For Sale! Crappy E-Voting System With A Horrible Reputation For Security! What? No Takers?
from the who-wouldn't-want-to-buy-it? dept
Last October, Diebold admitted that all of the bad publicity around the security problems related to their e-voting machines had the company thinking not about fixing those security problems, being more open with the security community and admitting their past mistakes -- but about getting out of the business entirely by selling the unit off to some other company to deal with. Of course, when just about every headline about your company is trashing it -- and the best you can do is crack jokes about the security problems and deny any problems exist (despite tons and tons of evidence by well-known experts in the field) -- you might imagine it would be tough to find a willing buyer. You'd be right. Diebold admitted today that no one wants to buy the e-voting unit, so the company is stuck with it. So what's the company going to do? Admit it made mistakes in the past and is now going to fix them and take e-voting concerns seriously? Of course not! They're simply going to distance the e-voting business from the rest of the company. They're going to run the e-voting unit entirely separately from the rest of Diebold (which is a big ATM maker). The quotes from Diebold's CEO don't sound like someone who is trying to fix a struggling business, but someone who wants to distance himself from the business, saying that they'll support it for the "foreseeable future." Perhaps if the company had actually taken all of the concerns seriously the business wouldn't be struggling and the rest of the company wouldn't be so ashamed to be associated with the e-voting portion.
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oh, wait, we're talking about politicians and bureaucrats.....never mind. diebold sales continue...
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It's the voters
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Re: It's the voters
Don't blame the politicians and the bureaucrats, at least put their time in.
Do you really believe this????? Are we talking about the same politicians that continuously try to pass video game laws that always get shot down. Or are you talking about the politicians that try to pass a no cell phone usage while walking the streets in NY? As far as I'm concerned voting doesn't do much anymore. I'm sure if the American people want something and vote to have it but the government doesn't want you to that the government wouldn't pass it?
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voting machines
Maybe someday.
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Re: voting machines
Regards, Bryan
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Re: Re: voting machines
You may just have forgotten to provide an email address, but OTOH, would anyone be interested in buying a bridge...?
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Oh really?
There's no useful technology to be bought. There's no goodwill attached to the name. I'm not surprised nobody wants to buy it.
My suggestions;
There are some nice touchscreen terminals around. Source one.
Attach a reliable eftpos-style PRINTER inside a solid perspex box in a way that votes can be seen printed on paper, agreed with, then scrolled out of view onto a 'take-up spool' for random auditing, independent optical scan recounting, or even manual counting if necessary.
Build an embedded voting system for it based on Linux or Freebsd (using recorded prompts or festival TTS for accessability) and one of the following projects.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/votesystem/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/stv/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/free/
Sell the whole 'voting solution' including source and documentation to the appropriate voting agencies in a GPL-compatable manner. Patches to GPL code become GPL, but your hardware modifications, configuration work, and any code you wrote from scratch (glue-scripts) are not required to be GPL, so you CAN claim copyright on the system-as-a-whole. You can also sell support services.
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Re: Oh really?
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If you believe strongly (as many people do) that the votes aren't being fairly counted, why bother voting? Here's my vote, scrawled on the back of a shopping receipt. I'll save you the effort and just drop it in the trashcan myself and get back to work. Thanks for caring.
Seriously.
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week.... just week
You would think they would attempt to use something a little more secure....... ** ROLLS EYES **
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e-voting
I requested a pull handle like on the slot machines, so when I vote, I can pull the handle and if I'm lucky my vote will count, but then again I'll never know who my vote went to
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Re: e-voting
In my ideal voting system, the ballot marker should be separate from the ballot box, so that the voter can verify his vote before submitting it, the names of every voter to vote in each polling station should be recorded and the votes from each station counted separately, so that if the wrong number of votes are returned from anywhere, everyone who voted there can be called in to vote again (making it very difficult to stuff ballot boxes). The filled ballot boxes should then be transported and guarded by at least two people, and observers from any of the candidates can observe but not intervene at all stages of the counting process. Furthermore, the counting should be done under video surveillance, providing evidence for a court case. This would make a very secure voting system.
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Open Source
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