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?

[shaitand]

Someone with 30 minutes of quickbasic experience can write an application that accurately counts button presses.

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

DIEBOLD: We vote so you don't have to ...

[Rockin'Robert]

Stalin told us: "It's not who votes. It's who counts the votes," but we NEVER listen to anybody - huh? (Not that I am a fan.)

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

[eebra82]

It's usually correct to not blame on malice what can be explained by incompetence. But I do find it hard to understand how a seemingly-simple requirement (essentially, count the number of times a button has been pressed) can be so badly botched by a company whose other "secure terminal" products (eg, ATMs) seem trustworthy and reliable, without the implication of a sinister motive.

That's because money is heavily monitored and tracked wherever it goes. Votes are registered and received, but not monitored and traced on two ends.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be a retard. No one with 30 minutes of Quickbasic experience can write an application scanning paper ballots and perform optical recognition on them with any degree of accuracy.

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

[kvezach]

If anything is simple enough for formal verification to work, yet important enough that formal verification should be used, surely voting machines must be it. Of course, if they're really doing this out of a sinister motive, then (to them) there's no point.

Kudo's

[stabiesoft]

To this guy who took it upon himself to provide this check, and kudo's to the supervisor who made it possible. The idea of providing DVD image scans so anyone can verify the vote is genius. I hope other counties start providing real verification like this.

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

[SleepingWaterBear]

This is a bit of an overreaction. There's no reason that a properly designed electronic voting system can't achieve greater speed and accuracy while producing a paper trail which allows full accountability. Just have the machine produce a printout which the individual voter can verify, then in case of doubt you can always resort to a manual count. Ultimately electronic voting systems should save time and increase accuracy, and we're going to switch to them.

The problem here is that the politicians have no idea what a properly designed electronic voting system looks like, and so they just leave it all up to Diebold and the like, who have no real incentive to do things right. What we really need here is a detailed set of specifications for how voting machines ought to perform, and laws that prevent machines which don't meet those specifications from being used in an election.

why not have dual voting programs?

[kingduct]

I have read over and over about unreliable software counting votes. Why not have each vote be counted by two programs? It seems like it would be fairly trivial to have them share the same interface, but the actual methods of counting votes and securing themselves would be completely independent. They would be written by two sources (whether free or not) and then could be used to test each other (in addition of course to humans counting the paper trail the two would print out).

you are talking rubbish ..

[rs232]

"There are a few differences between ATMs and voting machines. First of all, ATMs are used daily, and if there was a bug in an ATM, it would be caught very quickly. Second of all, ATMs can be reflashed using the same connection that they use to contact the bank"

Firstly, voting machines should be subject to a full stress test before being deployed in a live election. Secondly ATMs can not be remotely 'reflashed', To upgrade required the replacement of the ATM module and the use of an external hand-held unit (plugged into the ATM) and the presence of two bank officials and the use of two unique PINS.

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

[db32]

Your right. They would say "that's a fucking stupid idea to scan ballots and use OCR to read them and then just rely on the machine when it promises that it got the answer right, at the very least we should be counting button presses".

Do you hold your ATM pin number up to the screen waiting for it to be scanned or do you punch the buttons...

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

[scribblej]

I program banking systems for a living.

It's cute that you think "electronics simply don't do [...] accountability." Believe me, I'd be out a job real fast if they didn't.

The bottom line is, this was handled really, really poorly.

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

[mrmeval]

That's shit. I'll take the ballot I handle and allow it to be scanned. If the count is suspect then the ballots exist outside of some computer generated fantasy and real humans can count them.