Just in tonight as tabulation continues in Ohio’s primary election today. Via Josh Sweigart at Middletown Journal:
Although the “attack” is delaying communication of results on the board of election’s website, McGary said it is not having an impact on actual ballot counting.
“We do not think that anyone has hacked into our site, but we have crashed three servers. And in examining those servers, there are two unidentified sites that are deliberately diverting traffic.”
McGary added: “Our servers are under attack, we feel.”
The board of elections’ information technology department is still working on the issue, she said.
“Our IT is saying this is being done deliberately,” McGary said. “This is definitely something of a concern for us, but the votes are safe.”
Long-time readers of The BRAD BLOG will remember that similar “glitches” affected the 2004 Presidential Election in the Buckeye State when the election night reporting website went down late in the evening, was moved to the “back up servers” of a far Rightwing firm in Chattanooga, TN, before coming back up to show that George W. Bush had taken the lead over John Kerry.
That system was created by Mike Connell, the GOP’s IT guru who, in 2008, was subpeonaed for a deposition in a long-standing 2004 election fraud suit, only to die in a mysterious plane crane just weeks after the election, before he could testify in open court. Computer security experts have long charged that the results of Ohio’s ’04 Presidential election may have been compromised by a so-called “man in the middle” computer attack as the servers changed locations that night.
Similarly, in the hotly contested 2005 Special Election contest between Jean Schmidt (R) and Paul Hackett (D) for Ohio’s 2nd Congressional District seat, central tabulator computers went down during late-night counting in Clermont County, only to come back up showing Schmidt with the lead over Hackett.
Whether something similar could be going on tonight in Butler County remains to be seen, but the attacks on the servers certainly seem worth noting here should further information become available over the next few hours, days, or weeks.
[See end of article for an UPDATE on the above story.]In another part of Ohio, Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) experienced its own predictable failures with its ES&S precinct-based optical-scan vote tabulators during pre-election testing over the weekend. 89 of the county’s 1,200 machines (6%) froze up entirely during those tests…
From the Cleveland Plain-Dealer on Saturday:
All told, 89 of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections’ 1,200 machines powered down and then froze during a specific test done to ensure the optical scanners were reading paper ballots correctly.
Voting machine manufacturer Election Systems & Software, Inc., said it believes the problem has to do with the scanner’s software. And they believe they have a coding update that will fix it.
The Ohio Board of Voting Machine Examiners needs to approved the update. ES&S believes it will be OK’d in time for November general election.
…
In addition, the board also tested 108 new machines that are slated to go back to ES&S, and found that 14 failed. A deal was struck for the board of elections to keep the machines until the old ones are fixed. The board can send out machines to precincts during the day if there are problems.
“So it wasn’t only the machines that were used before, but brand new machines,” said Jane Platten, executive director of the board of elections.
We’ve yet to hear of any problems at the polls today in Cuyahoga, though voting machine problems often tend to be noticed in the days, weeks, and months following elections, if not on Election Day/Night itself.
In today’s election, OH Sec. of State Jennifer Brunner was overseeing her own election while facing off against OH’s Lt. Governor Lee Fisher for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Republican Sen. George Voinovich.
Reports tonight indicate that Fisher has defeated Brunner, according to the results reported by Ohio’s fully-computerized voting and tabulation system.
UPDATE 5/7/10: Officials have determined that the Butler county server attack incident was serious enough to warrant an investigation by the County Sheriff’s office. From is initiating an investigation. From today’s Journal News…
…
“We want the voting public know that we take this very seriously, and consider this a grave issue for us to get to the bottom of whether it was related to our internal system or whether there was an outside factor to this,” said Board of Elections Chairman Tom Ellis.
Ellis said the Board of Elections intends to release the full investigation to the public once it’s completed “to ensure the integrity and fairness of our election system.”
“This is something that we’re involved in a lot more than people would believe,” said Lt. Mike Craft of computer investigations. “It’s not an area that we’re not familiar with.”
“Although the ‘attack’ is delaying communication of results on the board of election’s website, McGary said it is not having an impact on actual ballot counting because here in Ohio, as in most of the country, we don’t actually count votes anyway.” OK, I admit it. I added that last part.
same old same old …
the war on terror is focused in the wrong place .
Thank you Brad for getting this important story out there. Glad you’re back from vacation. You are back, I hope?
While you were gone there was another report of voter registration slamming going on in Ca.
as in, “we have to get as many voters as we can registered as Republicans so when we do the man in the middle hacks it just looks like it was regular patriotic Americans voting”
Why do we pretend this isn’t happening? How many times do we need reports of a normally registered non-voter going to the polls and finding out they have already voted? Whatever…
I have a lot of problems with this paragraph:
We are not being told how many machines were tested. We want to know how many machines were tested, and what percentage of THAT number failed the test. I would seriously doubt that they tested all 1200 machines, but that is the supposition we are being led to, so this is sloppy at best, but more likely, intentionally misleading. If they tested all 1200, why didn’t they say so explicitly? I would bet that they tested 120 machines at most, and just didn’t want to report the huge percentage of machines that failed.
Then there is the “powered down and then froze” thing. This is very odd indeed. A simple software failure might cause the machine to “freeze”, or to “power down”, but it can’t do both in that sequence. Once it powers down, it can’t power back up on its own. If it froze up during operation, then it would have to be powered down, so the sequence seems wrong. But! This WOULD be consistent with a clever hack that sees it is about to be detected, so deletes itself, and then initiates a shut-off, which would leave the machine looking clean and ready to go. The freezing-after-power-down part looks like the hack wasn’t done quite right to put everything back in place so that it could start-up correctly. Can we know this? Well of course not, but I would be worried, and would want to do a simulated election, making it believe it was election day, and then go through the motions of counting votes, and then get final tally, then MANUALLY COUNT THE BALLOTS to see if the manual count agrees with the official tally.
These machines should be treated as infected until proven otherwise. Always. But the problem is that there are so many ways of hacking them and they are inherently opaque, with no way to prove the are not infected.
Why can’t elections be counted using optical scanner machines that don’t have any internal software? They could. We just choose not to do it that way. Grrrrr. One could make a scanner that would work with available ballots, using only parts from Radio Shack. ! In the “Humboldt Election Transparency Project”, they counted ballots using the images of each ballot from a pure optical scanner that didn’t know it was scanning ballots as opposed to pictures of flowers. That’s how it should be done, so that each stage of the process is transparent.
Every precinct, in every election should have a procedure, after the polls are closed, of (1)picking one machine at random by flipping a coin repeatedly–>head = North half of room, tails = South half–etc. (i.e. using some completely transparent method) then (2)that machine should generate its tally-tape, and then (3)the paper ballots should be counted manually to see if they agree with the tape, and finally and most importantly, (4) the memory card should be read by the “central tabulator” machine to see if the card has the accurate vote matching the other steps.
But there are holes everywhere when software is involved–Stephen Spoonamore has the best take on all of that. He says that secret ballots and software are incompatible
Our elections are important enough that they should be manually counted, with the public being able to view the ENTIRE counting process. Votes from each precinct should be counted AT THAT PRECINCT, directly from the ballots.
“In the love of truth”,
jd
There are also some changes happening on the internet:
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/1...-on-may-5.aspx
– Tom
Election Webservers are only a point to post results. In the big picture they don’t matter. Official Results can be had FACE TO FACE
OATH BREAKERS CONTROL OUR ELECTIONS
1. OUTLAW ELECTRONIC VOTE TABULATION DEVICES
2. CRACKDOWN ON FCC’S ORIGINAL MISSION STATEMENT
3. MAKE LIFE IN PRISON FOR TAMPERING IN ANY FORM
I want people working for my Government SCARED OF THE RAMIFICATIONS for BREAKING THEIR OATH! I don’t want this arrogance crap, I want them to POOP THEIR PANTS and KNOW WE THE PEOPLE put them away for their crime for LIFE. This extends into all agencies and branches of government! I want them SCARED the law will wreck their fscking day. If you don’t break your oath, you got nothing to be scared about. PROBLEM IS, the INITIAL oath breakers have embedded and are protecting themselves. SECURITY AUDIT FOR EVERYONE!
(Including me, as if I was any importance anymore)
This audit however will take a SNAPSHOT of the TIME AND DATE of HISTORY and compare it to YOUR PERSONAL ACTIONS. Did you introduce some unconstitutional SHTZILLS? Your TOAST!
ALL OUR PROBLEMS ARE BECAUSE THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM HAS NOT BEEN ADDRESSED:
AN UNBROKEN EMPOWERED PUBLIC HUMAN CHAIN OF CUSTODY WITH PUBLIC HUMAN OVERSIGHT, TO COUNT/TABULATE VOTES. ALL ELECTRONICS VIOLATE THIS CAUSE HUMANS CAN’T SEE ELECTRICITY!
ONLY THEN WILL IT BE HONEST!
HUMANS CAN SEE A PAPER BALLOT TOSSED INTO A BARREL, THEY CAN’T SEE THE DOPING LOGIC OF SOME DIEBOLD/PREMIERE/SIERRA or whatever their god damn fscking name is now ELECTRONIC VOTE TABULATION DEVICE / OR ELECTRONIC REGISTERED VOTERS DATABASE.
THE COMPUTERS HAVE TO GO!
we will go
You apathetic fucks who read this GET OFF YOUR ASS AND DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!
Legally Of Course.
God DAMN it already! A DECADE OF HELL NOW.
TomR said on 5/5/2010 @ 5:05 pm PT…
Internet Changes?
IP numbers CIDR NETBLOCKS numbers aren’t effected by DNS, DNS is affected by such numbers.
Learn TCPIP
effect? affect? crap.
PING: I need to LEARN ENGLISH.
out of morbid curiosity i went to butlercountyelections.org to look at the numbers reported after the “glitch”
in the gov race,all 4 parties total votes cast were 40,404
state issue 1 (basically a borrowing question that won) total votes cast 51,226
then down to issues 6 & 7,which are both library issues(tax increases)6 is the lane library that includes 150 precincts voting and 7 is the middletown library that includes 144 precincts voting(there are only 298 precincts in butler county)
now i tried to find maps that showed if the 2 library areas over lapped in any way but i couldnt find that info so i am ASSUMING that they are 2 seperate areas…..lanes total votes were 19724,middletons total votes were 33,229,if they are 2 separte districts with no ovrlap,that is 52,953 votes……both library tax increases won ,MIDDLETON BY ONLY 95 YES VOTES
i find it odd that almost 13,000 more peops voted to raise their taxes than voted in the gov race,,,and considering reps turned out 3 to 1 dem in butler,i find it even odder that republicans voted to raise their taxes not once but twice in middleton(a school tax,bond issue passed too)
i am also curious which 4 precincts are not included in either library district and how large those precincts are because 52,953 votes plus 4 more precincts is the real number of voters*****
no precinct by precinct numbers were available yesterday
anyone know anything more about butler county?
“…Sullivan said the county knows that the hundreds of clicks that brought down their servers came from the same Internet IP address, but little else is known. They’re not sure if that computer had a glitch, or if their computer had a problem interacting with it…”
http://www.oxfordpress.com/news...us-689786.html
Love-of-truth @ #5:
“… then MANUALLY COUNT THE BALLOTs…”
If you really wanna know who won, it always comes down to that, doesn’t it?
“…the votes are safe…”
Oh, well, I can just sleep soundly now.
That damn ACORN…..I know they’re responsible somehow.