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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!
When your ATM gets scammed: All you lose is money.
When your voting system gets scammed: You lose your rights.
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.
"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.
Yep, it's been used over here, and runs on Linux live CDs. http://www.softimp.com.au/evacs/index.html
There's a Wired article here: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2003/11/61 045
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Because the money is in making it NOT work right.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Another group of companies who are ideally positioned to benefit from this are gaming machine manufacturers. In fact, since ATMs probably aren't as open to government scrutiny and regulation as your average video poker machine is, the gaming machine manufacturing industry is probably *better* positioned to comply with government regulation and produce a tamper-resistant system than Diebold is, and could probably fairly easily adapt one of their gaming platforms to the purpose - you sign in, you get a card to insert in the machine (good for one "voting credit"), you make and review your choices, you collect the machine-punched verification card and "voting card" and deposit both in the appropriate boxes on the way out (with the punched "ballot paper" really only being for verification and tamper-control purposes). Forget the privacy concerns - the voting cards needn't be traceable to any particular individual, and could be constantly re-coded with one-time-use "voting-credit-numbers" as they're recycled during the course of the day - and since the paper electoral rolls won't have timestamps on them, there'll be no way to tie the time of use of a particular voting-credit to a particular voter. To me, this almost seems natural and self-evident, and I'd be very surprised if there weren't gaming companies considering either doing this themselves or spinning off subsidiaries to do this themselves.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't really know how to respond to this, other than that I am disappointed for your lack of open-mindedness towards voting machines. Electronic voting technology is an active area of research: See http://accurate-voting.org/ for one example. Are voting machines fit for general use now? Absolutely not. But they continue to get better, as more and more research is being devoted to this hot topic.
All of the issues that you discussed can be subverted with better software, and more secure hardware. For instance, many people have suggested the use of TPM chips in voting machines to attempt to prevent software tampering. Teams of experts can validate source code and prove that it does what it's supposed to - I understand that you'd like to be able to validate it yourself, but the more open the source is, the more people that can look at it and can raise a red flag if something is wrong.
It's a shame that so many counties have poured money into machines like the flawed Diebold and iVotronic systems, because it means we may not see upgrades to more secure, and accurate systems for some time. However, pen and paper has its flaws as well. Voting machines have a lot of potential to fix the problems with both pen and paper, and the machines used today. What we need from the Government is more attention and action to these problems - audits and source code reviews should not be simply passed on as what seems to be happening in Sarasota, FL. What we need from members of the public, like yourself, is to not turn a blind eye to the possibilities, but to believe that researchers are doing their best to bring more secure voting machines to use.
Premiere Election Solutions
Now when elections are stolen, people will be PESsed off.
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.
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..
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
Matrix voice: "We've been watching you for some time Mr Anderson".
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
As Subject, surely?
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
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.