Question from a VERY non-tech person..

[elizm]

If the machines are impounded for evidence is there a chance any evidence will still be left? Would they not have been able to cover it up/make changes by now? Is there anything that can be found now to prove fraud or tampering?

[Occulus]

1. Well, if it was on the hard drive in the machine

(and I assume you're talking voting machines here), the data may still be there, even if they "erased" it. Even if they formatted the disk, data *can* still be recovered; it's just more work.

The noly "safe" way of making sure there's nothing left on a hard disk, that I've heard of, is by filling each and every single sector of the drive with new data. A former tech support guy I worked with a while back told me that if you want to be "sure", you write a batch file that fills up the drive with "Boo!" or something, and run it until it tells you the drive is full.

There are, I believe, utilities yu can buy that do the same thing. I doubt the people messing with the machines had time for that, however.

[elizm]

2. Thanks!

That gives me some comfort...:)

[DoYouEverWonder]

3. If you can get inside the machines and the programs

I am sure you will find lot's of evidence. The hackers will have left their traces everywhere because most of them are arrogant enough to think they will never get caught.

[lcordero]

4. Yes there is a very good chance

I think that the DoD standard is low level formatting a hard drive 7 times in order for info to be considered completely unrecoverable. Is this an election fraud question?

[elizm]

5. So could they have had time...

to make it completely uncoverable? Sorry if these are silly questions but I just wanted to know before I got my hopes up completely about what might happen when or if the machines are impounded for evidence after the filing tomorrow. Guarding against false hopes, you know.

UnREcoverable

[lcordero]

6. they could have, but they are so arrogant that they

probably didn't.

[many a good man]

7. Probably have to de-compile the program

and inspect the code line by line. That would open a kettle of fish because its proprietary and already state-certified.

If the malicious code was overwritten, it may be possible to restore some of it from the hard disk. OTOH, if the code was updated in RAM and never written to disk, it would irrecoverably vanish without a trace when the computer is powered down.

You're best chance is to look at the results from the card reader itself--before it gets interpreted by the tabulation software. If you had the original file you could compare it to the original results. You could also re-run the cards through the reader and compare it to the tabulators results.

[megalith]

8. De-compile the code?

Hello again Torches

You are on the money again.

In the case of DRES all bets are off. The actual vote data files are probally useless, audit log might show saomething, might. Line by line examination would take 10,00 programmers forever as any windows system program can be hacked without touching the target programs core executable, and can be made to erase itself afterwards.

Any paper based system can be reconstructed however. (see the Xmas present from Green Co-ord thread)

And you do not need to ID the hack to find the hack. In other words, a testing protocol that properly exercizes the equipment will reveal the hack, becasue in the case of paper ballots the hack cannot be removed. It must always be resisdent and active so that it reproduces the same erronious results anytime a given precinct is scanned.

we are workinbg on such a protocol

Best
Orren
SE Ohio Green Co-ord

[many a good man]

9. Paperless voting is INSANE

It sounds like you guys know what you're doing. I only hope you are given the authorization necessary to properly challenge everything you have to.

PM me if you think I can be of any assistance to your efforts. Not knowing is almost as bad as knowing...

[megalith]

10. Assistance?

Torches
* are you near Ohio?
* I have too few posts to use any of the contact features on this forum

Orren

[many a good man]

12. MD supports OH

Sorry, I live in the burbs outside Washington. Born and raised in Cuyahoga county, though! I don't know how many posts you need before you get an inbox. If you have a website maybe I can email that and the admin can pass the info to you...

[megalith]

13. Contact!

Torches
I live 60 minutes NW of MD burbs
send email to

[e-mail]

best

Orren

[Clark2008]

14. Isn't that what the Green operative was doing the other night

When he asked for help in recovering data in DOS?

On edit: I found the thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=203&topic_id=191078

[megalith]

16. Green Operative

Tapping the ashes from his green cigar, and adjusting his green Fedora hat, pulled down to obscure his green eyes, the shawdowy political operative hissed, "Hey Buddy, that was me!"

Orren
SE Ohio Green Co-ord

[Clark2008]

17. Then I was right!

:)

And, I realized after I'd re-read my post that "Green operative" made it sound like "secret squirrel stuff." LOL!

Did you get what you needed?

[MarkusQ]

11. They need to leave it there so the recounts will match.

Assuming there is someone tampering, and they are rational, and they don't want to get caught, their best bet would be to leave everything as is, fight impounding of the machines and/or full hand recounts with all their might.

That way, they can allow as many machine recounts as the world wants, and always get about the same results.

--MarkusQ

[mulethree]

15. Mostly yes

A lot here about hard drives and voting machines.

The electronic voting machines typically don't have hard drives. They use ROM, FLASH and battery backed RAM for storage both their firmware and for storing votes. (chips, not disks)

In some machines there is no capability for removing programming. When 'firmware' is distributed on ROM, PROM or similar read-only chips, the machine can only read the program, it can't change or erase it. (11% of votes in Ohio)

Newer systems use FLASH or similar non-volatile read/write memory. These can be written by the machine much like a hard drive, so code could be erased or changed pretty easily. But it is stored electronically, not physically like a hard drive, so you do not have magnetic traces of earlier data like you would with a hard drive.
(5% of votes in ohio)

These systems are all called DRE Direct Record Electronic, because they record the voted directly to memory devices. Even when the programming is stored on non-writable memory, the votes are stored on writable memory. Typically the writable memory is removed from the machine in a cartridge and taken to a machine which reads it in.

The machine which reads the vote-cartridges does usually have a hard drive and run 'normal' software like DOS or Windows. It also has access to the writable vote cartridge and could conceivably change the votes stored in there. Most voting machines store at least 2 copies of the data so that a bad cartridge does not result in lost votes. You would put a 'good' cartridge into the voting machines and it would copy it's backup memory of the votes onto the cartridge. An audit should compare the backup of votes on the voting machines to the data from the removable cartridges to check that they match.

From this point on, the processing is similar for paper-ballots like optical scan and punch cards. A more 'normal' computer is used to collect vote data from the 'reader', total up votes and so forth. These 'tabulator' programs are where BBV, Rubin and others found most of the blatant hackability and security holes. But the tabulation is pretty easy to double check. If you confirm machine-level vote counts, or precinct-level optical or punchcard counts, you can add them up by hand if need be, or with a computer program thats known to be clean.