Diebold's Election Data Off-limits 497
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.'"
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.
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What is so proprietary (Score:5, Insightful)
It certainly adds credence... (Score:4, Insightful)
voting rights? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Re:Cananda (Score:3, Insightful)
...and we can still manage to figure out who won that same night. *snicker*
Re:Diebold's bad, but officials also to blame (Score:2, Insightful)
In 2008 people in Florida will be whining "The ballot was too confusing, I didn't realize I was supposed to touch the NAME on the touch screen. Can we get the butterfly ballots back?" or in an alternate scenario: "The touch screen disciminates against us fatties. I meant to hit Republicrat but my fat finger pressed both Republicrat and independent so I want my vote back! I demand a recount!"
Re:Computerized voting is a great idea (Score:3, Insightful)
For instance, a system could be designed whereby every individual vote was published (names removed) in a simple format (*.txt?) as to allow each user to count the vote for themselves, as well as verify that their vote was cast correctly. A highly superior system for ensuring that an election is not a farce, compared to the blind faith we maintain in paper...
That said, Diebold's systems are certainly worse than paper. Leaving elections in the hands of private companies who seem to have little interest in maintaing any kind of democracy/republic gives me the willies..
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?
Re:STOP TAKING BLACK BOX VOTING STORIES (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Cryptographically secure voting (Score:3, Insightful)
Bruce Schneier described such a system in his book Applied Cryptography.
ISBN 0-471-59756-2 (1993 first ed. there're newer ones)
(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-
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.)
Re:Cryptographically secure voting (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
big numbers? (Score:1, Insightful)
If we're willing to trust air-traffic control and nuclear ballistic missile command-and-control to computers, I'm not quite sure why voting is such an intrinsically scary proposition.
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
This is the reason that we need Open File Formats (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
Re:big numbers? (Score:3, Insightful)
If they fail utterly, maybe. If the radar screen goes completely blank, then, sure, there are emergency procedures that might allow the ATC operators to guide planes in under VFR, God and weather willing.
But what if the technology just goes a little wiggy? What if the distances the radar screen reports are all 10% too small? There's nothing in the system that can catch that until Something Bad happens.
Same thing with missile control. Sure, a human gives the launch order. But then you trust the guidance computer to deliver the warhead to Soviet Russia instead of, say, downtown Chicago, because of some little bug or other in the onboard software.
Heck, you trust the mechanisms in your car all the time. You drive down the road at speeds and at distances relative to other cars that if your brakes suddenly stopped working as designed, you'd be dead. There's no way for you to "override" the machine and do the braking yourself, Fred Flinstone style. Some newer cars have cruise-control that can take over braking and accelerating at all speeds -- do drivers really have the reflexes to take over in time if this mechanism flips out? Slams the accelerator to the floor suddenly when the car in front brakes sharply? I'm guessing not.
Or take the flight-control system in a 767. If the hydraulic assist goes out, can the pilot still move the control surfaces by brute strength and wires? Are there even any wires anymore?
Or take your basic heart-lung machine used in open-heart surgery. Sure, if the machine gives up the ghost in the middle of the operation, while your heart is lying outside your chest half taken apart, there's a human heart surgeon standing by. To pick up the phone and call for a priest, maybe.
Basically, we increasingly rely on machines to work as they are designed, and our command options are increasingly limited to whether or not we push the "start" button. The "go to manual override" option is becoming about as useful to 21st century life as it was on the bridge of the Enterprise. But why fret about this? Humans have always trusted their lives and fortunes to their tools.
Re:big numbers? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have reasonable trust in the computers that control air traffic and nuclear missles, and I can even trust the computers in voting machines. I do not trust voting machines that are black boxes whose output files can only be read by the computer manufacturer. How can I trust a voting machine whose manufacturer promised that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."?
Re:big numbers? (Score:3, Insightful)
Alaska could learn from Massachusetts (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Diebold's bad, but officials also to blame (Score:2, Insightful)
Why have a paper trail? For a million reasons. To have a hard count to verify that the computer count is correct. To have a backup in case the database becomes corrupted. To ensure that there is no tampering.
To not have a paper trail leaves the voters in a dangerous situation. If something happens to the election database, or if someone manages to tamper with it, there will be a way to verify that the election results are correct.
Re:This is the reason that we need Open File Forma (Score:2, Insightful)
I say, fine, don't releast that file format.
But issue an order that the data be given in a comma-delimited or tab-delimited format, while you then do everything possible (State goverment-wise) to get them to hand over the original format files and pass regulations that mandate that such formats be open and all data captured be released to citizens directly (via a web site) for immediate download and review. Period.
Diebold is just being an a__hat over this, and they should be smacked down rapidly, fargin' iceholes.
Re:Computerized voting is a great idea (Score:1, Insightful)
I do hope you're not directly equating the use of paper ballots with being a "less-developed country".
Despite what your pro-Diebold officials have doubtless propogandized, there is no reason why a modern democracy cannot do perfectly well with paper ballots. The United Kingdom - the world's oldest continuously-functioning democracy, the source of many of America's customs and laws, and one of your fellow members of the G8 - is among the many developed nations that still use paper ballots of the sort where you indicate your vote by marking an X in a little box.
The consequences of this antiquated system? Well, voting fraud is certainly not a major problem (it happens, mostly with postal votes, but it's by no means "widespread"). Nobody finds the ballots "too difficult"; the community of persons with disabilities has yet to complain about it being somehow inaccessible; we still get our election results promptly. So, no major disadvantages. What about the advantages? Well, let's just say that unlike in certain superpowers, we are actually capable of holding elections where the losing party doesn't even consider challenging the results. We are actually capable of holding elections which do not result in 50% of the population accusing the other 50% of rigging the vote.
Hmm.
Re:Open Government (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean without copyright, trademarks and patents?
I think we need to be more specific.
It would be nice if everyone could think for a moment and come to a complete and final decision about what they actually mean and want.
But its a lot harder to get independant thought out of our free society than an angry unorganized mob foaming at the mouth for "justice" and "freedom" and other concepts they barely understand.
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.
I used a pencil (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:big numbers? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why does the idea have to be "interesting"? A boring solution that works sounds great to me.
Re:big numbers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Gears, handbrake, ignition switch.
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.
Love Them Machine (Score:3, Insightful)
In other words, the difficulty of counting votes doesn't grow linearly. It may take 10 times the people, but it's only slightly more complicated.
Canada had its results fairly well finalized within 40 minutes of most polls closing (B.C. closed 1/2 hour later). There's no reason the U.S. can't do the same.
What the U.S. should do is:
But people are in love with their machines, aren't they?
Re:Mod parent down (Score:1, Insightful)
The present department of justice does not have justice on its agenda. It's too busy fighting on behalf of the Republicans. The Alaska Division of Elections does not have fair elections on its agenda. It's too busy fighting on behalf of the Republicans. It's the same story with environmental protection, agriculture, and most sadly, defense.
Re:Computerized voting is a great idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do you act as if I'm ignoring that? I said you also need trustworthy volunteers watching the ballot boxes. Can you substitute one piece of paper for another in a locked box in front of my eyes without me noticing?
My point is quite simple: you can substitute one electronic ballot for another, in plain sight, in front of as many witnesses, volunteers, and auditors as you like, without any of them being the wiser. You cannot substitute one paper ballot for another in that way, because if you try to do so without having the collusion of every random person who might be in the same room, then they'll say "Hey, why are you switching the ballot boxes?"
So there is the communication from precinct captain to supervisor to the capital to consider.
This is again easy to solve: if candidates can allow their own volunteers to supervise the counting, then they can check the final counts and any discrepancy will cause them to say "Hey, why did that number change?". And again: paper counts are possible to supervise, electronic counts are not.
In short, I don't worry much about the naked complexity of the computer code required
Although the complexity of the computer code required should worry you (we've already seen bugs that affected thousands of votes - how much more worrisome does it have to get?), it's the complexity of the computer code *installed* that should worry you more. There is no way to verify that the code which was "certified" is the code which was installed, and in fact we know of many cases in which the opposite has occurred.
That is, which can prove that no one was able to modify the tally on the disk drive or that no once was able to replace a ballot box with another of his choosing just after the polls close.
There's an easy way to prove to you that none of the ballot boxes have been replaced: I just invite you to come stay up all night with them and watch them.
Now, prove to me that nobody was able to modify a tally on a disk drive. You simply can't do it. Are you going to verify that the source code is flawless? That's never happened even when the programmers were all trying to make it so - imagine how much more insecure software gets when the programmers all have huge incentives to insert backdoors! How are you going to trust that the binaries on the machines correspond to that source code? Remember, you can't just tell the machines to give you their own binaries - a good rootkit can just keep uninfected files around to make itself look clean. For that matter, who says the rootkits have to be on the disk at all? Why not in the BIOS? Or the hard drive firmware? Or in an altered CPU?
Paper and electronics simply don't work the same way, no matter what strained attempts you make to equate them. An audit trail is possible with paper because changing a paper ballot while an auditor watches would require a teleporter. Changing a hard drive ballot while an auditor watches just requires a hard drive.
Diebold owns the *format*, not the data. (Score:3, Insightful)
That having been said: To the extent to which the government contracted to have critical electoral data effectively encrypted and held hostage by a private company, there must be some way to have that declared illegal and/or unconstitutional.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Re:big numbers? (Score:1, Insightful)
US military deaths in Iraq 2235
Election fraud is destroying this coutry.
Re:What a huge amount of BS (Score:3, Insightful)
Its an outgrowth of the "War on Crime" and the Punishment/Vengence mentality currently in vogue (even though we know the harsher you make the prisons, the more dangerous the prisoners are to society once released).
We Americans love our wars apparently, War on Crime, War on Drugs, War on Terror, War on Poverty. You and I know that these "wars" can never be "won", but it sounds good in 7 second sound bites, and a lot of naive people here go for it, so the "war" rhetoric continues to be used. To the simple-minded, or the naive who want to remain willfully ignorant, its impossible to explain to them why the War on Drugs is actually hurting the War on Crime, for example. Like non-violent drug offenders taking up space in prisons that should be reserved for the most violent and dangerous criminals.
Only in America (which has a higher percentage of its population incarcerated then the USSR at its end) are there non-violent drug-related offences that get mandatory prison sentences that are longer than the sentences for many *violent* crimes. Oh, and when we let them out, we won't let them vote either. That last little act of meaningless vengence will certainly turn those hard core criminals right around and get them to straighten up their lives. Yea, right.
This is what happens when you conduct your political discourse via 30-second TV commercials, where facts are optional, and calm rational thought is recognized as a weakness.
When our democracy finally dies, I hope the rest of the world will at least remember that we Americans *started out* with the best of intentions. Sigh.
Re:big numbers? (Score:3, Insightful)
A piece of paper has two sides. On one side of the ballot, you have the options. On the other side, you have the spot where the stamp should go. After marking your choice on the ballot, you fold the ballot so that the person stamping the ballots cannot see where you marked. You can watch that person while they stamp the ballot and if they open it up to take a peek, you can call out "Shenanigans!"