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Ohio Audit Reveals More Diebold Problems
armb writes with a link to a Wired Blog entry about irregularities found in Diebold databases from the state of Ohio. The election in question here is November 2006, and the corruption of the entries may raise doubts about accurate tabulations. "Vote totals in two separate databases that should have been identical had different totals. Although Diebold explained that this was part of the system design for separate vote tables to get updated at different times during the tabulation process, the team questioned the wisdom of a design that creates non-identical vote totals. Tables in the database contained elements that were missing date and time stamps that would indicate when information was entered. Entries that did have date/time stamps showed a January 1, 1970 date. The database is built from Microsoft's Jet database engine. The engine, according to Microsoft, is vulnerable to corruption when a lot of concurrent activity is happening with the database, such as what occurs on an election night when results are uploaded and various servers are interacting with the database simultaneously."
Let us remember a phrase I once heard on Slashdot.
"Arguing on Slashdot is like competing in the Special Olympics...
You may win but you're still retarded."
But I know from experience with Citrix that Jet does not scale to more than 1000 simultaneous users. This seems to be borderline incompetence to me.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
I programmed with the Jet DB "engine" years ago. I wouldn't even run a web site with it. The only thing I found it useful for was business applications, such as connecting an Excel spreadsheet to Access. But that was years and years ago. Why would anyone write such a large and critical system using Jet today, when even Microsoft tells you not to? The only answer is incompetence.
Developers: We can use your help.
That is an old outdated desktop engine. Databases needs compressing and repairing all the freaking time - want to go multi-user? or over a network? forget it, it's have never performed well in that capacity in ANY version. Microsoft even advises not to use it anymore. They push desktop version of the SQL Server 2005 Engine (and now even have a version that just requires a couple DLLs in the application directory, however I do not know if that is available yet).
Jet Database Engine, a.k.a. Microsoft Access.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
Actually, in 2006, ohio switched from Red to Blue (no, not Red vs. Blue, though that's a more interesting topic admittedly).
Regardless, the usual complainers, would not be complaining much about their side loosing on this one.
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> The database is built from Microsoft's Jet database engine.
Jet? Shit.
I'm gonna submit proposals to program up a new Mars Rover using Visual Basic!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Wow - an MS-Access Database? If that's indicative of the level of tech they've got inside those puppies, no election is safe!
Good lord, I'd say anything over 10 users is a problem with Jet, from my experience anyways.
Jet is fine for what it is, but like any other tool it has a proper purpose and should not be mis-used.
I don't know the specifics of the Diebold stuff, it would seem to me though if you had one Jet DB on each machine along with a proper upload tool it should work just fine.... at the same time if I was building a voting machine process from scratch I wouldn't think of using it.
fwiw. ymmv.
TFA didn't say, but does anyone know if it is possible to get an accurate, tally? Would it make a difference?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
for a simultaneous nationwide facepalm?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
What is really sad is how you so reflexively defend the republicans against vote fraud that you didnt even bother to notice that the 2006 elections were mostly won by democrats.
I've had very few banking errors using ATMs and I'm quite sure that I am not the only user on the system when I do use them. Why would this company have any trouble with this kind of operation? Is it because there is no accounting so they don't bother to get it right?s -selling-solar.html
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Learn to read and analyze data instead of kneejerking please
This is about the 2006 election. To remind you, that's when Ohio went Blue.
Don't get me wrong, there are many cases where 'sore looser leftie' is a potentially valid complaint. This isn't one of them.
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I await the next problem-free election. You know, the one where no one can even insinuate anything went wrong.
- There will have to be perfect information about every tiny detail of that election, or they'll say "What are they not telling us? What are they trying to hide?"
- Everyone will have to find out absolutely everything at exactly the same time. Otherwise "Why did they wait to release that information? What were they trying to hide?"
- All of the ballots will have to be exactly the same. Otherwise "The ballots were misleading!". (Even though every locality has to have different ballots. Hmm.)
- All of the ballots will have to be in every dialect of every language, modern, extinct, or completely made up. Otherwise, it's "not fair".
- No voter can ever have ambiguous eligibility. I guess we'll all have to agree on who is a voter and who isn't before the election. This will have to include a comprehensive list of names there's unanimous agreement on.
- And voters will have to be able to "become" eligible up to the end of voting on election day. Otherwise, someone will be disenfranchised.
- And, of course, none of the thousands of election workers can even make the tiniest mistake.
Without this, the election is FIXED. (Unless my guy won. Then it was fair.)
What neophyte picked MS Access for a dynamic multiuser environment, and how is it that their life isn't a living hell of crashes and deadlocks as a result? (You know, the way mine was.)
I think this is what you call "not ready for prime time." I much prefer my county's system, which has a Scantron-like form that you fill in with pen and which gets scanned on-site, giving you an instant total-- and an immediate notification if there's an overvote or undervote. Plus there's that handy little paper trail...
Of course, the part that gets me angriest, as a former poll worker, is the fact that there are people who will mess with someone else's vote. You don't do that.
Actually I am a lab rat in an elaborate plot to take over the world.
In the last episode, the capitol building collapsed - and now, the following letter appeared on the broken stairsteps to the Ohio capitol:
"We're sorry that the capitol building collapsed, but it ends up that we used Licoln Logs to build the dome, and it ends up that it collapses when the wind hits it from multiple directions at once.
We've gotten some complaints that we should have expected this, and were "total morons" for choosing such a design. We think this is a gross oversimplification, and more than a little unfair. We used multiple layers of high-quality chewing gum to secure the dome, which required countless hours of chewing, along with thousands of gallons of spittle. When you complain against such a massive effort, you insult the sore mouths of our hard working employees.
Sincerely,
Halliburton CEO
Bozo D. Clown"
Next episode: FEMA picks up the pieces.
Ryan Fenton
They should have hired those monkeys from the careerbuilder.com commercial to design the system. They would have done a better job. Who in their right mind would use Jet for this or for anything important for that matter? "Free" apparently drove the choice.
> about their side loosing on this one.
How did one side become less tight than the other?
Hey genius, you don't think that there's a few corrupt Dems that would take advantage of exploiting known weaknesses in Diebold's shitty voting machines to steal an election? If you don't, then you're fucking naïve.
this really isn't about MS having a shitty database. It's really about Diebold not knowing how to design a database application. Other than that, I'm just too shocked to say anything while quietly making a mental note to avoid all things called Jet from MS and anything that comes from Diebold.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
When does someone bring them to court over SCREWING UP AN ELECTION.
Seriously, I dont care if the errors caused changed the outcome or not, its fairly clear that they failed, in the worst possible way, to maintain the level of creditability needed for a damn election. This isn't a "oops, my bad" This should be a federal offence with manditory jail time.
No system is perfect, but come on, JET!? Might as well have the vote counted in diffrent states by the party currently in power, would be just as accurate.
I'll give you, Republicans ain't always right and neither are Democrats, but when Democrats almost always scream fraud! when they don't win it's pretty easy to discount them quickly just because they are always up in arms about it.
"When you can't run anymore, you crawl... and when you can't do that, you find someone to carry you." - Malcolm Reynolds
They make horrible voting machines, and in TFA it's claimed they tabulate results at the precinct level not the machine level. DUMB.
/. articles will likely continue until they're no longer used, for obvious reasons.
I do understand why Republicans get so defensive about this,but these machines have to GO.
The
Now, I'd never think about developing this on a Microsoft Jet DB, since it's been somewhat deprecated for the MS Desktop SQL Server (MSDE) and SQL Server 2005 Express, which are much better and lightweight enough for a current desktop.
Nonetheless... what MS probably stated is that basically access to a JET Db is not thread safe, which means that concurrent access will cause corruption with a probability directly proportional to the amount of activity. YET if you serialize access to a Jet Db (which is a necessary and basic requirement given that it's not thread safe) there shouldn't be a fear of corruption, unless the API is buggy. If each voting station has a Jet Db and they all get exported to a central (thread safe) db then there's no need for concurrent access to any of the individual Jet DBs, and there shouldn't be a big fear of data corruption (which, anyway, can be verified somewhat easily).
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
but this isn't necessarily even the democrats that are complaining.
It's just people who found screwups in Dibold voting devices.
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The election in question here is November 2006. The Democrats did win in November 2006.
You do have a point, sometimes I forget that just because I don't like certain doesn't mean they can't have a valid point.
"When you can't run anymore, you crawl... and when you can't do that, you find someone to carry you." - Malcolm Reynolds
At the same time, when an election that was mostly won by democrats brings out republican shills that say "we won fair and square" automatically, it is kind of hard to see them as anything but ditto heads. Hell even rush limbaugh probably isnt that stupid.
I had a job interview with Diebold about 4 years ago. This makes me glad they never called me back.
I've been programming for 25 years and many various systems and this just does not seem like that difficult of a system to write. Am I missing something? You show a screen with the candidates for an election, have the person touch the screen, "Are you sure?" Yes/No got to the next one. At the end show all the selections. Are you sure again, print off the results twice, once for them once for an audit trail. Store the results in a database. And then it counts the votes. If they don't want to go through all the paper, send it to a PDF or something. Have a couple layers of redundancy (local, county, state) just to keep everything in sync. I guess I just don't see the difficulty. Allow officals to see the code. Count+=1
Maybe this will be my summer project.
Look, let's say I had hired an accountant. Then, let's say that I found out that he was keeping two separate databases of my finances. Let's also say that they had different totals in them, and he was only showing me one of them.
Not only would I fire his ass, but I'd make sure to press criminal charges of fraud. Why are these creeps from Diebold, Sequoia, ES&S, et. all not in prison yet?
Diebold makes ATMs; don't tell me that they can't get something as simple as a vote database right. Occam's Razor points to outright fraud, not to simple incompetence.
Militant Agnostic: "I don't know, and damn it, neither do you!"
After seeing how they develop, I absolutely like the idea of their going back to handling my money.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I consider voting machines to be a pretty straightforward application of computer technology: counting things. There are thousands of examples of this being done with complete accuracy. Heck, Wal-Mart always knows how many boxes of ice cream it has in every store and the exact temperature of each freezer. Diebold gets the contract and you'd think they were trying to land a man on Pluto.
Voting machines need to be an open-source project anyway. We ALL need to know what's going on in those things.
This is so pathetic. I recall a saying that basically says never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. I suspect that these election failures are the result of serious incompetence on the part of Diebold and/or election officials.
> > about their side loosing on this one.
> How did one side become less tight than the other?
Too much gay sex, obviously.
> 'sore looser leftie'
WTF does that mean? The lefties are less tight than what? How does being loose make them sore?
How did one side become less tight than the other?
By getting repeatedly fucked by the other party?
Oh come on, that was so not flamebait.
"When you can't run anymore, you crawl... and when you can't do that, you find someone to carry you." - Malcolm Reynolds
Reading this made me think about my time doing safety critical systems (it fails, someone dies) and its really stunning to think that something like voting in a democracy isn't considered mission critical to the country.
There really is no excuse for voting to not be done on a comparative basis e.g. every vote to be checked via 3 different software lines (this isn't rocket science) and a voting system to then confirm that the vote is being applied correctly. This vote should then be written to two (at least) data sources to enable reconciliation at the end.
This is a freaking implementation of a check-box system where is the sodding complexity that means its expensive to be professional.
Voting in a democracy is mission critical, to not consider it that way is to say that voting doesn't matter.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Entries that did have date/time stamps showed a January 1, 1970 date.
TFA didn't say, but does anyone know if it is possible to get an accurate, tally? Would it make a difference?
Another interesting point, if this is the worst of the corruption then it's likely to be possible to retrieve a 'very accurate' tally. But why the hell did they use the JET engine, to save a few pennies? The JET engine is one of the WORST things ever to come out of M$, I would put it even in front of WinME on that list. I've seen database corruption with only one user doing very minimal read/write/modify to it before.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
If they're dumb enough to use Jet in this sort of application, I'd hate to see their database schema... it'd probably make my eyes bleed.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Yes, Finally Understanding Deceit or Fraudulantly Undermining Dependability. These guys tried to hide that they were peddling junk by saying it was proprietary. There are no accurate time stamps. You can verify corruption as has just happened, but you can't recover from it. Every single elections official that signed a contract with Diebold needs to be investigated. If there were no kickbacks, and they really knew nothing of this, then this surely is fraud.
Designed to fail, more likely.
But don't worry, Diebold has spent the bucks to make SURE
that at then end of the night, the machine prints.
And then we know who rules the world for a decade.
So I guess the real question is, knowing all this...
why are we not throwing rocks and setting people on fire?
Mod me pissed and ranting, but WHY do we put up with this shit?
Our forefathers would bitchslap us until their arms got tired.
...ANYWHERE in the system.
Surest sign of technical incompetence there is.
you had me at #!
that's not borderline at all, that IS incompetence.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Visual Basic? You're crazy. You should use brainfuck!
Isn't this fraud in so many ways?
Calling something a voting machine AND selling it, when it isn't a voting machine fit for that purpose at all.
It's as much a voting machine as my bedsheet is a certified parachute fit for skydivers.
They're lucky they're in the USA. In other countries they might actually get lynched by angry voters or executed (for treason?) if they escape the mob.
But it'll be hard to convince the rest of the world that the US is interested in democracy and fair elections in Iraq if this sort of thing keeps happening in the USA.
Maybe the USA should just modify and use the American Idol voting system. It can't be much worse than using Microsoft Jet and all the other crap Diebold is making.
to build the space stations onboard inventory system in access.
Then when it crashed, insist that it can only be fixed 'on site'.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
WTF does that mean? The lefties are less tight than what? How does being loose make them sore? If there were ever a proper time for a Goatse link, this would be it.
Your brain is not a computer.
WTF were they thinking building such a massive database-driven application with Access?? Jesus Christ. No wonder government jobs are so fucking easy to get.
Real database engines keep complete transaction logs.
Which is why when explaining a result matters, you use a real database engine, not something like jet, which is simply a library to maintain indexed files.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yes, only it'd be a little tough for the entire nation to simultaneously slap Walden O'Dell's face. I humbly offer my services as the nation's representative in this matter.
Would someone like to claim dibs on Ken Blackwell?
This is nearly unbelievable! So essentially the voting machines were running Access. Even Microsoft says that the Jet DB engine should not be used in situations when a lot of concurrent users are expected. So I guess this is one case where Microsoft cannot be the bad guy, shocker!
Why would they do this? If cost was the issue, Jet vs SQL server say, then why not go with PostgreSQL, MySQL, or other free alternatives? Even if you're a Microsoft shop, it isn't that hard to make MS stuff interface with OSS DB backends.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
George W. Bush!!!!!....wait a minute...WTF?!?!?!?....
Actually it was. There is nothing wrong with being right of center, but if one of your right of center friends starts ignorantly going off about how democrats are whining about an election they actually won, just look away. There are idiots on both sides, you have no obligation to step in and attack democrats for sometimes being as stupid as your friend.
...even Microsoft, who wrote Jet and used it for years as the basis of Microsoft Access and Visual Basic's database component, says not to use it 'cause it's crap. Got a link for that? There's always SQL Server 2005 Express/Compact/whatever Edition, and this is what Microsoft recommends today. Hmmm, don't use our old product, it sucks, use our new product (which, of course, has no bugs whatsoever) available from us to you today! Have you driven a Ford... lately?It was always thus... Two spaces after a period is only appropriate in circumstances where all characters are the same width, such as an old-school typewriter. So nobody “decided” that it would be that way “on the Internet;” we just stopped using the special-case rules that sprung up a few decades prior when we were using technology that wasn’t capable of proportionally spaced type.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
I would have chosen something more reliable, although I don't think the problem was caused by Jet (storing wrong timestamps doesn't make any sense). Jet is not perfect, but it can handle small jobs, and probably it could have been made to handle voting machines also.
Assuming they has plenty of experience with Jet (or MS Access), there are many ways to avoid corrupting data. Jet hates when the network is disconnected, having too many indexes, keeping records locked, and of course blue-screens and power failures. A daily "compact and repair" is good, but doing it for the first time after something begins to act weird is really dangerous! A good database design is also necessary. I would have kept a local copy, kept a log, manage most data locally, make a daily backup, etc.
I unfortunately have worked with MS Access for 10 years, mostly small applications. I think at most I've had 25 users in Access 97 in a slow network, I never had corrupt data. I have corrupted things during the development process constantly. The undocumented SaveAsText and LoadFromtext are my friends.
Thinking of the voting process, it is mostly appending data, which Jet should have handled easily...
Feel free to take your suggestion to the Department of Justice. I'm sure Attorney General Gonzales will give your suggestion the careful attention it deserves. [cough]
Great, so the election is possibly fraudalent (see other /. articles for all the other issues). Why should the reps and senators care? This just gives them a soapbox to stand on and state how they are going to fix it (again, not that they didn't 'fix' this election mighty well to start with), and it gives them reasons to funnel even more money to the corporate power-mungers in the name of getting it right.
So.. was the fraud corrected, or re purposed?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
We can use any tools we want. Hell if they want to shrink down tiny scribes who are placed in the machines to write everything down, then fine. But they have to fully disclose everything. Otherwise what will happen is that eventually we'll be unable to find problems and problems will continue to occur w/o our knowledge until at some point the whole process is a sham.
The database is built from Microsoft's Jet database engine
Why not just put a degaussing coil in all the door frames?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
But the Ohio Constitution should keep Diebold out of the election process.
And who the f*** decided that using two punctuation marks is acceptable on the internet... never mind asking who the f*** decided that * is an acceptable replacement for letters in a written sentence (not just in a file system)?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Back in 1995 I came in touch with the JET engine for the first time. It was used in a database application for a commercial aircraft carrier (!) Databases were corrupt all the times. It was obvious that the technology was a mess. At that time, much better alternatives were available for a little more $$. Hence I could not understand why anyone would spend time and money with such broken technology.
Now we see the use of this technology again, and in an application that is crucial to the future of the U.S and to the future of many other countries... the same mistakes are being made again.
But that is not the real problem. Yes, we know that electronic voting machine manufacturers have a long record of being lazy, careless, and incompetent. The actual problem is with the opinion of the decision makers in the administration and with the opinion of the public. Information technology is widely accepted as a means to make collecting, sorting, and counting, of numbers, names, addresses, etc. more reliable and more efficient. So why not use it also to collect and to count voter ballots?
There is this subtle difference between paper and electronic storage. If you write something on a paper or make a hole, then it will be very difficult and time-consuming to remove the writing or the hole. In any case, too much work to alter ballots in significant numbers! And, if you still do, you leave a trace to be discovered by the forensic experts. In contrast, the information stored on a hard disk, in a flash ram, or transferred via network, can be altered very quickly and, if done well, without leaving any trace. Hence it is by nature that electronic voting machines are insecure and unreliable.
Badly designed and badly implemented electronic voting machines just add up to the insecurity and the lack of reliability that this technology has by its virtue. On the other hand, measures like paper audit trails are certainly very helpful, but these are mere attempts to improve a technology that is bad from the outset.
Looking at people's difficulties in understanding and dealing with today's computer security threats, I guess that it will take a lot of time until the aforementioned difference is in the heads of majority of the public and of those involved in the voting process. In the meantime, we will have many more "voting machine news": For every major election where electronic voting machines will be used, there will be stories about malfunctioning machines, missing audit trails, about elections being stolen, and so on. This is the wrong approach to "strengthen the democratic tradition".
My credo is that running a democracy has a prize that is called "counting by hand".
Now they've done it... there's an element of plausible deniability now. It may not be that Diebold is corrupt and in the pocket of the GOP. It could also be that they're a bunch of idiots who are unqualified to deliver voting equipment upon which a large part of our democratic processes depend. Either way, though, they should go.
What is M$' liability? Surely they were collecting licensing fees and knew what the machines were being used for. Given their warning, should they not have refused to license? Does their warning get them off the hook? Didn't work for Napster....s -selling-solar.html
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What this proves is that Diebold either did not test their software sufficiently or covered up bad test results at layer of their company. The state of Ohio was certainly incompetent in not fully testing the product they bought before deploying it.
This is the result of crony-ism in the contracting. The crime isn't so much of Diebold's, it's of who hires them. There's been numerous stories in the news about their incompetence, over and over, about what proper procedures should be, and whoever hires them after all that is simply doing it under pressure, orders or favoritism.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Diebolds electronic voting division was purchased wholesale from Global Election Systems in 2002. GES produced crap back then and it is no suprise that they continued to produce crap under new management. Their incompetence shouldn't reflect poorly on the ability of the engineering staff in the ATM division, although it does say quite a bit about the top-level management.
It's all about "plausible deniability".
Look at it this way: If you are planning to engage in high-profile, widespread illegal activity, why not make it difficult to trace the crime? By creating multiple ways that the data can corrupt itself - poor choice of database, drivers, security, etc. - there is now so much white noise that it is far more difficult to prove malice.
They figure someone will realize the numbers are wrong, but now try proving that it was a conspiracy. It is much more difficult to find exactly where the numbers were changed a) on purpose and b) by the same consistent source with so many other discrepancies clouding it over.
I see quite a few responses that start with "In MY country..."
Diebold has been in the news so much, especially at slashdot, that folks (especially those overseas) can be forgiven for thinking that the whole US uses Diebold voting machines.
It doesn't. I've never voted on a Diebold machine. Here (ironically, since we are known as home of the world's most corrupt governments, especially in Chicago) in Illinois (Springfield, the state capital, to be exact) we had elections last month. They were Diebold-free.
Here, you get a paper ballot (!!!) and a card. You stick the ballot and card in the machine, and use a touch screen stylus. When you're done, the machine tabulates your vote AND prints the vote on the paper ballot, which you then put in a box.
If the election is contested they have paper votes to recount.
I voted for Janazzo (I know her dad), but Mahoney (the incumbent) beat her two to one.
-mcgrew
its really stunning to think that something like voting in a democracy isn't considered mission critical to the country. ...to not consider it that way is to say that voting doesn't matter
You are incorrect on both counts.
First, if something is "mission critical" do you entrust it to people who have no idea of the necessary details, or will just use a default position to produce the end result as opposed to careful thought and analysis? No.
Perhaps you don't understand what "mission critical" means. I'll clue you in a bit. Take a look at the Space Shuttle. See those massive engines? Those are mission critical. If they fail so does the mission.
Does the country continue to operate if voting fails? Yes. Every election has had issues with voting. Every election from the beginning has had counting issues, validity of the voter issues, etc.. Yet the *Republic* marches on (though it is becoming more of a democracy - yes that's a bad thing). The troops still fight, stupid laws still get passed, political games still occur, the courts still continue functioning, ambassadors still do their jobs, the IRS still siphons the results of your work from your paycheck, the cops still arrest people, the people still work, shop, and generally live their lives, and so on.
Now that said, it does not mean voting shouldn't be taken seriously. But to say it is mission critical is to say something that isn't true.
Why do companies like Diebold not take voting seriously? The people don't. To paraphrase "K" a bit, a person may take voting seriously but the people do not. When you have a large portion of the voters who vote on "single-issue" or party-line they are not taking it seriously. When people go in and punch votes that they didn't research, they aren't taking it seriously. When people are given the choice of evils, the decision is generally not taken seriously.
The candidates and lawmakers don't take voting seriously either. If they did they wouldn't put all manner of blocks in the way of political speech. They also would not make laws to "protect" us from stupidity. They act as if we are stupid except for that short moment of casting a vote - for them. Hell look at all the accusations by the Gore-siders when Bush was elected: the other voters were stupid.
You want voting to be taken seriously? Give us a "none of the above" option. How does it work? Simple: if NOTA "wins" all who were on the ballot are barred from the next election, and it is held 90 days from the first. If NOTA still wins, the office goes vacant until the next election. Clearly nobody was able to fit the bill so nobody sits in the office. If the office goes a couple cycles w/o a victor, dissolve it wherever not constitutionally required.
Another option: Require a majority. Not just a majority of voters, but a full-on majority of citizens. Most elections (in the US at least) don't require a majority, just a plurality (yes that means less than half of the votes can still win - as Clinton did) of the votes cast. Consider the whole of the adult citizenry the body, and in order to have a solid vote mandate that votes of more than half of the citizenry are required to be voted in.
Right now if a third of those eligible vote, and half of them vote for one guy you've got about 1/6th of the population voting someone into office. Where a majority is not required, the numbers can drop down to 20% of votes cast which in the above example would mean what, 1/30th of the population?
Do the same thing for all issues in front of the voters. Bond issues, levies, tax raises, initiatives, etc..
Voting is marginalized by the government (which has a vested interest in doing so), by the voters (who do not do "due diligence"), and by the candidates (who know they don't really need a majority of people, just a plurality of those who hauled their asses down to teh voting station or sent their mail-in ballot in). Something so heavily marginalized can not be mission critical.
Yes, the
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
I posted this somewhere else, but it needs to be restated. The reason that Diebold can't get this right, is because they don't have their ATM engineers working on it. Diebold Elections Systems did not exist until 2002 when Diebold purchased Global Elections Systems. The basic software architecture (including the use of Jet) goes back to a touch screen voting system designed by iMark in 1995. In that system the database was single use - stored on a smart card, and had to be merged together later.
The purchase of GES was in response to the federal voting legislation passed after "hanging chad" issue. This legislation, while not requiring the use of electronic voting machines, including many provisions (such as requiring that people with disabilites be able to vote using the same system as everyone else) that certainly encouraged them. Diebold expected a huge increase in voting machine purchases as a result of this, and didn't have time to build their own system from scratch, so they acquired one. Thier predictions were correct and they have made a ton of money from the deal holding 80% of the market, even though their design is garbage.
Basically all these problems with voting machines are because of misguided voting reform, where after ignoring an issue for years voters turned around and demanded something be done, and the politicians happily obliged by passing knee-jerk laws and buying up whatever snake-oil was available at that minute. Which is pretty much politics in a nutshell - ignore a problem until it gets really bad and then overreact and make things worse than they were to begin with.
Ohio is a little smarter than Florida(by the heat to brain ratio), but perhaps they fell victim to computerized hanging chads.
"Jet Blue/ESE is nowhere near the design of say, Oracle or PostgreSQL, or even MSSQL for that matter. It's about on the level of version 3 or 4 of MySQL (using MyISAM, not InnoDB), or perhaps SQLite."
... You say that as if these two databases are anywhere NEAR the same level. They're not. ... You say THAT as if MSSQL is somehow a lesser DB than Postgre. It's not. In fact, it's just as capable and worthy as Oracle for many tasks
Huh?
1. "Oracle or Postgre"
2. "or even MSSQL"
3. "It's about on the level of version 3 or 4 of MySQL" OK, this is the killer sentence. MySQL 4 doesn't allow nested select statements ANYWHERE (Not in SELECT, FROM or WHERE clauses), it doesn't support HAVING it's prone to full table scans when they're not really needed. I'm a HUGE MySQL supporter--look at my recent comments, I've been defending MySQL--but, frankly, Jet is a better database than MySQL 4. Hands down. Now, MySQL 5 beats its pants off, but c'mon, the query optimizer in 4.x alone is enough to give Jet the win.
Missing option: Slashdot Poll
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...Jet is well known to be massively broken. Still haven't seen any proof of that here... I'm not trying to say anyone is lying, but I'm not going to sign off on "Microsoft says don't use it" until I see a link to microsoft.com to that effect. If you don't think it is, you've never tried to do anything non-trivial with it. Hell, I haven't tried to do anything with it. I'm old, in my day if we needed a database we wrote one. Nowadays mysql seems to do the job just fine (at least it works for my MythTV box) but filesystems and diskdrives have gotten so fast I typically just use a journalling filesystem on a RAID array as a data sink. It's easier than mucking about with extensible hash tables in the app code, and compatible with pretty much all backup and search utilities.After sending Diebold their check and W-2 (or whatever the business equivalent is), and Diebold asks "why is our check $37, but the W-2 reports $7Billion in taxable income", tell them "because mutliple clients were writing the two databases, maybe one of them is corrupt. The fault is the outdated Microsoft software we use, we don't know which number is incorrect, so we're not changing anything. Have a nice day! ."
I am not a sig.
Microsoft keeps making ridiculous toys that don't stand up to real problems. It keeps happening again and again. Stop screwing around with Microsoft and use some real tools for critical applications.
That Diebold is not making voting machines anymore. So they stole one...er..two elections. The big questions is how will they steal the vote in the next election????
Diebolt used the worst DB Engine in existence, even MySQL probably would have been a better choice...
Is Jet a closed specification? Because if it's closed, there's no easy way to know for sure that there's no record of how data was altered... unless you're Microsoft. Obviously this doesn't mean that it's all good because there is a record, but it'd be very difficult for someone to corrupt the system in complete knowledge that they couldn't be traced. An open spec system might be easier to corrupt in many ways, assuming there was a fault in the spec (which would probably be unlikely), if only because it'd be possible to know for sure whether the traces had been removed.
That said, I'd easily believe that there was incompetence in an attempt to be corrupt.
Awww - I was out of town this past weekend, so noone's going to see my extraordinarily witty comment. No matter. The tree must fall anyway. To wit:
So Diebold's machines weren't working as Diebold intended in 2006? That explains how the Democrats won both houses of Congress.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
In the link you kindly provided, Microsoft is not saying "Jet sucks and you shouldn't use it" (although certainly there are people outside MS who are saying exactly that) but rather Jet is no longer supported by Microsoft.
Which is a good enough reason not to have anything to do with it, it really doesn't matter if it sucks or not; nobody should be buying product based on unsupported closed-source software.
A government that claims to be representative and democratically elected certainly shouldn't be trusting elections to a company that is shipping product based on unsupported closed-source software.