Diebold’s voting machines on his
website. Diebold sued the students for copyright infringement under
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. He and a few other students
fought all the way to the Ninth Circuit, which predictably voted for
the students.
From Occupy Wall Street to now Occupy Des Moines, a former activist
posted a two-minute video on YouTube detailing plans to “peacefully
shut down the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucus.” The activist say the
video was left outside of his tent on November 3.
As I noted last week, there is plenty of opportunity to turn the Iowa
caucus into the Iowa circus, especially once the “Occupy Iowa Caucus”
movement comes to the foreground. Yesterday eight members were
arrested in the headquarters of the Democratic party headquarters in
Des Moines.