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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.
For fuck's sake, can we just use an open source solution or build a better one already? This should be OSS's moment to shine because amongst us there are the ideas, talent and skills to make a system that for all purposes is more secure, transparent and robust than what is currently on offer from Diebold or any other proprietary vendor.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Maybe a couple charges of treason should be thrown in as well. Electoral fraud. Coup coup d'état. Indecent exposure.
The company blames a conflict between their software and antivirus software for the problem...
Yeah, the antivirus software kept deleting Diebold's Republican-favoring trojans.
Who was fuckwitted enough to think using Windows on voting machines was a good idea? Nothing wrong with using an embedded appliance.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
COLUMBUS - In a decision that surprised nobody, a 6-man 6-woman jury voted 11-0 with no abstentions in favor of the plaintiffs. Testimony on damages resumes next week.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Oh please, Windows is the reason it went wrong?
No, the reason it failed is because it is a bad product.
I've used Windows and Linux software, as have many people here, and believe me, I've seen great and crap software on both platforms. Writing for non windows platforms doesn't infer some magical 'excellence' to code.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
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).
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.
Ok, if you are buying computers to be used as election machines why would you even run an antivirus? There should be no way a virus could even touch the install. Don't connect it to the internet, and think twice before even networking it. Don't have a single USB port on it, no CD ROM drive, card reader, whatever. And no HDs. What they should really have is an open source BIOS (such as Linux BIOS) booting Linux or another OSS OS, which logs into a user that only has rights to use one program, and that is the only program installed. Preferably, the data should be stored on a Compact Flash card for fast booting which would have double or triple redundancy over multiple cards.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Indeed, something doesn't sit well with me about that explanation....
One might reasonably ask why one would need to run anti-virus software on what should be a completely isolated network of computers that should never be in any way connected to anything resembling a public network. One might reasonably ask why an antivirus program would interfere with a network connection. One might reasonably ask how the authors of a piece of software could be so inept that they would fail to report such a failure to the operators in an understandable fashion, particularly on something so fundamentally critical to the operation of a democracy.
As much as I believe the adage that one shouldn't attribute malice where incompetence would suffice, the more reports of fundamental flaws in their software I hear, the harder it is for me to conceive of a team of actual software engineers who could be that inept.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
I'm hoping that this issue does not become partisan.
The CEO of the Diebold was a die-hard partisan, and a top fundraiser for a partisan candiate. We all remember the quote where he "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes" to the partisan candidate. And if by magic, election fraud allegedly helped the partisan candidate win the tightly contested election in Ohio.
These machines can be abused by either party.
Sure. Both parties may do it. The point is, the machines WERE abused by one of the parties. The machines are one problem. The abuse is a second problem. Since there is no audit trail, not even fair-minded, non-partisan individuals can audit the election result. How ironic. And partisan.
This situation was partisan from the start.
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!!
Diebold has already accidentally leaked the results:
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/diebold_accidentally_leaks
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
The last politician to be hanged in America was Florida's own Rep. Chad.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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.
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This is clearly just the start. Ohio seems to have a slam dunk case against Diebold/Premier with regard to the newer machines. If Ohio wins this one, anti-Diebold suspicions become much more credible, and you can expect a deeper investigation into the company's role in the probably stolen 2004 election.
If these PCs are running anti-virus software, how do they get certified? Do they certify a certain set of definitions and hope they don't get hit by a newer virus, or do they update the virus software after certification and hope there's nothing dodgy in the update? And even more importantly, what are these machines being used for that makes them susceptible to viruses?
... 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
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.
The American People MAY have been harmed and MAY have standing to sue. But that's a hard sell in court.
The State of Ohio HAS been harmed and DOES have standing to sue. (And they decided to do it. Oh, Goodie!)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
they nation should contract the Nevada Gaming Commission to manage voting software development testing and quality assurance.
why do I have to think of these things....
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.
Karl Rove is about to be indicted for playing with the ohio election. Of course, in the end, my guess is that if this proceeds too fast, or if McCain gets in, it will not matter. Either W or McCain will pardon Rove. After all, the pub party ALWAYS comes before the nation or morality.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Maybe this entire goddamn decade has been nothing but a Y2K bug in some virtual reality demo at some rave, jammed on "bummer" the whole time.
Can I get a reboot?
--
make install -not war
A good movie which deals in part with some of the shenanigans that go on in Ohio is Stealing America : Vote by Vote by Dorothy Fadiman.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
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.
Funny I think that people are so cautious to trust computers here, but they're fine for everything else. Just make it open. We can gain some advantages.
-Immediately before voting, you are handed a number. How we generate these numbers is up for debate. Perhaps they are centrally generated and serial. Perhaps a hash of name + DOB + other stuff. Each choice here opens different doors.
-Barcode equivalent to said number must be scanned at the machine. Number must also be entered on an onscreen key pad.
- Number + voting choices + timestamp + voting machine id are stored in a central database. Immediately. Nothing local.
-You get a receipt with your Number + voting choices + timestamp + machine ID. It also has these other handy value on there. A digital signature, created by said central authority with its private key. The public key is well known long in advance.
-After the election, the entire result set is made available for download. Yeah, a recount is a big fucking deal. We have these neat machines that are good at math. The bigger deal here is that if you check the database after you voted and the entry for your number doesn't match, you scream bloody murder. If you don't trust the machine, any party can verify the central authority's signature.
-But in addition to 'any' party, it is critical to have a non-networked verification appliance, which does nothing but verify the central signature for you before you physically leave. If you scream bloody murder at this point, we can consider the plain-text part of the receipt trusted. You obviously couldn't have faked the entire receipt while being watched by everyone. More on this soon.
Nice huh? Let's recap some advantages here:
-You can verify that your vote was counted and correctly
-You can't determine who voted for whom, except yourself.
-The receipt actually means something
Let's elaborate on that third point.
There are several means of lying to you, which can't easily be solved without adding machines into the mix
-What if the receipt says you voted for X but the machine recorded you as voting for Y? This is as good as pressing the wrong button. The signatures will both be valid. But if the plain-text portion shows the wrong candidate, you'll notice and scream. If the plain-text portion doesn't match the the central signature (the one most directly relevant to proper recording) you will catch this at the non-networked verifier. The receipt can still be trusted having not left the polling place, so you will be allowed to vote on another machine, as meanwhile the machine you previously used is marked for a serious investigation...
-What if the central authority records whatever it wants but produces a normal signature? The receipt will be considered entirely valid and endorsed. People will notice quickly as they check the database from home. You have a paper trail that can be trusted. What if the signature is bogus? People notice before they leave the polling place.
Up to this point? Criminal negligence bordering on treason. Open source needs to step up.
"Strangers have the best candy" -Me
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'd like to see some people elected who can solve the real problems without the impractical ideology.
I have to agree with what you say. Even I consider my party leaders to be nuts.
Of course, I consider myself a libertarian mostly on four points:
Government budgets should be balanced - on the federal level by cutting spending, not increasing taxes .gov out of the marriage business.
Guns should be legal(but regulated for safety - IE carrying is legal, brandishing/discharge in an unsafe manner is not; self defense encouraged)
Drugs & Prostitution should be legal(but regulated for safety, must be 18 to use, drugs are cut with safe substances, of a specified potency, Sex workers need to meet the same rules as the porn industry)
Beyond that - civil unions, get the
I'm also pro-choice and pro-death penalty when we KNOW he's the sicko who did it. I believe that it's possible to be environmentally friendly without breaking the economy. I want China's wages to go up even faster, bringing the day when 'made in the USA' is the more economic choice for more than national pride sooner. I don't think that bio-fuels are ready for the prime time yet, but I'd encourage hybrids where it makes the most sense - like city taxies.
If I got in I'd try to simplify the tax system. I like the idea of fairtax, but believe that it needs work - and certainly wouldn't get rid of the entire IRS, as you'd still need to audit businesses.
I don't read AC A human right
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
Of the counties mentioned where votes were dropped, Cuyahoga (Cleveland area) is overwhelmingly Democratic. Butler (Cincinnati suburbs) and Montgomery (Dayton), OTOH, are much more Republican.
What we need is an Open Inspections of Electronic Voting Machines Act which would require that any citizen be allowed to inspect the software and security process/procedures used in any electronic voting machine. The manufacturer would still be allowed to copyright the software so that competitors could not copy it. This would go a long way toward convincing me that such machines were trustworthy.
I'm not sure that most voters really care, though. In the recent OH primary, voters were allowed to ask for a paper ballot if they didn't trust the machines. I was the only voter in my precinct who used a paper ballot.
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