Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?
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
It's not whether every electronic election is rigged that's the problem, but the fact that if one were, we'd never be able to tell. That means the outcome of an election is not definite, which means it's worse than useless. At least with paper votes more folks are included in the counting process, which is performed in public - it's a lot harder to pull off massive election fraud.