Maryland Votes To Ban Diebold Voting Machines 240
vandon writes "Computerworld.com reports: 'The state Maryland House of Delegates this week voted 137-0 to approve a bill prohibiting election officials from using AccuVote-TSx touch-screen systems in 2006 primary and general elections. The legislation calls for the state to lease paper-based optical-scan systems for this year's votes. State Delegate Anne Healey estimated the leasing cost at $12.5 million to $16 million for the two elections.'"
The old fashioned ways are still the best (Score:5, Insightful)
There are places where technology does not belong and the old fashioned paper trail is still the best. I do not trust any voting system that the voter does not mark the paper. Anything else can be hacked or riged too easily.
Re:Hope it doesn't rain.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The electronic scanning simply speeds up the process.
Re:Hope it doesn't rain.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that we need the ballots to be impossible to tamper with. It is that we need to know when they have been tampered with.
Re:Voted? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ironing 101
Taking it on the chin (Score:5, Insightful)
137 to 0 -- ouch!!
Diebold has gotten itself into a quagmire and they don't seem to be able to pull themselves out. How hard was it to add a paper trail to the machines to start with?
And yes, there's plenty of fraud with paper ballots and mechanical voting machines. But the idea is that electronic voting machines are supposed to be superior to those systems, and without a paper trail to verify that votes have been recorded properly, they're reduced to being no better and actualy, given their hackability, worse.
why the mania of using electronic counting (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The old fashioned ways are still the best (Score:2, Insightful)
Diebold is whatever it is... as will be any other attempt as similar technology. What is broken in this context is the _process_ first, and trust second. If they had been willing to address the process, in the open, then perhaps trust could have been achieved.
It doesn't help when the Diebold CEO pretty much stated publicly [to paraphrase], "We _will_ deliver Ohio to the Republicans". I think they should all go read some counterpane blogs...
Because... (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank God (Score:2, Insightful)
So open source the voting software, and record electronic votes in two or more remote, neutral party logs. Then you could easily compare the logs to make sure that votes haven't been tampered with. No black box, less chance of human error.
Diebold is an enemy of the republic (Score:5, Insightful)
Flamebait, troll, yadda-yadda.
It's true.
Black-box voting systems have continually been championed by those who would criminally game the system for their own advantage, democracy be damned. They tend to defend their actions with nothing more righteous than cynicism: we do this because hey, everybody does it.
No, everyone DOESN'T do it, and that is no justification in any event. The ends to not justify undermining democracy. Democracy is a large part of what makes societies strong, not weak, and undermining it only serves to strengthen the enemies of it, whether those enemies are foreign or domestic.
So bravo to Maryland. I hope all states follow their example, and that those citizens who are forced to use unverifiable voting machines take a sledgehammer to them instead.
Re:The old fashioned ways are still the best (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hope it doesn't rain.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Since you cannot audit the process, the answer seems to be "yes".
True. That does not excuse rectifiable problems with successor systems.
From my reading the vendors of these systems there is no effort to
close the holes, only "trust us".
Re:Thank God (Score:5, Insightful)
FURTHERMORE, I'm a strong believer that touch screen systems should only exist to produce a filled out, printed ballot that is then processed by conventional means. The goal here should be to increase the accuracy of the vote, not the speed. Government can wait - I'd rather have it done right than done fast.
the diebold system is simple not secure (Score:3, Insightful)
inability to recheck the vote is prima facie quite enough reason to outlaw those machines.
Re:Hope it doesn't rain.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hope it doesn't rain.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It does make a difference. With a punch card, or a paper ballot, or even a mechanical voting both anyone can trace when fraud has occured. And in those cases we implement some security, track where the fraud came from (if we can) and redo the election.
With the current generation of electronic voting machines, we can't do that. I don't care who makes a good machine, but Diebold hasn't made one. And they've defended that design as if they think it is a good machine. Geeks don't like people who pretend a bad design is a good design. We'll tear into them. If they routinely defend bad design by saying it is good design and overlooking what we think are obvious flaws we'll notice, and start to expect that. Until they change, a group that decides who they like on the technical ability of a company won't like them. They are lying about their technical quality; at least in our eyes.
This group respects and admires good thought processes. Neither you nor Diebold are showing them at the moment.
It's a matter of the 'document of record' (Score:5, Insightful)
Optical scan is almost as bad.... (Score:5, Insightful)
By far, the most secure method of counting votes is by hand. Several hundred people counting the votes (and witnessing the count) is far more secure than one guy in a backroom counting votes with a computer. The more people witness the count, the better.
We need to have total transparency in the process. Hand counts ensure that.
Why voting *machines*? (Score:5, Insightful)
But then I remember - this is America we're talking about. The company that *makes* the machines has doubtless bribed... uh, 'lobbied' the relevant politicians to ensure that such machinery is the only possible choice for such an important task...
Re:Hope it doesn't rain.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hope it doesn't rain.... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Paper
2. Pencil
Mark X on Paper.....
No major screwups though......
Oh fer Gawd's sake (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, Paper ballots that are marked on - not punched through. Use a machine and human countable (scantron) format. It is not bright, it is not shiny, it is not new. Howevere it works, and the methods of corrupting it are well understood by all involved - the same is not true of voting machines which will never be perceived as anything other than an opaque black box.
Now if you are just suffering from a common desire to complicate things, why not complicate the democratic process, not the actual act of voting?
For example, elections cost money, lets bring back a poll tax to pay for it. Say two bucks - and allow charities or political party reps to hand out two dollar bills to anyone who asks for one (but at least 100 feet from the polling place)
Runoff elections are expensive too - eliminate them and use an IRV system.
Straight Party Line voting is a pain to count - lets not allow it. If the voter won't explicitly vote for a specific candidate, then that candidate is undeserving of a vote.
Ballots are getting unwieldly, have separate ballots for each jurisdiction (federal, state, county, city, precint, etc). There are never more than 3 races on the federal ballot. Why confuse those races with the JP and Sheriff's races?
It's hard to get on a ballot especially with laws set to favor the major parties. Let anyone get on the ballot if they can pony up a "ballot placement fee". Let's say 1 penny per registered voter in the jurisdiction, but triple that to have party affiliation listed. (It would cost about a million bucks to get on the Presidential ballot, but triple that to run as a Republican, Green, Democrat, Libertarian) It would cost a lot less to get on the ballot where there are fewer potential voters - 5 bucks to run for Mayor of Cut-n-shoot TX for example.
Just a thought or two on how to complicate things.
Do both. (Score:5, Insightful)
The voter checks the ballot printout and drops it in the box. Those are counted electronically and retained, same as now.
Meanwhile, the touchscreen data has been batched and sent electronically to render the unofficial results the instant the polls close.
The paper, the thing the voter dropped in the box, is the official ballot.
If there's a notable discrepancy, bring in the accountants, alert the media, and wait for the lawyers.
Doing both, counting and sending in the results by orthogonal mechanisms, allows much better security. Someone would have to tamper with both processes, and get them exactly the same, or an investigation would ensue.
Re:Hope it doesn't rain.... (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm always amazed at this stupidity (Score:4, Insightful)
many states only allow for recounts if an election is extremely close
Every time I'm reminded of this fact, I just shake my head in wonder. It has got to be one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of. The argument seems to be that, if an election isn't close, fraud couldn't have effected the outcome--which is exactly the opposite of the truth.
Don't believe me? Consider two case, both using touch screen voting machines: in one, one randomly selected million people vote on the ballot issue "Coke vs. Pepsi," and the outcome is a 49% / 49% split. In the second case, all but sixty eight of them vote "Pepsi", with sixty eight abstentions.
Now ask yourself: in which case would you suspect that the voting machines or tabulators or something had been rigged?
--MarkusQ
P.S. A much better test would be mandatory recount if the results differ from the exit polls by more than a small amount.
Yes, but not in this case (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe.
But in this case, it doesn't pass muster.
I do computer stuff for a living and if analyst came forward with a business process to handle credit card authorizations that simply authorized it with no audit trail and no means to verify anything about that authorization, you'd reject the design out of hand. You wouldn't even need to see the program specs, or source code or anything to know it's a bad design. You don't even have to ask a lot of questions. It's just a bad design.
So when Diebold has a system that raises questions *with everyone who sees it* and won't answer those questions, then it raises concerns about not only their veracity, but their motive.
And given the results of the 2000 presidential election and Diebold's refusal to address legitimate concerns leads to some very uncomfortable questions about their motives. The best case scenario is that Diebold's software engineers are incompetent. That's the best case.
SO I appreciate that there is a vocal minority who would trash anything, however, this isn't a minority of people questioning Diebold. Virtually everyone with a technical and business background is questioning these systems. And Diebold is noticably silent.
Re:As a MD voter... (Score:2, Insightful)
I prefer that we don't introduce paper ballots, as discussed in the legislation, because they don't solve any problems. There's a good discussion at http://euro.ecom.cmu.edu/people/faculty/mshamos/p
I've got a master's degree in Computer Science, and I've been an election judge for several years, working with the Diebold machines. In my opinion, the procedures established by the election board are sufficient to prevent the general public from accessing and/or hacking the unofficial vote counts.
Re:Hope it doesn't rain.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Open Source code is not sufficient because there is no realistic way to ensure that the code published is the actual code run on each machine.
A paper trail can be validated ex post facto. This is best done just as QA is done on a production line -- always validate a portion of the product even when there is no reason to expect that there is a problem.
That way, no matter what code they are running, if it tries to steal votes to any signifigant degree it will show up in the validation sample. And then a full recount can originate all the funny tabulations.
There is also the very real potential for influencing the outcome of an election using purely electronic voting by simply causing a power outage in the areas where the population is not likely to vote the way that you want.
I Hope You Don't Work For the Board of Elections (Score:3, Insightful)
Paper ballots, even if "spoiled" by abuse after votes are cast on them, still offer lots of evidence. Evidence of the choice of the voter. And evidence of the crime of whoever abused them.
Digital ballots leave no evidence. Hence the much higher risk that they will be abused, and votes rigged by (ab)using them. They're also much cheaper and easier to rig on a large scale, with fewer accomplices. Without physical records, like cheap, familiar, reliable paper, they're worse than useless.
"TIRED OF DIEBOLD BEING A WHIPPING BOY"? What the hell is wrong with you? How about getting Diebold out of the (almost never applied) "whipping seat" by stopping them from rigging elections? You're in Ohio, where the latest count of disenfranchised 2004 voters is over 308,000, where Cuyahoga (Cleveland) County is still indicting criminal poll workers 15 months after the election. Of all of America, Ohioans should be demanding justice for Diebold's crimes. But instead, you're rooting for the "home team", which is screwing all of us. Let me guess who you voted for in the last few elections...
Paper ballots can be mechanically printed for inspection by the voter before it's collected. Extra technology, like video surveillance, can reduce vote fraud even more. Just because you live in Ohio, home of Diebold, doesn't mean you have to be so ignorant about how to count ballots. Or insist that criminal voterigging be ignored just because it happens so much.
Re:Diebold is an enemy of the republic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Because... (Score:2, Insightful)
Voting machines are paid for by money that is forcefully taken from people, called taxes.
So, yes, people are concerned more about the latter than the former.
Re:Hope it doesn't rain.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I Hope You Don't Work For the Board of Election (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That's why EXIT POLLS are so accurate except wh (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Because... (Score:1, Insightful)
Now let's talk about 'audit trails'. Quite frankly auditing of paper ballots is a myth. You MIGHT be able to tell if they were tampered with but you have no way of knowing if that paper ballot is a real ballot unless you can basically hand each ballot to a specific person and identify that the person is alive, or was when the ballot was cast and it is indeed their ballot. How do you prevent extra ballots, lost ballots, swapped ballots or any of the other methods of managing them, from affecting it? probably the same way you protect voting machines. Through process and trusted people and observers.
All of you complain and bitch about Diebold but I can tell you that Diebold is only one player in a really large field and they arn't even the largest player really. States like New York don't even look at Diebold for machines. Yet you have all sprayed every voting machine company with the same brush. I want all of you to realize one other thing. There are no PAPER ballots for many other places of doing voting. There are mechanical machines that simply use a mechanical counter to track the votes. At the end of the day the clerks read the counter on the back and mark off how many votes per person. Why? Because PAPER is too expensive. We arn't talking about votes for class president at college or anything.
I'm probably going to be marked troll and I may even deserve it to some degree I just feel like so many of you out here arn't actually thinking through the real issues. The fact that paper doesn't magically prevent people from falsifying things. It is probably in fact even easier to falsify and costs orders of magnitude more than electronic systems do. And the only real protection we have on voting fraud is processes and trusted individuals. Much like we do for ballots.
Voting costs and difficulties don't end once you make that vote. You will NEVER be able to see how your vote affected the votes. And it's that way by design.
Re:Hope it doesn't rain.... (Score:2, Insightful)
at least, until SCOTUS says otherwise.