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Diebold Flops in Alaska
lukej writes "From the Anchorage Daily News, During yesterday's preliminary and ballot measure election across Alaska, Diebold built voting machines failed to 'phone home' causing a hand recount. As a party spokesperson said:
"I can say there are many systematic problems with Diebold machines that have been identified in many contexts."
Additionally, the state itself has mandated some hand counts of all electronic results, and the Democratic Party is simply suggesting voters request paper voting."
Ted Stevens is a class 2 Senator and will not be up for re-election until 2008.
Though in fairness, their ATMs have had just as many problems, but luckily ATMs dont completely undermine democracy. worm infections media player hack. Great idea to use windows XP (embedded) on an ATM...
Warhammer forums
Just a personal experience, but Diebold ATMs have never failed to dispense cash or record deposits of mine. Those other problems are at least partly at the fault of the bank who installed the machines.
The only thing that will effect Teddy Bear's chances of re-election will be death. The Democrats here in Alaska sometimes don't even bother running an opponent because there is literally no way Ted will be ousted -- he's done too much for the economy here, what with having been the (now former) head of the Senate Approprations Committee for 6 years. Sure, he's in bed with the oil industry, but if it wasn't for the oil industry, Alaska wouldn't be where it is today.
Interesting factoid: Uncle Ted is now the longest serving senator, making him president pro tempore. In other words, he is only two heartbeats away from being our president (of tubes)!
I'm part of the Open Voting Consortium and we've been proposing a system in which the voter uses a machine to produce a paper ballot. That ballot *is* the ballot, not some copy, not some receipt, but the actual ballot. And it isn't good until stuffed into a ballot box.
The paper ballot is the core - it's in a form and font easy for machine readers to read, but it can also be read by people.
Now, that vote-printer machine can be any machine that has an interface appropriate to the needs of the voter - such as audio driven for sight impaired voters. (A ballot reader would be available to do an audio readback.)
Our proposal is to do this, plus a canvassing system (that's the part that aggregates the precinct counts into the grand totals.)
And we feel that *all* code, and all machinery, should be inspectable and testable by anybody who wants to run a test (and they should be able to publish their test results.) That's one step short of full open source - which doesn't mean that the code couldn't also be open source under one of the licenses.
It is a mistake to think of these things as a software issue - it involves machines (even if they look and smell like PC's, although I personally tend to prefer smaller/lower power engines like the WRAP or Soekris machines) and procedures, lots and lots of procedures (like what to do if a voter walks out in the middle of casting his/her vote - there are laws that say what to do, and they, of course, vary from state to state and even county to county.)
But it is harder to do than one thinks - the machines themselves can't just be any old junk PC. They need to be robust in the face of voter use and tampering behind the scenes. And they need to have lots and lots of places where they can be locked-down (often using things as simple as lead-and-wire tamper seals) to prevent hanky-panky by warehouse or precinct people.
They need to be power-conserving (imagine a precinct with a single circuit breaker/fuse and a flakey or non-existant ground, and that the voting is occuring during a thunderstorm.) UPS's are a pain - they have a high failure rate and given that they often contain a lead-acid battery, are neither lightweight nor quite innocent should they leak. And it's important to keep the fire marshall happy.
And printers are a pure pain in the rear - they can draw a lot of power and are generally the most failure prone part of the system.
And there are lots of legal requirements - like protecting the privacy of the vote. You can, for example, potentially reconstruct which voter voted which way by looking at things like sequencial files used for audit/error-detection or for ballot tallies.
And the stuff has to be easily configurable en masse - counties tend to need hundreds, thousands of these things, and they better all be the same. And they need to be able to be transported by folks who aren't necessarily gentle and set up by people who make your grandmother look like a tech support wizard.
We were planning on doing a project to produce a reference model for such a system via the University of California (multi-campus project with UC Santa Cruz in the project lead position) but we got cut out of California's HAVA (Federal voting act) funding when the previous California Sect'y of State got caught up in a brouhaha on other matters. It's still worth doing - every state would benefit.
Speaking as a Euroweenie, I just don't understand the apparent apathy in the USA with regards to the very serious issues surrounding vote counting machines. In a democracy, could anything be more important than making sure that votes are counted correctly and fairly, with a transparent process that can be verified?
Have you seen this, for instance?
http://alternet.org/blogs/video/40755/
That was a computer programmer testifying (two years ago) that he'd been asked to write vote rigging software for the Ohio elections. What was the outcome of that? Was there a formal non-partisan enquiry into the elections in Ohio? Was there a huge public protest there? What am I missing?
Actually, he's the longest serving senator in the majority party. Robert Byrd is the longest serving senator. Sen. Byrd will become president pro tempore (assuming he is re-elected this fall) if the Democrats ever control the Senate.
Furthermore, for Ted Stevens to become president, Bush, Cheney, and Denny Hastert would all have to die or otherwise be unable to assume the presidency. Come to think of it, he is only two heartbeats away as Cheney doesn't really have a heart, but a sort of robotic device that keeps his oil^H^H^H blood flowing.
One American political party (the one who currently controls the country) likes Diebold voting machines and likes the CEO of Diebold.
An Aug. 14, 2003 fund-raising letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold sent to the Ohio Republican party said that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." The letter coincidentally went out the day before Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell (a Republican) was set to qualify Diebold as one of three firms eligible to sell upgraded electronic voting machines to Ohio counties in time for the 2004 election.
http://www.bradblog.com/DieboldContributions.htm
Darn, I just read the headline and thought this story was about the 2004 presidential election..
Diebold and the State of Alaska still hasn't released the data files that could show wtf really happened there.
http://www.bradblog.com/?cat=101
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What brought down WTC-7?
We've got it working here in brazil for ten years now. We were the first country in the world to have fully eletronic elections (since the year 2000). We also lend the machines to Paraguay and Ecuador, and currently have plans to start exporting the technology. On presidential election we can have the results within 12 hours, and in small towns, within a few minutes. BTW, it runs on Linux. Just my 2 cents :)
You are somewhat wrong, and somewhat right. There certainly is a government entity that choses the voting system, but it is the Department of Voting. In major metro areas (Such as the Cities of Anchorage, Juneau and Fairbanks in AK) or more rural counties (The rest of AK including where I will be soon residing) each department has different officials and different systems. Being an in-law to someone who is the president of the voting department (forget their official name) there is infinitely more than who contributes or who has the best product. My in-law (and his minions) spends at least a hundred hours a week looking at the plethora of different systems, performing tests, performing contract negotiations etc etc etc and then has to deal with the financial departments and administrative departments to get permission to perform semi-live tests or even go for public opinion on new systems. It's a bureaucratic nighmare, and a lot more job than most of us can imagine.
Erutangis ym si siht.