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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?
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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