ES&S To Buy Diebold, Blackbox Voting To Sue 175
Gottesser writes "Long-time election rights activist Bev Harris (she had an HBO special a while back where she hired Hari Hursti to hack an optical scan voting machine) just sent this out: 'Diebold/Premier Election Systems is being purchased by Election Systems & Software (ES&S). According to a Black Box Voting source within the companies, there will be a conference call among key people at the companies within the next couple hours. An ES&S/Diebold-Premier acquisition would consolidate most US voting under one privately held manufacturer. And it's not just the concealed vote-counting; these companies now also produce polling place check-in software (electronic pollbooks), voter registration software, and vote-by-mail authentication software.' Our voting system is heading toward a server-centric model with our vote being delivered to us by computers under lock and key far away from public oversight. Here's ES&S's press release. Wikipedia's got something on the ongoing string of ES&S controversies as well."
Re:Paper ballots (Score:4, Informative)
This is what we do in Canada. Paper is simple. Paper scales well. Paper is cheap. The booths for voting are made from old tables and cardboard. We generally only have problems once in a while when some idiot grabs a ballot box and runs off, only to fling it in a ditch. Paper is also fast. We get our election results as fast as America, and with less second guessing.
Inaccurate title (Score:1, Informative)
"ES&S To Buy Diebold, Blackbox Voting To Sue"
Actually ES&S is only buying Diebold's e-voting business, not the whole company
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125199401359883707.html
Florida abandoned touchscreen voting in favor... (Score:4, Informative)
optical scan, personally I never understood the motivation for touch screen voting other than gee whiz technology.
When they proposed touchscreen voting to replace punchcards in palm beach county, it cost $20 million while optical scan cost 2 million.
When voters demanded a paper record for recounts it turned out to be cheaper to implement optical scan than to equip
touchscreens with printers.
Sure voters may undervote but at least its their own damn fault and not because of some computer error or dirty tricks.
Re:Paper ballots (Score:3, Informative)
That's a pretty interesting idea, but I don't think it's practical. Basically, it fails because it rests on the assumption that people will entirely honest.
Since only you know your own long string, there's nothing to stop you from claiming your string was not found and the election was rigged. Thus, you still end up with the original problem that a recount is impossible.
With paper ballots, you can verify the following phases very reliably:
1. Person submits exactly 1 ballot.
2. Each ballot by each person can be visually seen to be deposited in the box.
3. All ballots in the box can be (re)counted by any independent party.
It's a completely robust system. Sometimes you have to stick to ancient tech :-)
Re:Florida abandoned touchscreen voting in favor.. (Score:2, Informative)
Actually Black Box did show how the Optical Scan system could be pwned! Access to the cards that hold the counts, even for a couple of minutes, could result in the election being rigged!
The only good part, is you still have the ballots. Reset the counting machines, use a card that is good, and the election results will actually (more or less) reflect the votes. I say more or less because the ballots are still filled in by Sheeple, and some of them, even after years of doing it, cannot fill out the ballot correctly!
Re:Florida abandoned touchscreen voting in favor.. (Score:3, Informative)
Which is why those cards are stored behind numbered seals. Next you'll say that the seals aren't perfect.
Re:FIRST!!11 (Score:5, Informative)
I wanted to mod you insightful but I thought it may be better to let you know that an open source voting system already exists [wired.com]. A security analysis (pdf warning) [ucdavis.edu] has been performed and the ACT Electoral Commission [act.gov.au] has full details of the the behaviour of the code you can download.
You should also check out Open Voting Consortium [openvotingconsortium.org] because we are all friends so lets help each other be free.
Re:Doesn't matter now. (Score:1, Informative)
Anyone who respects the process of democratic elections knows that the US presidential election results of 2004 were fraudulent as a direct result of criminal misconduct and secrecy on the part of the elections board of the state of Ohio (and possibly other states). Despite these facts and the untimely death of Mike Connell, to boot, no charges have been filed.
One can certainly be cynical in light of the evidence of misconduct and the constant delay or outright miscarriage of justice. Even the US presidential elections of 2000 appeared fraudulent because of the intercession of the Supreme Court in the electoral process of the state of Florida. We invest a lot in the pretense of democratic freedom, of course, but our political process demonstrates a tact as subtle as the Prime Minister of Italy. That is, none.
When you break it down to its core, on this issue, the tactics of fraud and election-rigging allowed a fraudulent regime to appoint and have confirmed by the elected Senate their own choice for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Whether or not he is truly qualified and capable, we also know this same Senate is incapable of addressing an issue that 80% of the country can decide quite easily.
The disconnect between politicians and the public are such that one could scarcely believe changing the president to Obama, or anyone for the next 30 years or so, will correct the miscarriage of justice, even if some Attorney General had the lot of them frog-marched to prison. The politicians responsible for upholding the law did not move to impeach or censure the executive even one time, much less succeed in passing the measure. Politicians actually come up with excuses to ignore factual reports of criminal incidents - in the process of 'protecting their jobs' ("No comment") they hew the party line into a new shape, based on focus groups, and then repeat that. It's all partisan propaganda and turf-war now, but 90% of them still get re-elected [wikipedia.org] every two years. Citizens end up 'fighting' over things they really have no conflicts of interest with...the elected incumbent simply has political baggage and financing to carry for their next campaign. That's it! In a very, very stupid way, and through a very, very stupid interpretation of the 14th Amendment [wikipedia.org], we are following a process based on fraud rather than the process outlined in our Constitution.
In short, don't assume everyone cynical doesn't care about the future of our country. We have yet to define a vector where the US government functions as a representative democracy in the 21st century. We might think about Constitutional Amendments to reign in the process of electing these stooges instead of relying on Obama to fix everything.