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."

Comments

Vaporware and voting don't mix.

[LostCluster]

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.

Re:Vaporware and voting don't mix.

[MisanthropicProgram]

This doesn't realate to the article but it relates to your post.

Long story short: I was at a company that sold vaporware. When we bitched about the stupid deadlines and what the fuck were the salesguys and upper management thinking, we were told that, "If we don't do it, someone else will and make the sale."

What a rationalization.

FINALLY!

[the_mad_poster]

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.

Re:Diebold

[whoever57]

Somebody save e-voting... before it's too late.

Why? What is the benefit? Ultimately, you have to have a certain level of trust. Current paper methods reduce the necessary level of trust -- because independent (and non-independent) observers are watching what happens for me.

Frankly, what happened in Florida was not good, but let's face it, when elections get that close, you may as well toss a coin! When things like weather could affect a result, is the accuracy of the count that important?

What is really important, though, is to prevent any person, organization or company getting into a position whereby they can systematically skew the results of multiple elections.

Until someone comes up with an electronic voting scheme that guarantees that no one can fix an election then we should forget about electronic voting and stick with paper.

Even if you consider the problems in Florida to be more of an issue than I do, they don't require electronic voting to fix them -- let's look for simpler, more foolproof solutions.

Re:Diebold

[laird]

"someone should create a good Internet voting mechanism, and keep it anonymous yet feasible"

Someone's creating a good eVoting mechanism, the Open Voting Consortium. Go to http://www.openvotingconsortium.org and help out!

I'll also point out that internet voting is fundamentally insecure, but any vulnerability can be exploited infinitely. When voting takes place in polling stations (i.e. offline and under observation), the poll workers can limit the damage of any vulnerability, because they can see who comes in, control who goes into voting stations, for how long, and can stop anyone doing anything too obvious (e.g. unscrewing the voting stations and modifying their internals, for example). Also, internet voting makes any a reliable audit impossible, because there's no voter verified physical record of a vote.

Re:Diebold

[Barto]

You mean like here in Canberra, Australia?

Linux desktop computers running open source (GPL) electronic voting software, burning the votes AND keystroke logs (to verify each vote if necessary) to CD-ROMs providing an "electronic" paper trail?

It is at least as safe, if not safer, than paper-and-pencil voting. As society continues to move towards staring at computer displays 24/7 electronic voting becomes an inevitability out of inertia, so it may as well be done right.

Barto

Re:50/50 nation means every vote really matters

[siriuskase]

No they don't, if you aren't in one of the most populous state, your vote isn't worth shit. It's like a contest where California, Texas, and New York count, and Florida is the tie breaker. If they need another tie breaker, that's Illinois and they work their way down the list. Due to the winner takes all nature of most states, little states (all but the top 10) don't count. States with a clear majority aren't compaigned in. It's a bite being in a populous state and not be worth an ad compaign.

55 California
34 Texas
31 New York
27 Florida
21 Illinois
21 Pennsylvania
20 Ohio
17 Michigan
15 Georgia

Re:A LOT worse then that

[SnapShot]

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.