Diebold Sued (Again) Over Shoddy Voting Machines 314
icypyr0 writes "Computer programmer Jim March and activist Bev Harris have filed suit in California state court against Diebold under a whistle-blowing statue. This is another in a series of blows dealt to the ailing company.
March and Harris allege that Diebold 'used uncertified hardware and software, and modems that may have allowed election results to be published online before polls closed.' They are seeking full reimbursement for all of the voting machines purchased in California. March and Harris could collect up to 30% of the reimbursement, under the whistle-blower statute.
In an interesting turn, the two are requesting that the state of California join the lawsuit. State officials have spent millions on the paperless touch screen machines; Alameda County has spent at least $11 million alone."
Vaporware and voting don't mix. (Score:5, Informative)
Governments don't take well to such practices. When dealing with a state government, you must cross every t and dot every i in the system. Any bugs, flaws or failures is simply delivering a product that wasn't to spec.
Diebold appears to have their hands caught in the cookie jar here. They've already been caught installing a "patch" on machines that were supposed to be "sealed" and in their final ready-for-voting state. Bev Harris has been the collector in chief of all of Diebold's other mistakes that they've tried to cover up... seeing what they have ready to present at trial should be fun.
FINALLY! (Score:5, Informative)
Whether this goes anywhere or not, Diebold's abuses are finally going to the mainstream. The number one weapon that people have on their side to affect a change in an unfair system is information, and this information hitting major news outlets with some degree of regularity is happening just in time to ensure that this nonsense DIES.
Remember, when your friends ask what this is all about, you have everything from blackboxvoting.com to the damning Diebold memos themselves to point to as evidence of the abuse and incompetence plaguing such a vital issue.
Re:Vaporware and voting don't mix. (Score:5, Informative)
Long story short: I was at a company that sold vaporware. When we bitched about the stupid deadlines and what the fuck were the salesguys and upper management thinking, we were told that, "If we don't do it, someone else will and make the sale."
What a rationalization.
Re:Microsofts cue? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Diebold (Score:5, Informative)
Why? What is the benefit? Ultimately, you have to have a certain level of trust. Current paper methods reduce the necessary level of trust -- because independent (and non-independent) observers are watching what happens for me.
Frankly, what happened in Florida was not good, but let's face it, when elections get that close, you may as well toss a coin! When things like weather could affect a result, is the accuracy of the count that important?
What is really important, though, is to prevent any person, organization or company getting into a position whereby they can systematically skew the results of multiple elections.
Until someone comes up with an electronic voting scheme that guarantees that no one can fix an election then we should forget about electronic voting and stick with paper.
Even if you consider the problems in Florida to be more of an issue than I do, they don't require electronic voting to fix them -- let's look for simpler, more foolproof solutions.
Re:Diebold (Score:5, Informative)
Someone's creating a good eVoting mechanism, the Open Voting Consortium. Go to http://www.openvotingconsortium.org and help out!
I'll also point out that internet voting is fundamentally insecure, but any vulnerability can be exploited infinitely. When voting takes place in polling stations (i.e. offline and under observation), the poll workers can limit the damage of any vulnerability, because they can see who comes in, control who goes into voting stations, for how long, and can stop anyone doing anything too obvious (e.g. unscrewing the voting stations and modifying their internals, for example). Also, internet voting makes any a reliable audit impossible, because there's no voter verified physical record of a vote.
Re:Diebold (Score:4, Informative)
Right now, it probably isn't. Would you want your average PC to be controlling your life support system, where if it dies, you do? The wrong guy in the white house could unleash a nuclear holocaust upon us all; is that any less important?
Really, I'm not sure that it's worth it to do electronic voting anyways. A properly designed machine-assisted paper voting system (big ballots in your choice of languages, mark-sense sense system with no chad, etc) is pretty economical and reasonably hard to mess with -- especially because its functioning and potential for fraud is easier to perceive.
Re:Diebold (Score:5, Informative)
Linux desktop computers running open source (GPL) electronic voting software, burning the votes AND keystroke logs (to verify each vote if necessary) to CD-ROMs providing an "electronic" paper trail?
It is at least as safe, if not safer, than paper-and-pencil voting. As society continues to move towards staring at computer displays 24/7 electronic voting becomes an inevitability out of inertia, so it may as well be done right.
Barto
Re:Democracy... (Score:1, Informative)
Technology had nothing to do with it.
Re:This has to happen in many states to be effecti (Score:0, Informative)
Re:Democracy... (Score:3, Informative)
This is a bald-faced "Urban Myth" go back and review the facts of the 2000 election and you'll find the Supreme Court in reality ended up being a non-factor in the outcome of the election.
you make some good points, but as the 2000 Presidential Election demonstrated, some of my countrymen can't figured out
A.) how to make a X
B.) How many X's to put on each line of the Ballot.
In other words the simpler the user interface the more Americans will actually comply with balloting regulations and thus have their votes counted.
IMHO Digital voting systems are VERY feasible as well as a good idea. Just look at the global banking system - primarily digital with systems oversight of other distributed systems and capable of securely moving around trillions of dollars a day almost without incident. If we can do this, it seems to me to be a no-brainer to put together a reliable and secure E-Voting platform.
Re:FINALLY! (Score:3, Informative)
Transitivity (Score:1, Informative)
Now imagine a transitivity problem with two voters and two candidates. #1 votes AB, #2 votes BA. Looks a lot like a tie in a plurality election.
Flip a coin. Draw straws. Russian Roulette.
Or we could break the tie the same way we break ties now in plurality elections. Can't remember how they did that last time there was a tie? Can't remember the last time there was a tie?
Using Condorcet doesn't magically make ties occur more often.
Condorcet voting doesn't have a transitivity problem, at least not any more than any other voting system does. No one's bothered to fix the transitivity problem of plurality voting, so why worry about it with Condorcet?
Re:Diebold (Score:2, Informative)
Re:50/50 nation means every vote really matters (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Diebold (Score:4, Informative)
There has always been some element of trust in the elections. We've all seen the T-Shirt "I'm from Chicago, Two ballots please." but at this point I still think that paper ballots are more reliable. If you put the paper ballots in a lock box, and the lock box is opened under the supervision of all sides involved in the election as well as the media, then it becomes a lot more difficult to defraud an election.
(Although changing voting locations at the last minute, putting up National Guard roadblocks, and disqualifing thousands of people who happen to have the same first and last name as convicted felons in other states are potential abuses in this scenario. But computer voting wouldn't fix those problems either.)
Even if we did have a verifiable open-source voting system I still think it would be a good idea to have paper ballots. What would be best is after you vote, the machine prints out a paper ballot that is both machine and human readable. The voter can then examine their ballot and confirm all their choices are correct, and place it in the lock box.
When the elections are over you tally both the electronic voting machines and the paper ballots, and if there is a significant difference you know at least one of the numbers is wrong. Since the methods involved in defrauding an election via paper balots and computers are different, I imagine it would be very difficult to make the results come out the same.
Now, ultimately, I think that an open-source voting solution that uses both encryption and digital signatures would be best. Peer review can confirm that the system is nih impossible to rig. The average person won't understand this, but then the average person is not involved in the old fashioned voting sytem anyway.
Oh, interesting story I heard a few years ago about paper ballots on talk radio. Someone was at the place where the machine reads the ballots. The caller said that he suggest they test the reliability of the machine by taking a stack of ballots, and running them through the machine twice and seeing if the results come out the same both times.
I forget if they actually did it and there were different results, and the voting people didn't like him, or if they just didn't like him without even trying. Some people just don't like you to question them, and it seems the bigger their responsibility, the less they like to be questioned.
You're very correct - the parent company is solid! (Score:3, Informative)
Diebold Election Systems is hemmoraging money.
My theory:
When Diebold bought Global Elections Systems in...lesse, I *think* the sale was finalized in 2002 with partnerships/investments prior, I don't think the larger corp understood what a pack o' jackals they were dealing with.
I could be wrong mind you, but...
OK, here's a piece of evidence. Alameda County first bought their touchscreen voting system off of Global. They signed a contract. When Diebold corporate swallowed Global, the contract was re-written so that BOTH the newly-renamed Diebold Election Systems Inc ("DESI") subsidiary AND the parent company(!) were named co-contractors for Alameda County.
Which means even if corporate cuts "DESI" loose and destroys them, they're in hock on that contract if it all goes south.
IF they had suspected the old Global bunch was playing fast and loose with elections laws, they would NEVER have co-signed the contract, would they?
Second point: we have the stash of Diebold EMails running from 1999 (Global era) through early 2003 (Diebold era). The names of the players involved in the tech support, programming and marketing internal mailing lists DO NOT change. No new management team was brought in from Corporate, no new major names appear, there's virtually no references to new procedures or oversight, nothing.
My conclusion: corporate thought they were buying a smoothly running little org, rather than a pack of rampaging pirates.
There's no WAY Diebold corporate can continue hemmoraging CREDIBILITY! Forget the money for a sec - corporate makes their money supplying security gear for BANKS for God's sake. What happens when the banks start saying "errr...hey guys, don't look now but the name "Diebold" has become synonymous with terms like "idiots" and "crooks" and whatnot...".
And here's the cool part, folks. The really hilarious part.
All of this has happened before.
1966. A small electronic voting company called Harris (no relation to Bev!) gets bought by a megacorp...which within a couple of years, realizes that the voting subsidiary is worth 2% of the profits and 80% of the negative PR.
IBM isn't in the voting business anymore. Took 'em three years to wise up. See also:
http://www.csl.sri.com/users/neumann/dugger.htm
Y'all can bet your Palm Pilots Diebold Corporate is gonna get the same clue.
Jim
Re:A LOT worse then that (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A LOT worse then that (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sorry I don't have a paper copy to hand to you; ironically this is one of the issues that we are discussing on this thread.
Here's instructions for the future if you need information.
1. Type "www.google.com" in the location bar of your browser (you might refer to it as "that fancy web thing I've done been hearing so much about").
2. Press the "enter" key. This submits the "location" you typed in to the "web".
3. When the "web page" appears, type in the words "diebold deliver ohio" in the little rectangular box.
4. Once, again, you need to press the "enter" key.
5. A list of "web pages" appears. Click on one of them using the "left button" of your "mouse". Try and choose a respectable source like "FOX News" or "Monster Truck Week".
I hope this helps.
Re:A LOT worse then that (Score:3, Informative)
Or how about...
Do some research! (Score:3, Informative)
Ummmm. Nope. Sorry. You're the one who is mistaken here.
The Supreme Court ordered that the recount be stopped [pitt.edu] (and, that is the ONLY recount, not "multiple recounts" as James Baker and the Republicans claimed over and over again during the press coverage of the 2000 election fiasco) and that the totals from the election night be certified. This DID have a huge effect on the outcome of the election, because, as was found by a group of eight news organizations that did a recount of the Florida 2000 votes [consortiumnews.com], Gore won in a number of different recount scenarios, even if you don't count the extra illegally counted [princeton.edu] absentee votes that pushed Bush over Gore's vote total.
Your facetious "can't make an X" statement shows how little you know about what happened. The main problems with the 2000 election in Florida were:
1) Tens of thousands of people [gregpalast.com] were incorrectly put on the felon list and removed from the voter rolls
2) The "butterfly" ballot debacle [asktog.com] that caused thousands of votes (3:1 of which were likely to go to Gore) to not be tallied. These were punch ballots, and not "X marks the choice" ballots.
Now, were the Consortium recounts widely reported as a Gore victory? No. Why? At least partly because they were completed in November of 2001, while the majority of the country was in shock after September the 11th. I'm not saying this as some sort of conspiracy theory, but a LOT of the news coverage at the time was pretty soft on anything related to Bush, because many, many people (look at his approval ratings [umn.edu] from that time period) thought that we needed to support our President during the traumatic times.
Next time, before you call something an "urban myth", why don't you do some research?
Re:A LOT worse then that (Score:2, Informative)
Of course this is all purely speculative (that's my loony disclaimer). But does it really seem that far-fetched? Maybe the pres himself isn't in on it but he isn't the only one who want to see him reelected, and all it takes is one unethical engineer, or in the case of diebold's system whatever hacker takes the time.