Ohio Audit Reveals More Diebold Problems 222
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."
I don't know anything about databases (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I smell fud (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Problem-free election? (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 party. Voters of all different ethnicities (this is Toronto) seem to have no problem. Also, we try to station people who speak the language of the neighbourhood at the polling stations. If the voters really need to, they bring a copy of the literature with them, and find the name which is the same on the ballot, and mark their 'X'.
The eligibility standard is very simple: All Canadian citizens 18yrs or older on election day who are resident in that riding may vote. Credentials are not required unless in the case of a challenge, or if they need to register or change ridings.
They can register at any time up to the end of election day, at the polling station. This is important, so that people will not be disenfranchised.
The purpose of having thousands of election workers and having distributed counting is so that mistakes are relatively random. If it's too close, it's sent to judicial recount, and things are looked at more closely.
This is one way to run a fair election.
I was not involved in the Ohio election, so I cannot give my professional opinion, but from what I've heard from the media, there were numerous conflicts of interest which would be illegal in Canada, and numerous other irregularities which would be illegal even in the U.S.
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!
Different People (Score:3, Informative)
The purchase of GES was in response to the federal voting legislation passed after "hanging chad" issue. This legislation, while not requiring the use of electronic voting machines, including many provisions (such as requiring that people with disabilites be able to vote using the same system as everyone else) that certainly encouraged them. Diebold expected a huge increase in voting machine purchases as a result of this, and didn't have time to build their own system from scratch, so they acquired one. Thier predictions were correct and they have made a ton of money from the deal holding 80% of the market, even though their design is garbage.
Basically all these problems with voting machines are because of misguided voting reform, where after ignoring an issue for years voters turned around and demanded something be done, and the politicians happily obliged by passing knee-jerk laws and buying up whatever snake-oil was available at that minute. Which is pretty much politics in a nutshell - ignore a problem until it gets really bad and then overreact and make things worse than they were to begin with.