NYT Notes Flaws In Current Electronic Voting Methods

dstates writes "The New York time has an informative article on electronic voting with some frightening statistics and interesting anecdotes. Printers on Diebold machines in Cayahoga County OH jammed 20% of the time, making paper trail recounts suspect. Crashing voting machines in California reportedly resulted from Windows CE sensing fingers sliding from one key to another as a drag and drop event, and the Diebold software failing to handle the event. Of course, rather than just ignore this unanticipated condition, the OS did the right thing for a voting machine and crashed."

NYT Notes Flaws In Current Electronic Voting Metho

[Wonko the Sane]

I found one already without even reading the article:

...reportedly resulted from Windows CE sensing fingers sliding...

I don't understand what's wrong

[youthoftoday]

Now, I'm not a US citizen, but the way I see it, Company X convinced officials A and B to buy these machines. The machines were bought, company X was paid by the taxpayer, officials A and B were paid by company X, the board, employees and shareholders of company X were paid. The voting machines went wrong so more money will have to be spent on them.

Who cares about right and wrong? Rich people and public officials made themselves some money.

Surely an American dream. What could be more perfect?

Realtime Embedditis

[arivanov]

Of course, rather than just ignore this unanticipated condition, the OS did the right thing for a voting machine and crashed.

That is realtime ebedditis for you. A well known brain rotting disease which affects a specific portion of the programming community which most likely has a bit too much of Klingon blood in their veins. They can program a multitasking system only according to the 17th maxima of Klingon programming. "Klingon multitasking systems do notsupport "time-sharing". When a Klingon program wants to run, it challenges the scheduler in hand-to-hand combat and owns the machine." It looks like in this case they have also followed the other maxima of Klingon programming: "Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak. Bugs are good for building character in the user." and "Perhaps it IS a good day to die! I say we ship it!".

On a more serious note this is someone strictly following the specs. There are systems where it if you encounter an unknown situation your spec says that you crash instead of trying to be original and let the watchdog sort it out. Quite common in embedded systems and standard spec requirement in things like voting terminals and ATM.

Re:Software standards are just terrible, complicat

[Anonymous Coward]

For a system whose job is so simple, keep the product equally simple.

I have already proposed a new hardware solution: using a core component based on carbon nano-platelets, encased in a security layer composed on bio-cultivated fibres, coated by a impact resistance plastic polymer coating. This can be used to encode ultra-high resolution glyphs at the atomic level onto a wafer of specialised high contrast bio-cultivated fibre sheets. These sheets are collected in high security aluminium casings, with secured access points.

For vote counting, these casings are accessed via a private key security method and the sheets are distributed through a double-pass grid based visual recognotion system. This system is based on ultra-low cost, long life bio-degradable wetware, each grid node containing a state-of-the-art high density neural-net based visual recognition system. The grid system collates the vote totals through a summation n-ary tree to the final local arbiter. These arbiters then declare, or organise further summation passes as required if any grid nodes are suspected of mis-computation.

I have already been granted a patent for this from the USPTO, so I'll sue anyone who uses a similar system. These items will be marketed under the trademarked names of Carbonomark(TM) and Organosheets(TM).