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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[micromoog]

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

. . . vote for Nader.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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.)

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.

[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.

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.

two words,

[pair-a-noyd]

Papaer Ballots..

#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.

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

[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

[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.

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!"

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.

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.

[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.

[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).

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

[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.

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

[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

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.

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?!?

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.

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?

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..

.... 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

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.

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.

two more words

[trentblase]

Spell Check

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.

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.

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.

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.

The voters should demand a recount!

[dpbsmith]

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

Never mind

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

[CGP314]

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


-Colin

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.

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 :)

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.

Too much work ..

[0dugo0]

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

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

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).

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.