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

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.

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

[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.

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

[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

[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...

"appeal the decertification."

[Lookin4Trouble]

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

Fixed for ya