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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."
Wouldn't it be easier just to build some sort of error checking device for paper ballots, and have that at the polls when you submit your ballot? There's got to be a better way to fix the problems with paper ballot voting than moving it to computers.
We may actually have an election, just like a real democracy!
Delivering militantly anti-commercial music to all two people who care!
It was only Diebold's machines that were banned, not black-box voting machines in general.
Diebold will spin off its voting machine division, and it'll be bought out by some other manufacturer like Sequoia or AccuPoll. You'll see these machines again. They'll just have another name on them.
The've banned it for the next elections, and only in certain counties....they're in the only counties that had the machines up and running, but that doesn't mean another county couldn't push for it that isn't on the list of banned.
Personally Diebold should have taken initiative and just attached a printer to the machines and used the printed ballots as proof-of-vote/voting-means. But it seems like they get the money and then they don't think to fix their problems...initially when this whole fiasco came up I was supportive of the whole electronic initiative because it made it SO much less confussing and set a standard for the entire state. But i guess they screwed that up.
Myself and my family are from Napa, CA (one of the cities that had some serious problems with Diebold), and I can't explain how frustrating it is to not be sure if your vote was counted properly or not. For democracy to work, you must have faith in the security and validity of the elections.
Well said. This is a subtle but critical point and it goes straight over most people's heads. "Our county didn't have any problems!"
A common rule of legal ethics states that the appearance of a conflict of interest is a conflict of interest. It creates unaddressable concerns about impartiality and undermines faith in a process that depends on it. Voting is the same way. The appearance of voter disenfranchisement is voter disenfranchisement. It deprives us of our rights as citizens to know for certain that our votes are being counted, which is what disenfranchisement is. Perfectly reasonable voter concerns about touchscreen voting have not been alleviated, nor can they be alleviated. So you voted touchscreen? How do you really know? You really don't, and what's more, you really can't. Worst of all, in some counties, it turns out you really didn't.
Thomas Jefferson said the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. I bet wasn't even considering pretty flashing lights as a threat to the republic.
That's what they say, the problems are overstated because voters like the machines? Hell, I like a lot of things that are easy to use, but that doesn't mean they're good for me! Think about these:
* beer
* cola
* sweets
* credit card
* slot machine
* M$ software
What rubbish you speak. Election counting is and always has been simple.
When you get a complex system like a computer you need to be sure thats all its doing and thats all its ever doing.
When steel ballot boxes are being stored they can be stored in a warehouse. Its hard to tamper with ignorant steel boxes in a meaningful way.
To subvert thousands of humans who count ballots manually leaves, lets say, thousands of human witnesses.
When electronic voting machines are being stored they need to be watched carefully to make sure they aren't modified, don't have their guts swapped out, etc, this between-election security is also very expensive.
Its expensive before you start, its expensive to run, and expensive to store with many possible points of subversion.
It will do humans good to count votes and realise they don't want to delegate safeguarding their democracy to fickle machines.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Electronic voting with this level of security and accountability would be as safe as doing a paper ballot vote, then giving all the ballots to me for counting. Of course I'd promise to count accurately, wink wink, nudge nudge.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Worse than just having an apparent interest in the outcome of the elections, Diebold managed to trip over the safety valves that are supposed to make sure no company can tamper with the results for any reason.
The software they ran, everywhere in the state, on election day was not the version that they submitted for certification. You just can't skip these kinds of checks and expect to be treated like your software is honest, because these reviews exist because we're just not going to take anybody's word for it.
At best, they cut a corner they weren't allowed to. But worse yet, they undermine their credibility in claiming that we can trust that they're not going to attempt to fix what is likely to be an extremely close election in November.
We fined Dame Shirley Porter 30m for rigging the sale of council houses in her constituency to Tory rather than Labour buyers.
We still hand count things cos we're a quaint backwards country but I'd rather that than trust a machine who's owners I don't trust.
--
USA: home of the world's largest terrorist training camp.
I am getting so tired of reading this. As I understand it, Gore shot himself in the foot. If he had asked for a recount for the whole state, he would have won. Instead he decided he only wanted a recount of the counties where he thought he should have won, but didn't. Ironically, those counties Bush would hve won anyway.
I could be wrong on some of those details, but that is how I remeber the whole thing.
Well I get a Paper Receipt for my $0.99 Slurpie
at 7-11,
why can't I get a Paper Receipt when I am voting
for THE LEADER OF THE USA ?!?!
Is that Too gosh darn much to ask for in a Democracy?
The basic problem is ensuring that the vote is correct and not tampered with. How can you trust a company to not tamper with something as profitable as a vote when you can not trust them to keep to the terms of the contract?
Diebold has proven beyond a doubt that they can not be trusted. They not only did not fulfill their contract, they tried to sneak a patch into a certified machine (thus de-certifying it) before an election. Hmm... If they had not been caught at that, what else could they have gotten away with. How much are local elections worth in bribe money? How much are national elections worth? If all you have is a small number of people to work with in the bribe, how hard is it? Oh, and they have a vested interest in seeing people get elected who support them. They may not use it today, but what about when times get tough and they are comfortable?
I love using computers for work flow. I help companies manage work flow for a living. Yet, there are those who have no business using these technologies at this moment. I would not trust my voting to any computer system yet.
My reasoning has to do with complexity. The more complex a system is the easier it is to pull something off. Complexity hides errors and cheats. A voting system would need to be based on something very simple. It would need to have very strong security safeguards. And, it would have to be completely open to inspection, by anyone at anytime. Anything short of this simply allows mischief to be hidden more easily.
Look at all the fallout in the Florida presidential elections. Most of it was introduced by a company that "messed up" buy disallowing people to vote in the elections. All computer based with little or no over site, tied directly to the winning family. There may be nothing to be seen in this case, but the appearance of impropriety is bad enough to damage the operations of government.
The problems with elections is not liberal or conservative. It is American. People who are drawn to power tend to do what they can get away with to keep power. Why give them one more option to illegally wield power by putting an untrustworthy system into place?
InnerWeb
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
The other side's just as dirty, and in the USA, that kind of thing goes on all the time.
... which is essentially what my country (the United States) has become over the last four years.
Gerrymandering is a national past-time with our elected officials.
What happened in Texas was more dramatic, and sinister, than that.
No, Gerrymandering doesn't go on "all the time." It is however fairly common, and occurs generally once every ten years when districts are redrawn as a result of census results (populations move from state-to-state, changing the electorial and congressional map, and from region to region within a state, changing local and state electorial maps).
What happened in Texas was that the Republican controlled congress conspired with the Republican governor to redraw district lines just three years after they had been redrawn (as a result of our last census)...the difference this time being that there was no democratic majority in one of the houses to force a reasonable compromise on the ruling party's governor (back then, Dubya Bush).
Because such an extraordinary action required a quorum to be present, and various other parliamentary machinations, a number of Democratic state senators made a point of not being around when the Republicans tried to steamroller these changes through. The result was the governor putting out an arrest warrant on the senators (with the idea of taking them to the capitol in chains and having the necessary quorum present), forcing the senators to seek asylum in neighboring states.
It was positively banana-republic-esque
In the end other parliamentary maneuvers were taken, and I believe the Gerrymandering (without the need to compromise with the opposition) went through, guaranteeing the republicans several seats in the Congress that are currently held by democratic constituencies now divided into Republican-majority districts.
We are watching the the decline (and probably, ultimately, the fall) of a once great nation. Four years ago, after Bush Junior had stolen the election, I argued that, while we have to endure four years of a usurpur running our country, we will survivie this, and can elect a replacement in four years.
Now I'm not so sure. Even if Kerry does win, the mess they've created in four short years (the strategic and political blunders that have cost us the world's sympathy, the world's respect, and most of our non-military influence in the same world, and left the middle east a shambles, not to mention the (possibly irreversable) erosion of our fundamental constitutional rights in this country) is so tremendous that, while he at least will probably not inflict further damage, it will probably be more than one presidency, or even several, can adequately repair.
Add to that the fundamental attack on our democratic institutions, of which Diebold, Florida, and Texas are but a part, and one wonders just how much longer our civil society will survive, in any form.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy