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Diebold Election Audit Logs Defective
mtrachtenberg writes "Premier Election Solutions' (formerly Diebold) GEMS 1.18.19 election software audit logs don't record the deletion of ballots, don't always record correct dates, and can be deleted by the operator, either accidentally or intentionally. The California Secretary of State's office has just released a report about the situation (PDF) in the November 2008 election in Humboldt County, California (which we discussed at the time). Here's the California Secretary of State's links page on Diebold. The conclusion of the 13-page report reads: 'GEMS version 1.18.19 contains a serious software error that caused the omission of 197 ballots from the official results (which was subsequently corrected) in the November 4, 2008, General Election in Humboldt County. The potential for this error to corrupt election results is confined to jurisdictions that tally ballots using the GEMS Central Count Server. Key audit trail logs in GEMS version 1.18.19 do not record important operator interventions such as deletion of decks of ballots, assign inaccurate date and time stamps to events that are recorded, and can be deleted by the operator. The number of votes erroneously deleted from the election results reported by GEMS in this case greatly exceeds the maximum allowable error rate established by HAVA. In addition, each of the foregoing defects appears to violate the 1990 Voting System Standards to an extent that would have warranted failure of the GEMS version 1.18.19 system had they been detected and reported by the Independent Testing Authority that tested the system.'"
Sounds to me like touchscreen voting might have some problems with it.
Ok, so when do we get to throw Diebold exec in jail for election tampering already?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
is old. Its been known for years now. Its an Access database. Pretty sure you could reboot it, then hold down shift while it was starting to prevent the "auto-run" loading of the forms. And all the audit logs are just Visual Basic "triggers" that insert into a "log" table. Changing votes is as easy as going to the vote table and changing them. The Visual Basic triggers will be fired off, and insert crap into the logs. Then you just go to the log table and delete the new entries. There aren't logs of log changes or there would be an infinite loop of log entries, so you've just erased all record of your tampering. BlackBoxVoting.org has had detailed instructions up for as long as I've been hearing the name "Diebold".
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
for target practice. At least some states would know the right way to use them. Or maybe the governator could balance the state budget by selling them as scrap, or even better to third world dictatorships where they would find their true calling in "democratic" elections.
Actually, the logs were 100% accurate.
What we have here is a case of corporate sabotage by their competitors wanting them to look bad. Call me a conspiracy nut, sure. You're going to say these things are impossible to break into or tamper with, but this is the truth!
seems like it's sort of like the allowed amount of rat droppings in a bag of potato chips. somehow it's really hard to stop rats from shitting in your food, or to stop republicans from stealing votes
for providing a defective product?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
Explains a lot, actually.
There is an *allowed* number??
Look at previous systems:
People counting manually will make mistakes.
Mechanical systems will have flaws.
So electronic systems inherit the rules that mechanical/manual systems ran under.
This entire situation is insane. My company's software isn't perfect but we can handle hundreds of thousands of transactions without missing one. I don't understand how you can fail so miserably at something as simple as electronic voting. The post below about it being based on an Access database melts my brain.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
The difference is that with a paper ballot system, there is an accurate paper trail. You can't just toss out an entire block of ballots without someone finding them in the trash with a paper ballot system. But, it appears that exactly that can happen with the diebold systems.
Diebold may not be maliciously trying to tamper with elections. They have just made it exceptionally easy to tamper with elections. They should not be trusted.
Okay, seriously, did GEMS get thrown together in someone's basement, or was it built as an academic exercise, or what?
Maybe they outsourced it to a country that doesn't hold elections.
At any rate, the people in charge of selling this steaming pile of Access to various state and local governments should at least be charged with fraud. Ideally they would be charged with sedition, but that's probably harder to prove.
I have not seen a single issue in my accounts due to ATMs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
There is an *allowed* number??
In any organic process, there will be a systemic error rate. These are people we're dealing with, not machines. People get confused, they make mistakes, they get angry and other people allow those mistakes to stand, sometimes they do the right thing for the wrong reasons or the wrong thing for the right reasons. Voting is a right, but nobody ever said it's done right. That said, the goal is to make that error rate less over time, to make continuous improvements in voter education, in process control, and in effective auditing, all the while knowing that perfection is a direction not a goal.
The problem as presented here is that the error rate grossly exceeds what previous methods had, and that this is attributable to systemic flaws, rather than the inherently higher initial error rate that would be present in the early use of any new system.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I was very surprised this past election when I attempted to show my State Issued Photo ID card (Driver's License) and Social Security Card to prove who I was in order to vote.
The very polite woman looked away and told me that she CANNOT look at my ID Cards because of laws/rules.
She simply verbally asked for my name from a list of registered voters in my district, I signed my name on the blank beside my computer printed name and was handed my ballot.
Scratching my head, I went into the both and voted. Next I returned my paper ballot card to a large scanning device and inserted it and that was 'voting' for 2008.
What troubles me is that there was almost ZERO authentication! All I needed, was a name and to show up where that name would be likely registered and I could vote fraudulently.
I get more authentication getting gas with mt debit card at 7-11!
I realized that this must be ON PURPOSE. But why? All I can conclude after much though is to allow fraud.
->We already have a perfected system that nearly everyone already knows how to use! They are called Credit Cards!
Why can Mastercard/Visa reliably authenticate BILLIONS of unique transactions with very little error and an audit trail and Diebold cannot?
I believe that when the US has another election, we should be issued Visa/Mastercard Debit cards with our pictures on them linking to a database of our eligibility to vote in US elections.
We use the same credit card/ debit card devices that are used all over which are tied to a computer touch screen, and we "purchase" a list of candidates (just like building a PC at NewEgg..) and then "purchase".
Now I have a printed receipt that instantly confirms my choices and selections after the transaction. If I made any mistake, I will need to immediately take that receipt to the person conducting the elections with my photo ID debit card for voting, and they will assist me in correcting the errors and I will need to electronically sign a form and will be issues a correction receipt with my previous incorrect choices credited to my "account" and the my new correct selections "purchases" on the new receipt.
of course, I will be able to later look this up online to verify my paper receipt matches the online database of my "votes" (purchases).
Why reinvent the wheel? Mastercard/Visa have over 30 year experience conducting authenticated transactions and their fee is typically less than 3%.
The Sause is not in the touch screens or their audit logs, it is in AUTHENTICATION and being able to reliable VERIFY your selections got registered as your choices.
(Of course I will later expect a statement via the US Mail (built in fraud protection laws) that will exactly match my printed receipt obtained at the time of my voting...)
Considering that still, several months later, the State of Minnesota is recounting paper Senate ballots over and over, is this REALLY that bad of an option?
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Diebold_offices_listed_in_yellow_pages_0222.html
Out of 13 listings in Florida, 5 turned out to be Wal-Marts. Similar office listings have been uncovered in Alabama, Mississippi, and New Hampshire. Since the office listings exist in each state and not just in Utah, it is probably unlikely that the corporate branch in every state is acting independently of each other.
Just a thought - why should they be trusted if you can't trust 'em to give real physical addresses to their offices?
Most people will feel that the candidate they wanted won, so the machines must be okay. Most will never consider the possibility that their candidate wasn't supposed to win. Or won despite having the machines against him. And the losing side had already picked scapegoats before the election so the don't need to worry about the machines.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
The HAVA set that standard for all voting systems in federal elections, not just electronic ones. The scantron ballots we use, for example, are by far my favorite method for various reasons, but they can certainly misidentify a bubble.
But somehow these errors were both detected and corrected. If there's no paper trail, how did they know these ballots were deleted, and then how did they know what the votes should have been in order to correct them?
Is Diebold completely incompetent when it comes to software QA, or does the voting machine work exactly as designed?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
You have to read the context around that "allowed" though. It was stated as allowed error rate. You have that accurate paper trail, so recount it. Do it again. And again. And again. Chances are, if you're doing by hand, machine, or really any method, with a total of over 100 million ballots for a recount, you're going to get some slightly different result every time. That needn't be malice - people, and machines, make mistakes. The thing is making sure that those mistakes are as rare as possible, and that the actual rate is within some established level of tolerance.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
There is an *allowed* number??
0 is a number, too...
Not that its still not shoddy, but this report seems to imply that version 1.18.19 was still being used in the 2008 elections. The current version seems to be 1.18.24 and has been out since Oct 2007. Not realy easy to tell whats been addressed, but it at least seems to imply in a few of the release notes that it corrects previously recorded software defects.
Recall Obama?
I mean if the past was any benchmark for the present in regards to Bush's being elected then relected and the leftist /. contingent calling for his impeachment over election fraud...
then by that one can only conclude, you should be saying the same about election 2008.
Funny, I dont see one word in that regard now that your stooge won
Then why bother switching at all? If the best they can do is to match the defect rate of the previous process, then it seems silly to convert over to an entirely different way of doing things.
Mind you, I have no idea if this is actually the case; just that the statement above struck me as a bit odd.
I know it must be hard for you to bear, having a responsible centrist president. But fortunately THESE election results were valid, unlike your Mr. Chimp's first election by judge. It shows your real character, that winning is more important to you than democracy. So I don't feel too sorry for you. In fact, I'm glad the Republicans have become the marginalized party of the deep south, religious fanatics, and wingnuts everywhere. Please, please run Palin for president! That would guarantee another four years of Obama. Seriously, you guys just need to form a new conservative party. Your current one is deceased.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I understand that these results are unacceptable, and that there are some inherent problems with computer voting, but can someone explain to me the sheer hate of Diebold that you see on Slashdot every time there is a story about it?
Open Source voiting (software and hardware), with code in public domain and some verification systems in place.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
when we told of such things and the shady connection in between diebold's parent corporations and cheney and his position as a CEO, we were dubbed 'conspiracy junkies'. guess it wasnt us, who was the junk.
Read radical news here
as if any message that had been sent to any parties in the preceding 50 years accomplished anything ...
you still have madoffs, cheneys, that rotten republican appointed DOJ woman that screened FIFTY applicants in regard to their views on abortion, bush, freedom of speech etc BY MISTAKE (she says so) by using special software specifically built for that task, nixon, well. you keep counting.
'clear message' hahahaa. clear messages do not work. VIGILANCE does. you, as citizen, have to be always vigilant and in defense of your rights and your liberties'.
Read radical news here
There is an *allowed* number??
Yes, and originally it was supposed to be a little worse than paper, but not much. I don't know what it now. There was an allowance for slightly increased errors to encourage entry and because the point of them was never to replace paper (at least initially) but to allow handicapped people to vote without assistance. And there is an "allowed" number with paper too. So it's not like electronic voting gets a free pass. The only way to eliminate errors is to allow vote verification. And despite the fact that open voting worked great in this country for about 100 years, people somehow think anything that could reduce anonymity is bad (there were some incidents that were racially motivated after the Civil War, and open voting was abandoned). Unless I can look at my vote *after* it is counted, there will always be errors. And giving me the ability to look at my vote after it is counted, makes it possible for others to do the same, though I can think up a large number of ways to nearly eliminate that possibility, the fact that it's still there makes many go batshit insane about the issue. I still haven't figured out why, if it will eliminate all types of fraud and errors other than voter tampering which wasn't an issue for much of this country's history and is easily managable, wouldn't people want a trackable system?
Learn to love Alaska
Results are determined thus:
There are 6 counting methods available in this scenario (2 CDRs, 2 scantron auto reads, and (if needed) two manual reads).
All that needs happen is that 4 of the 6 counts match up. CDRs are almost guaranteed to match up, so that's two (and if they don't match up, there has been some type of tampering or system failure, and we move from the CDRs into the Scantrons). After that, if the two scantron autoreads match up to the CDRs within the margin of error, then we know that the votes were counted correctly (3 items were not reviewed by the voter, but those 3 items match up with the voter reviewed cards). If, after looking at these four counting options, we do not have four matches (One of the scantron autoreads doesn't match the other three, or one of the CDRs is corrupted or unreadable, etc.), we do the manual counts. If we do not have 4 matching counts at this point, the votes are not valid, and a revote is required.
Yes, this is an "armchair" analysis, and I'm sure has some holes in it, but how in the heck is an Access Database with VB triggers any better than this armchair analysis?
Before commenting on the Bible, please read it first
I understand there are complexities to any software project - I've been doing this stuff professionally for over 10 years now, and I still fail to see what's so hard about capturing votes. My only real guess is that Diebold and others are re-inventing the wheel - coding a complete system from the ground up and making a lot of mistakes along the way.
But seriously, if your entire business model was based on a machine that exists to simply tabulate votes, don't you think you'd have the bandwidth to do it very well?
My sig sucks.
And that's what you don't want. You don't want people going vigilante, or even starting a civil war.
That's why electronic voting machines are stupid, and why this should be considered an extremely serious matter.
Elections don't have to just be fair, they have to be easily _seen_ as fair.
Electronic voting machines are opaque to most members of the public. They do not satisfy the latter criteria and are hence unsuitable.
In contrast it's easier satisfy the latter when you do hand counting and there are representatives from the various parties observing the hand counts. You'd need magicians in enough counting stations to rig stuff.
Sure there'll always be some small minority grumbling or doing stupid stuff. But you don't want a large minority doing that.
The other thing to watch out for are postal votes. But this is a similar problem whether you hand count or do it electronically.
The difference is that with a paper ballot system, there is an accurate paper trail.
In Chicago, the Democrats would have a pre-printed set of ballots already filled out to go back in with the others. They'd make sure that dead people voted and such to get the numbers close enough that people wouldn't lose too much faith in the system. Or the Republicans in the south that would use poll taxes after they were illegal, block access, change polling places so that people couldn't vote. In both cases, no amount of recounts will get you the accurate number. The paper doesn't match the people's will. So, you are assuming that a paper trail is "accurate" when even if everyone that wanted to vote did, and the ballots weren't tampered with, there is still controversy. Is it a dimpled chad? Pregnant? Hanging? Paper can be better or worse than electronic voting, and electronic voting can have a paper trail as well. So to claim one is superior means to me that the person making the statement is comparing the best theoretical implementation of one with the worst of the other. To compare a "proper" implementation of each would result in a near-tie, well withing the current allowed error rates. It's just that it's easier to screw up the electronic version (well, not even that, but that the lowest bidder for an electronic system will put out crap, and the lowest bidder for a paper system can't do that bad unless they serve it all on flash paper and you use candle light to read the ballots).
Learn to love Alaska
What legitimate benefit do these machines provide? Voting is such an incredible privilege. When will people wake up and realize that these ridiculous machines, motor voter registration, same-day registration, and similar garbage do nothing but dilute the power of the legitimate vote?
The difference is that with a paper ballot system, there is an accurate paper trail. You can't just toss out an entire block of ballots without someone finding them in the trash with a paper ballot system.
What if a flood or fire control system destroys a box containing, say, 10 ballots. Under what circumstances should the original electronic votes, who can no longer be aligned to a paper trail, be counted? What if it is unsure if they were electronically counted, or if perhaps some other random 10 ballots were the ones not counted the first time? Should the entire election be redone if the margin of victory was less than 10 votes?
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Didn't something very much like this happen just a couple of years ago? Looks like Diebold did exactly as stated back then...
"
Diebold did not rule out the possibility of later selling part or all of its ownership in the realigned company. "While we plan to fully support this business for the foreseeable future, we feel a more independent structure should allow it to operate more effectively," said Thomas W. Swidarski, president and chief executive.
Translation: Wanna buy a load-o-crap with a shiny new name?
"
There are 2 reasons this happened:
1. The product schedule and feature set was determined by a commission paid sales force of non-technical people that were selling this product to local governments. The sales people cared about their commission and nothing else. They certainly did not care about the pesky concerns of the nerdy engineers who were writing the code.
2. This is not a sexy product for software engineers to work on so it was a huge challenge to recruit engineers to work on it. The result was a weak team of under-performers who could not get jobs working on cool stuff.
The combination of these two issues has resulted in what we see today.
If you can only match the defect rate, but improve efficiency in terms of cost and/or time, then it doesn't seem quite so silly to convert.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
Do you have any idea how many people work for the financial institutions investigating credit card fraud and false/bad transactions? Hint: a lot.
The credit card system is FAR from perfect, we are just so heavily invested in it because it makes the credit companies a ridiculous amount of money.
Although, elections arguably have the potential to make those credit companies even MORE money. Maybe they SHOULD invest in it... (Oh god I hope not though.)
It was plain stupidity. If you can explain something in equal terms as malice or stupidity... and it's not like Diebold has experience in making reliable transaction machines.
Do I really have to spell it out to you?
No, of course not. You don't want to. I'm just a conspiracy kook.
of that is caused by the ATM system? The only issue that we have with our banking system is corporate greed. That is a different issue, than failures in the computer systems.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I seem to remember reading in one of my trade journals that part of the reason the voting machines are worse than ATMs is that the ATMs cost 10 times as much each. Hmmm, that shows our priorities.
Agreed, but everything I've read to date about electronic voting seems to indicate that it's more expensive to implement/maintain than traditional methods. I honestly don't know if it's any faster in recording votes, but counting them always seems to fall back to manual methods due to accuracy concerns anyway.
...it turns out that a voting machine bug produced incorrect results in November, 2008 and John McCain actually won by a landslide.
When asked for comment, newly sworn-in Vice President Sarah Palin gave a hearty thumbs up and declared "You betcha! Yer darn tootin' we won!"
To get the best all round reliable system that is also affordable and accountable. Surely some company or organization out there can be encouraged to put up a prize as a reward for development.
Getting commercial access to space is important for sure, glad that that is underway, but for any country calling itself a democracy, surely nothing is more important to its citizens than the assurance that all elections are being conducted fairly using a reliable system.
Up here in Canada, we still use paper ballots and that has worked well for us, but of course the US is 10x the size of Canada in terms of population, I can see the desirability of electronic accounting for managing elections, but not if its not reliable.
In all honesty, I think there is still considerable doubt that Bush & Co won the first election fairly, and look at the impact that has had on the world: massive economic meltdown, a war thats taken thousand of lives on both sides for debatable benefits, and 8 years of badly mismanaged US Foreign Policy (at least IMHO). There's no assurance that if the election had gone the other way it would have been any better, but if Bush didn't legally win the election what a testament to the necessity of reliable election hardware and software.
Oh, and if any design is submitted using an Access database - the submitters should be taken out back and shot :P
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
There is an *allowed* number??
That number MIGHT be zero... And monkeys MIGHT fly out my butt right now. ...
Probably just a coincidence that they actually did.
but never treason. At what point do accidents like this trigger government concerns of possible treason? Clearly Diebold and businesses like them aren't going to be dissuaded by outrage alone, but maybe building the tools for democrasy shouldn't be a particularly lucrative endeavor and the cost of mistakes should probably be considerably higher then in many other fields. Elections aren't business. I'm not a consumer of democracy.
Quack, quack.
well it's a good thing they caught all the errors then, isn't it? Right? They did catch all the errors, right?
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Yeah, but the point (I thought) of the electronic voting was to make this easier and more accurate. If it's just as flawed as the previous system, why bother going through the trouble of changing?
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
"Live Free or Diebold."
I don't know if this is really on topic (or even of interest) but the (German) Federal Constitutional Court judged that the usage of electronic voting machines in Hesse was illegal
the main point was the intransparency of the counting process - so at least in Germany the usage of electronic voting machines is very unlikely.
the decision (unfortunately only in German, no idea if a Google translation makes sense...): http://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/entscheidungen/cs20090303_2bvc000307.html
I was on that ballot as a candidate for US congress. Now I know the reason I lost! I want a recount. It's a conspiracy, I tell you!
/they are out to get us
United States Representative
1st Congressional District
Humboldt County, California
Mike Thompson
41,113
Zane Starkewolf
13,949
Carol Wolman
6,303
Pamela Elizondo
8
If you add a couple of zeros behind the number of deleted ballots, I might have won!
In favor of open source voting (both hardware and software): 2,438,891
In favor of purchasing more Diebold voting machines: 302,698,212
Verification Logs:
[Error: File not found - C:/Documents and Settings/tswidarski/My Documents/evote.log]
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
What's the tag-line on that company anyway: "Elections are the problem, Premier is the solution?"
--
Toro
I thought that computers were supposed to be good at math, especially basic counting.
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
In most industrial settings, if something's built to a specification, and it's later discovered to have failed to meet the specification, the vendor's still at least partly liable, even if the customer failed to discover the defect in initial validation.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Open voting was abandoned because it allows voter coercion, either through threats of violence or bribes of some sort. These are very good reasons to have secret ballots. We don't need to get rid of them, we just need to either stick with paper ballots or have people who are actually qualified design the electronic systems. I seem to remember an article on Slashdot a while back that described an electronic voting machine designed by cryptography professionals that would be secure and yet maintain the voter's anonymity. The design was presented publicly so that anyone could inspect it.
The problem isn't electronic voting per se, though it's definitely debatable whether it can offer any benefit (accuracy or financial) over paper ballots. The problem with electronic voting is Diebold and the process by which they are selected. Electronic voting machine designs should undergo the same sort of peer review period that NIST had for AES and is currently having for the new cryptographic hash standard. All designs should be public and should be entirely decoupled from the actual manufacturing and procurement of the machines. Once a design is approved, any company should be able to produce machines based on that design. States, counties, etc could buy machines from any vendor since there could be a procedure for verifying compliance with the standard.
But the important part is that none of the inner workings of election vote tabulation, whether on paper or recorded electronically, should be behind closed doors. Everything should be open to public inspection. Only with that type of transparency can we achieve a voting system that we can trust.
Incidentally, to your point about having open ballots, we still do have open ballots in a certain sense. Absentee ballots still present the opportunity for someone other than the voter to verify who the voter voted for. As such, I think they need to go away. Polling stations could be setup at embassies and consulates around the world to ensure that people traveling or living abroad could still vote, but it's important that all voting take place in an environment that's guaranteed to be free of coercion.
One of the most important rules in software development I've learned is:
Providing a good product means you take what the client asked for, and create what they actually needed. In my ~12yrs of professional experience, when I can do this, my customers (often another dept within the company) are ecstatic with the results.
Anything else is sub par, even if it meets the demands. When I had to take this route, I've never seen the customer get very excited, the solution merely "gets the job done" in which the next word to that sentence is "poorly".
Venezuela tested Diebold voting machines. There's even a remarkable email conversation about it out there on the intertubes. Venezuela asked one of the Diebold techs why there were several ways to corrupt elections. Answer from Diebold's tech: "My boss told me to make 'em like that"... Venezuela rejected Diebold's machines. They developed an Open Source solution wich is in use in several countries now. All this is old news. I really don 't understand why Diebold execs still aren 't in jail. After all, some of them have been there before.
Why is it whenever some apologist trots out Napolean's quote to "prove" that incompetence should always be assumed instead of malice, they always leave off the very important qualifier, "adequately"?
Can all the gigantic, mind blowing holes in Diebold's software be ADEQUATELY explained by incompetence?
Not in my opinion. YMMV.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
I've had to show my driver's license each time I've voted for both Federal and Provincial elections here in Canada. I don't know what they do if you don't have some government ID though.
Yes we have about 1/10th the US population but even a Federal election using 100% paper ballots AFAIK is completely counted by the end of the night. Voting ends around 9 PM and by about 12AM pretty much everything is counted and we know who won. I don't understand how the USA is so screwed up that it can't even get a ballot count done properly.
I don't really see what all the fuss is about.
It's really hard to skew an election by more than a few percent, given that we have all kinds of polls, and Nate Silver, and so on. And it's a stretch to take seriously any election that is won by a few percent.
I'm terribly disappointed in the last few years. Does anyone actually believe that Obama's election marks a new era of thoughtfulness and wisdom? PAH! He won convincingly enough, but not because the American people suddenly sprouted brains. He won because of charisma and a very good ground team, and possibly because the Arabs manipulated oil prices ;)
Don't get me wrong: I am starting to really like him. I believe that he will fail--the country was too economically fucked up when he took over. But that's not the point.
The point is this: a democracy is only safe when the citizens are educated and wise. Do we have that? We have a few educated and wise people, a few educated and greedy people, and a shitload of sheep about half of whom were, this time, convinced by stellar effort and happy coincidences that Republicans couldn't save them. Until we have a majority who can process information and make wise decisions, a few votes one way or another do not say a damn thing about what The People want.
ps. Yes, I love the idea of trying the responsible execs for treason. I just don't think it'll help very much with the real problem.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
Good, but only as well as they're built. Their flaw is that they're designed and built by humans. Software has bugs - so does hardware (remember the Pentium FPU bug?). To expect that any computer system is going to produce absolutely flawless data is naive at best. There always has to be some acceptable level of error.
Just an example - I work for a local government that bills property taxes. Our entire tax system is written in house (and very old - the software is in COBOL and though it's been changed and maintained, it's original incarnation is nearly 25 years old). We have nearly 90,000 real property tax bills (in addition to personal property where I'm not familiar with the numbers) to send out every year. Every year about 3 weeks before the bills actually go out, our Auditor's office pulls 50-100 random tax bills from the system and hand calculates them to compare with what the system calculated to see if there are any errors. If there are, we correct them (and diagnose where the error came from). Normally their sample set is correct though. That said, it never fails that we always have at least a few people come in after bills are sent and find an error in the way something is done. Usually it's a human data entry error - every so often it's a mistake in the software. The point is, it's virtually never perfect.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
True--an absentee ballot can be intercepted in the mail. The same vulnerability exists for Oregon's 100% mail-in voting. For that matter, your boss could tackle you at the polls as you walk from the privacy booth to the scanner. If I ever vote absentee, I'll be damn sure to put the ballot in a locked mail drop, not the mailbox in front of my house.
Despite this problem, absentee ballots are, IMHO, a good thing. If I lived abroad, I'm not sure if I'd trust the nearest American embassy/consulate to be the official proctor of my absentee ballot and forward it on to my county. I'd want to mail it straight to my county myself--drop it in a public mail drop, or in a country with an unreliable mail system, send it via UPS or FDX.
Mail interception aside, I know of a major weakness in absentee ballots:
BOSS: "Every employee will request an absentee ballot from the county supervisor of elections, sign the affidavit, and turn the ballot, privacy envelope, affidavit, and outer envelope over to me. Failure to comply will result in termination."
Note that this is theoretical. If this boss doesn't wind up in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison over this, he'll wind up with an empty workplace.
From the aspect of the actual elections office, there's a pretty strict procedure for absentee ballots:
- Ballots are mailed in. The mailing MUST be in this EXACT order: ballot, privacy envelope, affidavit, outer envelope. ANYTHING missing or in the wrong place will result in the whole package being shredded and a note made of the shred.
- The canvassing board opens the outer envelope and verifies the affidavit. If everything checks out, the affidavit is filed away, and the privacy envelope is thrown into a pile. Once the ballot hits the pile, goodbye link.
Yeah, but the point (I thought) of the electronic voting was to make this easier and more accurate. If it's just as flawed as the previous system, why bother going through the trouble of changing?
If it were faster and/or cheaper and/or took less space without making accuracy worse that would be an improvement too.
Plus I'm sure accuracy was -supposed- to actually be better.
But in reality, most elections aren't that close, and making it faster and cheaper is probably more important than further improving the accuracy in most cases.
Good call. It amazes me how even as I get older, I still forget that money runs this country and permeates even aspects that should be above such things.
Sure does cause a rift between the different "classes" of technological adeptness.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
Honestly, I am really trying not to don the tin foil hat here... but the personal result of this is disgust. If we can make a voting system (my son and I did so in my living room), why can't a company like Diebold? Once a pattern emerges, the answers become obvious, though anecdotal.
1. Did Diebold and it's board make a substantial contribution to one party or the other? If so, one cannot expect neutrality.
2. Does Diebold use Open Source Software and techniques in the coding of their voting machines? If not, one cannot expect transparency and impartial peer review.
3. Would any system that is tested and shown to have a 0 variance be better than Diebold's? If so, we cannot expect fair elections from their machines.
Could Tech Savvy individuals develop a better system with more transparency and accountability? Given the correct answers to the first three questions, Yes.
Remember the 10 shortest words of greatest power: "If it is to be, it is up to me." If you are serious about this, the next step is to develop a competitive system and present it. Personally, I am working on a parlimentary system, and while the code is similar, it would not scale to a national election. The problem is authentication, and the preventing "vote early, vote often" while maintaining anonymity. Here are some basic standards / benchmarks that seem common sense to me:
Open Source must be used, and staff coders must become familiar with every line of code. It follows therefore that the OS and software must be compiled from scratch. Any improvements to the code must be handled in accordance with GPL
Accountability and error checking must occur at each point where data is converted, correlated, or handed off. Parity checks or checksums are insufficient. Use MD5 checksums or come up with an even better system.
Once the system begins testing, publish the code and issue cash awards for breaking it. Put the black hats to work for you, and for Christ's sake, LISTEN TO THEM!
Using Open Source means the source code itself will be free. This does not mean the package including approved hardware, expertise and training will be free. That's where the money is made. Odds are that it'll be cheaper than the Diebold solution.
Just remember to keep it simple at every level, and it must have an attractive GUI. Show, don't tell. The average Joe hates to read, and it's easier to go multilingual if text is at a minimum. Aside from the user experience, these must be set up, used, maintained, and read by relatively untrained people. KISS always applies.
I can't help wondering if Diebold's ATM software developers are using the Voting Machines division as a dumping ground for incompetents ... something like the B Ark in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. How else can you explain an editable log (facepalm) on a voting machine?!
Another point: the company is trying to produce machines that they think county-level election officials will buy. Trying to produce a good electronic voting system would result in a very different system.
Are you employed by Microsoft? It certainly sounds like it so what are few thousand system crashes hey its "personal computer" we do not care about stinking thousands (millions). We are MS and WE know what is best for everyone. Sounds a little like the Borg We know what is best for you. How would you like to receive a death penalty and it was based on data from a electronic voting machine that people voted the death by execution. Wouldn't you want *EXACT* numbers and hey so what if it was off by a "few" percentage points. What is the difference between 50 and say 51 percent, then you might want to worry about the 1 or 2 or 3 percent a LOT.
Not that this is a valid comparison but its along similar lines. The infamous chad debacle in Florida is but one example or the number of elections that were lost by 1 or 2 (or more) percent.
I think you have a perspective that a lot of people have in that its not important until in impacts "me".
Come on! How hard is it to pop some triggers on the DB so that any change whatsoever results in the current record being written to the audit trail? Really, how hard is that?
And haven't these folks heard of logical deletes instead of actually deleting it? Use a delete flag, folks! I find it amazing that such concepts are strict requirements for simple things like clinical trial systems, and regulated heavily and audited regularly by the FDA, but our voting system has no such regs or audits.