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."

Comments

Re:Seriously guys,

[ms1234]

Keyword is contract and how long they can milk it.

It's harder than you might at first think

[karl.auerbach]

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.

Re:It's harder than you might at first think

[linuxghoul]

This is practically the same as what I proposed on my blog a while back:

A proposal for a Trustable Electronic Voting System

Seeing how the failure of electronic voting to earn our trust is a hot topic today, heres my shot at a proposal for a secure electonic voting system.

1. The voting process starts with a voter walking into a polling station and presenting his/her ID. This is verified by the officials, and possibly representatives of the candidates, and once verified, the Voter is issued a Physical Token. This Token is NOT generated on demand, and can be something like the tokens used at game arcades. Each token needs to have a globally unique serial ID, which would need be changeable. Each polling booth is issued a fixed number of voter tokens, enough for the total number of voters expected to show up at a booth. Any unused tokens need to be returned to the Election Authority.

2. The voter takes the token (remmeber that this token is not associated with his identity in any way) and walks up to the voting machine. This machine consists of a touch screen with the poll options on it. The machine activates when the voter drops the token into its slot. The user makes his/her selection, confirms it, and is issued a printed reciept of his/her choice. The machine keeps a running tally of the votes polled, but does NOT communicate the vote to any central server. This information is kept secure inside the machine itself, and the machine needs to be made physcially temper proof and temper-evident. At the end of the polling process, all the voting mashines can be collected together and an authorized elction officer can instruct the machine to reveal the poll results. All results from all machines can be tallied to get the final election result.

4. The receipt format would be a standardized one, established by the febderal election officals, including the fonts, sizes and the information content. It will have on it, printed, the day/date and identifier of the particular election and the id of the machine which issued the reciept, and in large fonts, the selection made by the voter.

5. The voter checks on the reciept to make sure the information on the reciept matches what he had punched in. If not, the vote is invalid, and he/she gets to vote again.

6. If the reciept information is valid, the voter proceeds to another machine, where he/she inserts the reciept into a slot. This second machine reads the receipt using Optical Character Recognition, and maintains its own independent tally of votes polled. It also securely holds all the receipts in a safe vault inside it. The first machine and this second machine are not linked in any way.

7. The first machine and the second machine must not be made by the same manufacturer, or by companies with substantial holding by common entities.

8. Ideally, the token and the receipt would be federal standards, and the machines themselves can be made by any number of companies. They would need to get certified by a testing body. The certification test would focus on standards compliance (including such standards as physical size, accessibility, etc).

9. A single company may make both the machines, but in any specific poll booth, machines from two indepepdent manufacturers need to be used.

At the end of the election, the polling officials return to a central location with all the unused tokens, and the sealed machines. The total number of votes polled by both the machines, and the number of tokens issued is first matched. Then both the machines are activated and the total tallies of votes taken and matched against each other. In case of mismatch, the paper reciepts are retrieved from the second machine, and counted by hand.

The crucial points are:

1. Two independent tallies of the same votes, with a trail between corresponding votes (the receipt carries the token ID, so from the machines databases, one can matc

Re:It's harder than you might at first think

[freedom_india]

There is such a voting machine being used in the World's most populus Democracy for past 12 years.

http://www.eci.gov.in/EVM/index.htm

OR

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_voting_machine s

All that you have suggested is already in the machine.

Seems the country that has long been derided as Third-World, dirt Poor, unwashed masses can implement a technologically superior yet simple solution to maintaining Democracy amongst its unwashed masses with highest ethics.

Unless US loses its NIH syndrome, it is bound to be abused by companies like Deibold.

Re:It's harder than you might at first think

[frdmfghtr]

Makes you wonder why they bother with all the added hassle of machine voting at all, really.

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!

On a related note...

[Nekkrist]

Check out this testimony from a former programmer at a election fixing...I mean voting machine company.

http://alternet.org/blogs/video/40755/

Summary --
Computer programmer Clinton Eugene Curtis testifies under oath before the U.S. House Judiciary Members in Ohio. Stephen Pizzo writes:

If you can watch this entire video, and still use an electronic voting machine, you deserve the government you get. If your state or district has decided to use electronic voting machines this November demand an absentee ballot today. Watch this video. Then join those of us who have decided that since paper was good enough for our constitution, it's good enough for our vote too.

Oh, and when you're done watching the whole video... pass it along. November is only a a few weeks off and the last thing Republicans want to see is either house returned to Democrat control. Because if that happens, hearings happen. And if hearings happen... well, who knows - someone(s) could go to jail. So, demand a paper ballot or an absentee ballot in Nov. and leave the cheaters with a pocket full of worthless Diebold electrons.

A partial transcript:
Are there computer programs that can be used to secretly fix elections?
Yes.
How do you know that to be the case?
Because in October of 2000, I wrote a prototype for Congressman Tom Feeney [R-FL]...
It would rig an election?
It would flip the vote, 51-49. Whoever you wanted it to go to and whichever race you wanted to win.
And would that program that you designed, be something that elections officials... could detect?
They'd never see it.

Re:Nothing will happen

[All Your Name Are Be]

Actually 'he' was a she, and she was from the Democratic party. From TFA:

Alaska Democratic Party spokeswoman Kay Brown said the slowdown caused by the touchscreen machines is indicative of larger problems with the machines.

"I can say there are many systematic problems with Diebold machines that have been identified in many contexts," Brown said. "That there were technical glitches with the machines is not surprising, and it's one indication of the kinds of things that can go wrong with the machines and it's something to be concerned about."

The day before the election, the Democratic party urged voters to choose paper ballots instead of the touchscreen machine. They say Diebold's touch screen machines may be insecure and vulnerable to attack.

Re:Seriously guys,

[Ulven]

You miss the point. He could write a 'pretty good' voting machine in a day (Or not, that's not the point). Diebold, with all their money and years can also come up with one that is 'pretty good'. It should be perfect. Therefore, on a time/money per quality of product basis, Diebold are worse than useless.