Diebold Flops in Alaska 255
lukej writes "From the Anchorage Daily News, During yesterday's preliminary and ballot measure election across Alaska, Diebold built voting machines failed to 'phone home' causing a hand recount. As a party spokesperson said:
"I can say there are many systematic problems with Diebold machines that have been identified in many contexts."
Additionally, the state itself has mandated some hand counts of all electronic results, and the Democratic Party is simply suggesting voters request paper voting."
Re:ted stevens? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Diebold's still around? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Diebold's still around? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:ted stevens? (Score:3, Informative)
Interesting factoid: Uncle Ted is now the longest serving senator, making him president pro tempore. In other words, he is only two heartbeats away from being our president (of tubes)!
It's harder than you might at first think (Score:5, Informative)
The paper ballot is the core - it's in a form and font easy for machine readers to read, but it can also be read by people.
Now, that vote-printer machine can be any machine that has an interface appropriate to the needs of the voter - such as audio driven for sight impaired voters. (A ballot reader would be available to do an audio readback.)
Our proposal is to do this, plus a canvassing system (that's the part that aggregates the precinct counts into the grand totals.)
And we feel that *all* code, and all machinery, should be inspectable and testable by anybody who wants to run a test (and they should be able to publish their test results.) That's one step short of full open source - which doesn't mean that the code couldn't also be open source under one of the licenses.
It is a mistake to think of these things as a software issue - it involves machines (even if they look and smell like PC's, although I personally tend to prefer smaller/lower power engines like the WRAP or Soekris machines) and procedures, lots and lots of procedures (like what to do if a voter walks out in the middle of casting his/her vote - there are laws that say what to do, and they, of course, vary from state to state and even county to county.)
But it is harder to do than one thinks - the machines themselves can't just be any old junk PC. They need to be robust in the face of voter use and tampering behind the scenes. And they need to have lots and lots of places where they can be locked-down (often using things as simple as lead-and-wire tamper seals) to prevent hanky-panky by warehouse or precinct people.
They need to be power-conserving (imagine a precinct with a single circuit breaker/fuse and a flakey or non-existant ground, and that the voting is occuring during a thunderstorm.) UPS's are a pain - they have a high failure rate and given that they often contain a lead-acid battery, are neither lightweight nor quite innocent should they leak. And it's important to keep the fire marshall happy.
And printers are a pure pain in the rear - they can draw a lot of power and are generally the most failure prone part of the system.
And there are lots of legal requirements - like protecting the privacy of the vote. You can, for example, potentially reconstruct which voter voted which way by looking at things like sequencial files used for audit/error-detection or for ballot tallies.
And the stuff has to be easily configurable en masse - counties tend to need hundreds, thousands of these things, and they better all be the same. And they need to be able to be transported by folks who aren't necessarily gentle and set up by people who make your grandmother look like a tech support wizard.
We were planning on doing a project to produce a reference model for such a system via the University of California (multi-campus project with UC Santa Cruz in the project lead position) but we got cut out of California's HAVA (Federal voting act) funding when the previous California Sect'y of State got caught up in a brouhaha on other matters. It's still worth doing - every state would benefit.
I don't understand (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking as a Euroweenie, I just don't understand the apparent apathy in the USA with regards to the very serious issues surrounding vote counting machines. In a democracy, could anything be more important than making sure that votes are counted correctly and fairly, with a transparent process that can be verified?
Have you seen this, for instance?
http://alternet.org/blogs/video/40755/ [alternet.org]
That was a computer programmer testifying (two years ago) that he'd been asked to write vote rigging software for the Ohio elections. What was the outcome of that? Was there a formal non-partisan enquiry into the elections in Ohio? Was there a huge public protest there? What am I missing?
Re:ted stevens? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, he's the longest serving senator in the majority party. Robert Byrd is the longest serving senator. Sen. Byrd will become president pro tempore (assuming he is re-elected this fall) if the Democrats ever control the Senate.
Furthermore, for Ted Stevens to become president, Bush, Cheney, and Denny Hastert would all have to die or otherwise be unable to assume the presidency. Come to think of it, he is only two heartbeats away as Cheney doesn't really have a heart, but a sort of robotic device that keeps his oil^H^H^H blood flowing.
Re:Nothing will happen (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I don't understand (Score:4, Informative)
Where do you get the apathy from? I guarantee you most of the outraged posts here were written by Americans, there has been extensive media coverage of voter machine problems, and investigations by legislative bodies. Also keep in mind that not every state uses Diebold machines, and furthermore some states that do use them don't use them exclusively.
Re:Hand count vs. Diebold (Score:4, Informative)
An Aug. 14, 2003 fund-raising letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold sent to the Ohio Republican party said that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." The letter coincidentally went out the day before Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell (a Republican) was set to qualify Diebold as one of three firms eligible to sell upgraded electronic voting machines to Ohio counties in time for the 2004 election.
http://www.bradblog.com/DieboldContributions.htm [bradblog.com]
Oh, wrong election (Score:2, Informative)
Diebold and the State of Alaska still hasn't released the data files that could show wtf really happened there.
http://www.bradblog.com/?cat=101 [bradblog.com]
--
What brought down WTC-7?
How hard can it be? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It's harder than you might at first think (Score:5, Informative)
We have such a machine in Canada. It works very very well. It's called a number 2 pencil.
This always comes up, but Canadians fail to realize just how different American elections are. My typical ballot includes over 50 selections -- I don't mean 50 options for a single race, I mean 50 separate decisions, including national, state, county and municipal officials, plus ballot initiatives, judicial retention votes and others that I can't remember right now.
Many parts of the US do use simple paper ballots, marked with a pencil and tallied by hand. They're areas with small populations, and they're nearly always among the last to report results, because tallying the votes is hard. Sure, it's parallelizable, but with such a long list of individual decisions, it requires much greater parallelism than Canadian elections do, and the large number of races means that combining the separate tallies is also a time-consuming and error-prone process.
Further, paper and pencil has the disadvantage that it excludes many people with disabilities from being able to vote.
Voting machines, designed and implemented correctly, *are* a better way, at least for our style of voting.
Sometimes technology is the answer.
Re:It's harder than you might at first think (Score:2, Informative)
Granted I think tokens are a bit of an overkill both in complexity and expense I think a better idea would be to use a drivers license (with a magnetic strip) as a token and those who do not have a drivers license would be issued a one-time use swipe card. Hashing the data would keep it anonymous yet be verifiable for audits etc.
Re:Nothing will happen (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's harder than you might at first think (Score:3, Informative)
I don't disagree with this statement, and neither does my original post. The key idea here being the "current system in use in the US" which we all here on
What blows my mind is that Diebold already produces ATMs that do exactly this, yet for some reason instead of starting with an ATM model they started from absolute scratch and botched it with years and millions of dollars at their disposal. Speaking as a robotics engineer working in an ISO9000 environment, while I recognize that ATMs are rather different in function from an e-voting machine; for a company with such experience to produce the garbage they have is shocking. At the very least the ATM division should have had a list of lessons learned and security/verification techniques that could have been used by the e-voting group as a good starting reference. But I guess good engineering sense just doesn't pad the budget enough when working on a government contract.