ES&S To Buy Diebold, Blackbox Voting To Sue

Gottesser writes "Long-time election rights activist Bev Harris (she had an HBO special a while back where she hired Hari Hursti to hack an optical scan voting machine) just sent this out: 'Diebold/Premier Election Systems is being purchased by Election Systems & Software (ES&S). According to a Black Box Voting source within the companies, there will be a conference call among key people at the companies within the next couple hours. An ES&S/Diebold-Premier acquisition would consolidate most US voting under one privately held manufacturer. And it's not just the concealed vote-counting; these companies now also produce polling place check-in software (electronic pollbooks), voter registration software, and vote-by-mail authentication software.' Our voting system is heading toward a server-centric model with our vote being delivered to us by computers under lock and key far away from public oversight. Here's ES&S's press release. Wikipedia's got something on the ongoing string of ES&S controversies as well."

Comments

Re:Paper ballots

[Aliotroph]

This is what we do in Canada. Paper is simple. Paper scales well. Paper is cheap. The booths for voting are made from old tables and cardboard. We generally only have problems once in a while when some idiot grabs a ballot box and runs off, only to fling it in a ditch. Paper is also fast. We get our election results as fast as America, and with less second guessing.

Re:FIRST!!11

[MrKaos]

.. We need open source software so that the voting process is transparent. I'll stick to any location I can find that still uses paper ballots otherwise. I also seem to remember these machines being trivially easy to tinker with.

I wanted to mod you insightful but I thought it may be better to let you know that an open source voting system already exists. A security analysis (pdf warning) has been performed and the ACT Electoral Commission has full details of the the behaviour of the code you can download.

You should also check out Open Voting Consortium because we are all friends so lets help each other be free.