Los Alamos Reconsiders Touch Screen Voting

goombah99 writes "Los Alamos county, which boasts the highest geek PhD per capita in the world and considerable clout in secure computing, has voted to rescind its previous plans to purchase Touch Screen voting systems and will ask the New Mexico's secretary of state to address its concerns regarding an imminent state-wide purchase. They may get forced by the Clerk's office to use them anyway if the state makes its bulk purchase of Sequoia AvcEdge touch screen systems with a Windows-based WinEDS database. The Los Alamos position is welcome news since it casts the rejection of these systems in a more sober light; widespread right-wing conspiracy theories have done great harm by galvanizing election officials to be dismissive of re-opening their consideration of the issue. What won the day was convincing the county they had until 2006 to comply with HAVA, and that better machines with voter verifiable audit trails and even open source, were on the way. There is also more in the local newspapers."

Comments

No, not conspiracy theories.

[The Terrorists]

They aren't conspiracy theories. There is plenty of evidence about the Bush-Diebold connection. The theories are based on solid, classical campaign finance skulduggery and not on the technical merits of the system at all. There was a good SecurityFocus article on the register about it as well, focusing on the technical aspects. I propose the establishment of independent technical federal commissions to review all voting technologies.

Re:No, not conspiracy theories.

[puppet10]

And the only reason they have any traction is because the voting machines don't have a voter, human readable, verifiable audit trail to track the votes. Thus you open up all sorts of conspiracy theories because theres no way to prove to a reasonable person that the votes have not been tampered with either through error or design.

Re:No, not conspiracy theories.

[h4rm0ny]

First step in concealing your conspiracy is to make it sound stupid. The moment a few TFHs (Tin Foil Hatters) appear and start raving about every voting machine in the country being rigged or the banking system being controlled by the Elders of Zion, then more moderate critics and theorists coming afterwards get lumped into the same category.

Essentially, the loonies lay claim to an issue and then you can no longer support the issue without being seen to support the loonies.

Not saying that this is the case here - just a general principle.

Re:No, not conspiracy theories.

[corebreech]

You've got to be kidding me!

We've got evidence that Diebold tampered with results, we've got evidence that blacks were denied the opportunity to vote, we've got Katherine Harris and we've got the supreme Court and oh yeah we've got the Governor of Florida who just happens to be the First Retard's brother.

We could go on with how the war on drugs disenfranchised some hundreds of thousands of blacks thus preventing them from voting, in violation of the Constitution, or we could talk about how recounts were illegally obstructed and in some cases denied.

Talk about losing credibility! Damn body, where have you been these last few years?

Re:No, not conspiracy theories.

[mark2003]

There is a vast amount of evidence that large numbers of people were denied the right to vote because they had a similar name to that of a known criminal - sometimes just a surname and town in common could be enough. Those running the election (Katherine Harris) employed a company now owned by Diebold (I believe) to construct the list used. This list included people from other states who had prior criminal records but were allowed to vote under FLORIDA law - however they were removed from the voter's role.

Now due to demographics and crime rates in the US, where those who are poor and black are more likely to have a criminal record, this deliberate policy of ignoring FLORIDA state law by it's governer and the electoral commitees disadvantaged the Democrats as most poor and black voters vote democrat. The fact that they mis-matched on name also helped the Republicans as not many wealthy, white Republican voters have similar names to poor blacks. There are many, many cases of the wrong people being denied the right to vote.

Re:No, not conspiracy theories.

[pavon]

Bull. All this "evidence" is mearly circumstantial.

Fact: The Diebold Machines have horrible design and implementation.
Fact: Diebold has done some shaddy things to cover their buts when they make a mistake.
Fact: The CEO of the company has donated money to the republicans.

How does this imply that there is a great conspiricy? Lots of people give money to the republicans. Lots of people write crappy software. Lots of businesses try to get away with things that they shouldn't. Where is the proof that the reason for their actions is that they want the hand the election over to the republicans? It is just as likely that they are just incompetent and greedy, not conspiratal. Repeat after me: Correlation does not imply Causality.

Now is it possible that Diebold really is doing this to hand the election over to Bush? Sure. Is there any proof? No. But there is proof that some people framing this issue as a conspiricy theory has made the rest of us loose alot of credibility. And doing so is completely uneccisary because there are so many (factual) reasons why we shouldn't use these machines. So do everyone a favor and stick to the facts.

Touch screens had so much potential.

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine the fun you could have selecting a president by poking a picture in its belly, and being rewarded with a Pilsbury-esque "Tee hee! Thanks for voting for me!"

Of course....

[southpolesammy]

the ultimate irony would be if the Los Alamos council used the Sequoia voting system to take the vote....

Re:Los Alamos

[snarfer]

I don't CARE if the code is open source. That's just asking the voter to trust different people. AND there is no easy way to guarantee that this is the code in the machine. Also, it doesn't protect against breakdowns of equipment.

What is needed is a voter-verified paper ballot printout that goes into a separate locked ballot box. This way, after voting on the machine the voter can check the ballot to be sure that the voter's choice is correctly recorded.

Using the electronic voting machine reduces the error rate to near-zero. Printing the ballot reduces the counting problems (hanging chads...) because they are standardized, uniform and can be run through counting machines quickly.

With a system like this in place the security of the electronic machines doesn't MATTER.

Thank GOD!

[Anonymous Coward]

Touch Screen systems just aren't reliable, there's no paper trail, they're closed source, etc. How Diebold has managed to penetrate so deeply is amazing to me. Are our elected officials really that stupid, or has Diebold really swindled them?

I believe electronic voting systems can work, but only highly secured, rigorously tested, and open source systems that leave a paper trail. If nothing else, a piece of paper that the voter can use to verify the votes he or she cast.

For now, I'll stick with punch cards or penis pullers, thank you very much.

They VOTED...

[Anonymous Coward]

...to change the way they vote? Only in geek county would you have recursive voting.

Dismissive

[krysith]

I don't know that it was the conspiracy theories that made the election officials so dismissive of concerns about electronic voting. It seems to me they were dismissive of the concerns about e-voting before any of these conspiracy theories began to propogate. I think the main reasons why election officials like electronic voting so much is that it makes their job easier, and it seems all high-tech and modern. The concerns about it seem like the typical luddite worries about change to them.

If anything, I think that the conspiracy theories will do more to get their attention - after all, it's their job to make sure that people have confidence in the election results. Having a bunch of backwoods farmers saying "I don't trust the results from your damn computers" is one thing. Having Los Alamos computer scientists saying "I don't trust the results from your damn proprietary software" is quite another, and I think they are waking up to that.

Sign the HR 2239 petition!

[Eraserhd]

We need your help!

HR 2239 is a bill which requires all touch-screen voting machines to produce a paper receipt which the voter can read and verify, then drop in a lock box. The receipts in that lock box are used in a recount. This bill also mandates a recount in 0.5% of districts chosen at random to verify that the touch-screen voting machines are reporting the results accurately.

Sign the online petition to support the bill. Contact your representatives, educate them and demand they support the bill.

We also need legal help with injunctions against the machines, starting with the 37 Diebold states. The organizers of BlackBoxVoting.org have 65,000 documents to make the case.

Re:Right out of the MS playbook

[introverted]

Governments want traceability and backups in case the something goes wrong.

What I think the government wants varies according to how paranoid I'm feeling on any particular day. As a voter however, I want traceability and backups so I can be assured that the vote wasn't tampered with.

Article slashdotted posted here

[Anonymous Coward]

Headline News
Council yanks voting machine funding

By ALLISON MAJURE, lareporter@lamonitor.com, Monitor Staff Writer

Revisiting a motion that had narrowly passed by a 4-3 vote last month, Los Alamos County Council rescinded funding for the purchase of 17 Sequoia Pacific "Edge" touchscreen voting machines by a vote of 7-0 Tuesday.

Councilors Nona Bowman, Diane Albert and Mike Wheeler opposed the original motion on Oct. 28. At a meeting Nov. 4, Councilor Fran Berting asked councilors to support her motion to revisit the issue. They voted 5-2 to do so with Councilors Geoff Rogers and Jim West opposed. In light of newly received information, Berting sought an opportunity for further discussion on the voting machines, as well as an opportunity to change her vote.

The 17 machines would have been purchased by the county as back-up machines for each of Los Alamos' precincts. The State of New Mexico has already funded the purchase of 19 "Edge" touchscreen voting machines for Los Alamos through federal funding received as part of the Help America Vote Act.

The HAVA was enacted shortly after the presidential election of 2000 when discrepancies in Florida called the count into question. Among its requirements is the provision of voting machines for the visually impaired so that they may vote independently without personal assistance.

During public comments, Kathy Campbell read her letter to the editor to the councilors and highlighted the fact that the proprietary software that tabulates the votes is not failsafe. Any tabulation errors indicated, would need to be researched by Sequoia Pacific technicians, because the software is proprietary, she said.

"Australia, Canada and New Zealand use open source software for their voting machines, which are reliant on an open source operating system such as Linux or UNIX," she said in an interview today.

Charlie Strauss also provided information for the councilors, saying the state deadline for the use of these machines is 2006, not 2004 as was previously asserted. He said, "There's no need to rush, we're going to have good machines soon," indicating that machines with a ballot-level voter verification capacity might be on the market shortly.

Strauss urged councilors to send a letter to the New Mexico Secretary of State expressing concerns about the validity of the "Edge" machine's output. He referred to New Jersey Rep. Rush Holt's bill, HR 2239, which is sponsored by 61 other congressional representatives, as useful for its language which objects to touchscreen machines made by Diebold, Sequioa-Pacific, ESS and others.

The councilors unanimously endorsed a motion to rescind funding for the voting machines and to draft a letter to the New Mexico Secretary of State, articulating Los Alamos' concerns.

Power Without Accountability

[FunWithHeadlines]

"widespread right-wing conspiracy theories have done great harm by galvanizing election officials to be dismissive of re-opening their consideration of the issue."

I read the CBS News article in the included link, and I don't see the "great harm" anywhere in that article. I'm wondering if the submitter is showing a bias by his comments.

I am not aware of any solid proof that the right-wing has used electronic voting machines to ensure election, but it stands to reason that it has and will happen. Why? Because politicians on both sides have tampered with election results and methods for decades (centuries, millenia). So it would be quite naive to think that the right-wing wouldn't try to use whatever advantage it had. The left-wing too, when they are in power, would do the same thing. Power corrupts.

This is a non-partisan problem. Either side is likely to try to use closed-source technology to their favor. It is short-sided to think this is only a right-wing problem -- it's not. Whoever is in power will use whatever means are accesible to maintain that power. Therefore it is imperative that the voting method being used does not give them an obvious tool to corrupt in maintaining that power. Diebold (and other manufacturer) machines are bad news, no matter which side you are on. Elections are stolen routinely throughout human history. Don't give them another tool to do the job, for they will most assuredly use them.

Think about it: Do you really want to give politicians a method to hide voting result confirmations? To be able to say, "Here are the results and, hey whaddya know? I won!" and have no possible way to verify that? That's called power without accountability, and we all know where that leads.

Obviously there is something dodgy going on...

[mark2003]

The very fact that the officials have signed contracts that forbid any investigation of the equipment and that there are no verifiable audit trails makes me think that there is some truth in these "conspiracy theories".

When government is not open and transparent it is usually because those people who make up the government are trying to hide something, usually fixing things in their own self interest.

Would you trust your money to a bank that had no audit trail and whose systems and accounts were not open to independant audit?

Paper trail now!

[Dr_Marvin_Monroe]

I just don't see why the voting machine folks can't get the message. Simply include a cash register tape, just like most stores have!

Everywhere across the country, hundreds of millions of people get paper receipts with their purchases at the store. This happens, because Republican (and Democratic) store owners "Don't trust" the electronic tabulations in the machines and demand a verifiable "paper trail" from each of their cash registers. If store owners don't trust a $0.99 purchase to be recorded electronicly, why should we trust voting machines. It's simple, effective, and not expensive either. It happens HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF TIMES PER DAY.

Why can't everyone simply get a printout of their votes?...Why the foot-dragging...other than proving the conspiricy theories!.... To the voting machine folks, just add a paper tape, just like an ATM or cash register!....It's the right thing to do.

Conspiracies aren't the point.

[hethatishere]

The fact that these machines are designed so carelessly and without regard for security is a danger, not to Liberals because of a vast right-wing conspiracy but to us all. These machines were designed by people with little regard for Democracy. The Diebold Memos more than show that. What endangers the sanctity of Democracy hurts us all.

Re:Los Alamos

[monkeydo]

What is needed is a voter-verified paper ballot printout that goes into a separate locked ballot box. This way, after voting on the machine the voter can check the ballot to be sure that the voter's choice is correctly recorded.

If the paper ballot is used only as an audit trail then it is completely worthless. The voter has no way of knowing that what is on the paper acurately reflects what is tabulated. The obvious solution to this is that you actually count the paper ballots, but then the machines are just really expensive punch card punchers.

Anyone who thinks that voters are actually going to check their ballots is deluding themselves anyway. The ballots in Florida were NOT confusing, and if people had checked them their would not have been a problem. When you have a reporter ask someone if they are sure who they voted for and the answer is, "No." The problem is with the voters, not the counting.

Where I vote there are clear instructions, and people who will show you how to vote (on a sample ballot) if you can't figure it out yourself. Maybe what we need is to spend some money educating voters instead of building more expensive, more easily corruptable voting apparatus.

Evidence?

[siskbc]

They aren't conspiracy theories. There is plenty of evidence about the Bush-Diebold connection.

Read your link and missed anything that could be construed as evidence. The only fact is that there was a technical glitch. Everything else is complete speculation.

I mean, even think about it: if they were going to rig 16,000 votes, where would they do it - in a precint with a population of 600, or a population of 100,000? Which would make more sense? There's no way they "get away" with it the way it went down, and it was so blatant that there's no way it would have even had the presumably desired effect.

I'm not saying to believe everything "the man" says, but fuming over evidently nothing denies credibility to real causes.

Re:Evidence?

[Noren]

It's not much more reassuring to think that there is no conspiracy at all- and the machines make random, unpredictable errors in the amount of 16,000 votes. For all we know, they did just that in precinct(s) with a population of 100,000 and no one caught it because it wasn't blatantly obvious.

I still don't find that to be an acceptable voting tabulation method, even given the large assumption that no one is guiding the 'errors'.

Re:Evidence?

[wytcld]

if they were going to rig 16,000 votes, where would they do it - in a precint with a population of 600, or a population of 100,000?

What the evidence shows is that it is easily possible to rig these machines. What historical evidence shows is that people who can rig elections sometimes do. For instance, Lyndon Johnson first got into the Senate because of ballot box stuffing in one Texas county; and there were a lot of people in Cook County, Illinois who managed to vote for JFK despite their graveyard residences. There were some stuffed ballot boxes in Kansas City when Truman first got into the Senate too.

So we can conclude from history that given the chance, Democrats at least will sometimes rig elections. Are Republicans more pure? How about those Republicans who cheated California on electricity, or the Republicans who have cheated mutual fund holders out of what's looking to add up to billions (okay, there may be a few Democrats among executives in those industries - perhaps 5%)? With the Republicans particularly adept at cycling people between public and private office, we should assume that their ethics in public office are uniformly different than when they're in private "enterprise"?

You can't deny this about individual Republicans: they're enterprising. And so, history shows, have been the Democrats. It's not a conspiracy theory that's the problem here, it's the notion that history has been repealed and our current vote counters are angels.

Yeah, right.

Re:Enron

[corebreech]

As far as I know there was a crackdown on Enron as a company.

ROTFLMAO!!!

Yeah, Kenny Boy is doing his 10 years at Leavenworth, even as we speak!

NOT!

Who would it benefit if the executives were thrown in prison for life and told to pay billions in damages (which they'd never be able to do)?

How about all the victims to come from the next set of CEO/thieves who will do whatever they want secure in the knowledge that if they get caught nothing really bad will happen to them?

One of the reasons we put people in prison is to discourage others from committing the same crimes.

Using your logic, we should be freeing all sorts of criminals.

(of course, if we are talking about non-violent drug offenders who never hurt anybody then I would wholeheartedly agree.)

Re:Enron

[mark2003]

The whole points of execs, i.e. directors, partners etc., is that they ARE responsible for the actions of their company. They make policy, they make the decisions and unltimately they have to take the fall if their company is involved in illegal actions. That IS corporate law.

The real travesty in this case is that Andersons was brought down to stop the investigation going any further up the food chain, alegedly to members of the current administration. Bizarely in the case of Andersons the responsible partner was able to get off scott free by turning state's evidence and the normal employees paid for it instead. I have worked at Andersons and I know how much power and control over information an individual partner has over his team/division. It was very easy for that partner to keep his behaviour secret from the rest of the company...

Not even a good conspiracy theory

[bee]

Man, all these conspiracy theories going around about the right wing taking over the world just suck. They don't even have any of the standard conspiracy theory elements:

• The complicity, at the very least, of the Pope
  
• Evidence that the moon landings were faked
  
• Involves the real people behind JFK's assassination
  
• the Illuminati
  
• black helicopters
  
• space aliens
  
• the Men in Black
  
• Area 51
  

and plenty more-- I'm sure you can come up with more than me.

Put the politics aside

[lakema]

When the CEO of one of the largest voting machine manufacturers (Diebold) sends out a fund raising letter saying he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year." you have to be at least a little skeptical. http://www.portclintonnewsherald.com/news/stories/ 20030827/localnews/140871.html

Exactly.

[Chris Burke]

Thank you for disecting the heart of the "conspiracy theory" issue. How can normally skeptical people call this a "conspiracy theory"?

Fact: A company is producing voting machines which are easily tamperable and which allow such tampering to go completely undetected except through observing anomalous results.

Fact: There are people who would benefit greatly from utilizing this ability.

Fact: The company in question has given a good deal of money to one of the groups of people who would benefit from exploiting the flaws in the company's system. Even stated that they want to help said group win.

How could a rational, skeptical person look at this and not think "something isn't right here"?

Perhaps you are right, and alleged skeptics have suddenly become convinced that everyone in politics (or just their favorite politicians?) have become saints.