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."
Nothing will happen (Score:3, Insightful)
He later said: "Of course, they contribute heavily to my party, so its not like we're going to revoke their contract or anything."
Seriously guys, (Score:5, Insightful)
All I can say is, those secret election-rigging backdoors must take a lot of work, because what else have their developers been working on?
Re:Diebold's still around? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hand count vs. Diebold (Score:5, Insightful)
Concern over the machines led the Alaska Legislature in 2005 to pass a law requiring a mandatory hand count of ballots in one randomly selected precinct in every election district.
Be interesting to hear about how those random hand counts compare to the machine tabulations.
By the way, it'd be nice if slashdotters took notice that a number of the failures were related to phone lines (probably people plugging them into the wrong jacks, digital lines, or lines requiring special dial-out numbers, etc.)
Last but not least:
The Diebold electronic voting machines nationwide have been criticized by voter groups and computer scientists who say they are vulnerable to fraud. Diebold has defended the machines, saying they are secure when elections officials follow proper procedures.
That's the whole point, Diebold: you shouldn't have to "follow proper procedures." The machines should make it impossible to do so, just like I punch a ballot, place it in a box, which is locked and sealed, and taken by police to the counting facility, etc. The current system requires a fair amount of work to interfere with; the Diebold machines seem to require a fair amount of work to NOT interfere with!
Re:Seriously guys, (Score:5, Insightful)
Your solution lacks accessibilty options... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hand count vs. Diebold (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, that depends on how carefully you pick your "random" precint, doesn't it?
KFG
Re:Hand count vs. Diebold (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd love to hear the justification from the person who is authorizing this programme.
Re:Nothing will happen (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don't understand (Score:3, Insightful)
If all that "Democracy" and "US Constitution" stuff the US likes to boast about isn't just bullshit talk, then all the Diebold people involved and their bosses AND the people who approved the machines should be lined up and charged for _treason_.
Tell me why making crappy voting machines AND approving them shouldn't be regarded as treason.
Re:Diebold's still around? (Score:5, Insightful)
Our politicians are more interested in winning than preserving democracy.
Hence these voting machines.
In US money is more valuable than freedom/democracy. Hence why would we require a very high reliability from ATM, but none from the voting machine?
But at least we have electronic toilets. (Score:4, Insightful)
Ever think we spend our time perfecting the wrong equipment?
Re:Still buggy? (Score:5, Insightful)
No! There is no "free market" when the government is the customer. It's all about connections, campaign contributions, whose turn it is (I'll explain that in a minute), and many other distortions. If you accept that it is the role of government to control/regulate free enterprise so as to "smooth the rought edges" of capitalism, then how can that work when the government is also the customer? You have a serious conflict of interest.
As regards "whose turn it is" -- I worked for a defense contractor years ago. We submitted a prototype for a new missile system. Our system met all of the program requirements (size, range, accuracy, cost); plus we won the "shoot off" hands down (our competitor failed to hit a single target). However, our competitor had not won a contract in awhile and neither had any other contractors in their geographic region (ie congressional district). Consequently the contract was awarded to them. This is just one example of what goes on every day with big government contracts. It is hardly what I would call a "free market". Rather, it is more aptly called a "fixed market" - as in, "the fix is in".
Re:It's harder than you might at first think (Score:5, Insightful)
We have such a machine in Canada. It works very very well. It's called a number 2 pencil.
No joke. Sometimes technology isn't the answer.
Re:Seriously guys, (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's harder than you might at first think (Score:4, Insightful)
Poker machines here in .au have to run firmware which hashes to a number attached to the license of the machine. The hash is made when the machine passes validation and the authorities can at any time go to a machine and check the hash against the ROMS.
As many others have pointed out, this is not rocket science.
Re:On a related note... (Score:3, Insightful)
Imagine the outcry if Deibold makes Coke Vending machines or ATM's like this, where it deducts a penny/dime more randomly from your/bank account.
News At 11.
We would have so many laws passed against this so fast that you would wonder how congress (which usually is as fast as a snail) managed to pass so many laws.
Re:On a related note... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is one of the problems with political commmitee hearings. They are looking for an answer, and tend only to look in the places that give them the answer they want. The testimony concerning Feeney's staffer correcting the course of his work - that Feeney wanted to hide code to rig an election, not to know how to detect sowfware that could rig an election as he had originally provided - could be quite damning. Nonetheless, proof-of-concept viruses are also written by white-hat hackers for new exploits, so it could be entirely on the up and up. Of course, this research should have been made public. Does anyone know how Feeney has voted or testified when confronted with digital ballot machines? Is he publically for or against paper trails?
Witch hunts and lynchings are not my cup of tea, nor should their methods be used in civilized discussions. Sadly, most Americans are too ignorant of computer operation to make an informed decision concerning this type of thing. Even otherwise intellegent people do not understand the technology which goes into software and coding; these are black boxes which operate like a microwave oven or an alarm clock.
Note: I'm a democrat and always have been. I voted against GWB both times. And have had some very nice (unspoken) "I told you so" moments with my wife since 2004 (she's a long time republican and voted for GWB).
Re:It's harder than you might at first think (Score:5, Insightful)
AMEN!
I used to be on the electronic voting bandwagon, but when I saw that it was prone to failure and couldn't be trusted, I jumped off. When machines are reported to carry several thousand votes more than there are registered voters in a precinct, how can ANYBODY say "well, the number isn't enough to change the outcome." How do you know this? What about "errors" that go undiscovered? A little here, a little there, all under the radar so to speak...until you put them all together.
Paper, paper, paper...mark your ballot with a black marker, drop it in a box, and it gets counted by a representative of each party. No electronic storage to deal with, no way to electronically change results, and it's a permanent record.
The only two ways it can fail (that I can think of):
(1) The ballot is a misprint in which case it is simply destroyed (again, witnessed by a representative of each party that it is in fact a defective ballot) and a new, blank one re-issued. The ballot is examined to be defect-free BEFORE being handed to the voter.
(2) The marker runs dry.
The only way there can be fraud is if the votes are tampered with after being deposited; since all ballots are in human-readable form, then the ONLY way to tamper with them is also in human-readable form.
We can process millions upon millions of bank transactions every day but cannot count votes without grotesque errors? Come on people! It's not that hard!
Re:I am actually happy that elections are rigged.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I don't understand (Score:3, Insightful)
Administered chiefly by incessant American Idol and Fox "news" for the proles, and an institutionally-corrupt political system that makes it abundantly clear that voting is an increasingly pointless action for the intellectuals (who are in any case outvoted by the mindless hordes of Fox-news-watching proles).
I'm in the UK, where the same thing is starting to happen. Tony Blair is slowly removing power from traditional sources and investing it in himself and his cabinet, while removing judicial and parliamentary oversight.
The name for the tactic is the boiling frog [wikipedia.org] syndrome.
In these cases, it starts off as a weakening of the link between "voting" and "assigning power", and then progresses by weakening independant oversight of the government. Initially the changes are small and they fly under people's radar... slowly increasing the degree makes people grumble a bit but they gradually get used to it... doing this gradually enough and long enough means people will accept things that would have caused bloody rioting in the streets only a few years before.
US culture is now so decadent (sorry, but there's no other word for it) that the president can commit treason or war crimes, corporations can buy representatives' votes outright and people can stand up and testify that representatives of the incumbent political party employed them to fix elections, and all people do is grumble a bit and change the channel.
When you've got a solid political system and one corrupt politician you can effect change. When the entire system's corrupt there's no point in even trying.
I think that's why there's no huge public protest - when things have got bad enough that people accept "free speech zones" with nary a mutter, you know the only thing to do is move country or stage a revolution (and good luck finding popular support for the latter).
Re:It's harder than you might at first think (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey, there's an idea. Let's let the people who run the casinos build the machines that decide our government. That should be safe.
Re:It's harder than you might at first think (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, paper ballots can only present the choices one way, so there's no possibility for a second-chance "These are the votes you're casting. Are you sure?" step. That's particularly important when the ballot design itself is confusing.
Both of these factors made big news in Florida in 2000, and arguably swung the presidential race. Not that these problems outweigh the problems with electronic machines, but building a fix for old symptoms without solving the underlying problem is a time-honored tradition in the US.
Re:It's harder than you might at first think (Score:3, Insightful)
You make many good points which I agree with, but your first and last sentences above don't jive. We don't process millions of bank transactions daily by pencil and paper, it's done electronically. So if you're against electronic voting don't bring up the ability to securely process bank millions of transactions as an example since it's really an argument FOR e-voting. Just a thought.
The holy grail of e-voting is the ability to tally all the votes very fast, because apparently people in this country freak out if it takes more than 24 hours to count some 150 million (gross estimate) votes. Not getting into all the other problems with the US voting system, I think it would benefit greatly if the system allowed for the tally to be done in however long it takes. I mean, we wait months until the officials elected by that vote even go into office, why is it that if all the votes aren't counted by the next day it's all doom and gloom? I know, time is an enemy as it allows for more opportunities for the system to be interefered with. But really, a secure paper system that's very tamper-proof should have been developed over the last 2+ centuries our republic has been around.
Re:It's harder than you might at first think (Score:5, Insightful)
People who use that banking system can go back and verify that their transactions went through. They can look at their bank statements and make sure that they're the only ones spending their money.
People who use an electronic voting system cannot go back and verify that their vote was cast correctly. No one can with any system in use in the US. In a paper system, however, you can go back and recount the original paper votes.
Re:NEW PRESIDENTIAL SPEECH (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, I realize I'll be modded down offtopic but I thought this type of thinking was worth responding to. Manufacturing jobs will come back to the states as soon as americans are willing to pay for them. You can't cry and make noise about no manufacturing jobs, yet demand the "low low prices" at Walmart caused primarily by asian workers making pennies an hour.
You want American manufacturing jobs back? Be prepared to foot the bill American workers demand.
Re:NEW PRESIDENTIAL SPEECH (Score:1, Insightful)
The money saved by cutting off foreign aid to countries which don't support the Iraq occupation is a drop in the bucket compared to the actual cost of the occupation, Israel is the number one recipient of foreign aid and supported the attack but can't send troops for obvious reasons. Should we cut them off? Egypt opposed the war officially but is very supportive of the war on terror and likely has incriminating evidence of US complicity in torture. We could cut off their foreign aid under your criteria but doing so would probably cause enough trouble that it would end up costing us more than we saved. Either way it's still an insignificant amount compared to the total cost of the Iraq invasion and occupation.
Telling the terrorists "screw with us and we'll hunt you down" doesn't really work after you have just pissed off every single ally you have besides the UK, a few random post-Soviet countries, and a couple of tiny island nations. Considering the massive economic disruption created by the US in your scenario it would not be surprising if many nations became much more willing to look the other way so long as the terrorists based in their territory only attacked US interests.
Re:Compare this to a Pure Digital camera (Score:4, Insightful)
When you're in the business of building $30 one-time-use camcorders, and you mistakenly leave your FTP site open with your client-side software on it [digg.com], and some hacker figures out the cipher and the key length, and some other hacker takes that information and performs a clean-room reverse-engineering and writes a little distributed application that results in a third group of enterprising hackers brute-forcing the key within two days, and when you're gracious enough to post a polite request instead of a cease-and-desist [forumer.com], and the people who cracked your hardware are ethical enough to take down the offending code to help keep you in business... things work out pretty nicely. Even if there are a few mirrors of the missing piece of the puzzle floating around on the 'net.
When you're in the business of deciding whether the R-sociopaths or the D-sociopaths gets to govern a trillion-dollar economy, and the source code to the machines that control access to all that money, all that power, and all those guns happens to leak.... probably not so good.
Re:It's harder than you might at first think (Score:1, Insightful)
Then carry the paper ballot (which is both human and machine readable, such as using a easily OCR'd font) across the room and drop it in the ballot box, or feed it into the OCR or punch-card reader, or what ever other counting machine is used.
But the machine that counts the ballots is a different machine entirely than the machine that the voter uses to vote.... and the data is exchanged from one to the other only via the individual paper ballots. If the ballot-making machine is tampered with, then the human-readable ballot will show it when the voter reads it after it prints. If the counting machine is tampered with, you have the paper ballots to audit it.