California AG Says He'll Sue Diebold

moby11 points to this Reuters story carried by Yahooo!; it begins "California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said on Tuesday he would sue electronic voting machine maker Diebold Inc. on charges it defrauded the state with false claims about its products."

Comments

A YRO topic??

[bob beta]

I thought politics.slashdot.org was just set up for this non-online stuff.

Re:A YRO topic??

[echeslack]

I also think they placed it under the wrong topic, but I think this is just as much a general technology issue as it is about politics. I figure politics.slashdot.org is for actual politics. This is really about technology's role in politics, so it makes sense as general news on this sight. Not sure why it would be under yro though. But a lot of stuff gets put under IT that seems entirely unrelated to IT, so who knows.

Re:A YRO topic??

[Lehk228]

Diebold eVoting machines and their various flaws are not really a political topic, rather a technical topic, now the conspiracy theories about handing the election to bush (regardless of merit) may be political, the machines and their (lack of) adoption and use is Tech related.

Re:A YRO topic??

[arkanes]

He did, in fact, say this, although it was in the context of a speech at a fundraiser dinner. I think it's inappropriate for the CEO of a company that makes voting machines to be so obviously partisan, and it certainly wasn't the wisest thing he could have said, but I don't read a massive conspiracy to defraud into it the way some people do.

That said, while most of the problems with Diebold software can easily be explained by total incompetence and lack of regard for the importance of correct behavior (as opposed to the appearance of correct behavior), some thing are very hard to see as anything except a deliberate creation of a way to manipulate votes.

Recoup some of our money

[tonydiesel]

Good. With California (still) facing rather sizable budget deficits and having paid Diebold so much money to begin with, this seems like a good step. I'm worried about the 2004 election in our state, we don't have enough machines, volunteers or money to solve the problems. Since my taxes went toward paying for those machines in the first place, I'd be happy to see the state get some of my money back so it can put it towards the stuff it really needs.

Too bad about the criminal case though, it may not be fair, but Diebold sure seem like a bunch of crooks to me!

Sued "Out the Ying-Yang"

[Performer Guy]

This is going to be entertaining. The developer memo that Diebold should "Charge them Out the Ying-Yang" for paper copies because it was a new feature will surely come back to haunt the company. Such a disgusting attempt to exploit the customer over product deficiencies will not sit well with a jury.

I think the damages in this case may be "Out the Ying-Yang". That's a phrase that really grows on you when the shoe is on the other foot. Come on say it with me Diebold, "Out the Ying-Yang".

Re:From TFA...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe Diebold should cowboy the fuck up and accept its responsibility as an aid to the democratic process of the United States of America instead of diddling about as an aid to the Republican Party.

Re:From TFA...

[nharmon]

Well, since they didn't bother to test the machines, then the state shares in some of the blame.

Mayber caveat emptor doesn't apply to the gov'ment?

more than that.

[www.sorehands.com]

It is not just the sale of the machine and things on the hype. Diebold also 'repaired' systems using unahthorized/unapproved/untested software and patches.

Diebold needs to be bankrupted

[ShatteredDream]

Electronic voting is a guaranteed way to have a dictatorship. Once a closed source machine is in charge of counting your votes, as long as the number matches the participants, who could challenge it, it's a machine. Say good bye to minor parties if this becomes mainstream.

And now for the finger-pointing!

[Brian_Warner]

I was wondering when the blamestorming was going to finally hit the Diebold fiasco. At what stage will people realise that with something as important as a voting machine, independently checking its secrity would be a good idea? Sure, Diebold is partially responsible, but so are the people that decided to pay for their flawed systems.

Re:And now for the finger-pointing!

[dasmegabyte]

Problem was, at the time people were looking to pay for voting machines, there was not one mass produced machine with open source code.

Not one.

Do you even understand how government, especially local government, works?? You get the money once. It's a set sum, with an additional budget for maintenance and support. If you don't spend the money, it's gone. So you have to buy when you have it. You can't wait. You can't hope or wish. You have to pick a vendor and pay them and hope they do a good job, because the money won't be coming back if you wait too long.

Diebold had machines. People bought them because Diebold made big promises and nobody else had a decent machine for a fair price. Meanwhile, Open Source lost yet another battle due to a complete lack of understanding of how things work. If an OSS solution had been ready when the evoting money came in, and that solution was cheaper and backed by a solid company with a reputation and support staff, it would have won.

That didn't happen. Not because local government is stupid and doesn't understand open source, but because open source is nearsighted and reactionary and was not ready.

Price on Democracy

[weston]

"Out the Yin-Yang" indeed. It's hard to put a price on playing fast and loose with American democracy.

For as much as modern pundits seem to throw around the term "treason" these days, I'm surprised the term hasn't been applied to Diebold.

How about simply...

[Nick Driver]

What false claim was that?
How about simply that the product was supposed to work correctly as it was claimed to do before the sale.

All technology vendors need to be foreced to quit hiding behind some software EULA that allows them to escape being held liable when their stuff don't work right. If it takes charging them with fraud, then so be it.

Re:Is this the right way to go about it?

[AuMatar]

Umm, what the fuck planet do you come from. Diebold claimed to have a product that fit the purposes of the state (a secure electronic voting system). They marketed the system as that. The system has been found NOT to be secure, and that they knew it wasn't secure. Claiming a produuct is fit for a purpse when you know it isn't is fraud. They shouldn't just be sued, there should be people in jail over this.

As for not dragging a corporation through the courts because youy have a beef with their practices- thats THE FUCKING PURPOSE OF A COURT SYSTEM. If you think someone is breaking the law, you bring them to court and see if the judge agrees. You think when someone lies about there product and commits fraud, we shouldn't sue their asses for our money back? We sure as hell should.

First to market: Corporate natural selection

[Theovon]

Sometimes, competition and rush to market is so intense that companies simply CANNOT do a proper job. The reason? No one is going to do a proper job. If you wait and do things right, then a competitor will get their half-ass product to market before you, and then you lose. No one is the wiser until way down the road. Now, since everyone is doing the hack-and-slash job, the winner is whoever managed to cover their mistakes better or who had fewer visible mistakes (or marketed better, etc.). By the time people figure out that the chosen product is shite, the companies that might have done a good job are either long gone or on to other things.

Only after this first wave of a new kind of product do companies "learn from the mistakes of the past" (translation: we can do it right this time because customers finally expect to wait on a proper product).

Capitalism is wonderful, but as with anything run by humans, it has its challenges.

Diebold is the sacrificial lamb in this case. There's no way that history could have turned out any other way. If it hadn't been Diebold, it would have been someone else doing the same crap job and then getting sued by CA. They were the lucky ones who got to market first and the unlucky ones who got caught at doing what they and all of their competitors were doing. As usual, some other company will soon come along and produce a slightly better machine, etc.

Re:Is this the right way to go about it?

[cmowire]

Would you accept a pacemaker that was made by a "good company" that wasn't "necessarily adequately tested"?

Is a voting machine any different than a pacemaker? If a pacemaker fails, you die. Consider that every election features some real whacko candidates. What if voting machines conspired to elect a whacko to presidental office? Do you really want to think how many people would be killed if we a madman in the Whitehouse?

The problem is that Diebold assured the technically inept California voting folks that they were perfectly able to build a good system. And then lied. And have been knowingly breaking the law. And are trying to still profit from this by charging as much as possible for printers so that there is a verifiable paper record of the votes, to fix *their* decided security holes.

I mean, really, do you *know* that they haven't been inserting loopholes? Of course not. There's a variety of ways that they can mess with the machines. We just don't know and, since each voter has neither the ability nor the knowlege to dissassemble their voting machine to ensure that it is properly recording votes, we *can't* know.

I wonder how much longer...

[m2bord]

we will be able to be protected by whistleblowers.

someone please correct me if i am wrong but...

this suit and the carnage over it began some time back with diebold's documents being leaked onto the net and posted just about everywhere.

the following articles will jar some memories...

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/29/07 26256&tid=103&tid=137&tid=126&tid= 17

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/17/21 18218&tid=153&tid=103&tid=17

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/22/01 42252&tid=153&tid=172&tid=103&tid= 17

and there are many more on this topic, http://slashdot.org/search.pl?tid=103&query=diebol d&author=&sort=1&op=stories

basically...the new features prposed in the upcoming versions of windows and ms-office, plus the pending legislation before congress would protect the company and will kill this kind of information from being leaked.

once those leaks are sealed and only authorized eyes see these documents, you can bet that whistleblowing on nefarious activities will come to a halt.

Re:How can we tell people about electronic voting?

[sholden]

people ... assume I'm exagerrating.

See "The boy who cried wolf".

See "The Y2K bug will destroy civilisation so you better stock up on cans of food and bottled water and shotgun ammunition, and a bunker in the middle of nowhere would be good too..."

Of course you personally probably didn't do the wolf crying but the media did and people know nothing happened (and don't believe that the people working to fix problems might have had something to do with that).

Also the "fear of computers" has been reduced by the wide acceptance of ATMs. After all if the banks trust them with huge amounts of money, why shouldn't I with voting]?[*]

* Of course banks don't want to lose money and don't gain anything from ATM fraud. The makers of the machines could steal lots of money but the banks would notice... Whereas with voting the machine makers and the election runners (or a section of them) can be working together to rig the vote - a very different, and much harder to secure situation.

Re:Just hope he doesn't have the case in Florida..

[McNally]

Except it's California. If Kerry doesn't take the state easily, that's a red flag to investigate

I know that the Bush v. Kerry battle is the main event on the political calendar this year but it's important for people to remember that we have three branches of government in this country, two of them elected, and it's just as important who controls the other two. (And that's just at the federal level! State and local races matter, too!)

Both federal legislative houses are fairly evenly divided and the Senate in particular is completely up for grabs. But a few closely contested House seats that get swung the wrong way while everyone's eye is on the big show could have a huge effect, too..

I don't believe the tinfoil hats are called for just yet, but please try to remember that there's more than one election taking place this fall.