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Diebold to Withdraw from E-Voting?
ICA writes "It appears after years of criticism, Diebold may be ready to withdraw from electronic voting entirely. The company is concerned that this relatively small and marginally profitable unit is hurting the company's overall image."
de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Diebold was a respected maker of bank vault, ATM, security (!) and deposit equipment before they started messing with the E-voting market.
As my dad said, don't stake your reputation on something if you can't seem to get the hang of it; he was talking about sports, but it applies here as well. Diebold can't do this well; they should stop doing it and concentrate on their core business.
That, and Diebold has already accomplished what it's CEO promised to do - deliver the Presidency to the Republicans.
"The company is concerned that this relatively small and marginally profitable unit is hurting the company's overall image."
That's absurd. Diebold's voting machines have destroyed the company's image completely, in my opinion. Seriously, if you know something about the history and you have a little technical knowledge, would you ever buy anything from Diebold?
DEADbold.
--
My summary of U.S. gov corruption. Where's your's?
> I doubt the ATM division would be much different.
Very different problem. There are fewer ATM's and banks pay a lot more for them. The are put in place once and generally not moved. They are serviced by trained technicians rather than volunteers. The technology is much more mature. And banks are more concerned with security than the average politician / bureaucrat who's simply looking for the lowest bidder.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Lucky for us they did get into e-voting, and it has hurt their reputation. If they didn't, we wouldn't have been as aware that if security was their ass, they wouldn't be able to find it with both hands tied behind their back! Their reputation needed to be brought down.
Maybe I'm a conspiracy theorist, I don't know, maybe I've been in the computer business too long.
Diebold should have been able to make an e-voting system. NO bank would accept the "really, really, it works" hand waving from Diebold with regards to the e-voting. All ATM machines, teller machines, and machines that handle monetary transactions somewhere along the line, produce at least one verifiable paper record of credit and debit for each party in the transaction and agents involved. To do less with voting seems completely absurd. For Diebold to even suggest a system without proper accountability makes absolutely no sense what so ever. They really do understand security and record keeping, what the hell happened with e-voting? As a corporation, e-voting should have been a slam dunk for them.
Ineptitude at such a large corporation is not unheard of, but surely someone would have said something, right? When the president of Diebold said he would do what ever he could to make sure G.W. Bush gets re-elected, it was an event that colored my "benefit of the doubt" stance on Diebold.
I honestly believe that G.W. Bush and company helped fix the election and Diebold was just one of the methods. It only takes slight tampering to sway a consensus or another. When the polling authority in ohio opened ballot boxes to "pre-screen" the supposedly "random" selection in order to avoid a full recount, one has to wonder. In 2000 it was Florida, in 2004 it was Ohio, regardless the outcome is the same.
I think in the U.S.A. we have to ensure our own democracy before we try to bring democracy elsewhere by force.
Just my $0.02
P.S. This is not a flame post, just the words of a sad and disillusioned patriotic American.
You know that the technologies, hardware and software behind Diebold's systems were not inexpensive. So it's highly unlikely that they will just drop out of this. What will happen instead is that their work will be sold to the highest bidder. And that company will become the new Diebold with the main difference being that this new company will likely have e-voting as their main focus. Expect to hear about a new "better" voting machine before the next presidential elections. If they play their cards right, they'll spin it to make it seem like they are totally new and have better reliability than Diebold did. Then the same old games will be played and we'll have another presidential election tarnished by uncertainty about the results. They play this game enough times and this will seem "normal". Those voters who are happy with the results will not question the results. Those who are unhappy will also stop questioning as the other side will beat them into submission by saying, "sour grapes" enough times. And all will be well for those with the money to buy votes.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Getting in the middle of a left-wing conspiracy was the problem.
1) Republicans are actively trying to tamper with the votes
2) They are trying to tamper with electronic votes
3) Somebody at Diebold was friendly to Republicans
That was the problem for them. Yes, this is flamebait. But that doesn't make it wrong.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
You can't "elect" W more than twice, so their work here is done.
You'd have to be crazy to want to get into that business. Any piece of hardware that a third party has access to can be modified as long as someone is willing to put in enough effort. There's enough zealots on both sides of an election that you can guarantee someone would figure it out no matter what you do to the hardware.
There will never be truly "secure" electronic voting without a complete rework of every aspect of the process and even then it probably would never be truly secure.
What we really need to do electronic voting is secure tallying. We need a public, verifiable way of checking that the tallies are legitimate. We also need to make sure that they are also anonymous.
Any proposed method of verifying your electronic vote, whether it's a paper receipt, a bar code, or a website that you can check later on, is susceptible to being left out of the tally. So what if the website reports that it has correctly recorded your vote? You have no way of knowing whether your verified vote is counted in the official tally. Even if you see a vote exactly like yours in the official tally, it may or may not belong to you. With anonymous voting, several people might be looking at a single ballot, all thinking it was the one that they cast.
I'm trying to imagine a system where we can all have verified votes and make sure that they are affecting the official tally, but still maintain anonymity in the vote. Voting is basically a system where each voter can affect the outcome of the election by exactly one vote, for each office and issue. Perhaps a system where each voter adds encrypted strings of their vote to the official tally. Each voter can decrypt the official tally string and see that their vote has affect the tally. At the end of the election the last voter turns their decryption string to the officials, and the tallies are decrypted.
As you can tell, I'm not a mathematician nor a computer scientist. Please feel free to chime in and criticize or offer new ideas.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Personally, I see no other purpose in the design of Diebold voting systems other than to facilitate fraud. Seriously, there just aren't any really good protections built into the whole device.
Now, that it appears very likely that in 2008, Democrats will control both houses of congress and the presidency,I can understand why the folks at Diebold are worried about things like future investigations of their business. I really can believe it might make business sense for the Diebold management to dump their voting machines business at a loss-and let somebody else hold that hot potatoe. I would also expect some substantial managerial turnover is in order too.
Now, the problem is that Diebold is just the most visible of several corrupt companies here. I wouldn't forget about ES&S--which is another major player in the market-and which has similar problems.
With all the negative press surrounding electronic voting, I wonder if this signals a jump back to the standard paper or mechanical voting machines. Any election can be fixed, but I've always felt electronic voting isn't quite ready yet. Given that most people wouldn't understand how an electronic voting machine could produce wrong or fraudulent results, it's probably not the best thing to introduce right now. People understand the idea of improperly marked paper ballots or an election official tampering with the older mechanical tabulators. People don't fully grasp the idea of a group of hackers, whether for fun or profit, gaining access to or changing vote results.
I say we should wait until computer security really is nailed down. Not just because Symantec or other vendors say we're secure, but because it's actually so. Listening to security vendors do presentations at work to the executives is a painful exercise. The common theme is "buy this box, and you're 100% secure from these threats." I think it's going to take a lot of convincing (and a few examples) to change people's thoughts on this.
What I find amusing, is how much success we had using electronic voting machines here at Brazil... we have been using these for almost 10 years now. The last presidential election was almost entirely conducted using these machines... and only a few on the entire country had to be replaced due failure.
Of course there are some issues to be sorted, but overall it was a huge improvement over the old paper-based system.
So, why did Brazil succeed where the USA failed?
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
Psst - I'll give you a little tip: they know that. In fact, everyone knows that. But it's better to rant and rave about how Bush stole the election than it is to admit that they had a candidate that many people just didn't like.
Uh, if they're purchasing a company, they then take on that company's responsibilities until they divest themselves of it - which is what they're attempting to do now.
Diebold themselves sell (I believe) more ATMs than any other manufacturer in the US. Whether this is true or not they have a very large share of the market. So there is no excuse for Diebold putting out anything as flawed as these voting machines.
Flawed? Only because the guy they helped put in office is a fucking chimpanzee. Or did you miss the memo about doing all they can to deliver all of Ohio's electoral votes to the monkey?
Here's how this really plays out: Diebold (for whatever reason) wants to back the shrub. So they buy an e-voting corporation and use it to help stuff the ballot boxes. Now they're getting ready to discard a big pile of shit which any responsible investor would have known was a big pile of shit, simply because it DID serve their political agenda, and they're done with it. You respond by defending Diebold and talking about how it's not really their fault.
I don't think anyone can be blamed for believing that you are a paid shill after this performance. Especially since you went so far as to tell us that you have family working there. You are simply not a disinterested party. I'm not saying that you are - but I'm not saying that you aren't, either.
Diebold had both a responsibility, and if you are to be believed the ability to put out a quality product. They failed to do so. In fact, they failed so spectacularly, it "seems" like they actually sought to do exactly the opposite.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The reason you really hadn't heard about them prior to this whole electronic voting mess is because their security and ATM products are quite good. Diebold was completely off everyone's radar because they had such a good reputation in the industry. A company does not get to be around 150 years by selling a lot of garbage.
The voting fiasco happened because of a bad business decision. With the entire nation in an uproar over the botched 2000 elections, Diebold saw an opportunity to capitalize on everyone's concerns. They are a company in business to make money, remember. So, they bought up another company that already had electronic voting machines and Diebold had an instant product line. Sure that product line had a lot of flaws, but I'm sure Diebold saw those as minor compare to those big piles of government cash being thrown at the voting problem to make it go away.
Now, Diebold is realizing the seriousness of those flaws and realizes that the company might have to start from scratch to redesign everything to Diebold standards. That's going to cost them a LOT of money. Remember that thing about being in business to make money? In addition, by making this problem go away they can get back to their core businesses which are what they are really good at.
SiO2
For those making the decision of what voting system to use, there are many different (and often competing) values which must be considered, including, in no particular order:
Computerized voting machines, when well-designed, are much more user-friendly than nearly any other voting system and can address many of these other values in a comparatively trivial way. For instance, computerized voting systems can provide auditory feedback to blind voters, can easily display ballots in multiple languages.
Furthermore, VVPTs are not the best option for keeping a concurrent record of the system's functionality. One option I've encountered may be far superior to this: A video record of each voting terminal while in use.
My point here is not to argue against VVPTs (I think they have their place), so much as to further expand the debate. By understanding all of the considerations that must be made in selecting a voting system, perhaps we can have a more expansive and illuminating discussion about it here on Slashdot. Any potential solution (VVPTs, optical scan, paper ballots) will have both merits and flaws. But boiling it down to a "They're stealing the vote. VVPTs will save democracy!" doesn't do anybody any good, it just confuses the issue. As per usual, a little research into the issue will expose it as far less black and white than it first appears.
I am not a lawyer. This post does not constitute any form of legal advice.
You seem to have not paid attention. There were wide, and well substantiated claims of Diebold problems in that election, many of which are open to interpretation as to whether or not they were fraudulent, and if so if they were politically motivated (as opposed to just covering for incompetence). The problem was that the elections were so overwhelmingly in favor of the Democrats that these irregularities had little impact.
Here's the thing that bothers me about this, though: EVERYONE should be upset when someone says something like that. His statement should be read as, "I will use the Republican party to tear down democracy." Republicans should take that as a slap in the face, and should be MORE outraged than Democrats!
Pot/Kettle
As an ofttimes Republican voter I was:
* Upset when a thorough study of the 2000 Florida results (by mostly liberal mainstream media) concluded that Bush had indeed won the state, but long after that history has been re-written to only focus on headlines from 24 hours after the election.
* Upset that a paper ballot system, with known, but fixable flaws, was thrown out not only in Florida but in other voting districts all over the country, even in cases (such as my last two voting districts) where the paper based systems did not share the "hanging chads" issue and had never had any known problems concerning fraud or miscounts.
* Upset that perfectly valid systems all over the country were scrapped in favor of retrofitted WINDOWS laptops and Windows touchscreen devices with only marginally tested software.
* Upset that in the 2004 election cycle, Democrats AGAIN cried foul in districts where lazy, incompetent election officials spent taxpayers money hand over fist too buy this junky hardware and software rather than do realistic requirements analysis, and particularly upset that while these changes took place (pre 2004) these same left wing complainers said NOTHING, waiting instead for the results that they didn't like.
or but that wasn't enough,
* Post 2004 I engaged in numerous debates with individuals who swore they were not complaining about the 2004 results, but were indeed interested in the issue. Again, these people grew silent as distance from the 2004 election increased. As I would bring up newly discovered issues with this Windoze based software (and hardware) they would thank me politely for reminding them and then go right back to Bush bashing, continuing to ignore the very REAL bipartisan problems that were being ignored by the mainstream media.
* While you say the results of 2006 were "overwhelming", in fact in many local elections the margin of victory, particularly for newly elected democrats were a dozen votes, and for state level offices a few hundred. Almost NONE of these votes were contested, even in cases where the Republican candidate had only to request a recount.
Did these Republican candidates even get a "good sportsmanship" pat on the back from the press? Saving the taxpayers millions of dollars in recount costs, in fact got them nothing except continued insults from people like you.
Your right, we should all be outraged (and I am) by slipshod voting practices, whether the cause is corruption or incompetence (and very little is being done at the election-official level about incompetence), how many of them can you name who have been "fired"?
We should also stop accepting the fact that other types of voting corruption has gone on for years in largely Democratic districts. It seems to be widely accepted, even among Democrats that this corruption goes on, but where is the outcry? As your post indicates (not intentionally I'm sure) many Democrats are of the "ends justifies the means" school of thinking and simply don't consider an election invalid if their candidate wins. Of course there are Republicans who fall into this category too, but silence from the left is deafening.
The results of this, which will serve us (you) lazy citizens right, will be another ma
There's one huge reason why paper ballots are the best: You don't have to be computer-literate to understand paper ballots and the physical security needed to keep them safe. Transparency and trust in the voting systems are absolutely essential to our democracy.