Ohio voting machines confiscated in criminal investigation

Make

Just wondering if they were Diabold machines... I mean, I see the note later on about sequoia machines, but that seemed to be a seperate thing from the main one... Wouldnt be suprised if they were made by our ol' Republican loving friends at Diabold.

Well...

If it's what's-his-bucket (I forgot the name already), it probably wouldn't matter even if he won all of Ohio.

I think the government should force the sellers to be Open Source for the good of the nation. How do we really know that behind the scenes the voting machine isn't just adding one to a certain candidate? At least there's the every-so-often check by university people, yet they find a ton of holes; think how many the Open Source community could find.

Once again

Richest third-world nation on the planet.

@ Chad H

I guess the machines *were* made by Diebold (or whatever their election systems unit is called now) as they are headquartered in North Canton, Ohio. I would be surprised if their home state bought a competitor product.

I've had some contact with Diebold's ATM business - there are lots of good people there, good to work with. E-voting still scares me though.

Uhhhh....

...If I read correctly someone was able to disable the system that logs unauthorised changes. Why was this even possible?? I hope this is not a manufacturers feature, but some kind of modification of the devices software.

Electronic is bad idea.

Old school polls using paper ballots and ballot boxes, with people counting the ballots works fine. Scrutineers can validate the count and document questionable counts. There is a literal paper trail, and the system is easily understood and verified.

I've worked as a scrutineer, and a poll clerk and as a deputy returning officer: this is not a complicated way to hold a vote, and I doubt that it approaches 10% of the price of the electronic method.

Electronic records and computer systems are far too vulnerable to surreptitious alteration to be trusted with an election.

The USAers harp on their 'right to bear arms': when did they forget about the right to observe (scrutinize) their elections? Electronic voting obscures who casts ballots and obscures the accuracy of counting of ballots, it eliminates a physical record of the vote.

With paper ballots, the returning officer holds up the ballot and calls out 'one for party X': if the returning officer is wrong it is obvious and the citizens present can say so. I can see no way to unambiguously do a count or recount using electronic voting.

Placing the election mechanism beyond the oversight of the electorate is a bad idea in a democracy.

Or, try the most reliable way ...

Good old paper and pencil ballots. Considering the cost of voting machines, it's not that expensive. They're used in Australia exclusively - and there is almost always a result "on the night", plus scrutineers from parties can, literally, look over the shoulders of official counters to verify the count as it occurs and accompany the sealed ballot boxes to the counting room - that is, everybody watches everybody else and every step in the process - the only thing that's secret is the voter placing their marks(s) on the ballot paper(s). Any re-counts, although they are quite rare, are also reliable. Usually, about 70% of the vote is tallied by around 4-5 hours after polls close (which gives a quite valid result, though, of course, every vote is counted). With a system as good as that, why even consider electronic machines?

---- Released Under GPL2----

To make paper voting even more secure, consider this:

a. Print invisible water marks on each ballot paper (on paper stock), and, as is currently done, keep the ballots under lock and key until election day, when they're distributed to polling booth officials to be handed to each voter at the polling booth;

b. Embed artificial DNA in the 'lead' of the pencils - a unique sequence for each electorate - and, similar to ballot papers, keep them under lock and key until election day;

c. If the election count is challenged in any electorate, or an official notices a discrepancy, then both the DNA sample left by the pencil and the watermark on the ballot paper(s) can be checked for validity.

(C) Anonymous Coward

----End GPL2 Release----

I often think that proponents of electronic voting are one of the following:

- Manufacturers if voting machines

- Naive tech-heads, yet to learn much about the 'real world' and its pitfalls

- People with a vested interest in tampering with elections.

It's getting chilly in here - I might need my coat.

National Body

Of course in Australia we also have a national body that

1. manages the elections,

2. makes sure that the process is simple,

3. runs national advertising campaigns explaining how to vote,

4. Is apolitical and incredibly professional.

If you have a mishmash of a system, you expect to get a mishmash of results.

(but they still managed to lose my voter registration update last time)

Duh

People suggesting how to secure electronic are missing the point. The only convincing reason to go electronic in the first place is to enable fraud.

Re: Or, try the most reliable way ...

You may want to release your idea under GPL3 rather than 2, else someone could either patent it (no copyright license needed).

;-)Or, try the most reliable way ...

rd232 beat me to it

They are not installing voting machines *despite* the potential for fraud, they are installing voting machines *because of* the potential for fraud. You can rig a paper-based election, but there are so many annoying inconveniences involved, like what to do with that heavy box full of paper for the opposition candidate. Enough boxes dumped down sewers and eventually someone is going to notice your thugs doing it. And if you want to create ghost voters, then considerable medium abilities are necessary to get them to walk into a polling booth and grab a pen with their ectoplasm. And if you tell a man in the street that "The SFD protocol was probably compromised leading to data diarrhoea in the FDK backup" and show him a log you'll get a blank stare, but tell him that government troops have been ripping up ballot papers and show him photos and he'll be ready to riot.

Coincidentally the front page story on the Times is about widespread postal vote fraud. The excuse for that is to 'increase turnout'. What a stupid idea. When a vote results in a crap government it's not because we were too lazy to go and vote for the good politicians. There aren't any. It's their fault, not ours, no matter how much they'd like to pretend otherwise - and how much of our money they're willing to spend in the hope that we'll boost their egos.

The big problem with American elections

The big problem is that they have a huge number of elections, the same day.

They've been using mechanical aids for a long time.

In Florida:2000 they had a paper trail, and were prevented from checking it.

So, while these electronic machines don't leave a paper trail for checking, the big problem may be that nobody with any chance of winning an election wants the results to be checkable. They want the authority which comes from the magic of the ballot-box, but counting the actual votes? How quaint.

No one listened 10 years ago....

Ohio used to have an automated, computerized voting system that relied on punch cards. Votes were tabulated in a very timely fashion and there was a hard paper trail. Ohioans had an accurate vote tally most times before the 11:00 News and always in time for the morning paper....The mouse trap worked quite well.

The Ohio Republican party decided to moderinze all this with touch screens that leave no paper trail....Did Clintonista victories in the Buckeye state have anything to do with that? Oh well "modrenization" is always good right?

When I explained this to my relatives in Ohio 10 years ago and pointed out they were easily compromised, exploited, etc they looked at me like I told them about flying saucers and the loch ness monster.

@Matt Caldwell and Bronek Kozicki

Matt:

A few questions:

1) The tallies are not announced until after the polls close, so why is an instant tally of votes important?

2) Cannot the instant reading of the ballot be used to correlate how a given person voted?

3) Cryptographically signed papers and pens could be used to correlate votes to individuals too, no?

It seems to me that the old school manual method of holding an election is not broken, and does not need to be 'fixed'. Most of the 'fixes' proposed here, including yours' look a lot like application of computers merely because we can, not because there is a real benefit... and there are some possible serious ill effects.