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.

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.

"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

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: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: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.

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