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Maryland Votes To Ban Diebold Voting Machines
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Mar 10, 2006 05:25 PM
from the now-maybe-they'll-have-real-votes dept.
from the now-maybe-they'll-have-real-votes dept.
vandon writes "Computerworld.com reports: 'The state Maryland House of Delegates this week voted 137-0 to approve a bill prohibiting election officials from using AccuVote-TSx touch-screen systems in 2006 primary and general elections. The legislation calls for the state to lease paper-based optical-scan systems for this year's votes. State Delegate Anne Healey estimated the leasing cost at $12.5 million to $16 million for the two elections.'"
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Diebold's Election Data Off-limits 497 comments
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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Maryland Governor Wants Voting Paper Trail 111 comments
smooth wombat writes "Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. said Wednesday that he has lost confidence in the state's ability to hold fair and secure elections this fall, and called for paper receipts for Maryland's electronic voting machines,and the delay of early-voting procedures approved by the Democratic-controlled legislature." From the article: "'In light of these recent national decertifications and the Maryland General Assembly's decision to override my vetoes ... I no longer have confidence in the State Board of Elections' ability to conduct fair and accurate elections in 2006,' said Ehrlich, a Republican, in his letter to Board of Elections Chairman Gilles W. Burger. Democrats criticized Ehrlich's apparent shift on the paper-receipt issue, noting that he vetoed a bill last year that would have studied the option. Advocates of reforming the state's voting system cheered Ehrlich's remarks, which he made a day before a Senate committee is to hold hearings on a bill that would require a paper trail. "
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Your Rights Online: Diebold Whistle-Blower Charged With Felony Access 585 comments
Vicissidude writes "An employee of law firm Jones Day found legal memos showing that their client, Diebold Election Systems, had used uncertified voting systems in Alameda County elections beginning in 2002 - violating California election law. The whistle-blower turned over the memos to the Oakland Tribune, which published the legal memos on its website in April 2004. The company's AccuVote-TSx model was subsequently banned in May 2004. Now, the whistle-blower, Stephen Heller, has been charged in L.A. Superior Court with felony access to computer data, commercial burglary, and receiving stolen property. If convicted on all three counts, Heller could face up to three years and eight months in state prison. Blair Berk, Heller's attorney state, "Certainly, someone who saw those documents could have reasonably believed that thousands of voters were going to be potentially disenfranchised in upcoming elections." Sandi Gibbons, spokeswoman for the L.A. County district attorney's office rebuts, "He's accused of breaking the law... If we feel that the evidence shows beyond a reasonable doubt in our minds that a crime has been committed, it's our job as a criminal prosecutor to file a case.""
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Diebold Threatens to Pull Out of North Carolina 615 comments
foobaric writes "A North Carolina judge ruled that Diebold may not be protected from criminal prosecution if it fails to disclose the code behind its voting machines as required by law. In response, Diebold has threatened to pull out of North Carolina." From the article: "The dispute centers on the state's requirement that suppliers place in escrow 'all software that is relevant to functionality, setup, configuration, and operation of the voting system,' as well as a list of programmers responsible for creating the software. That's not possible for Diebold's machines, which use Microsoft Windows, Hanna said. The company does not have the right to provide Microsoft's code, he said, adding it would be impossible to provide the names of every programmer who worked on Windows."
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Couldn't hack it (Score:5, Funny)
Oops... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oops... (Score:5, Informative)
If its anything like the one in the Ga House, they go up to a giant light board with the Rep's name, where it turns on either a Red or Green light next to the name, and tallys all the lights of the same color to give a play-by-play of the votes. If the tally is incorrect, its plainly visible. Im sure a rep would complain if their vote shows up incorrectly on the big board with their name next to it...
tm
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The old fashioned ways are still the best (Score:5, Insightful)
There are places where technology does not belong and the old fashioned paper trail is still the best. I do not trust any voting system that the voter does not mark the paper. Anything else can be hacked or riged too easily.
Re:The old fashioned ways are still the best (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Taking it on the chin (Score:5, Insightful)
137 to 0 -- ouch!!
Diebold has gotten itself into a quagmire and they don't seem to be able to pull themselves out. How hard was it to add a paper trail to the machines to start with?
And yes, there's plenty of fraud with paper ballots and mechanical voting machines. But the idea is that electronic voting machines are supposed to be superior to those systems, and without a paper trail to verify that votes have been recorded properly, they're reduced to being no better and actualy, given their hackability, worse.
In related news... (Score:5, Funny)
In more related news, stock of the Harland Company, parent company of Scantron [scantron.com], got a small bump [google.com] today.
Diebold is an enemy of the republic (Score:5, Insightful)
Flamebait, troll, yadda-yadda.
It's true.
Black-box voting systems have continually been championed by those who would criminally game the system for their own advantage, democracy be damned. They tend to defend their actions with nothing more righteous than cynicism: we do this because hey, everybody does it.
No, everyone DOESN'T do it, and that is no justification in any event. The ends to not justify undermining democracy. Democracy is a large part of what makes societies strong, not weak, and undermining it only serves to strengthen the enemies of it, whether those enemies are foreign or domestic.
So bravo to Maryland. I hope all states follow their example, and that those citizens who are forced to use unverifiable voting machines take a sledgehammer to them instead.
I didn't see any reason for the upgrade anyway... (Score:5, Informative)
Too bad Accupoll went bankrupt (Score:5, Informative)
Too bad "On January 30, 2006, AccuPoll filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Pursuant to this filing, AccuPoll will cease operations and liquidate its assets. Therefore, AccuPoll voting systems are no longer available for purchase."
In related news... (Score:5, Funny)
password in source code (Score:5, Interesting)
He gave a talk about it last year and advocated a paper ballets and optical scanners as others have.
Interesting Note on Main Diebold Lobbyist ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, it's the same guy that crushed Cesar Chavez's union movement in California and lobbied successfully for multiple increases in the guest worker H-1B program as chief lobbyist for the Microsoft sponsored ITAA (itaa.org).
What cracks me up is
from cio.com
The vendor community doesn't like it. "We oppose the idea of a voter-verified paper trail," says Harris Miller, president of the trade group Information Technology Association of America. Introducing paper into the mix, he says, defeats the improved efficiency and reliability e-voting promises.
from zazona.com
Harris Miller, the president of ITAA, worked as a lobbyist/consultant for California agribusiness in the late 1980s. Miller's first big client was the National Council of Agricultural Employers, a group of large growers who use migrant and illegal alien workers. [20]
His firm helped farmers to bring in "temporary" agricultural workers from Mexico. These farmers wanted to undercut gains that Cesar Chavez and UFW had made. This boosted the profits of Miller's agribusiness clients. Harris painted such pictures as "fields full of crops, just lying there, rotting in the sun because of the 'crisis' of a 'shortage' of farm workers." This was a prelude to using the same strategies for an organization that Harris founded in the late 1980s, the ITAA, which is a lobbying organization that represents "high tech" firms. He merely substituted the category of scientist and engineer that was in highest demand for the agricultural worker. He has become very wealthy from the new "high-tech bracero" program.
A spokesman for the Farmworker Justice Fund, Inc. said "he [Harris Miller] was a lobbyist/consultant to the growers and was very active for years on the agricultural guest worker legislation. "
Miller said that critics who deny there's a high tech labor shortage probably also think that the world is flat.[26] We can be thankful that this scofflaw didn't accuse us of believing in the Tooth Fairy.
Optical scan is almost as bad.... (Score:5, Insightful)
By far, the most secure method of counting votes is by hand. Several hundred people counting the votes (and witnessing the count) is far more secure than one guy in a backroom counting votes with a computer. The more people witness the count, the better.
We need to have total transparency in the process. Hand counts ensure that.
Re:Hope it doesn't rain.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The electronic scanning simply speeds up the process.
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Re:Hope it doesn't rain.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that we need the ballots to be impossible to tamper with. It is that we need to know when they have been tampered with.
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It's a matter of the 'document of record' (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Hope it doesn't rain.... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Hope it doesn't rain.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Hope it doesn't rain.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Since you cannot audit the process, the answer seems to be "yes".
True. That does not excuse rectifiable problems with successor systems.
From my reading the vendors of these systems there is no effort to
close the holes, only "trust us".
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Re:Hope it doesn't rain.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Hope it doesn't rain.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It does make a difference. With a punch card, or a paper ballot, or even a mechanical voting both anyone can trace when fraud has occured. And in those cases we implement some security, track where the fraud came from (if we can) and redo the election.
With the current generation of electronic voting machines, we can't do that. I don't care who makes a good machine, but Diebold hasn't made one. And they've defended that design as if they think it is a good machine. Geeks don't like people who pretend a bad design is a good design. We'll tear into them. If they routinely defend bad design by saying it is good design and overlooking what we think are obvious flaws we'll notice, and start to expect that. Until they change, a group that decides who they like on the technical ability of a company won't like them. They are lying about their technical quality; at least in our eyes.
This group respects and admires good thought processes. Neither you nor Diebold are showing them at the moment.
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Re:Voted? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, if they did I'd call it a new world record in incompetence when it comes to vote tampering...
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Re:Thank God (Score:5, Insightful)
FURTHERMORE, I'm a strong believer that touch screen systems should only exist to produce a filled out, printed ballot that is then processed by conventional means. The goal here should be to increase the accuracy of the vote, not the speed. Government can wait - I'd rather have it done right than done fast.
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