Submitted via IRC for Sulla
The nation's top voting machine maker has admitted in a letter to a federal lawmaker that the company installed remote-access software on election-management systems it sold over a period of six years, raising questions about the security of those systems and the integrity of elections that were conducted with them.
In a letter sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) in April and obtained recently by Motherboard, Election Systems and Software acknowledged that it had "provided pcAnywhere remote connection software ... to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006," which was installed on the election-management system ES&S sold them.
The statement contradicts what the company told me and fact checkers for a story I wrote for the[sic] New York Times in February. At that time, a spokesperson said ES&S had never installed pcAnywhere on any election system it sold. "None of the employees, ... including long-tenured employees, has any knowledge that our voting systems have ever been sold with remote-access software," the spokesperson said.
[...] Election-management systems are not the voting terminals that voters use to cast their ballots, but are just as critical: they sit in county election offices and contain software that in some counties is used to program all the voting machines used in the county; the systems also tabulate final results aggregated from voting machines.
Software like pcAnywhere is used by system administrators to access and control systems from a remote location to conduct maintenance or upgrade or alter software. But election-management systems and voting machines are supposed to be air-gapped for security reasons—that is, disconnected from the internet and from any other systems that are connected to the internet. ES&S customers who had pcAnywhere installed also had modems on their election-management systems so ES&S technicians could dial into the systems and use the software to troubleshoot, thereby creating a potential port of entry for hackers as well.
[...] In 2006, the same period when ES&S says it was still installing pcAnywhere on election systems, hackers stole the source code for the pcAnyhere software, though the public didn’t learn of this until years later in 2012 when a hacker posted some of the source code online, forcing Symantec, the distributor of pcAnywhere, to admit that it had been stolen years earlier. Source code is invaluable to hackers because it allows them to examine the code to find security flaws they can exploit. When Symantec admitted to the theft in 2012, it took the unprecedented step of warning users to disable or uninstall the software until it could make sure that any security flaws in the software had been patched.
Around this same time, security researchers discovered a critical vulnerability in pcAnywhere that would allow an attacker to seize control of a system that had the software installed on it, without needing to authenticate themselves to the system with a password. And other researchers with the security firm Rapid7 scanned the internet for any computers that were online and had pcAnywhere installed on them and found nearly 150,000 were configured in a way that would allow direct access to them.
Source: Top Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States
[20180718_130441 UTC; Updated to add: description of election management systems, stolen source code, and report of a critical vulnerability.]
Related Stories
The project Protect Democracy is suing the state of South Carolina because its insecure, unreliable voting systems are effectively denying people the right to vote. The project has filed a 45-page lawsuit pointing out the inherent lack of security and inauditability of these systems and concludes that "by failing to provide S.C. voters with a system that can record their votes reliably," South Carolinians have been deprived of their constitutional right to vote. Late last year, Def Con 25's Voting Village reported on the ongoing, egregious, and fraudulent state of electronic voting in the US, a situation which has been getting steadily worse since at least 2000. The elephant in the room is that these machines are built from the ground up on Microsoft products, which is protected with a cult-like vigor standing in the way of rolling back to the only known secure method, hand counted paper ballots.
Bruce Schneier is an advisor to Protect Democracy
Earlier on SN:
Top Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States (2018)
Want to Hack a Voting Machine? Hack the Voting Machine Vendor First (2018)
Georgia Election Server Wiped after Lawsuit Filed (2017)
It Took DEF CON Hackers Minutes to Pwn These US Voting Machines (2017)
Russian Hackers [sic] Penetrated US Electoral Systems and Tried to Delete Voter Registration Data (2017)
5 Ways to Improve Voting Security in the U.S. (2016)
FBI Says Foreign Hackers Penetrated State Election Systems (2016)
and so on ...
Another item from Def Con 26, which ended the other day, an 11-year-old was easily able to change tallies on real electronic voting equipment within minutes. These machines are designed not to leave any evidence when tampering happens so it was useful that there were many witnesses present for her demo.
Election hackers [sic] have spent years trying to bring attention to flaws in election equipment. But with the world finally watching at DEFCON, the world's largest hacker conference, they have a new struggle: pointing out flaws without causing the public to doubt that their vote will count.
This weekend saw the 26th annual DEFCON gathering. It was the second time the convention had featured a Voting Village, where organizers set up decommissioned election equipment and watch hackers [sic] find creative and alarming ways to break in. Last year, conference attendees found new vulnerabilities for all five voting machines and a single e-poll book of registered voters over the course of the weekend, catching the attention of both senators introducing legislation and the general public. This year's Voting Village was bigger in every way, with equipment ranging from voting machines to tabulators to smart card readers, all currently in use in the US.
In a room set aside for kid hackers [sic], an 11-year-old girl hacked a replica of the Florida secretary of state's website within 10 minutes — and changed the results.
Earlier on SN:
Georgia Defends Voting System Despite 243-Percent Turnout in One Precinct
South Carolina's 13k Electronic Voting Machines Vulnerable, Unreliable
Top Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States
(Score: 4, Informative) by Revek on Wednesday July 18 2018, @01:13PM
They installed pcAnywhere. The worst remote control software possible.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 5, Insightful) by idiot_king on Wednesday July 18 2018, @01:15PM (22 children)
Wait... let me get this straight. A capitalist entity asserted its dominance to possibly influence politics with its clout? If only someone like Marx had predicted this almost 2 centuries ago!
Oh wait.... He did. Seriously people, it's not hard! It's too obvious, even!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @01:27PM (21 children)
Marx diagnosed accurately, he fucked up with the cure, class warfare. Intentionally, I guess.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday July 18 2018, @02:24PM (2 children)
"If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist" -- Karl Marx, 1880.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday July 18 2018, @06:19PM (1 child)
Well, he is reported to have said that, so something substantially similar, to the French Workers party. And Engels wrote a letter that said about the same thing.
This isn't really surprising, as most philosophers are more interested in developing their ideas than anything else (as philosophers). But a search indicated that from context what Marx was saying was about (in French) "If you guys are Marxist, then I'm not.".
Too bad he didn't have a chance to say the same thing to Lenin and Stalin.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @06:36PM
Fortunately, the International Committee of the Fourth International does have a chance to say such things (through their World Socialist Web Site), and they do say such things.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Sulla on Wednesday July 18 2018, @02:25PM (15 children)
Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to ignorance. His cure caused more deaths than leaving the patient alone would have.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 0, Troll) by Sulla on Wednesday July 18 2018, @05:07PM (4 children)
Stating facts is troll now? Compare the treatment of the people of China's imperial government against the treatment of the people by Mao's communist government. The Kingdom of Cambodia and the Khmer Republic against the Khmer Rouge. Tzar Nicholas II was pretty bad, but compared to Lenin and Stalin he looks like nothing. Venezuela is a pretty obvious one... North Korea...
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @06:32PM (1 child)
No matter how many times somebody builds up that straw man, it remains a straw man. Nobody wants to implement Stalinism or Maoism.
I see control of the means of production by bureaucracy and an elite inner party in those examples, not control of the means of production by the workers.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Sunday July 22 2018, @12:00AM
You mean they played out the events of Animal Farm to perfection. Communism has never existed on planet Earth. Just dictatorship by committee, or some thinly veiled form of Fascism.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by shortscreen on Wednesday July 18 2018, @07:13PM (1 child)
During a war between communists and anti-communists, why do you lay the blame for death and destruction only on the communists? If you want to compare the entire histories of communism and capitalism, the latter has a much longer rap sheet. If you limit the comparison to the era when communists are in power, you still have ol' Adolf making them look good.
Stalin had a lot of people sent to work camps, comparable in scale to incarceration in the US today. Stalin himself was exhiled to Siberia at least five times before the revolution.
Conventional wisdom on the horrors of communism has been edited by anti-communists.
(Score: 3, Informative) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday July 18 2018, @11:25PM
That's largely because the US has been the most rabidly anti-communist country and it also has the most efficient and effective propaganda machine humanity has ever seen, so the average citizen of the US probably has no real idea of the horrors perpetrated in their name in places like Honduras. [wikipedia.org]
I am amazed sometimes by the hate some Americans have for Castro and the Cuban Revolution, when the US supported dictator Batista was so obviously a murderous tyrant.
According to Wikipedia, he outlawed the Cuban Communist Party in 1952, which leads me to wonder if Communism is such a poor political system, why does it need to be outlawed?
That's just a couple of examples of the US doing some awful things in the name of fighting Communism. There are plenty of others if you'd like to look.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday July 18 2018, @06:29PM (9 children)
You don't know what the alternate paths of history would have been. Most of the deaths were caused by extreme distortions of Marx's ideas by self-seeking demagogues, and they would probably have found some other way.
Still, Marx's ideas would not work above the level of a small community. (A single business could also make them work, if it wasn't larger than a small community.) Even in that case making the ideas work requires a continuing ideological commitment that is not natural to human societies. Normally it arises for short periods under the influence of a charismatic leader...and leaves when he either leaves or loses energy.
That said, the large mass of people who basically had nothing to lose combined with a small wealthy group that was oppressing them was a recipe for revolutionary doctrines. Communism wasn't the only one to arise then, so did Nazism and Fascism. (The details are significantly different, e.g. Fascism was more closely connected with nationalism, Nazism was more closely connected with racism, and Communism preached "workers solidarity", but they were equally revolutionary. I suspect that there were also some Christian, etc. revolutionary movements, but those haven't made the history books.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @07:24PM (7 children)
It doesn't go against human nature, you simply have been raised in a society that glorifies the top down pyramid hierarchy and rewards greedy behavior. The natural human state is much more cooperative once the basic needs of food and shelter are no longer a problem.
Basically we have every system eventually subverted by the sociopaths who desire power and control, and that is not the fault of the billions of humans who are not shitty people.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday July 19 2018, @01:04AM (6 children)
Before you assert this you need to read up on the great leap forward. China tried eliminating those "sociopaths that desire power and control" by removing them from power and sending them to work and re-education camps. That experiment did not end well. North of 20 million people starved to death. The total death toll was more than double that.
If you want to repeat that experiment you better do something different or you'll join a long line of well intentioned mass murderers.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday July 19 2018, @02:29AM
Wasn't it "sociopaths that desire power and control" who did that?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 19 2018, @04:48AM (1 child)
Herp derp whaaa? Oh yeah, the unstated assumption that I meant we should go full guillotine revolution!!!
Thanks, very helpful, I will do my best to be a mal-intentioned mass murderer instead OK???
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday July 19 2018, @01:14PM
I'm sorry if that came off harsh, but it needs to. We have a painful history of charismatic leaders starting out with the very best of intentions, genuinely trying to make the world a better place, and killing millions in the process. We have to learn from those mistakes or we will repeat them.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday July 19 2018, @05:15PM (2 children)
The "Great Leap Forwards" isn't a good counter-example. The same gang stayed in charge, and there's no reason to believe that the punished (or killed) were any worse than those that kept power. The news wasn't any more trustworthy than the news usually is.
That said, I'd be a lot more convinced if "anonymous coward" could come up with even one example of his ideas working out at larger than a village level (or small business level). I can come up with plenty of examples of them working out (for the life of one leader) myself. (Also a number of examples of them failing, but those tend to be less well documented. Also shorter.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday July 19 2018, @10:59PM (1 child)
It does work in tiny communities; I've seen it. It hits a limit around 40 or 50 people where things start to fall apart. I would be interested to know if there is an evolutionary reason for that limit, and if it varies by ancestry.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday July 20 2018, @12:23AM
Check out Dunbar's Number. I would guess there's an evolutionary reason for that, but it's also true that there's a systematic reason for it. The more time you need to spend maintaining relationships, the less you have available for anything else. This is why barn-raising and corn-husking bees were common. They let you mix work and maintaining relationships. But that's the context in which Dunbar's number was discovered. Other contexts are likely to vary the number slightly up or down.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Derf the on Thursday July 19 2018, @01:13AM
For the example you were thinking might be out there...
The Taiping (Heavenly Kingdom) Revolution [led by Jesus younger brother, Hong Xiuquan] and it's fall-out. The Christians and their Bible are directly responsible for this one.
It is definitely in the all-time top 20 by by death toll and may even actually take out the top spot; and most of us haven't even heard the story once.
Estimates range from 5 to 100 million dead, 1850's 60's Southern China.
Worth a bit of learning...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll#cite_note-15 [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @06:23PM (1 child)
When the upper classes are demonstrably waging warfare on the working class, you don't get to tell the working class that "class warfare" is off limits to them.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Sunday July 22 2018, @12:03AM
The absolute best proof of that his housing and rental prices going 10-15 times the sane amount, 30-35% of your income. No young person alive under 20 today will ever own a house, and will be lucky to find 2-4 roommates to rent the house that their parents afforded with living wage jobs in the 70s'.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @01:46PM
https://www.rapid7.com/db/modules/auxiliary/scanner/pcanywhere/pcanywhere_login [rapid7.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @02:45PM (13 children)
It's good to scrutinize these machines, but they are not networked during an election, and there are per machine and per elections staff records that can be checked for discrepancy, along with paper tallies.
I think the narrative has shifted from "omg! Login from Moscow into the voting machine" to "Russians told us true things we little people should not have known".
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday July 18 2018, @03:01PM (4 children)
Would it be essential that malicious software is installed DURING the election? Give me, or any other evil sumbitch, some time to think about that. The election is six months away, but I have access to the networked machines NOW!! All I need is the right time bomb . . .
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @06:26PM (3 children)
These machines have a CF card that stores per machine data and probably has a detailed log of user activity. We election staff have an IR dongle that we sign onto the machines with when we bring a voter to a (random) machine. I guess it can store timestamps during the day, but it is not in the machine while the voter is voting. At end of day, each machine uploads its count to the dongle, and the last machine will print out the aggregate count on paper. At our desk, we keep a manual list of how many people we have sent to the machines, along with a record of who all came to vote.
A paper copy is displayed at the polling place for public inspection, the dongles go to a regional center where they are compiled into the generally released results. The CF cards are stored separately and are probably only accessed in case of a complaint about the machines' operation.
Most election staff has been there for years, we know our community, additionally at important elections we have party monitors inspect our records and poll voters. If anything is out of the ordinary or doesn't match counts, that raises flags. Electronic voting isn't great, but the insinuation that Russia had its fingers on the screens during the election, without any human noticing, is just not rational, and is pure politicking to discredit President Trump.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by HiThere on Wednesday July 18 2018, @06:31PM
And nobody has ever heard of any malware that tampers with the logs.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @08:24PM
Sounds like you really don't understand hacking and your main defense is "we do exit polls and compare to the actual vote tallies". If the machines are hacked then the CF cards are vulnerable and you can't trust any of the data on it or the machines. How many 3rd party votes got switched to a D or R candidate, how many D votes were switched to a relatively close 3rd party option? How many R votes were switched from relatively close 3rd party to Trump?
This has been an ongoing worry for over a decade now and isn't some new thing with Trump. However, Trump lost the popular vote and won a key swing state by a razor thin margin so along with the accusations of tampering and collusion it seems more and more likely. Bury your head in the sand if you'd like, but don't expect anyone else to share your naive worldview when the evidence of rampant corruption and dirty dealing in US politics is so staggering.
Thanks for your work in trying to ensure fair elections, but many people no longer trust the system especially with the voting machines that have been repeatedly demonstrated to be insecure.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday July 19 2018, @12:48AM
The e-ballots that will be loaded onto the individual machines are created from the controller. The risk is that when the controller distributes the e-ballots to the machines (via cartridge or compact flash card) that it will contain malware that permits an attacker to predetermine election results.
This is not a hypothetical risk. It has been demonstrated for at least one type of e-voting machine.
I'll go ahead and attach my own [citation needed] to that. I know I've seen it demonstrated to a set of county election officials, but I can't find the specific disclosure ATM.
(Score: 5, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday July 18 2018, @03:12PM (7 children)
They are not networked during an election, but in this instance PcAnywhere was configured for a modem connection and they used the remote access functionality durig the vote tallies in Michigan.
Note the RA kit is on the controller, not the individual voting machine. It's in the machine you'd need to compromise if you were going to put malware on the cartridge that gets put into every voting machine to set up the vote.
That's not very clear. I'll try again.
Election machines are in a disconnected hub and spoke topology. The election is configured per-precinct on the controller (where the RA software is). This programs a card or more often a cartridge that gets put into each voting machine. People vote on the machines and the results are carried back to be loaded into the controller. Then the controller's tallies are spot checked against specific voting machines.
If you compromise the controller and put malware on the programming cartridge you can own the whole thing.
That's a problem.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Wednesday July 18 2018, @03:43PM (6 children)
So in other words the numbers presented in Michigan were fraudulent.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Sulla on Wednesday July 18 2018, @05:09PM (1 child)
So where the ones in Louisiana showing Bernie losing heavily to Hillary by the electronic voting but beating her in the paper ballots, he should have lost on paper (boomer democrats still lean conservative) vs millennial (left of boomers).
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @06:33PM
I have no faith the Democrats are really much better than the Republicans and would be unsurprised if they cheated as well. They had to pull some really shady shit to get Bernie ousted in the primaries.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday July 18 2018, @06:32PM
You don't know that. The numbers could well have been fraudulent, and that's as far as the evidence so far presented will let you take things.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday July 19 2018, @12:39AM (1 child)
You can't logically say that. That is a positive assessment of facts not in evidence. You can say that a known security vulnerability existed in the election controller machine at the time of the count. You can also say that this attack verctor would have allowed an intelligent attacker to compromise the vote if it existed prior to the individual voting machines being programmed. You can't say if an attacker exploited that vulnerability to tamper with the voting machines without additional evidence.
You can reasonably assume that additional evidence, positive or negative, is unlikely to still exist.
If you don't hack the voting machine before the votes are collected then manipulation at the data at the controller will be caught. Each voting location prints off a slip that can be double-checked against the rolls for the precinct. If you want to change the vote you have to do it early enough in the process that the paper printoff matches the precinct results from the controller.
Full Disclosure: This is my experience with E-voting in Tennessee. It is a mistake for me to speak with authority about Michigan's system, and I should not do that. My apologies.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Thursday July 19 2018, @08:34AM
If you bother to read the preliminary reports from the aborted vote audit in Michigan from the 2016 election, you would not try to say that, even as a Microsoft shill. You guys hold a major part of the responsibility for what happened around the US through your passing off utter garbarge in place of computer technology and worse, pushing said garbage in place of the only secure method available to-date: paper ballots.
But it doesn't end there. It turns out that Michigan was one of the states that could not even manage their paper ballots in a responsible manner [usatoday.com]. In some precincts, close to a thousand of them just near Detroit, the ballot count mistmatches were quite large.
tldr; lacking supporting evidence of their validity, the numbers reported in Michigan were fraudulent
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 19 2018, @01:05PM
No kidding. The Detroit Free Press [freep.com] explains how things are supposed to go:
Greg Palast [gregpalast.com] tells how it actually went:
(Score: 5, Funny) by DannyB on Wednesday July 18 2018, @02:48PM (1 child)
This is outrageous! Something must be done. Call your congress critter!
1. Hardcoded backdoor passwords must be made more difficult to find.
2. Voting machines must be upgraded to the LATEST version of Windows XP with all security patches applied!
3. Telnet servers must be run on a non-standard port for security.
4. Outdated modems on voting systems must be upgraded to broadband connections.
5. Obsolete ASCII systems must be upgraded to support Unicode. It's the 21st century. It should be possible to use Emojis as part of the political candidate's name.
6. And for God's sake, use encryption! (No jokes about ROT-13 or ROT-26 please. Because they don't support emojis.)
7. In case voting system vendors haven't heard yet, everything is now moving to the cloud.
Professor: today we're going to be talking about encryption. In the 1970's IBM was helpful in working with the US government to develop one of the first early national standard encryption systems . . . (student interrupting)
Student: Oh!!! I know!! I know!!
Professor: You know what?
Student: You're going to talk about EBCDIC right?
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @06:03PM
Indeed. You need to upgrade to ROT-180 or ROT-360 to get emoji support.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday July 18 2018, @04:15PM (4 children)
No more of this shit. It is not crystal clear that our votes have been manipulated and falsified, and very probably going all the way back to the disastrous 2000 election (remember the head of Diebold saying he was committed to getting R votes?). Paper ballots, with several counts, all being watched like a hawk.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Wednesday July 18 2018, @05:53PM (3 children)
Amen to that. It should be almost impossible for any concept to be worse than electronic voting itself, but electronic voting with fucking proprietary software absolutely is. And yes...I remember Diebold's O'Dell pledging to "deliver Ohio" to Bush...fuck me anyway.
Also...pcAnywhere??? I thought that went away with 900 baud modems(??). Whatever the intention (which can't possibly be good) the Russians must have loved that one.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @06:30PM (1 child)
The Rs realized the majority of citizens were no longer supportive of their regressive politics, so they cheated (seems incredibly likely) and manipulated the states still stuck in the 80s and treating Reagan like the 2nd coming.
I mean really, the more I learn about Reagan the more it just makes no sense. Brainwashing propaganda is so very real!
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday July 18 2018, @06:59PM
The Rs realized that the Ds moved too far into their turf (see Clinton's achievements), so they decided to recapture the formerly D unionized vote by going full anti-system anti-foreigners.
It worked, as it previously (and simultaneously) worked in Europe and elsewhere after a giant crisis, because it's so much easier to blame someone (and pray your god) for your problems, even at the expense of your own safety net.
The Democratic party is still too stupid to answer this, even as their main allies are being decimated. Focusing on Trump being an idiot, or on Illegals being mistreated, is not going to win the next election.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Wednesday July 18 2018, @06:48PM
> It should be almost impossible for any concept to be worse than electronic voting itself, but electronic voting with fucking proprietary software absolutely is.
How about "electronic voting with fucking proprietary software" with a law stating that paper accountability was illegal ?
Even Putin and Kim were wondering why we didn't go for the less obvious direct disqualification/elimination of the opponent.
(Score: 2) by Aegis on Wednesday July 18 2018, @10:46PM
Posted by a guy constantly arguing that it's totally fine for Russia to hack our election infrastructure.