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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.'"
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.
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.
There has been so much chicken little, sky is falling hysteria about voting I think the public has become immune. Before you mod me troll, I think this is a scary thing. How anyone can say voting records are propriety data is just beyond comprehension to me. Electronic voting is scary, in all its forms. Unless it is open, I don't know how we can trust the result of ANY election. 2008 is looking more and more like 1984.
Save a Life. Donate Blood. Please.
...to Massachusets wanting to switch everything to open file formats. That way they don't get fucked by Diebold or MS.
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 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)
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.
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.)
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.
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.
But we're not, and we don't- both of those systems have manual overrides and people in the loop in case the computers fail. Your electronic voting machine fails and you have nothing to prove it, and no backup of the data even if you know it did. The appropriate question is: We don't trust our air-traffic control or nuclear ballistic missile command-and-control computers enough to leave no room for failure, why should we trust our voting machines any more?
It's not the computers themselves I mistrust, it's those that operate them without public oversight.
The people who program and operate the air-traffic control computers and the missile command computers have a vested interest in avoiding collisions/missile launches. Besides the fact that most people would feel horrible about the innocent lives lost through an error, if a nuke or an airplane suddenly landed in someone's backyard, it would be pretty hard to cover up. People may ask awkward questions.
Electoral votes however... well, if you own the data collection process and the database itself, who would ever know if you skew the results? And, after all, it's not as if anyone actually gets hurt or anything.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
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.
I will tell you FLAT OUT that the government would shoot the first CEO to tell them that they couldn't show the "Launch Nuclear Ballistic Missile" code because it was proprietary.
End of story. Code that is that/this important to our government should NEVER be held by a private individual.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
If someone screwed up either of those systems, we'd notice. It would be hard not to. If someone moves 5% of the votes from one candidate to another, it's not so noticable. In fact, without a way to recount static votes, there's no way to really prove that it did or didn't happen.
Last I knew, the very foundations of our country did not rest on full transparency of our airport traffic control systems or missile command and control structure. Our country, and most others DO depend on fair, open, and transparent elections. That's why this is so damn important.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
There's no way for you to "override" the machine and do the braking yourself, Fred Flinstone style.
Gears, handbrake, ignition switch.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Okay, you're right- we do trust computers to handle machines and our lives all the time. But we design those machines and have decided that their designs are adequate to serve the functions we are trusting them to do. A voting system that does not have a physically verifiable record is inadequately designed. It is imperative that any voting system have a physical object representing each vote, whose value can be altered neither by accident nor by malice without anyone taking notice. In an all-electronic system, there's nothing to recount if the values have been altered, and detecting manipulation is a lot more difficult. With a paper ballot storing your vote, the votes have to be physically altered, destroyed, or stuffed to change the vote, all of which are a lot easier to detect.
I think we need a system where ballots are printed securely like money, with unique numbers printed on the ballots. Each polling location would be issued a range of ballots and would have to account for each one. At the poll, you insert your ballot into a computer, which serves as an easy interface, in whatever language you want, and prints your selection on the ballot in a form that is both human and machine readable. Separate computers can then count the ballots, some of which should also be randomly hand-counted to make sure the counting machines have not been tampered with.
What I find most incredible about all of this is not that this company won't release the data.... it's that a private company has any control over this data at all....
What country on this planet has privatised it's electoral process ?
Are you guys completely out of your minds ?
Electoral systems are often facilitated by private companies e.g the printing ballot sheets, the making of booths etc... but the actual process of counting votes, that should never be the responsibility of anything other than a independent public body, the privatisation of such a thing to me is horrifying, especially in a country that dominates the world.
There is no possible way an electoral process under these circumstances could be described as OPEN, free and fair. To quote Thomas Jefferson "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"... well I'd say the whole vigilance thing went out the window round about the time MTV first went to air.