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Ohio Audit Reveals More Diebold Problems
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Apr 27, 2007 11:33 AM
from the must-offer-witty-comment-on-unsurprising-situation dept.
from the must-offer-witty-comment-on-unsurprising-situation dept.
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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I don't know anything about databases (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I don't know anything about databases (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:I don't know anything about databases (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:I don't know anything about databases (Score:4, Interesting)
But CLEARLY this kind of stuff is not because Diebold isn't capable of doing it properly. It's because they explicitly don't want to do it properly.
If we're going to have electronic voting machines, and I don't think that we should (not even optical scan), they should be developed, owned, and maintained by the government. Period.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
As Hyneman would say..."There's your problem."
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh yes (Score:3, Insightful)
Different folks. (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
1000?!?!? (Score:2, Insightful)
Jet is fine for what it is, but like any other tool it has a proper purpose and should not be mis-used.
I don't know the specifics of the Diebold stuff, it would seem to me though if you had one Jet DB on each machine along with a proper upload tool it should work just fine.... at the same time if I was building a voting machine process from scratch I wouldn't think of using it.
fwiw. ymmv.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I bet it doesn't. It's really more of a single-user database engine. It's nice for redistributing with a single user application, but not appropriate in a network setting. Makes you wonder if they (Diebold) just didn't have anyone with any multi-user database experience.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the term you are looking for is gross incompetence.
Maybe they're trying to convince people that even if they wanted to rig the election, they're too stupid to do it properly?
Re:I don't know anything about databases (Score:5, Informative)
Not quite. Exchange uses Jet Blue [wikipedia.org], as do AD and other things embedded in Windows (DHCP server, WINS, etc.). It was strictly for MS-only internal use until Windows 2000, when it was renamed Extensible Storage Engine and the API was made available.
Diebold is using Jet Red [wikipedia.org]. Jet Red is what MS Access uses, as well as the "Microsoft Jet DB Engine" ODBC source that many crappy third-party VB apps use.
Despite sharing the same name (though Jet Blue was renamed, Exchange still refers to it as simply "Jet" in a few places), there's almost nothing in common between the two. Blue/ESE is a lot more fault-tolerant than Red, but concurrent access must be provided by a server application running on top of it -- multiple apps can't open the database file directly at once. That's probably a good thing, since Red/MS Access's cooperative concurrency scheme is what's responsible for most of the corruption issues people have with it.
Jet Blue/ESE is nowhere near the design of say, Oracle or PostgreSQL, or even MSSQL for that matter. It's about on the level of version 3 or 4 of MySQL (using MyISAM, not InnoDB), or perhaps SQLite.
Jet Red/MS Access is just plain garbage and should never be used. Shame on you, Diebold. Shame!
Parent
Jet (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
That, or the morass of our government dictated a few things that didn't make sense. They tend to be behind the times in terms of software/hardware advances.
Re:Jet (Score:5, Insightful)
If you wanted to make an insecure system that was easy to hack and manipulate, didn't have basic security features, data integrity, and no audit trail, and thus no record of how data was altered outside of specifications, you might use such a deprecated application.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
JET?? (Score:5, Insightful)
2 databases?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only would I fire his ass, but I'd make sure to press criminal charges of fraud. Why are these creeps from Diebold, Sequoia, ES&S, et. all not in prison yet?
Diebold makes ATMs; don't tell me that they can't get something as simple as a vote database right. Occam's Razor points to outright fraud, not to simple incompetence.
Parent
Re:2 databases?!? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a bit like saying Panasonic would make a great a telephone carrier because they make phones.
Parent
I have bad news for you... (Score:3, Insightful)
Jet Database Engine (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
The software used to tabulate votes is build on an Access database!?!? holy crap! Talk about the mother of all bad ideas. There are so many know issues and so many better options that this should never have gotten this far. Who the crap was in charge of designing this system? Jim from Accounting?
-Rick
I'm leaving...on a Jet plane. Don't know when... (Score:3, Funny)
Jet? Shit.
I'm gonna submit proposals to program up a new Mars Rover using Visual Basic!
[OT] Your .sig (Score:4, Interesting)
It was always thus... Two spaces after a period is only appropriate in circumstances where all characters are the same width, such as an old-school typewriter. So nobody “decided” that it would be that way “on the Internet;” we just stopped using the special-case rules that sprung up a few decades prior when we were using technology that wasn’t capable of proportionally spaced type.
Parent
Don't ATMs access databases too? (Score:5, Insightful)
--
Vote with your roof! http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Re:Don't ATMs access databases too? (Score:5, Insightful)
The things that went wrong with ATMs were both funny and scary. I have no reason to believe things have changed. The banks and manufacturers go to great lengths to satisfy customers without letting details of the problems get out, because this would undermine confidence in the devices.
With ATMs, if you're smart, you have a slip of paper to verify a transaction. If there's a dispute with the bank, the bank will usually honor the paper documentation, and the customer has no reason to make an issue of the problem.
With voting, there's no going back and fixing results after the fact. Often there's no piece of paper. And on top of that, the whole process is under fairly intense public and governmental scrutiny.
So I wouldn't say there are less problems with ATMs. You just don't hear about them.
Parent
Different People (Score:3, Informative)
The purchase
Dumb Idea (Score:2)
Of course, the part that gets me angriest, as a former poll worker, is the fact that there are people who will mess with someone else's vote. You don't do that.
Next up on "Government Contracts!" (Score:5, Funny)
"We're sorry that the capitol building collapsed, but it ends up that we used Licoln Logs to build the dome, and it ends up that it collapses when the wind hits it from multiple directions at once.
We've gotten some complaints that we should have expected this, and were "total morons" for choosing such a design. We think this is a gross oversimplification, and more than a little unfair. We used multiple layers of high-quality chewing gum to secure the dome, which required countless hours of chewing, along with thousands of gallons of spittle. When you complain against such a massive effort, you insult the sore mouths of our hard working employees.
Sincerely,
Halliburton CEO
Bozo D. Clown"
Next episode: FEMA picks up the pieces.
Ryan Fenton
I was going to ask for the hahaha tag, but (Score:4, Insightful)
So... (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, I dont care if the errors caused changed the outcome or not, its fairly clear that they failed, in the worst possible way, to maintain the level of creditability needed for a damn election. This isn't a "oops, my bad" This should be a federal offence with manditory jail time.
No system is perfect, but come on, JET!? Might as well have the vote counted in diffrent states by the party currently in power, would be just as accurate.
can't believe they're still used (Score:2, Insightful)
I do understand why Republicans get so defensive about this,but these machines have to GO.
The
I smell fud (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, I'd never think about developing this on a Microsoft Jet DB, since it's been somewhat deprecated for the MS Desktop SQL Server (MSDE) and SQL Server 2005 Express, which are much better and lightweight enough for a current desktop.
Nonetheless... what MS probably stated is that basically access to a JET Db is not thread safe, which means that concurrent access will cause corruption with a probability directly proportional to the amount of activity. YET if you serialize access to a Jet Db (which is a necessary and basic requirement given that it's not thread safe) there shouldn't be a fear of corruption, unless the API is buggy. If each voting station has a Jet Db and they all get exported to a central (thread safe) db then there's no need for concurrent access to any of the individual Jet DBs, and there shouldn't be a big fear of data corruption (which, anyway, can be verified somewhat easily).
Re:I smell fud (Score:5, Funny)
You just have to boost the 5v output using an op-amp, and secure the lead with a clamp or some electrical tape so it won't wiggle out.
Parent
Re:I smell fud (Score:5, Insightful)
2. There's a known data corruption issue in the engine caused by concurrent activity
A reasonable conclusion is that the programmers were idiots and wrote an non-thread safe application with multiple threads. Another conclusion would be they intentionally attempted to fix the election. Incompetence before dishonest is the usual way to approach those things...
Parent
Isn't democracy mission critical? (Score:5, Interesting)
There really is no excuse for voting to not be done on a comparative basis e.g. every vote to be checked via 3 different software lines (this isn't rocket science) and a voting system to then confirm that the vote is being applied correctly. This vote should then be written to two (at least) data sources to enable reconciliation at the end.
This is a freaking implementation of a check-box system where is the sodding complexity that means its expensive to be professional.
Voting in a democracy is mission critical, to not consider it that way is to say that voting doesn't matter.
No, it isn't (Score:3, Insightful)
You are incorrect on both counts.
First, if something is "mission critical" do you entrust it to people who have no idea of the necessary details, or will just use a default position to produce the end result as opposed to careful thought and analysis? No.
Perhaps you don't understand what "mission critical" means. I'll clue
Audits can be done using real database engines (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is why when explaining a result matters, you use a real database engine, not something like jet, which is simply a library to maintain indexed files.
The JET engine is not the real problem... (Score:3, Insightful)
Back in 1995 I came in touch with the JET engine for the first time. It was used in a database application for a commercial aircraft carrier (!) Databases were corrupt all the times. It was obvious that the technology was a mess. At that time, much better alternatives were available for a little more $$. Hence I could not understand why anyone would spend time and money with such broken technology.
Now we see the use of this technology again, and in an application that is crucial to the future of the U.S and to the future of many other countries... the same mistakes are being made again.
But that is not the real problem. Yes, we know that electronic voting machine manufacturers have a long record of being lazy, careless, and incompetent. The actual problem is with the opinion of the decision makers in the administration and with the opinion of the public. Information technology is widely accepted as a means to make collecting, sorting, and counting, of numbers, names, addresses, etc. more reliable and more efficient. So why not use it also to collect and to count voter ballots?
There is this subtle difference between paper and electronic storage. If you write something on a paper or make a hole, then it will be very difficult and time-consuming to remove the writing or the hole. In any case, too much work to alter ballots in significant numbers! And, if you still do, you leave a trace to be discovered by the forensic experts. In contrast, the information stored on a hard disk, in a flash ram, or transferred via network, can be altered very quickly and, if done well, without leaving any trace. Hence it is by nature that electronic voting machines are insecure and unreliable.
Badly designed and badly implemented electronic voting machines just add up to the insecurity and the lack of reliability that this technology has by its virtue. On the other hand, measures like paper audit trails are certainly very helpful, but these are mere attempts to improve a technology that is bad from the outset.
Looking at people's difficulties in understanding and dealing with today's computer security threats, I guess that it will take a lot of time until the aforementioned difference is in the heads of majority of the public and of those involved in the voting process. In the meantime, we will have many more "voting machine news": For every major election where electronic voting machines will be used, there will be stories about malfunctioning machines, missing audit trails, about elections being stolen, and so on. This is the wrong approach to "strengthen the democratic tradition".
My credo is that running a democracy has a prize that is called "counting by hand".
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Is not!
You may win but you're still retarded.
I know you are, but what am I?
Re: (Score:2)
Re:here we go again (Score:4, Funny)
> voting is implemented, and are only upset that a democrat wasn't
> elected in the last election?
Yes, next question.
BTW, when Bush came into office the solar system had nine planets
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
This is about the 2006 election. To remind you, that's when Ohio went Blue.
Don't get me wrong, there are many cases where 'sore looser leftie' is a potentially valid complaint. This isn't one of them.
Re: (Score:2)
It's just people who found screwups in Dibold voting devices.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Problem-free election? (Score:5, Insightful)
In point of fact, there is a difference between "requiring perfection" and "avoiding obvious incompetence". Just, y'know, for future reference.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Coincidence? Gee, I wonder...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Problem-free election? (Score:4, Insightful)
Mob, Press and Documentary video TV accusations do not constitute legitimate evidence unless they have facts to back up their claims (not saying they don't).
Guilt by association is one Logical Fallacy which is throw around a lot these days.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The public is allowed to watch at every step of the process (especially counting).
Voting times are staggered across the country so that everyone learns what happened at the same time.
All the ballots *are* exactly the same. This is not a difficult task.
The ballots have only the name of the candidate and the name of the