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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.
...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.
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
Ah, thank god you have me to debug your code. Here ya go:
private void countvotes(bool vote,SSN){
if(vote){
Kerri+=1;
alert_SS("$SSN");
alert_IRS("$SSN");
}
else{
bush+=1;
echo "thank you, citizen, now go play somewhere else";
}
}
Baby Jesus? Hell, writing critical software with VB would make adult Jesus cry!
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?
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.
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
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
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.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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.
Every time you write an app in VB, God kills a kitten.
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 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
'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.
It's funny, I would actually prefer to start off the electronic voting process a bit differently. Let me fill out a regular paper-ballot first. You know, color in circles, press-out chads (ugh), whatever. Now, let me feed that in to an electronic reader. Then let me verify that the reader has counted my vote correctly & submit. The original paper copy is saved, but the electronic counting procedure is also used.
I have always thought that the original purpose of electronic voting was to remove some of the uncertainty as to whether or not my paper-vote was correctly counted. This would do that, plus there would be a paper copy.
Then, over the years, we could develop ways to replace the paper-vote with a possible electronic one. Although I don't necessarily see the point.
However, I gotta say that many people over 50, which make up a large percentage of voters, would manage to be baffled by even the simplest electronic system. Heck, even I get a little lost trying to vote the way it is now. Too much crap going on, just count my friggin' vote!
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.
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
Or how about...
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
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.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
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.
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.