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.'"

Comments

Secure ATMS? Ha!

[MilesNaismith]

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.

Re:Secure ATMS? Ha!

[arun_s]

The open letter sounds too idealistic, I can't imagine Diebold doing even half the things there. Looks like their line of thought is pretty clear from the second link:

Siwdarski is already trying to distance the Diebold name from its voting machine business to protect its brand.... the company recently ordered the name "Diebold" removed from the front of the voting equipment. Why? A spokesman would only say, "It was a strategic decision on the part of the corporation."

There's a fat line between what ought to happen and what actually does.

secure ATM ??

[Dalec21]

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]

threads are dead (?)

[arun_s]

Can somebody puhlease fix the site (or atleast have a notification on the front page if something's being fixed)?
Why's poor /. gone so buggy all of a sudden?
Detailed information is provided by these gentlemen.

How about starting off with

[gamer4Life]

banning all employees from being affiliated with any political party?

Is there any real chance of full disclosure?

[edwardpickman]

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.

Those damn tags!

[GFree]

So... many... traps

Is Slashdot infested with mice (or other vermin) to require so many itsatrap tags or what?

Irrational company bashing

[fortinbras47]

How much of the criticism of Diebold is legitimate and how much is over the top political grandstanding?

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.

Not likely

[eclectro]

The same hubris that made them lie on the video in "hacking democracy" will lead them to ignore this letter. I poll watched Tuesday for a couple of hours, and even though there was the veneer of smooth operation here, in actuality there were numerous unseen problems/potential problems.

• Poll workers were not familiar with the technology. They all know what a computer is, but they don't know what happens inside the computer. Like the difference between "registering a vote" (best for a testable system) versus actual "counting the vote" as the individual Diebold machines do.
• These machines (unlike the ones in Virginia) do produce a paper tape of the votes. I bet Diebold, being the cheapskates they are, used the same printer used in the ATMs. The printer housing protrudes about 10 inches away from the touchscreen. So when the voter stands at the machine to vote the printer is at the side of the voter so the voter can not see it. I saw only one person watch what was printing, and he had to do this by stepping back from the machine after pressing each selection. Everybody else just ignored what was being printed.
• There was numerous problems with inserting the voter card into the machine. Even though the voter put the machine in the card, it seemed to occasionally have a hard time accepting it, and it hung up a few people. A small detail, but with thousands of voters vying for a few machines and poll workers needing to attend to it, it has the cumulative effect of making the lines longer.
• The elderly, handicapped, and infirm all seemed to universally struggled with the machines. While they may normally struggle with any voting, I overheard one person tell her caregiver and these were her exact words "those machines are hard." Her caregiver responded and said "no, those were easy" which brings up the next critical point;
• Everybody liked the computer touchscreen. We are a nation that for the most part embraces new technology. But because "it's a computer automatically means that it's right" thinking takes over here. I heard many voters say "that's slick" or "that's neat." The public needs to be educated between the difference of "being slick" and "being correct." Election officials that had problems were quick to excuse it as "operating error" and big media inexcusably reported it as such, but clearly there are issues of usability that come into play with these machines. Giving voting machine vendors a pass on this is inexcusable. I think the election officials "defending their purchase" rather than address issues is wrong. And as voters think "Because it's a computer" does not make the machine and software operation and design correct (as any slashdotter will tell you), voting machine vendors should not take advantage of this to ignore problems.
• I wonder what the durability of the memory cards are. Maybe my fellow slashdotters could enlighten me as to the number of read/write cycles before they go bad. This needs to be a matter of public record. Remember, these cards are facing industrial duty with millions of votes cast. Are they rated for this use or did they get them from CDW? I bet they aren't. This seems like a potentially fatal election killer to me if one of those cards break, either from memory going bad or the physical bending of contact pins in the slot (I have seen that happen with other cards).
• While we have a paper trail, if there is a recount needed, how hard will it be for the election workers to read the votes in tape form? How long will this take? How accurate will it be, or will the recount only serve to confuse the outcome further or will it clarify it? As can be seen, the political climate is such that a recount happenning is guaranteed. Also, for all those machines without a "paper trail," because a recount is impossible (as it's just a re-tally), they should not be a part of an election syste

Flawed by design

[erroneus]

"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.

Electronic Voting Machines

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

It's all about incentives

[rollingcalf]

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.

Look to Victoria

[argent]

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?

The Diebold FUD will disappear now that...

[stankulp]

...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.