Fla. Voting Machines Have Recount Flaw

Now heres a surprise.



Jun 13, 4:16 PM (ET)


TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) - Touchscreen voting machines in 11 counties have a software flaw that could make manual recounts impossible in November's presidential election, state officials said.

A spokeswoman for the secretary of state called the problems "minor technical hiccups" that can be resolved, but critics allege voting officials wrongly certified a voting system they knew had a bug.

The electronic voting machines are a response to Florida's 2000 presidential election fiasco, where thousands of punchcard ballots were improperly marked. But the new machines have brought concerns that errors could go unchecked without paper records of the electronic voting.

The machines, made by Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb., fail to provide a consistent electronic "event log" of voting activity when asked to reproduce what happened during the election, state officials said.


Officials with the company and the state Division of Elections said they believe they can fix the problem by linking the voting equipment with laptop computers. Florida's two largest counties - Miami-Dade and Broward - are among those affected by the flaws.
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040613/D836BCDG1.html

Who makes the decisions on how the elections are run, ballots, machines, etc.?

Is it done on a state basis, with Jeb cronies running the system?

Or is it done on a county basis, controlled by the party that has the majority to run things?

If it is a county issue, Miami-Dade & Broward are controlled by Dems, correct?

I have been wondering about this, going back to 2000 fiasco.

Any info appreciated!!!

and they can manipulate the results anyway they like.

This type of hysteria only contributes to not getting accurate votes. I think Avi Ruben and Bev Harris are truly the spawn of Satan for getting people to beleive this crap.

It would take a conspiracy of democrats AND republicans beyond imagination to get evoting to purposely alter votes. Even if they figured out a machine that would favor republicans, they would need to get it through random election mode audits at the various evoting companies (diebold isn't the only game in town), past election official audits, and random audits for certification (where they pull them out of production and audit the results).

Every "shortcoming" found with evoting resulted from no election commission control - every freaking one of them. In fact the SAIC stated in it's report for Maryland:

"Indeed, Professor Rubin states repeatedly in his paper that he does not know how the system operates in an election and he further identifies the assumptions that he used to reach his conclusions. In those cases where these assumptions concerning operational or management controls were incorrect, the resultant conclusions were, unsurprisingly, also incorrect"

It's much easier to get an unskilled person to stuff a ballot box or discard votes than find highly skilled engineers and technicians to become part of some improbable conspiracy.

I don't have any problem holding evoting to the highest standards. But it's completely disingenuous to hold them to a standard you won't hold to existing methods because you think it's a freeper conspiracy.

How come it's ok to hate Diebold because the CEO contributed to the RNC, but ignore the fact that Avi Rubin was on the board of VoteHere.com, a Diebold competitor when he wrote his report?

God, I hate republicans. But I hate political driven paranoia more because it creates more damage in spite of itself.

THe nature of the voting systems in use, and the processes surrounding their use, leaves huge security gaps that can (and will) be exploited for electoral gain ...

Hey ? .. NO one ever cheats: right ? ...

Paranoia ? ... are you not a student of human nature ? ...

If there is no problem: then there shouldnt be a problem in going to open source, and dumping the private systems for transparent public systems ...

You dont object to that: do ya ? ...

Is there another Diebold suckarse in this world ? ....

to send votes from machines for counting, for example, it seems to me that fraud by the company is possible. Unfortunately, there is some history of using such uplinks, after promising the public they won't be used.

The furor around Diebold was not only that the CEO contributed to the Repubs but that he actually indicated that he intended to deliver Ohio's votes to the Repubs.

What's wrong in your eyes with insisting that the machines produce a hardcopy for each voter, WHEN THE VOTE IS CAST? This would allow one to have the purported benefits of electronic voting, while maintaining a transparent record for recounts. No religious faith in "fairness" would then be required.

I am able to demonstrate exactly how wrong you are. All it takes to alter the final count is one, single person with nefarious intent who has access to GEMS during an election. It can be done in about five minutes. I can demonstrate the actual process.

Sorry, but you're wrong. Plain wrong.

..who is both wrong and ill-informed...

This is the problem. If you were left alone with a GEMS systems, you may be able to change the election results at a district (although highly doubtful). If my 5 year old were left alone with a ballot system, she could change the election results at a district as well.

I am way more informed about this paranoia then you think and it's the reason it makes me so mad. With no election controls, you can't have an election.

You can't be left alone with a GEMS system anymore than my daughter could be left alone with a ballot system. That's not how our system works. But that's how the evoting haters want to frame the issue - disingenuously.

The systems are NOT connected to the internet and have no IP connection at all. The do have a direct connect phone line, much like an ATM machine. I don't see anyone sweating over their bank accounts because of this. It's alomst impossible to gain entry to and very, very difficult to change the results. In fact, audit votes are contained in the database, so any attempt to alter the votes would be obvious and correctable.

Evoting allows people with disabilties to vote in privacy. Evoting eliminates over and undervoting. Evoting CAN give us recounts (no matter what they tell you - they are lying) and a lot faster. Your hatred of republicans is getting in the way of fair voting. Many seem to suggest just because the CEO of Dielbold is a lowlife freeper, so are all his employees, all his competitors, and all his competitor's employees are freepers.

That's not reality. The reality is, Avi Rubin and Bev Harris has used your good nature to make a lot of money selling books and hysteria. They should be ashamed of themselves. I want my mom, who can't see for crap, to enter a voting booth and not have anybody tell her what to do and where to do it. I want anyone with a disability from bad vision to the mentally challenged to have the same opportunity of a secret and accurate vote to have the same opportunity as us who have no problem using any system presented to us.

Too bad some of you don't seem to care about those who benefit from better systems. That would get in the way of good freeper hatred. It sounds like Sean Hannity in reverse.

At our service ? ...

CANT they do permanent bans here in DU ? ...

Yes or no? A paper audit trail to keep track of votes. yes or no? ATM machines print out receipts because no matter how secure they might be, it doesn't mean technical mishaps don't happen.

So. What is it?

If you think that a grand republican conspiracy among every evoting manufacturer, their employees, and all the election commissions certifying the systems exists, how hard to you think it would be to print a bogus receipt, miscount good receipts, or just make up numbers during recounts?

Are these freepers so smart, that no democrat/independant engineer or technician could detect this conspiracy that apparantly is only known to republican engineers and technicians? Could these trojans, bugs, racial profiling code snippets go undetected by democratic election commision programmers validating the source code? Are we that stupid?

Finally, if somebody wanted rig an election, why try to retain highly skilled programmers ready to commit felonies when you could lobby for paper votes instead and get a bunch of 12 year olds to stuff ballot boxes a lot easier?

I am not a tinfoil type, but whenever I see someone objecting to a paper trail in addition to an electronic trail, I really wonder why.

What's so objectionable about paper receipts? If you agree with the goal, why not have paper as well? Wouldn't that be more secure by default?

Can you give me one good reason why we shouldn't have BOTH?

Sounds like a good idea. The only problem I see is that the systems are currently using two databases... one that holds YOUR vote, and a separate one that is used to read the "official" count which doesn't have the audit votes...


As to not being able to alter the counts, it has already happened in FL. Remember the several thousand negative votes for Gore in 2000? The only reason it was caught was because of the timing involved where networks had reported some vote totals from that district and suddenly Gore had many thousand less than 5 minutes before and people started screaming. When they went back and re-read the memory cards, one of them was missing, and hasn't been heard from since...

The reason for two databases is a simple accounting method.

With double-entry accounting (which all evoting compaines use), you can't just delete entries. If you want to remove a vote, you would have to enter that record as a "debit" (so to speak). The credit/debit method resolves so that it must always balance. So, someone would have to gain access to both databases and make the same change to both. Without the contents of both, you can't do it. Toying with the data would be obvious and easily correctable because the only things that couldn't resolve, are the bogus votes (in either direction).

As far as Gore's votes, he probably would have won with evoting because all the disenfranchised voters would have had a real vote. Like it or not, Gore lost because the people that wanted him in Florida (older people...less dexterity, eyesight not as good, all the things I've already said) had trouble with the ballot system. Even if you get rid of the butterfly ballot, you still have the pregnant hanging chad nightmare and the election commission's ability to "divine" the intent of the voter.

I can't even beleive this is debateable. Paper balloting sucks worse than anything if you truly want all votes to be counted.

That would certainly explain why changes to one database were NOT reflected in the other...</sarcasm>

In repeated tests, the changes made to the database that was actually read from to obtain the results were neither recorded in logs nor reported in the other database.

Paper ballots are designed to give a fail-safe to electronic balloting. The electronic methods are almost certainly safe, but I still want to see a ballot with my votes recorded in people readable format. That way when all else fails I can get a real, manual recount of the ballots in a public forum with independant observers. With the purely electronic format you so ardently support, this is NOT possible.

edited to add:

As for the disenfranchised actually getting to vote, some 120,000 voters were denied the right to even cast (or attempt to cast) a ballot in the 2000 elections. It is estimated that 80% of these would have been democratic voters. Your e-voting wouldn't have helped them in any way.

Further, the disenfranchisement was a function of the actions of the SCOTUS in stopping the LEGAL AND MANDATORY state-wide recount, not the voting methods, because the FL Supreme Court did order a state-wide recount, that several independant organizations have performed with Gore winning by wide margins in all scenarios except the one Gore himself asked for, in which the votes were only retallied in a few counties. The reason Gore's scenario was rejected by the FL Supreme Court is, interstingly enough, the same reason that the SCOTUS claimed to be the reason for stopping it... that it would treat voters in different precincts differently, which was specifically prohibited by FL and US law...

"In repeated tests, the changes made to the database that was actually read from to obtain the results were neither recorded in logs nor reported in the other database"

In repeated tests, nothing which actually happens in reality is ever used in the test.

Please, for the love of whichever higher power you might prefer, understand this: Elections cannot work, no matter how it is done, without controls.

Without the system we have now, which includes the election commission and very specific procedures, there would be nothing stopping anyone - regardless of party affiliation - from modifying election results. Again, what is easier? To hire 100's of highly skilled engineers and technicians to perpetuate a complicated felonious conspiracy, or lure a bunch of 8 year olds that can't go to jail with a box of M&M's to stuff ballot boxes?

And the same with all these "tests" and "flaws" found. Nobody has been able to replicate what they've "discovered" under the watchful eye of a polling place with responsible republicans AND democrats managing the process.

This has been one of the biggest problems evoting has had - training and following procedures (as if they never existed with newer paper ballot systems). Diebold apologized for a voting problem and everybody jumped up and down going, "SEE? SEE? I TOLD YOU SO!!!".

But what was the real problem? The poll workers did not turn the machines on in time so that they could warm up, self-test, and validate before running. So, they got started late and Diebold got blamed for "not counting votes". The machines themselves worked fine.

Other problems? Election officials did not change the default password on some systems as required. These people should not be in control of ANY type of voting system if they can't handle that important of a detail.

These are problems, but only different types of problems from the ones we typically have with paper systems. Except with paper systems, fraud is much, much easier.

Lastly, how about a little common sense? Let's assume that the CEO of Diebold is in complete control of all voting systems, his competitors, and could actually "bring votes from Ohio" or wherever. Meaning, he would be in the driver seat when his republican candidate got elected.

To do so, he and his competitors are investing billions into this technology to make it a standard way of voting. But like with any great conspiracy, they get found out. The lose their billions in investments and sales with their jobs. What kind of sense does that make?

As far as SCOTUS: That's a separate debate having nothing to do with this current news. Many Floridians could not have their vote counting because of paper ballot problems. That is relevent to the evoting issue. Besides, SCOTUS stopped the recount because 100 different people were doing it 100 different ways. Agree or disagree, those are the facts. I don't want Bush mining for votes in Texas if this next election is close with his administration changing the standards (hanging chads, pregnant chads, terrorist chads, etc) as to how they are recounted. This works both ways.

As far as Open Source, I think that is not a bad idea, but might be difficult to maintain as better hardware becomes available. I think this is the most reasonable approach to security concerns. But again, there are republican and democrat programmers. This would assume both would contribute to nefarious source code in the first place. Plus, I'm not sure it would make Avi Rubin happy. He claims C++ is inherently unsafe. Speaking as a C++ developer, he's a nutjob.

We're wasting each others time here. I don't accept your arguments and you won't accept mine. You place far to much belief in the "multitude of prgrammers" theory. The fact is that the coding required would be pretty small, and that the systems are created in a proprietary environment where no one is allowed to see the final code except for a select few (who are selected based on standards which we aren't allowed to see).

And yes, I do know something of computer security and procedures... I design security for networks as part of my job as a network consultant, so I can assure you that ANY system that can be physically attained can be breached, and very quickly to boot, and any breached system can be manipulated in almost any way the breacher chooses (especially since this is an old version of Windows CE that the machines are using!).

"systems are created in a proprietary environment where no one is allowed to see the final code except for a select few"

You are making arguments with statements that are not true. No wonder we can't agree.

The source code itself has to be certified by the election commission. The source code is reviewed, tested, and certified by election commission programmers. While not widely dissiminated to the public, it is not kept secret by any evoting manufacturer. All of them open their source code to the election commissions.

There are plenty of technologies used to make it impossible to substitute "final" code with something else (CRC checking, seals, source code control, etc) and goes back to the grand conspiracy and what it would take to implement it to help someone into office. Even though the software has no idea who is on the ballot, let alone their party affiliation.

My point here is not to protect a bunch of greed-mongers, but protect the rights of the disabled to cast a secure and private vote. I want all votes counted instead of being thrown out because of voter mistakes. You may think I'm full of it and that's fine. But I'm not a hypocrit. I hate freepers less than I love accurate voting results. I don't want Bush back in because of hanging chads and confusing ballots.

" Nobody has been able to replicate what they've "discovered" under the watchful eye of a polling place with responsible republicans AND democrats managing the process."

Oops, you just endorsed the validity of manual recounts!

Do away with proprietary software and use open source.

I develop software myself and I cant imagine why a simple addition and subtraction formula has to be "secret"...especially when it involves something as important as voting.

The point of a recount is pointless... an electronic recount will give you the same electronic count failure as before.

Some things should not be computerized and voting is at the top of the list.

You mentioned ATM machines... nobody worries about those because you know and I know exactly, to the penny, how much money we have in our accounts. Any discrepancy would be noted and the alarm would sound. Voting is anonymous and secret by design so there is no way to know if the tally is right or wrong.

You are misinformed about double entry accounting, which is one database, many accounts (e.g., accounts receivable, cash on hand, inventory, etc.). What Bev found was analagous to two sets of books, as if you had two accounts receivable accounts, two cash on hand accounts, etc.

When you do data entry, you always save the source documents. Think of having a paper trail as saving the source documents. Two (almost) independent systems, and each one keeps the other honest.

Obviously, this one is winging it, while calling everyone else ignorant.

:eyes:

but you have disgreed with the board. The penality is bye bye

I should just shut up and accept the status quo..it is easier..

This state will always be known as the state that changed history!

Because I can't imagine that people will stand for being swindled out of their votes another time around...

They aren't even trying to hide it either. I would hope that every single person that is turned away at the polls and not allowed to vote due to a (mistake) would sue Jeb Bush and the state of Fla.

You'd think the Bush dynasty would want to inspire confidence in itself, finally.

their carelessness.

Jeb will just change the #s in the end!!!
Their is never a fair fight with the Bushes!!!

woops - posted a post to the wrong thread.. nevermind

The plan is falling together purrrrrr-fectly.

-Karl Rove