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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
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!
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. Diebold has seriously undermined this, especially in my hometown. The jokes and grumblings have been raging, not to mention the rumors of the end of our Registrar of Voters' career. Although "no harm, no foul" has been claimed, confidence has been undermined, which IMHO, is one of the most important aspects of a good democracy.
The last time we had a geek uprising of this size, Quantum Leap had just been cancelled! ...ha... ha... yikes. *ducks*
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
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.
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 seriously don't get what the big idea is. Most people I've spoken to agree that the Diebold machines are almost as reliable as the system that the slashdot polls are run on, and we all know that slashdot polls are top-notch scientific polls!
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
What if the insecure voting machines aren't the result of incompetent programmers -- what if they've been made insecure on purpose so they are easy to manipulate. You can't tell me right now some republican hitman doesn't have a machine and isn't figuring out how to walk into a polling station and cast 5,000 votes at once. After all, this is the most important job in the world we're talking about here.
And if anyone ever finds out -- theres no paper trail, no audit, no log, no way to know what really went on, and it was done on purpose by a company whose president swore to deliver electoral votes to bush.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
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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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.
It's not just one massive replacement machine you need for voting. It's incremental improvement over paper voting.
[a] Design a machine which helps voters to tick a voting card. Uses whatever touchscreen display is fashionable this month, and spits out a card with that box ticked.
- If it fails, voters can tick the box by hand.
- If it misvotes, voters can bin it and ask for another card
- It can be verified as the voter takes the printed card and sees the tick in the right box
[b] Design a machine which takes poll cards and sorts them into piles, depending on which candidate is ticked (plus an "invalid selection" pile)
- If it fails, the cards can be sorted by hand.
- It can't misvote because it has no knowledge of which box represents which candidate.
- It can and should be verified by people flicking through the sorted piles of cards to confirm they're all for the same candidate.
[c] Design a machine which can count how many cards are in a stack (similar to banknote counting machines)
- If it fails, the number of cards can be counted by hand.
- It can't misvote because it has no knowledge of which candidate's cards are being counted at any one time
- It can and should be verified by people randomly selecting piles of cards to count by hand, as many as they can manage, and checking the accuracy of their answers against the counting machines.
How hard can it be? Why do people insist on votes being recorded electronically? Why do people insist on votes being sent by modem, rather than announced by the returning officer? Why do people trust machines to count their votes, when it's trivial to do so with a hall full of volunteers? It's not even much faster to use a computer, especially not when the machines are untrustworthy and the result can't be announced until the lawsuits subside.
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?
Well, it was the shenanigans BEFORE the election that really hurt Gore. Katherine Harris, the florida election comissioner took pains to rig the election *before* anyone knew that florida would choose the president. One of the strangest things they did -- they wanted to remove felons from the voting roles (illegal), but there was no way to do this for some reason. So they took the list of felons, and deleted EVERYONE who shared a birthday with any of them -- some 40,000 people.
Other strange things -- the counties that did have electronic voting machines (some did), in white counties, the machine wouldn't allow you to form an incorrect ballot, it would warn you and ask you to recast the ballot. In black counties, the SAME machines accepted the ballot and threw it away letting the person think they were voting.
That's just the begining of the weird antics in florida -- the problem is it demonstrates an unwillingness to play fair in the democratic process
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley