We’ve had a lot of stories on this issue like this one and this one and this one. Looks like Diebold’s boss won’t be able to “deliver” any more votes to his friends.
Feds to Toughen E-Voting Standards?
A federal agency is set to recommend significant changes to specifications for electronic-voting machines next week, internetnews.com has learned.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is recommending that the 2007 version of the Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines (VVSG) decertify direct record electronic (DRE) machines.
DREs are currently used by more than 30 percent of jurisdictions across the U.S. and are the exclusive voting technology in Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland and South Carolina.
According to an NIST paper to be discussed at a meeting of election regulators at NIST headquarters in Gaithersburg, Md., on Dec. 4 and 5, DRE vote totals cannot be audited because the machines are not software independent.
In other words, there is no means of verifying vote tallies other than by relying on the software that tabulated the results to begin with.
The machines currently in use are “more vulnerable to undetected programming errors or malicious code,” according to the paper.
The NIST paper also noted that, “potentially, a single programmer could ‘rig’ a major election.”
It recommends “requiring SI [software independent] voting systems in VVSG 2007.”
Its called the paper ballot. It’s a very simple concept. That paired with showing your ID at the polls would eliminate 99% of problems. But than again, I may be using too much sense for some people.
It’s about time. See also http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/rss.php?a=2483
I’m all for the paper ballot This all started because that paper ballots were discriminatory to certain Americans. They were too complicated. Also there’s “hanging chads”. Somebody please make up your minds(?).
So Uncle Dave…Diebold delivered votes to its friends according to you…show me or tell me where…give me some details, otherwise I think you should chill the hyperbole a bit.
an addendum –
Believe it or not you have at least one reader who has friends/family who work for Diebold Election Systems and are doing the best job they can very conscientiously. Seeing such a slanderous statement from a place I respected makes me sick. I have no problems with the story, but the lead-in is disgusting.
I agree with you #5. This blog is becoming nothing but a liberal propaganda rag.
I suggest we also ask Canada, Britain or some other country with a non-corrupt government to monitor our elections.
How about just a show of hands. Or even better, dueling with pistols.
#7
1) no government is free of corruption; and the larger it gets, the more prone to corruption it becomes.
2) due to the proliferation of media outlets and information access, I wouldn’t be surprised if we were in one of the least corrupt (relatively speaking) periods in our history.
#4: So, is the president of Diebold saying he will in writing good enough?
#5: Two points: First, I don’t know your friend and he could very well be blameless in all this. Doesn’t mean the management isn’t up to no good. Second, as a former programmer, having read how easy it is to hack the system and how, and given how a voting machine isn’t even close to being as complicated as even, say, ATMs which have been hack proof for a long time, I have to wonder if something isn’t going on within the company to ensure they are hackable. Either that or the programmers are staggeringly incompetent. Show me (and all the states and now federal governement) a reason to believe otherwise and I will change my opinion.
BTW, I find it interesting that the word ‘friends’ is assumed to be referring to Republicans. I chose the word precisely because it didn’t state whom those friends were.
#10: Amazing the images you can find searching Google.
#5 Jeff: It doesn’t necessarily have to be a Diebold lprogrammer who manipulates the vote totals. It is more likely to be a poll worker. From: http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/15595.html
At the beginning of the test election the memory card programmed by Harri Hursti was inserted into an Optical Scan Diebold voting machine. A “zero report” was run indicating zero votes on the memory card. In fact, however, Hursti had pre-loaded the memory card with plus and minus votes.
The eight ballots were run through the optical scan machine. The standard Diebold-supplied “ender card” was run through as is normal procedure ending the election. A results tape was run from the voting machine.
Correct results should have been: Yes:2 ; No:6
However, just as Hursti had planned, the results tape read: Yes:7 ; No:1
The results were then uploaded from the optical scan voting machine into the GEMS central tabulator, a step cited by Diebold as a protection against memory card hacking. The central tabulator is the “mother ship” that pulls in all votes from voting machines. However, the GEMS central tabulator failed to notice that the voting machines had been hacked.
The results in the central tabulator read:
Yes:7 ; No:1
#11 – No, that’s not good enough. If I make an accusation I back it up. You made an accusation. Back it up. Don’t guess, don’t assume…tell me where it happened.
Your accusation smears everyone who works there, top to bottom, because the people on the bottom would need to be complicit to accommodate the management hijinks.
I don’t care or dispute how crappy their management is. My concern is those who work where the rubber meets the road. Your statement tars them with the same brush.
Further, as far as the President of the company goes, you are basing this on very old information. You need to catch up with the times. Diebold dealt with his stupid statement a long time ago.
There are any number of things that are worse than Diebold if you look into this at all. You betray a very shallow knowledge of what you write about by not showing any knowledge of any other vendors or pieces of this.
Want scary? There is NO mandate for voter registration database standards. I know of dead people who voted recently because of this. This doesn’t negate the bad parts of e-voting, but for some reason it’s completely ignored by folks such as yourself.
#14, so you know of people who voted in place of dead people? I certainly hope you notified the authorities because voter fraud is a Federal offense. By not notifying the Authorities you are ‘aiding and abetting’ voter fraud.
You want the rest of us to do what is right, so I hope you will too.
#15 I didn’t need to report it. It was a piece of a lawsuit that addressed several events. That was buried among them and missed by pretty much everyone. This was a lawsuit where the head of Black Box Voting got listed as an expert witness in the beginning. After testifying he was downgraded by the judge to witness, and the judge wound up dismissing him entirely not too long after. The case wound up being dismissed in large part due to his incompetence, even though parts of it were entirely legitimate in my opinion.
A disclaimer here…this is all to the best of my knowledge based on talking to several people. If I’m wrong, then I’d be happy to be corrected.
I have been waiting and wondering…..
What happened to the hundreds of stories of voter fraud, intimidation, disenfranchisement, yadda, yadda, yadda. As soon as the Democrats swung the pendulum from a little to the right to a little to the left, all of the protesters rolled up their cute little signs and the lawyers packed up and went home. The week before the election the bought-and-paid-for media were wailing about the inequities of unfair voter ID requirements. Voting machines that can’t be trusted. In 2000 and 2004 we heard for weeks how the election was stolen. Law suites. Investigations.
Congratulations are in order. No voter intimidation this year. The machines all worked. No disenfranchisement. Didn’t hear of anyone being turned away. Did we fix all of the problems over the weekend before the election? I don’t think so. I think the party that lost accepted the loss. That the way it is supposed to work. A lesson many of the political whiners in this country should learn.
GOOD!!!!!
They need to put those hackable machines in the dump, where they, and Diebold belong! As far as I am concerned, the government should penalize Diebold for coming up with a second rate system that can easily be hacked by a 13 year old. After the Secretary of State from Ohio said that he would “Deliver Ohio to Bush at any cost,” that should have woke some people up. But Nooooooo! They had to wait for the people to complain.
Now that the current administration feels threatened by possible investigations, they want to make nice. We should investigate EVERYTHING! Then let the chips fall where they may.
As far as those of you who don’t believe that there was any voter intimidation in 2006, just look here: http://thinkprogress.org/2006/11/07/voter-intimidation-virginia/
Get rid of these crooks, and put them in jail!
When they had some of these touch screens rigged with paper ballots, and did test recounts, it turns out the hand counts were off by 2%. The machines did better than the hand counts, as expected. Nevertheless, I think dumping the machines is probably a good idea. Why not just use optical scanning of paper ballots?
I think that these states that adopted these EVM’s were foolish. My state replaced the 3 old traditional voting booths at my polling place with 12 voting stands to fill out a real simple optical scan ballot. The line now forms at the table to check off your name and get the ballot. Last election I was in and out in ten minutes including a dozen referendums. These scanners are simple, tough, and should last for dozens of elections. And, the paper ballot is stored inside in case of a manual recount is required. I heard that the elimination of the storage fees for the old voting booths had returned enough money to pay for the new machines.
#14: “Your statement tars them with the same brush.”
You know what? You’re absolutely right.
I’ll say it again a different way. Diebold (I pick them because if you follow the links to past DU items they are about Diebold products) has created a product that is either incompetently or deliberately designed to be easy to compromise. If it was the former, then the company should be easy to put out of business via competition, assuming political friends don’t make competition impossible. If the latter, then it was done to ensure a particular political outcome. The tests done on the machines point in that direction. Tell me what other options there are given security and accuracy should be the top considerations of the design and development of a voting machine.
Diebold denying favoritism doesn’t absolve it of anything until their machines are impossible to influence.
Perhaps your friend (and many others in the company) don’t feel they have done anything wrong and very likely they haven’t. But that doesn’t absolve them of continuing to work for either an incompetent or corrupt company unless they personally are doing something to ensure change.
My vote is too important to play nice with hurting you and your friend’s feelings. Nothing less than the inability to tamper and 100% accuracy is acceptable. If Diebold and the other companies can prove they can achieve this, then I will back down. But given this article, clearly they haven’t been able to do so to the states and to the Federal government whose job it is to ensure such things.
You go, Uncle Dave!
#21 Uncle Dave, I am not trying to change your opinion of Diebold or anyone else. I am trying to get you to walk the walk that you’ve talked. Obviously you can’t see that, and for that I have to say I pity you. You made a statement and you won’t back it up, instead choosing to try to deflect it into other areas every time I bring it up. It’s sad, and you have definitely lowered the bar for all of your coworkers here.
I know it’s futile, but I’ll try one last time. You made an accusation. Back it up.
Never mind…I’ve wasted my time here. With your willingness to evade a question at all costs, have you considered running for office?
#25: I think I answered your question quite directly. Sorry you don’t like it. But to be more succinct, the actions of the company and the product it sells is its own answer.
Wow! I’d say hell must have frozen over (if I believed in the place) if I got traaxx to agree with me!
All we ask for is secondary verifiability. It’s that simple. If there is a question about how the final count was reached, there MUST be a human certifiable way to recount the tally.
Imagine going to the supermarket and having the register not give you a printed listing of your purchases, relying on the ‘trust us, the register is correct’ method. Questins? Sorry, we just keep a total of the items purchased, but they are not in any way tied to a particular purchaser. You were overcharged for this item??? Prove that you paid for it in the first place!
That is what non-paper trail voting machines ask the voters to do… trust a bulk result with no secondary verification method in case of questions. Our computer says there were 500 votes for Joe Smith… prove otherwise. You can’t, since there is no other count in existence than the electronic result, and there is no method to recount the votes.
I do believe in hell, angles, God, a right and a wrong and even dinosaurs, but Uncle Dave you’re just wrong. 🙂
Actually, if people are too lazy to go down to a voting booth and cast a paper ballot, something that we can recount until hell does freeze over along with all the possibilities of law suits and court battles, do we need to enable a voting system that’s this problematic and prone to cheating. I thought we have enough cheating with illegals voting and multiple ballots going to the same individuals, but it would seem that the powers want a fail safe system for their government, it’s obliviously not ours anymore.
Wow, Jeff. It must be wonderful to live in a fool’s paradise.
I know some nice people who worked for Enron. They would never commit accounting fraud. Therefore, if I use your Logic-Free Reasoning™, Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Andy Fastow, et alia are all pure as the driven snow.
After all, everyone knows that top management (and shareholders) at every corporation routinely seek approval of their actions from lower-level employees.
In case you didn’t notice (the phrase ‘selective blindness’ comes to mind here), it is no secret that Diebold’s board and leadership is made up of ardent supporters of the political party that looks out for the interests of those sad, put-upon unfortunates of our society, the super-rich. That would be the Republicans, for those slow on the uptake.
Of course, since their game was blown and they had millions of eyes watching for their trickery, they wisely decided to lay off the shenanigans.
Or maybe it’s all just coincidence. Yeah, that’s the (optically-scanned) ticket!
#30: Where am I wrong? I agree that paper ballots are better at this point. If we are going to have EVMs, then they need to be 100% accurate and tamper proof. Otherwise, for voters, what’s the point?
#31 – Heh…drew me back in even though I tried to drop this. Go back and read what I wrote. In every case I have not tried to defend the management of Diebold. In fact, I happen to think they’re pretty stupid for not responding smartly to what has gone on. I have defended the workers who are doing an honest job. It’s nice that Uncle Dave’s situation allows him to reside in an ivory tower and do only pure clean good work for whom he chooses. Unfortunately there are folks out there who are not in as good a situation, and those who feel they are trying to do the right thing . To follow your the line of reasoning you seem to be following you are advocating throwing the line accountants in jail just because they worked for Enron, regardless of whether they had any complicity with Lay or not, just by working for the same company. I’m willing to bet there were accountants who were doing the right thing and supported the case against Lay et al. as best they could. But your statements would make them felons just like the top.
Oh, and Uncle Dave did not say they laid off the shenanigans. in fact he claims that the shenanigans are on-going, based on a stupid statement by the president of the company made in 2004 and thoroughly addressed to the satisfaction of everyone except the conspiracy nuts. Uncle Dave and those who make the same argument only discredit themselves (and the organizations for which they speak).
#24 I quite clearly said that what I was reporting was based on information that came to me through several people. They are people I trust and I trust that there is truth in what they told me. However, I cannot give you detailed sources. I have no problem with you disbelieving me. Skepticism is good and it’s something I support. I posted it because it’s what I believe. However, I have been clear to say that it’s speculative, unlike some of the egregious hyperbole that others deal in, claiming conspiracy and evil.
Personally, I think the management of Diebold is too dumb to do this kind of thing and get away with it, but if Uncle Dave wants them to be evil geniuses, so be it.