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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 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.
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
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
You, the voter, don't get to keep the receipt. What happens is that you get to see is whether the machine voted for you as you wanted, and then that receipt is kept by election officials to act as backup in case the electronic count fails in some way. Then the receipts are used to recount the election. Because you can't read the machine directly with your eyes, if there is any question as to the tally produced by the machine, the paper receipts can be used to recount. Yes, there has always been fraud, and paper can be compromised, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be doing better when adopting new methods and better procedures for securing the ballots. The idea that the tally is correct because the machine says so is a myth: "It must be right because the computer says so!" Diebold has consistently denied that their computers could fail and that a backup method for recounts was needed.
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.
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.
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.
But many states have laws saying that a vote recount can _only_ be done if the votes are within 1-2 percentage points. So they can rig the machines to make sure it's 3 or 4% in their candidates favour and any recount would be illegal.. and your paper receipt is hopelessly lost in the void.
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.
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.
North Carolina has gone a bit further and now requires a percentage of random hand recounts to verify the system is working correctly. This provides a check on not just the voting machines, but on the tabulating equipment, which could also be tampered with.
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
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
This is a good countermeasure against massive fraud - as long as there is a paper trail to recount. Hopefully other states have a similar provision in the election laws - be wary if your state is trying to get rid of this provision.
I'm not a Troll, it's reverse psychology.