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Diebold Sued (Again) Over Shoddy Voting Machines
icypyr0 writes "Computer programmer Jim March and activist Bev Harris have filed suit in California state court against Diebold under a whistle-blowing statue. This is another in a series of blows dealt to the ailing company.
March and Harris allege that Diebold 'used uncertified hardware and software, and modems that may have allowed election results to be published online before polls closed.' They are seeking full reimbursement for all of the voting machines purchased in California. March and Harris could collect up to 30% of the reimbursement, under the whistle-blower statute.
In an interesting turn, the two are requesting that the state of California join the lawsuit. State officials have spent millions on the paperless touch screen machines; Alameda County has spent at least $11 million alone."
The concept is classic in the computer software industry... sales sells a vaporware product that hasn't been built yet, and then the R&D people have to take shortcuts in order to get a product shipped by the date it was promised.
Governments don't take well to such practices. When dealing with a state government, you must cross every t and dot every i in the system. Any bugs, flaws or failures is simply delivering a product that wasn't to spec.
Diebold appears to have their hands caught in the cookie jar here. They've already been caught installing a "patch" on machines that were supposed to be "sealed" and in their final ready-for-voting state. Bev Harris has been the collector in chief of all of Diebold's other mistakes that they've tried to cover up... seeing what they have ready to present at trial should be fun.
The whistle blowing statue, that is.
Evil is the money of root.
Whether this goes anywhere or not, Diebold's abuses are finally going to the mainstream. The number one weapon that people have on their side to affect a change in an unfair system is information, and this information hitting major news outlets with some degree of regularity is happening just in time to ensure that this nonsense DIES.
Remember, when your friends ask what this is all about, you have everything from blackboxvoting.com to the damning Diebold memos themselves to point to as evidence of the abuse and incompetence plaguing such a vital issue.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Diebold has offered to supply test voting machines for use in jury trials in California.
Diebold == Dieslow.
:-)
Somebody save e-voting... before it's too late. Looks like Florida is going to be in a worse position than in 2000. I know I keep saying this, but someone should create a good Internet voting mechanism, and keep it anonymous yet feasible. I'd like to be sure my vote was counted, and the only way to really do that is by the old fashioned SQL count() function.
At least then I'd know that my vote is my say. Nowadays, you're either black, hispanic, poor, criminal, or you look like these groups so you're unable to vote. It's a crying shame, and in all its flaws, Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 actually does demonstrate the problems with the 2000 election quite intricately.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
because if the state joins in, the state will pay for and handle the case, and the two who started it won't have to do much. If this happens, they'll only get 20% by the way. They'll get 30% if they handle the case themselves and win though...
As long as we're screwing ourselves with these electronic voting machines, why don't we at least switch to Condorcet voting at the same time? Computers could make Condorcet voting really easy.
Then, of course, put in that paper trail thing.
used uncertified hardware and software
Lets hope Microsoft doesn't use this as a cue to move thier OS onto those machines. Hell, next thing we know, we'll be able to vote on our X-boxes!
who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
Catching Diebold's products actually being in violation of the law may be a technical matter that might result in lawyers talking for days, but should that burden ever be meant, the penalty is huge, especially in California.
Diebold promised their equipment would be up to spec. If it's found that it's not, then that's just plain simple basic fraud. In CA, the whistleblower law we're talking about makes the company have to refund 100% of the money the state gave it, and 30% goes to the citizens who started the case. More or less, Diebold will have lost all of the revenue it got from CA, plus all of the losses incured due to the fact that they already tried to deliver a product that they now aren't getting paid for...
This is the kind of thing that sends a company pretty close to bankruptcy... good thing Diebold has its ATM product line to fall back on.
The line between shoddy and shitty has never been so fine.
...a whistle blowing statue. It'd look nice next to my tuba playing lawn gnome.
Going after the money trail is cleaner than going after proper procedures.
common && !commonsense
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Part of the reason why there was such a big deal over the counting of the Florida votes last year was because Florida's electoral votes were enough to give either candidate the victory in the overall election.
In many past presidential elections, isolated incidents of corruption or other flaws weren't as important because the overall result was a clear landside for one candidate or the other. Even if the irregularities in a state got so bad it tipped their electoral votes in the wrong candidate's direction, that state worth of votes usually isn't enough to tip the entire national election.
This year, with the nation split so tightly, and last time's close call fresh in everybody's mind, the tolerance for such flaws is going to be lower than it's ever been. The smallest election scandal is going to get magnified now.
DuDE!!! Shoddy/shitty/Deuce
dealt to the ailing company.
Diebold as a company isn't ailing, it's doing pretty well from what I gather making ATMs...Diebold as an electronic voting manufacturer is ailing. In fact, it's so bad that some people in the company have suggested dropping it altogether because it is making the company look bad. But they persist, which may even bring further question to Diebold's CEO's political motives...
We had the mess in Florida, but instead of identifying the real problem (plurality voting, where voting for two people ruins the ballot and a spoiler can throw the election to the overall loser) we instead looked at one of the symptoms (hanging chads, and whether or not a hole was completely punched through).
Want to fix the real problem? Use Approval voting or a ranked method like Condorcet. Overvotes don't hurt either methon (two "Approvals" or first place votes are easily counted), undervotes are tossed like normal, and a third party candidate won't throw the election to the guy at the other extreme of the political spectrum.
As it is, even if Diebold had an absolutely perfect system, Nader could still throw the election to Bush, overvotes would still be tossed out, and then you *add* the problem of having an untraceable vote that can't be recounted.
...we can put a man on the moon, but can't make a simple machine that counts "yes/no" votes?
Seriously, any of you slashdotters are MORE than competent enough to design a voting machine. Yet, these dickholes seem to not be able to get it right, after tossing millions of dollars in to it. A simple yes/no question, folks. That's what it boils down to.
God help us all... particularly those that are involved in politics.
2)Find out all about their dodgy dealings.
3)Blow whistle.
4)Profit!
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the whole reason for the whistle blowing law was to protect employees who want to come clean, not for them to make a profit.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The OpenVoting folks in the article complained about using the Whistle Blower/Money type lawsuit. But having read a lot of articles on Diebold and its "tactics" it seems like the only thing Diebold will listen to is an argument (court case) that affects its bottom line. That whole "follow the law and do it right" concept is lost on them. Maybe if Diebold has to cough up $100M or more they might consider doing it right. Either that or they'll pay off with vouchers for free voting machines!
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
And just yesterday, the 'news' show had a nice report about electronic voting........
... A system of government whereby the people get the rulers they deserve.
Seriously though, I'm generally an advocate of using IT to automate boring and repetitive tasks, but as far as elections are concerned I think it's a very bad idea. The outcome of the last US election was effected by the use of 'voting technology', and they (I'm not a US citizen, thank god) ended up having a president appointed by a panel of judges.
If elections are run in the more traditional way of putting an X in a box on a piece of paper and then having an army of people count the ballots then the whole process becomes transparent. Election fraud is made difficult by having many people involved in it's administration, the reverse is also true.
My tinfoil hat is beginning to itch, but if I wanted to rig an election using voting machines I'd like to leave myself an alibi. After all, one should never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence. Think about it.
but if its a "big big payout" for them...then that 10% won't make too bit a difference...only a Hummer H2 or a houseboat.
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
That's not hard for someone who is unscrupulous and is also already in power to do. Someone who is already in power can grant "favors" to the people in these companies that make decisions, whereas a challenger can only promise future favors. Considering how "business friendly" and "wealth friendly" the current administration has proven itself to be, a promise by said administration to grant favors would be taken very seriously. And since the government today basically answers only to the corporations (especially those that own the media), I think it's unlikely that such "payoffs" would get very much media attention. Furthermore, the administration is in control of a number of agencies that can "guarantee" that anyone at those companies who works on the software in question will not talk. If they try, they'll have an "accident".
Any system that can be exploited ultimately will be, and the more incentive there is to exploit the system the sooner it will happen. In the case of a voting system that is unauditable and easily manipulated, I think there is every reason to believe that it will be exploited in the upcoming election.
The only way to counter it is to make sure that the number of states using them is few enough that they cannot have a meaningful effect on the election.
But so far, only a few states have taken any action against electronic voting machines to my knowledge, and only California has banned their use outright (again, to my knowledge). That's not nearly enough to ensure that the upcoming election is truly fair.
That's why I think Bush will win the upcoming election no matter what the voters actually think -- the current administration is the most ruthless and underhanded I've heard of, and that kind of approach is all that's needed to exploit the obviously vulnerable electronic election system in the U.S.
Tinfoil hat stuff? You bet. But 20 years ago, anyone who suggested that software would be patentable in the future would have been dismissed as a conspiracy theory nutcase. But it happened. 30 years ago, anyone who suggested that the U.S. would pass a law like the USAPATRIOT act would have been laughed out of the room. But it passed anyway. Tinfoil hat stuff is hard to dismiss if it is internally consistent, agrees better with all the facts, and explains current events better than everything else. As is, I believe, the case here.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Here's what we need...
A touch screen voting booth that lets voters select the canidates they want.
After the voter casts their vote the booth prints out a ballot that's machine readable yet understandable to the naked eye.
The voter checks to make sure that the canidates they selected are recorded on the ballot and then feeds it into a reader. It's this machine that actually records the voter's vote.
This way not only do we get the benifit of a machine count but a paper trail to boot.
private void countvotes(bool vote){
if(vote){
Kerri+=1;
}
else{
bush+=1;
}
}
Not rocket science
To vote for one person for president, he should have his vote discounted. Why should the dumb-bunnies, too idiotic to vote properly, decide the leader of the free world?
All of those condorcet extentions are just nonsense.
They all deal with what to do in a very unlikely tie election. They all are based on the idea that a tie should be impossible. They are all created by people who look at all the data sitting there in a condorcet election and think "surely there must be some logical way to resolve this tie."
I have a logical way to resolve a tie. Flip a coin. If the election is that close, that there are exactly the same number of votes for two candidates, then what difference does it make?
All these extentions do is take plain condorcet which is already so complex that some people can't understand it and make it so complex that most people can't understand it. We can do without it, especially since the extentions would only get used in about 1 out of every [insert big number] elections anyway.
People need to stop debating over what tie-resolving protocol is best and start trying to get Condorcet elections in their country/state/city/etc.
Voting machines need to be certified, basically this means someone needs to inspect it and make sure it works correctly, is tamper-resistant, etc. hardware and software is certified together. but Diebold treated their software like many IT products. release what you have and patch, patch, patch. Unfortunately, in the case of election this meant uncertified software (and allegedly uncertified modems as well) was used. Diebold could have put anything in that code.
Of course, whoever did the certification job on the Diebold certainly wasn't doing their jobs very well.
A good model for EVM would actually be the Navada Gaming commission for slot machines and the like. Software updates need to digitally signed and encrypted by both the company, and the commission. Running slot machines without approved software is illegal.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Jim March broke the news last night over on The High Road; I submitted the story last night, but was rejected. Anyhow, follow the link, and you can read Jim's commentary, and discuss the case with him (he's a senior member and very active participant over at THR). All sorts of little tidbits over there--the suit has been in the works since November, but a gag order was just lifted yesterday. Somebody else mentioned that the plaintiffs get a 30% bounty on the damages, or 20% if the state provides legal assistance (that should be 15%, not 20%, BTW). He also discusses the basis for the fraud suit, and the somewhat unique method (Qui Tam) they've chosen to fight Diebold; he likens it to the tax evasion case against Al Capone. Definitely a good, lively discussion over there; well worth a read.
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
Writing software with VB makes baby Jesus cry.
Lets hope Microsoft doesn't use this as a cue to move thier OS onto those machines.
I can't speak for Diebold's entire line of voting machines, but the ones used in the last election in San Diego County were running Windows CE.
More evidence of ruthless and underhanded voting tactics.
The diffrence is 10%, or $5 million apeace. that would buy at leat 50 loaded H2s.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Hear hear. And might I add, we should all be grateful for those people who give up their valuable time to man the voting stations. I don't know about the US, but here in Canada they work largely on a volunteer basis, to ensure that democracy functions as it should. My sincerest thanks goes out to them.
Baby Jesus? Hell, writing critical software with VB would make adult Jesus cry!
I like the paintings and website layout/colors.
Transitivity is just a tie. Take the simplest case with three candidates and three voters. Voter #1 votes ABC, #2 votes BCA, #3 votes CAB.
Now imagine a transitivity problem with two voters and two candidates. #1 votes AB, #2 votes BA. Looks a lot like a tie in a plurality election.
Flip a coin. Draw straws. Russian Roulette.
Or we could break the tie the same way we break ties now in plurality elections. Can't remember how they did that last time there was a tie? Can't remember the last time there was a tie?
Using Condorcet doesn't magically make ties occur more often.
Condorcet voting doesn't have a transitivity problem, at least not any more than any other voting system does. No one's bothered to fix the transitivity problem of plurality voting, so why worry about it with Condorcet?
All forms of voting are imperfect on a large scale.
Old-fashioned paper ballot boxes can be stuffed a la "Box 13" of LBJ's Senate (D-TX) election of '48.
Mechanical ballots like Florida's 2000 punch-card ballots are vulnerable to designs which make incorrect voting likely, and this can be engineered to favor a particular candidate.
All-Electronic ballots vulnerable to software and hardware errors.
All of the above are vulnerable to catastrophies like fire, tornado, and other extreme circumstances.
Our best bet is to combine the best of the available technologies:
1) The actual ballot is a human-readable, voter-verified ballot that, barring corrupt poll workers and observers, cannot be easily tampered with after the vote is cast. This physical ballot will be counted on election night and used in any recounts.
2) machines are used to assist the blind and other handicapped voters in casting their votes and verifying their ballots, and to make a "clean" ballot which can be read quickly with almost zero errors by a counting machine or human counter.
3) machines keep a secondary count of vote totals so news media can have a good, unofficial, estimate of the actual vote totals within a short time after the polls close. Barring error, the unofficial count will match the official count exactly.
Oh, of course any machines used in voting or counting votes would be "open for inspection" - that is, the hardware design, manufacturing processes, source and object code, would be published information and open to scrutiny. The actual hardware and object code would be audited to make sure it matched the published specifications, and if not, the difference would be documented for all to see.
As machines aren't perfect, human poll workers, election judges, and observers will be allowed to observe all parts of the election process.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
More to the point, how does the voter know that the data written to the CD-ROM is the same as how he actually voted? I can show you a computer and a printout of a GPL program, and claim that the GPL program is what's actually running on the computer, but how do you verify that?
Nader could still throw the election to Bush
People blame Nader for that but I blame the democrats. They should expect to have a split vote unless they negotiate an alliance with Nader.
Thank God for Microsoft, they make passable mice.
Nice sig, but Microsoft's mouse technology was licensed from Hewlett Packard.
Well, I'm not sure what you mean, but here's what I meant. (assuming no one has a better idea than mine, in which case I might go with their idea)
Have the user-interfacing voting machine print out a nice ballot card, both human readable and machine readable. This goes in a ballot box. Then have seperate machines to count the ballots.
To test the user-interfacing machine, voters may, if they wish, compare the human-readable portion of their vote printout to what they entered into the machine.
To test that the machine readable and human readable parts of the cards match, randomily select some to be examined.
Humans can read machine readable code, just not very easily, and therefore can tell if the two parts of the card match.
Anyone who cared to could build another machine to display what the machine-readable part of the card says, and compare it to what the human-readable part says. (or perhaps just include an OCR and compare without human intervention) I'm sure a voting machine manufacturer would love to catch one of their competitor's machines misprinting ballots.
To test the counting machines, just do the same thing. I'm sure a voting machine manufacturer would love to catch their competitor's machines counting incorrectly.
Naturally, the voter doesn't get to take that vote card home, it's what gets counted.
So unless anyone else can think of something, I say we start with this next week.
Sadly the most common sales technique worldwide.
Diebald issued a stream of no less then 3 patches in 3 days to fix their flaming new counting software release. "This will seal the problems while the machines are sealed until SP2 is out" said a pointy haired spokeperson. "We're proactively seeking the achievement of market leadership by deploying retroactive patches to updated software. Nation trust us." he said in a stunning wordplay worth of Nostradamus fame.
... " an unidentified supporter said ; a few seconds later an angry queueing sweating roaring mob introduced him to the concept of releasing by due date. No penguin was harmed in the process.
Opposers of the Diebald software proposed an open-source alternative , but their open attitude apparently is preventing them from ideologically sealing anything. "Let me patch it realtime while you vote ! Hey watchout I'm patching here !! wait just another minute
Another angry flash mob quickly assembled in streets chanting praises of the aging, but reliable paper and pen voting system.
This is probably just the tip of the iceberg.
*sigh*
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
BTW, Jim March is not now a programmer, he's a full time lobbyest for a gun owner's rights group.
Screw voting. It will never be 100% accurate. Lets just build a cage and have a presidential candidate death match -- to the victor goes the spoils.
But to stay on topic, 100% accuracy is ABSOLUTELY necessary for the american election system to work, considering one vote could be the deciding factor in XXX number of electoral votes for the entire state. And with the sheer amount votes that are out there, 100% accuracy is a seemingly unattainable goal.
Anyway, consider the following (call me Bill Nye) - ATM networks function on the premise of a centralized host which validates and verifies transactions, and a series of terminals that transmit those transactions. This allows for real-time validation of all transactions that occur on the network. The person using the ATM presents his identification (ATM Card) -- enters a PIN to verify that this is the right person, proceeds with their transaction, and is provided with a receipt for their personal records. People use these every day. They are trusted and relied upon technology.
If you can trust your money to it, you can trust your vote with it too. A voting system like this has its problems, but you have a pretty decent trail to follow if you personally want to contest something: Your reciept, and the little camera in the ATM took your video while voting.
You'd think an ATM manufacturer like diebold would just use what they already have.
The banks audit the shit out of the ATMs. The bank wants the ATM to dispense the amount someone asks for, no more no less, all the time. The bank wants that ATM to accurately fetch and send customer and transaction information, all the time. The bank wants the ATM to dispense money ONLY for the customer to whom it belongs.
Well, if Diebold made it where there was an override code ot just come and steal money, the bank would find out in a big hurry (there'd be a discrepancy between physical audits and transaction longs, and camera tapes to see who did what). If Diebold made ATMs that screwed customers for fun, the bank would be pissed (since the customer and secret service would be pissed). Basically, it is in the bank's financial intrest to make sure the ATMs work like they are supposed to and are well audited, so they do.
This isn't to say they never fuck up, everything fucks up. However the bank watches for that and corrects it. The idea is these things need to be accurate and reliable almost all the time (and they are) so customers trust and use them.
Now that you don't trust them because of the name on them, doesn't really matter to the bank. The bank knows how well they do or do not work, and presumably they are happy.
The difference is all in oversight. The banks police their machines for accuracy since the must do so to remain in bussiness. Those involved in the voting process do not necessairly do likewise since it can be to their advantage to rig an election.
One thing I think people fail to realize is that voting is not exact. If we recounted the vote last election, the number would have changed every single time. The two were so close that statistically, they were tied. Voting is not exact and there is always error. This is the reason why when there was a recount I didn't really care what the outcome was. Sure, I wanted my canidate to win, but the simple fact of the matter was that the two tied and all that was left to do was to play according to the rules of the game to decide who won the tie breaker. Who won the tie breaker had little to do with who actually had more votes.
My biggest concern with voting is that the occasional ballot will be lost or miscounted. This will happen, and so long as it is random it probably is not going to have much of an effect. The real concern is that someone can break into these machines and really mess up the numbers they spit out. A few hanging chads here and there don't mean anything and are just an excuse to keep recounting until one guy likes the result. Someone maliciously changing votes with one of these e-machines on the other hand can cause some serious damage.
Personally, I would rather they simply stick to simple paper ballots. True, they get miscounted, but a few random miscounts are a small price to pay prevent real election fraud. People need to keep things in perspective. The real fear is not that every vote isn't counted. The real fear is that votes are counted that are faked. Our goal should be to eliminate voting fraud and work towards reducing voting miscount, but never at the expense of making fraud easier.
A voting station consists of:
1) touch-screen computer.
2) printer.
3) scanner-fed shredder.
Polling place consists of:
1) one-or-more voting stations.
2) one scanner-fed lock-box "ballot box".
3) one computer conected to ballot box.
4) one lable/sticker printer attached to the ballot box computer.
5) one scanner-fed lock-box "errata box".
6) one computer conneced to errata box.
7) one or more trained poll staffers.
By "scanner fed" I mean a contraption such that an optical scanner reads a document and, after all the barcodes are scanned, if they make sense, the physical document prodeeds to the fed device.
-- ALL Printers (etc) print on a "reasonably heavy" card stock.
-- The errata bin scanner, unlike all the other scanners, will not reject/return an unscannable document. The Errata box also has a slot for truly mangled debris sheets. This errata bin should score or deface the ballots so inserted (have a roller splash "void" over their face etc.)
-- There is no "network", wireless or otherwise, connecting the voting stations to anything.
How voting procedes:
1) before polls open the voting system is used to print-up a bunch of "blank" ballots that have psudo-random or sequenced or whatever "GUIDS" and the big black words "this side down" in several languages, and these printed blanks are set up in bins. Blank ballots are printed at (any of) the voting stations using an administrative key or there could be a dedicated blank printer.
2) The voter aproaches the human who checks the voters ID etc.
3) The voter the selects, at random, one of the
"blank" ballots and takes it to a voting station.
4) The voter scan-and-shred(s) the "blank" ballot to start the touch-screen process.
5) The voter navigates the touch-screen process in the language of their choice.
6) When the voter selects "done voting" the card-stock printer prints a completed ballot with (JUST) the name-office or initiative-selection pairs (e.g. President: Bob, or Issue 167: NO) selected by the voter for the issues he wishes vote, the GUID from the "blank" original, an encoded barcode/dotcode splash containing all the votes in machine readable form, the GUID, the "voting station serial number", the "voting station voter-session sequence number" and a checksum.
7) The voter then leaves the voting station.
8) The voter visually reviews their ballot print-out.
9) The voter may then either proceed to the ballot box or back into any voting station to ammend their vote via a scan-and-shred operation.
9a) If the voter elects to change their vote, they return to any voting station and, do the scan-and-shred operation as in step 3, but the station has read the barcode/dotcode splash and brought up what it read from the splash as the reviewable and changable defaults. The voter carries on.
9b) If the voter elects to cast his ballot, he takes it to the ballot box, where it is scanned and the ballot is stored in the lock-box.
10) The voter is given an "I voted" sticker with an MD5 (etc) checksum of their ballot printed on it as produced/recorded by the ballot-box.
-- Any ballot that is cast into the ballot box should be scored (e.g. roller stamped) with a scanner-cookie barcode that would make the voter stations reject it so that somone couldn't just open the box with a key/pry-bar and take the ballots over to a voter station, and edit them.
-- The ballot box would reject scanning/honoring a duplicate GUID, preventing all sorts of tampering/stuffing schemes.
-- A successful post-casting edit attack would be revealed by the mismatch of the nubmer of ballots in the box (physically counted) compared to the number scanned by the box, so there is a check-and-balance.
-- Any ballot that cannot be scanned by any of this equipment because of dammage (dropped, stepped on, torn, etc) or when a voter decides that something is "queer" is scan-and-stored by (or just p
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Hello. We are looking for the nuclear vessels in alameda. Could you tell me where the nuclear vessels are?
Let me see if I get this straight.
The 2000 election was supremely screwed up, particularly in Florida, because people were voting with some old-timey machines that made holes in paper ballots, which could then be counted by machine. Only sometimes the holes didn't punch all the way through, or sometimes the ballots themselves were a little bit confusing.
The ballots had to be recounted by hand in Florida, with the help of a lot of volunteers and quite a bit of state money in order to deal with these problems -- also that Florida state law (as in most other states) requires a manual recount in case of extremely close races.
So the solution from the Federal Government is the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) that says states need to have secure, accurate voting machines that meet stringent guidelines for security and accuracy (not to mention accessibility by the disabled). If these machines are electronic, so much the better.
Under HAVA, the Federal government will grant the states buckets of money ($861 million so far, and plenty more to come) to get their voting machines compliant.
Only there's a few problems. States don't yet know what being compliant means, because the standards and definitions are still being worked out by the Election Assistance Commission (eac.gov) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (nist.gov).
The EAC has got as far as appointing a subcommittee, but they're not due to meet again until Jan 2005, at the earliest.
What you're left with is states looking for machines they THINK will be compliant with HAVA -- particularly with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which calls for private, unassisted voting by blind people -- meaning that the voting machines will have to have audio components that read a person's choices and, before casting a vote, read a person's selections.
Direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines are very good in this regard -- they can be very easily customizable at the state level to work at the precinct (or school board district) level.
But the problems with DREs are well documented -- inaccurate counts, easy (relatively) to manipulate, hackable, etc. And without a hard-copy record, impossible to do a recount.
So the solution proposed by California Sec of State Kevin Shelly, among others, is to have DREs create a 'voter-verifiable paper audit trail' (his term). Which means that the electronic machines have to print a paper record of the ballot which is then kept securely for recount, if neccessary.
Now this begs a couple of questions.
If a jurisdiction uses these fancy new machines to record, tabulate, and transmit vote results electronically, but at the same time has to keep paper copies of the votes for recount, then the paper ballots will surely be subpeonaed after any vote that is reasonably close (say within 5 percent).
It is a given that the paper ballots are going to be counted anyway, especially considering the number of races (town, county, school district, congressional district, senate, etc.) that are 'close' in any given year.
What this means is that HAVA is asking states to trash existing, functional machines that produce machine-readible paper ballots, machines that originally cost maybe $300 each and are already paid for, and replace them with new machines that cost more than $1000 each, and produce ballots that will have to be counted by hand.
Another issue that the press has not yet gotten wind of is the large number of election officials who have retired, gone on early retirement, or changed jobs since 2000. An unprecendented number of chief election officers in counties and states across the country will be supervising their first general elections this November. A comforting thought.
The outgoing officials saw sense -- that there is a train wreck approaching. An awful lot of people will be voting on machines untested in an actual election environment, and those machines are by many measures inferior to the
Is this like the pied-piper of Hameln - the statue plays its whistle, and everybody's votes disappear... and then if the piper isn't paid, he releases some of the votes back, and George W. Bush is re-elected?
I heard that your library burnt down and destroyed your only two books - and one was not even coloured in yet.
each ballot is a piece of paper that you can look at with your eyeball before dropping it in the ballot box. So you can make sure that the ballot is marked the way you wanted. When the votes are counted, if there's a dispute, they're recounted by hand with representatives of both candidates inspecting each ballot.
I prefer Approval Voting. Thats where you vote for as many of the people available as you wish.
It is simpler for the average person to understand, and would be easier to implement, and does not have the flaws that the more complicated voting methods have. (At least as far as I know. I've been meaning to do a mathematical proof that it is best. Has anyone out there already done that?)
Also, voting methods are determined by the state. I don't even think it is part of the State Constitution but either laws or procedures. Because of this people in states that allow Ballot Initiatives can get the voting method changed themselves without, or in spite of, the actions of elected politicians.
You can also change the distribution of your state's electoral votes from winner take all to proportional. (At least one state in the union does this.)
I'm not sure but I think it would require a federal constitutional amendment to get rid of the electoral college altogether.
I hate Liberals and Conservatives.
If you are a Liberal or a Conservative, then HAVE A NICE DAY!
Courage.
That isn't the big problem here. The REAL problem is that Diebold is NOT apathetic, but is run by people who are sworn and fanatical supporters of BushCo. I think in the extreme case, they will do whatever they need to do to get the results their friends are paying them for--and that's why they want such flaky systems in the first place. Bad security by obscurity, but just imagine they slip a copy of the source code to a black hat hacker on THEIR side.
[Why won't this system let me log in on yro.slashdot.org with Opera?]
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
would the fucking, b*tch loon be taken seriously.
If I see that cunt's face in one more piece of media, I'm gonna fucking explode.
Anyone else starts spouting conspiracy-laden horseshit and they rightfully get pounced on. Meanwhile, this stupid twat gets a pass to rant on and on.
Can anyone explain why Bev Harris should get more consideration than the droppings my dog leaves twice a day in my backyard?
This is very true. I would feel very unconfident about my vote just leaving the screen and getting dumped into a computer. No paper, no hard trace at all.. It just gets turned into some 1's and 0's. In a strict order at that...
NOW if there was a system that would use a computer interface to generate a hard copy ballot that could somehow be very quickly counted similar to the famous SCANTRON system.. You at least can have the option of computer count & human count. You get the great assurance of dropping that computer punched and personally approved ballot into the ballot box.
I'd walk away a happy camper.
If the brand new voting machines don't work, who do you think has to deal with it? The "government officials". They probably also get part of the blame, even though the selection of these machines was probably ultimately made by politicians for "political" reasons.
The traditional way of creating this kind of government-related technology is through long term, well-funded government efforts. In different words, voting machines should be developed by an agency, they should be given time to get lots of input, and the software should be public and free afterwards. Unfortunately, even though those shouldn't be ideological issues, they are in the current climate: to many politicians, it is axiomatic that private enterprise is more efficient, and for government to do anything substantial amount to communism in their view.
However, a more baisc question is and remains: why do we need this at all? Paper and pen ballots work just fine and they are easy to audit. If we want technology in there, we can scan those ballots and put the scanned images on-line for everybody to recount at their leisure.
a third world country with 650million registered voters has conducted general elections coupla months ago using electronic voting machines. http://www.ibef.org/artdisplay.aspx?cat_id=194&art _id=2041
http://techaos.blogspot.com/2004/05/indian-evm-com pared-with-diebold.html
Every time you write an app in VB, God kills a kitten.
diebold ?
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Over the long term, they're cheaper to use. At least they could be, if mass produced using OSS and commodity components.
paintball
The Bush administration and the GOP dominated
...)
Congress were very quick to earmark $6 Billion
for eVoting upgrades, after the "hanging chad"
problems in the 2000 elections. The push to
"use it, or lose it" for this money meant a
rush to adopt some very badly implimented
solutions from corporate friends of the Bush
administration.
So now that the word is out about these crappy
eVoting machines (WITH NO PAPER AUDIT TRAIL),
and the Bush administration is now "floating
trial balloons" in the press about DELAYING
the November national elections. As well as
preparing the public to EXPECT terrorist acts
similar to the Madrid train bombings that would
be designed to disrupt these elections.
Doesn't anyone else besides me see a conspiracy
theory in the making? Like: if the GOP feels
that they will not win the November elections
using the SOP of FUD, that there WILL be some
major terrorist attacks here AND there WILL be
a delay in the national elections.
(Pardon me while I put on my tin-foil hat
I'm not so sure about that one.
With mark-sense, you've got one machine per precinct. The voting booth is a table with a privacy shield and a pen.
As compared to a computer in each voting booth, with a printer, and all of the associated ballot-handling machinery to make sure that the person can't tamper with the now-submitted ballot.
Somehow, I still don't think that, even with OSS and commodity components, it's going to be a good deal to have a computer at each booth.
Gentoo Sucks
I can't get games.slashdot.org here because URLs with 'game' are blocked by my employer. If I cut 'games.' out of the URL I can view the content - the subdomain just decides the colour scheme/design of the page, I think.
Chop 'yro.' off - you should get the same story in standard slashdot green
Diebold *corporate* is financially solid in ATMs, bank vault security, etc.
l
Diebold Election Systems is hemmoraging money.
My theory:
When Diebold bought Global Elections Systems in...lesse, I *think* the sale was finalized in 2002 with partnerships/investments prior, I don't think the larger corp understood what a pack o' jackals they were dealing with.
I could be wrong mind you, but...
OK, here's a piece of evidence. Alameda County first bought their touchscreen voting system off of Global. They signed a contract. When Diebold corporate swallowed Global, the contract was re-written so that BOTH the newly-renamed Diebold Election Systems Inc ("DESI") subsidiary AND the parent company(!) were named co-contractors for Alameda County.
Which means even if corporate cuts "DESI" loose and destroys them, they're in hock on that contract if it all goes south.
IF they had suspected the old Global bunch was playing fast and loose with elections laws, they would NEVER have co-signed the contract, would they?
Second point: we have the stash of Diebold EMails running from 1999 (Global era) through early 2003 (Diebold era). The names of the players involved in the tech support, programming and marketing internal mailing lists DO NOT change. No new management team was brought in from Corporate, no new major names appear, there's virtually no references to new procedures or oversight, nothing.
My conclusion: corporate thought they were buying a smoothly running little org, rather than a pack of rampaging pirates.
There's no WAY Diebold corporate can continue hemmoraging CREDIBILITY! Forget the money for a sec - corporate makes their money supplying security gear for BANKS for God's sake. What happens when the banks start saying "errr...hey guys, don't look now but the name "Diebold" has become synonymous with terms like "idiots" and "crooks" and whatnot...".
And here's the cool part, folks. The really hilarious part.
All of this has happened before.
1966. A small electronic voting company called Harris (no relation to Bev!) gets bought by a megacorp...which within a couple of years, realizes that the voting subsidiary is worth 2% of the profits and 80% of the negative PR.
IBM isn't in the voting business anymore. Took 'em three years to wise up. See also:
http://www.csl.sri.com/users/neumann/dugger.htm
Y'all can bet your Palm Pilots Diebold Corporate is gonna get the same clue.
Jim
Securing voting machines is an expense. Period.
Slot machines bring in money. Thus, securing a slot machine is a tax on the operator. It's a lot easier to tax a company's profits than to spend money out of your own tight budget.
Okay, now listen carefully. Take off the tin-foil hat, set it on the table beside you, and take a deep breath. Okay, now, look around. Is anybody looking in your window? Do you feel gamma rays penetrating the depth of your soul? If so, replace the tin-foil hat. If not, leave it off.
;^)
Where in the world do you get off ranting against "BushCo" about this? A much more simple explanation of the situation is what the others posters have been saying. Diebold overpromised (sales) & underdelivered (engineers/techies). They got themselves into a hard deadline, with unproven technology, & couldn't quite make the cut. I'm sure they're working their a$$ off trying to get the job done right, but it's apparently pretty darn hard for them.
Now, as far as BushCo, how could this possibly be worth the risk for them? The only possible benefit to them would be to somehow add votes to Bush or detract votes from Kerry (or other dems). Yeah, like that wouldn't be detected. We all know that, as intelligent as BushCo is[n't], they would probably try and insert a ++vote (snicker) just before the end of the code. Hackers? Bush? Yeah, right.
Don't be a hate-mongerer (sp?). The rest of us are here for intelligent discussion, not political rants.
On another topic, who will you be voting for?
'In a recent fund-raising letter Diebold's chief executive Walden O'Dell said he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."', The Cleveland Plain Dealer
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
(Goes nicely with his censored statue of justice.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Sorry to respond to myself, but this CEO is a fucking moron. Even if you are a rabid partisan, if your company has government contracts to supply voting machines you probably shouldn't shoot your mouth off about your commitment to deliver an election to a particular political party.
The board of directors of Diebold should bitch-slap this stupid SOB.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
Writing security critical apps in VB makes me want to cry.
Ignorance kills, complacency kills, hatred kills, but usually not the ones guilty of them.
Can you hand me a source on that quote? Who found and published this letter?
Ignorance kills, complacency kills, hatred kills, but usually not the ones guilty of them.
Where is this statue located? Did it get pooped on by pigeons?
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
I'm sure this is not a new sentiment, but...
Although I don't believe your conspiracy theory is very likely, it has enough chance of being true that it is worthwhile to have the machines be as secure as possible (which is: much more secure than today). The Nevada Gaming Commision tests mentioned in your great-grandparent and great-great-grandparent posts sound like a good starting place. It would be nice if the gov't certification could be even stricter than the NGC standards, but I think I would be assured enough if the Diebold machines were able to get the approval of the NGC.
The last elections were such a mess that I think it better that EVMs are not used in this election if the public believes they can be rigged.
In this article by the Toledo Blade an alleged "computer expert" and state rep candidate Mr. Myers expresses his views as it pertains to paper trails and EVM's as "I liken this part of the bill to adding a ladder to an elevator. We had something good. Now it is just made more complex."
I guess adding a printer COULD make these pesky things a little more complex AND prone to failure, but I fail to see why. If a system can't pipe data to more than one output/storage device it's not worth having IMHO.
When we have up and coming wanna-be politicians whom are supposed to know better (you would think someone claiming to be a bonna-fide computer expert would) and we still get drivel from them like this I really feel they don't want honest elections. Trust being the core component behind most large issues in life, such as money, relationships, voting, driving...trust this : to error is human, to really screw something up takes a computer.
Hurricane Island Outward Bound
OB
Why not just wait until election day and call out names and then ask everyone in the state to put their hands up if they want that person? I think it would just about be better than Diebold.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Here's a snippet from CNN. Their quote is, 'In August, O'Dell said in a fund-raising letter for the Ohio Republican Party that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes" to Bush.'
I'm sorry I don't have a paper copy to hand to you; ironically this is one of the issues that we are discussing on this thread.
Here's instructions for the future if you need information.
1. Type "www.google.com" in the location bar of your browser (you might refer to it as "that fancy web thing I've done been hearing so much about").
2. Press the "enter" key. This submits the "location" you typed in to the "web".
3. When the "web page" appears, type in the words "diebold deliver ohio" in the little rectangular box.
4. Once, again, you need to press the "enter" key.
5. A list of "web pages" appears. Click on one of them using the "left button" of your "mouse". Try and choose a respectable source like "FOX News" or "Monster Truck Week".
I hope this helps.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
I don't think he really meant it the way it sounded. Nobody would be dumb enough to mouth off like that if he really intended to "fix" the election.
Of course, he's still too stupid to be entrusted with our voting, and his machines should be ripped out and thrown into the nearest lake!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I write test stand software and firmware for instrumentation. I just don't understand why this is so damn difficult. It seems like a no-brainer to me.
The only way to counter it is to make sure that the number of states using them is few enough that they cannot have a meaningful effect on the election.
Even one state can have a meaningful effect on the election, especially in a race that's as close as this one is.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
If you want your vote counted and you want a paper trail, vote with an absentee ballot.
It's like "looking busy" at your employment - it's actually easier to do real work than to fake it. - bmo
It's not about paranoia. It's about an administration that has been promoting a fascist agenda, ie moving away from civil liberties and towards a tyrany, (check out the patriot act, and the current homeland security mandates for industry--official USCG regulations as examples) in bed with Diebold, who happens to (1) support Bush with political donations and public pronouncements (look how much Diebold execs have contributed to Bush and that somewhat famous quote about Diebold being ready to deliver the election to GWB),(2) to be practicing deception in the distribution of voting machines that CANNOT be audited for a recount, and (3) has been found to be lying about their voting software.
A "flaw" in the voting software would not be detectable by the public because the code is proprietary and hidden from sight. That flaw could accidently swing the vote towards a particular candidate or party. Who would know? Election fraud is NOT new and politicians would risk it, just as other criminals risk breaking the law to achieve their own ends.
The RISK is that our liberty is at stake. Our say in how our country is adminstrated is at stake. Why should we trust a company that AT BEST is not very competent and at worst might just be in league with some less than honest politicians to stuff the ballot box in their favor? There is a recognized opportunity to rig the elections in a way that would be VERY hard to prove. And if you can't prove election fraud, then you have no crime, so the practicer would get away with it. Right, the only way then to prove it would be a wistle blower...and are we to hang the whole of our liberty upon the supposed honesty of one person?
The best practice is to trust, but to verify. It is the verification step, the auditable voting records that could demonstrate election fraud, and the openness of the code to public scruitiny, that is lacking in Diebold. And we have seen, in other areas of government, that were there is darkness (secrecy) there is a strong tendency towards corruption. Hence the many "sunshine" laws.
Creative Spelling Copyright (2002). May use without Persimmons
P.S. Screw you, the burden of proof is on the presenter.
Ignorance kills, complacency kills, hatred kills, but usually not the ones guilty of them.
if you ask me there is a lot to be said for user error. I feel like that's a bigger issue then the butterfly ballot. If people had taken another three seconds to look at the ballot I don't think there would have been as many misvotes. That and if you had been carefully you wouldn't have left the infamous hanging chad. We can't fix the user though; so we fix what we can: the machine. A touch screen that prints my vote out, for tabulation, and keeps independent count for the media sounds like the best idea to me. I just feel like there's not big a change for tampering any other way. From there on out it's all about the procedures you set up around the system.
Oh and Diebold sucks and blows; at the same time! It makes me mad that a company would treat something as important as voting in such a craptastic way.
Isn't that where the nuclear wessels are?
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Actually, I'm not directly worried about my vote in this election, because I don't believe my area is seriously considering EVMs. I am worried that my vote will be rendered insignificant because all of the votes in an EVM region to be updated to VOTE_FOR=BUSH (or KERRY), and therefore my vote, valid and easily countable though it is, will not matter at all. (I know my vote isn't worth much, but it's worth infinitely more than nothing.)
... software for an election system with standards for validation and verification that don't achieve a quarter of the reliability that MilSpec achieves. Is there a more ubiquitously 'mission critical' an application? I don't think so. Yet they don't even have requirements for end-to-end error detection, let alone correction. It's a classic one-way communications channel, and there's virtually nothing to ensure the information isn't corrupted, either deliberately or systemically.
Or how about...
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
The Presidential election is unique. It's the only election in which multiple "office-holders" (electors) are all determined by a single vote tally - i.e. "winner-take-all." Only Maine and Nebraska have rationally addressed this anomaly so far.
It seems to me that states have a choice:
(1) If they continue to promulgate the statewide "winner-take-all" paradigm, then the absence of a valid winner should result in neither candidate taking anything. Unless the margin of 'victory' achieves a statistical confidence level of 90% (or a legislated alternative), no electors should be chosen from that state. None.
(2) Adopt the Maine/Nebraska apportionment of electors by Congressional District, with two elected statewide. Split the statewide pair when the vote is a statistical tie.
Both approaches preserve the "small state" advantage.
30 years ago, anyone who suggested that the U.S. would pass a law like the USAPATRIOT act would have been laughed out of the room.
60 years ago we put Japanese Americans in prison camps. This make the Patriot Act look pretty lame by comparison.
I wasn't aware the that code was proprietary. Does that mean that even government officials can't access & verify it? If so, that's just plain stupid.
It's also just plain stupid that there isn't a paper-trail. I mean, come on, it's really the first time we've done this and they don't want a back-up plan. For the love of Pete!
Anyway, I like this post a lot. The earlier post was just a quick bash of "BushCo" with none of the explanation that goes into this one. That's more what I was calling out.
I do tend to think that DieBold is "trying" to do a good job though. You've got to admit it's a pretty big project to try and tackle this quickly. Especially with all the controversy & attention. There definitely needs to be a set of checks & balances in place though. Personally, I like the Las Vegas Slot Machine approach.
If more people expressed their views like you do in the last paragraph, perhaps we could really make some headway into getting the problems fixed.
Why is the truth modded down on Slashdot?!? Admit that the democrats are involved in attempted voter fraud!
Ummmm. Nope. Sorry. You're the one who is mistaken here.
The Supreme Court ordered that the recount be stopped (and, that is the ONLY recount, not "multiple recounts" as James Baker and the Republicans claimed over and over again during the press coverage of the 2000 election fiasco) and that the totals from the election night be certified. This DID have a huge effect on the outcome of the election, because, as was found by a group of eight news organizations that did a recount of the Florida 2000 votes, Gore won in a number of different recount scenarios, even if you don't count the extra illegally counted absentee votes that pushed Bush over Gore's vote total.
Your facetious "can't make an X" statement shows how little you know about what happened. The main problems with the 2000 election in Florida were:
1) Tens of thousands of people were incorrectly put on the felon list and removed from the voter rolls
2) The "butterfly" ballot debacle that caused thousands of votes (3:1 of which were likely to go to Gore) to not be tallied. These were punch ballots, and not "X marks the choice" ballots.
Now, were the Consortium recounts widely reported as a Gore victory? No. Why? At least partly because they were completed in November of 2001, while the majority of the country was in shock after September the 11th. I'm not saying this as some sort of conspiracy theory, but a LOT of the news coverage at the time was pretty soft on anything related to Bush, because many, many people (look at his approval ratings from that time period) thought that we needed to support our President during the traumatic times.
Next time, before you call something an "urban myth", why don't you do some research?
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
The real issue, to me, is that the wrong people are being sued.
The voters should be bringing class action lawsuits against the government hacks who bought the bill of goods from Diebold. If you vote on one of these machines, your vote was cast for *whoever* the controllers of these boxes want.
Getting disenfrachised this way is the real crime.
There has been PLENTY of press and information about the numerous flaws in the Dieblod units going back several years.
OFF WITH THE HEADS OF THE HACKS!
Once that is accomplished, maybe, maybe, just maybe some of the the other election officials will pay some freakin attention.
Of course this is all purely speculative (that's my loony disclaimer). But does it really seem that far-fetched? Maybe the pres himself isn't in on it but he isn't the only one who want to see him reelected, and all it takes is one unethical engineer, or in the case of diebold's system whatever hacker takes the time.
Ignorance kills, complacency kills, hatred kills, but usually not the ones guilty of them.
I was sitting in the bar with a friend of mine t'other day discussing word affairs, WMDs, political honesty, etc, and my friend said, he said,
"The only question is how Bush will steal the next election."
(No, he's not a Republican or a Democrat. Just a Canadian who has a tendency these days to wish he lived in New Zealand instead of right next to to the Good Old USA, Defender of Democracy and all that is Just and Right.)
And can anyone explain to me why it is so necessary to have computerized balloting? Other countries around the world do just find with paper ballots. Why is it so necessary to have the results Right Away instead of waiting a bit? What would be the harm, say, of getting the results of an election the next day instead of today?
Just asking.
Is it NOT ENOUGH that this company would be so utterly in bed with the republican party, to have the contracts terminated on the spot? Ok, maybe not, but apart from the anticdotal evidence (promising Ohio, staying in a business that isn't profitable to them) which suggests Diebold has no intention of providing honest election machines, why arn't other parties more critical of this scandal? Why isn't the public crying bloody murder? Why do the standards take forever to be formulated, why not just:
-Verifyable by all parties?
Ie - like the paper elections we have here in Canada. Why does it take a genious, or a tin foil hat wearing activist to point out that a sealed ballot box counted by only one partisan party isn't democratic at all? Why is this even a debate?
...and I don't receive a paper confirmation of my vote, can I sue claiming that my electronic ballot was counted wrong, and force them to prove it's been counted correctly?
If they can't, it means their system may be compromised. If it can, then my privacy has been compromised. Either way, without a paper trail they should lose.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Boy, whenever I feel like killing time it's nice to know that Bush supporters can endlessly supply distortions for me to correct.
Do you forget how easy it is for people to look at the actual Supreme Court writeup?
Stevens: The federal questions that ultimately emerged in this case are not substantial.
Souter: The Court should not have reviewed...this case.
Ginsburg: I might join The Chief Justice were it my commission to interpret Florida law.
Breyer: The Court was wrong to take this case.
How much clearer can they get? Even Souter, appointed by Bush Senior, agreed that they should have let Florida decide the case. I don't know what straw you're grasping at to say that seven are in agreement about federal issues being involved. Clearly there aren't seven who think there's enough federal issue to justify the Supreme Court deciding the case.
See http://avirubin.com/judge.html:
This is possibly the worst candidate's name *ever*. Of course, the less than 1% who vote Libertarian won't mind.
Which reminds me: I'm sure that the margin of victory in several states last time was *less* than the Libertarian vote: how come they didn't get excoriated along with that Nader guy? Could it be that the Libertarians are even *more* unimportant than the Greens? Pity. Not that you can really tell the difference between a Libertarian and a Republican anyway...
Slot machines are secured because people will spend more if they trust the machines. Its good for the casino to have the government bless your slots.
Voting machines should be secured because more people will vote if they trust the machines. Democracy will benefit.
Not exactly three times as much, but close for the smallest states. Those two Senator electoral votes really matter when the population count only gets one electoral vote.
Now, that doesn't matter when you look at only the largest numbers of electoral vote states. When it does matter is when the small states have mostly voters for one party and collectively let a small number of voters create a large hurdle for the majority of voters in big states to overcome.
How did the first 55 smallest states electoral votes end up going last time? Did they favor the Republican party, perhaps leading to an electoral majority with a popular minority? Sounds very likely, because that's what happened.
Bev Harris and her attorney are suing so they can get rich. Diebold is probably more innocent than not, and what you have here is a partisan Democrat looking to smear a corporation and get rich quick at the same time.
Critical thinking usually means that accusations filed in court should be taken with the grain of salt they deserve.
This is my sig.
...on the paperless touch screen machines"?
Well, fair enough. Those paper touch screen machines don't work too well, after all...
they do something like that, but I'm not aware of any other state that prints sequence numbers on its ballots. What state are you in? Ballots shouldn't have any distinguishing numbers.