Slashdot Mirror
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.
Give me a few minutes -- I'll have a .torrent for you.
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
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)
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.
Sorry, but the information in this case comes from the Alaska Daily News, not from Black Box Voting or Bev Harris.
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.
Voting machines are not used in Canadian elections. If a Canadian company makes voting machines, it is benefitting from the foolishness of people elsewhere.
...and we can still manage to figure out who won that same night. *snicker*
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
So he's a libertarian. What's your point?
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
Well, not really. To begin with, the Conservatives only got a little over a third of the seats in Parliament, meaning that they will form a minority government. Furthermore, the Senate (which is not elected) is dominated by Liberals. So, yes, the Conservatives will form the government, but they will not be able to do whatever they like.
Moreover, the issues in the election were largely not aligned with left-right divisions. In fact, there wasn't an awful lot of disagreement on policy at all. What this election was really about was disenchantment with the Liberals, partly because they have been in power for a long time and partly because of a number of scandals. The election was anti-Liberal, not pro-Conservative. Indeed, although the Conservatives gained seats, there was also a dramatic increase in the number of seats held by the New Democratic Party, which is socialist, roughly the equivalent of the Labour Party in some other countries.
There are also major differences between the Conservatives and the US Republican party. For example, they have explicitly stated that they have no interest whatever in banning abortion. On same-sex marriage they have not taken a stance on the issue itself but merely say that they will allow a free vote (meaning that MPs are not obligated to vote with their party). Their platform included reducing the sales tax, which is arguably a progressive move since the sales tax is regressive. So, yes, they are to the right of the other major parties, but they aren't the Republicans, thank goodness.
This doesn't change any of the facts. There's no reason we should be denied the ability to audit our own voting process.
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-
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.)
The source of the information is irrelevant. Why don't you discuss it on its' own merits, instead of resorting to demonizing the messenger. This is a tactic taught in debate class -- something practiced by those that are more concerned with "winning" an argument than getting to the truth of a matter. Discounting some information out of hand because it came from someone or something that doesn't fall 100% in-line with your personal idealogy is both foolish and dangerous.
BTW, the source of the article was the Anchorage Daily News, not your beloved BBV. Get a grip.
---
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.
Bev Harris has nothing to do with the issue; bringing up the petty squabbles within the anti-black-box-voting movement doesn't help achieve the goals of the movement. Not reporting stories like this just because some people are on the outs with Bev Harris would just give the corrupt elections officials and vendors a free pass to do as they please.
I read your link and most of the links on that page, and I'm not impressed. Apparently some people find Bev Harris abrasive and a little paranoid, and are up in arms and throwing all kinds of nebulous and unsubstantiated allegations around. Maybe she is as bad as some people say, but it looks to me like an internecine squabble, nothing to do with the real issues.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
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
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.
Wikipedia - Electronic voting in Canada
I have a blog with more info at blog.papervotecanada.ca
We had a national election last night in Canada. A country of 30 million people. We had no problem getting the votes counted. I know 30 million isn't 300 million, but having 300 million people just means you have more people to count the votes. The trick in Canada is that all the ballots are the same, and only ask you to vote for prime minister (actually, you vote for your MP). It is very simple, and hard for the voter or the counter to screw up.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
...both of those systems have manual overrides and people in the loop in case the computers fail.
If they fail utterly, maybe. If the radar screen goes completely blank, then, sure, there are emergency procedures that might allow the ATC operators to guide planes in under VFR, God and weather willing.
But what if the technology just goes a little wiggy? What if the distances the radar screen reports are all 10% too small? There's nothing in the system that can catch that until Something Bad happens.
Same thing with missile control. Sure, a human gives the launch order. But then you trust the guidance computer to deliver the warhead to Soviet Russia instead of, say, downtown Chicago, because of some little bug or other in the onboard software.
Heck, you trust the mechanisms in your car all the time. You drive down the road at speeds and at distances relative to other cars that if your brakes suddenly stopped working as designed, you'd be dead. There's no way for you to "override" the machine and do the braking yourself, Fred Flinstone style. Some newer cars have cruise-control that can take over braking and accelerating at all speeds -- do drivers really have the reflexes to take over in time if this mechanism flips out? Slams the accelerator to the floor suddenly when the car in front brakes sharply? I'm guessing not.
Or take the flight-control system in a 767. If the hydraulic assist goes out, can the pilot still move the control surfaces by brute strength and wires? Are there even any wires anymore?
Or take your basic heart-lung machine used in open-heart surgery. Sure, if the machine gives up the ghost in the middle of the operation, while your heart is lying outside your chest half taken apart, there's a human heart surgeon standing by. To pick up the phone and call for a priest, maybe.
Basically, we increasingly rely on machines to work as they are designed, and our command options are increasingly limited to whether or not we push the "start" button. The "go to manual override" option is becoming about as useful to 21st century life as it was on the bridge of the Enterprise. But why fret about this? Humans have always trusted their lives and fortunes to their tools.
"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."
I have reasonable trust in the computers that control air traffic and nuclear missles, and I can even trust the computers in voting machines. I do not trust voting machines that are black boxes whose output files can only be read by the computer manufacturer. How can I trust a voting machine whose manufacturer promised that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."?
I have no problem with computerized tabulation of the votes -- the machines can count the "little bubble thingies" -- but for the love of [insert deity here], don't drop the paper trail. I want an auditor to be able to come in and verify the count. If it cannot be audited and verified independently, then I cannot trust it.
Home Automation & Linux -- now I know I'm a geek
I saw things the same way here. The exit polls were the real smoking gun.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
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,
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
Why does the idea have to be "interesting"? A boring solution that works sounds great to me.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
The difference is, many of these systems are very simple and designed to do one thing well, without fail, with multiple redundancy.
The flight surface control system on a 767 isn't the same one which runs the in-flight entertainment. It is a specifically designed mathematical logic system which does what it's told, when it's told, and nothing more. Should part of it fail, a seperate system detects that part of it failed and routes the control through another system. If all else fails, there's another system which basically exists to hard-wire the controls into their respective control surfaces regardless of any other computer saying that the plane should be climbing/descending/turning/bursting into flames.
Diebold uses Microsoft Access, which despite being a reasonably powerful database also happens to implement a general purpose execution system into it and run on general purpose hardware.
The two are simply not the same.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
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."
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.
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.
Patents and copyrights don't apply to military projects anyway. That is one of the reasons it is very nice to work at a military equipment developer.
Oh well, what the hell...
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?
The flight control and FAA systems have a rigorus backup system, and redundancies. They have certification levels for the software developers, and even the install too! (like, good luck plugging your airport radar controller into a ordinary wall outlet, let alone one without a battery backup and generator, and you do test your generator monthly, right?). And all hardware is tested like crazy, and certified.. (you buy this system, with this power supply, this exact model of nic, etc) Their are paper trails, backups, redundant systems, etc..
If serious questions were raised about the accuracy of these systems (like has happened to diebold) the project would be put on hold, and all questions would be answered.. Often times, the source code has to go into "escrow" in case your company goes out of business too..
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
...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!!!)
Could be. But what's your point? That the Diebold electronic voting system in particular is crappy software and should not trusted? Or that electronic voting itself is a disaster waiting to happen, something we are just not smart enough as a species to implement securely?
I could have missed something, but I don't think anyone is claiming that it can't be implemented. And it's not just Diebold, Sequoia Systems has had some major problems as well. When a voting machine turns in negative numbers, that's a problem.
The voting machine manufacturers have their own little consortium and hired that ITAA mouthpiece Harris Miller to spread confusion to the news media (his great talent). The companies have fought as hard as they can to eliminate any paper trail that could be used to check the numbers reported by their systems. And no, I don't think they are trying to rig an election, they just don't want anyone to be able to prove their machines can return faulty numbers (which they have been shown to do). Links to all this stuff should be available from blackboxvoting.org (or google on "volusia county voting"). I've provided links many times in the past, and it doesn't seem to help - we just get the same discussion over and over. Electronic voting without a verifiable recount (not requerry) capability is a disaster waiting to happen.
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.
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.
Right you are. Now, ask yourself whether you personally are aware of -- or have even worried about -- exactly how and by whom your paper vote is counted, and how and by whom and with what security that vote tally is transmitted to the capital for the Secretary of State to certify the election. If you're like most people, the answer is no. People just drop the ballot in the box and trust that it's all going to work out, at least until they start seeing scary stories on Nightline. Hell, people have to be taught about the existence of the Electoral College every four years.
What's the difference? Well, people have seen hairy photos of airplanes crashing. We've all seen films of Hiroshima. So, people worry about the security of ATC software or nuclear weaponry. But aside from the goofball antics in Florida in 2000, which, except to the usual sprinkling of Oliver Stone disciples tends to be nowadays rather a yawn of an issue, not much has gone badly wrong with voting, electronic or not. If a county supervisor has been slightly fraudulently elected, well it matters a lot to he and his local supporters, but not so much to citizens four states over, for whom life will go on pretty much as it has.
Which brings us to the larger point: I suggest there are in the end two possibilities here: (A) Any fraud through electronic voting is so minor as to be unimportant, or (B) it will not succeed.
Case A: Someone tampers subtly enough with the vote tallies that a very close election (e.g. Bush v. Gore) gets decided one way versus another. Disaster? Hardly. What people overlook about close elections, and Bush v. Gore in particular, is that the fact that the vote is so close is just another way of saying that both candidates are essentially equally preferred by the people. So for the purposes of representing the will of the people either will do, to within very small error margins. That's not to say the results of electing one versus the other might not be very different. Al Gore would have made a very different president than George Bush (albeit less different, I think, than Gore voters hope or Bush voters fear). But the legitimacy of electing either one is essentially identical. You can't, unless you're a Jesuit, say that someone for whom 60,000,001 people voted is significantly more "the people's choice" than someone for whom 59,999,999 people voted.
In effect, slight fiddling in very close elections doesn't matter much. You're not changing the basic principle of elections -- that the winner represent the will of the people -- very much, if at all. You are doing not much more than is done by a million small random factors anyway, e.g. whether it is raining or not on election day, whether candidate A wore a nicer tie than candidate B in their last televised debate, and so on ad infinitum. If an election is so close as to be determined by tiny, trivial factors, there are a billion of them, and fraud is not obviously the most important.
Case B: Now if you change vote tallies enormously, in elections that are nowhere close, then, er, I think someone's going to notice. If for example you change Orange County vote tallies so that it goes 80% Democratic, or Santa Barbara tallies so it goes 80% Republican -- well, people are going to notice. They're going to say: WTF? This has never happened before. No one I know voted this way; it's not consistent with pre-election polls, it makes no sense with demographics, it's not consistent with other parts of the State, et cetera and so forth. Really, in the end we judge the legitimacy of an election not just because the Secretary of State announces the results using his serious grown-up voice, but also because in many large and small ways, the result "fits" with other facts we know.
So in this case, there would be a huge hue and cry, and the results wouldn't stand. People would demand a recount, and if one were not available, a new election. And they'd get it. And then they'd lynch the designers who made the fraud possible.
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/
The difference in trust is in the people making these things. We trust that the people making air-traffic systems don't want planes to crash, and we trust that ballistic missile engineers don't want missiles to go off unpredictably. However, there is little trust that Diebold want there to be an accurate count of the votes. Given that the CEO was a republican promising to deliver votes to Bush.
The fact that they won't release the original files because they claim that the already well known Access schema is a trade secret just adds more fuel to the fire. The most rational explanation right now is that they are hiding a known accidental or deliberate miscount, for which they believe there might be forensic evidence in the binary file.
Ever heard of the maxim that justice must be done, and must be seen to be done? Well transparency is even more important for democracy. Right now, America isn't a democracy anymore.
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."
Its an outgrowth of the "War on Crime" and the Punishment/Vengence mentality currently in vogue (even though we know the harsher you make the prisons, the more dangerous the prisoners are to society once released).
We Americans love our wars apparently, War on Crime, War on Drugs, War on Terror, War on Poverty. You and I know that these "wars" can never be "won", but it sounds good in 7 second sound bites, and a lot of naive people here go for it, so the "war" rhetoric continues to be used. To the simple-minded, or the naive who want to remain willfully ignorant, its impossible to explain to them why the War on Drugs is actually hurting the War on Crime, for example. Like non-violent drug offenders taking up space in prisons that should be reserved for the most violent and dangerous criminals.
Only in America (which has a higher percentage of its population incarcerated then the USSR at its end) are there non-violent drug-related offences that get mandatory prison sentences that are longer than the sentences for many *violent* crimes. Oh, and when we let them out, we won't let them vote either. That last little act of meaningless vengence will certainly turn those hard core criminals right around and get them to straighten up their lives. Yea, right.
This is what happens when you conduct your political discourse via 30-second TV commercials, where facts are optional, and calm rational thought is recognized as a weakness.
When our democracy finally dies, I hope the rest of the world will at least remember that we Americans *started out* with the best of intentions. Sigh.
Having someone stamp your ballot means someone else has seen your ballot, and in the US votes are supposed to be anonymous
A piece of paper has two sides. On one side of the ballot, you have the options. On the other side, you have the spot where the stamp should go. After marking your choice on the ballot, you fold the ballot so that the person stamping the ballots cannot see where you marked. You can watch that person while they stamp the ballot and if they open it up to take a peek, you can call out "Shenanigans!"