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Comments: 175 +- Politics: ES&S To Buy Diebold, Blackbox Voting To Sue on Thursday September 03, @06:05PM
Posted
by
kdawson
on Thursday September 03, @06:05PM
from the all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace dept.
from the all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace dept.
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Gottesser writes "Long-time election rights activist Bev Harris (she had an HBO special a while back where she hired Hari Hursti to hack an optical scan voting machine) just sent this out: 'Diebold/Premier Election Systems is being purchased by Election Systems & Software (ES&S). According to a Black Box Voting source within the companies, there will be a conference call among key people at the companies within the next couple hours. An ES&S/Diebold-Premier acquisition would consolidate most US voting under one privately held manufacturer. And it's not just the concealed vote-counting; these companies now also produce polling place check-in software (electronic pollbooks), voter registration software, and vote-by-mail authentication software.' Our voting system is heading toward a server-centric model with our vote being delivered to us by computers under lock and key far away from public oversight. Here's ES&S's press release. Wikipedia's got something on the ongoing string of ES&S controversies as well."
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you asked for it! (Score:2, Insightful)
Our voting system is heading toward a server-centric model with our vote being delivered to us by computers under lock and key far away from public oversight.
Didn't we want to be just like all the other democratic countries? The private sector delivers, and now we're bitching about it. Voters -- 'ya just can't please them.
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Enforce Good Practices (Score:3, Interesting)
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The issue here is not company structures and ownership, it's how e-voting works that is the issue.
FIRST!!11 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:FIRST!!11 (Score:5, Informative)
I wanted to mod you insightful but I thought it may be better to let you know that an open source voting system already exists [wired.com]. A security analysis (pdf warning) [ucdavis.edu] has been performed and the ACT Electoral Commission [act.gov.au] has full details of the the behaviour of the code you can download.
You should also check out Open Voting Consortium [openvotingconsortium.org] because we are all friends so lets help each other be free.
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Electronic "voting" needs to die (Score:5, Insightful)
This should force the FEC to outright ban electronic voting. I guess my .sig is getting old by now.
Florida abandoned touchscreen voting in favor... (Score:4, Informative)
optical scan, personally I never understood the motivation for touch screen voting other than gee whiz technology.
When they proposed touchscreen voting to replace punchcards in palm beach county, it cost $20 million while optical scan cost 2 million.
When voters demanded a paper record for recounts it turned out to be cheaper to implement optical scan than to equip
touchscreens with printers.
Sure voters may undervote but at least its their own damn fault and not because of some computer error or dirty tricks.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been an Elections Inspector in New York State for the last five years. Every time one of these stories crop up I wrote a detailed summary of the procedures and technology we use. In spite of these procedures including the retention of paper ballots I still can't convince the tinfoil hat crowd that our elections aren't being decided by a shadowy cabal working out of the Diebold offices. I've about given up on trying to convince them otherwise.
There are legitimate concerns surrounding so-called DRE (
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Actually Black Box did show how the Optical Scan system could be pwned! Access to the cards that hold the counts, even for a couple of minutes, could result in the election being rigged!
The only good part, is you still have the ballots. Reset the counting machines, use a card that is good, and the election results will actually (more or less) reflect the votes. I say more or less because the ballots are still filled in by Sheeple, and some of them, even after years of doing it, cannot fill out the ballot
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Which is why those cards are stored behind numbered seals. Next you'll say that the seals aren't perfect.
Re:Florida abandoned touchscreen voting in favor.. (Score:4, Insightful)
it does NOT MATTER that you feel you have inside info that the voting system is 'trustable'.
widespread, we (the people) don't trust it anymore. too many reports of bad things happening in the last few elections.
even if those are all made-up (and we know they are not); we need to have trust, first and foremost.
yes, sometimes you have to sell a car (or trade it in) just so you can know you'll not be stranded on the side of the road. we have a used car, now, so to speak; and we just don't trust it anymore.
paper (canada uses that!) is trustable.
open source is trustable.
the lying bastards who 'pledge all they can do' to ensure one candidate gets in; is NOT trustable! it does not matter if YOU, some elections guy, think its trustable. the rest of us lost that faith years ago.
to restore it, we need to go to low-tech methods. high tech is not always the answer. in this case, its the anti-answer.
Parent
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Was letting two companies lose people's votes any better?
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So the trouble with the electronic voting is the inherent secrec
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its taking forever to merge sun and oracle; yet these other 2 BASTARD companies are allowed (we know they will be) to merge?
time for pitchforks and torches to be seen in the streets.
(now, we only need caring americans to carry them!)
yeah. hell will freeze over first.
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Paper ballots (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Paper ballots (Score:4, Informative)
This is what we do in Canada. Paper is simple. Paper scales well. Paper is cheap. The booths for voting are made from old tables and cardboard. We generally only have problems once in a while when some idiot grabs a ballot box and runs off, only to fling it in a ditch. Paper is also fast. We get our election results as fast as America, and with less second guessing.
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Re:Paper ballots (Score:5, Insightful)
However, *I* do personally care if people know how you voted because it makes it far easier for someone to pay and/or intimidate you to vote a certain way.
Parent
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However, *I* do personally care if people know how you voted because it makes it far easier for someone to pay and/or intimidate you to vote a certain way.
There is already a very easy way for any would-be intimidator to verify the vote - he just tells the victim to provide a photo of a ballot with the desired choice on it, with a cell phone, from inside the voting booth. The worst thing the victim can do in this case is to invalidate the ballot after vote by marking something else or just crossing it all out, but even so this is good enough to prevent people from voting for someone you do not like, and in many cases this is good enough. And no, this isn't the
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At least then there is evidence of intimidation - you get tons of people with pictures of their ballots.
In practice, this is used far more often to buy votes than to intimidate people into voting the right way. Turns out that votes are real cheap, and when you can verify them, it is very much feasible to alter election results simply by throwing some money at it.
And, of course, a picture of a ballot proves nothing. After all, the alleged victim could easily fake intimidation by taking a photo of his ballot and sending it to someone, even when not actually asked to do so!
It also requires extra steps and effort and you could probably fake it if you wanted (just photoshop your photo).
This is trivially circumvented by putti
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That's a pretty interesting idea, but I don't think it's practical. Basically, it fails because it rests on the assumption that people will entirely honest.
Since only you know your own long string, there's nothing to stop you from claiming your string was not found and the election was rigged. Thus, you still end up with the original problem that a recount is impossible.
With paper ballots, you can verify the following phases very reliably:
1. Person submits exactly 1 ballot.
2. Each ballot by each person can
What else is left? (Score:5, Insightful)
All the ingredients necessary and sufficient to engineer an election result undetectably and without pesky statistical red flags. George Orwell himself couldn't have designed a more riggable system.
Say goodbye to democracy.
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Democracy (in the U.S.) died some time ago. Gerrymandering [wikipedia.org] killed it. The election is already rigged when the districts are drawn.
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Is there an Open alternative? (Score:3, Insightful)
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I know I've seen enough developers on here discussing how easy of a problem it is to solve.
I'm involved in the software development cycle as a tester. I hear that a lot, too. It never seems to be true.
WoW! Matter of time... (Score:2, Insightful)
So we're not even going to bother pretending we have fair and balanced elections now?
On the one hand. that's terrible. These people should all be shot for treason.
On the other... Yeah elections should go smoother since theres no confusion with a standard 'this is the only way' system.
Man... our country is so fucked... gonna be 10 years before the majority notices too. And another 50 to even think about fixing it.
Sucks to be US!
You have to hand it to these companies (Score:2)
Money-saving opportunity! (Score:2)
Sweet, now the political parties will only have ONE company they need to bribe donate to for all of their voting needs. At least that'll curb a bit of the government spending. That, or they'll just give themselves bigger bonuses. I'm sure they'll take the interest of the public to heart first though :P.
Thanks for reminding me... (Score:2)
It's time to re-read "The Stainless Steel Rat for President".
Congress passes "God-Bless-America-Bill" (Score:5, Insightful)
Washington DC
October 1, 2009
In a stunning display of bipartanship today, Congress saved the taxpayers several million dollars by suspending all future elections. Proponents of the bill point out that most people didn't even bother to vote last time, and that of those who did, polls show the overwhelming majority of them held strong opinions about issues they didn't even begin to understand.
"It was a ridiculous waste of the taxpayer's money," said Sam Rickenbaugh of the GAO. "We'd spend millions, billions even on holding elections, and the voters who even bothered to show up were the same mouth-breathing idiots who get roped into jury duty. It was a pathetic display, embarrassing even."
Democrats and Republicans have agreed to share power across the aisle, and points of contention will now be decided based on who can gather the largest contributions for their side.
"Now this is Democracy," posts John Ringerton of My Country Right Or Wrong.com. "You got an opinion, you can put your money where your mouth is like God intended."
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I think elections are a great invention. They only have one small flaw, that was not thought through: The non-voters case!
So I propose the following solution pattern:
Every non-voter *counts*. Either trough making a law, that automatically makes you a foreigner if you don't vote, and adding a "none of the above" option on the ballot,
or more conservative, to automatically count people not showing up to have voted as "none of the above".
BUT: The "none of the above" gets all the same abilities as a party. In it
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we need to get rid of mechanical voting too (Score:3, Insightful)
the most technophilic countries and the poorest should all vote the same way: paper
whatever convenience is gained with mechanical and electronic voting is lost by casting doubt over the legitimacy of the voting process. technologically souped up voting processes renders democratically elected governments open to criticism of illegitimacy, regardless of being just rumors or the truth. more technology in the equation creates dark areas, attack vectors, unnecessary complexity for such a simple process as recording and counting votes (too laborious? use OCR). its also more expensive
so you are basically paying a lot more money for a little more convenience and a giant dollup of doubt in the mind of the public about the legitimacy of their own government. which leads to social instability
yes, you can tamper with paper votes, but its hard and you need a mob of conspirators
mechanical voting increases the number of attack vectors an order of magnitude and decreases the number of people you need to make a dent in the vote, and its harder to trace your tampering
take that further, and electronic voting is a manipulator's dream: one guy with 300 milliseconds of access to a database can do more damage than an army of paper ballot tamperers/ stuffers/ truck drivers, and he can do it in such a statistically invisible way as to make his tampering forensically invisible. public servants are full of integrity and with such high salaries none could ever be paid to look the other way, right, right? and with electronic voting, you need only corrupt one or two obscure key guys, not an army of polling station workers as with paper. a conspiracy of two or three might be airtight with electronic tampering, but a conspiracy of dozens and hundreds with paper/ mechanical is what... more airtight?
as for attack vectors, with electronic voting, take your pick: there are millions where with paper voting there are only hundreds. those tasked with guarding the integrity of the electronic voting process can easily be routed around with the right creative hacker thinking up the right attack vector no one imagined but him. sure, yeah, no one is for hire to do that for a few million and then disappear to rio for the rest of his life, right? oh, and of course, there aren't giant gobs of money floating around politics that often winds up with shady power brokers, right?
electronic voting and mechanical voting must die, for sake of the integrity of our governments, upon which the entire stability of our societies rest. using anything besides paper is insane
to my knowledge, (Score:2)
These voting systems are all built on microsoft access database applications.
There isn't even a presumption of security on these machines. They are designed to be able to steal elections.
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Indeed. Now Diebold with have to go back to simply making ATM's and other devices that require great accuracy and reliability. But somehow, they just couldn't get a voting machine to work properly and securely.
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I take it you have never used a Diebold ATM.
Re:Doesn't matter now. (Score:5, Interesting)
So, you have evidence that Democrats, as a group, are any less concerned about the inherent dangers of all-electronic voting systems than the population as a whole?
I'm a Democrat. I voted for Obama. I'm glad he's President. (Or rather, I'm glad McCain isn't President; not quite the same thing, but it's what we've got.) And now that we have a Democrat in the White House, I think it is exactly as important that we have a trustworthy election process as it was when had a Republican. I don't want anyone rigging elections, in favor of any candidate of any party.
No matter how bad things get, as long as we have honest elections, we have a chance to fix them. If we lose that ... forget it, it's over. Democrat, Republican, black, white, whatever: if the people in charge have the means to ensure they stay in charge regardless of the will of the people, they will use that power, and we are permanently screwed.
In short, AC, don't assume everyone else shares your level of asshole cynicism. There are a lot of us who still care about the future of our country.
Parent
Re:Doesn't matter now. (Score:4, Insightful)
No matter how bad things get, as long as we have honest elections, we have a chance to fix them. If we lose that ... forget it, it's over. Democrat, Republican, black, white, whatever: if the people in charge have the means to ensure they stay in charge regardless of the will of the people, they will use that power, and we are permanently screwed.
I hate to break it to you but they already have the means [wikipedia.org] to remain in charge regardless of the will of the people. What good does an honest election do you when the politicians get to decide who their voters are instead of the other way around?
In short, AC, don't assume everyone else shares your level of asshole cynicism.
What's wrong with cynicism towards the political parties? They are all a bunch of lying hypocrites. You just feel good about yourself because the guy you regard as evil happened to lose. That doesn't change the fact that the two major parties are both propping up a system that undermines our representative republic and that the major difference between the two of them is which freedoms you'll lose when they are in charge.
Parent
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unless they are moving state lines, gerrymandering does not seem relevant to presidential elections...
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And now that we have a Democrat in the White House, I think it is exactly as important that we have a trustworthy election process as it was when had a Republican. I don't want anyone rigging elections, in favor of any candidate of any party.
That puts you and I squarely in the minority. I'm not an R or D, but much more towards the [fiscal, not social] conservative end, for what it's worth. The problem is our friends who vote for either party can't see past partisan issues to fix the ones that are actually important, like voting process integrity.
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Fuck you sheep who refuse to take up arms and revolt to save this country.
That's hilarious, considering that the extent of your action is to post to slashdot, and maybe complain a bit amongst friends ;) I mean, it's /possible/ you're going to be out there with whatever guns you've acquired, facing down a tank... but it's not very likely.
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Don't sweat it dude, they just want to make sure Ron Paul doesn't win in 2012.
Not at all (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:So now . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
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Depends. How many dead voters can vote electronically in Chicago?
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The "hanging chads" were what made the news, but it was districts with electronic counting and/or voting equipment that should be blamed for the 2000 debacle. Why didn't we hear about the county in Florida that reported -16,000 votes for Gore, or the county that reported a vote tally at something like 125% of total registered voters?
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Because then your vote could be verified by people with a vested interest in intimidating you into voting the way they want? Do you really want your employer/union official/wife/etc to be able to see how you voted? Having any sort of mechanism that allows individual votes to be identified after the election would allow this to happen.