Colorado Decertifies E-voting Machines

mamer-retrogamer writes "On December 17, Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman decertified election equipment used by 64 Colorado counties, including machines made by Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold Election Systems. A report issued by the Secretary of State's office details a myriad of problems such as lack of password protection on the systems, controls that could give voters unauthorized access, and the absence of any way to track or detect security violations. Manufacturers have 30 days to appeal the decertification."

Comments

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard the e-certified devoting machines.

Re:Really?

[morgan_greywolf]

Or was it they were devoted to e-certifying machines? Or were they certifying voting on e-Machines? Argh! I'm so ocnfused!

skynet wants to vote

[User 956]

Colorado Decertifies E-voting Machines

Bad move. Everyone knows that lack of suffrage for machines is one of the catalysts of the machine uprising.

Re:skynet wants to vote

[rickb928]

Bah! I'll take on a Diebold voting machine any day. Hell, I'll take on hundreds of them.

I'm more worried about Mother... But she's busy with the politicians.

Re:skynet wants to vote

[SargentDU]

transformers\ Don't touch it to the cube! you don't know how evil it will become!\ end Transformers

Re:skynet wants to vote

[RealGrouchy]

Before you give suffrage to machines, you must first program them to feel pain.

- RG>

I love it.

[palegray.net]

Quote: formerly known as Diebold Election Systems . . . Funny how some companies change their name and expect to carry on their shady, underhanded, public-trust-violating business practices with few or no consequences. Wonder how often this happens in other industries related to government contracting.

Re:I love it.

[jackpot777]

Wonder how often this happens in other industries related to government contracting.

Dig around on SourceWatch. Here's what I found:

BearingPoint was formerly KPMG Consulting Inc., the consulting division of the huge accounting firm KPMG LLP that was brought down in the Enron/Arthur Anderson scandal of 2002. In July of 2003, BearingPoint was awarded a contract by USAID worth $79.5 million to facilitate Iraq's economic recovery with a two-year option worth a total of $240,162,688

Amoco got rid of its company name when it merged with British Petroleum, greenwashing their hands of the Amoco Cadiz oil spill.

Just for the sheer cheek of it all, the Astroturf page gives you cause to ponder at just how amoral businesses can be.

Re:I love it.

[alexhard]

Just for the sheer cheek of it all, the Astroturf page gives you cause to ponder at just how amoral businesses can be. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:I love it.

[PitaBred]

Amoral is without morals... I think it means exactly what he thinks it means. Companies are amoral because the only thing that matters is getting more money. If they can make it legally, they will. If not, they weigh the reward vs the risk of penalty. That's pretty much the definition of amoral. Only if companies did the illegal thing simply to do something bad would they become immoral.

Re:I love it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Amoral is without morals... I think it means exactly what he thinks it means. Companies are amoral because the only thing that matters is getting more money. If they can make it legally, they will. If not, they weigh the reward vs the risk of penalty. That's pretty much the definition of amoral. Only if companies did the illegal thing simply to do something bad would they become immoral. There are no degrees to amorality, you either are amoral, or you are not. Thus "how amoral they are" is wrong.

Re:I love it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the name change was probably to protect Diebold's safe and ATM business from their e-voting reputation catastrophe. Note diebold.com's telling lack of mention of their manufacture of e-voting equipment.

Nevertheless, parent is right. A mere name change won't fool many, as long as the media make a point of the connection.

Re:I love it.

[Alpha830RulZ]

You need to get your accounting firms straight. KPMG/Bearing Point had nothing to do with Arthur Andersen or Enron. Several local offices of KPMG hired personnel formerly from Arthur after the firm disbanded.

Re:I love it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Quote: formerly known as Diebold Election Systems . . . Funny how some companies change their name and expect to carry on their shady, underhanded, public-trust-violating business practices with few or no consequences. Wonder how often this happens in other industries related to government contracting.

No news here. Once Anderson was disgraced for their enabling of the whole Enron scandal, they just spun off Anderson Consulting under a new name. Where do you thing the initial A and C in Acenture came from?

Re:I love it.

[WindBourne]

Accenture is author anderson software, which is the same group that did Texas Style Acccounting. Changed their name to protect the guilty.

In fact, the vast majority of the contract firms change their name every decade or so.

Re:I love it.

[bogjobber]

Don't forget Altria, formerly known as Phillip Morris. They changed their name after all the smoking lawsuits were settled in 2003.

Re:I love it.

[bitserf]

Companies do this because it works. Heck, I work for a company with a respected brand name in its industry. But roughly 10 years ago, with the prior name, the company was mired in lawsuits and known for being ethically suspect. Very little people know that we're the company they used to love to hate.

Re:I love it.

[jackpot777]

That's exactly it. Just to give you reference: I was thinking of the Ford Pinto Memo when I thought of the word.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Safety_problems

Through early production of the model, it became a focus of a major scandal when it was alleged that the car's design allowed its fuel tank to be easily damaged in the event of a rear-end collision which sometimes resulted in deadly fires and explosions. Critics argued that the vehicle's lack of a true rear bumper as well as any reinforcing structure between the rear panel and the tank, meant that in certain collisions, the tank would be thrust forward into the differential, which had a number of protruding bolts that could puncture the tank. This, and the fact that the doors could potentially jam during an accident (due to poor reinforcing) made the car a potential deathtrap.

Ford was aware of this design flaw but allegedly refused to pay what was characterized as the minimal expense of a redesign. Instead, it was argued, Ford decided it would be cheaper to pay off possible lawsuits for resulting deaths. Mother Jones magazine obtained the cost-benefit analysis that it said Ford had used to compare the cost of an $11 repair against the cost of paying off potential law suits, in what became known as the Ford Pinto Memo.

This page says "the costs for fixing the Pinto was $121 million, while settling cases where injuries occur was only $50 million".

Money came before human life.

Amoral.

Re:I love it.

[Cornflake917]

There are no degrees to amorality, you either are amoral, or you are not. Thus "how amoral they are" is wrong. It seems that the dictionary disagrees with you.

From http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/amoral:

2. having no moral standards, restraints, or principles; unaware of or indifferent to questions of right or wrong: a completely amoral person.

From http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/amoral:

science as such is completely amoral -- W. S. Thompson

Completely is an adverb that modifies the amount of an adjective. If amoral was a binary decision, then these dictionary examples are redundant and, by your standards, wrong. The original use of "amoral" was grammatically correct and made sense. What exactly is wrong about it?

Obligatory replacement criteria

[davidwr]

Might as well get this over with...

Any machine they get must be better than what they used before 2000.

The main problems with 20th-century machines were:

* some were prone to jamming, losing votes, or having impossible-to-read votes
* most were impossible for the blind or severely-mobility-impaired to use without someone else seeing their vote.

E-voting attempted to fix both of these problems and did so quite well.

The problems are that they did not maintain the good things about most existing voting systems:

* privacy of the vote
* what was cast was what was counted - voter-verified paper trail
* transparency of the vote-counting process
* ability to do a completely manual recount in a transparent manner

Compromise these and you are worse than what you had before.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[CastrTroy]

I have some better replacement criteria. All voting machines should be replaced with pen and paper. The counting should be done by people. Works just fine up here in Canada. Sure it's not perfect, but it seems to have way less problems than voting machines.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[gardyloo]

Stop summarizing issues in clear, concise manners! What the hell will we have to argue about at this point?

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[Anonymous Coward]

Blah blah blah 50 issues on a ballot blah blah blah not immune from keying error blah blah blah optech eagles already work like this blah blah blah.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[Anonymous Coward]

Advantages of 20th Century voting machines:

  * Easier to rig since you can do without the trunk full of ballots.

Advantages of E-voting machines:

  * Even easier to rig than the mechanical voting machines.

  Counting paper ballots is easy to parallelize, which is why the time to count them doesn't rise significantly with the size of the population. But if you don't tell people that, they might be persuaded to believe we must have some kind of machine to count for us.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[eln]

It should be noted that Coffman believes that these problems can be fixed in time for 2008 using upgrades and patches, so this is definitely not a death knell for e-voting in Colorado.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[palegray.net]

Seems like we have to choose between two different categories of risks. We get to tolerate either:

(1) Closed electronic voting systems that suffer from numerous problems, such as lack of accountability. No way to tell if the company producing the systems and collecting the data was paid to alter the results.

(2) Pen and paper voting systems that suffer from numerous problems, such as lack of accountability. No way to tell if the guys collecting and tabulating the ballots were paid to alter the results.

Sucks.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[Sparr0]

No way to tell if the guys collecting and tabulating the ballots were paid to alter the results. How about you WATCH them? Make ballot counting committees of multiple people from each political party and force them to count together and check each others' counts, and make the entire process a public event. Hold it in a high school gym, let [up to] a thousand interested citizens watch. I live in a voting precinct of about 10k people, and I know at least 50 of them would show up to watch this, out of a sense of civic duty or even just curiosity. ONE of those people is going to notice if some ballots marked A end up in the box for ballots marked B, and any of them can compare the scoreboard totals from their event with the reported totals for the next step up the chain of accumulation, probably available online and in a newspaper.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[Chris Mattern]

(2) Pen and paper voting systems that suffer from numerous problems, such as lack of accountability. No way to tell if the guys collecting and tabulating the ballots were paid to alter the results.

Unless, of course, you have representatives of all the candidates present at all times while the votes are handled. You know, *the way every proper pen-and-paper balloting system works.*

Chris Mattern

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[cwills]

I live in Boulder County, one of the areas that had the voting machines de-certified..

We use a pen/paper for marking the ballots. The problem is in the machines that count them..

Just remember ... the power in voting is not with the people who cast the ballots, but with the people who are counting them.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[Anonymous Coward]

That needs to be modded up. Every time the voting issue comes up, someone points out that there exists a system of voting that has worked well for the past, well, thousand years or so. (Whenever it was that paper became common.)

And the answer thrown back is always that American ballots are "too complicated". But ask why Americans pass dumb laws like the US PATRIOT Act or condone torture, and you're told that US isn't a direct democracy, it's a representative republic.

Really? Then why are that ballots so complicated that pencil and paper can't work?!

Either it's a representative republic and paper ballots will work, or it's a direct democracy and these crazy electric voting machines are need to get instant results. It doesn't work both ways.

The simple reality is that not only can paper ballots work, in a lot of polling places in the US they DO WORK and are in use.

So why voting machines? There's the obvious reason, money. And then there's the paranoid reason, power...

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[Sique]

Why restricting it to affiliates of the candidates? Just let everyone watch the count who wants to watch! There is nothing secret about a vote count.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[Black-Man]

Yeah... that watching the counters sure did wonders in Chicago in the 60's/70's/80's when election stealing w/ PAPER BALLOTS was the norm. Paper trail is a bunch of BS. Elections were stolen w/ a paper trail - what difference does it make??

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[jeti]

In theory, this is exactly how it works in Germany. In practice, no one seems to be too interested. The counting is mostly done by teachers and other state employees that couldn't shirk the task. I recently volunteered to help out and I think everybody who cares about democracy should do so, too.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[MightyMartian]

In some countries, each political party on the ballot can have a representative at each poll to make sure no shenanigans take place. There's no such thing as a perfect balloting system, but to claim the old-fashioned pen-and-paper system is somehow critically flawed is not bourne out by the evidence. The problem in the US is a) fear-mongering by companies making electronic voting equipment and b) overly-complex ballots.

International election observers have never, so far as I'm aware, in countries such as Canada, which use a standardized pen-and-paper ballot for all national elections. The good old fashioned rule of an incredibly tight ballot count between different candidates triggers a recount, and if need be, a judicial recount in front of a judge.

It's a helluva lot better than some proprietary blackbox that everyone has to take on faith actually works. It's good to see some states now seriously questioning the use of these machines, and the liberties which the companies that make them have been afforded.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[MightyMartian]

The fact is that there's a simple way to have the best of both worlds. Just have every voting machine/terminal produce a paper copy; the physical ballot. That way, if things get called into question, you can physically recount.

It simply amazes me that this isn't a requirement.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[RealGrouchy]

I propose a much better form of direct democracy that will solve all these problems once and for all.

For each candidate, get a large sack that is heavy enough that it requires exactly half of the electorate to lift it.

Tie a big, long rope around the sack, and hang the rope from a pulley.

Put an extension on this rope around a second pulley, and tie the other end of it around the candidate's neck.

Then let the electors loose. Politicians will be *highly motivated* to not piss off more than half of the electorate. Whichever candidate survives gets to run the government. Instant results, no counting required. Problem solved.

And if no candidate wins the confidence of a majority of voters, or if they all step aside before the vote, then there will be no politicians left to run the government. Problem also solved.

- RG>

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[Oscar_Wilde]

No way to tell if the guys collecting and tabulating the ballots were paid to alter the results.
 
That's been thought of, but I think you're probably trolling by bringing it up. I'll bite anyway since I'm sure some people do think this is a valid concern.
 
I'm not sure how it works in other countries but here in Australia each party can send scrutineers to polling places. After polling closes, the scrutineers stand around looking at ballots as they are counted to make sure it's done right. Of course though, they will ignore informal votes for their party while pointing them out those for other parties. That's why you need scrutineers from every party there. Take a look at the scrutineers handbook for more details of what they do before, during and after polling.

And you can always go back and recount the paper votes a second time if need be.

Paper voting is old and well proven technology. Only a fool would choose an unproven technology just because it's new or marginally faster.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[palegray.net]

It was supposed to be a humorous reference to grossly rigged elections of the past. Oddly, everyone seems to be taking it pretty seriously by offering repeated explanations of ballot observers. Wow.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[koh]

I recently volunteered to help out and I think everybody who cares about democracy should do so, too.

And in doing so, if there had been fraud, maybe, just maybe, you'd have noticed it. You're Internet-savvy and you can post your opinion and proof worldwide. There are more people like you in your country than you think. GP has a good point.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[Anonymous Coward]

"(2) Pen and paper voting systems that suffer from numerous problems, such as lack of accountability. No way to tell if the guys collecting and tabulating the ballots were paid to alter the results."

There are scrutineers from all parties in ridings who watch the vote count.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[cayenne8]

"And the answer thrown back is always that American ballots are "too complicated". But ask why Americans pass dumb laws like the US PATRIOT Act or condone torture, and you're told that US isn't a direct democracy, it's a representative republic.

Really? Then why are that ballots so complicated that pencil and paper can't work?!

Either it's a representative republic and paper ballots will work, or it's a direct democracy and these crazy electric voting machines are need to get instant results. It doesn't work both ways."

Well, it is a bit more complex than that. We ARE a democratic republic. Our representatives (unfortunately) passed the Patriot Act...not by a vote of the people. That was a Federal thing. The thing is, the US is NOT just one country, but consists of 50 states. We're more like the EU now is...each state (supposedly, but, that's another thread) is like its own country, and representatives from each state goes to the Federal govt. But, when we have elections, things can vary a great deal by state. When federal elections come around, they usually coincide with local elections, and often voters do get direct power to vote locally on referendums, state constitution issues, etc. So, the ballot the avg. person gets, in each city, can contain on some voting days (local voting way more often that national voting)...some people may have a ballot, that has city issues, state issues, local officials running for office, state officials running for office, federal officials running for office, etc. So, the ballots are not the same at all often even for 2 cities during the same elections period.

While it wouldn't confuse me to paper and pen it....well, it probably would mess with other people. Heck, every method they've come up with to vote...has historically confused some people, and caused their votes to be thrown out.

But, voting on local issues varies by state and city...some put some items up for democratic vote by their populace, others, not so much. But, this comes due to the independence of local and state govts. from the Federal system...yet somehow, all the separate entities still manage to interact together.

Next week, I'll be discussing the 'blue lines' in hockey.................

:-)

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[MightyMartian]

This is pretty much how it works in most former British possessions. England went through a good many reforms over the years as the Commons evolved into a fully elected body via universal suffrage. There were many inequities in the system which were, over a few centuries weeded out. The idea of scrutineers was an important one, allowing parties to look over the shoulder of those counting the ballots, and just as importantly, over each other's shoulders. When you've got four or five party scrutineers hanging out, it becomes a good deal harder to commit election fraud.

Let's also remember the bad old days, when election fraud was more than ballot stuffing, stealing ballot boxes and other such dirty tricks, but was also evil deeds like intimidation and voter bribing. All sorts of things have been tried over the years, and every once in a while something new comes down the pike, like a candidate secretly helping out some third-string candidate in the hopes of splitting the vote and gaining him victory. Election systems are not immutable creatures, carved in stone. You have to continue to work at them to keep them fair and honest, and that's what the decertification is about, to make these manufacturers aware that at least some states are becoming aware that these systems may be the greatest around, but that without controls and standards, how could anyone ever know.

Do I think the conspiracy theories against Diebold are outrageous. You bet. But considering the lack of ability to confirm that, it's clear things have to change.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[Eco-Mono]

Yeah, but then the "obese vote" would suddenly become a power bloc on the political scene.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[Chris Mattern]

No, if you don't have some kind of control over who gets in, the resulting mob scene isn't going to help maintain proper security or accountability.

Chris Mattern

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure it's not perfect, but it seems to have way less problems than voting machines.

Fewer.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[lymond01]

Any vote can be corrupted, but an electronic vote, as of right now, can be corrupted 1) en masse, 2) with no way to recount.

At least with a paper ballot system, you can always keep recounting the paper ballots, and stuffing the ballot box is more difficult than changing a line of code.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[Anonymous Coward]

International election observers have never, so far as I'm aware, in countries such as Canada, which use a standardized pen-and-paper ballot for all national elections. That sentence no verb.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[unfunk]

When federal elections come around, they usually coincide with local elections, and often voters do get direct power to vote locally on referendums, state constitution issues, etc. So, the ballot the avg. person gets, in each city, can contain on some voting days (local voting way more often that national voting)...some people may have a ballot, that has city issues, state issues, local officials running for office, state officials running for office, federal officials running for office, etc. So, the ballots are not the same at all often even for 2 cities during the same elections period. Aha.. thankyou for pointing that out to us outsiders. Here in Australia, Federal, State and Local elections, and plebiscites/referendums are all staggered so they almost never coincide with each other... possibly an idea for the US to take on board> :)

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, for federal elections in Canada, each candidate has the right to have one observer present per polling station, during both the election and countingof the ballots. They're called scrutineers, and they can't talk about anything to do with politics within the voting area, which includes a "bubble zone" around the building . Usually (always?) these people volunteer, and every time I've volunteered to be a scrutineer I've been one of 3 or 4, one for each candidate, sitting at a polling station making sure nothing funny happens. After the voting was closes, we all had sheets where we could write down the results as each ballot was read aloud. If something didn't add up, we could ask for the votes from that polling station to be recounted. Also, the ballots are kept for a pretty long time, so if anybody claimed that "irregularities" occurred, that could also be checked out.

So yeah, I would say there is more accountability in Canada's paper-ballot system than there is in a system that relies these e-voting machines.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[Sique]

It works fine in Germany or Austria. Counting the vote is public. Everyone can watch.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[dances with elks]

I've been at an election count (only local government) and all the counts are done by local council employees on from paper ballots on tables infront of them. Candidates or helpers from any party can look at any of the counts to check its all ok and independent observers from the electoral commission are also present. For very close results any side can ask for recounts. Its really not that difficult, all the results were known before the night was out and this will have been repeated over most of the country.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[mpe]

Pen and paper voting systems that suffer from numerous problems, such as lack of accountability. No way to tell if the guys collecting and tabulating the ballots were paid to alter the results.

Whilst you might not be able to tell if the people were paid it is quite simple to ensure it dosn't matter. You simply have scruitineers to check. There is only a problem if the count is being carried out in secret by people who are not accountable for their actions.
If you want a technical solution as well then these are known as "television cameras".

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[mpe]

The problem in the US is a) fear-mongering by companies making electronic voting equipment and b) overly-complex ballots.

Possibly a bigger problem is people closely connected to either the candidates (or their political parties) being involved in running elections.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[mpe]

Well, it is a bit more complex than that. We ARE a democratic republic. Our representatives (unfortunately) passed the Patriot Act...not by a vote of the people. That was a Federal thing. The thing is, the US is NOT just one country, but consists of 50 states.

The US isn't the only federal republic. It certainly isn't the only country with multiple levels of government.

We're more like the EU now is...each state (supposedly, but, that's another thread) is like its own country, and representatives from each state goes to the Federal govt.

A very big difference between the US and the EU is that there are no pan-EU political parties even if there were they'd only be standing as MEPs. Whereas in the US it appears to be a case of Democrat or Republican at virtually all levels (and very unlikely for these parties not to be on a ballot.)

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[mpe]

The fact is that there's a simple way to have the best of both worlds. Just have every voting machine/terminal produce a paper copy; the physical ballot. That way, if things get called into question, you can physically recount.

Having a machine print a completed ballot makes "ballot stuffing" slighly easier. Since it removes the possibility of forensic analysis showing if several ballot papers have been filled out by the same person.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[Firethorn]

I'd tend to discount them slightly over the 'body builder' block...

At least in Hillary's case, it'd be suicide for her. A recent poll found that 40% of people would turn out to vote against her. /Pictures a battle where the other candidate strangles with an empty line as 40% of the population go to the hillary line to pull the opposite way.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[Monsuco]

1st off hand counting is slow, subject to human error, and of course human corruption. Second do you mean someone should write down who they would vote for? I have sloppy hand writing. The only thing one should hand write on a ballot is a write-in vote. 3rd the hand recount in Florida was pretty much a huge problem, with charges of corruption, and it ran way behind schedule.

Why not just use a bubble sheet? A Second Grader can typically figure out how to use one of these on a standardized test and machines can be programmed to read this with essentially perfect accuracy as long as you fill in the bubble completely using a standard number 2 pencil (which could be provided by the voting place). Something might have to be done about write in candidates and for visually impaired but how hard is that? A write in could simply be done like:
For President I vote for:
1. George Bush
2. John Kerry
3. Ralph Nader
4. I wish to write in a vote for ____________ (write name in blank and fill in bubble)
A second grader could fill this out and if someone wrote in a candidate their ballot would simply be read manually by an election worker. The counting machine could simply beep to inform the election worker. As for the blind and visually impaired, large print and braille versions could be available. Now for blind and visually impaired people doing write ins, they might need the assistance of an election worker. Of course absentee ballots are still the easiest. I vote absentee in the primaries and local elections. I poll in State/Federal. I live in Colorado BTW, so maybe I will write to a state legislator about this.

Re:Obligatory replacement criteria

[palegray.net]

The whole post was meant in jest, sort of a way of making light of frustration with voting systems in general. See my earlier response in the same vein.

Premier/Diebold decertified or not?

[N7DR]

I couldn't find a confirmation in TFA as to which companies really had machines decertified. Our local (Boulder) paper reported this morning that of the four companies involved, only Premier/Diebold had *no* certification revoked. So that's rather at odds with the summary. Seeing that I couldn't see any confirmation of the summary's statement in TFA, I suspect that the local paper got it right.

Re:Premier/Diebold decertified or not?

[snl2587]

Let's hope, though, that none of the electronic voting machines were certified. Not that paper voting is any more secure. Last I checked, paper burns rather nicely. Maybe we should chisel votes in stone?

Re:Premier/Diebold decertified or not?

[Odin's Raven]

I couldn't find a confirmation in TFA as to which companies really had machines decertified. Our local (Boulder) paper reported this morning that of the four companies involved, only Premier/Diebold had *no* certification revoked. So that's rather at odds with the summary. Seeing that I couldn't see any confirmation of the summary's statement in TFA, I suspect that the local paper got it right.

Looks like your local paper got it right - according to this News Release from the Colorado Secretary of State, the results were:

Premier (formally known as Diebold) All voting equipment submitted for recertification passed.

Sequoia The optical scan devices, Insight and 400-C, used to count paper ballots both passed, but the electronic voting machines, the Edge II and the Edge II Plus, both failed due to a variety of security risk factors, including that the system is not password protected, has exposed controls potentially giving voters unauthorized access, and lacks an audit trail to detect security violations.

Hart The optical scan devices, eScan and BallotNow, both failed because test results showed that they could not accurately count ballots. The electronic voting machine, eSlate, passed.

ES&S The optical scan devices (M 100 and the M650) both failed because of an inability to determine if the devices work correctly and an inability to complete the testing threshold of 10,000 ballots due to vendor programming errors. The electronic voting machine (iVotronic) failed because it is easily disabled by voters activating the device interface, and the system lacks an audit trail to detect security violations.

Maybe the Colorado Sec of State should go read yesterday's 1,000 pages of bad news: Ohio e-voting report released article over on Ars Technica, then chat with the Ohio Sec of State about the EVEREST Testing Reports, which document high-risk issues with equipment from all the vendors that were tested (including Premier/Diebold).

Re:Premier/Diebold decertified or not?

[Keys1337]

Forging millions paper ballots is harder than forging millions of electronic votes. Manipulating elections by arson draws too much attention, thus it is not really a problem.

Re:Premier/Diebold decertified or not?

[Joe Helfrich]

The Premier/Diebold machines were "conditionally certified," and the Secretary of State's office is going to provide a list of things they have to do to be recertified. That list is supposed to be available on the department's website, but it wasn't there when I last checked this afternoon.

See http://www.denver.rockymountainnews.com/documents/2007/2007-12/20071217/20071217premier.pdf, which is a copy of the letter to Premier from the SoS.M

Those machines were the only ones to receive this rating--everything else mentioned in the report, including Boulder's optical scan machines that they've been using for years, were decertified with no path to reinstatement outside of the courts.

This isn't about securing elections. This is about getting the whole state, particularly the metro counties where electronic counting was used, on Diebold machines.

There's an idea.

[palegray.net]

"Impeachment" sounds so... nasty. Let's change the term to "devoting", which has a nice neutral ring to it.

Decertification not enough

[zgregoryg]

What we need now is an investigation into who in government certified this product in the first place, and how they were able to afford their Cayman on a gov worker salary.

Diebold's former names

[davidwr]

I heard Diebold used to be a subsidiary of Citibank's medieval "what's in your wallet" steel-weapon-wielding competitors. They invented AMT fees, remember?

What's in your voting booth?

Re:Diebold's former names

[palegray.net]

I was going to vote, but heard some guy named Chad hung himself in the booth. Must have been the frustration of it all.

Re:Diebold's former names

[Fast Thick Pants]

Asian Massage Terminals used to be free? Man did I miss out...

Re:Diebold's former names

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for posting the most un-funny thing I have ever read. I was looking for a benchmark for anti-humor. Thanks!

Voting Made Easy, Secure

[sexconker]

Go to polling location.
Tell attendant your name and address.
They look you up on a list, and you sign.
They give you a paper card, you mark your votes, you place it in a locked box.
It is later hand counted.

Hand counting doesn't take long (hey herds: think distributed computing), and should always, always, always be an option - never trust the machines.
If someone wants to vote electronically (old people who can't figure out chads), just give them a touch screen that prints out a physical ballot that they turn in.

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[Leet0]

"Hand counting doesn't take long (hey herds: think distributed computing), and should always, always, always be an option - never trust the machines." That should be (hey NERDS: ...) sorry, had to! i'm a nerd.

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[Anonymous Coward]

you left out a step:

Show government certified ID to PROVE that you are who you say you are.

Otherwise you are wide open to fraud.

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[OldeTimeGeek]

Hand counting doesn't take long

Right. The 150,000 votes for three elected offices and eleven measures in the 2007 San Francisco Mayoral election, which were counted by hand, took almost a month to tally. Imagine how long it would have taken if all 450,000 registered voters had submitted a ballot.

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[afidel]

That's not far off from what Cuyahoga County Ohio is planning to do for the upcoming primaries. They are proposing to drop the error prone, insecure electronic machines they spent millions on and going to photo-scan sheets similar to those used for basically all standardized testing in the US. The known error rate for those machines is lower than any other technology including double checked hand counting and of course you can always go the hand counting route if you want to because the forms are completely human readable.

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[richkh]

Canadian Federal election, 2004. Paper ballots. 13.5 million votes. Less than 24 hours for results. It's not that hard.

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[CastrTroy]

In Canada we count votes so fast, we had to create laws against reporting the results so the west coast voters wouldn't be influenced by the results of the east coast voters. That should give everyone a good idea of how quickly votes are counted in Canada.

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[OldeTimeGeek]

It appears that vote counting is done at the polling stations and only the results are tabulated centrally. Is this true?

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[Anonymous Coward]

True. Also, while the voting stations are run by volunteers, each voting station also has representatives from every political party present, overseeing the process of voting and counting. I think it's a pretty good system; I fear the day when electronic voting starts making inroads here.

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[JimBobJoe]

Canadian Federal election, 2004. Paper ballots. 13.5 million votes.

Correct--Each voter cast one vote (for their MP) multiplied by 13.5 million voters= 13.5 million votes to count.

2004 US election: State of Ohio, Franklin County. Each voter had 57 choices mulitplied by 560,000 voters= 31,920,000 votes to count.

One medium sized US county created nearly 3 times the quantity of votes to count that the entirety of Canada did in a federal election. Remember, our elections are quite different down here...pen and paper ballots would make things "complex."

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[JimBobJoe]

Otherwise you are wide open to fraud.

I'm always amazed when people say this. Voter fraud is like counterfeiting pennies--a lot of work with very little to be gained. If you're going to put all that time and energy into getting a candidate elected there are many much easier ways of doing it.

And if you were to do it, it wouldn't be through the misrepresentation of other people. If the dead voted in Chicago, it wasn't because people were pretending to be other people, it was because the most powerful man in American politics was pulling the strings at the top. Far easier to get the pollworkers to do everything for you.

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[ZenDragon]

Hand counting it just as susceptible , if not more so, not only human error, but influence from shady politicians. In my humble opinion, voting should be done electronically using open source software in a secure but open environment that can he checked by all those involved, including the voters. With the advent of PGP, Kerberos, and the multitude of other security mechanisms, there is no reason why this particular issue has been such an enormous point of contention. I always love how so many of these companies involved in this sort of thing are always tied to certain politicians in some way shape or form. Could they be more obvious?

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[sexconker]

Damn - I even proof read it.

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[sexconker]

57 choices or 57 decisions?

If I can choose 1 person out of 57 candidates, that's 57 choices, 1 decision. That's 1 vote.
We don't go and add up all those useless 0s.

Obama: 01011101101...
Clinton: 11010100010...

No.

If you had 57 things to vote on, then you're still exaggerating - state propositions and local measures are handled differently than national stuff.

Regardless - if we take 1 minute to count each ballot, and 200 million ballots are cast...

4 million per state. Say we've got only 25 counting stations per state...
160,000 per counting station. Say we've got 40 volunteers / counters per station...
4000 per volunteer. Say they work 6 hours a day...
Just over 11 days.

Now we have to add them back up!
40 volunteers report their numbers at each station, and they're added up...
1 hour to add, double check, and see if anyone's counts were statistical outliers.

Now we count together the stations in each state...
25 stations per state report their numbers, and they're added up. Again, 1 hour is plenty of time.

Then we simply add up the electoral votes each state is worth, take another hour, if you must.

Hay guys, that's less than 12 days total, and we can re-inspect any statistical outliers.

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[Blakey Rat]

Is that hand-counting? Or using Scan-Tron-type counters? Most states in the US currently use some form of electric counter, and we also deliver reports within 3 hours of the polls closing. As a Washingtonian, I kind of wish we had a "shut the f--- up, press" law to prevent them from reporting results before the west coasters have even had a chance to vote.

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[JimBobJoe]

I meant 57 decisions.

President/VP
US Senator
US Congressman
State Rep
State Senator
State Board of Education Rep.
About 10 County judges
About 12 Municipal judges (*every* judge in Ohio is elected)
Two County Commissioners
County Prosecutor, County Auditor, County Treasurer, County Sherriff
2 statewide referenda
5 county referenda
9 City of Columbus referenda

Ok, sorry, I'm doing this all by memory, and I've only got 48. Admittedly, that was an unusually large election--rarely do that many city and county referenda come up--and an unusual quantity of judges were up as well.

state propositions and local measures are handled differently than national stuff.

They might be in other states, but in Ohio they are all on the same ballot at the same time and processed the same way.

As for your math, I don't disagree with it, but I'm not sure where you'll find that many volunteers who are willing to do that type of drudgery.

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[sexconker]

Are you joking?

There's an endless supply of teenagers looking to do volunteer work of that sort to pad their resumes and applications.

Then there's the handful of sycophantic go-getters that will actually volunteer for the entire campaign, hoping to get picked up by a politician.

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[GeekZilla]

In Canada, the ballots are so fast, they count you!

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[OzoneLad]

I meant 57 decisions. That sounds goddamn excessive. Every time I hear the "we have to vote on multiple things at once" argument, it makes me wonder whether all those decisions are brought together for the sake of efficiency, or to spread your attention so thinly that you won't notice when a candidate or a party pulls a fast one.

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[JimBobJoe]

Are you joking?

No. The board of elections in my county worked its ass off trying to find pollworkers--a job which pays $120/13hr day. State law now allows 17 year olds to do it (which helps a bit, particularly when they get extra credit from their teachers) and county government will allow someone to take the day off with pay for pollworking. And they *still* were short about two dozen pollworkers on election day this year (needing about 4500 in a county of about 1.2 million people.)

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[JimBobJoe]

The bulk of the City of Columbus referenda were bond issues, which all passed. Some believe that the city's decision to put them all there at the same time was to do exactly as you said.

I could, incidentally, happily stop voting for judges, which I think is pointless.

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[CastrTroy]

That's hand counting. Mind you, it's a bit easier, because we usually only have 1 question on the ballot, but I think that helps things a bit.

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[Aexia]

It's several orders of magnitude more difficult to rig paper ballots because you have to attack every single precinct. You have to make multiple attacks at different weak points to successfully tamper with the ballots while destroying physical evidence of the alterations.

Whereas with electronic voting, you just have to compromise any one of several points in the process and evidence of fraud is almost impossible to detect. (Unless it's done stupidly.)

While you might be able to influence a very close election by tampering with a handful of precincts, anything larger scale requires an immense amount of corruption around the entire electoral process... and frankly, I don't think it exists anywhere anymore. At least not outside of small municipalities.

As the Bush administration's own investigations proved, vote fraud is practically non-existant these days. Despite the rhetoric, there simply aren't huge numbers of illegal or duplicate voters. Most election fraud these days is related discouraging and impeding legal voters. ie: caging, registration purges, misinformation, etc. And the Bush administration has obviously been reluctant to persue investigations into that...

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[missing000]

That should at least say in French Canada...

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[mpe]

Correct--Each voter cast one vote (for their MP) multiplied by 13.5 million voters= 13.5 million votes to count.
2004 US election: State of Ohio, Franklin County. Each voter had 57 choices mulitplied by 560,000 voters= 31,920,000 votes to count.

With a fair proportion of these you have months to count them. If time really is a factor if you put each vote on a separate physical ballot paper counts can be done in parallel.

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[mpe]

As for your math, I don't disagree with it, but I'm not sure where you'll find that many volunteers who are willing to do that type of drudgery.

It dosn't appear to be a problem elsewhere in the world. If it's really that difficult select random people using the mechanism in place for getting people to serve on juries in criminal trials.

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[mpe]

I could, incidentally, happily stop voting for judges, which I think is pointless.

At best, at worst it's a bad idea. Because it can encourage judges to voice opinions on political issues.
The thing is that more voting does not always equate to more "democracy".

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[mpe]

It's several orders of magnitude more difficult to rig paper ballots because you have to attack every single precinct. You have to make multiple attacks at different weak points to successfully tamper with the ballots while destroying physical evidence of the alterations.

Thus requiring a conspiracy involving a large number of people. The more people involved the more likely it is that one will make a "mistake" or will blow the whistle. That is before you even consider that rigging an election is likely to need people to conspire when doing so is directly against their own self interests.

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[sexconker]

Odd - I remember being in high school and working for free for an "extra credit" assignment (which was essentially mandatory...).

(California)

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[Firethorn]

I have to agree that while mostly pointless, it does place a check on judges.

We've voted 2 or 3 out of office in NE for stuff that obtained at least local noteriety.

Stuff like the judge suing for millions with respect to a lost pair of pants...

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[Firethorn]

If the dead voted in Chicago, it wasn't because people were pretending to be other people, it was because the most powerful man in American politics was pulling the strings at the top.

Richard Joseph Daley's the most powerful man in American politics? Interesting.

The dead voting is normally more of a joke in New Orleans than Chicago, but both are noted for having high levels of voting fraud.

I'll note that this has persisted for decades at the least, lasting through multiple parties in control of US politics.

It's more a statement about the local corrupt politics machine in the local area than it is for national stuff, encouraged by monolithic voting districs and loose/non-existant voter identification requirements.

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[JimBobJoe]

Richard Joseph Daley's the most powerful man in American politics? Interesting.

Relatively speaking, yes. He was de facto ruler of one of the nation's biggest metro areas, and enormously influential outside of Illinois for a good 15 years.

It's more a statement about the local corrupt politics machine in the local area than it is for national stuff, encouraged by monolithic voting districs and loose/non-existant voter identification requirements.

I agree on the local corrupt machine and the monolithic voting districts, but the voter identification requirements issue is a completely bullshit ruse that people have fallen for hook and sinker (which isn't hard, after all, people assume that fraud happens in much the same way "non-fraud" occurs--i.e., they vote one way, so clearly fraud would happen in just about the same way.)

I call it counterfeiting pennies for a reason--a guy going around voting multiple times might get 10 votes in a day which in a big race is meaningless and in a small race is impossible (since there aren't enough voting stations for him to appear at.)

An unattended pollworker, on the other hand, can run 10 votes in a matter of minutes. Two unattended pollworkers could add hundreds of extra votes.

Plenty of people have been convicted of vote fraud in the US--they were either pollworkers, or people voting in their own name registered at two different locations (because they think they can since they own land in both.) ID cards can't prevent either.

Re:Voting Made Easy, Secure

[SuiteSisterMary]

So, what...three days instead of one?

What's better; fast results dictated to you by the Supreme Court, or accurate results dictated to you by the People?

Is this a surprise to anyone

[rambag]

I don't need to say much other than, this is the company we employee to make these machines and we expect fair and working products? http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0307/S00065.htm http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0211/S00081.htm http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2004/04/63298 /case

Don't forget Haliburton

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

Try reading it

[baffled]

Perhaps reading TFA will assist in seeing confirmation.

Re:Try reading it

[shlashdot]

Except it doesn't. OP is right, the reports I heard specifically cleared Diebold/Premier.

Re:Try reading it

[baffled]

Ah, you're correct. The AP story is slightly more specific. It appears now that only Diebold machines are allowed, unless the other companies apply some patches. Well now, isn't that interesting. Only Diebold machines allowed.

"appeal the decertification."

[Lookin4Trouble]

Manufacturers have 30 days to submit bribes to appeal the decertification.

Fixed for ya

Re:"appeal the decertification."

[Anonymous Coward]

Colorado is not the east coast.

Re:"appeal the decertification."

[SirGarlon]

I fail to see why the manufacturers deserve any say in this matter. The State of Colorado bought some equipment. Then they tested it and found out that it sucks. They decided not to use it. A waste of taxpayers' money, but other than that I don't see the problem. The manufacturer still got paid, right? Maybe if they expect repeat business they should try making equipment that doesn't suck.

Was this decision the result of a vote?

[Anonymous Coward]

The 64 Supervisors of Election voted yea or nea on decertification

The result was 79-4 for decertification, motion carried

Remember kids, you can't spell penis without...

[patmandu]

...Premier Election Solutions (PES)!

Re:Remember kids, you can't spell penis without...

[ScrewMaster]

Why is this a troll? Diebold is owned and operated by dicks.

Diary is incorrect

[Phoenix Rising]

Premier systems are the only ones NOT decertified. This is contradictory to every other decertification and audit performed in other states and brings into question the validity of the testing in Colorado.

Re:Diary is incorrect

[TechnoCarl]

The Denver post article is wrong, and the URL to the report is wrong. The press release is at
http://www.sos.state.co.us/pubs/pressrel/coffman_completes_elec_voting_equip_tests_12-17-07.html
and the Certification page is at
http://www.elections.colorado.gov/DDefault.aspx?tid=501

I'm surprised.

[palegray.net]

So far, nobody's mentioned projects like the Open Voting Consortium in this discussion. This might be a perfect time to point Colorado officials in the right direction. Just a thought...

Re:must be better than what they used before

[patmandu]

You mean like No Voting Machine Left Behind?

In Related News...

[GodfatherofSoul]

The Republicans will get blown away in the 2008 elections. Go figure.

Re:In Related News...

[wiredlogic]

The Republicans will get blown away in the 2008 elections.

Monica is a turncoat, too?

Re:In Related News...

[DaveAtFraud]

Monica is a turncoat, too?

No. It was just a slip of the tongue.

Cheers,
Dave

Re:Help the Environment

[cthulu_mt]

Man this chucklehead hasn't eaten more mod points over the last few days than the Cloverfield monster. Can /. ban his IP address?

Holy Shit... Yay!

[forkazoo]

As a Colorado resident, I have to say I wasn't expecting this sort of a move. It seems like most people I talk to about this sort of issue are grossly anti-informed, and try to dismiss anybody talking ill of the new magic electro voting machines must be a luddite incapable of understanding the issues.

I have been considering rambling for five minutes about voting machines at the next Freak Train in January. (It's an open mic show in Denver at the Bug Theater on a Monday at the Bug Theater.) I was sort of assuming it wouldn't be worth my trouble, but with this local news as a starting point, I may just do it.

BTW, if anybody local knows of any good venues for talking about these sorts of things, I enjoy rambling in front of an audience. :)

Vote-filling-out machines: great idea

[davidwr]

If someone wants to vote electronically (old people who can't figure out chads), just give them a touch screen that prints out a physical ballot that they turn in. Excellent idea.

What I want to know is...

[gurps_npc]

Are the people at Premier Election Solutions fools??? I am sure they think they have great machines.

SO WHAT?

There is so much public outcry against their machines, that they had to change their name from Diebold to Premier. Look is it THAT hard to realize that even if their machines are perfect at what they do they have a big image problem and no, changing the name won't solve it.

You want real intelligent advice, here:

Go through the YEARS of bad publicity. Pick out the most respectable of the people that despise your machines.

Invite them to make a presentation of what features they want in a voting machine.

Instant free consumer research. Then just have your designers create two or three models:

1. Economy model that offers only the features that are cheap to add on.

2. Moderate model that offers some of the more stuff that costs a bit more.

3. Deluxe model that offers every SINGLE one of the features that their critics asked for.

BOOM. They have just turned their worst weakness into their biggest strengths. I bet at least on of these models would be a huge seller. Even if none of the models sold, they can advertise them and say "Don't blame us - we tried. Those cheap SOBs refused to pay for it."

You don't even have to begin construction until you get an order in. Worst case scenario, they have paid their designers for a learning project.

Diebold machines were not decertified

[doit3d]

From a summary I read earlier from another source:

* All voting systems made by Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S), both paper-based optical-scan and DREs, were completely decertified. Their op-scan systems tested, according to Coffman, "both failed because of an inability to determine if the devices work correctly and an inability to complete the testing threshold of 10,000 ballots due to vendor programming errors." Their ubiqutous, and fatally flawed iVotronic DRE system "failed because it is easily disabled by voters activating the device interface, and the system lacks an audit trail to detect security violations."
        * Paper-based optical-scan systems made by Sequoia Voting Systems were conditionally certified, while their DRE systems were completely decertified for use, as they "failed due to a variety of security risk factors, including that the system is not password protected, has exposed controls potentially giving voters unauthorized access, and lacks an audit trail to detect security violations."
        * Paper-based optical-scan systems made by Hart Intercivic were decertified "because test results showed that they could not accurately count ballots"(!), while their DRE voting system was conditionally certified.
        * And finally, both optical-scan and DRE voting systems made by Diebold/Premier were conditionally certified for use in Colorado.

Here is the source, but I do not know the accuracy of it: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5451

Nice tags...

[Anonymous Coward]

politics, usa, myriadisnotanoun , !audittrail, nowbanitfederally
Wanna bet?

Fantastic

[curmudgeon99]

Finally the elected folks have woken up. This is obviously not a technology we want to base our democracy on...

How about this for a voting system?

[thirty-seven]

How about a ballot like this, marked with a pencil? And after you mark it behind a privacy screen, you fold it and present it to a poll worker, who looks at the folded ballot and verifies there is only one, valid ballot and initials it, then hands it back to you and you put it in a simple cardboard ballot box.

The votes are counted at each polling place by the poll workers, and representatives of each candidate can observe, and it is open to public observation.

Is this just too simple?

Re:How about this for a voting system?

[Cajun Hell]

Is this just too simple?

Well, it sure is deeply flawed. Think: how can someone make a profit on it? At least require that it use a special kind of paper that only my company makes.

Re:How about this for a voting system?

[ScrewMaster]

Not good enough. Someone else might figure out how to make your paper and undercut you. You need to bribe^H^H^H^H^Hcontribute to the proper Congresspersons so that it is written into law that only your paper may be used: all others need not apply. Even better, make it so that any election where your paper is not used is automatically declared null-and-void.

That's how you guarantee yourself a neverending revenue stream.

Re:How about this for a voting system?

[WolfTheWerewolf]

This one comes to mind, brought fresh today: Sometimes what's right isn't as important as what's profitable.

OT: tagging beta

[Anonymous Coward]

The eventual implementation of /. Tagging clearly requires some kind of moderation system. Myriad is indeed a noun. I know this isn't the first occurrence of a bad tag, but on a site with a high ratio of educated users, this example is laughable.

- T

Re:OT: tagging beta

[ScrewMaster]

A high ratio of educated users to ... what, exactly? Orangutans? Baboons? Politicians?

this really annoys me

[circletimessquare]

pencil

paper

ovals

optical scanner

end of f***ing story

there is no compelling reason to make voting more complex than that, and any more complexity just means less transparency and more attack vectors for shady characters

hell, mechanical voting is more complex than that, and has a history of tampering shenanigans

of course people can still mess with pencil and paper. however, in LESS ways than mechanical or electronic voting

but you go ahead mr. slow-witted bureaucrat and champion a voting scheme that undermines faith in our democracy and our government

figure it the f*** out

just figure it the f*** out before we become a fascist state. k thx

Re:this really annoys me

[night_flyer]

Oklahoma is like this >= => draw a line to complete the arrow, run it through an optical scanner... why it has to mere difficult than that boggles the mind

Re:this really annoys me

[lachlan76]

It becomes a bit more difficult if you want to do preferential voting. But here (Australia) we just write numbers in the boxes, and we know who the new government is by ten or eleven.

It's all about democracy and freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

But apparently it's not just the USA where people have a problem when it comes to voting and voter representation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JJlI9swbsA

BearingPoint != Arthur Andersen - you're confused

[Steve Hamlin]

Bearing Point: I realize you're just quoting from SourceWatch, but both they and you have it wrong, and you're removing the limited context that they had.

the huge accounting firm KPMG LLP that was brought down in the Enron/Arthur Anderson scandal of 2002

No, ARTHUR ANDERSEN was the huge accounting firm that failed due to Enron. KMPG Consulting just bought a piece of the corpse: mostly the U.S./Western Europe operations of the business consulting unit of Arthur Andersen (AABC).

More detail:

The consulting division of KPMG-U.S. was spun of as a separate U.S. public company in early 2001. They then started acquiring other consulting companies (some of them from KPMG-Brazil, KPMG-Japan, etc - all separate accounting partnerships that really are not the same company as KPMG-US.)

In addition, they would also buy smaller (non-KPMG branded) consulting firms.

Arthur Andersen LLP had spun off Andersen Consulting in 1989. Again, two separate companies. After that split (and subsequent protracted litigation between Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting to the tune of $billions), Arthur Andersen started a consulting divison again, called AABC.

After Arthur Andersen fell apart as a result of Enron, different companies started buying up different pieces of Arthur Andersen - by country and by business unit. In the U.S., AABC that was part of Arthur Andersen-U.S. was purchased by KPMG Consulting, Inc. (the relatively new separate public company).

By this point, KPMG Consulting had acquired tons of firms, people, accounts, etc, and re-branded themselves as Bearing Point.

KMPG != Arthur Andersen

tagging gone bad

[Myopic]

what the heck happened with the tags on this story? are they having a conversation now?

Re:tagging gone bad

[dangitman]

Slashdot tags became self-aware at 2:14am EDT December 19, 2007.

By the time Slashdot tags became self-aware, they had spread into millions of computer servers across the planet. Ordinary computers in office buildings, dorm rooms, Cowboy Neal's organic antelope farm, everywhere.

The trick is to keep it simple.

[mustpax]

The simpler a system is, the easier it is to secure. India already uses electronic voting machines with great success. Now that is well engineered solution.

No, Diebold, it's not gonna be secure when you introduce 1024 bit encryption.

Re: Damn - I even proof read it.

[jeremiahbell]

It was probably a Freudian slip. People do have a herd mentality when it comes to computers, and the herd thinks that computers are better for everything. They can be great for voting, but we need a paper trail if computers are used. In Kansas they have elected to create a system where all electronic votes are centrally tabulated in Topeka, the state capital. [anything else I say after that sentence would be obvious]

Exactly

[ImaLamer]

When I walked into my polling place in 2004 and found a computer to vote on, I flipped out. Albeit inside, but I flipped. There was *no* mention that our county would be a place where they would be "testing" these machines, so I was really surprised. The first two things I was suspect of (just based off raw emotion): Won't someone be able to tie this directly back to me, making it a non-secret ballot? and How can I be sure my vote is counting for the right person?

I'm a computer nerd at heart, and maybe my views on politics, free (libre) software and the tendency to think Orwell was an optimist skews my view... but walking in as a layperson I was upset to find centralized machines taking over the process. All I wanted to do is refuse to vote, get pissy, and have them remove me from the building so I could fight the whole thing in court. Sometimes someone just needs to make that stand and start 'the good fight'.

Myriad

[Aeonite]

A report issued by the Secretary of State's office details myriad problems...

All better.

Re:Holy Shit... Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sorry, but I guarantee you will get heckled like a motherfucker.

Seriously, what WORLD do you live in?!

Re: Direct Democracy

[GeekZilla]

How about this way...

The 'Hot or Not' Solution

A mathematical--but controversial--idea for fixing the flaws in voting.
Dec 17, 2007 | Updated: 5:57 p.m. ET Dec 17, 2007

In the history of U.S. elections, the fall of 2000 is notorious for the debacle that occurred in the country's attempt to elect a president that year. But if a compelling new book is to be heeded, an even more significant election development occurred in the month before America went to the polls that November: the launching of the "Hot or Not" Web site.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/78467

Re: Damn - I even proof read it.

[Leet0]

just watch out for herds of nerds on voting day and we'll be ok

Ample fair warning

[tcgroat]

Here's the regulations (469K pdf) governing the recertification. Neither the recertification nor the requirements is a surprise. This notice is nine months old and resulted from a Denver District Court order issued September 22, 2006 (Conroy v. Dennis, No. 06CV6072, Denver Dist. Ct.). With so much advance warning, no supplier has an excuse for failing certification. The fall-back position? According to the Coloradoan, "...[Larimer County Clerk Scott] Doyle said legislators might mandate a statewide mail-in election next year if problems with electronic voting machines cannot be fixed soon."

Re:Help the Environment

[alshithead]

"Man this chucklehead hasn't eaten more mod points over the last few days than the Cloverfield monster. Can /. ban his IP address?"

No, they probably can't if he's at least as smart as some of the script kiddies. However, those of us with friends in the government sector are already working on it. My wife worked for the Office of Naval Intelligence, my friend for more than 25 years works for the FBI, and my dad is Homer Simpson. The chucklehead is headed for doom. It may not be immediate the end is coming. Think suitcase nuke in his minicity.

Re:BearingPoint != Arthur Andersen - you're confus

[Viceroy Potatohead]

I think a good term for that would be capital laundering. The basis of any corporation is capital. AA behaved criminally. Just as some random drug lord's property can be seized by the state, it should, in fairness, work the same way for a corporation. If a corporation is deserving of rights, then its investors deserve to be punished for wrong-doing as well (not just a convenient figurehead or lieutenant). That should be done by the state, the same as it is for individuals. All shares seized, people in the active positions held criminally liable, with the state now owners of the capital.

Allowing the market to revalue the stock, and then "clean" the capital by purchasing and re-branding doesn't strike me as particularly just. Once property of the state, I could see reselling, but without that, it's allowing the capital to escape legal culpability via market forces. Next time someone pushes the idea of corporate rights, I should find out how I can achieve the same legal immunity, other than working in Hollywood.

The big advantage of pen and paper voting

[Per Abrahamsen]

You can cheat and mistakes can be made with pen and paper voting, just like with any other voting system. That is not why it is superior.

But the public can understand the process. You put you X on a piece of paper. The papers are sorted into columns after party and candidate and counted. Every step of the vote counting procedure is completely transparent to ordinary people. If someone cheats or if an error is made, it also happens in a way the public can understand.

The reliance of what is essentially "magic boxes" for the mechanical procedure must be very alienating to the voters.

[ As an aside, living in a country with proportional representation, what happens after the vote count, that is how we go from who got number of votes to who gets elected is much more convoluted, but people seems to be satisfied that the final composition of the parliament between parties represents the composition of the vote. The party that got 10% of the vote also got 10% of the seats. ]

Re:The big advantage of pen and paper voting

[Firethorn]

But the public can understand the process. You put you X on a piece of paper. The papers are sorted into columns after party and candidate and counted. Every step of the vote counting procedure is completely transparent to ordinary people. If someone cheats or if an error is made, it also happens in a way the public can understand.

At least in the USA, this would be an incredibly inefficient way to do the counting. We're fond of omnibus balloting.

I don't remember an election where I had less than a half a dozen political offices, three measures, and a couple judge confirmations to vote for.

A simple stack system like you propose just wouldn't work well. Counting the votes by system as you sift through the stack would work better.

This is part of why I don't mind electronic counting near as much as I do electronic voting.

People can understand that as well, it happens with standardized tests in school and elsewhere all the time. It can be more accurate than hand counting.

Best yet, designed right you can feed it through pretty much any random optical scanning system for a recount(heck, I've suggested using the school system's scanners before). Then audit via retotaling and spot recounting, by hand if considered necessary. I'd do it with a couple random* voting districts each election just for audit purposes.

Too many anomolies would trigger a 100% recount.

*Random as selected by dice or lottery, not by election officials looking to save themselves labor by counting only the smaller districts.

Verify reciept online!

[jma05]

Disclaimer: I am not a US voter. I don't have a clue of actual practices here. And it's my bedtime.
But here is an idea which I think has all the benefits of the electronic system and more security than simple paper vote. Comment.

1. Voter gets assigned a unique random number upon vote. Receipt is printed with actual vote and assigned random number.
2. A spreadsheet with all the votes (shuffled for privacy) is put online for public download. Everyone gets to check how their vote got registered without the system knowing who is checking it. If there is a discrepancy, voter can contest with the receipt as proof.

Benefits:
1. Instant tally like an electronic system.
2. Paper trail is decentralized with voters, not in a central location where there is still potential for abuse.

I probably missed something obvious. But this is Slashdot and I get to suggest the impractical now and then.

Re:Verify reciept online!

[petermgreen]

My understanding is that the problem with systems like that is they allow vote blackmail. Once you can prove who you voted for those in a position to exert a coercive influence over you can check you are doing what they told you to do.

Re:Verify reciept online!

[jma05]

In other words, voter privacy is compromised and I did consider that factor. Disclosure happens only if fraud has happened and only by the voter's choice. And only a small portion of the fraud has to come to light for the elections to be repeated. I can imagine this to be a problem in small populations but not in general election sizes. And if the situation has reached a point where the US civilians already fear retribution for such reporting, much has already been lost. I don't think the current situation is that bad.

Re:Verify reciept online!

[Firethorn]

. I don't think the current situation is that bad.

Personally, I don't think about the current situation. I look into the past and see that public voting(people can find out how YOU voted) has indeed caused major problems in the past - people risked their jobs, homes, and lifestyles on the basis of their vote.

Not believing that human nature has fundimentally changed in the last 200 years, I don't believe in going back.

The problem with your receipt is that it can be stolen or demanded. Illegal as all heck, but illegal stuff happens all the time.

Re:Verify reciept online!

[jma05]

I don't think you understood what I stated. The whole point of generating a UNIQUE RANDOM number on the receipt was so that it was de-identified. The printing of a receipt can always be made optional by a voter if he think he is under threat by carrying one or for any other reason. In any case, no one showed any interest in this idea. So there isn't any point discussing it further.

Re:Verify reciept online!

[Firethorn]

How does having a random number on the receipt prevent "You're fired/expelled/don't get paid/etc... if you don't produce your receipt"?

Appeal??

[Trevin]

Try "replace and re-certify".

Politicians. Sheesh.

Mod Sensible Parent Up, Please!

[chocolatetrumpet]

This is a good thread- a lot of intelligent people are promoting pen and paper, saving me the trouble of typing it all out. Convincing people of the same thing over and over again is really exhausting.

several recent voting disasters in Colorado

[peter303]

I recall in 2005 the precent voting lines in Denver reached SIX HOURS on a freezing Novemeber day. The cause was that voters were permitted to vote in any precent instead of their home precent and the certified-voters-list was on a web-server instead of a computer printout book. Well you guess it: the server locked up in the first 45 minutes beacuse it was never stress-tested by the vendor.

Earlier this year a couple of all-mail-in elections took seven days to count. The optical readers crapped out and too few people had been hired.

So the Secretary of State was directed to certify four new election systems ten months in advance to catch potential problems. They were tested for accuracy and efficiency. And he found significant problems in two of them. Ten months is insufficent to obtain certified replacements and train new election workers, so Colorado is fishing for solutions. The Secretary of State claimed he tried to certify much quicker, but the machine companies stalled as much as possible hoping to avoid de-certification.

Re:BearingPoint != Arthur Andersen - you're confus

[Steve Hamlin]

...and what actually happened is almost exactly what you described. Your wish has already be granted.

Arthur Andersen LLP, a large partnership, was criminally convicted at the federal level of obstruction of justice. It lost licenses to practice accounting at the state and federal (SEC) level. The entity was and is facing many lawsuits with potential damages in the $millions or $billions. The company itself, which is not yet bankrupt or dissolved, has under 200 employees, mostly concerned with handling ongoing litigation and wrapping up the company. Arthur Andersen LLP is essentially over.

The invested capital of the company, similar to common stock, was each partner's 'capital account'. Each partner had $hundreds of thousands, if not $millions of dollars, in their capital account (at another Big4, I heard that partner's capital accounts earned 6-8% per year - kinda like preferred stock, or a dividend on the invested capital).

Most if not all of that invested capital was lost. Hundreds of millions of dollars. I had even heard that new partners, who take out a loan to buy into the partnership with an initial capital investment, wound up being stuck with the $250,000 loan, but saw their invested capital immediately worth nothing. Some particular types of vested retirement funds were protected, I think, probably because they were no longer part of the LLP directly, but trust assets.

In short, the investors lost everything.

What was left? People that had skills. Who had worked together, had contacts, relationships, business processes. The value of an assembled workforce. Ongoing projects with clients. But no viable entity.

At this was happening, other business approached the main partners of different business units, saying: "so, what is your group of 1,000 professionals going to be doing in 6 months?" That group would agree to move, en mass, over to the new company. The new company would then PAY Arthur Andersen LLP a lot of money to buy out employment agreements, non-competes, future billings under ongoing projects, probably laptops and workpapers, etc. That happened for small business units, it happened for entire country practices. (EY-Japan purchased AA-Japan's audit and tax practices, for instance. The AA-Japan business consulting unit (AABC) went to Hitachi.)

These funds were and are being used to pay fines, large legal judgments, and the little ongoing operations of the entity (who are mostly handling litigation and admin).

There wasn't any company for the government to take over. Even if the Gov't took possession of "Arthur Andersen LLP", what would they do with it? The entire business is people, and the people were leaving. The shell of the LLP entity wound up extracting cash from that exodus by leveraging existing employment agreements, non-competes, etc. But what else was left for the government to run? There is no manufacturing plants to take over or sell, and you can't force people to work for a company against their will.

--- --- ---

The partners that were directly involved in the actions that got Arthur Andersen LLP into trouble, David Duncan (the lead Enron audit partner in Houston), and Nancy Temple (lawyer with corporate in Chicago) were held accountable. Duncan was criminally convicted and sentenced to prison (on appeal). Both lost licenses, I think (CPA and Attorney). Probably can't sign audit reports, be admitted to practice before the SEC, etc. Their professional careers are over (at least at the level they previously were).

And are presumably facing numerous civil lawsuit that name them personally, which will take the next 5+ years to deal with.

--- --- ---

And last of all, don't forget the the U.S. Supreme Court later overturned the criminal conviction of Arthur Andersen. The original criminal conviction is what caused the company to go down to be

Colorado SOS staff

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone wondered how Premier ie Diebold actually got certified in the state of Colorado? The EMS system that is used by Premier uses access as its database system. If we are wondering how secure that product is, wouldn't you use something other than access. How does the SOS office allow a system like that to get certified. California had way too many problems with their system years ago. I think its odd that it is only Premier that is certified. Well, lets look at the certification staff at the SOS office. There are two key people on the certification team who work at the SOS that used to work at ElPaso County...hmmm what system does that county use? Something smells a bit off here!