CA Secretary of State Bans Diebold Machines

Etcetera writes "The CA Secretary of State has just announced that they're pulling the plug on the use of Diebold voting machines (thank you KNSD) as a result of the flaws that came up where they were used during March's elections. More background on the issue (not updated yet) from the Secretary of State's perspective is available here."

I think i speak for us all.....

THANK GOD.
You know its scary when legions of geeks are overwhelmingly against a new form of technology....

Re:I think i speak for us all.....

The last time we had a geek uprising of this size, Quantum Leap had just been cancelled! ...ha... ha... yikes. *ducks*

Re:I think i speak for us all.....

They'll probably get their friends in the Federal Government involved in it, wouldn't that be fun to watch.

And in the end Ahnold fights and saves the USA by kicking all the other Republicans' Butt in Congress.

Re:I think i speak for us all.....

I know you are being funny -- but I have a very serious theory. We all know its possible to design secure and tamper evident voting machines -- its probably not even that hard. We know about the gaff where the president of diebold who promised to deliver the votes to Bush... we know the republican shenanigans in florida won the presidential election.

What if the insecure voting machines aren't the result of incompetent programmers -- what if they've been made insecure on purpose so they are easy to manipulate. You can't tell me right now some republican hitman doesn't have a machine and isn't figuring out how to walk into a polling station and cast 5,000 votes at once. After all, this is the most important job in the world we're talking about here.

And if anyone ever finds out -- theres no paper trail, no audit, no log, no way to know what really went on, and it was done on purpose by a company whose president swore to deliver electoral votes to bush.

You don't: Re:I think i speak for us all.....

We all know its possible to design secure and tamper evident voting machines -- its probably not even that hard.

What rubbish you speak. Election counting is and always has been simple.

When you get a complex system like a computer you need to be sure thats all its doing and thats all its ever doing.

When steel ballot boxes are being stored they can be stored in a warehouse. Its hard to tamper with ignorant steel boxes in a meaningful way.

To subvert thousands of humans who count ballots manually leaves, lets say, thousands of human witnesses.

When electronic voting machines are being stored they need to be watched carefully to make sure they aren't modified, don't have their guts swapped out, etc, this between-election security is also very expensive.

Its expensive before you start, its expensive to run, and expensive to store with many possible points of subversion.

It will do humans good to count votes and realise they don't want to delegate safeguarding their democracy to fickle machines.

Sam

Re:You don't: Re:I think i speak for us all.....

It's not just one massive replacement machine you need for voting. It's incremental improvement over paper voting.

[a] Design a machine which helps voters to tick a voting card. Uses whatever touchscreen display is fashionable this month, and spits out a card with that box ticked.
- If it fails, voters can tick the box by hand.
- If it misvotes, voters can bin it and ask for another card
- It can be verified as the voter takes the printed card and sees the tick in the right box

[b] Design a machine which takes poll cards and sorts them into piles, depending on which candidate is ticked (plus an "invalid selection" pile)
- If it fails, the cards can be sorted by hand.
- It can't misvote because it has no knowledge of which box represents which candidate.
- It can and should be verified by people flicking through the sorted piles of cards to confirm they're all for the same candidate.

[c] Design a machine which can count how many cards are in a stack (similar to banknote counting machines)
- If it fails, the number of cards can be counted by hand.
- It can't misvote because it has no knowledge of which candidate's cards are being counted at any one time
- It can and should be verified by people randomly selecting piles of cards to count by hand, as many as they can manage, and checking the accuracy of their answers against the counting machines.

How hard can it be? Why do people insist on votes being recorded electronically? Why do people insist on votes being sent by modem, rather than announced by the returning officer? Why do people trust machines to count their votes, when it's trivial to do so with a hall full of volunteers? It's not even much faster to use a computer, especially not when the machines are untrustworthy and the result can't be announced until the lawsuits subside.

Re:You don't: Re:I think i speak for us all.....

repeat of the 2000 Florida fiasco with guys holding ballots up to the light

Only if you wait until after the voter has left the building to catch the bad ballots. If the voter feeds the ballot into the machine himself, then he'll be standing RIGHT THERE when the machine issues its error beep and says the ballot is indecipherable. Thus he knows he needs to ditch the bad ballot and try again. This is precisely how the system in the community I vote in works, by the way.

When you finish filling out the ballot with the felt tip pen provided (it works on an optical scan of the ballot to see where you put your line next to the candidate - each candidate has an arrowhead and arrow tail pointing at it, but with empty whitespace between them. You complete the picture of the arrow by drawing a line from tail to head, and it's these horizontal lines that the scanner looks for). Anyway, the point is that YOU, walk it over to the scanner machine, and YOU feed it into the slot, and YOU watch the machine take your ballot, and pop up a green light if it could understand it, or a red light and a beep if it cannot. If you get it rejected, it's blatantly obvious to you, right there, that it's rejected because instead of dropping the ballot into the lockbox for archiving, it regugitates it back at you, the voter. Maybe it was a bad scan and you can try again. But if you try more than twice and it doesn't work, then a poll worker (who is watching the people using the scanner) will hand you a new, fresh ballot and destroy the old one (while you watch, the worker tears the ballot, while averting eyes to avoid seeing who you voted for.) You can then walk back to one of the privacy booths and try again with the fresh ballot.

How do I know this? I deliberately voted a bogus vote one year, in a minor election for some local positions where there were only two positions up for election, and they were positions I wasn't informed about (so I felt it would be wrong to make a vote on them). The only reason I showed up was to vote on a referrendum. Anyway, I decided to use this chance to test the system. I filled out a ballot where I tried to vote for both candidates in one of the minor positions.

I went through the process as explained above, and when it was done, whispered to the poll worker that I did it on purpose as a test of the system, because as a voter, I didn't trust it. I came away happily surprised, and I really think this sort of system would have fixed all those problems in Florida, without needing a fancy touchscreen computer.

And the system is also quite fast. When you fill out the ballot right, it takes something like one second to feed it to the scanner and get a green light, so it's just a quick stop on your way out of the room.

The Wisconsin (where this is used) vote in the 2000 election was almost as close as the Florida vote, but there was no need for a recount (partly because it wasn't enough electoral votes to matter, and partly because there was a general consensus that the system was good enough that the first count was probably right on target. We've had recounts before where the recount was only different by less than 50 votes or so, and those were a matter of misplaced ballots rather than errors in the tallying.)

Re:You don't: Re:I think i speak for us all.....

There is no reason you can't marry the best aspects of both an electronic count and a paper ballot. A paper ballot is the least corruptable record of the vote, and leaves a manual method for disputes to be settled. An electronic count makes less errors that a human count, and can get the final tallies done within a few seconds of the last poll closing.

The system I use when I vote is just like that. You complete a ballot on paper using the provided felt tip pen.

Then YOU, the voter, walk the ballot from the privacy booth over to the scanner machine, and then YOU, the voter, feed your ballot into the machine (either direction - it can tell which way it is and read it rightside up, upside down, top to bottom, or bottom to top).

Then, and this is the important part, the scanner processes your ballot RIGHT AWAY, in less time than you can blink an eye. If the green light lights up, then the machine understood your ballot , tallied it in it's local count, and dropped it into the archival lockbox, and you can leave. If the red light lights up, then the scanner makes it really obvious your ballot wasn't readable because it spits it back out at you instead of putting it into the box. That way you know your ballot is fouled. The poll worker who's watching over people using the scanner will get you a new ballot, destroy the old one, and let you walk back to the privacy booths to try filling it out again.

This solves so many of the stupid problems Florida had:

1 - The voter knows when he leaves, that he leaves with the confidence that his ballot was readable by the machine.

2 - The voter has a chance to correct his unreadable ballot HIMSELF - so there's no need to second-guess what the voter intended. Every ballot that's saved in the lockbox is one that you know is scannable because it already *was* scanned.

3 - The tallying is fast because the scanner machine keeps it's own sub-tally as it goes. When the polls close, all that needs to be done is to sum up the subtotals from each scanning machine.

4 - When a voter uses a write-in blank, the ballot is marked specially in a way that flags it for human counting later, and is sorted in such a fashion that these ballots are easy to find in the pile.

5 - A paper record is preserved as well as an electronic one.

6 - The ballot is so simple that I can't see how a touchscreen interface could be any simpler.

7 - To double-check the integrety of the scanner machines, a random selection of a few of them is audited every time, with it's subtotal compared against a human count of the ballots that passed through it. If these spot checks show suspicious discrepency, then the whole vote is human-counted, and investigation into the problem will begin, or at least that's what I'm told. (So far this process has not uncovered discrepency, except in a few cases where it's understandable why the human count and the machine count differ - like a stray mark that a human considered a double vote, but it wasn't dark enough for the scanner to see it.)

Re:You don't: Re:I think i speak for us all.....

"Back to the point, how many bins would this be? The last big election I voted in had over 100 candidates. Minor candidates, but I'm sure they all thought they were as important as the other. There is NO way the average voter is going to be able to see and check that each of their votes went into the right bin -- and thats what matters -- the person voting can check this... I'd take on you other points, but this one irked me the most..."

Sorry to irk you, but I think you might have misunderstood my suggestion as some way of sorting votes as soon as they're made. I wasn't. (in my country, it's illegal to count votes before the polls close.) I was referring to a system where the votes are cast, placed in a box, and later that evening, they're all taken to a town hall somewhere and counted.

Firstly, the voter doesn't verify that their vote went into the right bin, that's for the vote-counters to do. The voter marks their vote (using a machine if necessary), then checks that their vote is correct by looking at the card. If it's correctly marked candidate 84, then they're happy, and they put their voting card into a locked black box with all the other cards. (showing the election officer's stamp on the back of the card to prove it's a valid vote)

Repeat as necessary until the polls close.

The returning officer then supervises a hundred volunteers who empty the ballot boxes onto the table, and sort them into piles. That's where the sorting machine helps.

If you do have a limit on the number of bins a machine can sort, then you need to be a bit more organised. "candidates 1-10", "candidates 11-20". And then send each part-sorted pile to somebody with another machine.

You comment about being able to find the right candidate when voting -- that's irrelevant to the vote-counting. Finding the right person to vote for is done *when the ballot card is marked*, not when it's counted. I believe I used the phrase "using whatever method of selecting candidates is in favour this month" or such like, to describe the method for marking your vote card. Whatever, once that's done, the task of sorting them into piles and counting each candidates vote is done completely separately, after the polls have closed.

"Back to the point, how many bins would this be?" -- if you have 100 candidates, you're going to have at least 100 piles of voting cards on your counting-tables, regardless of the method chosen to mark or count them, so I don't see how an automated card-sorter can do anything but help the people dealing with so many candidates. If 3 people get 80% of the vote, then separate those piles out first. The idea of such machines is that they're tools to make a human job easier. If you want 20 machines, get 20 of them, because they don't need to have any intelligence or any knowlege of what's being voted for.

Once the cards are sorted into piles by candidate, you have a verifiably correct answer. Anyone can flick through a pile of votes to see that there isn't a vote in the wrong pile. Anyone can count a pile of votes to check that it matches the official answer. And anyone can see how many votes each candidate has, by looking at the count for their pile.

And the results are then published, so you can check that the numbers add up when you take all the different counting stations into account.

(as an aside, have you ever read those usability studies which show that people can't cope with more than 7 choices at a time, and shouldn't be presented with them? 100 candidates is never going to be a good election)

Go ahead and have a go at the other points, they ought to withstand critisism if they're to be suggested for a voting system.

Re:You don't: Re:I think i speak for us all.....

Don't move the ballots! You *must* count the ballots at the polling place if you want any accountability. It's not hard for any serious candidate to provide an observer for each polling place; they can even count by hand. If a candidate can't provide an observer his/her organization has serious problems and shouldn't be using up ballot space.

People keep thinking that moving ballots makes them easier to count, instead it just opens another opportunity to commit fraud by switching boxes, or similar shenanigans.

Stand up for your right to fair elections: request in-place counting immediately at the close of ballotting, with a representative of each candidate present.

Re:I think i speak for us all.....

we know the republican shenanigans in florida won the presidential election.

I am getting so tired of reading this. As I understand it, Gore shot himself in the foot. If he had asked for a recount for the whole state, he would have won. Instead he decided he only wanted a recount of the counties where he thought he should have won, but didn't. Ironically, those counties Bush would hve won anyway.

I could be wrong on some of those details, but that is how I remeber the whole thing.

Re:I think i speak for us all.....

I am getting so tired of reading this. As I understand it,

Well, it was the shenanigans BEFORE the election that really hurt Gore. Katherine Harris, the florida election comissioner took pains to rig the election *before* anyone knew that florida would choose the president. One of the strangest things they did -- they wanted to remove felons from the voting roles (illegal), but there was no way to do this for some reason. So they took the list of felons, and deleted EVERYONE who shared a birthday with any of them -- some 40,000 people.

Other strange things -- the counties that did have electronic voting machines (some did), in white counties, the machine wouldn't allow you to form an incorrect ballot, it would warn you and ask you to recast the ballot. In black counties, the SAME machines accepted the ballot and threw it away letting the person think they were voting.

That's just the begining of the weird antics in florida -- the problem is it demonstrates an unwillingness to play fair in the democratic process

Re:I think i speak for us all.....

You know its scary when legions of geeks are overwhelmingly against a new form of technology....

Not so. It happens all the time.

Stairmaster, NordicTrack, Bowflex, elliptical trainer...

DIebold may actually face criminal charges

According to wired

http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,63191,00. ht ml

Re:DIebold may actually face criminal charges

This guy gives a nice twist on things, when confronted with the possibility of criminal charges, after uncertified software was installed on 'production' voting machines. (from the Wired article:)

"This doesn't solve the problems," Iredal said. "It just sets a tone of confrontation at a time when we should be working together to address issues with the certification process."

Soooo... there is a problem with the certification process, rather than with the business practices at Diebold. Of course Diebold should be allowed to install whatever software they deem neccesary on the machines, we can trust them, right?

Electronic voting with this level of security and accountability would be as safe as doing a paper ballot vote, then giving all the ballots to me for counting. Of course I'd promise to count accurately, wink wink, nudge nudge.

Re:DIebold may actually face criminal charges

I'm surprised there has been so little reaction like this in the US. Over here in England, gerrymandering or interfering with the ballot is a very serious offence comparable to treason. Given how seriously you lot take your 'democracy' I'm surprised you don't jump on Diebold from a very great height leaving nothing but a few jailed execs and bankrupt investors.

We fined Dame Shirley Porter 30m for rigging the sale of council houses in her constituency to Tory rather than Labour buyers.

We still hand count things cos we're a quaint backwards country but I'd rather that than trust a machine who's owners I don't trust.

What happened in texas was appalling

The other side's just as dirty, and in the USA, that kind of thing goes on all the time.

Gerrymandering is a national past-time with our elected officials.

What happened in Texas was more dramatic, and sinister, than that.

No, Gerrymandering doesn't go on "all the time." It is however fairly common, and occurs generally once every ten years when districts are redrawn as a result of census results (populations move from state-to-state, changing the electorial and congressional map, and from region to region within a state, changing local and state electorial maps).

What happened in Texas was that the Republican controlled congress conspired with the Republican governor to redraw district lines just three years after they had been redrawn (as a result of our last census)...the difference this time being that there was no democratic majority in one of the houses to force a reasonable compromise on the ruling party's governor (back then, Dubya Bush).

Because such an extraordinary action required a quorum to be present, and various other parliamentary machinations, a number of Democratic state senators made a point of not being around when the Republicans tried to steamroller these changes through. The result was the governor putting out an arrest warrant on the senators (with the idea of taking them to the capitol in chains and having the necessary quorum present), forcing the senators to seek asylum in neighboring states.

It was positively banana-republic-esque ... which is essentially what my country (the United States) has become over the last four years.

In the end other parliamentary maneuvers were taken, and I believe the Gerrymandering (without the need to compromise with the opposition) went through, guaranteeing the republicans several seats in the Congress that are currently held by democratic constituencies now divided into Republican-majority districts.

We are watching the the decline (and probably, ultimately, the fall) of a once great nation. Four years ago, after Bush Junior had stolen the election, I argued that, while we have to endure four years of a usurpur running our country, we will survivie this, and can elect a replacement in four years.

Now I'm not so sure. Even if Kerry does win, the mess they've created in four short years (the strategic and political blunders that have cost us the world's sympathy, the world's respect, and most of our non-military influence in the same world, and left the middle east a shambles, not to mention the (possibly irreversable) erosion of our fundamental constitutional rights in this country) is so tremendous that, while he at least will probably not inflict further damage, it will probably be more than one presidency, or even several, can adequately repair.

Add to that the fundamental attack on our democratic institutions, of which Diebold, Florida, and Texas are but a part, and one wonders just how much longer our civil society will survive, in any form.

I don't understand electronic voting.

Wouldn't it be easier just to build some sort of error checking device for paper ballots, and have that at the polls when you submit your ballot? There's got to be a better way to fix the problems with paper ballot voting than moving it to computers.

Re:I don't understand electronic voting.

The basic problem here is that, in 2000, the public was shocked, SHOCKED, to learn that if you ask a person to "choose one", there is about a three percent chance that he or she will attempt to make an invalid choice, such as two candidates (overvote), or 1/10 of a candidate (unintentional "undervote"). Sometimes this is a mechanical problem (e.g., hanging chads) and sometimes it's just a combination of poor directions and voter stupidity.

Prompt ballot scanning can prevent some overvote problems. If two ovals are obviously marked, or two chads are obviously punched, then the ballot can be rejected, and the voter can have a do-over. (Prompt scanning is common for optical ballots, and rare for punchcard ballots.)

But this does not solve all problems. For optically scanned ballots, a voter can make a faint mark that is apparent to a human but not readable to the machine. Or a voter can make a circle around an oval that the machine disregards. (The "fill-in-the-arrow" style largely avoids this problem.) For punchcard ballots, a chad can be incomplely punched due to some defect in the card, the stylus, or the voters.

Electronic voting machines and lever voting machines prevent these problems. With these, it is not only impossible to cast an invalid vote. It is also impossible for anyone to look back at the evidence and say, "Well, it looks like the voter meant to pull this lever / touch the screen here, but didn't try hard enough."

Of course, certain voting errors cannot be prevented by any scheme. If the voter indicates a different choice than he or she intended, and then does not check the results, then the wrong vote is cast.

I would guess that (on average) voters have this kind of core logic fault at least a few percent of the time. People tend to vote in a hurry, and many do not take it very seriously. This is inherently uncorrectable.

Of course this has nothing to do with the basis for this particular decision regarding Diebold. The stated basis of this decision was the set of serious problems experienced in getting their machines operational. Unstated, but probably about as important, was the fact that Diebold has been demonized by every liberal and semi-liberal mouthpiece in the country for the last two years. No other voting machine manufacturer is going to be held to the same level of scrutiny as Diebold at the moment. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing...

Re:I don't understand electronic voting.

A quick thought on overvoting. This is an "error" that should be available. It indicates that you don't agree with any of the canidates, and unlike an "undervote" this cannot be argued as voter error later.

Error conditions should always be avoided. If a voter truely wants to not vote in a race, they should be asked to fill in an oval that indicates such.

In some places in the world, a "None of the above" or "None of those listed" option is on the ballot in what is called a "Turkey Ballot" format. Basically, if the non-option should obtain a specfied in the rules number that indicates a critical mass, the election must be reheld, but all of those who appeared on the ballot in the first vote are disqualified because voters have declared them all turkeys. The parties are basically each being told to nominate somebody else because the voters didn't like any of the options they were presented with.

Re:I don't understand electronic voting.

"The basic problem here is that, in 2000, the public was shocked, SHOCKED, to learn that if you ask a person to "choose one", there is about a three percent chance that he or she will attempt to make an invalid choice, such as two candidates (overvote), or 1/10 of a candidate (unintentional "undervote")."

Can't say I was particularly shocked at this - sorta expected it. If I think about my (and most likely our) field of expertiese look at e-mail worms/viruses. Wow, how can someone be so stupid to open said attachemnt. Given that the overwhelmingly do, how can we expect them to vote correctly. Then take into consideration 9as the parent notes) mechanical failures and what do you expect?

And no, I do not intend this as "funny". Just think about the level of stupidity that has someone opening a "I love you" attachment (or even "I'm a virus" which people where I worked opened) and ask how you would design a fool-proof voting mechanism for them. Especially given that there is a certain amount of error from even competant people that you can not avoid.

And I will agree with the parent that this doesn't exclude Diebold from being incompetant.

RE: ... Diebold has been demonized by...

So, we switch out one set of problems affecting a small percent of votes for a larger set of issues affecting a larger percentage of votes...

The basic problem is ensuring that the vote is correct and not tampered with. How can you trust a company to not tamper with something as profitable as a vote when you can not trust them to keep to the terms of the contract?

Diebold has proven beyond a doubt that they can not be trusted. They not only did not fulfill their contract, they tried to sneak a patch into a certified machine (thus de-certifying it) before an election. Hmm... If they had not been caught at that, what else could they have gotten away with. How much are local elections worth in bribe money? How much are national elections worth? If all you have is a small number of people to work with in the bribe, how hard is it? Oh, and they have a vested interest in seeing people get elected who support them. They may not use it today, but what about when times get tough and they are comfortable?

I love using computers for work flow. I help companies manage work flow for a living. Yet, there are those who have no business using these technologies at this moment. I would not trust my voting to any computer system yet.

My reasoning has to do with complexity. The more complex a system is the easier it is to pull something off. Complexity hides errors and cheats. A voting system would need to be based on something very simple. It would need to have very strong security safeguards. And, it would have to be completely open to inspection, by anyone at anytime. Anything short of this simply allows mischief to be hidden more easily.

Look at all the fallout in the Florida presidential elections. Most of it was introduced by a company that "messed up" buy disallowing people to vote in the elections. All computer based with little or no over site, tied directly to the winning family. There may be nothing to be seen in this case, but the appearance of impropriety is bad enough to damage the operations of government.

The problems with elections is not liberal or conservative. It is American. People who are drawn to power tend to do what they can get away with to keep power. Why give them one more option to illegally wield power by putting an untrustworthy system into place?

InnerWeb

I can't believe it..

I thought this would never happen..

How CA goes so goes the nation..

Now if only the rest of the states follow suit

We may actually have an election, just like a real democracy!

Clickable Links

Representative Democracy [wikipedia.org]

Republic [wikipedia.org]

Finally...

Myself and my family are from Napa, CA (one of the cities that had some serious problems with Diebold) [wired.com], and I can't explain how frustrating it is to not be sure if your vote was counted properly or not. For democracy to work, you must have faith in the security and validity of the elections. Diebold has seriously undermined this, especially in my hometown. The jokes and grumblings have been raging, not to mention the rumors of the end of our Registrar of Voters' career. Although "no harm, no foul" has been claimed, confidence has been undermined, which IMHO, is one of the most important aspects of a good democracy.

Don't worry

It was only Diebold's machines that were banned, not black-box voting machines in general.

Diebold will spin off its voting machine division, and it'll be bought out by some other manufacturer like Sequoia or AccuPoll. You'll see these machines again. They'll just have another name on them.

Re:Finally...

Myself and my family are from Napa, CA (one of the cities that had some serious problems with Diebold), and I can't explain how frustrating it is to not be sure if your vote was counted properly or not. For democracy to work, you must have faith in the security and validity of the elections.

Well said. This is a subtle but critical point and it goes straight over most people's heads. "Our county didn't have any problems!"

A common rule of legal ethics states that the appearance of a conflict of interest is a conflict of interest. It creates unaddressable concerns about impartiality and undermines faith in a process that depends on it. Voting is the same way. The appearance of voter disenfranchisement is voter disenfranchisement. It deprives us of our rights as citizens to know for certain that our votes are being counted, which is what disenfranchisement is. Perfectly reasonable voter concerns about touchscreen voting have not been alleviated, nor can they be alleviated. So you voted touchscreen? How do you really know? You really don't, and what's more, you really can't. Worst of all, in some counties, it turns out you really didn't.

Thomas Jefferson said the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. I bet wasn't even considering pretty flashing lights as a threat to the republic.

Re:Finally...

Worse than just having an apparent interest in the outcome of the elections, Diebold managed to trip over the safety valves that are supposed to make sure no company can tamper with the results for any reason.

The software they ran, everywhere in the state, on election day was not the version that they submitted for certification. [wired.com] You just can't skip these kinds of checks and expect to be treated like your software is honest, because these reviews exist because we're just not going to take anybody's word for it.

At best, they cut a corner they weren't allowed to. But worse yet, they undermine their credibility in claiming that we can trust that they're not going to attempt to fix what is likely to be an extremely close election in November.

Diebold is...

completely inept.

This is good news.

Possible Ramifications?

I'm an Australian, so I'm not particularly sure what the 'status' of the election is/was, but could this mean the result may be overturned? This could lead to undesirable consequences such as new state/country level laws being made defucnt couldn't it? Please enlighten me if it was overturned, as this is the first that I've heard of them.

Re:Possible Ramifications?

No it wasn't. It's my understanding that Schwarzeneggar won by a large enough margin that the votes which were thrown out were irrelevant to the outcome. Similarly, if outstanding absentee votes are less than the margin of victory, they are discarded. The outrage is that the mistake *could have been important* and changed the outcome, not that it did, or was large enough to possibly have done that.

Kevin Shelley

If it's on paper, you'll have my vote next election.

Please let Maryland be next!

I can only hope that MD is next in line to dump Diebold. Don't get me wrong, I love technology, and I'd really like to see the voting system automated, but lets do it the right way. Now if I were a true geek, I'd have a link to the John's Hopkins study on the Diebold machines.

Re:Please let Maryland be next!

True Geek, right here.

In PDF [avirubin.com], and a Google HTML version [216.239.41.104]

Wow

Maybe things do work in this system.

I used one of these in March

I live in San Diego and was one of the guinea pigs in the last vote. Although there was no "start" button, the machines had all the hallmarks of Windows... the buttons and navigation system, the data entry fields, everything. The interface was basic, just a few colors, radio buttons, and text boxes (much like one of those demo machines with IE in full-screen mode). There was a card reader/writer on the side that you stuck your card into. They were actually quite large too, perhaps twice the size of a standard laptop and looked to be quite heavy.

The part that really scared me was that you just put your card in the machine and take it out when you're done. There is no physical change on the card itself to indicate that anything was written to it. It is one of those smart-card type things, not the magstripe kind. There should be, at a minimum, a changed color on the outside when data is written, and in a perfect world there would be some sort of e-ink or lcd on it that displayed your choices when you took it out.

Based on all this, how am I supposed to know that my vote was cast? Even if the data was written to the card and there was a vote cast, how am I to know that the data written to the card is the same data I entered? Why is there no paper receipt? I really hope these machines are premanently banned. They really do scare me.

Re:I used one of these in March

I used one as well.

I was in a hurry, as I was voting before heading off to work. After I finished voting, I was walking to the table to hand the card back when my cell phone vibrated. I walked outside with my phone to take the call, away from the other voters... with the card still in my hand.

Ok, so that would have just meant that ~I~ didn't get to vote... which would have been bad, but not the end of the world. That's not the interesting bit though! What I later heard was that there is only one card per voting machine. Had I not returned the card, that machine would have been out of order for the rest of that election. I can't confirm this to be true, but if it is, that's really scary!

I think any third rate magician wouldn't have a problem substituting a card of their choice for the community card in this system.

Actually, come to think of it, you could swap the card out in private right at the booth.

I wonder how long it would take for someone to come up with a pirate card for this (assuming tha the machines ever see the light of day again)? A read-only card that would cast the same set of votes over and over again...

Re:I used one of these in March

That's an interesting point, but the paper ballots are counted in public by public officials following rules created by your state legislature. For elections in Michigan, anybody who wants can observe the election procedure, and can complain if they think it's done poorly; I'd imagine you could do something similar to monitor a vote recount.

The difference here is that the electronic ballots are tallied in secret by secret software written by a private company, with no observation allowed.

For electronic voting to work, it's going to need to use completely open software, where many experts can verify that it will work properly. Since so many people have an interest in the system working perfectly, there will be lots of people reviewing the code, and I think that very few serious bugs would be there for long.

verifiedvoting.org [verifiedvoting.org] is advocating this same position. I'm not sure if they're actually writing software.

Re:I used one of these in March

Sigh.

Look, I love open source too, but it alone doesn't solve every problem. Are lots of people going to review the code running on every machine? The internal structure of the chips in every machine? The integrity of every bit of every communications link used to report votes?

Give me a paper trail. I'd like the code to be open, but really the machine can do whatever it wants if it fills one simple criteria:
Produce a hard copy of the vote that can be inspected directly by both the voter at the polls and by election officials after the fact.

Then we can double-check some random sampling after the fact, or everything if the sampling finds problems or the election is close.

Verifying the integrity of the system beforehand is fine and dandy. But no amount of it is ever going to be any substitute for verifying it's integrity AFTER the fact. If you can't independantly check up on the results and confirm the machine did what it was supposed to, I don't care how much checking you did ahead of time to ensure it would do what it was supposed to.

It makes me mad, because it's not like what I (and others) am asking for is in any way hard. Just augment the existing system instead of replacing it. Currently I use a stupid (purely mechanical) machine to mark a paper ballot that I drop in a box. If you want to replace that stupid machine with a more high-techy device that counts the votes as they are cast in addition to marking a paper ballot that I drop in a box, that would be awesome. If you want to eliminate the paper ballot I drop in a box, that's just obviously stupid. I don't see any reason someone would advocate eliminating the indepenantly verifiable record unless they have some interest in not being able to tell if the machine messed up. Whether that interest is based on their wanting to rig the election or on wanting to avoid exposing problems in order to sell more machines, I don't care.

bans for a while

The've banned it for the next elections, and only in certain counties....they're in the only counties that had the machines up and running, but that doesn't mean another county couldn't push for it that isn't on the list of banned.
Personally Diebold should have taken initiative and just attached a printer to the machines and used the printed ballots as proof-of-vote/voting-means. But it seems like they get the money and then they don't think to fix their problems...initially when this whole fiasco came up I was supportive of the whole electronic initiative because it made it SO much less confussing and set a standard for the entire state. But i guess they screwed that up.

Banned in FOUR counties only.

RTFAHeadline, at least.

Unfortunately, and I speak as a California resident, they are not being banned in all counties...yet.

RTFDecertification notice!

No, I'm afraid you are incorrect. I think you'll find the Diebold Accuvote-TSx is completely decertified throughout the State of California, with immediate effect.

http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/ks_dre_papers/dec er t.pdf

This only affects 4 counties, as the others use earlier models or other companies machines. but then the slashdot article didn't say "eVoting banned in CA" did it?

Helle-Fucking-Lujah!!!

That's all I have to say.

On behalf...

of all the intelligent and objective people on Slashdot, and in so many other forums, who saw all of these issues two years ago:

WE TOLD YOU SO!

Now... if you're ready to implement a reliable, trackable, scalable and secure electronic voting system, I think we're all still willing to help you. If you'll just listen this time.

Why did they get rid of Diebold machines?

I seriously don't get what the big idea is. Most people I've spoken to agree that the Diebold machines are almost as reliable as the system that the slashdot polls are run on, and we all know that slashdot polls are top-notch scientific polls!

Hallelujah!

As a US citizen and California resident who is decidedly non-denominational/agnostic (not to say atheist!) Praise the $deity!/$Universe/$fate.

Diebold (for non-US voters) was (is?)

1. Opposed to paper receipts on the basis of anonymity BS! BS squared! barcodes are paper that is anonymous! (no threat to voter but still required of vendor)
2. Using uncertified software for important elections! certified was for example 3.14.7 they use 3.14.9 in official elections in major counties (districts, prefectures, territories) such as Los Angeles, which account for 10+ odd percent of the population of California and lie on public record about it being certified (perjury!)!
3. Use M$ software for machines (windoz, access!)
4. Have NO default passwords (someone broke into their FTP server almost without trying!)
5. CEO (Ohio resident) is on record in PUBLIC media as saying "We WILL DELIVER!!! Ohio's electoral votes to George W. Bush in 2004!"

6. He (Bush) "won" the last one (2000) with a MINORITY of the vote, plus the influnce of his brother "jeb" and his cronies in Florida!

7. This presidential campaign, he has raised almost 200 hundred MILLION dollars (US) for his adverts, speeches, BRIBES (my words not his! he would never be this honest)

Welcome to 1984 (aka 2004), Pax Americana, headed by Bush dynasty. opposed by 49+% of Americans, but still "legal" so called!

So what did it?

Was it the head of Diebold's promise to deliver Bush the White House in 2004? Or was it the "If voting could change anything, it would be illegal" sig from one of the marketing execs? Or was it just the lack of security and encryption on the machines that did them in?

Either way, I'll be a Luddite and demand to use the old mechanical ballot machines with the levers and switches. My voice has always been heard with a "Kerchunk-- Ding!" and I don't see why that should change when the newer system is less reliable.

This battle has just begun!

Here's how this will play out:

Diebold will appeal this to the 9th circuit court, which will uphold the law... The supreme court will then overrule the 9th circuit, as usual, and also as usual allow the plaintiff free reign to not only disregard the new law but to throw out any common sense related to the law and set a precedent for wide open fleecing of the American voter. Don't believe me? Here's a couple of examples:

9th Circuit Rules in Favor of Medical Marijuana (overruled by SC)

9th Circuit Votes that Recall Election must be postponed (overruled by SC)

Well, you get the idea. They are the most overruled court in the land.

By the end of this case, the Supreme Court will have Diebold sitting on the board of the California Elections commission and charging voters $5 to vote. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but forgive my cynicism -- this isn't nearly over yet.

In other news...

electronic voting machines are being used successfully (ie. w/o any major incidence) in largest ever task undertaken in history... namely, general elections in largest democracy - India!

Oh and Brazilians have been successfully using electronic voting for a decade, and India has been using them on and off for half a decade.

You know, sometime over-engineering sucks.

Re:In other news...

Oh and Brazilians have been successfully using electronic voting for a decade, and India has been using them on and off for half a decade.

The real problem isn't the reliability of the machines. Electronic voting has existed in the Netherlands for decades, using fully proprietary hardware and software. The voting machines [nedapspecials.com] are very reliable and easy to use. These are the machines Ireland would have used for their electronic elections. The state of NY is interested as well.

Quess what, I'm still against electronic voting of this sort. The machine doesn't produce a paper trail, and there is now way to find out, ever, if fraud has taken place by the machine's supplier or operators. The fact that a paper ballot system is unwieldy ,slow, and requiries many people for collecting and counting, is a fact that works in the system's favour! It means that anyone trying to commit fraud on a large scale, will have to face a similarly unwieldy task, and he will have to get past all of these people as well.

Re:In other news...

We use papertrail-less electronic voting in Belgium too, and there was an incident where a spontaneous bitflip in the counting machine's memory caused a miscount of 8192 votes. It was blamed on cosmic radiation. And no, I'm not kidding.

Still, the vote gets recorded to a separate magnetic card for each voter, so it is possible to retally, even though you have to take the voting machine's word for it that your vote was recorded correctly.

The Real Reason

The reason for this ban was not so much the mechanical failures, but the way in which Diebold went about doing business with the State of California. The San Jose Mercury News has this article [newsbank.com] (Reg. Req.'d), as well as this suggestive but somewhat spartan article here [mercurynews.com] (no req req.d).

I'm not registered, but per the second article:

Shelley also told reporters at a press conference in Sacramento that he urged the state Attorney General to pursue criminal and civil charges against Diebold for installing voting machines that had not been certified by the state and then misleading government officials.

In fact, I recall reading the first article in the San Jose Mercury News when it was printed, and evidently the machines Diebold installed were a second-generation set. Their first-gen. machines had been approved a while ago, and so they evidently tried to cut corners, assuming the second-gen. ones would certify as well, and went ahead and installed the machines before they were certified.

On the other hand, I think it's interesting to wonder whether or not they really would've certified. Is it possible that the circumstances that led to the failure of these second generation machines may've also lead to the failure of the first generation machines, as well? I suspect the CA Gov't officials are dodging a bullet here, since Diebold seems to come out as the only fall-guys here (and rightfully so, as far as they're concerned).

I defer to anyone who has read more about this than I, which isn't much to begin with.

From an Election Geek

I am fulltime techie for a California election office, and one who fully supports the measures taken today. I attended all three days of hearings the last couple of weeks, felt like i had fallen into watergate.

There were many conspiracy nuts there, however as one who is closer to the situation I can tell you that it is a lot simpler than that. It is a story that most people in the high tech industry have seen played out many times.

Diebold bought a company a couple of years ago that was on the verge of bankruptcy. This company (Global election Systems) was a typical high tech startup, they spent a tiny bit on engineering a product, a little more on making it LOOK good, a little more on sneaking it past certification, a little on marketing it to election officials, and a LOT on trying to sell investors. And then the Vancouver stock market scandal hit. And took some of the founders to jail.

Diebold released that the product stank, but also that the timeline for getting a better product certified would cost them big in the marketplace.
So they shuffled the unfinished, untested, uncertified, glamourous new product with the kludgy, limited, but certified old product. Always answering a question by referring to the product that would give the best answer. It was an elaborate shell game of trying to misdirect the responsible agencies until they could finish the new product. And in an old high tech story, product delays left them high and dry, with all of their marketing lies exposed. The engineers just could not keep up with the marketing peoples card tricks.

They will almost certainly be prosecuted, and almost certainly will be out tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in California alone, just in false claim lawsuits.

All of this was almost a given on March 2nd, when their untested tech crashed and burned on them.

The bigger news is that it looks like most of the other Counties that used an Electronic Voting System in March will opt to NOT use one in November, as the requirements to use the DRE voting systems are so onerous as to be impossible in this day of tight budgets and tight deadlines.

For a very good, balanced, view of this from the election officials point of view look at:

http://www.electionline.org/site/docs/pdf/EB7_ne w. pdf

Re:From an Election Geek

I agree that the "grand conspiracy" theory that Diebold is actively trying to sweep Republicans into power is a bit much...

However, Diebold played right into those people's hands with what they did, running an uncertified product which skipped all of the checking processes that were in place to make sure that nobody is attempt to cheat the system. The first set of canaries in this mine are dead... we shouldn't allow this operation to go any further because once they go arround the certification process, there isn't really much more needed to taint the vote counts and get away with it.

Good.

What do you know? The system works.
Dodgy company does dodgy things. This goes unnoticed at first but eventually enough people take notice and the powers that be move to make amends.

I'm always amused by the hysterical ranting of, slashbots. Take this example...
Headline: "Corrupt politician introduces bill that gives excessive power to corporation X"
Slashbot response: "It's the end of democracy as we know it!"
Reality: The bill hasn't even been debated and has zero chance of passing.

Basically, there always have and always will be people who try to subvert the system. Eventually, they get noticed and changes are made to stop them from doing it. This, my friends is the endless cycle of human existance.

I know that Slashdot is a media outlet and likes a beatup, but do try to chill out a bit more; we're supposed to be more intelligent than tabloid readers.

It's okay: people like them!

Diebold has been a frequent target of such groups, though most California county election officials say problems have been overstated and that voters like the touch screen systems first installed four years ago.

That's what they say, the problems are overstated because voters like the machines? Hell, I like a lot of things that are easy to use, but that doesn't mean they're good for me! Think about these:

* beer
* cola
* sweets
* credit card
* slot machine
* M$ software

Good vs. Bad

Good for democracy
Bad for Diebolds Business

Which one do you prefer?

An overlooked alternative?

Remember those achievment tests in school?

You get a number two pencil and blacken in the dots for your choice ( no hanging chads)?

Why not use those? You would get the best of both worlds: electronic voting...and an easily verifiable paper trail.

Listening to the radio last night ( Air America ) some congressman introduced a bill offering a similar ( but not the same ) alternative in a bill.

( about time ).

He said out of 400 members, 140 jumped on the bill with him to cosponsor it.

Guys, Gals, if you care about your vote and your country now is the time to write your US Representatives to get them off their ass:

http://www.congress.com/

PAPER?

Well I get a Paper Receipt for my $0.99 Slurpie
at 7-11,
why can't I get a Paper Receipt when I am voting
for THE LEADER OF THE USA ?!?!

Is that Too gosh darn much to ask for in a Democracy?

The New Method

That California will use to determine its politicians works thusly:

1) Each voter is provided a special "voting bean" which resembles a football.

2) On election day, said "voting bean" is inserted into the anus of a politician.

3) The last politician to be filled with "voting beans" wins the election.

Elegant in its simplicity, really.

Bubble sheet scanner and LED printer

The optical scan aka "bubble sheet" ballot method works very well in many states but suffers from one major problem: flexibility. My idea is to redesign the currently used optical scanner container to contain a LED printer that would print each "bubble sheet" ballot as they are needed. On the printer there would be a few fixed buttons that would allow poll workers to print ballots in different languages, large print, disability access (except braille of course), etc. Each ballot would have the standard unique number and possibly an additional bar code for ballot tracking. The ballot template would be stored as a PostScript file and checksummed by the printer to insure against changes. These ps files would be tossed on a cf card and sent to towns. The printer and scanner would not have any kind of data connection.

The important part is that voters would vote on machine readable paper ballots that could be electronically counted and easily audited at any time. If the ballot template had been tampered with the audit will find it.

This seems to give voters a more flexible voting system than currently used, a much lower cost per seat than the currently proposed e-voting systems, simple for poll workers to setup, use and breakdown and a rock solid audit trail.

I predict...

... that Diebold will now attempt to sue the state of California for one reason or another.

So glad the March elections went well.

Diebold officials, ... maintained its machines are safe, secure and demonstrated 100 percent accuracy in the March election.

Firstly, bullshit. Nothing's 100% accurate. Secondly, I don't care about one single election that happened to work. I want a process that is proven and well tested, independently, in stressed situations. Because March-in-Cali may've worked, but Jan-in-Maryland was a complete disaster ("I was really surprised with the totality of the problems we found. Just about everywhere we looked we found them,"

"We could have done anything we wanted to," Arbaugh said. "We could change the ballots (before the election) or change the votes during the election."

They also were able to perform a man-in-the-middle attack, which involves intercepting votes being sent by modem to the server, changing the votes and sending on the new votes to the server.

(More on the Maryland disaster at Wired [wired.com]. Amusingly enough, Diebold claimed that this validated their machines as capable to handle further elections.

GEMS runs on Windows 2000

It's very interesting to see that the Diebold debacle pinpointed the lack of security and reliability of a machine that is primarily a Windows 2000 embedded system.

The Wired article shows that many of the system's vulnerability were due not to the GEMS software itself, but to the W2k operating system.

So from now on, if anyone insists on choosing MS over other solutions for mission-critical system, and says "nobody ever got fired for choosing MS", we can point them to the Diebold debacle. Not only were they fired, they got it rubbed in and on national headlines!

may not be so good

it seems that they are possibly against all electonic voting machines, not just closed-source ones. It would be cool if they would approve an open system running on an open os, such as OVC [openvotingconsortium.org]'s machine.

Solve the "senior citizen vote" problem

Every senior citizen that I know is capable of playing 12 Bingo cards at once. Here's how we solve the issue once and for all - give them a ballot that looks like a Bingo card and a big Bingo blotter.
Problem solved!

Wank wank wank

Let me see. It's another Diebold story, so we're going to have n posts about how pen-and-paper votes are much better, m posts about how different methods of vote-counting are better, ad nauseam.

Seriously, people. Give it a rest.

About damn time

this state got some common sense.

I live in california, and I'm glad to see this over all the stupid changes and moves this state has done over the past few decades.

Diebold machines are terrifying

Ever used a Diebold ATM machine?

*BEEP* *BEEP* *BEEP* *BEEP* *BEEP*

i.e. Take your fucking cash, now!!!

*BEEP* *BEEP* *BEEP* *BEEP* *BEEP*

i.e. Take your fucking card out of me, now, BITCH!!!

*BEEP* *BEEP* *BEEP* *BEEP* *BEEP* *BEEP*

Thank you for banking with AmSouth. Have a nice day.

WTF!

Why are these guys still allowed to stay in business?!

Worm and viruses

Have they ever considered how worms and viruses and other malware could turn electronic voting into a disaster?

Got to love it

They talk about the greatest nation on earth, civilization, and defending the democracy, but don't know how to vote?