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

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.

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.

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

[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

[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

[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> :)

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?

[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).

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

[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

[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

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

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.

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.

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:In Related News...

[wiredlogic]

The Republicans will get blown away in the 2008 elections.

Monica is a turncoat, too?

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: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.

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

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."