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More E-Voting SNAFUs
tassii writes "Looks like Diebold is in yet more trouble. In this article from Wired.com, an audit of the Diebold E-Voting machines revealed that the company installed uncertified software in all 17 counties that use its electronic voting equipment. While 14 counties used software that had been qualified by federal authorities but not certified by state authorities, three counties, including Los Angeles, used software that had never been certified by the state or qualified by federal authorities for use in any election. And in this article, Wired.com is reporting that at least five convicted felons secured management positions at a Diebold, including one who served time in a Washington state correctional facility for stealing money and tampering with computer files in a scheme that 'involved a high degree of sophistication and planning.'"
So what exactly is the problem with the way the rest of the civilized world does elections? (i.e. pen and paper and counting by hand)
It works, it has a paper-trail, any idiot understands the ballots, there are no hanging chads, and the entire voting system is entirely political and not commercia... oh, I see.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Open sourcing of the code is needed for public confidense if nothing else.
Or at least a "dumbing down" of the system so Ma & Pa Kettle can understand it. Here in
Trolling is a art,
It takes people writing their newspapers and demanding the story.
Pick up the phone and talk to the editor, then pick up a pen and write to the editor. Then get a half-dozen friends to do the same, and get them to get a half-dozen of their friends to do it, too.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Walden O'Dell, head of Diebold Election Systems, wrote a letter to Republican contributors in August that said "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
Maybe there really was much basis for his confidence ....
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Of course, if the conspiracy-theorists are correct and the company is a front for the RNC to control election results, or the company is in the business of selling results to the highest bidder, you'll be risking your life. Techno-warfare for the protection of our democracy.
The often suggested idea that we return to paper ballots misses an aspect of US elections that would make such thing difficult, namely the complexity of our elections. Although the national offices get most of the attention, ballots may include 20-100 other things to vote on. Everything from state representatives down to obscure changes in county and city charters that most don't even take the time to read.
These ballots have always been tedious to count by hand. Perhaps we could outsource the hand-counting to some third world country.
Woverly Harris Gooch, IV CTO American Fire and Bomb, LLC
I don't get exactly what open source has to do with corrupted officials and politics. You can use open source, but as long as there is someone running a system that is corrupt, what difference would using open source for the machines make?
Get a life outside of your little OSS world.
"The vendor may not understand that we run elections in the state."
The point of the acquisition of media, or the concentration of media power, is to influence the electorate.
And no greater influence can be held over the electorate than replacing them outright with programmable machines.
So basically what you are asking for is to have the same people who aspire to control the electorate to call attention to their efforts at achieving even greater control over the electorate.
It's just not going to happen.
They see where America is going. They see the exodus of jobs going overseas that is to come (what we've seen to date is nothing), and they realize that the result will inevitably be the electorate veering hard to the left. And since they can take all their capital with them overseas that would be fine, except for one thing: the U.S. military.
They can't simply cede America to a reactionary leftist because there's no telling what kind of retribution would be exacted.
So they do this instead.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Votes were never meant to be pure virtual. Use a touchscreen to help a voter make their paper ballots, but always print a paper ballot and drop it into the ballot box. It's okay to have machines count those paper ballots, but what we learned in Florida 2000 is that the paper ballot must be clearly human readable too. That way, manual recounters don't have any ballots where the voter's intent is questionable, and voters can read their ballot on the way to the box, and if it doesn't say what they want it to say they can hand tear it up and try again.
THE next election will be done by diebold, and the election after that will be by a bunch of angry americans with rifles. the revolution is comming my frends, this is the beginning, bush lost the last election, and he is still our president, now it will be easyer to hide the next election resuts and put whoever you want in power next. im not advocating to own a gun, because they will get rid of those people first but at least make sure you know how to use one. because if you have any sense and dignity, you will need to in the next ten years.
what's wrong with a paper ballot. Canada does just fine with write ins.
>Yes, it's technology, so in that sense it may be of interest to nerds, but why front page stories about every single minor event that occurs WRT e-voting several times per week ?
w s&new_topic=8
3) Oh, and don't forget that along with the uncertified software on the Diebold machines in California, and the felons on the payroll reported in this sotry there are apparently some irregularities with certification records from the 2002 election in Georgia where Max Cleland was defeated (despite his having lead the all the polls up the election).
w s&new_topic=4
What's more basic and important to a democracy than voting? The message that this equipment and the companies involved are questionable doesn't seem to be getting out to the major media as much as it should. This is cheap publicity and many Slashdotters feel strongly about the issue. That by itself should be enough but if you want more detail or excuse: 1. The Diebold machine's software seems to have been designed to make fraud easier:
http://www.blackboxvoting.com/scoop/S00065.htm
Any competetant secretary who knows MS Access could jimmy this software without much help at all.
2. One of the other two companies that makes voting machines, ES&S, is owned in part by a Republican senator, Chuck Hegel, who was elected Senator two years after Nebraska bought his machines. He didn't see fit to disclose his substantial interest in ES&S, or the fact that he had formerly been chairman and CEO of this company in his FEC filings. Moreoever, there was an attempt to supress the publication of a story on this topic by a Republican political lawyer.
http://www.blackboxvoting.com/modules.php?name=Ne
http://www.blackboxvoting.com/modules.php?name=Ne
Don't you think that important criteria chosing the vendor for voting machinery should include the appearance of trustworthiness, and that the machine's be designed with security in mind and audited by software industry accepted outside experts? With the voting machine companies that appearance is entirely to the contrary, and the every reputable expert that has looked at them has concluded that they don't meet basic security criteria. Rather than attempting to remedy these shortcomings they've hired PR companies to spin the news.
Electronic voting would need the same - having a unique number for each vote - and no duplicate numbers - to rule out the same person voting twice.
Why would you need to have ballot serial numbers to prevent that? Strike a person's name off of the voter's list when he shows up to vote, hand him an unmarked ballot and let him go and vote. Done. He can't vote twice because his name has now been stroked off of the list.
No serial numbers or ballot identification required.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
"Trust us, we're the government" doesn't carry any weight
/., I don't fear government-backed vote rigging being more likely due to e-voting. There are plenty of examples of this using old techniques...Plus, taking advantage of this on a national scale would require a rather elaborate conspiracy, and I don't believe that the conspirators would trustworthy enough to keep quiet about it...
/. that somebody will reply saying that Bush used the supreme court to steal his way to the presidency. However, perhaps you should read this article before replying.
Actually, in this case it's not the government that we're being asked to trust. It's companies producing demonstrably untrustworthy products.
Unlike many (apparently) on
As long as we have a multi-party system, instead of a single-party or 'power and opposition' system, allegations of rigged votes will get attention.
And I know that this being
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!
Seems to me that perhaps the Freedom Of Information Act is applicable, here. It has been used in the past to gain access to many other documents that were relevant to the public good.
As for "Trust us, we're the government!" that's something the founding fathers would NEVER agree with, as they didn't completely trust the government they themselves were creating.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Why not make some e-voting software that is open source. Run it on linux, or one of the BSDs. Instead of whining for Diebold to open the source (they won't) try making your own. I'm not a good enough programmer, but I'm sure someone here is.
Not a sentence!
Oh yeah, and the CEOs of those companies are Bush "Pioneers". Meaning they have raised over $100,000 for the Bush election committee.
Here's the process:
1) Fund raiser collects a bunch of money for Bush.
2) Fund raiser is rewarded with legislation forcing municipalities to buy the equipment from said fundraiser.
3) Fund raiser profits AND directly begins manipulating the election for said president.
4) Fund raiser is further rewarded with jobs from third parties.
The bitch is that most of this is perfectly legal.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
You're focusing on how hard it is to show that there are
"no" problems. You're ignoring the fact that we have a
situation where there are extremely serious *known* problems
that should be absolute showstoppers, yet there is still
somehow, contraversy about what should be done.
The Diebold exec who said out on the record that the
company was committed to delivering the election to
the republican candidate, ought to be in Guantanamo Bay right now getting his teeth checked.
The company ought to ALREADY have been barred from ever
touching an election, and their privileges for having
contracts with financial institutions ought to be put in jeapordy, already,
just based on the evidence we already have.
So instead of dwelling on the fact that it's always going to be
impossible to prove a system is perfect, please pay
more attention to the fact that the system we're being offered
is already known to be inadequate, if not treasonous.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
FWIW: "Drive by wire" cars are currently being designed, and for all I know tested, and perhaps even sold. I'll grant you that they will be for the luxury market to start with...but don't count on the manual override staying around. Tried to roll down a window with the key out of the ignition recently?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You have it backwards, Diebold(in a semi-getting-close-to-maybe-becoming-a-better[as in works better] kinda way) should have to PROVE their trustworthiness, simply because an untrusted(in the TCPA sense, how ironic) voting system, one side could cleverly imply the system is rigged, and influence the elections illegally.
IANAL, but that Diebold didn't get sued out of existence for using "untrustable" or "untrusted" software is just sign of how individual-unfriendly, and big-corporation-friendly the USA have become. Of course, in truly democratic countries, the person who installed untrusted software in a voting machine would automatically commit a felony, and do hard jail time. The fact that it was not an isolated incident would compound that into conspiracy to commit a felony, and probably send 10-20 people in jail, and 5 people in the witness protection program for blowing the whistle on the others.
But then, where I live, while not perfect, certainly our rules(Quebec's) makes our politicians work a little harder not to appear to be corrupt, their success at this, is mitigated...