Slashdot Mirror
California Sues E-Voting Vendor ES&S
Gustoman writes with news that the California Secretary of State has sued ES&S, a vendor of e-voting machines, for selling machines that were modifications of the model that has been certified. Apparently ES&S relocated two circuit boards, rerouted several internal cables, and changed some mounting bracket supports in their AutoMark A100 devices, named the modified version AutoMark A200, and sold 972 of them to five California counties. The changes sound somewhat trivial, but the certification contract specified that no "substitution or modification of the voting systems shall be made with respect to any component of the voting systems... until the secretary of state has been notified in writing and has determined that the proposed change or modification does not impair the accuracy and efficiency of the voting systems sufficient to require a reexamination and approval." The state is seeking a penalty of $10,000 per machine sold, plus the cost of the machines to the counties — almost $15 million in all.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
California's testing and qualification of voting machines -- this time around, at least -- was quite formidable, including tiger teams to hack the machines. The report from the testers was the reason they all got sent back in the first place.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
They had a contract. The supplier failed to follow it. Breach of contract is handled like this, I doubt the contract had anything about "just return it and go elsewhere" in it (also I'm not sure govt spending can be redirected as easily as that, remember that there's the whole lowest bidder thing to go through). Even if, that would cause additional costs for the govt because of the additional work to get another machine made. If a store sells you a product that's not what you told them you want that's fraud, if a supplier sells you something that's not what the contract specified that's breach of contract.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
http://www.news4jax.com/politics/3890292/detail.html "The software is not geared to count more than 32,000 votes in a precinct. So what happens when it gets to 32,000 is the software starts counting backward," said Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman. The article says that they'd known about the problem for two years and failed to fix it. http://abcnews.go.com/US/comments?type=story&id=2646802 Randy Wooten figured he'd get at least one vote in his bid for mayor of this town of 80 people even if it was just his own. He didn't. Now he has to decide whether to file a formal protest. http://backslash.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/01/191235 The Open Voting Foundation's disclosure that only one switch need be flipped to allow the machine to boot from an unverified external flash drive instead of the built-in, verified EEPROM There has been tons of mishaps with those machines reported on slashdot alone... I certainly don't blame them for throwing the book at them and fining them for all their worth. It certainly sends across the message that the voting system is not to be fucked with and hopefully it can help prevent situations like the above.
bah.
But the story gives the rest of the clause:
...until the secretary of state has been notified in writing and has determined that the proposed change or modification does not impair the accuracy and efficiency of the voting systems sufficient to require a reexamination and approval...
So all they had to do was write to the secretary of state, explain that they had just moved a few things around, and wait for confirmation that the secretary agrees that the changes don't require reexamination. That's a pretty standard thing to have to do for any company that makes things for government or military. It doesn't matter if it's the component layout, colour, font on the front panel legends - if it's changed then you notify the changes. It's absolutely amateur and shows a total lack of understanding of the importance of the job they are doing if they don't know this.
I've done a bit of work on mil-spec hardware in the past and even as an engineer intern I was fully aware that every resistor and capacitor on the circuit board was made to a specification and couldn't be changed without notification. If this is how they treat hardware that can be easily inspected and compared with specs, I shudder to think what the underlying software is like.
just under 1000 voting machines, essentially a $300 computer, cost $15 million?
I'm in the wrong business...
The US, being an enormous country, has a many levels of government. Unlike many other countries, it runs all elections for all levels of government on a fixed date (some Tuesday in November), rather than spreading them around the year. Of course, not every position is up for election every year, but still this means that the "ballot" contains tens if not hundreds of separate elections, ranging all the way from the US President to the county water board and the town mayor, not to mention multiple "ballot initiative" (direct legislation). Each election (especially president, governor etc) can feature tens of candidates (most of them irrelevant). Printed ballots are thick booklets; both filling them correctly and manually reading them is a non-trivial operation. Also, manually tallying the votes in these hundreds of elections takes a lot of time.
This is not to say that this was not done manually in the past, but certainly using computers greatly simplifies the process. I think the best solution is to use computers to generate the ballot, but only use computer counts provisionally. That is, the voter will step up to a computer and will make selections, after which the computer will print a filled ballot that can be optically scanned. The computer will also tally the votes giving a quick result for most of the races. Nevertheless, the printed ballots should be considered the official votes, the ones to be used if a recount is necessary. In important races (President, Governor) it's probably better to automatically count the printed ballots and only use the computer counts for provisional results. Note that this also allows for people to manaually fill their ballots if they feel like it.
The Americans and many other countries face a difficult choice here. On the one side we have instand reports on the outcome of the voting even before the voting is completely over. On the other side we have the democratic process.
One side is money, the other side is the people.
Darn, which one could be more importand?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
In Europe minority votes count for something and you have more than 2 credible parties. That makes rigging an election far less valuable.
In the US just a few thousand votes in a key are brings your party from a lot of control (president) to very little (Democrats in the Senate and House can't get shit done).
With razor thin margins and 49% of the vote counting for nothing it is possible to subtly change the votes and drastically alter the political landscape.
In 2000 Florida was withing 1/100th of 1% (0.01%) and would have made Gore the president. I doubt there is many places in the rest of the world where so few people in such a small area could cause such a dramatic shift. This makes the risk/reward analysis in the US much different than other places with your minority reresentation and 3+ parties.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
The November 2006 California Gubernatorial election had seven statewide offices and twelve ballot propositions (Californians can enact laws through ballot propositions). This was just the statewide offices - it doesn't count any local offices, initiatives or municipal boards. And this was a small one. The California Presidential primary election in February, 2008 has seven state-wide propositions, with thirty two more in circulation and thirty two more in the final stages of verification at the Attorney General's office. Most of these won't appear until the November general election (where there are more propositions because, as a rule, more people show up to vote), but it gives you an idea of the number of issues people are asked to vote on.
And that doesn't even cover ballots for the sight-impaired, ballots in multiple languages, provisional voting which doesn't get counted until the voter has been verified and mail-in ballots. This is why we use electronic balloting.