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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
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?
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.
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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"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.