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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.
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
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!"
A number of years ago, I was responsible for handling software problem reports for a couple of vendors ATM machines. (We were a third-party service company.)
The things that went wrong with ATMs were both funny and scary. I have no reason to believe things have changed. The banks and manufacturers go to great lengths to satisfy customers without letting details of the problems get out, because this would undermine confidence in the devices.
With ATMs, if you're smart, you have a slip of paper to verify a transaction. If there's a dispute with the bank, the bank will usually honor the paper documentation, and the customer has no reason to make an issue of the problem.
With voting, there's no going back and fixing results after the fact. Often there's no piece of paper. And on top of that, the whole process is under fairly intense public and governmental scrutiny.
So I wouldn't say there are less problems with ATMs. You just don't hear about them.