California Panel Recommends Dumping Diebold

sdw3u writes "Wired reports that a voting panel urged California officials to stop using a voting machine made by Diebold Election Systems, and recommends that the state consider filing civil and criminal charges against the company." There's also an AP story. We covered the hearing yesterday, with Diebold admitting that their machines had numerous problems.

Comments

I'm in Orange County, CA and I vote

[rjamestaylor]

During the last election, the one after we elected the doing-better-than-anticipated Arnold Schwartzanegger (I can't spell) Governor, I voted in Rancho Santa Margarita and our polling location used electronic voting machines. Exiting the booth one of the 4 or 5 volunteers asked if I liked the new machines, clearly expecting a hearty "Hell yeah". Since no one else was in the polling area at the time I stopped and told them the truth: I did not and I was worried about my vote, other's votes and the potential for loss or after the vote manipulation, present company excepted. They were shocked and the leader asked me to please explain. I gladly told them that

• the user interface was different than the punch cards we'd used for so long; that meant confusion, especially since there was no way to "train" on the new equipment before casting the actual vote(!),
• there was no physical record of the vote
• being that there was no physical record changing the vote count would be simple.
• there was no "receipt" showing me my vote so I knew I voted correctly.

I did not get into the hacking issues, since these were not the brightest people; which was another problem in itself. They responded that they did indeed have a record of each vote -- on a central machine controlled by a lady who had a running tally of votes and could print a vote audit trail for each machine. But each machine depended on that central one to hold its votes and there was no corroborrating (I can't spell) record from each machine. I asked what would happen if the central computer failed. I don't rememeber the precise details but it was clear that there was one backup and if it was also lost, all was lost. What is a recount? Re-print the vote total you just printed. There is no way to recount the counted votes. They thought this was a feature ("no need to recount") instead of a flaw ("no way to recount").

Then I told them I was responsible for databases. At different times I have been responsible for hundreds of thousands of credit card settlements daily and explained how our failsafe measures failed to the extent a days worth of customers (say, half a million US dollars, without including AMEX) were doubled and, due to an API error, the fix resulted in a triple billing. Wheee. Our systems had much more checks and balances, backups and audit trails than there silly voting system and yet one days transactions went wildly wrong (we somehow avoided the news, though our problem involved the same processor as Walmart's in their recent fiasco). How would they retract double/triple counted votes? Replace lost votes?

The good people at my polling place had received the warm fuzzies from the people promoting inaccountable electronic voting; they didn't like hearing my input. But why would we treat our money as more precious than the foundation of our republican democracy?