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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 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."
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?
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.
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
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
Pen and paper: the only way to vote. Say no to machines.
I know it's all the rage on slashdot to rattle your sabots, so I really hate to break it to you -- machines are already used to count votes made with pen and paper, all over the country. You complete the arrows with a pen, and then feed your card into a computer that reads and tabulates your vote.
So instead of saying "no to machines," why don't we say "yes" to fixing the problems? #1 we need some redundancy built into these systems in case of problems. #2 we clearly need a better group of engineers working on the problem than those at Diebold.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
I suppose that turning things digital isn't always the best solution. These kind of issues proves that fact.
I guess what I really like about paper voting is not only the paper trail but the fact that the whole process is viewable and hard-tooled.
"Soft" ware is too changable to quickly. If there was a hardware only voting system (tres expensive!) with no firm or software I'd be all for it. It should not be changable except in very transparent ways.
Any database worth its salt that isn't complete shit should be able to handle multiple writes hitting it at the same time. If not the software should be able to recognize this and wait for it to be free before it just starts going all wonky.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
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
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
"the Daily Show appearso to have a habit of making deceptive cuts. But who knows..."
What do you expect from A FAKE NEWS SHOW?
Not saying the story isn't partially based on fact, but the intention is to be funny (and damn funny it is)
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
Occured to you HHAAHAH is way of expressing acknowldegement of humor? No?
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."
The point is, if you only have to count one vote per ballot it's easy to do by hand, if you have to count 10 or 20 votes per ballot, things get more complicated.
This post cannot be rebroadcast without the express written constent of Major League Baseball.
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
In the voting arena, I would say that problems with inaccurate counts would be priority 2 (since nobody dies directly)
are you sure?
See, the Daily Show isn't really fake news. That's the thing. What Stewart talks about is actually news. Usually when they are being outright false they are obvious about it, such as many of the "translations" they have. The problem, if there is one, is that many people use it as their source of news. Probably almost no one who saw this clip saw the actual interview it was from, and few heard details about that particular study.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that even though they are not a serious news outlet, because they are baseing the show entirely off of actual events (and because a somewhat alarming number of people actually use it for their news), they have a responsibility in my opinion to not be deceptive, either by just presenting things as-is or in a blatently false manner.
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.
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
... 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
"Digital doesn't mean bad, they just have a stupid buggy system. "
No, I disagree. The system may be buggy, but the concept of a digital computer counting votes is unfixable.
You don't know what code is running. If you magically do know, you certainly won't grok it all, especially as they patch constantly even during elections. And although you may have some certain knowledge of the boxen in front of you, you've no idea what the other ten thousand machines across the country are doing.You don't know if the computer is working properly. You don't know if the data is being altered enroute to a central counting machine. You don't know if the code or the data is being modified from second to second. The process is pretty much a setup to cheat, and I've no doubt plenty of people are lining up to alter future elections. And we'll never know about it -- the ultimate fault. They is no ability to detect fraud. No trail. Nothing but bits.
The paper and pencil and human counter is flawless. A neutral counter. Monitors appointed by each candidate watch the count. And if there is dispute, it is settled firstly at the counting table, and in extremis the entire vote can be recounted until every vote card is vetted and agreed on.
This very process was occuring in Florida when the Supreme Court Five shut it down. And they were getting it done in days . No problems -- all the whining was being settled at the tables. It was working, and working perfectly, and would have given Gore the win had they been given more than 30 minutes before the "deadline" to restart the recount.
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.
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By not letting you check the results?
rj
Unless you believe the rumors that he ordered surveilence of Bin Laden's 'friends' cut back because his Saudi relatives were complaining)
That isn't a rumor, it's a fact.
John O'Neill resigned as Deputy Director of the FBI in protest over that.
As for him 'reading a book to a bunch of kids', that's not such a bad thing. I mean, it's not like he helped plan the 9/11 attacks (did he?). My worry is that it may be his actual reading level.
The worrying thing about that is that had he instead ordered planes scrambled, the second tower would not have been hit. Instead of doing that, he sat around with a bunch of kids letting the "Pearl Harbor" required by the Project for a New American Century occur.
Both of those are acts of treason in my book.
No ad hominem needed.