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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."
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.
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.
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.
...a whistle blowing statue. It'd look nice next to my tuba playing lawn gnome.
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 smallest election scandal is going to get magnified now.
Unless if is in favor of the incumbent president. In that case it would be unpatriotic to talk about it.
... 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.
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!
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
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";
}
}
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.
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
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.