Black Box Voting

Diebold KNEW about this flaw and said nothing until caught red handed.  The latest flaw - the audit logs on Diebold voting systems do not work all of the time. So in effect they are useless, because you cannot trust them.  The shame of it is that Diebold will keep doing this over and over again until states toughen up their laws, as we in North Carolina did. You see, in North Carolina, Diebold would have faced criminal and civil penalties for hiding this.

Diebold Admits Systemic Audit Log Failure; State Vows Inquiry

By Kim Zetter March 17, 2009 | 6:29:04 PMCategories: E-Voting  

SACRAMENTO, California — Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) admitted in a state hearing Tuesday that the audit logs produced by its tabulation software miss significant events, including the act of someone deleting votes on election day.

The company acknowledged that the problem exists with every version of its tabulation software.

...The GEMS software is used to tabulate votes cast on Premier/Diebold touch-screen and optical-scan machine, and is used in more than 1,400 election districts in 31 states...

But to know Diebold is to not trust Diebold anyhow. Personally I think Diebold Voting Systems is the scum of the earth, especially after Diebold tried to gut North Carolina's Public Confidence in Elections Law.  When Diebold couldn't gut our law, they packed up their little briefcases and left. 

In North Carolina we took measures to deter this dishonest, unethical and shady behavior by making it ILLEGAL. 

The real reason Diebold ran 

Friday, December 23. 2005 David Allen at BlackBoxVoting.com

Yesterday was the deadline for signing the affidavit mentioned here:

§ 163‑165.9A. Voting systems: requirements for voting systems vendors; penalties.
...
(3) The chief executive officer of the vendor shall sign a sworn affidavit that the source code and other material in escrow is the same being used in its voting systems in this State. The chief executive officer shall ensure that the statement is true on a continuing basis.
...
b) Penalties. - Willful violation of any of the duties in subsection (a) of this section is a Class G felony. Substitution of source code into an operating voting system without notification as provided by subdivision (a)(2) of this section is a Class I felony. In addition to any other applicable penalties, violations of this section are subject to a civil penalty to be assessed by the State Board of Elections in its discretion in an amount of up to one hundred thousand dollars ($100,000) per violation. A civil penalty assessed under this section shall be subject to the provisions of G.S. 163‑278.34(e)."

Who do we owe for this section of the Public Confidence in Elections Law? 

David Allen of High Point and owner of this blog!

Wouldn't these be good federal standards? 

Along with this tough section of law, we also tip our hat to the many activists (and some computer scientists) around the state who lobbied their County Commissioners and county Boards of Elections as well as  attended many of the public demos for Diebold.  Very few counties were willing to purchase Diebold as a result so it just wasn't worth the hassle and the potential lawsuits for Diebold. 

I am proud to guest blog here for David from time to time when not doing other things.

Its time to bring out that old photo of a Florida voting machine, because Florida still can't count votes:

2 days after election Diebold still "counting" votes in Florida County. The governor of Florida has been asked to intervene in Hillsborough County Florida's elections. 

Election officials in Hillsborough County Florida are having to feed 80,000 ballots into optical scan machines made by "Premier Election Solutions" (Diebold).  The election also didn't go so well for Hillsborough Election Supervisor Buddy Johnson, whose election was tied to those uncounted ballots.  Johnson ended up conceding the election and county officials are considering a lawsuit against Diebold er I mean "Premier". (We're supposed to be fooled by the name change.)

Oh, and isn't it time that Florida started hiring or appointing election directors, instead of creating the conflict of interest of running their own elections?

Diebold just can't seem to stay out of trouble. Just changing the elections division name to Premier Solutions hasn't helped any. This company just can't seem to follow simple rules, like count the votes, or don't violate General Public License when using open source software. You can't just incorporate this software into your proprietary system:

Diebold faces GPL infringement lawsuit over voting machines

By Ryan Paul | Published: November 04, 2008 - 05:32PM CT

Artifex Software, the company behind the open source Ghostscript PDF processing software, has filed a lawsuit against voting machine vendor Diebold and its subsidiary Premier Election Solutions. Artifex says that Diebold violated the GPL by incorporating Ghostscript into commercial electronic voting machine systems.

...If Artifex's allegations prove correct, then it will further demonstrate the broad scope of Diebold's technical incompetence and irresponsible business practices....

In an article by Todd Weiss at Computerworld, Are design issues to blame for vote 'flipping' in touch-screen machines? - a Diebold spokesman admits that his company isn't designing or improving any touchscreen voting machines. He notes the growing popularity of paper ballots across the US.   "Since new touch-screen machines aren't being designed, no usability studies are being done to improve existing designs, he said. Of course Riggal, like makes sure to blame voters for the problems with touch screen machines.  

What about a possible Oprah effect? Oprah may have helped put another nail in touch screen voting's coffin - when she voted yesterday, electronically, the machine didn't record her vote for President at first. "It didn't record my presidential vote." 

 Charles Stewart III over at Election Updates says that DRES (touch screens) are not gone for good, that "While DREs are declining, they aren’t going to disappear..."

Well, I am still hoping that our entire country ends up ditching touch screen voting and goes to simpler more reliable and more transparent systems.

Ok, last week's news was that touchscreens in West Virginia were flipping votes from Barack Obama to John McCain. And they couldn't stop it.  Today, Brad Freidman of Brad Blog reports that in Tennessee, there are machines flipping votes the other way, from John McCain to Barack Obama.  And vote flipping has been reported in South Carolina as well.  Now that we have both sides pissed of, can we get off this Merry-Go-Round? Please!

Brad reports: 

Votes Reportedly Flipping from Repub to Dem in TN! October 22, 2008 by Brad Friedman

So NOW Can We Impound These Machines, Take Them Out of Service and Give Every Voter a PAPER BALLOT, Please?!

Several Decatur County voters are concerned about problems with the voting machines at the Election Commission Office. Voters claim they tried to vote for McCain for President but the machine checked Obama instead....

At least three voters encountered the problem when casting their early ballot on Saturday morning. Franklin Boroughs says he intended to vote for Republican but rather the computer had checked the Democratic candidate instead.

Brad writes about vote flipping in other years, and that in 2006 the only candidate to demand action was Rick Santorum, (R-PA).  At the end, Brad notes how both sides are responsible for doing something about these machines:

Unlike the Democrats, for some reason, Republicans don't seem to be afraid of being called "sore losers" or "conspiracy theorists" (most likely because the Rightwing media are the ones who spout such nonsense, and there are few in the media willing to throw such absurd insults at Republicans if/when they actually do the right thing.)

We would gladly support the efforts of either party here who does the right thing for the voters and gets these machines the hell out of service. Now!

Agreed, make it stop. We've seen this movie several times, we saw it four years ago as a matter of fact. Make - it - stop!

The Connecticut Secretary of State requested that the UConn VoTeR Center perform a pre-election audit of the memory cards for the Diebold Accu-Vote Optical Scan tabulators used in the August 2008 Connecticut Primary Elections

The audit found that of 185 Diebold voter cards, 175 were found to be properly programmed, the rest contained junk data.  The machines are supposed to be able to detect this, so supposedly the cards could not be used in an election.  5.4% is a high failure rate when trying to prevent chaos on election day.  The cards were shipped to UConn directly from the vendor, LHS.

This failure rate doesn't surprise me at all. Just look at Voters Unite's llong laundry list of problems with Diebold (that we know about) over the past several years.  Standards for voting vendors are terribly low, they've been given a free pass for too long.