Feds Want To Decertify All Electronic Voting Machines

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.

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(?).

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 suggest we also ask Canada, Britain or some other country with a non-corrupt government to monitor our elections.

#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.

#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

#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.

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.

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?

#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.

#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.

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.

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!

#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.

You know, what’s really disturbing is that among other things, Diebold also manufactures ATM machines that we all entrust our financial access to on a regular basis.

#37, Also the banks control the code. That is something Diebold refuses to allow the election officials even to see.