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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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.)
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
...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!!!)
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.