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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.
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."
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.
You mean write a patch for the President? Aren't you already using Mr Bush 2.0 or something :)
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...]
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?"
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.
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 can't remember there ever being the kind of nonsense that Diebold has regularly caused.
I suppose that turning things digital isn't always the best solution. These kind of issues proves that fact.
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
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.
This whole administration has been in public beta since day one...
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
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
Digital doesn't mean bad, they just have a stupid buggy system. How do the SATs and other standardized testing services handle millions of those scantron sheets without problems? Instead of poking holes in a piece of paper and leaving hanging chads, have people use a friggin pencil and bubble in a box. If you don't follow the instructions and the computer can't read your bubble for whatever reason then your vote simply is discarded. Humans should not be involved in deciding who the vote was "supposed" to go to because they can be influenced.
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
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.
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.
No - the UK has almost exactly the same system as Canada (where do you think they got it from?) and likewise has seen no problems with it over the last century or so. However the UK has about twice the population density of the US (~60 million people in less than 10% of the area) and it still works (well, it did elect Blair but that can't really be blamed on the system :-)
So no excuses - you could fix it with a system that works if you wanted to!
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
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;
}
"And now you shall learn the secret of boot to the head"
... 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.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
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.
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.