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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.
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
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....
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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
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.