Slashdot Mirror
Touch Screen Voting Industry Circling Wagons
bhoman writes "Salon has an interesting article/interview with the author of a forthcoming book, Black Box Voting, by Bev Harris, that looks at electronic voting machines, especially Diebold touchscreens. The story includes incriminating internal memos, cease and desist orders from Diebold, transcripts of an industry teleconference where Harris Miller of the ITAA brags of his lobbying experience, and documentation of a backdoor via an Access MDB with no password. This is for software currently being used in 37 states. "
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/09/23/bev_h arris/index.html
How much longer until a major newpaper picks it up?
Touch Screens are GOOD! The technology is getting an incredibly bad smear thanks to the idiots at Diebold who are using it in ways which are, well, dishonest. I wish somehow the technology could be separated from the fools who use it to further their schemes. Let's hear it for all the good that touchscreens do !
The Fix is in. "How George W. Bush Won the 2004 Election":
t ml
http://www.infernalpress.com/Columns/election.h
I wouldn't use an Access Database as a way of securing my list of CDs, let alone my democracy.
Then again, does Dubya have any more brothers who are governors?
This might be just me, but the apparent insecurity of these voting machines almost ensures courtroom nonsense and bickering. I could be wrong, and I hope so.
----
"Ours was a free culture. It is becoming much less so."-Lawrence Lessig
You can check fingerprints on paper too you know. And with paper, you have the ability to say "This ballot was held by X and he voted for Y", whereas with a screen with some 5000 people touching it in 1 day, good luck finding any useable prints.
It to open the source for these "voting machines" so they can continually undergo a public review.
Hell the hardware needs to be open for review also. It's not like there is any secret designs in there (Unless you are trying to hide something illegal)
All it takes is a tiny bit of off the shelf hardware components, a refrence design and the software to make it work easily... anyone could make an electronic voting system.
until it's all open for review by today's IS and IT experts I will not trust it or the companies making them. This isn't some silly toaster or PVR... this is the basis of the United States... voting..
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Well, it is called Access after all.
Doesn't it make you glad to be in a country were your democratic views are stored in an unprotected Access Database!
An open invitation to election fraud
The U.S. government seems to me to be becoming more and more corrupt. As David Letterman recently said, "When you make out your check for the Iraq war, there are two Ls in Halliburton."
Money seems to be everything, the health of the country nothing. McCain is right, we need campaign finance reform.
Every software in government, which is paid for from citizens taxes, should be open source. So that every citizen (at least the one which is a programmer) could check whether the code is good and fair, especially in elections.
Of course the code actually used in voting machines should be double checked by government professionals, but everyone should have an access to read the code.
I love high tech as much as anyone on Slashdot, but paper ballots make a whole lot more sense: with even a modicum of security you have the originals for recount (recounts being actually pretty straightfoward Florida FUD not withstanding).
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
You can have fraud using any medium, but when you throw computers into the mix it's a heck of a lot easier to have fraud on a grand scale.
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
What is the fascination with Access? Why does every company seem to use Access for important data when there are so many other databases that are not only higher quality, but less expensive at the same time?
There is nothing funnier than companies that try to use Access as the database for 150,000-pageview-a-day websites. Middle management at its most entertaining.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Let's all forward this to Jeb Bush so he can get Florida in order before any more shananigans in 2004!
--------
Free your mind.
...are nothing but electronic fraud machines. They are designed to facilitate cheating. There is no substitute for the old fashioned paper card ballot, which *can* be made to reliable be read by high-speed scanning machines. The paper card ballot just needs to be made with larger punch-out holes and positive punch-out tools to fix the problem with those teeny-tiny "chad" holes.
More info is avaliable atw s/20 01574367_votefraud21m.html
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localne
Ok, I admit it, I really thought of fingerprints when I say touchscreen voting. Would anyone care to tell me what kind of screens are used for these touchscreens ? Would anyone with a little will be able to capture your fingerprint on the screen ? I mean, someone comes in, votes, wipes the screen real clean, you come in and vote, next guy comes in and uses that powder the police uses on the screen ? I see no real use for this informations, but still, privacy is privacy ...
In Canada, we don't fancy things like socks
and these touchscreens can have marquee screensavers saying, "This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane."
If the machines would actually print out a receipt of sorts, leaving a paper trail for the voter and the election officials, then we would get the best of both worlds. An easy, understandable, and technologically advanced voting system that is open to accurate recounts. But the first count still wouldn't be guaranteed correct.
All the lovely US voting system where you come in with a voting book. Nice to have direct voting for more then your representative but the size you have to parse. No wonder people are not voting.
To the Canadian Federal System which is very complex. You get a piece of advanced storage medium which has the properties to be destroyed and put carbon into the environment. So what you do is you sign the form with the universal signature, that is correct you put an X into the circle of the candidate of choice. If there is no X in a single circle the ballet is spoiled.
Now back to our subjecct. I love Private Enterprise in particular when it has a Vested Interest in selling its product. Personally I prefer the Canadian method and the longer it takes to count the ballets in New Found Land so the results will not be known until the poles close in British Columbia.
Make Voting slower where the method of anonymous vote is assured. That is I can not be tied back to my vote cast.
Does anyone have an open source voting system project going?
-- $G
And don't forget the REAL problem that plagues touch screen voting...
Fat fingers.
What if the fewest number of candidates you can vote for is three at a time?
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
If the touch screen prints out a ticket that confirms your vote and you put half of the ticket into a locked box all the votes are completely auditable. The ticket could even have a long random number on it that you could use to confirm your vote was counted correctly. If there is a re-count they put all the neatly printed, voter confirmed ticket stubs through an optical reader. No pre-preinted ballots are needed, just a roll of ballot stock. Something is fishy here, must business want to supply a materials to a customer on an ongoing basis. Here they are fighting the customer telling them you don't want to mess with paper.
Free cell phone tracking
Diebold makes hardware and (I'm assuming) software for ATMs. They seem relatively secure and foolproof to me. After reading the article, it seems Diebold has not applied any of their experience in the ATM business to the design and implementation of the voting machines.
...the right of the people to keep and arm bears shall not be infringed.
How about a program that not only places the votes in a secure database, but also creates a PDF (an open format) and stores it on the local disks (RAID). Include all details of the vote, such as voter ID, etc. All the same stuff we keep on paper today.
After voting is complete, another program could open the PDFs and parse them out (is this possible?) and compare the results with the database. I don't know what to do in case of a discrepancy, haven't thought that through.
Oh, and whatever happens, no Windows allowed.
The screen itself could probably somehow capture an image of your fingerprint, without the intervention of a second person with a dusting kit... but they don't really need it because they already have a "fingerprint" of you on the smart card you pick up when you walk in and show your photo id. no votes are anonymous with these machines.
Paper receipts make it easy for a corrupt party to pay for votes.
I dare to doubt the average US citizen would notice the difference if CowboyNeal would get elected president... (Finally. I thought that poll option would never come in handy!)
:D
Oh well, back to the drawing board I guess
Karma? What's that again?
but its manufacturer is run by a die-hard GOP donor who vowed to deliver his state for Bush next year
Gee, so from the Republicans' standpoint, what's the problem?
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
What really got me was the bit where one of their "engineers" was explaining how the "system test" is merely the normal POST. I'm currently in the process of writing a very simple inventory / cash flow management system for my employer, and I started building strict integrity checks and reports into it as one of my first steps. Meanwhile, the people making our voting machines can't be bothered?
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
... for anything important such as voting. I'm a programmer, I do that for a living I've *never* seen a software project that didn't include quick hacks, known vulnerabilities by the dev team, ,a lazy programmer and a PHB.
The fact the matter is, EVERY software project has stuff like that.
I wouldn't trust a software (much less a closed source software) written by anyone (including NASA, govs, whatever) to do anything like this. And personally, I can't believe anyone who has worked in the industry would.
And that is, regardless of the project management techniques, reviews, whatever.
IP Therefore I am.
Geez, if this is the state of industry I suddenly feel like we should all be voting via punch card.
Those who can do. Those who can't sue.
these people think so.
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
...but can he do the job?
-'joe versus the volcano'
I live in Seminole County Florida and we used optically scanned paper ballots, like those answer sheets in school that required a number 2 pencil (of course for voting pens are used). They are easy to use with the names on the ballot right next to the box you fill in. The results are read instantly when inserted in the box that holds the ballots, when a recount was ordered they just ran all of the ballots through again and had the results ready in a few hours. We have had this system for years (at least 10) and have had no problems, it is an easy answer to all of the issues that we are seeing with low-tech and high-tech voting machines. It provides a physical record and does not produce hanging chads.
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
If you don't already have the cookie, it doesn't work.
throwing technology and computerization at the problem will necessarily make the system more secure. Not that these aren't good things, but my experience has been that, from a security standpoint, adding complexity can often increase opportunities to compromise a system.
I'm not saying that a state-of-the-art computerized, hi-tech voting booth can't be rock-solid secure. However, I do see the potential for companies to sell hi-tech voting machine soley on the *impression* that the added technology automatically makes them more secure.
I think the focus should be solely on the standard of security. Whatever system can meet that; be it punch card, touch screen, whatever, is the system we use. Sadly, I suspect such a standard will put internet voting a long way off.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
I'm glad for this article and for people raising red flags on electronic voting.
.
The truly sad part is that, from what I can tell, even if there's nothing suspicious in the realm of vote-fixing, we're still dealing with terrible software design and security.
And, sadly, that terrible design and security is all too common.
I'm hoping articles like this turns peoples eyes towards the fact that we've got lots of terribly made computer systems, applications, databases, websites, and so on doing very vital roles. In my IT career I've seen hospitals brought to a crawl by lousy patient software, websites with databases so bad that they had to be shut down for maintenance reguarly, simple applications delayed for months by bad planning and inappropriate technology, and far more.
So, sadly, in the area of voting, it's business as usual. But business as usual is pretty bad for the usual business as is . .
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
The EFF is organizing a petition to encourage IEEE to set trustworthy standards for electronic voting. Read about it and join the petition here:
http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/IEEE/
"EFF supports the IEEE in taking on the issue of setting standards for electronic voting machines. We also support the idea of modernizing our election processes using digital technology, as long as we maintain, or better yet, increase the trustworthiness of the election processes along the way. But this standard does not do this, and it must be reworked."
This makes me less than comfortable, honestly. Being from florida, I almost miss the hanging chads. 8)
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
The way the software for the space shuttle is written, for example, with every single line of code documented, justified, and proven to do what they think it will do. Maximum security, blah blah blah is need to. Perhaps the programming language should be specially selected so that mathematical proofs can be done with the code to show it's doing what it's supposed to.
The hardware implementation needs to be virtually foolproof as well, which means simple!. All of this needs to be in the open.
Still, it's hard to beat optical scan sheets: a screen could display instructions in any language desired, the person marks the ballot with a pen (easy to replace if broken - printers and other mechanical output can't be trusted not to run out of ink or paper), it's scanned, the screen verifies the correct votes, and the ballot is retained as backup proof for recounts. The error rate for optical scans is very low, around 1%, better than the rest.
I agree voting should be slower, choosing elected officals should require deliberation. imho the real issue in the US is not that voting is difficult, it is the inablity of major politcal parties to address issues. Politics in this nation has degraded into something akin to a football game where all that matters in winning. The framers of this country had something to say about that:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. - The Declaration of Independence
Yeah, I saw a yard gnome once, it didn't scare me - Space Ghost
Predictably, a bunch of /. responses focus on the fact that the source isn't available for public review as the primary problem, but that's irrelevant, and Bev Harris explained the correct solution quite clearly in the article.
Open source wouldn't be a bad thing, mind you, but why bother auditing the code? What you really want is to audit the *results*, and the easiest, best solution to that is also the simplest: Have the touch screen machines print paper ballots with a nice list of races and selected candidates. Then the voter can verify that they actually voted the way they wanted to, and the paper ballots can be counted and compared with the computerized tallies by anyone who wants to question the system.
As Harris points out, the fact that the manufacturers sem so dead-set on avoiding paper printing seems almost sinister... the solution is so obvious, and so simple that it makes you wonder what their true motivations are. They make a lot of noise about printers being too error-prone and difficult to operate, but that's just silly. Take a look at the thermal printers used by retail systems -- they work day in and day out for years with no more maintenance than replacing rolls of paper. Designing a workable printer for a voting booth wouldn't be trivial, but neither would it be an impossibility. The requirements are very simple: Be able to run for an entire day without jamming or running out of consumables, and print paper ballots that are easy to read and remain clear and legible for at least three years.
There are various minor improvements that can be made to this idea, such as a machine-readable section of the ballot to make automated verification easier, etc., but at bottom paper achieves a level of transparency and reliability that no purely automated system can ever achieve, no matter how many geeks have pored over the code.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
This has to be stopped now.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
This is why optical scanners are good -- the machine does the counting, but the paper you fill out is saved too.
I'm going in 5 minutes to vote in the Boston preliminary City Council election -- the first time they've got these new machines in place. I'll come back and reply to this post with my impressions.
It's very nice in that the counting is performed by machine [which, while not perfectly accurate, is more accurate than counting by hand], but if there's any suspicion of chicanery, one can always go back and examine the physical ballots themselves.
Method and apparatus for voting;
1) Voter walks into voting office, identifies himself and is issued a paper ballot.
2) Voter fills a square/cirkel on the ballot, next to the candidate's name and/or picture.
3) Voter inserts ballot into machine
The, either;
3a) Machine spits out ballot because no choice or multiple choices have been indicated.
4a) Voter is instructed to report this to the staff at the polling station
4aa) If the machine is working properly, staff instructs the voter to go back in the booth and invalidate his/her ballot by marking a couple of candidates so his/her original choice cannot be determined, the faulty ballot is destroyed, and the voter is issued a new ballot, proceed to step 2.
4ab) There's nothing wrong with the ballot. The machine is buggy, so this polling station now switches to manual counts, and shuts down the machine.
OR;
3b) The machine says "your vote is X - is this correct?"
3ba) the Voter choses "yes". The vote is counted and the ballot is stored in a secure box.
3bb) the voter choses "no". Go to step 4a
If the machine bugs out, so what, follow the manual procedure, you need the paper ballots and pens anyway!
If the machine works, great, you have your results within minutes after closing.
If you need a recount - no problem, you have a paper trail. Recounting can be done manually, or by machine.
If people don't fill in the ballots correctly - the machine asked for confirmation, so they can't bitch about it.
Write-in candidates? Sure, just have a checkbox "write-in"; you can sort those out (by machine) easily and do a manual count on the write-ins only (if write-in candidates collectively even pass the threshold). You could even have the machine ask to type the name of the write-in candidate and have it print it on the ballot (for legibility in recounts).
It's really not rocket science...
Now distance voting, online or otherwise, that's the big one..
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Instead of storing the vote electronically, have the voting machine print off your ballot once you've voted, which you would then place into the ballot box. Increased accessibility and usability, no spoiled / ambiguous ballots, and no chance for loyal party members to control the electronic voting.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
Though they only spent three-quarters of a page of copy on this, I found it interesting that U.S. News and World Report did a decent job with this week's coverage of this topic.
Typically, I don't have many kind words for USNWR, often questioning my own subscription tendencies, but I am pleased to see they reference the Johns Hopkins and Rice report regarding the insecurity of the Diebold system.
Now, if only folks would see the same potential flaws in the Hart Intercivic system, then perhaps they would not be shipping 9,000 e-Slate voting machines to California.
Personally, I detest that the last four times I've voted here in Texas I've walked away with a laundry ticket. I demand a paper trail! Or at least an online database where I can review all my past votes cast. (Of course, in a perfect world, the database would be open for peer review - r/o - and the source to the programs that access and tally the votes would be available for peer review.)
How about pen and paper, like the rest of the world uses?
Troll? That's a stretch. Think about it, there's no coicidence between the increasing occurence of news stories on this subject with the downfall of the Democratic party.
This is an observation. Plain and simple.
Not necessarily. The idea would not be for the voter to take the receipt with him, but to put it into a locked "ballot box" where it would provide an independent audit trail. Machines would be randomly audited after each election to ensure that fraud did not take place.
I would say that the system could be made even better this way: separate out the voting and tallying machines, using the paper as a medium of transfer.
It would work like this:
(1) Voter makes choices on the voting machine.
(2) Voting machine prints out paper ballot with text and barcode representation of the votes.
(3) Voter confirms that text matches his wishes; if so he places the vote in the tallying machine which scans the bar code, puts it into a database, prints the database serial number on the ballot and deposits it into a locked box. If the ballot is unreadable,the machine spits the ballot back out and the voter can try a different machine. If for some reason the tallying machine will not accept a voter's ballot, the ballot is placed in a separte locked box for manual tallying.
(4) After the election, database records are randomly audited to compare with paper ballots; paper ballots are likewise randomly audited to ensure that the bar codes correctly. The locked "ballot boxes" should have a mechanical counter which indicates the number of times they are opened; a proper log should be kept every time of every time the ballot box was opened and why.
Such a system would have the auditability of a paper system, with an electronic system's rapid and accurate tallying and ability to handle complex balots.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I stick MY paper receipts though a scanner and they go into a box. Nobody has ever offered to pay me for one (but I don't live in Chicago).
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
She's at center of high-tech voting debate, about Bev Harris, who wrote the book about voting fraud.
I'd like to add two things. One: Not all of the text books are decided on in Texas. "Left" states will go with whatever committees in California decided. Two: Text books are (generally speaking) no longer written by people knowledgable in the subject field. They are written by professional writers. It is the same thing that makes many technical books so bad. So all in all you get the most politically correct ("left" or "right" versions) stuff written by the people who don't know much of anything about what they write.
Not the whole answer, at least.
We need to check, not only that the software has no obvious backdoors, but that
I'm not that paranoid; there are probably any number of other things that could be screwed with and still have the code pass any kind of review with flying colors.
Paper ballots are the only answer.
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
It doesn't cost a thing to be able to use an access MDB for your data. And the odbc/oledb drivers are in the default install of Windows (OK, so you have to pay for the OS). But any OS can read an MDB file with free drivers.
I guess you're referring to the front-end application that gives you form designers and such.
They have the employee handbook for the Company here
the open source community has one major flaw:
the only customer they write for, is themselves. One only has to look at the lack of forward movement on the linux desktop front to see that. it's good enough for a hacker, even a power user - but for your mom? not unless she's a hacker too.
I love open source and linux as much as the next slashdotter - but there isn't alot of open-source support of traditionally government apps.
Is there even an open source e-voting project?
Is there an open source criminal history database project?
Is there an open source air traffic control app? dmv app?
No. because most people in the open source community don't need those apps. and the people who need those apps aren't typically hackers.
furthermore, if a project based on linux were developed for any of the above apps - it'd be done by government money. And i'd be extremely surprised if anything developed with government money became open source.
I think that it -should-, it being written with tax dollars, to improve public service - but I sincerely doubt that it -would-.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Quote from the article: While seeking information last January about a voting-machine company for a book she was writing, she found a Web site "on about the 15th page of Google." The open, unprotected site held some 40,000 files that included user manuals, source code and executable files for voting machines made by Diebold, a corporation based in North Canton, Ohio.
What we need is a stronger regime, one even more unafraid of manipulating silly elections. The point of elections isn't to choose a leader; it is to advertise to people that they have "chosen" their new dictator.
Unwashed masses that THINK they were somehow involved are much easier to abuse. THAT is the purpose of putting on an election performance.
--
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." - Josef Stalin
Your laughing at the US...
while you're sharing an apartment with 15 other dot-heads while you are forging a resume, and filling out several different forms trying to come to America.
Yeah, that's funny!
As an american citizen living abroad, I can tell you there is something fundementally wrong with the way voters are authenticated at least in one state.
:)
I vote once every 4 years, for president, as he/she is the only person representing my views while outside of the u.s.
I registered in 1992 for the first time in my birthstate of Michigan and voted. Did so again in 1996 and 2000. What was the difference between the first and subsequent votes ?
Well for starters, in 96 & 00 I merely walked into the highschool that held the voting booths and showed my ID, they checked their list and had me sign some paper (the address listed is from nearly 25 years ago.) I didn't preregister with the government, I just walked in.
Because my drivers licence was foreign he seemed a bit curious, and I asked him if I could vote for state senator/congressman & all of the ballot initiatives. He didn't seem to thrilled with the idea but admitted once I closed the shutter, nobody would know.
If anybody needs an extra vote in michigan, I'll be willing to sell.. well, I better not..
I could be killed in a car wreck tomorrow and my name would still be on that list I suspect.
Obviously these people are masters at gathering and implementing requirements from the various governmental entities that would use this.
Requirements:
1: Allow government to edit results
2: Make sure logs can be altered
3: Provide false sense of security
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
to CD's, then send them to all media outlets, and your Attorney General. If you can, send them to all elected officials.
You will need broadband for there should be around a half gig of info.
Stand up for our rights, fight corporatism.
photosMy Photostream
It's more secure than I thought.
Don't know if this is going to fly before we have some sort of method for uniquely identifying individual voters.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Note however that even if we put a password on the file, it doesn't really prove much. Someone has to know the password, else how would GEMS open it. So this technically brings us back to square one: the audit log is modifiable by that person at least (read, me). Back to perception though, if you don't bring this up you might skate through Metamor.
There might be some clever crypto techniques to make it even harder to change the log (for me, they guy with the password that is). We're talking big changes here though, and at the moment largely theoretical ones. I'd doubt that any of our competitors are that clever.
I seem to recall that, back in the Dark Ages of the 70s, RACF was able to handle this kind of access control quite nicely. To say a log file can't be protected from the sysadm is either dishonest or incompetent. Either reason should be enough to disqualify a company employing someone like that in that position from anything requiring the public trust.
I have to say that the American system of party funding is just getting way out of control. What strikes me as ludicrous is not the fact that major party donors donate (i.e. bribe) the Republicans and the Democrats. It's not the fact that these donations more often than not result in some form of law being passed that just so happens to be favourable to the donator. What I find totally astonishing is how this is seen as completely normal and totally acceptable.
Why on earth were people getting so upset about hanging chads in 2000 when it really didn't matter who was voted in; both parties were going to provide a corporate whoring service to those that had paid up before the chads were even news.
At every election there is an ever decreasing voter turnout and an ever increasing party donation total, and no-one seems to give a shit! The only thing that changes is which channel Greta VanfuckingSustran is reading the results for.
You may as well bring on the Access powered electronic voting booths. It's not going to make a blind bit of difference.
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
and that would be what?
Okay, so my state is one of the 37 states that now uses electronic voting. The state even has a cute web site up. We are using the much-maligned Diebold system. This e-voting system was adopted over fear of the paper ballot debacle in Florida.
How would you approach state and local representatives about removing, suspending, or replacing this expensive, highly touted system?
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
My voting machine has blaster worm.
I started to say, in the title of the parent comment, Diebold cannot keep its own documents secure.
If it can be reasonably argued that votes are easily discarded or altered, then your 15th ammendmant rights have been unlawfully abridged. Sue to delay an upcomming election until the problem has been solved. The State cannot lawfully disenfranchise you by their negligant handeling of this issue. Although the misconduct is by contractors, the State has ultimate oversight.
The executive and legislative branches have not been fulfilling their duties on this issue. The checks and balances system works in real life. You must seek redress in the courts. Sue.
While I do believe that Paper ballots and optical scanners are the correct solution, it does need to be pointed out that they suffer from many of the same flaws. The same companies make the optical scanner databases as the touchscreen ones, and they use the same databases.
The votes could still be manipulated during the count. You could still have the issue where it reports different numbers by county than for the whole state, hiding from a limited recount. Only a total manual recount would catch cheating.
The reason that paper is better as an immediate medium is that the original is human readable and verifiable. A printed reciept is only good if every voter carefully checks it. If it is large enough to be human usable you might as well print the whole thing.
Finally papaer and permanent markers are cheap and portable. California could run their recall election on paper and have the votes scanned in the next county. One day delay in counting is way less than six months to buy touch screens.
This is not a political statement. This is not legal advice. It's a frick'n Slasdot post. However: I'm Running For
Are you better off today than you were three years ago?
Remember how Linus is "for" ring-0 like code ala TCPA? He said it had its place, and he was not going to play politician. Well, with IBM patches and the TCPA chip they made, that would go well with the election software.
Heck, if you wanted to get REALLY secure (given linux):
1: Have TCPA hardware/software installed
2: Have NSA security extentions on kernel
3: Have rootplug support setup so that ONLY the county seat has access to them.
Once this is setup, you cant enter root. If there was a kernel bug with Rootplug, you couldnt do much either. Lastly, rebooting a new OS will not allow you to see the data unencrypted. And of course, backups could be made to WORMs
Nasty setup if done right.
It is the desparate grab of a disintegrating party of traitors . Facing oblivion, the DemocRats choose to plame the voting process.
How else can such a moron become a president?
Did you really vote for him??
I want my karma, and I want it now!
Don't mod me down before you read the whole thing!
Ask yourself do you life in an "real" democracy?
Is this realy true?
You are always told you live in a demoracy.
The only time you have dircet influence or impact on a democracy is when you can vote.
But what about your vote?
Who counts your vote?
You, the people or some private company?
What technology is used?
Who controlls this company this technology?
Who does a check of the results the company gives to the public (TV stations, newspapers...)?
Almost exactly one year ago we had public elections in Germany.And you know what: ALL VOTES WERE COUNTED IN PUBLIC BY HAND!
My mother was the boss of such a polling station. There were about 400 ballot papers to count. They thought they were finisched with counting and did a check like (how many ballots cast == how many votes counted) and discovered an error. So they counted again. One hour later everything was okay.
Also in the US every vote should be equal. Is this alway true?
You give your right away to technical solutions that differ about +/-5% if the same ballots are counted again! If I were to vote in the US, I would demand a counting by hand. Fuck the TV stations that want an excact result 15 minutes past the closing of the last ballot station! You don't have to use a technology only because some company promotes it's use.
For the sake of your democracy step forward and demand a manual counting of your votes!
That is not possible? Why because there a companies lobbying for their ultimate "Vote-A-Matic"? These products only cost the money of all the taxpayers. A counting of the votes by the public costs nothing! Many people volunteer for counting the votes.
Is there vote fraud in Germany? Of course there is but you can uncover ist better, because there is a manual counting of the votes. The result of every ballot station is published in newspapers and the internet. If you doubt the rsults of a specific ballot station, you can demand a recount!
Demand a manual counting of your votes in the US!
These are my thoughts of your lost demoracy.
NoSuchGuy
(Sorry for all the faults, english is not my mother language.)
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
Another article by Bev Harris: Diebold Voting Machine Fraud in Georgia. The Seattle Times article notes criticism of Harris for posting stories at web sites like Scoop and Conspiracy Planet, but says apparently her information is reliable.
voting technology is really not the issue, voter apathy is. When I lived in Taiwan during the end of KMT martial reign, voter turnout was in the 90 percentile, and the opposition party had volunteers monitoring ballot counting: paper ballots, counted off one by one, and independently verified. Shit, they would even send cars to trail the people who delivered the ballots from the polling stations to where they were tallying the votes, to make sure no ballot box switching was going on. Nowadays, voter turnout in Taiwan in about 70%, and people are complaining that it is too low.
Until Americans as a whole start to care about their political process (last I heard, voter turnout is below 50%), what technology is used for voting is just a technical (no pun intended) detail.
NO CARRIER
the california districts are not nearly as influential as teh texas ISD's.
Also, most publishing houses will not go through the extra expense of publishing different version - so, they give the manuscripts to their biggest customers, and have them review it.
christ, its only been since 1991 that texas has required teh teaching of evolution.
... hi bingo
Punch cards may have been "good enough" to elect Davis, but Gray Davis did manage a 6 point margin of victory over Bill Simon (Davis 48%, Simon 42%). The margin of victory in the recall election, provided Davis is recalled, is likely to be far smaller.
In the latest PPIC poll, Bustamante leads Schwarzenegger 28%-26% (margin of error 3 percentage points). The methodology of punch card voting does not have the precision neccesary to discern a statistically signignificant result in such a race.
But then again, neither does touch screen voting.
Celebrating 1000 posts, 1000 flames
or at least those with privacy and basic democracy rights in their mind.
then add the people who couldn't vote because they got *anything* to do with justice (owning even a little amount of drug, being caught drinking underage, being suspected of terrorism and never being judged for that, and so on..)
this way their victory is already confirmed. i think they are a little bit smart than we can imagine.
Quotes from the above article:
No official at Diebold or the Georgia Secretary of State's office has provided any explanation at all about the OTHER program patch files -- the ones contained in a folder called "rob-georgia" on Diebold's unprotected FTP site.
Inside "rob-georgia" were folders with instructions to "Replace what is in the GEMS folder with these" and "Run this program to the C-Program Files Winnt System32 Directory." GEMS is the Diebold voting program software.
Another quote:
- And assume that all 22,000 program patches did exactly what they said they did: Corrected a conflict between Windows CE and Diebold's firmware to prevent screens from freezing up.
My favorite is to see union thugs driving homeless people down to the polls, and then waiting outside w/ cartons of cigarettes and booze to get votes for the democrats. Nice. Need a vote? You trust these democrats with your tax money? Miami Florida, they have videotape of it from Bush-Gore 2000. Also, the dead people voting in Florida and Chicago for Democrats. Nice. Glad they're honest.
or at least those with privacy and basic democracy rights in their mind.
then add the people who couldn't vote because they got *anything* to do with justice (owning even a little amount of drug, being caught drinking underage, being suspected of terrorism and never being judged for that, and so on..)
et viola - someone has already won the elections, because a lot of people won't even go and vote. whops.
ps: I'm the same guy who posted a comment like this 2 minutes ago, I just added a clarification. sorry to moderators
I mean, Bush himself recently declared that there were no WMD's in Iraq, but it only made news deep within the covers of the various big journals which even bothered carrying the little item.
But this one, voting corruption in the world flagship of 'Democracy', is going to be the real indicator.
I mean, it seems this voting machine problem is in fact well known and understood by millions. People have time to raise a proper stink and prepare. I very much look forward to seeing if America will DO something about it or if they'll just grunt and roll over to a new sleeping position.
Unfortunately, it doesn't really matter very much in a political sense. At this point, it doesn't matter who gets into office. They're all a bunch of dangerous bastards who can be expected to play ball to the New World Order agenda. Those who can actually make a difference have a strange tendency to die tragically in King Air A-100 plane crashes.
I had no idea that Arnie was royalty! He's married to a Kennedy, his mom is married into high-level Austrian politics, and his pappy was in the SS. The boy terminator declared himself the loyal friend of a convicted Nazi war criminal, no less. --Oh yes, and the all-white, all-male, all-billionaire Bohemian Club which has a habit of determining who gets to be the president of the United States, (among other things), has agreed to make Arnie a king of some standing, possibly THE king. Sheesh. Thank goodness California put the brakes on when they did!
My only hope is that if America does manage to wake up enough to fix this voting machine horseshit, that it'll take the next step and realize that the current administration, and all current potential administrations, are corrupt to the core, put ALL of them in jail, and start fresh. I mean, sure, they'll have no functioning government for the next year, and people will panic, and the dollar will vaporize, and the really evil bastards will all hide out until everything blows over, but. .
Who am I kidding?
More likely? This voting machine problem will be looked and:
1. People ignore it, and what difference does it make after that?
2. People 'fix' the problem and then wait patiently to see which monster gets properly elected to continue the destruction of the universe.
Americans don't have the awareness or the spine for a real revolution.
-FL
Harris Miller, by the way, the head of the ITAA. This is a
front organization for Bill Gates in Washington.
Harris Miller is not a tech expert, but an
immigration lawyer. He made his career lobbying
for importing more itinerant laborers to pick
crops. Impressed with his skills, the richest
people in America hired him to lobby for more H1-B
visas. Unfortuneately for American workers, he
suceeded. Norm Matloff has some information on Harris Miller here.
more information here.
Note: a guy that looks a lot like Miller
drives a Big Mercedes with Virginia vanity licence tags saying "ITAA".
He goes 95 MPH when everybody else is going 70-75 and runs people off the road.
Someone may have already posted this, but:
R ep ort_Version2.pdf
http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~voting/CalTech_MIT_
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
Currently a voterID (your name) is only used to verify that you are allowed to vote in a given district.
Putting my name and my vote on the same piece of paper is bad business.
I can see, maybe storing a large random number (NOT serial) and printing it out on a notarized slip of paper, so that people can come forward and confirm their vote (and dropping their identity) if there was a conflict ala 2000, or if they simply chose to in order to give description to their character.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I'm inclined to agree with you on the punch card issue delaying the CA election. However, I think punch card systems should be replaced with better systems if possible.
Pray that Queen Hillary the First doesn't make it into the white house in 2004, because if that happens who knows, we may see judges deciding elections from now on.
Isn't that what happened in the last presidential election? As a Democrat, I'm not bitter about it. The bottom line is that FL was a statistical tie; the margin of victory was smaller than the margin of error for ballot tallying. Nobody really knows what the intent of the electorate was with sufficient precision to state with true confidence who "actually won". Both parties were playing games with recount methods to try the skew the results in their favor. The irony is that subsequent analysis suggests that both parties were wrong about which method would have supported their candidate best.
I take away some different lessons from FL than most.
(1) The electoral college has some usefulness. The president is elected by electors, not popular votes. Therefore there is no question that Bush received the electoral votes of FL and that therefore he is the legitimately president of the US. There is a question whether the electors voted as they ought to have; however they are not really bound to vote in any particular way. If they voted with what was, in their opinion, the plurality of the electorate, then they really can't be criticized.
(2) Electronic voting machines would have helped, provided there was no fraud. The problem is of course it is impossible with current generation machines to prove this. There is no doubt that in the absence of fraud electronic machines would provide a more precise count. However,
(3) Concern about precision of tallying is misplaced. The real problem is that the method of the election, plurality voting, is so bad. Suppose Bush won the plurality of voters; this is by no means certain, but it doesn't really matter. Gore would have won by a clear margin in a head to head race, but Nader spoiled the election for him. I don't want to get into an argument about whether Nader should have taken this into account. No candidate should ever have to take the possibility of election spoiling into account, because we should have an electoral system which handles multi-way races better.
In short, electronic voting machines are a "quick fix" to a broken system; however they're fixing an aspect of the system that really is not so terribly bad. Even if they were perfectly secure, auditable and accurate, which they are definitely not, they wouldn't make much difference at all, especially in the CA recall election.
The real reason that the CA recall election should not go forward is that plurality elections with over a hundred candidats are nearly bound to produce a capricious result. Virtually the only system that is workable in this scenario is approval voting. Under approvial voting voters would check off all the candidates they would consent to have as governor. The candidate most widely approved of wins. Approval voting is simple to understand, requires only a single round, doesn't require the voters to rank candidates in an enormous field where they may not be familiar with most of them.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Can't we use Freedom pf Information Act or sunshine laws to demand the code to the voting machines and then review them wether they like it or not?
This is not a political statement. This is not legal advice. It's a frick'n Slasdot post. However: I'm Running For
1. Take a legitimate issue (e.g., touch-screen voting) :: CLASS EXERCISE ::
2. Take an issue that made a certain constituency angry in the past (e.g., George Bush's legal if questionable victory in the 2000 election)
3. Write an article involving a conspiracy between the two issues that makes the same constituency fearful for a future issue (e.g., George Bush committing massive fraud to win the 2004 election)
Write an article using the following for the above three aspects:
1. Suspension of civil liberties due to the war on terror;
2. RIAA cracking down on file sharing;
3. File sharers will be shipped to Guantanamo Bay as enemy combatants.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Silly silly silly!
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
That brings up an interesting point. The main beef I saw in the article was that the database was not auditable in the event of changes made, and that there's no other trail of information to follow.
The IRS would *never* accept the idea of accepting a tax return from the common citizen in the form of a database file without keeping some form of a copy for themselves.
And that, IMO, makes for an interesting point: The IRS is a government entity that deals with money. Where money is concerned, fully auditable paper trails are an expectation with just about any entity, let alone the IRS (just check out Wal-Mart or some other large business). Laws abound left and right in this regard, too. But, apparently, with our votes, which I think are equally, if not more important, an audit trail has been deemed unnessarily expensive.
The inherent mistrust of man when it comes to money (that the IRS holds), should be held to with voting as well.
.
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
They should video or snap a photo of each person touching the screen as they vote. Therefore, each vote can be verified easily. Anonymization is maintained as long as the picture only takes a pic of the hand...
-Sean
Two public dogmas for you: "Anything for progress" and "My computer has the same problem, and I don't care enough to do anything about it."
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
What a typically American response. Your ignorance is only exceeded by your ego.
No, that's not a basic democratic principle. That's a current principle used to encourage everyone to vote without fear of reprisal, but it's hardly a fundamental aspect of the system.
There are at least two reasons why you want secret balloting, one of them rather subtle. The obvious one is to prevent voter intimidation; the other is to keep people from being able to bring evidence that they voted for a particular candidate outside the confines of the voting booth.
Otherwise, I can park across the street with a sign reading, "$1 Paid For Each Vote for Candidate X" and buy votes from people coming out of the polling place with proof of their vote. Some of the machines being discussed would enable corrupt voters to do exactly that.
You really don't want to have any way to associate individual voters with their votes during or after an election. I'm sure there are tons of potential exploits beyond the few that I've heard of or thought of myself. Dropping the voter-secrecy requirement would be a major step in the ongoing banana-republicization of America.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
not because of this , but that we are voted out by machines. yeah, how machorcratic.
I don't have a verifiable paper trail, but I've never worried about something "hacking" a big box of gears, "bugs" in the gears, the big box of gears going on the fritz, or the gears being made to somehow fit some nefarious purpose. You can't "patch" the gears remotely.
I see no ways that this system is inferior to a touch screen system. THEY SHOULD USE WHATEVER VOTING SYSTEM WORKS THE BEST, NOT THE ONE THAT'S THE MOST "ADVANCED" AND EXPENSIVE.
Thank you.
I wonder if we can argue before the court that the recall should not be delayed, because the electronic voting machines aren't any better than the punch cards.
I don't care when or if the recall takes place. What I want is for the courts to demand a better standard of quality in the election process.
This is not a political statement. This is not legal advice. It's a frick'n Slasdot post. However: I'm Running For
... is for someone to hack a major election. By setting 100% of the vote to some obscure candidate, a very clear message about the validity and security of these voting machines will be made crystal clear. hmm... do they use these in California?
An excellent article
...from the moscow times. Oh the irony.
Also, has an extensive bibliography of other links at the bottom.
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
The problem isn't that Americans don't give a damn about democracy it's that we've come to have a somewhat blind faith in the integrity of the system. The only time it's recently become an issue was the presidential election, and people can write that off as a rare fluke.
Until Bart Simpson wins the presidency by a landslide in some major precint, nobody's going to pay attention to the problems with these voting systems. Then when it's all said and done we'll go back to paper ballots and take our chances with the hanging chads.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
CNN Technology had a related story about Diebold Voting system problems last Monday.
...Nothing interesting here. Just move along...
I think most concerns could be addressed by introducing a write only medium much like pen and paper is. Seems prone to fraud to only have the rewriteable medium of a hard drive to record votes. We need something that can after the fact be verified to have been tampered with, akin to eraser marks on a ballot. Otherwise, it is just far too easy and tempting to rewrite the votes. Especially for close elections.
Perhaps, something akin to Burning a CD as each vote is cast? Something like that. But Whatever medium is chosen it should be cheap. And the mechanism reliable. And it should be verified by the voter after each vote cast that the vote was recorded properly on that medium.
For many people, who gets elected is a matter of life and death, this isn't just another software application.
Here's my idea: After you vote electronically, you put in your home address, e-mail, and phone number, which can then be given to a 3rd party commercial firm that is charged with verifying everyone's votes. Then, they can mail you a receipt with a listing of your votes, and call you to find out if it was ok with you, and also e-mail you. If you dont' repond to all three means of contact, then your vote isn't counted. As a bonus, you get to receive special offers from their affiliates.
- Donny was a good bowler, and a good man.
There is no problem with punch cards per se. Punch cards punched by machines are pretty damn reliable and unalterable without alteration being detected (assuming you have a checksum value indicated too).
The problem with punch card VOTING is that they are being punched by weakling grandmas.
So make a touch screen system that instead of tallying votes, just does the punching for you. You select your candidates via touch screen (or really, any way you want.... buttons and levers, voice recognition, braile, etc.) and out pops a punch card with your choices.
Now just like in places using the optical scanners, you then take the machine-punched card to the other side of the room to a punch card reader, manufactured by a DIFFERENT company that lets you read what votes are recorded on it. If your votes are right, you deposit it in the ballot box to be counted. If not, you (they dufus who made a wrong selection) go to the poll manager, claim spoiled ballot, and get a new card, start over and do it right this time.
If your ballot is challenged, it can be put in a challenge envelope, rather than haveing to whip out some paper ballot where your votes can be easily read by anyone, destroying your confidentiality.
This system eliminates the problem of no paper "record" of the touch screen votes, since the touch screens are NOT tallying votes... they just produce punch cards... not tallying or recording (and no Access databases of the tally to be hacked).
If the touch screen machine is hacked, then it will be detected real quick by someone checking a card punched by the touch screen machine on the reader across the room. Someone would have to hack BOTH of them to make a fraud work.
This takes a lot less smarts and security in the touch screen kiosks, and recounts are possible since an audit trail exists (the paper ballots). Lightning strike/power failure/other FUBAR/ doesn't wipe the memory (and the votes) on that touch screen machine.
BTW, I'm pattenting this process so you will all have to pay me royalties. Profit!!
My favorite is to see union thugs driving homeless people down to the polls, and then waiting outside w/ cartons of cigarettes and booze to get votes for the democrats. Nice.
Well maybe if they did that enough they'd make up for all road blocks around voting booths in black neighboorhoods, or the many thousands of voters who were mistakenly placed on an illegible list for felons.
moron
Sorry, but a recent study showed that OCR ain't all that great either. The machines that read are prone to error.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
MOD PARENT UP!!! for obvious reasons.
By opening the source even just for the back end portions, leaving the interface and customization part of it closed is not a problem. just have an open source back end, so that you can see where the votes go, how the data is structured. It appears that one of the bigger issues is not voter fraud, but identifying each individual vote. that would be easily identified and removed. and different versions can be more easily certified.
Have your touch screen record and count votes electronically.
have a paper log on a cash register roll, in plain English, and in machine readable barcode.
Have that log visible to the voter under glass.
After voting, the voter can verify his ballot.
If it is right, press enter, and *snip* the "receipt" is dropped into a locked ballot box upon which the machine is mounted.
If it is wrong, the voter can press a button to void the ballot, the log entry and barcode are voided, and *snip* the voided "receipt" is dropped into the locked ballot box, and the roll scrolls up for a fresh ballot to be cast.
The machines can instantly tally and report the recorded votes. If you want to audit the vote, the board of elections have a permanent, not easily tampered and not sequential log to scan in with barcode scanners. Still not satisfied with the programming of the barcode scanners? Well, it's there in plain English too, verified by the initial voter. Start counting. No hanging or pregnant chads, no guessing about the intent of the voter who did or didn't punch a hole.
The ultimate in open source, since common people can verify the accuracy of the count.
An electronic log can never have that much certainty.
Without some good media coverage, the only way anyone (in power) will take a serious look at this issue is if the following results come in for Election 2004:
Adolph Hitler 34%
Mickey Mouse 33%
Saddam Hussein 33%
When I lived in Massachusetts, for the last couple of election cycles, the ballots were printed out on a flat white sheet of paper. We used a thing called a BLACK MARKER to complete a line for the candidate we were voting for. This neat piece of paper was fed into a nifty machine.
So, the actual paper ballot was retained if a recount was necessary...and the electronic part was just scanning the marks I made on the ballot. Granted, write-in candidates needed to be verfied manually.
That's all that needs to be done for ANY electronic voting system. None of this touchscreen bullshit, source code fiasco, or questions of verification. The miracles of OCR are something not to be overlooked!!
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
Tell two of your friends about vreceipt, and have them tell two of their friends, etc. We need to have everybody asking their congressmen not only "Why are we implementing easily tampered with voting systems?", but "Why are we implementing them instead of mathematically verifiable alternatives?"
There's a lot to the white paper at that link, but here's the part that makes voting receipts possible: The receipts are given out and are identical to an entry in the published "first stage" election results, so you can verify that your vote was counted. The receipts have been repeatedly encrypted with different election officials' public keys, so nobody who wants to buy/blackmail your vote can tell who you voted for (but you can, by examining the original "2-ply" receipt which you pull apart before leaving the booth). Election officials scramble the order in which results are published after each decryption stage, so nobody can trace your vote from first stage to final cleartext results, but half of the published decryptions are randomly checked so any corruption on the part of the election officials will be caught. You still need to have poll watchers to make sure that a polling site doesn't report more votes than there were voters (since the vreceipt process protects against lost or altered votes, but not illegitimately added votes), but that's much easier than attempting to make sure that even an open source voting machine is doing it's job right.
The problem is, no one looks at the paper ballots, even in a recount -- they just run them through the machines again.
In the Diebold memos is a fascinating bit about Volusia County. Diebold machines apparently gave Al Gore MINUS 16,022 votes. Just a glitch, said the news media.
Not quite -- the internal memos show that the programmers couldn't quite explain it, but what they DO know is that two different memory cards were uploaded, card #0 (correct totals) and one hour later, card #3 (all totals correct except for the presidential race). Card #3 has since been misplaced, darn it, no one can find it. And in the memos (triggered by a pesky Florida auditor, doggone those people) as they struggle to come up with a plausible explanation one of them cautions the others to be careful, "you never know when the boogie man is reading these."
You can find this memo and commentary on it at www.blackboxvoting.com and you can find a link to ALL the memos at the activism site, www.blackboxvoting.org
They seem pretty okay. The ballot is a straightforward fill-in-the-circles thing, and they give you nice wide-tipped felt pens, so it's trivial to fill in the circles properly. Then, you feed it into a big square box that looks like a combination between a safe and a paper shredder. The feed mechanism is surprisingly fast -- like a high-end copy machine. The workers there didn't seem to know much about things like "encryption", but from what I gather, the machine saves its data to a floppy disk, which is taken downtown at the end of the day. It's probably pretty easy to alter the data on that disk -- but then, that's no easier than submitting false data from the precinct would have been earlier....
How is tallying votes this hard to do? The computer was invented as a counting machine first of all, so you would think that voting would be a perfect task for computers.
1. Set up a network of computers at the polling place; doesn't matter what they are, just get a contract with Apple, Dell, etc to build a lot of cheap , 300mhz computers. Hell, you could even snap them off ebay or ask people to donate their machines for voting.
2. Clear the hard drive, then install Linux on every machine (don't have to do it manually, you can use Ghost or another imaging tool).
3. Just for the sake of this post, let's say the voting program is in Java.
4. We set up a series of computers for voting, each hardwired to a central voting location (location, not the entire state or county) computer.
5. People vote, each computer can print out a paper verify on a thermal printer.
6. At the voting location, each voting computer keeps updating the location's central computer.
7. At the end of voting, or in intervals, just have the location's central computer link up to the internet, initiate a Socket connection with the main State computer (encrypt, compress, etc too) and update the State computer on the vote tallies. And when the location's central computer isn't linking to the main State computer, physically PULL THE ETHERNET JACK OUT OF THE WALL!
Seems easy enough... Hell, why bother with a company? If open source people can build a whole OS, it doesn't seem that hard to build a well documented voting system.
And why do you even need to bother with Access? It seems to me that you could just build a Hashtable, the keys can be codes for the individual voting locations, and the values can be custom classes holding as many Vectors and Hashtables as needed to hold the choices.
I'm a long-time IT person, and I voted using one of these machines last election, and it was *very clear* that these machines lack accountability.
Thank you for exposing this, and no, I'm not a nut; I voted Republican, am a conservative, but this is not a conservative or liberal issue; this cuts to the core of the republic and it needs to be fixed right now.
If we can trust lottery machines & their process for the winning tickets, then we should trust the process for handling votes...
Everyone agrees the audit trail needs to be non rewritable. Why not burn it to CD "on-the-fly". Heck, you could set up a cd burner at each precinct and make a play-by-play disk that could be used for a recount if the master count at HQ is doubted.
And why not give me a pki encrypted receipt. It would not be readable by anyone but the central office (with their key) and if I felt there was election fraud, I could confirm my vote was counted.
The count needs to be recorded on write once media, be it paper, CDR, or routed into a wooden ball. It does not need to be cumbersome (think journal printer on a cash register), but it should be available for scrutiny if I (or anyone else needs to see it).
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
I disagree. The incentive for lottery officials to manipulate the results is low compared to the incentive to turn a democracy into a veiled dictatorship.
Besides, lottery machines DO generate paper receipts that the ticket buyer gets to handle. With voting we don't want people taking their votes home with them lest they be coerced into voting a certain way.
Colorado, and presumably other states, actually have constitutional prohibitions on any voting mechanism that allows a person to prove how they voted.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
How about using something similar to state/national lottery machines? You have a card, you mark it, feed it into the machine, and it reads it using OMR. Instead of spitting out the ticket like in the lottery, it could swallow it and retains all paper tickets in case there's a recount, in which case a paper trail exists that you can audit by hand.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
In Florida where I'm from there were rumors about people using stiff pieces of wire, like from a hanger, to punch holes in punch card ballots that were stacked-up 100's in a pile. The idea is that you can spoil large numbers of votes for opposing candidates by creating double-votes.
In fact, there were counties where the rate of spoiled ballots was 30% greater than the average for the state.
Now this technique doesn't take a lot of effort to make work and just about anyone can do it.
By making voting electronic, don't we at least make it more difficult to cheat?
Now if anything is in doubt about the election results, compare the collected paper reciepts to the database. If a precinct is suspected of counterfieting reciepts, then there are at least two additional security measures which could be taken (either or both) at the time of voting:
Does anyone see any holes in this?
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
... and get some open-sourcers together to go ahead and write a system. all this bellyachin' about flawed software doesn't do any good if there's no alternative. let's get some people together to sit down and crank out something better.
"You want a toe? I can get you a toe by three o'clock... with nail polish."
Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2001 8:07 AM
"Hi Nel, Sophie & Guy (you to John), I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded. Will someone please explain this so that I have the information to give the auditor instead of standing here "looking dumb".
"I would appreciate an explanation on why the memory cards start giving check sum messages. We had this happen in several precincts and one of these precincts managed to get her memory card out of election mode and then back in it, continued to read ballots, not realizing that the 300+ ballots she had read earlier were no longer stored in her memory card . Needless to say when we did our hand count this was discovered.
"Any explantations you all can give me will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks bunches,
Lana
"
followup:
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 15:44:50 -0500
"There are two separate issues/problems that are getting combined in this stream.
"- a check sum error occurred which the poll worker reset and continued counting the card "did not" require downloading before be reset. She never reran the previously counted ballots and this resulted in some negative PR post election. So that is Lana's primary question, how did this happen? Ken explanation sounds like a good one and will not require a line for VTS if we can ever get to GEMS.
"- the negative numbers on media display occurred when Lana attempted to reupload a card or duplicate card. Sophia and Tab may be able to shed some light here, keeping in mind that the boogie man may me reading our mail. Do we know how this could occur? "
NOTES
Sophia was the Diebold tech involved with the San Luis Obispo vote tally that appeared on the Internet five hours before poll closing.
Sophia is also the King County tech rep -- note the Ken Clark alter the audit log memo, talking about doing "end runs" around the voting system -- "King County is famous for it"
followup: possibility of "unauthorised source
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 13:31:04 -0800
"John,
"Here is all the information I have about the 'negative' counts.
"Only the presidential totals were incorrect. All the other races the sum of the votes + under votes + blank votes = sum of ballots cast. The problem precinct had two memcory [sic] cards uploaded. The second one is the one I believe caused the problem. They were uploaded on the same port approx. 1 hour apart. As far as I know there should only have been one memory card uploaded. I asked you to check this out when the problem first occured but have not heard back as to whether this is true.
"When the precinct was cleared and re-uploaded (only one memory card as far as I know) everything was fine.
"Given that we transfer data in ascii form not binary and given the way the data was 'invalid' the error could not have occured during transmission. Therefore the error could only occur in one of four ways:
"Corrupt memory card. This is the most likely explaination for the problem but since I know nothing about the 'second' memory card I have no ability to confirm the probability of this.
"Invalid read from good memory card. This is unlikely since the candidates results for the race are not all read at the same time and the corruption was limited to a single race. There is a possiblilty that a section of the memory card was bad but since I do not know anything more about the 'second' memory card I cannot validate this.
"Corruption of memory, whether on the host or Accu-Vote
does it bother anyone else that the corporation building and supplying these voting machines is "committed to helping ohio deliver its electoral votes to the [current] president next year." that's exactly what ChoicePoint said to Bush in the 2000 election in florida. (CP was the corp that handled the purging of legitimate florida voters from the polls.) and -- surprise, surprise -- look what happened.
i think you're thinking of Katherine Harris.
I think the American people need to ask themselves a very simple question here. Are elections a reliable way of choosing politicians, or are they a form of prime-time entertainment?
What is the advantage of voting machines -- electronic or mechanical -- over good old paper ballots? One thing and one thing only: they give you the result the minute the polls have closed, which is a great advantage to journalists and folk who don't like waiting up all night, but has no other benefit at all. If something goes wrong, either all hell breaks loose (Florida 00) or, even worse, nobody notices (as possibly happened in Georgia 02, according to the article).
Why is it assumed that the answer to a failed technology (punch card machines) must be a new, untested technology? What was stopping the California federal judges from ruling "these punch card machines are no good, so we're going to run this election using good ol'fashioned pen and paper." No need to delay, since printing out a few million pages of ballot papers and distributing them could be done in days (newspapers manage a similar feat daily). Sure, it would take a few hours longer to count, but that's better than waiting another 6 months.
Paper ballots are by far the most robust system. People can check to make sure they ticked the right box -- if they got it wrong, they might not be able to vote again but they can at least spoil the paper. The counting can be overseen by officials from each party to ensure that it's done fairly. The ballots can be stored and recounted if needed. They can be guarded while being stored, again by representatives from each party, as a safeguard against tampering (not to mention being securely locked up with tamper-proof seals). With electronic methods, especially those that leave no paper trail, you have to take the machine's word for it, and with no certainty that a clever hacker hasn't managed to fiddle the results.
If you want superfast counting of results, there's even a low-tech way to do this. Give each voter a specially-minted token (like a subway token), and have a separate box for each candidate. Drop your token in the slot for candidate you want to vote for. Have an official listen for the "clunk" when they fall so they can hear if someone tried to drop several (counterfeit) tokens in one box. At the end of polling day, weigh the boxes, divide by the weight of each token, and hey presto, total votes.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
And Diebold has been sending cease-and-desist letters out to people who have covered this. This particular mistake looks like a screw-up rather than fraud, but either way I want no part of it.
Don't drop the soap, Tommy!
They are demanding that the links on BlackBoxVoting.org be disabled. I will get the photocopy of this absurd letter posted on www.blackboxvoting.org
A quote often attributed to Stalin (although there is doubt as to if he said this,) "It's not the people that vote who count, it's the people who count the votes."
A PITA to read the Salon article with their trial subscription B.S. but it was a pretty interesting read. The article seemed to jive with what I know about Access and how security can be cirumvented on it's databases. It's pretty shocking information that they're hooking any part of this to the 'net with what amounts to a 2-way path into the data source. I hope to hell that this does indeed get picked up by the more mainstream press and that it's inclusion here on Slashdot helps.
It's nice that you stopped by to post too, your personal comments on what has been going on are insightful and valuable - thank you! Had I mod points this would be top of my list to mod up.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Well I should have edited that title
But there's at least one case where linking being some sort of violation was held up in court I'm afraid. The DeCSS linking done by 2600 was found in violation and even held up under at least one appeal. Unfortunatly I think they finally ran out of energy to pursue it and left it at that rather than trying to go further fighting it. I hope that you don't run into that same problem and support your posting of their memos...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Technically and intellectually, these people are complete morons. Access databases? Fixing software problems by just having the software print something different? Apparently, they don't even know how to spell the name of the second biggest city in the US.
Not only are these people corrupting our voting process, they are also making billions in the process. Which means that they are smart when it comes to being criminal. And that's something we really need to worry about.
People have been talking about this for quite some time, but the paper-pushers in the elections offices don't really care, because no one who matters (and, no, you and I *do not* matter) gives a shit. Probably also, they are quite fine with the ability to clean up their fuck-ups without leaving a trace (especially here in King County, Washington).
Here's one that supposedly happened quite a bit until systems were modified to defeat it:
You go to the polling place, and get stopped across the street by a couple of guys, who hand you a pre-filled ballot form. You put it in a pocket, walk in, get a blank form, go into the booth and dawdle for a few minutes. Before leaving the booth you pull out the pre-filled form and pocket the blank form. When you leave the booth you drop the pre-filled ballot into the box, walk back across the street and and give the blank ballot to the guys waiting there. They give you your money/don't break your kneecaps/don't kick you out of the union/whatever.
My voting area uses punched card ballots (and they've never been a problem) that have an feature designed to defeat this. Each ballot has a perforated easy-tear section with a serial number printed on it. When you get your ballot, the volunteer writes down the serial number you took. Before you can put your ballot into the box, the volunteer verifies that the ballot you're about to put into the box has the same serial number as the one she gave you. Then you tear off the serial number, which gets destroyed, and put the remainder of the ballot in the box.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Wow, someone actually gets it right!
In addendum to point 1:
Where are all the political bitchers NOW that were crying about how unfair the electoral college is? Where is the push for change? It's nowhere, because it was partisan bullshit, not "true reformers".
Check out MIT's study on error rates concerning voting machines - the optical ballot tops out over the purely electronic "touch screens".
I assume that all of you know that there is a bill in congress right now that would mandate a voter verified paper trail, and would ban undisclosed software and wireless communications devices. And I assume that every damn one of you has called his or her congressional representative to ask them to support it, then backed it up with a fax or email. If you haven't go do it now. It will only take a few minutes, and then you can get back to your nattering. A summary of The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003 (H.R. 2239) can be found at: http://holt.house.gov/issues2.cfm?id=5996. If you're really ambitious, ask both of your senators to sponsor a companion bill in the Senate as well. Find your representatives at http://www.house.gov and http://www.senate.gov.
would ease a lot of the concerns about the collection and dissemination of the data. Of course the integrity of the company has been damaged with this revelation. One thing I don't understand is this, a major concern is the fact that the votes can be traced. why don't they just use the electronic machines as a "first line" counter, have it print out a vote ballot with only the name of the party voted for, and perhaps a unique identifying symbol for each candiate for ease of sorting the re-counted ballots. the person verifies the ballot, puts it in the cardboard box, which keeps a paper-trail and allows for the re-counts. at least until the electronic voting system becomes foolproof, which knowing governments and computers will take around 200 years. the voting machines don't need to be extremely powerful machines, in fact the most expensive portion of it would be the touch screen.
OFFTOPIC! FLAMEBAIT! 100 PERCENT TROLL! Oh wait, this is the Slashdot company line... Right on, DUDE!
adding complexity can often increase opportunities to compromise a system
People won't care if you give it a green and blue Fisher-Price GUI. They'll just lap it up like dogs on a steak or a monkey on a swollen ass.
Pretty sad, given our self-imposed idealism about humans being intelligent.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Why not use some custom write once media. The number of voting machines needed to run a country wide election is surely large enough for some hardware manufacture to make a custom hard drive that can only be written to once. This drive would simply not allow deletions or modifications to the data once it was written.
Sure, with custom tools you could wipe the drive, or maybe modify it's contents, but this would be at least as hard as modifying paper ballots.
Throw in some public/private crypto on the drive data, and you have what is probably the most secure solution and a solution that is very easy to count.
I propose we name it RETRACT: Republican Tally Readjustment and Correction Tool.
Of course the Democrats can employ the sister system: DETRACT.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Frankly, outside of a few Los Angeles and San Francisco schools the big, bad, "left" boggie man has had absolutely no effect on school books. If you go anywhere else in the US you'll see the right and religious fundamentalists having far more impact than any other group.
But according to pinheads such as yourself, that's the way it should be.
Oh, by the way, what part of 200 years of slavery, Native American genocide, an additional 100 years of black apartide, support of dictatorships and neo-colonialism in Central and South American and the backing of brutual dictatorships around the world for the last fifty years shouldn't be considered demonic?
Debunking the "59 Deceits"
Holy jesus flipping christ. What is the #1 most important aspect of ballot box design? Security?
Here is a ballot box with
A: No lock.
B: No hasp for a lock.
C: No one keeping an eye on it.
I might actually have a chance to be president in 2004.
TallGreen CMS hosting
Sorry for the redundant post (and lack of a solution), but any way you cut it, we are in serious fucking trouble.
its the PC people on the left....
PC people claiming africans had invented iron smelting thousands of years ago.
Or that most sciences were known in China thousands of years ago.
Everybody has an agenda, and hardly anyone sticks up for the truth.
So I'm no defender of the fundamentalists, but lets spread that blame around.
"Oh, by the way, what part of 200 years of slavery, Native American genocide, [...] for the last fifty years shouldn't be considered demonic?"
Fine, but include the fact that the US is based on western civilization, and its thoughts and ideals, and that while all this bad stuff happened, it pales in comparison to the genocides that have taken place all over the world.
Its more *honest* to put it in a historical perspective, but you're so hung up on *how bad* the US is, that you refuse to see it in perspective.
It reminds me of Jews claiming hitler was the worst guy of the 20th century because he put millions of jews to death. Ignoring gypsies, and such, they conveniently don't mention that Stalin killed 4-5 times as many people as Hitler.
When we mention slavery, it isn't PC to point out that slaves were sold to the white man in Africa. The would take away the shock effect. It spreads culpability around so that it can't be used to blame. Hell, there are people who claim that 200 Million blacks were killed as part of the slave trade. Ignoring the fact that its impossible to bring 200 Million people on sailing vessels in the 18th & 19th century, its all pseudo-historial crap that gets put in text books because it makes some weak-minded PC folks feel better. Its like upper middle class guilt....pathetic.
Nobody wants perspective anymore; its all about "making sure the kids know how bad was and is".
I hope those kinds of people just die.
If you use paper, then stick with it.
All this talk of electronic systems being backed up by various paper system will work EXACTLY this way...
1) You will pay a fortune for 1, 2, maybe 3 or more versions of "electronic voting" systems. Each bought, paid for, failed, and replaced in turn. See..."Emissions inspection" for a guide to Government expenditure in the new age.
2) By "fail" in (1) we mean a significant failed election, court cases, dubious results ultimately fixed by the judicial system. Read... $$$
2a) To restore "confidence" a new system will be bought and rammed into place. It will be just as broken and fraudulent as the one that came before, BUT the only thing really required of it is that it isn't, yet, a DEMONSTRATED fraud.
3) By way of (2) EVERY election will be contested, and we'll end up counting the paper ANYWAY, EACH and EVERY time.
So, best to just stick with the paper and save yourselves the taxes.
Electronic systems are doable, in theory. However one has to start by securing real, intelligent, dedicated, and independent thinking individuals for the task. Decidedly not a function of today's mindset.
Also, you have to remove the political and profit motives. In the US, today, that's an utterly unimaginable concept.
So we'll stick with the tried and true approch of "Brand Recognition". The largest Corporate names (frauds, each and every one) aligned with the largest University names (also frauds, each and every one) dedicated to production of profits and fame for both. The "common good" be damned.
Sad, sad, sad. So much potential to make a better world, all pissed away.
No, you're wrong. Greg Palast did extensive research into what happened. Don't buy the party line from Fox News, CNN, and others who completely whitewashed what happened in Florida.
Now that Diebold has a lock on voting systems, expect more fraud and even less media acknowledgement of it.
All these discussion about costs and speed usually leave out the primary goals of a democratic voting procedure, which should be:
The ballots are secret so that nobody can be persecuted for his vote.
The final tally reflects accurately the will of people having voted. For accountability purposes the count should be easy to verify so that allegions of election fraud can be resoved without doubt.
All entitled citizen can take part in the election and cast their vote in a safe and a easy manner.
I seriously doubt, that the average citizen is capable to even understand the necessary steps to check whether a computer-voting machine has been tampered with, not even to think about being able to verify the authenticity.
Considering how many ways have been found to tamper with simple and easy to understand paper ballots, adding the possibilities for fraud offered by a computer are mind-boggling.
Without any paper trail, "The computer said so" will be the final arguments about whether election results are correct. Going by how reliable computer systems are runing in banks and the IRS, this isn't really a very high standard of confidence for a democracy.
If a paper trail is generated anyway, why is it necessary to replace technologies understood and trusted by most people - pens or stamps - with computers? The only added feature is that the secrecy of an election can be more easily be subverted.
That fact that those computers are running Windows and a voting software written by half-wits is making things only slightly worse. Even the best and most open system design won't reach the trustworthiness and accountability of a simple pen or stamp.
Paper and pencil votes are so retro, our american friends couldn't abide by it.
It's far more progressive to have some punched cards shipped across the country to offer concerned parties at least the chance to tamper with the votes.
And as we all know, computers are here to make our life easier, so they're a defnitive must on the shopping list of the discerning election-fraudster.
I want the names of all the Diebold technical personnel involved with these machines so I can add them to our hiring blacklist.
Perhaps I've been living in an idyllic career vacuum, where everyone is competent and of good character -- and perhaps that's why I'm completely, jaw-droppingly astonished beyond words after reading Scoop's copy of the internal Diebold memos. With the possible exception of $(MUMBLE_SALTPILE_MUMBLE), I've never witnessed such opaque incompetence. These "engineers" not only don't know what they're doing, they clearly don't want to know what they're doing.
That whole "explanation" as to why a password on the database would be "pointless", since GEMS needs a password to add vote records... <*shaking head*> It's crystal-fscking-clear that they want an anonymous database user/account (the voter) that can only append records (votes) to the database; it must not be allowed to read or modify records. Read-only accounts are given to the vote counters and, if you really need to, a single strongly-passworded read-write account is given to the election commissioner. Once you establish these requirements, you then look for software that will do this for you. If MSAccess won't do it, junk it and move on. If no existing databases will do it, then My God, you're going to have to do some actual engineering! .
These idiots are trying to fudge the requirements because, apparently, they don't want to have to use any software they can't scoop up at Fry's (and, apparently, writing their own software is an anathema). I mean, yeah, their incompetence has placed the integrity of the Republic at risk, yadda yadda yadda, but am I the only person who sees their behavior as a kind of disinterested laziness? I can sort of understand people who are disinterested in the act of voting because the hiring roster has been stacked. But I mean, for God's sake, what kind of self-respecting person -- never mind software engineer -- would demonstrate such a profound lack of interest and respect in designing a fundamental instrument of democratic principles? If it were me, I'd be lying awake at night, worrying that I wasn't dilligent enough, wasn't smart enough to take on work of such profound importance. It would probably eat me alive, because any screw-up could be disasterous, because doing an excellent job would be so absolutely critical . But no, these guys are just phoning it in, tossing aside crucial security concerns with utterly stupid aphorisms such as, "Passwords actually don't matter much..."
Blacklist them. The software screwup you avoid may be your own.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
What was wrong with the mechanical voting machines?
Seriously. Was there some sort of problem with them that I haven't heard about?
Voting machine prints out paper ballot with text and barcode representation of the votes.
So we have to be able to read barcodes to be sure what our ballot is telling the machine?
The ballot has to have only one representation of the vote, which is easily readable by both human and machine.
Thats the only way to be sure that a hand count and machine count of the ballot will have the same results. There are other ways, but this eliminates a possible error.
We use OCR in my town. Sure, it may miss a mark every now and then, or the totals may have been "adjusted", but *you can always go back and hand-count each ballot*!
And, every ballot is hand-marked by an individual. So, some color outside the lines, and some don't fill the circles completely. It's not a signature, but it is a personalized way of doing things.
I'd scream bloody murder if they tried to put touch screen voting in my town. At "X" times the cost of op-scan, what does it get you? Much more complicated software, a vendor lock-in and *no* traceability! (Never mind all the malicious possibilities).
A few weeks ago I used an electronic voting machine for the first time to vote in a bid for new ammendments to the Texas constitution. Most of them were very dubious, like "If no one runs against a candidate for office, he/she is automatically installed without a race" and many other stupid things that just shouldn't be an ammendment to our constitution, a document that shouldn't be taken lightly enough to add "Churches may not pay taxes on undeveloped land owned by them" to it. I voted yes to many, but no for at least half. Stepping away I remembered all the controversy surrounding these devices and I was this close to just asking if I could use a paper ballot instead (but I'm not even sure if they would have allowed that.) My paranoia was confirmed a few days later when I learned that EVERY ONE of the ammendments passed. I didn't get to see the brand name on the voting machine, but I am now in full-on fear mode after seeing these electronic election candidates win by a landslide more often than not.
God is real unless declared integer.
(3) Voter confirms that text matches his wishes; if so he places the vote in the tallying machine which scans the bar code, puts it into a database, prints the database serial number on the ballot and deposits it into a locked box. If the ballot is unreadable,the machine spits the ballot back out and the voter can try a different machine. If for some reason the tallying machine will not accept a voter's ballot, the ballot is placed in a separte locked box for manual tallying.
This is great. Now, instead of a vending machine with a dollar bill, I can stand in front of the vote tallying machine for an hour trying to get the damned thing to take my ballot.
FrontDoor 2.02; Noncommercial version Press Escape twice for...
Whats wrong with this system:
You vote on a punch card, you stick it the slot of a machine which will tell you only that the card has been correctly read and tallied, the machine records whatever information the state/feds require inside on a paper tape. At the end of the election, several people (say a couple of random votors, officials and reporters etc..) will witness/open the machine and read off the totals for each candidate down the phone to some central place and at the same time the media will see the results and so will anyone else who wants to know. That way the numbers will be counted and added by many people - not just random people at home but all the various media and officials. If any creative adding is done then it will be seen. The machine should be as simple as possible, forget windows, forget linux, it can take results in memory, paper, even abacus i dont care as long as its simple. If it has a touch screen, if it has any screen its too complex, more than one way to record results that can be compared is ok, wi-fi and microsoft databases are not.
Oh and if no-one can design a simple system where you punch a hole or make an electronic readable mark that a bloody GCSE student could come up with then the country is screwed.
Any decent system must be simple and have multiple redundancys all the way down the line. These touch screen arcade machines cost 1000's its stupid.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Problem is, the IEEE (I'm a member) has a vested interest in a technological answer to the ballot "problems". Their only tool is a hammer (apologies to AMD), so the ballot is damn well gotta be a nail. The problems with the FLA ballots were directly related to the use of punch cards--a previous technological "fix" to a system that wasn't broken (paper ballots, marked with ink).
You can't have voting receipts... because that would make it too easy to corrupt the voting process.
You mean like corporations buying candidates with contributions dosn't corrupt the voting process? Hey, let the little guy profit from the corporation's largess for once.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
If people want to sell their vote, fine. Our whole system is really based on doing exactly that anyway.
So "Some Guy" offers you a cash settlement that you feel is more than you are likely to achive from a candidate. Heck, you're voting for lower taxes, more Social Security, free drugs, etc. Any way you slice it, Americans vote for whomever is most likely to "steal more money from others than myself in taxes, and maximize money spent on the betterment of me, and mine."
If a cash settlement answers that call, well then, so be it.
But, here's The Problem(tm)...
"Some Guy" shows up and TELLS you to vote X, Y, and Z or you, and yours, will be killed. Prove it, or die.
Now, go vote.
Please take a look at this and this and then write your congress creatures and tell them to support HR 2239.
Considering the EULA of MS Products clearly states that they cannot be held responsible for any defects or data loss with their products and they SHOULD NOT be used in life or mission critical applications ..Couldn't someone file an injuction to stop this before it is too late? Surely once a court of law had a look at all these opportunities for fraud and data loss, it would make 'hanging chads' seem like no big deal.
What I'm wondering is how this type of requirement isn't part and parcel of every RFP for voting machines. Perhaps our government no longer considers voting as important as commerce...a sad day, indeed.
A summary of The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003 (H.R. 2239) can be found at: http://holt.house.gov/issues2.cfm?id=5996
Call your congresserson and ask them to support it, then back it up with a fax or email. Do it now - this is time critical. Find your representatives at http://www.house.gov
If you're really ambitious, ask both of your senators to sponsor a companion bill in the Senate as well. and http://www.senate.gov.
I recently attended a training class for the new WinVote machines from Advanced Votin Solutions we're using to replace our obsolete Shouptronic 1242 machines in Fairfax County, VA.
w invote.ht ml
This next election in November will be the first test of these machines (it's an off-year unexciting election so turnout will be low).
I was a little concerned when the WindowsXP screen showed up after booting this device, and even more concerned that these machines communicate among each other using Wi-Fi (802.11b).
I would prefer any company producing voting machines would release their specification to the public for review so that everyone can be assured of the security of their methods. I think a case might be made to require the opening of standards when it comes to the public interest -- the trustability of the voting process.
Current numbers I've seen in the news seem to indicate that punch-card, optical counting and the new touch screen ballots have comparable error rates of around 2%-3% and that no method is inherantly unfair.
The only argument for upgrading the machines then is to provide better accessability for handicapped voters. In my county's case, we don't have to bring a special paper ballot to meet our legal obligation to allow voting for mobility-impaired voters (curbside voting). Now we can bring the entire machine to them. New options for the visually impaired include audio ballots and that's a big improvement.
This talk by some in the media and in the current ACLU case in California about the high error rates in punch card systems is pretty much unfounded. The Flordia 2000 debacle was blown out of proportion by a desperate Democrat party. Pretty much every newspaper/organization that has conducted independent review of the ballots has concurred with the final result. My opinion is that punch cards are not any more inaccurate than other voting methods.
Fairfax County Voting Machine Vendor:
http://clients.enfocom.com/avs/products_
-Crolis
A little off topic, as it has nothing to do with the sleezyness of the story, but just an idea of a voting system that might actually work, in a nut shell make everyone audit all votes:
Here goes
1. All votes are assigned a unique number.
2. This number is given to the voter after he makes the vote, and is sent to the database.
3. The entire database of vote_number -> vote is stored in a single file, that is distributed to everyone. Yes thats right everyone gets a file contaning the votes of everyone else. Not with names, just anonymous numbers.
This way:
A: everyone can make sure there vote was tallied the way it was supposed to be, by looking up the number they recieved on the master file.
B: everyone could be sure that the tally was accurate, bacause everyone would have the same file. The redundancy of the file would prevent anyone from manipulating the vote anywhere.
So what do you guys think, am I over looking something fundimental, or is it that simple. It doesn't even require open source software to be implemented. Just an open data set.
How is it that in America, the land of Democracy(TM) people can be excluded from voting? If Im a convicted felon, and i do my time (or not for that matter), why is it "ok" to not let me vote?
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Actually, it depends on which state you are in. In the state I live in, after a person has served their time, they regain the right to vote. I did a web search and found one source stating that this is the case in 32 states. Only 9 states have absolute lifetime bans on voting for convicted felons.
I suppose one option for convicted felons is they could move to a state that allows them to vote after they have served their time. However, you still have the problem in Florida where allegedly many were convited by The Department of Pre-Crime.
http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.
This signature used to contain a cute kitty virus with ansii art. Please set the slashdot editors on fire. Thank you
When you can't attack the facts, you attack the person. Nice strategy, but sometimes it's the messege and not the messenger that should matter, and for these issues, you might do well to at least keep an open mind. Politics is power, and there are people out there that, dispite what you think, want nothing more to keep that power.
What was the message, then? Well, the message here is that political elements in Florida did their best to steal votes to sway the outcome of the 2000 election. Note the non-partisan language there! If roles were reversed, I'd still feel the same way: it bothers me, as it should anyone who cares about a democracy. (even an approximation of one, like America's) As soon as we let this happen, we start the slow slide of power away from the people.
If you believe me in error about this issue, please point me to the corrections, and I'll gladly re-evaluate my stance.
Yeah... I voted for about 20 years in Orange County, FL. What those paper markup ballots lack is privacy. Though one uses the privacy-screened three-card-monty tables to actually mark the paper ballot, positioning them to be slurped up by the counting machine is problematic. Though a rediculously long and narrow manila file folder is provided to screen your ballot as you position it to be sucked into the reader, it rarely works, and one is forced to remove said ballot from the folder, thus exposing it and its markings to the precinct worker minding the counting machine.
I got sneers from the yokel in my East Orange County precinct, as I was one of a handful who did not vote for the shrub last time.
Surprisingly, the Supervisors DID NOT verify the list. They simply took what they were given and implemented it. So yes, the felon convicted in 2005 did lose his vote.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
Let's rig the election so that The Star Wars Kid is elected president!
-Mike
As of 3:15 PM (Pacific time), www.blackboxvoting.org, Bev Harris' site for activists, appears to have been shut down by its hosting company. Since this closely follows demands by Diebold that very embarassing internal memos of theirs be removed from the site (as Diebold copyrighted material), looks like we may have another case of IP law/DMCA being used to silence those who tell the truth.
Gator Graphics? Hmm...
Ask your doctor if getting up off your ass is right for you! -- Bill Maher
It's been said before, everyone is biased. When it comes down it it, what really matters is are the allegations factual.
Maybe there were voters that were purged incorrectly- we will never know. But if it had been such a widespread problem, don't you think the USCCR could have found at least one person to testify that they were kept from voting because of the list?
It's funny, but in a beaurocracy as big as it took to compile the Felon's list you would think that there would have been at least one honest mistake even in the best of circumstances. For example, I get calls from dept collecters about twice a year for dept that is owed by someone with a similar name as me.
I base my arguments on the findings from the United States Commission on Civil Rights
Is this the report you are refering to? I didn't read the whole thing but here is a quote that seems to corroborate Greg Palast's allegations:
But it still does leave many questions. The report is very much a summary, and leaves out just about any detail.
:)
Greg Palast claims to have 2 CDROMS with the complete felons' list. I suppose it would be a violation of privacy and stuff but it would be nice if they were published so we could look at them ourselves.
This Article on Greg Palast's website claims to detail how Choicepoint came up with the list. It would be nice to find an independent source to confirm the details that isn't just quoting from Palast or an associate.
The article said that the NAACP sued Katherine Harris' department and one, but didn't mention any details. I was able to find this page which seems to be the complaint and details specific incidents of people denied to vote. I'm not big on legalise and couldn't find a court case number. Anyone know how to look this up?
err.... I was trying to lookup something I had read before on Palast's website that I thought implied that he was published in the London Times reporting on the Felons' List. But now I can't even find that. Maybe he was refering to the Guardian instead of the Times. Anyone know what I'm talking about here?
Oh one more thing to ask: Supposedly there were lots of roadblocks out on the streets on Election Day 2000. Did anyone get pictures of these? Anyone know of any websites with pictures or specific details on this?
Documentation and sources are a good thing.
I was able to find this Salon article that says 173,000 names were removed from the voter roles, and that 8,000 of them were people who were convicted for misdemeanors, not felonies.
As to media bias, I think the mainstream media is biased, but not according to "liberal" or "conservitive" slant but towards the status quo. Rather than a bias of disinformation, it is underreporting that is the problem. In other words stories that would reflect badly on advertisers or the parent company go unreported. In this case challenging the legitamacy of the current administration would be upsetting to the status quo and bad for business in general. Too bad the economy is in the crapper.
Are Salon and The Guardian unbiased sources?
For the record, I didn't vote for Al Gore and was extremely frighten
This signature used to contain a cute kitty virus with ansii art. Please set the slashdot editors on fire. Thank you
I second that recommendation. Skimmed it in the bookstore. Among other things, women must not be portrayed cooking or cleaning. The word "warrior" is banned. No wonder they managed to sap the life out of inherently interesting topics like colonial America.
The goal is to have accurate tallying.
...
In my home town we use paper ballots and a blue felt pen to connect arrows indicating our choices.
The ballots are then loaded into electric counting boxes. At close of the polls the boxes are "read" and the results known.
If there is a question of validity, the paper ballots are re-counted.
I would like to see some sort of identifiable mark placed on a ballot. That way if an individual ballot comes under question, the voter can be inquired.
I would also like to see some sort of ID checking at the polls. Not just My name is... I live at
QED.
comment directly in my journal
FYI: A followup response from the precinct pretty much leaves only the "unauthorized" possibility:My understanding is that the card was not corrupt after (or before) upload. They fixed the problem by clearing the precinct and re-uploading the same card. So neither of these explainations washes. That's not to say I have any idea what actually happened, its just not either of those. The problem is its going to be very hard to collect enough data to really know what happened. The card isn't corrupt so we can't post-mortem it (its not mort).
Use this as your SALON_PREMIUM cookie :
L TRAMERCIAL_NOSURR OUND%2CSALN_SHOW_ADS%3DN8 4
SALON_PREMIUM
SALN_REG%3DY%2CSALN_USERNAME%3DU
salon.com/
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I got this in my inbox yesterday:
Today I got this follow-up & correction:
Don't let the bastards get you down. If it takes a libel suit, so be it; shame or no shame, they're bringing it upon themselves.
:)
Keep up the good work
The solution is a voter-verified paper trail which would allow actual recounts, plus mandated recounts at random in a small percentage of districts (like .5% I think). HR 2239 is a bill in the house which proposes to do that. Sign the online petitions to support it and get more information at VerifiedVoting.org.
Keep the freedom to vote.
Ever use a bill changer in a casino?
There's no limit to how good such a system can be if it matters enough to the people buying it.
And, we're talking about a freshly minted piece of paper with markings designed to be machine readable.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Here is what I have been doing all day:
Reporter: Why is Diebold sending cease and desists?
Me: Because they don't want anyone to see their memos
Reporter: Oh. What is in the memos?
Me: Oh, things about security flaws and using uncertified software and using cell phones to intercept and transfer votes and discussions of how to fake things...
Reporter: Wow. Where can I download these?
Me: At this web site
Reporter: Okay I'm going there now, okay, it's downloading, when I'm done will you give me a guided tour?
Me: Sure. And here is a neat little web page where you just enter any search term and it instantly searches and find you the Diebold memos that match
Reporter: What search terms should I start with?
Me: Try "boogie man" and also "hack" "cel phone" "broken" "fake" and one of my personal favorites, "What good are rules"
Reporter: I'll try that "what good are rules" one. Found it. Gosh, what is he doing? Is that legal?
Me: No.
And so it goes. Excellent plan, Diebold. Yes, shut down a web site, that'll help.
Besides reporters, the memos were downloaded today by the U.S. House of Representatives.
Blackboxvoting.org currently has the following notice on its website:
NOTICE
Due to a dispute with Diebold, Incorporated, and its wholly owned subsidiary Diebold Election Systems, Inc. (collectively "Diebold"), which is claiming links to certain materials that do not reside on the blackboxvoting.org website constitute copyright infringement, blackboxvoting.org has been temporarily disabled.
We regret any inconvenience this may cause visitors and journalists to the blackboxvoting.org site and hope to have this matter resolved shortly.
In the interim, send questions or information requests to admin@blackboxvoting.org.
The number one problem with the paper ballots that you are proposing here is that American elections are getting quite complex, even for the voter.
At the last general election I was at there were over 30 different offices that were being voted on, together with 3 tax referendums and 5 changes to the state constitution. The full text of one of these proposals was over 40 pages of legal fine print. The offices ranged from a US congressional seat, school board officers, county coucil, state representative and senator, city council, a half dozen judges, and a conservation district seat. And this was an "off-year" election when the US Presidency wasn't even up for grabs, or the state governor's seat.
While using paper ballots could reflect this mess in an organized mannor, trying to count these votes effectively is not a trivial task, and even good honest election judges who are trying can make many mistakes, even counting votes for the wrong office.
The token idea here wouldn't work because voters would have dozens of tokens that they would need for each office, not to mention the literally hundreds of boxes needed for all of the candidates and questions.
The tendancy is for even more offices to be decided by voters, and the referendum issues are also becoming more common. It is not unusual for the local animal control officer to be an elected office, not to mention the chief law-enforcement officer (here he is called the sheriff). On really hot topic, most politicians would rather that they be dealt with directly by voters, so the politician can simply point to the referendum and say "That is how you, the voters, wanted this issue decided."
My experience is that the voters usually get it right, but you need to be very well informed going into an election if you want to exercise your franchise properly.
It is this complexity that is driving the voting machines and trying to automate the counting process, not the drive to get these results out faster to the press.
This is a SEARCH ENGINE, folks, that finds the Diebold memos. What's next -- Google?
"The purpose of this letter is to advise you of our clients' rights and to seek your agreement to the following: To remove from the web site the Diebold Property, and to remove or disable the information location tools (including any associated indices used for searching) contained therein as identified in the attached chart and to destroy any backup copies of the Diebold Property and/or information location tools, including associated indices, that are contained on your server."
Bev --
You've done a fabulous job getting information out on this, despite Diebold's attempts to shut you down.
A question: In this Slashdot comment, you write that the 2002 Georgia election was "rigged". Do you still believe that? Do you have evidence to back it up? If so, how was it rigged?
I take far more than a sound-byte 2 seconds to make decisions about someone's credibility or lack thereof. I've read and listened to a lot of sources - with many, several massively spun - about the Election of 2000. I also followed the court cases. Greg Palast is but one, albeit an excellent one, source I read to find out what was going on.