More Votes Lost By Diebold; Discovered By Unique Voting Transparency Project
from the reliable,-huh? dept
For years and years Diebold Election Systems (now Premier Election Solutions) had always vehemently denied that its e-voting or optical vote scanning machines had any problems -- despite mounds and mounds of evidence of problems. We were shocked, this past summer, when the company finally admitted to a glitch with some of its machines, but the company still downplayed the significance of this, claiming that it didn't believe the glitch (which loses votes) had actually impacted any elections.Yet, even after this glitch was officially revealed, in the election just last month, we're now finding out that Diebold machines caused 200 lost votes in an election in California. Even worse, no one would even know about this at all if it weren't for a highly ambitious and very unique program set up by some voting activists to ensure there was real transparency. They convinced the local government to let them scan every single ballot and put it online for anyone to view. It was that separate process where they discovered the ballot counts didn't match, and that Diebold seemed to show absolutely no records of the missing ballots, despite having scanned them.
Makes you kinda wonder how many other areas lost votes that absolutely no one knows about because they didn't have such a system in place, huh?
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Filed Under: accuracy, california, e-voting, elections, lost votes, transparency
Companies: diebold, premier voting
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Re: Close elections
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Voting Soviet Style
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Re: Voting Soviet Style
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On top of all that, if you want to deposite a check at the Deibold ATM at my bank, you have to put the check in the ATM and it scans the check and uses OCR to determine how much it is made out for. How can they read hand writing on a check but can't read bubbles on a ballot?
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If you think you get the politician you voted for, you're a damned fool. You get the politician who was arranged by the people who pay for and count those votes.
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The CEO of Diebold has a few quotes you could use to insinuate this further.
The fact is there is NO valid reason for this to be happening. Even only halfway competent programmers and engineers can design a system that can do this accurately.
So that leaves me wondering why a company with experience in a related field is 'having issues' with this.
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It's really that easy
OBAMA = OBAMA + 1
Either at the end of voting, or in real time, the vote counts are transmitted to a database. It's a remarkably simple system that someone with only basic programming knowledge could whip up within a week. It won't be perfect, but that's what testing is for. Testing that these companies get paid enormous amounts of money to do.
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It IS that simple.
A voting machine is much more simple than an ATM.
All a voting machine does is track variables that contain vote counts. It then transmits these counts to a database that holds the sum of all voting counts. Sometimes, the machines don't even hold the data on the machine, they send the data in real time to the database.
Honestly, it's perfectly realistic to think that these companies are paid off. It's even reliably likely. However, you'd need to catch them at it. 'Mistakes' like those seen with these machines would never make it to release software, BECAUSE of how simple the system should be.
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Sorry...
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Prove a negative
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Or you could offer up some form of conspiracy, but that would mean pointing the finger at a side, and it's not fair for an arbiter to do such a thing.
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Er, but they already admitted it
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I'd pay for that
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No, it's *not* that easy
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Re: No, it's *not* that easy
"I don't think anyone here realizes it isn't easy." Tsk tsk. You need a new job. Vending machines accurately count product and cash intake. Now when you open the cash box and there is a fake dollar, or slug, they still get counted. How easy would it be to construct a machine to punch holes through paper? No, dont put anything in it that is not purely mechanical. Same with the machine to read it. Nah...thats too easy. As far as getting money without it being removed from your account, I am sorry, but I do not believe you.
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Strobe Talbot, President Clinton's Deputy Secretary of State, as quoted in Time, July 20th, l992.
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vote counting
Why not just get more jurisdictions to use that?
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