Diebold Demands That HBO Cancel Documentary

Frosty Piss writes "According to the Bloomberg News, Diebold Inc. is insisting that HBO cancel a documentary that questions the integrity of its voting machines, calling the program inaccurate and unfair. The program, 'Hacking Democracy,' is scheduled to debut Thursday, five days before the 2006 U.S. midterm elections. The film claims that Diebold voting machines aren't tamper-proof and can be manipulated to change voting results. 'Hacking Democracy' is 'replete with material examples of inaccurate reporting,' says Diebold. 'We stand by the film," said a spokesman for HBO. 'We have no intention of withdrawing it from our schedule. It appears that the film Diebold is responding to is not the film HBO is airing.'"

Comments

about to backfire..

[adam]

You have to figure HBO has a pretty sizable legal department, and wouldn't air a documentary that wasn't accurate (for fear of being sued). So if diebold's claims are untrue, all they are really doing are serving to help publicize the documentary before it airs. Brilliant move, haha. I know I had my DVR set to record it, but I can imagine many other /.ers did not... and now undoubtedly, some will.

Regarding Diebold's claims, although the article is a little short on facts, for instance, following this section, "According to Byrd's letter, inaccuracies in the film include the assertion that Diebold, whose election systems unit is based in Allen, Texas, tabulated more than 40 percent of the votes cast in the 2000 presidential election." ... "The letter says Diebold wasn't in the electronic voting business in 2000, when disputes over ballots in Florida delayed President Bush's victory for more than a month and raised questions about the reliability of electronic voting machines." I would like to see an actual fact that states whether their claims are true or not. For instance, maybe they weren't in electronic voting business in 2000, but that doesn't mean they didn't still tally many paper votes (the aggregate of which amounts to 40% of the votes in the election)-- or that he hasn't screwed up interpreting what the film says (since he apparently hasn't seen it). Regardless of which, I think it's probably safe to assume if HBO isn't backing down, and does air the documentary, that this is largely smokescreen on the part of Diebold to try and convince the public that HBO is just an extension of the "liberal media" lying to them.

Furthermore, the article is short on explanation, but I don't think this is just a crass comment, "It appears that the film Diebold is responding to is not the film HBO is airing." ..but rather that HBO's spokesman is actually suggesting they are responding to this film, VoterGate, and not Hacking Democracy, whose UK working title is listed as "VoterGate" and whose tagline says, "Computers count America's votes in secret. 'Votergate' hacks the votes." The co-mingling of the word "Votergate" does lead to some confusion, even though the directors of each film are totally different, one is produced by "Digital Bazooka" productions and the other by "Teale-Edwards" Productions (which produced another good, but sad HBO documentary that I would reccomend watching -- Dealing Dogs). My suspicions are probably best supported by the line,"The company, which hasn't seen the film, based its complaints on material from the HBO Web site, Bear said." ..if they haven't seen the film, it's a bit difficult to suggest it is full of eggregious errors, and maybe they are commenting about 2004's VoterGate.

On a personal note, I am a documentarian, and no documentary can ever be completely "true" to everyone. Laymen make the mistake of thinking to shoot a documentary you just point some cameras at stuff, edit it, and voila. But there is so much more than that.. a documentary is about capturing the "truth" the documentarian sees. For (s)he to use cameras and mics to tell the story that (s)he saw. There is always some bias in this, and one important trick to being a good documentarian is divorcing yourself from this bias as much as possible.

Re:about to backfire..

[spisska]

For the record, Diebold has only been in the election machine business since 2001. They only make direct-recording electronic (DRE) machines, and have never produced paper ballot readers or any other equipment other than electronic machines and electronic pollbooks. Here is a good historical overview of Diebold's election activities.

There are a number of points that are completely missed or misunderstood in the discussion of election hardware, and why so many jurisdictions have moved to such questionable devices. The story of what has happened is a case study in how the federal government creates a royal mess from good intentions.

After the debacle of Florida 2000 Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which was designed to prevent such a thing from happening again. Of course the problems in Florida were not caused by faulty election equipment but by poorly designed ballots.

Of all the parts to the eqatuation in FL 2000 (voting machines, ballots, election process, registration, administration, etc) it was the ballots that were at fault, and the administration of the resulting dispute that created the big issue. I still believe that if Al Gore had accepted (or insisted upon) a statewide recount of Florida rather than trying to game county-level results he would have won Florida, and the presidency.

Instead the POTUS (President of the US) was effectively elected by the Supreme Court. And that led rather directly to HAVA -- a federal law wherein the federal government assumes authoritah over the states on issues concerning election procedures, quite contrary to strict readings of the Constitution.

The Constitution clearly gives the states power to handle their own electoral affairs, but at the same time gives the federal government power to distribute funds, and to set requirements on the distribution. Through HAVA, Washington pledges a ton of money to each state and local jusrisdiction to upgrade their election hardware to something that is compliant with HAVA, but the requirements only apply to election for federal office -- ie President and Congress. But since it's too much trouble to maintain separate election system for fedreal and local offices, and too much money to ignore, all states are scrambling towards HAVA compliance.

Diebold comes in because of a rather ill-thought clause in HAVA -- Section 301. This requires that HAVA-compliant hardware meet the needs of blind voters in allowing them to 1) cast a ballot without assistance, and 2) to review and change ballot selections before casting the ballot.

As of 2000, blind voters cast ballots with the assistance of two election judges (in jurisdictions that did not require Braille ballots). HAVA requires that all blind voters have audio ballots. Which means many effective and accurate voting systems and procedures are no longer valid.

Once HAVA was passed, Diebold saw a business opportunity in US election systems (they had previously sold electyion hardware to Brazil). Diebold could certainly deliver counting machines with audio capability, and naturally they theough that security requirements for ATMs were analogous to those for election systems.

The points of this whole rant are 1) Diebold gets a lot of deserved blame for producing faulty hardware, and a lot of undeserved blame for commiting mass electoral fraud (remember that they didn't have any election hardware in 2000); 2) All DRE machines (with or without paper trail) are subject to problems and errors; and 3) the voting process is sound, even if the equipment has flaws.

Make sure you vote on November 7, make sure if you're using a DRE machine that your vote is properly recorded, and make sure you have some sympathy for the sorely undertrained and underpaid election judges at your precinct.

And don't complain if you don't vote.

Re:Got a better...

[Beardo the Bearded]

Should we show the Diebold documentary?

Yes: 25%
No: 21%
Republican: 54%

Re:Thanks Diebold!

[kfg]

I demand that you withdraw your post, or . . . I'll stamp my feet and demand again.

Don't expect a lawsuit to come of this. That would mean discovery.

KFG

Open Voting System

[DrugCheese]

I don't understand why an open voting system wouldn't work. (And yes I know the major hurdle would be beating the peoples in power to transition to one)

Source code is 100% open to find exploits and bugs, when you vote you're given a ticket with a number, anyone can go online and see how everyone voted but only you are able to tell which vote was yours by the corresponding ticket number. That'd allow for everyone to do their own count if they wanted.

I've just don't like technology getting a bad name because people abuse it. An electronic voting system would be more secure then a paper trail with PEOPLE manually counting each vote.

No?

Re:Open Voting System

[forand]

I do not believe any system that lets someone track a single vote will stand up against the provisions in the constitution which protect anonymous voting. There are very good reasons that it is not a good idea to have confirmation of a vote that can be check outside the polling station. Mainly you do not want to allow the buying of votes.

While I understand the desire to know exactly how your vote was counted I think that having a paper trail that can be counted by humans would make it a lot harder to have widespread voter fraud. Even if you are given a encrypted key that only you know there is no reason that you should expect that what the computer tells you is what it counts in the tally. The ONLY way to be sure is to have two distinct methods for getting a count then comparing the statistical corroelations. You being able to check how you think you voted online doesn't tell you how the machine acutally tallied the votes.

That's all they're refuting?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's interesting to see the selection of facts Diebold has chosen to refute.

According to Byrd's letter, inaccuracies in the film include the assertion that Diebold, whose election systems unit is based in Allen, Texas, tabulated more than 40 percent of the votes cast in the 2000 presidential election

...

The letter says Diebold wasn't in the electronic voting business in 2000, when disputes over ballots in Florida delayed President Bush's victory for more than a month and raised questions about the reliability of electronic voting machines.

In other words, in the light of allegations of insecurity and the ease of which a Diebold DRE or tabulator (GEMS) can be modified, they nitpick the date in which they got into the voting machine industry.

Bravo, Diebold.

Also, the article's implication if I'm not mistaken is incorrect:

The letter says Diebold wasn't in the electronic voting business in 2000, when disputes over ballots in Florida delayed President Bush's victory for more than a month and raised questions about the reliability of electronic voting machines.

If I'm not mis-reading this passage, the article is implying that Florida ballots in 2000 raised questions about the reliability of electronic voting machines. The only problem is that the problems in Florida were due to "hanging chads" and the poor design of "butterfly ballots" in Palm Beach County, two problems which are entirely specific to paper voting methods. Maybe they meant to say "and raised questions about upgrading their voting technology" but who knows.

liar liar

[dustwun]

Is anyone else reminded of Jim Carey in Liar Liar?

Fletcher: Your honor, I object!
Judge: Why?
Fletcher: Because it's devastating to my case!
Judge: Overruled.
Fletcher: Good call!

Get big media attention

[teslatug]

Lou Dobbs on CNN was talking about the Sequoia voting machines operated by the Venezuelan company, and I think we should bring to his attention the Diebold ones too. Please take a moment and send a polite comment at their feedback form

Try other big media outlets. We need the general public to become aware of this potential debacle before it's too late.

Forced to wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm really forced to wonder if the Slashdot group-think would hate Diebold as much as they do if Gore won in 2000 or Kerry won in 2004. I sincerely doubt it. If anything, they'd probably be considered as heroes in that case.

Call that a flame or troll if you want (and I'm sure that politically-charged mods who love to abuse their mod privileges will be more than willing to do so); but with the collective hatred for anything republican on Slashdot, things have finally gotten to the point where any statements against Diebold are as knee-jerk or fashionable as the rampant anti-Microsoftism and anti-republicanism that we all see. They're almost as cliché as the "overlord" and "you insensitive clod" comments.

Re:Well...

[QRDeNameland]

...they are certainly bold. I wonder if they will live up to the rest of their name?

Well, if you do a German-to-English translation of "Diebold" on Babelfish, it comes back with "thief old".

Even worse, if you rearrange the letters of Diebold Election Systems, you get So Dems Lose Indetectibly.

Coincidence? You decide.

Re:Self-inflicted wounds........

[drDugan]

You are so twisting the story.

First off, you link to a new site which has reposted a blogger post from "Say Anything" blog - who apparently will say anything to make his point, even if it doesn't make sense. Most conclusions on his blog page are completely illogical.

The actual article to which you refer is here:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/kmbc/20061102/lo_kmbc/1021 4492
and the leadership of ARORN had nothing to do with the fraud - they immediately fired the people involved.

Now contrast this to the litany of counter examples and suspicious patterns listed here:
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/wa s_the_2004_election_stolen

Power! BTW: Order your Diebold parts now.

[Futurepower(R)]

"The question is addressed to those enthusiasts that do care and will sort the matter out in a few hours..."

LOL. MOD PARENT UP. I love the feeling of power that technically knowledgeable people have. And it is increasing. (I'm not suggesting that anything illegal be done; I just love the feeling of knowing how things work.)

Talking about power, anyone need Diebold parts? You must have an account with them, but hey, no problem, right? Just tell the local elections boss, "Oh yes, we'll need two of those fazongas immediately." Response: "Well, if you say so, order them now." Check out the memory card at $155.00 for 128 MB. Ohhh, it's "industrial grade". Well, all right.

Off topic: Did you know that George W. Bush had a top-of-the-charts song written about him? The song, "American idiot", was number 1 on the music charts in Canada, number 3 in Britain, and in the top 10 in many other countries. No matter whether you vote Democrat or Republican, you'll have to admit that is amazing.

--
Funniest George W. Bush Comedy Videos

Much harder

[Tony]

Much harder.

Especially considering that the Dow isn't a good direct indicator of economic health. If you consider how well the dollar isn't doing, the DOW isn't doing that hot.

The Bush spend and spend fiscal policy has pushed the US debt to the greatest it's ever been. As Alan Greenspan tried to explain, increasing the national debt is the worst thing you can do for the economic health of the US. At least the Democrats want to balance the income and the outgo, as anybody with a pocketbook and a job should understand.

As far as the Republicans being tougher on terrorism: prove it. Prove that Iraq wasn't a distraction from real terrorism. Prove that Iraq didn't contribute to terrorism, as a recent intelligence report indicates.

So, assuming you weren't being obliquely ironic, you are a nard. If you were being all ironical and stuff, I apologize. I'm not in the most subtle of moods right now, as there are a lot of Bush apologists out there, considering he's an asshat with a terrible approval rating, and I'm really worried that Bush and his gang have fucked us over to the point of no recovery.

In any case, Allah Be With You.

Ahem!

[Tony]

Let's see.

Tens of thousands of voters from poorer (usually Democratic) counties being erroneously included on a list of felons, thus not being allowed to vote. The list was compiled by a company in the employ of Republican campaigners.

Per-capita, older and fewer machines being sent to Democratic counties.

Unofficial recounts that indicate that Gore won.

State-initiated opposition to recount requests.

And the list goes on.

There's good, solid evidence the 2000 election was stolen, pure and simple. Whether it was intentional or not is another question. But there were more than enough anomalies without electronic voting to make it . . . irregular, to say the least.