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CNN Reports on Diebold
An Anonymous Reader writes "CNN has finally picked up the story about concerns about Diebold voting machines. It's about time this made it into the mainstream media." If you're interested, here are a couple
of related
stories.
explanation as to why there is no paper audit trail? Since that is the clearest, easiest, most obvious sore point, the first element to raise big, flappin' red flags with the most lay of lay-persons, what official explanation has Diebold come up with as to why there is no paper audit trail?
of course he doesn't..
corporate interest controls the media.
That's what they WANT you to think.
In reality, this is just a plot to replace Diebold with a company that is owned by Rumsfeld.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
What are the problems with the current system of a piece of paper and an X? How would this new system overcome them? Most importantly, what extra problems would this new system cause? These are all questions that should be answered before any public money is spent on changing the way people can vote.
Video Game cheats, hints a
A year from the election and it looks like some people are already maneuvering to challenge the results.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
It's about time that our media decided to note what is essential to our way of life. Voting is the foundation of America, fair voting in particular.
And, I know, there have been countless rigged elections.
Nothing compares to how bad electronic voting is. I just hope this provokes them to create an open solution.
Civil Disobedience is a great example of how democracy should work.
A law made by "the people" is made to represent the best interest of "the people" in general. It should be fair and in proportion, and that should be the basis for obedience to that law. Making theft illegal is in everone's best interests, because it should protect your posessions.
When a law is out of proportion, unjust, or in any other case plain wrong, it is no longer in the best interest of the people in general, and thus should be void. "The people" ignore (break) the law, because they in general do not agree with it.
The ability for the public to act this way should prevent government agents from making laws for their own benefit (corruption). The public has a means of protecting their public interest.
If the voting system is corrupted, it's in the publics best interest to expose this. I'm not aware of who leaked the memos in the first place, but linking to material available on the web should not be punished IMHO.
I think it's utterly wrong to place responsibility of the counting of votes in the hands of a commercial enterprise, not if they don't give full and in-depth insight in the process, and allow auditing at every level at any time. Not because I'm an open source zealot or "liberal", but because I trust a commercial enterprise as far as I can throw them, and that's not very far...
David Bear, a spokesman for Diebold Election Systems Inc., one of the larger voting machine makers, said "the fact of the matter is, there's empirical data to show that not only is electronic voting secure and accurate, but voters embrace it and enjoy the experience of voting that way."
This is the point where a bad reporter starts typing up the story, and a good reporter starts asking about smartcards reporting -16,000 votes. At least the AP is looking at the right story now, so hopefully eventually the right person will be looking at it.
Why not just stick with the old punch-card method?
I'm wondering if all of those dangling/hanging chads were caused by equipment that had seen better days. Think about how many years those machines served us well. No one here is a stranger to the fact that equipment wears out and gets old. On the other hand, the voter also has a responsibility to make sure that the card is punched to the best of their ability. If your choice isn't legible and it's by no fault of the machine (noted by the individual at that moment) that vote should be discounted.
With touch screens, you're just complicating it. That just my opinion though...
Machines will never be appropriate for something this simple - and I say that in a cost effective paradigm.
The only way to be sure that a machine isn't fucking up or being abused is to print an audit trail..... which would use paper so any cost effectiveness goes out the window. Not even counting the cost of expensive machines etc.
The other reason to oppose this is to stop voting from moving anywhere outside of the polling booth (which is where the logic of electronic voting leads) -- because that will just lead to massive fraud, hacking, vote buying, and husbands standing over their wives and children during voting time to make sure they vote for "the party" (which shall remain unnamed).
it doesn't stand up;
technologically (security).
economically (it's madness)
or democratically (it has sinister implications, vulnerabilities and adds nothing other than a contempt for the average voters understanding of how ballots work)
So, from a gnu/linux and general tech lover, fuck off technology we don't need you here.
This paragraph annoys me the most though,
They embrace it huh? They enjoyed the experience? What empirical data, the one he pulled out of his ass? That's something he'd probably enjoy. Interesting how CNN headlines the last section with "Critics Mistaken"
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
As far as I can tell - from various news reports - there have been a number of suspicious results. Suspicious in the sense of pointing to software flaws as opposed to corruption.
A number of results have thrown up the same odd set of figures a number of times.
I just wonder if this isn't a place where Benfords Law could be applied ?
ac
This article doesn't have anything to do with the previous Diebold evilness...
This article is more about the general problems with touchscreen voting in general.
I think touchscreen voting is a good thing!
Yes, it will be less secure. Yes, it makes everybody nervous note to have things on pen and paper... However, you can say that about everything that is now done electronically! Heck, it just paid all my monthly bills online this am. My granddad would never trust "these new fangled machines" to send/accept his money.
There will be problems with new machines... it's good we are talking about them now. Hell, I just hope that this is another step toward online voting. Woah... talk about security problems then.
Davak
Apparently, the poster didn't actually read the article... It doesn't mention the Diebold memos about how easy it is to modify results. The article gives the reader the idea that those opposed to electronic voting machine are all technophobes that don't 'get' how great these new machines are.
In my opinion, this article does nothing to help. Not that it matters. My state managed to count its votes correctly back in 2000, and they agreed with the majority of the nation. Touchscreens aren't what Florida needs. They need better-trained officials, and apparently a better graphic designers... And better voters, judging by their electoral votes back in 2000... Just kidding.
Man, I love computers. But they sure are a pain in the butt.
Both the print and online editions of Newsweek have an article about the systems as well.
Online voting is evil and has no place in a democracy/republic. Note, this applies to mailin ballots also.
hint: you do not want others to be able to prove who you voted for...
Computer Scientists are usually:
"Use a computer to do it. Its 3 million times faster, can read your mind and do your ironing!"
And the non geeks respond:
"Nah, its too hard, expensive, dangerous and unreliable."
Whereas in this case it seems we can't disuade them from using it.
I wonder how long it would take to label these electronic voting systems as a joke if one were allowed a circumspect examination. Of course you won't be able to get anywhere near them because the developer company will claim security when the only real security is being completely open about it.
Unsuprisingly, Fox picked this up first:
m l
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,99241,00.ht
Just 'cause CNN take forever doesn't mean the entire press does.
that the geeks are always the first to know about the important news. Thanks /.
If I wanted easy I wouldnt be an engineer or a patriot.
I really hope E-voting becomes a trustworthy standard. With the right people, this could become a reality. It would enable us to move democracy into a new era, where the public could vote on each policy.
Download the power of government to everyone, so that fairness becomes the new standard. Inform the public based on true logic, not stupid logic, like "if you vote for this, you will be good looking."
E Voting could allow us to venture into true democracy, where the people actually run things, instead of the few who profit from the losses of everyone.
I mean... if you BANK online, what's so bad about voting online? Seriously. My theory is that if it's not safe enough to vote online, then it is not safe enough to vote anyway. If the corruption is there to the point where you can't post a ballot online, then the same must be true with any form of electoral process.
If E Voting became a standard, we could have elected officials at all levels of government, not just the top. The problem with the way things are today, is that when you've got Mr. X who has been in the CIA for thirty years, his power is too great. He can make things happen so that it doesn't matter if the top official wants it or not, the will of these mystery men always railroad democracy for the common population.
But who's going to clean up government?
Who is going to make the world a better place?
It has to be the geeks. We have to be the ones to take the power back and download it to the masses, because most geeks believe in equality, and respect for everyone. And we're smarter than most of the corporations who are running things now.
I propose a Geekocracy. Let's shed this Duhmocracy.
according to this site, 80 percent of american votes are cast by machines built by one of two corporations (Election Systems and Software (ES&S) and Diebold Voting Systems -- both described as 'Republican'). Although this concentation does not directly preclude democracy, it does certainly make it rather vulnerable.
We know that purely electronic forms of voting are no good (even if they e.g. added a recipt printer to a diebold machine, how would that help?)
We also know that other forms (punch cards, lever operated and others) can cause mis-interpretation or confusion.
And we know that the old ways (i.e. paper balots, like in australia) are too expensive (mainly to transport, store, audit, track and count all those votes, remembering that the US has a lot more people than australia and a lot more poling booths plus the system is different)
The ideal solution is to use those paper cards like they have for multiple choice tests and things.
They have the advantage of a purely paper system in that you can see exactly who you voted for and know that who you voted for is who gets recorded but they are much easier to manage/count than a piece of paper with some boxes that you mark with an X on it.
probably voter privacy issues. But its not like that problem cant be solved ffs.
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms,
Official explanation? You make it seem as if Americans were robbed of Robotic Al Gore on a shoddy recount or something. The Powers that be would never lie, they believe in God so there you atheistic terrorist. And if that doesn't work, we could always send in the army to take over the oilwells in your backyard. SUV driving, gas guzzling, Al Qaeda following, non-bible reading oxycondone abuser. That was so unAmerican of you... Paper trail... *scoffs
MoFscker
We are a Constitutional Republic NOT a "democracy".
I don't want to live under the tyranny of the whims of "the people" voting on every little thing that they know nothing about.
IMHO, the only real change will come after someone hacks the units and Mickey Mouse or OBL wins the presidency or some other position. Until then, Joe Public is going to keep trusting what he is told. Of course, whoever does this will probably be branded a terrorist and given 465 years in prison.
If you've learned anything from history class, it is pretty clear that what the government tells you probably isn't the best for you, but is the best for them. It's sort of like how the guv'mint gave out gas masks for folks in certain cities in Alabama in case of a leak at the local nerve gas disposal facility. It's a nice thought, and will probably make "Bubba" feel safe (and not bug their local elected official, which really is the entire point), but it really isn't worth a damn.
Bubba probably didn't get much of an "educashun" but still trusts the folks who wear suits and has the ability to vote. Bubba could be any one of a several million folks in the US who take everything at face value.
That said, I have no idea how liebold actually got so far and actually deployed these machines.
The emails and just about everything else about the company just scream incompetence followed by lying to cover their asses. It's like middle managers did all the work. Simply amazing.
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If everyone if so concerned about verifibility of the election results, then give them what they want. This seems so obvious to me...
Use a machine (e.g. a touchscreen based computer) to generate a paper ballot. This paper ballot should both contain a human readable printout of what you (the voter) just voted for, as well as a mag-stripe encoding of the same. Use the same basic technology as used in the airline industry - human readable on the front, machine readable on the back. These printed, mag-stripe coded ballots are then given to the kind people at the balloting place where it is deposited into a locked steel box for counting later. No electronic counting on-premesis. No "internet connections". Just consistent, countable, checkable, permanent and persistent results.
The results are electronically counted thanks to the mag-stripe encoding. If someone or some organization wishes to contest the count results, there is the printed version on the front of each card to give an actual, unmistakable account of that vote.
The ballot generating machines would be there strictly to generate a "valid" ballot. Valid in this sense meaning checking that someone isn't exceeding the number of votes per race allowed (e.g. not voting for more than 1 person for the presidential election). The machine would also generate a "review" screen before the ballot is actually printed to allow the voter to make sure that all their votes were properly tabulated.
The whole point of this mindless exercise is to produce consistent, unmistakable results, right? No more "hanging chads" or partial punch-thru's, right? No more presidential election decisions by the Supreme Court, right?
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
not the story.
CNN didn't mention the leaked internal memos, the cease and desist letters, or the refusal to remove them from the internet.
Slashdot is my Mercer Box.
From the CNN article:
The complaints about lever machines in the early 1900's did not come from mechanical engineers. Instead, they came from groups of people who did not understand these "confounded contraptions". The election officials could, or could allow anyone to, examine the insides and workings of these machines. There was no secrecy about it.
Ironically, the complaints about punch cards have, in part, come true. This is why we are doing this rush to computer voting in the first place, because the punch card system in Florida (and as it turns out, elsewhere, too) showed the faults in the system. But despite the flaws in punch card systems, there was no secrecy; they could be examined and the flaws could be seen and understood.
Both systems above were not only "open systems", but also had various audit trails incorporated. While not perfect, punch cards could be manually counted if machine counts were suspect. The flaw with Diebold and other electronic voting systems isn't that they are electronic, nor is it even that they might be connect to, or through, the internet. Instead, the flaw is that unlike their predecessors, these systems are closed, and have no audit trails.
Unlike past systems, where the concerns were raised by people that didn't know much about the technology they were based on, the issues being raised about electronic voting systems are being raised by people who fully understand this technology, the flaws that are inherint in the technology itself, and the methodologies needed to compensate for such flaws, and ensure reliable and correct operation despite such flawed technology. All the voting systems have flaws, and they always will. What sets the past systems apart from what vendors are trying to push on us today is that those past systems were known to be flawed to a certain degree, and they could be examined to verify that. What vendors of electronic machines are asking us to believe is that their systems are absolutely perfect and that no one ever needs to "look inside" to verify anything, and that no audit trails, and no recounts, will be needed.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I've heard that they have been discontinued since the 1960s. But in my opinion they were the most fullproof, most economical things around. They were easy to use, and tamper proof because you needed keys, and a good know how into how to set the things. So, I say, start producing the old lever machines, make them the nation wide standard.
Yes, but the design of those lever machines is available to election officials, and can be examined carefully prior to every election. Is Diebold willing to offer those assurances to election officians? Say, open sourcing everything and allowing officials to take it apart and reassemble it before the election?
The HAV act (help amerca vote), created a land rush by mandating a minumum number of touchscreen voting machines by 2004. The stalking horse provision in the bill is that blind people cant use most voting systems without assistance, and people in wheel chairs have difficulties as well. Noble motivation yes, but the cure is worse than the problem.
This land rush was led by diebold with a first-to-market system. they acheived this by using off the shelf components and OS and DB. THe system has not proven reliable or safe. I wont regurgitaete the accusationsof fraud, except to mention that any time elections differ by 6 sigma from poll results someting reeks. Unfortunatley other companies ESS and Sequoia tried to keep pace. the ESS systems at least have the benefit of actually failing to boot so often that florida has abandoned them! THe Sequoia system is the best of the lot but still has its own flaw. At least the sequoia people, when pushed, seem to be trying to respond to the demand for voter verified balloting.
The good news is that After pressure by california's santa clara county (19 million dollar
contract), Sequoia voting system has agrees to implement (at no cost) a
voter verified, recountable, paper ballot in addition to the touch
screen systems.
(see here )
Already the House of representatives has a bill pending ( The Voter
Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003) that will require
all touch screen voting systems to be voter verifiable.
(see here )
Indeed the entire country of brazil, which has 400,000 electronic
voting machines has decide to replace them with voter verifiable
systems.
(see here )
A 95 page caltech and MIT study surveying many years of voting reports
that among all voting methods, the method with the single largest
average error rate is electronic voting, which is senate and
gubenatorial elections has almost TWICE the error rate of optical scan voting. This means that by enfranchising blind people we disenfranchise far more people. a bad trade.
(see here page 21 )
Indeed reality is much worse since that's just an average, since
electronic voting errors tend to be both non-random and clustered in
catastrophic events.
For example, Bernalio county in Albuquerque reported 48,000 voters went to the polls
but only 36,000 votes were registered on Sequoia voting systems.
(see here )
Similarly, many votes were lost in the latest election in florida
counties using Sequoia voting systems. Janet reno is investigating
cases where heavily democratic counties registered ZERO votes for any
democrat. Sequoia systems has presented Los Alamos FALSE information
of Seqouia systems. For example, they claimed it did not run on
windows OS. In fact WinEDS their database collection system is based
upon microsoft OS, and uses a Microsoft-based SQL DB, and the password for
this system is "password" (really!).
(see here )
You can in fact obtain this very minute on CD rom a program which will
break into any diebolds MS ACCESS based database and change results then erase all log
entries of the intrusion. It's easy to imagine that SQL can nbe attacted too either by security hoiles or user admin mistakes in the table grants.
Sequoia's Glowing reviews in florida, santa
clara and Lousianna counties are somewhat marred by the fact that the
Luosianna county agent who reviews them highly is now under indictment
for a payoff from seqouia, like wise the santa clara and florida
registrar have both been (publicly) paid off by the
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
mod way up.
using an electronic voting system with an audit trail that is also a tax credit coupon.
;-).
When you go into a voting booth you get a card that has the time that the last person voted (this allows individual authentication of the voting record, more on this later).
You insert the card into the voting machine and, if you want a tax credit, your ssn. The time stamp plus ssn is one way hashed and the hash is printed on your card. The card number is then your tax credit authentication code.
At the time your card is printed (vote cast), another blank card with just a time stamp is generated for the next voter.
The voting machine records to two seperated databases, call them db1 and db2, the following;
db1( My_Candidate++, My_timestamp )
db2( hash( ssn, timestamp ) )
The db's writen to a permanent media, like maybe cdr, dvdr, or paper, or whatever.
db1 is used to tally the vote, it is also made publically available, db2 is sent to the IRS for tax credit validation purposes.
And last, a law is passed that forbids any entity from combining the two db's (this is the weak link, still have to think about this). In fact, no one but the IRS is legally allowed to have a copy of db2. Also, the oneway hash needs to have a crack effort barrier that is computationally huge (like a couple of minutes on an NSA machine
Pros
The tax credit ensures massive turnout
If you are paranoid about giving your ssn out, then you don't have to, but you don't get the tax credit either.
You can look at the publically available voting record to see that no votes were inserted between yours and the previous voter.
Cons
Possible breach of anonymous voting (but this also possible by other means, like bugging or social engineering).
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
That sounds like almost every company I've worked for. People have such little faith in the government doing anything well, as this shows and experience reminds me, you have the same people in corporations you have in government jobs. They just don't have to be as public about their failures.
Lol, supposedly we live in the best and richest country in the world. Yet, we cannot find ways to help those in need, keep the rest of the world from being pissed off at us, reduce dependence on foreign trade/oil and find viable ways to help everyone improve their standard of living. Best country my ass, maybe when widowed grandma's aren't choosing between eating and taking their meds we'll be approaching good.
IMO this is by design: 2000 set a precident that in the USA elections could be rigged, and now they are just following that logic. Its all downhill from here.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
I'm sending a copy of the internal memos to NBC nightly news right now. The woman I talked to from NBC practically begged me to when I told her how the CNN story had left their contents out of the report.
Go Democracy! Up with surveyable elections!
The story didn't mention the company's bias towards one particular party. When I did a paper on electronic voting for a class earlier this year I found the company has strong Republican ties and the chief executive (Walden O'Dell) of the co. has personal connections to Bush/Cheney. The company donates almost exclusively to Republicans. O'Dell had a fundraiser at his house for Cheney which raised $500k earlier this year, has donated and raised money for the RNC and is a leader in Ohio with helping Bush with his re-election campaign. He's written in editorials on how he is committed to delivering votes to Bush. Normally I wouldn't complain on what a business person does in his free time, but with the business he's in I'm not sure that it's appropriate. And it really doesn't seem appropriate for the company itself to be this involved in politics.
v _h arris/index_np.html
I didn't realize until today that Salon has reported on this before.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/09/23/be
Another good page summarizing
http://www.snarkcake.com/004339.html
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Tried to find the story from the CNN front page, almost impossible it's so well hidden... or maybe its just me!.... or (dons tinfoil hat) maybe it's only there to appease the usual suspects (us!)
we never wait for 'clearance' from the phonIE payper liesense corepirate nazi ?pr? ?firm? execrable.
latest readings result in maintaining the planet/population rescue initiative on crisis mode high alert.
you know where to look/who to trust?
With just over a year to go before the next presidential race, touchscreen voting machines don't seem like the cure-all some thought they would be. Skeptics fear they'll only produce more problems, from making recounts less reliable to giving computer hackers a chance to sabotage results.
Oh yes, those EVIL HACKERS are going to really fsck the election. Why didn't they cite the connections in diebold to republicrats and the fishy elections? Oh, right, because it's one big merry-go-round clusterfuck. hmm...so the reason the machines are saying republican are because they are broken or hackers are making the votes republican but somehow I think a hacker is more likely to have everyone vote for "my big cok" rather than the govenator.
And I'll bet if Ralph Nader wins the next presidential election, that they'll do several recounts in disbelief and try to make sure he isn't president and if he gets 20% (which I think he will, he got over 5% last time around when crazy mofo's like me didn't know him) of the vote and any voting area with these machines will eek out almost every vote in favor of bush. They'll probably pass some bill so that their foundation won't get federal funding the next year like they did last time.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
In reading all these comments on touch screen voting I've never seen the issue that bothers me most raised.
There is a constant refrain that any system can be hacked. Sure any voting system can be compromised but the how is all important. It you're going to stuff ballot boxes you need to have a bunch of people do it and they have too have physical access to the boxes. How many boxes can one person stuff, 1? 10? Many more opportunities to catch them in the act. In a computerized system one person can hack the whole election creating any results that that one person may want. This is IMHO a totally different magnitude of issue.
This sort of problem also favors the incumbent wildly, who has all the access to any part of the system they may want.
Just because any system can be hacked doesn't make all hacks the same. Some are worse than others and some favors one person or group more than others
In January, 2002 the State Elections Board approved two closed source touch screen voting systems, the ES&S Votronic DRE and the GBS Accu-Touch EBS 100 DRE.
This spring I raised the system integrity issues with the Board, and persuaded them to revoke the certifications.
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
When you have 10 people in a room 7 men and 3 women.
A man proposes "I say lets vote to rape the women".
Well hey they better enjoy it 'cause "majority rules"
that is the fairest way right?
I could go dig up quotes if you want, but that really is the gist of their argument. It usually focuses on how expensive and "unnecessary" paper verifcation would be.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
>You make it seem as if Americans were robbed of Robotic Al Gore on a shoddy recount or something.
Yea! It is not like the electronic voting machines did something crazy like give Gore a -16,022 vote count and 16,000 votes magically appeared for others...
Ohh wait a second...
I think it's not really possible to check on each voting machine if the software on that machine is the one your government told you was safe and good... At least not in a way any non-geek would understand...
A distributed system would be somewhat easier to control, if you only use a `couple of servers' i'm sure you can get some geeks to check a few md5 hashes...
However then it's still your government telling you that it's safe, the same people you might not want to re-elect. So what you really want is a system where they use and open-source, distributed voting system, or you want no electronic voting at all. It's just way to important a thing to treat so simply.
And i know i'm making this distributed thing to easy, but i think that the open-source community would be willing to help figure out how it should be done.
What are our other options here? If I go into my polling place on election day and see Diebold Electronic Voting Machines can I demand another voting method? Should I plan on voting absentee? Seriously, is there a way to refuse to use those damned machines and still participate in the election?
There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
What privacy issues would be in a paper trail that weren't in a ballot type system for the last 200 years? Eh?
All that needs to be known is if a person voted, and that his votes were tallied. Just like it is today with paper.
This kind of idiocy is the sort of thing that really fucks up the idea of electronic voting, and is really th only reason it's not widely used today.
People who don't like them say Diebold is guilty of fraud and incompetency.
Yay misleading reporting.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
San Mateo County uses big paper ballots with mark-sense readers at every polling place. The voter marks the ballot with a black marker, then slides it into the ballot box, which scans it as it winds it in. The ballot then drops into a big locked container (the container lid is the scanner). At the end of the election, all the scanners are read out for a quick count, and all the boxes go, still locked and sealed, to a warehouse in case a recount is needed.
This works quite well.
Ah Indymedia, the most reputable site on the net. I know if I want someone to take me seriously, I always link to indymedia.
Hacking the systems and rigging the election is illegal. But perhaps millions of mysterious votes for say, Mickey Mouse would get the attention of the media and force a change in the system.
If thats what it takes to restore democracy to this process, I am all for it. It would need to be organized enough however, that there could be no mistaking the (questionable) results. Select an obvious non-candidate and coordinate with others to produce results so obviously skewed that it would be impossible to ignore.
Didja notice the sub-heading that that quote is under? "Critics mistaken", it says. Pretty unbiased, huh?
"Outlaw Linux the prefered OS of drug dealers child pornographers and terrorists"
It would pass in a landslide.
AC posts standing up for poor, maligned Fox News?
The Fox stands up for itself pretty well - it's much better reporting than the AP story, and they got it to air weeks ago. Just because Fox sometimes comes off as a parody of a news service doesn't mean you shouldn't acknowledge when they do something right.
ELF and the other socialists should leave them alone, they would never do any thing like alter votes for goodness sake!
Electronic voting is coming, and I'd sure rather trust it to good, honest Christian Anericans who believe in absolutes like right and wrong than to a-moral atheists or some foreign company!
"I knew my god was bigger than his. I knew that my god was a real god and his was an idol." Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
>take back your country
Give us an issue worthy enough to incite military commanders to reject their source of authority, and we will. Not before then. Not without outside assistance.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I wonder exactly why it takes the mainstream press so long to get its head out of its ass when there is a story of this magnitude. I understand there is a follower mentality in most of the press. I also understand that it takes some time to research a story. I don't understand why Diebold was able to get away with this for so long, though.
Then again I don't think much of the American press anyway. Too centrally controlled, 0wned by too few companies. It wouldn't surprise me if the reason this stayed under a rock for so long was a few strategically placed phone calls.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
but electronic voting still blows
The Washington Post ran an article about some electronic voting machines being deployed in Virginia and Maryland. In Fairfax County (where I live), we will be using the AVS WINvote system, while those in Maryland will be using ones from Diebold. Interestingly, Fairfax County is the home of a lot of high-tech companies and their employees who should be somewhat computer savy.
The W in WINvote stands for Wireless as in 802.11b (i.e., WEP encryption). However, from what I have read, there is additional encryption used and the machines normally do not communicate with another system except during setup and the final vote tally. The votes are supposed to be redundantly stored on each system.
It should be interesting to watch the voter's reactions after learning more about WINvote. A limited test of the system last year apparently yielded favorable responses.
The UN has no place interfering in US elections. Like so many times that would follow, Bush did the right thing.
I don't want to see paper trail..if anything I want to see money trail. Show me the money.
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
I think it's along the lines of "it's too hard"
As I recall, they've said printers are prohibitively expensive both to make and maintain because of the ink and paper required (Or just the paper if we insist on continuing to punch holes.)
Yes, I used a Diebold Touch Screen Voting Machine, and I really enjoyed it. It was almost identical to another activity I enjoy which also involves a computer screen and touching things. And the end result is so similar.
Interociter
-=What do I want? I'm an American. I want more.
Of course CNN would roll over and say whatever the company involved wants them to. The American press has absolutely no guts to sniff out a story and perform investigative journalism. They're too afraid of being sued or offending anyone.
Where is Spider Jerusalem when you need him?
Interociter
-=What do I want? I'm an American. I want more.
We can't do civil disobedience when we go to the polls. The only type of civil disobedience we can have there is not voting. And when the Diebold board of directors gave $200,000 to the Republicans over the last election cycle and Wired reports that they made an unauthorized patch with Georgia's software before the Republican upsets in 2002, that makes it seem rather fishy...
Not a strong point, but I believe that's what theirs is.
One simple rule for its versus it's
Punch cards work just fine. The hanging chad fiasco was just a smokescreen to keep everyone from realizing the actual problem was the list of thousands of people who should have been able to vote but were turned away at the machine.
Posthuman since 2001.
But the voting machine companies would MAKE MORE MONEY selling the printers. Marginal revenue from add-on sales like this are much sought-after sales by hardware companies.
But it IS the companies that are resisting selling these add-ons. This immediately makes me suspicious! WTF?!
Have you EVFER heard of a company that doesn't want to sell you an add-on printer, with a maintenance contract? What is going on here?
There isn't any mention of the problems at Diebold, election mistakes, internal memos, or the company's fight to keep this information from the public.
It seems to me that there's another problem with computerized voting machines that hasn't been touched on much.
While it's possible to design a computerized system with a verifiable audit trail, paper records, what have you; the techniques used to ensure that these work properly are not intuitive and are difficult to explain to an interested bystander. Think of trying to explain an MD5 sum to your mother.
In contrast, during the Florida recount *everyone* knew the difference between a hanging chad and a pregnant chad, and most people had passionate opinions about how well they conveyed a voter's intent. Same thing with the infamous "butterfly ballot" in Palm Beach.
I have this nightmare of the next disputed presidential race ending up like the breast implant lawsuits. One side is totally, utterly wrong, but their "experts" sound just as confusing as the other side's experts, and all the gobbledegook provides just enough of a fig leaf for people to believe what they want to believe anyway.
For that reason, I won't support any voting system unless it passes the "USA Today" test -- every important aspect of the system should be completely explainable by one of those infographics that USA Today likes to put on its front page -- ideally, the only words needed would be captions at the bottom.
Punch card systems, despite their problems, pass the USA Today test. So do optical (scantron) systems. Lever voting boxes -- even voting by raised hands. Computerized systems fail miserably.
Money trail:
Republicans ----> Diebold
^ |
| |
| |
+_______________+
Diebold make huge donations to the Republican party. Republicans give their backing to Diebold to remove any audit trail from the voting process.
It's a win/win situation for everyone, so long as your a Diebold executive, or member of the republican party.
Why is it that everyone is bitching, but no one is working on an alternative? Searching for 'Election' on sourceforge came up with exactly NOTHING. That's like the RIAA shutting down Napster without offering a suitable replacement. The 'problem' just got worse. What we need is a open source replacement, and a lot of you smart geeks working on it. Have criticisms? Do something. Change it. We're not gonna get anywhere just sitting here bitching about it. Want the government to use more open source solutions? Provide them. Instead of working on some me-too office software or what not, how about doing something original and getting some real props for it? That is the ONLY way out of this mess. Software by the people for the people! :-)
No guarantee whatsoever that the human-readable part and the machine-readable part are identical.
Instead, generate a ballot where the same content is human-readable and optically-readable by machine. Even straightforward printing would be fully scannable, since a machine is generating the text, another machine will know exactly what to expect, and could read it accurately.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Well, the Chinook tribe is actually still kickin', running the casinos and whatnot.
www.chinooknation.org
What if the voting machine was tampered with to produce a paper ballot where the human readable side shows a different candidate than the machine readable side?
Sure, as I walk out of the booth I can check the human readable side to verify that whoever I voted for is printed there, and sure, if a hand count was ordered the human reading my ballot paper will know my intentions. But since I wouldn't have a trusted magnetic stripe reader handy, there's no way to verify that a magnetic striped ballot paper I have in my hand is really going to tally up properly on the vote counter the way that I voted.
You're almost there with a verifiable way of electronic voting - however the tallying machines MUST be able to verify and tally my vote EXACTLY the way that I as a voter verify it and EXACTLY the way that the vote would be verified in a hand count by a human. Duplication of information on the ballot paper in this manner just provides one more way that the electoral system can be subverted.
There are machines capable of reading a black mark in a certain location on a piece of card. I can't see why these weren't considered as away to provide a paper audit trail. Electronic transmission of preliminary election results to a tally room is all well and good for the TV coverage, but the binding election result MUST be arrived at using a open and verifiable means at every stage in the vote tallying and ballot paper distribution/storage process.
Now what does this tell us about the news agencies that actually use this technique? :)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
This is probably the most important point in the whole mess!!!
Add a page explaining why the project was abandoned.
America has a long history of fixing elections. It's as American as apple pie and conquest by force.
Now I can learn to enjoy being ruled by a detached, wealthy elite. Thanks for the link!
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
The wierd part is - that pretty accurately sums up Diebold's position on the matter.
And not a single word about source and messages' leak that demonstrated how bad the system really is. Instead we see claims that Diebold has "empirical data" that voters love the new machines just like Happy Meals at Mcdonalds.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Make not voting illegal. Sounds stupid you say? It already is illegal in australia. The way it works is that when you show up at the voting station, your name gets crossed off a list and then you go vote. After the election, anyone whose name wasn't crossed off and who doesn't have an excuse (i.e. in a coma in hospital) gets fined. There is no way to trace how a person voted, just that they did. I doesn't even stop people from not voting, as they can just show up, get their name crossed off, and spoil their ballot.
The only real problem with this system is that it would lead to more people who are ignorant of the issues and who don't care about the election voting. I personally think this could be a huge problem, but Australia seems to have managed it well enough.
you forgot to add various Soviet & Russian dictators.
between the greater and lesser infinities sleep the dreams undreamt
...is in Monday's New York Times.
Although it concentrates more on the free-speech issues of Diebold's cease-and-desist campaign, it is far more informative than the deeply flawed CNN piece.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Not because I'm an open source zealot or "liberal".
You got that right. You're a cocksucking slashbot.