Slashdot Mirror
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."
how hard can it be? I could rig up a basic voting system in an afternoon and it would work "pretty good". A large company, on a multi-million-dollar contract, with years of work should be able to produce a flawless machine for something as simple as tallying some votes.
All I can say is, those secret election-rigging backdoors must take a lot of work, because what else have their developers been working on?
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Concern over the machines led the Alaska Legislature in 2005 to pass a law requiring a mandatory hand count of ballots in one randomly selected precinct in every election district.
Be interesting to hear about how those random hand counts compare to the machine tabulations.
By the way, it'd be nice if slashdotters took notice that a number of the failures were related to phone lines (probably people plugging them into the wrong jacks, digital lines, or lines requiring special dial-out numbers, etc.)
Last but not least:
The Diebold electronic voting machines nationwide have been criticized by voter groups and computer scientists who say they are vulnerable to fraud. Diebold has defended the machines, saying they are secure when elections officials follow proper procedures.
That's the whole point, Diebold: you shouldn't have to "follow proper procedures." The machines should make it impossible to do so, just like I punch a ballot, place it in a box, which is locked and sealed, and taken by police to the counting facility, etc. The current system requires a fair amount of work to interfere with; the Diebold machines seem to require a fair amount of work to NOT interfere with!
Please help metamoderate.
Our politicians are more interested in winning than preserving democracy.
Hence these voting machines.
In US money is more valuable than freedom/democracy. Hence why would we require a very high reliability from ATM, but none from the voting machine?
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Is it the power of the free market?
No! There is no "free market" when the government is the customer. It's all about connections, campaign contributions, whose turn it is (I'll explain that in a minute), and many other distortions. If you accept that it is the role of government to control/regulate free enterprise so as to "smooth the rought edges" of capitalism, then how can that work when the government is also the customer? You have a serious conflict of interest.
As regards "whose turn it is" -- I worked for a defense contractor years ago. We submitted a prototype for a new missile system. Our system met all of the program requirements (size, range, accuracy, cost); plus we won the "shoot off" hands down (our competitor failed to hit a single target). However, our competitor had not won a contract in awhile and neither had any other contractors in their geographic region (ie congressional district). Consequently the contract was awarded to them. This is just one example of what goes on every day with big government contracts. It is hardly what I would call a "free market". Rather, it is more aptly called a "fixed market" - as in, "the fix is in".
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
We have such a machine in Canada. It works very very well. It's called a number 2 pencil.
No joke. Sometimes technology isn't the answer.
AMEN!
I used to be on the electronic voting bandwagon, but when I saw that it was prone to failure and couldn't be trusted, I jumped off. When machines are reported to carry several thousand votes more than there are registered voters in a precinct, how can ANYBODY say "well, the number isn't enough to change the outcome." How do you know this? What about "errors" that go undiscovered? A little here, a little there, all under the radar so to speak...until you put them all together.
Paper, paper, paper...mark your ballot with a black marker, drop it in a box, and it gets counted by a representative of each party. No electronic storage to deal with, no way to electronically change results, and it's a permanent record.
The only two ways it can fail (that I can think of):
(1) The ballot is a misprint in which case it is simply destroyed (again, witnessed by a representative of each party that it is in fact a defective ballot) and a new, blank one re-issued. The ballot is examined to be defect-free BEFORE being handed to the voter.
(2) The marker runs dry.
The only way there can be fraud is if the votes are tampered with after being deposited; since all ballots are in human-readable form, then the ONLY way to tamper with them is also in human-readable form.
We can process millions upon millions of bank transactions every day but cannot count votes without grotesque errors? Come on people! It's not that hard!
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
People who use that banking system can go back and verify that their transactions went through. They can look at their bank statements and make sure that they're the only ones spending their money.
People who use an electronic voting system cannot go back and verify that their vote was cast correctly. No one can with any system in use in the US. In a paper system, however, you can go back and recount the original paper votes.