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.

Comments

HAVA and voting errors.

[goombah99]

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