VoteHere Whistleblower Suit

astar writes "VoteHere is a DRM electronic voting machine vendor. Dan Spillane is sueing them for wrongfull termination in a whistleblowers suit."

Comments

RTFA!

[unborracho]

Not even the poster can RTFA... they make DRE machines (Digital Recording Electronic).. not DRM. When I first looked at the article post, I thought: "oh great, now the MPAA/RIAA has sway in voting machines too?"

Article.

[Raven42rac]

The article is from February 27, 2003. Which is an eternity on the internet. From what I did read, it looks like a normal whistleblower suit, only with the cliche "e" thrown in front of it.

Re:Use schools as a model?

[big tex]

They have that.
I went to college in Mass., and they have a glorified scantron machine.

You get you paper ballot and a #2 pencil, and go into the booth. When you come out, they scan it. If it registers any errors, it spits back out, and you get to re-do. If it is correct, it sucks the ballot into the box and records the data electronically.

Assuming there is some good way of making all of these ballot boxes talk to a central computer, it sounds like the best answer to me.

Suit settled

[aqui]

This suit has to my knowledge already been settled.

Looks like VoteHere doesn't want more bad PR.
A quote from an article at the seatle times:

"We have resolved the matter to our mutual satisfaction and have agreed that we are in pursuit of many of the same goals for election reform," Spillane's attorney, Stan Lippmann, said.

Fired engineer reaches deal with election-software company:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/20 01795328_voting19m.html

30 seconds on Google and Voila... ;)

Security

[mfh]

> When you come out, they scan it. If it registers any errors, it spits back out, and you get to re-do. If it is correct, it sucks the ballot into the box and records the data electronically.

The security problem is that people will see your ballot and match it to your face. If it spits out a ballot that's got errors, they can see who *you* voted for. That's the problem. They need a system that will protect your identity. And you can't trust someone, just anyone, to use a system they are unfamiliar with.

Maybe ABM/ATM machines could be used for voting?

What are they referring to?

[BandwidthHog]

There are a few bits in the complaint itself where the lawyermonkeys make some vague reference to things that sound like they could be really dastardly deeds, the kind of things best revealed only in open court (well, at least on the lawyerly TV shows).

"Data path defects hindered the software's ability to correctly transmit the vote from the screen to the system."

"Spillane, Herzong and other quality engineers complained that parts of the voting system were not being documented"

"One such defect, a design problem, left the software unable to properly track certain "events," which in turn threatened the loss of votes, and endangered efficient and timely operation of the polls."

Disturbing at best.

Re:Whistleblower Laws?

[Anonymous Coward]

Info here.

Basically, if:
-your employer works for the US government in some capacity
and
-your employer acts to defraud the government somehow
and
-you report the fraud to the government
and
-the company fires you for tattling on them

then

-you can sue them for wrongful termination, based on the fact that you were legally obligated to report their illegal activities to the government.

In some cases, if the government manages to recover the money that was stolen from them, they can give you a percentage of it.

suing/wrongful

[stevejsmith]

1. suing, not sueing
2. wrongful, not wrongfull

Re:Use schools as a model?

[BandwidthHog]

We use Scantrons here in NC, and we feed the ballot into it face down.

Sure, we're bass ackwards in almost every other conceivable way, but according to the laws of averages, we had to get *something* right.

BlackBoxVoting activist doesn't trust VoteHere

[veranikon]

Echoing a previous response, I'm also surprised this lawsuit over a termination in 2001 is somehow considered recent news.

However, of note about VoteHere is that the E-voting activist Bev Harris (http://blackboxvoting.com) has few nice things to say about the company. San Francisco Indymedia is carrying her account of a recent encounter with the Secret Service over an alleged VoteHere hack.

And here's Bev Harris's opinion of VoteHere:

Okay, a word about VoteHere: This is the company that has no visible means of support. It doesn't seem to sell anything. Its board is heavily infested with defense industry types -- a former CIA director (Robert Gates, now heads George Bush School of Government); it had Admiral Bill Owens, also Vice-Chairman of SAIC and a member of the Defense Policy Board with Perle and Wolfowitz, a very close friend of Cheney; currently headed by former Washington Secretary of State Ralph Munro.

VoteHere announced that it would be releasing its software for review, back in July 2003. It was planning to release it in September, and was supposed to do so to Dr. David Dill's web site. It never released the code, just a bunch of literature about its product. (It did release some, but not all, of its code this month, making a big splash about it). About a week into October, I got solicited with an email "click this link" for VoteHere software.

Now who would fall for that? Why would anyone in their right mind grab the stuff in some clandestine manner when it was being released into the open momentarily? And this is a company that never sells anything. Who gives a sh*t anyway, what its software does? It now is trying to peddle yet another alternative to a voter verified paper ballot, an idiotic solution where we turn over auditing of the vote to a handful of cryptographers who work for a private company with defense industry ties. No one I know thinks that is even a viable concept, so why would we care to examine the software these cryptographers make up?