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Maryland Votes To Ban Diebold Voting Machines
vandon writes "Computerworld.com reports: 'The state Maryland House of Delegates this week voted 137-0 to approve a bill prohibiting election officials from using AccuVote-TSx touch-screen systems in 2006 primary and general elections. The legislation calls for the state to lease paper-based optical-scan systems for this year's votes. State Delegate Anne Healey estimated the leasing cost at $12.5 million to $16 million for the two elections.'"
Is there no room for tampering with paper ballots? Have you ever taken a fillin the bubble test?n g.mistake.ap/index.html?section=cnn_latest
What about the SAT being all screwed up?
http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/03/10/sat.scori
Rain blamed for SAT scoring error
(AP) -- Blame it on the rain. The company that scans the answer sheets for the SAT college entrance exam said Thursday that wet weather may have damaged 4,000 tests that were given the wrong scores.
Maybe it is because I live in Ohio, and am tired of Diebold being a whipping boy- but seriously- Is there a bigger potential for fraud with an electronic machine? There has always been bvote fraud, since long before the advent of electronic voting.... With a punch card I get no reciept, I just hope that after I put it in the box, it ends up being counted....
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
I guess they couldn't hack it.
Unfortunately, they voted using a Diebold machine, so it doesn't matter anyway.
I'm a technology snob and love the newest and greatest stuff but....
There are places where technology does not belong and the old fashioned paper trail is still the best. I do not trust any voting system that the voter does not mark the paper. Anything else can be hacked or riged too easily.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Maryland Votes To Ban Diebold Voting Machines
The big question is, did they use Diebold machines to count the votes? *ducks*
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
137 to 0 -- ouch!!
Diebold has gotten itself into a quagmire and they don't seem to be able to pull themselves out. How hard was it to add a paper trail to the machines to start with?
And yes, there's plenty of fraud with paper ballots and mechanical voting machines. But the idea is that electronic voting machines are supposed to be superior to those systems, and without a paper trail to verify that votes have been recorded properly, they're reduced to being no better and actualy, given their hackability, worse.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
in the first place? Where I live, all votes are counted manually, and we usually gets results no later than 6 hours after the poll has closed. Size of the electorate can't really be much of an issue, since more people oughta mean more counters as well.
That is a lot more expensive than a magic marker or hole punch.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
In related news, it seems that Diebold has since started a new ad campaign.
In more related news, stock of the Harland Company, parent company of Scantron, got a small bump today.
"We've been hearing from the public for the last several years that it doesn't have confidence in a system without a paper trail," Healey said. "We need to provide that level of confidence going forward."
So open source the voting software, and record electronic votes in two or more remote, neutral party logs. Then you could easily compare the logs to make sure that votes haven't been tampered with. No black box, less chance of human error.
Theres JUST some meny issued... Paper trails are one of them.. There was an article stating that some TIMES were off, some machines didnt sync to their NTP servers, times were off, votes are invalid. And if they're connecting to an external NTP server... They are on the net... which opens up ALOT of other (possible) issues...
I dont think the public is ready to throw away those paper ballots.
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
Flamebait, troll, yadda-yadda.
It's true.
Black-box voting systems have continually been championed by those who would criminally game the system for their own advantage, democracy be damned. They tend to defend their actions with nothing more righteous than cynicism: we do this because hey, everybody does it.
No, everyone DOESN'T do it, and that is no justification in any event. The ends to not justify undermining democracy. Democracy is a large part of what makes societies strong, not weak, and undermining it only serves to strengthen the enemies of it, whether those enemies are foreign or domestic.
So bravo to Maryland. I hope all states follow their example, and that those citizens who are forced to use unverifiable voting machines take a sledgehammer to them instead.
As a Maryland voter, I was confused as to why we went to touchscreen voting anyway! We had a relatively new optical system (I called him R2D2 because of the size ans shape of the device that ate your ballot) that worked great, and was relatively fool-proof, I mean, it was a huge sheet of paper with big holes. We replaced that simplistic approach where dozens could vote simultaneously with dozens of little computers, of which only two or three were "allowed for use" at any given time, to conserve battery power. Needless to say, the systems were less than fool-proof as well. For once, this GOP'r actually is pleased with the Democratically controlled Maryland legislature.
A Texas company called Accupoll had an electronic voting device which provided a VVPAT (Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail), which was approved in several municipalities, and was certified HAVA (Help Americans Vote Act) compliant.
Too bad "On January 30, 2006, AccuPoll filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Pursuant to this filing, AccuPoll will cease operations and liquidate its assets. Therefore, AccuPoll voting systems are no longer available for purchase."
In other news Diebold announced today the introduction of the AccuVote-TSx-2 touch-screen voting system. The new system boasts the same features and functionality of the AccuVote-TSx, however, it has a different name to comply with a recently enacted law in the state of Maryland.
Unknown host pong.
As a MD voter I have to say, great. I've used the Diebold machines and they are easy to use and helpful for complicated ballots and those who need other languages; I just don't trust that their results can't be manipulated in an undetectable fashion. I really wanted to see a paper trail and now it looks like Diebold will be forced to provide one. You really need to be able to trust your voting system, and having actual paper ballots outside the black box restores that level of trust. If that costs an extra $16 million, so be it.
this guy at my company who works on information security found the key hard coded in the diebold source code. source code which he found online. for those that don't know about cryptography, this is bad.
He gave a talk about it last year and advocated a paper ballets and optical scanners as others have.
137 to 0 ?
Wow, that's a powerful smackdown.
It's hard to image another state moving forward with Diebold voting equipment after that resounding (and well-deserved) defeat.
I wonder if it's time to think about a short sale.
As a Marylander, I am SO happy they they are getting rid of those damn things.
The dumb thing is that the system that we had before wasn't even confusing at all. Each candidate's name had a arrow with a gap in it. You simply used a pencil to complete the arrow for the candidate you wanted to vote for.
You just turn this:
- ->
into this
--->
No one was even complaining about it.
I assume that they just wanted to jump on the electronic voting bandwagon, no matter how much the entire IT community railed against the machines.
Technoli
and there is no way to recheck the vote.
inability to recheck the vote is prima facie quite enough reason to outlaw those machines.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Diebold's main lobbyist, Harris Miller, is running for Senate in Virginia.
... (get this) ... he's running as a Democrat.
...
...
Yes, it's the same guy that crushed Cesar Chavez's union movement in California and lobbied successfully for multiple increases in the guest worker H-1B program as chief lobbyist for the Microsoft sponsored ITAA (itaa.org).
What cracks me up is
from cio.com
The vendor community doesn't like it. "We oppose the idea of a voter-verified paper trail," says Harris Miller, president of the trade group Information Technology Association of America. Introducing paper into the mix, he says, defeats the improved efficiency and reliability e-voting promises.
from zazona.com
Harris Miller, the president of ITAA, worked as a lobbyist/consultant for California agribusiness in the late 1980s. Miller's first big client was the National Council of Agricultural Employers, a group of large growers who use migrant and illegal alien workers. [20]
His firm helped farmers to bring in "temporary" agricultural workers from Mexico. These farmers wanted to undercut gains that Cesar Chavez and UFW had made. This boosted the profits of Miller's agribusiness clients. Harris painted such pictures as "fields full of crops, just lying there, rotting in the sun because of the 'crisis' of a 'shortage' of farm workers." This was a prelude to using the same strategies for an organization that Harris founded in the late 1980s, the ITAA, which is a lobbying organization that represents "high tech" firms. He merely substituted the category of scientist and engineer that was in highest demand for the agricultural worker. He has become very wealthy from the new "high-tech bracero" program.
A spokesman for the Farmworker Justice Fund, Inc. said "he [Harris Miller] was a lobbyist/consultant to the growers and was very active for years on the agricultural guest worker legislation. "
Miller said that critics who deny there's a high tech labor shortage probably also think that the world is flat.[26] We can be thankful that this scofflaw didn't accuse us of believing in the Tooth Fairy.
With paper ballots (as in Canada's X on a slip), scannable hand-marked ballots, and paper receipts, the piece of paper is the legal document of record. With fully electronic voting, the electronic log is the document of record. Easily hacked.
Optical scan is also full of problems because the ballots are still counted by computers. There have been numerous reports of the Diebold Accu-scan system having a back door into the central tabulator, as was shown recently in Leon county, Florida. Optical does have the advantange of retaining a paper record of the vote, but it's still not the most secure method of couinting the votes...
By far, the most secure method of counting votes is by hand. Several hundred people counting the votes (and witnessing the count) is far more secure than one guy in a backroom counting votes with a computer. The more people witness the count, the better.
We need to have total transparency in the process. Hand counts ensure that.
Oops, the little scumbag moved toh tml
http://action.miller2006.net/miller2006/homepage.
sorry
But then I remember - this is America we're talking about. The company that *makes* the machines has doubtless bribed... uh, 'lobbied' the relevant politicians to ensure that such machinery is the only possible choice for such an important task...
You must think in Russian.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/0 4/159216
My musings are here.
That's how they said it my neighborhood.
I'm moving to maryland. It amazes me that all states havn't done this since the 2000 'election' - except texas and florida of course.
NO!!!
It's the paper scanner one's that are the problem!!! Doesn't anyone in the government ever frig'n read?
I guess they're ALL in on it.
Good-bye.
:T:R:A:N:S:
... the troops have moved in, and Maryland is now known as East Utah.
Lose the obsession on using software to vote. When you have to keep complicating the system (multiple remote logs etc) you are actually emphasizing the perceived insecurity of your paperless system. The voting machine itself is the single point of failure. If the feed from that machine is corrupt, your "neutral party logs" are also corrupt. The added layers of complexity do NOT make voters feel more confident that their vote will be accurately counted - it has the exact opposite effect. Because the problem here is one of emotional investment it will not be resolved through "reasoned argument".
Seriously, Paper ballots that are marked on - not punched through. Use a machine and human countable (scantron) format. It is not bright, it is not shiny, it is not new. Howevere it works, and the methods of corrupting it are well understood by all involved - the same is not true of voting machines which will never be perceived as anything other than an opaque black box.
Now if you are just suffering from a common desire to complicate things, why not complicate the democratic process, not the actual act of voting?
For example, elections cost money, lets bring back a poll tax to pay for it. Say two bucks - and allow charities or political party reps to hand out two dollar bills to anyone who asks for one (but at least 100 feet from the polling place)
Runoff elections are expensive too - eliminate them and use an IRV system.
Straight Party Line voting is a pain to count - lets not allow it. If the voter won't explicitly vote for a specific candidate, then that candidate is undeserving of a vote.
Ballots are getting unwieldly, have separate ballots for each jurisdiction (federal, state, county, city, precint, etc). There are never more than 3 races on the federal ballot. Why confuse those races with the JP and Sheriff's races?
It's hard to get on a ballot especially with laws set to favor the major parties. Let anyone get on the ballot if they can pony up a "ballot placement fee". Let's say 1 penny per registered voter in the jurisdiction, but triple that to have party affiliation listed. (It would cost about a million bucks to get on the Presidential ballot, but triple that to run as a Republican, Green, Democrat, Libertarian) It would cost a lot less to get on the ballot where there are fewer potential voters - 5 bucks to run for Mayor of Cut-n-shoot TX for example.
Just a thought or two on how to complicate things.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
The real reason that touchscreen voting should be used is so there is no error in the ballot. Remember all those hanging chads and invalidated votes? The computer can validate that you voted correctly. Of course, a paper printout is necessary so you can trust them, but this should eliminate any invalid ballots.
It seems to be pretty important that there is no way for a 3rd party to determine your vote. Even just a number you remember isn't good enough - if your boss says everyone not giving me a number with particular votes is fired.
Man, you really need that seminar!
If the computer prints out a ballot AND tallies its own score electronically, you get the best of all worlds.
The voter checks the ballot printout and drops it in the box. Those are counted electronically and retained, same as now.
Meanwhile, the touchscreen data has been batched and sent electronically to render the unofficial results the instant the polls close.
The paper, the thing the voter dropped in the box, is the official ballot.
If there's a notable discrepancy, bring in the accountants, alert the media, and wait for the lawyers.
Doing both, counting and sending in the results by orthogonal mechanisms, allows much better security. Someone would have to tamper with both processes, and get them exactly the same, or an investigation would ensue.
sigs, as if you care.
Yes, verfiable backups are good.
But this whole thing about needing a "paper trail" is a bit political and a bit insane.
Are they really saying that if we print out on paper, or punchcards or punch tape then that is safer or more reliable than backing up to a hard drive and/or CD and/or DVD.
Some people are minds are thinking 50 years ago.
many states only allow for recounts if an election is extremely close
Every time I'm reminded of this fact, I just shake my head in wonder. It has got to be one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of. The argument seems to be that, if an election isn't close, fraud couldn't have effected the outcome--which is exactly the opposite of the truth.
Don't believe me? Consider two case, both using touch screen voting machines: in one, one randomly selected million people vote on the ballot issue "Coke vs. Pepsi," and the outcome is a 49% / 49% split. In the second case, all but sixty eight of them vote "Pepsi", with sixty eight abstentions.
Now ask yourself: in which case would you suspect that the voting machines or tabulators or something had been rigged?
--MarkusQ
P.S. A much better test would be mandatory recount if the results differ from the exit polls by more than a small amount.
"There is a very sizable - and often very vocal - minority who wouldn't know a good thought process if it smashed them in the face"
...and the more the programmer/analysts would defend it, the more it would make you suspicious about what they're trying to pull. Because you don't have to be a Knuth, Schulman, Appleman, or Berners-Lee to see it.
Maybe.
But in this case, it doesn't pass muster.
I do computer stuff for a living and if analyst came forward with a business process to handle credit card authorizations that simply authorized it with no audit trail and no means to verify anything about that authorization, you'd reject the design out of hand. You wouldn't even need to see the program specs, or source code or anything to know it's a bad design. You don't even have to ask a lot of questions. It's just a bad design.
So when Diebold has a system that raises questions *with everyone who sees it* and won't answer those questions, then it raises concerns about not only their veracity, but their motive.
And given the results of the 2000 presidential election and Diebold's refusal to address legitimate concerns leads to some very uncomfortable questions about their motives. The best case scenario is that Diebold's software engineers are incompetent. That's the best case.
SO I appreciate that there is a vocal minority who would trash anything, however, this isn't a minority of people questioning Diebold. Virtually everyone with a technical and business background is questioning these systems. And Diebold is noticably silent.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
At the next meeting of the local Teacher's Union
"Okay people, lets have your vote ID so we can make sure you voted for the right candidates"
Right outside the polling place:
"Okay give me your vote ID, if you voted the right way, we will have your payment mailed to you after verification"
In a dark alley:
"Hey a vote ID - if our victim voted for the right person, we let em go less their money, but if they voted wrong, we express our opinion foreceully and in a permanemt fashion"
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
Here's a link to a programmer who was hired to actually develop vote fraud software. He quit after awhile and turned whistleblower, and he's being ignored by the mainstream media and the government prosecutors. This case has ties to the abramhoff lobbyist scandal, chinese spies, and the bushes. He is now running for congress in florida against the crooked Rep he wants to replace. I've listened to him being interviewed on the radio, this is a HELLUVA case he has.
http://www.clintcurtis.com/issues.html#votefraud
Just so everyone can follow along with by jmorris42 (1458)'s rant:
a sed
p press+turnout
Democrats traditionally have lots of dead people vote for them
http://www.google.com/search?q=vote+democrat+dece
Republicans traditionally try to suppress voter turnout.
http://www.google.com/search?q=vote+republican+su
Third Party Candidates...
Vote early and vote often?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
You are pretty much correct in your assessment of the Democratic machines of the last 100 years or so. There are examples of on both sides of the aisle though and this could easily degenrate into a nasty pointless flogging of both parties.
I think you're missing the point. This isn't about partisan loyalties, it's about trust in the electorial process. Once the voters lose faith in the system they become disinfranchised and, if the situation continues, open to other, less pacifistic ways to solve their governmental issues.
Once trust is lost you risk chaos. Diebold hasn't done a good job on gaining anyones trust in their products, by any definition I can think of. Trusting them with elections, however true their intent, isn't something I'm willing to do right now. Maybe in the future, but a lot of work will have to be done between now and then.
When I'm feeling down, I like to whistle. It makes the neighbor's dog run to the end of his chain and gag himself.
This is hardly a troll.
Optical scanner machines are a huge part of the problem, as is the central tabulator these scanners feed. They both are wide open for hacking and vote fixing.
Here's an article on how the optical scan machines can be hacked:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0505/S00381.htm
http://www.gwinnettdailypost.com/index.php?s=&url_ channel_id=32&url_article_id=12538&url_subchannel_ id=&change_well_id=2
One step closer...
--Chemguru
I think verifiable backups are good too. My concept for a good electronic voting system would include a public database which shows every vote cast, indexed by anonymous voter code. Every voter would get a paper receipt for their vote, which would allow them to "look up" their individual vote at the official results site. However, I don't think this will happen because so many people are hung up on the idea of votes being "secret". If results were public, and everybody got a receipt for their vote, then it would be that much easier for elections to be "bought". But hey, transparancy is a double-edged sword. If a new law needs to be passed which makes it illegal to outrightly buy (or sell) votes, let it be so. (-As if pork isn't the same thing.)
In an effort to boost my karma by mimicking those statements most likely to be positively moderated, I hereby present the following post:
"Well, it looks like the Republicans aren't going to win Maryland this year!"
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Why does everyone in Washington seem to think that machines are needed to eliminate paper entirely?
There are two reasons to use mechanical/electronic/automatic voting machines:
1. Accessibility. Voting machines allow people with poor eyesight, who can't read, or speak a different language to vote properly. The machine will check for over- or under-votes before the vote is submitted, it can increase text size, and it could even read the directions out loud into a pair of headphones, in a variety of languages.
2. Counting speed. The vote counts can be completed the moment the polls close, keeping the media happy.
Neither of these two reasons necessitate eliminating paper entirely.
Here's how I envision an electronic voting system:
The voter walks up to a touch screen which takes them through the voting process. They get assistance if they need it (see point #1 above).
When the voter is finished, the machine prints out a page from an attached printer, perhaps onto specially watermarked paper. The printout includes a brief listing of who was voted for in each election in plain text so the voter can verify, and there is a bar code on the back of the page which encodes all that information. The voter signs by the plain text vote, folds the paper to hide the plain text votes and signature, and seals the vote with an official sticker. Then a polling place volunteer scans the bar code into the computer and drops the sealed ballot into the locked ballot box.
In the event of a recount, the pages are all bar code scanned again in an official process. If further recounts are needed after that, the seals can be broken and the votes tabulated using the plain text. Obviously, calling for the breaking of vote seals ends the anonymity of the vote, and as such should be treated with great care by the election officials and only used in the most extraordinary circumstances. If the race is so close that votes need to be verified by hand, the need to break the seals should outweigh voter anonymity.
All the code should be open source, of course, to be sure that the barcodes are actually encoding the proper information, and to maintain transparency in the entire process. Any company that refuses to submit to code review or open the code to the public should not be trusted with such an important task. Would you trust a contractor who builds your house but refuses to show you the blueprints or have a structural engineer review them?
But my point is that paper is crucial to the process. It is currently the only way to ensure recountability and anonymity at the same time. Sure, there's opportunity for fraud, as there is in any process, but this limits the opportunity for *automated* fraud.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
Steven Heller, the guy blowing the whistle on Diebold's voterigging crimes is now being persecuted in court with felony charges. Aphor's diary has details of his legal defense. Including an easy way to do something about it: donate a little money to protect his rights, and your right to vote freely.
--
make install -not war
Here's the rest of the ad campaign. Or this.
Exit polls have always been VERY accurate in predicting the vote outcome, as there is no reason for people to lie about who they just voted for.. but *for some reason* in Ohio this last Pres. election the exit polls were way off.. and that state was fully electronic, using machines by Diebold where the President of the company said he would "deliver Ohio" to President Bush.. and there was no paper trail.
I'm not saying there is a conspiracy here, but in a situation like that where the exit polls were very different from the outcome, you could order a recount of the paper ballots. It's VERY hard to tamper with millions of paper ballots.
Nice FUD.
Paper ballots, even if "spoiled" by abuse after votes are cast on them, still offer lots of evidence. Evidence of the choice of the voter. And evidence of the crime of whoever abused them.
Digital ballots leave no evidence. Hence the much higher risk that they will be abused, and votes rigged by (ab)using them. They're also much cheaper and easier to rig on a large scale, with fewer accomplices. Without physical records, like cheap, familiar, reliable paper, they're worse than useless.
"TIRED OF DIEBOLD BEING A WHIPPING BOY"? What the hell is wrong with you? How about getting Diebold out of the (almost never applied) "whipping seat" by stopping them from rigging elections? You're in Ohio, where the latest count of disenfranchised 2004 voters is over 308,000, where Cuyahoga (Cleveland) County is still indicting criminal poll workers 15 months after the election. Of all of America, Ohioans should be demanding justice for Diebold's crimes. But instead, you're rooting for the "home team", which is screwing all of us. Let me guess who you voted for in the last few elections...
Paper ballots can be mechanically printed for inspection by the voter before it's collected. Extra technology, like video surveillance, can reduce vote fraud even more. Just because you live in Ohio, home of Diebold, doesn't mean you have to be so ignorant about how to count ballots. Or insist that criminal voterigging be ignored just because it happens so much.
--
make install -not war
As anyone who reads the news knows, this company is a total fraud.
However, I still think the idea of an electronic voting machine has potential. Why not simply design some sort of open-source based system (easy to audit) that was made to work accross a plethora of manufacturer equipment (thy name is Linux). This would open the market to more competition, more scrutiny.
Furthermore, I think generating a paper copy or "receipt" for both VOTER and ELECTORATE just makes sense. With all the money spent redesigning currenly in the past few years, I have to think that this technology exists. No, not perfect. But what is?
Call me crazy, but I think a properly implemented electronic voting machine could serve to *decrease* voter fraud.
Math is math. Regular expression is regular expression. The tools are there. The future is now.
It's because this country has been taken over in a stealth coup. They need to have "elections" continue to maintain the charade of an elected government and to keep the plotters in power. The old way was too hard to rig in huge numbers, the new computerised way is ridculously easy to rig to give any results you want. It's been mandated by the Feds, ie, mostly the coup plotters. At the top levels, it involves both so called "Dems" and "Repubs", that is why after the last election you saw that sniveling skull and bones millionaire weasel Kerry turn tail and run away as fast as he could and why the top "leadership" of the Dems was so utterly silent on the obvious election fraud, yet the grassroots and a lot of the midlevel functionaries were highly suspicious, as well they should be, along with the third party gents, the real big loses with computerised con voting..
The grassroots Ds and Rs activists simply can't and won't believe they have been completely conned and that their leadership is corrupt and has nothing whatsoever in common with their "supporters" other than a political drama elaborate charade. it is just hilarious really to watch it go down.
Really, it is no different from some tinpot dictatorship where badguy supremeo gets 99% of the vote..We all know it is a crock. Faced with the glaringly obvious conjob that computerised elections resulted in, along with the two for one "party" conjob, the US people HAVE to just eat it, because there is no credible alternative short of outright revolt, and they have enough military and police who would be perfectly content to lay waste to huge numbers of people based on a simple order to do so. And everyone knows this in the back of their mind, they have been terrorized into complete submission. Most of the cops and most of the military would be perfectly fine with following any order they are given. There aren't enough of them willing to say "no" to heinous orders to matter any longer. I know several older cops, and a lot more older vets, most have told me this and it is what I also noticed. The ones they have in now just don't care, and aren't old enough to even have a memory of what even a half free nation is supposed to be like, no clue at all, nothing.
Anyway, this is how dictatorships stay in power, the so called civilian leaders order around the paramilitary police and the soldiers. It happens all over the planet for millenia, there is absolutely nothing special at all about the US when it comes to this common human trait and autocratic social structure. The police and military are there first and foremost to keep the autocrats in power.. This in their hearts the US people know, that's why they eat it, then eat it, then eat it again as things continually get worse and worse, because there isn't a damn thing you can do about it. Not one damn thing. Nothing practical. What most do is try and embrace the autocrats so nothing bad happens "to them", because they are OK with it happening to "the other guys" party/religion/race, it doesn't matter. "With us, or against us" is the phrase used.
The bottom line is, no dictatorship ever got "voted" out of office. And no dictatorship ever got in without murder, fraud, election shenanigans, terrorism, compromised media, corrupt judiciary, etc, whatever it took at the time. Different recipes all baked a similar cake there.
And the government is never going to "bust" itself for extreme high crimes and misdemeanors. That just isn't going to happen. And the population numbers aren't yet high enough with those who fully understand that we no longer have an honestly elected government, they still think "it's not that bad" and are still mostly trapped in that complete con of "D vs R". Really, the median of political thought in the US can be summed up by Limbaugh and Franken, and that's it, low IQ chronic liars as political heros, and the politicians go downhill from there.
MOST of them will still think it is "not that bad" once they are being herded in
"If results were public, and everybody got a receipt for their vote, then it would be that much easier for elections to be 'bought'".
Which is why voting receipts cannot be given in general. votes would be sold whether legal or not.
I don't think anyone is seriously asking for vote reciepts. that is more of the view of the mis-informed public of how paper would fit into voting.
Ignoring the we-need-paper-trail histeria, What exactly is the purpose of the paper in this system?
Paper is not a relieable backup mechanism, whether centralized or handed out to voters, for latter re-tally.
Paper receipts printed by the voting machine can be falsified as easily as the votes themselves. I press the button for candidate JK, the machine prints out a receipt indicating that I voted for candidate JK, but in fact it records that I voted for candidate GWB. So what the hell good is a paper trail or a receipt?
That's bad.
Recounts are done only in the case of very close elections, perhaps with a vote difference of one percent or less. With an all-electronic system, of course you'll get the same number every time a "recount" is performed. Maybe with scanned ballots you'll get some slight differences (dirty machine? smudged ink?).
But consider a fraudulent voting system that allocates one vote cast for candidate JK out of every five instead to candidate GWB. This happens silently, in the machine. If the number of these fraudulent votes pushes candidate GWB's total over the recount threshold, then there's no recount and also there's no way of ever knowing that this took place.
That's Real Bad.
While it can be argued that the potential for fraud exists with hand counts, it's possible to minimize it by allowing representatives from all parties participate in and oversee the process of counting hand ballots. Ballots and counts can be challenged and verified or disqualified at the precinct level. Yes, it will take time to count the votes by hand. But the Consitution does not say that we must have the vote tallied before we go to bed on Election Night! So it takes a couple of weeks. That's fine. Democracy won't die from waiting. But it WILL die from fraudulent voting.
"receipt is kept by election officials to act as backup"
Does anyone backup their computer using printer dumps (to reciepts or paper), or punch cards (or punch tape)?
Why is this being discussed?
My preferred system would be to have:
That would give you a very high level of assurance, because you're not relying on one single path being free of corruption. It's not "perfect" in that if there is an error, you cannot know which path was the path that created that error. In order to have a failsafe system, you need 2/3rds + 1 of the paths to be trustable. (It's just a variation of the Byzantine General's Problem.) You need three wholly independent paths, then, as an absolute minimum just to have a chance of having a reliable system.
But all the reliability in the world for the voting system is useless if insufficient people vote. I would argue that 75% of the registered voters (or 50% of the population, whichever was greater) would probably be a reasonable minimum. If the minimum isn't reached, the polling stations should be kept open until the end of the day in which the minimum IS satisfied.
(In neither case is a person obligated to vote - democracy implies the choice to not vote. However, as non-voting is a choice made as part of the election, it should be recognized, not ignored as a passive "whatever".)
Oh, and all ballots should have the option "Re-Open For Nominations" as a choice. If this choice wins, the election should be abandoned and re-held, with the last round of candidates barred from standing in the re-run.
Such an overhaul of the system would unquestionably be detested and despised by most of the politicians, you'd be really hard-pressed to get the volunteers necessary, and it's unclear how voters would take to being held utterly responsible for their conduct.
(At present, many voters regard US elections as a senseless game with no meaning and no real consequence. They also regard politicians as corrupt, but have no interest in that corruption being eliminated. As all politicians are deemed corrupt, nobody really cares who wins. Politicians can rig ballots with impunity because it's expected of them. Only the corrupt become politicians because that's how the game is defined. They don't care, because they know apathy will guarantee them job security. The cure, then, would be to ensure that apathy guarantees nothing.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Does anybody else have any questions about how trustworthy Diebold is?
GodWasAnAlien wrote: Which is why voting receipts cannot be given in general. votes would be sold whether legal or not. Would it truly be the end of democracy for individuals to be able to prove their vote? If the voting public can't be trusted not to squander their ballot, perhaps the whole idea of democracy needs reconsideration. An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought. Simon Cameron US financier & politician (1799 - 1889)
Every time this issue comes up I wonder why we don't use pen and paper and count by hand. Make the office a duty incumbent upon the citizens. With a couple dozen counters per precinct I don't see how it could take longer than a few hours.
"Would it truly be the end of democracy for individuals to be able to prove their vote"
Perhaps not, though it could lead to some corruption.
But, I am not really seeing what is gained by such a system.
If the your vote was wrong. There is really nothing you could do about it. Your "anonymous voter-code" is anonymous, so you cannot prove that was you, or you found it on the street. And you cannot prove who you intended to vote for.
I suppose you could complain, and the number of complaints could help calculate a loose voting error statistic.
"stopping them from rigging elections.... Let me guess who you voted for"
Did it really matter who was voted for ?
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
If you haven't noticed the difference since Bush took over, or don't remember the difference when Bush Sr ran things, there's no point explaining it to you. Trust me - it matters.
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There is also the very real potential for influencing the outcome of an election using purely electronic voting by simply causing a power outage in the areas where the population is not likely to vote the way that you want.
Actually, I think the best way to throw an election would be to cause the power outage in an area that would normally vote in a desirable manner, while at the same time doing something more insidious in a difficult area... The power outage would make the other party look bad and rile up the public against them, while providing a distraction about the real thing.
The printout includes a brief listing of who was voted for in each election in plain text so the voter can verify, and there is a bar code on the back of the page which encodes all that information.
You're introducing essentially the same problem as before (the human cannot verify the vote actually being sent...unless that human understands bar codes).
If you absolutely have to have a printer in the process (aside from pork barrel politics to feed money like people to Diebold, I don't see the necessity), the printer should just print a dot by the candidate being voted for. The vote should never *ever* leave the voting booth, be it by electrons or paper, without being verifiable by the voter.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
The reason is because in the U.S. there are a large number of (a) idiots and (b) immigrants who unfailingly spoil paper ballots in mind-blowing numbers by overvoting, making ambiguous marks, and numerous other creative modes of spoilage.
Or the GOP just doesn't like having a President that's a lame duck because his win is within the margin of contestable votes.
I suspect that the real underlying goal (which nobody wants to admit to) is to have *binary* output coming out of the voting booth. It doesn't really matter whether it's A or B, just that it *can't* have any possibility of being counted as anything other than A or B.
From the voter's standpoint, this is a load of horseshit and doesn't matter to him. It doesn't do anything to increase the speed or accuracy of the election, and it feeds lots of money to people like Diebold.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
"SO I appreciate that there is a vocal minority who would trash anything, however, this isn't a minority of people questioning Diebold. Virtually everyone with a technical and business background is questioning these systems. And Diebold is noticably silent."
Well put, I have been doing "computer stuff" for a long time, I and many of my old-fart co-workers can smell Diebolds design all the way from Australia. The key to fair elections is not found in technology, satisfying the majority of election observers is the best defence against fraud. Judging from the simple google search Diebold is doing the opposite by not providing an audit trail. The fact that I didn't even mention Diebold in the search only enforces the notion that the paperless design is not trusted by anyone who has a clue.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I've also been using computers for over two decades now. The machines we used in the last election were totally counterintuitive. I'm glad they are going back to paper.
In the UK we call this the Shy Tory Factor. People who are voting for 'selfish' purposes such as lower taxes are less likely to answer pollsters' questions than those voting for more noble reasons. The vote share for the Conservatives over here is often several percent more than exit polls would predict.
Can't believe Americans had 2 full elections with these things. Votes were tampered with right under their noses and the best the country could do was with mammoth slowness, carry out preliminary investigate and then ignore them.
Read http://www.hermes-press.com/criminal_vote2.htm
In 2004, the first news about the presidential election was reassuring. Mainstream reporters, apparently sending their dispatches from lunar outposts, said the election had gone smoothly. Earth-dwellers experienced a very different reality. From coast to coast, came complaints of voter intimidation, erratic machines, and crazy numbers.
The morning after the 2004 presidential election was eerily similar to the morning after the 2000 presidential election. All the well-founded predictions that George W. Bush would lose went out the window, and he was once again,
by some sleight-of-hand, installed in the office previously awarded to him by the Supreme Court. Something was seriously wrong. There were questions, not all of them from Democrats, but the American press ignored them.
Theres 30 more pages..........
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Random comparison of a sample of machines votes against paper audit trail votes is how you detect the fraud. So even then, the paper trail is necessary.
how much have you read about diebold and their business methods?
I live just minutes from Diebold's world headquarters in North Canton, OH. They have offices all over this area and employ about 2000 people in the Canton/North Canton area - not bad for a smallish area.
Diebold has been in existence for nearly 150 years. They started out making safes, vaults, etc. Then back in the 1960's Diebold began making Automated Teller Machines. For almost 150 years Diebold has been a solid company with a decent repuation. They've always been well respected in this area.
Then they decide to acquire a company that makes voting machines.
At the time, Wally O'Dell, then CEO, was a loud-mouth, speak-before-you-think Republican who dabbled way too much in politics. He contributed $2000 to George W. Bush's reelection campaign (Diebold has since forbade any executives from making political contributions thanks to Wally). He pretty much made Diebold a target that everyone likes to shoot at.
Now here's the fascinating part: According to the FY 2004 Annual report, Diebold Election Systems, a division of Diebold North America, contributed less than 4% to the company's annual earnings.
3.7% of their total business is causing them immeasurable grief.
Now, that's fascinating.
There was an article in our local newspaper last Sunday about Tom Swidarski, the new CEO, and Diebold in general. Of course, the paper asked him about the election systems fiasco and O'Dell's political contributions. Swidarski said "The issue of politics... is very different than the other businesses we're in, and so I have to determine if we can handle that aspect of it."
Diebold makes some fine ATM and security equipment. They do an impressive business with their services. A former CEO with strong political ties made the decision to acquire an Election Systems manufacturer. What a bad move.
I wouldn't be too suprised if Diebold divests and/or sells off the ES company altogether. It'd be a smart move.
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
They have Faster Than Light travel, but on Battlestar Galactica (in the season finale), they voted for the president using hand-counted paper ballots! Even Galactica can't get secure e-voting...
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
"as there is no reason for people to lie about who they just voted for"
Then why have secret ballots to begin with?
Personally, I have yet to meet one, but I believe it is my civic duty to lie to exit pollsters. Aside from the fact that I'm not there to help them with their story and make money (especially if I'm not going to get a cut), I believe they set a bad example by demanding information that's been designed to be about as personal and private as you can get. It'd be less intrusive if they asked people who had just voted what their Social Security Numbers were.
This is exactly what I think is happening with these exit polls. It is not fraud.
Lets say for instance that 2% of all Bush voters feel guilty about it and claim they voted for Kerry, while there are no other lies on the exit polls.
In Texas with (I don't know, lets guess) 75% for Bush, the exit polls would then say 73.5% for Bush. Everybody looks at this and says it is well within any error. In California (again with a guess number) 75% for Kerry, the exit polls say 75.5% for Kerry, again well within any error. But in Ohio, with it 50.5% for Bush, the exit polls say it is 49.5% for Bush and 50.5 for Kerry, and the exit polls now disagree!
Even though the error is consistent all across the country, nobody will think there is anything wrong except in Ohio. It seems amplified in the close states, making it look like there is some kind of planned fraud in the close states.
I'm surprised at the cost alone. $16 mil for paper systems, $90 mil for electronic? Something is missing in that article...
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Mark X on Paper.....
And one of the secrets to why that works so well is that you only mark one X for most elections.
The X on paper doesn't scale well if there's more X's. In a New England state like Connecticut it could work because people there may only vote for 5-8 items/offices in even the biggest elections.
In Franklin County, Ohio, during the 2004 election, we voted for 57 different offices, tax authorizations, city/county and state referenda. (Which is also why we had 3 hour lines to vote.) With nearly 600,000 ballots, the combinations and counting become very complex. There's no easy way of creating a hand count system for such a large ballot (whereas you can create a hand count system for a small ballot that scales up to the size of the ballots used.)
Yes, we keep it easy for Federal and Provincial elections. We only pick an MP or MLA so there's only one X to mark on the ballot.
However, our civic elections are huge - at least in the big cities. In Vancouver, we've got the mayor, 10 city councillors, parks and school boards, and about half a dozen "referendum" (more like spending approvals than true referendums). Maybe 30 votes in all. We've been using paper ballots with electronic scanners for years. Paper trail, fast counts, etc. Really, voting technology isn't rocket science....
That's because putting a Republican in as governor would have otherwise been impossible in a Democrat stronghold like MD.
The text of the bill (1,2) also indicates that random manual recounts will be required to compare the computer tabulation with the paper record. The bill has the public support of the governor, but has not passed the senate.
m
d f
The bill's main points:
* Requires paper trail
* Requires manual recounts of 5% of ballots, selected randomly.
* Prohibits use of a specific Diebold system in 2006.
* Requires use of a an 'optical scan system' (type unspecified) in 2006
The bill could still die in the senate. The last two points are
expensive and controversial; they were added as amendments before the
bill passed on Thursday. Those amendments also converted the bill to
an emergency measure, which requires 3/5 of each house to pass.
(1) Current status in the Maryland Senate: http://mlis.state.md.us/2006rs/billfile/hb0244.ht
(2) Text of bill: http://mlis.state.md.us/2006rs/bills/hb/hb0244t.p
First off: "Why does it surprise anybody he'd run as a democrat?"
It's not; however, it not being a surprise does not change my opposition to it.
"It's not as if there's any substantive difference between the two parties. Oh, maybe abortion, but other than that it's all the same."
There is quite a bit of truth to this. Both parties, on the federal level have been taken over by Straussians, the Neoconservative and Neoliberal movements. Both have the same goal, namely economic domination, and similar methods for attaining it, including intrusive government. And, both are very effective at whipping the liberal and conservative portions of both parties into fighting amoungst themselves. The only other power of significance is the Christian theocratic movement, which mostly acts as a weapon rather than as a leader. Abortion is just a wedge issue to keep us peons arguing amongst ourselves, although it looks like the Christian theocrats may be starting to make some progress (for them anyway) on the issue.
"Make politicians wear sponsor patches like race car drivers and it'd be immediately obvious why this is so..."
This is why usually the first thing I do when I research candidates is to go look at the FEC data on opensecrets.org. I can usually get a pretty good feel for how the votes will go. However, I do wish there was an easier way to pierce the veil of PAC donations and corporate ownership. Those PACs can simply just be slush funds for laundering in money beyond the $2000 limit, or from less than likeable donors. And, sometimes those corporations are either owned by other corporations that are of interest, or by foriegn governments, where a conflict of interest may occur.
And finally:
"Government IS the problem."
Saying government is the problem is like saying guns are the problem. Government is merely a system for getting large projects done in an organized manor, without the need for an individual profit motive. It allows for things to be done that are impractacle on the individual level, unprofitable on the corporate level, and/or security sensative on a large scale. Let corrupt, incompetent people, out only to get thiers so screw everyone else run the government and you get a government that is corrupt, incompetent, and is out only to make itself more powerful, screw everyone else.
That being said, the more powerful a government, the more likely it will be abusive, as the power of the position will attract the corrupt and the corruptable. The government that is best is the one that governs least, and still performs the functions neccessary keep the nation running well.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Moderation 0
50% Insightful
50% Troll
No point explaining reality to Anonymous Bush TrollMods who haven't learned a thing in the past 5 nightmare years.
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make install -not war
That Diebold machines are used anywhere in this country, after what happened in California, speaks volumes about just how far through the looking glass we are.