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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.""

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.

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?

[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

[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.

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.

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: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.

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.

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.