Maryland Scraps Diebold Voting System 209
beadfulthings writes "After eight years and some $65 million, the state of Maryland is taking its first steps to return to an accountable, paper-ballot based voting system. Governor Martin O'Malley has announced an initial outlay of $6.5 million towards the $20 million cost of an optical system which will scan and tally the votes while the paper ballots are retained as a backup. The new (or old) system is expected to be in place by 2010 — or four years before the state finishes paying off the bill for the touch-screen system."
But what I want to know - (Score:5, Funny)
Re:But what I want to know - (Score:5, Funny)
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If your browser allows user stylesheets (i.e. Opera, Konqueror), adding the following to your user CSS file should do it:
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li > a[title="BETA! - Brief labels that you think best describe an article"]
Diebold = Premier Election Solutions. (Score:5, Informative)
Changing the name was a sneaky move.
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Changing the name was a sneaky move.
Re:Diebold = Premier Election Solutions. (Score:5, Insightful)
Especially in Chicago, NYC and the East Coast. (Score:3, Interesting)
Unlike state government agencies, the banks, especially many of the ones in Chicago, NYC and up and down the east coast of the US, are run by the kind of folks who might be inclined to provide a set of concrete sneakers to anyone who sells them untrustworthy ATM machines. And the ATM makers know this.
Re:Especially in Chicago, NYC and the East Coast. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because we know what's actually important? (Score:2)
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Re:Especially in Chicago, NYC and the East Coast. (Score:4, Interesting)
On a recent gameshow (1 vs. 100), first question was who was so and so's step son. Some actress got married and by the marriage the stepson is like 5 yeas younger than the dad. Whatever, I can't remember the question or answer, that is completely useless knowledge (unless you are an agent or something). Out of 100, only 3 people got it wrong. Not bad. 97% of the people in that set knew the answer.
Next Question: What is the third highest rank in the Senate called?
Out of 97 people, a third got it wrong.
Now these are people who were screened for a TV gameshow. They should be smarter than the average bear. A third got it wrong.
These and people less intelligent (than gameshow contestants) are the voters. What do you think they care about more? What do you think they spend more time exposing themselves to, politics or OJ and Britney? That is the true hopelessness of our situation. If you know of a way to get 200 million people to stop paying attention to a drug-addicted talentless dead-beat mom or other Hollywood scuttlebutt, I would love to hear it. You want us to run a marathon to stop election fraud when most of the public barely knows how to crawl. Nevermind the 100 yard dash to comprehend why our economy and world reputation are crumbling to dust. IMHO, that is the answer to your question.
Other answers may vary. This answer does not constitute the opinion of my employer or my land lord or my cat. This answer may become invalid in the future and no guarantees are made, either thusly, thisly, or implied. This answer may be copied if it contains this disclaimer. Due to quantum fluctuations, this answer may cease to exit at any time. This answer may cease to have been written in the first place if an unforseen time warp should occur. Do not submerge this answer in water.
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What -- exactly -- do you think that they were screening for? I'd be willing to bet it wasn't intelligence. People who make for a fun[ny] game show audience, now, that'd be a pretty good guess.
While I appreciate the sentiment, you should be a little fair
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No, they should be better at memorization than the average bear. Not smarter; there's a difference. Intelligence, in the traditional sense, is a measure of the ability to synthesize new ideas, not regurgitate the original ones.
The fact that proportionally so many of the people were unable to answer the question has more to do with the lack of decent civics classes (and lack of givin
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Christ, only a third? I am abd on a Ph.D. in history and even I don't know that off the top of my head (minority whip maybe?).
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* feature a comically gigantic keypad, making it harder to conceal your PIN as you enter it
* occasionally fail to debounce button pushes
* take ten to twenty seconds to count out and dispense a couple hundred dollars in twenties
* take five to ten seconds to print a receipt
* emit loud and annoy
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Try getting elected as an atheist. You have about as much chance as a guy with a Hitler tash and torrets.
I much prefer the way things are treated in the UK. As a politician you don't talk about religion. You don't declare it a bunch of bull honky, you don't profess your faith.
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Apparently Diebold and the value in the register that represents something they want to have a higher percentage doesn't see it as flawed.
It's just following a routine.
Re:Diebold = Premier Election Solutions. (Score:5, Insightful)
The more I learn about this Diebold outfit, the more I think they should be kept far away from any part of our electoral system. Just yesterday, I read an interesting story about a county clerk in some rural Nevada county who looked the machines over carefully and, not being a techie, called in a few trusted computer people to check out one of the systems. Naturally, Diebold's machines are closed source, so they say this County Clerk violated their EULA. The worst part of this is that Diebold put pressure on the County Board until this clerk was forced to resign. They've got that much power.
Just the idea that our elections would run on a closed-source, impossible-to-audit system is unbelievable to me. Especially after the rate of undervoting (ballots that were completely filled out, except the Diebold machines say there was no vote cast for President that only seemed to occur in heavily Democratic precincts in Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Ohio. In some minority districts, the rate of undervoting was EIGHTY PERCENT in 2004. That means, in a heavily contest year, in an area that has a high turnout rate, voters went in and filled out their computer ballot for all the local races, all the judgeships, county board, etc., but for some reason did not cast a vote for President. It's absolutely ridiculous. Problem is, since there are no paper ballots, it's impossible to audit. Diebold sends in the count and that's it, jack. Four more years of a jug-eared dry drunk in the White House.
It's going to take a while, and maybe a few election cycles, but if we can't get honest paper ballots in every single precinct in the USA, there needs to be some serious shit a-flyin'.
Oblig. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (Score:2)
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It goes without saying the original code must also be open to scrutiny.
Then I might trust it.
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Transparency should be the order of the day. Computers will always tend to obfuscate things for the common man, because as far as he is concerned, anything that happens inside a computer system may as well be a form of arcane magic. There are a far higher number of people who understand the principles of "counting", given you a far greater pool of competent election officials to draw from.
Understanding cryptographic signatures and ens
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Hey buddy, why don't you take your useless partisan bullshit rhetoric somewhere else? Here's a newsflash for you, asshole: pointing out that "the other guy" also sucks does not diminish the suckage of "this guy," regardless of what names you plug in to the variables. Really, all you ever manage to accomplish with your vapid, nonsensical drooling is to pollute the polite discourse the rest of us are trying to accomplish here!
In summary: you're not helping. In fact, you're harming America by trying to turn t
Re:Diebold = Premier Election Solutions. (Score:4, Funny)
My "Bush-bashing discourse?" Check again, dipshit -- I'm not the same guy you were blabbering to. You're just making such an ass of yourself that even otherwise-disinterested third parties like myself feel the need to point out how much of a fuck-up you are!
"Like me?" You don't know anything about me, Mr. I'm-Too-Stupid-To-Check-The-Name-Of-The-Guy-I'm-Replying-To, except for the fact that I think you're a flaming douchebag!
Now, seriously. Are you even even aware that you completely ignored every piece of meaningful content of PopeRatzo's post, and instead flew off the handle over a random meaningless remark? You're acting like you're a spoiled four-year-old who was insulted personally, and that's just stupid. Grow a thicker skin, and stop deluding yourself that you're G. W. Bush! Unless you are Bush, in which case your whining represents whole new orders of magnitude of patheticness...
Where can Diebold hide now? (Score:3, Insightful)
Diebold are going to have real trouble building their reputation back up after this; even though other machines may be vulnerable, the fact that this case has been so well publicised is seriously going to damage Diebold's public image.
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Re:Where can Diebold hide now? (Score:4, Interesting)
But that is not what they did... instead, there was a conversation in a darkened back room somewhere that went something like this:
Politician: I thought you said it would be undetectable?
Company Rep: I thought you said we'd not be prosecuted?
Politician: You didn't say you'd fsck it up this badly.
Company Rep: I did what you told me you wanted, give or take a couple of votes.
Politician: This is not going to be good, you had better hide the evidence now, bury it deeply.
Company Rep: No problem, we just paid Britney another $2 Million to pee on the courthouse steps.
profit!
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I love optical scanners. They are so easy to do, quick to report, and easy to check if there is a problem.
What a lot of people don't realize is that on election day those boxes are carted around escorted by agents from both parties. There is no funny business to be done because it is being watched the entire election with lawyers for both parties parked around the area ready to respo
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Because the other parties around here can't muster enough people to vote at every polling place, much less provide a volunteer to staff each one and assist in carrying the ballots around.
Neither the Republicrats nor the Demopublicans currently feels threatened enough by a third party to risk charges of rigging an election. Think about the
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And pigs are certain to fly anytime now.
Some states appear to question their machines. Others don't. But I don't see anything about states demanding their money back for the scrapped equipment. And therefore I don't think Diebold is too concerned! They already sold the f
Re: Where can Diebold hide now? (Score:2)
Sudden outbreak of common sense indeed (Score:2, Insightful)
Can this momentum spread to the federal level? Perhaps by having the money given to the states with the express implication that it be used for as secure and verifiable voting device as possible?
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Whaddya wanna do here, give Ron Paul a coronary?
Verified Voting (Score:4, Informative)
Thought others might find it interesting.
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I do have to say that I find it troubling that so many states don't require either a paper trail or proper auditing of elections. Seems to me that democracies work far better when there's somebody keeping an eye on things to make sure that partisans don't cheat the masses.
I have nothing to say, besides (Score:2, Redundant)
Stuck with the bill. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Stuck with the bill. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I like to say "It's OK! This is how we LEARN!" but unless the responsible parties are actually held accountable for their decisions they won't learn either. While in a perfect world this would lead to some people losing jobs or offices, I find that it's quite rare that people pay attention to huge wastes of taxpayer dollars. Putting it in terms th
Re:Stuck with the bill. (Score:5, Insightful)
voting (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm... an all-electronic system doesn't work, and neither does all-paper. Gee, I wonder if there's someway to combine the two and maybe get some sort of hybrid, combining the best of both worlds...
TFA does describe a method of combining electronic and paper, the optical scanners. A person votes on a paper ballot which is then fed into a scanner. The scanner allows for quick tabulation of votes but if there's any questions about the votes the paper ballots are still available. And there's no reason tou
Re: Stuck with the bill. (Score:2)
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Good (Score:2, Funny)
What about the old machines? (Score:4, Informative)
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I think they tried, but the Jawas stole them.
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Why on Earth are they still paying? (Score:2)
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Election fraud (Score:5, Informative)
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Heck, I only missed by a president or two. My parents used to vote on those machines, but by the time I got around to voting (in 2006) we were using Diebold optical scanners. Frankly they're comforting, because there's a sheet of paper they can read if it gets fucked up.
Heck, Shoup is still in the game today! (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a little of Shoup's history. [sptimes.com]
It's a big, hairball of a mess and none of the right people are in jail.
-FL
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JUST HOW THE FUCK IS THIS POSSIBLE???
" ... impossible to imagine ..." (Score:4, Insightful)
That's true, as far as it goes.
But voting systems can -- and have been -- imagined that make it much more difficult to get away with such an attack.
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The Greeks and Romans voted with black and white stones. It wouldn't be that hard to implement something similar. Picture vending machines that recognize different coins - they are pretty close to foolproof in as far as not mistaking a quarter for a dime goes. Get to the polling station, get a 'coin' (or stone or ball or disc or bill or whatever). From there, how hard is it to only allow one vote per pe
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Oh good, so now my neighbor can know who I voted for. So can my boss and my wife.
Nothing like good ol' fashioned voter intimidation.
they should not pay Diebold (Score:2)
Paper ballots are pretty horrible, too (Score:3, Interesting)
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True, though both ballots are machine readable and human readable. Either sheet, chosen by the voter, can be shredded. Software can be tampered with, but the people hand-counting votes can a
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Optical scan ballots (Score:5, Insightful)
Designing a reliable balloting system is really quite easy. The UN nailed it down decades ago:
1. Printed paper ballots wherein each ballot is marked by grease pencil or felt marker.
2. Ballots are folded and placed into a slot on top of a locked clear plastic box.
3. The boxes are guarded, transported to a central location, and then opened and the ballots are all hand-counted by volunteers in front of observers from all parties.
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Re:Optical scan ballots (Score:5, Interesting)
They can be. Have the touchscreen device print the vote onto the paper ballot, and a barcode with a checksum. Scan it optically and verify it against the checksum.
Anyone can verify their ballot - they simply look at what is marked. Misreads simply don't happen - if the two don't match, there is a problem. Give they guy a new ballot (replacing the old one), and have him do it again.
If the hand recount doesn't _exactly_ match the automated totals, it can be scanned in batches (any size). Count X ballots, scan X ballots. If they don't match, there is a problem.
As a nice side effect, machines don't have to be trusted, and don't have to have a network connection either. The machine can't screw up your vote without marking the wrong thing (or the CRC would be wrong), and you can check that yourself before it's counted. Recounts can be done by hand, and in the event of total system failure, you can still mark the silly thing by hand.
As a nice bonus to this, you get the benefits of touchscreen voting - secret ballots for the blind (audio), multiple language support, pictures, the ability to offer more in-depth descriptions of line items, etc.
It's not exactly rocket science.
Re:Optical scan ballots (Score:5, Funny)
No, but if you could do it with rockets, that would be awesome.
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Have the company that designs and manufactures the machine to print the ballot be a different company from the one that designs and manufactures the counting and checksum machine. (This would require an open checksum algorithm-- another plus.)
In fact, get two companies to build the counting and checksum machines, and verify them against each other.
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Re:Optical scan ballots (Score:5, Insightful)
This brings up one of the consistently-unasked questions in debates over electronic balloting: what's the hurry? I don't mean "It would be nice if we knew sooner," but what is it about an election requires that this stuff be done quickly?
A second unasked-question would be, "what makes hand-counting errors less desirable than electronic-counting errors?"
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The point behind optical scan is that it is quick, low cost and still auditable.
It's quick, but the system I propose is considerably cheaper. I disagree with the third point. Optical scan ballots, in practice, are only "audited" by the same scanning equipment used to count them initially. This does not really translate to "auditable" in my mind since equipment tampering is undetectable. The likelihood of observers being able to certify the reliability of the scanning equipment "on the spot" is very low. Voter suppression is the most serious issue in the USA, and as my system is extrem
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Optical scan ballots, in practice, are only "audited" by the same scanning equipment used to count them initially.
Humans are capable of reading those ballots. So if there's questions as to the accurracy of the count the ballots can be hand counted.
FalconRe: (Score:2)
We know who the winning political party (and thus the Prime Minister) on the night. Sure, some seats take a while, as postal votes have to come in, and the last 1/6th of the Senate takes a while to become known, but the raw figures are known on the night, and the delay for the final numbe
Re:"guarded, transported to a central location" (Score:2)
Better to count them at the local polling station, observed by local reps of parties.
Once you have them in a central location, who is guarding them? The incumbent regime, of course.
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Lawsuit time? (Score:4, Interesting)
Who wrote these contracts? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just in time (Score:2)
I'm sure there will be no problems in the next presidential election.
Why not skip the electronics step then alltogether (Score:2)
Going with paper only in first place will save quite a few million dollars and will be set up in what - 6 months including training?
Get some balls and sue Diebold (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's start holding them accountable for their shenanigans instead of just taking our ball and going home.
My previous county's voting system (Score:5, Informative)
Here's your paper, here's your marker. Fill in the dot next to who you're voting for. If you make a mistake, please see one of the attendants for a new ballot and we will destroy the old one, and record the action and confirm it with your signature. If you would like to vote and are unable to properly use the marker, please see one of our attendants for assistance. Once you are done, please slip your ballot into the secured box at either end of the room. The "I voted" sticker is optional and will not be forced on you.
I voted in that county for 7 years, and not once did anyone ever question the authenticity of the outcomes, even when outcomes were close.
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Here is our process:
1: Show up to the polling place (Some people find this pretty hard to do).
2: Give them your name and DL, Military ID, State ID card, or Passport.
3: They look up your name, address, and Party and give you the appropriate ballot in a hard, opaque plastic sleeve with a black marker pen.
4: You go into a little stall and take as much time as you want figuring out which corrupt blowhard you want to "give" your vote to.
5: You then b
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Blind people can't vote.
People with no arms or legs can't vote.
The comatose and brain-dead can't vote.
People from Florida couldn't understand it.
Are you willing to nearly disenfranchise these voters (or force them to ask for/have assistance) just for your silly, reliable, simple, and trustworthy system?
You're PRACTICALLY Hitler!
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I meant to post sarcastically; obviously the blind and seriously disabled are going to HAVE to ask for assistance no matter what system is used, the brain dead/comatose shouldn't be voting (unless you're a Democrat, in which case you're in favor of ID-free voting, felons voting, so I expect you're in favor of voting for the dead or nearly-so, since it worked so well for Kennedy), and ultimately this whole ISSUE was touched off by a few urban Florida c
Anything can be manipulated (Score:2)
Mr. Willis seems to buy today's system. I do think this can be an asset but buying something like this and they tell you not to look under the hood, thats a problem. Eve
Proud to be a Marylander (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny in 140 years or so Maryland has gone from that to being one of the more progressive states in the union. Seriously, don't let our past fool you Maryland is a great place to live -- and for the record we never did leave the union. Now let's not get into what the states official motto translates to.
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Windows CE insanity (Score:3, Interesting)
If the voting system is more complicated than a basic 4-function calculator, you're doing something waaaaaaay wrong. Maybe you should just licence the system Brazil uses? Or India? That's where your hi-tech comes from theses days anyhow.
optical scanners (Score:2)
http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=4463776866669054201 [google.de]
Basically, optical scanners can be hacked just as easily as touch screen voting machines, and election officials can easily prevent effective manual recounts.
The only reasonable voting system is one in which all counts are conducted by hand, in public view.
There are some things that don't need to be automated: sex, cooking, hair cutti
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Re: NY Might Keep Physical (Paper) Ballot Records (Score:2)