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Diebold's Election Data Off-limits
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Jan 24, 2006 03:37 PM
from the who-needs-checks-and-balances dept.
from the who-needs-checks-and-balances dept.
tommcb writes "The State of Alaska Division of Elections has denied a request by the Alaska Democratic Party for the raw file format used to tabulate voting results by citing that the data is in a proprietary format that is owned by Diebold. The ADP says 'The official vote results from the last general election are riddled with discrepancies and impossible for the public to make sense of'. The article contains some good quotes from Jim March of Black Box Voting: 'Copies of these kinds of files have been sitting on the Internet for over two years, with Diebold's knowledge.'"
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News: Diebold Threatens Wary Voting Clerk 632 comments
An anonymous reader writes "From the Salt Lake Tribune: a wary county clerk called in BlackBoxVoting.org to test the integrity of Diebold voting fraud machines, part of a recent $27 million statewide purchase (to make sure that only the "Right" candidates win). Diebold goon says machines are now jinxed and it may cost up to $40,000 to fly in a company witch-doctor to make sure there were no warranty violations. Since EVERY SINGLE VOTER who uses these machines is a potential hacker looking to alter election results, why is Diebold so concerned? "
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What is so proprietary (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What is so proprietary (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Which is why (Score:4, Interesting)
There were repeated requests for basic information, but the King Co. elections department (run by D's) either didn't provide the information or covered it up or even openly lied about it, all this while an important trial is being held to uncover who was really elected. Based on admissions by the elections department, they manufactured votes and counted votes that should not have been counted.
What's even sadder is the Sec. of State (an R) promised to clean up the rolls with a statewide database, and promised that database to be online Jan 1. Except even now, nobody seems able to obtain a copy of that database, and the Sec. of State says it won't come out until February. We'll see if it really does.
For more information, go read the research Stefan Sharkansky has been doing at http://soundpolitics.com./ [soundpolitics.com.] It'll give you great insight into how elections departments should act versus how they do act.
I'm an R, but I don't tolerate this kind of crap, not in Alaska, not here in Washington, and not anywhere. We must have a publically accountable voting system, or we'll have people who say the only way to affect change in government is through violence. I don't want another civil war, particularly if it could've been prevented by people running elections openly and honestly.
Parent
Re:What is so proprietary (Score:4, Insightful)
What country on this planet has privatised it's electoral process ?
Are you guys completely out of your minds ?
Electoral systems are often facilitated by private companies e.g the printing ballot sheets, the making of booths etc... but the actual process of counting votes, that should never be the responsibility of anything other than a independent public body, the privatisation of such a thing to me is horrifying, especially in a country that dominates the world.
There is no possible way an electoral process under these circumstances could be described as OPEN, free and fair. To quote Thomas Jefferson "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"... well I'd say the whole vigilance thing went out the window round about the time MTV first went to air.
Parent
Re:big numbers? (Score:5, Insightful)
But we're not, and we don't- both of those systems have manual overrides and people in the loop in case the computers fail. Your electronic voting machine fails and you have nothing to prove it, and no backup of the data even if you know it did. The appropriate question is: We don't trust our air-traffic control or nuclear ballistic missile command-and-control computers enough to leave no room for failure, why should we trust our voting machines any more?
Parent
Re:big numbers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Gears, handbrake, ignition switch.
Parent
Re:big numbers? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we need a system where ballots are printed securely like money, with unique numbers printed on the ballots. Each polling location would be issued a range of ballots and would have to account for each one. At the poll, you insert your ballot into a computer, which serves as an easy interface, in whatever language you want, and prints your selection on the ballot in a form that is both human and machine readable. Separate computers can then count the ballots, some of which should also be randomly hand-counted to make sure the counting machines have not been tampered with.
Parent
Re:big numbers? (Score:4, Insightful)
What's the difference? Well, people have seen hairy photos of airplanes crashing. We've all seen films of Hiroshima. So, people worry about the security of ATC software or nuclear weaponry. But aside from the goofball antics in Florida in 2000, which, except to the usual sprinkling of Oliver Stone disciples tends to be nowadays rather a yawn of an issue, not much has gone badly wrong with voting, electronic or not. If a county supervisor has been slightly fraudulently elected, well it matters a lot to he and his local supporters, but not so much to citizens four states over, for whom life will go on pretty much as it has.
Which brings us to the larger point: I suggest there are in the end two possibilities here: (A) Any fraud through electronic voting is so minor as to be unimportant, or (B) it will not succeed.
Case A: Someone tampers subtly enough with the vote tallies that a very close election (e.g. Bush v. Gore) gets decided one way versus another. Disaster? Hardly. What people overlook about close elections, and Bush v. Gore in particular, is that the fact that the vote is so close is just another way of saying that both candidates are essentially equally preferred by the people. So for the purposes of representing the will of the people either will do, to within very small error margins. That's not to say the results of electing one versus the other might not be very different. Al Gore would have made a very different president than George Bush (albeit less different, I think, than Gore voters hope or Bush voters fear). But the legitimacy of electing either one is essentially identical. You can't, unless you're a Jesuit, say that someone for whom 60,000,001 people voted is significantly more "the people's choice" than someone for whom 59,999,999 people voted.
In effect, slight fiddling in very close elections doesn't matter much. You're not changing the basic principle of elections -- that the winner represent the will of the people -- very much, if at all. You are doing not much more than is done by a million small random factors anyway, e.g. whether it is raining or not on election day, whether candidate A wore a nicer tie than candidate B in their last televised debate, and so on ad infinitum. If an election is so close as to be determined by tiny, trivial factors, there are a billion of them, and fraud is not obviously the most important.
Case B: Now if you change vote tallies enormously, in elections that are nowhere close, then, er, I think someone's going to notice. If for example you change Orange County vote tallies so that it goes 80% Democratic, or Santa Barbara tallies so it goes 80% Republican -- well, people are going to notice. They're going to say: WTF? This has never happened before. No one I know voted this way; it's not consistent with pre-election polls, it makes no sense with demographics, it's not consistent with other parts of the State, et cetera and so forth. Really, in the end we judge the legitimacy of an election not just because the Secretary of State announces the results using his serious grown-up voice, but also because in many large and small ways, the result "fits" with other facts we know.
So in this case, there would be a huge hue and cry, and the results wouldn't stand. People would demand a recount, and if one were not available, a new election. And they'd get it. And then they'd lynch the designers who made the fraud possible.
Parent
Re:big numbers? (Score:5, Insightful)
The people who program and operate the air-traffic control computers and the missile command computers have a vested interest in avoiding collisions/missile launches. Besides the fact that most people would feel horrible about the innocent lives lost through an error, if a nuke or an airplane suddenly landed in someone's backyard, it would be pretty hard to cover up. People may ask awkward questions.
Electoral votes however... well, if you own the data collection process and the database itself, who would ever know if you skew the results? And, after all, it's not as if anyone actually gets hurt or anything.
Parent
Re:big numbers? (Score:5, Insightful)
End of story. Code that is that/this important to our government should NEVER be held by a private individual.
Parent
Re:big numbers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Last I knew, the very foundations of our country did not rest on full transparency of our airport traffic control systems or missile command and control structure. Our country, and most others DO depend on fair, open, and transparent elections. That's why this is so damn important.
Parent
Re:big numbers? (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that they won't release the original files because they claim that the already well known Access schema is a trade secret just adds more fuel to the fire. The most rational explanation right now is that they are hiding a known accidental or deliberate miscount, for which they believe there might be forensic evidence in the binary file.
Ever heard of the maxim that justice must be done, and must be seen to be done? Well transparency is even more important for democracy. Right now, America isn't a democracy anymore.
Parent
Re:What is so proprietary (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:What is so proprietary (Score:4, Funny)
It's ALASKA for god's sake. They would deny anything put forth by the alaska democratic party simply because it was put forth by democrats. They would probobly deny tax cuts and an increase in oil payments just so that they could push through a version with their name on it.
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Re:What is so proprietary (Score:5, Funny)
Vote
Adjusted Vote.
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Re:What is so proprietary (Score:5, Funny)
It was found to be in violation of various patents, not to mention an infringement of the DMCA.
Parent
Diebold's bad, but officials also to blame (Score:5, Insightful)
Aside from that, blame is also richly deserved on the part of the State and Local morons who wrote their contracts with Diebold and other computer voting firms in such a way that they let them restrict access to this sort of vital information, as if verifying the results of an open election somehow isn't really all that important.
Gimme the connect-the-line ballots any day. At the very least, they'd be harder for the morons who deal with this sort of thing to fuck up.
Re:Diebold's bad, but officials also to blame (Score:5, Insightful)
I do not buy the story that the Government is powerless here. The local and state governments can easily obtain these records if they want to. The contracts do not matter much. First of all contracts that obscure voting results can be easily invalidated as against public policy. Secondly even if the contracts were valid, the government can easily break the contracts if they want to. They will be liable for damamges, but since Diebold would not sustain any losses from breaking of the contracts the damages would be only nominal.
So that is all bullshit. The Alaska officials who refuse to reveal the results do so out of their own motives and not because of some silly contracts.
One can easily figure out what these motives are.
Parent
Computerized voting is a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not obvious at all. Greater accessibility for the handicapped, more legible interfaces for long complicated ballots, the early detection and correction of "misvotes" and unintentional "undervotes", and the elimination of "hanging chads", stray marks and half-filled scan bubbles, etc. all make computerized voting a great idea.
What's a bad idea is storing the votes in computer memory. Computers have only one good mechanism for storing ballots in a failure-resistant, tamper-resistant fashion, and that's printer ink on paper. Touchscreen voting machines need to finish up your vote by printing it out on a paper ballot, prompting you to confirm or (with the help of a poll worker) destroy that paper, and finally directing you to the ballot box where the paper should be inserted to become part of the official count. If that was how electronic voting worked, I think even the computer-literate population would be thrilled.
Parent
Re:Computerized voting is a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think this is correct. There's nothing inherently tamper-resistant about paper. That's why check-forging is a problem, and even counterfeiting. That's why ballot fraud was widespread in the 19th century and still is in less-developed countries that use paper ballots.
I don't think the exact medium of storage is at all the issue. I don't think it matters whether you store the votes on paper, in NVRAM, on a disk drive, or as stacks of pebbles in labeled buckets. What is important, I suggest, is being able to guarantee the chain of custody from the original voter. It's like preserving evidence in a trial: you've got to be able to prove to anyone that the vote you cite as part of a winning candidate's tally can be rigorously traced back to the hand of someone who meant to cast that vote, even if you can't (or won't) name the voter. In other words, you need a completely reliable audit trail.
I agree this is something that commodity and consumer computing hasn't thought twice about, and using commodity and consumer computing technology would be a little alarming. But I would suspect that perhaps in certain niche computing markets there has been good attention paid to forging ironclad audit trails. Maybe in the military? Keeping track of nuclear weapon activation codes?
Parent
Re:Diebold's bad, but officials also to blame (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted, our electoral system is a simplier than the US style, but our works like this:
1. A post-card like thing is mailed to my address, informing me where & when to vote (usually a nearby school, church or library).
2. On the appointed date, I go to the local polling office, with my card, and photo ID.
3. Once they check my name off, they give me a piece of paper. I walk to a table with a card-board shroud (for privacy). I use a pencil to mark the name of the person that I am voting for.
4. I show them the outside (unmarked) of the paper, and they verify that it is the same one they gave me.
5. I jam the paper into a cardboard box on the table.
6. I go home, and watch TV while eating beer and Popcorn.
7. At 10:00PM we knew who our new Prime Minister is.
8. I wake up the next morning, and go to work, ready to be screwed by a whole new govt party.
l8f57
Parent
Who owns the data? (Score:5, Insightful)
And since this is about elections, I would say the public owns the data. So hand it over.
So much for copyrights (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why I as a libertarian despise the arguments in favor of strong IP law. They are trying to make ideas behave like physical property, and in doing so they create a society where no one has absolute ownership over their own work that they made with their own money. As I said, yes it is your creative work/data, but you cannot fully excercise that ownership because your property rights are trumped by another party's patent rights.
That sounds like sharecropping, not property rights to me. You might as well say that by buying a framed picture you implicitly signed an agreement to not using a competing frame-maker's product to store your pictures. Oh wait, that basically is the argument of the defenders of strong IP law. You didn't see the contract, it wasn't even mentioned, but by God you implicitly signed some ephemeral social contract allegedly brokered 200 years ago by our forefathers in some secret masonic temple lacking euclidian geometry hidden away from common knowledge. But this implicit contract, really is there... we swear.
It certainly adds credence... (Score:4, Insightful)
Diebold nonsense (Score:5, Interesting)
The format isn't patented, I don't think, and isn't copyrightable, so the only legal protection it might have is trade secret. However, since the format is already out in the open, due both to revelation in other states and from the Diebold files posted on the net, it is no longer a trade secret and there is nothing that Diebold can complain about.
Furthermore, I don't see that anything actually prevents the State of Alaska from revealing the file format even if it is a trade secret. What can Diebold do about it? The State probably has sovereign immunity, and in any case, the secret is probably worth nothing so even if Diebold sued successfully they wouldn't get any damages to speak of.
Meanwhile here in Canada yet another election has been conducted without any problem using simple paper ballots. Just five lines with the names and parties of the candidates and a circle in which to draw an X. No need for voting machines, no possibility of confusion, minimal opportunity for fraud.
Re:Diebold nonsense (Score:5, Funny)
Well, assuming you can consider a win by the Conservatives as being "without any problem."
Parent
Re:Diebold nonsense (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
North Carolina (Score:4, Interesting)
voting rights? (Score:5, Insightful)
But if the data had porno website searches in it (Score:5, Funny)
Re:But if the data had porno website searches in i (Score:5, Insightful)
So someone's searching Google for pictures of boobs is the government's business after all?
And what data Diebold-made, state-purchased machines collected during a public election - that's nobody's business but Diebold's? Wow!
(I know the parent expressed the very same thought more elegantly, tersely and humorously, but I just had to vent a little. Sorry.)
Parent
Cryptographically secure voting (Score:4, Interesting)
If I understood correctly, we could have a nationwide vote, everyone leaves with a piece of paper with a number printed on it, and can take that number home and verify that their vote was correctly counted on the internet (where public lists of votes are posted), while the whole system remained anonymous. It looked like election fraud could be completely eliminated.
There were more complex schemes with paired barcodes and filtered light or something, but that was the basic idea.
If such a scheme can be mathematically proven to be secure, why aren't we using it?
Re:Cryptographically secure voting (Score:4, Insightful)
If your vote is linked to a piece of paper that is given to you, how is the vote anonymous? Maybe its not completely open, but it would still be bad because superiors can still demand to get your number to verify the vote - therefore undermining the anonymity of the vote. Or how about pay for vote scams?
Parent
Re:Cryptographically secure voting (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Solution: Make an X (Score:5, Insightful)
We just voted yesterday in Canada - made an X in the appropriate box. Kind of hard to mess that up I've always thought. And even if it was an OSS voting machine, the general public and in fact most people would get nothing from that, not having the first clue of what the code meant.
I know the US is 10x the size, but you also presumably have 10x the people counting. And in any case, for one event every 4 years it seems reasonable. Heck we do it every 1.5 years it seems
This would help both Dem's and the Republicans - it'd be much easier to see who won so if the Dems should've won obviously this information would be useful. If the results were correct it would help the Republicans as this whole "illegimate president" thing could finally be done away with.
I know it's popular to bitch about the US elections and mock the US, but personally I'm impressed. The courts decided where appropriate, jurisdictions seemed to be respected, and rules followed etc. There was an orderly hand over of power. Do you think things would've gone as well in every country where the election was balanced on the finest of margins?
Plain old paper ballots would have made the whole affair as open as possible.
Re:Solution: Make an X (Score:5, Insightful)
Vote counting is massively parallelizable. It doesn't take very long for somebody to tally the votes from a couple hundred ballots. The federal election in here in Canada was yesterday, with the polls closing at 19:00. Turnout was about 65%. The results were in before midnight.
With a little effort I bet Americans could manage this too.
Parent
Open Government (Score:5, Insightful)
From proprietary building codes to election mechanisms, we must demand that our system of government belongs to all of us, without restriction.
Load shotgun, aim, amputate foot (Score:5, Interesting)
I couldn't be more pleased with this.
Diebold, by refusing to release the data, shows what a boondoggle it is to allow public information to be locked up in proprietary format.
The State plays right into the Bush-Gore-2000 paranoia over ballot counting. They're not allowed to release the raw data, because of the mistake they made allowing a proprietary format to be used.
A transformation of the data (be it a printout, ASCII dump, spreadsheet, or whatever) is not sufficient. Any transformation process is likely to use the same (proprietary) algorithm that was used to generate the official results, which could have hidden errors. It also makes me wonder what else is in the format, perhaps data that shouldn't be there.
Yup, this is a positive development.
MS-Access table layout (Score:4, Informative)
Diebold systems use Microsoft Access as the underlying file format for everything, including the audit logs. So it's not even that they're claiming the file format is theirs -- it obviously "belongs" to Microsoft -- they're claiming that the table layout they came up with for Access is theirs. Which could be interesting, given that if the state programmed the ballot layout themselves, it's possible that some of that table layout was generated by the Diebold program. So you've got one Diebold program generating a table layout for the MS-Access file format, and Diebold is claiming that generated table layout is theirs.
Brilliant!
-jdm
(Relative) No Brainer (Score:4, Insightful)
Besides, it gives good press to the Democratic Party and bad press to Diebold. As for the government, well, everybody hates the government already, right?
-h-
Past Canadian Results: RAW Format + other musings (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't understand how this cannot be public knowledge in the States. I just checked Elections Canada [elections.ca] and the raw database information is available right on their site [elections.ca] to anyone that wants it.
In Canada we only have to make one choice; the minister we would like to be elected to parlament in our riding. As I understand it, in the States you make a bunch of decisions on the same ballot. Many Canadians have posted that "Oh... The paper works just fine here.. Silly Americans". Obviously! we only have one x to mark and count... I can see where electronic ballots can be useful in the States although I don't see how they can be as transparent as paper ballots...However, in Canada the WHOLE election system is completely transparent and any citizen can access any information they wish through the public organization 'Elections Canada'. A similar public system should be in place in any democracy.
On another topic I'll throw this out there.. Why not have paper ballots that can be read into computers. Wouldn't you have the best of both worlds? Both a paper record and electronic counting/
This is the reason that we need Open File Formats (Score:4, Insightful)
Beautiful! (Score:5, Insightful)
Openness has proven very useful for software development.
History has also shown it to be very important for government.
Combine those two together, and the importance is even more drastic. Openness and transparency in voting is essential.
I am so disappointed with this country... (Score:5, Informative)
Thirty years ago I would have assumed that if there was the slightest hint of election fixing that ALL election officials would tear into it with abandon, and that the people would similarly tear into any official that even suggestion that it was a bad idea to look into election results.
These days I have the same confidence in our system that I have in any south-American, African or Russian system, essentially none. That said, all you ever hear from the populous is the occasional reference to "wingnuts" and liberal media trying to jack the existing government.
Perhaps I'm mostly disturbed with my own inaction. Anyone have suggestions on things I can do that really work? Voting does NOT (No matter what you have been trained to believe), talking to representatives does NOT (unless you can outbid the lobbyists whispering in their other ear--I can't). I've just given up...
Any suggestions at all?
(PS. How did Diabold get away having a name that spell-checks to Diabolism? It's like they are throwing it in our faces!!!)
I live in Alaska (Score:4, Informative)
While I agree our state Division of Elections (and their vendor) needs to do a better job of breaking down individual district results, there is not a problem of "no paper trail" here in Alaska. The Diebold machines used for many years here (including 2004) are not the touch screen "pure electronic" machines, but rather fill-in-the-blank bubble cards that are then scanned into an optical reader. The paper cards are then randomly spot-checked to the results the optical scanners provide. I have complete faith in the machines and I've voted on them since ~2000.
Re:Jim March and Gun Owners (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:STOP TAKING BLACK BOX VOTING STORIES (Score:4, Insightful)
I read your link and most of the links on that page, and I'm not impressed. Apparently some people find Bev Harris abrasive and a little paranoid, and are up in arms and throwing all kinds of nebulous and unsubstantiated allegations around. Maybe she is as bad as some people say, but it looks to me like an internecine squabble, nothing to do with the real issues.
Parent
Re:Weird elections... (Score:4, Interesting)
I saw things the same way here. The exit polls were the real smoking gun.
Parent
Canadian elections (Score:5, Informative)
Well, because Canada is smart enough to not actually use Diebold's crappy Windows-based technology. We just completed a federal election yesterday that went pretty much without a hitch. All federal electoral districts in Canada use one, identical system: A paper ballot. The format of all ballots across the nation is identical--the only difference being the names. The names are always in alphabetical order of the candidate's last name, with the full party name printed underneath, in slightly smaller print. Beside each name is a large circle, clearly associated with one of the candidates.
The process of voting in Canada is simple, and identical across the country for federal elections, and pretty much the same for provincial elections as well. You receive a voter registration card in the mail telling you where to vote, and if you are not registered you phone a well advertised 1-800 number to find the location of your poll (you can register any time up to and including voting day). You go to your poliing station and a scrutineer finds and crosses off your name on the official printed copy of the registration (or collects and signs your registration form if you just registered). You are then handed a folded ballot (all ballots in the entire country are even folded the same) and are directed to the voting booth. You then select the candidate by drawing an X in the correct circle using an HB pencil, fold your ballot back up and return it to the scrutineer. The scrutineer removes the perforated section, hands it back and you put it in the ballot box.
It's been like that for decades, and it has always worked perfectly fine. There are no "pregnant chads", no confusing ballot formats, no clunky Windows-PCs-as-voting-machines and no political controversy around the process. We have to improve maintenance of our permanent electors registry, but that is already nearly up to snuff by now, and has never been as bad as the US.
As for electronic voting machines, the company you mentioned only supplies those to MUNICIPAL elections. Furthermore, they are specialised elctronic tabulators, not glorified PCs. You still record your vote on a paper ballot--it is just machine readable now (you connect the broken line next to a candidate). The tabulators count up the official results, however if a judicial recount is ordered in a very close race, it is conducted manually.
If I encounter a Diebold PC in a municipal election I'll be quite disappointed. Since what most cities do ain't broken, I doubt they'll "fix" things in future elections with Diebold's flashy goods.
Parent
Bad bad bad idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Anything that gives away anything more than evidence that you voted can be used against you or used for corrupt purposes. People liked to joke that the USA had the "best government money can buy" but the reality of a bought election would be far worse than most people would imagine.
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