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.

Comments

Re:Even as an e-voting opponent, this seems harsh.

[king-manic]

I could understand Cal's concern if different IC's were used, or if code was re-flashed. But if the two machines had the same circuit diagram, same components, and code, this penalty seems zealous. I live in California, and it's painful to see bureaucratic zealots nominally on my side, but being far from reasonable. This particular error on the part of the voting machine company appears to be on the level of a failure to file necessary paperwork. The contract didn't say "penalties only if re-flashed", instead it mentions any modifications needs to eb examined and approved. If you signed that contract you must be an idiot to do this substitution. You have to be strict or else you have more "diebolds". Any and all changes must be examined. All penalties assessed would be based on contract law. Paperwork is how a legalist society is run. It's not like jumping through hoops is new to government contractors.

Re:Further proof...

[KDR_11k]

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.

Look at their track record.

[Qem]

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.

Elections in America are COMPLICATED

[l2718]

I see absolutely no downside about doing it the traditional way. Is there any reason to do it with machines in america, or you do it that way just because it's cooler?

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.