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."
you asked for it! (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Didn't we want to be just like all the other democratic countries? The private sector delivers, and now we're bitching about it. Voters -- 'ya just can't please them.
Kidnap their kids (Score:1, Insightful)
Rule the world.
FIRST!!11 (Score:2, Insightful)
Electronic "voting" needs to die (Score:5, Insightful)
This should force the FEC to outright ban electronic voting. I guess my .sig is getting old by now.
Paper ballots (Score:4, Insightful)
What else is left? (Score:5, Insightful)
All the ingredients necessary and sufficient to engineer an election result undetectably and without pesky statistical red flags. George Orwell himself couldn't have designed a more riggable system.
Say goodbye to democracy.
Is there an Open alternative? (Score:3, Insightful)
WoW! Matter of time... (Score:2, Insightful)
So we're not even going to bother pretending we have fair and balanced elections now?
On the one hand. that's terrible. These people should all be shot for treason.
On the other... Yeah elections should go smoother since theres no confusion with a standard 'this is the only way' system.
Man... our country is so fucked... gonna be 10 years before the majority notices too. And another 50 to even think about fixing it.
Sucks to be US!
Re:Paper ballots (Score:5, Insightful)
However, *I* do personally care if people know how you voted because it makes it far easier for someone to pay and/or intimidate you to vote a certain way.
Congress passes "God-Bless-America-Bill" (Score:5, Insightful)
Washington DC
October 1, 2009
In a stunning display of bipartanship today, Congress saved the taxpayers several million dollars by suspending all future elections. Proponents of the bill point out that most people didn't even bother to vote last time, and that of those who did, polls show the overwhelming majority of them held strong opinions about issues they didn't even begin to understand.
"It was a ridiculous waste of the taxpayer's money," said Sam Rickenbaugh of the GAO. "We'd spend millions, billions even on holding elections, and the voters who even bothered to show up were the same mouth-breathing idiots who get roped into jury duty. It was a pathetic display, embarrassing even."
Democrats and Republicans have agreed to share power across the aisle, and points of contention will now be decided based on who can gather the largest contributions for their side.
"Now this is Democracy," posts John Ringerton of My Country Right Or Wrong.com. "You got an opinion, you can put your money where your mouth is like God intended."
Re:Congress passes "God-Bless-America-Bill" (Score:1, Insightful)
It's sad how close this is to how it really works.
we need to get rid of mechanical voting too (Score:3, Insightful)
the most technophilic countries and the poorest should all vote the same way: paper
whatever convenience is gained with mechanical and electronic voting is lost by casting doubt over the legitimacy of the voting process. technologically souped up voting processes renders democratically elected governments open to criticism of illegitimacy, regardless of being just rumors or the truth. more technology in the equation creates dark areas, attack vectors, unnecessary complexity for such a simple process as recording and counting votes (too laborious? use OCR). its also more expensive
so you are basically paying a lot more money for a little more convenience and a giant dollup of doubt in the mind of the public about the legitimacy of their own government. which leads to social instability
yes, you can tamper with paper votes, but its hard and you need a mob of conspirators
mechanical voting increases the number of attack vectors an order of magnitude and decreases the number of people you need to make a dent in the vote, and its harder to trace your tampering
take that further, and electronic voting is a manipulator's dream: one guy with 300 milliseconds of access to a database can do more damage than an army of paper ballot tamperers/ stuffers/ truck drivers, and he can do it in such a statistically invisible way as to make his tampering forensically invisible. public servants are full of integrity and with such high salaries none could ever be paid to look the other way, right, right? and with electronic voting, you need only corrupt one or two obscure key guys, not an army of polling station workers as with paper. a conspiracy of two or three might be airtight with electronic tampering, but a conspiracy of dozens and hundreds with paper/ mechanical is what... more airtight?
as for attack vectors, with electronic voting, take your pick: there are millions where with paper voting there are only hundreds. those tasked with guarding the integrity of the electronic voting process can easily be routed around with the right creative hacker thinking up the right attack vector no one imagined but him. sure, yeah, no one is for hire to do that for a few million and then disappear to rio for the rest of his life, right? oh, and of course, there aren't giant gobs of money floating around politics that often winds up with shady power brokers, right?
electronic voting and mechanical voting must die, for sake of the integrity of our governments, upon which the entire stability of our societies rest. using anything besides paper is insane
Re:Tag with 'democrats' (Score:2, Insightful)
The "hanging chads" were what made the news, but it was districts with electronic counting and/or voting equipment that should be blamed for the 2000 debacle. Why didn't we hear about the county in Florida that reported -16,000 votes for Gore, or the county that reported a vote tally at something like 125% of total registered voters?
Re:Doesn't matter now. (Score:4, Insightful)
No matter how bad things get, as long as we have honest elections, we have a chance to fix them. If we lose that ... forget it, it's over. Democrat, Republican, black, white, whatever: if the people in charge have the means to ensure they stay in charge regardless of the will of the people, they will use that power, and we are permanently screwed.
I hate to break it to you but they already have the means [wikipedia.org] to remain in charge regardless of the will of the people. What good does an honest election do you when the politicians get to decide who their voters are instead of the other way around?
In short, AC, don't assume everyone else shares your level of asshole cynicism.
What's wrong with cynicism towards the political parties? They are all a bunch of lying hypocrites. You just feel good about yourself because the guy you regard as evil happened to lose. That doesn't change the fact that the two major parties are both propping up a system that undermines our representative republic and that the major difference between the two of them is which freedoms you'll lose when they are in charge.
Re:Why Not (Score:3, Insightful)
Because then your vote could be verified by people with a vested interest in intimidating you into voting the way they want? Do you really want your employer/union official/wife/etc to be able to see how you voted? Having any sort of mechanism that allows individual votes to be identified after the election would allow this to happen.
Re:Doesn't matter now. (Score:3, Insightful)
And now that we have a Democrat in the White House, I think it is exactly as important that we have a trustworthy election process as it was when had a Republican. I don't want anyone rigging elections, in favor of any candidate of any party.
That puts you and I squarely in the minority. I'm not an R or D, but much more towards the [fiscal, not social] conservative end, for what it's worth. The problem is our friends who vote for either party can't see past partisan issues to fix the ones that are actually important, like voting process integrity.
Re:Florida abandoned touchscreen voting in favor.. (Score:4, Insightful)
it does NOT MATTER that you feel you have inside info that the voting system is 'trustable'.
widespread, we (the people) don't trust it anymore. too many reports of bad things happening in the last few elections.
even if those are all made-up (and we know they are not); we need to have trust, first and foremost.
yes, sometimes you have to sell a car (or trade it in) just so you can know you'll not be stranded on the side of the road. we have a used car, now, so to speak; and we just don't trust it anymore.
paper (canada uses that!) is trustable.
open source is trustable.
the lying bastards who 'pledge all they can do' to ensure one candidate gets in; is NOT trustable! it does not matter if YOU, some elections guy, think its trustable. the rest of us lost that faith years ago.
to restore it, we need to go to low-tech methods. high tech is not always the answer. in this case, its the anti-answer.