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CA Secretary of State Bans Diebold Machines
Etcetera writes "The CA Secretary of State has just announced that they're pulling the plug on the use of Diebold voting machines (thank you KNSD) as a result of the flaws that came up where they were used during March's elections. More background on the issue (not updated yet) from the Secretary of State's perspective is available here."
According to wired
. ht ml
http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,63191,00
yeah, too bad we're not a democracy and never were. We're a Republic.
No it wasn't. It's my understanding that Schwarzeneggar won by a large enough margin that the votes which were thrown out were irrelevant to the outcome. Similarly, if outstanding absentee votes are less than the margin of victory, they are discarded. The outrage is that the mistake *could have been important* and changed the outcome, not that it did, or was large enough to possibly have done that.
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
True Geek, right here.
In PDF, and a Google HTML version
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
I live in San Diego and was one of the guinea pigs in the last vote. Although there was no "start" button, the machines had all the hallmarks of Windows... the buttons and navigation system, the data entry fields, everything. The interface was basic, just a few colors, radio buttons, and text boxes (much like one of those demo machines with IE in full-screen mode). There was a card reader/writer on the side that you stuck your card into. They were actually quite large too, perhaps twice the size of a standard laptop and looked to be quite heavy.
The part that really scared me was that you just put your card in the machine and take it out when you're done. There is no physical change on the card itself to indicate that anything was written to it. It is one of those smart-card type things, not the magstripe kind. There should be, at a minimum, a changed color on the outside when data is written, and in a perfect world there would be some sort of e-ink or lcd on it that displayed your choices when you took it out.
Based on all this, how am I supposed to know that my vote was cast? Even if the data was written to the card and there was a vote cast, how am I to know that the data written to the card is the same data I entered? Why is there no paper receipt? I really hope these machines are premanently banned. They really do scare me.
Ads? What ads?
Err, and Google HTML version without annoying highlighting
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
Unfortunately, and I speak as a California resident, they are not being banned in all counties...yet.
http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,63191,00.ht ml
I believe that Arnold was voted in before Diebold was introduced in March of this year. As I remember it was good old fashioned punch cards.
Here is the March 2004 voter's guide, which will show any of the votes that may have been affected.
Representative Democracy
Republic
Diebold will appeal this to the 9th circuit court, which will uphold the law... The supreme court will then overrule the 9th circuit, as usual, and also as usual allow the plaintiff free reign to not only disregard the new law but to throw out any common sense related to the law and set a precedent for wide open fleecing of the American voter. Don't believe me? Here's a couple of examples:
9th Circuit Rules in Favor of Medical Marijuana (overruled by SC)
9th Circuit Votes that Recall Election must be postponed (overruled by SC)
Well, you get the idea. They are the most overruled court in the land.
By the end of this case, the Supreme Court will have Diebold sitting on the board of the California Elections commission and charging voters $5 to vote. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but forgive my cynicism -- this isn't nearly over yet.
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
electronic voting machines are being used successfully (ie. w/o any major incidence) in largest ever task undertaken in history... namely, general elections in largest democracy - India!
Oh and Brazilians have been successfully using electronic voting for a decade, and India has been using them on and off for half a decade.
You know, sometime over-engineering sucks.
- mritunjai
I am fulltime techie for a California election office, and one who fully supports the measures taken today. I attended all three days of hearings the last couple of weeks, felt like i had fallen into watergate.
e w. pdf
There were many conspiracy nuts there, however as one who is closer to the situation I can tell you that it is a lot simpler than that. It is a story that most people in the high tech industry have seen played out many times.
Diebold bought a company a couple of years ago that was on the verge of bankruptcy. This company (Global election Systems) was a typical high tech startup, they spent a tiny bit on engineering a product, a little more on making it LOOK good, a little more on sneaking it past certification, a little on marketing it to election officials, and a LOT on trying to sell investors. And then the Vancouver stock market scandal hit. And took some of the founders to jail.
Diebold released that the product stank, but also that the timeline for getting a better product certified would cost them big in the marketplace.
So they shuffled the unfinished, untested, uncertified, glamourous new product with the kludgy, limited, but certified old product. Always answering a question by referring to the product that would give the best answer. It was an elaborate shell game of trying to misdirect the responsible agencies until they could finish the new product. And in an old high tech story, product delays left them high and dry, with all of their marketing lies exposed. The engineers just could not keep up with the marketing peoples card tricks.
They will almost certainly be prosecuted, and almost certainly will be out tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in California alone, just in false claim lawsuits.
All of this was almost a given on March 2nd, when their untested tech crashed and burned on them.
The bigger news is that it looks like most of the other Counties that used an Electronic Voting System in March will opt to NOT use one in November, as the requirements to use the DRE voting systems are so onerous as to be impossible in this day of tight budgets and tight deadlines.
For a very good, balanced, view of this from the election officials point of view look at:
http://www.electionline.org/site/docs/pdf/EB7_n
No, I'm afraid you are incorrect. I think you'll find the Diebold Accuvote-TSx is completely decertified throughout the State of California, with immediate effect.
c er t.pdf
http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/ks_dre_papers/de
This only affects 4 counties, as the others use earlier models or other companies machines. but then the slashdot article didn't say "eVoting banned in CA" did it?
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Ha! Of course both sides believe the other one is the fucking dumbass. Just like Osama and Dubya both say they fight with the help of God. Please read this article, or this one, with an open mind? Sure you say the writer is a liberal, but do you think he just made up his allegations out of thin fucking air?
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
As someone who actually was a reject checker for the SATs, I state without equivocation: #2 pencils are subject to smear. Roughly 2% of SAT tests had to be hand-checked (circa 1986) because they were rejected by the IBM-manufactured collator for smearing between circles. The result? Everyone's lazy and doesn't really care if you go to CMU, Pitt, or Lehigh and so smeared SAT answers were marked wrong: an "overvote" in the election parlance.
Mayhap the optical technology has improved in 20 years, but I doubt that. So, think: 2% was enough to swing Florida's presidential election in 2000. Do you really want to standardize on an optical ballot, which is subject to it's owen equivalent of the hanging chad?
If Americans just sit quiet and watch what happens, these people will get away with it all by just throwing money at some lawyers. What you should do is write (as in snail mail) to your congressman and any and all other political figures you can find and tell them that these people must be prosecuted, that the future of Democracy in US is at stake, and that we must make sure nobody in the future will even think of trying to get around the system.
Write them, and tell everybody you know to do so as well. Remember, posting sarcastic comments on Slashdot isn't part of the democratic process.
"Back to the point, how many bins would this be? The last big election I voted in had over 100 candidates. Minor candidates, but I'm sure they all thought they were as important as the other. There is NO way the average voter is going to be able to see and check that each of their votes went into the right bin -- and thats what matters -- the person voting can check this... I'd take on you other points, but this one irked me the most..."
Sorry to irk you, but I think you might have misunderstood my suggestion as some way of sorting votes as soon as they're made. I wasn't. (in my country, it's illegal to count votes before the polls close.) I was referring to a system where the votes are cast, placed in a box, and later that evening, they're all taken to a town hall somewhere and counted.
Firstly, the voter doesn't verify that their vote went into the right bin, that's for the vote-counters to do. The voter marks their vote (using a machine if necessary), then checks that their vote is correct by looking at the card. If it's correctly marked candidate 84, then they're happy, and they put their voting card into a locked black box with all the other cards. (showing the election officer's stamp on the back of the card to prove it's a valid vote)
Repeat as necessary until the polls close.
The returning officer then supervises a hundred volunteers who empty the ballot boxes onto the table, and sort them into piles. That's where the sorting machine helps.
If you do have a limit on the number of bins a machine can sort, then you need to be a bit more organised. "candidates 1-10", "candidates 11-20". And then send each part-sorted pile to somebody with another machine.
You comment about being able to find the right candidate when voting -- that's irrelevant to the vote-counting. Finding the right person to vote for is done *when the ballot card is marked*, not when it's counted. I believe I used the phrase "using whatever method of selecting candidates is in favour this month" or such like, to describe the method for marking your vote card. Whatever, once that's done, the task of sorting them into piles and counting each candidates vote is done completely separately, after the polls have closed.
"Back to the point, how many bins would this be?" -- if you have 100 candidates, you're going to have at least 100 piles of voting cards on your counting-tables, regardless of the method chosen to mark or count them, so I don't see how an automated card-sorter can do anything but help the people dealing with so many candidates. If 3 people get 80% of the vote, then separate those piles out first. The idea of such machines is that they're tools to make a human job easier. If you want 20 machines, get 20 of them, because they don't need to have any intelligence or any knowlege of what's being voted for.
Once the cards are sorted into piles by candidate, you have a verifiably correct answer. Anyone can flick through a pile of votes to see that there isn't a vote in the wrong pile. Anyone can count a pile of votes to check that it matches the official answer. And anyone can see how many votes each candidate has, by looking at the count for their pile.
And the results are then published, so you can check that the numbers add up when you take all the different counting stations into account.
(as an aside, have you ever read those usability studies which show that people can't cope with more than 7 choices at a time, and shouldn't be presented with them? 100 candidates is never going to be a good election)
Go ahead and have a go at the other points, they ought to withstand critisism if they're to be suggested for a voting system.
repeat of the 2000 Florida fiasco with guys holding ballots up to the light
Only if you wait until after the voter has left the building to catch the bad ballots. If the voter feeds the ballot into the machine himself, then he'll be standing RIGHT THERE when the machine issues its error beep and says the ballot is indecipherable. Thus he knows he needs to ditch the bad ballot and try again. This is precisely how the system in the community I vote in works, by the way.
When you finish filling out the ballot with the felt tip pen provided (it works on an optical scan of the ballot to see where you put your line next to the candidate - each candidate has an arrowhead and arrow tail pointing at it, but with empty whitespace between them. You complete the picture of the arrow by drawing a line from tail to head, and it's these horizontal lines that the scanner looks for). Anyway, the point is that YOU, walk it over to the scanner machine, and YOU feed it into the slot, and YOU watch the machine take your ballot, and pop up a green light if it could understand it, or a red light and a beep if it cannot. If you get it rejected, it's blatantly obvious to you, right there, that it's rejected because instead of dropping the ballot into the lockbox for archiving, it regugitates it back at you, the voter. Maybe it was a bad scan and you can try again. But if you try more than twice and it doesn't work, then a poll worker (who is watching the people using the scanner) will hand you a new, fresh ballot and destroy the old one (while you watch, the worker tears the ballot, while averting eyes to avoid seeing who you voted for.) You can then walk back to one of the privacy booths and try again with the fresh ballot.
How do I know this? I deliberately voted a bogus vote one year, in a minor election for some local positions where there were only two positions up for election, and they were positions I wasn't informed about (so I felt it would be wrong to make a vote on them). The only reason I showed up was to vote on a referrendum. Anyway, I decided to use this chance to test the system. I filled out a ballot where I tried to vote for both candidates in one of the minor positions.
I went through the process as explained above, and when it was done, whispered to the poll worker that I did it on purpose as a test of the system, because as a voter, I didn't trust it. I came away happily surprised, and I really think this sort of system would have fixed all those problems in Florida, without needing a fancy touchscreen computer.
And the system is also quite fast. When you fill out the ballot right, it takes something like one second to feed it to the scanner and get a green light, so it's just a quick stop on your way out of the room.
The Wisconsin (where this is used) vote in the 2000 election was almost as close as the Florida vote, but there was no need for a recount (partly because it wasn't enough electoral votes to matter, and partly because there was a general consensus that the system was good enough that the first count was probably right on target. We've had recounts before where the recount was only different by less than 50 votes or so, and those were a matter of misplaced ballots rather than errors in the tallying.)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Florida did not scrub all the voters who shared birthdays with felons. They scrubbed all voters who shared names AND birthdays from any felon, FROM ANY STATE! Therefore if John Jones was a convicted felon in New York then ANY John, Jonathan, Johnny Jones with the same birthday in Florida was prohibited from voting. To make sure this disenfranchised more Democrats than Republicans, this rule was only applied to black Floridians with similar names and birthdays. White voters with similar names were not scrubbed.
t id=217&row =2
Florida did scrub voters as felons who had only had misdemeanor convictions.
Florida scrubbed voters who had been convicted of felonies in other states. This was not legal as only Florida felons could be prohibited from voting in Florida.
Rural votes in the poorer counties (presumably more Democratic) had a rejection rate of 1 in 8 for "spoiled ballots" while more conservative counties only had rejection rates of 1 in 100. In the conservative counties ballots were run through the optical readers many times until they were accepted while the poorer counties only had the ballots run through once before they were invalidated.
Here is a summary:
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?ar