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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."
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...
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.
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.
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 problem is that ATMs are a device used by the banking industry, and that's an industry that is based on trust. More or less, if customers start telling their banks that they feel funny trusting a machine marked "Diebold" because they got tied up in an election-rigging scandal... they're dead.
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.
In true geek fashion, let me instead proclaim the superiority of the mean Kemeny order over plain Condorcet.
On the other hand, Condorcet would be a huge step toward allowing the electorate to choose the candidate they want without spoilers or extremists gaining power.
... 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.
I don't understand the problem with normal mechanical voting machines. The ones we use in CT aren't difficult at all. What's the point in using computers for voting when there's a mechanical method that works as well already, without the worry of malicious software and the need for an additional paper trail?
I mean.... It's like, what are you going to do when you're trying to vote and the power goes out?
The problem here is deeper than that. The simple truth is that voting software is a relativly simple project. EVEN with VB (which is what Dibold is using for their software), it would be simple to build a secure system. The fact is, they don't have the expertise to do so with any tool.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
What they should be doing is making sure the voting machines are NEVER able to remotely connect to anything. Once voting is done for the night election officials should have to PHYSICALY connect or transfer votes from the machines to a device that sends the tally to the central counting.
Once a voting machine is "certified" it should be LOCKED, taped, and completely inaccesible to remote or phyical tampering.
This excellent article at the Register explains what a good voting system needs.
Anarchists never rule
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.
Exactly. Electronic voting as a "solution" in search of a problem. It just isn't needed. And, since thee is no audit trail with the top commercial systems, it is not appropriate for voting at this time.
Actually, I see a great opertunity for a company that wants to do it right. Learn from Dibold's STUPID mistakes, clean up!
What's the joke?
1. Build e-voting system with audit trail. 2. ...
3. PROFIT!
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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.
Seems like many of the reports so far have shown great support for Diebold at the local and state level. Time and time again, state officials have brushed off complaints and critisms. Even in California, this went on for quite a while. Withness the condition in Florida. The issue is being pressed not be gov't officials, but by grassroots citizen's groups, the ALCU and other non-governmental groups.
Looks who's filing the lawsuit. The plaintifs are Jim March and Bev Harris... activists, not gov't officials. In fact, the lawsuit has been sealed for at least 7 months while the government tried to decide if they wanted to join the plaintifs.
The state of California has STILL not decided if they want to join the plainfits in this lawsuit. That's hardly needing to cross every t and dot event i in the system. It's more a case of needing to hide problems well enough from activists. It's clear the election officials are apathetic and would rather keep any problems swept under the rug than admit they were cheated, purchased shoddy products, and failed to detect accuracy problems.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
unfortunately, to you, it is. there's no one running by the name of 'Kerri'. sorry, mate.
and why is vote a boolean? if you were trying to make a joke, shouldnt it be if(true)...?
sigh...tell your manager at diebold i said hello.
Unless I get a paper certificate that I can verify for myself, and that counts as "my vote" in cases where a recount is called for, I am not interested in switching to a new technology.
There are plenty of tricks that can be played unless the voter can verify a hard copy ballot themselves. In nearly all cases these ballots wouldn't be used, but they would allow for recounts of suspicious votes. Keystroke logs are a nice touch. Unless, of course, the keystroke logger is tampered with. hard copy receipts, on the other hand, can be verified on the spot by the voter, and are much more difficult to modify successfully after the fact.
A paper trail can be tampered with. You just need to make your own voting slips, number say 100 votes with the candidate you want and replace a random selection of votes in a ballot box with the illegitimate votes.
The idea of "just need to" modify the operating system, keystroke logger and voting software - open source software in a heavily monitored environment - is ridiculous. This system is not perfect but the level of conspiracy needed to tamper with the voting system would be in the same ballpark as paper ballots.
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.
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.
Like I said, with the other things, there's money involved. If the gas pump or scale are tampered with, that's measurable losses (or gains) for the tamperer, or tamperee (probably not a word, but hey, the context makes sense).
Maybe the problem here is that there doesn't seem to be any measurable effect to the voting machines not being secure (well, you and I know that there is, but maybe the mass public doesn't). I get the feeling that until there's something that costs a lot of people something (maybe money), people won't really care about how secure the voting machines are.
Voter apathy is at an all-time high right now, nobody cares about voting. Because of that, I suspect that most people, even if they hear of this, figure, "Well, I'm not voting, why do I care?"
-- Joe
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.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, intelligent people recognize that the results of the election were within the margin of statistical error, and both candidates knew that, so both candidates were playing every political card they could to try to make the most of the sampling error. In the meantime, the US Supreme Court did exactly what it was designed to do: it made a final and binding decision during a period of national crisis by telling Florida, "Sorry, you don't get to change the rules after the fact." Honestly, it's not like Al Gore was some kind of Righteous Crusader for preserving the Integrity of the Vote. He wanted recounts in select counties where he thought he could pick up a net gain. He wanted to win. He just never managed to get the recounts to come out in his favor.
As for the butterfly ballot, I'm sure that some people who intended to vote for Gore ended up voting for Buchannan, but it would be highly illegal to just assign a certain number of those votes to Gore. In any case, if your vote isn't important enough to you that you're willing to make sure you're punching the right hole, then you deserve for your vote to be a random function. Or do you suggest that we just give all of the Buchannan votes to Gore, to make sure that nobody gets disenfranchised?
Note to liberals: That election was 4 years ago. Wipe your tears, quit the sobbing and get over it.
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