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Diebold Rebrands What No One Wants
Irvu writes "Diebold has apparently failed in their bid to sell their tainted elections systems unit. Unable to find a buyer the CEO of Diebold promised that the system will be run more 'openly and independently.' To prove that they are serious, they renamed it. Diebold Election Systems is now Premiere Election Solutions. They still sell GEMS, AccuVote OS and the ever-unpopular AccuVote-TSX which performed so disastrously in California's Top-to-Bottom Review under the same names. Apparently their rebranding effort only goes so far."
There are:
old voting systems
[X] paper
bold voting systems
[ ] electronic
There are no old bold voting systems.
DIE bold.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
At least their death (and "rebirth") was rather bold.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
What Is A Troll?
.. I kid you not.
The term derives from "trolling", a style of fishing which involves trailing bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite. The troll posts a message, often in response to an honest question, that is intended to upset, disrupt or simply insult the group.
Usually, it will fail, as the troll rarely bothers to match the tone or style of the group, and usually its ignorance shows.
Why do trolls do it?
I believe that most trolls are sad people, living their lonely lives vicariously through those they see as strong and successful.
Disrupting a stable newsgroup gives the illusion of power, just as for a few, stalking a strong person allows them to think they are strong, too.
For trolls, any response is 'recognition'; they are unable to distinguish between irritation and admiration; their ego grows directly in proportion to the response, regardless of the form or content of that response.
Trolls, rather surprisingly, dispute this, claiming that it's a game or joke; this merely confirms the diagnosis; how sad do you have to be to find such mind-numbingly trivial timewasting to be funny?
Remember that trolls are cowards; they'll usually post just enough to get an argument going, then sit back and count the responses (Yes, that's what they do!).
How can troll posts be recognised?
* No Imagination - Most are frighteningly obvious; sexist comments on womens' groups, blasphemy on religious groups
* Pedantic in the Extreme - Many trolls' preparation is so thorough, that while they waste time, they appear so ludicrous from the start that they elicit sympathetic mail - the danger is that once the group takes sides, the damage is done.
* False Identity - Because they are anonymous cowards, trolls virtually never write over their own name, and often reveal their trolliness (and lack of imagination) in the chosen ID. As so many folk these days use false ID, this is not a strong indicator on its own!
* Crossposting - Any post that is crossposted to several groups should be viewed as suspicious, particularly if unrelated or of opposing perspective. Why would someone do that?
* Off-topic posting - Often genuine errors, but, if from an 'outsider' they deserve matter-of-fact response; if genuine, a brief apposite response is simply netiquette; if it's a troll post, you have denied it its reward.
* Repetition of a question or statement is either a troll - or a pedant; either way, treatment as a troll is effective.
* Missing The Point - Trolls rarely answer a direct question - they cannot, if asked to justify their twaddle - so they develop a fine line in missing the point.
* Thick or Sad - Trolls are usually sad, lonely folk, with few social skills; they rarely make what most people would consider intelligent conversation. However, they frequently have an obsession with their IQ and feel the need to tell everyone. This is so frequent, that it is diagnostic! Somewhere on the web there must be an Intelligence Test for Trolls - rigged to always say "above 150"
Who is at risk?
Any newsgroup, bulletin board, forum or chatroom can attract trolls, but they don't have the brains to attack nuclear physicists, and they are drawn to the quick response where sex, religion and race are found; so politics is easy prey.
One troll famously tried to infiltrate a mensa group; the results read like 100 trolls
Have a tall frosty glass of.... SHUT THE HELL UP!
work on the voting systems?
Got caught sleeping on the job? Producing crap? Everybody hates you? Have a bad reputation? Change your name! Maybe some people will think you are a new company.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
Why did Diebold get sidelined after it made a bad product, and couldn't get out of the bad reputation, while Microsoft also makes bad products, and people can't get enough of it, and MS hardly try to change its name!
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
When your ATM gets scammed: All you lose is money.
When your voting system gets scammed: You lose your rights.
doesn't change it into chocolate cake!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Dems: D'oh! Lost another one to Diebold!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
we need to brainstorm some, how about
- Guaranteed Result Election Systems
- Early and Often Voting Machines
- DPV (Dead People Vote) Solutions
- NTSC (Never Twice the Same Count) Electionware
With a bank, if you get the numbers wrong, you lose that bank as a client FOREVER.
With an election, if you get the number wrong, you have a politician who will be your friend for life.
Think about it. They can handle billions of dollars, but they can't keep a million votes straight? At some point you realize that it isn't incompetence. It's their goal.
"Apparently their rebranding effort only goes so far."
Politicians want to know what they're buying when they buy an election. They KNOW Diebold can deliver the votes!
This seems like just the opening that an "open" company would need to really turn the US upside-down. The failure to sell the business unit means people are scared of being associated with the closed-source voting mess. Even if the security problems are really accidental, in the current climate, you'd be hard pressed to get anyone to believe you.
At a crossroads like this, an OSS company could just step right in and take over the whole election software market. If some OSS platform were successful here, there'd be no competition from closed source platforms after that. OSS voting forever after. I know that "open" means never having to rely on a single source (if you don't want to), but a great hardware solution coupled with all open source code would make one (or a few) companies really pop.
I have not been looking too hard for OSS voting machines myself, so maybe they're already out there. In that case, they just need some PR so that they're visible to the general population.
Redhat? Ubuntu? Where are you?... Here's your opportunity...
"Wherever Diebold and ES&S go, irregularities and historic Republican upsets follow. Alastair Thompson, writing for scoop.co of New Zealand, explored whether or not the 2002 U.S. mid-term elections were fixed by electronic voting machines supplied by Republican-affiliated companies. The scoop investigation concluded that: The state where the biggest upset occurred, Georgia, is also the state that ran its election with the most electronic voting machines. Those machines were supplied by Diebold." From Diebold, Electronic Voting and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy
by Bob Fitrakis.
Link: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
More: " (Bev) Harris writes that the hacked documents expose how the mainstream media reversed their call projecting Al Gore as winner of Florida after someone subtracted 16,022 votes from Al Gore, and in still some undefined way, added 4000 erroneous votes to George W. Bush. Hours later, the votes were returned. One memo from Lana Hires of Global Election Systems, now Diebold, reads: I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16,022 [votes] when it was uploaded. Another hacked internal memo, written by Talbot Iredale, Senior VP of Research and Development for Diebold Election Systems, documents unauthorized replacement votes in Volusia County.
Harris also uncovered a revealing 87-page CBS news report and noted, According to CBS documents, the erroneous 20,000 votes in Volusia was directly responsible to calling the election for Bush. The first person to call the election for Bush was Fox election analyst John Ellis, who had the advantage of conferring with his prominent cousins George W. Bush and Florida Governor Jeb Bush."
And: "Documents illustrate that the Reagan and Bush administration supported computer manipulation in both Noriegas rise to power in Panama and in Marcos attempt to retain power in the Philippines."
Two words: crooked casino.
I think Diebold does in fact make ATM machines.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
"Vote once, count many!"
I was wondering why he left is such a hurry.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Because the money is in making it NOT work right.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
If you call a tail a leg, how many legs has a dog?
Five?
No, calling a tail a leg don't make it a leg. - Abraham Lincoln
They can call their "system" whatever they want to. It'll still be bad news.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
Premiere Election Solutions AKA Piece of Electronic Shit
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Voting machines as they are are pretty much as good as they can get. There is no way a Compuiter could ever be trusted to do exactly what it is expected to do, and no way to be 100% sure it has not been tempered with. Those machines will always be unfit for public voting. As a voter I have several rights that a machine can never provide. I'm guaranteed by law that my vote is secret. But it has been shown that the electromagnetic radiation of voting machines can be measured accurately enough to draw some conclusions about what has been voted. Also I have the right to know how the voting works. Everybody can understand how counting votes with pen and paper works. Understanding a voting machine is pretty much impossible without a CS degree. Even if the sourcecode for both the hardware and Software was available pretty much nobody can tell if the machine actually does what it claims to do. Also there is hardly any chance to get an actual Rom dump to compare the sources you are looking at with the code that is running on the computer.
That was the point - Diebold does, and their ATM machines (unlike their voting solutions) are extremely secure. The poster was wondering why the people who are involved with their ATM design don't seem to be involved with their voting system design.
Other replies did a good job of explaining why this is...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Right because as we all know, that a man will only have one female sexual partner in his whole life...
It still is shocking that SOME people gave a dam. Most people fuck around all the time, and its probably the only reason to really be alive. I mean computers are nice folks but i'd rather have my fingers else where.
"Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken!"
Please stop hurting America -- Jon Stewart
Back in the day, rebranding would get you hanged for a livestock thief.
All I can say is: Die Boldly, Diebold...the sooner the better. I'm tired of 'running iron' elections being acceptable.
Hang 'em high, and dry!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Comment removed based on user account deletion
because it's a different problem.
With ATMs, both sides of the transaction get to audit it to make sure that they aren't getting ripped off. With voting, no party gets to audit. If anyone could audit that your vote was cast correctly, then they could also buy votes and audit that the vote was cast as bought, or you boss could just audit that you voted the way that he told you to, or the gang down the street could audit that you voted how they told you to... etc.
An ATM is a much simpler problem because it is more transparent.
I feel a draft.
You are in Room # 12
Tunnels lead to 3,11,13
I want to take this opportunity to remind everyone that this whole electronic voting fiasco is the result of asking the government to solve a small problem. Please for the sake of all that good don't ask them to solve a big problem!!!
Sometimes at night I imagine the darkness is filled with horrible things with too many teeth, like Julia Roberts.
Diebold apparently believes that you can polish a turd.
load "$",8,1
"They've rebadged it, you fool."
This was not a strategy to get the voting machines back into play in the places which rejected them. Diebold is a very old company going back into the 19th century, and was until relatively recently a very well established and trusted name in security equipment. The Diebold Elections Systems division has not only failed to produce reliable products, but has garnered enormous bad press which has reflected extremely negatively upon that name. Regardless of what their true motives are with Diebold Election Systems, I think everyone can see why any rational executive at Diebold would see the need to protect the Diebold name. A good name is one of the greatest assets a company in any industry can have, and especially so in security, where trust comes grudgingly. If Diebold seems incompetent, possibly malicious, with its election systems, why would you, the bank manager, trust them to build your ATM machines?
Calling them Premier Election Systems does not undo the damage that's been done, but it does help deflect future damages. Any attempt to recertify the machines under the new name is probably something they still would have done under the old name.
That doesn't make the machines any less awful. It doesn't absolve Diebold of the responsibility for what it has done, nor does it mean that their ATM machines are any more trustworthy now. If I were the bank manager, I probably still would not buy their machines. But, if we are going to criticize the company for its incompetence, let us at least criticize them for the incompetencies which they demonstrate -- not ones which we misinterpret into their strategies.
It ought to be possible ( using PGP ) to have the vote counters return to you a code that is your vote encrypted. Only you can decrypt it. If it is not correct, you can go public.
how the fuck does where a man sticks his dick have any kind of relevance on his competence in country running?
if a guy makes good leadership decisions we shouldn't be judging him on sex. shit, we shouldn't even want to know about who he fucks! bob my accountant could be gay for all i know, i still appreciate he's the best man to do my tax.
personally, i'd prefer a well-laid president. probably start less wars in an effort to enhance his apparently lacking masculinity. maybe we should shout bush a hooker - 'y'know, on reflection, maybe we should just not shoot them quite so much and be friendly and perhaps they'll like us.. maybe invasion isn't the best way to say i like and respect your nation.. whew, what was i getting so excited about? here i was thinking there was this axis of evil and all it was was the fact i hadn't gotten laid in five years!'
sheesh..
Secure maybe. The one at the local Wawa goes into a BSOD/reboot loop about once a month. It's really amusing when it loops while debiting your account. I've personally had to call the bank twice to get a series of thousands of non-existant 20$ withdrawals reversed. I'd rather they got to the 'die' part of their name already.
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
This isn't taking in consideration state laws, in which your state may may specifically define what you mentioned.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
I'll bid $5.00 for the company..
...What? it's not worth even that much?...
"10001110101 - periodic table with a centerpiece of mind" -Clutch
The name "Premiere" kind of implies thay want to do hit and run elections. I expect though by the end of the first act, the audience will decide the show is not ready for prime time and will vote with their feet.s -selling-solar.html
--
Solar power the easy way: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Diebold obtained the voting system through an acquisition. The system was created from the ground up by a completely different team, and thus no connection to the ATM guys. In fact many of the transgressions had already taken place at the time of buyout, it just was not well known yet.
Independent review (of the leaked source code) concluded that the code base was of shockingly low quality, lacking in many basic principles of secure and defensive design, most likely written by programmers with very little training. Unfortunately this didn't stop it from being election-ready certified, which I imagine is where the real value was for Diebold.
Unfortunately, as any decent coder knows, a huge mess of spaghetti code is nearly impossible to fix short of a complete rewrite, which is probably why the system hasn't gotten any better since then.
[CEO] Hmmm, sales of "Turd" have dropped off severely...
... ? ...
[Marketing Guy] Let's rebrand.
[CEO] Ok, what do you suggest?
[Marketing Guy] How about "Blossom"
[CEO] I love it. Lets run with that...
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
They will rebrand, reorganize, etc., but in the end, don't forget their loyalty is to one political party. That is where the lobbying money goes, so you know who to blame whenever there's an e-voting fiasco.
I think we need to rebrand the discussion. What we need is computer assisted voting. Basically, the touch screen just provides an interface where the computer prints out your ballot which you review for accuracy and deposit in the ballot box. Later, ballots can be counted by hand or some type of scan-tron. Tabulations can be kept in both machines and in the event of mismatches, the paper ballot is recounted providing the official count (or if the numbers are far enough off, a re-vote). The scanning process could be observed and run at such a speed that humans can watch the count in real time and with enough people watching the possibility of count errors going undetected would approach 0. This would take care of most of your concerns about magic happening behind the screen. Nevertheless, the source code should still be freely available.
It's not a perfect system but it provides the basis for a system that's pretty much on par with paper. That is, the problems with election fraud we would see would be the same types of problems paper ballots suffer from (ie people voting twice, someone stealing a ballot box, some poll running out of paper).
This is what is in the draft proposal for New York State voting machines (among many other requirements regarding privacy and the disabled etc). But I only found this out recently by clicking on a signature from a slashdot poster. I encourage everyone to take a few minutes and visit http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ and check what sort of voting machines your state has, is testing, or is thinking about getting.
Also, for those new yorkers out there, you may want to visit this page about the testing underway for NYS eletronic voting machines for 2008.
meep
Just goes to show you really don't wanna hire your brother in law to work on important stuff...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
The Gator^H^H^H^H^HClaria business plan.
Diebold already made a "computer assisted voting" system.
;).
That's what people are complaining about
Seriously though, technically it's an easy problem to solve - the USA has plenty of smart people who can build practical solutions.
The real problem is the US Gov would prefer to be the one to decide who gets to be the next US Gov and do whatever it takes, just like they prefer to decide who gets to be the next Iraqi Gov.
TSX is already the name of an operating system for the DEC PDP-11. According to the distributor (who is still around and still providing support), the name is trademarked.
Logically idea, however if you read most of the complaints here on slashdot and other progressive dominated sites the big worry is that manufacturers are placing code in the computers and changing votes. With that setup you have two places where that can happen.
Meanwhile back in the real world, the problems you had in Florida, and what caused all theses changes, was human based. Bad ballot design and people not following the instructions of the machines such as emptying the punched chat holders. Even the newest cash registers can get the printers easily messed up when people have to replace the ink/ribbons and paper, or when removing of a stray piece of paper that got in the system. You are not going to get any different people working at the poll booths, so beside a nicer user interface with hopfully some input checking, you are not really solving the problems that caused all this mess in the first place.
It would be of interest to see if any states are testing to see how hard it is to change the ink, paper and repairing paper jams.
Why can't they have the people who make there ATMs work on the voting systems?
The elections machines have been subjected to numerous public tests, the results of which are available to everyone. The ATMs have not. We are told that the ATMs are dependable and secure, but I don't think we really know and I haven't seen much from the banking industry that implies that they are somehow all that much more sophisticated computer security wise than anyone else.
I believe the main reason that ATMs aren't a security issue is because it'd take too long to stand there to hack the machine and the payoff isn't all that great. You can rob a bank in a minute with a gun and get a few grand.
Have they raised prices? I mean elections are already costing a couple of hundred million. If we wind up with a Hilary/Obama ticket on the Democratic side how much with Diebold charge the Republicans to win this time around? We could be talking some serious election time inflation. If hacker/Linus nuts really want to show their support for open source they need to hack into Diebold and get Linus Torvalds elected President. Sure he's not a native born American citizen but that's a truly great hack, get some one elected that can't even take the job. It'd also get all the non computer geeks wondering who the hell Linus Torvalds is? They can also claim hey don't look at us if it was a linux OS this would have never happened.
I'll agree with just about everything you say, but I'll remind you of this:
Long ago, people were scared of "NutraSweet" because of some series of news stories and bad press. So they took the label off of the foods that contain it... just the label though. It's still there. Just look for "aspartame" in the ingredients list.
Diebold actually does have a good reputation. They make banking equipment (ATMs and things) and it appears they actually make a decent quality product in this area.
The high profile criticisms of the company cant be doing the banking sector any good.
No other company will touch Diebold's voting machine sector with a 10 foot barge pole. The risks of negative publicity are too great.
"Right because as we all know, that a man will only have one female sexual partner in his whole life..."
This is Slashdot. Some guys should be so lucky.
Perhaps then can open-source it and just produce and sell the hardware?
Yeah, right, like that's gonna happen!
Stop the brainwash
To decide on whether this name change was a good way forward for the company, Diebold used its own voting machines to conduct a ballot of all its employees.
When the results were announced, an overwhelming 124% of employees voted yes to the change.
If Diebold seems incompetent, possibly malicious, with its election systems, why would you, the bank manager, trust them to build your ATM machines? Because Diebold did not break the golden rule that says who can fuck with and who you can't.
As Subject, surely?
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Anyone else curious about the "sowsear" tag? A google turned up this tidbit of cultural literacy:
You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear
meaning:
It is impossible to make something excellent from poor material.
A bit obscure, but quite apropos. Kudos to the tagger for piquing my curiosity...
I have never really understood the idea behind the automatic counting or automated voting system.
Here in Serbia, where we had a lot of problems with the elections, the voting itself and counting are the least problem. We had exactly the same problem as USA (i.e. corrupted legal system) but the voting procedure itself was never an issue.
Manual counting takes only couple of hours even for the largest poll stations. Summing the results takes exactly the same time everywhere. Time for summing the results is so larger than the process of counting, so it is plain stupid to try to reduce the time spent on counting. It takes couple of hours to get estimated results, and you have to wait till morning if you have close elections. No voting machine will solve this issue.
Manual counting has a lot of advantages - since you get paper trail by the very definition of the process. (I speak about process where you take you pen and then you circle the name of the wanted candidate/party.)
No sig today.
First of all ATM's don't handle billions of dollars in a transaction. Dunno about those in the USA, but most here are capped at 500 Euro, and your daily limit further caps it.
Second, an ATM is, by and large, just a slightly more secure terminal to the bank's central computers. It's not the ATM that authorizes your transaction, or transfers the money. It's just a terminal that's networked with a central system. So it's slightly easier to get things right.
With voting machines, the whole assumption that it must be anonymous, plus the bigger distrust of a single central station that counts everything, screw that assumption up big time. You can't go and transmit "Moraelin voted for the German Anarchistic Pogo Party" (I didn't, but for an easily rememberable example sake) over to other computers.
Third, the various kinds of bank terminals get numbers wrong more often than you'd think. E.g., the Deutsche Bank fairly recently introduced OCR machines where you can just shove the check in and have it read, so you don't have to type it all. Well, one of the damn machines didn't read the decimal point, so I ended up transferring 100 years worth of fee to my insurance.
The bank will help you solve such problems, but never claimed that it's 100% bullet-proof and more infallible than the pope.
Fourth, banks (if their central software is anywhere near well written) have other checks and safeguards.
E.g., every cent transferred must be a cent that comes from somewhere else. Even if someone maliciously manipulated the software or the database, you have a chance to catch it. If at the end of the month you do the totals and you have money that appeared out of nowhere, or disappeared into nowhere, you can start an investigation.
Plus it can catch erroneous transfers in the first place. For example my erroneous money transfer should have bounced from the start because most sane people don't have that kind of money in their personal day-to-day account.
E.g., similarly all the money moves must be accompanied by an entry in the transaction table. If someone's account grew by a million, but the transactions to that account don't add up to +1,000,000$, you can call the cops.
E.g., you can have other triggers, regardless of whether the transaction is correct or not.
For example, any incoming money transfer over, say, 10,000$ will automatically trigger an investigation. Ditto if someone suddenly starts getting lots and lots of little transactions. That's mostly against money laundering, but would also catch any error where a bunch of money appears out of nowhere.
For example, you can have bogus rows in the accounts table, which normally have no reason to be accessed, and are booby-trapped with a trigger. If some DBA comes with such ideas as "I know, let's shave a cent out of each account and add it to mine" or "I know, let's export the names and credit card numbers and sell them to scammers", chances are he'd stumble over such traps. Plus, it would trigger an investigation when a bunch of credit card numbers assigned to such bogus accounts start appearing in transactions.
Etc.
All this simply doesn't apply to votes.
- You don't have to take a vote from somewhere else to assign a vote to Moraelin, like would be the case with money
- You don't have people checking their balance and asking you to fix the errors. The whole idea of anonymity is that you shouldn't store anywhere stuff like "Moraelin voted for the German Anarchistic Pogo Party". If I can check "wait, did you count my vote for the German Anarchistic Pogo Party?" a month later, then so can someone else. That's another bank safeguard that just doesn't exist.
- you can't really use any sums as triggers, because everyone gets the same number: 1 vote. Each transaction says exactly the same: "1 vote for party X". So you can't go and say "whoa, we'll investigate all transactions over 10,000".
- since it's anonymous, you can't check how many transactions each person has, either
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If something doesn't work right...change the name. It sounds bad to say we kidnapped people and kept them in secret prisons. "Extraordinary rendition" sounds so much more pleasant.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Why didn't the repackage the thing as Premiere Opinion Solutions and sell this as a web solution? POS would be a much better acronym for this stuff!
I assume by that you mean that you quit fighting for your rights, since the only way to guarantee you'll keep them is to keep fighting for them. The moment you relax, they WILL be taken from you. It may be so slowly you won't even notice, but it'll happen.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Clinton stuck his dick in one or more of his fans.
But if someone sticks his dick in the fan, he is surely a retard.
So yeah, it is good to know about the president's sexual deviances.
I agree Computerised voting cannot work since it is a black box that does not allow the people to see what is going on and does not allow any checking by non-technical people
... this is the problem with mechanical voting machines "hanging chad" anyone?
However a system that really only prints what you want to vote clearly and can be counted quickly is an advantage, a system in which any information is hidden from the voter is a failure since it will not be trusted
The old fashioned system of "put a cross in a box next to who you want to vote for" works on all levels except it is hard to count accurately, but if it could be printed in a form that both humans and a machine could read then it would make the "spoilt papers" be zero and the count fast
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
I presume you're American?....
"When your voting system gets scammed: All you lose is your 'rights'.
When your ATM gets scammed: You lose your MONEY."
There, fixed that for ya....
A rose by any other name would still be ill-concieved visual basic and MS Access.
and hope the people you sell it to and feeble-minded and have no memory or sense of smell.
I wouldn't use that system to elect a Girl Guide to the Cookie Fundraiser.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
It would give a few people something to do for the day and you could even take the money spent on the diebold machines to have a little shindig afterwards. I'm sure volunteers wouldn't be hard to find if that was done. I encourage you all to support Bev Harris over at Blackboxvoting.org.
She has been fighting the electronic voting systems from just about the start of things and I myself have made many donations to her cause. She is a true patriot guarding our most sacred right in this country. Please support her cause.
If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up. - Comedian Mitch Hedberg R.I.P. 03/30/68-2/24/05
Hey, just because your President appointed himself Dictator-for-life doesn't mean ours won't! He's still got a year and a half left!
Money.
Seriously, they make a lot of revenue from their ATM business; banks can afford to pay handsomely for them, since #1) they're banks and have lots of money (mostly ours), and #2) ATMs generate revenue for them (that $2 you pay a competitor's bank when you use your ATM.)
The voting machines, on the other hand, make very little money for them, since towns, counties, states, etc generally don't have enough money to make the voting machines profitable when they're sold. So there's two things going on: Diebold cuts the prices on voting machines in order to get government to use them, and they also don't feel they need to commit the resources to a product that isn't profitable. Best of both worlds here; they get their machines into the field so the can manipulate the results the way they want, and generate such a crap product that nobody will notice the difference between "accidental" erroneous results due to shitty machines/programming and deliberate manipulation.
If it sounds like I think it's a certainty that Diebold is guilty of conspiracy to commit election fraud, it's because I do. The only question is to what degree.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
It seems backwards to me since I live in Oklahoma which is generally filled with incompetent people. But the way we vote in my area is a nice piece of paper and a black marker. I live in a fairly small town (~40k people) where various issues have won and lost by a single vote. The votes are optically scanned on site so results are available pretty much as soon as the polls close, but even if there was an issue recounts never took more than an evening.
Besides being able to easily confirm votes its also almost impossible to screw up voting. If you cant draw a black line to connect the arrow next to your choices name.. then the problems are greater than just voting.
Perhaps the rest of the country should take note?
That's not only misleading, but VERY misleading. Brand names, especially very successful brand names, do not get removed just because a patent expires. NutraSweet Company is still an active, profitable and majority supplier of aspartame. They have every incentive to put the brand on foods that contain it...except that people know to avoid the red and white twirl mark just as readily as they avoid the jolly roger symbol that mark poisons.
Why do you think they are so secure? Losses at ATM's are not generally publicly reported so we have no data on how secure they actually are. Pretty much like the voting machines.
The difference is that ATM's are auditable (unlike the voting machines) and fraudulent transactions can be reversed in favor of the customer. Banks don't break out those losses publicly except in unusual circumstances.
Coverage by the Brad Blog: Mentions by:
- Media articles linked to by the Daily Voting News
- Why Tuesday
Personally, I find the revealations about Sequoia voting systems incompetence and/or fraud in the 2000 election in the recently aired report by Dan Rather to be more interesting news.Follow my election reform blog at AllAboutVoting.com
Premiere Election Solutions
PEZ? Put your thumb on the button and out pops the candidate of the machine's choice?
When a company or its products get a deservedly bad reputation, consultants often recommend that the company rename itself or its products in the hope that consumers won't remember the connection. Thus, ValuJet became AirTran and Retail Credit became Equifax. Enron is now Enron Creditors Recovery Corporation, but it's a pretty safe bet that any future operational parts of Enron will get a new, non-Enron game. So Diebold is just playing the same game in the hope that people are not paying careful attention.
That poll in your post is confusing! I think I just accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan!
Here's the problem with that: A publicly accessible website isn't good enough, because people can now buy votes outright. They simply wait for you to come out, visit the public website, and see who you voted for. They then pay you what you agreed upon ahead of time.
If no one, even you, can prove how you voted, then votes can't be bought from individuals.
It's also not good enough to simply see your own vote echoed back. You have to be able to see every vote up there, so that you can do a "recount" yourself -- including sanity checks like how many people voted. The more transparent it is (without actually showing who voted for whom), the fewer ways there are of fixing an election.
Probably the closest we can get is to make it possible, even easy, for people to verify to themselves that their vote was counted, and it was counted for who they said it was for, but not make it so easy to prove this to others, except by looking at a paper trail. That way, if a lot of people start to realize that their vote wasn't counted, they can demand a recount from the paper trail.
As an example: Allow the user to enter some passphrase into the machine, and then later into the website -- something they can memorize. But have an incorrect passphrase still produce a valid result. That way, you can "prove" to someone that your vote was counted for one candidate, and "prove" to yourself that it was counted for another. But it makes it difficult to "prove" that there's a miscount, except by a lot of people forming an angry mob because their votes weren't counted.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
My name... is Premere Electronic Solutions!
Just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Perhaps Diebold could be encouraged to "do the right thing" with a "Diebold -- Made In Ohio" campaign.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
They do. It is a core development team of about 4-6 guys, using Windows, Visual Basic, and Access databases. They contract a lot of their "hard work" out to small time software development houses. My company was less than a mile away from their place in North Canton, so we got almost all of there work while my company existed. Tasks ranged from completing a demo of PDA/ATM software communicating over IR (Yeah, they didn't care that it was a bad idea), to fixing "bugs" in modules where we weren't usually given much of the code to begin with, and no test cases, so we have no idea what it went into... or what we were really fixing.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I don't know about you, but I'd much rather live in a small apartment than a prison. Just look at all the changes over the last eight years in the US. All it would take to screw a country over for decades would be a few bad leaders.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.