Open Source Program Reveals Diebold Bug

Mitch Trachtenberg writes "Ballot Browser, an open source Python program developed by Mitch Trachtenberg (yours truly) as part of the all-volunteer Humboldt County Election Transparency Project, was instrumental in revealing that Diebold counting software had dropped 197 ballots from Humboldt County, California's official election results. Despite a top-to-bottom review by the California Secretary of State's office, it appears that Diebold had not informed that office of the four-year-old bug. The Transparency Project has sites at humetp.org and http://www.humtp.com." Trachtenberg also points to his blog for the Transparency Project, and his own essay about the discovery and the process that led to it.

Comments

Re:Is Hanlon's Razor sharp enough to cut this?

[theaveng]

If you read the article, they were Not pressing buttons. This was a paper-and-pen method followed by a scanning machine. The scanning machine was dropping ballots for some unknown reason.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Is Hanlon's Razor sharp enough to cut this?

[nabsltd]

The point is that the machine failed at identifying the ballots, not just identifying votes.

I can see that optical scanning might have issues, but then the counting machine needs to spit out the "bad" ballot into a different pile so that it can be manually checked. The machine failed to do this.

Re:Is Hanlon's Razor sharp enough to cut this?

[the eric conspiracy]

The fact that we are being asked to swallow this is disgusting.

Thats what my ex used to say.

Re:Is Hanlon's Razor sharp enough to cut this?

[whoever57]

The point is that the machine failed at identifying the ballots, not just identifying votes.

Not true. The machine counted the ballots and then later, the software deleted them along with any record that they ever existed.