Slashdot Mirror
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
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
Never never never smoke crack before geometry class!