Diebold Admits Flaw In Voting Software

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "At a public hearing in California, Diebold's western region manager has admitted that the audit log system on current versions of Premier Election Solutions' (formerly Diebold's) electronic voting and tabulating systems — used in some 34 states across the nation — fails to record the wholesale deletion of ballots, even when ballots are deleted on the same day as an election. An election system's audit logs are meant to record all activity during the system's actual counting of ballots, so that later examiners may determine, with certainty, whether any fraudulent or mistaken activity had occurred during the count. Diebold's software fails to do that, as has recently been discovered by Election Integrity advocates in Humboldt County, CA, and then confirmed by the CA Secretary of State. The flaws, built into the system for more than a decade, are in serious violation of federal voting system certification standards."

Comments

and who's going to CARE?

[v1]

The flaws, built into the system for more than a decade, are in serious violation of federal voting system certification standards.

Sure, you and I care, but who's the them that's going to DO anything?

Besides the obvious "toss them out on their arse", I'd like to see them heavily fined. And I mean like "we want a refund"

Re:and who's going to CARE?

[HTH NE1]

There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.

And if your goal is the opposite, what is the order in which one removes these boxes from use?

Re:and who's going to CARE?

[WNight]

Soap, ammo, jury, and leave ballot because it doesn't change anything anyways.

Re:and who's going to CARE?

[Joce640k]

Refund or not, the Diebold saga is now five or six years beyond being funny. They should have lost whatever contract they have *years* ago.

Re:and who's going to CARE?

[gd2shoe]

"contracts"

There fixed that for ya. This distinction makes it all the less funny. it's not just a single idiotic/corrupt bureaucracy that has bought into this, it's a great many of them.

Re:and who's going to CARE?

[Haeleth]

There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.

And if your goal is the opposite, what is the order in which one removes these boxes from use?

One doesn't.

There's no need to remove the soap box. It's easier just to force your opponents to take even more extreme positions against you, so that people just stop taking them seriously.

There's no need to remove the ballot box. Half the country would still vote for your party even if its leader publicly killed a kitten at every campaign appearance, and the other half would still vote against you even if you were running against Hitler.

There's no need to remove the jury box. You just need to make sure you select the right juries.

And there's no need to remove the ammo box. A bunch of ragtag militias with peashooters can't pose any realistic threat to your rule. (You might, however, beneficially threaten to restrict gun ownership, because that guarantees that all the gun nuts will concentrate exclusively on protecting their precious gun rights, and won't notice anything else you do.)

Umm, duh?

[girlintraining]

These flaws have been reported in many mainstream press outlets, investigated by a half-dozen independent groups, and yet it was still cleared for use in state, county, and federal elections. Let's ignore Diebold for a minute -- I know plenty of other people here will (rightfully) hang them. This points to a major systemic flaw in our certification programs for voting machines. Period. End of discussion.

This isn't just Diebold. This is dozens of state, local, and federal agencies that abjectly failed in their duties to their constituents to protect the voting system. This is huge. Epic. I cannot stress enough the damage this has caused to the confidence in the system. Again, let's ignore Diebold and ask the really hard question -- Where do we go from here? Can e-voting systems be trusted? What changes need to be made to the system (and they better be major)? What do we do to restore voter confidence in a system that just got skinned, gutted, and mounted?

Re:Umm, duh?

[geekoid]

e-voting can not be trusted. Not at all.

Hell I can give you code that looks perfect, but then have the compiler put a backdoor in for me.

Computer science is not ready for this type of system to be used on a scale the size of a state.

Re:Umm, duh?

[Hatta]

What do we do to restore voter confidence in a system that just got skinned, gutted, and mounted?

Skinning, gutting, and mounting those responsible for certifying these machines would be a good start.

Re:Umm, duh?

[corsec67]

Hell I can give you code that looks perfect, but then have the compiler put a backdoor in for me.

And then I could give you a processor that has a backdoor in it.

Re:Umm, duh?

[MightyMartian]

Canada uses paper ballots. Care to name the last time there was any evidence of ballot stuffing?

This claim of some major flaw in paper ballots is a load of horsecrap. It's been the line of inept goons like Diebold, and it's just plain false.

Re:Umm, duh?

[arth1]

Skinning, gutting, and mounting those responsible for certifying these machines would be a good start.

The problem, as I see it, is that the certification process is a farce. The vendors who sell something sign that they meet the requirements. If "independent" testing is required, the vendor pays for that too, hiring "independent" testers to sign papers.

I.e. it's all based on trust. No, sir mayor, I can assure you that there's NO offal in our sausages!

Until the government people who make the requirement actually do QA testing themselves, without "assistance" from the vendors, the public is going to get scammed. And this will continue as long as we here in the US have a deep distrust for government, and rather would hire companies and corporations to do the job instead of hiring government workers at a decent pay. There are neither people nor funds for the local governments to do the job themselves, so they HAVE TO trust the vendors or their cronies.

Re:Umm, duh?

[Obfuscant]

Why is that a hard question? Electronic voting is imminently desirable.

Why? I have no desire for electronic voting.

I much prefer a simple, paper ballot. It is a physical object that can be counted and recounted. If there is a question of ballots being lost, simply count all the ballots and see if the number matches the number of ballots that were turned in. If there is a need to recount, you can go back to the original ballot and count it again.

AND I prefer elections to be run using polling places, where a voter goes to identify himself prior to voting, thus proving that he exists and has a right to vote. Where he casts a secret ballot with nobody looking over his shoulder. Where absentee ballots are provided to ONLY those who can prove they will be away and can't make it to the poll.

AND where the polling takes place during the same time everywhere the polls are open. For obvious reasons.

The only real problem is that the software is crap and the people certifying the crap software have been doing a crap job.

Crap job? Wasn't there a story not long ago about some precincts using OBSOLETE electronic voting software (Diebold, as I recall) with known problems? And that somehow this was Diebold's problem and fault? I remember it because I immediately thought "what would someone who reported a bug in gcc version 1.0 be told?" Would the gcc authors accept responsibility for fixing it, or would they laugh and say "dude, gcc 4 is out, update your ass."

Re:Umm, duh?

[cduffy]

(Well, technically the voter can tell, as they have their public key and know what vote they cast, so can re-generate the vote, re-encrypt it, and look to see if a vote posted over the network matches the vote that was re-calculated. But nobody else could do this, and given the time overheads, this could never be used to check up on voters to see who they voted for. It could only be used by voters themselves to ensure their vote was in the system.)

One of the massive historical problems folks need to solve is "vote selling", which is enabled whenever a voter can prove how they voted to someone else. This gives the mob the ability to enforce threats against anyone who votes John Law ("prove to me you voted for ${CORRUPT_BASTARD} or I'll ..."), corrupt employers the ability to fire employees who don't prove that they voted the way the employer requested, removes effective privacy in the voting booth between husbands and wives (and I do know folks whose votes in the most recent US presidential election would have been viewed in an extremely unkind light by immediate family members), and otherwise allows undue influence.

There are systems which address this; look into how Punchscan is implemented, or any other Vocomp finalist.

Re:Umm, duh?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

and I do know folks whose votes in the most recent US presidential election would have been viewed in an extremely unkind light by immediate family members

Not to belittle your main point, but people in that situation that have far more pressing problems than something as abstract and distant from daily life as who gets elected to office, even a local office.

One Word: Scantron

[indytx]

We can all agree that punch cards are terrible, but there are other alternatives which are secure and accountable. Scantron ballots are used in Texas, and there's always a paper ballot trail of the actual vote in case of a ballot contest. I'm no Luddite, but I've never understood this rush to replace technology that works with the next big thing just because it's the next big thing.

Re:Funny how they admit flaws

[noidentity]

Funny how they admit flaws when they lose the election.

Why would they admit non-existent flaws when the machines correctly ignored the votes cast, and properly logged deletions when the machines were being watched?

Seems unlikely

[pembo13]

I know the whole don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to ignorance thing. But Diebold is an ATM maker, I find it hard to believe that they were this ignorant. I would think that an ATM would be a more complex device than a voting machine.

It's not a bug; it's a feature!

[Locke2005]

I'm much more worried that the Diebold system works exactly as designed, which is much more sinister than a "flaw" unexpectedly creeping into the software. I say the developers should either prove this wasn't intentional or go to jail for conspiracy to commit election fraud.

There is a lot of talk, and little action.

[Futurepower(R)]

'The "them" will "do" what they can to steal an election here and there.'

That seems to be the correct interpretation, that the flaws are deliberate. If there were a few defects and they were corrected immediately, that could be accidental. But we've been discussing Diebold flaws for years. Most Slashdot readers, I'm guessing, would be fired for living with something so buggy.

Diebold changed the name of its unit that sells voting hardware and software to Premier Election Solutions. Don't be confused; it's still Diebold.

Re:There is a lot of talk, and little action.

[Foobar of Borg]

Here's your very first clue in life, try to hang on to it: Programmers work every day in almost every industry with things so buggy.

And here's your first clue. Diebold is in the business of making ATMs. That's right. Literally billions of financial transactions, with multiple options and screens to go through on the UI, are performed every year using Diebold ATMs. Yet, they can't seem to get a simple voting machine to work as it should. And you think there is nothing fishy about that?

NO!

[Jane Q. Public]

Paper voting is not perfect but the flaws are known. Electronic voting machines can be given different kinds of flaws from year to year... the long and short of it is, paper may not be perfect but it's a hell of a lot BETTER than electronic systems.

Seen on a bumper sticker:

[gillbates]

Ignore your rights and they'll go away

Diebold executives could be charged with:

1. Violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
2. Graft.
3. Obstruction of justice.
4. Treason.

And this is just off the top of my head. But sadly, this isn't receiving the outrage it should, and I suspect the reason is because Americans have always been largely apathetic to things which didn't directly affect them.

We needn't worry about things like democratic process and the right to vote; if we ignore the problems long enough, we won't have to worry about election fairness, because there won't be any elections. This is how it starts, folks. For that reason alone, these guys should be charged with crimes.

Re:Calling into question...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

If the machines should not have passed certification, and yet they were certified (were they?) then the agency doing the certification ought to be brought up on charges as well, and any OTHER systems that they certified ought to be open to question as well.

No point. The end result will turn out to be like an ISO9000 system - the certifiers had a process and they followed it to the T. The problem is that the process does jackshit. But everybody followed the rules. And the people responsible for creating the rules? Those will be the politicians that voted for the laws that specified electronic voting systems in the first place.

I guess you never played chess

[zogger]

What is it worth, in terms of dollars and power, to hijack big elections, to wind up owning the government? Now, what is the worth of the entire total electronic voting machine "industry"? Now subtract the second from the first, notice the result... in other words, the real vote hijackers never cared a bit about the potential of losing some penny ante chump change pawn company down the timeline sometime, especially if they were the ones "in charge" of "insuring the integrity of the vote" in the first place...

flatfoot 101, motive, means, opportunity....

This is just pathetic

[BlueParrot]

Usually when software goes wrong I can see that it may be hard. Internet Explorer may be shit when compared to the competition, but then I guess writing a browser may be difficult, I could see how you could mess that up. Similarly having the implementation of an encryption scheme fail, I can see how you coudl mess that up. That stuff is hard.

However, how the fuck do you mess up counting votes? I can see it fail on the hardware end, optic sensors giving wrongr eadings, inkjet printers not working... but failing to write a program that count votes? This is beyond pathetic. From what I've read about Diebold it sounds as if they were too lazy to actually write and audit the software and simply did the equivalent of sticking the results in some generic spreadsheet program.