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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."
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.
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.
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...
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!
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.
The problem here is the only body with the ability to fix this mess across the entire nation before the November election is Congress and they've already refused. So you are stuck tryng to fix it state by state.
There is a bill with more than a hundred sponsers that would require a paper trail in November but it is being sat on by the same people who wrote HAVA which is the bill that started this mess in the first place.
Here is the statement from the bipartisan representatives and senators that have bottled it up in committee.
It contains some disturbing statements, this one in particular:
"Most importantly, the proposals requiring a voter-verified paper record would force voters with disabilities to go back to using ballots that provide neither privacy nor independence, thereby subverting a hallmark of the HAVA legislation. There must be voter confidence in the accuracy of an electronic tally. However, the current proposals would do nothing to ensure greater trust in vote tabulations"
Not sure how they can claim a recountable paper trail, "would do nothing to ensure greater trust in vote tabulations".
They also want the same agency that is apparently responsible for the current mess to sit on the problem and do nothing in time for this election:
"Questions regarding voting systems security, as well as many others, need to be examined by the entity responsible for doing so under existing law, the Election Assistance Commission, before Congress begins imposing new requirements, just months before the 2004 presidential and congressional elections, that have not been fully considered. The security of voting technology is a non-partisan issue. We encourage you to allow HAVA to be implemented as enacted and provide those who are charged with ensuring the security of voting systems the time and flexibility needed to get the job done effectively. "
As if this whole situation wasn't disturbing enough this same commission is exploring give the Bush administration, and Homeland Security power to postpone the election in the event of a terrorist attack, especially if it looks like Bush might lose in its wake the same way the Spanish government did, if it becomes apparent he may not have made America safer.
@de_machina
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