Diebold Admits Ohio Machines May Lose Votes 502
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."
Re:Open Voting (Score:5, Informative)
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:why do these machines remain certified? (Score:5, Informative)
Corruption.
(Was that obvious?)
Re:Ohio requires partisan poll workers (Score:3, Informative)
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,
No they don't. You just have to be a registered voter.
Brochure from the Ohio SOS office. [state.oh.us]
Re:Ohio requires partisan poll workers (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Open Voting (Score:3, Informative)
OVC is still alive, and showed up at the Linuxworld conference with a demo. They do, however, desperately need donations.
Re:Open Voting (Score:4, Informative)
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:3, Informative)
The tree of liberty needs to be watered by what again? Is it hugs and puppies, safe in their comfy beds? I can't quite remember.
Re:Open Voting (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Open Voting (Score:3, Informative)
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." - Thomas Jefferson
Re:why do these machines remain certified? (Score:3, Informative)
...There are NO race conditions. There is NO need for parallel execution. ...
I'm not so sure of that. At least according to the Washington Post story on the problem [washingtonpost.com], the problem appears to be with counting votes from the memory cards from multiple machines at a time, and sounds a bit like, err, umm, it might be a race condition:
Perhaps there's no need for parallelism, but, for better or worse, it sounds as if there might be parallelism.
Re:Open Voting (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Happend in NM and NV (Score:5, Informative)
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:Happend in NM and NV (Score:3, Informative)
And the repercussions of this decision could be predicted by anyone with a tiny bit of IT knowledge.
Re:Open Voting (Score:2, Informative)
Well, no it didn't happen. In each case the person in question won the majority of the electoral college which is how you become the President.
Now I am assuming you are attempting to reference the Florida issue, and if you were to do a little research you would find that the non-partisan sponsored recounts showed that that the candidate in question did win the popular vote from Florida.
Re:Hand scanning? (Score:4, Informative)
THere's nothing stopping the use of a automated scanner.
The manual scan was actually arrived at as the preferred model after an discussion over months of many voting system and security experts. There's lots of in obvious practical details and security holes foiled by the hand scan. Among the best reason is that it brings in attractive parts of hand counting such as witnesses, and checking of each ballot at is goes by. It destroys residual ballot order. And very high level of individual ballot scrutiny. THere's some downsides to this but a very serious analysis judged this was the best approach. You are free to differ but if you want to object to this as a show stopper then you are oblicated to review the archived e-mail discussions OVC held on this choice.
One part of the OVC system I did not mention is that there will be automated scanners in the voting facility so people can check their own bar codes should they worry. Or they can even scan them with their own cell phones (since it's not a cast ballot, the scan does not consitute a violation of privacy any more than a cell phone picture of a normal hand marked ballot does. )
The linear bar code was chosen because it is the easist to keep information straved in a visible manner--you just can't go hiding things like personally identifiable info because it's easy to limit the size of the code to one that could not support that. And while not evident to every one it is sufficiently evident that indepenent experts can reassure people on that.