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Diebold's Election Data Off-limits
tommcb writes "The State of Alaska Division of Elections has denied a request by the Alaska Democratic Party for the raw file format used to tabulate voting results by citing that the data is in a proprietary format that is owned by Diebold. The ADP says 'The official vote results from the last general election are riddled with discrepancies and impossible for the public to make sense of'. The article contains some good quotes from Jim March of Black Box Voting: 'Copies of these kinds of files have been sitting on the Internet for over two years, with Diebold's knowledge.'"
About a 3 table schema in MS Access?!?!?!? It's not like competitors would *bother* to duplicate it...
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Aside from that, blame is also richly deserved on the part of the State and Local morons who wrote their contracts with Diebold and other computer voting firms in such a way that they let them restrict access to this sort of vital information, as if verifying the results of an open election somehow isn't really all that important.
Gimme the connect-the-line ballots any day. At the very least, they'd be harder for the morons who deal with this sort of thing to fuck up.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
the access file is proprietary, sicne when?
One "election" at a time.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Give me a few minutes -- I'll have a .torrent for you.
Democratic country to dictator: You rigged your elections! We will come and kick your ass.
Dictator: I did not rig the elections, I used the same Diebold machines as you did.
Democratic country: You use illegal technology! We will come and kick your ass.
Why do I even bother?
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Who cares what format was used or that it is proprietary. If it's your data, you can do whatever you want with it, regardless of the format.
And since this is about elections, I would say the public owns the data. So hand it over.
Why yes, it is your original creation and you have a full right to protect it, but oh wait... you have to respect the rights of the person who wrote the format you are now using to store your work in.
This is why I as a libertarian despise the arguments in favor of strong IP law. They are trying to make ideas behave like physical property, and in doing so they create a society where no one has absolute ownership over their own work that they made with their own money. As I said, yes it is your creative work/data, but you cannot fully excercise that ownership because your property rights are trumped by another party's patent rights.
That sounds like sharecropping, not property rights to me. You might as well say that by buying a framed picture you implicitly signed an agreement to not using a competing frame-maker's product to store your pictures. Oh wait, that basically is the argument of the defenders of strong IP law. You didn't see the contract, it wasn't even mentioned, but by God you implicitly signed some ephemeral social contract allegedly brokered 200 years ago by our forefathers in some secret masonic temple lacking euclidian geometry hidden away from common knowledge. But this implicit contract, really is there... we swear.
...to Massachusets wanting to switch everything to open file formats. That way they don't get fucked by Diebold or MS.
Basically what they say is they want to give us a printout from the (electronic) file. They don't want to give us the file itself. It doesn't enable us to get to the bottom of what we need to know
It seems to me that election software is pretty simple. It's basically a list of candidates and the number of votes each one got. Or you could have a log file of the candidate that people voted for. How on earth can you make a proprietary format out of this? It's just a simple list! I don't get it.
No Sigs!
The format isn't patented, I don't think, and isn't copyrightable, so the only legal protection it might have is trade secret. However, since the format is already out in the open, due both to revelation in other states and from the Diebold files posted on the net, it is no longer a trade secret and there is nothing that Diebold can complain about.
Furthermore, I don't see that anything actually prevents the State of Alaska from revealing the file format even if it is a trade secret. What can Diebold do about it? The State probably has sovereign immunity, and in any case, the secret is probably worth nothing so even if Diebold sued successfully they wouldn't get any damages to speak of.
Meanwhile here in Canada yet another election has been conducted without any problem using simple paper ballots. Just five lines with the names and parties of the candidates and a circle in which to draw an X. No need for voting machines, no possibility of confusion, minimal opportunity for fraud.
Diebold also ran into problems with North Carolina. North Carolina law requires voting machine makers turn over all their source code to the state for review. Code gets held in escrow all the time. So I don't buy their excuse. For some reason I get the feeling that Diebold is trying to cover up really bad and insecure code.
Regardless of your political leanings, this seems like a pretty shady way of avoiding giving the public its voting records. It seems to me that we should not be allowing proprietary formats to be used in the voting process. When the rights of intellectual property and the rights of corporations usurp the rights of citizens to examine the voting record, I think that we enter dangerous territory and should ask some some serious questions about the way elections are held in our country. I'm all for using technology to make voting easier, but if it comes at the expense of accurate elections, I'd rather go back to paper and pen.
forty-two
I'm so glad I live in Canada
"I would say the public owns the data. So hand it over."
What are you? A politician? You don't "own" my vote. Just your own.
If that data had porno website searches in it, you'd have the White House asking for it.
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
If I understood correctly, we could have a nationwide vote, everyone leaves with a piece of paper with a number printed on it, and can take that number home and verify that their vote was correctly counted on the internet (where public lists of votes are posted), while the whole system remained anonymous. It looked like election fraud could be completely eliminated.
There were more complex schemes with paired barcodes and filtered light or something, but that was the basic idea.
If such a scheme can be mathematically proven to be secure, why aren't we using it?
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
I don't think voting is the sort of thing that should be automated; it's hard enough to make sure things are above board without blackboxing things.
:)
We just voted yesterday in Canada - made an X in the appropriate box. Kind of hard to mess that up I've always thought. And even if it was an OSS voting machine, the general public and in fact most people would get nothing from that, not having the first clue of what the code meant.
I know the US is 10x the size, but you also presumably have 10x the people counting. And in any case, for one event every 4 years it seems reasonable. Heck we do it every 1.5 years it seems
This would help both Dem's and the Republicans - it'd be much easier to see who won so if the Dems should've won obviously this information would be useful. If the results were correct it would help the Republicans as this whole "illegimate president" thing could finally be done away with.
I know it's popular to bitch about the US elections and mock the US, but personally I'm impressed. The courts decided where appropriate, jurisdictions seemed to be respected, and rules followed etc. There was an orderly hand over of power. Do you think things would've gone as well in every country where the election was balanced on the finest of margins?
Plain old paper ballots would have made the whole affair as open as possible.
The notion that any part of the law or the process of government can be owned is abominable.
From proprietary building codes to election mechanisms, we must demand that our system of government belongs to all of us, without restriction.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Bev Harris is an acknowledged kook who used to do the Art Bell circuit but got promoted to legitmacy because her people are so effective at pushing these stories to media like Slashdot. Boom, she's an EFF award winner. The black box voting people are bigtime astro-turfers and they use willing sites like slashdot to make BBV seem more legitimate and draw in more marks. Read up on BBV: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboa rd.php?az=view_all&address=203x340188
Gee, could we get some stories about how communism is bad from the John Birch soceity while were at it?
Never overestimate the end user. -jeramy b. smith
From the article:
For instance, district-by-district vote totals add up to 292,267 votes for President Bush, but his official total was only 190,889.
Election officials have an explanation. Early votes for statewide candidates were not recorded by House district but rather were tallied for each of the state's four election regions.
My observation:
If this is true, shouldn't 292267 minus 190889 be divisible by 3 (considering these votes were counted three extra times)?
The answer (101378) isn't...
I couldn't be more pleased with this.
Diebold, by refusing to release the data, shows what a boondoggle it is to allow public information to be locked up in proprietary format.
The State plays right into the Bush-Gore-2000 paranoia over ballot counting. They're not allowed to release the raw data, because of the mistake they made allowing a proprietary format to be used.
A transformation of the data (be it a printout, ASCII dump, spreadsheet, or whatever) is not sufficient. Any transformation process is likely to use the same (proprietary) algorithm that was used to generate the official results, which could have hidden errors. It also makes me wonder what else is in the format, perhaps data that shouldn't be there.
Yup, this is a positive development.
Obviously, computerized voting is a stupid, stupid idea.
That's not obvious at all. Greater accessibility for the handicapped, more legible interfaces for long complicated ballots, the early detection and correction of "misvotes" and unintentional "undervotes", and the elimination of "hanging chads", stray marks and half-filled scan bubbles, etc. all make computerized voting a great idea.
What's a bad idea is storing the votes in computer memory. Computers have only one good mechanism for storing ballots in a failure-resistant, tamper-resistant fashion, and that's printer ink on paper. Touchscreen voting machines need to finish up your vote by printing it out on a paper ballot, prompting you to confirm or (with the help of a poll worker) destroy that paper, and finally directing you to the ballot box where the paper should be inserted to become part of the official count. If that was how electronic voting worked, I think even the computer-literate population would be thrilled.
We don't need to see their tabulation.
These aren't the chads you were looking for.
You can go about your business.
Move along...move along.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
So he's a libertarian. What's your point?
Is tabulating and sorting votes really that complex of a task? It would seem that the greater challenge is to develop a simple and robust interface.
It almost seems you could whip up a Python script to do it as far as computation is concerned and store the results as a text file. Hard to imagine what kind of deep dark company proprietary secrets are being protected here.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Diebold systems use Microsoft Access as the underlying file format for everything, including the audit logs. So it's not even that they're claiming the file format is theirs -- it obviously "belongs" to Microsoft -- they're claiming that the table layout they came up with for Access is theirs. Which could be interesting, given that if the state programmed the ballot layout themselves, it's possible that some of that table layout was generated by the Diebold program. So you've got one Diebold program generating a table layout for the MS-Access file format, and Diebold is claiming that generated table layout is theirs.
Brilliant!
-jdm
Only the Clinton White House. The Bush White House is opposed to sex. I think Clinton has all the adult websites book marked anyone. I true geeks President.
Who cares? It's Alaska
Although I'm not an evangelical open source advocate, I do think that open source software is the best choice for all computerization of matters of public record. Although ballots are "secret" in the sense that nobody knows who cast which one, they are ultimately a matter of public record, since we kinda have to know who got the most votes. All machination and digitalization with regards to public records (meaning data available to the public, they can store classified documents however they want, I don't care) should be required to be stored in open formats (not free, necessarily, but open in the sense that anybody can develop software to save, retrieve, view, and edit those records), and the software used by the government to manage those records should be open to public audit at a minimum.
And frankly, if Microsoft wanted to sign up for this deal and handle our voting machines, I'd be 100% in favor of it so long as they met these requirements.
But really ... when it comes to federal elections, the ungodly majority of people either pull the party handle or pick one of the two major candidates. Why on earth do we need billions invested in technology to run up a tally of how many people picked which of two options?
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
What advantage is electronic voting supposed to bring ? Don't we just do it... because we can ?
The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.
So Diebold claims that their proprietary database format can't be released. The state has two choices. Release the data and defend themselves in a lawsuit or don't release the data and let a third party force Diebold to defend themselves in a lawsuit. Seems to me that the state of Alaska is letting the Democratic Party take the lead here - and I don't see a problem with it. Why waste taxpayer dollars and exposure to liability when a third party will foot the bill?
Besides, it gives good press to the Democratic Party and bad press to Diebold. As for the government, well, everybody hates the government already, right?
-h-
Things got frozen into the ice up there during the last Ice Age. They're remarkably lifelike when defrosted.
So someone's searching Google for pictures of boobs is the government's business after all?
And what data Diebold-made, state-purchased machines collected during a public election - that's nobody's business but Diebold's? Wow!
(I know the parent expressed the very same thought more elegantly, tersely and humorously, but I just had to vent a little. Sorry.)
Why not an open source project to design the hardware & software? The actual hardware could be built under contract to the open source specifications. I'm not saying it would be a cakewalk, but it doesn't seem any harder than any other open source project. Since it concerns the future of the american democracy, I'm sure volunteers would appear. There are a lot of pro's for computer counting. It should be faster & more accurate, right? Before some smart aleck posts the "idea of a wooden box with a slot & paper ballots" for open source election hardware, I'll share this story. I voted early on election day, and brought my wife to the polls in the evening. We stuffed paper ballots (marked with a penciled X) into a wooden box with a slot. By the time she voted, the box was pretty darn full. Half an hour later, we were listening to the evening news report the election results. I felt like my vote wasn't even counted, since I knew the box had not been emptied & counted in the last half hour (polls were still open). The metropolitan areas of the state with electronic counting had reported in well before the boondocks and determined the outcome (statistically). As an engineer (ME), I think it would be a very cool project.
The last US presidential elections were a joke. At least that's how many people saw it in my country.
There were so many 'problems' with e-voting (no paper trails, machines starting with 5000 votes already in memory, malfunctions, etc) that it was not even funny.
In my country, if there were ANY doubt, even on ONE ballot, we would restart the whole electing process, no questions asked.
I don't understand why you americans didn't do anything when all this 'bugs' appeared...
Iraq: war to save the U
Then allege fraud, take them to court and subpoena the records.
If the election results are honest, what do you have to hide up there in Alaska, aye?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Well, good for him! And good for California, too.
Er, because there are 120 million of those little bubble thingies to read and score? And people want the final results in a few hours, tops? And two elections ago it was necessary to make fewer than 500 mistakes while scoring those 120 million votes (an error rate of 0.0004%)? And, finally, because taxpayers are not willing to pay the salary of a half-million-man army of vote counters, vote-counter supervisors, and vote-counter inspectors and auditors?
If we're willing to trust air-traffic control and nuclear ballistic missile command-and-control to computers, I'm not quite sure why voting is such an intrinsically scary proposition.
Read The F'ing Article! It says that the election department willingly offered them the data in the form of a printout. NO ONE is denying that the actual data is public! But, the Democratic Party says that they cannot accept anything but the original database file, including schema. That, says Diebold and the election department, is proprietary and will not be released.
.MDB file.
So, basically, they can have the data in an Excel spreadsheet if they want but, they aren't being allowed to have the original Access or SQL
I don't understand how this cannot be public knowledge in the States. I just checked Elections Canada and the raw database information is available right on their site to anyone that wants it.
In Canada we only have to make one choice; the minister we would like to be elected to parlament in our riding. As I understand it, in the States you make a bunch of decisions on the same ballot. Many Canadians have posted that "Oh... The paper works just fine here.. Silly Americans". Obviously! we only have one x to mark and count... I can see where electronic ballots can be useful in the States although I don't see how they can be as transparent as paper ballots...However, in Canada the WHOLE election system is completely transparent and any citizen can access any information they wish through the public organization 'Elections Canada'. A similar public system should be in place in any democracy.
On another topic I'll throw this out there.. Why not have paper ballots that can be read into computers. Wouldn't you have the best of both worlds? Both a paper record and electronic counting/
Give them the illusion of choice and they will blindly follow for they choose not to make one.
That excuse that they can't release it because of the file format is absolutely ridiculous. This is just another reason that we need ONLY open formats in our local, state and federal governments. I understand that security might be of concern for many files, and that can be handled by other security methods like putting the files in an encrypted container of sorts. That way if they need to release the data, they can remove it from the container and have no problem distributing the results. At the same time, why should it need security from reading when it is only votes. Unless the data also contains the names of who voted then it should not be a problem. I also believe that once the person does vote that the data is immediately written to at least 2 places. One should be a printed record that the voter that just placed the vote can easily and positively verify, then also to a digital write once medium that can not be changed, maybe something like a CD that can not be overwritten. I am sure that electronic voting is here to stay, so we need to make sure that it is secure and verifiable by all.
Nay, I believe they are covering up a rigged election.... and presumably their complicity in it. I thought it was pretty damned convenient that Bush started winning at the last minute after the whole rest of the country had pretty much voted, and just by coincidence the state tipping the balance to give Bush the election was using-- wait for it-- Diebold Election Machines.
And let's not forget that infamous quote from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc., who swore that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.h tm)
And just for the record-- you might wanna think about the election bru-ha-ha that happened in 2000 in California... a state conveniently governed by Bush's brother... coincidence??? Yeah, sure. Oh, and the margins were extremely slim there too.
So where's the evidence? Where's the smoking gun? Why aren't people crying out and taking to the streets? Well, it turns out THEY ARE! A quick google search for for "US Election Fraud" comes back with 17.9 Million entries. Another search for "us stole election 2004" turns up 9.2 Million entries. Yet another for "bush election fraud" turns up 11.9 Million entries. Admittedly these results are unscientific, and there is perhaps some overlap in the numbers, but every search with combinations of words like "Bush", "Stole", "Election", "US", and "2004" or "2000", and various permutations of these terms, comes up with literally millions and millions of results-- meaning a significant percentage of people in the US (and of course around the world) believe the US Elections were not fair and accurate. A similar check for with Clinton comes back with only a comparative handful of results. And very few people seem concerned with Nixon, Carter, or Reagan's election results-- only around a million or so have anything to say on that subject. And just for illustration purposes and to give us some counterpoint results, a google search for the word "vagina" turns up about 23 Million entries, so while it is clear that people are obviously more interested in vaginas than Bush, still they are ruminating about the liklihood of a fraudulant US election at least half as often. I'd say these are some startling results!
So, while this is definitely a somewhat tongue-in-cheek commentary about the subject of Diebold and election fraud, not to mention a clever way to work in the word "vagina" multiple times during my post... the subject of hijacking the US election is a very serious one and people need to demand that their elected officials do what's right (as if that ever happens) and get down to the truth of the elections. People are worried what the revelation of such a high, treasonous crime would do to the national outlook, economy, and to the rest of the world. However, I say that NOT looking into it, NOT telling the public the TRUTH, and NOT hanging everyone involved by the balls until blue would be an even GREATER INJUSTICE foisted upon the American people!
Yes its bad if the election's been compromised. Its worse if people know and nothing happens.
Here are a lot of links to get you on your way... there are a lot of people concerned about Diebold, the elections, and whether or not George W Bush is the rightful president-- and they are concerned about it not ONCE, but TWICE!!!
The Wikipedia Entry on the STOLEN US Election:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_co ntroversies_and_irregularities
A goog search on the subject: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=2004+election +voting+machine&btnG=Google+Search
Some selected sites (I have no affiliation):
Hearings on Ohio Voting P
from the who-needs-checks-and-balances dept.
That's every bit as factless as Diane Feinstein claiming that there are 2 branches of government.
"Checks and balances" are not between the political parties. They're between the branches of government. (That's Legislative, Executive, and Judicial, Ms. Feinstein.)
This is great.. I hope Diebold takes a strong stand here, making it obvious to even the most non-technical person that closed voting system, and Diebold specifically, is a really bad idea.
Openness has proven very useful for software development.
History has also shown it to be very important for government.
Combine those two together, and the importance is even more drastic. Openness and transparency in voting is essential.
If the evidence is so damming you forgot all about National Security. Under house rules National Security trumps all.
If Deibold actually screwed up, what prevents them from generating a file and then handing it over? I mean, the Democrats want "a file" in the "raw file format". How do they know that it is the same file as the one generated during the elections or that it has not been modified in any way? Can somebody answer this for me?
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Which is why the majority of WA voters don't believe Christine Gregoire was elected governor.
There were repeated requests for basic information, but the King Co. elections department (run by D's) either didn't provide the information or covered it up or even openly lied about it, all this while an important trial is being held to uncover who was really elected. Based on admissions by the elections department, they manufactured votes and counted votes that should not have been counted.
What's even sadder is the Sec. of State (an R) promised to clean up the rolls with a statewide database, and promised that database to be online Jan 1. Except even now, nobody seems able to obtain a copy of that database, and the Sec. of State says it won't come out until February. We'll see if it really does.
For more information, go read the research Stefan Sharkansky has been doing at http://soundpolitics.com./ It'll give you great insight into how elections departments should act versus how they do act.
I'm an R, but I don't tolerate this kind of crap, not in Alaska, not here in Washington, and not anywhere. We must have a publically accountable voting system, or we'll have people who say the only way to affect change in government is through violence. I don't want another civil war, particularly if it could've been prevented by people running elections openly and honestly.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
...be covering up from the last election?
Didn't they have a rather important referendum vote, as well as "electing" politicians? And wasn't the subject something of interest to high level Feds who have a stake in the outcome, said outcome only being tangentially what the subject of the referendum was, but primarily a part of the ongoing dispute between states rights and a severely over reaching federal government, who long ago overstepped their Constitutional limits?
Naw, they wouldn't want to cover that up. Naw, the Feds are all honest guys! And the state government of Alaska isn't a group of Fed jackboot licking toadies! And Diebold is the poster child corporation for honesty, ethics, above board behavior and most of all, sheer rock solid competency!
What a joke. It's toast, give it up, there are no elections anymore. There's a pure dictatorship running things now, end of story. Anyone who can't see it is either not looking or living in denial because the reality of the situation is too much to contemplate and accept. That bad "dictatorship" stuff only happens in them other places over there on TV! And besides, I got me a HDTV and an iPod, and the beer is still cheap, so everything is still OK!
For more information: http://blackboxvoting.org/
Ofcourse they wont release the data, why on earth should the "election" results be available to the public?
Adopting Open voting/documententation standards would curtail these sorts of issues, without the FUD of forcing constituents to switch... However, I think that blaming it on Diabold is only a scape-goat to hide corruption in the voting system, so it's likely to remain...
“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with nuclear bombs. We have a protractor.” — Neal Stepnenso
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
There are 2 kinds of people in this world. Those that can keep their train of thought,
Some counties use this: http://www.diebold.com/dieboldes/accuvote_os.htm ; it's a "fill in the bubble" type thing. You use a pen.
Good someone is defending our second amendment INDIVIDUAL right to bear arms. And I say this as a left Green, a left Green however who believes we should defend ALL the bill of rights. Frankly at this point the freedom denying Dems annoy me just as much as the freedom denying Reps. Please count all the votes, make the data available to anyone to be peer reviewed, and don't eviscerate our bill of rights. Is that so much to ask of our politicians? Didn't they take an oath of office vowing to defend the constitution?
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
I say, fine, don't releast that file format.
But issue an order that the data be given in a comma-delimited or tab-delimited format, while you then do everything possible (State goverment-wise) to get them to hand over the original format files and pass regulations that mandate that such formats be open and all data captured be released to citizens directly (via a web site) for immediate download and review. Period.
Diebold is just being an a__hat over this, and they should be smacked down rapidly, fargin' iceholes.
In many states, paper ballots read by the computer are standard, but have problems too. Oklahoma has ballots marked by drawing a line between two arrows.
Then they are read by a machine.
Problems:
* people who can not hold a marker steady or see the ballot. Help is allowed under very strict rules.
* because of different jurisdictions: city, county, state, national, schools; you may have to mark 4 or 5 different ballots in some years.
* Wording on some ballot questions, is very difficult to read and decide which question it is and what yes or no means!!!!
Good Stuff:
* easy to recount either by machine, or by hand.
* "fast" reporting of results, polls clost at 7pm, results know state wide by 10 pm usually.
* if a precinct maching is down, after the polls close they can be read by another machine at the county court house.
Never trust a man wearing a coat and tie!
I walked into the local community school's gym, stood in line for 2 minutes, accepted a paper ballot from the election official, malked behind a cardboard partition and checked off my candidate with a wooden pencil. I then folded the ballot the same way I had recieved it, and handed it back to the same election official, who teared off one edge and handed it back to me. I then placed it in a cardboard box. The election officials are members of the local community. I could have done it, but did not have my act together enough for that. I don't know what would happen if someone would be unable to check the ballot on their own. I assume they would be allowed to take along a helper, or phone in their vote, or something. Elections Canada has made provisions for disabled voters. Why the bother? why the fuss? Why on earth is the president's family put in charge of elections????
could it be?
Yeah... about that... funny story...
XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-U
Why is that? In 2003 Diebold bought a Canadian company called Global Election Systems, the #1 supplier in Canada of electronic voting machines.
Well, because Canada is smart enough to not actually use Diebold's crappy Windows-based technology. We just completed a federal election yesterday that went pretty much without a hitch. All federal electoral districts in Canada use one, identical system: A paper ballot. The format of all ballots across the nation is identical--the only difference being the names. The names are always in alphabetical order of the candidate's last name, with the full party name printed underneath, in slightly smaller print. Beside each name is a large circle, clearly associated with one of the candidates.
The process of voting in Canada is simple, and identical across the country for federal elections, and pretty much the same for provincial elections as well. You receive a voter registration card in the mail telling you where to vote, and if you are not registered you phone a well advertised 1-800 number to find the location of your poll (you can register any time up to and including voting day). You go to your poliing station and a scrutineer finds and crosses off your name on the official printed copy of the registration (or collects and signs your registration form if you just registered). You are then handed a folded ballot (all ballots in the entire country are even folded the same) and are directed to the voting booth. You then select the candidate by drawing an X in the correct circle using an HB pencil, fold your ballot back up and return it to the scrutineer. The scrutineer removes the perforated section, hands it back and you put it in the ballot box.
It's been like that for decades, and it has always worked perfectly fine. There are no "pregnant chads", no confusing ballot formats, no clunky Windows-PCs-as-voting-machines and no political controversy around the process. We have to improve maintenance of our permanent electors registry, but that is already nearly up to snuff by now, and has never been as bad as the US.
As for electronic voting machines, the company you mentioned only supplies those to MUNICIPAL elections. Furthermore, they are specialised elctronic tabulators, not glorified PCs. You still record your vote on a paper ballot--it is just machine readable now (you connect the broken line next to a candidate). The tabulators count up the official results, however if a judicial recount is ordered in a very close race, it is conducted manually.
If I encounter a Diebold PC in a municipal election I'll be quite disappointed. Since what most cities do ain't broken, I doubt they'll "fix" things in future elections with Diebold's flashy goods.
it really is amazingly hypocritical for a governing administration to
No. What is amazing is that you don't know that:
1) State of Alaska Division of Elections != United States Department of Justice
2) Slashdot users modded that insightful.
Wait. I forget. This is Slashdot where bashUSGovernment = insightful
He doesn't want people in California to have concealed weapons, because he's got a lot of enemies.
That or Libertarians are teh evil. One of those two is his point.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It seems to me that election software is pretty simple. It's basically a list of candidates and the number of votes each one got. Or you could have a log file of the candidate that people voted for. How on earth can you make a proprietary format out of this? It's just a simple list! I don't get it.
Voting is simple until you start thinking about security.
One example... How do you protect the anonymity of the voters? No one should be able to figure out who someone voted for, and voters shouldn't be able to prove to someone else who they voted for so as to prevent selling of votes.
I felt so empty leaving the voting booth after using an electronic voting machine. They should print a receipt for you with a confirmation code of some sort. And in the future, allow you to enter in your confirmation code on the internet and it can show at least what "party" is registered with your vote.
There have been some attacks and changes, I think; I haven't really been following this.
I forget what 8 was for.
Are you kidding, the current disarray in the Democratic Party STEMS from the illegitimate President thing. In 2000, it was a STRANGE election... not the first split in the popular/electoral vote, but the first one in a hundred years. The media went bonkers because everyone nominally remembers how elections work from high school, but never really thought about it.
However, the GOP benefited from this because Bush held all the levers of power, and "legitimacy" isn't terribly relevant when it comes to Presidential powers when your own party controls Congress. Bush basically spent two years rolling the Democrats on the Hill because they decided that instead of being a constructive opposition party, they would spend two years talking about the election.
The GOP base was (and remains) convinced that Bush won the election and the Democrats were trying to steal it. The Democrats maintain that they won and the Supreme Court stole it... What happened on election day 2000? Who the hell knows, it was a tie, within the margin of error of the counting apparatus in Florida... and the Florida legislature was going to send their own slate of electors... If that happens, the House and Senate vote on which slate to accept. The House (under GOP control) votes for Bush's slate, the Senate votes on party lines 50-50 and Al Gore as VP casts the tie-breaker for the Gore slate (that's legitimate... not a neutral VP in ANY sense), and the tie-breaker? Whichever slate was signed by the Governor of the state, Jeb Bush... In the end, ALL the Supreme Court did was prevent the US from looking like a total Banana Republic with the President-Elect being decided by a tie-breaker coming down to his brother...
However, when the Democrats spent two years complaining about a fluke election result, the GOP trounced them in 2002 (opposition is supposed to win mid-term elections), and you see the current situation.
So remind us WHY the GOP cares about the illegit Pres. issue?
. . . the secret ballot.
You have enough there to tie the paper ballot to the voter . . .
hawk
"What is important, I suggest, is being able to guarantee the chain of custody from the original voter. It's like preserving evidence in a trial: you've got to be able to prove to anyone that the vote you cite as part of a winning candidate's tally can be rigorously traced back to the hand of someone who meant to cast that vote, even if you can't (or won't) name the voter. In other words, you need a completely reliable audit trail."
Wow! That sounds almost like...trusted computing.
this is about partison politics. Alaska Democrats are asking for it.
no doubt Diebold will regret the replublican's hiding behind their assumed "intelectual property"
can't wait to see how badly mangled this data is. I bet it's a pure joy to analyze, especially if the crooks at diebold are using MS Abcess
1) In terms of federal election results, Alaska is so heavily republican leaning anyways that any discrepencies in terms of the presidential election would not have changed the result, I feel 100% confident in saying. I'm not familiar with any other issues that may have been up for voting, but clearly any cover-up would NOT have to do with the presidential election, and probably not with other federal level elections.
2) It is up to each state to decide how to select their electors. No state is under any constitutional obligation to use Diebold machines, or indeed to use popular voting at all! State governments could draw straws, hold snail races, or require prospective electors to duel - it's whatever the state government wants. As such, any state government could very well prefer to use knowingly crooked vote tabulating devices, since anyways it is the state government that gets to decide how electors are choosen. Using a known-to-be-crooked device is a method a state government chooses. It's all quite constitutional, even if it seems "unfair" to the "average Joe".
If you don't like it, get a recall movement going and replace your existing crooked state government. The problem, and thus the solution, lies with the state government end of things, not the federal government end.
Government IS the problem.
There were repeated requests for basic information, but the King Co. elections department (run by D's) either didn't provide the information or covered it up or even openly lied about it, all this while an important trial is being held to uncover who was really elected. Based on admissions by the elections department, they manufactured votes and counted votes that should not have been counted.
And the bottom line out of that trial is that there was no evidence of fraud with the only consequence being the removal of four illegal votes for Rossi. There was a reason the GOP went with that porportionality nonsense: they knew full well that if they started putting (more) felons on the stand, they'd lose a ton of votes. The felons lists were overwhelmingly male and men voted overwhelmingly for Rossi.
Hundreds of felons fraudulently voted for Rossi yet it's Gregoire who "stole the election"? Give me a break.
You can do better for elections information than Sound Politics. Sharkansky is talking out of his ass most of the time. No one who actually knows the subject matter takes him seriously.
In other words, the difficulty of counting votes doesn't grow linearly. It may take 10 times the people, but it's only slightly more complicated.
Canada had its results fairly well finalized within 40 minutes of most polls closing (B.C. closed 1/2 hour later). There's no reason the U.S. can't do the same.
What the U.S. should do is:
But people are in love with their machines, aren't they?
I am a hard core liberal Dem and a PCO. I have observed election procedures alongside both Bev and Jim. (The lefts obsession with gun registration is pointless and has lost us the rural voters who remember when Roosevelt saved their bacon in the 40's.) I have found both to be professional and knowledgable about the procedures and hardware in my state.
Libertarians may not be our natural allies but as long as they support the plain english meanings of the bill of rights I welcome them to the fight.
The root in this thread points out the sillyness of allowing Diebold to pretend it's access tables and schema are propriatary.
The activist at BBV are also questioning why there is no proof that the state of WA has ever inspected the code like the statutes require. I have been trying to find this out for years but without the resources to do so I am glad BBV is doing it for me.
Open source software is the key.
The counting optiscan hardware is 1990 vintage xt type processors and the paperhandling hardware of the same era. If this cannot be open sourced far easier than most might think then something is very wrong with this country.
*"Cogito Ergo Liberalis"*
I support the idea of electronic ballot preparation , not electronic voting. The best system I've seen so far has you cast your ballots into a machine that then prints out the ballots onto one or more sheets of paper that are then handed in to the election judge when you are done. That gets rid of the stupid errors like voting for more than one person in a single office, smudged or partial votes (aka the pregnet chads from Florida), and still gives a manual audit trail for you to review. To help speed up the counting, bar codes or some other OCR enabled text is also displayed that will automate the counting by machine, but this can also be done by software from multiple vendors for verification.
Diebold had come to Utah (where I live) to also put in the machines. I am a strong critic of what they are doing, but at least Diebold consented to providing a paper audit trail for all voting machines. The audit trail, however, is not something that you would want to in real life try to review except under the most extreme cases, and even then it is likely that the voting would be invalidated due to fraud.
...that I really can't even put it into words. Not just Diabold or the government, mostly the people.
Thirty years ago I would have assumed that if there was the slightest hint of election fixing that ALL election officials would tear into it with abandon, and that the people would similarly tear into any official that even suggestion that it was a bad idea to look into election results.
These days I have the same confidence in our system that I have in any south-American, African or Russian system, essentially none. That said, all you ever hear from the populous is the occasional reference to "wingnuts" and liberal media trying to jack the existing government.
Perhaps I'm mostly disturbed with my own inaction. Anyone have suggestions on things I can do that really work? Voting does NOT (No matter what you have been trained to believe), talking to representatives does NOT (unless you can outbid the lobbyists whispering in their other ear--I can't). I've just given up...
Any suggestions at all?
(PS. How did Diabold get away having a name that spell-checks to Diabolism? It's like they are throwing it in our faces!!!)
Not just any company, a company run by a senator. "In 1996, Hagel became the first elected Republican Nebraska senator in 24 years when he did surprisingly well in an election where the votes were verified by the company he served as chairman and maintained a financial investment. In both the 1996 and 2002 elections, Hagel's ES&S counted an estimated 80% of his winning votes." This from an interesting article at http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
We are all just people.
This has been said already, but it is really worth highlighting at this point. This discussion has shown clearly that Diebold's claim is flimsy on technical and legal grounds. This play really does not make much sense unless these data reveal some deeper flaw (or worse) in the method. The whole thing is odd. Stinks actually. Usually the state owns data they pay for. "Rights in Data" is a standard boilerplate clause in most RFPs. Perhaps this data threatens the interests of those who won the elections. People are buying time.
The whole thing makes me quite sad. I love technology, but deterministic systems are vulnerable to manipulation. A robust audit trail, with a proper chain of custody (as was pointed out) is crucial to decreasing the vulnerability.
But in the end the voting method is part of the social contract. And no contract is worth the paper it is printed on if both parties do not intend to honor it. IF there is a strong will to steal an election it will be done. I have worked as an election observer in some former Soviet republics. If you want to know how to stuff a ballot box I can tell you because I have seen it. You don't need an MS Access data base.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Er, because there are 120 million of those little bubble thingies to read and score? And people want the final results in a few hours, tops? And two elections ago it was necessary to make fewer than 500 mistakes while scoring those 120 million votes (an error rate of 0.0004%)? And, finally, because taxpayers are not willing to pay the salary of a half-million-man army of vote counters, vote-counter supervisors, and vote-counter inspectors and auditors?
What I think you must have meant to say but it got screwed up in a Diebold case apparently was:
Er, because there are 120 million of those little bubble thingies to read and score and people want the final results in a few years and two elections later.
Logically this needed correcting for ignorance or casuistry:
It was necessary to be able to prove fewer than 500 mistakes while scoring those 120 million votes, because taxpayers are not willing to allow an half-million-strong army of volunteers, that could do the job overnight and get it right, or make any number of recounts and get it absolutely correct with no margin of error possible.
Wasn't there a federal law about the voting machine code being accessible to all? Strange behaviour! How come convicted criminals were allowed to tender for that contract? They aren't even allowed to vote are they?
Somehow the term "making a monkey" out the presidency seems very appropriate.
If you don't like it, get a recall movement going and replace your existing crooked state government. "
And who counts the votes to recall the corrupt legislators who authorized the use of Diebold's machines. Diebold!
Damn you Catch-22!
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
... so secret even you don't know who your vote counted for.
We are all just people.
Seriously. What are YOU going to do?
Write a letter to your representative?
Write to the news media?
File a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act?
Run for office or help someone decent get elected?
My guess is:
(1) you'll do none of the above,
(2) continue having similar events occur, and
(3) have no acceptable answer to your kids when they ask you what you did when crooks destroyed democracy in America.
---
if (time_spent_on_entertainment > time_spent_improving_america){
return crappy_results;
}
You go into your booth. You take a paper ballot and fill it out. You finish, then run it through the machine. This machine cannot interperet results and cannot communicate with anything. The machine displays each line (image only, a slice of a scanning), one at a time, with a next and a back button to allow you to take your time. At the end it shows the whole form and your choices. Then it asks you if it is correct. If you say no, it shreds it, keeps it internally, and tells you to try again. Then, when it is correct, you drop the form in a box. The boxes are collected at the end of the day, and are taken to and area where they are fed into a machine that scans it in the exact same way, only this machine has OSS that can interperet it (probably needs to be reset for each form each election, like a Scantron grading scanner). There is no reciept, to prevent anyone from learning your vote (to punish or reward people for voting one way). Then, the machine totals all results for all entries, which are then printed out into a tamper evident container, which is then taken to the central counting machine, where all boxes are broken and the area totals are placed in the central counting machine, which then prints the results for the whole thing. The area totals are also checked by hand. This allows for manual checking by the voter and the counters, and seems to me to be more difficult to compromise. Any thoughts?
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
That having been said: To the extent to which the government contracted to have critical electoral data effectively encrypted and held hostage by a private company, there must be some way to have that declared illegal and/or unconstitutional.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Anything that gives away anything more than evidence that you voted can be used against you or used for corrupt purposes. People liked to joke that the USA had the "best government money can buy" but the reality of a bought election would be far worse than most people would imagine.
India has been using Electronic Voting Machines for over 15 years with no damage to election process. It is a small portable battery operated machine. http://www.eci.gov.in/EVM/
PCO?
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Why 2008? 2004 was the first year these were used with major anomolies in the election process. "1984" just happened.
Code that is that/this important to our government should NEVER be held by a private individual.
I don't agree that just because the government thinks it really needs something that it should have it. That way lies tyranny.
And in this case, it seems pretty clear that the government (i.e. the guys who won the election) may well NOT want the raw vote published. The party interested in the release of the data isn't the government -- it's the people.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
And the bottom line out of that trial is that there was no evidence of fraud with the only consequence being the removal of four illegal votes for Rossi. There was a reason the GOP went with that porportionality nonsense: they knew full well that if they started putting (more) felons on the stand, they'd lose a ton of votes. The felons lists were overwhelmingly male and men voted overwhelmingly for Rossi.
Hundreds of felons fraudulently voted for Rossi yet it's Gregoire who "stole the election"? Give me a break.
This is the exact opposite of a line Democrats used for Florida 2000. What hypocrites!
In Florida, when felons were purged from voter rolls, a small fraction of legitimate voters had their names removed as well.
The motto of the Democrats then was: 'Better to let a hundred felons vote than to disqualify one legitimate vote.'
While for Washington 2004, they say: 'Sure, there were some legitimate votes thrown out. But the vast majority were the fraudulent votes of felons.'
But in no way do the Democrats have a monopoly on hypocrisy. The Republicans have shown themselves to be exactly as bad in these disputes. It's all disturbingly symmetrical.
Diebold is lying to the state of Alaska and they are buying it. You cannot own a file format. A file format is information. Therefore if they own it, it must be "intellectual property". So, what category of intellectual propoerty is a file format? It can't be copyrighted because it's not a form of creative expression. It cannot be patented because it is not a device or process. It cannot be trademarked because it is not a phrase or logo used to represent their business or products.
So how can they own it? Simple, they can't. Intellectual property law protects certain specific categories of information in certain circumstances. You cannot just say "we own this" and have it be so.
2 simple options for computer voting:
1.Voter selects vote on touch screen, vote is recorded in database (which could simply be a match between candidate and # of votes). Also, paper ballot is printed with human readable vote and machine readable barcode. If there is a dispute in the database count, the barcodes can be scanned or the human readable votes can be counted.
2.Same as 1 except with no internal database and the barcodes being the primary method of counting
Neither option requires any computer to know who voted for who, it just records how many people voted for which guy (which is all that matters in an election). The hardware could either be PC hardware or some suitable embedded system (perhaps with an ARM or something) and the software could be easily written.
Q: We would like a copy of the data from the last election please
A: Umm, you can't have it, the format is "proprietary"
Truth: We don't have a copy any more, you don't leave something that incriminating just lying around...
--- I've completed diagnosis of your problem and can classify it as a YOYO...You're On Your Own
The big picture here, and what the Alaska Democratic Party is after, is that if you add up the individual district results, 2+2 does not equal 4. The individual district results add up to far many more votes than were officially cast. The Division of Elections acknowledges the mis-perception but is esentially saying "trust us". Their explination has some merit to it - that since Alaska is organized different than other states (Alaska does not have counties, and our electoral bounderies do not necessarily corrilate to other political bounderies), the software used to display the return results is somewhat hacked together (no pun intended) for our unique requirements. What's confusing is that it's causing some district results to be "double counted" when added up individually. The problem is further exacerbated by all the absentee ballots cast in the 2004 general election.
While I agree our state Division of Elections (and their vendor) needs to do a better job of breaking down individual district results, there is not a problem of "no paper trail" here in Alaska. The Diebold machines used for many years here (including 2004) are not the touch screen "pure electronic" machines, but rather fill-in-the-blank bubble cards that are then scanned into an optical reader. The paper cards are then randomly spot-checked to the results the optical scanners provide. I have complete faith in the machines and I've voted on them since ~2000.
If Diebold is worried about the format the information is in then I have the perfect solution, export it!
Hell, I'd be happy if we got a tab delimited text file.
All we care about is the information. I don't give a damn what form it's in. Diebold's proprietary format can go screw itself, I'm not interested. This is just an untenable excuse, and it screams coverup on every band.
"Build a man a fire warm him for a day, set a man on fire and warm him for the rest of his life."
You've been lied to. The resolution that was voted upon was not Murtha's, but one proposed by Republicans that was so poorly written that noone who loves the military like Jack Murtha does could vote for it. A proposal that only functioned to fool gullible citizens like yourself who do not understand that Murtha's proposal has not and will never have it's day in congress while Republicans hold sway.
Play Command HQ online
Hanging chads can be "interpreted".
Sorry I can't respond to posts scattered throughout, I'm kinda busy right now :).
:).)
But here's some general info not found in the story:
1) Glade County Florida gladly handed us at Black Box Voting a copy of their GEMS data file (the MS-Access abortion). Diebold didn't do squat to 'em. So the people saying Alaska's elections office is to blame are dead on. What are they hiding? They're among dozens of other jurisdictions also refusing these data files across the nation. Diebold has been distributing a memo asking them not to but legally it isn't worth it's weight in broken video card parts.
2) If y'all want to see the cease'n'desist from Diebold to me asking me to take my site down (containing these same types of files) in 2003, it's still online at:
http://www.equalccw.com/liebold.html
(If you see a black Buell S3 motorcycle running around the Seattle area with the words "LIEBOLD" on both sides of the gas tank, wave, that's me
The point is, they've known the files are out there, I dared them to sue me via a DMCA counter-notification including giving them my home address for process service and they backed down. There's no more "secret sauce" here as the trademark lawyers put it.
(The files on my site are being moved this week over to http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ with pointers to the new locations as I'm now paid staff at BBV. That's a fairly recent development but immaterial to this situation.)
3) The MS-Access data files contain a "double set of books"...all of the vote data is duplicated in two tables. If you query the Diebold-written front end ("GEMS") for data on the whole county's election totals, those numbers come out of one table. If you query for any one precinct or a group of same, the numbers come out of the other table. By default they match. To hack an election, you rig the numbers that provide the whole county totals via MS-Access itself or VB scripts or Java or whatever tweaking on the Jet database engine. That way, the hapless clueless honest GEMS user at the county elections office who can't tell there's two tables is hosed. IF they suspect trouble at all, they spot-check individual precincts, hand-counting the totals and matching them to the individual precinct totals in GEMS. Do that a few times, they'll think it's all cool. They have no way of knowing there's "two sets of books" in the damned thing unless they print out EVERY precinct and add them up on a hand calculator.
4) If Diebold concerts tables to Excel, y'all REALLY think they'll export both if somebody hacked one? Riiiight. Hence the need for the raw file. (Oh yeah. There's a THIRD table. We don't know what it's for. Yet.)
Now look, it's not certain this was done in Alaska, OK? Actually, this whole thing in Alaska doesn't really look like a deliberate vote hack. We've seen some already, they're slicker than this...like James Bond (well except for that idiocy in Volusia County 2000 but nevermind). Whatever happened in Alaska was more "Inspector Clouseau". Probably just a dumb screwup on the part of elections officials.
But "we the people" (or at least the geekier among us) damned well have the right to sort it out, and that's why this is going to get pushed to a lawsuit, if not in Alaska, somewhere else. There are other states like Washington and Colorado where there are cash penalties for wrongfully denying public records so they're reaaaally tempting targets if the Alaska Democrats drop this ball. But...having talked to them, I don't think they will, I think they're going to follow this all the way to court and win.
One way or another, we're going to get access to these data files, it's a no-brainer.
Then...let's talk source code.
Jim March
Staffer/investigator
Black Box Voting Inc.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
PS: Alaska
* because of different jurisdictions: city, county, state, national, schools; you may have to mark 4 or 5 different ballots in some years.
* Wording on some ballot questions, is very difficult to read and decide which question it is and what yes or no means!!!!
How are these problems with machine-scanned-paper voting? The situation wouldn't be any different using either completely computerised ballots or hand-counted paper ballots.
The elections department did produce documents that they wouldn't reveal during the trial later on to Stefan Sharkansky. He has some of the lawyers on record saying that had they known what they know now, the trial would've been much different.
You can go ahead and call Stefan whatever names you like. That doesn't change the fact that he has documents where the elections department admits to countin votes that they admit shouldn't have been counting, greater than the margin of victory. He also has documented proof of voter fraud, double votes, dead votes, and more that weren't available at the time of the trial. He has proof of a whole lot more things, if you'll take the time to see his evidence.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
You wrote a thoughtfull post (sometimes reading slashdot is not just a time waste). What I find most scary is not the creepy White House at the present moment, but all those sheeps in the US who goes out of their way to cover over their governments abuses. A good example is the people who moderated the GP post with its to the point, funny observation as a troll.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
Just put everyone's name and who they voted for on a big website. Anyone can see and compile the data, and also be sure their own vote wasn't switched. The anonymous voting system serves no purpose whatsoever. It's an open invitation for fraud. You might claim it would allow people to buy votes, but you're totally blind if you can't see how that's already happening. After all, how our legislators vote is in the public domain -- we would cry the system was corrupt if we couldn't see how our lawmakers voteed. Why should we, as citizens, expect some shroud of secrecy around our own votes?
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild
Computerised voting is the worst idea since the non secret ballot.
Imagine the old paper system where the government paid private companies to count the votes.
Imagine if this company took all the votes into a giant factory with the windows blacked out and the doors shut, and emerged several days later and declared the election results.
You cannot query this result. You cannot enter the building to see the votes being counted. You cannot force the company to show you how they count the votes. You cannot even see the votes anymore.
Would you be satisfied with this? Would it make you feel better if government agents were inside the building to oversee this process? Would you feel happier if you had a blueprint of the counting process design?
Yet computer voting proponents are essentially proposing this very situation. Government oversight is irrelevent. Open source code is irrelevent. transparency is irrelevent. At the end of the day, votes are going into this blacked out factory, a computer, and a result is simply thrown out and you have no idea if it is right or wrong.
Nothing will make computer voting acceptable. Nothing. Unless everyone can see the individual bit voltages flipping on and off, and the votes physically tallying, there's no difference between a result by electronic voting and an outright lie. No matter what any tech-evangelist has to say.
May the Maths Be with you!
1) State of Alaska Division of Elections != United States Department of Justice
They are both a branch of the many faced hydra that is a modern Government. The Grandparent post was insightful. The left hand of government appears to be ignorent of, or ignoring what the right hand is doing,
May the Maths Be with you!
Are there any competitors of Diebold that are actually working on a verifiable secure system? Or at least a better one? If so, who are they? If not, why not?
Isn't there money to be made in designing a better system than we've got? I can't believe there isn't a group of 20 programmerrs and/or public minded citizens who wouldn't be willing to take on this project.
Concidering the number of programmers in India (some of them might even enjoy programming), I think this just demonstrate that Elections in India, particularly in remote areas (where the EVM is used primarely) are a sham. ...
It is not even clear that a user cannot just vote as often as s/he want:
Did you hear a beep ?
Not yet, not yet
I think I heard a beep !
No, No, dear brother in law
Ok
Now you hear a beep.
A yes now I hear.
And in any case units can be duplicated, there is no paper trail, no possibility to do a recount.
Now wonder the BJP was elected.
Electronic Voting is a Con Game.
I guess everyone will just need to cast write-in votes for Backdoor Teen Sluts in the elections this November.
That's the best excuse they could come up with?
What is this? Patent law? Copyright?
Sorry, but logically the primary concern should be the mechanics of the very system through which copyright and patent privileges are able to exist.
If you can't fix the machine because it won't let you look under the hood, then the machine is doomed.
But that's pretty basic reasoning. Diebold is bleeding in the water, I think. . .
Too bad it's happening in a state where electoral fraud is less likely. I wonder if that was planned so as to throw off doubts about Diebold's process when the results are finally laid bare to public examination. . . This should be happening in one of the swing states. Alaska???
Alaskan water is frozen. . .
Big media is all owned by the CIA. It's been that way since the second world war. This story is a waste of time. We all know the election was fraudulent. We all know Bush is a criminal.
Why is he not hanging from a tree?
-FL
If Microsoft puts that format it it's Palladium/Secure Computing restricted control format, will Diebold even be able to verify the data without a security token from Microsoft?
Ted Stevens wants to be re-elected, you don't do that by pissing off the company counting the votes.
Problems:
* people who can not hold a marker steady or see the ballot. Help is allowed under very strict rules.
Absentee ballots don't have these restrictions, so anybody requiring assistance can just vote absentee (depending on absentee voting rules in each particular state).
* because of different jurisdictions: city, county, state, national, schools; you may have to mark 4 or 5 different ballots in some years.
I can't speak for all states, but all of the ballots I've used have contained all candidates for all positions on a single ballot. Any state that uses multiple ballots for a single election is asking for trouble.
* Wording on some ballot questions, is very difficult to read and decide which question it is and what yes or no means!!!!
Typically, the confusing paragraphs are followed by a "A yes vote means..." statement. The questions are also mailed out ahead of time and posted online to allow people to decipher them at their own pace.
None of these are technical issues; all of them come down to election regulations at the state and municipality levels.
Not that I've spent alot of time thinking about what the best way to vote would be, but the system you just described seems pretty rock solid to me.. With this type of system available there's no excuse for purely electronic ballots. I don't understand how someone could stand up in Congress and say what's wrong with a purely electronic system and them be passed up. Could be one of two reasons; Either Diebold has a strong lobby and a financial reason for purely electronic ballots or a party sees a political gain in having purely electronic ballots.
Cheers
Give them the illusion of choice and they will blindly follow for they choose not to make one.
People are obsessed with the two parties which have brought nothing but failure after incompetent failure. They will vote for somebody not even knowing the first thing about their platform based soley on their association with one of the two long term providers of constant pure failure. Now that person voted they feel they did their civic duty and leave the parasite Republican or Democrat unchecked as they forget their constituents and head to D.C. to get with Dubya and get on the Abramoff cash cow for personal wealth and benefit. Maybe when they are caught being a crooked criminal and the media hypes it a bit, that person pretends to care again and may gripe a bit at work. They do not change the way they vote. They do not make it a point to keep tabs on D.C. at all. They do not protest. They do not show their dislike of this by writing to a snake still in D.C. They do not show they are serious by voting these vermin and all of their bedfellows out of office. Almost makes the whole debacle of Diebold a moot point, why care about rigged elections when you don't care to BEGIN with? Why try to wake up sleeping fools when after decades of pumping propaganda into the mainstream the Republicans & Democrats have effectively turned the voter base into cattle; clueless animals with herd mentality. Does it matter if Washington dumps a light brown shit or a dark brown shit on your head? That is really what we are talking about with rigging elections, you are getting shit on no matter what. It is just a matter of what kind of shit is rigging up the election to dump on us all because we will be dumped on.
If you are serious about wanting a change and getting American back to being prosperous like it used to be, wake the fuck up.
http://www.lp.org/
Try to learn a little more about who you are empowering too, our foreign policy is a shining example of the D.C. mentality and lack of caring about you, the poor, or anybody else that does not sit with them at their Imperial Table of the Rich and Worthy.
http://www.economichitman.com/
It just seems so absurd that so many people are getting their panties in a bunch in a purely token expression of emotion. Were people serious, there would be organizations created and supported and they would be getting as many other organizations involved as possible such as the United Nations and any other watchdog group concerned about crooked elections. Were people serious, there would be wholesale public outcry [e.g. Watergate] and somebody would eventually connect the dots that a climate has evolved where we actually have to worry about rigged elections and which single individual will get into power and further expand their powers unchecked while deminishing freedom and liberty. Nobody seems to grasp that concept, the Federal Government has gotten too powerful and too big. Big to the point that it all but completely runs our lives and takes greedily from us while providing us in the long run truly nothing. All this and more to seriously consider and question...and people make a token gesture of being upset over a box that can, and probably did already, rig elections.
The People should be upset over the root fact that we have allowed the Federal Government to go overboard in the first place, Diebold is just them now playing with their new tools to cement already secured power. Instead; We The People, in order to form a more perfect tyranny and fascism, have become lazy and disconnected ourselves from our Governments and civic duties.
Diebold offers system with a paper trail. Aparantly it is more expensive. Or something. Anyway most counties that choose their electronic voting system CHOOSE the paperless option. Everyone's makeing Diebold out to be the bad guy here, but they're just one vendor in many that the boards of elections choose, and chose the worst product imagineable.
Since in MY state, the particular boards who chose paperless voting happened to be counties known to be heavily democrat, I can't help but wonder if the whole shenanigans were manufactured in a deliberate attempt to stain the current administration.
Anyway, just because Alaska's elections authority SAYS they can't turn over the data because it's in a proprietary format, doesn't mean they aren't using diebold as an excuse to simply not do something they don't want to do in the first place.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Now I can flip out.
I'm fucking 19. I voted last November. I walked in behind THREE OLD LADIES IN WHEELCHAIRS! My precinct uses SIMPLE FUCKING PUNCHCARDS, you know, the OLD FASHIONED BULLSHIT that these computers are supposed to be replacing because the handicapped supposedly can't use? The voting judges just directed them to the booth with the machine on a lower stand that they could reach. SOUNDS ACCESSABLE ENOUGH TO ME! DOES THE JOB, DON'T IT?!
Don't give me the hanging chad bullshit. There were signs right by the machines that clearly said YOUR VOTE WILL NOT COUNT UNLESS THE PUNCH IS COMPLETELY REMOVED FROM THE BALLOT CARD. If you cannot follow this simple instruction, I wonder how you managed to get to the polling place in the first place. And given the trouble everyone's had with what should be a horrifyingly-simple piece of computer equipment, the hanging chad is nothing by comparison.
Blind? Braille.
Deaf? Maybe a FUCKING TAPE RECORDER?!
My tax money is being wasted, for a bullshit reason, and with Diebold's decidedly shady business practices, something tells me we're all getting the short straw.
There are several simple reason why felons can't vote, usually until they've served their time and paid their debts to society.
When you commit a felony, you have shown that you don't respect the people of this country enough to follow the laws. If you don't respect the people, should you be allowed to be a member of that society? Of course not. Allowing felons to vote is like allowing wolves to be a part of the sheep herd. We must keep them separate and distinct, and not afford them the rights of the people because they are dangerous and do not have society's best interests at heart.
There's other reasons too, dealing with punishment and justification. As part of the punishment of committing a crime, you become indebted to society, and thus, a slave to society, until that debt is paid. Slaves aren't masters, and they can't tell masters what to do.
The other reason I hear is that felons have demonstrated an impaired judgment. We can't trust their judgment in simple matters like "should I try to shoot someone dead or should I try to resolve matters peacesfully" based on their past behavior. Why should we trust their judgment in big manners such as who should lead the country?
Another reason is this. Imagine a society where the majority of people are felons. That is, over time, people have been caught, accused, convicted, and sentenced for committing felonies. If these people were allowed to change the law, what would the law say? Since we can't allow that, we can't allow them to have any say in the law.
Another reason is actually quite simple. We believe that men can't govern without the consent of the governed. Law-abiding citizens don't consent to law-breaking citizens governing them. So they don't get to vote.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.