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."
Pen and Paper (Score:5, Insightful)
Proud? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Tea Party redux (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:Pen and Paper (Score:2, Insightful)
Volunteers (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, I was thinking tech-savvy volunteers would be more tempted to fix the elections when Diebold machines are used.
Re:Open Voting (Score:5, Insightful)
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:2, Insightful)
This is why we have guns.
Re:why do these machines remain certified? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:why do these machines remain certified? (Score:5, Insightful)
diebold assured us that there were no problem..
a position they've now changed and will not be punished for.
Re:Open Voting (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Don't Do It (Score:3, Insightful)
If I was a tech-savvy worker in Ohion, I'd run for the hills before volunteering to be legally responsible, or associated in any way, with these buggy voting machine known to malfunction and dump votes.
Although the guy above with the Boston-tea-party-throw-them-from-a-bridge-accidentally had a really good idea, you don't need to be tech-savvy for that (well, other than working knowledge of the theory of gravity)
Re:Tea Party redux (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Open Voting (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Proud? (Score:2, Insightful)
You seem to think ballot voting was more reliable before electronic voting. I'll grant you that electronic voting has the potential to forge votes more easily (...if (Gore) then (Bush)...), but there has always been issues with large numbers of people voting: stuffed boxes, lost boxes, poor counting, false counting. When you think of what's at stake (leader of the free world), you'll realize that some people will do whatever it takes to get their person elected.
That being said, stay angry, keep your protests going, and we'll all try to get something for the better.
Re:Open Voting (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think this "shows limits to open source". It shows that something might have gone wrong with this specific project (though the post below yours makes me believe even that might not be true).
You can't take one specific thing and generalize it; things don't work like that.
Re:Open Voting (Score:4, Insightful)
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:why do these machines remain certified? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Open Voting (Score:5, Insightful)
Thomas Jefferson disagrees with you.
Re:Open Voting (Score:2, Insightful)
That's only if the paper trail includes information about the person who voted. Doesn't even remotely make sense to put that on the trail.
Re:why do these machines remain certified? (Score:3, Insightful)
Your vote machine should never EVER be keeping a running tally.
Of course it shouldn't. It also shouldn't drop votes. Come now, let's not overestimate DieBold, here.
Re:This is what we call a (Score:3, Insightful)
Birthday: it happens every year and is quite predictable.
Re:Open Voting (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't even think it needs to be a LiveCD
The LiveCD option provides an avenue for forensic verification. If the system boots from a LiveCD, that disk can be compared via MD5SUM and SHA1SUM to a control copy to rule out tampering. With vote data stored separately of the OS, forensic investigation of misconduct can be focused on pure data instead of data + OS.
Let the poll workers take the voting machines home, they'll just get a fresh LiveCD on voting day.
Just my 14 cents (pfft...inflation...)
Re:Tea Party redux (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Open Voting (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:why do these machines remain certified? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Proud? (Score:2, Insightful)
Personally, I protest weekly in my town
Way to jade the listeners. Protesting is synonymous with complaining. It doesn't actually DO anything. Petitions (not the online kind) for propositions, ballots, recalls, elections, nominations, donations, gaining any kind of personal political influence and the like are effective. Being the obnoxious minority is not. There are protests going on every day in the United States, and how many of them have mattered in our 230 year history? 1? When you see Pakistanis burning American flags in the streets and screaming and shooting guns into the air because you are a godless heathen, does that cause you to sympathize with them, or make you want to tell them to shut the hell up?
Politicians see protesters as people who have too much time on their hands to be making any real money, and therefore are the non-influencial and unimportant. There are stronger, quieter avenues that they do fear and respect and are just as accessible to the public as a soap box.
That said, keep fighting the good fight, I only suggest you devote your energies to more productive channels of respect and influence than being loud or otherwise bothersome. Maybe start by running for city counsel, or supporting someone sympathetic to your cause to run.
Re:Open Voting (Score:4, Insightful)
Ummm -- you are an idiot, yes? You can classify these "issues" into two buckets:
1. OMFG! I can cast a small number of extra votes!
2. Hey, cool -- I can cast as many votes as are needed for my party to win.
Which poses a bigger threat to democracy?
But wait! Before you go ahead and start making changes, you should do a cost/benefit analysis: how many people will your new system prevent from voting versus how many invalid votes will there be? Under your system, most ways of making onesies-twoies extra votes aren't blocked (photo ids are a dime a dozen). But your system will prevent many people from voting. Tens of thousands of people don't drive and don't have passsports -- why should you make them jump through lots of (expensive) hoops?
There was an article in the Wall Street Journal some months back -- a fellow turned 18 before trying to get a driver's license. He had to apply *in person* in the *state capitol*, hundreds of miles away. Why? Because if you're a minor, you're parent vouches for you. Over 18, they can't, and so you have to prove who you are. Which is hard, because you don't have a driver's license.
In short: photo verification solves essentially nothing, while disenfranchising tens of thousands.
Re:Open Voting (Score:2, Insightful)
We had a vote on that from 1860 to 1865, the feds won. That's not a valid reading of #2 anymore.
Re:Open Voting (Score:5, Insightful)
""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:2, Insightful)
Could someone explain something to me? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Open Voting (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Open Voting (Score:3, Insightful)
How do you know that the paper you verified scrolled away into the ballot box and not into the paper shredder next to the ballot box?
If a computer must be involved, let it serve ONLY as a mechanism to help the voter fill out their ballot. Then let the voter confirm that the ballot is correct and manually submit the ballot for counting. Let the counting be performed both by a computer for the preliminary count (for efficiency) and by a group of humans for the official count (as a quality assurance mechanism.)
Re:Open Voting (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
It's happened 17 times in our nations history, and 2004 wasn't one of them. There's nothing mysterious about it, the popular vote is completely meaningless in an election. The only thing that matters is the electoral college. That's the way the Constitution was written, and there has not yet been an Amendment to change that.
Re:Blown way out of proportion (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why do these machines exist? (Score:3, Insightful)
The last election I voted in we had over ten different measures to vote for... local sanitation commissioner, bond referendums, etc (we have a lot more democracy than you guys have). Having a computer interface to select is really quite nice when there are dozens of votes to cast. Having zero confidence in the result is really the only bad part of the electronic vote-placing machines.
Yeah there are RF attacks on electronic machines, so they are technicallly inferior to pen and paper for voting -- but our winner-take-all system tends to cause there to be two parties and moves them towards the center (of our country's political spectrum), so really there's not that much incentive to determine how specific people are voting. Most people here couldn't care less if you know who they voted for... it's only if a giant database were to be assembled. But frankly you can tell who somebody is voting for from their purchases and myspace anyway.
Re:Open Voting (Score:5, Insightful)
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:3, Insightful)
"Revolution, armed or not, is at the core of our system of government."
Maybe on a piece of paper that the current establishment does not take seriously, and hasnt for a long time.
You seem to have a poor grasp of what government is, or is just out walking your verbal pet rock. A revolution is an action that totally eliminates the power of current government, replacing it with a new one. Democratic elections are way different from revolutions and what may be derived from this concept.