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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.'"
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.
With a Scantron style system, at least you can go back and count the ballots by hand.
The electronic scanning simply speeds up the process.
I ain't evil, I'm just good looking.
There is a bigger potential for covering up fraud with an electronic machine. If a paper ballot is tampered with (or gets rained on, or something else happens to it) it is noticable. The paper will show some sign. With an electronic ballot, you can tamper with the ballots and leave no sign.
It's not that we need the ballots to be impossible to tamper with. It is that we need to know when they have been tampered with.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
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
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.
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.
Since you cannot audit the process, the answer seems to be "yes".
True. That does not excuse rectifiable problems with successor systems.
From my reading the vendors of these systems there is no effort to
close the holes, only "trust us".
emt 377 emt 4
FURTHERMORE, I'm a strong believer that touch screen systems should only exist to produce a filled out, printed ballot that is then processed by conventional means. The goal here should be to increase the accuracy of the vote, not the speed. Government can wait - I'd rather have it done right than done fast.
I think groupthink in this case is exactly the point - the voters don't want Diebold machines counting their votes. Diebold has taken virtually no action to reassure the public that everything is legit - they could release their source code, for example.
I've seen plenty of pro-Microsoft and pro-Diebold posts get modded up. All you have to do is have a clear point, and show it. You didn't manage that. You said the fraud happens, and it doesn't make a difference if we can trace it or not.
It does make a difference. With a punch card, or a paper ballot, or even a mechanical voting both anyone can trace when fraud has occured. And in those cases we implement some security, track where the fraud came from (if we can) and redo the election.
With the current generation of electronic voting machines, we can't do that. I don't care who makes a good machine, but Diebold hasn't made one. And they've defended that design as if they think it is a good machine. Geeks don't like people who pretend a bad design is a good design. We'll tear into them. If they routinely defend bad design by saying it is good design and overlooking what we think are obvious flaws we'll notice, and start to expect that. Until they change, a group that decides who they like on the technical ability of a company won't like them. They are lying about their technical quality; at least in our eyes.
This group respects and admires good thought processes. Neither you nor Diebold are showing them at the moment.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
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.
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.
We are really advanced here in Canada....
1. Paper
2. Pencil
Mark X on Paper.....
No major screwups though......
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.
"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