Senators Demand To Know Why Election Vendors Still Sell Voting Machines With 'Known Vulnerabilities' (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Four senior senators have called on the largest U.S. voting machine makers to explain why they continue to sell devices with "known vulnerabilities," ahead of upcoming critical elections. The letter, sent Wednesday, calls on election equipment makers ES&S, Dominion Voting and Hart InterCivic to explain why they continue to sell decades-old machines, which the senators say contain security flaws that could undermine the results of elections if exploited. "The integrity of our elections is directly tied to the machines we vote on," said the letter sent by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Mark Warner (D-VA), Jack Reed (D-RI) and Gary Peters (D-MI), the most senior Democrats on the Rules, Intelligence, Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, respectively. "Despite shouldering such a massive responsibility, there has been a lack of meaningful innovation in the election vendor industry and our democracy is paying the price," the letter adds.

Their primary concern is that the three companies have more than 90 percent of the U.S. election equipment market share but their voting machines lack paper ballots or auditability, making it impossible to know if a vote was accurately counted in the event of a bug. Yet, these are the same devices tens of millions of voters will use in the upcoming 2020 presidential election. ES&S spokesperson Katina Granger said it will respond to the letter it received. The ranking Democrats say paper ballots are "basic necessities" for a reliable voting system, but the companies still produce machines that don't produce paper results.

Comments

Same reason they keep remaking Skyrim

[aitikin]

People keep buying the machines. Just like people keep buying the new versions of Skyrim.

Re:Same reason they keep remaking Skyrim

[sexconker]

I bet it involves an arrow and his knee.

You know it's funny

[rsilvergun]

how they're all Democrats. Ok, it's not that funny. In fact, it's not funny at all. It's more than a little messed up actually.

Re:You know it's funny

[Immerman]

It's got nothing to do with Trump (unless you're implying he won because the election was rigged?)

Election integrity is the single most important aspect of a democracy, and the fact that apparently only Democrats seem concerned with the fact that so many of our elections can be easily and invisibly rigged should be deeply disturbing. *Especially* to Republican-leaning voters, since it means that at best their politicians don't actually care about election integrity, and at worst intend to rig elections so that they don't have to depend on your support to maintain power.

Re:You know it's funny

[fafalone]

Have you looked into *why* people are calling them racist for their Voter ID laws? I agreed with Voter ID before I did. They actively make it harder for poor areas to obtain a suitable ID, and disallow legitimate ID types that are still government-issued that are more likely to be possessed by the poor while allowing ID types like college IDs more likely to be possessed by the more wealthy. There's burdens in time and money required to get a DMV ID that are significant obstacles for the very poor, and Republicans are unwilling to address them, and actively exacerbate them with their placement of DMV facilities, their operation hours, and their staffing levels-- they attack all of those points to favor wealthy white areas and hurt poor, minority-populated areas.
If you take a look at my post history you'll see I'm extremely hostile to the identity politics bullshit, so if I'm calling out a seemingly neutral policy as racist, you can bet it's for cause. Look into it yourself. If Republicans supported addressing the problems I described above, I'd be right there with you arguing it's not a racial issue, but they're not only not addressing them, they're making them worse, and in a specifically targeted manner.

Then there's also the point that Republicans have lied over and over about wide-scale voter fraud that ID checks would prevent; it simply doesn't exist, so the fact they're lying about their motive is just one more item in the list of why in this case, it is indeed either a race issue, or targeted in a way that so closely correlates without fact-based justification (e.g. there is a reason to more heavily police certain areas, but not to relocate DMV offices away from them) to it that there's no meaningful difference.

Re:You know it's funny

[DamnOregonian]

There's also this small fact, right here.
The DNC is a 527 organization (IRC s.527)
It is free to do what it will within that organization. It's free to select the candidates it puts on its tickets however it sees fit.
Is what they did hypocritical, since they seem to support universal suffrage? Yes.
But it's not even the same ballpark is changing laws in ways that are proven to disenfranchise legal voters.

Re:You know it's funny

[nine-times]

It's also important to note that there's been a long history of the US trying to suppress minorities from voting. As soon as black people had the right to vote, there were laws specifically designed to make it hard for them to vote. So when someone suddenly proposes a new law that makes it harder to vote, and seems like it would disproportionately affect minorities, it should be understandable that people would be suspicious. They should be prepared to make a case why the change is needed, and how they're going to prevent any disparities in who faces hardship in voting.

"Election Vendors"

[Anonymous Coward]

That's really *quite* fitting. And instantly makes the title answer the question.

Re:"Election Vendors"

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't it Diebold who got caught promising to "deliver you the election" to a bunch of Republicans a couple years back? The backlash then forced him to rename the company into "Premier Election Solutions", wasn't it?

No, I don't care it was this party instead of that. What matters is that it was a political party at all. And, of course, that far too many places in the USoA still think that such voting machines are a good idea, or that throwing away the voting tally slips is okay, and so on, and so forth.

Re:"Election Vendors"

[_merlin]

Eugh, there was software I'd been involved in the development of running on those Diebold voting machines (I didn't work for Diebold, just a vendor they bought software from). It wasn't the kind of software I'd want running on a voting machine.

Better question

[burtosis]

How is even selling these legal? Any electronic voting machine that doesn't print out a human legible ballot for the user to read, verify, and turn in to be counted manually as the main tallying method should be illegal.

Re:What a Cluster...

[darkwing_bmf]

Our system is much simpler. You fill out the paper ballot like a scan-tron and the voting machine eats it and tallies the numbers. Election officials can always go back and count the ballots by hand if needed.

Re:What a Cluster...

[Freischutz]

Normally, I would disagree with the following quote:

The ranking Democrats say paper ballots are "basic necessities" for a reliable voting system, but the companies still produce machines that don't produce paper results.

But if these vendors can't even patch their systems, I don't trust them to implement an auditable system that guarantees privacy based on a solid understanding of modern crypto.

So, sadly, paper ballots seem necessary in 2019.

Yup, that is true. As things stand people can ... oopsie daisy, wipe the database containing the key voting data whenever it is convenient: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/... Kemp's explanations sound hard enough to believe as it is. If there were paper copies he'd really have to stretch to explain why the paper copies accidentally caught fire and burned to ashes in an old old oil drum in the yard behind his office the very same day the database was wiped.

Big difference is team blue

[rsilvergun]

changed their rules after they got caught (though the right wingers in the party managed to hang onto some of their power sadly). Check the links above. The GOP keeps getting caught again and again and again. No changes whatsoever. They keep doing it because they keep getting away with it.

I would say he did

[rsilvergun]

there was rampant voter suppression going on all across the country. Poor districts were understaffed and/or had too few machines. There were several cases of voter intimidation too when the Supreme Court overturned rules that prevented people from "campaigning" near polling offices (it was used by white supremacists in black neighborhoods to intimidate voters by showing up open carrying with racists signs).

Trump won by a few thousand votes. These sorts of things, taken together, are how he won.

Re:I would say he did

[fafalone]

So because Hillary was somewhat corrupt, an assessment I certainly do not disagree with (nor do I disagree that her actions regarding her e-mails were criminal), the response was to elect a man that was not only obviously ignorant and intensely dishonest, but was also extraordinarily corrupt in his private business dealings, in the expectation that he would somehow be *less* corrupt in office? I also suspect you're going to deny that he's been more corrupt in 2 years in office than Clinton was in her whole career, despite the overwhelming evidence that is indeed the case, even setting aside anything Russia-related.
See this is why people think Trump voters are dumb. It's not that you're wrong about Hillary being terrible, it's the farcical argument that Trump was *less* terrible, especially on points like corruption-- that one doesn't even pass the laugh test dude.

Re:So do something about it!

[jeff4747]

Pass some fucking laws regulating elections!

That would require Republicans to vote for those laws. And Republicans, despite all their "concerns" about election integrity when it comes to in-person impersonation voter fraud, just can't quite get concerned about all the various kinds of election fraud.

Yes, elections are the domain of the States, not the Federal government.

The Feds can still set minimum standards, such as requiring a paper trail.

And in California ...

[fahrbot-bot]

Their voting machines will only print a paper ballot if you ask for it, otherwise they'll just provide ballots "only in electronic form." /future-irony

Re:See you in prison, Trumptards.

[sexconker]

3 million more votes? What are you talking about? Trump won 306 to 232.

It's not fair

[rsilvergun]

but the difference is that when the Dems were called on it they made changes. When the GOP is called on it they deny, evade, lie, double down, and do it all over again.

Re:Just to be clear

[Riceballsan]

In my opinion, the electoral college is just broken beyond belief anyway. The main arguement of it is that without it, candidates would be able to win just by representing the densest population areas, but in reality reaching out to more or less the top 20 large cities, still wouldn't even reach the double digit percentage of voters. Now in the general election more or less, 10 states or so matter. The other 40, you can pretty much already mark down for the republican or democrat before we even know who the nominees are.