Open Source Program Reveals Diebold Bug 175
Mitch Trachtenberg writes "Ballot Browser, an open source Python program developed by Mitch Trachtenberg (yours truly) as part of the all-volunteer Humboldt County Election Transparency Project, was instrumental in revealing that Diebold counting software had dropped 197 ballots from Humboldt County, California's official election results. Despite a top-to-bottom review by the California Secretary of State's office, it appears that Diebold had not informed that office of the four-year-old bug. The Transparency Project has sites at humetp.org and http://www.humtp.com." Trachtenberg also points to his blog for the Transparency Project, and his own essay about the discovery and the process that led to it.
Re:Is Hanlon's Razor sharp enough to cut this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone with 30 minutes of quickbasic experience can write an application that accurately counts button presses.
The fact that we are being asked to swallow this is disgusting.
DIEBOLD: We vote so you don't have to ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is Hanlon's Razor sharp enough to cut this? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's usually correct to not blame on malice what can be explained by incompetence. But I do find it hard to understand how a seemingly-simple requirement (essentially, count the number of times a button has been pressed) can be so badly botched by a company whose other "secure terminal" products (eg, ATMs) seem trustworthy and reliable, without the implication of a sinister motive.
That's because money is heavily monitored and tracked wherever it goes. Votes are registered and received, but not monitored and traced on two ends.
Re:Is Hanlon's Razor sharp enough to cut this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't be a retard. No one with 30 minutes of Quickbasic experience can write an application scanning paper ballots and perform optical recognition on them with any degree of accuracy.
Re:Is Hanlon's Razor sharp enough to cut this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:64,161 votes with 197 errors (Score:1, Insightful)
Don't say "still" "a" "concern". *Any* percentage can shift the outcome of an election, and each single vote counts. And it's not a concern. This gotta be fixed one way or the other and possibly cleared up in detail. How something like this could happen at all, who would be to blame and should (be forced to) take responsibility.
Kudo's (Score:4, Insightful)
To this guy who took it upon himself to provide this check, and kudo's to the supervisor who made it possible. The idea of providing DVD image scans so anyone can verify the vote is genius. I hope other counties start providing real verification like this.
Simple Election Algorithum (Score:1, Insightful)
No - Step 2) Recount!
Step 3) goto Step 1
Yes - Step 2) "The people have spoken!"
Re:Is Hanlon's Razor sharp enough to cut this? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a bit of an overreaction. There's no reason that a properly designed electronic voting system can't achieve greater speed and accuracy while producing a paper trail which allows full accountability. Just have the machine produce a printout which the individual voter can verify, then in case of doubt you can always resort to a manual count. Ultimately electronic voting systems should save time and increase accuracy, and we're going to switch to them.
The problem here is that the politicians have no idea what a properly designed electronic voting system looks like, and so they just leave it all up to Diebold and the like, who have no real incentive to do things right. What we really need here is a detailed set of specifications for how voting machines ought to perform, and laws that prevent machines which don't meet those specifications from being used in an election.
Re:What bothers me more (Score:3, Insightful)
why not have dual voting programs? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have read over and over about unreliable software counting votes. Why not have each vote be counted by two programs? It seems like it would be fairly trivial to have them share the same interface, but the actual methods of counting votes and securing themselves would be completely independent. They would be written by two sources (whether free or not) and then could be used to test each other (in addition of course to humans counting the paper trail the two would print out).
you are talking rubbish .. (Score:5, Insightful)
Firstly, voting machines should be subject to a full stress test before being deployed in a live election. Secondly ATMs can not be remotely 'reflashed', To upgrade required the replacement of the ATM module and the use of an external hand-held unit (plugged into the ATM) and the presence of two bank officials and the use of two unique PINS.
Re:Is Hanlon's Razor sharp enough to cut this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you hold your ATM pin number up to the screen waiting for it to be scanned or do you punch the buttons...
Re:64,161 votes with 197 errors (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. In a lot of places, jerrymandering has made individual votes less important because the winners often win by a large margin. This is true for both major parties.
However, for statewide elections as evidenced in Minnesota recently, individual votes can have a HUGE impact. A +/- 200 error isn't good enough when the winner's margin is only 100 votes.
Re:Is Hanlon's Razor sharp enough to cut this? (Score:5, Insightful)
I program banking systems for a living.
It's cute that you think "electronics simply don't do [...] accountability." Believe me, I'd be out a job real fast if they didn't.
The bottom line is, this was handled really, really poorly.
Re:Is Hanlon's Razor sharp enough to cut this? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's shit. I'll take the ballot I handle and allow it to be scanned. If the count is suspect then the ballots exist outside of some computer generated fantasy and real humans can count them.
Re:Is Hanlon's Razor sharp enough to cut this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Your union rep wants to see your voting receipt to make sure you voted 'correctly'!
If that doesn't scare you imagine the same scenario with your boss doing the verification.
You can't make the system 'voter auditable' without losing the secret ballot.
Take your idea but don't print the verification number on the ballot. Store it in the voting machine then reconcile the machine records to the central databases at the end of the day as a check. Hackers would have to change multiple systems in synch to get away with steeling votes.
Registration fraud still needs to be fixed.
Re:Is Hanlon's Razor sharp enough to cut this? (Score:1, Insightful)
you DO know that if they can identify the ballot to the voter thats unconstitutional, right ?
and "they" includes any computer program with access to both databases.
voter privacy is MUCH more important than having a fraud free voting system. this is so that "they" cant hunt you down and kill you when the "they" turns into a fascist state.
Re:Is Hanlon's Razor sharp enough to cut this? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Is Hanlon's Razor sharp enough to cut this? (Score:3, Insightful)
'The fact that we're being asked to swallow electronic voting is disgusting. Some things electronics simply don't do well, and one such thing is accountability.'
Paper and electronic systems are equally accountable. The solution is transparency and to combine the two. Count the votes electronically, in real time, on a large publically visible display with a serial number attached to the ballot. You watch your vote be added to the tally. Then you take the human readable, optically scannable printout, again with serial number on it and drop it into a seperate box that scans it and keeps a second tally.
You have no proof of your serial number to show someone who wants to buy your vote. Both tallies must match. You watch your vote counted publically and if counted wrong then can raise issue right there. It doesn't matter that you have no proof you are n576898 because there will be a discrepency in the database record for n576898 and the human readable printout. And the pollsters can watch from start to finish to assure that the number of voters matches the number of votes.
Re:Is Hanlon's Razor sharp enough to cut this? (Score:2, Insightful)
Or really, really well...
Re:Is Hanlon's Razor sharp enough to cut this? (Score:3, Insightful)
I would have said the same thing to the person you are replying to, but since you did, let me play devil's advocate and say you're only right if the intent was to either facilitate voting, or subvert the system directly. If the goal was to destroy faith in the system, this is a pretty good job.