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Diebold Fails Again in San Diego
ptudor writes "An article in today's San Diego Union Tribune reveals nearly 3000 absentee ballots in the San Diego primary one month ago were miscounted. 'The miscounts occurred because multiple scanners simultaneously fed the absentee ballot data into the computer tabulation system. The large number of ballots and candidates on them overwhelmed the system. Diebold spokesman David Bear said the company has provided a software fix to the county for the new problem.' The irregularities were found in a routine post-election review." You can also read more about the problems on election day.
I hope they fix all these issues in time, before those votes count for real...
There won't be any software-fixes for a flawed political-system!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
They really ARE using Microsoft Access ;)
Let's take a vote on who pays for all these mishaps, the taxpayers or the company!... no, wait...
I don't know about everyone else but we try to fully test our software before moving it to production. Seems like they should do the same... "During the March 2 election, one of the pieces of equipment used at polling sites was not fully tested, and it failed."
... if Diebold and Cisco are owned by the same parent company!
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
I hope these don't have any Cisco equipment built in to them...
-Patrick
"They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
How hard is it REALLY to count and store votes?
I mean, there are sites on the net that conduct thousands of transactions in very short periods of time. It doesn't seem like this is really that hard.
How can a company like diebold still be in business if they can't take data from some form fields, and put it into a database?
Have you seen the "secret" video? Go here and take a look. I love how these things can't be trusted to add correctly.
Pen and paper: the only way to vote. Say no to machines.
Is it me, or does the thought of having the scanners overwhelm the system inspire some sort of DoS attack?
All we need now are a bunch of election volunteers feeding the scanners such that the main tabulating computer crashes... I suppose if they do it right, they could crash the entire system and lose all the counts.
OTOH, at least absentee ballots *HAVE* paper markings to indicate one's vote, so manual recounts are available, still.
Somebody obviously missed the multiprogramming/multithreading lecture in college.
I didn't vote in San Diego, but I am close by and did vote on a Die-Bold system. I have to admit I was tempted to go to the registrars office and vote manually or pick up an absentee ballot. Just so I could have a verifyable paper trail. Its interesting to learn that the absentee's could get messed over just as well.
I was suprised though while standing in line that the two people in front of me had absentee ballots and chose to vote via touch screen anyway.
Until there is a way to have two or three safety checks that are electronic, we are always going to see these problems. Have an electronic machine from one company send the vote to its database, and print a "receipt" for the vote out. Then, have they receipt scanned into a system built by a different company, and check the results. The voter can also look at the receipt and verify that is who they voted for, as well, as being double checked to veryify there are no "programming" errors.
-- johntracy.com, because everybody else is wrong.
Of course, there were only around 6000 votes in the first place..
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Americans don't let the rascals take office the day after the election. We don't need computer screen ballots. Paper with an X in the box is fine.
Bettern punch cards.
Bettern electronic.
Cheaper too.
The real problem with elections is voter apathy and the influence of big bucks. Making incumbents spend all their money and re-raise for the next election would help more than buying expensive, insecure voting machines. Letting people deduct $50 bucks from the top of their 1040 for contributions to legal candidates would help too.
"The irregularities were found in a routine post-election review."
Oh, so that's what they're calling it...
If California government spent $32 million on this system that has been so controversial, I have just one question:
Why wasn't there more quality assurance involved?
Stupid people piss me off, stupid bureaucrats piss me off even more
if ( voter != white )
discard(vote);
I still don't see why we can't stick to paper...
My area usues well labled and hard to screw up fill in the circle sheets that you feed into the scanner yourself. It's reliable paper and offers very quick counting.
Usually I'm all for using technology to make life easier, but this is one area where I think reliable is more important than easy.
Yup.
-Derick
"These performance failures are unacceptable," Ekard wrote. "Having a reliable and trouble-free voting system is absolutely essential to the county. Your failure to provide such a system in the March election was extremely troubling and any issues that remain must be fully resolved long before the November election."
Problem is, it is no longer "long before the November election."
I have commented on this subject before, and see nothing that changes my view; rather, it reinforces it.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Jon Stewart: "But these things can't be that insecure..."
Some security researcher: "We broke into the board of elections and completely changed the result, erasing all of our traces and got back out"
Stewart: "...um, but sure, you give a guy a day and..."
S.S.R.: "We did it in 5 minutes."
[Paraphrased, but the idea is here... Also, it's possible that the last statement by the SSR was not referring to the entire operation; the Daily Show appearso to have a habit of making deceptive cuts. But who knows...]
Real election fraud is not in the counting of votes, but rather the registration of voters. Why does everyone focus so much time on making sure everyone's vote is counted, rather then on seeing if they should be voting in the first place?
How is it something that can handle the amount of traffic Slashdot does with duct tape & bubblegum (MySQL & Perl), yet a Diebold machine can't handle 3000 absentee ballots? Friggin' amazing. To quote Weird Al, "What kinda chip they got in there, a Dorito?"
You have multiple entries coming into the same table. Wouldn't it stand to reason that the database would lock that table upon a write request thus allowing only 1 write at a time? Wouldn't that keep things running more smoothly?
Or, was this a case of table locking causing a deadlock as all the other threads got stuck waiting for the table to unlock again?
Either way, it seems that you don't run into these problems with a paper ballot. After all, if the box is getting too full, someone can put a new box out.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
has ties to the republican party as one of it's largest donators. this whole thing stinks of day old feces.
In all this talk about electronic voting machine failures, I still don't comprehend how the process can be so complicated that it has so many failures, requires full featured OS (i.e. Windows), etc... I mean all voting is a position, list of names, select 1 or more (depending on the type of election). Couldn't this all be done with code small enough to fit on a ROM or something that would be almost impossible to tamper with? Even votes could be somehow "burned" into a write-once type of memory. Simple network adapter to transfer the results.
In many areas absentee votes are not counted except in the case of a very close election. The effect of a "malfunctioning" voting machine might easily be to make what looks like a very close election be a not-very-close one.
There is no way to win. Diebold is guarding all the doors, they are holding all the keys.
Or tech support. Many machines were stuck in a wierd default state, having their firmware batteries run out for being so long in storage.
There was not adequate tech support, and many districts had techie, unauthorized voters pitching in to help get the machines up. While I'm glad for their service (they could have just walked away) I worry about how problematic that could be in the future.
I think that it's a terribly damning sign that Slashdot generally condemns e-voting.
Most Slashdotters are geeks, many hard-core computer geeks. They use computers far more than the typical person, to handle many, many aspects of their lives. Most of them were using email and IMing systems well before the general populace. Slashdot is almost universally enthusiastic about new technological advances (humanoid robots, organic computing, OLEDs, new storage technologies, mp3/ogg players, new operating systems, etc). And yet, standing WAY out among all this is e-voting, which Slashdot is overwhelmingly negative on.
This is no more than one data point, but it's a very strong, influential, and *negative* data point against e-voting. A lot of people with interests in computer security read Slashdot -- if they feel that it isn't worth trying to trust e-voting, isn't it worth listening to them?
May we never see th
> He's my brother
No, you got it wrong...
He's my Sysadmin.
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
The voting process demands openness and accountability, and for these reasons software cannot be used, even if it's open source. Voting must remain dependant on human countable physical ballots (or similar).
One idea I had would be as follows:
In an election with 4 candidates there would be 4 transparent tubes, each coated with an opaque wrapper. Voters would insert a coin-shaped plastic token into the cylinder representing their favourite candidate, and when the votes need to be counted the opaque wrapper would be removed to simply show which candidate had won. It's obvious, completely transparent and recounts are unnecessary because the winner should be obvious to all.
Occured to you this was was meant as a joke?
Help fight continental drift.
I used to write mission critical software (as in, you-screw-up-and-your-user-can-die) for the US Army (Artillery Control). We had to pass internal unit test, integration test, system test, FQT, fielded IOT&E. At each point (past developer level integration), if an anomaly occurred, a trouble report was generated. All priority 1 and 2 reports HAD to be addressed and resolved. Priority 3 needed to be resolved or have a formal waiver.
1 - Failure to perform, user at risk
2 - Failure to perform, no workaround
3 - Failure to perform, workaround available
4 - Irritating/annoyance
5 - other
In the voting arena, I would say that problems with inaccurate counts would be priority 2 (since nobody dies directly). There should be NO WAY any fielded system should have those sorts of trouble.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
... only idiots do.
And there are a lot of them.
Secondly, just use paper ballots and be done with it. If you need to see how it's done, come to Canada.
Fiat Homos et Pereat Theos
When a consultant I reviewed their product suite as well as other vendors such as Votec. They use MS SQL Server and Visual Basic. How funny. I knew their products would fail. Their off the record breagging involved hyping their M$ team and saying they got some of the best minds in the MCSE market!!!! As well they felt my ideas with using Transaction servers with their product suite for verification was a bit a farfetched. Uh huh!! Anyways - it is funny. Cheers
With a company name as Die bold, can anyone seriously suggest they don't know they are going to go down in flames, and just like SCO tries to make as much noise as possible while doing so?
What's the next company name? Killmyselflaughing?
Um, well the system worked fine until it tried to do more than 2 things at once, then it borked..
Software quality assurance usually involves load testing, apparently something they neglected. Looks like the guy who hacked the whole thing in BASIC was also the QA engineer.
TallGreen CMS hosting
Read the last paragraph on that article you linked to. I ask you, Slashdotters, is there *not* a great election conspiracy afoot? :-)
May we never see th
There is something like 2000 pages on regulations and cirtification requirements your product most go through in order to be cirtified by the US Governement. The spec is unreal. I was invovled in this but can't say where. I will say Diebold was a competitor. Local governments don't have the same necessary must have requirements. The main issue is each state has separate laws for voting. You basically need to write software Helen Keller with a 20 IQ can use. That is tough.
CA can't even be trusted to properly oversee a utility industry and you expect them to handle voting? ;)
Be happy. Nothing else matters.
Careful!
If a voter can walk off with a receipt, that means that their vote can be verified to outside parties. This means that votes can be bought, which is definitely a bad thing. I assume you meant that the paper receipt would be "eaten" by the scanning machine, but it's an important distinction.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
# dieharder.sh
/tmp/backup.db /tmp/backup.db|mail -s "Winner by a landslide" public@america.com
# etard0 @ infiltrated dot net
for i in `sed '/kerry/!d' *`
do
sed 's/kerry/bush/g;s/nader/bush/g'$i >>
echo
done
I have been wondering lately if phsyically damaging these machines is not justified in a system that is supposed to cherish democracy to such a high degree. Civil disobedience is justified in some cases, and I believe that the use of unverifiable electronic voting machines with known vulnerabilities is just such a case.
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.
Have college professors give the task of writing voting software as a group assignment. Tell them it's work 40-50% of their grade. I'm sure we would get far better results than what the Diebold people are making. Also, cost to taxpayer: $0. Then hire some competent (and way in debt) grad students to do maintenance.
There really is no excuse for this kind of bad engineering. It's not as if computer science is not well understood (we created it after all). Do the government and Diebold both have no idea how to engineer and test a relatively simple vote counting system? How did it get 'confused' by a large number of candidates/votes? How was this system tested?
TallGreen CMS hosting
You would have thought by now that people would have told Diebold to take their voting machines and shove it.
You would also think that another company would have tried to make it into this market, which it seems like would be fairly easy since exhibiting a failure rate lower than Diebold seems achiveable.
Unfortunately for us, the shortcomings of one company are probably going to ruin the chance of e-voting becoming commonplace in our society anytime soon.
The fact is, in most other industries, if a vendor makes such a crappy product, and it has been proven multiple times to make a crappy product, that vendor is usually dropped and another one is found.
Are there other vendors of e-voting machines that Diebold? I hope there are, and I hope governments wise up and realize that Diebold should be boycotted when it comes to anything to do with counting ballots.
And remember, this company also makes ATMs...
Maybe it's just me, but the parent post's echo of the MAIN ARTICLE may not deserve +5 Interesting; perhaps the moderators didn't read the article themselves, or haven't followed all of the eVoting threads here over the past few weeks.
Yes, the idea of the voter-verifiable paper trail IS the main idea of the article. The voter should be able to request the receipt but not be able to take it home (to prevent vote buying), and blind people should be able to have an audible verification done with earphones.
Friendly Tip to Moderators: the quality of this discussion thread will improve if you go up to the top of the screen and select "Newest First" instead of "Oldest First". Many posts past the first 100 are well worth reading; you don't have to understand all previous posts to moderate later posts.
I didn't see this in anyone else's reply, but if it's there and I missed it, pardon my redundance... The Computer Ate My Vote
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
It seems that VoteHere decided to go the other way and open the source for scruitiny. It's a great decision on their part, however I think they're also trying to cut development costs, since they can't offshore it.
my $0.02
This article highlights problems also. In the follow-up it appears that Diebold still claims that their systems work, despite evidence to the contrary.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
What about Scantron? That thing never broke down, even though there were a few times I wish it would have.
We put enough faith in it to tally the aptitude and academic future of our youth it should be good enough to tally the leaders of tomorrow.
for the voters reading /. here is an excellent site showing all the troubles with this company and others. share the link with others.
http://blackboxvoting.com
this should be setting off alarms for anyone who remembers the Florida fiasco. Florida's hanging-chad solution....move to Diebold boxes....AHHHH!!!HERE WE GO AGAIN!!!
It's great that the clip is available online, but it has become apparent to me that the knowledge of the voting machine problem is not widely known. Even at the two tech conventions that I recently attended, one of which was oriented to non-profits including political action groups, most of the attendees that I spoke with had little knowledge of who Deibold is, of the problems with computerized voting that have already occurred, or of the inherent design problems that could be used to corrupt the election results using these machines.
What would it take to get that clip televised?
Read, L
The Indian call centers couldn't understand the CA valley accent.
think about it. Now think about the level of developers that are being hired by Diebold.
God Save Us All
Sincerely, author of Embedded Propaganda
Maybe not in our lifetime, but someday...
Very interesting... - sounds too strange to be true, could there be more to the story than what we are hearing?
I agree that Diebold should fix the problems, but how likely does it seem that they will ever prduce a reliable system, based on their record? (I quote the e-mail sig of a high Diebold official, don't remember which: "If voting made a difference, it would be illegal." sorry, but I can't find the emails anywhere at the moment, so no link) What we need is transparency. The code on voting machines should be publicly available for scrutiny and input. I guess you'd call that *gasp* open source. In the current climate of IP paranoia, though, I suppose this is only a pipe dream.
Can somebody please explain to me why these systems are so complicated to get working?
A naive approach:
1. Have a SQL server for holding the data. Practically the only data you need is how many votes there are for each candidate.
2. The machine collects the vote from the user. Display a button for each candidate, let them click one with a touch screen.
3. Box makes secure SSL connection with server and sends the vote.
4. SQL server increments value in table.
All the technology to make these things secure is already written. Why is this so difficult?
I mean, really, a online shopping system is _significantly_ more complex than this. I don't know all the details but I find this whole Diebold situation incredibly embarssing and damaging to the whole computing industry as the public get the impression computers cannot be trusted.
Tech support is in India.
I just skimmed the story you linked to, and while there are some pro-e-voting folks, there was already a lot of objecting to it as a good idea.
Also, keep in mind that people weren't raising security and reliability issues as heavily then -- there had been no actual testing of e-voting. I, personally, had some vague notion that I might be able to vote from home via my web browser (which would provide *significant* real world benefits in convincing people to vote). I still think that such a system, where people are mailed, say, smartcards, would be a lot more acceptable (and if every American had a smartcard reader on their computer, a lot of e-commerce security problems, like databases of credit card numbers being swiped, would go away).
May we never see th
"Nothing could possibli go wrong."
Voter fraud by breaking shitty software?
That's for amateurs.
*REAL* voter fraud relies on the teamsters.
Vote Democrat! Your dead uncle's border collie's water bowl does!
Here it is, they better take it before I GPL it.
while (ballots > 0) {
if (vote == republican)
republicanCount++;
else if (vote == democrat)
democratCount++
else
cout "Threw his vote away" endl;
}
Besides, Democracy died the day "lobbying" was conceived of. Voting is meaningless now -- all that matters is how much money you can offer your representative.
"And now you shall learn the secret of boot to the head"
Sure. Slashdot is nothing more than the collective ideas of its users. Do you have respect for the knowledge and opinions of Bruce Perens, Alan Cox, and John Carmack, and those of their ilk? How about Monty, of cdrecord and Ogg Vorbis fame? I've seen all these post (especially Perens, who sometimes starts posting like a fiend). There are cryptographers, computer scientists, physicists, mathematicians, soldiers, police officers, sysadmins, artists, geeks, Libertarians, Republicans, Christians, typographers, musicians and Cowboy Neal that post to Slashdot. Sure, you aren't going to buy into all their opinions. Some of them are clearly wrong (like folks that disagree with me :-) ). But that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of material of serious value to be found on Slashdot. Some of the stuff you find people posting on Slashdot you can't really *get* anywhere else, unless you happen to work with and rub noses with some pretty important people.
It's en vogue to bash Slashdot, just because, well, there's a lot of BS on Slashdot. But there's a lot of BS on the Internet as a whole. Heck, there's an awful lot of BS in real life. You just have to sift and filter in any medium you're using.
May we never see th
Fill in the blank doesn't even work.
I remember during some of the analysis of the 2000 Florida election disaster that one of the recount counties gave facts about the number of ballots that had multiple votes. IIRC, dozens had at least 2 votes, many had 3, some had 4, and a couple even had 11. This means some voters are either completely hopelessly confused, or they're screwing around.
Also, remember the election officials in each county have great capacity to screw things up.
As with most problems, the root of the failure is lack of education. There are just a lot of ignorant people out there. This may or may not be their fault. They shouldn't be voting if they can't understand the words "MARK ONLY ONE".
.sigs are for post^Hers.
An online shopping system is easily verifiable, if your goods don't turn up you complain loudly. With a (truly) secret ballot you can't verify your vote. There lies the difficulty.
"The irregularities were found in a routine post-election review."
One wonders if they would have been found at all if the ballots were electronic.
I could write a piece of voting code that reports results into a central database after each voter,
doesn't leave a paper trail, and ensures one use per voting card in an election.
This seems so trivial, I wonder how they screwed it up, and why aren't they being prosecuted as terrorist who are trying to hijack american democracy with an electronic attack on our election outcomes.
Why are the governments paying for the priviledge of being hijacked, and why aren't they demanding a full refund for the machines ?
Imagine if Abduhla Musctaffa owned the company making these machines . . . and he had promised to deliver the election to their party. Would the US government be equally lazy about investigating the potential tampering with the system ? Would the voters be equally complacent ? I suspect that they would [ be lazy] , but that doesn't mean I'm not outraged by the whole fiasco already.
--Tsiangkun
***---***
I'm Tsiangkun Tzu and I authorised this sig
How freaking hard could this be? Receipts are a good idea. I would go further and have an internal paper journal, a write once media with a pre writen signature (CD-R drives are cheap), and all solid state electronics for the software. I would go so far as to suggest that flash may not be acceptable. Network communications should be encrypted and a very high amount of physical security should be in place (off site server via VPN?) . I don't think a custom OS both server and client side with an audit trail is asking for too much seeing how corupt elections are becoming. We have the fu*king technology, what the hell is the problem?
Isn't it interesting that this post is followed by "Diebold Fails Again in San Diego"...
Dozings.com -- Its kinda funny... If you're as crazy as me.
Never attribute to malice that which may adequately be explained by stupidity.
I agree, the partisanship stinks. The software should be open source and government funded. However, if they had sinister motives wouldn't it be more likely that they'd make functional software that appeared to be working at least? Of course they may also be cheating AND malfunctioning...........
Photos.
... I don't know you tell me. In the last general elections, we were the first state to go all computerised voting, diebold machines. We had all the normal pre elction poll numbers. We also had the real time election day poll numbers. What we got was an "upset" election that defied all the poll numbers, and put an R in the governors seat for the -> first time since the civil war -, along with some other interesting race "upsets". In the morning,election day, there were a boatload of news flashes about people reporting irregularities with the machines, by mid afternoon most of those stories not only stopped coming, they disappeared from places that were initially reporting them, drudge report being one of them, because I know I checked his page before leaving to vote, when I got back around an hour later, it was gone, and that just do not happen on his page all too often. At least I never saw it happen before, they scroll away, but don't get actually removed. Local news on the TV downplayed the heck out of it, and by the next day it wasn't talked about. The term is "spiked" the stories got spiked.
coincidence?
The ramifications are, they can be programmed to give any results they want, and you can't tell. They can be reprogrammed on the spot with a card, or done over a modem. You tell me if you think they are secure, accurate and unbiased, because there's no way anyone who doesn't work for diebold can tell. Before, we had paper ballots, you could eyeball the results, anyone who could see and count could verify a result at the end of the day, now... the machine spits out whatever, there is zero, repeat zero way to verify what the real numbers are. And tell ya, it only takes alteration of a few numbers to REALLY change things.
but it's NEW and SHINY, so it must be better, right?
Tell me, what is the worth, in dollars, a guess, of CONTROLLING a state office like a governorship or a national office like a Rep, Senator or a Presidency? Really, what's the worth, then think on what people do for much, much, much less potential "reward", how far human beings will go for just a few thou? Criminals do a very poor risk/reward ratio when they do a crime. But, what are the risks of getting caught if BY LAW AND DESIGN only a few people really know what's going on with some black box, when your naked eyeballs aren't enough to verify a tally, when no paper trail exists, when the black box has several ways to access it, and when the potential rewards for any criminality can run into sums of figures that are planet earth mind boggling large? When the power that can be accrued by skewing a tally includes literally the getting handed the power of life or death over entire other nations? What is the risk/potential reward ratio then?
Lotta questions, so far the only answers we have point to A-serious incompetence or delibarate malfeasance with voting computers, and B the people involved are connected to extremely radical elements in the political military industrial complex within a single political party, an extreme faction of that party.
I know what my analysis of that tells me
Anyone know if the errors statistically 'favored' one party over another and if so, by what margin?
I'm not implying any intentional wrongdoing, I'm just curious about the numbers involved because mistakes like this won't impact the outcome of an election unless the election is very close and the mistakes statistically favor one party/candidate over another.
The impact on voter confidence/faith in the system is another matter.
...for not using simple paper ballots. Canada is a British Parliamentary Democracy and its voting system is based upon what Britain does...and the population of Britain has not been an issue. Hell, India has run elections on the same system with WAAAY more voters (it being the most populous democratic nation in the world by a large margin). I admit that India is moving towards a mechanised way of voting at some levels but population is not the biggest motivator there.
When you have a bigger population, it follows that you'll have more ridings, more polling places, more scrutineers (counters) so the task of counting the vote does not become insurmountable. What makes the need for an automated system more pressing in the USA is it's system of government.
I myself am Canadian so I may have a different perspective than a US-born citizen, but IMHO the US is the most democratic nation in the world. Americans vote for EVERYTHING. They elect their head of state (president), their federal representatives in both houses (congress and senate) as well as state and local governments. They elect their judiciary (judges, police chiefs) and hold binding votes on legislation (propositions). In the presidential race they even have primaries to vote for candidates they want to vote for in the main election! They also hold elections quite often...federally, elections are held every two years.
In the US elections are WAY more important to the governing process than anywhere else in the world--I don't think many non-Americans appreciate that fact (even here in Canada most don't). When an American votes they aren't making an X by someone's name once every 3 to 5 years...they could be voting for their congressman, their senator, president, a number of propositions, local judge and their state govenor all in one year. It's easy to count votes for an election manually, but who wants to that when you have so many elections to count? No wonder it's such a hot issue in the US (even discounting the contoversy of the 2000 election)?
In Canada, we vote for our Member of Parliament federally, our MLA/MPP/MNA provincially and for a councillor, mayor and school board rep municipally. That's it. Ever. Any other votes held are not binding (municipal plebicites and what have you--although the outcomes carry political weight). These elections are every 3 to 5 years, unless (usually because of a minority govenrnemt situation) a vote of non-confidence triggers one sooner. Why would we ever need more than a pencil and paper with such a simple, infrequent system of elections?
In a way I envy the American system. Canadians do not get to elect our head of state--that would technically be Elizabeth II, HRH Queen of Canada. Her Canadian representative (the R.Hon Governor General Adrienne Clarkson, who basically gives assent to our bills to make them law on behalf of the Queen) is also an appointed position. All the members of the Canadian senate are also appointed. All judges are appointed too, and referrendums (binding votes on legislation) are extremely rare and have only been conducted on major constitutional issues.
All these appointments are selected (technically with the Queen's blessing/rubber stamp) by our Prime Minister--the "real" leader of Canada (R. Hon Paul Martin II), who was acclaimed leader at his party's convention and was elected to parliament by winning the most votes of any candidate in his home riding. Meaning that in the strictest sense only a few tens of thousands of people residing in a small patch of Quebec actually got to vote for the Prime Minister. This year if the Conservatives miraculously win it's the same thing, except that a few thousand Alberta residents are the lucky ones--but at least in that case there was actually a real race for the party leadership and a more democratic method of selection than the traditional Liberal convention.
Soo....unlike the "grandparent post" I would NOT recommend the US follow the Canadian system. The fiasco the US is going t
The big advantage is that it's totally secure. Sure it's a bit more complicated than marking X in the box for a single candidate like in the British system, but it should remain a manual process regardless of the cost. Democracy is too important to be left to companies who are 'determined to deliver the next election to George Bush.'
Drill baby drill - on Mars
.... making that 50 clams the largest contribution anyone can make to a candidate or party (cumulative during any two year election cycle), and making it illegal ( a serious federal felony ) for any corporation or organization to donate a single penny.
That would sort out a lot of this political BS in short order.
I got nothing against campaign finance reform, it's not a free speech issue, it's a "remove the so-called right to pay bribes" issue.
Another way to open the political process is to have 24 hour voting days.
And yet anothert would be and to disallow ANY over the air broadcaster, who has been granted a peoples license to have a monopoly on a channel or frequency, from sponsoring any political "debate" that DIDN'T include all the candidates who had qualified to be on the ballot, and make that qualification equal in all the states. To have any debates, you have to have all the printed on the ballot candidates. To do less is perpetuating a lie and a scam, and to do it on the peoples airwaves -those broadcasters do NOT own those airwaves- is a pure act of fraud and theft.
The "two party and only those two parties for evah and evah" carved in stone "system" is incredibly broken, and it's a national disgrace, IMO.
Little David was in his 5th grade class when the teacher asked the children what their fathers did for a living. All the typical answers came up --fireman, policeman, salesman, doctor, lawyer, etc.
David was being uncharacteristically quiet and so the teacher asked him about his father.
"My father's an exotic dancer in a gay cabaret and takes off all his clothes in front of other men. Sometimes, if the offer's really good, he'll go out to the alley with some guy and make love with him for money."
The teacher, obviously shaken by this statement, hurriedly sent the other children to work on some exercises and took little David aside to ask him, "Is that really true about your father?"
"No," said David, "He works for the BUSH campaign, but I was too embarrassed to say that in front of the other kids."
But look at the parts I've listed again. A minimal database (a few tables at best), a minimal GUI (one type of widget, 2 or 3 screens at most) and one type of communication with the server. How could you possibly mess up the programing of this?
Take a look at Amazon as a comparison. There database system will be significantly more complex (products, categories, who looked at what, best sellers etc.), there's more lines of communication (email, credit card verification, mail delivery couriers), the GUI has more elements and paths etc.
I find the Diebold situation deeply concerning that the democracy of a country could be effected by what is a relatively simple programming task.
...and I voted absentee (mail-in) specifically to avoid those damn diebold touch screen fiasco machines. *sigh*
I think the choice of action the fedral government should take is pretty obvious:
1. Demand that all Diebold voting machines are recalled immeadiately and that Diebold refunds all states in full.
2. As a temporary measure, reinstall the previous voting machines/methods or simple cards in all states.
3. Assign a task force made up of experts in a wide variety of fields, ensuring that the group isnt biased towards any corporate or political parties. The general rule should be that the system is as simple as possible, only uses computers if it will actually provide an advantage, is open!
(obviously any corporate members will point out that its not fair that the system be open. This is one of the most important systems in the country and its vital for democracy that its open to the public to look at, if it isnt there is simply no way you can call the system democratic in anyway)
4. Given that the new system will be designed by geeks, it will require a fraction of the budget of Diebolds spagetti crap, donate the old Diebold machines to schools.
If Bush can go to war on a whim he can do this, and if he doesnt do this right now he is a dictator, its simple.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
it's a fascinating subject, but in my opinion, and some other smart peoples opinions, the computerised voting that is being pushed onto the US people is for one purpose, to completely eliminate chance when it comes to voting for "the annointed ones" who think it is their born right to "rule" over everyone else. I 100% believe that, and I have zero doubts. Google around for votescam,diebold, voting irregularites, etc and spend an evening reading the empirical and anecdotal out there. You can watch at how vote scamming grew from simple ballot box stuffing to the industry it is today, one step at a time, and how these voting machines have been literrally crammed down our throats. Check out the history of the "voter news service" scams. See what connection rep hastert has to computerised voting and his election perhaps. Do that, you'll be convinced that it's a conspiracy, it's to control power inside the US, it'sworking, and it'sworth trillions of dollars. whoever controls the reins of political power in the US gets granted near-king status now. Ask yourself, is it worth it to try, given that as the reward for suceeding? I think these "rulers" think it is, especially when they can make it illegal to question them or their machines. That's called "shooting fish in a barrel".
Anyway, good luck reading, it's an incredible eye opener. I still vote, but it's from inertia mostly. I used to be suspicious of it, now I'm sure, I'd wager a years pay plus on it. Incidently,last time, I had some write-ins, they don't show up in the results. Guess my vote doesn't count anyway...
soapbox, still here, restrictions increasing rapidly, zero privacy any longer, government has the "right" to 0wnz you
ballotbox, see discussion, probably corrupt and irrevelant
jurybox, judges and DAs disqualify or hold in contempt people who are aware of and try to exercise their rights as jurors, ie, you can rule as a juror on the legality of the law in question,along with the individual case'es defendent, numerous examples out there
ammobox, still available,but rapidly being restricted out of existence in piece-meal manner, and no longer is it legal to have parity with the king's troops or agents, the one single vital *thing* that made our nation even possible, "parity" as the ultimate check and balance against despotic abuse.
Hmm, looking at the list we are almost totally en screwed. Won't be long now.
Too bad I was right when I saw this coming like 4 decades ago, got hip enough and smart enough to spot obvious trends. Sucks. It's gonna get worse, much worse. We are in the tail end of the good old days, enjoy them.
I live and vote in San Diego. I used the touchscreen devices; my wife used an absentee ballot. After using the Diebold boxes, I thought my wife had found a way to evade their problems. From today's article, it looks like I was wrong.
When I went to vote in the morning, at about 8:30 AM (well after the polls were scheduled to open), the machines were still non-functional (you've no doubt already heard the details) and the polling workers couldn't say when the help they requested would arrive. They suggested waiting or going to another polling location to submit a provisional ballot. (At this point, feel free to ponder why these were not tested by the vendor beforehand. Isn't that what YOU would have done?)
Nothing makes democracy feel real to you like being turned away from a voting booth.
When I returned in the evening, the missing cables were provided, instructions corrected and the devices functional. But not well.
In California, each voter receives a balllot information booklet before the election. With the old punch-card paper ballots, the booklet and the ballot were laid out in exactly the same way. You could transfer your decisions from booklet to ballot trivially. The touchscreen display, on the other hand, had the same visual look as the booklet, and the screen was laid out in pages, but page layouts did not correspond to the booklet. Candidates were in different locations on the touchscreen and the booklet. Matching up the two were a pain, and it took a very careful attention to detail to avoid error! Considering that the visual cues implied that that they should correspond, and that they did correspond in the old punchcard system, and I'd be very surprised if it didn't contribute to incorrect selections. (It was at least as bad, probably much worse, than the Florida butterfly ballots.)
Now, if you are replacing an existing system, isn't Rule #1 finding out how the existing system works, so that you know which functionality needs to be replicated?
The last page of the ballot is a vote summary. (Good idea.) It was multi-column on a virtual page that was one screen wide but much, much longer vertically than the physical screen. This is an atrocious user interface. (Imaging reading a PDF of a three-column, 8-1/2" x 11" page on a normal portrait monitor.) Prior to this summary page, the entire previous program was logical page = physical screen, with a horizontal prev page/next page paradigm. So, a bad user interface that's inconsistent with the rest of the application's UI.
Is that how you like to design YOUR software?
Finally, there's the fact that there's no paper record or physical trail of the votes. I can't begin to imagine how this passed Day One of requirements review!
All in all, it did not feel like the polished, professional effort that I want democracy and the control of our nation to depend on.
I would just about kill, to have a job like Diebold. It'd be totally wonderful to have a job, where you could fail over and over and over again, while receiving millions of dollars worth of federal (your tax dollars at work) business. All without the slightest bit of concern that somebody somewhere might ask... "Do you guys actually have any clue what the heck you're doing?"
So far, all I see is security failures, operational failures, service failures, and a huge progression of operational and technical SNAFUs. I'd prefer not having to stand on my head to vote... (I'd like easy and simple as much as the next person), but if I can't trust the results of the process... then for all intents and purposes, I cease to be participating in a republic. Either we eliminate the faulty process (up to and including the elimination of the offending service provider), or we eliminate the people who won't eliminate the faulty process.
Genda
what Bush knows about diplomacy.
It's pretty scary to see how little the local Registrar of Voters cares about having any sort of verifiable voting system. The official FAQ even has two entries regarding reliability (how do I know my vote was counted accurately after casting it, what happens if there's a recount) and studiously avoids answering either one - in the first case they simply stop after describing a bunch of irrelevant steps which happen before you cast your vote and in the second they pretend that a generated image file stored on the machine is somehow more valid than the stored vote record on the same machine.
What about a minor form of civil disobedience:
On the next election, pick one seat (either that you don't care about or where the winner is a lock) and enter a write-in candidate. Use your own name, or a made-up name likely to be unique.
It would be my expectation that the # of votes cast for all write-in candidates should be public record. We could then use this method to see if our votes had been recorded at all.
(Hmm... I'm beginning to think about other hacks: buffer overflow via the write-in candidate option, anyone? )
Here in Vancouver, BC (Canada, again) our civic elections are reasonably complicated. It is a true multi-party system with independants allowed. We normally vote for 7 parks board trustees, 9 school board trustees, 12 city councillors (=~trustees), 1 mayor and a handfull of referendum questions.. Thing to note here is that for the 7, 9 and 12 seat positions, each voter gets to cast (up to) 7 9 and 12 votes out of all the candidates. Each of the parties (there are usually 3 or 4 parties running) usually fields a full set of candidates, and there are often independants, so it's not at all uncommon to be voting for 12 out of 50-60 (4*12+N) alderman candidates (as an example). It's not uncommon to also have between half a dozen (and up to 20) mayoral candidates. Then there are the referendums.
Voting is currently done on OCR... They are originally counted by computer, but if there are any questions, it's always possible to recount the paper ballots by hand (and it is done, from time to time). It's pretty easy to audit the computer results by picking a random polling station or two and comparing the computer reported count to the manual count. The system could easily handle a single-transferable vote system (like in Ireland) and have the machine counted results out before morning.
Much like in federal and provincial elections, candidates and/or parties can have scritineers at the ballot locations to ensure that everything goes as it should.
Because the system has a human-readable paper trail, I've never had any real quams about letting computers do the initial count. The technology is trivial (by today's standards) and well understood. None of this whiz-bang
bullshit.Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
What do you do? Do you get your elected official to fight the problem? Right up to the highest court, perhaps. Maybe you'll get lucky and you won't have to deal with one of the judges installed by Bush.
Civil wars start this way. --Or they would if people had any energy left over from their daily lives. If the bad guys weren't in charge of the military.
The trap is closing, friends. As Sauron put it, "The hour is later than you think!"
-FL
If I were your professor, I would have failed you.
See, there's this thing some databases have been able to do for a while called "transactions", you might remember the acronym "ACID" from some of those lectures that obviously went straight over your head?
That includes auditing the compiler, operating system, and hardware? Oh wait, but if you're using Java you [probably] can't even get the source code for the compiler; and as far as I know there are no hardware platforms that are entirely open. So the question you've got to ask yourself is: is Australia an important enough country to warrant the kind of conspiracy necessary to rig one of these underlying subsystems? In comparison: nuclear power station software systems are important enough to be verified by formal methods.
And these are just the problems with the actual voting. Centralised results compilation is a whole other kettle of fish, as is managing voter lists. In conclusion: you have no idea what you're talking about.
Always bet on the winning horse. You can afford to buy a new one with the winnings.
Diebold is definately trying to fuck with the votes. They use MS Access for their database, and there is no security at all. There is a number of backdoors, and there's been tampering with votes for years. They are connected to another large evoting company, and together they control a whopping 80% of the e-votes in the states. Here's some links:
1 50 .html . blackboxvoting.org/
This one is the best. You can download the software (GEMS) and see exactly how insecure it is. Try it.
http://www.equalccw.com/voteprar.html
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0309/S00
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/voting.shtm
http://wiki.volitant.net/diebold-cd
http://www
.....in about a couple of weeks and its going to be all electronic. Wonder how it will be with the Largest democracy going to e-poll. Aaah but who wins rarely ever matters in India. More info here: http://www.eci.gov.in/faq/elecvtmach.htm
I (sort of) teach computers at a school here in Michigan to Kindergarten through 8th grade students. This type of material is great for them. Everytime they ask why they need to know all kinds of things about computers I tell them it's the same reason they need to know all about their government, even if they aren't going to be President; Because horrible, lying, anti-American cheats will take advantage of them and use what others don't know to harm them.
And then I give them an example like Diebold. We are going to be getting a large group of voting citizens that think computers are only good for playing Diablo II and think they are computer geniuses for being able to load it. Most of them will have no understanding of why this technology harms them and how it allows others to control them.
..you can "still have your real time voting stats" and such, does not make it so, not in my state of georgia. Just because it is possible, or that the source code could be examined, doesn'rt fly, it isn't, and chances are it won't be. We are now stuck with insecure, extremely easy to manipulate voting "results". This is a very serious issue, a critical issue, and ad lib casual dismissive quips do not fix the problem.
Technically, previous we had a more verifiable and easy to use system, that was paid for and working. Lockable wooden box, opened in the morning, open for inspection to see it was empty, locked at night. any dispute was easy to resove. costs zero money, those voting boxes were long paid for. I voted in both extremely dense population districts,and in very rural, but the vote always went through and was human countable. Pencil, fill in the circle. Worked well, really, and anyone with a set of eyeballs could verify the count right at the precinct level.
I agree on the no practical differences between Ds and Rs now, especially at the upper levels, I rarely vote for one now, I vote third party,some named independent, or write in, etc. Politically, I am a strict constitutionalist, vote accordingly. There are a few D's or Rs that I *might* vote for, were I in their districts, examples, ron paul or tom tancredo.
I started working politics as a young lad in the goldwater campaign, and learned some serious lessons then, especially how the R party got hijacked by the rockefeller/globalist (basically the NWO faction) wing back then and sabotaged their own candidate. Wheels within wheels. Switched back and forth, always found out the system with the entrenched partys itself is corrupt, either party, so....
I think the florida vote was an abomination, there were exploits and illegalities taken from all partys involved in that fiasco. They should have re run it, started from scratch, with poll workers telling everyone there to vote correctly, and a default of malformed ballots being tossed with no ananlysis of what they "might indicate".
I still don't think we have all the answers there, but I think there were conflicting high level efforts to hijack it, both parties in other words.
I have long stated publically my wish for a grand jury investigation of both the RNC and the DNC to look for violations leading to indictments and prosecutions, starting with the RICO act. I believe the combination of those two parties, along with their corporate sponsors, most notably the higher levels of public media, has lead to a full takeover- a coup- of what should be the people's government. There are no checks and balances when all the judges that are appointed are handpicked/vetted members of one or the other of those parties.
"going crazy" over observations that the vote is being hijacked is not so crazy if there is serious credible evidence that *this is so*.
...been trolled, I neglected originally to mention I live in georgia. There hasn't been a republican governor here since the reconstruction (after the scorched earth destruction) era after the civil war. Sorry to have not been more clear.
note, I can't PROVE that the 2000 national or my 2002 state vote were hijacked, but it looks suspicious as all get out to me.
I go vote, but voting constitution party or libertarian or whatever, I am used to my vote always being in a minority, but to answer critics who saw a vote for anyone who isn't in the D or R party is "wasted", I say the only wasted vote is one not cast, generally speaking. Since I have no desire to see either a D or R in the presidency, for example, it matters little to me which of the two bozos gets in, the country continues to get borked further. So my vote isn't a "spoiler" vote. Very generally speaking, the Libertarians usually snag some votes from the Rs, the green party candidate from the Ds, reform party hit both about equally, etc,etc,so I don't see that as being any sort of spoiler effect, it balances out.
The few times we have had third party candidates (at the national level) get any media coverage of note, there has always been a surge in people actually investigating and voting for an alternative candidate. I will note this going way back. This goes way back,it is just a bit of verifiable data that is true, so what the media does now is NO COVERAGE as a default. they give a very slight minimum coverage, that's it.. The media is top to bottom owned by connected globalist people who have R's and Ds in their pockets, so they have no desire to publicise any third party or it's candidate, it might upset too many carefully blackmailed and bribed political/economic/power apple carts that have been established over the years. Having bought and paid for political control at all levels of government is much too lucrative for them to adjust, this is why you will barely even see a mention of alternative candidates or partys, they always push the globalists candidates to give people the illusion there is "choice". This is just SO obvious.
About the only place an individual can still make a difference is in the most basic local elections. At county level or above, nope, it's the carved in stone One-party-with-two-names "system", it is little different from blatantly open "one" party systems, such as in Mainland China.
The Free State project is the best attempt I have seen to break this criminal system, it is an astounding idea, and I wish them well, but I have no desire to relocate to New Hampshire. If they had chosen either Vermont, Maine or Idaho (various reasons not relevant to this discussion)I might have considered it.
...surprised. I know I went out of my way covertly, using contacts inside "the establishment" to see what da man has on people, ie, me in particular. It's a lot, I think people would be shocked if it became public knowledge what is already in government databases.
It's just the circle of life. For a long time corporations have been buying votes from politicians. Now it's the governments' turn to buy votes back from a corporation. It's like the food cycle, just with the 'stripping of Americans' freedom and right to vote' instead of food.