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Maryland Tests Voting Machine, Declares Success

Posted by michael on from the works-for-me dept.

Dachannien writes "Capital News Service reports that the Maryland State Board of Elections has staged a test of its Diebold touch-screen voting machines in an effort to demonstrate their security and accuracy. A machine randomly selected from Maryland's voting machine warehouse was tested in a mock vote against two human vote-counting counterparts, and after counting fifty votes, the human vote counters had made several errors versus zero for the voting machine. But is this a legitimate test of the concerns of voting machine activists, or does it merely support a logical fallacy?"

3 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. In somewhat related news... by MSBob · · Score: 3, Informative

    International election observers noted several issues with the US election process this year. One of the criticism in their report is electronic voting without a paper trail. Here's the link

    --
    Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
  2. Re:It's the wrong test. by hype7 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Damn straight!

    And guess what? This is exactly what Australia has done. If you want an example for when you write to your representative, use the Aussies.

    -- james

  3. First, it's worse than you can imagine - these... by JimMarch(equalccw) · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...were tested in "test mode" versus "election mode".

    Yes, I'm serious. There's a software setting on the touchscreen to do one or the other.

    But that's OK, 'cuz the software in there is "certified" and subjected to code analysis by a test lab, right?

    Oooops. Diebold withheld thousands of lines of custom code in the voting terminals from review by declaring it "Commercial Off The Shelf" (COTS) software. Under FEC rules, "COTS" doesn't need serious scrutiny...but Windows CE at the terminal is NOT "COTS" despite Diebold's assertions otherwise - WinCE is a "software kit" that needs to be "finished" (mostly core drivers like video, etc) by the hardware manufacturer.

    Diebold.

    So hide a couple hundred lines of code somewhere that checks for the "election mode" versus "test mode" flag...

    For more on this WinCE issue including Diebold internal EMails discussing it:

    http://www.equalccw.com/sscomments2.html

    That's not even getting into how screwed up the central tabulator software is:

    http://www.equalccw.com/deandemo.html

    Ain't no WAY you can trust a Diebold system. Period.

    Jim March
    Member, Board of Directors, www.blackboxvoting.org