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San Diego Diebold Poll Worker's Report Posted
James Renken writes "I was a poll worker in San Diego for this year's primary election. It was the county's first using Diebold voting machines, and as you may have heard, we ran into some problems! My full report of the goings-on can be found at Live from the Nuke Free Zone. Enjoy!"
Uncle Diebold's Clubhouse
On March 2nd, I was a poll worker for this year's California primary election. More specifically, I was a Systems Inspector in San Diego county, whose problems with voting machines and procedures received some coverage in the national media.
First, a summary of my personal opinion: I think that current electronic voting systems are better than the traditional systems in terms of security, and also in terms of usability for most people. However, I share the opinion of many bloggers that major security issues remain in the new machines and implementations, and that these issues should already have been fixed.
More details below...
This was San Diego's first election using electronic voting machines - specifically, Diebold AccuVote-TSx stations. Previous elections in the county used punch cards. The county failed to make the mandated upgrade prior to the last election, and a federal court ordered that it be done for this primary.
Previously, precinct boards in the county were made up of an Inspector, an Assistant Inspector, and clerks. As of this election, a Systems Inspector and an Assistant Systems Inspector have been added at each precinct. According to the Registrar of Voters, this is because a four-hour training session would have been required in order for Inspectors to learn both the general procedures and how to operate the machines. Instead, most of the technical details are left to the Systems Inspectors.
I was contacted and assigned as a Standby Systems Inspector, meaning that if necessary, I would stand in for a missing Systems Inspector or Assistant Systems Inspector in my part of the county. The standby system is apparently not used very much; they forgot to handle some details, like sending me a copy of the poll worker's manual, or notifying me that the location for the mandatory training had changed. Fortunately, I'm fairly resourceful, and the classes were running late anyway.
In the class, we were introduced to how the system works. Along with the usual paperwork and supplies, each precinct has:
* A Precinct Control Model (PCM).
* A number of voting stations (either four, six, or eight).
* Two Voter Access Cards (VACs) per station, plus one or two extras.
* Two Supervisor Cards.
A poll worker (usually the Systems Inspector) sits in front of the PCM. One poll worker has each voter sign the roster, while another checks the voter's address on another list. That second worker points to the appropriate line on the address list, and the PCM operator sees which party to program a ballot for - with the party name never said aloud.
The PCM operator then selects the party on the PCM's touchscreen, and inserts any one of the Voter Access Cards (VACs) for programming. The VAC is then given to the voter, who inserts the VAC into any one of the stations, and is then presented with the ballot for their party. After casting their ballot, the voter's VAC is ejected, and the voter is instructed to give it back to the poll staff. The VAC itself is not a ballot at all - it just authorizes a voting station to bring one up, and tells it which party's ballot to display. After a ballot has been cast using a VAC, it must be reprogrammed on the PCM prior to being used again.
We were warned that some voters might try to cheat by claiming that they received the wrong party's ballot. We were advised that, should this happen, we should insert the card in a station to make sure that it had not been used to cast a ballot already; then, add one to the tally sheet of programmed but uncast ballots, and reprogram the VAC after checking the voter's registered party on the street address list.
That was about it. We were shown the startup and shutdown procedures for the machines, and cast a few sample ballots with them. The regular poll workers were noted on a list, and some paperwork or other was handled. I asked about getting ahold of a poll worker's manual, and was promptly given one from a large box that was sit
"I think that current electronic voting systems are better than the traditional systems in terms of security, and also in terms of usability for most people."
But how are those Diebold machines at allowing a recount? Do they finally create a paper trail, or is it still "faith-based voting"?
and i didnt have any probs. corse im familiar with computers and i showed up midday, not at the beginning
Wouldn't the loser be more likely to complain?
Yeah, I think pretty much anyone who reads slashdot probably heard about it.
And this.
And probably a few more links I could karma whore with.
It seems like these Diebold systems have all sorts of features like smart cards and locks that make them look secure, but when you actually kick the tires you realize things are not as secure as they should be.
We'd be much better off with a system that produces prints a human readable and machine readable piece of paper, and then put those pieces of paper into a ballot box. At least, when the security of a box in plain sight gets compromised we know that something happened... the worst case here is swearing in a losing candidate.
Not to be confused with the Free Nuke Zone.
Oops, my bad
Damn my brain working faster than my fingers...
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
So much for progress through IT!
Like Bill Maher said: "Voting with computers used to sound cool and futuristic, back in 1969. Today we know that computers are just big fuck-up machines."
I didn't think so.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Gore Lieberman -- 2000
litigious bastards
suck it sco!
Looks like a Diebold ATM machine's software crashed and dumped out into Windows XP.
Oops.
Wouldn't it be your fingers working faster than your brain?
"Ask not for whom the bone bones. It bones for thee." --Bender
Videos and photos of one of Diebold's ATM machines at Carnegie Mellon playing Beethoven today might amuse you.
All the places where he said
"It appeared to have recorded all of the votes properly, but I can't be 100% certain" or apparently.
With 1,000,000 people voting, an error 1/1000 is enough to change the results of election for the whole state. We need paper ballots.
It is even scarier, because he was a poll worker and did't realize this.
So, I'm going to argue against the seemingly overwhelming majority of people out there about voting machines.
:)
Yes, there are issues. Are the issues any worse than what can/has been done in the past with non-electronic voting? Probably not. I think that Florida proved that you can tamper with the old system just as well as an electronic one.
Eventually what voting comes down to is trusting that the people who run the system are honest. If you have dishonest people anywhere in the chain; you're going to get bogus results. The only solution that I can see to this issue is that the process must become more open.
1) Diebold needs to modify the machines to produce a printed slip that shows the party X voted for. X is then responsible for ensuring that the slip makes it into the collection basket. Bar codes can be used to correlate votes in the machine and votes on paper, and verify that they match. Because the electronic vote must match the paper vote, and because the user can verify the paper vote themselves, it becomes harder to cheat.
2) Make the vote counting process open. If anyone wants to, let them watch votes being counted. Canada does this, why not? Votes are counted to verify election results. In the event of a discrepancy, the paper votes would be used. The electronic tallies would be used for "quick" results.
Well, it's an idea, anyways
What, me worry?
I just ran into my Assembly Rep., Marc Pocan, who informs me his bill to require a paper trail on electronic voting machines passed the Assembly unanimously. No word on whether it will be taken up in the Senate, as the session is about to wind up. Sorry, no links yet.
We're already safe for this November, as the State Elections Board has not certified Diebold machines, or their competitors.
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
ok, ok... the obvious thing to do at this point for the Democrats, is to write a virus that infects Diebold machines and causes them to win. Definitely. Then the Republicans and their spies would learn of it, and try to make better viruses to stop the Democrats viruses. Before you know it, the election will be put on hold, and programmers everywhere will have jobs! :D
Now thats what i call politics.
Here are some photos of a crashed Diebold ATM from National City bank. Yep, that's the windows desktop and the college kids who took the photos were controling the machine. Be afraid.
From what was said there, it sounds like poll workers were looking at voter's screens. Sure it was when the machine was throwing a tantrum, but ...
I'm aware that in the electorate my mother lives in (in New Zealand, not US), at the last election several elderly immigrants votes were voided, because they needed their family in the booth with them to translate the ballot forms.
bits and peace
Nicholas Daley
Frankly, that guy doesn't have a clue.
Remember, Americans: Bring your voter registration card, and a sledgehammer for Diebold. They are stealing our freedom to vote, the very democracy over which so much blood has been spilled, and the corrupted political process is encouraging it via awarded contracts and almost silent acquiescence.
This crosses political affiliations and affects all Americans. I strongly believe that this must be stopped it by all means necessary or we will lose the ability to collectively affect the policies of our country, no matter how small your individual voice might be. This is zealous, without a doubt, but not all zealotry is bad. "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."
Live free or die.Does the Diebold do anything to to correct the traditionally crappy choice in candidates? Maybe if it let you create your own cadidate, position by position. Two parts "Simone", a dash of Hal, hmmmm....
Clitmap.com: A better adult search engine
And then you'll have a paper trail
Indefinitely Detained US Citizen
I may be paranoid here of just ignorant of how the final process works, but my biggest fear from these things involves the transfer of the data from the precinct machines back to its central point.
After the machines are dropped off and loaded into the "rented truck" some tech has to extract and accumlate the count data. How easy would it be to alter the counts before the data is transmitted to the central site? Suppose a non tech centric deputy was to oversee the final tally. It might be possible for the tech to alter the counts in plain sight of the deputy without him knowing specifically what's going on.
It's really hard for me to believe with the amount of tin foil programming/tech talent available that these systems have gone into use without something as simple as a printed ballot. There too much black box magic going on in these things for me to trust them...
This never seems to be addressed, but cost.
If these machines are more difficult to operate and more expensive to maintain, and require the hiring of additional personnel to administer, why are they being used?
Paper ballots seem exponentially cheaper in all respects, and I haven't seen a piece of oaktag crash in many years.
http://www.nukefreezone.net/archives/000140.html#1 15
Ok, I admit Diebold's systems are flawed. No Paper Ballot(tm), no trust. I agree.
/.ers are so frequently decrying "Method Patents" if we cannot fathom the creation of a *fair* automated tallying system (something more 'complex' than paper), why not question what the system itself is?
Diebold and its advocates are bent and determined to use them in elections. OK, lets do that.
The Comprimise(TM): Change the voting Method.*
If your country is split so close, so narrowly through the center, that the *POSSIBILITY* of tampering is not 100% obvious (that causes those riots in the streets...) why not look to garner a better concensus? Why not consider altering the *structure* of the debate? Why not consider the method?
We
If your public discourse is incapable of discussing *that* issue -- Real Reform of Government (like, I dont know, maybe more than a Democracy of the Republicrat Party). If your paperless ballot system was meant to build concensus, you wouldnt have this debate in the first place.
NO LARGE GROUP WOULD BE UNHAPPY WITH THE RESULTS. Maybe the "one person one vote, winner take all" system is just a little dated? Lets start communicating. Lets focus enough to discuss our governance...if we cant, why build all these "communication tools?".....oh, look, a shiny thing...
*Woha, woha, woha. Before you go flaming me, or modding me down, I am not delivering a flippant "this is the solution" answer, im suggesting a place to start thinking. I am not for, or against, *that particular method*. There are many, how about PR? (Use Google))
I think that Florida proved that you can tamper with the old system just as well as an electronic one.
Yes, but at least with Florida we know that election fraud occured. With the Dibold machines, how will we ever know?
Twenties Retirement
I was pissed off to have to use the new machines. I was considering voting absentee on election day (as I read that this would involve a paper ballot), or else making a stink at the voting booth and demanding a paper ballot, but I was really busy, and knew that my votes weren't likely to be critical in this election, so I let it slide.
In a word, the system sucks. From a voter's perspective, here is what happens:
1) Walk in, they ask you for your address and name. No ID requested.
2) Sign your name IN PENCIL.
3) They ask for your party affiliation ("Green" oh that's cute!)
4) They hand you a smartcard.
5) Go to the machine, insert the card, and use the touch-screen to vote.
6) The interface is terrible: Looks like a demo I that someone wrote on the plane ride over to California. Fonts are hard to read, the layout is busy, etc. etc. Other interface bugs I noticed: If you hit the "Next page" button twice, it would blink the button twice, even though only one page was turned. Just crappy UI overall.
7) I was VERY tempted to write in my own name on the "Write in" section for one of the offices. My thinking was that write-in candidates must be public info, right? So I could use this as a sort-of checksum to make sure my ballot was really cast. Make up a fake write-in candidate for an office that I didn't care about, then check the election results later. But I chickened out.
8) The end of the process is the worst: You eject your card from the machine, take it back to the poll worker, who then throws it into the pile of used cards. I was struck by this: was my vote on the card that he had just threw back into the stack? Upon further reflection, I realized my vote was on the voting machine, but the appearance was that my vote had just been thrown away.
Now to be fair, steps (1) and (2) have always been that way. No ID required (for good reason), but why sign your name in pencil?
But the rest of the system did not inspire confidence. It felt very, very sketchy.
I did a search on Money in Politics Database and found 27 records of DIEBOLD employees donating to political campaigns, and 16 of which to the Bush-Cheny 04 Campaign.
Indefinitely Detained US Citizen
As other people have posted here are pictures of a Diebold ATM crashed here on campus that dropped to the Windows XP display. We poked around at it for a while because the monitor was a touch screen (and a very, very crappy one that that). Interesting things:
- Windows media player was installed (as seen in the pictures)
- It's a P4 2GHz with 512mb of ram (wtf?! why on earth does it need that)
- There's a CD-RW installed
- There are two partitions and C: can't be accessed
- There's the standard crap that comes in My Documents (like the Beethoven playing)
- The printer is an Epson USB printer
- There was a device listed for ATM Driver or something, I presume what actually feeds cash.
- We never were able to get the network up, but there's an Intel network card in there.
- For some reason there are speakers so we could hear the Beethoven.
- It's running XP Embedded, didn't catch what version or what patches it had.
- There was some sort of Text-to-Speech (or maybe S-to-T) program
- As you can see Acrobat is installed
- Remote Desktop was enabled! (might have been turned on by one of us though)
That's what I remember from the 5 minutes before running to class.
Hmm... maybe we should check those facts.
I don't like the guy either, but this Florida crap has to stop. Complain about his policy in Iraq, in Afghanistan, domestically, whatever - there's plenty of good fodder for criticism - but sour grapes won't win you any minds.
If you don't trust Diebold, request an absentee ballot. In California, at least, these are still old fashion recountable paper.
The cake is a pie
Yes, but at least with Florida we know that election fraud occured. With the Dibold machines, how will we ever know?
what does it matter? if you know there was election fraud in florida in 2000 and nothing came of it, then why does it matter whether we know that future elections are similarly fraudulent?
I was an assitant systems inspector. We had problems as well, but they were not as bad as the article describes. Our PCM didn't boot into the software, but it was an easy fix -- someone else fixed it before I showed up. I actually ended up driving over to the next precinct over to rescue them -- they didn't have any teenagers working there so no one knew how to use a computer. I started poking around the root filesystem looking for a link to the executable. I noticed a directory called "autoexec" so I checked it out only to find that it contained neither the executable nor a link thereto. I finally found the actual location of the executable--it seemed to be on a datacard of some sort--and started it for them. We had one voting maching give a blank page to someone when it was in large print high contrast mode, but we just hit next and it was fine. The worst problem we had was this: At the end of the day we log into the machines with the admin access card and print a report of the vote totals. One of our machines failed to print -- it just cut off in the middle and wouldn't reprint (some paper trail, eh?). In fact, during the training session, I saw one machine print a line of gibberish when instructed to print. Maybe there's a buffer overflow in the print system somewhere. The worst part was that the voting stations give a total number of votes cast onscreen and a total on the printed tape, and on all of our machines but one, these did not match. They were all off by one vote. I got reports of the same behavior from other poll workers at different precincts. I cancelled one ballot that day, so that might explain the one machine with matching totals. Perhaps the total shown onscreen counts the admin login as a vote. At any rate, it's a stupid error. So, that's my story. Now I just gotta wait for the government to send my check...
Diebolds voting technology was actually put to the test by some security experts this year who found that:
- It was an "easy matter," they reported, to reprogram the access cards used by voters and vote multiple times.
- They were able to attach a keyboard to a voting terminal and change its vote count.
- And by exploiting a software flaw and using a modem, they were able to change votes from a remote location.
"Diebold, the machines' manufacturer, rushed to issue a self-congratulatory press release with the headline "Maryland Security Study Validates Diebold Election Systems Equipment for March Primary." The study's authors were shocked to see their findings spun so positively."
The central problem with electronic voting lies not with bugs, hardware failures, or security, but rather than with our modern concept of democracy and where we see ourselves going as citizens of a common nation.
It is clear that present electronic voting efforts are the first step in a general program of transforming voting as we know it into an online, decentralized process, with the final goal being a system where voting is an activity as simple and hassle-free as ordering a pizza or sufing to a website.
Therein lies the problem. As citizens of a common nation, our involvement in the democratic process should be something that brings us together, together with people we would not ordinarily encounter, for what can only be called our sacred ritual of casting votes. A ballot should not be a screen with virtual buttons floating in hyperspace, it should be a hefty card, symbolizing the hefty decision that lies with each voter, it shows our seriousness that decision needs is embodied in the real physical ballots that are carefully tallied and counted and not simply disseminated into electronic bits.
The process of voting should be a little inconveniencing, with voters having to drive to the polling station, stand in line, and punch a ballot. It reinforces our sense of civic pride to have to make a bit of an effort to vote. It demeans the democratic system for the voting process to be allowed to atrophy into a simple matter of point-and-click, no need to get out of your chair. Choosing the laws and leadership of a nation should be an act more involved than switching channels.
When the once-proud rituals of democracy are reduced to a set of simple gestures, once the paricipants in the voting process are reduced to a mass of isolated individuals typing on keyboards or pushing buttons on PDAs, a sense of togetherness is lost. The insiduous decentralization of the voting system that is the end result of electronic voting can only lead to the erosion of our sense of citizenship, of being equal paricipants in something larger than ourselves. Could the erosion of democracy itself be far behind? It seems the dystopian corporate-run societies of so-called "cyberpunk" "fiction" more than just sci-fi.
>Democracy of the Republicrat Party
Yeah, keep believing there are no differences between the parties. Its that kind of thinking that got us in this mess in the first place.
If you want reform, you're going to have to work with the system and within it to change it. Voting Green and walking away is about the least you can do and about as reformist as voting LaRouche and patting yourself on the back for being such an independant thinker.
Heaven forbid "reformists" meet the people running for office and help get a more progressive democrat on the ticket instead of just crying foul, voting third party, and bitching for 4 more years.
Does anyone else find it weird that the maker of the horribly insecure "paperless" Diebold voting machines is a massive Bush Campaign contributor?
In Ohio [he] told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.
O'Dell attended a strategy pow-wow with wealthy Bush benefactors - known as Rangers and Pioneers - at the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month. The next week, he penned invitations to a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser to benefit the Ohio Republican Party's federal campaign fund - partially benefiting Bush - at his mansion in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington.
The letter went out the day before Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, also a Republican, was set to qualify Diebold as one of three firms eligible to sell upgraded electronic voting machines to Ohio counties in time for the 2004 election.
[Link to the story quoted above]
I get modded down to troll for posting a link to a CNN story refuting a parent post? Seems like the liberal minds around here like to practice the censorship that they condemn. I apologize, oh great ones, for posting something that might run counter to your preconceived ideas.
Well, these voting machines are the wrong tool to fix this problem. The electronic voting machine like Diebold's are meant to totally erase the paper trail which is very bad thing, IMO. What they should make is basically a ballot booth that prints punchcards. You stand at the machine and it asks you:Then the machine punches the ballot for you, so there won't be any confusion as to who you're voting for. You can also run an independant tally in the electronic machine, then check it against the punch cards by feeding them back in to a reader, if everything meets up, then few people can contest the results.
Killed in a car accident, head of a company that was trying to push for a different system with a paper trail of votes.
Suspicious?
This space available.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My speculation is that it caches the bloated application(s) into a RAM disk. Makes things quicker. RAM is cheap.
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
More details at the posted link. Very amusing. A story submission in itself. Was anyone here, er, there?
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
i STILL would like to send a shout-out to mah west sac peeps! more specifically: DieBold Election Systems 1300 South River Road, Suite 135, West Sacramento CA, 95691 btw, u can mark shit off topic all you want, but when you spend all your time analyzing someone else's shitty job we get nothing done. you want change? do something about it! and at times complaining or writing do loops just doesn't cut it! -grep_who
More like "-1, Truth"
lobbyist
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
A Q/A transcribed (by me) from the scanned manuals distributed to poll workers:
"what about the issue of Open Source Code?"
Diebold's ballot tabulation source code is checked extensively by an independent testing authority which tests according to voting software standards developed by the Federal Election Commission. Once this test process is successfully completed, the source code is placed in an escrow facility.
Source Code is not open to the public to protect not only the companies intellectual property, but also to prevent the possibility of tampering or other fraudulent manipulation of the tabulation program.
in Georgia, the Secretary of State challenged a citizen to try to tamper with the ballot tabulation program after this citizen made claims about the program's vulnerability. When the citizen learned the source code was not available, she abandoned the effort to tamper with the program.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
OK, now my reaction to that Q/A:
The FEC hasn't published any real testing standards, so it's not terribly useful to say that the code was testing against the FEC standards. Also, it's not useful to say that the code is in excrow, or audited, unless the code in production is built from the code in escrow and audited, because otherwise you haven't proven anything other than that the same company that produced the voting system you're running also produced some code that passed your audit and went into escrow. That is, there's no reason to believe that it's the same code, so the audit doesn't prove anything about the code in production.
And, of course, we all know after the last few decades that "security through obscurity" doesn't work as well as "security through peer revew".
And I don't know what the Secretary of State's ability to intimidate one critic proves, since several other security audits of proprietary voting systems have revealed massive security flaws.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
The data seams to be on commercial flash cards, so :
:
- Make the format public
- Publish a public/private-key signing algo (with up to 1 MBit keys)
- Everyone that is interested can show up at the end of the election and sign the results on the flash card. (With a flash card reader/writer) On the flash card will be his public key and the sign.
- The card is put back in the voting booth who verifies that the results are unaltered and that all signs are valid. If all signatures are ok, the booth gives a signed report to all signing parties about the signatures used on the results.
- Then the card is on the way to the central point.
If anybody has a problem with the result from his precinct, he can come with the list of signers and ask to see the result and it's signatures. If a signature is missing, we have a problem.
This should garantuee that it's impossible that
1) Someone tempers with a result. They would have to break the public key and even the CIA is (hopefully) unable to break a 1 Mb key.
2) Someone just claims without merrit that result is tempered for "fun" or profit. As their signature is on the result, you can easily point out that they signed these result on the voting day.
In case someone shows up with a broken device to halt the election, one could just ignore him after 3 (or 10) unsuccesfull signings. His fault for using a broken device and not bringing a backup device.
While this doesnt prevent tempering inside the voting booth (to prevent this we still need a paper trail and a paper trail the voter can see), I'm very confident that this makes it impossible to temper with the data on the transfer.
That is, if the signers keep their private keys private.
Suggestion for paranoids : keep the private keys only on the signing device, destroy any storage (including RAM) they were on during their generation, do not connect to any network during generation, and destroy the signing device's storage right after succesfully signing.
I would argue that this is even more secure than traditional ballots. Of course, the candidates would need to have someone computer savy they trust to use this protection, but in this computer dependand world, a candidate should have these.
Of course, if someone has a (quantum) computer that can break 1 Mb keys, we're out of luck, but if somebody has such a thing and can keep it secret, he has ways to temper traditional elections too.
And to come back from to the first point : "PUBLIC FORMAT". I completly agree with you about black box magic. Anything in a voting machine must be complety open (open as in "can be freely inspected by everyone without a NDA", not as in "copyleft"), or else it cannot be trusted. Including formats and sourcecode. And we still need paper trails, just in case we overlooked an obscure (intentional or not) bug.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof for my post which this sig is too small to contain.
Diebold takes the current 2-party system to its logical extreme. No real choice made, while maintaining the illusion that you had one. (They choose for you.)
that autorun is disabled?
Couldn't you just walk in with your own card containing an autorun.inf and a nasty virus? How intimate are the daisy-chained machines? Would it spread with the data upload?
There are SO many ways to break this system that it is obvious that the current ruling class has lost touch with reality.
I think we need to organize public awareness campaigns about how easily the votes can be tampered with and how hard the Republicans are trying to push this through in order to fill their own pockets and gain power.
The US Government is more broken than the voting machines. Sounds like it is time for the government to receive a format and reinstall. Open source this time please.
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
Trust me, I have a persecution complex about many things... but suggesting that the slashdot moderation system is being run by a shadowy cabal bent on suppressing expression on a forum for a fringe, not politically important group stretches credulity and is likely just egotism on your part.
Perhaps you were modded down for the tone of your post. Considered that? Or does Occam's Razor tell you that the shadowy cabal was the most probable hypothesis?
If you SHOW, to EVERYONE, that the system has problems then that would say something to those in power.
That's good in theory, but in practice, the mainstream media, which is currently the most effective way of disseminating information, has been anything but objective in its selection of what is and isn't worthy of covering. It's worth noting that the media has found an interesting method of injecting its bias by selectively deciding what is and isn't worth covering, which in many cases, is more effective than spinning something in their favor. Either way, the media is becoming progressively more aggressive in employing both methods.
The Internet couldn't have come at a better time in terms of giving more people, more sources of information, but its ability to influence or educate the populace is trivial compared to the major media conglomorates. Notwithstanding the constant quips by the mainstream media designed to undermine the Internet as an alternative source of valid news.
As a result, I don't believe that something like civil disobedience is effective any more. A good example of this can be found in the network coverage of the WTO meetings (in Seattle for example) where thousands protested, and it was covered by the major media, but little more was conveyed than the idea that a bunch of freakazoids smashed some stuff. The agenda of the majority of the protesters, the issues they raised, were all but ignored in favor of 10-second video clips of cars burning and fringe characters acting unruly.
So the current battle isn't to find the truth, it's to figure out how to get the truth to the people through a web of entities which not only will oppose your efforts, but dilligently work to undermine you at every aspect. If your methods involve anything illegal, this gives the media powers that oppose you the evidence they need to dismiss you, and destroy you without any discussion or second thought.
It has to be collected and retained like an old fashioned paper ballot. In which case, electronic voting offers nothing.
Say it prints out the vote. The tally still says what CEO "I am committed to delivering Ohio's electoral votes to G.W. Bush" wants the tally to say.
Canada counts paper ballots under the watchful eye of partisans, and gets it done in a few hours. How many ballots can you count in an hour? Hire enough counters and let the parties watch. Done fsking deal.
I was in the odd position of being called a luddite by a computer science academic. He was Russian, and figured electronic vote rigging was not such a new thing. I have a little more of a security background, and I think the challenges of securing the system end-end are insurmountable. As the systems are now, they are laughably easy to corrupt. And is there any greater incentive to cheat than political power?
if you're not into breaking things, get an absentee ballot. you can do it from home, and those are always paper.
http://www.gutenberg.net/etext93/civil11.txt
^---that's the link.
George W Bush has won the election yet again with a total of 99% of the votes despite not even running.
They answer the question themselves, without even realizing it:
"what about the issue of Open Source Code?"
(scroll down a bit)
Source Code is not open to the public...
Now, why is it not open to the public? The first reason given is to protect some unnamed company, in this case Diebold. The second reason is to protect against terrorists, which is the new word for hackers in case you hadn't heard.
In other words:
To protect the company from any liability, and to protect the public from terrorist attack, the vote tabulation code will remain secret.
Who was the lucky Georgian who was challened by the Secretary of State? What an honor, to hack for the people of your entire state!
> Eventually what voting comes down to is trusting that the people who run the system are honest.
So your argument is we should let Diebold run the election and just trust them? You think this is a convincing argument?
I don't get it, are you saying anyone can go and vote at any polling place if they know the name and address of someone who lives in the allotted area? What am I missing?
That CNN story doesn't explain all the problems -- like purging anyone with the same first/last name as a felon in largely democratic districts, causing chaos at the polls.
I don't doubt that Bush got more votes in Florida. In that sense, the CNN story is right. I do, however, doubt that more people went to the polls intending to vote for Bush.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
This is typical Off by one error - ...1 (duh)
Computers count from 0 ( where 0 is 1..)
People count from 1 ( where 1 is
Move along - nothing to see here...
-FL
Guys with Texas accents wearing the words 'Bush' on the back of their jackets neeed to 'inspect' the machines?
Then the dirt began to surface. Internal emails. Party affiliations. Conflicts of interest. Bad code.
This stuff has been laid bare. The world has been alerted. Very Smart People(tm) have given their dour warnings.
At one point I was even getting a little optimistic. I posted something here to the effect of, "Well, this is the test! Everybody now knows and agrees that electronic voting is a Bad Idea, and now we'll get to see how proactive Americans are going to be. The choice has been placed before them. I can't imagine that nothing will be done about this!"
Foolish, foolish Fantastic Lad!
Americans are not just asleep; they are tied down! Too tired after their long work days to do anything. Too brain-wiped by their cell phones, drugged food, anti-depressants, television and social conditioning to be able to gather the brain cells required to elicit anything more than a vague, "Aw nuts" response. And the media is owned by the wrong people. Man, back in Superman's day, the headlines would have shouted, "CORRUPTION!" and there would have been public outcry, riots, Bushmen hauled from office and run out of town on good ol' American rails!
But instead, people choose to sleep.
Man. Some days I wish I was an American living in that once bold nation just so I could shotgun some asshole politico or Diebold rep and be hauled away with a raised fist while American housewives whimpered and their stout husbands shook their heads, "Well, something had to be done! It's a shame it came to this, but Americans simply don't lie down for this sort of thing!"
Well, perhaps at one time this might have been true. There was a time when hanging a corrupt politician would have been considered a reasonable response. But now the people are so controled, that their rage can be directed with pin-point accuracy at whatever target the corrupt politicos want destroyed. "Just blow up a building or two and blame the people we want to see take a fall! That ALWAYS works!"
Pathetic.
-FL
nt
~Idarubicin
so long as it isn't dubya
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
From the article:
> Few people without a strong sense of civic duty
> would work a fourteen-hour day for $60 or $100
Maybe they should outsource voting booths to India.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
I have to say that I don't agree with the commonly stated idea that all voting by computer screen is bad. I think that many of the points that have been raised are good (possibility of hacking, etc) and that the paper-trail point is a good addition. I'm already planning on writing my first ever letter to my state representatives to suggest some of this and explain some of the problems with the current system.
While I don't believe Open Source is the solution to everything, I'm somewhat surprised that it didn't make better inroads on computer voting. The voting point may have been lost on this simply because DieBold was chosen as a company rather than one that had experience with Open Source (or even 3rd party code reveiw) or a company that had less to hide (see posts involving DieBold ATMs).
I think that the system could be very effective with a few modifications (the idea, not the DieBold system).
One, go Open Source. The right to vote is a right for every citizen of the United States. This process should be transparent so that rather than instigate fears that the vote was not counted or could be lost in the computer (purposely or accidentally) the end user could instead be at least more sure that the system was simply a way to tabulate votes since the source was free for anyone to look at.
Forget the FUD surrounding Open Source voting, this is like the FUD surrounding handgun laws. Opening the source for voting systems would indeed allow people to view the code and find exploits, BUT rather than just the hackers/whoever having access to the exploits they would also be findable by law abiding citizens, which means they could be fixed. This brings me to two:
Two, put the code into a public forum and leave it there for a minimum of 12 months. This should allow time for many people to examine it, test it, tinker with it, atempt to break it. I could see groups of peopple banding together in their spare time. Heck, make it a competition to see who can find the most backdoors, holes, and bugs in the system. Give them extra points if they can provide a clean fix to the specific problem.
Three, paper trail and redundancy. Have each vote tabulated not only in the computer but printed to a receipt. Collect the receipts on the way out by way of a locked bin. As people get used to this it might be possible later on to move to a more high-tech method of redundancy, but this should do for now. Place these bins in locked access vaults (still unopened) that require a two or three key access, either at a bank or maybe have something specially built at the courthouse, or somewhere else that is relatively high security.
Four, still write the electronic votes to a single removeable memory card or the like.
Basically I would see this as a server client deal with the main server receiving the full list of votes from the client voting machines in that room, recording them, then writing the results to a smartcard or compact flash card. At that point the removeable HDD and the flash card are both delievered to the central location and we have additional redundancy. A simple sticker applied to both could mark which district they come from.
Five, when the voting period is concluded, the HDD's and cards should be collected by lectoral area and processed. Anything questionable in the results could be double checkd against the machine readable receipts we created in the earlier steps.
So we have code that is more highly trusted, double redundancy for the electronic count, paper trail as backup, and yet I still feel there should be a better way to solve this, simply because making a machine count 280 million pieces of paper has got to suck...
Whee signature.
A papertrail just gives a false sense of security - this is like a database transaction problem. Who says that just because you've got a paper receipt that the machine used the same electronic results? The *only* way to get around this is for the machine to produce a human-readable printout - which is then counted by a simple local mechanical machine. Then those same printouts are sent up to be counted again at the county level, then again up at the state level. This would allow anyone to easily balance the counts at the individual, preceint, county, and state level. Everything could be easily audited and any mistakes in logistics identified. Just about all other solutions I've seen require faith in some part of the system. What I'm recommending here isn't convenient, and is labor-intensive. But who cares? We're talking about voting right? So, spend a little time on it. Hell, don't the Canadians have a completely manual system?
What is wrong with paper ballots ? Maybe someone can enlighten me. I live in a 80M poeple nation where paper ballots seem to work without any problem. We have elections, some of them rather complicated, and usually you have to vote on something every 1-2 years. We always get speedy and dependable results - even with national elections that are way mor complicated than a US presidential elections we usually have a stable estimation before midnight on voting day, ad a provisorical result sometime next day. There never was any problem with vote fraud worth mentioning (though occasionally a politician gets in trouble with the finer points of anti-vote-fraud laws) and basically the perception is that this just works.
Why can't yopu make that work in the US ?
1) Diebold needs to modify the machines to produce a printed slip that shows the party X voted for. X is then responsible for ensuring that the slip makes it into the collection basket.
No the slip should drop into a locked box inside the machine when the person leaves the machine. The slip should be shown behind a plexiglass panel. This prevents me from voting one way an turning in a forged slip to delibeately force a recount. It also applies the KISS philisophy.
Bar codes can be used to correlate votes in the machine and votes on paper, and verify that they match.
No they can't. That would totally negate your first idea, since HUMANS CAN'T READ BARCODES. I would not be able to tell that the barcode on that slip is actually the correct one for the canidate I chose.
Life is too short to proofread.
The VAC is then given to the voter, who inserts the VAC into any one of the stations, and is then presented with the ballot for their party.
So, in other words, if I read this correctly, you are only allowed to vote for your registered party on election day?
That is plain pathetic. What if the one and only candidate for your party suddenly reveals something you don't like 2 days before the election. You won't have to time to register to vote for another party?
No wonder voter turnout is so low.
I reckon they should do away with primaries. Let anybody stand who manages to get a certain number of votes and on voting day you can vote for anybody you like - even if it happens to be for a party you don't normally vote for.
3) Who the fuck needs a president anyway. That's just a relic from the monarchy days.
Who needs a large government anyway? That's just a relic from the times of the pharaoh. Government is soo ancient history.
So if a corporation wanted a particular law passed they would have to bribe 2000 politicians!!. I am not saying that they could not but let's make it expensive for them for gods sake.
But as the amount of power one person wields decreases, their bribery threshold is expected to also decrease.
Put another way, if there is one cake at a party with 10 people then you could expect a decent slice. If there are 60 people with a slightly larger cake, then you wouldn't expect the same sized slice as before.
There would also be a larger selection of people to 'influence'. It's easier to monitor <500 people, when compared to 3000.
Each politician only has to answer to 100K people which means all voices have a chance of being heard.
You might think that this would increase voter turnout, but every national election also involves local elections. Local politicians typically answer to far less than 100K people, which means that most people don't bother to have their voices heard regardless of opportunity.
Only if there is massive concensus however do the laws get passed.
Here's the problem. Law makers make laws - it's their job description. Since everyone knows that you need massive concensus to get any law passed, you've opened the door to backroom deals even further.
It would be an awsome system.
Time to deflat the ego. It's a different system with different (better or worse) problems.
I love how people like yourself forget to mention that countless organizations, from the NYT to the AP to the Miami Herald went to and recounted themselves using any avaliable standard regarding hanging chads, and Bush STILL won.
An MIT/Caltech study of voting technology found that paper ballots are the most accurate.
The 2004 Democratic primary had a turnout pattern of primary-specific apathy (lower than expected votes) and caucus-specific inspiration (high and record high votes). Why did the New York primary record a 20-year low turnout on the same day that the Minnesota caucus recorded a 33-year high turnout?
South Carolina's state Dem party fought pressure from the national Dems to institute a loyalty oath for voters, which would have torpedoed Edwards. State officials chose to hand count paper ballots for security, even though machines were available. South Carolina was one of the few 2004 primaries to report record turnout and the only state where Edwards won.
Hand counted paper ballots are the gold standard of voting. Cheaper and faster are neither necessary nor desirable properties of biennial elections.
Think of how much tech is in these electronic voting machines? Paper ballots with really simple tech would work. Thumbprinting ballots would take care of the many vote/one person problem. As for the counting problem. Banks have been counting things for years. Maybe people should ask them.
Poopie. These machines can be hacked, but can they be hacked enough to generate the thousands of fake votes needed to make a difference?
yes, that is correct. In order to provide anonymous voting to all registered voters, you are not required to have ID. The only thing keeping you from using someone elses name is the possibility that they will show up later (or have already shown up). In fact, this seems like a fabulous way to invalidate _all_ results at a polling place which is not likely to vote in your favor. Simply show up early with a couple of dozen people who claim to be local residents. When the real people show up later there will be no way to determine which votes were valid and which weren't.
I was about to say the same thing. The CNN story was off-topic. It didn't say one way or another if fraud occured.
Thankfuly they dont make Automated External Defibrillators. I dont understand how people can create devices to restart someone's heart, (completely unattended!) with 100% accuracy, but cannot create a voting system that is as accurate.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
sounds like a great idea. Anyone who knows they're going to be voting on a digital system should show up with friends...
er...if Bush got more votes (which he did, if you use the recount method Gore wanted), how does that in any way argue against election fraud? It just shows that, if there was fraud, it worked...
If you read through the discussion, I'm sure you'll see plenty of mention of various differences in the voting procedures between democratic and republican districts in florida that affected how many votes were successfully cast.
Twenties Retirement
"I think that current electronic voting systems are better than the traditional systems in terms of security."
We know you are a Diebold employee 'cause anybody who claims the above must be being paid to say it. If U R not a Diebold employee, you're kidding, right???? Whatever "security" (if any) is on evm's is laughable. And why are officials fighting us when we demand PAPER trails.