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Diebold Sues Massachusetts for "Wrongful Purchase"
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Mar 26, 2007 12:51 PM
from the better-lawyers-instead-of-better-products dept.
from the better-lawyers-instead-of-better-products dept.
elBart0 writes "Diebold has decided to sue the commonwealth of Massachusetts for choosing a competitor to provide voting machines for the disabled. Diebold wants to force the state to stop using the machines immediately, despite the upcoming municipal elections in many towns. The commonwealth chose the competitor based on an open process that included disabled groups. Diebold executives appeared confused when encountering election officials who made an intelligent choice."
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Politics: CA Proposes Rigorous Voting Machine Testing 172 comments
christian.einfeldt writes "During her successful campaign for California Secretary of State, newly-minted California Elections Czar Debra Bowen spoke repeatedly of the need to use free open source software in voting machines to ensure the integrity of California's elections. Now that Secretary Bowen is acting on that campaign pledge, closed-source voting machine vendor Diebold worries aloud that rejecting its black-box voting machines could snarl California's elections. Diebold's concerns come at the same time that it is suing Massachusetts for declining to purchase those same voting machines." Quoting: "California's elections chief is proposing the toughest standards for voting systems in the country, so tough that they could [have the result of banishing] ATM-like touch-screen voting machines from the state. For the first time, California is demanding the right to try hacking every voting machine with 'red teams' of computer experts and to study the software inside the machines, line-by-line, for security holes."
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News: Diebold Goes 0 For 3 In Massachusetts Case 119 comments
beetle496 writes "ComputerWorld reports that last week a judge denied Diebold's request to block ES&S pact with Massachusetts. This is a follow-up to the earlier discussion here after Diebold contended that the state had erred in selecting the machines of its rival, citing accessibility provisions of the HAVA law. Quoting: 'Diebold's request for an injunction to block the execution of the contract with ES&S was rejected... The judge also denied Diebold's request to have an accelerated discovery process and to keep the state's legal team from viewing internal Diebold documents... "The suit is still there, but they went zero for three yesterday," the spokesman said.' The actual accessibility concerns have been discussed over at the TEITAC listserv, including a few telling observations from experts familiar with accessible voting and at least one state insider."
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Politics: Ohio Audit Reveals More Diebold Problems 222 comments
armb writes with a link to a Wired Blog entry about irregularities found in Diebold databases from the state of Ohio. The election in question here is November 2006, and the corruption of the entries may raise doubts about accurate tabulations. "Vote totals in two separate databases that should have been identical had different totals. Although Diebold explained that this was part of the system design for separate vote tables to get updated at different times during the tabulation process, the team questioned the wisdom of a design that creates non-identical vote totals. Tables in the database contained elements that were missing date and time stamps that would indicate when information was entered. Entries that did have date/time stamps showed a January 1, 1970 date. The database is built from Microsoft's Jet database engine. The engine, according to Microsoft, is vulnerable to corruption when a lot of concurrent activity is happening with the database, such as what occurs on an election night when results are uploaded and various servers are interacting with the database simultaneously."
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Good move! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good move! (Score:5, Funny)
Next up: Diebold sues the voters but allows quick settlements of $3000 each.
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Re:Good move! (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, it worked great for SCO! Oh, wait...
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Re:Good move! (Score:5, Funny)
If I was purchasing voting machines for another state I would add: "doesn't sue potential customers when it loses a bid" to my list of qualifications. That would clearly put Diebold out of the running.
Every once in a while you read about executives from a company that are so ridiculously inept that it is funny. Diebold certainly fits that description.
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Biased Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Biased Summary (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Biased Summary (Score:5, Funny)
I think that says it all
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Re:Biased Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
In all honesty though, a bit of editorialising is warranted here. What if Coke sued you because you bought a Pepsi? What if AMD sued you because you bought an Intel chip?
Diebold's premise is moronic and it invites speculation as to how closely related the parents of their board members are, and which particular brand of crack their counsel are smoking.
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Re:Biased Summary (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not quite the right analogy. It's more like if you were deciding between Coke and Pepsi, and told both companies that you'd be selecting on the basis of taste. Suppose now that Pepsi's research shows that people strongly prefer Pepsi over Coke -- but you choose Coke anyway. That's sort of what's going on here.
That said, as I noted in my other post, I don't understand where the actual legal issue is in all this.
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Re:Biased Summary (Score:5, Funny)
I can only imagine it went something like this:
Diebold exec: ... so we want to sue them because they went with our competitors, and, uhm, that's not fair. Because we always win. And, like, why should someone else get to win? It's not fair.
... ... ... we'll get right on it.
Diebold lawyer: *stifling laughter* That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
Diebold exec: We're paying you how much?
Diebold lawyer:
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Try buying heating oil in CT... (Score:5, Interesting)
Step 2: Call them and ask the price of oil next time you need some.
Step 3: Get a load of oil from Oil Company B, who happens to have a better prioce that week.
Step 4: Get your credit account cancelled by Oil Company A because they know how often you should need oil and you didn't order form them.
No, it's not a lawsuit, but they're denying you credit for simply buying from their competition.
This is all perfectly legal in the State of Connecticut. It's like driving by a Mobil station to get cheaper gas at Shell, then Mobil cuts up your Mobil card.
Business today seems to run on the notion that if it's not specifically prohibited, we should try and do it, no matter how bad it looks. I get better ethics and learning curves from my third graders.
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Re:Biased Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
What if some large entity produced a long list of selection criteria and then asked suppliers to submit bids and supporting documentation, no doubt costing real man hours of the companies submitting bids? At that point, the large entity chose one supplier without any feedback to either the chosen supplier or those suppliers not chosen.
That's more what's going on here. I doubt Diebold has any reasonable expectation that the purchasing decision will be overturned. What they really want is access to the state's documents explaining why the state chose their competitor so they can address their weaknesses before they're asked for bids on other contracts. Given the effort that goes into the bidding process for these kinds of Government contracts, what they're asking for isn't all that unreasonable. But thanks to the screwiness of the US legal system, they can't just ask for something reasonable and expect to get it. They must ask for something entirely unreasonable and then demand the reasonable request as a means of supporting the unreasonable request. My guess is that Diebold's discovery motion will either be granted or denied at which point the suit will be dropped.
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Re:Biased Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
First, there is no such thing as objective reporting. Everything is biased. Period.
Second, Slashdot is not about journalism. It's the offspring of a news aggregator (why the hell is "aggregator" not in the Firefox 2 US English dictionary?) and a forum. Slashdot doesn't report the news, Slashdot reports that someone else has reported the news.
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Re:Biased Summary (Score:5, Funny)
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Insane. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm speechless.
The problem with the Diebold machines (Score:5, Funny)
It's about time. (Score:5, Funny)
Clearly the best product for any situation is the one that the biggest company is pushing. It's not like companies get to be big in the first place by overcharging for their products and using the courts to keep competition down.
Correct me if I'm wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Words fail.
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Catch 22 (Score:5, Funny)
It's easy to see how things got mixed up from there...
Reasons? We don't need no stinking reasons. (Score:5, Informative)
There isn't one. To save others the trouble, here's the closest thing to a reason they give:
I'm a little surprised they think they can sue just based on a gut feeling and expect to get away with it, but then again, it is Diebold. They seem to get away with just about anything.
Seems reasonable to me (Score:5, Interesting)
Wrong actor, right technique. Based on security issues alone, we know Diebold is always the wrong choice. Just by a knee jerk methodology, we could keep the machines out of people's hands for another few months each time. It would generate some press, if nothing else.
LBJ wanted his opponent accused of having sex with barnyard animals. It wasn't that he thought the charge would stick -- he wanted people to hear the candidate deny it. In this case, the response will be "well, your software is a joke -- completely insecure." We'll get to hear Diebold deny the charge. Any suit brought to force reopening analysis before purchase of Diebold's stuff would mean that, once again, they'd have to say "No, our software isn't laughably insecure. No the fact the our code showed up on the Internet isn't a problem. No, our keys are not from a hotel minibar and orderable over the Internet, and no, they're not all the same. No, we didn't miscount this race in this way or that race in that way." If they deny it enough, everyone will know that it's true. Oddly, though, in this case it actually WILL be true.
So I think we should also allege that they have sex with barnyard animals.
Re:Makes sense (no, really!) (Score:5, Informative)
If it were as you say, it would almost make sense.
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Re:Makes sense (no, really!) (Score:5, Insightful)
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The basis for their suit is... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would imagine the rational goes something like this:
"The secretary of state's office set their requirments for a voting machine contract, and invited bids. We have looked at the bid they accepted, and looked at ours. We believe our bid meets the criteria far more closely than the bid that was accepted, and we think any objective observer would agree. We don't think anything improper went on, but we do believe that the state has not selected a vendor in line with the rules they laid out. There for, the process has not treated us fairly"
In a nutshell, they're saying the state did not fairly apply their own rules. If they had, Diebold believe they would have won.
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