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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!"
So much for progress through IT!
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
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.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...
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 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...
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]