Slashdot Mirror
Ohio Sues Over Missing Electronic Votes
dstates writes "The Columbus Post Dispatch reports that the State of Ohio is suing Premier Election Systems (previously known as Diebold) over malfunctions in electronic voting machines. Election workers found that votes were 'dropped' in at least 11 counties when memory cards were uploaded to computer servers. The same voting machines are used nationwide. The company blames a conflict between their software and antivirus software for the problem and says that an advisory was issued on the subject. The Ohio lawsuit contends that the company made false representations and failed to live up to contractual obligations and seeks punitive damages."
If these machines affected the outcome of the election, perhaps it is the American people (and the people of Iraq) who should be seeking punitive damages from Diebold.
As someone who has had a couple of contracts working with Diebold, it wasn't only Windows, but Windows, VB6, and an Access database. I wish I were joking.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
But shouldn't there be a law against tampering with elections? Like....a really really really serious, potentially company-destroying law?
The kind of law that would have fines and penalties so great, diebold is sent to the brink of bankruptcy and it's CEO's are all incarcerated?
Maybe that's a little extreme sounding to some, but when you consider that the very foundations your country was built on are at stake, you have to take a tough stand.
I certainly don't agree with the death penalty or anything like that, but I do think this should be a matter of the utmost importance.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
If you assign punitive damages to a vote, aren't you then assigning a value to said vote? Since it's illegal to sell your vote to begin with, what good is it to assign a value to something you cannot sell in the first place.
If you can't sell or buy something, does it have value? Is it priceless or worthless?
Certainly voting technology should be open-source, cryptographically signed etc. But this is not the point. No matter where the software and hardware come from, there must be a unique certified official configuration, well ahead of the election. Ideally, there should be a way to prove that a given piece of hardware is in the certified configuration.
If there is adverse interaction between Diebold's software and the anti-virus software then the certified configuration should not have included the anti-virus software. Alternatively, once this was discovered. Diebold should have certified a new configuration (without the A/V) and removed the A/V product from the computers. In any case local authorities should not be in charge of making changes to the configuration, or installing software on their own (e.g. choosing the correct A/V product). To the customer, all components of the voting system should behave like black-box appliances -- not like general-purpose computers (independently of the underlying implementation).
The one thing that I've never seen Linux do that Windows does extremely well is propagate viruses.
Again, why Windows? Why the worst of the worst of the worst???
Antivirus program conflict, my ass.
Electronic voting is FAST. Fast to get results. Some folks would be just as happy with results announced after a few days. Sorry, that isn't the climate in the US. You see, the TV News programs are going to announce a winner by midnight Eastern time. They have to. If they do not, nobody will watch their election results the next election and they lose millions (maybe billions) in ad revenue. Therefore it is a foregone conclusion they are going to announce a winner. And it will be by midnight Eastern time.
This was done in 2000. CBS announced Gore as the winner just before midnight Eastern time. Lots of folks went to bed knowing "their man" had won the election. Turns out, CBS was basing their "winner" declaration on exit polls and trends - just like they all do and have been doing since the beginning of such things. Only this time they were wrong. People woke up Wednesday morning and found out that somehow, after actually counting the votes, their man didn't win at all. Obviously the election had been stolen by the evil Bush.
Well, in 2008 if the counting isn't completed by midnight the TV News folks are going to announce someone as the winner. Maybe they are right, maybe not. Do you want to be around if McCain is announced as the winner early and it turns out Obama gets the nod two days later? Or, worse, Obama is announced early and McCain turns out to really have won. I see burning cities in November should that come to pass.
Another thing: with the elections running 50.0001% vs. 49.9999% counting individual votes becomes extremely important. We are way, way past the point where the accuracy of hand counting will lead to consistent results. Every count by hand is going to deliver different results because the accuracy is maybe 0.5% This has no effect when the difference is 10% of the vote. It changes the outcome when the difference is less than 0.5% of the vote total. Hand counting isn't going to get better than 0.5%, no matter what anyone does. There are people involved and that is just a limit on their abilities. So how many recounts do we go through and when does someone (like the Supreme Court) say to stop?
At this point in the US paper ballots might as well be exchanged for flipping a coin. Same outcome. I suppose paper ballots would feel a little better.
Wow, is there actually anyone buying this excuse? As if a voting system would not also send the grand total as a checksum. It would be immediately clear that something is wrong, as it should. Anti-virus programs or even a virus-infested recipient system should NOT interfere with the actual process. There should be a safe protocol that verifies that the information is sent and received correctly. Seriously, if voting machines can be compromised this easily, then that strongly reinforces the demand for a paper trail. Just have the machines print out a ballot (which should not contain a barcode, just have the voting information), have the voter check to see if it corresponds with his or her preferences and put it in a container. Then count those votes, by machine if you insist, but have them on hand for a recount by hand. Citizens can then challenge the voting tallies and see their votes recounted manually. There is nothing more important than the right to vote, it should not be this easy to lose votes somewhere in the process...
Amount of increased national debt (2008 National Debt - 2000 National Debt)
plus
Widow's and orphans benefits and social security payouts for soldiers dead in Iraq
times Ohio's population (2000)
divided by US total population (2000)
And then TREBLE DAMAGES.
Because that's how much it cost us.
Thank God my state uses mail-in permanent absentee optical scan paper ballots and only uses electronic ballots for disabled and/or elderly voters.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A family friend of mine is part of an ohio voter watchdog mailing list.
The MSM has at best mentioned it in passing, but senior diebold officials with heavy connections to the republican party were left alone to perform "patches" on the voting machines which, aside from eye witnesses at the time, went entirely unlogged, and which were entirely unsupervised.
Shortly after, the 2004 presidential elections took place.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
For starters, I may be a dual citizen (US/CDN) but I do not live in the US and have not had the pleasure to deal with such devices. Here it's all pen and paper and people tallying the votes at the end of the day.
I completely understand the need and want of the voter to have his/her vote cast confidentially. But my biggest wonder, if you want this to be accurate, why not get a receipt from the machine when you're done voting, with say a unique serial-type number on the bottom (not like a counter since someone could watch and figure out who was #42, for the completely paranoid). So the machine would register that you have voted, and that say #55828034 Voted for X but the two would not be associated. Then when the results are uploaded/downloaded/processed you would have a list of people that voted and a separate list of #'s with vote results. Then have a 'secure' government website which you could punch your unique # into and make sure that it matches what you intended to vote. If not there should be a 'contest vote' option to say go to a government office, prove your identity and have your vote changed and possibly the system reviewed (depending on the percentage of error).
Ok, that idea got away with me haha but I hope you get my drift.
I say don't drink and drive, you might spill your drink. Before you get behind the wheel just stop and think.
We use this exact pen and paper system in Canada, and TV stations are usually able to make a pretty good prediction by midnight as to who will win. The next morning, the newspaper headlines almost always confirm what the tv stations were predicting the night before.
There is no Columbus Post Dispatch. It is the Columbus Dispatch.
It says "Columbus Dispatch" on the fucking byline.
It says "Columbus Dispatch" on the publications' title.
It says "Columbus Dispatch" on the URL.
Cite your fucking sources properly.
--
I am thrilled to hear that at least some places are trying to demand reliability and/or punitive damages. Last I heard in other places, they were going to scrap the faulty systems and replace them by someone else, effectively pouring millions of dollars into Diebold for a crap product.
... the only elections they've affected were purely local ones.
And they didn't even affect them, since the miscounts were noticed and corrected from the paper audit trail built into the system.
You don't know that they didn't affect the elections. The miscounts THAT WERE VISIBLE may have been corrected. But that doesn't prove they aren't just the tip of an iceberg - like the mismatch of a few cents in an accounting ledger that may point to multiple errors that nearly canceled - in THAT check - while shorting one account by a bunch and boosting another by almost the same amount.
The tiny difference tell you something's wrong. They aren't necessarily the ONLY thing that is wrong. And if something else is wrong it may be wrong by a LOT.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Nope, disagree, the old way with paper ballots means anyone can look at the ballots and count them, using any computerized system, closed source, open source, whatever, means you need to be an extremely well versed programmer with years of experience to even start to make sense out of the code and the vote tally at the end of the day. It fails the publicly auditable and verifiable test immediately because of that. We don't need computerized voting at all. We could stand a 24 hour voting cycle though, and simplified ballots, even if it meant multiple election days instead of the kitchen sink on one ballot. And a "none of the listed" option to "vote" for, to help eliminate the "lesser of two evils" phenomenon we all get to enjoy.
All my bank's ATMs run Windows, and they just started pulling them all out of all the convenience stores and replacing them with something less flashy run by some independent ATM company that will probably charge me $5.00 a transaction. Why? Well it turns out that a bunch of similar machines got pwned...
Embedded Windows ... just say no.
One thing I still haven't seen anything like an explanation of is this: How is it possible to have any, let alone that many, technical and programmatic problems with something so conceptually simple? I mean, we are not talking about a control system for a Mars lander, or the entire Oracle database, or even a simple accounting application. This is a simple enough task: verify the user's eligibility to vote, accept a vote, save a log entry, send results to server. I bet I could make this work in a week in any language, up to and including Intercal. One would have to go out of one's way to create a transmission problem that would lose votes.
So perhaps the answer is that somebody has gone out of their way to make something that looks like a faulty system, so the result of elections could be manipulated under the cover of "technical difficulties". Or are they just criminally incompetent?
I'm slightly different, in that if I were to reform the USA, I'd simply take away quite a bit of the power of the federal government. Leave it somewhere between where it is now and about where the EU is now.
For example - I'd give the senate back to the state legislators. That ensures that senators are beholden to the state they come from. I believe that this would tend to act to preserve state powers, limiting federal ones.
I'd also create a 'house of repeals'. Their job is to balance the budget(by slashing, if necessary), get rid of bad legislation, outdated legislation, etc...
I don't read AC A human right