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

Electronic "voting" needs to die

[rsborg]

This is the most precious part of our democracy and we're going to let one company lose people's votes down the memory hole?

This should force the FEC to outright ban electronic voting. I guess my .sig is getting old by now.

What else is left?

[bughunter]

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.

All the ingredients necessary and sufficient to engineer an election result undetectably and without pesky statistical red flags. George Orwell himself couldn't have designed a more riggable system.

Say goodbye to democracy.

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:Paper ballots

[ngg]

I personally don't care if people know how I vote and I think I should have the option of it being public.

However, *I* do personally care if people know how you voted because it makes it far easier for someone to pay and/or intimidate you to vote a certain way.

Congress passes "God-Bless-America-Bill"

[jeko]

Washington DC
October 1, 2009

In a stunning display of bipartanship today, Congress saved the taxpayers several million dollars by suspending all future elections. Proponents of the bill point out that most people didn't even bother to vote last time, and that of those who did, polls show the overwhelming majority of them held strong opinions about issues they didn't even begin to understand.

"It was a ridiculous waste of the taxpayer's money," said Sam Rickenbaugh of the GAO. "We'd spend millions, billions even on holding elections, and the voters who even bothered to show up were the same mouth-breathing idiots who get roped into jury duty. It was a pathetic display, embarrassing even."

Democrats and Republicans have agreed to share power across the aisle, and points of contention will now be decided based on who can gather the largest contributions for their side.

"Now this is Democracy," posts John Ringerton of My Country Right Or Wrong.com. "You got an opinion, you can put your money where your mouth is like God intended."

Re:Doesn't matter now.

[Daniel Dvorkin]

So, you have evidence that Democrats, as a group, are any less concerned about the inherent dangers of all-electronic voting systems than the population as a whole?

I'm a Democrat. I voted for Obama. I'm glad he's President. (Or rather, I'm glad McCain isn't President; not quite the same thing, but it's what we've got.) And now that we have a Democrat in the White House, I think it is exactly as important that we have a trustworthy election process as it was when had a Republican. I don't want anyone rigging elections, in favor of any candidate of any party.

No matter how bad things get, as long as we have honest elections, we have a chance to fix them. If we lose that ... forget it, it's over. Democrat, Republican, black, white, whatever: if the people in charge have the means to ensure they stay in charge regardless of the will of the people, they will use that power, and we are permanently screwed.

In short, AC, don't assume everyone else shares your level of asshole cynicism. There are a lot of us who still care about the future of our country.

Not at all

[WindBourne]

ES&S is not known to be ran by a corrupt republican. So, the election will simply go to the top bidder.

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.

Re:So now . . .

[afidel]

Actually Cuyahoga County (largest in Ohio) threw out Diebold after they had horrid technical issues in 2004. They didn't need any vote rigging to screw the majority Democrat vote here, the huge failure rate of the machines meant lines were long enough that people left in disgust. We went back to all paper registers and scantron style ballots and 2008 was MUCH smoother despite significantly higher turnout.