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An Open Letter To Diebold
jcatcw writes "Computerworld's Rob Mitchell tells Diebold President and CEO Thomas Swidarski how to regain Diebold's reputation instead of throwing in the e-voting towel. He recommends full disclosure of all existing problems, a process for disclosure of future problems, hiring of some real professionals as CTO and as an advisory group, and public testing. 'Surely if Diebold can make a secure ATM there is no reason why it cannot make secure and reliable e-voting apparatus in which the public has confidence.'"
What makes you think Diebold ATM units are secure? I had a friend who worked in bank software. He said if you knew half of went what on, you'd keep your money buried in jars.
ok .. maybe I am way off here .. was Diebold not the one that had all the videos posted of people
cracking their ATM ??
[insert sig here]
They left out what may be IMO the single biggest factor if you're going to have a DRE voting machine: a paper trail!
I don't care if it's open source, audited, proved correct, or whatever, I would probably feel more comfortable with a machine from today plus a printer.
When did they make a secure ATM?
ATM's are bought by banks. As much a $250,000 can go through one ATM in a weekend. (Maybe more) The banks demand security. Voting machines are purchased by bureaucrats who probably use "password" for their office PC password.
Mr. Mitchell: Thank you for your concerns. STFU. I am Swidarski and all your votes belong to us.
Someone clue this guy in. The Democrats won this time.
That means there's no problems with Diebold.
"Surely if Diebold can make a secure ATM there is no reason why it cannot make secure and reliable e-voting apparatus in which the public has confidence." — has diebold actually made secure ATMs?
But their voting machines ARE secure... the Democrats won!
To gain access to root on these machines, enter this code.
Left left left, right, A, A, C, Right, Left.
Diebold ATMs aren't "secure"; they are merely secure enough that no further investment should be made in them because the losses are cheaper to accept than the cost of the increased security.
The ugly truth of voting is "lots of votes get flushed". The reason we trust our system of voting now is because we have partisan poll watchers who are making sure that the other party doesn't take liberties. In other words, little old ladies. No, all respect due to little old ladies, but do you think they feel confident being in charge of any kind of new technology? If they're wise, they won't be.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Can somebody puhlease fix the site (or atleast have a notification on the front page if something's being fixed)? /. gone so buggy all of a sudden?
Why's poor
Detailed information is provided by these gentlemen.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
The Fed regulates the security involved with ATM's. Every last detail is laid out, down to the 3DES encryption. Nothing regulates voting machines, and no sign of QA. Diebold didn't care, nor did the beurocrats that signed the damn order to unleash these pieces of shit on our population. Let's hope someone gets sued outta the shitstorm, and things change..... But I'm not holding my breath.
I, for one, welcome our Diebold-provided Republican overlo.... what?
oh. shit.
does that mean we like Diebold now?
at least, there's going to be lawyers crawling all over the place making sure no one got disen... wait? They aren't?
holy shit.. i'm so confused. Fsck politics.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
banning all employees from being affiliated with any political party?
The most significant problem here is Diebold itself and polling machine isn't all that hard to design or implement... there are dozens off variations.
I say that due to their involvement in this and the way they've handled problems this is the last group of people US citizens should be trusting with their vote.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Maybe paper offers a greater degree of transparency than electronic bits. We shouldn't hope for more secure electronic voting machines, but rather a public realization that sometimes "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Sure, cryptography, open-source, signed binaries, etc. begin to offer the transparency we need in voting, but at the moment, the expense greatly outweighs any conceivable benefits (what, no need to argue about chads?).
Paper voting works. Distributed counting means less impact from an individual case of polling-place fraud, and the paper record can be stored for a public recount where many eyes can verify the results.
The design and source code of the machines should be public information. All of them. There should not be any IR or wireless connectivity. That includes the tabulators. Touch screen voting is slow, dumb and expensive. Complicated elections eat up time. Optically scanned ballots only need a few additional tables to accommodate a heavy turnout. Machine time per ballot is minimal, and the ballots can also be counted by hand.
ATMs are much easier to make. The ATMs _can_ trust the bank. The user can easily verify if the ATM works or not because they leave a "paper trail" (um hello, if it wouldn't give precisely the amount of cash out that you requested, wouldn't it be a little bit suspicious and wouldn't people have noticed it?).
Voting machines cannot trust neither the user, nor the authorities and to top it off it has to be verifyable to both. In short, a much harder problem.
The requirements to verify the voting process if paper ballots are used: being a non-retarded human being and a small amount of time.
The requirements to verify the voting process if voting machines are used: electrical engineer and programmer proficient in all related languages and access to the source code, months of time verifying the voting machine, then making sure the voting machine used at the election is the same one you verified.
If you look at it from the average person's perspective: in the first case the voting process is transparent for the average person. They understand and if they want, can verify the local process. Paper voting also gives a much better accountability to the overall picture. You generally count the votes locally, then make a official log about it, send the result up in the chain. Then when the overall results are known, you can check the website or whatever to see whether the numbers up on the website about the local results match with your local results you have in your hands. I know that if they didn't it would be found out pretty quickly because at least some people do make this comparison. So now we know that the local results on the website match the local results in the local voting stations. Now you can just simply add up the local results to check the big picture, whether it matches. At least some people will do that, so you can be reasonably certain that the results are pretty accurate, because to tamper with the outcome you would have to modify things on a local level at lots of places simultaneously and since we're talking about paper you'd have to involve a lot of people so we would know about it if someone attempted it.
In the second case, even if you would have the overlapping skill requirements to verify stuff, you still need to have the time and the access. Then, votes are tabulated not at a local level, but a step above, at a regional level, so you reduced the number of places you would have to tamper with in order to skew the voting process. Since it is a complex electronic process which few people understand exactly, you can modify the results involving much less people and can do it in a much more stealthy way. Since it is electronic, carrying out the act on a wholesale level is not a problem for the bad guys. You got to ask the question one time: which is easier: simultaneously manipulating a few tonns of paper scattered across the whole country when they are guarded by thousands of people, or voting machines coming from two main sources, two companies which aren't guarded at all, or to be more precise, people are forbidden to guard them (source code-wise) and even if you would attack not at the source code level, but at the regional counting level, then it's still much easier to tamper with than with paper.
We have to face it: not even an open source voting machine is good enough. It's much easier to simplify the ballots to catch up with the only positive thing voting machines provide, than to design an electronic system capable of transparent, accountable voting. Even if you take a barebones microkernel/firmware voting machine, it is still a hundred thousand(*) times more complex than paper voting.
*I just pulled that number out of my ass, but I think most people underestimate the complexity difference between the two methods.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
You guys are missing the point:
Given that:
1) the CEO, all of current management, sales and computer programmers who kept their mouths shut, remain in place,
2) the CEO being the same person who pledged to bring the elections over to the Republicans,
what would a solid reason be which would give me ANY, even tiny, reason to put ANY amount of faith, back into Diebolt?
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It's called the "sausage factory" effect.
If you knew what went into probably 90% of the products you use daily, you wouldn't want to have anything to do with them. It's obvious that Diebold's voting machines were the Grade D blood sausages of their lineup; made with the shoddiest possible materials in order to extract the maximum possible profits from an unwitting buyer. Their ATMs, I suspect, are a little better; it might not contain all the ears and noses that get tossed into their real cheap crap, but they still might be lax if Freddie on the meat saw sneezes all over it.
Open source voting, and to a larger extent open source software, are like the organic food of the IT world. Nobody's guaranteeing that the end product will taste good, but at least you know what's gone into it. Or if you want to put it another way, it's a sausage factory that anybody can walk into and check out.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It seems that Slashdot's not displaying replies properly...
Dear Diebold
After years of absymal performance, the public is understandingly distrustful of both your product and company. Don't fret, the world's expectations for the performance of the entire computer industry are quite low. Products don't even have to be good, just good enough.
So here are a few steps you can take to finally gain voter's confidence:
1. Under no circumstance should you release your source code. I know that earlier revisions have been distributed to the general public, and look at all the trouble that has caused. It is better to remain silent and thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
2. Outsource, nobody ever got fired for outsourcing. Americans will celebrate knowing that many nations came together to build their democracy.
3. Encryption is an overrated buzzword. People love transparency in the democratic process.
4. Paper trails increase the price of an election for taxpayers. So do your patriotic duty and keep costs to a minimum. Besides, if the paper trail and computer result were different, it could create a lot of work and problems for your fine institution.
5. Another method to keep costs down is to minimize luxuries like manuals and support staff. Don't worry, elderly volenteers will learn how to operate and repair these systems with ease.
6. Hire a well known person to oversee my proposed inititives. I recommend Karl Rove, I'll bet he'll even pay you for this privilige.
7. To prove that the public knows that you are running this company for the love of democracy and not money, I'd recommend everyone employed by Diebold to dump their stock before doing anything else I have recommended. To get a fair price, you'll need to know about the status of the company, so build a Diebold Accounting program to count your assests (it shouldn't be too hard to fork your voting software). Remember that it is your corporate duty to release the results to the public.
To ensure that no politican could ever shut you down, claim that you have created many jobs. To bolster your numbers, claim that the dead work for you, if they can vote, why not make 'em work?
See you in 2008,
ac
Now that the Democrats control both houses, I think Diebold is looking down the barrel of some serious election tampering charges.
Now, I'm all for people making a living at developing commercial software. Diebold has smart people and they can figure something out to make a buck. Heck, as far as I'm concerned, if they can meet some standards they could sell the hardware. But - the US Debt per person is $28k each. Isn't there other things that we could be using the money we're spending on voting machines on? Here's some that I can think of:
Anyway, just $0.02
-n
RandomAndInteresting.comdefending the world from stupidity since 1979
you know, things in election day preparation and execution are changing. i volunteered to be an election judge Tuesday in Maryland's infamous Montgomery County, and in the one precinct i was in we had myself and a guy who does IT security for NASA as judges. yes, there were also some elderly folks, but the thing is, there's nothing stopping us geeks from getting involved. the county made a real effort to implement procedures that helped bridge the gaps in security that the machines introduced, and the result was a pretty successful election. it's true that elderly poll workers perhaps aren't the best choice for staffing a country-wide rollout of new technology, so that's why people who give a shit need to get involved. if all geeks are willing to do is submit sensationalist stories to /. making outrageous claims that the sky is falling, then you are only pawns implementing the powerful's plans of voter suppression and intimidation. the fact is, people came out to vote, and their votes were counted. all the hype only served to keep people from coming to the polls, fearing it was a lost cause. it wasn't. these machines are not perfect, but if people with know-how are unwilling to help, and only willing to bitch from the sidelines, they're just as much of the problem as Diebold is.
If there's a hand in the cookie jar full disclosure is highly unlikely. I said before the election was over that if the Democrats won in some of the close states there wouldn't be an inquiry because it might expose attempts to sway the elections by Republicans. With the Senate so close there hasn't been a whisper of opposition. Given how hard the Republicans fight I find it really telling that they aren't claiming fraud by the Democrats. I have a feeling the election wasn't so close but fraud managed to make it close but still couldn't win them the election. There were multiple claims of fraud and election problems on the day but everyone is letting it pass quietly. There needs to be a paper trail and the representatives from each party need to oversee security at every polling place. Even if it means flying Democrats into the deep south to balance things.
The problem with electronic voting machines is dwarfed by the problems inherent in the way voting is done in most states. Oregon has been using vote by mail for 10 years and they consistently have higher voter participation than every other state and practically no fraud. What's more, voters are better informed about the candidates and issues they're voting for and have time to research before voting. To learn more, check out: http://www.votebymailproject.org/whyvotebymail.htm l
Electronic voting is cool, especially for a user interface geek like me, but in this case, simpler is better.
It's bad enough that you figured out my password; did you have to go and post it too? Now I have to change it :(
So... many... traps
Is Slashdot infested with mice (or other vermin) to require so many itsatrap tags or what?
I think all states sould vote by mail.
On a side note if you want to make $1500 dollars per week just by stuffing envelopes let me know, we dont need any help anymore this year but in november of 2008 we will need workers that live in oregon and hopefully a lot more states by then.
"The robot polls are open.... the robot votes are being counted....Nixon wins!"
"Slapping lipstick on a pig does NOT make it Natalie Portman. Paris Hilton, maybe, but not Portman." - UncleTogie
It'd be a bit easier to, if the code it ran, as well as the OS it ran on, was open-source, but even so, any computer made to record votes is suspect.
The comparison of a voting computer to an ATM is interesting. ATMs made withdrawing and depositing money without a human bank teller present ubiquitous. But when you use one, you authenticate yourself to the machine, first by having a bank card, and second by inputting a PIN. Your picture is taken. The machines have tamper alarms. The results of using an ATM are instantly verifiable, if you withdraw cash, or almost instantly, if you deposit money, by checking your balance online. With a voting computer, on the other hand, you don't authenticate yourself to the machine (do you really want a "national ID card"? I don't); there's usually no one watching what you're doing while you vote; and there's no way to verify the results (AFAIK, you usually don't get a receipt -- and even if you did, how do you know someone hasn't hacked the machine?). I don't know if these things have tamper alarms, but haven't heard that they do.
In short, there's no reason to throw a high-tech solution at a problem like how to record votes, when existing low(er)-tech solutions do the job just as well, and are less prone to tampering.
Fortunately, my state does vote-by-mail. If any state that's decided to use computerized voting machines has an initiative petition process, I'd encourage the citizens of that state to write a petition to ban their use.
Welcome to 2005, population you: http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Diebold_CEO_resigns_ after_reports_of_1212.html
The point, I hope, that does not get dimissed, is that our votes have absolutely no place being counted by private interests. None.
They have been paid millions upon millions of dollars for this equipment and have made a fortune.
Why should more money be given to them to fix a problem they made?
The government should TAKE the equipment and code they purchased and give it to an open source group to either learn from or scrap entirely and build something better.
If Diebold ran the debt clock you'd be able to edit the national debt to any number you wanted.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Here.
"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence."
However, I don't think Diebold is incompetent here. If you assume they are corrupt and _want_ those flaws to remain in there, such a petition makes absolutely no sense. And I definitely think that's the case here.
Here.
Poor Rupert Murdoch will have no one left to suck up to.
Might I suggest televizing Saddam Hussein's Execution? He killed over a thousand of Kurds after all.
Not like George Bush who only killed 650,000 Iraqis and 2,8000 Americans. Totally different.
There you go Rupert! Whoze ya Daddy now?
I don't know quite how it happens, but through some process, it becomes in vogue to completely hate and irrationally bash a company. For a while it was cool to hate Nike, but then people got over it. Same with the GAP. (Maybe its the millions they spend on ads.) Now the latest is for all the politicians to bash Walmart. Hillary Clinton returned Walmart's contribution to her campaign "because of serious differences with company practices." She USED to sit on the Walmart board, and it's not like they made some dramatic change in strategy. Academic studies show that Walmart provides the same kind of wages and benefits as other companies in the retail sector, but that doesn't seem to affect the Walmart criticism.
Techy people love to hate Microsoft, sometimes for good reason, but much of the stuff you read on Slashdot is beyond way out there. My impression is that the anti-Microsoft crowd is getting smaller. Nobody seriously talks about breaking Microsoft up into separate companies anymore, even though Microsoft is roughly about as dominant in the OS and office suite market as it has ever been.
PR is expensive, and I guess giving up the vote machine business may be Diebold's only way to get out of the political target sight.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Because that CEO resigned last year?
What the heck does that actually mean?
Elections are currently run and votes counted by government agencies (Secretary of State, country registrar of voters etc...)
Private companies supply these agencies with technology, as they ALWAYS have. Voting machines have been supplied by private companies since voting machines were invented. Voting machines have to be certified as meeting proper standards for accuracy etc... by the State. Before voting machines, private companies supplied the government with pens and paper.
Are you advocating that some government agency has a monopoly on voting machine design? manufacture? Do all the employees have to be full time government employees? This sounds like a colossal mess to me, especially considerring all the touchscreen problems I've heard about aren't purposeful fraud problems, but problems with screen calibration, user error, poorly trained poll workers etc... (problems that are more likely to be fixed with competition between voting machine companies than by some centralized dumb government voting machine company).
Are volunteer poll workers "private interests" because they don't receive a government salary? Are you advocating that poll workers can't be volunteers?
What's wrong with the time tested system of "trust, but verify" Let private companies do what they do best and make the machines, and have government run the actual election and verify that everything is legit.
No, seriously. Throw in the towel, Diebold. Don't let us stop you - we'll be OK. How msny more "glitches" do we put up with before we say enough - we must have mandatory paper ballots. Fuck these electorial slot machines. Inherently insecure.
Oppressing an entire population is never cheap.
--Jeckler (/. Beta IS GARBAGE!)
The democrats won, somebody must have been tampering with the machines... full disclosure all the way!!
...and it was funny. But you have to wonder whether the Dems "won" because Diebold et al didn't dare rig the vote again this time round, after all the scrutiny and criticism (as well as implied impending investigations...), and also whether the Dems maybe could have won even more seats. Maybe the vote was only rigged a little this time...merely tweaked just enough to make it all look legit.
No, I do not chew on my tinfoil hat.
Microsoft is only getting better press on Slashdot now because they've reacted to the bad press from a million sources received in the past, and have started to put their house in order. They're no longer on a religious jihad about open source, but instead are learning to interwork with it and benefit from it. So any improvement in their standing is deserved.
Diebold in contrast are as shut off in their own private world as ever, not willing to accept any of the criticisms that have been levelled at their practices and completely deaf to the numerous hints that their technology is really crap.
So Diebold deserve their continued bad press here, and elsewhere.
"The democrats won! No problem then right?"
Idiots. Shut up already. There were a lot of eyes on this election cycle. There was a lot of public and organized outcry about the use of Diebold software and equipment. There's a pretty good chance that any attempts to rig any of the elections were aborted.
It seems more than just a little strange to me that with all the public outcry against Diebold that it was implemented anyway. With such great public knowledge about the flaws [read: dangers] in the devices and systems, if these were cars, people would simply stop buying and driving them. The voters didn't often have any choice in the matter and when they did, it has been shown that they opted for some paper ballot form such as the absentee ballot. (There was a lot of paper balloting this cycle!)
To me, it seems like there was great resistance to KEEP the flaws in place in spite of public outcry. I'm still interested to know WHO wants to keep these flaws in place and why. I'm really wondering why people aren't asking that simple question and how that question didn't get exposed and used on the campaign trail? (Imagine a candidate campaigning with 'my opponent has ignored the public's interests by keeping these demonstrably unsafe voting machines in place!')
There were a lot of eyes on this election cycle and many people were poised to attack against election fraud. But just because democrats won of lot of elections this time around doesn't mean fraud didn't happen and that it wasn't perpetrated by democrats. I think the most significant thing here was that there were a lot of eyes on the elections. I hope we keep it that way and keep the public's interest in keeping it that way as well.
I am originally from India and I am watching this thread about Diebold Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) with amusement. Come on, even Brazil & India have better experience with EVMs.
However, on a serious note, the Indian experience has a relevant takeaway. The EVMS are procured by a single entity, Central Elections Commission (CEC), which is similar, to the (toothless) US agency, FEC
I live in NJ, home of 600+ Boards of Education. What has this done? Drive up the cost of Education and increase property Taxes.
If FEC can procure EVMs (from different manufacturers), this will
a. drive the cost of EVMs down. (The EVM manufacturers don't have to market their wares to each individual county)
b. More importantly, FEC can demand a tougher security audit of these machinesand ensure that all the EVMs conform to a single Security mandate.
Why does only the Federal Govt. decide things like National Security & minting of currency. Becuse these are matters of vital, national importance. I can't think that the proper tabulation of votes doesn't belong in the same category.
Rob Mitchell is missing the point. You cannot run an election on beta software. You cannot use a real election as a beta testing process to debug your software.
Diebold should be treating their voting machines with the same reverance as NASA treats their operational platforms because, like space flight, there is no second chance in an election. You cannot just restart the process and continue. If a voting platform fails, the entire election process effectively fails. Diebold needs to do the job properly the first time, and if they can't then they must be man enough to admit it, and get out of the game early.
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
Freakonomics logic applies here. It's all about the incentives.
Banks have far stronger incentives to ensure the ATMs work right, and you have more recourse if something goes wrong. If you lose money because of a faulty ATM transaction, you have enough time to follow up and recover it. Whereas with a voting machine, there are tight deadlines for calling the results, and once the results are officially announced it's too late. If something goes wrong and the bank loses money via the ATM, the banks eats the cost, which gives them an incentive to ensure it does not give out too much money.
On the other hand, an electronic vote machine maker has much weaker incentives to do it right. It is actually against their interest to produce a paper trail, because that could expose the inaccuracy of the vote counts and reduce their future sales. In addition, the political leanings of the management or engineers give them an incentive to deliberately do it wrong.
The only way to give proper incentives to do it right is to (1) require a paper trail that can be recounted by humans and (2) manually count the votes from a random sample of machines, with the randomness based on a physical process like flipping coins after the polls are closed (2) order a manual recount of everything if the manual count of the sample differs from the machines by a specified margin, and (3) the supplier of the voting machines does not get paid if a manual recount is triggered.
Ultimately though, electronic voting is a solution looking for a problem. There is no need for it; other countries have shown that pure manual counting gets things done efficiently and accurately, as long as there are representatives from all major parties involved so they can watch each other. That the US is much bigger than those other countries is irrelevant; it is only required for states to report their results, and each state is not much bigger than those countries that run their elections nationally. In addition, the bigger the population of voters is the more counters you can get.
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
They aren't being counted by private interests. That's not the problem here. I hope you're not claiming that somehow being a private company means you can't build a reliable voting machine.
Here's a story about a Tranax ATM being hacked: ATM Hack Uncovered. They discussed this on Digg: ATM Hack Uncovered.
Diebold voting machines are certainly not secure: Insecure voting. Be sure to watch the HBO Special, "Hacking Democracy", linked there and mentioned in an earlier Slashdot front page story.
It's not that there is specific information about hacking Diebold ATMs. It's that there is so much information indicating that Diebold is not interested in security.
Banks have their own system of bureaucracy. They're by now used to ATMs and how they work, but look at their behaviour towards phishing and online fraud, and you see that they aren't better by an inch. As soon as bureaucrats are left without a proper procedure to follow to the minute, they're running in circles, hopelessly lost.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Has anyone noticed the comments system is broken on this article. The only visible replies are the ones replying to the article itself. I've have five replies to my first comment on here and none of them are showing up. If I bring up up one (via the email link) and click the parent link, I'm taken to an empty comment.
What makes you think jars are secure? I had a friend who worked in a jar factory. He said if you knew half of what went on, you'd keep your money buried under the mattress.
In ATMs, both parties can verify their function. When you withdraw money, you see how much money you got. And on your statement, you see what was deducted from your account. Both can be verified and both sides are audited by independent parties, not only once. Banks, on the other hand, do of course have a way of verification. They know how much money the put in the tray, they know how much should be gone, and they can count.
Furthermore, you have a business relationship with your bank. You're not your bank's shareholder, using the ATM to vote on their policy. That's pretty much what is the case with voting machines.
The problem with voting machines is that it is, in the current setup, near impossible to verify their functionality. No side can actually verify that the machines count votes the way they are supposed to. You'd have to trust them implicitly, something I can hardly support. Never ever trust a machine, for it is only as good as its maker.
In fact, voting machines in the current makeup would put democracy and the outcome of elections fully into the hands of their creators.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A) If your picture looks like or includes any of the following objects, proceed to step C:
B) If your picture looks like or includes any of the following objects, proceed to step C:
C) You need to increase your system's security.
Full credit for this one goes to
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
This year about the outcome of the 2006 election? I don't hear one single "winner" complaining that the election was stolen because of the electronic voting. I also don't hear any "loosers" bitching about them either. Hummmmmmmmm maybe because it isn't so much the machines, as it is the outcome of the elections?
To have digital voting machines? Votes are fairly important, and its alot harder to misconstrue them if theyre filled in and signed, rather than zeroes and ones on a memory medium. =\
Especially since he got all those democrats to win this time...
Doing so would be admitting to breaking Federal Voting Laws, not to mention several State and County Election Laws.
Diebolds only hope is a complete and transparent Redesign.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
The complexity of Diebold touch-screen voting machines is their downfall. People who see these things for the first time should be able to set them up and/or use them. Maybe they're just [very] poorly designed?
Victoria, Australia is testing a new voting machine in elections this month.
They print out a standard ballot, which is deposited in the ballot box.
And they're counted by the same machines that count hand-filled ballots.
If Australia, with its complex transferrable vote system, can handle this... why can't the US?
can you imagine the actual number of votes cast?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Given that:
1) the CEO, all of current management, sales and computer programmers who kept their mouths shut, remain in place,
2) the CEO being the same person who pledged to bring the elections over to the Republicans,
Um, no.
Walden O'Dell was the CEO who was committed to "help Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President."
He was canned in 2005. Thomas Swidarski replaced him and then canned 5 of the 7 most senior Diebold execs.
There were thousands of people staring at this election hard because of these machines and the reslt of glitchesa coming in was pretty roust, on the record evidence.. The citizen oversight was *huge* compared to the previous two elections. I'd say that was a critical difference this time. And from reading election threads here and there, whenever people had a chance to not use the machines, they mostly did in droves.
And here is reality. If it had looked like massive voter fraud *this time*, the chances were again huge for some serious mass physical protest and "social strife", beyond getting the lawyers involved.
The US people have grown rather annoyed with "business as ususal" with the corporate crooks and pirates stealing everything that isn't nailed down, which has been the result precisely from the outcome of the past two elections.. Very, very annoyed. In fact, I think the vindication is in the immediate reactionary wall street stats,the drop, the same big pirates seem to have lost a little confidence in their free-check ability to keep ripping off the people. I think they are starting to get the message they need to tone down the criminality "business as usual" crap they have inflicted on the people during this regime's reign. You have some of their more prominent mouthpieces (rats in other words) abandoning ship and trying to distance themselves from the results, globalist fascist goons like Perle and Limbaugh for instance, trying to make-believe they haven't been a major part of the problems.
Other than for disabled voters, e-voting seems to be a solution in search of a problem. It's expensive, hard to use and unreliable.
Even if you had an open source voting machine, how much would you trust it? Given stories about (actual, not speculated) hacks like the original unix cc + login hack, it's quite possible that even seeing the source is not always enough if the stakes are high.
FYI: Somebody at Bell labs in the 70s made an administrative / support back door into Unix by patching the login program to have an "extra" account. If you deleted this back door from the source code to login, the compiler put it back (presumably you could take steps to hide what you were building from the compiler, but for simple partial clean-ups...). If you then cleaned up the source to cc, and recompiled the source to cc using cc, it put THAT hack back in AS WELL. Open source is NOT enough -- you have to have the entire "stack" in your development environment be trust-WORTHY.
The risks of these machines outweigh the benefits for all but disabled voters. Even then, a disabled-friendly interface could still produce an immutable human readable (paper or other tangible medium) artifact to be placed in a lock box. These artifacts should then be either human counted (I know it costs a few hours and dollars -- it's IMPORTANT, OK?) or PERHAPS counted by multiple scanners from different vendors.
On the other hand, if your requirement is "make it hard to detect cheating", the current paperless systems support that feature rather nicely.
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
I wish I could see your comment printed in our local paper, "The Bee". Of course, these are facts they seem to not want to know. :-(
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
Surely if Diebold can make a secure ATM there is no reason why it cannot make secure and reliable e-voting apparatus in which the public has confidence.
It mostly depends on how "secure" is defined, but generally there is no such thingy as secure ATM, be it Diebold or not. Voting will not be 100% reliable unless we all become telepaths.
There you are, staring at me again.
2) the CEO being the same person who pledged to bring the elections over to the Republicans
Yeah, and he did such a fantastic job of following through on that, too.
Some you folks are starting to sound like the 9/11 and UFO conspiracy nuts. It doesn't matter that the Democrats fairly won the election even with Diebold voting machines in place around the country, they're still evil and this must all be part of some vast Rovian conspiracy. There's no way Diebold will ever regain your trust, because you refuse to give it no matter what. So why should their CEO take anything you say seriously?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
I really doubt that dems would want to bring up any charges of election tampering. Seems to me that the winners of the election would try to downplay any questions about the election being invalid. (especially in such a close race)
Uh, call me crazy, but shouldn't this have come about two days earlier? I mean, after the fact is all well and good, but, well, ---
Nah, guess I'm just crazy. It makes total sense to wait until the day after an election to ask for secure voting machines.
"All of this will take time so get started now - and don't set expectations too high for 2008."
Wait... wasn't there lots of allegations in 2006 about the systems not being secure? In that big... whatchamacallit... Pres-i-dential elec-tion... hmm... Shouldn't they have... I dunno... gotten started back then, perhaps?
Maybe I'm just old fasioned, and like to see things happen when they're pointed out, nottwo years later.
Want to find other gamers to play board and role playing game
My best friend was in IT at the local credit union (dedicated to servicing the local Fortune 50 company's employees). He used to tell stories that were simply astounding. Mostly human error type stuff (e.g., someone forgot to run the manual overnight process that applies payments to credit cards; the automated process that handles direct deposits errored out and the operators hadn't noticed for three days, resulting in many overdrafts; etc.), but still, it was eye opening.
Now he's the VP of IT for a different CU. The malfeasance that occurs at the executive level is staggering in it's own way. But, at the end of the day, I suppose it can all be chalked up to 'the human factor.' After all, technology only does what we tell it. Right?
use Diebold ATM's. When I asked, several steps up the corp. food chain, why, here is a summary of the answer I recieved:
:')
We like NCR more than we like Diebold.
So it was more of a corp. contract/money saving deal than anything else. I like my banks ATM's , so no matter. The point is,
there is competition in the ATM industry, just as there is in the "voting industry"(?should this even be a phrase?).
The competition in the industry is going to help make better products, in time.
I also live in a somewhat rural area that isn't plagued by electronic voting, not even optical scan machines. When I was 18,
I spent an election season canvassing and making phone calls for the DNC(1996). I also was a poll watcher, and helped verify
the election results( i stood there and watched the old ladies count for HOURS). It was grueling, but I didn't have to correct
TOO many mistakes. I recall our biggest problem was one ballot counter didn't think she had to wear her reading glasses.
My counterpart from the GOP and I knew each other from church, and still keep in touch. She called me last night to talk about
the election, life, etc, and about the optical scan machines. We both hoped that the machines were easy to calibrate. We'd both
hate to try to convince one of those things to put on its reading glasses if it kept making mistakes.
Amongst the things the Dems have to address is the utter lack of trust in electronic voting machines, particularly from Die("committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.")bold.
The republicans lost on tuesday?
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
...the Democrats won.
Any election that Democrats lose is automatically illegitimate.
Any election that Democrats win is automatically legitimate.
When Democrats lose elections, they shriek to the heavens and say it had to be stolen from them. When Republicans lose elections they shrug their shoulders and move on.
Here in Missouri, it was Democrat election fraud as usual, so it is not newsworthy. The election was close so the inner-city precincts of St. Louis and Kansas City were able to wait until statewide results were in so they could gauge how many Democrat votes they needed to manufacture. Talent was ahead all the way until the end when KC and STL turned in their results and McCasket squeaked in.
The good news is this will embolden the Democrats to nominate Hillary in 2008. That will energize and unify the conservative base like nothing ever seen before.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
both forms of voting suffer from the same major issue, no one knows for sure that the person voting is allowed to vote at the time they cast their vote. Are they legal resident? Are they a felon? Have they voted elsewhere?
Plus in this election there were sites that ran out of paper ballots. Paper ballots also only have one form of retention. A digital vote can be transmitted off to multiple locations all at one time, printed out at the site and remotely all at one time, and even locked down with encryption so that if the vote is altered it does not decrypt properly.
Electronic voting is key but so is verifying that person voting is allowed too. This includes picture ID.
If anything paper voting will allow the fraud that exist to continue unabated. Sorry, that vote 2 years ago in Washington was about as perfect example of why paper ballots are horrid. Votes showing up out of nowhere, etc.
Paper has to go. We can't trust the vote until as many people are taking out of the handling of votes as possible.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I concerns me after watching the HBO special that maybe the flaw was intentional. After seeing evidence of negative votes it is apparent that someone knowlegable with the machines knew. A system designed to report zero votes when the ballots have been pre-stuffed with equal positive and negative votes for canidates and not zeroing them out is rather suspicious. With this they could make extra money from corrupt politicians from eiother party. And exactly why and for what reason did the RNC owe Diebold money. I think a Federal Grand Jury should be involved here and for all those involved if such a scandle exsist should be considered a treasonist act.
Well, the funny thing is that you have an incompetent idiot trying to tell a crooked incompetent idiot how to restore their company. It is funny.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What good is it if the machine prints me a receipt of who I voted for? Who's to say what gets printed is what actually gets tabulated? I really believe the ballots themselves should be paper, with the check boxes far enough apart to prevent confusion and should be marked with permanent ink. Then they should be scanned and the votes tabulated that way. This way, there IS a paper trail.
Yup, and here's the links showing how to hack their voting machines:0 080882009&hl=en
o n_diebold/
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=867372668
More info: http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/
This is *extremely* scary stuff. Not just theoretical, these guys have working code which proves you can steal votes without detection -- it lies dormant during the testing phase, and only "activating" during the real election.
It doesn't have to be like this -- electronic voting *can* be done properly (confirmation sheet behind a glass plate which goes into a lock box), but the approach being taken is inexcusably irresponsible of both the gov't purchasers and manufactures, to the degree it makes me extremely suspicious of the motivations of those involved. Especially, if you remember, when the CEO of the Diebold makes statements like he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year" in a fundraising pitch.
http://money.cnn.com/2004/08/30/technology/electi
I voted in Virginia and, at least in my county, I was offered the choice between a paper ballot and electronic. I chose paper.
Done.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
In my precinct we've used optically scanned ballots for years, and I really can't think of a single valid reason that justifies the use of touchscreen appliances. With the optical ballots there's no intimidation factor and you have a paper trail that the voter won't have to spend additional time verifying.
Sure there's still the possibility for the voter to munge the ballot up, but the hardware costs are so much lower and there's far less training needed to run one. I strongly believe that the voting appliances that caused such fluff this election season were a complete waste of our tax dollars, but what's new about that?
The Democrats won! There can't be any voter fraud now!
Wait....unless it's just not letting Republicans vote by not printing ballots. You have to hand it to them. They are primitive, but effective in their cheating.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
...and while I was voting without any problems at all, some old man started using the booth next to me and immediately called someone over and told them his machine kept automatically choosing a republican candidate and exclaimed that the "same thing happened during the presidential election!" Meanwhile the volunteer showed him what to do and told him to press harder on the screen and then he says "Oh...okay", and he didn't make another peep about it. People need to realize that there are a lot of crazy people out there that make crazy accusations. This guy was one of them. This to me is a perfect example of how some of these stupid stories get started - by kooks. with agendas.
Terrible karma and aiming lower, which in this environment of one-sided reason, is higher.
Fsck politics.
At least you got that right!
I'll bet ex-VA senator George Allen's (and the Repuplican party) not so happy with e-voting about now. All he can see on a re-polling is the same old numbers that reported his loss in the first place.
The fundamental problem with voting machines is that a voter's act of voting is supposed to be private, but that's all. The act of counting and accumulating those votes for a particular candidate is not supposed to be a black box. It's supposed to be transparent, public, and verifiable. Which means all closed source black box voting machines will never be trustworthy. Diebold's first mistake was thinking they should step into the market in the first place. If the thing your selling is transparent, public and open, how on earth are you going to make money off of it when what's going on inside it is public knowledge? You have nothing to sell if everybody has it. And in a voting machine, everybody should know how it works.
Question everything
they NEEED to open source the code behind these things too, i mean theres even LAWS stating that is mandatory and yet they dont do it!!
a voting system shouldnt even be considered unless the code is open to review, they should also keep a better record of the votes instead of a single value that can easily be changed
Rob Mitchell (and others) doesn't get it! There's no way that the public will ever have the confidence in e-voting that they can have with traditional paper ballots. Nor is there the need.
/end rant
Ask any idiot on the street to volunteer for a day watching the voting process, including the count at the end and the publishing of the results for his district. Unless he's a total retard or overly paranoid he will realize that he can audit the entire process and can be reaonably sure that his vote was actually counted. Now throw a computer in somewhere in the process... there goes the control and thus the confidence the average voter has over the voting process.
The only need for e-voting machine is to help disabled people realizing their vote. If that means touch screens with an extra large font... go for it. But why does that have to translate into e-voting for everybody?
Oh yeah, there's the other argument from e-voting proponents: The vote gets counted faster. WTF?!! This isn't the 19th century, EVERY 1st world country that does paper ballots has the results in within a couple of hours. Getting the votes faster is code-speak by officials who can't be bothered to invest a fucking day overseeing the polling station and counting the vote at the end. No, these enlightened people just want to call it a day and go home. Let the computer take care of everything.
I'm fucking sick of it! It's their fucking duty (and every citizen's who cares for the accuracy of the voting process for that matter) to make sure that the voting process is not tampered with. And it only takes a couple of hours every few years. Is that really to much to ask?
Here's an idea: Why not use the millions that are spent on e-voting machines and the ensuing maintenance costs every year to pay the people who staff the pollings places 25 Euro an hour. Or maybe 50 Euro for the 2 hours it takes to count the votes in an average district. You'd get a lot more "volunteers" that way.
I'm just glad, that some countries in the EU are moving away from e-voting. Ireland has scrapped all e-voting equipment they had (before it was even once, talk about wasted money) and Amsterdam just went back to paper and pencil, because of the tempest attack that was demonstrated against their voting equipment. In Germany, there are few places that use e-voting equipment and the CCC is strongly advocating against it. But it's still an uphill battle.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
The main reason you can't have a paper copy for the voter as well is because that would allow people to sell their vote. A paper copy is then proof that you voted for who the person paid you to vote for.
Diebold, no matter what they do, is a private company. Voting is a transparent, PUBLIC process.
Would you give your paper ballot to a masked man who then goes behind a wall to log your vote, and then shreds it?
It doesn't matter what assurances anyone in the company gives us. They don't know what's actually running on their machines on election day. The programmers don't know either. Neither do the security professionals.
You can secure a system against stupid mistakes, but you can never -- never -- secure it against a malicious attack from the inside. No matter how smart you are, there's always someone smarter and more motivated than you.
Even paper trails can be played with. Who makes the paper trail counting machine? Infinite regression.
Canada does it right. Simple elections, paper ballots, counters observed by both parties, totals carefully checked and forwarded. Easy to recount. And they finish in four hours.
And everyone trusts it.
You're not alone in a booth when you get your absentee ballot. This leaves the door open to "voter education" events by unions/businesses/evangelical churches/liberal churches that "help" people fill out the complicated ballots and add peer pressure or threats. Then there's domestic violence, you wouldn't believe what control freaks some of the batterers are.
Weird new behavior in all the threads I open: There are none of the usual "Reply" links with messages. But the floating "547 Comments" box has "Top" and "Reply" links. If I click that "Reply" link, as I did for this message, I get the usual reply page, and if you can read this, it works. But all the usual info, including the Subject, is blank.
...
/. to discuss such things. I've looked, but if it's there, I don't recognize it. And I'm probably giving away my true geekiness by admitting to an interest in such things. ;-)
Now to verify that the Submit button works
(I also wonder if there's a place in
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Was a voting system where you're never sure if your vote is what you think it is ever going to work? Even with a paper trail, there's no saying what I put into the computer is correlated with what came out on that piece of paper, yet it's the computer entry that will be counted.
Even scanned paper ballots, sure it's faster, but the scanner can be tampered with as well.
The only way you can dismiss the above is if you're a complete voter skeptic and believe our votes don't matter anyway. Hand-counted paper ballots - it's the only way to be sure.
Hi, I break into banks and credit unions for a (legal) living.
ATM security is a joke. Ever since Diebold moved to Windows for their ATM software, it is trivial to hack them. When I go into a bank/credit union to perform a penetration test, I regularly find ATM's on the main network segment, with access to all ports, and a copy of WinXP installed on them that is still vulnerable to MS03-026.
ATM's are bought and sold. The hard drive is not wiped between clients. So when I hack into the ATM using a 3-year-old vulnerability, I find the data for 10 financial institutions.
That's not counting the fact that many places keep the key in the back of the ATM, allowing unrestricted access to the computer guts of the machine to any employee or even member of the public who passes by.
The idea that some people have that "Diebold makes ATM's secure, so they can make voting machines secure" is laughable to anyone who has ever had experience with the security of ATM's.
"Surely if Diebold can make a secure ATM there is no reason why it cannot make secure and reliable e-voting apparatus in which the public has confidence." No. I'll speak to this issue as a computer scientist with 28 years of engineering experience, and a sizeable portfolio of user interface patents. The issue is complicated by the need to consider the situated context, in terms of failure modes. Those that say "we can build reliable ATM machines, why can't we build reliable voting machines?" are missing exactly this point, subtly so. ATM machines - and the credit card industry - suffer from a known actuarial fraud rate. This is generally kept fairly secret, but amounts to a mild tax (reflected in interest rates) on the banking system. HOWEVER, the "error direction" is uncorrelated with general command and control of the monetary system - it is "noise", in an information processing sense. It is acceptable, whereas fraud in voting systems is not spread out in the same way - it results in point failures that swing command and control of the polis. Hanging chads are "noise". There are more than one kind of noise, in terms of statistics; hanging chads are "white noise". The errors produced by hanging chads are spread out over the entire system in a random way. Additionally, the paper ballots are entirely "in the realm of the senses" - you can look at them, see them, touch them, judge them. And recount them, with a Mark One Eyeball (or a committee of eyeballs, drawn from opposing parties). If the error rate is small, but random (white noise), then that is acceptable in my mind; because it will even out over time, "falsely" awarding close elections to opposite parties in an unbiased manner in terms of statistics. Hanging chads do not have intention. Moving ballots away from the realm of the senses into electronic form means that a hidden algorithm can intentionally corrupt the votes. An EEPROM memory holding software code can be difficult to trace back to known source. Add to this that Diebold claims the commercial right to hold the actual software proprietary, and you have a nasty situation where the machinery of voting now becomes arcanely obscure, not transparent, and potentially corruptible. And Deibold is known to "service" the machines in the field, sometimes without audit trails or even permission from the voting officials. If the issue is to make it easy for disabled to vote; fine, make machines that are touch screen etc., - that make marks on paper, that can be then fed into the traditional process, after the voter approves of the marks in front of their own eyes. I distrust even optical scanner evaluators that are software controlled; but they are at least susceptible to recounts based on the actual marks on paper of paper ballots. Electronic voting can so completely corrupt the system that democracy could be completely lost, in an unrecoverable way, short of a violent overthrow of the government, leaving us with a mere Spectacle where the outward forms are observed, but a permanent power arrangement comes into being.
Fixing the problem basically means replacing all the equipment. New machines with printers, new memory cards that are not so easily tampered with, and rewriting the tabulator software with proper encryption and authentication (digital signatures etc).
Now who is going to pay for that? Don't expect Diebold to pay for it - they're a business, not a charity, and they already lost a ton of money on this.
If the Diabold voting machines don't fail by design due to corruption then we're talking about the most incompetent computer company in the history of the world.
Taking into consideration the members of the Bush administration that are major stockholders I think a cruise missle might be in order.
Why aren't we all voting on the Internet by now?
There are plenty of security tricks for ensuring a voter's identity online. Then you could vote anytime, anywhere. As for those who don't have access to computers at home, at work, or at the public library (is this anyone at all?), they could go vote at the polling place on election day using a public Internet terminal set up for just that purpose. The volunteers who man the polling station wouldn't have to be responsible for confirming IDs, gathering ballots, or trying to maintain proprietary voting machines.
You could even print out the 'confirmation screen' and keep it as a receipt.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
'Surely if Diebold can make a secure ATM there is no reason why it cannot make secure and reliable e-voting apparatus in which the public has confidence.'
In an ATM you have a distinct advantage in that all parties to the transaction want to have a record of the transaction and who made it. So, there are permanent records that can be audited and verified. With election machines you cannot record identifying information, for anonymity's sake, and you have to assume that a person willing to modify the records will have unrestricted access to the hardware for at least brief periods of time before or during the election. So you need a system that is at least as auditable as paper ballots and can only be verified by the voter at the time the vote is cast. Oh and you need the same surge capacity as paper ballots because you can't assume that you will see an average turnout.
Given that the whole point of ATMs is to reduce the number of people that need to be involved, I don't see an analogous ability to reduce the number of election workers involved with electronic atm like voting machines. What are these Vendors claiming the benefits are compared to optical scanned paper ballots? Just saving trees? Or do these things actually save costs, even when they are implemented properly? Seems to me voting machines invariably cause problems that you otherwise might not have, such as long lines, so any savings should be seen against all the costs and any reduction in capacity from not having enough voting machines per total number of registered voters.
So that if it saves a few thousand dollars per election, but the cost is that 15% of registered voters decide not to vote because they would have to wait outside in the rain while your 5 voting machines are monopolized by indecision, in a precinct of 5,000 registered voters. I grew up in a district that had no more than 5 voting machines for about 5000 people. Given the surge of people that showed up during relatively short period of times near the end of the day, it would have been much better to have had paper ballots which could have meant that you can hand out a few dozen ballots at a time, at least, and then you can easily handle over a thousand people an hour without a wait since scanning the ballots just takes a second.
Just think how easy it is to intentionally cause long lines in large precincts when you don't have enough voting machines to go around, you just need a couple hundred people, lets call them Republicans, to decide to take a little longer deciding who to vote for. If they know the district is Democratic and it is a statewide race, then a relatively small group of uncoordinated individuals could cause hundreds or thousands of voters to just go home. And the difference between indecision and purposefully taking your time is indistinguishable if you say take 5 minutes to vote. Think throughput and process, even forgetting about security, paper ballots are fundamentally superior because you can hand as many as you want out and people can scan them in when they are ready.
I think once you start talking about having this surge capacity in the number of voting computers that are on site, then any purported overall cost savings with ballot printing costs goes away. Even assuming $2000 per 5000 ballots printed. So for one theoretical precinct, $2000 per election plus the cost of optical scan equipment, probably need just one or two scanners, not sure how much they cost, versus the cost of 8 voting computers which still may not give you the same voter throughput as paper ballots and probably don't last as long as the optical scan machines.
Hey look! Democrats won and there aren't any "vote machine FRAAAUUUUD!" cries! What a coincidence.
"Surely if Diebold can make a secure ATM there is no reason why it cannot make secure and reliable e-voting apparatus in which the public has confidence."
Yeah there is-- it's owned by Flaming Republicans...
And Diebold Machines are part of the apparatus that Democrats won by, OMG!
Maybe this has already been suggested and maybe there's a lot of holes in this, but I always thought it was pretty wild to pay for computers that would serve only one purpose (voting). Couldn't we find a way to work around this? Why not build a really scaled back version of Linux designed to only take input from a mouse (and uses a protocol that adds the votes over the network so that they are authenticated by the machine as well as other machines), make it a dual boot, and place the machines in local libraries. On election day, run an authentication program in the morning that verifies that the OS is EXACTLY what it should be, and lock the boxes so there is absolutely no access (not even to a keyboard). Just a mouse, a screen, and a network. I'm really not an expert, so I guess I'm asking why this couldn't be done?
Financial security comes from auditing. Auditing requires records of who did what. Voting systems require anonymity, so auditing can't be done.
_ problem_wit.html
Bruce Schneier has an excellent short piece on this.
"Some have argued in favor of touch-screen voting systems, citing the millions of dollars that are handled every day by ATMs and other computerized financial systems. That argument ignores another vital characteristic of voting systems: anonymity. Computerized financial systems get most of their security from audit. If a problem is suspected, auditors can go back through the records of the system and figure out what happened. And if the problem turns out to be real, the transaction can be unwound and fixed. Because elections are anonymous, that kind of security just isn't possible."
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/11/the
"Surely if Diebold can make a secure ATM there is no reason why it cannot make secure and reliable e-voting apparatus in which the public has confidence"
This is such a seriously foolish quote it stopped me from bothering to RTFA. ATM's and evoting machines are doing two completely different tasks, there are countless reasons a company can succeed at ATM's and not at evoting.
ATM's by definition retain and want no anonymity, while voting must retain anonymity or you risk tyrants and bureaucrats monitoring who people voted for and retaliating against or rewarding them. The need to insure anonymity vastly complicates the problem of also insuring integrity of the count. Evoting and internet voting advocates often dismiss the importance of anonymity as they pitch how convenient it would be to vote over the Internet. Voting over the Internet would be insane. Maybe anonymity is not so important....until people gain power who want to keep it by any means necessary, then anonymity is crucial. If people think their vote is being monitored they vote the way they think is safest, which is why dictators run sham elections where they get 99.9% of the vote. When people know their vote is being watched they vote for the dictator every time, unless they are suicidal.
ATM's are constantly audited by both the user and financial institution that runs them. If they recorded a false transaction the books wouldn't balance and either the bank or the customer would be instantly unhappy. The voter has absolutely no way to audit an all electronic system to insure it actually counted their vote as cast. If there were one it would almost certainly run afoul of the mandate for anonymity.
The only audit trail that is acceptable is the evoting machine produces a paper ballot the voter can check and which is the thing which is actually counted and even more importantly recounted. Thats how the evoting machines where I vote work, they just produce a paper ballot that is checkable by the voter, you can fill the same ballot out by hand, they go to an optical scanner to be counted and they can be recounted by hand if necessary. With this approach the evoting machines are mostly a very expensive convenience and are really not worth the money being spent on them for the average voter.
If there was an ounce of sanity in this country evoting machines would have been confined to a couple machines in each precinct specifically for the needs of disabled voters, which would help them produce a paper ballot without requiring someone to help them and meddle in how they vote. Unfortunately in the wake of the 2000 debacle, large amounts of federal money were dangled in the front of greedy Republican friendly companies like Diebold and ESS and they are now vast numbers of enormously expensive machines in precincts across the country. Beyond the subsidized initial expense the maintenance costs are enormous, since once you buy a system you are locked in to that vendor and their support contract. The logisitics of deploying them are also expensive, extremely prone to failure, and frequently overwhelm the civil servants and poll volunteers who have to deal with them. Elections are something which occurs once a year or every two years. Creating this enormously expensive technological infrastructure for something that occurs infrequently is insane, It is mostly designed to enrich the companies that feed off it, and that was true of all the mechanical systems which predate evoting, its just worse with computers in the mix.
The only small case you can make for evoting is it prevents people from making mistakes like voting for two candidates in a race. Sorry but if you screw up your ballot its your fault your vote will be disqualified.
Voting really is something best left to people marking paper ballots with pens, and then counting them by hand or maybe an optical scanner if you want to be real high tech, and then ALWAYS with MANDATORY hand counts of random precincts to insure the system is on the up and up. This really isn't the rocket science we've turned it in to.
@de_machina
Try using "Dopefish" as a write-in candidate to see a great easter egg.
(No, I'm not going to spoil the surprise!)
We have been using electronic voting machines for 20 years now, and Deibold isn't the only e-voting machine maker. They draw attention only because conspiracy nuts think they work for the GOP or something. Get a life.
Look, I'm not a Registered Democrat (independant) but I voted heavily Democratic Tuesday, because I strongly disagree with many things that the Republican party has done in recent years, and I feel that checks and balances are incredibly important.
:P
That being said I've been outraged by the state of electronic voting for years, and even with the very very close Democratic takeover of congress (which I am ecstatic about), I am STILL outraged by the state of electronic voting in this country.
Listening to Republicans bash bash bash Democrats for not making noise about the electronic voting when it worked in their favor for a change is absolutely absurd. For one thing it's only been a couple of days since the elections. You are completely out of your mind if you think that Democrats are going to be screaming at the top of their lungs that "We Won!!!! The election was rigged!!!!" For another thing, the CEO of Diebold isn't Democratic and didn't gaurantee a Democratic victory.
But the clincher, for me, is that the morning after the 2004 Election a very important family member of mine was bitching to high heaven that the Democrats would force a recount and would drag it out into December again. I listened to Kerry's speech conceding the election, then went to this family member. He absolutely refused to believe it. He was just bash bash bashing the "evil liberals" and refused to believe that they would do the honorable thing.
Republicans, admit it. Half the time your talking points about the evil liberals are more a mirror reflection of what you do yourselves, and your recent complaining about the Democrats not taking electronic voting because they are now in power is a perfect example of that. I for one hope that you again are making yourself look like fools, and this will be proven when congress finally actually does tackle the issue of electronic voting, SOMETHING CONGRESS DIDN'T DO WHEN YOUR "HOMIES" WERE IN POWER.
That being said do we really have to be so confrontational all the time? Aren't we all Americans and like living here? I'd really appreciate it if we could try to get along and conduct rational discussions and actually work together to make this a better place for a change. Hint: Listening to Michael Savage pronouce every liberal a "pervert" and a "traitor" doesn't help things much
I don't think so. Some may recall a /. article about students in New Mexico or Arizona (can't remember exactly which state) wherein some students that came across a malfunction Diebold ATM machine. From the default ATM user interface these students managed to get the ATM to reboot. It was built in Windows, and at which time they logged into a user account (was it XP?) and then proceeded to pull up Windows Media Player and dl a few songs and played them - of course playing in repeat mode so that the bank employee would have something to listen to - I suppose.
This happened shortly after a group of, i believe, MIT students won a cease and desist order from Diebold. They had legally stumbled on to Diebold internal memos and communications dealing with a plethora of issue with code stability and covertly inserting update patches for kludged voting machines. All without notifying the various necessary state and local authorities about it.
Anything Diebold makes is in the same mind set as M$. Don't make it secure make it pretty and easy. In otherwords, make the customer happy and pray nothing "untoward" happens - great strategy for the security of yours and my financial and voting data!
Diebold needs some serious oversight IMHO. In fact I would advocate open source code. Why? It's kinda like that Capital One commercial - you know, the one that ask "do you know what' in your wallet?". In this case it's do you know what in your voting machine - the answer is an unmistakable NO! So how the hell does one know if it's doing what is says it supposed to be doing? You don't - unless you're a Diebold developer and then your under an NDA... Time for the U.S. Gov to seriously rethink the Diebold contract - as in CANCEL IT!
"Why does only the Federal Govt. decide things like National Security & minting of currency. Becuse these are matters of vital, national importance."
I am too tired tonight to recall enough or research the details but the dizzying array or often disparate election procedures and laws in the US is mostly related to local governmental autonomy and states rights issues. Due to the nature of the USA origins and peoples there has always been a certain level of distrust for a monolithic federal government. Remember there are also state and local elections often concurrent with federal elections. I agree that I think more openness in processes, uniformity in technology and regulation and much better legal oversight would be generally a great idea. However I can also relate with some who have concerns about issues of too much federal power in general. The governing of the population in the US despite some national and international opinion has always been an exercise akin to herding cats, IMHO this is how it should be.
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew