Slashdot Mirror
Diebold Admits Ohio Machines May Lose Votes
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Premier Election Solutions (a subsidiary of Diebold) has acknowledged a flaw that causes the systems to lose votes. It cannot be patched before the election and the machines are used in half of Ohio's counties, but they are issuing guidelines for avoiding the problem that presumably contain a work-around. While Diebold initially blamed anti-virus software for the glitch, they have now discovered that the bug was their own fault for not recording votes to memory when the cards are uploaded in 'certain circumstances' — something their initial analysis missed. It would be nice to hope that Ohio poll workers would be tech-savvy enough to make this a non-issue, but they had poll worker shortages last year and might need tech-savvy people to volunteer."
Corruption.
(Was that obvious?)
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Because the only open voting system is the one that uses pen&paper, everything else is just a little less obscure then any random proprietary system, since you don't have any guarantee that the system you are voting on is actually the one they claim it is.
The crux with any kind of electronic voting system is that it can't be verified by the voter and if you can't do that, then it should have no place in a democracy.
It's clear you are highly confident that you are right so you will no doubt be surprised to learn that you are simply uneducated. Please take some time and read up on the OVC system. It's one of the only systems that actually meets the criteria you demand and also manages to gain the advantages of computer automation.
The OVC is not propietary. It's 100% open. You don't have to pay a cent to use it or the voting machine design. Their eventual inexpensive but sustainable bussiness model is to certify third parties that use their code and designs meet the specs of those designs. They then use those proceeds to maintain open code. and open designs.
Their system is a two-part (actually 3) system on which one dumb system has a GUI whose sole purpose is to generate a printed paper ballot you can hold in your hand. This is not a cast ballot. it's just amarked ballot. It's up to you to put it into the ballot box or discard it or take it home uncast.
When ballots are deposited into the ballot box they are not scanned at that time (e.g. not an opscan). Only later in a public counting room ballots are removed, shuffled to destroy residual order permenantly, and then wand scanned by hand. The people wand scanning can at any time casually verify that the wand scan record matches the human printed record.
The nice this is that one has a partial check for large anomolies. Every cast ballot has to have been generated so the two machines must match. Hence one can't easily susbtitute new or extra ballots without some very elaborate on-site activity of a nature likely to be caught. Second, it also makes it evident when ballots are not counted, and while there can be some leakage if admistrators don't track ballots uncast, it not only clamps that but lets you see exactly what was on the ballots that were not recorded as cast. Any pattern is a clear give-away of malfeasance.
Since there's no central place where software can be contaminated (e.g. the demonstrated diebold virus attack) and even if it happened you could still count the paper ballots the voter held in their hands, it's very robust against errors.
thus it has the major benefits of both paper ballots and electronic records keeping and allows cross checks that neither can provide.
It's primary remaining weakness is simply the question of whether an electronic pen beats a normal pen. I can give arguments on both side of that.
Another advantage of the OVC bussiness model is that because it runs on commodity PCs you can literally discard the machines (e.g. give them to schools) after each election. THis is a lot cheaper than secure storage and maintainence. Additionally it means you can buy way more than you need for most elections and not have scarcity creating long lines.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Sequoia's data base upload software used microsfoft access which silently dropped all records after the first 32,000. As a result NM lost 12,000 votes in a presidential election decided by 500 votes. The same thing happened in NV the previous election cycle.
Google it. 12,000 votes lost in bernalillo.
the company took the machines and files to denver and then announced had "found" the votes, which were then counted. Sequois is owned by a shadowy Venzuelan consortium that is believed to include hugo chavez.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.