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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.
... 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.
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.
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
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?
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.
According to Kenneth Arrow no voting system can be perfect
Yes, but some argue that Arrow's requirements of a perfect system were excessively stringent.
Basically, Arrow took his intuitive ideas about how an ideal system would behave, codified them into well-defined requirements and then proved that they're mutually incompatible. Some argue, however, that one of his requirements was stated more strongly that is intuitively reasonable.
The criterion in question is the "Independence from Irrelevant Alternatives", which states that addding or removing non-winning candidates should not affect the winner. This seems like a good idea until you consider sufficiently complex situations, in which it becomes clear that there *is* no intuitive right answer and that it is, in fact, reasonable to expect that the introduction of other candidates into a deeply divided electorate may change the outcome, even if the introduced candidates don't win.
Some variants of the Condorcet system do satisfy a slightly relaxed form of Arrow's Independence from Irrelevant Alternatives criterion. If you're willing to accept the relaxation as "intuitive", then those variants are, indeed, perfect.
It's also worth noting that the circumstances under which these Condorcet variants fail to meet Arrow's original criterion would occur very, very infrequently in the real world. Even if someone doesn't want to accept the relaxed form of IIA, they still have to admit that, in practice, Condorcet is perfect very nearly all of the time.
we *could* do a lot better than plurality
Absolutely.
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