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Diebold Admits Ohio Machines May Lose Votes

Posted by kdawson on Fri Aug 22, 2008 11:33 AM
from the i-didn't-do-it-nobody-saw-me-you-can't-prove-anything dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Premier Election Solutions (a subsidiary of Diebold) has acknowledged a flaw that causes the systems to lose votes. It cannot be patched before the election and the machines are used in half of Ohio's counties, but they are issuing guidelines for avoiding the problem that presumably contain a work-around. While Diebold initially blamed anti-virus software for the glitch, they have now discovered that the bug was their own fault for not recording votes to memory when the cards are uploaded in 'certain circumstances' — something their initial analysis missed. It would be nice to hope that Ohio poll workers would be tech-savvy enough to make this a non-issue, but they had poll worker shortages last year and might need tech-savvy people to volunteer."
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[+] Your Rights Online: Open Source Program Reveals Diebold Bug 175 comments
Mitch Trachtenberg writes "Ballot Browser, an open source Python program developed by Mitch Trachtenberg (yours truly) as part of the all-volunteer Humboldt County Election Transparency Project, was instrumental in revealing that Diebold counting software had dropped 197 ballots from Humboldt County, California's official election results. Despite a top-to-bottom review by the California Secretary of State's office, it appears that Diebold had not informed that office of the four-year-old bug. The Transparency Project has sites at humetp.org and http://www.humtp.com." Trachtenberg also points to his blog for the Transparency Project, and his own essay about the discovery and the process that led to it.
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  • Open Voting (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TheSpoom (715771) * <slashdot@@@uberm00...net> on Friday August 22 2008, @11:34AM (#24707423) Homepage Journal

    It is at this point that I would normally point people to the Open Voting Consortium [openvoting.org], but unless I'm missing something, the project stalled some time back in 2006 [sourceforge.net]. Yet they're still taking donations...

    Am I missing something or is it time for a fork? Because I think we definitely need an open, easily verifiable voting system.

    I don't even think it needs to be a LiveCD as the current project seems to have. What is so difficult about making a paper trail?

    • Re:Open Voting (Score:5, Informative)

      by garcia (6573) on Friday August 22 2008, @11:47AM (#24707633) Homepage

      I'd point people to take it up with their representatives and other relevant politicians or even picketing to bring attention their cause. Unfortunately the politicians are in on it and the picketing is now only permitted in "Free Speech Zones" and may end you up in jail after crooked judges who still sit on the bench after multiple infractions eliminating due process [lazylightning.org] agree with the government that you are a terrorist.

      So, just suck it up and let the assholes win while we all fucking suffer. Global Warming is a fucking threat? Please.

        • Re:Open Voting (Score:5, Insightful)

          by the kostya (1277822) on Friday August 22 2008, @12:02PM (#24707905) Homepage

          Yep, if I am not mistaken, the right to bear arms is in the Bill of Rights so that the government will not be able to silence the will of the people and so that if the government gets screwy, we can have another revolution.

            • Re:Open Voting (Score:5, Insightful)

              by Moofie (22272) <lee@ringofsa[ ]n.com ['tur' in gap]> on Friday August 22 2008, @12:30PM (#24708399) Homepage

              Thomas Jefferson disagrees with you.

              • Re:Open Voting (Score:5, Interesting)

                by spiffyman (949476) on Friday August 22 2008, @01:39PM (#24709809) Homepage
                Nonsense. Thomas Jefferson explicitly worries about the ability of our system to have legitimate control over future generations, given the constant revolutions we go through.

                At one point, he even suggests that we should wipe out all laws every 19 years (a number he derived from population density and life expectancy at the time).

                If this thread picks up I'll go find the citations for this. It's in TJ's letters (to Madison, I believe).

                Revolution, armed or not, is at the core of our system of government.
            • Re:Open Voting (Score:5, Insightful)

              by Mister Whirly (964219) on Friday August 22 2008, @01:44PM (#24709891) Homepage
              Good thing you are not a judge. The Supreme Court of the United States disagrees with your interpretation also. They decided that the 2nd ammendment does grant the individual (not just the militia) the right to keep and bear arms. But don't take my word for it, I could be a big liar. Instead, read it yourself here [findlaw.com].

              ""Right of the People." The first salient feature of the operative clause is that it codifies a "right of the people." The unamended Constitution and the Bill of Rights use the phrase "right of the people" two other times, in the First Amendment's Assembly-and-Petition Clause and in the Fourth Amendment's Search-and-Seizure Clause. The Ninth Amendment uses very similar terminology ("The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people"). All three of these instances unambiguously refer to individual rights, not "collective" rights, or rights that may be exercised only through participation in some corporate body.
              This contrasts markedly with the phrase "the militia" in the prefatory clause. As we will describe below, the "militia" in colonial America consisted of a subset of "the people"--those who were male, able bodied, and within a certain age range. Reading the Second Amendment as protecting only the right to "keep and bear Arms" in an organized militia therefore fits poorly with the operative clause's description of the holder of that right as "the people."

              We start therefore with a strong presumption that the Second Amendment right is exercised individually and belongs to all Americans.""
          • Re:Open Voting (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Austerity Empowers (669817) on Friday August 22 2008, @12:11PM (#24708047)

            Well the only real threat of an armed rebellion is when enough people are unhappy about enough things that they're willing to risk dying. The 2nd amendment exists for that cause. One person is a criminal, 10 people are a conspiracy, thousands is a revolt.

            I personally think it's fixable with less extreme measures, but it may entail a bit more suffering before enough people have visibility that there's a problem.

            Most of the country hasn't seen electronic voting machines (yet). Wait till we stand in line and watch them crash, or behave strangely, or visibly ignore input. Wait till the popular candidate mysteriously loses. No one needs to die for this, it just needs to APPEAR to fail one time.

            • Re:Open Voting (Score:5, Interesting)

              by FredFredrickson (1177871) * on Friday August 22 2008, @12:30PM (#24708405) Homepage Journal
              Yeah, we just keep waiting, waiting for things to get worse. And they do. And nothing happens. So we wait longer- and things do get worse.. But it gets worse a little at a time, and we keep procastinating. We need to revolt before it's too late..
            • Re:Open Voting (Score:5, Interesting)

              by quanticle (843097) on Friday August 22 2008, @01:01PM (#24709071) Homepage

              Wait till the popular candidate mysteriously loses.

              Well, it already happened once in 2000, and again in 2004. How many times does the popular candidate have to "mysteriously" lose before people wise up?

              I know it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but if I were planning to subvert a democratic process I'd always engineer wins by one or two percent, rather than absolute blowouts.

              • Re:Open Voting (Score:5, Insightful)

                by lgw (121541) on Friday August 22 2008, @02:49PM (#24710883) Journal

                Democracy (representative republic or otherwise) is not a process with many significant digits - get used to it. It doesn't need to be to work properly.

                We're picking our leaders through a popularity contest, and there's almost nothing in the process that selects the candidate more fit to govern. It seriously doesn't matter if there an error of several percent in the system - so the slightly less popular candidate won? So what? Popularity correlates so poorly with skill at governing in the first place that it's not like it's some tradjegy.

                The point of democracy is simple: you get to toss out the guy who almost everyone agrees is a problem without actual bloodshed and revolution. While people complain about had bad things are, and how little choice we have, we're still an incredibly free and wealth country, and the vast majority of people are annoyed but still content. If that wasn't true, both parties would be scrambling to get back to "you hate us, but not enough to actually vote for the other guy".

                As has been said by folks wiser than me: democracy sucks worse than anything except for everything else that has ever been tried. We're able to toss out leaders who almost everyone agrees have failed us with a minimum of effort, and that one fact is the key to democracy.

                Even if some voters really, really, really hate a leader, if there's still a large percentage of voters supporting the guy then democracy is working as intended.

    • Re:Open Voting (Score:4, Informative)

      by syphax (189065) on Friday August 22 2008, @12:14PM (#24708107) Journal

      OVC is very much in operation!

      Read the blog posts on the site to get a sense of what they are up to. I don't know why the Sourceforge stuff isn't current; they are actively developing.

      It's very much a shoestring operation; why not throw 'em $5-10?

        • Re:Open Voting (Score:5, Informative)

          by goombah99 (560566) on Friday August 22 2008, @01:22PM (#24709473)

          Because the only open voting system is the one that uses pen&paper, everything else is just a little less obscure then any random proprietary system, since you don't have any guarantee that the system you are voting on is actually the one they claim it is.

          The crux with any kind of electronic voting system is that it can't be verified by the voter and if you can't do that, then it should have no place in a democracy.

          It's clear you are highly confident that you are right so you will no doubt be surprised to learn that you are simply uneducated. Please take some time and read up on the OVC system. It's one of the only systems that actually meets the criteria you demand and also manages to gain the advantages of computer automation.

          The OVC is not propietary. It's 100% open. You don't have to pay a cent to use it or the voting machine design. Their eventual inexpensive but sustainable bussiness model is to certify third parties that use their code and designs meet the specs of those designs. They then use those proceeds to maintain open code. and open designs.

          Their system is a two-part (actually 3) system on which one dumb system has a GUI whose sole purpose is to generate a printed paper ballot you can hold in your hand. This is not a cast ballot. it's just amarked ballot. It's up to you to put it into the ballot box or discard it or take it home uncast.

          When ballots are deposited into the ballot box they are not scanned at that time (e.g. not an opscan). Only later in a public counting room ballots are removed, shuffled to destroy residual order permenantly, and then wand scanned by hand. The people wand scanning can at any time casually verify that the wand scan record matches the human printed record.

          The nice this is that one has a partial check for large anomolies. Every cast ballot has to have been generated so the two machines must match. Hence one can't easily susbtitute new or extra ballots without some very elaborate on-site activity of a nature likely to be caught. Second, it also makes it evident when ballots are not counted, and while there can be some leakage if admistrators don't track ballots uncast, it not only clamps that but lets you see exactly what was on the ballots that were not recorded as cast. Any pattern is a clear give-away of malfeasance.

          Since there's no central place where software can be contaminated (e.g. the demonstrated diebold virus attack) and even if it happened you could still count the paper ballots the voter held in their hands, it's very robust against errors.

          thus it has the major benefits of both paper ballots and electronic records keeping and allows cross checks that neither can provide.

          It's primary remaining weakness is simply the question of whether an electronic pen beats a normal pen. I can give arguments on both side of that.

          Another advantage of the OVC bussiness model is that because it runs on commodity PCs you can literally discard the machines (e.g. give them to schools) after each election. THis is a lot cheaper than secure storage and maintainence. Additionally it means you can buy way more than you need for most elections and not have scarcity creating long lines.

    • Re:Open Voting (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Bombula (670389) on Friday August 22 2008, @12:56PM (#24708973)

      These voting machines might "lose votes"?

      Jesus fucking Christ, I'm sorry, but how goddamn hard is it to make a machine that can accurately count up to at most a few tens of thousands? The entire world depends on machines that accurately count billions of numbers per second.

      There. Is. No. Excuse. For. This. Shit.

      • Happend in NM and NV (Score:5, Informative)

        by goombah99 (560566) on Friday August 22 2008, @01:30PM (#24709651)

        Sequoia's data base upload software used microsfoft access which silently dropped all records after the first 32,000. As a result NM lost 12,000 votes in a presidential election decided by 500 votes. The same thing happened in NV the previous election cycle.

        Google it. 12,000 votes lost in bernalillo.

        the company took the machines and files to denver and then announced had "found" the votes, which were then counted. Sequois is owned by a shadowy Venzuelan consortium that is believed to include hugo chavez.

      • Re:Open Voting (Score:5, Insightful)

        by TheSpoom (715771) * <slashdot@@@uberm00...net> on Friday August 22 2008, @11:54AM (#24707737) Homepage Journal

        That's not what's meant by "voter verifiable". The printed slip shows that you voted and for whom, but you put the slip into an actual ballot before you leave the station. That way, if the electronic result is questioned, the ballots can be counted by hand.

        Obviously, we don't want to go back before an anonymous ballot system and the corruption that happened back then.

        • Re:Open Voting (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Austerity Empowers (669817) on Friday August 22 2008, @12:18PM (#24708169)

          The electronic equivalent is the receipt system. Have the machine print your vote on receipt paper, visible behind glass in the machine. As the last step, you verify your selection, and the paper scrolls away. If you do not approve, if the slip is incorrect, if there is mechanical printing failure, etc. the ballot is destroyed, the electronic vote is not pushed, and you try again.

          Later on, the ballots are collected, counted by hand the traditional way, and that is compared against the electronic result.

          That way ballots are anonymous, there is a paper trail that is verifiable by the various interested parties, but the electronic system can be trusted and kept in check.

              • Re:Open Voting (Score:4, Interesting)

                by corsec67 (627446) on Friday August 22 2008, @01:14PM (#24709327) Homepage Journal

                Watch "Hacking Democracy"

                In Ohio, they had a law that 3% had to be counted by hand and matched to the tally.
                The problem was that the officials were preselecting the 3%, and chose a set that they knew would match.

  • Pen and Paper (Score:5, Insightful)

    by oahazmatt (868057) on Friday August 22 2008, @11:35AM (#24707447) Journal
    I recommend returning to Pen and Paper voting, and then using those paper ballots to vote out the officials who had paid to bring in these obviously inferior devices for wasting tax payer dollars.
  • by MyLongNickName (822545) on Friday August 22 2008, @11:36AM (#24707453) Journal

    Get over it folks! It will only drop votes for Democrats. So clearly this is an isolated bug.

      • by NeverVotedBush (1041088) on Friday August 22 2008, @02:39PM (#24710707)
        We have the finest {democracy, republic, dictatorship, monarchy} here in the United States that money can buy.

        I am quite sure that the 2000 and 2004 elections were both tampered with in various ways. Whether it was Tammy-Faye lookalike Katherine Harris, or the SCOTUS, dropped votes, intentionally misleading ballots, lost voter registrations and roles, or any of the other dirty tricks that all combined handed the elections to someone who did not actually win - either the popular vote or the electoral college.

        The people involved may have thought they were working for their country, but instead, what they did was commit treason against this country.

        I hope they realize that their crimes have led directly to the deaths of 3000 Americans on 9/11 and some 4500 since then in a failed and illegal war. This is not to mention bankrupting the country to make the Bush family fortune, and those of their friends, huge.

        Treason has been a part of the Bush legacy since before WWII when Prescott Bush and Sheldon Bush, against Federal law and while Prescott's son was fighting in the Pacific, helped to finance the Nazi war machine in order to make billions of dollars.

        The facts are that the Bush clan was meeting with the bin Laden family to discuss oil deals at the very moment the planes slammed into the WTC towers, the Pentagon, and the field in Pennsylvania. They were quickly escorted out of the country in one of the only planes allowed to fly during the nationwide grounding of all aircraft besides military flights guarding major cities. This was done on executive order and against the protests of the FBI who wanted to question them. The Bush family made the decision that their business partners convenience was more important than the safety and security of the USA. It's also fact that George Bush and Condoleeza Rice were briefed over a month before 9/11 (the August 6 PDB) that bin Laden was planning an attack using commercial aircraft "against targets such as the World Trade Center and Pentagon". He never bothered to read the full briefing and instead went to Crawford to vacation. Condoleeza Rice admitted the title of the briefing, the general contents, and that she didn't read the full briefing either during filmed and documented testimony in front of the 9/11 Commission. You can see the video on YouTube.

        In spite of Bush family history, George W's literal desertion and refusal to even serve in the National Guard while others died in Vietnam, his extremely low intelligence, and his outright laziness, elitism, and being an untreated alcoholic, people compromised their country and their futures to keep the power in the hands of the republicans.

        I hope they are happy. Our economy has suffered a huge blow from the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Wait until people figure out the same thing is melting down in the credit card industry. They bundle up credit debt and sell it to investment companies who buy it with your retirement dollars. As defaults skyrocket, what you have left is going to take another and a very big hit. Meanwhile we pay some $2 billion dollars a week for George W's illegal war while the rest of the country rots.

        This country allowed two elections to be stolen, and a complete idiot to assume office and do more damage to this country than any enemy, country, or threat has ever been able to do. The USSR couldn't end the USA and neither could communist China - until George W. Bush took the reigns and dug us into such a hole, and at such a time - when cheap energy is running out and climate change is about to really screw with food supplies - that we more than likely will not be able to survive as a nation anyone here recognizes.

        Oh well.
  • Proud? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FredFredrickson (1177871) * on Friday August 22 2008, @11:37AM (#24707467) Homepage Journal
    How much more do we, Americans, have to take before we take action?

    They might as well have said, "Admittedly, we failed at not only our most important task, but our only task: Preserve and Continue Democracy."

    Personally, I protest weekly in my town.. but when will we get riots in the streets.. the ones you'd expect from those good ol' freedom loving Americans? Are they too busy listening to the "proud to be an american" song to actually be an american? It's not just a status, it's not juts a privilage, it's a responsibility.

    I'm dissapointed that this is on the front page of slashdot, and tomorrow, will be off the front page of slashdot, and that's all the waves it will create. I'm not proud, I'm ashamed of my country.

    I stopped going to church because the people who went were too busy feeling good going to church to actually do good things.
    • Re:Proud? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Jerf (17166) on Friday August 22 2008, @12:21PM (#24708241) Journal

      Personally, I protest weekly in my town..

      Well, there's your problem, making yourself easily ignorable. Heck, the relevant people would have to go out of their way to find out about you.

      Stop protesting in the streets, and instead spend the time doing two things:

      • Cultivating a relationship with the local news outlets. They like government corruption (or anything related to it) stories. (Yeah, that's a simplification but it's basically true.)
      • Figure out how to file lawsuits, and start filing.

      The sum of those two things is greater than the sum of the parts.

      You've indicated a willingness to spend time on the issue, but you need to re-think your tactics.

      (I can't. I don't live in Ohio or, to the best of my knowledge, in anyplace that has such ballot machines, and therefore I have no standing [lectlaw.com].)

      Protesting in the streets has its place, but it's a very overrated political action. If you're not several thousand people making a point that 80%+ of the population strongly agrees with, you're wasting your time. Do something with your time that works, instead.

  • by bigtallmofo (695287) * on Friday August 22 2008, @11:37AM (#24707471)
    Turns out Diebold accidentally leaked a snippet of their C# source code that shows the conditions that the machines may fail to register votes:

    if(vote.Party == "Democrat" && democratvotes % 3)
    democratvotes++;

    Oopsie!
  • by InvisblePinkUnicorn (1126837) on Friday August 22 2008, @11:37AM (#24707479)
    Don't blame me, I voted for a';DROP TABLE users; SELECT * FROM data WHERE name LIKE '%.
  • Tea Party redux (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Just Some Guy (3352) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Friday August 22 2008, @11:38AM (#24707489) Homepage Journal

    but they had poll worker shortages last year and might need tech-savvy people to volunteer.

    Want to really help? "Accidentally" run over the crate of voting machines, or allow it to fall off a bridge into a deep river. Do democracy a favor and destroy these abominations, you tech-savvy butterfingers!

    • by HTH NE1 (675604) on Friday August 22 2008, @11:46AM (#24707601)

      Want to really help? "Accidentally" run over the crate of voting machines, or allow it to fall off a bridge into a deep river. Do democracy a favor and destroy these abominations, you tech-savvy butterfingers!

      Ahem... before the election.

    • Re:Tea Party redux (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sp332 (781207) on Friday August 22 2008, @12:10PM (#24708011)

      CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

      Serves: 1 precinct

      Things you will need:
      at least one day off work
      money for fines
      a destructive device (something small, like a ball-peen hammer, is recommended)

      1. Go to the polls as early as possible. Try to be one the the first voters.
      2. Ensure that the polling place has enough reserve paper ballots on hand, or can easily obtain them in time.
      3. Disable the polling machines. One or two well-placed hits from a hammer should do.
              Act quickly to get them all before you are stopped.
      4. Cooperate with any police officers who arrive. You may be treated roughly. Do not put up a fight at this point.
              You will almost certainly go to jail for some time, from hours to days, depending on circumstances.
      5. If there is any media present, let them know what you did and *why* you did it.
              Try not to come off as a raving loony. Practice in front of a mirror is recommended.

      • by AlamedaStone (114462) on Friday August 22 2008, @12:26PM (#24708315)

        Please mod parent up.

        Civil disobedience is where we need to be now, to prevent us bleeding-heart liberals from needing to learn how to care for small arms.

        • Re:Tea Party redux (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Just Some Guy (3352) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Friday August 22 2008, @12:50PM (#24708843) Homepage Journal

          Civil disobedience is where we need to be now, to prevent us bleeding-heart liberals from needing to learn how to care for small arms.

          Bleeding hearts? I'm about as conservative as it gets, but the idea of either party hijacking an election infuriates me. Maybe next time it'd be a Green supporter who throws an election to the left, or maybe a fascist who only elects hardcore pseudocons - oh, sorry, neocons.

          Even if nothing else, if I didn't love democracy and care for the process, I'd still like to know that my guy won by an honest vote. I'd rather lose than win it traitorously.

  • by YesIAmAScript (886271) on Friday August 22 2008, @11:40AM (#24707517)

    Please, someone give me a reasonable explanation as to why these machines remained certified for the last 8 years despite all this crap?

    • Corruption.

      (Was that obvious?)

      • by Shotgun (30919) on Friday August 22 2008, @12:01PM (#24707877)

        It has to be corruption. I mean, damn, the cheapest shareware author from the early 90's would be ashamed to ship something this spectacularly screwed up. It's got to do ONE simple, straight forward job. There are NO corner cases. There are NO race conditions. There is NO need for parallel execution. It is the simplest transactional system that one anyone could devise. And yet, it DROPS DATA !?! Get the F*** outta here!!

        This cannot be explained by incompetence or stupidity. The ONLY explanation is outright corruption.

        • by Hyppy (74366) on Friday August 22 2008, @12:12PM (#24708069)

          It's got to do ONE simple, straight forward job. There are NO corner cases. There are NO race conditions. There is NO need for parallel execution. It is the simplest transactional system that one anyone could devise.

          Playing Devil's Advocate here, but wouldn't a voting machine be a perfect example for a possible race condition?

          Scenario: Both Voter 1 and Voter 2 choose Obama.
          Vote machine 1 reads current number of votes: 10
          Vote machine 2 reads current number of votes: 10
          Voter 1 and Voter 2 both cast their ballots for Obama simultaneously.
          Vote machine 1 writes new vote tally for Obama: 11.
          Vote machine 1 writes new vote tally for Obama: 11.

          So, instead of receiving 2 votes, Obama is only credited for 1.

          I'm just saying, almost ANYTHING can be explained by incompetence or stupidity.

          But, my vote's with you. Corruption.

          • Your vote machine should never EVER be keeping a running tally. Your vote machine should be keeping a line-item list of votes cast.

            Or, put another way, your voting machine should only ever be making, to your vote record table, INSERT statements. Never a SELECT, and most certainly never an UPDATE or DELETE.

          • Vote machine 1 reads current number of votes: 10
            Vote machine 2 reads current number of votes: 10
            Voter 1 and Voter 2 both cast their ballots for Obama simultaneously.

            Others have pointed out that you don't keep a running tally. But even if you did, say, for summary purposes, that would be:

            Vote machine 1 acquires a lock to the counter and reads current number of votes: 10
            Vote machine 2 attempts to acquire the lock and is blocked
            Vote machine 1 updates the counter and releases its lock
            Vote machine 2 gets the lock and continues

            At any rate, there is exactly one correct way to handle machine voting: use it as an input device that is capable of printing an official paper ballot flawlessly. Use the machine totals for preliminary results, but use the paper ballots for the certified results. It elimates the whole "butterfly ballot" and "hanging chad" debacle from 2000, and works even if the computers crash.

    • diebold assured us that there were no problem..

      a position they've now changed and will not be punished for.

  • I'd be more than happy to be a poll worker (I'd even forfeit my salary to be one), except for the simple fact that one has to be a registered Democrat or Republican to be a poll worker in Ohio, which requires a statement made under penalty of election falsification (a felony) that you do indeed agree with the principles of the party and desire to be affiliated with them.

    As I do not support the principles of either major party nor do I wish to be affiliated with either one, I cannot be a poll worker unless I commit a felony (which would probably bar me from being a poll worker).

    Now, I'm obviously going a bit overboard here. No one really cares if you lie about your partisan identification. Republicans crossed over like crazy in the primary to vote for Clinton, but no one ever got arrested for it. In any case, I take such oaths seriously, so I can't be a poll worker.

      • No.

        ORC 3501.22(A) [ohio.gov], to wit:

        [...] The judges shall constitute the election officers of the precinct. Not more than one-half of the total number of judges shall be members of the same political party. The term of such precinct officers shall be for one year. The board may, at any time, designate any number of election officers, not more than one-half of whom shall be members of the same political party, to perform their duties at any precinct in any election. The board may appoint additional officials, equally divided between the two major political parties, when necessary to expedite voting.

        I've tried on several occasions and have been turned away each time because I refuse to register as either a Democrat or Republican.

        You should also read the brochure. It has a space for party affiliation. As I said previously, the "oath requirement" enforcement is incredibly lax, so incredibly lax that the SoS didn't even bother to point out that it is one of the qualifications under law.

  • Volunteers (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Propaganda13 (312548) on Friday August 22 2008, @11:46AM (#24707603)

    Actually, I was thinking tech-savvy volunteers would be more tempted to fix the elections when Diebold machines are used.

  • All or just some? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cdrguru (88047) on Friday August 22 2008, @11:49AM (#24707663) Homepage

    Unfortunately, the way the US elections are managed, we can have some type of "instant results" from voting machines or we can just let the TV News announce a winner based on exit polls and the like.

    One way or the other, there will be results announced the night of the election. There is just too much ad money riding on the election coverage. It has to be relevent. And by relevent, I mean a winner has to be announced. Period.

    They announced Gore as the winner in 2000. We're still getting over that. What happens this year if they announce Obama as the winner and then on Thursday the announcement comes out that, well, really, after counting all the votes for real it looks like McCain won? What do you think will happen?

  • by rpillala (583965) on Friday August 22 2008, @12:06PM (#24707961)

    I thought they had staff dedicated to this, like the CEO.

  • by Kaptain Kruton (854928) on Friday August 22 2008, @12:13PM (#24708091)

    While Diebold initially blamed anti-virus software for the glitch, they have now discovered that the bug was their own fault for not recording votes to memory when the cards are uploaded in 'certain circumstances'

    "Certain circumstances" -- a.k.a "voting"

  • by MagdJTK (1275470) on Friday August 22 2008, @12:53PM (#24708915)

    I don't understand why these machines exist. I've only voted in one general election (here in the UK) and we used the old "cross in the box then put the paper in the slot" technique. The result was still in by the next day, so what problem are these machines supposed to be solving?

  • by mlwmohawk (801821) on Friday August 22 2008, @01:55PM (#24710071)

    The machine has one job. One job only. It counts votes.

    I've been developing software for almost three decades, and I can't understand how you can write software so bad that it can't count.

    I can't believe it is a simple error. There is a reason why this is happening and it isn't about "counting" votes, its about about choosing which votes count.

    You can't blatantly steal an election without getting noticed. You can, however, lose a number of votes that don't seem statistically important on any one machine, but when combined with many, can alter the results of a close election.

    That's what gerrymandering is all about, keep everything close, and small errors can let you win.