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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."
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?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
when they lose the election.
Dual Opteron < $600
And I mean like "we want a refund"
Yeah! I want my eight years back!
Nader 2000
What?
I used to work as a "Computer Audit Analyst" for the Florida Division of Elections, certifying voting systems for use in the State of Florida. Certification for Premier/Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia was pretty much a given, no matter the fact that their systems are complete shit and the certification process is a joke. Scan a few thousand ballots, have an independent testing lab review your source code, and you're good to go. Google "sequoia yellow button" to see what I mean.
Not to mention the attitudes of the folks who work there. They call people like me "activists" with a sour tone of voice, grudgingly fill public records requests, and the newly-built [2006] voting-systems lab was the size of a damn closet. Think the types of people who think F/OSS is so high-school students have something to tinker with.
Sadly, most American voters don't even think about the voting backend, and are wholly uninterested in the fact that three corporations have a legally-enforced triopoly in voting equipment, sell overpriced shit to the counties, and take legal action against anyone who finds security flaws in their systems.
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?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
'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.
I don't know if you were going for sarcasm or missed it in the article, but the machines in question (the flawed machines in Humboldt County) ARE optical scan machines. They are made by Diebold and they have software flaws that cause errors in how the votes are tabulated. For example, their software was in some cases dropping the entire first batch of scanned ballots (batch 0).
However, it is precisely because they are optical scan ballots - with a paper trail - that led to the flaw being found. Mitch Trachtenberg, a volunteer AFAIK, was able to scan all of the ballots post-election and tabulate them using his own open-source software. The discrepancy between his results and the official results is what led to the discovery of the flaw in Diebold's software.
I'm glad that they were using optical-scan ballots and that they saved the paper copies (and made them accessible), but it's still vulnerable to software flaws, "errors", etc., even if it is optical scan.
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....