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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.
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...
Try writing a short, to-the-point letter (a real one, e-mail is useless) to the editor thanking them for the story but pointing politely out that it could have been more thorough in this aspect.
The owls are not what they seem
Both the print and online editions of Newsweek have an article about the systems as well.
You wanna see the crap these guys discuss privately?
t ml#excerpts
1 0/msg00002.html ]
3 /msg00098.html ]
1 0/msg00001.html ]
g 00051.html ] (emphasis added)
http://www.why-war.com/features/2003/10/diebold.h
"Elections are not rocket science. Why is it so hard to get things right! I have never been at any other company that has been so miss [sic] managed." [source: http://chroot.net/s/lists/announce.w3archive/2001
In response to a question about a presentation in El Paso County, Colorado: "For a demonstration I suggest you fake it. Progam them both so they look the same, and then just do the upload fro [sic] the AV. That is what we did in the last AT/AV demo." [source: http://chroot.net/s/lists/support.w3archive/19990
"I have become increasingly concerned about the apparent lack of concern over the practice of writing contracts to provide products and services which do not exist and then attempting to build these items on an unreasonable timetable with no written plan, little to no time for testing, and minimal resources. It also seems to be an accepted practice to exaggerate our progress and functionality to our customers and ourselves then make excuses at delivery time when these products and services do not meet expectations." [source: http://chroot.net/s/lists/announce.w3archive/2001
"Johnson County, KS will be doing Central Count for their mail in ballots. They will also be processing these ballots in advance of the closing of polls on election day. They would like to log into the Audit Log an entry for Previewing any Election Total Reports. They need this, to prove to the media, as well as, any candidates & lawyers, that they did not view or print any Election Results before the Polls closed. However, if there is a way that we can disable the reporting functionality, that would be even better." [source: http://chroot.net/s/lists/rcr.w3archive/200202/ms
Fox News has reported on this before:
Suspicions About New Electronic Voting Machines
But I guess it is not news for slashdot unless it is CNN or NYT. And it is an AP story, not a CNN story.
Not really. It quotes someone from MIT saying, "The computer science community has pretty much rallied against electronic voting. A disproportionate number of computer scientists who have weighed in on this issue are opposed to it."
Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes
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.
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.
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.
Too bad they don't mention how lacking Diebold's security is, e.g. how easy it is to open Diebold's Access DB and add users/passwords, to change vote results.
Not just the security of Diebold's voting machines, but the security of Diebold the company. Their web site was hacked, revealing private code and documents. If they can't keep their own secrets secret, how can we trust them to keep OUR secretes secret? And why in the world was their code internet-accessible?!!
cpeterso
Though the Diebold system seems to be in violation of 301
(2) AUDIT CAPACITY.
(B) MANUAL AUDIT CAPACITY.--
(i) The voting system shall produce a permanent paper record with a manual audit capacity for such system.
So I don't know how they're getting accepted anyway.
2) It's not lightning fast. The major news media outlets want to be able to declare a winner before most people shut off their TVs at 10PM. It gives the viewer a feeling of closure. Waiting until 3AM for the numbers from Podunk, Iowa and surrounding municipalities does absolutely nothing for ratings.
We recently had an election in Ontario. This involved the paper ballot system. Polls closed at 8pm and results were complete enough for the media to call it a Liberal Party majority government in less than an hour. Individual ridings were called within 10-15 minutes.
Someone will say "Well, you only 10 million people in Ontario, it doesn't take long to count that."
Counting ballots scales very nicely. You have to count 10 times as many ballots, you hire 10 times as many people to count. It's not that hard.