California Grills Diebold Over E-Voting Foul-Ups

orthogonal writes "Electronic voting machine producer Diebold admitted today that 'thousands' of voters were turned away from the polls during the Super Tuesday Presidential Primary because of flaws in Diebold's machines. Diebold Election Services Inc. president Bob Urosevich said 'We were caught', and answered 'yes' when asked 'Weren't [California voters] actually disenfranchised?' Today, California officials may recommend decertifying some or all of Dielbold's machines for the November General Election." Reader TargetBoy adds: "Diebold knowingly used uncertified software in California elections. Especially interesting is the comment that, 'The law firm's memos reflect a corporate defense firm on a $500,000-a-month campaign to protect Diebold.' Wonder how much it would cost to just fix the problems?" Apparently India is having evoting problems of its own: purple writes "The world's largest democracy is in the midst of a 4-month election marathon. Except this time around the whole thing is run electronically. And, surprise surprise, things seem to not be working perfectly. Some polling booths have been ordered to re-poll due to malfunctions in the electronic voting machines. In another article, 191 voting booths were ordered to re-poll. Other polling locations seem to be operating on voter lists from 2001. I suppose the good news is that these errors were caught before they could have really screwed things up."

Comments

Here's the rub

[American AC in Paris]

OK, all conspiracy theories off to the side. Forget the whole "Getting votes for the Republicn Party" bit. Ignore whatever political motivations may be surrounding Diebold at the moment. Assume that Diebold has no desire to commit or facilitate election fraud.

The simple fact is that, while Diebold does indeed care about producing accurate voting results, they are more concerned with making money. If Diebold is forced to choose between increasing their profit and making the system better, they'll choose profit.

If you put voting machines in the hands of the private sector, the private sector will try to maximize profit. Corners will be cut. There simply isn't any way to avoid this, so long as the people making the machines are doing so to make money off the venture.

So long as the design and development of voting systems is left to the private sector, voters will be disenfranchised for the sake of profit. That's all there is to it.

Re:Here's the rub

[Oxy the moron]

I would contend that Diebold does not, in fact, care about providing accurate results. The article somewhat hints on this:

The law firm's memos reflect a corporate defense firm on a $500,000-a-month campaign to protect Diebold.

Regardless of purpose, this establishes that Diebold's primary intention was NOT to make the voting system more accurate or practical, but to make a buck on a cheaper system and hope to play the legal game to get out of trouble if it needed to.

Re:Here's the rub

[El_Ge_Ex]

thank you Captain Obvious! You statements were just what we needed to save the day! ...oh wait... your statements didn't do shit.

hmm... Public Sector = Too Costly, but Private Sector = Too much Risk.

Perhaps what we need is a fake election (aren't they already :-\ ) where several vender's systems can be tested at once in different areas. The best system wins the contract.

-B

Re:Here's the rub

[Jhon]

Personally, I was happy with the punch-card voting system we've had in Los Angeles forever. "Chads" are only a problem if you don't follow instructions (which in CA are posted in pretty much every conceivable language -- at taxpayers expense).

"All electronic" to me means, "Not 100% safe". Unless the gizmo kicks out a paper "receipt" that the voter checks for accuracy then placed in a "lock box" for random audits, I will NEVER trust such a beast. Id rather be requesting absentee ballots.

Re:Here's the rub

[Ion Berkley]

You know the one thing I feel I lack when I read (with great interest) peoples concerns about electronic polling is just how bad were previous low tech systems. We all remember the Florida presidential debicle, but I wonder if there is somewhere much more info collected across many elections and systems that gives us something to compare with.

Re:Here's the rub

[Liselle]

You bring up an excellent point!

Makes me wonder though, if corporate greed can be used to our advantage. Knowing that profit is the motivator, and not altruism/patriotism/whatever, means that hitting them in the wallet is the best assurance that they will play nice. It's a known target.

Maybe it's naive to assume it will work, and there will be a horde of ACs to inform me as such, but while we're in fantasy land: strict government guidelines for how electronic voting functions. Even paper ballots have a margin of error, your electronic system has to do at least as well, with a certain amount of guaranteed uptime. Certified this, authorized that. Otherwise, you'll never get that check to cash, or maybe get hit with some stiff investor-frightening fines.

Hmm, maybe strict rules like that will scare away the private sector from making voting machines, though... Hell, that works for me, too.

Re:Here's the rub

[telbij]

So long as the design and development of voting systems is left to the private sector, voters will be disenfranchised for the sake of profit. That's all there is to it.

Well, only in the case where the government is too trusting to draft a suitable contract to protect voters' rights.

All that's really needed is for government to stipulate that a single foul-up will result in zero payment. You can bet that would get Diebold's act together pretty quick. If they don't like that we can go back to paper ballots which have a pretty good track record; statistically reliable error is much better than the possibility of wholesale errors or even fraud.

Unfortunately, this whole electronic voting movement is just companies capitalizing on the mishaps of the 2000 election. If legislators knew anything about how computer systems actually worked, they wouldn't be so easily convinced that it's better than hanging chads.

Re:Here's the rub

[corbettw]

Not to excuse the incompetent greedy fucks at Diebold, but they're only a symptom of the larger problem. The real problem is that the government types who are making decisions about going to evoting know fuck-all about how computers work, and are not interested/capable of any real oversight (the "magic box" can't be wrong, can it?). Couple that with the natural human tendency to get as much return on as little investment as possible, and it's almost as bad as setting up a dingo farm next to a day care center.

Afterall, consider that Diebold is one of the largest makers of ATMs in the world. Ever wonder why they can make ATMs that don't screw up your checking account balance every time you withdraw funds? Simple: banks are accountable to their customers, share holders, and various government agencies to not screw up people's finances. If someone went to the ATM and it reported they only had $18,181 (a reference to a previously reported bug on the upper limits of counted votes), when in fact they had ten times that much, there'd be a huge outcry (if the reverse happened, the bank would eventually catch it, and again there'd be a huge outcry, at least internally to the vendor). So, again, the problem isn't that Diebold is greedy (which they are) or stupid (which they are), but that the people to whom they are directly accountable (the various county registrars) have no clue what the hell they're doing.

Re:Here's the rub

[Wateshay]

The problem isn't the private sector. If it were true that quality in the private sector was always hurt by profit motive, then private sector businesses would always produce substandard quality vs. public works. However, in the private sector, quality does get produced, because there is a segment of the market that demands it, and therefore there are companies that are motivated by profit to produce that quality (e.g. Apple Computer, BMW, Rolex, etc.). The problem is not that the private sector can't produce a quality product, but rather that the government doesn't demand it. If the government were to take into consideration more than just going with the cheapest bidder in all instances, we would get better quality. Of course, that has to be balanced against the unfortunate side-effect that if more subjective issues than price are taken into account, you are more likely to get croneyism, but I really think there's a better balance than the way the government operates now.

Re:Here's the rub

[Frymaster]

Ignore whatever political motivations may be surrounding Diebold at the moment.

but it's true! the deibold voting machine deliberatly and consistantly omits one valid candidate:

the spoiled ballot.

ballot spoiling has long been a traditional form of protest against the process of the election, the limite choice of candidates or the state in general. with the diebold machines there's no effective way to spoil your ballot.

except maybe by pouring your pepsi on it.

Re:Here's the rub

[GreyPoopon]

The simple fact is that, while Diebold does indeed care about producing accurate voting results, they are more concerned with making money. If Diebold is forced to choose between increasing their profit and making the system better, they'll choose profit.

If you put voting machines in the hands of the private sector, the private sector will try to maximize profit. Corners will be cut. There simply isn't any way to avoid this, so long as the people making the machines are doing so to make money off the venture.

The problem isn't really with having the machines in the hands of the private sector. Moving them to the public sector just opens up other motivation to cut corners or alter results (think political). The real issue is that the driving force behind the private sector no longer has the strong balancing factor that was historically attributed to investors. A few decades ago, businesses had to carefully plan for long-term viability. Investors held them to that, and a company that made short-term gains was not necessarily considered a good investment. Enter the day trader, and everything changes. Now companies are motivated to make decisions that yield short-term gains in profits because investors unwisely jump on the short-term gains. Look at how quickly a CEO comes and goes and it becomes obvious. The incentive provided to a CEO is short-term. They come in, make a quick gain, get their compensation, and then head off to destroy another company. It doesn't matter that three years later the company they left will be in the toilet when the irregular accounting and outright lies to the public are noticed.

I'm not sure what the solution to the problem is, but somehow investors need to start holding corporations responsible for long-term success, and long-term sacrifices to yield short-term gains need to be severely punished. Believe me, if the management at Diebold knew that regardless of how much money they make now, it could all be taken away from them for unethical business practices, they would focus on quality and customer satisfaction.

Re:Here's the rub

[bobej1977]

Hold on, don't fall for this as a "privatization is bad" arguement. The problem is that government institutions continue to deal with Diebold, rather than seeking out other "better" private solutions. It's not the private market's fault.

If voting were truly privatized, you'd see a system where private firms collect and certify votes from people for a fee. Counting votes would merely be tabulating all the voting firms. This would work because if a voting firm fucked up even one vote, everyone would run to another voting firm for the next election, and you can bet that these firms would all be watching each other like hawks. Obviously you'd need a unique identification system and a way to verify that your vote was registered properly with the government.

Sound outlandish? Think IRS and e-filing through a tax-agency.

Re:Here's the rub

[American AC in Paris]

thank you Captain Obvious! You statements were just what we needed to save the day! ...oh wait... your statements didn't do shit.

Well, hell. Here I was hoping that my opinion would have at least cleaned the kitchen while I was gone.

Lazy, good-for-nothing words...

Re:Here's the rub

[trentblase]

This isn't a downside of the voting machine itself. It's up to the person inputing the candidate info to leave a "abstain" or "no confidence" option. Surely the software could support such an option (even if you had to hack it by putting First Name: No, Last Name: Confidence)

Re:Here's the rub

[jlechem]

Man after reading the article, I couldn't agree with you more. I was all for electronic voting until I read the article. Diebold is not the company I thought, not even close. Talk about being slimy and trying to weasel their way into use. It looks like California might be forced into using their software/hardware at this point in time. Get private companies out of the voting software business, let the NSA or someone else do the job. These guys are just after as much money as they can get.

Re:Here's the rub

[comedian23]

Do people really intentionally f up their ballot as a form of protest? I have never heard of that before.

Re:Here's the rub

[szquirrel]

If you put voting machines in the hands of the private sector, the private sector will try to maximize profit. Corners will be cut. There simply isn't any way to avoid this, so long as the people making the machines are doing so to make money off the venture.

Somebody has to build the voting machines. Unless you're advocating a team of government employees assembling them by hand from base minerals, the private sector will have to get involved somewhere.

All the government needs is a contract that specifies rigorous standards with serious penalties for not meeting those standards. The machines don't work? Diebold doesn't get paid. Maximize THIS profit, bitches.

Re:Here's the rub

[secolactico]

Doesn't it have a "None of the Above" choice?

You can always not show up, tho it probably will be counted as apathy instead of protest.

Re:Here's the rub

[nomadic]

The problem isn't the private sector. If it were true that quality in the private sector was always hurt by profit motive, then private sector businesses would always produce substandard quality vs. public works.

Yes, the problem IS the private sector. Efficiency, quality, and reliability DOES NOT automatically follow when profit is the motivation.

The problem is not that the private sector can't produce a quality product, but rather that the government doesn't demand it

The government did demand it, they were promised it, and Diebold lied about it.

but I really think there's a better balance than the way the government operates now.

No, there isn't. Diebold does a hell of a lot worse than the government does.

What's happening here is all the people with the anti-government, pro-privatization bias are scrambling to make it look like somehow it wasn't the private sector's fault.

Re:Here's the rub

[Catbeller]

but to make a buck on a cheaper system

That doesn't track logically. The system already costs $5000 per voting machine. If the printer was added, they'd simply add another few thousand for the work and hardware. Memos have surfaced taht confirm this: they were instructed to charge HIGH to add that capability, if it came to it.

No, from the minutes of a meeting inadvertently attended by a publisher, and from justing oogling Diebold's 500K/month legal fund, itcan only be said Diebold's ONLY aim is to prevent the addition of printed ballots for verification purposes.

So they don't want an audit trail. Now, why?

They know that if the system is audited, ie a recount made and results from counting paper matched to election tallies, the numbers won't match up. OR, they are making sure the machines can secretly alter election vote totals, and don't want it known.

Since there is no profit motive, it must be incompetence, or cheating, or both.

Re:Here's the rub

[cardshark2001]

Couple that with the natural human tendency to get as much return on as little investment as possible, and it's almost as bad as setting up a dingo farm next to a day care center.

Ehhh....., just how bad is that exactly? Does it have anything to do with Superman?

Re:Here's the rub

[LordMyren]

the problem is symptomatic of the current state of the world. damn the torpedoes, all that matters is today.

look at governments. they're building enough schools to meet todays demand, knowing full well they have no extra space for tomorrow. roads are not built with any thought to future traffic. and the big one, social security. ;)

we're the most shortsighted society since f scott fitzgerald's lost generation.

Re:Here's the rub

[Anonymous Coward]

Releasing official guidelines can have the effect of indemnifying vendors who are able to meet the guidelines with an insecure system.

Private enterprise can work, but the vendors must remain absolutely liable for any problems they cause.

Re:Here's the rub

[snarfer]

"they are more concerned with making money"

So why does Diebold resist selling ballot printers to go along with the machines? This is what I don't get -- all the problems are solved by printing a ballot that the voter looks at and then puts into a ballot box. These ballots can be counted, just as ballots are counted now (except they would be uch easier to count because they would be uniform and machine-generated...)

AND, Diebold would MAKE MORE MONEY! But they are resisting this to the death.

Re:Here's the rub

[Civil_Disobedient]

The problem is that government institutions continue to deal with Diebold, rather than seeking out other "better" private solutions. It's not the private market's fault.

They're not selling hammers and toilet seats -- this is the very essense of our liberty that we're putting into private hands. There are some things that are bigger and more important than greed, you know.

This would work because if a voting firm fucked up even one vote, everyone would run to another voting firm for the next election.

Oh sure, but I have to wait until the next election to try and pick a "winner". Absurd. Hell, why bother having an EPA, or an FDA? If you choose to eat from a company that sells you tainted meat, well, just buy from a different supplier next time.

Re:Here's the rub

[bgoss]

It's not really f'ing up a ballot, it's intentionally NOT voting for any candidate or issue. That has always been known as a sign of at least no confidence in any candidate if not a protest. Of course that action is countered with the fact that nobody gives a crap about your protest or lack of confidence.

Re:Here's the rub

[flossie]

I'm not sure what the solution to the problem is, but somehow investors need to start holding corporations responsible for long-term success, and long-term sacrifices to yield short-term gains need to be severely punished.

You have hit the nail squarely upon the head. The complete lack of regard for the long-term that is now endemic in the US and, increasingly, the UK is a recipe for disaster.

Assuming that there is absolutely no chance of investors (whether individual or institutional) getting a sudden attack of morality, the best way that I can conceive of to fix the problem is to use the tax system. Increase the capital gains tax on stocks and shares which are sold without being held for long and decrease the tax on long-held stocks and shares.

If taxes decayed to near zero for investments held for 25 years or more, you can bet that pension companies would start taking the long-term view. This would exert a significant beneficial pressure on the behaviour of company directors.

Re:Here's the rub

[SQLz]

For real though...how many corners can you cut with what is basically system that executes 2 lines of code:

$bush++;

or

$kerry++;

Re:Here's the rub

[comedian23]

I see. Sounds like a waste of time and effort to me, but oh well. I would rather write myself in than leave it blank.

Re:Here's the rub

[bobej1977]

Bah, the very essence of liberty is ALWAYS in private hands, our own. It's called revolution. The number one cause of loss of liberty for a people is and always has been government. Do private corporations represent a newer subtle form of government? Yes. But one we always have by the balls (boycott) and one which although it may exert power (economic) it can never hold authority.

As to your EPA/FDA example, I did mention a regulatory agency, but it would be primarily an auditor/regulator (as the IRS is to the Treasury) rather than a facilitator. It's primary occupation would be to enforce the rule of law as it pertains to voting. The problem comes when the agency (State Department) audits and regulates itself, there is too much room for corruption.

In fact, such a system bears a striking resemblence to the FDA/food industry relationship. We don't expect the FDA to slaughter the cattle and bring it to the neighborhood store. The FDA ensures that the people who do, do so responsibly.

Re:Here's the rub

[nelsonal]

It's trouble brewing, and I think Superman moved in a few buildings down where he opens mayo jars for Lois (and likely a few other old ladies in the building).

Re:Here's the rub

[nelsonal]

It would be pretty funny to walk into the voting area and see someone torching their ballot over in their little voting booth. Someone might give a crap about that form of protest, especially after the smoke alarms go off.

Re:Here's the rub

[nacturation]

Memos have surfaced taht confirm this: they were instructed to charge HIGH to add that capability, if it came to it.

I don't see this as (necessarily) a huge conspiracy to avoid an audit trail. This is likely a simple matter of Diebold achieving vendor lock-in with a limited feature set and then charging outrageous prices to add to that feature set. Where have we seen that before?

Re:Here's the rub

[nelsonal]

The problem with e-voting is that it was adopted too quickly. I think systems were installed in less than a year after Florida. If an organization (private or public) sat back and designed a system to meet secure criteria (for a year) with proper testing e-voting would save a considerable amount of voting staff time. Seems to me that a group of /.ers could form a company and build a system that worked a whole lot better than this.

Re:Here's the rub

[micromoog]

with the diebold machines there's no effective way to spoil your ballot.

. . . vote for Nader.

Re:Here's the rub

[EvilTwinSkippy]

So, again, the problem isn't that Diebold is greedy (which they are) or stupid (which they are), but that the people to whom they are directly accountable (the various county registrars) have no clue what the hell they're doing.

That's a bit like saying pick-pockets aren't the problem, it's people who don't watch their own ass all the time. Yes, there are things you can do to avoid being fleeced, but the ultimate blame is with the purpetrator, not the victim.

Re:Here's the rub

[Civil_Disobedient]

But one we always have by the balls (boycott) and one which although it may exert power (economic) it can never hold authority.

Boycott? That's how we're supposed to keep private corporations in check?! And how, pray tell, am I supposed to boycott a company like Diebolical? Don't vote?

We don't expect the FDA to slaughter the cattle and bring it to the neighborhood store. The FDA ensures that the people who do, do so responsibly.

But we're not talking about a product that is subject to the laws of supply and demand or other market forces. The IRS is a government agency, and gets paid through taxes. But how is a private company supposed to get paid to offer voting services? Through (you guessed it) the government, the "number one cause of loss of liberty" in your words.

Or I suppose we could just institute a poll tax. The IRS and FDA get paid through taxes, right? I'm sure people won't mind their hard-earned money going into private hands for the luxury of voting.

Re:Here's the rub

[EvilTwinSkippy]

While I agree, there is no eye on the long-term, I am hard pressed to find the "good old days" you are refering to.

The 1910's were tied up with WWI. If you were in the war material business, you did well. Investment capital was tied up in the war effort.

The 1920's made the dotcom era look sane in comaparison. Everyone was kiting "Aeroplane" related stocks, until the market tanked.

So through the 1930's and 40's you had the twin devils of the Great Depression and WWII.

The 1950's saw the birth of the Cold war.

The 1960's ... we have all seen the moves.

The 1970's was the birth of Voodoo economics and hyper-inflation as we know it, continuing on to the 90's.

The 90's we a recession tailed by a... well we all were there.

Re:Here's the rub

[EvilTwinSkippy]

There is a catch. No matter how badly, a tax assistant can only cost you money. (Alright, if truely fraudulant, perhaps jail time.)

With health care, the military, utilities, and voting you are talking about more than money. If I'm die because someone was cutting corners, I'm still dead if they try to give me a refund. Rome found out the hard way what happens when you rely on contractors for the defense of your homeland. Utilities are a natural monopoly, and must be regulated as such. Attempts to de-regulate them have not worked. Voting is an intangible right.

Priceless does not mean "Really high price tag." It means something that money cannot replace.

Re:Here's the rub

[cyways]

Take a look at the reports of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project at http://www.vote.caltech.edu/.
Their server seems overloaded today so let's not all go and slashdot it right now.

Re:Here's the rub

[IceAgeComing]

I'm not sure what the solution to the problem is, but somehow investors need to start holding corporations responsible for long-term success, long-term sacrifices to yield short-term gains need to be severely punished.

As Yogi Berra once said, It's Deja Vu all over again. This thread makes some excellent points, including your own. One direction to push society is toward a higher ethical standard. The problem today is that politicians who promote these standards don't get elected because businesses don't support them. FUD and money win elections.

* We must educate people until we have a FUD-sensitive public who acts rationally.

* We must continue to reform campaign financing. Free TV advertising wouldn't hurt any. The public does own the airwaves, after all, at least in the US.

* More likely, we'll repeat history and have a huge political/economic/social crisis, at which point some reform will occur.

Re:Here's the rub

[Short Circuit]

Hell, why bother having an EPA, or an FDA? If you choose to eat from a company that sells you tainted meat, well, just buy from a different supplier next time.

To expand on your point for those who didn't get it:

That meat could kill you. Or get you an elected official who's difficult to remove from office.

Re:Here's the rub

[admiralh]

A dingo stole my baby!

Re:Here's the rub

[Anonymous Coward]

or Kerry!

Re:Here's the rub

[GreyPoopon]

While I agree, there is no eye on the long-term, I am hard pressed to find the "good old days" you are refering to.

I'm not sure there was a time period that was actually "good", but there were time periods where companies themselves were more responsible. Probably the closest thing to what we are experiencing today is the 1920's. However, coming out of the great depression, companies were more responsible than they are today. The 1950's Cold War didn't really have much impact no fiscal responsibility of businesses. The 1960's was OK as far as businesses go, too, but some of the things that went one may have launched the hyper-inflation of the 70's. I believe that the 90's launched a new era similar to the 20's.

Re:Here's the rub

[persaud]

> Not to excuse the incompetent greedy fucks at Diebold,
> but they're only a symptom of the larger problem. The real
> problem is that the government types who are making
> decisions about going to evoting know fuck-all about
> how computers work

Sufficiently Competent Malice == Incompetent Benevolence.

Re:Here's the rub

[The AtomicPunk]

Hmm... let's see.. our choices are:

1) A private sector company that will lose the contracts because their stuff is so blatantly crappy .

or

2) Highly motivated (snicker) government employees that are directly tied to the people in power (who presumably want to stay in power).

Thanks, I'll take the capitalist approach.

There's nobody with half a clue that hasn't heard about all the problems with diebold, yet these government employees (the same people who would be involved in developing a GOVERNMENT system) won't cancel the contracts.

Why's it matter anyway, socialists win regardless of whether a republicrat or demopulican gets elected ?

Re:Here's the rub

[nadamsieee]

In your analogy Diebold is the pick-pocket and the various County Registrars/Secretaries of State are the victims. The problem with your analogy is that normally pick-pocket victims don't seek out the thief. And when the thief picks the victims' pockets, the victims don't normally make excuses for the thief.

Re:Here's the rub

[nadamsieee]

What could we do to curb this? Would a law requiring 30, 60, or maybe 90 day holding period on all stock purchase help?

Re:Here's the rub

[bobej1977]

Boycott? That's how we're supposed to keep private corporations in check?! And how, pray tell, am I supposed to boycott a company like Diebolical? Don't vote?

Which is my point exactly, the problem is that because voting is NOT privatized you can't boycott a bad company. The government is making your choices for you. I can't entrust my vote to a trustworthy agency because there is only one game in town, the government. If you privatize, there would be many games in town and I'd be able to choose the one that suited me. Perhaps where we disagree is that I believe at least one of these theoretical companies would be more honest and trustworthy than the government, you do not.

As to cost, the government could simply allow each person to take the cost of voting as a tax credit. You'd pay a voting agency up front to record your vote for you. The capitalist playbook even tells us that this will actually cost you less than the alternative because of efficiency gains due to competition.

If you don't think your hard-earned money is already going to private hands for the luxury of voting you are kidding yourself. Somebody manufactures the booths/paper/pencils/counters/etc. that are used during a vote. Diebold is one of them

Re:Here's the rub

[jeffbart]

And how, pray tell, am I supposed to boycott a company like Diebolical? Don't vote? Don't you dare blame this on the failings of a free market, this is a no-competition situation precisely because Diebold has a government granted monopoly. I have only been following this sporadically, and not thought very deeply about solutions, but it does seem obvious that it's vital to have competition at the performance stage, not just the bidding stage. It's unfortunate that elections are just once or twice a year, it does make it hard for refinement, "comparison shopping", and feedback.

Re:Here's the rub

[El_Ge_Ex]

Yeah, just cut their allowance. That's what my parent's did.

I never earned allowance ever again and got a job at school instead... :)

-B

Re:Here's the rub

[bobej1977]

I've got nothing against regulation. Certainly the voting industry would be regulated. But here's my point in personal terms:

I trust PG&E with my electricity more than I would any government agency. I trust my local bank more than any government agency with money. I believe Ford builds a safer and cleaner car than the government would if it decided to start making cars. I would entrust my health to a private hospital before I would a public one.

In all of these cases is a regulated or semi-regulated industry where private companies provide products or services. In all cases, I believe the product/service of the private entity is superior to a government run alternative.

I contend that your vote would be safer under such a system than it currently is.

Re:Here's the rub

[persaud]

You need to create financial incentives that yield a net increase in process quality (vote tabulation integrity). Think ISO 9001, FDA and pharmaceutical regulation, CISSP, HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley and other auditing standards.

Randomness is an essential component of auditing (and encryption) systems, especially in local regions with small populations where physical threats can subvert processes. In such cases, no number of nominally independent local auditors (including poll inspectors) can ensure non-tampering. There were many issues of concern in the 2004 Democratic primaries.

Random inspection by randomly selected auditors from the largest possible international pool would be step one in the auditing of electoral integrity.

Risk management of financial integrity would look at the size of the potential loss in a system compromise. What would be that size in a national U.S. election? Annual national spending? Number of deaths in a military conflict? Societal opportunity cost of ineffective trade, health or education policy?

There are already financial incentives for electoral integrity - for boards of directors, pension fund managers, international aid distribution. Some work better than others, but basic principles are known:

• Shorter filing deadlines
• Longer inspection deadlines
• Robust records retention
• Time-locked revolving doors
• Economic autonomy of auditors

Computer security relies on defense in depth and is most cautious about insider trust assumption.

Electoral integrity is a superset of computer security.

Re:Here's the rub

[SpaceCadetTrav]

Efficiency, quality, and reliability DOES NOT automatically follow when profit is the motivation.

So what you're saying is that it's impossible for me to buy a BMW and eat a steak right now. I have to buy a Ford with a McDonalds burger because profit motivation will never create quality? Where have you during the the last 200 years of capitalism?

Re:Here's the rub

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem isn't the private sector. If it were true that quality in the private sector was always hurt by profit motive, then private sector businesses would always produce substandard quality vs. public works.
Yes, the problem IS the private sector. Efficiency, quality, and reliability DOES NOT automatically follow when profit is the motivation.

No, the problem isn't the private sector. Public sector methods do not automatically produce efficiency, quality, or reliability. Witness DMV, IRS, INS.

The problem is not that the private sector can't produce a quality product, but rather that the government doesn't demand it
The government did demand it, they were promised it, and Diebold lied about it.

The government has not yet demanded it, or Diebold would not be getting paid

but I really think there's a better balance than the way the government operates now.
No, there isn't. Diebold does a hell of a lot worse than the government does.

The government's solution to problems is to throw bureaucracy at them. While there may be situations where adding middle-managers and paperwork generate cost-effective solutions, that's a pretty small set.

The above may look like an argument, but closer examination will reveal it to be a long-winded form of yes-it-is:no-it-isn't, with "arguments" and "counterclaims" bearing little or no relationship to each other. One can find just as many examples of mismanaged, corrupt public projects as one can find examples of lying, cheating corporate projects. This must make them both bad systems for arriving at a utopian solution.

Re:Here's the rub

[nomadic]

So what you're saying is that it's impossible for me to buy a BMW and eat a steak right now. I have to buy a Ford with a McDonalds burger because profit motivation will never create quality?

I've never seen a more ridiculous, shoddily made strawman.

Where did I say "profit motivation will never create quality"? Please, find it for me.

I mean, my post wasn't very long, only wrote a few sentences, but after scouring it I still can't find it.

I mean, at one point I say that the profit motive doesn't result in quality all the time, but I just can't imagine an English speaker misinterpreting it to that extent.

Re:Here's the rub

[persaud]

John Edwards ran a stellar campaign on exactly those principles, including 2-week internet disclosure of lobbyist meetings, 7-day advance notice of Senate bill changes and free broadcast time for political campaigns.

Although questionable tactics were used to force him from the race, it was extremely encouraging to see how many people did vote for the non-FUD presidential candidate.

Public perception of voter apathy is the single most dangerous threat to electoral integrity, because it provides convenient cover for "low turnouts" (which could be suppressed votes).

Diebold stories unfortunately help feed the apathy myth, even as they perform necessary education on the larger need to improve our process.

Re:Here's the rub

[theLOUDroom]

Yes, the problem IS the private sector. Efficiency, quality, and reliability DOES NOT automatically follow when profit is the motivation.

It sure does when you say:
"Your product must meet these efficiency, quality, and reliability requirements or you're not getting paid."

The government did demand it, they were promised it, and Diebold lied about it.
AND THE GOV'T KNOWS THAT DIEBOLD LIED! The gov't should have cancelled to cotract immediately and demanded their money back. The contract should have been written in such a way that they can do this.

What's happening here is all the people with the anti-government, pro-privatization bias are scrambling to make it look like somehow it wasn't the private sector's fault.

I'm not "anti-government, pro-privatization". I actually work at a company who's single biggest customer is the government.
Someone within the government is NOT DOING THEIR JOB. There should be a contract, a set of requirements, and a set of tests to verify these requirements. It would be absolutely stupid to buy something like an e-voting machine "as-is".
Someone is not doing their job WRT keeping tack of taxpayer money.

Re:Here's the rub

[persaud]

> I trust my local bank more than any
> government agency with money.

You think you do. Would you bank at an institution that was not FDIC Insured? FDIC = Federal Government.

Ford? See Ralph Nader and vehicle safety.

Private vs public hospital? At the same price point?

PG&E participated in the price gouging of California, which had nothing to do with electricity and everything to do with manipulation of so-called deregulation that was rejected by libertarians. Happy about your taxes? Or the $15B bond measure?

Re:Here's the rub

[Catbeller]

Not a huge conspiracy at all. It's right out in the open. They don't want the printers. They're spending fortunes and dragging in their favorite legislators to block the audit trail.

They're not claiming it's expensive, or complicated, or anything logical. They claim it's not necessary.

Now, we've plenty of data at this point, from negative tallies in Indiana to system tests by computer scientists. The tallies are not working even by Dielbold's standards. The scientists cracked the system in 5 minutes in one case, and found multiple hacks in all others that permitted them to own the voting machines, the aggregation machines, the modem communications, the voter smart cards... their conclusion: minumum effort to change vote totals at will!

Doesn't take a "conspiracy theory" to stare the truth in the face. The machines don't work as they are supposed to. The basic idea is unsound and an invitation to cheat. The system is already hacked, and the vote counts can be changed. Strange results have occured in Georgia and otherplaces: wild swings for candidates that don't match the polls. The company has fought like a rabid hyena to prevent an audit trail, even though doing so means extra profit.

I don't think the entire company is out to cheat the voters. But I find it easy to believe that either the machines don't work as advertised, or the company bigwigs may be terrified that an paper audit was run and cheating occured. I also find it humanly certain that someone in the Bush-fanatical company has it in their head to use the easy methods already known to tip a race in the Republican's favor. Why not? It's untraceable.

In any case, extremely robust printers are available for use,so fallibilty of hardware isn't an issue. Do ATM's fail to print very often? It's Diebold, they specialize in tough hardware.

Cost isn't an issue. They can charge whatever they like.

Time wasn't an issue, until they ran out the clock.

The audit trail IS the issue for them. They fundamentally deny they need one. Their reasoning is nonexistent. They simply assert it isn't necessary.

It boils down to this: they are blocking the ability to hold recounts. They don't want recounts. There must be a reason. They are capable, can charge what they like. So... they have something they don't want known. It can onlybe that tthe possiblity exists that the recount tallies won't match the original totals. Think what kind of hell would explode if the new, bulletproof system was shown conclusively to be completely untrustworthy. It would be a scandal unlike any other, especially seeing how hard they tried to hide the problem.

Fear of esposure as incompetents or fear of exposure as the enablers of a falsely elected government, take your pick. And ALL previous elections would be invalid on the evidence!

I don't think most Americans would even care, but some would. Enough to send people to prison.

Re:Here's the rub

[SphericalCrusher]

Very good point. Even when the day comes that E-Voting is perfect, senior citizens will still bitch and complain about it -- saying that someone probably hacked it -- calling for recount after recount after recount. When the day comes that we finally see good from this, I hope I'm still young enough to vote. Ha.

Re:Here's the rub

[Anonymous Coward]

So, if I understand what you're asserting, the private sector (Diebold in this case) is fully and completely justified in delivering overpriced shit in violation of contract terms to government agencies? And that the private sector will deliver quality only when absolutely, positively forced to do so? Let me point out the reality to you: consumer goods (BMWs, Rolexs, etc) are purchased (typically) one at a time by individuals whereas voting machines are puchased in huge bulk quantities. While it is economically impossible for a shoddy manufacturer to bribe each individual consumer with a few thousand bucks in "campaign funds" to puchase a junk car or watch, it is economically feasible to use those same few thousand dollars to influence a bulk purchase. Note that the same is true of purchases of bulk materials sold between private sector companies - I might not be happy with the P.O.S. ball point pens my company provides me, but the purchasing guy is enjoying the weekend in Vegas that the vendor gave him.

Re:Here's the rub

[corbettw]

That's a bit like saying pick-pockets aren't the problem, it's people who don't watch their own ass all the time.

Your analogy makes no sense. I think a better one would be, whom do you blame when the hens get eaten: the fox that was guarding the hen house, or the dumb ass farmer who hired the fox in the first place?

Re:Here's the rub

[Anonymous Coward]

Using the tax code to influence the behavior of CEO's would certianly be effective but I think it would be treating the symptom rather than the problem.

There is a reason CEO's focus so much on the short term and that reason is not because the CEO is "evil" or the investors are short sighted.

The CEO and the investors care only about one thing, accumulating more wealth (this is not strictly true but for the sake of argument pretend it is.)

The problem then becomes how can you align the CEO's incentives with the investor's wishes? In other words how can you make the CEO act like an owner rather than an investor?

The answer is to make the CEO an owner (stock grants, stock options, deferred bonuses contingent upon 5 year performance etc.) This is done and this works fairly well but, to come back to the point, the problem of short sightedness still exists.

And the reason it exists is this. There is a trade off between accountability and the incentives of a manager. (I am using accountability in the sense of accurately reporting financial performance to the investors.)

The manager knows that his compensation is tied directly to the performance of his stock. The manager also knows that investors value (very much) smooth, constantly increasing profits. So as a result the manager will do everything in his power to make earnings increase in a smooth orderly manner.

The problem is increasing the health of a business requires, almost everytime, that the income statement takes a hit. R&D looks like it is a money sink if viewed on a quarterly basis, expanding into a super nice new facility absolutely clobbers the income statement with one time operational costs, etc.

In the past the CEO would adjust the allowance for doubtful accounts, the allowance for returned product, the unrealized gain on financial assets and the ratio of a million other allowances. This was done not to trick the investor but because the CEO had incentives to keep stock price high (level earnings growth) and he also had incentives to grow the business (higher stock price in the future)

Introduce draconian accounting measures. Now this cookie jar accounting can no longer go on. Now the CEO cannot "borrow" from the doubtful accounts account but has to take the hit on the income statement. Suddenly building the business right isn't such a hot idea for the CEO, it would be much safer to focus on minor cost cutting and small expansion efforts. The upshot is it is much more difficult for an Enron to occur.

So to sum up this rambling post:
There is an inverse relationship between length of vision of senior leadership and the strictness of financial reporting in companies run by managers that do not own a significant portion of the company.

Any attempt to treat this basic paradox in investor interests with the tax code will simply result in some very fancy accounting as a work around.

Re:Here's the rub

[KevinDumpsCore]

> If the government were to take into consideration more than just going with the cheapest bidder in all instances, we would get better quality.

The US government must always go with the cheapest or it will be called "wasteful"... Remember the grumbling over $1,000 toilet seats when Ronald Reagan was President of the United States?

Re:Here's the rub

[Wateshay]

Efficiency, quality, and reliability DOES NOT automatically follow when profit is the motivation

I didn't say that (or at least I didn't mean it). What I meant to say was that you can get quality out of the private sector, you just have to demand it. "Demanding" quality doesn't mean just saying, "Hey, give me quality!" The only way to demand it (and get it) is to use both the carrot and the stick. If they give you quality, compensate them fairly. If they don't give you quality, don't buy the product. The problem with Diebold isn't Diebold per se (which doesn't mean they aren't a corrupt company who cut corners to squeeze out every dollar they could), but rather the fact that the government didn't require them to properly prove that they had met the design requirements (which I'm sure specified that the damn thing should work).

Was it Diebold's fault that they delivered crap? Hell yes!
However, it was the government's fault that they used that crap.

As for whether or not the government would produce a better product itself. Maybe, but maybe not. In house government development projects suffer from a lot of problems, too. Yeah, there have been a lot that have had wonderful successes (NASA), but there have also been a lot that have suffered miserable failures (NASA), just like in the private sector. Just like the efficiency, quality and reliability don't automatically follow when profit is the motivation, neither do they automatically follow when profit is not a motivator.

Re:Here's the rub

[Wateshay]

Maybe he implied it by the fact that your statement seemed obviously meant as a counter to my argument that profit motivation can create quality.

Re:Here's the rub

[Wateshay]

There's a difference between paying for quality, and wasting money.

$1,000 for a $10.50 toilet seat is wasteful (if that really was the case, I've heard there's a lot more to that particular story)

It's not wasteful, though, to choose a supplier who will provide quality at a slightly higher price than a supplier who will provide crap.

Say, for instance, that the government could choose between Diebold (who have proven themselves incompetent) building a system at $1 million, and IBM (who have proven themselves competent) building a system at $1.75 million. The government would in most cases choose Diebold, even though in the long run IBM would be the much better value all around.

Re:Here's the rub

[Aidtopia]

Remember that there were three debacles in Florida:

1. Diebold machines used in one county registered -16,000 votes (yes negative) for Gore. When that was corrected, and the media eventually picked up the new numbers, Gore called Bush back to rescind his earlier concilliation. I suspect that recognizing there could be an error this large inspired the idea of asking for recounts, on the hope that similar errors may have changed the outcome. Of course, there's no way to recount the electronic districts, so we'll never know if there were more Diebold problems or even if the -16,000 votes were undone correctly.

2. The butterfly ballot created confusion. How much we'll never know, but some people probably voted for someone other than who they intended to. If this was the cause of the surprising number of votes for Buchannen, then it's likely this issue alone cost Gore the election, regardless of the next point.

3. Hanging chads and the whole problem of reading intent from a punch card was the center of media attention, even though the first two issues probably had a much bigger affect on the election than this one. Yes, there was lots of debate and unstable numbers, but the official recounts and the after-the-fact audits by the media indicate that the problems with punch cards didn't skew the vote enough to make a difference.

I suspect that if the first problem didn't happen or wasn't detected, then we'd never have heard about the other two, and we wouldn't be spending millions on contemptuous, incompetent e-voting vendors like Diebold.

Re:Here's the rub

[Shurhaian]

I think it might be a matter of syllable count. You know, that big, arcane word "automatically" just got ignored as too long to be relevant.

Re:Here's the rub

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats a heck of alot of assumptions. I guess what I am wondering is, did they have more problems with machines in democratic or independent districts? Or were republicans affected by this also? (and I dont mean districts where repubs are a minority). Even though I believe George Bush will win the next Presidential race whether he runs or not. Did Deibold do anything to help Arnold win in Calif?

Re:Here's the rub

[raidient]

Given that I accept your premise that the private sector are doing it for the money, why do you ask me to accept your first statement?

"OK, all conspiracy theories off to the side. Forget the whole "Getting votes for the Republicn Party" bit. Ignore whatever political motivations may be surrounding Diebold at the moment. Assume that Diebold has no desire to commit or facilitate election fraud."

Would not all these things be ways of making even more money? So why should we think that they are not being carried out?

Re:Here's the rub

[Lux]

It could also be that they don't want records that can show their junk doesn't work in a court of law.

It smells just like liability concerns to me. And that's in line with the 500K/mo legal fund. But I won't go so far as to say they haven't or won't intentionally skew election results. Splitting the legal budget with some top notch outside security consultants would probably be a more effective way to curb liability, but only if they were willing to lock themselves out of skewing election results.

Re:Here's the rub

[Guppy06]

"The simple fact is that, while Diebold does indeed care about producing accurate voting results,"

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Re:Here's the rub

[Guru2Newbie]

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

And it seems Diebold has quite a lot of ass-fault to pave with...

Re:Here's the rub

[Dyolf Knip]

Diebold isn't really that incompetent. Remember, they're one of the largest suppliers of ATMs in the world. Accurately moving billions of dollars of their cash is not the sort of thing a bank would take lightly, right? So choosing Diebold for this job was not actually totally stupid.

What _was_ stupid was to continue to use them even after their fuckups had come to light. Their stupdity and related coverups were more than enough grounds to cancel the contract and demand money back, so Diebold had no incentive to do a decent job. If they did this to a major bank's line of ATMs, they'd get their asses reamed. But from Diebold's perspective, the US government is, as roystgnr put it, a "big stupid customer with deep pockets who will be happy no matter what". So while I blame Diebold for being cheap sleazebags, I blame their customer even more for letting them get away with it more than once.

Thank Goodness Somebody's Noticing

[filesiteguy]

I have some very good friends over at the Los Angeles Voters' office. Oddly enough, they've been somewhat in the dark about all this. I've been sending them updates as I get them. I cannot believe that a voting system would be considered acceptable without extensive testing. (This in addition to the woeful concept of usng MS Acess as the back end database.)

Re:Thank Goodness Somebody's Noticing

[Analogy Man]

I suppose the good news is that these errors were caught before they could have really screwed things up.

My immediate reaction to this is the definition of insanity "Doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result." Do they expect to actually do anything fundamentally different in November. If the flaws are fundamental to the system, they will manifest themselves every time.

I wonder.

[Neil Blender]

Did India outsource its voting machines? Seems like maybe it's not just a matter of incompetent programmers. Maybe e-voting is actually hard to accomplish.

Re:I wonder.

[ddelrio]

We outsource everything now. That's part of our problem. Government and business are now inexorably tied to one another. It's no coincidence that so many members of the current administration have held positions in companies which have been used as military outsourcers.

Re:I wonder.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe e-voting is actually hard to accomplish.

Perhaps I'm over-simplifying, but it seems to me that e-voting is roughly as hard as banking through ATMs, and we seem to have a good solution for that.

Re:I wonder.

[asimulator]

Electronic Voting Machines in India were developed by the government owned Bharat Electronics many years ago (before outsourcing, before the IT boom). The Government of India put off their deployment until the Election Commission, the constitutional body charged with carrying out elections, ordered they be dusted off, upgraded and deployed. This is the first national election to use EVMs, but they have been used in state and local elections in the past few years.

So, no, they were not outsourced.

Re:I wonder.

[neelm]

The poster, and the guy who modded it Interesting, must not be any type of programmer.

The logic, is mind numbingly simple. Just record a vote, that's all the public termanial has to do.

Some thought to security, but again nothing new here. There are several proven methods in use at this moment such as SSL/PGP/RSA/MD5 and more all the time. Some hardware security in place too, again all the tech needed here exists and is in use now. Hell, a well designed tamper-proof case would do most of the work, then make it run off of and internal battery/UPS system.

A plan! You don't do everything at one in a major system, you do peice at a time and make sure there are backups for everything. AKA paper ballots printed out for at least the next 5 years while the tech is worked on would be a good start.

Most important: independant *open* review. The specs and code for this system should fall under the freedom of information act anyway. If you feel that is asking too much of your company, then please kindly turn down the multi-million dollor rfp.

Re:I wonder.

[American AC in Paris]

Maybe e-voting is actually hard to accomplish.

Of course e-voting is hard to accomplish. That's not the issue.

What is the issue is that Diebold is doing everything they can to ramrod an unfinished system into place for the November elections.

Would you run beta software on your company's production billing server? Because that is what's gonna happen this November.

Re:I wonder.

[rsidd]

There's no high-level programming involved. All the software is in ROM, hard-coded on the chips, and cannot be modified. And it dates back to the 1980s and has been in testing since then.

The problems mentioned in the header have very little to do with voting machines: see this post. The repoll could simply be because thugs physically smashed the machines, for example; and even if it's mechanical failure, 191 is a pretty small number given the scale of these elections.

Re:I wonder.

[Anonymous Coward]

It takes time and some real talent to design a good, flexible, reliable and secure networked kiosk.

Re:I wonder.

[arkanes]

There's actually one much harder condition for voting machines, and thats anonyimity. It's much harder to make a secured system when you can't (and in fact don't want to) trace transactions to users.

Re:I wonder.

[micromoog]

Remember the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about as he was leaving office?

Improper Apology

[archipunk]

"We were caught. We apologize for that," Urosevich said of the mass failures of devices needed to call up digital ballots. ...

"We're sorry for the inconvenience of the voters," Urosevich said.

Nothing about apologizing for the problems with the product, or the fact that they didn't work. He appologizes for getting caught.

Re:Improper Apology

[Maestro4k]

• Nothing about apologizing for the problems with the product, or the fact that they didn't work. He appologizes for getting caught.

Which speaks volumes about Diebold as a company. Using the phrase "We were caught" implies they willfully put the bad machines out, etc. Having the head of the company say this makes it very hard for even the most forgiving of souls to trust them.

Re:Improper Apology

[Bowling Moses]

So can Bob Urosevich and other executives in-the-know at Diebold be charged with voter fraud for knowingly releasing faulty voting machines? Or is this one of those deals where the corporation is responsible and since you can't send it to prison, you slap a fine on it?

Re:Improper Apology

[donutello]

What are you basing this on? Assuming the person is not a complete idiot, I have a very hard time believing that he made that actual quote in that actual context. I don't doubt that he is more sorry about being caught than he is about commiting the wrong but I very much doubt that he would say that.

Without the full context of the quote, it is very hard to figure out what he was saying.

Re:Improper Apology

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it is time for someone to brush up on his Freud.

two words,

[pair-a-noyd]

Papaer Ballots..

Re:two words,

[Troy]

You Caveman! Everyone knows the Soylent Greenballots are the wave of the future.

Re:two words,

[goldspider]

I'll make a deal with you.

We'll give you back the paper ballots...

...if you don't complain when a bunch of old bats can't tell the difference between "Al Gore" and "Pat Buchanan".

Re:two words,

[pair-a-noyd]

Oh yeah, and I don't mean punch cards like the Florida crap, I mean like this one,
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/pictures/bal lot1893b.jpg

check this site for more info,
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/pictures/

#2 pencil

[Anonymous Coward]

Complication does not equal sophistication. Sometimes, a number 2 lead pencil really does work best.

Re:#2 pencil

[BK425]

Excellent point, and if we back up a step and ask what the goal of e-voting is it's speed of counting (I think, nobody seems to talk about the wider goald of evoting). Wich is why Washington state has an awesome system. It starts with picking up a pen...
You pick up a pen and a piece of paper and walk to a privacy table. Mark your ballot in human readable media and feed it to a scanner as you exit. Paper is kept, scanner keeps a log and the hard part, the -counting- speed is greatly increased. Washingtons been doing that for years now.

Re:#2 pencil

[EvilTwinSkippy]

The Philadelphia area has a pretty neat take on electronic voting. They replicated the functions of the old mechanical voting machines, using LED's and pushbuttons to replace the levers.

While they are smaller and a good deal more attractive than the old gray bohemeths, when you step inside the controls are laid out in the same way voters for the last 50 years have been accustomed to.

The names and ballot questions are printed out on a poster-sized sheet of paper, which slips over the lights and buttons. When you are done voting you hit a giant green button "VOTE" that is in the same place as the old handle.

Simple. Elegant. Fool-Resistant. It's all solid state. No software to tangle with.

It's a disgrace!

[dawg ball]

I think it's disgraceful that people forfeited their right to vote because of "foul-ups" Let's just hope that, if they plan to use these machines in the presidential election, that all the bugs would have been ironed out.

E-Voting? Pah

[llamaguy]

Computers are cool and all, but its VERY difficult to screw up just going to the ballot box and putting your form in. Software can have bugs, hardware can have bugs but generally, ballot boxes don't. Then again, it's easier to fiddle with votes on papa er ... until someone figures out how to break 128 bit encryption.

Re:E-Voting? Pah

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Who needs to break the encryption when the county server has an open netbios connection and the voting machines are using Access with admin no password for a back end?

Re:E-Voting? Pah

[whovian]

But what's so hard about e-voting, again?

I can't imagine that the computer end is so difficult. The code cannot be that complex. You need a numbered menu, human input device, some switch statements, and increment counter. Maybe check for buffer overflows, etc. Save the results with high-grade encyption that requires a password to access. Give the voter a receipt with a printed confirmation hash for verification. Plus, computer hardware is such commodity items that there should be sufficiently good drivers.

Seems to me that humans are demonstrably capable of mucking things up all on their own -- even with paper ballots.

Re:E-Voting? Pah

[DarthBart]

VERY difficult to screw up just going to the ballot box?

Someone explain that to the people in Florida.

Push hole in paper. It don't get no easier than that.

Re:E-Voting? Pah

[cr0sh]

From what I understand, the "hanging chad" issue in FL occurred not so much because of incompetent voters, but because of incompetent poll workers (and one could argue, incompetent engineers who designed the machines).

You see, the punch machine had a tray that held all of the cut bits of paper - the "chads". Just like a regular paper hole punch, every once in a while you have to empty the tray so that more chads can be punched. This was supposed to be the job of the poll workers. However, due to any number of factors (maybe they were just overworked, and not incompetent?) - those trays did not get empty, thus they didn't allow the ballots to be punched properly.

Now, what about the engineers of the machines? Well - for starters: Why did they make it a tray, instead of a very deep bin, or a bag, or something similar - something that no matter how many votes occurred on any one machine, it couldn't be filled in the course of an election day?

Only a few answers likely suffice: They were lazy, they were incompetent, or (likely) they were told not to by the company they worked for because such a larger recepticle would add a few pennies to the cost of manufacture which could instead be PROFIT (greedy bastard syndrome).

Re:E-Voting? Pah

[Catbeller]

There were no "screw ups" with the paper ballots in Florida.

The Republicans descended on the state in waves, filed gobs of lawsuits, and fired PR bullshit cannons at the TV talking heads.

The "problem" was the hysterical Republicans at the counting tables. At the doors, rioting. At the courts, delaying. On the TV, bloviating and installing doubt into people's heads.In the Supreme Court, concocting a BS, only-this-one-time decision to install their boy.

The recount of the paper ballots was going fine, no hitch, no fuss, until the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the process. They held up the decision until 30 minutes before the deadline they themselves set up as sacrosanct, then invited the state to finish up in that half hour.

It hascome to light that if Gore had won the initial count, those armies of drones were instructed to demand recounts until our anal sphincters bled. And to question the legality of Gore's presidency for the next four years. The cable channels would have been a non-stop illegaltheftoftheelection telethon for the Republicans until the people would have impeached Gore just to shut the right wing the hell UP already.

And, oh yeah: a recount was made, afterthe election,by a consortium of newspapers and the parties themselves. If the votes had been recounted, with the overvotes added in (candidate checked off, and the name written in as well -- a common practice, apparently) rather than discarded --

Gore won.

Finito.

Re:E-Voting? Pah

[Anonymous Coward]

its VERY difficult to screw up just going to the ballot box and putting your form in.

That's why we have public officials involved, so that even these simple processes can be subject to manipulation. :-)

Even when the voter's mark itself is beyond debate, the higher-ups will second-guess your mark. For example, I remember hearing how 'XYZ minority district in Florida would presumedly not have intentionally voted for Buchanan in the 2000 election, therefore we should negate those votes as errors...'

Were they mistakes? Perhaps. But we don't KNOW that they were mistakes. The fact is, people voted. We can't throw away votes just because the mistakes made in one district may happen to be more evident that the mistakes made elsewhere. Speifically, if the district in question had instead been primarily white, the Buchanan votes (erroneous or otherwise) would never have been questioned.

We should never underestimate the self-interest of professional politicians. You could deploy the best paper or computer-based polling system possible, yet politicians nonetheless WILL find a way to subvert the integrity of how it gets used.

Re:E-Voting? Pah

[comedian23]

Any links? Facts? Did you work on the recount? Anything whatsoever to back your statements would be great.

Re:E-Voting? Pah

[comedian23]

>They were lazy

I think this is more likely the reason than anything else.

You can only make a tray so big unless you want to hook a paper mill up to each machine to recycle the "chads" as they fall out. Expecting someone to empty a little tray once or twice isn't that tall of an order.

We have probably ALL tried to use the hole-punch at work to find it jammed up with two years worth of little paper holes because some people are too lazy to take the cover off and shake the thing over the trash.

Re:E-Voting? Pah

[SpaceCadetTrav]

Good luck, he works for Michael Moore.

Re:E-Voting? Pah

[cr0sh]

That's exactly the thing - I have never seen one of these punch hole voting machines, so I can only guess here - but I bet the trays are at most one inch or so deep, by so many inches square.

Why didn't the engineers instead design them to be say, six inches deep (increasing volume greatly) - so that there was *no chance* of them filling up in current or future elections? Only if they were incompetent, or doing so would eat into the profitability of the machines for the makers...

Re:E-Voting? Pah

[plsuh]

Implementing an all-electronic voting system is a *very* hard problem, all of the ill-informed pontificating to the contrary. There are three conflicting requirements:

1. The voter must be able to verify that his or her vote was correctly recorded.
2. The vote must be anonymous to anyone except the voter.
3. Election officials must be able to conduct an independent recount.

Any two of these are easy to implement; all three together are hard. The theoretical underpinnings are not well understood and few formal mathematical protocols have been defined, unlike areas such as e-commerce and PKI. We cannot easily build on the work from those fields, as a major goal behind the theory and protocols from e-commerce and PKI is non-repudiation, which is the exact opposite of (2) above. Anonymity is a very strong requirement, in fact. It is not sufficient to say that the voter just gets a receipt that shows how he or she voted, and as long as they don't show it to anyone it's OK. If a voter can prove that he or she voted a certain way, we run into the realm of vote coercion (a la the Soviet Union) or vote buying (a la Chicago). It must be impossible for anyone, including the voter, to prove that he or she voted a certain way.

The only two formal e-voting protocols defined so far are Rebecca Mercuri's and David Chaum's. Of the two, Mercuri's is much better studied and understood, but Chaum's is the more interesting and elegant. Both are practical protocols, directed at solving our current problems. They are not attempts at a deep theoretical analysis of the underlying problem domain, which we sorely need before we go further down the e-voting path.

--Paul

Re:E-Voting? Pah

[beamin]

http://www.supremecourtus.gov/florida.html

The Supreme Court of the US overruled the Supreme Court of Florida and halted the recount.

Who's not surprised?

[ctishman]

See, the sick part about all of this is that nothing will actually happen. Diebold will stall and complain and fling their influence around, The Governator will promise to look into it and do nothing.

"The general election is too close to fix anything now! If ONLY we'd learned about it sooner!"

Re:Who's not surprised?

[normal_guy]

You can say this why? Because an unprecedented number of electronic voting machines have been deployed, only to fail in some districts? And the backlash from that previous debacle was quietly swept under the rug? Your cynicism doesn't apply in this particular situation. I'm actually writing and waiting for things to happen, and they probably will - at least in some of the districts.

Re:Who's not surprised?

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Too close to the election?

All you need to correct this situation are a few ton of pencils and a contract with a high-volume printing company.

The $40,000,000 spent on electronic voting is far more than it would have cost to hand-count every vote in that state for the next 10 years.

Re:Who's not surprised?

[Civil_Disobedient]

This is why I have to laugh at those that still think "the people" are in the driver's seat of this country. I think the problem stems from the idea of "the people" as a group. "We" is really just you and me, with our own agendas and desires, times a few million. Very rarely, a lot of people will share the same desire, and then something gets done. More often than not, "we" fall into disarray and end up sitting on our asses.

Mortgages, phone bills, kids, food on the table, getting your car to run on a cold December morning when you're late for work and fearful of being fired -- these are our priorities. What we really need in this country is a disenfranchised leisure class to stir shit up.

Like Orwell said:

"Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."

Bah!

[B3ryllium]

Doesn't ANYONE use Sound Software Engineering Methodology any more?

It's pathetic, really, that these companies can't get it right. I can't tell if it's due to their own incompetence, or because governments are so fearful of technology that they over-compensate by making the requirements too demanding.

I mean, heck, you'd think the governments would WANT flawed software, to increase their chances of getting elected. Or perhaps, if you were conspiracy inclined, you'd think that the governments want the public to THINK the software is flawed, so they can return to the tried-and-true election rigging tactics.

Either way, the solution is to use proper software engineering principles - most likely with a strict formal specification.

Why don't we have a Federal Standard?

[WarlockD]

I mean with all the problems I have been hearing about how some county's voting problems vary from county to county.

Here in Texas, we have communities hand counting, some use optical scanning, and some even used the punch cards. We don't have to worry about shipping the votes though the Pony Express anymore, so why has there never been any effort to make standardized, open standard machines for everyone? Is it just because the states don't want to lose that power?

Re:Why don't we have a Federal Standard?

[archipunk]

Why don't we have a Federal Standard?

For the same reason as with many other things in this country: States Rights.

This topic was widely discussed during the 2000 election, with lots of questioning about why there wasn't a standard mandated by the Federal govenment. But the elections are run by the municipalities, and not by the national government.

Re:Why don't we have a Federal Standard?

[griffjon]

Yeah, Texas doesn't have the greatest record of fair voting, either. Just google "Ballot Box 13" and texas (add an LBJ in there for good measure) ;)

You'd think that there'd be some impetus towards a minimal standard.

Re:Why don't we have a Federal Standard?

[alphaseven]

There are constitutional reasons why you can't have a Canadian style nation wide standard for voting.

The question you should be asking is, why doesn't Texas have a state standard?

It would be cheaper if you had a single body running the election in each state, making ballots and buying equipment in bulk, making sure the poor communities have the same equipment as rich communites. I've read this isn't done for buget reasons, most states pass the costs for elections onto individual communities.

Tehnology is not the root problem here.

[Muda69]

Machine voting isn't the problem, Diebold is. They've created a horrible, insecure system. It's simple enough to create a more secure system that it's hard not to believe Diebold is deliberately enabling fraud.

A system where votes were printed to a machine-readable piece of paper, verified by the voter, then deposited in a secure box, would be simple and secure. By printing votes you create a self-verifying system -- voters can check their vote is correct, and an audit can easily verify that votes were recorded as voters intended. Management of the printed records would be just like the ballots we already are using, but without the reliability problems of punch-card systems. Tallying could be done mechanically, as a barcode could accompany the printed text.

The whole system is very simple. Even if they just used an ATM style of security (printing to an internal paper log) they would be far superior to Diebold. But using logic is difficult in this case, because Diebold is clearly making absurd claims, and it's difficult to refute absurdity.

EVM 2003 is trying to create a complete open source voting system (not just machine). I wish them the best of luck. This is more than just philosophy about copyright and IP, it's the defense of democracy from those that want very much to take away even the slight accountability that currently exists. They've already made it into office with one fraudulent election (2000), and very possibly kept control of congress with another (2002, with many states being won with unverifiable votes that didn't match up with predicted results).

Re:Tehnology is not the root problem here.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up. Insightful

Re:Tehnology is not the root problem here.

[nadamsieee]

One note: EVM2003 is our demo software only. The Open Voting Consortium is the name of the group working on a solution to the black-box voting problem.

Re:Tehnology is not the root problem here.

[Anonymous Coward]

Security issues aside (for the moment)Technology is one of the problems. We all know how fast hardware/software becomes obsolete these days. This is all based on commercial grade hardware which will probably be obsolete/unsupported before the '08 elections. This is just a corporate welfare scam. I fail to see how it is significantly better than the Canadian system. Replace early Replace often.

Re:Tehnology is not the root problem here.

[theLOUDroom]

Tallying could be done mechanically, as a barcode could accompany the printed text.

Just a nitpick here. There is nothing to be gained by putting barcodes on the ballots because humans can't verifiy them. The person can only verify the text accompanying the barcode.
In the end you'd still have to verify that the barcode actuallys matches the text above it, but if you're going to do that you may as weel just skip reading the barcode altogether and verify that the text matches the electronic count.

The proper way to do it is to have an encoding that is both human and machine readable (like an OCR font, punched out hole, filled in bubble, etc).

Re:Tehnology is not the root problem here.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, they bought a "horrible, insecure system" and branded it. Dollars to donuts says Diebold wasn't totally sure of the problems with the system when they bought it. Do the math: why would Diebold, a company whose very business is built on security, accuracy, and reliability, build something so clearly counter to their core business?

We need more than Decertification

[JivanMukti]

Decertifying some (or all) of the machines is an ok start. What about fines? Criminal charges for violating state election laws?

Maybe if the company and the persons who run it were actually held responsible for their actions it might make others more likely to comply with the law.

All in all though, I'm glad California is aware of the problems and hasn't just ignored them.

Re:We need more than Decertification

[llamaguy]

Maybe if the company and the persons who run it were actually held responsible for their actions it might make others more likely to comply with the law Big companies are never held responsible. Or at least, they arent in the UK and the US. When Jarvis fouled up and caused a train crash they gave them a contract to continue renewing that same stretch of track. Unless the US government decides that dodgy voting systems are enough to warrant a massive response, this company will get fined a ridiculously small amount of money, noone will really get blamed and everything will just go on as if nothing happened.

Re:We need more than Decertification

[JivanMukti]

I know. Just wishful thinking on my part I guess.

And unfortunately I expect that 'mistakes' will continue and citizens will get used to it and won't demand accountability and systems that work. Just like we've gotten used to some pretty poorly written software and user interfaces that suck.

Peace

Re:We need more than Decertification

[Nevo]

Better yet, decertify the results.

The state will be forced to hold another election, and you can bet your sweet ass they'd sue Diebold for reimbursement.

Hit 'em in the wallet.

Re:We need more than Decertification

[CthuluElder]

I completely agree, and if the contract precludes fines and criminal charges, perhaps a civil suit.
Any voter from the counties known to have voting machine trouble could start a class-action. Actually maybe any voter in California, because the election is now in doubt.

hmmm..

Re:We need more than Decertification

[Anonymous Coward]

How about drawn and quatered on national tv? This isnt a minor fuckup yknow.

Re:We need more than Decertification

[lothar97]

I live in San Diego (where it looks like 1/2 of the polling places had problems). I voted in the election, and it was quite uncomfortable for a few reasons.

1- The machines were clearly running some sort of Windows system (not sure which), and I've NEVER even secure ones like Win2K crash on me (heavy sarcasm)

2- The people running the polling place had an average age of about 93. I can just imagine them attempting to troubleshoot a DLL error while my vote is being eaten.

3- To review my choices, I had to go back. It didn't give me a nice summary screen, I had to move forward and back across multiple screens to see my choices. Since I'm a Green Party member, I had less screens to scroll through.

4- The most chilling- no reciept. You touch the screen to cast the ballot, and it just goes back to the main screen. All previous elections with punchcards, you received a ticket from your ballot, so you could find a copy of it later (if you wanted). Sure I doubt anyone does, but not having any record of my vote (other than the fact that I signed in) was quite uncomfortable.

Re:We need more than Decertification

[JivanMukti]

Never thought about that. Very good point.

two words,

[Anonymous Coward]

Your Face...

Screwing Things Up GWB styleeeeee!

[Anonymous Coward]

flip-flop and you don't stop!!!

LOL whats nice about these is that we are living it RIGHT NOW thanks to W. want more of the same dipshit?

Re:Screwing Things Up GWB styleeeeee!

[Anonymous Coward]

nice to see you're modded up as 'informative' while the parent comment is -1.

Nice to see where the bias of the moderation system lies and the abuse of it once again.

Fraud

[lspd]

Personally I don't really care about glitches, crashes and other problems with the machines. What I do care about is the use of uncertified software and the fact that these companies are more or less getting away with it. It sets a bad precedent for the future. Who cares if a few voting machines get decertified if you get to rig an election as a result? Any use of uncertified software should bar that company from ever producing voting machines in the US again. Do we really have to wait until someone is caught rigging a major election before real efforts are undertaken to stop it?

Re:Fraud

[maximilln]

Rigging elections is a very complicated process that relies more on massaging statistics than it does on any particular machine. I'm more curious to see the results of India's recounts. A carefully controlled data acquisition system could give concrete proof to suspicions about human irregularity and consistency. What percentage of people who voted up four months ago will vote down now? Which media outlets producing which news stories have the greatest effect in swaying votes up, down, or inverse?

No one's ever going to get caught doing it. In a system that is so complicated it's too easy to disavow all knowledge or shuffle the focus to the next person in line. Diebold may not ever produce legitimate voting machines but that certainly won't stop them from gathering patents on intellectual property and demanding payments from any other company that does eventually produce validated and accepted systems.

I empathize with your views and, in general, agree. The "bad precedent for the future" was set a long time ago--around 1900 by my reckoning at the time when the US gov't sold the citizenry into an impossible debt to the gold standard set and controlled by the banks. How is it ever going to be possible to pay off a debt when the creditor is allowed to change the rules of repayment at a whim? We just have to suffer through the results as they stand today.

Re:Fraud

[Anonymous Coward]

Judging from reports from the field, the Super Tuesday primary and other elections during the Democratic primary may already have been rigged... At the order of the Democratic party! In all elections where Diebold machines were used, John Kerry came in significantly ahead of Howard Dean... Despite exit polling showing the opposite result! In all elections where Diebold machines were NOT used, the margin was much closer, and Dean often won, but these were also often small districts, of little import to the final result.

Ever wonder why the media stopped reporting on exit polls after the second round of Primaries? There's your answer!

Re:Fraud

[Ralph Wiggam]

"Do we really have to wait until someone is caught rigging a major election before real efforts are undertaken to stop it?"

Because these machines don't produce a paper trail, it will be almost impossible to catch someone rigging an election. Whatever numbers the computer spits out are the final numbers, that's it. Even when the number of votes is 10 times the number of voters (as in Evansville, IN) there is no way to recount.

There is circumstantial evidence showing election fraud here in Georgia in 2002. Our incumbent Democratic Governor and a Dem incumbent Senator both had 10% leads in the polls the week of the election. Both lost. Warehouse employees have reported that Diebold patched thier systems after the elections board had certified the software on them. Diebold certainly isn't doing the rigging themselves, but their incompetence may be letting someone else do it.

I recently read a great quote from that champion of Democracy, Joseph Stalin - "The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do."

News of the GA 2002 election:
wired.com
scoop.co.nz

-B

Re:Fraud

[Inebrius]

It might have something to do with the people running the polls, and the media that reports the results. In California, Cruz Bustamante wasn't doing so bad in the polls, but he lost by a considerable margin to Arnold. This was predicted prior to the election, with specific reference to the bias of the polls/media.

Re:Fraud

[mOdQuArK!]

It might have something to do with the people running the polls, and the media that reports the results.

Of course since the machines didn't leave an audit trail, you'll never know. If I wanted to set things up so that I could steal an election, I'd sure like this setup.

Paper Rulz

[Anonymous Coward]

From Workingforachange.com -

"I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
-- Wally O'Dell, CEO of electronic voting machine manufacturer Diebold

Give me paper or give me death!

Nonmember?

[sangreal66]

Nonmember? Is that meant to be some kind of pun?

d'oh

[Vlion]

What the bloody crap! That is just wrong. Would someone kindly put Diebold out of business, please?

California officials will vote

[Anonymous Coward]

On whether to punish Diebold. This will be accomplished with an electronic vote using Diebold equipment. Diebold is confident they will be found not guilty, unanimously.

Let the /. programmers do it

[AviLazar]

How about we create the ePoll machines :) Make it open source and that way we can all trust it when we see the code. ;) -A

Re:Let the /. programmers do it

[Maestro4k]

But if we let the /. people do it, we'll have everyone trying to get first vote! :)

Re:Let the /. programmers do it

[AviLazar]

So the only conspiracy code will be who can make the sneakiest, open source code that allows them first vote and nobody else realizing it :)

Absentee Ballots

[yohohogreengiant]

I wish submitting absentee ballots was a sure-fire way to overcome this electronic-voting madness. Here in Hawai'i they get counted, but in other places they may not even be counted at all if the results aren't close enough. I'm a deputy registrar here in Hilo and I'll probably be working the polls on election day. I have to say I'm relieved, in that although we'll have one of these proprietary democracy-destroying machines at all polls, we'll also have the older, more reliable paper ballots in all precincts. If someone approaches me asking which method they should use, I won't hesitate to state my personal preference for analog.

I have to ask

[Le Marteau]

Once again, I have to ask - what is the big goddamned rush to get election results that requires electronic voting machine? Why are people so frickin' hard to get the results of an election, like, on election day.

People should just chill, let a team of little old ladies count PAPER BALLOTS marked in PENCIL or PEN, and get the VERIFIABLE RESULTS a week or so later.

Re:I have to ask

[Civil_Disobedient]

Why are people so frickin' hard to get the results of an election, like, on election day.

I believe it's a case of a hammer in search of a nail. Or, to quote a sig I saw once on /., "Just because you fixed it doesn't mean it was broken."

It's not like the country will come to a stand-still if the results aren't known three minutes after closing the voting stations.

Re:I have to ask

[Gid1]

Totally agree, but it doesn't even need to take a week... overnight should be enough. Here in the UK, it's currently done as a paper ballot. The General Election results for the entire country are counted in time for the (new?) Prime Minister to move into 10 Downing Street the next day, rather than having a Prime-Minister-Elect for a few months. In most cases, the count is done within a few hours of the polls closing. The UK has a pretty big population, and I'd expect the ratio of banking/clerical staff available per voter is pretty much the same between the UK and the US, so it's a scalable thing.

Okay, so the Prime Minister isn't the Head of State, but the General Election actually elects all our representatives (MPs), and so completely replaces/revises the executive and legislative branches at the same time. As far as the head of state is concerned, the monarchy is transferred automatically at the moment of death of the current monarch. The Queen actually became queen while up a tree in Kenya.

Anyway, a paper/pen ballot could be designed whereby a preliminary count is performed using an optical reader, but keeps the readable slips for a manual check afterwards. It works for lottery tickets, so why not ballots?

Also, why the HELL do the voting machines cost $40 million for a few counties?!?

Re:I have to ask

[travdaddy]

Another benefit other than speed was supposed to be that the electronic voting machines would make counting votes MORE reliable, not less. A lot of this push towards electronic voting came from the Florida fiasco, where chads were used of course.

Of course, in reality, we're seeing that e-voting makes voting even less reliable! What's up with that? I blame Diebold, not the whole idea of e-voting.

Grilling Diebold?

[Kenja]

Save me some white meat.

Re:Grilling Diebold?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a nigger, you insensitive clod!

What about the county's responsibility?

[djaj]

As much as I think black boxes like Diebold's should be forbidden from this kind of endeavor (Hi, choir!), I have to wonder as well why San Diego County didn't have a backup plan. It boggles the mind that they would do something as important as this without having backup paper ballots.

Also, while I feel bad for the folks who are having their ability to vote without assistance taken away from them, it has to be better than having broken machines at which no voting at all can take place.

Re:What about the county's responsibility?

[micromoog]

while I feel bad for the folks who are having their ability to vote without assistance taken away from them, it has to be better than having broken machines at which no voting at all can take place.

I disagree. If no voting at all can take place, the system will get fixed and ultimately no one will be disenfranchised.

The hypocrisy of the Democrat Party

[Anonymous Coward]

Democratic activists, more than Republicans, are quick to point out the dangers of Diebold's sloppy numbers messing up elections.

Yet they are actually advocating for less-accurate numbers elsewhere, in an important matter that impacts voting districts: the census. For years now, the Democrats have been encouraging having trendy guessing-games to make up imaginary numbers to replace actual counts in the census, on the idea that they can have wonks make up as many Democratic voters as they want to.

Come on now, insist on accuracy in both the census AND vote counting.

Re:The hypocrisy of the Democrat Party

[curtisk]

Democratic activists, more than Republicans, are quick to point out the dangers of Diebold's sloppy numbers messing up elections.

hmmmmm....maybe items such as these make them that way perhaps?

Come on now, insist on accuracy in both the census AND vote counting.

Agreed.

Re:The hypocrisy of the Democrat Party

[Garg]

Of course, there is no hypocrisy in the Republican party.

Imagine, if you will, that in the 2000 election, George W. Bush trails in Florida by a few hundred votes, with strange discrepancies in mostly Republican counties. You'd see the same exact people saying the exact opposite things. Gore would be trying to declare the election over, and Bush would be filing lawsuits right and left.

The sooner you realize that party people's loyalty is to the party, and not to the United States of America, the better off you'll be.

Garg

Re:The hypocrisy of the Democrat Party

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, Democrats don't want checks and balances on voting.. Right now Osama could show up and vote with no problem, since the whiners do what they do best if anyone ever tries to verify someone's identity when voting. After all who would osama vote for?

Re:The hypocrisy of the Democrat Party

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, there is no hypocrisy in the Republican party.

Imagine, if you will, that in the 2000 election, George W. Bush trails in Florida by a few hundred votes, with strange discrepancies in mostly Republican counties. You'd see the same exact people saying the exact opposite things. Gore would be trying to declare the election over, and Bush would be filing lawsuits right and left.

The sooner you realize that party people's loyalty is to the party, and not to the United States of America, the better off you'll be.


Possible. Just remember, though, that Tricky Dick (Nixon, for you children) refused to contest the 1960 election, even though it seemed to be more flawed that the 2000 election. Seems he had an aversion to reducing public trust in the process.

2000 didn't happen because the candidates were "party people", it happened because they were "stupid people".

It is interesting to me still that Gore would likely have won, if he had only followed Florida state law on challenging elections. Rather than trying to get the Florida Supreme Court to make new election laws in his favour (just as Bush did with the US Supreme Court, in response).

Last I saw on the subject, a Statewide recount would have resulted in a Bush victory, but a more localized recount (such as Florida law allowed for, but which was impolitic to push once the democrats started propogandizing about disenfranchising people) MIGHT have given Gore the win. Depending on just how limited the recount was, of course.

Re:The hypocrisy of the Democrat Party

[Anonymous Coward]

You are ignoring the fact that the liberal media announced to the world that Gore had won Florida before the more conservative counties in Western Florida had closed polls.

This proves one thing...

[techstar25]

This proves what we knew all along: that the worst programmers in the world are in California and India. In Florida we have great programmers, but we can't get the damn printed ballots straightened out.

WHY doesn't it work?

[koi88]

I really don't understand why voting machines never seem to work.
I mean, ATMs also use a complicated technology in order to prevent other people from taking your money, to prevent you from withdrawing more than you're allowed to, etc, etc.
But, in general, they seem to work. Or maybe only banks notice the problems?
Why are there so many problems with voting machines? Isn't counting what computers where made for?

Re:WHY doesn't it work?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's because anytime anyone tries to verify that someone is 1) eligible to vote and 2) registered to vote you have the Jesse Jackson's of the world decrying that people are being disenfranchised.

Really, I could program a secure open source voting system in a day or two...

Would it be too expensive to have smart card voter ID cards? No, not for what you're getting. Would the Jesse Jackson's of the world let it happen? No! These are the same people who cry foul if someone is requested to show ID with their voter registration card. Heaven forbid that someone actually be who they are presenting themselves as when they vote.

"We want to be able to track and verify votes." Track it to what?
"The person who placed the vote."
Ok. Let's do it...
"AAArrggghhhh, You can't do that, you're disenfranchising voters by tracking their vote!"

Re:WHY doesn't it work?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I really don't understand why voting machines never seem to work. "

You haven't yet figured out that the US is a banana republic, which has been run by essentially the same group of dictators for the past 30 years.

Note Rumsfeld and Ashcroft's careers in
Washington, for instance. Pay particular attention to the fact that they didn't just spring out of nowhere in 2000.

Wouldn't it be simpler to

[Anonymous Coward]

Simply have a voting terminal that just prints your vote out that you deposit in the box as always.

You could run it though an OCR easy enough and you'd have a perfectly good paper trail too.

Alameda County has been pursuing these issues ...

[whoever57]

..for some time. There have been several articles in the Oakland Tribune and other local papers. Alameda County has complained to Diebold and is clearly pusuing the issue.

Alameda County is basically the "East Bay", ie. across the Bay from San Francisco, including Berkeley, Oakland, Fremont, etc.

Alright, I have a question.

[unformed]

Allin all, how difficult would this --really-- be? At least getting the part right about who's allowed and who's not allowed to vote? I'm a programmer, I've studied cryptography, I understand the problems associated with voting, but what if they made an open system, hired good programmers, and hired other good programmers to check the first programmers work, without having a private company do the work. (or at least force the private company be open).

Lave the code open, let people look at it themselves, fin problems or what not .... test in in some *local* elections for a few years, and when those work, start moving it up to larger (ie: statewide) elections ....

Jesus, people have created some insane stuff back in the day, what's the problem now?

Re:Alright, I have a question.

[swillden]

Lave the code open, let people look at it themselves, fin problems or what not .... test in in some *local* elections for a few years, and when those work, start moving it up to larger (ie: statewide) elections .... Jesus, people have created some insane stuff back in the day, what's the problem now?

The problem is that this is different.

Take a look at Bruce Schneier's April Cryptogram newsletter, in which he publishes an analysis by Paul Kocher of the value of a successful electoral system hack. It's a huge pile of money. Very, very few systems have to be able to withstand adversaries with budgets reaching up to hundreds of millions of dollars. And it turns out that in most cases you don't really have to compromise that much of the system in order to swing things your way. Kocher points out that the Democrats only needed to change the outcomes of 23 races in the 2002 elections to change the balance of power in the House. The average margin of victory in the closest 23 races was less than 3000 votes, so selectively changing less than 70,000 votes could change the balance of power in the US.

And, given motivation, capability and access (which can always be obtained given sufficient motivation and capability), there are a thousand ways to tweak the results of any purely electronic system. Even if the code is open and widely peer-reviewed, how can you ever know what code is actually running on the voting machine you're using? Oh, sure, there are ways to prove what's running there, given secure hardware and a whole bunch of extra work and processes, but that's both very expensive and unnecessary.

The beauty of human-readable paper is that it doesn't *matter* what code is running on the voting machine. The voter can see that the ink on the paper accurately reflects his choices. Or not. Automated counting can still be done, too, because you only need a small number of counting systems which means it's feasible for all of the parties involved to provide adequate testing and oversight. Each party can bring their own counting machine, if they like, after having their own experts thoroughly verify its operation via white and black box testing.

Paper is simple, cheap, effective. It's just a no-brainer, if what you really want is fair and accurate elections.

Why are these so hard to build?

[BagOBones]

Vote counting and candidate selection shouldn't be hard to implement...

The only challenges is making it secure and accountable but these 2 problems should already have solutions.

You have to ask your self how the hell do you screw up simple voting?

I mean, Come On

[dynamo]

OMG this is so stupid. How fucking hard can it be to make a distributed database and client software to increment a couple hundred variables? You don't see these kind of problems with web polls. Sure there are different candidates in different elections, but if you split the problem along the lines of particular races, other than the shiny happy interface to use a snazzy hi-tech touch screen to touch the face of your fav candidate, it really comes down to a VERY simple database call to increment a count for each candidate. I could do this whole system with one single database table for results.

Seriously, I could put together a system to increment a couple hundred variables in non-realtime over a weekend reliably enough to stake my life on it's accuracy. Most of us could.

The classic example of stable, solid transactions would be the ATM machine. Maybe if some of the rocket scientists at Diebold would talk to someone who had actually worked on an ATM machine they would know how addition works in computers, even across globally distributes databases, and learn how to do things like paper receipts, reliable atomic transactions...

Huh? Diebold already makes ATMs? Oh..

Re:I mean, Come On

[broter]

...it really comes down to a VERY simple database call to increment a count for each candidate.

The problem is that it doesn't come down to incrementing the number of votes for a candidate, but that's what they're trying to do (poorly). With the system you propose, there's no way to catch errors in reporting after the fact. There needs to be a way of accounting for each vote that was cast from the client, and verifieing that it was correctly recorded at the server.

There are plenty of models to follow to do this, and Diebold is following none of them. That's a problem. From the the CEO's quotes in the article and documents posted from their internal memos (BlackBoxVoting.org?) it's obvious that they aren't interested in fixing the situation. That's a worse problem.

.... for more info and history on Diebold

[curtisk]

Black Box Voting and Bev Harris have led the fight against Diebold and ES&S hijinks for a while now, lots of good reading at that site to get you up to speed on the issues

Uhhhh how hard can it be?

[Anonymous Coward]

How hard can it be to build a reliable machine and the related software that basically presents you with a multiple choice????? Isn't this a no-brainer?

Re:Uhhhh how hard can it be?

[mcwop]

It's not. The hard part is getting the government to pick the right vendor or solution.

Cost of Failure is higher for ATMs

[Jammer@CMH]

The cost to the customer (the banks) and the supplier (liability, and perhaps lost sales) is much higher per incident for ATMs than for voting machines, so it makes bottom-line sense to inspect and test the hell out of ATMs. There is much less motivation to test voting machines to the same degree of rigor.

Re:Cost of Failure is higher for ATMs

[Anonymous Coward]

"The cost to the customer (the banks) and the supplier (liability, and perhaps lost sales) is much higher per incident for ATMs than for voting machines"

But disemfranchisement of voters is a life or death issue. The cost per incident ought to be measured in blood for voting machines, dollars for ATM's.

Re:Cost of Failure is higher for ATMs

[koi88]

That's cynical, but I guess you have a point.
Maybe I'm too idealistic to think that a wrong result at an election can cause much more damage than any problems with ATMs...

Slashdot's just asking for it now

[Anonymous Coward]

California Grill is a restaurant in Florida at Disney World. Slashdot is obviously infringing on Disney Itellectual Property by using the name of their restaurant in the subject line of this story, and creating needless confusion between Diebold, the state of CA, and the high priced eatery. Better put out some extra mousetraps before the lawyers get there.

Open source voting system

[VIIseven7]

eVACS is open source and has already been used in some Australian elections. I did a research project on electronic voting systems last semester, and eVACS seemed to be the best current system. IMO, it would be much better with a voter-verified paper trail, though.

Re:Open source voting system

[dynamo]

So add a paper trail, dude. That's _why_ it's open source.

two words,

[Anonymous Coward]

anal secks.

Second Thoughts?

[kravlor]

I think that when the chief of elections has to apologize -- not for disenfranchising voters, but getting caught disenfranchising voters -- election officials will really need to think hard about using their products in any way, shape, or form.

In all my voting experience in Minnesota, we've used optical scan machines that have an easy to read paper ballot that can be manually verified. I look forward to using that technology in the future.

Re:Second Thoughts?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I think that when the chief of elections has to apologize -- not for disenfranchising voters, but getting caught disenfranchising voters -- election officials will really need to think hard about using their products in any way, shape, or form."

No they won't. Maybe if they do hard time for their crimes. Or at least are barred from working in government ever again in their lives.

This isn't the sort of mistake you should ever make, period.

If Brazil can do it...

[Civil_Disobedient]

Maybe e-voting is actually hard to accomplish.

I don't know about that. Seems to me, if you put the right people in charge, and keep the system as open as possible, you're far less likely to have the sorts of problems that a private firm will run into. Just like any other kind of software. More proof needed? Well, electronic voting seems to be working just fine in Brazil.

Three Cheers for Bev Harris

[alfredo]

and her team for uncovering the problems with computer voting.

Buy 3rd World tech!

[Brazilian Joe]

Since you Americans, emperors of the world, are so much troubled to make a flawless electronic voting system, let me make a suggestion:
Buy Brazilian Tech.
Humbly ask Mr. President Lula how much would it cost to buy, no, license our technology which has been working since the nineties. It might cost even less than the amount you have already spilled on this corp.

Re:Buy 3rd World tech!

[Guppy06]

"Buy Brazilian Tech."

Yeah, because everybody speaks Portugese.

awesome.

[xgamer04]

Love sentence fragments in slashdot articles.

two more words

[trentblase]

Spell Check

Re:two more words

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw spell check. If you can't type 2 words correctly you shouldn't be posting.

Diebold uses MS Access?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear God! I sure hope this is no longer true.

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/access-diebold.htm

Re:Diebold uses MS Access?

[PDAllen]

Just to be fair here, while I acknowledge that MS Access is overpriced, inconvenient, produces massively bloated files, and implements a whole lot of stuff no-one wants while failing to implement real SQL...
it does give the right results if given correct MS dialect SQL.

Ask how to do it right where it worked...

[jorlando]

The elections in Brazil are electronic.

In a country with dimensions comparable to USA the electronic ballots are being used in the last elections, and here voting is mandatory.

paper ballots are used only for back-up (energy failure, ballot faillure and goes on).

In a south american country frauds are always a concern and electronic ballots helped to minimize frauds (there was a saying, in some rural areas, when the illiterates couldn't vote that was like that: in the elections the ones who vote are the dead literates and the living unliterates, due the forgery of vote registers of dead persons)

now the illiterates can vote (optional, not mandatory)... well, the politicians need to compensate the fraud...

the results of a presidential election is given in 24 hours, with partial tallys running all the day for public review.

Agreed 100%

[mfh]

> The simple fact is that, while Diebold does indeed care about producing accurate voting results, they are more concerned with making money.

I fully agree with your statement, and I'll go one further by saying that it's the financial weasels who wield the power in the company, and they are directly to blame. The financial weasels control the HR weasels, and the HR weasels control everyone else; in order for HR weasels to get bigger 401k plans (or whatever gold they seeketh), they must do what the financial weasels say. There exists no HR power over financial departments unless Catbert is involved and Dogbert isn't, and those of you who can observe financial/managerial departments will notice that the financial weasels control themselves in a deliberate pecking order, and it's the same order you see financial weasels strolling about the office building doing whatever managers do (strolling, terrifying others, making threats, drinking, smoking, eating).

The office geeks only control the development cycle, and because these poor creatures are always getting fucked over by all the company weasels, the products are often plagued with unforeseen circumstances that makes the financial weasels look bad, and the HR weasels look bad, appropriately (and everybody loses when that happens).

The way to avoid this, is to fire all of the financial weasels, the HR weasels, and hire some Donald Trumps who truly give a damn about the product, because they have the knowledge to understand the necessity of quality and how that churns in much more profit than quantity. Hire HR managers who don't play with their food. Hire office geeks who don't mind being fucked over a bit, but treat them *very* well (read: very well). Then you get a voting machine that not only works, but it audits itself, repairs itself and phones tech support to commend them on doing a good job.

What the problem was

[John Jorsett]

When I first heard, early on election day, the nature ofthe problems they were having, I guessed what was going on. They were using machines running Windows CE as the OS. The application code itself was in a flash memory, but they were relying on some kind of shortcut in the volatile system RAM to execute that code when the machine was turned on. The trouble was, when the poll workers were trained, they were given the machines to take home with them. SOme of them sat for long periods without power, so their batteries ran down and the RAM got erased, wiping out whatever it was that was supposed to execute the code automatically. The poll workers weren't trained for that contingency and had no clue what to do. Many of the polling places had voters, off the street, trying to help them diagnoe the problem and boot the software.

This whole thing was a fiasco from the beginning. Not only did they use known-uncertified code, they let poll workers take the machines home, protected only by a peel-off sticker for "security". They then had a bunch of unqualified and unvetted civilans being given access to try to fix the problems. Unbelievable.

Re:What the problem was

[fishbowl]

"Many of the polling places had voters, off the street, trying to help them diagnoe the problem and boot the software."

Were these "voters off the street" wearing dark suits and dark glasses and small 2-way radios by any chance?

Re:What the problem was

[John Jorsett]

Were these "voters off the street" wearing dark suits and dark glasses and small 2-way radios by any chance?

Mostly they were technical people who were trying to vote on the way to work. When they saw what was happening, they volunteered to help out, and the poll workers let them. One guy phoned in to a radio show and described how he had poked around in the Diebold machine to find the application, saying he could have replaced it with no problem with no one being the wiser.

Aren't Americans frustrated?

[xutopia]

For a country proud of exporting democracy to Iraq it is a shame they cannot even hold a proper elections for themselves.

I'm sick and tired of this whole Diebold charade. Is this governement so struborn that it will continue trying the same thing over and over again expecting a different result?

Re:Aren't Americans frustrated?

[halivar]

Exporting democracy to Iraq is fine... as long as the e-voting there is run by the new Iraq LUG.

Re:Aren't Americans frustrated?

[dynamo]

you can't export what you don't have.

Re:Aren't Americans frustrated?

[The Master Control P]

"Is this governement so struborn that it will continue trying the same thing over and over again expecting a different result?"

Heh... I once heard in a movie that this is called "insanity."

Wait

[Anonymous Coward]

MS Access is the back end of this database? Now that is downright scary.

California Girls Die?!?!?!

[Capital_Z]

I read that title a bit too quick. Glad I was wrong.

Tossing the Baby With the Bath

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

>Today, California officials may recommend decertifying some or all of Dielbold's machines for the November General Election.

Sadly, this will include the Diebold optical scanners used in my county. Like much associated with this issue, this would be JPFN. The optically scanned ballots are much like the machine scored tests used in university classes everywhere. You fill in a bubble with a black felt pen to vote for a candidate. Simple, quick, readable with either the optical scanner or the Mark I eyeball in the event of a power failure.

I am totally at a loss to understand this rush to electronic voting. As a citizen, I demand that my vote be:

• Secret
• Subject to verifiable recount
• Free from fraud

I realize that these are the ideal and that abuses have occurred under all forms of balloting yet used. However, the paper ballot and voting lists have stood the test of time. Reducing costs is not be a valid reason for mucking about with the very foundation of the democratic process.

Re:Tossing the Baby With the Bath

[demachina]

"I am totally at a loss to understand this rush to electronic voting."

Its pretty simple really. The party in power wants electronic voting without an audit trail. They approved billions of tax payer dollars to be thrown out to local election officials to insure it was instituted and at the same time insured all the electronic voting machine manufacturers bidding on said systems were controlled by Republican partisans who no doubt went out of their way to propose systems with no paper trail. WHO COULD POSSIBLY WANT A NASTY OLD PAPER TRAIL WHEN YOU CAN HAVE THESE NIFTY ALL ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS. Votes go in here, get turned in to electrons and you magically get a vote count out the other end. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

The Diebold incident in California really sounds like they were practicing for how to steal the election in November, in particular the part about installing uncertified software and getting caught. This is the #1 thing you need to accomplish to steal an election with electronic voting, installing uncertified software. I imagine they chose California to practice because California isn't likely to be a swing state and the primary didn't really count for much. The place they want to smoothly and successfully install their rigged software is in all the close swing states in November when it counts. They also want it in all the states with crucial senate contests.

Bottomline is electronic voting is a way to insure the people who control the machines, which happens to be the Republicans, can hold power if, god forbid, the majority of the electorate realize they are either incompetent or serving the interests of a minority at the expense of the majority and try to, god forbid, vote them out of power. We just can't have that. The Republicans are the only ones we can trust to save America and make the world safe for American hegemony. Those Democrats are dangerous, can't be trusted(well they can't but thats another story).

I don't imagine there are reliable statistics but its a near certainty that the default state for elections is for them to be rigged every time the opportunity exists to do so. The right wingers will no doubt lob out the standard accusation now that the Democrats are the one with the history of stealing elections. Well yes they've stolen them, the Republican's have stolen them, every party and politician, in a close race and with the opportunity to rig an election with a reasonably good chance of not getting caught will do so. Power is the ultimate drug, once people have it they will generally do anything to keep it and get more of it. Its only by nonstop tireless efforts by a large number of volunteers, concerned voters, that elections are made fair and secure. Relying on incompetent bureaucrats and politicians with mixed motives just doesn't cut it.

The gold rush caused by the billions of dollars the congress threw in to the market as a knee jerk reaction to the 2000 fiasco was certain to not create an environment where a reliable voting system would be produced and the rate of change is so high its pretty hard for concerned citizens to do much about it, though a few people are making a noble effort.

A couple nights ago one of the network news shows ran a piece on how unreliable the military mail system is and how its disenfranchising the brave warriors who are defending democracy around the world. They raised the possibility once again that the all votes of the military should be done electronically, so they could be cast in seconds. The end result being millions of votes being run through the Pentagon, with no paper audit trail, under the control of the Secretary of Defense whose job is at stake in the presidential election so he can adjust the outcome as necessary.

To be honest the U.S. in particular is reaching the point it doesn't really deserve a democracy. Maybe the Republicans should just declare a state of emergency and put democracy in the U.S. out of its misery. What's left of it at this point is barely worth saving anyway.

Re:Tossing the Baby With the Bath

[Anonymous Coward]

Another data point for those that share this concern... Condolezza Rice announcing this week that there are great concerns of a terrorist incident related to the November election. It sure seems like she is laying the groundwork for a claim that "There is NO WAY Kerry won... the voting has been tampered with by the terrorists and thus must be thrown out, with our current President's term extended until we can be sure a fair and honest election can be held."

I used to be very middle of the road with a few liberal tendencies, longing for the lost "progressive Republicans" who haven't been seen since the Reagan years. The current rush to destroy our rights, including the non-election of Al Gore, has changed all that.

Re:Tossing the Baby With the Bath

[Anonymous Coward]

The second amendment exists for a reason.

Re:Tossing the Baby With the Bath

[Anonymous Coward]

Its pretty simple really. The party in power wants electronic voting without an audit trail

Umm, no. The Democrats wanted the voting process "modernized". Far as I can tell, the Republicans didn't have a problem with the old way of doing things (it worked in their favour, remember?).

It is likely enough that if Gore had one last time, the positions in this little morality play we like to call Congress would have been reversed, with the Republicans calling for electronic voting, and the Demoocrats indifferent/opposed.

Re:Tossing the Baby With the Bath

[demachina]

You are wrong. Nice try to blame it on the Democrats though. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 was a virtual bipartisan stampede on both sides of the isle. It had a long list of Republican and Democratic sponsors. It was a little hard to find good info with a few minutes in google though this Lyndon LaRouche Article does have a writeup on it that includes the list of sponsors and all the essentials which can probably be used to find better info:

http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2004/3107repeal _h ava.html

It is from Larouche so has to be taken with a heavy does of salt.

This bill was heavily lobbed for by the Information Technology Association of America, which is, you guessed it, the fairly wealthy lobbying arm of the mostly Republican owned companies selling electronic voting machines. Anytime there is a wealthy lobby backing only one side of an issue and handing out campaign contributions Congress can be counted on to make bad decisions favoring that lobby.

This was after 9/11 and Congress was pretty whacked in the head in general then, it was after the 2000 Florida debacle and they were all keen to do something to make sure it didn't happen again even if what they passed is making the system MUCH WORSE and gave the ITAA, which includes Diebold a huge windfall, and dramatically increased the likelihood of a stolen election rather than reducing it.

Re:Tossing the Baby With the Bath

[e40]

If you think he was blaming the dems, you didn't read very carefully. He was directly saying the republicans are currently in the driver's seat on the ability to steal, and that both parties have in the past stolen elections.

Re:Tossing the Baby With the Bath

[Anonymous Coward]

You're wasting your time pointing out facts on Slashdot. The idiot who made the parent post is too stupid to understand these things. He has been brainwashed by his local Dems into blindly following the "rich = Republican = evil" train of thought and is too stupid to distinguish between the concepts.

Re:Tossing the Baby With the Bath

[demachina]

Uh, no, you didn't read his post. He said the Democrats were the ones who wanted to modernize the voting machines because they lost the 2000 election and the Republicans wanted to leave things as they were, with the unavoidable implication that the Democrats were the ones pushing this electronic voting mess. Fact is both parties rush in to HAVA just like they did in passing the Patriot act and voting for the war in Iraq.

Re:Tossing the Baby With the Bath

[Anonymous Coward]

"The second amendment exists for a reason."

You have an army battalion at your command? Artillery and air support? Ready to stage a civil insurrection? Or were you planning a coup d'état?

You really so pissed off with the status quo that you're ready to sacrifice everything including your own life in order to bring down tyranny?

Or are you just one of those nitwits who still thinks the second amendment counts?

This is why

[jd]

You pay by results. If x% of the population can't vote, or have a risk of an invalid vote, then that should be reflected in how much Diebold gets paid.

Paying first just means you have no control over what you receive. It incites corruption.

Re:This is why

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Um no. A better contract would be if x% of the population can't vote, the management at Diebold spends the next x% of their life in prison.

India

[rsidd]

Some polling booths have been ordered to re-poll due to malfunctions in the electronic voting machines. In another article, 191 voting booths were ordered to re-poll.

This should really be compared to what used to happen with ballot boxes: every Indian election has a few repolls, I'm not sure of typical numbers but 191 isn't a huge number given the size of the exercise (670 million voters, each polling station deals with around 1500 voters, you do the math). With the machines, at least you don't have the problem of thugs taking over smaller/more remote stations and "stuffing" the ballot boxes: the electoral officer can simply disable the machines.

Other polling locations seem to be operating on voter lists from 2001.

This has nothing to do with the voting machines. The machines don't contain the voter list.

Optical Scanning Ballots = Segregation?

[Maestro4k]

• From the first article:
• "We would do well to remember the lesson that separate is not equal. Going back to optical scan is tantamount to segregation," said Kathay Feng, an attorney at the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles.

This really blew my mind. I realize she's talking about blind and minority-speaking voters losing some privacy on casting their ballot, but it's a real stretch to say that's "tantamount to segregation"! I also wonder how much privacy a minority-speaking voter would really lose. Couldn't the sections of the ballot be explained to them, then they be left alone to mark the candidates? The candidates' names would be the same since names don't generally translate.

In any case, even if I was a minority language speaker or blind I would prefer a voting method that would actually COUNT my vote in exchange for losing a little privacy. It's pretty useless to get privacy on casting your vote if it'll just end up lost and not used.

Re:Optical Scanning Ballots = Segregation?

[comedian23]

U.S. Citizens are required to be able to speak/read/write basic Engish anyway. The only people we should be worrying about are the ones with disabilities.

Re:Optical Scanning Ballots = Segregation?

[gerardrj]

Frankly, I have to ask myself (and Ms Feng) this question:

If you don't understand English enough to understand a voting ballot, how are you any more likely to undertand what is going on the country and who/what you are voting for or about? Voting isn't just about choosing something, no matter what that something is, it's about chooseing the somethign that you support or want to see happen.

Sure there are local papers in foreign languages, but I think most such media outlets are rather biased toward a particular viewpoint and won't present the "larger picture" you would get by taking in news from many sources in the predominant language.

I get news from no fewer than about 15 sources a day between local, network, 24hr and international television news, radio stations, newspaper and the Internet. How does that really compare with one small foreign language newspaper or tv broadcast?

Re:Optical Scanning Ballots = Segregation?

[Maestro4k]

• I get news from no fewer than about 15 sources a day between local, network, 24hr and international television news, radio stations, newspaper and the Internet. How does that really compare with one small foreign language newspaper or tv broadcast?

Not disagreeing with you, just wanted to add that I try to read a few non-US news sites a day as well. That helps detect the spin (and hidden info) the US media (to be fair, all country's media has a country-based bias to it generally) puts on things. I also happened across a weekly news magazine in a free sub that turned out to be a great source. It basically summarizes the last week's news for you using viewpoints from news sources world-wide. Each article has at least a couple of views, major items get more. It's called The Week in case anyone's interested.

In any case, I think you hit the nail on the head quite well about non-English speaking voters being "segregated". Kinda hard to be disenfranchised when you don't know what you're voting for/about/etc. (I do think all citizens should be able to vote, but losing a bit of privacy because of a handicap (I'm lumping non-English speaking as a handicap here) is a far cry from disenfranchisement!)

The voters should demand a recount!

[dpbsmith]

...Oh, wait... ...these machine don't provide a means for a recount, do they?

Never mind

Cock-Sucking Whores gave Michael a good BLOW JOB

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Would you look at this: Story submitted early this morning, and rejected. But of course on of Slashdot's resident Cock-Sucking Whores gave Michael a good BLOW JOB.

w-t-f?

[LordMyren]

our little boy scouts electronics project involved AND and OR gates to make a vote tallying machine. one of a series of lightbulbs went off to indicate the winner.

the fact that these clowns cant make a simple voting machine work is absolutely pathetic.

i'd think that as a positive byproduct of the capitalism age, clowns like these would have their corporate empires burned to the ground, at which point we'd apply a heavy layer of salt.

captialism wouldnt be so bad if consumers werent such complete retards. we opt to pay for these absolutely shitty products, so there's a market for them.

myren

Re:w-t-f?

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Carthage^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HCapitalists must die.

Miami are another bunch of morons...

[MindSlap]

Out in Miami the dropped the use of printers for touch screen voting machines.
Of course..they can't be bothered with paper trails when the dem's start whining about ballot counts..
(This was reported by the AP yesterday...)

But then again..there is a reason its called FloriDUH.. (shrug)

Our chief elections officer says "Hell, no"

[Animats]

Warren Slocum, the Chief Elections Officer for San Mateo County, CA, is so mad about lousy voting systems he's become an activist to put a stop to this. Slocum is influential, because he's a top election official for a big county.

San Mateo County went to mark-sense machines years ago, and has had very little trouble. The ballot boxes consist of a lid with a scanner locked to a big plastic bin, so every ballot scanned is locked inside the ballot box should a recount be necessary. At the end of the election, the scanners are plugged into a phone line and transmit results to election HQ. They can be re-read later, and the ballots counted and matched against the scans if necessary, one ballot box at a time.

Other than generating huge amounts of paper, there seem to be few problems with this.

Re:Our chief elections officer says "Hell, no"

[Anonymous Coward]

More information---
Voters use a fat magic marker to connect the two halves of a broken arrow pointing to a candidate's name, so there's no need to fill in or judge little bubbles either.

Here's the rub-Three wishes.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm not sure what the solution to the problem is..."

You have to start using words like "Morality", "Ethics", "Accountability","Integrity" and "Values" in order to get anywere near the answer. Anything else gives us the present day mess the world's in. Just look at the story about Debian's most recent action, and the responses. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what our society values the most. Question for historians is how much pain and death will humanity have to endure, before we figure the above all out?

"Believe me, if the management at Diebold knew that regardless of how much money they make now, it could all be taken away from them for unethical business practices, they would focus on quality and customer satisfaction."

What's that? Actions should have consequences? Why that's unamerican. Besides in our ever shifting standards of "morality", why shouldn't shafting others be OK? Or even better, darwin decrees that it's survival of the fittest, and that if you get shafted? It's because you're weak, and should die off.

And another thing:

[rsidd]

The world's largest democracy is in the midst of a 4-month election marathon.

It's not a 4 month marathon: it's around 3 weeks, in 4 phases.

No, the problem is the public sector

[spreer]

There are companies that make machines that record transactions very reliably and are quite difficult to hack. Actually, Diebold makes some of them, if I remember correctly. They are called ATMs.

The thing is, their customers are in the private sectors too, and they care a lot about their money. It is in their critical interest to make sure those machines aren't easy to hack. There is a huge amount of pushback to make sure those machines are secure.

There is also accountability if those machines get hacked. If Diebold ATMs start spitting money, you can be sure banks will call the lawyers and start howling for blood. For some reason, if a voting machine misrecords votes, no one seems to care much. Their customers, the federal and state governments, don't hold them accountable. The election is over, so what are we going to do?

The real solution is going involve letting Diebold and other e-voting companies know there will be real consequences if the screw up.

spreer

Mod Parent Up

[hopemafia]

What about a system the combines computer voting stations with optical scanning:

1) Voter uses touch screen computer voting station to select candidates
2) Voting station prints a paper ballot
3) Voter checks ballot and;
a) If correct, inserts the ballot into the slot and presses an ACCEPT BALLOT button, the ballot is fed into a storage bin, and votes are stored electronically
b) If incorrect, inserts the ballot into the slot and presses a CHANGE BALLOT button, and the ballot is shredded and process repeats from 1)

After the election a random X% of the electronic records are compared with the corresponding paper ballots and if they don't match all paper ballots are recounted.

The fault is with CA

[shreak]

The problem isn't directly with Debold (although they definitely are culpable).

The fault lay with the requirements produced by California (and any other state trying E-Voting). That is to say, none. They just said "Give us E-Voting, whatever that means"

The agencies should NOT be allowing the machine producers to define the voting method. They will invariably produce a mechanism that maximizes profit potential. How do you test the machines once you get them. You don't even understand the process since you didn't develop it. As a developer I can tell you NEVER let development produce the requirements. We miss everything and when you think you found a bug we just say "it works as designed".

The various election agencies need to come up with a definitive set of requirements for what an E-Voting machine should do. The level of detail should be excruciating.

The agencies also need to define and publish policy and procedure around these devices as well. You don't actually need to devices to do this. If they are built to your requirements then the procedures can be followed.

The kinds of requirements need to cover things like:

A paper receipt must be produced by the voting machine with human and machine readable type. If the machine readable type is not the same as the human readable type, the code produced must not be unique per voter or voter session (i.e. I can't transcribe the code and use it to prove who I voted for or you cant prove who I voted for)

The executing code must be certified (Open or not) and must then be cryptographically signed. The certified cryptographic checksum must be published 30 days before the election and each voting machine must display the checksum at all times during operation in a place that is visible to voters (i.e. I can write down the checksum and verify that the machine I'm using is using the correct version of the software)

When setting up a voting area each machine must be checked for the proper software checksum. (potentially a matching of software checksum and hardware specification, a use for Trusted Computing perhaps?)

Each machine must be able to produce test ballots for every candidate and the test ballots must be accepted by the designated reader machine. The test ballots will be conspicuously marked in a human and machine readable way. The reader will display the candidate indicated on the test ballot when reading (could be a screen, 7-seg display code, whatever).

Lots more, in much more detail that I went into...

=Shreak

Re:The fault is with CA

[EvilTwinSkippy]

I've never quite understood IT spending. Here you have 4 counties that spent $40,000,000 collectively on a voting system. For that money you could hire several developers to custom design a system to your specifications, a small factory to produce your system to order, and a small goverment agency to keep the system running over time.

I see more people blow hundreds of thousands of dollars sourcing things out, or trying to shoehorn COTS (or supposedly COTS) hardware and software to solve and esoteric problem.

Re:The fault is with CA

[Anonymous Coward]

The fault lay with the requirements produced by California (and any other state trying E-Voting). That is to say, none. They just said "Give us E-Voting, whatever that means"


Probably. Louisiana has had reasonably reliable electronic voting for many years - longer than I've been living there. They apparently made the jump long before (~10 years)the current broohaha, and did their homework.

Re:Alameda County has been pursuing these issues .

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean where the nuclear wessels are?

Damn!

[DJStealth]

I only clicked on this link cause I thought it said "California Girls".

Better luck next time!

States Adhering to the Voluntary Federal Standard

[David Hume]

Why don't we have a Federal Standard? I mean with all the problems I have been hearing about how some county's voting problems vary from county to county.

The Federal Election Commission has a FAQ About The National Voluntary Voting System Standards. According to the FAQ, "[a]s of April 2001, the following States have adopted the FEC's voting system standards *OR* require the testing of systems against the standards by independent testing authorities (ITAs) designated by the National Association of State Election Directors":

Alabama, Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wyoming

The National Association of State Election Directors has, among other things:

(1) a List of NASED Certified Systems;

(2) an Updated List of NASED Certified Systems; and

(3) an Overview of the Certification Process.

What is so hard about voting?

[ndecker]

I don't understand whats so hard about Voting. There is a proven, scalabe, fault tolerant and fast method already available: Use paper ballots!

Here in germany we draw marks into circles next to the names of the candidates. The votes are counted by hand. The results are faxed to a central bureau where they are aggregated.

This system has several advantages:

• Results are availabe fast: The poll closes 6pm. First counts are ready about 8pm, the last ones maybe around 2am. Everything is ready the next morning.
• Linear scalability: For every 1000 voters you need x voting offices and about 10 people per office to do their duty to democracy.
• The people in the voting offices are randomly chosen. To commit fraud, you have to bribe or threaten those 10 people.
• There is no class break for voting offices. You need to bribe twice as many people to fraud another voting office.
• If you are higher up the chain, you cant commit fraud by changing the numbers you receive. The voting offices fax their results to the media too. Any difference would ring the bells in our computers fast.

Re:What is so hard about voting?

[hehman]

Paper has a lot of things going for it (like "proven"), but not "scalable", "fault tolerant", nor "fast". A well designed and secure electronic voting system (i.e. not Diebold's) would kick paper's tree-killing butt in each of these categories and more.

Re:What is so hard about voting?

[calix]

There is a proven, scalabe, fault tolerant and fast method already available: Use paper ballots!

Apparently, you may have missed out on the ElectionFun® recently had in Florida in 2000.

Re:What is so hard about voting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which solution is more "scalable", "fault tolerant", and "fast" if a storm knocks out power to your polling place on election day? Or a power surge crashes your machines. I'm sure the retiree volunteers have fun debugging computers with batteries used once a year and that have to last all day.

Re:What is so hard about voting?

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, you got your cheap laugh. What's your solution to verifiable anonymous voting?

Paper ballots doesn't have to mean hole punched ballots. Other countries know how to use proper paper ballots, we could too.

Testing?

[fdiskne1]

What ever happened to good, old fashioned testing? I've seen the problem with companies rolling out software into production before it has been fully tested and ended up paying the price. I've had to clean up the mess of other engineers who didn't test something and told them about it every time. I asked if they tested it. They answer "No, it should work. It always has before." When I ask if they are always 100% confident that nothing was missed, they say yes, but obviously this isn't the case. When it comes to something as important as an election, in my opinion, there is no excuse not to test, fix problems, repeat ad infinitum, then roll it out once everyone is satisfied there are no errors. If this takes 20 years, fine. Just make sure it works correctly before rolling it out.

eVoting made right

[soapdog]

We're using eVoting machines here in Brazil for a couple years without major problems. It's better for many people here are iliterate and eVoting machines carry photos and speak the name of the candidate. I see many saying that paper can be trusted more and computers, but hey, we're talking about humans and voting here, at least in Brazil, nothing was more fraudable (does this word exists in english?) than paper, all it takes was a huge shotgun, a corrupt landlord with an easy tone: "mark here..." At least eVoting is making it harder here for fraud.

Re:eVoting made right

[h1b_indian]

I agree with you. In India too, fraud became lesser thanks to electronic voting machines.

Because Americans worship technology

[Infonaut]

Technology fuels our economy, so it must be flawless.

Technology wins our wars, so it must be flawless.

We have a permanent hard-on for technology. Just look at Slashdot, for crying out loud. We're a country that worships technology for its own sake.

If it's newer, sleeker, faster, shinier, and eliminates interaction with people, we're all for it. We want a permanent state of newness. We don't care about history, or precident, or any of that bullshit.

Ready, fire, aim! It's the American Way.

They turned to ITAA to whitewash the issue

[gminks]

The electronic voting industry turned to ITAA to protect their images as activists started to expose how insecure the systems are.

ITAA has "gone on the e-voting offensive" to protect the industry. If Diebold is so concerned about producing voting accuracy, why did they go and hire a lobbyist like Harris Miller to protect their image?

And the services aren't cheap...." annual dues are calculated (they range from $600-$44K, depending on a company's sales. "Deliverables" will cost up to $200,000+". Why not pour that cash into securing their systems instead of their image?

I have to ask-Coin Toss Elections.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Anyway, a paper/pen ballot could be designed whereby a preliminary count is performed using an optical reader, but keeps the readable slips for a manual check afterwards. It works for lottery tickets, so why not ballots?"

Hehe, why not? At this point, both of them are a gamble.

Hold Them All Accountable

[NickFusion]

So, Diebold gets off with a half-assed apology, sorry about yer democracy, Mate! My bad!

And nobody on the federal level is making a fuss because...hmm, now I wonder why?

And it'll probably just tool along all status quo-y until...what? Massive, undeniable fraud? Some kind of grassroots "Hack the Vote" movement?

I think it was Heinlien that said, "It may be rigged, but it's the only game in town."

So keep the pressure on, and hope it makes a difference before November.

(Where's my EFF renewal form...)

Re:Hold Them All Accountable

[doc modulo]

"Diebold knowingly used uncertified software in California elections."

Diebold probably knew a lot more about the things their machines did to lose or reverse votes. I even heard someone at Diebold reconfigured the excel data coming out of the machines to increase believability of the voting results.

I'm not a lawyer so can someone tell me what it takes to become a traitor to the United States of America?

Re:Hold Them All Accountable

[red floyd]

I'm not a lawyer so can someone tell me what it takes to become a traitor to the United States of America?

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

Re:Hold Them All Accountable

[brianosaurus]

Its pretty insane, especially on the heels of last week's article about stealing an election:

The outcomes of the 20 closest [House of Reps] races would have changed by swinging an average of 2,593 votes each.

Is that within the margin of the "thousands" that were turned away? By what margin did Bush "win" the election in 2000?

Looks like Diebold election machines will only be useful as media players. (yes, i know the hack was on a Diebold ATM, but how many scewups does a company get before we stop trusting them with our system of government?)

Re:Hold Them All Accountable

[wonkavader]

Yeah, the other reply to this already answers your query -- it's gotta be aid to an enemy.

However, you might make a case that since we're at war, any "attack" on our institutions is aid to our enemy.

Pity we're not even really at war. We've got no declaration. What a messed up time we live in (since WWI) militarilegally speaking.

But it really cries out for a "treason"-ish crme, doesn't it? Is it a high-crime, even? Shouldn't knowingly disenfranchizing voters en-mass be a hanging offence?

Re:Hold Them All Accountable

[CGP314]

So who gets to decide who are the enemies of the US?


-Colin

Re:Hold Them All Accountable

[beamin]

Apparently the President does. Ask the guys at Camp X-Ray

Re:Hold Them All Accountable

[SpaceLifeForm]

Which is why the legal question needs to be asked:

What is war?

And if you disagree with what the PTB *say* is "legal" war, does that make you a terrorist?

Re:Alameda County has been pursuing these issues .

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they're in Alameda

I though that said

[sittingbull]

Whew, I though that said, "California Girls Dieblond Over... ". I was getting a little concerned.

[OT] Re:The hypocrisy of the Democrat Party

[cduffy]

You're familiar with this thing called "statistics", right? It's a branch of mathematics, and while it can be used to all kinds of evil voodoo if misapplied, there are a few subsets which are pretty much universally well-understood (except, perhaps, by yourself). Statistical sampling is one of these fields. It's entirely well-understood what kinds of procedure are necessary to obtain an unbiased and statistically valid sampling of a set, and what kind of determinations (with what level of error rate) can be made. This isn't rocket science -- much of it's high school math.

As a consequence, it's possible for (gasp!) 3rd parties to audit the procedures, math and output of such an operation after-the-fact, and make sure it was done in accordance with prevailing practices. A staistical-sampling-based census would certainly need to have 3rd parties overseeing and auditing it -- but even with that done, it would be a dramatic savings of otherwise-wasted cost and effort.

And no, I'm not a Democrat.

Diebold should be banned

[Soong]

...from selling voting equipment in the State of California. They have violated the public trust. The ban should be in effect for a time not less than five years.

I Wish They All Could Be California Grills

[Anonymous Coward]

Dooo wah wah wah.

good news?

[Anonymous Custard]

I suppose the good news is that these errors were caught before they could have really screwed things up.

Okay, but how many errors didn't get caught?

electoral process

[venkats]

outsource the electoral process to india, and we in return will outsource our politicians to you :)

Voting in India

[h1b_indian]

India introduced electronic voting machines in 1989 on an experimental basis in a few constituencies and has increased it to 100% over the years.

What really amazes me is that Americans act in an arrogant manner and do not want to learn from others' experiences or appreciate others. This is the same attitude which is seen on this website when outsourcing is discussed.

To give you a neutral view, corruption and technology are two separate issues. Sure you can use technology to aid corruption, but you don't need technology to commit fraud. An example is the farcical US election in 2000. Only in America can people be hoodwinked easily because they are a brainwashed lot believing whatever has been told to them by tehir Government. This is the sad reality. Hopefully internet will give the Americans more exposure to the world and not just the propaganda given by their TV channels.

Had the farce of judges appointed by a former President appointing the son of that President happened in a third world country, you can imagine the propaganda that Americans would have unleashed. Somehow, Americans think that their system is the best and they are proud of their farce too!

In India, if we have disputes, the judges don't say "STOP COUNTING!" The judges say, "RECOUNT!" That is the difference between India and America.

The present malfunctioning of machines is tolerable. They are most likely not software glitches, but similar to a malfunctioning laptop. When you have hundreds of thousands of such machines being used, 191 malfunctioning machines is not much of an error. You techies should know that!

I disagree...

[Nevo]

Yes, companies are out to maximize profit.

However, in an efficient market, a product that does not perform as advertised won't sell. Therefore, maximizing profit and building a working product are not mutually exclusive goals.

My personal conclusion is that this is simply a project the Diebold has mismanaged into its own destruction. My take is that this is incompetence, not malice.

Two more,

[Anonymous Coward]

Hanging Chads

Security? So what! The softwar is shit ANYWAY!

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Machine voting isn't the problem, Diebold is. They've created a horrible, insecure system. It's simple enough to create a more secure system that it's hard not to believe Diebold is deliberately enabling fraud.

Security? So what! The softwar is shit ANYWAY!

People like to harp and harp and harp on how insecure the Diebold system is, and this is very important. But put that aside for the moment and look at where the actual problems have been: software crashes that prevent people from voting, software glitches that produce false data. I don't care how "secure" the system is; if it produces garbage it can be Fort Knox, and who cares! The whole issue of "security" while conceptually important for voting software is in a way irrelevant here until they can make software that produces accurate data while not being tampered with.

Made-up numbers are not as accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

"Statistical sampling is one of these fields"

It is just the latest fad. It is nothing but guesswork, and it is less accurate than doing an actual count. "Statistics" is there because someone is too lazy to do a regular count in such circumstances. Fortunately, the Constitution requires an actual count of Census totals.

"A staistical-sampling-based census would certainly need to have 3rd parties overseeing and auditing it"

It would still be less accurate than a real count, because it would include made-up people. It also starts a slipper slope: how long before the election is done by a Gallup poll of 3,500 American likely voters? At least with an accurate count, there is no slipper slope: you are counting real people

The Democrats are dead-wrong on this one, just as the Republicans are dead-wrong on the Diebold issue and in opposing "motor voter".

"but even with that done, it would be a dramatic savings of otherwise-wasted cost and effort."

As would having Gallup do a poll to determine everything. Save a lot of money and time over doing a real count. No, I don't think that the Census part of counting voters is wasted.

Re:Made-up numbers are not as accurate

[cduffy]

"Fad" or "guesswork" my ass. Statistics is a very well-established branch, and I'd hazard that the math involved in the specific operations we're talking about here hasn't changed appreciably since the '50s.

The slippery slope you suggest is insane, at least on its scale: 3500 members out of a set of millions isn't a statistically significant sample, so any conclusions that were drawn would have huge ranges associated. (You've seen the whole x+-n% thing? That's the kind of output one gets from statistics, where the difference between x and the _real_ value is guaranteed to be inside n%. So, what one needs to do is determine how large n can be -- half a percentage point, maybe? -- and by that determine how many people to poll. Like I said before, it's high school math, if you went to a decent high school). So yes, it's less accurate -- but you know exactly how much less accurate, and can adjust your sample size until the inaccuracy is small enough to not actually affect anything.

Anyhow, there's a reason logic classes teach "slippery slope" as a fallacy: Because people can genuinely determine Thing A from Thing B, those who can rationalize Thing A still aren't necessarily going to support Thing B, even after they've become accustomed to the former.

The "fake people" thing is a misnomer, too. There aren't counts that include fake people, there are *projections* with *error rates* which are determined through entirely deterministic means. A full report still includes things like the number of real people polled, the methods used to select them (must MUST MUST be a random selection or the output comes out horribly skewed), the results from polling those real people, etc.

If you want to do something to help make democracy more representative of the people's will, I'd advise you look into some of the alternatives to simple plurality voting -- the Borda Count, Condorcet, Instant Runoff Voting, all of these result in a better election result, mostly by letting people vote for who they really want rather than voting against whoever they want least. Adopting one of those would be much much much more of a leap forward for American democracy than having a tightly-controlled census done by modern (or even 1950s) statistical methods would be a leap back.

Diebold TSx system Decertified in California

[alfredo]

This is big news guys, gals and CmdTaco

Check here later
Blackbox Voting.org

You're not correct.

[Moryath]

Diebold HAS to be out to make their machines in such a way that votes can be altered, elections rigged. Why do I say this? BECAUSE THEIR MACHINES DO NOT PRODUCE A PAPER TRAIL. It's really THAT SIMPLE. "The simple fact is that, while Diebold does indeed care about producing accurate voting results, they are more concerned with making money. If Diebold is forced to choose between increasing their profit and making the system better, they'll choose profit." Including a paper readout wouldn't require a major modification to the system at all. And polling locations do just fine with making people hand in paper ballots today, having them hand in a receipt from the machine is just as easy. Diebold out and out REFUSES to add a simple feature like a paper trail to their machines. The only logical conclusion one can reach is that they don't want to have any way to verify the counts their machines reach. And that's wrong.

Too much work ..

[0dugo0]

Just do a slashdot poll on John Kerry and George Bush and get it over with.

Nope, you're misreading them.

[Moryath]

Diebold HAS to be out to make their machines in such a way that votes can be altered, elections rigged.

Why do I say this? BECAUSE THEIR MACHINES DO NOT PRODUCE A PAPER TRAIL. It's really THAT SIMPLE.

"The simple fact is that, while Diebold does indeed care about producing accurate voting results, they are more concerned with making money. If Diebold is forced to choose between increasing their profit and making the system better, they'll choose profit."

Including a paper readout wouldn't require a major modification to the system at all. And polling locations do just fine with making people hand in paper ballots today, having them hand in a receipt from the machine is just as easy.

Diebold out and out REFUSES to add a simple feature like a paper trail to their machines. The only logical conclusion one can reach is that they don't want to have any way to verify the counts their machines reach.

And that's wrong.

California Girls

[budly]

did anyone else misread the title as "California Girls"?

Combining touch and optical

[Guru2Newbie]

That's fine unless you vote for a candidate that oh, maybe Diebold is paid not to favor, then it automatically shreds the ballot when you hit "ACCEPT BALLOT"...oops! Sorry, just a little glitch.

Re:Combining touch and optical

[hopemafia]

That's why you need a comprehensive external review of the voting machines inner workings prior to them being certified for use.

Indeed.

[OmniGeek]

The whole system is very simple. Even if they just used an ATM style of security (printing to an internal paper log) they would be far superior to Diebold. But using logic is difficult in this case, because Diebold is clearly making absurd claims, and it's difficult to refute absurdity.

It appears that at least some of the Diebold machines DO have internal printers, but Diebold has been notably coy about mentioning that, and indeed has been strangely resistant to the whole idea of verifiability. Makes me stop wondering. (tinfoil hat = ON)

Re:Indeed.

[dberger]

It appears that at least some of the Diebold machines DO have internal printers, but Diebold has been notably coy about mentioning that, and indeed has been strangely resistant to the whole idea of verifiability.

True, in fact Cringly wrote about this in his March 11 column

Why get an archaic company to do this

[lardbottom]

People never think right out of the gate about this stuff. Diebold wasn't qualified. They should have gotten G-Tech (or some other company like it) to do the voting machines. I mean, if they can make the lottery work in Texas, surely they can do the voting system. The tolerances are much lower for the lottery than they are for voting. And lottery machines are already ubiquitous.

One million dollars is worth a lot more than the vote to most people, not to mention the sharks with laser beams on their heads.

By the way, for you smart-alecky types out there, I did NOT intentionally draw a parallel between politics and billion-to-one odds.

Maybe I can avoid posting a dozen times.

[hummassa]

I live in Brasil. We have had voting machines in the last 12-14 years (yes, twelve to fourteen -- it depends the size of the city you are in). For the Brazilians here: the first election here in Belo Horizonte to use the machines were the mayoral (and city council, state representation, governor, house and senate) before FHC was elected (as I count it, 2 years + 8 years + 1 1/2 = 11,5 years). I know it, because I was "mesário" (election "table" official? election "clerk"? what is a good English translation?) in the previous election, and in the two subsequent elections). IIRC, there were electronic ballot boxes in Rio and Sao Paulo in the election before that (the only two cities larger than Belo Horizonte).
Our voting machines are mainly of three different (internally) models: (a) the old ones, that use VirtuOS (*) as the OS, (b) the new ones, that use WinCE as the OS, and (c) the newest and deprecated ones that have the second printer to print your vote, show it to you inside a clear acrilic case, and mix it with others inside the machine.
Externally, all of them look roughly the same: a box similar to the old "portables" of the eighties, with a 5-6" diagonal LCD and a big numerical keypad in the right side of the screen, that has, besides 0-9 keys, "confirma" (ok), "erro" (cancel), and "branco" (white).
The electoral process (from the point of view of the voter) begins ... when you get your first job. If you are a mandatory voter (literate person from 18 to 65) you have to go to Electoral Court and register to vote. In the process of registering, you receive the "Título de Eleitor" (voter id), in which you have the number of you voting section. To change jobs, and specially to get a government job, you have to prove you are a registered *and* *regularized* voter (you voted in the last election, or regularized your voting situation after it).
In the election day, you scan the newspapers (or the Superior Electoral Court website), search for the address of your section, and go there. No, there is no transit vote, you can only vote at that address. If you can't get there, you'll have to "justify" your absence.
At the section, you will present your voter id to one the "mesários", and if you don't have it on you, you can still vote (you can show other valid id), but will be delayed. The mesário will search for your name in the vote-ticket sheet, and annex it to your id while you vote. You will sign a receipt in a sheet, and proceed to the voting "booth". Another "mesário" will type your voter id # in a remotely connected keypad, setting the machine in the "ready to vote" mode.
The voting "booth" is really a desk with the voting machine over it, facing nobody else in the room, and sometimes with a cardboard "cover" around it. You will "dial" the numbers of the candidates, in order. when you dial all the digits of one candidate, a star-trek-like chime rings, his/her face will show up in the screen, and if you digited it right, you hit "ok". otherwise, you hit "cancel" and start over. After typing all the candidates, you hit "ok" one last time, the machine chimes again, and goes to "stand by" mode. You have voted. If you don't want to vote for nobody, you can hit "white" instead of the candidate ## (accounted as a "white vote", or "none of the above" -- this is the equivalent of putting your paper ballot in the box without marking anything), or if you really want to protest you can type 9999 or other non-existent-candidate-#, and your vote will be accounted as a "null vote", or "I'm really pissed of" (the equivalent of drawing pictures or writing "improper expletives" in a paper ballot)
Then, you get your id back, your ticket (keep it together with your voter id!!), and you go home. Ah, bars do not open (theoretically) in the election day, so hope you have bought your beer in the day before).
From the point of view of election officials, things are more complicated. The machines arrive to the Electoral Judge (yes, a Judge of Law) pre-prepared one to two months

Re:Maybe I can avoid posting a dozen times.

[Anonymous Coward]

hummassa ----

How do you avoid losing the whole day's votes if the embedded floppy goes bad at the end of the day?

The accuracy of the SW and system is irrelevant

[RhettLivingston]

An inaccuracy of as much as a few percentage points is not going to result in better/worse government. Once you're within a few percentage points, the only clear thing is that a clear decision has not been made. We desperately need to start asking "why"? Are the two sides really that close in appeal or is something being rigged (whether intentionally or as a side effect of the system is not really relevant)?

Candidates that win by a few percentage points haven't really won, they've just survived the election process. They still have a huge portion of their constituency unrepresented... No, actually unrepresented isn't right because in many cases today, those the vast majority of those that didn't vote for the candidate that won are in fact diametrically opposed to the candidates views. So, they aren't unrepresented. Instead they are actively misrepresented or, even attacked by their representative.

What our system is missing is a means to force a progression beyond this 50/50 stage.

One of the problems is accountability. It is hard to progress when someone can represent themselves one way during the election process and then act another way when in office. I think the primary problem with this is that the platform they run on is never proven or disproven. So, it can be brought up again and argued about again without being able to point back at facts.

Another major issue is that the platforms are incomplete. Candidates are running on the basis of what they will do about a couple dozen problems and then going off and making decisions on 1000s of problems. Their decisions on the side issues frequently don't match up to what you would think. Basically, I believe the issue here is that the debate is over issues instead of principles. If you could elect on the basis of a detailed knowledge of a candidate's principles and then have some means of holding them accountable to those principles at least in a broad sense, you'd be doing much better.

So, my hypothesis is that as long as there are no candidates (and no means in the system to force those candidates to come about) that can present a clear belief system and be trusted to follow that in their governing regardless of pressures placed on them by supposed constituents that often really don't have any real care about the principles of government, the system for electing them is irrelevant because we can't have a stable and progressing debate and discovery of who is right and who is wrong. Real progress will be elusive.

I'd like to see a "another choice please" option added to the ballots. If "another choice please" wins, I think the position should be left open with no provision to temporarily fill it. At least the representatives left after the initial fallout are the clear choices of SOMEBODY!!! I believe that most people would rather not be represented at all than be misrepresented to the degree that they are today.

Simply adding this option to the ballot and handling it in the specified way would likely force a major change very quickly. I think that we'd find the majority of the country unrepresented in the first election. But, that would be good, because it is already the truth, just one that the current system glosses over. Bringing it out would show the naked truth, our system of government has departed from representing the people to such an extent that our government has in fact failed.

An interesting side question to ask is "who is running our government"?. Ultimately, the answer is "whoever chose the representatives" because they are who the representatives answer to. Some think that the choice is by the people. They are wrong as long as the choice is from a rigged pool of candidates. My answer is "whoever is rigging the pool of candidates", because the fundamental differences in what the candidates from the supposedly different sides are doing in Washington has mostly disappeared. From a long term view, all of the candidates are taking power and money away from the people and cent

Re:The accuracy of the SW and system is irrelevant

[tunesmith]

When you have two parties that have been around for a while in a two party system, it's *going* to approach 50-50. You can't avoid it. Both are tied to their bases and reach towards the center to attain the magic 50 point. If one party underperforms, they react by being less extreme and reaching towards the center more. If they reach too far, they lose their base. 50/50 means the parties know their constituency and the people know their parties.

Third parties try to flip the paradigm and appeal to large cross-sections, which honestly could work, but the problem is the two-party system of the Electoral College ensures that they either have to build enough support to actually win the election in one election, or they risk hurting the people by disenfranchising them away from the likelihood of being accurately represented. (Definition: if there's another candidate that the population prefers overall, on a head-to-head basis, to the candidate that actually won, then the population has been disenfranchised.)

The best way to ensure that there are better choices for voters are to remove the cost of having multiple candidates. This means removing the Electoral College, counting nationwide using a system like Condorcet, and optionally including per-state weightings to protect regional interests in the way the E.C. tries to (but performs horribly at).

Re:The accuracy of the SW and system is irrelevant

[slothman32]

So I'm late by a day. I thought of an idea where each voter actually votes for issues like abortion instead of a person. Each candidate selectes a platform, "pre abortion." Then each candidate adds the percentage of people who agree with his on each issue, done seperately, to his total. The person with ithe highest total wins. When you vote in November or whenever, do you know the entire platform of you candidate? I doubt it. You might know some important stuff like being for the Iraq war or not but not every detail. This eleviates that problem.

Re:The accuracy of the SW and system is irrelevant

[RhettLivingston]

Better late than never.

Actually, one of my points was that issue based voting is not a good thing. Especially in the Federal government, the people we elect vote on many complex bills with thousands of items (another one of the problems in my opinion). When you elect on the basis of issues, you're electing someone for a very small percentage of their job. We need to get back to electing on principles, but with some means of scoring how they adhere to the principles in office.

Seems like there needs to be an independent system that rates candidates according to various principles, not just liberal or conservative principles, but many different ones. Then, you could tell the system how you rate various principles and see the people ranked according to your world view. It would take a large effort though. Maybe it could be done by a web site with a lot of public participation.

One big problem with doing it though is the complexity of the legislation being passed. Perhaps you could divide it up into little pieces, rate each piece as to how it relates to various principles, and then figure out an overall balance for the law being reviewed from the ratings of the pieces. But I'm afraid that we'd find that most laws serve most interests, even opposing ones, equally.

So, once again, I'm feeling that another area really can't be fixed by outside bolt-ons. Changes need to happen in the government structure. Long, complex laws shouldn't be around. Laws should be short and simple. It should be up to juries to handle the complexity of deciding each case rather than up to the law to spell out what to do in every situation. It seems that the more they spell it out, the less clear it gets anyway.

Re:The accuracy of the SW and system is irrelevant

[RhettLivingston]

A friend pointed out that a lot of those that aren't voting are in fact people who believe that none of the candidates should be put in office. If you take this to be true, then you could achieve the effect that I desire by requiring that any official be elected by at least 50% of eligible voters as opposed to a simple majority of those that come to vote. The more I think about it, the more I believe this would be even more effective in forcing the parties back to reality.

Re:The accuracy of the SW and system is irrelevant

[RhettLivingston]

I think that part of the problem is that they don't have to approach 50/50 and actually have not done so. Rather, they've found ways to approach 20/20 by just driving voters away by never addressing real problems.

I'm also not sure more candidates would help. Maybe they would if you could somehow get Hollywood and the shallower media outlets out of the game so that there is some chance of getting the public focused on more than sound bites.

I could go for some weightings though. Perhaps we could weight the votes on the inverse of how much the voters in the region watch TV or in direct proportion to how much time they spend outside :o)

Hard?

[YrWrstNtmr]

Harder than a worldwide ATM network? I don't see it.

A company that would use a poorly designed MSAccess db as the base for an election system speaks to incompetence all the way up the chain. Nothing wrong with Access, but please...not for an election system!

Their ATM network handles billions of dollars in realtime. Why isn't their election software as rigorous?

Breaking: Panel recommends banning Diebold

[polyiguana]

An advisory panel voted unanimously to ban Diebold machines in four counties today.

Another possible explanation.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

[...] they were instructed to charge HIGH to add [print] capability, if it came to it.

I don't see this as (necessarily) a huge conspiracy to avoid an audit trail. This is likely a simple matter of Diebold achieving vendor lock-in with a limited feature set and then charging outrageous prices to add to that feature set.

Another non-conspiracy explanation: Printers have lots of moving parts and are highly subject to failure. That's especially true if they are used intermittently, with months of storage between uses. Now deploy thousands of them, with the entire corps of news media breathing down your neck over every glitch, and you have an enormous PR disaster in the making.

Given that other voting systems that have been in service for years (such as mechanical voting machines) leave no audit trail, they might have thought that the risks from the printers were far worse than the risks from bad PR over the lack of an audit trail.

That's doubly true because there are a LOT of places - not just the machines themselves - where the count might be corrupted, maliciously or through bugs. Without the trail such corruption wouldn't be detected, with the trail it almost certainly would, and would become big news. Build in a scandal-magnet and you need extra bucks to weather the resulting scandals and achieve the same risk-reward ratio.

But I, for one, am VERY glad to see the conspiracy theories circulate - and that they're naming Republicans. Because IMHO they're likely to lead to increased pressure (especially among Democrats, who otherwise could care less) to add the audit trail - and thus make elections even harder to rig than with the previous, non-electronic systems.

Re:Another possible explanation.

[kgarcia]

Another non-conspiracy explanation: Printers have lots of moving parts and are highly subject to failure. That's especially true if they are used intermittently, with months of storage between uses. Now deploy thousands of them, with the entire corps of news media breathing down your neck over every glitch, and you have an enormous PR disaster in the making.


Remember them old calculators that would print out the results on a little paper roll that would be almost "punched in"?

Or how about Credit Card printers (you know, the ones that get used commercially to print out the receipts you print, that are good for HUNDREDS of transactions per day, day in and day out for months)...

That is, afterall, all we would need... a little piece of paper that can be hand counted... shouldn't be that hard, really... couple hundred bucks per unit, TOPS.

Vote Phishing

[4of12]

Some polling booths have been ordered to re-poll due to malfunctions

"Uh, excuse me, sir, your vote does not seem to have been registered in the computer properly."

"Would you mind coming back and verifying the machine is working properly by voting for Lyndon LaRouche? It's just a test."

Re:I have to answer

[pangian]

Once again, I have to answer - election officials see a number of advantages to electronic voting technology, none of which have anything to do with speed of reporting (which isn't currently an issue):

1) Accuracy. The main reason that everyone is junmping on the e-voting bandwagon is fear that they could preside over the next broward county, with significant numbers of voters being disenfranchised because it is impossible to be sure for whom they are voting. (Significant = greater than the margin of victory.) There is a perception that e-voting machines are more accurate then current voting systems.

2)Access. DRE machines can often be fitted to easily display and count ballots in multiple languages, and can provide audio or raised button (Braille) for the blind. As the first article mentions, currently voters with special needs don't actually have a secret vote. As governments expand excessibility requirements in all areas, electronic voting becomes more attractive.

3) Second-chance voting and error checking. Some electronic voting systems require that the voter check their votes and show any errors (accidently voting yes and no on the same referendum, or skipping a race). Second-chance voting is a good thing that is attractive to a number of voter advocate groups. (Its my understanding that the [leadership of the] League of Women Voters really likes electronic voting for this reason).

I'm not argueing for electonic voting. In fact I'm working with a number of groups opposed to e-voting. However informed debate on the topic requires that e-voting skeptics understand the reasons that election officials choose these technology. If you really are interested in this, I'd suggest that you have a look at a document called Myth Breakers for Election Officials produced by Voters Unite

The government didn't demand quality

[roystgnr]

The government did demand it, they were promised it, and Diebold lied about it.

Perhaps the government claimed they demanded a quality product, that doesn't mean they really did. If they had, then as soon as they discover the evidence to the contrary they will at least stop doing business with Diebold and at most sue Diebold for failing to live up to their claims and/or contracts. Have you ever bought a grossly faulty product and then continued to patronize the same company regularly afterward? The government does, all the time, and unless hell has frozen over they're going to continue doing so with the Diebold machines which will be filling voting booths in November.

The private sector doesn't work because private companies are miraculously more industrious and efficient than public agencies, it works because there are usually redundant companies supplying the same service, so selfish consumers avoid the companies who do a poor job of it, so selfish companies try to do a good enough job to keep some customers. If companies discover a big stupid customer with deep pockets who will be happy no matter what, how do you expect them to behave?

Two negligent parties

[theLOUDroom]

The simple fact is that, while Diebold does indeed care about producing accurate voting results, they are more concerned with making money. If Diebold is forced to choose between increasing their profit and making the system better, they'll choose profit.

If you put voting machines in the hands of the private sector, the private sector will try to maximize profit. Corners will be cut.

As someone who actually works on contracts for the government, I see a lot of these "where to place the blame" comments and can't believe how off base they are.
There are two parties that should be sharing the blame:

• Diebold
• The Gov't organization is charge of overseeing the contract.

Diebold is being grossly negligent. They should get sued and possibly have a few people go to jail. I don't care if profit is you motivator, you do not build a car that you know will explode in 10% of all collisions. If you do, you're being grossly negligent and deserve to be punished. Sure profit is your motivator, but that doesn't mean you have no responsibility for your work.

On the other side of things, WHY HASN'T THIS CONTRACT BEEN CANCELLED AND THE MACHINES THROWN OUT!?.
Someone in the Gov't is NOT doing their job. By this point the gov't should have said, "We can't trust these guy and they're doing shit work. It would not be wise to continue any sort of business relationship with them. We also shouldn't pay them for their crappy, useless machines."
The fact that this hasn't happened makes me suspect a payoff or a conflict of interest.


Just to give you guys a frame of reference:
The project I'm working on has about 1000 requirements. These must all be formally tested and some of these tests government witnessed.

It's a big PITA to do that much testing and I imagine it's one of the ways you can end up with a $100 hammer, but at least you're sure you've got the right hammer. In that case of something like a voting system, there should be a set of formal tests taking place to verify that the system actually works and the gov't is getting what it paid for.
The current situation indicates that someone is being negligent with taxpayer money.

Re:I have to answer

[Le Marteau]

Once again, I have to answer

Thank you. Much abliged.

... speed of reporting (which isn't currently an issue)

Maybe it's not an issued because results are issued on the same day. If the entire country went to paper ballots, as I advocate, you can bet it would become an issue, toot sweet.

There is a perception that e-voting machines are more accurate then current voting systems.

Excellently qualified, and a good point.

Some electronic voting systems require that the voter check their votes and show any errors

Personally, I think if someone is dumb enough to mark both 'yes" and "no" on a question, and cannot even properly mark a ballot, their reasoning abilities and the ability to decide an issue or select a candidate are highly suspect. Their disenfranchisement for that ballot should not be bemoaned.

However informed debate on the topic requires that e-voting skeptics understand the reasons that election officials choose these technology.

You are a gentleman and a scholar and I salute you.

respectfully and strongly disagree

[zogger]

I am of the opinion that machine voting IS the problem. Voting is too critical to not have on the spot, verifiable with your eyeballs 1- an empty ballot box on poll opening (easily checked by anyone there), and 2-a count that anyone who can add can perform and check at the end of the period. And we have an archaic short voting time period, it needs to be 24 to 48 hours. I have seen and heard of too many examples of people who simply can't make the polls, typically blue collars who are required to be at work from much earlier than "business hours" until let go in the evening. I once had to QUIT a job and walk off to go vote, they would not "allow" me to come in late, nor leave early, and that day we had overtime I wasn't expecting. And lastly, instant runoffs, no more "voting for the lesser of evil" styled voting, people will have a lot more incentive to vote their REAL first choice in elections.

I love computers, but with voting, nope, I want to be able to verify it with a paper ballot, not even punch cards,a mark in the bubble ballot is quite sufficient. And I don't mean a receipt from some black box voting machine, either, this is just thousands of dollars a precinct busy work with electronic voting. More government waste (and kickbacks),easier fraud potential and inefficiency. Selling the smell and the sizzle, not the steak, typical advertising crap.

If it is not readable by any human who chooses to poll watch or if there's a dispute immediately and a human can't read it, then it is not secure, and I don't care what "guarantees" they give. "They" ALREADY swore up and down that "it was secure and worked properly", and they have been proven to FAIL IT in not a very long time.

Government and government connected contractors have a long history of being liars and crooks, and with something like voting, using computers??? WAY too much temptation there to ignore, after all, what is it woreth in potential dollars and power over other humans to "adjust" who wins?

This is just another way for that to happen,a much easier way, and as you can see it has happened, exactly like it was predicted by folks like me several years ago when it was being discussed, and I remember the arguments then that it "would just work and be better". Phooie. I was right, they were wrong.

"Computerised Voting" came pre-broken and crooked right out of the box. And with a real voting period and not this half a day deal we got now,and some sort of instant runoff deal,and third parties being covered in the news, we might see more people voting. the way it is now is 50% voting roughly, that is not any sort of success figure. It would reduce lines and the wait,the longer period, and not discrimnate against workers who can't make it to the polls, or people who have emergencies come up they have to go deal with, etc. and "counting" is a normal human thing, I doubt there's any precinct out there that lacks people who can count. Yes, there's trouble with that too, but stricter enforcement of the laws on the books with severe penalties could knock that down considerable.

And then MAYBE if the paid off FCC can see fit to REQUIRE the networks to cover third parties and candidates in their day to day so-called "news" reports and in the so-called "official national debates" we might not only get more votes, we might get more voting enthusiasm and some constructive change in this nation, instead of this "new and improved and it's so shiny!" scheme which will only go to elect the same tired old parties and candidates who have caused all the mess in the first place. And FUNNY it was *their idea* to switch to "computerised" voting. I certainly don't recall seeing any private citizens approaching me with some petition to beg the government to please switch us to computers, because it didn't happen. It was shoved down our throats and sold to us just like beer or cornflakes on the TV. The "controllers" wanted computerised voting because it's more hackable than the old original system.

Hard tech is great, I love it, for SOME things, but in other circumstances, you can't replace normal human actions.

Re:respectfully and strongly disagree

[innocent_white_lamb]

I have seen and heard of too many examples of people who simply can't make the polls, typically blue collars who are required to be at work from much earlier than "business hours" until let go in the evening. I once had to QUIT a job and walk off to go vote, they would not "allow" me to come in late, nor leave early, and that day we had overtime I wasn't expecting.

In Canada, employees are entitled by law to four consecutive hours off work to vote.

For example, if your working hours are 9 to 5 and the polls close at 8, your employer must let you go at 4.

As I said, this is required by law and an employer can get himself into very deep shit indeed if he fails to honour that requirement.

Re:respectfully and strongly disagree

[armb]

In principle you can have machine voting that does have independant eyeball verifiable ballots. You can either use the human readable form as a backup to be used in the event of a dispute, or use a sample of them to check they agree with the machine's count (and then move to the "in the event of a dispute" procedure if any disagreement is found). (At the extreme, the "sample" is every single vote and the machine count is only a preliminary estimate, not the real count, but then you don't really have machine voting.)
It's not easy to do right though. (It's easy to either make checking votes were recorded properly easy, or to make voting anonymous in such a way that no voter can prove how they voted to anyone else, but difficult to do both at once. The "no voter can prove how they voted to anyone else" means no one can reliably buy your vote or intimidate you into voting for someone you don't want.)

Re:respectfully and strongly disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

With the states that have an early voting period it is inexcusable to use the excuse "I just couldn't make it to the polls." Early voting in my state lasts around a week and the polls are open early in the morning until late afternoon each day. If someone waits until the last minute and doesn't make it, then they need to take voting a bit more seriously.

I've also seen the suggestion of creating a law to require people to vote, but if people are not interested enough to vote, then they are likely too ignorant of the issues to make an informed choice anyway. Leave it up to the people who care enough to pay attention and spend the time to go to the polls.

Re:respectfully and strongly disagree

[hummassa]

In Brasil, elections are *always* on Sundays. People who work at elections are picked up by the Electoral Court (much alike jury duty) and they have a leave of 2 workdays for each day they are summoned by the Court, whatever may be their job.

Ok I have to ask...

[KaiLoi]

How hard can it _possibly_ be to make a machine that given 2 -> more options allows you to slecet multiple or one of those options?

I mean _really_?

Sure I can understand that adding security would adda layer of complexity.. but it looks like they aren't even doing that right.

The manual voting machine has got to be one of the simplist tools ever. How can you screw up a digital counterpart like this so badly? You'd almost have to _try_ to make it mess up this much.

Re:Ok I have to ask...

[gerardrj]

Simply allowing the user to select one or more options is not the only requirement. Granted, this should be farily simple but it's not a throw together type of project.

Some things to think about:
Change a vote before comitting the ballot
Pressing close, but not exactly on a button
Sight impaired voters
Heat, cold, shock and water resistant
Strong and difficult to deface while easy to repair
Easily transportable, but easily secured
Impervious to external interference from radios, electrical current, magnets, etc.
Each voter must start with the machine in the same state
"ease drop" proof, so indivudual votes remain secret

Personally I think all these touch screen systems are a cludge and overkill for the job. Use the "fill in the line" paper ballot and an optical scanner. You get a paper trail, instant electronic tabulation, ability to recount and examine "intent" and it's almost universally undersood.

Update at SFGATE

[Ian Peon]

SFGate just posted a new story. The advisory panel said to decertify their machines. Best paragraph:

In addition to the ban, panel members recommended that a secretary of state's office report released Wednesday, detailing alleged failings of Diebold in California, be forwarded to the state attorney general's office to consider civil and criminal charges against the company.

Yes, but... 41985.7

[Anonymous Coward]

What when someone counting votes starts adding additional marks to ballots to make them invalid? Paper isn't so perfect anymore.

Re:Alameda County has been pursuing these issues .

[demachina]

Anyone in a position to pursue this should make sure the source being used to the builds is placed in a secure place, it is reviewed, a binary is produced from it by election officials and not Diebold, its signed and that the signing is verified before and after the election by the precinct officials, not Diebold.

They should also randomly pull machines out on election day, during voting hours and test them without Diebold's knowledge or assistance. Random testing on election day would do a world of good in catching fraud. They should also consider taking random machines prior to the election and setting the date and time to be in the election window and see if they tally correctly.

If I were Diebold my goal would be to get uncertified, unreviewed binaries in their machine in swing states. That uncertified source would have a date/time check in it. Since they know well in advance when the elections are happening they want to rig, that date time check would have a branch. If its not during the hours of an election it would flawlessly count votes to fool the election officials validating the machines. If the machines think they are within the election window there would be some convoluted code that would flip a predetermined number of votes from the party they want to lose to the party they want to win. I wager no one actually tests the counts from the machine during the election window. If someone had access to a binary from a disputed election it would be interesting to disassemble it and look for date time system calls and see what happens in the logic that follows.

If Diebold is putting uncertified software in their machine you may as well throw any election their machines are used for out the window. To be honest I'm a little amazed they are so incompetent that they are committing these huge gaffes and producing results that are clearly erroneous and are setting off alarm bells. I can only imagine they are pretty incompetent, their machines really are unreliable or they are setting off alarms in elections like California's primary that don't count much, dutifully fixing the problems to look responsible and doing the real dirty work in swing states during the elections that count which will come off flawlessly but will have rigged the results. If they always insure the vote count total was correct and the margins were at least within the realm of possibility they could cheat on elections until the cows come home and no one would catch them without the presence of a paper trail.

Motive

[Anonymous Coward]

Wonder how much it would cost to just fix the problems?

Probably less. I wonder why they would spend extra money to create a voting system prone to manipulation...

I disagree, too, respectfully, too...

[hummassa]

And I have deep, first-hand experience on the matter: #8942031

Re:I disagree, too, respectfully, too...

[zogger]

whew, sounds complicated! I tell you what though, I REALLY like the idea of requiring voting,making it the law. I just cannot understand people who voluntarily do not vote,and it's a huge number in this country. Is it a bad sentence if you are caught and convicted for not voting?

I just don't know. When we have used simple paper ballots, it worked. We switched to machines with cars, it started not working. Now we have computerised and I would BET serious folding money some elections have been hijacked allready.

Anyway, to each their own, sounds like your nation has it more under control. Tell me, how do you like Silva so far?

Re:Alameda County has been pursuing these issues .

[whoever57]

They should also randomly pull machines out on election day, during voting hours and test them without Diebold's knowledge or assistance

While I wholeheartedly agree with your suggestions, I would like to add another thought:

If I were trying to build the software to fix an election, I would make it so that the fix only happened after a large number of votes were cast. In this way, it would be difficult to truly reproduce the election conditions and hence truly audit the machine.

I believe that the people who have specified these machines are working on the belief that deliberate fraud will not happen. Otherwise, they would be much more careful and thorough than they have been.

But why?

[tekunokurato]

Can somebody explain to me why it's so difficult to make a machine that takes and counts votes reliably? I've never used one, and I live on the other side of the country from cali, so I really have no conception of why this is so difficult. I would think that simple physical limitations, things like having just a screen and three buttons (yes/no/abstain, maybe?) would work just fine. I really don't get it.

Re:Alameda County has been pursuing these issues .

[demachina]

Not sure I really follow. We are talking about fraud at the machine level. If a vote was being cast once a minute in a 12 hour election day thats still only 720 votes per machine and I doubt they see anything close to a voter a minute. An election official could easily produce 720 votes in pre-election testing in a fairly short period of time. I think rigging the count just within the election time window is much less likely to be caught. The election officials are much to busy during that window to do random testing of machines.

Of course, if its a some have indicated and Diebold is just patching the machines at the last minute before the election with unknown and untested software that is just blatant indication of fraud and they should be charged and thrown in jail just for doing it.

the fix is in

[Doc Ruby]

"Wonder how much it would cost to just fix the problems?"

The problem is that Americans will dump Bush. To fix the election, $500K:m is just soft money on top of the $180M Bush raised to deliver the rest of the electoral college, regardless of the will of the people.

human readable printouts

[chihowa]

Hate to go OT for a sec, but it's my duty to correct this when it comes up.

Tallying could be done mechanically, as a barcode could accompany the printed text.

This is not such a great idea, as the barcode wont be human readable. So Joe Voter verifies that his ballot says he voted for Les Seroftwoevils, but the barcode says he voted for Satanhim Self.

He thinks the ballot reads correctly, but that's because he doesn't read barcode. Optical scanning of the human readable text would be better, but you still can't guarantee that the machine doing the recount hasn't been tampered with.

Human vote counting is actually very fast. The current implementation has problems, but returning results in a timely manner is not one of them. We don't need to spend so much effort fixing a problem that isn't.

illegal contract

[chihowa]

For the contract to preclude criminal charges, that would mean that the contract would be allowing or demanding criminal activities to be performed. Any such contract is an illegal contract and is void. Just like a contract on somebody's life can't be taken to court for enforcement.

California Girls Doubled-Over E-Voting Fsck-Ups!

[KnarfO]

me: "sweet!"
-click-

"oh....crap."

Re:Alameda County has been pursuing these issues .

[whoever57]

Well, if I were trying to build a fraudulent machine, I would do both:

Make it only fix the results on the correct day and

Make it only fix the results if the voting pattern matches that of a real election.

I don't know how many votes a single machine records, but if time (over which the votes are cast) were also taken into account, I think it could be made almost impossible for a fix to be detected.

Re:Yes, but... 41985.7

[don.g]

In New Zealand, we have party scrutineers hanging around the people who count votes. They're not about to let you change the ballots.

Re:I have to answer

[pangian]

Maybe it's not an issued because results are issued on the same day. If the entire country went to paper ballots, as I advocate, you can bet it would become an issue, toot sweet.

Don't sell yourself short. I'm constantly seeing people from Canada and England post that voting is done entirely by paper and that results are available by that evening or the next day. I've seen elections in a number of countries that aren't burdened by such things as "technology" or "electricity". Sure, it takes a few days for official results to be anounced, but this isn't due to delays in counting. Counting is usually done right there at the polling station as soon as it closes, with representatives from all the parties watching. The polling officials at that location know the vote count within a few minutes after polls close. The trouble in these countries is the time it takes to transmit and aggregate that data. In any country with reasonable phones/roads/databases, this shouldn't be at all time consuming. I suppose this excludes Mississippi, but what is that... 4 electoral votes?

Plus you have to remember that in the U.S. the public doesn't wait for the final vote count to be told "results". As soon as a small percentage of stations report results that corroberate the exit polls of the major networks, we all find out that Gore... no wait... Bush... no wait... Anthony Scalia won Florida.

Personally, I think if someone is dumb enough to mark both 'yes" and "no" on a question, and cannot even properly mark a ballot, their reasoning abilities and the ability to decide an issue or select a candidate are highly suspect. Their disenfranchisement for that ballot should not be bemoaned.

This is a sentiment that I'm inclined to agree with, and probably many polling officials would as well. Keep in mind though that many paper ballots are designed for easy counting rather than easy casting and others don't appear to be designed for easy anything-whatsoever. Multiple-page ballots, butterfly ballots, and the like... some of these things make the 1040 look reasonable.

It's Not New(s)

[calix]

There is a spectacular article entitled "Hack the Vote" in April's Vanity Fair. Unfortunately, VF doesn't have online content, but the article is well-worth the $4.50 cover price.
Michael Shnayerson writes

"this is a story of good intentions gone awry, of Congress bamboozled into thinking the machines were ready when they weren't, of county and state election officials softened over lavish dinners into endorsing one kind of machine over another, with some later induced to take jobs at voting machine companies. And like most American stories its about money -- big money, $3.9 billion, showered on the states to buy the machines, and buy them fast."

Vanity Fair, April 2004, p.158.

Re:Alameda County has been pursuing these issues .

[Anonymous Coward]

I know that... But where's Alameda?

From the mouth of the CEO himself

[gad_zuki!]

> OK, all conspiracy theories off to the side.

COLUMBUS - The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.

No we will not put the "conspiracy theories" away just because they threaten your own ideas of just how corrupt things have gotten. At the very least this quote should make every state divest in Diebold.

After the Help Americans Vote Act (HAVA) the states found themselves with more money than sense on "fixing" voting. Many chose Diebold. They chose wrong. Its time to fix that mistake.

Australia had open source voting 2-3 years ago. We've got Diebold.

>, they are more concerned with making money.

Yes, they did a good job of convincing states that their product is the way to go. As with most government contracts there was plenty of pork and cronyism to go around. Lets not drink the "the market will save us all" Kool-Aid while corruption goes unchecked.

Diebold on the way OUT in California!

[Catbeller]

Panel: Don't use Diebold touch-screen voting machines

By Jim Wasserman
ASSOCIATED PRESS
12:51 p.m. April 22, 2004

SACRAMENTO - California should ban the use of 15,000 touch-screen voting machines made by Diebold Election Systems from the Nov. 2 general election, an advisory panel to Secretary of State Kevin Shelley recommended Thursday.

By an 8-0 vote, the state's Voting Systems and Procedures Panel recommended that Shelley cease the use of the machines, saying that Texas-based Diebold has performed poorly in California and its machines malfunctioned in the state's March 2 primary election, turning away many voters in San Diego County.

The recommendation affects 15,000 Diebold touch-screen machines in San Diego, Solano, Kern and San Joaquin counties.

Machines made by Diebold and other manufacturers in 10 other counties are unaffected, although the panel was to consider them later in the day.

The panel's recommendation has national implications for the voting machine maker, which has also supplied machines to many counties in Maryland and Georgia. It also comes as states are gearing up to spend billions of dollars on modernized election equipment in the wake of the 2000 disputed presidential election in Florida.

If Shelley follows through with the recommendation, the affected counties would have to revert to paper ballots or older voting technology.

Diebold was disappointed and disagreed with the recommendation, said its marketing director, Mark Radke. The company will quickly write a report outlining its objections to Shelley, who has until April 30 to make a final decision.

The vote doesn't affect thousands of Diebold optical scan machines that read marked ballot cards in 17 counties. Nor does it immediately affect an earlier generation of 4,000 Diebold touch-screen machines in Alameda and Plumas counties.

In addition to the ban, panel members recommended that a secretary of state's office report released Wednesday, detailing alleged failings of Diebold in California, be forwarded to the state attorney general's office to consider civil and criminal charges against the company.

Diebold Election Systems is an affiliate of Ohio-based Diebold, Inc., a leading ATM machine maker supplying banks in North and South America.

Panel member Marc Carrel, an assistant secretary of state, said he was "disgusted" by Diebold, which has "been jerking us around." The company, he said, has disenfranchised voters in California and undermined confidence in the new and developing technology of touch-screen voting.

Local elections officials in Kern San Joaquin counties, which use Diebold's touch-screen machines were surprised by the news, saying they had experienced no problems in the March primary.

"I don't understand how they can say they didn't work well," said San Joaquin County Registrar of Voters Debbie Hench. The county bought 1,626 Diebold touch-screen machines for $5.7 million.

This decision will be a "step backward" for Kern County, said Registrar of Voters Ann Barnett, who bought 1,350 Diebold touch-screen machines for $5 million.

Regardless of what happens in California, the head of Diebold Inc. told shareholders Thursday that the company is not considering getting out of the elections business.

Chairman and CEO Walden W. O'Dell told reporters after an annual shareholders meeting that "we will help in California if we are allowed. If we are not, we won't. I think whatever goes on in California is separate from what goes on in other states. Each state will make their own decisions."

O'Dell said the North Canton, Ohio-based company remains confident the machines are safe and secure.

California panel members, however, disagreed. They cited a litany of alleged problems with Diebold in recent months, including its sale of machines to the four counties without federal and state certif

Do you have a reply

[infolib]

to our earlier discussion? Sorry about the off-topic-ness of this post, but I feared you hadn't noticed at all.

It's Lula down here :-)

[hummassa]

Is it a bad sentence if you are caught and convicted for not voting?
You mean, worse than not receiving your tax returns? :-) Nope, you have to write a letter to the electoral judge saying why you haven't gone vote. The judge will summon you for a hearing, you will apologize and pay a small fine. This if you do the "justifying" in 15 to 30 days after the election (depends on the election schedule, that varies).
Without either voting or justifying, you can't have a government job, nor vote in the next election, nor receiving and welfare, and next year, you won't receive your tax returns.
If you have a good justification, and show evidence, you can be exempt of the fine.
Tell me, how do you like Silva so far?
Plus ça change, plus c'est le meme chose... The more things change, more they stay the same. I voted for him, for I tought he would do something to stimulate growth. He did not -- yet at least, so I, personally, am not very happy. The worker's party has less corruption than the others, but that is far from meaning *no* corruption.

Re:It's Lula down here :-)

[zogger]

Oh well, he wasn't the globalist fatcats pick, so maybe there's hope for ya'all yet. Brazil is a pretty big and well off nation from what I understand, lots of natural resources and a good labor pool, you'll do OK in the future if you can keep out of the clutches of the world bank/IMF guys...and go for a gold backed currency, like the muslim countries are doing now. Just a piece of advice there that might make some sense, seeing as how you guys have great gold reserves.. I have some amethyst and quartz from your country, BTW...

hmm, the guy I work for a long time ago bought a few hundred acres (hectares? whatever ya got, he has a few hundred of them) down there, but I think it is still all forest. He runs some big farms, so maybe in the future that might be what he wants to do with it, but I don't know, just guessing..

Here, we have choice of multimillionaire skull and bones secret society candidate A or B. I always vote independent or third party, knowing full well they won't win, but my hope is every year I see the numbers rising slightly with people who vote similar.

Re:It's Lula down here :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Offtopic, but it's 'une chose', 'la chose' (ie, feminine). As in portuguese, right (la coisa)?

I find that with some exceptions, genders in romance languages tend to be very similar. I don't speak portuguese well, but in spanish it's el mar, but in french la mer; that sort of thing. But overall, you can take a good guess and be right 95% of the time.

worked fine

[Anonymous Coward]

I used the system in the last election. It worked fine and was easy to use. Voted for Arnold. In the previous election we had to use punch cards.

What I would like is a printed receipt of my vote and a web site to verify how I voted. The receipt would have a unique hash code to my vote. Also, the system should not be connected to the internet and should use embedded software. ( non pc )

Might not be perfect but its maginitudes better than punch cards.

just amazed

[zogger]

I got one reply to an earlier voting post, the poster related voting is required by law in Brazil. a good idea, IMO. Now I hear you are guaranteed the time to vote in canada. Another good idea. Here in the US, we are guaranteed to have the choice of blackbox voting for the one party with two names candidate of their choice, and our helpful "news" is extraordinarily careful to not clutter our simple little minds with any irrelevant "third party" nonsense..

Frankly I think it's been over for awhile. I vote out of inertia mostly. I considered the JFK whack to be a clear cut coup d'etat, and it's been seriously downhill ever since. Every suceeding administration or session of congress has gotten more crooked, farther away from the constitution, more insulated from the "real" US people, and more in the hands of international technofeudalists.

We as a society aren't even close to being what we were designed as. Sucks.

Get your facts here.

[Anonymous Coward]

NORC was responsible for the media-backed recount. You can download the database. See for yourself what would have happened if all the votes were counted.

No proof

[Stephen Samuel]

From The tri-valley article

"There's still not any evidence of electronic voting sys- tems anywhere in this country counting votes inaccurately," said Conny McCormack, the Los Angeles County registrar of voters.

Wrong! there was at least one case, in Georgia I believe, where one or more voting machines recorded N times as many votes as there were voters -- They had to divide the votes by N to get something that looked accurate.

I would acutually challenge them in the other direction: I'd say that there is absolutely no evidence that Diebold (or any other paperless) voting machines have ever recorded votes accurately. This goes double, now -- in the face of their California record.

nitpick: abort

[d34thm0nk3y]

OCRA

The absolute worst part...

[Anonymous Coward]

...about the Ca. election problems was that indepentant analysis of the devices before the election raised these very same concerns! Yet these concerns were brushed aside and the election allowed to happen with known faulty machinery. That's a bigger crime than the machinery being faulty in the first place, though it's awfully damn typical of the way things go these days. It's a lot easier to do wrong and apologise for it later than to do it right in the first place apparently.

Evoting code leaked

[IncandescentFlame]

while ( voting_day() ) {
canditate = accept_vote();
if ( verify_requested ) {
print_your_vote(canditate);
};
actual_canditate = "Bush, G.W.";
add_vote(actual_canditate);
};

The Inside Story Of California's Capitulation

[althecat]

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0404/S00199 .htm

As related by Bev Harris and purveyed to you today by Scoop.co.nz (Via DU) who broke the original Diebold story.

Re:I have to answer

[ikoL]

You are a gentleman and a scholar and I salute you.

"I am Jennifer Lopez, I eat tacos and burritos." - Eric Cartman

I'm sorry, I guess this is offtopic, but ROFL

Another hardware flaw

[bmasel]

If someone whacks a Diebld machine with a sledgehammer, the votes are lost. Whack a ballot box with a sledgehammer, and the ballots can still be read.

Contingencies

[hummassa]

You don't. There is a "contingency plan" for every possible failure.

If one machine does not work, you have 2 or 3 backup machienes for each 100 or so; if they don't work, also, you do paper ballot voting in the section that machine, call in the party officials and the scrutinizers, make the count by hand (remember, each box does not have an awful lot of votes).

If your floppy goes bad, you (the Electoral Judge, I mean) writes by hand in a Superior Electoral Court program the results from that box, signs a report that the computer emits saying "this data was entered by hand, it's my responsability", and affix it to elections papers.

If you lose connectivity, you get the car/boat, and take the disks to the neighboring electoral zone (=set of sections), with police escort. And the list goes on and on.

Forests and stuff.

[hummassa]

People generally don't have in mind that Brasil is less than 20% forest -- especially rain forest. Which is OK, because we are bigger than the continental USofA.
The country is divided in 5 regions: North, Northeast, Mid-west, Southeast and South.
If the area your boss has is in the Northern Region, chances are that it is rain forest (in which case he can only farm 50% of it... the rest is protected), or farming area (20% protected areas). This supposing he did not fell for not-for-sale areas (native Brazilian reserves, p.ex)
If the area is in the Northeastern, Southern or in the Southeastern regions, it's probably already farming area, and if he's not farming there, he should be careful because here, non-productive farming areas are up for grabs (they can be confiscated for land reform, to settle small agricutural producers).
If it's in the Northeastern, it can be in our semi-desertic, areas, too :-)
In the Mid-western region, there are the big plantation farms, mainly of soybeans. And our swampy forests.

Really OT.

[hummassa]

it's feminine. my bad.

interesting

[zogger]

I'll ask him what region it is in and tell him what you told me. I don't think he'd be amused if he found out he no longer had control, but then again I have no idea what he's got there, for all I know he might have leased it out or something.

Oh, forgot to tell you, the world's males thanks brazil for providing such a wonderful natural resource of human females!

I wish they all could be...

[TimTheFoolMan]

...California Grills

Re:Tehnology is the root problem here.

[natoochtoniket]

At a "high level", there are really only two requirements for a voting system. (1) The voting system must be fair and accurate. (2) An average person, with no special training, must be able to verify that the voting system is both fair and accurate.

It might eventually be possible to meet the first requirement by a very strict engineering process involving formal verification. However, I believe the only technology that can possibly meet the second requirement is "paper ballots."

It must be possible for a person who has zero understanding of technology to convince themselves that the votes were correctly counted. Hence, it must be possible to manually count the votes, if only to verify the original count. Hence, the original votes must be recorded on some media that a human can read without any machinery at all.

Technology can be used to print the paper ballots, and perhaps to mark the ballots in the voting booth. Technology can be legitimately used to count the paper ballots. But, the paper ballots cannot be eliminated.

this is true

[zogger]

--if the e-voting scheme is advanced enough to conform to all the ways of producing the actual true count with complete verification, seems like it would default to being able to easily collate who voted for who, which blows anonymity and would instill a set of "political correctness" via fear into whomever is voting.

I don't like it, it's too weird, too expensive, to hard to make it honest accurate and anonymous, and too easy to use the system as it stands for massive vote hijacking. When a few votes here or there can influence an entire election, even the "acceptable margin of error" is enough to skew the results in someones favor.

The simple paper ballot and empty box is not perfect, but it's the simplest and easiest and most fair system devised yet. All this other stuff is just the trend- a fad really- to computerise everything, even when it's not needed.