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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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The most ironic thing is, the politicians saying the voting machines were untrustworthy.
Ironing 101
Allow Diebold voting machines? [ Yes ] [ Yes ] [ Yes ]
(later) "...well, what do you know, due to a horrible software misconfiguration everyone's voted against the machines!"
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
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
The big question is, did they use Diebold machines to count the votes? *ducks*
Well, if they did I'd call it a new world record in incompetence when it comes to vote tampering...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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)
This is further proof that Republicans are intolerant. They obviously think that people shouldn't be allowed to vote, just because they are dead.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.