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United States Government Politics Your Rights Online

Florida Electronic Voting Machines Crash 59

Posted by michael from the blue-screen-of-election-disaster dept.
crash24601 writes "For a dose of one of our favorite topics, abcnews.com is carrying the story of a tabulation machine for electronic voting crashing during testing. Naturally, this happened in Florida. They are also carrying the article Is E-Voting Fundamentally Flawed? Though mostly a lightweight rehash of issues brought up before, it is good to see it published from a mainstream source."
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Florida Electronic Voting Machines Crash More

Florida Electronic Voting Machines Crash

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  • Called on account of rain... (Score:5, Funny)

    by lynx_user_abroad ( 323975 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @10:26AM (#10524556) Homepage Journal
    From the article:

    She said she suspected Hurricane Jeanne, which struck in September, may have zapped electricity and air conditioning to the room where the server was stored, causing temperatures to soar to 90 degrees or more and possibly causing the crash. The storm wiped out power to nearly 1.3 million homes and businesses throughout Florida.

    So, this election may be postponed on account of rain?

  • Well... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Edax Rarem ( 187218 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @10:26AM (#10524563) Homepage Journal
    ...According to Rumsfeld, four fifths of a country voting is ok.
    Isn't that enough?

    "He said an election could perhaps be held in "three-quarters or four-fifths of the country. But in some places you couldn't because the violence was too great"."

  • Well... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jesrad ( 716567 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @10:28AM (#10524582) Journal
    Mr Feces, meet Mr Fan. Fan, this is Feces.

  • its funny (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 14, 2004 @10:30AM (#10524598)

    that Americans think that by pressing a button on a machine (that they have no idea of how it works) is democracy, digital makes the potential for corruption so easy its just too tempting an opportunity to let go

    paper voting is still used all over the world because it is the EASIEST and SAFEST
    sure it might take a week to count the votes by hand but are you in a rush ?
    its far harder to lose 2 tons of paper ballots than press a secret key combo on a computer and poof all those votes have gone without trace or record

    but hey you carry on, its a great show watching what was a free and democratic society turn into a totalitarian corrupt theocracy, perhaps when the riots start you might ask where you went wrong

    • Paper doesn't scale well. There is a big difference between an election where you vote for a party and an American election with dozens and dozens of things to vote for.

      • Re:its funny (Score:4, Insightful)

        by roystgnr ( 4015 ) <roy@stogn[ ].org ['ers' in gap]> on Thursday October 14, 2004 @11:28AM (#10525512) Homepage
        Paper doesn't scale well.

        Paper scales great since the invention of the optical scanner. Nobody's objecting to the use of electronic assistance in the voting process, we just think that the record of votes needs to be relatively tamperproof paper rather than invisibly alterable RAM.

        Take any existing e-voting system, have it print out a paper ballot with the voter's selections, and let those ballots be the final judge of what the vote tally is, and you'll satisfy 90% of people's complaints. Make sure every precinct has enough extra voting machines, printers, paper and ink to handle breakdowns, and you'll satisfy another 9% of the complainers.

      • Re:its funny (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Sylver Dragon ( 445237 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @11:30AM (#10525546) Journal
        Why not? you just need more people to count, as the population gets bigger the pool of people to get voluteers from gets larger proportionally. Plus, there is no reason that we have to have the results in the next morning. Most measures don't go into effect until the beginning of the next year (calander of fiscal, depending), elected seats don't change until the next calander year; basically, we have a couple of months to sort things out, if one is used counting votes, who cares? At the very least paper ballots leave a readily verifiable audit trail, and they also tend to leave evidence in the event of tampering.
        Paper scales just fine, but the US is just too caught up in the idea that electronic voting will magically fix all of the issues we had in 2000. It won't it will simply change them. Besides which, I tend to think that a punch card ballot is a good intellegence test for voting, if you're too stupid to figure out how to punch a card correctly, and you are too lazy to learn, I don't want you to be deciding the direction of this country's leadership.

    • Re:its funny (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Astro-pilot ( 765980 )
      The reason paper ballots are still used in most democratic countries is that the technology there has not advanced sufficiently, not because it is the easiest and the safest. The exception that proves the rule is that India recently completed its general elections which resulted in a transfer of power. India used a fully electronic voting system, [indiatimes.com]- no paper ballots for a voting population of over 1 billion people. Not even the United States has dared to attempt this. Not only that, the e-voting system used i

      • Re:its funny (Score:3, Interesting)

        by epsalon ( 518482 ) *
        In Israel, which is as technonogically advanced as can be, general elections are always done on paper: Select your party, put the party's name into an envelope, seal the envelope, put it in the box.

        Noone has even considered using electronic voting here for the general elections. It just seems so... wrong.
        • In the US, you don't vote for a party. You vote for a candidate. For lots of offices. And for lots of propositions.
          My sample ballot for the upcoming election has (I think) about 43 different things to vote on.
          • Mostly true. The exception being the presidential race. In which case we are voting for which set of electors will cast votes for president.
    • its far harder to lose 2 tons of paper ballots than press a secret key combo on a computer and poof all those votes have gone without trace or record

      Obviously you've never seen a professional document shredding truck. They're all the rage here in the States as of late. Which may just be another point in your favor....
    • It's funny you say things and don't back them up at all... "paper voting is still used all over the world because it is the EASIEST and SAFEST" Hrm... Do you really think that counting votes by hand is easier than having a machine tally them up rapidly? Also, if it were an open source software used to record and tally votes (as someone earlier in this thread suggested), than we would not need to worry about people pressing "a secret key combo on a computer" and "poof" all those votes going without trace

  • Hurricane? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RealProgrammer ( 723725 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @10:31AM (#10524613) Homepage Journal

    Not to be insensitive to natural disasters, but:

    She said she suspected Hurricane Jeanne, which struck in September, may have zapped electricity and air conditioning to the room where the server was stored, causing temperatures to soar to 90 degrees or more and possibly causing the crash.

    Why do I get the feeling that everything that's gone wrong in the state of Florida for the last two months was ultimately caused by bad weather?

    A computer "stored" in a hot room shouldn't be damaged. These must really be delicate devices.

  • The voting machine didn't crash! (Score:5, Informative)

    by PatHMV ( 701344 ) <post@patrickmartin.com> on Thursday October 14, 2004 @10:32AM (#10524623) Homepage
    It was the machine which tabulates the votes that crashed. The actual were still safely recorded, untouched, on the counter keys (basically removable memory units) from the voting machines themselves.
    • One poorly trained operator or one inopportune crash could invalidate an entire state's election. Again.

      This scares me.
    • And when one of those irretrievably fails, what will they do? (and are they auditable, or just monolithic counters?) Would be followed by something like this, maybe?

      "Um, hi, um, I'm Mr. Smith, Assistant Secretary of State. I'm sorry it's so late, um well early, but I've called this press conference to announce the Secretary's resignation, effective immediately.

      The Secretary, er, former secretary, that is, would like to make it perfectly clear that her resignation has absolutely nothing to do with the f

  • How hard is it? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by panda ( 10044 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @10:34AM (#10524656) Homepage Journal
    As someone who writes software for a living, I have to ask just how hard is it to count votes?

    What kind of monster math could these things be doing that could cause a machine to crash?

    Could bush.voteCount++ have caused an overflow as the the algorithm ratcheted the count over 4 billion?

    I mean, c'mon. This has to be the simplest programming task in the world: increment a variable every time someone votes for a given candidate on a ballot. The only part of this that seems remotely hard would be the handwriting recognition on write-ins.

    Security and verifiability? No problem. Simply log every transaction as it happens and print a receipt that can be checked by hand if necessary. Additionally, make the source open and public. Let people see what the program does.

    Frankly, I believe this is what you get from companies like Diebold or other large vendors doing this. They have an interest in making this stuff more complicated than it needs to be in order to make more money.
    • I wholeheartedly agree. That's the question I ask myself every time I hear these stories.

      My bigger question, though, is how the crap can someone who makes these decisions actually decide to go with a vendor that makes this process so complicated? You don't hire a forklift operator to pick up the paper on your desk... I mean, does the term 'overkill' still exist?
    • You'd be surprised at how complicated the code is.
      See below:

      if (vote == kerry) bush++
      else if (vote == bush) bush++
      else if (voter == dead) bush++

  • Open Source it! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hoggoth ( 414195 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @10:43AM (#10524818) Journal
    This is a perfect example of a urgently needed technology that an Open Source solution would be great for.

    <wild-accusations>Electronic voting will *NEVER* work right as long as it is being done by companies like Diebold that are on one party or another's secret payroll.</wild-accusations>

    An open source solution would accomplish a few things:

    1) Provide a verifiably secure solution to electronic voting that would be resistant to tampering. I don't think I am exaggerating when I say the possibility of tampering with elections could degrade freedom in this country.

    2) Give Open Source's strengths the kind of publicity that reaches far beyond the current Microsoft/Linux squabbles. The majority of the public and news media has no idea what Open Source is about; But if Bill O'Reilly, John Stewart, GW Bush, and John Kerry are talking about it you can bet that tremendous numbers of people will be introduced to the ideas.

    3) Give some impressive visibility to the developers on the project. Visibility usually leads to marketability, jobs, projects, etc.

    Of course, visibility won't be great when the Diebold hitmen show up...

    Australia has some well made electronic voting running on Linux which can serve as a proof-of-concept for us Americans.

    So who's game?!

    • Replying to myself, here are some links relating to open source voting technology:

      Project to provide open source voting to California [open-vote.org]

      Australian elections done right with open source voting software [softimp.com.au]

    • This is a perfect example of a urgently needed technology that an Open Source solution would be great for.

      It's too bad that's impossible. Your customers can trust open source software, because they can compile and install the software themselves. Voters can't do that, so the best a company can do is publish some source code and make promises that the exact same program will be the only thing running on the voting machines. Since such promises are difficult to verify (see the Diebold machines that got u

      • Since such promises are difficult to verify (see the Diebold machines that got updated with uncertified software for example), you can never be sure that the voting software you're told is open source really is.

        I'm not so sure it's impossible. It seems like you could use some public-key approach to verifying that the software you are voting on matches the official build.

        I'm a little fuzzy on the ins-and-outs of public key crypto, but it seems like there should be some way of verifying that the softwa

        • I'm not so sure it's impossible. It seems like you could use some public-key approach to verifying that the software you are voting on matches the official build.

          I'm a little fuzzy on the ins-and-outs of public key crypto, but it seems like there should be some way of verifying that the software is signed by a key, and that the key matches the offical key.

          You can use a digital signature system to verify that the voting machine software has access to the official build, but not that the voting machine sof
        • > I'm not so sure it's impossible. It seems like you could use some public-key approach to verifying that the software you are voting on matches the official build.

          I think what the parent poster is arguing is that some nefarious party could install an election box running their own software, perhaps incorporating parts of the open source software, that appears identical in every visible way to the true open source software, including any checksums and verifications forged from the true open source softw
  • What a crap title for an article. They've just equated "Diebold" with "e-voting" just for the scare-mongering. It gets worse.

    The researchers also questioned the use of C++ for the original code, calling it an "unsafe language." Microsoft Windows is largely written in C++, and most UNIX systems are written in a combo of C and C++. It's not impossible to write good code in C++, but it's much harder than using modern code. "Modern code has features to help prevent you from making the most common mistakes," contended Wallach.

    Modern code does what? Write the E-voting machines in assembly and make them run on the simplest RISC processor out there. Unless you plan on using the voting machines as public solitaire terminals during the off season there's no reason any complex OS or programming language should be involved in voting. The voting booth devices just need to add. The tabulation machine... adds some more. If you want pretty graphics make the system about as big and scary as an Amiga and leave it be.

    • And now time for... (Score:3, Informative)

      by ImaLamer ( 260199 )
      ...my obligatory Diebold link [mintruth.com].

      St. Arbirix wrote:

      Write the E-voting machines in assembly and make them run on the simplest RISC processor out there. Unless you plan on using the voting machines as public solitaire terminals during the off season there's no reason any complex OS or programming language should be involved in voting.

      If Diebold can't even keep their money machines running how can I trust their voting machines? Man, you've got to be able to keep your "stack" (or "grip" if you prefer) in chec

  • The people don't want these machines. We're not against electronic voting machines per se, we're just not convinced this current batch is properly designed to facilitate and protect our democracy.

    Regardless of who "wins" (think about it, why is it even reasonable that I can put that word in quotes?) the election, with the roll out of these machines, it's the people who lose.

  • It's ridiculous how unprofessional those elections are handled.

    Once I thought the US were a mature democracy. That belief is gone now. I don't want to imagine the world in 10 years.

    *shakes head*
  • Yet another story about diebold! How many stories will it take until states take action to ensure accurate voting -- by DUMPING diebold.

    We thought if we threw tons of money at technology, it would solve the previous voting fiascos. At this point, another one seems imminent.

  • Voters in less populated areas will still be able to vote using paper ballots. -wink wink-

    There have been reports in several places of campaigners trying to register as many people as possible to vote, then tearing up and throwing away the non-republican registrations at the end of the day.

    Google news on "voter registration trash" [google.com]

    Add to that, smaller, mostly republican states have up to 3 times the representation per population in the electoral college as larger, mostly democrat states. And greater per

    • Re:Thankfully (Score:3, Informative)

      by ImaLamer ( 260199 )
      There have been reports in several places of campaigners trying to register as many people as possible to vote, then tearing up and throwing away the non-republican registrations at the end of the day.

      It may seem funny but it happens. Where I go to school there was a voter registration desk for one night. That night they took a measley 74 registrations out of say 1000 students.

      I only wanted to change my address as I've moved into city limits and wanted to vote in the city council race (for once). Low and

  • Wrong problem? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by natoochtoniket ( 763630 )
    Rather than arguing endlessly about which is the best machinery for elections, perhaps it would be better to address the real problem. The real issue is: how to be certain that the votes are cast freely and counted accurately.

    Suppose we were to place the burden of proof on the election supervisor to prove that the votes are counted honestly and accurately. If the election supervisor fails to prove this (in court, with adversaries, experts and a jury) then the election supervisor is executed for treason.

    • We will also have very few people volunteering to be an election supervisor.
    • Rather than arguing endlessly about which is the best machinery for elections, perhaps it would be better to address the real problem.

      To the extent that Florida's 2000 Presidential election has spurred the implementation of electronic voting machines, the real problem is not whether vothes are cast freely, or reall whether or not votes are cast accurately. The real problem is that the margin of victory in Flordia was so small that the election was essentially a tie.

      No matter what voting system is us
  • And slashdot isn't considered mainstream yet? Gee, what happens when a website gets posted? Oh, I know, it tends to heavily lag the website for a few hours until it's off the top half of the front page.

  • Obligatory Joke (Score:3, Funny)

    by Ann Elk ( 668880 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @01:40PM (#10527205)

    Q: What will happen in the Presidential Election if another hurricane strikes Florida sometime around November 2?

    A: Nothing; the Supreme Court is in Washington, D.C.

  • 90' too much heat? I lived in Baton Rouge without AC when it was hot and humid in the 90+' and an AMD server cooking in the corner of my room but it never warranted a crash... What kinda server are they using? And what OS? and what was the application written in?
  • Best voting scheme I've encountered for the AVERAGE voter is the mark-sense/bubble-in ballot.

    Correctly marked ballots can be counted very quickly, leading to very fast early returns. Incorrectly-marked ballots can be returned to the voter for correction. If a voter insists he's correct, he can put the ballot in a "count by hand" box and be done with it.

    It's also cheap. You only need 1 machine at each polling location. If you want, you can even do centralized counting, but you lose the "bad ballot, try
  • mod me down for growsing but when I submitted an earlier Yahoo/AP story [yahoo.com] and the more informative article in Tech Review [technologyreview.com] to /. it wasn't my turn I guess.
    And yes, the "subject" is my answer to all this e-voting crap.
  • The same thing happened during the Riverside County (Calif) L&A testing: the Sequoia software that does the central tally blew up.

    I don't know if the central "server" hardware is provided by Sequoia or not, but the central Windows vote-tally application that runs on it sure as hell does. In the eyewitness reports I've read from Riverside, it was the app that crashed four times but Windows itself didn't blow up...so the county claimed it "didn't crash".

    Horsecrap.

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