Thread: Hacking Democracy - the Hursti Hack (Demonstration and Testing) Diebold Machines

Hacking Democracy - the Hursti Hack (Demonstration and Testing)



Published on Apr 11, 2012 by Volatus

"Can the votes on this Diebold system be hacked using the memory card?"
2 people voted Yes. 6 people voted No. The machine reported 7 Yes, 1 No.

As a software "hacker" (in the proper, non-malicious definition), I can say this is definitely a completely valid and utterly shocking "hack" that may have affected countless elections over the years...

"If I had not seen what was behind this, I'd have no reason not to, I would have certified this election as a true and accurate result of a vote." - Ion Sancho, Supervisor of Elections, Leon County, Florida.

From the highly underrated documentary, "Hacking Democracy". See more about the hack and its background: Hursti Hack - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stop Electronic Voting Machine Fraud! -- Interview with Expert Rebecca Mercuri:



Howard Phillips hosts Electronic Voting System Expert Rebecca Mercuri, Ph.D. on Conservative Roundtable. Mercuri explains the recent shift towards electronic voting systems and the threat of election fraud, as the computerized machines are easy to hack and alter your vote. She discusses other voting machines; including mechanical, optical, punch-card, and lever ballot systems; mail and internet voting; hand-written ballots; absentee and write-in ballots; and the need for a paper trail for all computerized ballot devices.

This is an edition of Conservative Roundtable, the nationally broadcast conservative television program hosted by Howard Phillips, and produced by The Conservative Caucus. Art Harman is the creator, producer and showrunner. Please visit our websites: http://www.conservativeusa.org
http://www.howardphillips.com

All Americans Must Watch Documentary - Hacking Democracy



Uploaded by PSNy2kUK on Feb 7, 2012

This is a ground breaking documentary investigating allegations of election fraud during the 2004 U.S. presidential election.

2012 VOTER FRAUD PROOF- Ron Paul - Fraud Victim in 2012 - YouTube

From Wikipedia - Hacking Democracy is a documentary film by producer Robert Carrillo Cohen and producer / directors Russell Michaels and Simon Ardizzone, shown on HBO. Filmed over three years it documents American citizens investigating anomalies and irregularities with 'e-voting' (electronic voting) systems that occurred during America's 2000 and 2004 elections, especially in Volusia County, Florida. The film investigates the flawed integrity of electronic voting machines, particularly those made by Diebold Election Systems, and the film culminates dramatically in the on-camera hacking of the in-use / working Diebold election system in Leon County, Florida.

In 2007 Hacking Democracy was nominated for an Emmy award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism.

Demonstrated flaws

The documentary follows Bev Harris and Kathleen Wynne, director and associate director for nonprofit election watchdog group Black Box Voting, as they attempt to discover the extent to which it would be possible to alter results on the electronic voting machines of Diebold Election Systems (now Premier Election Solutions). Andy Stephenson, an employee of Black Box Voting from July-December 2004, assisted with comparisons of audit documents in Volusia County and obtained a secret videotape of Harris interviewing a voting machine testing lab. Kathleen Wynne captured live video of Harris finding voting machine records in a Volusia County trash bag, and captured video of Cuyahoga County elections workers admitting that the initial 3% recount ballots had not been randomly selected during the 2004 presidential election. Harris and Wynne then embarked on a series of five voting machine hack tests with Dr. Herbert Hugh Thompson and Harri Hursti in 2005 and 2006. During the course of the documentary, multiple methods of tampering with the votes are shown.

The first is through editing the database file that contains the voting totals. This file is a standard Microsoft Access database, and can be opened by normal means outside of the encompassing voting program without a password. Some jurisdictions have disabled Microsoft Access, making it more difficult to alter the database, but this protection was shown to be bypassed by Dr. Herbert Hugh Thompson through a Visual Basic program which searched for a string of text and edited the file through external means. However, alterations of the results in either of these fashions would be caught if a vigilant elections official compared the results with voting machine tapes.

Another hacking technique was demonstrated through hacking the actual computer code used in the Diebold Accu-Vote memory cards. This method was discovered by Finnish computer security expert Harri Hursti and is known as "the Hursti Hack". In this hack, Harri Hursti rigged the Diebold optical scan voting system to make the wrong candidate win by adding negative (minus) votes to one race. This resulted in that race having votes literally subtracted from its vote total. These methods were tested by the Leon County Supervisor of Elections, Ion Sancho, on the actual Diebold optical scan voting system used by Tallahassee, Florida in all their prior elections. This method demonstrated, contrary to a previous Diebold statement, that a person attempting to rig the votes of a precinct would need access to only the memory card, not the optical scan voting system or tabulation software. This method, when cross-checked between the optical scan voting system and tabulation software, appears legitimate, and further produces a false zero-vote print-out to verify that the memory card has no votes inside it before voting begins. Following this historic hack Ion Sancho stated: "If I had not known what was behind this I would have certified this election as a true count of a vote."