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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.
Going to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison? Hey, a guy can hope.
anyone here really trust the age of digital voting? i dont even have faith in the system when votes are done by hand, much less so in digitizing it.
Looks like a good time buy some puts on Diebold.
Man, I wish I'd heard about this while the market was open.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Boy, is this long overdue. This man bears a lot of responsibility for the current lack of confidence in the legitimacy of our elected officials and elections.
Whether or not you believe that elections in this country were stolen, you must admit that Diebold's response to questions about the security of their machines and software have, to put it mildly, not been helpful.
Boycott everything - they're all trying to fuck you one way or another
god's party is the majority of his favorite country
Since when were Republicans touched by his noodly appendage?
another contract for Haliburton to take over.
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??
Working in the software business I can tell you customers expect the world from software but aren't willing to pay for it. The blame belongs to the customer (i.e. the government) for accepting lowest bidder contracts instead of the software developers. Sometimes paying less costs more than doing it right the first time. Your tax dollars at work, folks.
He delivered Ohio to Bush, as promised.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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.
..or does someone not like Diebold?
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
Many of us know from experience that lots of users cannot figure out what seem to us to be rather simple computer interfaces. And, we've probably all encountered people who will not use a computer. Many of these folks tend to be older; I know several of them.
Now, if people in Florida in 2000 couldn't figure out the "butterfly ballot" (yes, a needlessly convoluted "interface" if you will, but not really all that tough), how do you think people are going to figure out a voting machine? Am I making too much of a leap in guessing that the same demographic (who I described above) that would have trouble with the butterfly ballot would have trouble with this too?
I have voted on rudimentary machines a long time ago (probably 1996-ish), and it wasn't exactly rocket science. But, isn't another election debacle being set up here with a move to voting machines?
Oh, what a beautiful symbol it is though!
The downside as I see it is that there’s an excellent chance that in the long run Diebold will be depicted as a good company that was badly run for a while by one bad man, but once he left, returned to goodness. This would make his resignation, ironically enough, a setback for that vanishingly small minority of us who care deeply about the legitimacy of our nation’s electoral process.
But hey, I’d love to be wrong about this.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
I'm not generally a conspiracy theorist, but given all the contraversy over Diebold's products, and if their board of directors is aware of of said contraversy, could this just be a feel good measure to divert public attention from the real issues? So the CEO is resigning due to "personal reasons", but is the company really going to change, or is it more of a "See? The Bad Guy(TM) is gone, you can trust us now!" type deal.
Somehow I don't think he was VOTED out of his office.
If it's good enough for fostering democracy, it ought to be good enough to maintain it!
Anyone who knows anything about business knows the cardinal rule: A people recruit A people, B people recruit C people. The CEO of Diebold was an F person and it's likely the whole company is now filled killers, thieves, and lawyers.
We've had electronic voting booths for ages (we had incredibly complex mechanical ones until the old clockmakers that built them for us all died or retired).
But we still haven't had any election fraud attributable to the machines.
Basically, it's because we have so few electors our votes aren't worth stealing.
Huh? The ad says "Anti-Bush Gifts and Gear". That doesn't strike me as a very credible news site.
Yes, because if someone doesn't like Bush (like 2/3 of us now), then up is down, black is white, and the sky is every color except the one they say it is.
Raw Story is well known to be a source of very early, unripe, possibly wrong information. It's raw, like the Drudge Report. But I check it all the time (rather than give hits to Drudge) because whenever a big story erupts I see it there first. It's a good site for the latest scuttlebutt. In this particular case there have been plenty of confirming sources during the past few days.
You saw "anti-Bush gifts and gear" and assumed the site is not credible because of a bias. Credible opinions are not necessarily "balanced". It's gotten to the point where editors at major newspapers are deliberately skewing stories to make them more "balanced" to please people like you. If I see "balance" in a story anymore I have to assume I'm being lied to.
Can the impossible be done and have this machines produce a paper trail now?
Thank the gods of real democracy this guy is gone.
I still want him indicted though...
--ken
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
*snort* That's rich.
Face it. If there's any activity which is truly steeped in human sin, vanity, arrogance, and utter foolishness, it's politics. There is nothing divine about it. Why would God have anything to do with politics at all? Didn't someone once say something like, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's"?
Be a disciple of Christ, and go out and feed the hungry, clothe the homeless, and visit the imprisoned. Christianity has everything to do with serving the poor, and nothing to do with politics.
-- The reason it's called the right wing? Irony.
God does vote!
So does Satan.... Normally the votes negate each other.
However last year they both voted for Bush...
--ken
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
Even if he's indicted, tried by a jury, found guilty and sentenced to a PMTA prison, his alleged services to the current administration would probably buy him a "Get out of Jail Free" card in the form of a presidental pardon for all crimes.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
While I'm sure there'll be plenty of partisan blows over the Diebold machines, at the end of the day this is about a company that, at the very least, was thoroughly negligent in the machines that it put out. There are serious questions not just to be answered by Diebold, but by various officials who approved these machines.
It's rather sad that it is, to some extent, turning into a partisan battle, because one would hope that all people; politicians, voters and investigators, irregardless of their political leanings, would care more about democracy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
why the company's machines were even used in the first place. The minute he announced his very partisan feelings on the election, his machines should have been instantly pulled as suspect. It should have been up to Diebold to prove they were secure and accurate instead of up to the public to prove that they weren't.
I'll tolerate anything except intolerance.
machines this time right? I mean, after all this has gone on, surely the government would find another contracter whom voting source was open, right?
The "e-voting" concept should be ... the computer prints the ballot and that paper ballot is your vote. That ballot lists ONLY the names you chose. You read that and drop it into the ballot box.
The computer counts the number of paper ballots it has printed for each candidate. This number can be released to the news agencies. But the real vote is the paper ballot.
At the end of the day, the names of the voters who used that machine are counted, the paper ballots are counted and both of those are compared to the total number of votes the machine says were cast. If they don't match, there is a problem.
In case of recount, the paper ballots are hand counted.
A random number of machines should also be checked against the ballots cast at them.
Multiple checks.
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
Diebold is a major manufacturer of ATMs. If they're so terrible at security, I guess I'll think twice before inserting my ATM card into one of their machines.
Just getting rid of the Diebold CEO does not fix the problem because the problem is the *system* rather than just one man. It is the system that allows one company to submit voting systems for use by the public with no oversight of their accuracy and integrity and it is the system that enables corrupt elected officials to allow Diebold to do as it pleased. The next Diebold CEO might be worse than the last one. Even worse, there will likely be other diebold-like companies springing forth to provide similar voting systems. Until the American public are able to throw off their cloak of indifference, timidity and cowardice and stand up to the Diebolds in their local jurisdictions, the system will remain broken.
Nor did the people who awarded them the last round of contracts
I am trolling
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 *
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?
What is the US Secret Service doing?
l eges_company_plagued_1206.html
...
It is supposedly their responsibility to see that election fraud doesn't happen, yet the evidence of fraud is clear as a day.
Why? Are americans happy with this?
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Diebold_insider__al
Shortly before the election, ten days to two weeks, we were told that the date in the machine was malfunctioning, the source recalled. So we were told 'Apply this patch in a big rush. Later, the Diebold insider learned that the patches were never certified by the state of Georgia, as required by law.
Also, the clock inside the system was not fixed, said the insider. Its legendary how strange the outcome was; they ended up having the first Republican governor in who knows when and also strange outcomes in other races. I can say that the counties I worked in were heavily Democratic and elected a Republican.
Resignation is not enough, I want prosecution
Ah jeez. Listen people, God doesn't play politics. Frankly, He's got better things to do. I wish people would quit trying to claim God is on the side of their party. If you people would bother to actually read what Christ taught you might understand this. [generalization]Republicans are sorely lacking the social justice of Christianity and Democrats are sorely lacking the moral judgements of Christianity[/generalization]. Republicans don't care about Christ any more than the Democrats do and vice versa. Quit using religion as a political tool.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
To quote the latest article on the Black Box Voting site (and then some background below that):
---
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/1559 5.html?1134523376
Due to security design issues and contractual non-performance, Leon County (Florida) supervisor of elections Ion Sancho told Black Box Voting that he will never use Diebold in an election again. He has requested funds to replace the Diebold system from the county. He will issue a formal announcement to this effect shortly.
Finnish security expert Harri Hursti proved that Diebold lied to Secretaries of State across the nation when Diebold claimed votes could not be changed on the memory card.
A test election was run in Leon County today with a total of eight ballots - six ballots voted "no" on a ballot question as to whether Diebold voting machines can be hacked or not. Two ballots, cast by Dr. Herbert Thomson and by Harri Hursti voted "yes" indicating a belief that the Diebold machines could be hacked.
At the beginning of the test election the memory card programmed by Harri Hursti was inserted into an Optical Scan Diebold voting machine. A "zero report" was run indicating zero votes on the memory card. In fact, however, Hursti had pre-loaded the memory card with plus and minus votes.
The eight ballots were run through the optical scan machine. The standard Diebold-supplied "ender card" was run through as is normal procedure ending the election. A results tape was run from the voting machine.
Correct results should have been:
Yes:2 No:6
However the results tape read:
Yes:7 No:1
The results were then uploaded from the optical scan voting machine into the GEMS central tabulator. The central tabulator is the "mothership" that pulls in all votes from voting machines. The results in the central tabulator read:
Yes:7 No:1
This proves that the votes themselves were changed in a one-step process that would not be detected in any normal canvassing procedure - using only a credit-card sized memory card.
Diebold Elections Systems head of research and development Pat Green specifically told the Cuyahoga County board of elections that votes could not be changed on the memory card.
According to Public Records responses obtained by Black Box Voting in response to our requests shows that Diebold promulgated this misrepresentation to as many as 800 state and local elections officials.
In other news, according to Bradblog a stockholder suit was filed today against Diebold by the law offices of Scott and Scott:
http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002153.htm
Permission to reprint granted with link to http://blackboxvoting.org/
---
Jim again. Let me fill you in on the background.
Six months ago Leon County elections administrator Ion Sancho asked us (Black Box Voting) to "test hack" his Diebold optical scan system. We brought Finnish security expert Harri Hursti and Dr. Hugh Thomson from Florida along.
Dr. Thomson proved that the central tabulator's database (in MS-Access of all things) can be hacked without a retail copy of MS-Access present. He used Visual Basic to control the MS Jet database engine directly, using very small script files...small enough to be typed in via MS-Windows Notepad at the tabulator console. We already knew the MS-Access database was tamper-friendly but this was real-world proof that you didn't need to bring in and load a copy of Access to tamper. The same things can almost certainly be done in Java and probably other ways as well.
Harri Hursti pulled off something new.
The report co-written with Bev Harris proved it's possible to doctor the poll tapes. These are the end-of-day printouts showing the number of votes for each candidate or issue taken in on that machine. It's basically
to the "true believers" that remain among my fellow Americans, but firing Walden W. O'Dell will not automagically bring back integrity to the voting system here in the U.S. Most slashdotters are savvy enough to know that paperless voting using secret, proprietary code can be easily manipulated. We will not be safe from this type of fraud until paperless voting is outlawed in ALL states.
Also, many slashdotters have knowledge of the "Law of Large Numbers", and know that a well-designed exit poll should be accurate within its designed level of confidence. Large statistical "anomalies" between exit polling and "recorded votes" associated with the 2002 (Georgia, Minnesota), 2004 (Presidential election, many states) and 2005 (Ohio referendums) verge on the quasi-impossible, until you factor in deliberate fraud. Exit polls do not lie, and when the margin of error is exceeded time and again, all with identical bias, we can be sure that the system is being gamed. Exit polls, after all, are how the fairness of elections is assessed in those "corrupt, third-world" countries.
At least be comforted the "powers that be" that really control the country still feel the need to throw us dogs the "bones" of legitimacy. In the words of Frank Zappa,
"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see a brick wall at the back of the theater."
Amen The fact that this is such an obvious solution and that it is so trivial to implement is what makes the chosen convoluted, hackable, no-recount alternative so suspicious. What honest and experienced company would chose anything but that easy and elegant solution you describe if not because they want to open the possibility to election fraud??? No amount of electronic tweaking will make the system secure. There is always a weak link. Even if Diebold had the best intention in the world, how can they be sure that a partisant lone coder did not sneake a line of code within I'm sure what are millions of lines, converting say 5% of the votes. This could be done at any point in the chain of programs that handle the votes; from the user interface, to the final tally, through the individual machine databases, the talying computer etc. I have programed plenty and I can tell you that, it would be very easy to implement the "bug" so that it happens ONLY on the day of the election and previous and following tests show no bias. a paper trail is necessary!
Oh the irony. Or something like that.
Diebold's CEO is out because the company is not credible with a Bush supporter at the helm.
AC says says Raw Story is not credible because of an anti-Bush ad.
Now Monkey's got some insightful comment where credible is not necessarily "balanced," therefore anything "balanced" is a lie. My head hurts.
I say we go with the purple finger thingy for our voting system.
Someone says "pound me in the ass federal prison" and that somehow makes it a romance?
-=Lothsahn=-
... To Diebold or not to Diebold, that is the question ... ... the answer is 42
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
If the allegations against him are true - and there is every reason to believe they are - then Bush's lies killed over 2000 American soldiers and over 30000 Iraqis for no good reason. Kerry has no such blood on his hands.
+++ATH0
"Or how about the CEO being close friends to Dick Cheney and a top republican supporter while his competitors supported both parties instead?"
You're trying to punish this guy for making his allegiances clear, while simultaneously giving kudos to people who don't.
I don't understand this reasoning, and I don't see how intentionally obscuring your motivations is any better than obscuring your code.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
You're completely right--it isn't funny. It's very, very scary. It's the reason people here are scared of going to jail. Sadly, a jail sentence almost guarantees cruel and unusual punishment in the form of anal rape. Last week on The Boondocks they covered this topic. One character is a lawyer who has always been straightlaced because of the threat of anal rape.
I remember, from a few years ago, an anti-rape activist (found his name thanks to Google: Tom Cahill) who was protesting the Vietnam war while living in San Antonio, and the police basically caused him to be raped. They threw him in a room with a bunch of career criminals and allowed him to be raped for about 24 hours continuously. That was his punishment for protesting the war.
By the way, I found his current website.
I personally believe that almost all prisons in the US today violate the Constitutional Amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment. But hey, the retards in my government routinely extract suspects for torture in the name of fighting terrorism, so I shouldn't be surprised. Yet another example of why it is shameful to be an American. I just pray they don't reviolate the First Amendment by bringing back prayer in school (ahem--Intelligent Design).
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Digital is great because of a few of its attributes:
Now what else does this list encompass... Oh that's right, the exact opposite of what you want from voting results!
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.