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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."
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.)
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
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.
HAH! I just wasted a second of your life making you read this, but I wasted a minute of mine thinking it up. DAMN.
LOL whats nice about these is that we are living it RIGHT NOW thanks to W. want more of the same dipshit?
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.
Alameda County is basically the "East Bay", ie. across the Bay from San Francisco, including Berkeley, Oakland, Fremont, etc.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
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.
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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":
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.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
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.
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.
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.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
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)
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
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
Never never never smoke crack before geometry class!
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.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Michael Shnayerson writes Vanity Fair, April 2004, p.158.
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.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048