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Diebold CEO Resigns Under Cloud
Philip K Dickhead writes "After numerous ethical lapses and much controversy, Diebold CEO, Wally O'Dell resigned to the applause of the markets. Diebold's price improved more than 5% today, as the story broke. Business Week is reporting that O'Dell is leaving for "personal reasons", although the news blog Raw Story cites board action on imminent securities fraud litigation, and legal challenges by states claiming fraudulent certification of Diebold voting machines. Latest vulnerability tests show an impossibly negligent attention to vote security and privacy." Not overly surprising, considering their recent childish antics in NC.
Huh? The ad says "Anti-Bush Gifts and Gear". That doesn't strike me as a very credible news site.
We geeks need to contribute to the open source voting software efforts!!
There are only two very early stage projects for the US market:
http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/
http://www.softimp.com.au/index.php?id=evacs
I'm trying to help out openvotingconsortium.org and am reading up on the other one which I just found out about.
What are you doing??
The head of Diebold is also a top fundraiser for President Bush's re-election. 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."
'Nuff said.
The voting machines that were tested post election consistantly made "mistakes" in favor of republicans... and now there's a Diebold insider that confirms those reports.
2 7222&tid=172&tid=103&tid=219l eges_company_plagued_1206.htmlh arris/index_np.html
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=28174
http://ideamouth.com/voterfraud.htm
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/19/17
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Diebold_insider__al
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/09/23/bev_
Anything else I can do for you?
Try Australia, or even India. Australia used fully open source voting machines with a paper trail - electronic voting entirely transparent and accountable to the voters. The voting machines where made by a private company using requirements drawn up by an indpendent body. The resulting code was then made available on the internet for full public scutany (and several bugs where found and corrected due to public involvement), and company employees where not allowed anywhere near the machines or the voting - no late "patches", no special "help" from the company on voting day.
India went simple - in a country where many villages are only accessable by elephant or similar transportation, and where there is a huge population (the electorate alone is over 660 million, more then twice the US popultion), they chose to use voting machines with the simplest of components - no operating systems, no databases, just simple electronics designed to allow an official to release one vote at a time to a voting board (list of candidates with a button beside each one), and then close the unit (no more votes could be cast).
E-voting isn't the problem, it's American politics. Privatized elections carried out with minimal or no government regulation will give you privatized results - not only have private e-voting companies refused to fix major flaws in their software, made untested and unapproved patches to voting machines hours before elections, but the results from those voting machines have been highly suspect - not just that e-voting districts have been the only ones that are wildly out of line with exit polls, and always in favor of the same party, but instances where outright fraud in favor of that same party is obvious - district e-voting machines reporting impossible numbers like many more votes then actual voters, and often negative votes for a non-republican candidate (i.e. Volusia County whose diebold machines recorded -16,022 votes for the democratic candidate). In Ohio the numbers got as high as -25 million votes for democratic candidates.
Most polls have/had about 20% of Americans believing that incidents of fraud aided the 2004 reelection campaign. So either your statement above is inaccurate or you think at least 1/5 of Americans are irrational and insane.
I actually don't think there was fraud, but your statement dismisses a fairly widely held minority opinion as being nonexistent.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/1303 7.html
"New information obtained by Black Box Voting investigator Jim March shows that mail-in votes in upcoming Nov. 8 elections will lack crucial safeguards. The Diebold "GEMS defect" -- the ability for anyone with access to change vote results on the "mother ship" that tallies and controls election results -- has now been acknowledged by Diebold, but has not been mitigated in most locations, and it is worse for mail-in votes. The GEMS defect has been proven. The risks are significant. Mail-in votes are at exceptional risk because they are counted on a system that lacks protective features found on polling place machines. While the precinct-based optical scan machines made by Diebold produce a results tape, the same machines, when counting mail-in ballots, use a different program and do not store vote tallies on a memory card, nor do they produce an independent results tape. Therefore the defective GEMS program holds the only record for absentee vote totals. "
Hey Black Box dudes - why aren't the mail-in ballots themselves a pretty good paper trail for themselves!?!?
Here is a great article relating to the security of Diebold's vote counting system
Here in Ireland the govt. tried introduce the typical flawed e-voting (no paper trail). They got away with a trial run in a couple constituencies in one election, but the group they set up to rubber-stamp their use in the following elections came back with an unexpected (for the govt) "you've got to be joking?" We're now stuck spending millions storing the things, and the Minister responsible for wasting millions buying the things in a previous dept. is now in charge of the Dept. of Transport, spending billions each year on ill-managed road and rail projects. Still, at least we still have good old paper ballot for our Single Transferable Vote elections (even if the processing time is rather high in doing it by hand - some counts take a week or more! It makes the outcome guessing so much more fun though as each count round happens, someone is elected or eliminated, and transfers are worked out).
I wonder would the States be interested in buying some as-new Nedap electronic voting machines from us? *grin*
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
The recent municipal elections in Ontario used optical recognition to collect ballots. You'd fill-in the boxes next to your choices, and the ballot would be fed into something that looked like a cross between a vault and a photcopier.
Paper trail AND electronic tallying.
The recent Canadian federal elections just used plain old paper and pencil technology. Simple, effective, and tallied within the night.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
It sounds like you will only accept evidence that has proven truthful in a court of law. Give us some standards of proof here - right now the preponderance of evidence is that a) the Diebold CEO was a big Bush supporter b) Diebold machines consistently err Republican that c) http://www.electiledysfunction.org/ConyersOhioHear ing_chunk_8.wmv republican organizations were actively enquiring about how they could undetectably change the vote and that d) the election results didn't match the exit polls. If you want to indictable evidence that everyone agrees upon, then you are out of luck. All that we have is evidence of either gross stupidity or maliciousness. Since we can't rule out the former, and the lack of a paper trail outrules testing whether vote switching occurred, it's circumstantial evidence forever. If you are determined to think the best of the man, then nothing anyone says will convince you otherwise.
But since he's either too dumb to be a CEO or too evil, either way I'm gald he's gone.
Seriously, it's not funny, it's creepy, quit it.
It's from Office Space. He's not quoting the concept, he's quoting the movie. You really can't blame him; he's like the thousands of other people here who think that because a movie is funny, all its lines are funny, too.
Now go find us a shrubbery.
Did you know....
/03/03_200.html
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1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S.
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/ 042804landes.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diebold
2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry.
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0916-04.htm
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/ 042804landes.html
3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/private_comp any.html
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/ 042804landes.html
4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/m ain632436.shtml
http://www.wishtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1647886
5. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines.
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/031004Fitraki s/031004fitrakis.html
6. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-connected with the Bush family, was recently caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee.
http://www.blackboxvoting.com/modules.php?name=New s&file=article&sid=26
http://www.hillnews.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx
http://www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/000896.ph p
7. Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush's vice-presidential candidates.
http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_28/b3689130.ht m
http://theindependent.com/stories/052700/new_hagel 27.html
8. ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the U.S. and counts almost 60% of all U.S. votes.
http://www.essvote.com/HTML/about/about.html
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/ 042804landes.html
9. Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
http://www.itworld.com/Tech/2987/041020evotestates
actually no. There is no proof in tampering/removal of the mail-ins vs what was counted by the machine. Scenario.
Feed in Ballots...
Find out Canidate X lost by 450 votes.
Alter Machine Total via documented exploit.
'Loose' 451 Cadidate Y mail in ballots.
Where the tape shows how many were read-in vs how many are present.
* We dance where angels fear to tread *
Australia used fully open source voting machines with a paper trail - electronic voting entirely transparent and accountable to the voters. I'm Australian, and every election I have voted in has been the traditional paper method. I think I might be confused with someone else.
Blessed are the 1337, for they shall pwn the earth.
This open-source system was developed by a number of well known names in the open source community - including - Andrew Tridgell (Samba), Martin Pool (Apache), and Rusty Russell (ip-tables / netfilter).
All elections for the ACT government in Australia are now run using this system. Votes are lodged either at an eVACS terminal or - if lodged on paper ballot sheets - are manually entered into the electronic system for counting. That is - all votes end up in electronic form before counting / preference distribution is done automatically by computer.
more info and source code from the electoral office and the government recommends continued use following a full review after the last election.
There are a couple of factors that meant electronic counting / voting were going to come sooner rather than later in the ACT: the useful base of some well regarded open source leaders + the ACTs difficult Hare-Clark preference distribution scheme (allowing the part of your vote unnecessary to elect your prefered candidate to go on and help elect your next prefered candidate).
+laughing at US politics paragraph+ Obviously the $200,000 cost of development of such an open, accurate, and secure system is clearly not high enough to give US governments' bank rollers the belief they are getting value for money from their political donations! Maybe Halliburton can develop such a system for use in the US for a billion or so?
Actually the shareprice went up, rendering your (fictional)put options worthless.
Today was a blip. January $35 puts look really good. They're twenty-five cents right now, and they could easly be double that in a week.
They Use windows and claim their systems are safe and tamperproof.
Exactly. At some point, those pigeons will come home to roost.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Try Australia, or even India. Australia used fully open source voting machines with a paper trail - electronic voting entirely transparent and accountable to the voters. The voting machines where made by a private company using requirements drawn up by an indpendent body. The resulting code was then made available on the internet for full public scutany (and several bugs where found and corrected due to public involvement), and company employees where not allowed anywhere near the machines or the voting - no late "patches", no special "help" from the company on voting day.
To clarify this, this happened once in an election in the Australia Capital Territory (ACT), which doesn't even rank as a state.
In fact we have paper voting in Australia. The votes are counted at (or near) the place of voting, which is usually the local public school, to minimise tampering while in transit. They are counted by volunteers, without state allegience. These volunteers, while they are counting, are observed by scrutineers, that is representatives from (at least the two major) political parties, who stand behind their backs.
This arrangement IMHO constitutes the minimum (we don't for instance have clear perpex ballot boxes as some other countries do) requirement for a fair vote. All voting machines, whether or not they use open source software, leave a paper audit, or whatever, have a far greater ability to be rigged.
No, you've not been entirely confused. The catch is that not all of Australia is involved - this wired article talks about A.C.T. using electronic voting in the federal elections.
(For other readers: this is only a single one of Australia's eight states and territories, and it's one of the smaller states.)
It's funny though because I've never seen the Democratics argue for a system that includes formal checks against exit polls for these apparently obvious anomalies.
Checks of voting results against exit polls are traditionally an "informal" function of the Fourth Estate. These duties are contracted out to organizations made up of trained professionals (e.g. statistician, sociologists) who specialize in compensating for extraneous variables to remove bias and assure a degree of confidence in the results. In return, the media organizations that pay for these polls gain prestige and a reputation for journalistic integrity as a function of the accuracy of the polls. An infamous counterexample is the Chicago Tribune's erroneous headline "Dewey Beats Truman" in 1948, which was based on a biased sampling methodology, due to phone polling when, in 1948, the distribution of telephones favored wealthy Dewey voters rather than poor Truman supporters. Certainly the reputation of the Tribune suffered, and they must still blush whenever the famous picture of Truman holding up their front page comes up.
Since then, the sophistication of polling has increased dramatically. A good article with reference can be found here:
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/letters_debating_ exit_polls.php
Some select quotes:
"...prominent survey researchers (e.g., Asner 1999, Cantril 1991:142), political scientists (e.g., Edwards & Wayne 1999:84), and journalists (e.g., Jurkowitz 2000) concur that they (exit polls) are highly reliable. As far back as 1987, political columnist David Broder wrote that exit polls "are the most useful analytic tool developed in my working life" (1987:253). Edwards & Wayne (1999:84) caution only that, "... the problem with exit polls lies in their accuracy (rather than inaccuracy). They give the press access to predict the outcome before the elections have been concluded."
"An exit pollster himself for more than 20 years, St. Louis University Professor of Political Science Ken Warren (2003) has never had an error greater than 2 percent, except one time--in a 1982 St. Louis primary. In that election, massive voter fraud was subsequently uncovered."
"Temple University professor of mathematics John Allen Paulos wrote in a column in the Philadelphia Inquirer that... "huge differences between the final tallies and the exit poll percentages occurred in 10 of the 11 battleground states, all of them in Bush's favor. If the people sampled in the exit polls were a random sample of voters, Freeman's standard statistical techniques show that these large discrepancies are way, way beyond the margins of error." (In regards to Mr. Baker's charge of unimpressive credentials, I note that Paulos, a prominent mathematician and author, was the winner of the 2003 American Association for the Advancement of Science award for the promotion of public understanding of science).
"Because of their reliability, exit polls are used to verify elections around the world. When exit polls deviated from the official count in Serbia and the former Soviet Republics of Belarus, Georgia, and the Ukraine; the world--led by the United States--accepted exit poll numbers over the official count, and in three of these nations, the election results were successfully overturned."
As for further sources, there is a wealth of links in other posts under this topic. I have been though and read the majority of these links for myself, and I stand by my statements based on the extensive research that has been done. My real research topic for tonight was supposed to be "Bubble-like visualization of UWB propagation in immersive environments", so you will forgive me if I invite you to get in touch with your own "Inner Google Monkey", if you really want to find out the truth.
I have no idea whether or not Diebold cheated in elections. However, your assumption is flawed that Georgia's election of a Republican governor was definitely a cheat. I live in Georgia. I lived in Cobb County and I now live in Gwinnett County. For those of you who don't know, in both of these counties, you simply do NOT get elected if you run as a Democrat. We have similar counties in the metro area that are majority African-American and it is almost impossible to be elected if you run as a Republican.
Prior to the electronic voting machines, Georgia has been voting more and more Republican. We've been electing Republican Congressmen in greater and greater numbers each year. Our former Democratic governor, Roy Barnes, was quite simply a dictator and he offended a lot of rednecks with his decision to change the state flag. You must be ignorant to underestimate how many of these people, who usually are "Yellow Dog" Democrats, for the first time in their lives voted for a Republican governor simply because of anger over the flag. Some of these same people are angry that the current Republican governor has not set up a statewide vote over the flag and given them a chance to vote for the old "stars and bars" again. Roy Barnes was the most unpopular governor I know of in Georgia and I have lived in this state since 1974.
In the same election year, Democratic Senator Max Cleland was soundly defeated by his Republican challenger. Cleland and our other Senator, Democrat Zell Miller, had a conversation earlier that year that went something like this -
Miller: Are you really going to vote "no" on the Homeland Security Bill?
Cleland: Yes, because it doesn't give the employees the same job protection other government workers have.
Miller: If you vote "no" on this, you WILL lose the election this fall. The Republicans will say that you're against national security, you'll look like a crazy nut job, and it will be game over.
Cleland: No, the voters will understand why I did it.
Miller: No, they WON'T!
So when fall came and we knew who would run against Cleland, the ads appeared on TV saying that Cleland voted against the Homeland Security bill and was thus another nut job Democrat who wants to make America unsafe for terrorists. He lost the election.
Just because a Republican wins a statewide election in Georgia, it doesn't mean that someone cheated.