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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."
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That is an old outdated desktop engine.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 is damn lucky to scale to 10 much less your claimed 1000. I have never seen 1000 concurrent users in a jet database. Not that it matters, I cannot believe anyone would trust it to tabulate election results.
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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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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.
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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.
In point of fact, there is a difference between "requiring perfection" and "avoiding obvious incompetence". Just, y'know, for future reference.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I agree. With a plethora of free or easily liscensed SQL databases out there, and the fact that ODBC data sources are every bit as easy to connect as Jet, there is NO excuse. The only reason to drop something like Jet into a production system is to make it crippled by design.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
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!"
NO! There is only OBVIOUSLY something wrong if there is EVIDENCE that something is wrong.
Mob, Press and Documentary video TV accusations do not constitute legitimate evidence unless they have facts to back up their claims (not saying they don't).
Guilt by association is one Logical Fallacy which is throw around a lot these days.
1. The data is corrupted (totals are different)
2. There's a known data corruption issue in the engine caused by concurrent activity
A reasonable conclusion is that the programmers were idiots and wrote an non-thread safe application with multiple threads. Another conclusion would be they intentionally attempted to fix the election. Incompetence before dishonest is the usual way to approach those things...
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".