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."

Comments

Open Voting

[TheSpoom]

It is at this point that I would normally point people to the Open Voting Consortium, but unless I'm missing something, the project stalled some time back in 2006. Yet they're still taking donations...

Am I missing something or is it time for a fork? Because I think we definitely need an open, easily verifiable voting system.

I don't even think it needs to be a LiveCD as the current project seems to have. What is so difficult about making a paper trail?

Re:Open Voting

[strelitsa]

"What is so difficult about making a paper trail?"

AFAIK, the legal fiction behind not providing a paper trail to end users is to prevent your boss or other nefarious authority figure(s) from having an easy way of confirming how you voted. IOW, boss generously allows you time off work to go vote but demands to see your voting slip to prove that you actually went, sees that you didn't vote for his brother-in-law running for dogcatcher as instructed, and cans you as a result.

Re:Open Voting

[sm62704]

When Sangamon County got the new (non-diebold) nachines, I was pleased that the machine spit out an actual paper ballot with human-readable votes.

Last election (primaries this year) the ballit was not human readable. I wonder why they changed it. Of course, this IS Illinois, where we're so patriotic that even being dead doesn't stop us from voting.

There is no reason or excuse to not have human-readable paper ballots.

Re:Open Voting

[FredFredrickson]

Yeah, we just keep waiting, waiting for things to get worse. And they do. And nothing happens. So we wait longer- and things do get worse.. But it gets worse a little at a time, and we keep procastinating. We need to revolt before it's too late..

Re:Open Voting

[sm62704]

In my county you get a stub from the ballot (well, you used to with the old machines) without your preferences marked, and a small sticker with an American flag that says "I voted".

BTW, the story's title "Diebold Admits Ohio Machines May Lose Votes", uh, this is slashdot, and as such shouldn't it be "Diebold Admits Ohio Machines May Loose Votes"? Actually if some nefarious Diebold person did it on purpose it would even be gramatically correct!

Loose votes sink boats!

Re:Open Voting

[initdeep]

don't feel bad.
i proved to our local election official that i can vote as my dead grandfather simply by walking up to his assigned polling station, saying i was him, verifying his address, and the signing his name (in my handwriting if i choose too).

since they do not, and will not ask for proper photo verification, they have no way of preventing this from happening.

yeap. voting is a secure process in this country.

Re:Open Voting

[quanticle]

Wait till the popular candidate mysteriously loses.

Well, it already happened once in 2000, and again in 2004. How many times does the popular candidate have to "mysteriously" lose before people wise up?

I know it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but if I were planning to subvert a democratic process I'd always engineer wins by one or two percent, rather than absolute blowouts.

Re:Open Voting

[corsec67]

Watch "Hacking Democracy"

In Ohio, they had a law that 3% had to be counted by hand and matched to the tally.
The problem was that the officials were preselecting the 3%, and chose a set that they knew would match.

Re:Open Voting

[quanticle]

Sorry, but I have to agree with the grandparent. The 2nd Amendment was effectively repealed the moment we got a standing army, complete with its own military-industrial complex. The fact that you own a .30 caliber (or even a .50 caliber) rifle becomes relatively unimportant when you consider that the government has a permanent force of tanks, artillery, and aircraft, combined with sufficient troops to operate them.

At best, all we could hope for is an Iraq-style insurgency, but even that would require significant foreign aid for the insurgents.

Re:Open Voting

[spiffyman]

Nonsense. Thomas Jefferson explicitly worries about the ability of our system to have legitimate control over future generations, given the constant revolutions we go through.

At one point, he even suggests that we should wipe out all laws every 19 years (a number he derived from population density and life expectancy at the time).

If this thread picks up I'll go find the citations for this. It's in TJ's letters (to Madison, I believe).

Revolution, armed or not, is at the core of our system of government.

Re:Open Voting

[the kostya]

I am not arguing that that is the only right it grants. I am arguing that the overthrow of an unpopular government is one of them. Quoting another Justice, Joseph Story, from Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States Book 3, Chapter 44, Sec. 1890:

"The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them."

why do these machines remain certified?

[YesIAmAScript]

Please, someone give me a reasonable explanation as to why these machines remained certified for the last 8 years despite all this crap?

Re:why do these machines remain certified?

[Hyppy]

It's got to do ONE simple, straight forward job. There are NO corner cases. There are NO race conditions. There is NO need for parallel execution. It is the simplest transactional system that one anyone could devise.

Playing Devil's Advocate here, but wouldn't a voting machine be a perfect example for a possible race condition?

Scenario: Both Voter 1 and Voter 2 choose Obama.
Vote machine 1 reads current number of votes: 10
Vote machine 2 reads current number of votes: 10
Voter 1 and Voter 2 both cast their ballots for Obama simultaneously.
Vote machine 1 writes new vote tally for Obama: 11.
Vote machine 1 writes new vote tally for Obama: 11.

So, instead of receiving 2 votes, Obama is only credited for 1.

I'm just saying, almost ANYTHING can be explained by incompetence or stupidity.

But, my vote's with you. Corruption.

Ohio requires partisan poll workers

[stinerman]

I'd be more than happy to be a poll worker (I'd even forfeit my salary to be one), except for the simple fact that one has to be a registered Democrat or Republican to be a poll worker in Ohio, which requires a statement made under penalty of election falsification (a felony) that you do indeed agree with the principles of the party and desire to be affiliated with them.

As I do not support the principles of either major party nor do I wish to be affiliated with either one, I cannot be a poll worker unless I commit a felony (which would probably bar me from being a poll worker).

Now, I'm obviously going a bit overboard here. No one really cares if you lie about your partisan identification. Republicans crossed over like crazy in the primary to vote for Clinton, but no one ever got arrested for it. In any case, I take such oaths seriously, so I can't be a poll worker.

Re:Ohio requires partisan poll workers

[LWATCDR]

Actually the idea behind the law is a pretty good one.
It is so that you have representatives of both parties at the polling places.
It is an attempt to prevent wrong doing. Imagine if you had only democrats or only Republicans working at any location? The requirement for saying that you fully support the party is so that people can not stack the deck with fake party members. Well you can still lie but the idea is to have have some balance.
And you don't have to be a member of any party to vote. Just to be a poll worker.
Not a perfect system or law by any stretch but the intentions are good and it is no where as evil as it looks at first sight.

Re:Ohio requires partisan poll workers

[stinerman]

No.

ORC 3501.22(A), to wit:

[...] The judges shall constitute the election officers of the precinct. Not more than one-half of the total number of judges shall be members of the same political party. The term of such precinct officers shall be for one year. The board may, at any time, designate any number of election officers, not more than one-half of whom shall be members of the same political party, to perform their duties at any precinct in any election. The board may appoint additional officials, equally divided between the two major political parties, when necessary to expedite voting.

I've tried on several occasions and have been turned away each time because I refuse to register as either a Democrat or Republican.

You should also read the brochure. It has a space for party affiliation. As I said previously, the "oath requirement" enforcement is incredibly lax, so incredibly lax that the SoS didn't even bother to point out that it is one of the qualifications under law.

windows?

[chibiace]

why is this thing running windows? anti virus software, come on guys.. will never get anywhere unless you start out right.

Re:windows?

[HTH NE1]

why is this thing running windows? anti virus software, come on guys.. will never get anywhere unless you start out right.

Do you know the source to your compiler? Do you know the source of the compiler used to compile your compiler? Ad infinitum?

Re:windows?

[LWATCDR]

While your post is full of silly anti-windows feelings it does raise a valid point.
ANTI-VIRUS? what the heck. This should be locked down and require signed binaries! What are they going to do surf myspace and run incredamail on these things!
Please this should be a secure embedded system and not a PC.
Not only that why not run QNX or even VMS on these things? both are a lot more secure than Windows and I would bet VMS is beats Linux and even OpenBSD for security.

All or just some?

[cdrguru]

Unfortunately, the way the US elections are managed, we can have some type of "instant results" from voting machines or we can just let the TV News announce a winner based on exit polls and the like.

One way or the other, there will be results announced the night of the election. There is just too much ad money riding on the election coverage. It has to be relevent. And by relevent, I mean a winner has to be announced. Period.

They announced Gore as the winner in 2000. We're still getting over that. What happens this year if they announce Obama as the winner and then on Thursday the announcement comes out that, well, really, after counting all the votes for real it looks like McCain won? What do you think will happen?

Re:Proud?

[Jerf]

Personally, I protest weekly in my town..

Well, there's your problem, making yourself easily ignorable. Heck, the relevant people would have to go out of their way to find out about you.

Stop protesting in the streets, and instead spend the time doing two things:

• Cultivating a relationship with the local news outlets. They like government corruption (or anything related to it) stories. (Yeah, that's a simplification but it's basically true.)
• Figure out how to file lawsuits, and start filing.

The sum of those two things is greater than the sum of the parts.

You've indicated a willingness to spend time on the issue, but you need to re-think your tactics.

(I can't. I don't live in Ohio or, to the best of my knowledge, in anyplace that has such ballot machines, and therefore I have no standing.)

Protesting in the streets has its place, but it's a very overrated political action. If you're not several thousand people making a point that 80%+ of the population strongly agrees with, you're wasting your time. Do something with your time that works, instead.

Why do these machines exist?

[MagdJTK]

I don't understand why these machines exist. I've only voted in one general election (here in the UK) and we used the old "cross in the box then put the paper in the slot" technique. The result was still in by the next day, so what problem are these machines supposed to be solving?

Re:Tea Party redux

[caliburngreywolf]

...ask them what they would do if they were REQUIRED BY LAW to use it.