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

[garcia]

I'd point people to take it up with their representatives and other relevant politicians or even picketing to bring attention their cause. Unfortunately the politicians are in on it and the picketing is now only permitted in "Free Speech Zones" and may end you up in jail after crooked judges who still sit on the bench after multiple infractions eliminating due process agree with the government that you are a terrorist.

So, just suck it up and let the assholes win while we all fucking suffer. Global Warming is a fucking threat? Please.

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

[TheSpoom]

That's not what's meant by "voter verifiable". The printed slip shows that you voted and for whom, but you put the slip into an actual ballot before you leave the station. That way, if the electronic result is questioned, the ballots can be counted by hand.

Obviously, we don't want to go back before an anonymous ballot system and the corruption that happened back then.

Re:Open Voting

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why we have guns.

Re:Open Voting

[the kostya]

Yep, if I am not mistaken, the right to bear arms is in the Bill of Rights so that the government will not be able to silence the will of the people and so that if the government gets screwy, we can have another revolution.

Re:Open Voting

[Anonymous Coward]

OVC is still alive, and showed up at the Linuxworld conference with a demo. They do, however, desperately need donations.

Re:Open Voting

[Austerity Empowers]

Well the only real threat of an armed rebellion is when enough people are unhappy about enough things that they're willing to risk dying. The 2nd amendment exists for that cause. One person is a criminal, 10 people are a conspiracy, thousands is a revolt.

I personally think it's fixable with less extreme measures, but it may entail a bit more suffering before enough people have visibility that there's a problem.

Most of the country hasn't seen electronic voting machines (yet). Wait till we stand in line and watch them crash, or behave strangely, or visibly ignore input. Wait till the popular candidate mysteriously loses. No one needs to die for this, it just needs to APPEAR to fail one time.

Re:Open Voting

[syphax]

OVC is very much in operation!

Read the blog posts on the site to get a sense of what they are up to. I don't know why the Sourceforge stuff isn't current; they are actively developing.

It's very much a shoestring operation; why not throw 'em $5-10?

Re:Open Voting

[AlamedaStone]

The tree of liberty needs to be watered by what again? Is it hugs and puppies, safe in their comfy beds? I can't quite remember.

Re:Open Voting

[TheSpoom]

I don't think this "shows limits to open source". It shows that something might have gone wrong with this specific project (though the post below yours makes me believe even that might not be true).

You can't take one specific thing and generalize it; things don't work like that.

Re:Open Voting

[Austerity Empowers]

The electronic equivalent is the receipt system. Have the machine print your vote on receipt paper, visible behind glass in the machine. As the last step, you verify your selection, and the paper scrolls away. If you do not approve, if the slip is incorrect, if there is mechanical printing failure, etc. the ballot is destroyed, the electronic vote is not pushed, and you try again.

Later on, the ballots are collected, counted by hand the traditional way, and that is compared against the electronic result.

That way ballots are anonymous, there is a paper trail that is verifiable by the various interested parties, but the electronic system can be trusted and kept in check.

Re:Open Voting

[camperdave]

Really? When I read the amendment, it seems like it's there so that you can be called upon to defend the country, not to overthrow the government. After all, technically the government is overthrown every election.

Re:Open Voting

[Moofie]

Thomas Jefferson disagrees with you.

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

[KDR_11k]

That's only if the paper trail includes information about the person who voted. Doesn't even remotely make sense to put that on the trail.

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

[Crudely_Indecent]

I don't even think it needs to be a LiveCD

The LiveCD option provides an avenue for forensic verification. If the system boots from a LiveCD, that disk can be compared via MD5SUM and SHA1SUM to a control copy to rule out tampering. With vote data stored separately of the OS, forensic investigation of misconduct can be focused on pure data instead of data + OS.

Let the poll workers take the voting machines home, they'll just get a fresh LiveCD on voting day.

Just my 14 cents (pfft...inflation...)

Re:Open Voting

[Bombula]

These voting machines might "lose votes"?

Jesus fucking Christ, I'm sorry, but how goddamn hard is it to make a machine that can accurately count up to at most a few tens of thousands? The entire world depends on machines that accurately count billions of numbers per second.

There. Is. No. Excuse. For. This. Shit.

Re:Open Voting

[sm62704]

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." - Thomas Jefferson

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

[goombah99]

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.

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

[rsclient]

Ummm -- you are an idiot, yes? You can classify these "issues" into two buckets:

1. OMFG! I can cast a small number of extra votes!
2. Hey, cool -- I can cast as many votes as are needed for my party to win.

Which poses a bigger threat to democracy?

But wait! Before you go ahead and start making changes, you should do a cost/benefit analysis: how many people will your new system prevent from voting versus how many invalid votes will there be? Under your system, most ways of making onesies-twoies extra votes aren't blocked (photo ids are a dime a dozen). But your system will prevent many people from voting. Tens of thousands of people don't drive and don't have passsports -- why should you make them jump through lots of (expensive) hoops?

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal some months back -- a fellow turned 18 before trying to get a driver's license. He had to apply *in person* in the *state capitol*, hundreds of miles away. Why? Because if you're a minor, you're parent vouches for you. Over 18, they can't, and so you have to prove who you are. Which is hard, because you don't have a driver's license.

In short: photo verification solves essentially nothing, while disenfranchising tens of thousands.

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

[Mister Whirly]

Good thing you are not a judge. The Supreme Court of the United States disagrees with your interpretation also. They decided that the 2nd ammendment does grant the individual (not just the militia) the right to keep and bear arms. But don't take my word for it, I could be a big liar. Instead, read it yourself here.

""Right of the People." The first salient feature of the operative clause is that it codifies a "right of the people." The unamended Constitution and the Bill of Rights use the phrase "right of the people" two other times, in the First Amendment's Assembly-and-Petition Clause and in the Fourth Amendment's Search-and-Seizure Clause. The Ninth Amendment uses very similar terminology ("The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people"). All three of these instances unambiguously refer to individual rights, not "collective" rights, or rights that may be exercised only through participation in some corporate body.
This contrasts markedly with the phrase "the militia" in the prefatory clause. As we will describe below, the "militia" in colonial America consisted of a subset of "the people"--those who were male, able bodied, and within a certain age range. Reading the Second Amendment as protecting only the right to "keep and bear Arms" in an organized militia therefore fits poorly with the operative clause's description of the holder of that right as "the people."

We start therefore with a strong presumption that the Second Amendment right is exercised individually and belongs to all Americans.""

Re:Open Voting

[mshannon78660]

I was initially in favor of this system, too - until I saw a study which showed that in this type of system, the vast majority of people did not even look at the paper ballot. I don't have the source right now, but really, would this surprise anyone? I'm now firmly in the paper ballot only camp. Scantron ballots give you the speed of electronic counting, but the person voting has actually marked the paper themselves, and the ballots can easily be recounted by hand.

Re:Open Voting

[deKernel]

Well, no it didn't happen. In each case the person in question won the majority of the electoral college which is how you become the President.

Now I am assuming you are attempting to reference the Florida issue, and if you were to do a little research you would find that the non-partisan sponsored recounts showed that that the candidate in question did win the popular vote from Florida.

Re:Open Voting

[orielbean]

Or at least have an election holiday so we can have enough volunteers to properly staff the sites. And maybe get some more tech-savvy people than the current beleaguered staff of well-meaning bluehairs...

Re:Open Voting

[Target Practice]

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..

Believe me, I'm already revolting.

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."

Re:Open Voting

[Hotawa Hawk-eye]

Have the machine print your vote on receipt paper, visible behind glass in the machine. As the last step, you verify your selection, and the paper scrolls away.

How do you know that the paper you verified scrolled away into the ballot box and not into the paper shredder next to the ballot box?

If a computer must be involved, let it serve ONLY as a mechanism to help the voter fill out their ballot. Then let the voter confirm that the ballot is correct and manually submit the ballot for counting. Let the counting be performed both by a computer for the preliminary count (for efficiency) and by a group of humans for the official count (as a quality assurance mechanism.)

Re:Open Voting

[corbettw]

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?

It's happened 17 times in our nations history, and 2004 wasn't one of them. There's nothing mysterious about it, the popular vote is completely meaningless in an election. The only thing that matters is the electoral college. That's the way the Constitution was written, and there has not yet been an Amendment to change that.

Re:Open Voting

[lgw]

Democracy (representative republic or otherwise) is not a process with many significant digits - get used to it. It doesn't need to be to work properly.

We're picking our leaders through a popularity contest, and there's almost nothing in the process that selects the candidate more fit to govern. It seriously doesn't matter if there an error of several percent in the system - so the slightly less popular candidate won? So what? Popularity correlates so poorly with skill at governing in the first place that it's not like it's some tradjegy.

The point of democracy is simple: you get to toss out the guy who almost everyone agrees is a problem without actual bloodshed and revolution. While people complain about had bad things are, and how little choice we have, we're still an incredibly free and wealth country, and the vast majority of people are annoyed but still content. If that wasn't true, both parties would be scrambling to get back to "you hate us, but not enough to actually vote for the other guy".

As has been said by folks wiser than me: democracy sucks worse than anything except for everything else that has ever been tried. We're able to toss out leaders who almost everyone agrees have failed us with a minimum of effort, and that one fact is the key to democracy.

Even if some voters really, really, really hate a leader, if there's still a large percentage of voters supporting the guy then democracy is working as intended.

Re:Open Voting

[Holi]

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..

Believe me, I'm already revolting.

So I have heard.

Re:Open Voting

[haxor.dk]

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

Maybe on a piece of paper that the current establishment does not take seriously, and hasnt for a long time.

You seem to have a poor grasp of what government is, or is just out walking your verbal pet rock. A revolution is an action that totally eliminates the power of current government, replacing it with a new one. Democratic elections are way different from revolutions and what may be derived from this concept.

Pen and Paper

[oahazmatt]

I recommend returning to Pen and Paper voting, and then using those paper ballots to vote out the officials who had paid to bring in these obviously inferior devices for wasting tax payer dollars.

Re:Pen and Paper

[eln]

They've thought of that, but no one could figure out what to do when "Mickey Mouse" won the Presidency, so the idea was abandoned.

Re:Pen and Paper

[BrotherBeal]

Obviously they extend copyright 4 more years.

Re:Pen and Paper

[spoilsportmotors]

And the ACLU would have a field day with it, being an effective poll tax. Won't anyone think of the illiterates?

Blown way out of proportion

[MyLongNickName]

Get over it folks! It will only drop votes for Democrats. So clearly this is an isolated bug.

Re:Blown way out of proportion

[NeverVotedBush]

We have the finest {democracy, republic, dictatorship, monarchy} here in the United States that money can buy.

I am quite sure that the 2000 and 2004 elections were both tampered with in various ways. Whether it was Tammy-Faye lookalike Katherine Harris, or the SCOTUS, dropped votes, intentionally misleading ballots, lost voter registrations and roles, or any of the other dirty tricks that all combined handed the elections to someone who did not actually win - either the popular vote or the electoral college.

The people involved may have thought they were working for their country, but instead, what they did was commit treason against this country.

I hope they realize that their crimes have led directly to the deaths of 3000 Americans on 9/11 and some 4500 since then in a failed and illegal war. This is not to mention bankrupting the country to make the Bush family fortune, and those of their friends, huge.

Treason has been a part of the Bush legacy since before WWII when Prescott Bush and Sheldon Bush, against Federal law and while Prescott's son was fighting in the Pacific, helped to finance the Nazi war machine in order to make billions of dollars.

The facts are that the Bush clan was meeting with the bin Laden family to discuss oil deals at the very moment the planes slammed into the WTC towers, the Pentagon, and the field in Pennsylvania. They were quickly escorted out of the country in one of the only planes allowed to fly during the nationwide grounding of all aircraft besides military flights guarding major cities. This was done on executive order and against the protests of the FBI who wanted to question them. The Bush family made the decision that their business partners convenience was more important than the safety and security of the USA. It's also fact that George Bush and Condoleeza Rice were briefed over a month before 9/11 (the August 6 PDB) that bin Laden was planning an attack using commercial aircraft "against targets such as the World Trade Center and Pentagon". He never bothered to read the full briefing and instead went to Crawford to vacation. Condoleeza Rice admitted the title of the briefing, the general contents, and that she didn't read the full briefing either during filmed and documented testimony in front of the 9/11 Commission. You can see the video on YouTube.

In spite of Bush family history, George W's literal desertion and refusal to even serve in the National Guard while others died in Vietnam, his extremely low intelligence, and his outright laziness, elitism, and being an untreated alcoholic, people compromised their country and their futures to keep the power in the hands of the republicans.

I hope they are happy. Our economy has suffered a huge blow from the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Wait until people figure out the same thing is melting down in the credit card industry. They bundle up credit debt and sell it to investment companies who buy it with your retirement dollars. As defaults skyrocket, what you have left is going to take another and a very big hit. Meanwhile we pay some $2 billion dollars a week for George W's illegal war while the rest of the country rots.

This country allowed two elections to be stolen, and a complete idiot to assume office and do more damage to this country than any enemy, country, or threat has ever been able to do. The USSR couldn't end the USA and neither could communist China - until George W. Bush took the reigns and dug us into such a hole, and at such a time - when cheap energy is running out and climate change is about to really screw with food supplies - that we more than likely will not be able to survive as a nation anyone here recognizes.

Oh well.

Proud?

[FredFredrickson]

How much more do we, Americans, have to take before we take action?

They might as well have said, "Admittedly, we failed at not only our most important task, but our only task: Preserve and Continue Democracy."

Personally, I protest weekly in my town.. but when will we get riots in the streets.. the ones you'd expect from those good ol' freedom loving Americans? Are they too busy listening to the "proud to be an american" song to actually be an american? It's not just a status, it's not juts a privilage, it's a responsibility.

I'm dissapointed that this is on the front page of slashdot, and tomorrow, will be off the front page of slashdot, and that's all the waves it will create. I'm not proud, I'm ashamed of my country.

I stopped going to church because the people who went were too busy feeling good going to church to actually do good things.

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.

LEAKED: Source code of innocent bug

[bigtallmofo]

Turns out Diebold accidentally leaked a snippet of their C# source code that shows the conditions that the machines may fail to register votes:

if(vote.Party == "Democrat" && democratvotes % 3)
democratvotes++;

Oopsie!

The circumstances?

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

Don't blame me, I voted for a';DROP TABLE users; SELECT * FROM data WHERE name LIKE '%.

Re:The circumstances?

[TheSpoom]

Well geez, you could at least have inserted yourself as the winning candidate.

*sigh* Supervillainy doesn't have the same draw it used to...

Re:The circumstances?

[Monsieur Canard]

Oh man, you missed a prime opportunity for a Little Bobby Tables reference.

http://xkcd.com/327/

Tea Party redux

[Just Some Guy]

but they had poll worker shortages last year and might need tech-savvy people to volunteer.

Want to really help? "Accidentally" run over the crate of voting machines, or allow it to fall off a bridge into a deep river. Do democracy a favor and destroy these abominations, you tech-savvy butterfingers!

Re:Tea Party redux

[HTH NE1]

Want to really help? "Accidentally" run over the crate of voting machines, or allow it to fall off a bridge into a deep river. Do democracy a favor and destroy these abominations, you tech-savvy butterfingers!

Ahem... before the election.

Re:Tea Party redux

[sp332]

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Serves: 1 precinct

Things you will need:
at least one day off work
money for fines
a destructive device (something small, like a ball-peen hammer, is recommended)

1. Go to the polls as early as possible. Try to be one the the first voters.
2. Ensure that the polling place has enough reserve paper ballots on hand, or can easily obtain them in time.
3. Disable the polling machines. One or two well-placed hits from a hammer should do.
        Act quickly to get them all before you are stopped.
4. Cooperate with any police officers who arrive. You may be treated roughly. Do not put up a fight at this point.
        You will almost certainly go to jail for some time, from hours to days, depending on circumstances.
5. If there is any media present, let them know what you did and *why* you did it.
        Try not to come off as a raving loony. Practice in front of a mirror is recommended.

Re:Tea Party redux

[AlamedaStone]

Please mod parent up.

Civil disobedience is where we need to be now, to prevent us bleeding-heart liberals from needing to learn how to care for small arms.

Re:Tea Party redux

[Just Some Guy]

Civil disobedience is where we need to be now, to prevent us bleeding-heart liberals from needing to learn how to care for small arms.

Bleeding hearts? I'm about as conservative as it gets, but the idea of either party hijacking an election infuriates me. Maybe next time it'd be a Green supporter who throws an election to the left, or maybe a fascist who only elects hardcore pseudocons - oh, sorry, neocons.

Even if nothing else, if I didn't love democracy and care for the process, I'd still like to know that my guy won by an honest vote. I'd rather lose than win it traitorously.

Re:Tea Party redux

[caliburngreywolf]

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

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?

[TheSpoom]

Corruption.

(Was that obvious?)

Re:why do these machines remain certified?

[Shotgun]

It has to be corruption. I mean, damn, the cheapest shareware author from the early 90's would be ashamed to ship something this spectacularly screwed up. 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. And yet, it DROPS DATA !?! Get the F*** outta here!!

This cannot be explained by incompetence or stupidity. The ONLY explanation is outright corruption.

Re:why do these machines remain certified?

[neoform]

diebold assured us that there were no problem..

a position they've now changed and will not be punished for.

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.

Re:why do these machines remain certified?

[SuiteSisterMary]

Your vote machine should never EVER be keeping a running tally. Your vote machine should be keeping a line-item list of votes cast.

Or, put another way, your voting machine should only ever be making, to your vote record table, INSERT statements. Never a SELECT, and most certainly never an UPDATE or DELETE.

Re:why do these machines remain certified?

[Hyppy]

Your vote machine should never EVER be keeping a running tally.

Of course it shouldn't. It also shouldn't drop votes. Come now, let's not overestimate DieBold, here.

Re:why do these machines remain certified?

[Just Some Guy]

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.

Others have pointed out that you don't keep a running tally. But even if you did, say, for summary purposes, that would be:

Vote machine 1 acquires a lock to the counter and reads current number of votes: 10
Vote machine 2 attempts to acquire the lock and is blocked
Vote machine 1 updates the counter and releases its lock
Vote machine 2 gets the lock and continues

At any rate, there is exactly one correct way to handle machine voting: use it as an input device that is capable of printing an official paper ballot flawlessly. Use the machine totals for preliminary results, but use the paper ballots for the certified results. It elimates the whole "butterfly ballot" and "hanging chad" debacle from 2000, and works even if the computers crash.

Re:why do these machines remain certified?

[Guy Harris]

...There are NO race conditions. There is NO need for parallel execution. ...

I'm not so sure of that. At least according to the Washington Post story on the problem, the problem appears to be with counting votes from the memory cards from multiple machines at a time, and sounds a bit like, err, umm, it might be a race condition:

A voting system used in 34 states contains a critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point, the manufacturer acknowledges.

The problem was identified after complaints from Ohio elections officials following the March primary there, but the logic error that is the root of the problem has been part of the software for 10 years, said Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold.

The flawed software is on both touch screen and optical scan voting machines made by Premier and the problem with vote counts is most likely to affect larger jurisdictions that feed many memory cards to a central counting database rapidly.

...

The problem is most likely to affect larger jurisdictions that upload multiple memory cards during counts, Riggall said. The GEMS system is supposed to save information from one card at a time to be counted in order as the cards are read by a database that Riggall described as the "mother ship." But a logic error in the program can cause incoming votes to essentially shove aside other votes that are waiting in the electronic line before they are counted. The mistake occurs in milliseconds, Premier's customer notice says.

The mistake is not immediately apparent, Riggall said, and would have to be caught when elections officials went to match how many memory cards they fed into a central database against how many show as being read by that database. Each card carries a unique marker.

Perhaps there's no need for parallelism, but, for better or worse, it sounds as if there might be parallelism.

Re:Ohio is the next Florida?

[eln]

Ohio already had its chance to be Florida back in 2004. Those two states need to stop hogging the spotlight and let a lesser-known state be Florida for once. I nominate New Mexico.

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

[dhovis]

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,

No they don't. You just have to be a registered voter.

Brochure from the Ohio SOS office.

Re:Ohio requires partisan poll workers

[dhovis]

It is also not true. Check my other reply for a link to the requirements.

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.

Re:Ohio requires partisan poll workers

[stinerman]

In case the thread gets long, I'll link to my rebuttal.

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.

Volunteers

[Propaganda13]

Actually, I was thinking tech-savvy volunteers would be more tempted to fix the elections when Diebold machines are used.

Re:LEAKED: Source code of innocent bug

[bigtallmofo]

Hey, I said it was a snippet that was leaked!

Don't blame me - I actually took 5 minutes to write up a whole function only to discover the stupid Slashdot filter won't let you post source code (Use less funny characters it tells you).

So I had to greatly (and I mean greatly) abbreviate the joke. Now that I've explained it, I'm sure it's 100x funnier.

This new comment system is really messing with my head. I need to sign off now. Can we go back to Slashdot 2005?

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:LEAKED: Source code of innocent bug

[eln]

Only on Slashdot would you not only get a joke written in C#, but also multiple replies complaining that it's not technically sound.

Not a problem

[BitterOldGUy]

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.

Just lie and pick a party. By lying, you are in fact following the principles of either party. Problem solved!

Fix?

[BitterOldGUy]

Actually, I was thinking tech-savvy volunteers would be more tempted to fix the elections when Diebold machines are used.

What do you mean by fix ?

I can just see it now, a miracle happens and Barr (L) wins the Presidency!

Re:Fix?

[ColdWetDog]

What do you mean by fix ?

I would be tempted to fix the machines by a liberal application of salt water. Failing that, thermite. No favoritism here.

Cannot be patched before election day?

[rpillala]

I thought they had staff dedicated to this, like the CEO.

There was a poll...

[RingDev]

To go back to the 2005 /. layout.

The majority of the local population here voted for the current version.

Oddly though, just shy of 2/3rds of /. users didn't vote...

-Rick

Don't Do It

[dcollins]

If I was a tech-savvy worker in Ohion, I'd run for the hills before volunteering to be legally responsible, or associated in any way, with these buggy voting machine known to malfunction and dump votes.

Although the guy above with the Boston-tea-party-throw-them-from-a-bridge-accidentally had a really good idea, you don't need to be tech-savvy for that (well, other than working knowledge of the theory of gravity)

Re:"Flaw" or

[mhall119]

That was one of the links in the summary....

In the what?

Certain Circumstances

[Kaptain Kruton]

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'

"Certain circumstances" -- a.k.a "voting"

Re:LEAKED: Source code of innocent bug

[KDR_11k]

On Slashdot C# is the joke.

Re:This is what we call a

[FiloEleven]

Birthday: it happens every year and is quite predictable.

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:Why do these machines exist?

[0xABADC0DA]

The last election I voted in we had over ten different measures to vote for... local sanitation commissioner, bond referendums, etc (we have a lot more democracy than you guys have). Having a computer interface to select is really quite nice when there are dozens of votes to cast. Having zero confidence in the result is really the only bad part of the electronic vote-placing machines.

Yeah there are RF attacks on electronic machines, so they are technicallly inferior to pen and paper for voting -- but our winner-take-all system tends to cause there to be two parties and moves them towards the center (of our country's political spectrum), so really there's not that much incentive to determine how specific people are voting. Most people here couldn't care less if you know who they voted for... it's only if a giant database were to be assembled. But frankly you can tell who somebody is voting for from their purchases and myspace anyway.

Re:LEAKED: Source code of innocent bug

[Firehed]

That C# is legible enough, even by non-coders (the modulus might throw people, but they'd still get the general idea). The real test would be if the joke was written in perl.

Happend in NM and NV

[goombah99]

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.

Re:Happend in NM and NV

[TheSpoom]

Sequoia's data base upload software used microsfoft access

And the repercussions of this decision could be predicted by anyone with a tiny bit of IT knowledge.

Could someone explain something to me?

[mlwmohawk]

The machine has one job. One job only. It counts votes.

I've been developing software for almost three decades, and I can't understand how you can write software so bad that it can't count.

I can't believe it is a simple error. There is a reason why this is happening and it isn't about "counting" votes, its about about choosing which votes count.

You can't blatantly steal an election without getting noticed. You can, however, lose a number of votes that don't seem statistically important on any one machine, but when combined with many, can alter the results of a close election.

That's what gerrymandering is all about, keep everything close, and small errors can let you win.

Re:Hand scanning?

[goombah99]

THere's nothing stopping the use of a automated scanner.

The manual scan was actually arrived at as the preferred model after an discussion over months of many voting system and security experts. There's lots of in obvious practical details and security holes foiled by the hand scan. Among the best reason is that it brings in attractive parts of hand counting such as witnesses, and checking of each ballot at is goes by. It destroys residual ballot order. And very high level of individual ballot scrutiny. THere's some downsides to this but a very serious analysis judged this was the best approach. You are free to differ but if you want to object to this as a show stopper then you are oblicated to review the archived e-mail discussions OVC held on this choice.

One part of the OVC system I did not mention is that there will be automated scanners in the voting facility so people can check their own bar codes should they worry. Or they can even scan them with their own cell phones (since it's not a cast ballot, the scan does not consitute a violation of privacy any more than a cell phone picture of a normal hand marked ballot does. )

The linear bar code was chosen because it is the easist to keep information straved in a visible manner--you just can't go hiding things like personally identifiable info because it's easy to limit the size of the code to one that could not support that. And while not evident to every one it is sufficiently evident that indepenent experts can reassure people on that.