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

[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

[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

[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.

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: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?