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Company to Pay for Election Problems
technoid_ writes to tell us the Indiana Star reports that Election Systems & Software has agreed to pay the Indiana State Government $245,000 in addition to extra hand-on and technical support in response to problems during the May primary. From the article: "The company, which has faced similar complaints in other states, reached a settlement with Arkansas officials Monday. In that deal, ES&S pledged services, training materials and technical support but offered no payment. Jackson, the Johnson County clerk, said the company "has done a 360" since the primary. ES&S officials have been more assertive in preparing for the fall elections. The instructional materials, she said, also will help."
Only $245,000 to rig an election? Sounds cheap to me.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
to take certain angle analagies too far:
doing a 90 = taking the first reaction to any situation, be it the best or worst reaction
doing a 270 = taking the last reaction to any situation, be it the best or worst reaction
doing a 540 (thats 360+180;) = taking the opposite position after first taking the same stupid position a second time
I think Jackson meant a 180 but is bad at geometry.
° doesn't seem to work here
Man, you really need that seminar!
Why is anyone legitimately interested in a "paperless" election? I can see more electronics and other such things, but PAPERLESS?
Certainly this company still made money off of the elections, but am I wrong to conclude that there was a lot more to this then meets the eye?
Having ordered more software titles then I can count (with accompanying hardware) for student information tracking, transcripts, test-scoring, etc, it's an all too common occurance for a company to deliver and install the software and leave the ultimate setup and performance up to in-house staff.
It would seem that this system was 1) rushed into production, 2) the victim of mainstaying (the state won't change their process to accomodate the software, they want the software to accommodate the state's past methods), and 3) the company was completely ill-equipped to handle support in cruch-time.
If you ask me the only, solution is open-source voting machines so any company can provide support, documentation is available nationally, and voters can have confidence not only in the process, but also in what's happening "under the hood" as well.
If you're half as beautiful naked, you'd be 4 times as beautiful with twice as many clothes on.
Enough of this crap with broken/complex/rigged election devices. Let's just go back to paper, pencil and handcounting. It's cheap, fairly reliable, and leaves lots of evidence when tampered. Let the news media rely on exit polls for immediate results (after polls close nationwide). They're more accurate than the official results, anyway.
--
make install -not war
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
There is a better solution than the current methods, in my opinion. Part of the solution is good training. Perhaps when the voter registration and voter cards go out, a mini-DVD could come with it, so people can watch a video of how the voting process works. There would also be written material. Furthermore, the voting machines themselves would talk interactively, with written instructions as well, to make the system as foolproof as possible.
It would work like this: You go into the voting booth. Each candidate or proposition that you vote for would appear one at a time on a display screen. As you vote for each item, it will tell you to confirm that this is the vote you intended to make. At the end of this process, a screen containing all your votes would appear, giving you a final chance to validate everything or go back to fix a mistake. Then, as you accept the vote, a printed paper ballot would be printed with the appropriate vote information, and you would be able to view it through a thick glass window, to make sure that what's printed on the paper matches what you voted for on the screen. This is the final time to make changes - choose to make a change and the ballot is visibly shredded and you get to try again. Choose to accept and the ballot is visibly inserted into a voting box.
The computer system would keep track of all the votes, with results available immediately. The ballots would be counted by hand in the following days or weeks, as before, so as to verify the system's results. This would be foolproof.
A government department actually got some money back from an IT supplier that screwed up? Why isn't it standard for this to happen, instead of taxpayers always picking up the bill for projects that never work properly and go overbudget?
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
Wow - a private company that makes a mistake. Gwarsh, I thought only liberal run goverments do that.
Come to think of it, that's the difference between Democrats and Republicans: Republicans outsource their failures.
Yeah, they need to make sure the 'right' candidate is elected.
Really incorrect. There's a considerable amount of progressives in the ownership as well - in fact, in Omaha (which is a pretty balanced city with a slight conservative feel, though we have a Democratic mayor and keep re-electing Ben Nelson for Senate who will almost certainly be re-elected again) some of these folks are very visible supporters of our Democratic candidates.
Actually most of ES&S's problems are due to incompetence, not politics. I've had friends and associates work there and was contacted pretty recently regarding a contractor position. It wasn't my area of specialization - information security is - and I declined, but knew they really needed a lot of help there and suggested they consider engaging me for additional assistance there. They tend to think a Security+ certification indicates expertise, and worse yet, explained that they really didn't need to do internal audits and pay a lot of attention to the security of the system because "we expect our technology vendors to do that for us." Vendors, as in Microsoft who supplies their OS.
Do you think Microsoft would step up and take the fall for these systems as part of that XP Pro license? ES&S really does not have a reputation for understanding their responsibility. It's very much a "tell the programmers to go invent great code" kind of shop with no controls. In Omaha, they're sort of regarded as a dead end programming job, and as I learned, they don't even think they need any change in how they handle information security.
After I was shocked about their complacent attitude, I asked a higher up why they wouldn't consider taking a proactive approach and beat the competition with a more secure platform - something Diebold is completely at risk for? They said that all they needed for their customers was a SAS-70 (a statement by a CPA that everything is OK) and until they were required to do more, they wouldn't.
So if you ever are involved with purchasing these things, look past the marketing fluff. People that buy insecure systems should also be held responsible.