Diebold comes clean, admits that its e-voting machines are faulty
By Darren Murph 
posted Aug 23rd 2008 8:29PM
posted Aug 23rd 2008 8:29PM
For years, Diebold has embarrassed itself by claiming that obvious faults were actually not faults at all, and during the past decade or so, it mastered the act of pointing the finger. Now that it has ironically renamed itself Premier Election Solutions, it's finally coming clean. According to spokesman Chris Riggall, a "critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point" has been part of the software for ten years. The flaw is on both optical scan and touchscreen machines, and while Mr. Riggall asserts that the logic error probably didn't ruin any elections (speaking of logic error...), the outfit's president has confessed to being "distressed" about the ordeal. More like "distressed" about the increasingly bleak future of his company.[Via Techdirt]
Christ, how hard could it be to make one of these machines? I feel like I would've been able to make an e-voting machine work by the time I had passed Programming 101. Talk about incompetence.
All you need is a team of monkey and 1 guy from the Geek Squad from BestBuy. That's your secret ingredient. ;)
Techie's right, even if his grammar isn't. Surely one guy from Geek Squad could sort this out. The people at Diebold / whatever must be complete idiots. They have successfully ruined what could have been a wonderful thing. They need to move on to somewhere they can't do any more damage - like a bank, or the airline industry.
It probably runs windows CE. On another note we can land a man on the moon and create a cell processor "supercomputer" on a chip but cant even get a god damn voting machine to count votes correctly... You would think that after all the scandals that the government would learn that privatizing roles that should be otherwise done by the government is a bad idea. Then again its pick you poison the bush administration or a corporation.
You're making the process sound way too easy. It's not like "var Candidate1; Candidate1++;" or anything like that. A lot of authentication and security has to take place. Do you really think it's safe to allow misfits to control something that handles the world's dominant nation?
Jesus these guys suck. There are ATM machines that dole out thousands of dollars a day and they are completely secure. How hard can it be to make a secure voting machine.
Someone in politics must like this company.
If you put the machines on a VPN with some serious encryption (to send back the results), why would you need security?
Arguably someone could hack the voting machines (physically, like taking it apart inside the booth), but it's not like the current setup prevents it.
@zmjjmz
A highly-encrypted VPN would be a very good way to go about it, as long as the voting machines could only see the central server and not each other. They could even send the results over an SSH tunnel for an additional layer of security.
If they're *really* concerned about sending data over the internet, each machine could have no network connection at all. Data from each machine could be physically brought to a central location, merged, then sent to the next central location until it's all in once place. (The data would be digitally signed and encrypted with the destination's public key.)
It was that goddamn McAffee virus software! It didn't live up to its promise of comprehensive security!
Awhile back Diebold wanted to purchase the company that i work for. The company i work for makes multimedia solutions for financial and government institutions. I am glad that my boss decided against it, what would become of our world class products.
Of course they're insecure. They were designed that way.
I don't think it comes down to incompetence my friends (as some are saying). It's not about 'not knowing' how to program a simple process such as transferring votes. It's about money and who THEY want to be elected. They say "whoever pays the most or has our interests at heart will get elected". It's been like this since e-voting was introduced. Which means that the shams that occupy the oval office right now were NOT voted in by the people for the people. They were voted in by BIG BUSINESS for BIG BUSINESS. Boy did they deliver. If you are in the arms industry, homeland security industry or oil industry you have done VERY well over the past 8 years.
Long live Heir Bush!
Fuck Diebold! Just went & put 350$ into my account & it took the cash with a reply of cannot complete transaction 00.00 dollars. So here I am out of cash for bills & food. Worse yet the woman next to me lost 900$ on a completely different machine. Think voting is bad? Try there ATM's for a completely rewarding experience! NOT!
I recall my Political Science professor at the University talking about how one of the electronic polling booths in a Democratic region in Florida had like -6000 votes or something like that for Gore and a positive number for Bush.
Failed sauce--- best served warm.
"Political Science professor at the University"
Enough said.
Anyways... I HATE my yellow teeth.
I have gammas. I'm so glad I'm a beta.
steven,
Are you proud that you are stupid and uneducated?
or
Are you afraid of what you might learn if you went to school?
Are you so stupid that you can not understand what I said?
Remember that Diebold is no longer around. They renamed their company to Premier Election Solutions to avoid the bad press. They changed their name in Aug 07 and even took off the Diebold name from the machines in 2006.
It wouldn't do good to bring up flak about Diebold while still letting states buy into Premier Election Solutions.
Just saying... :)
Sorry for the last eight years....
Sincerely,
Diebold/Premier Election Services
Dear Diebold/Premier Election Solutions.
Go FUCK yourselves.
Sincerely,
The American People
Dear American People,
Serves you right for not demanding an audit of the software. Don't blame us that you don't hold your elected, or not so elected, officials accountable.
Sincerely,
Diebold/Premier Election Solutions.
and the machine only drops votes of the candidates diebold doesn't support, right?
Or candidates that don't support Diebold.
yet, if you count votes the old fashion way, you'd probably lose (or gain) more votes due to human error (or, sadly, maliciousness).
The point is there is a paper copy and the results can be audited. With Diebold the results are un-auditable.
...wow.
http://www.xkcd.com/463/
Who signed off on using e-voting anyway? Everyone knows that the people who cared about this stuff were too corrupt to be trusted with it (or too incompetent to do it correctly) and that everyone who could do it correctly weren't corrupt enough to get a chance to program it.
The rise of electronic voting came after some people in Florida were deemed to stupid to use a paper ballot. I won't say which party they belonged to, but it rhymes with "democrat".
"deemed to stupid to use a paper ballot"
[sic]
Elections are always rigged anyway. We don't need a computer to remind us that elections are fixed. Just ask Bush how he and Cheney won (manipulated) their first presidency. I abstained from voting because I thought our candidates were crap. I made the mistake of voting for Bush on the second term. This time around, I think we have an old witch who doesn't want to leave the party. A grumpy old man who thinks he's a national hero and should be held in high places because his daddy and gramps were admirals. And then, we have Obama who we don't really know what he's all about. But darn it, people love him. Again, I think we are forced to choose, on the surface, between the best of both liars. And at the end of the day, or night to be more specific, the electoral college will do what it wants and choose whomever "the powers that be" have told them to because that's why they've been put in power for, to serve the mighty and influential.
Am I voting in the presidential elections this year? You better believe it. Who am I voting for? I have no clue at all. Am I a swing voter? Nope. I just don't think neither one of the two appointed candidates offer us any hope for more prosperous times. Instead of focusing on the real problems in our country, they play silly blame games and distracting crap. Way to go.
^ thread winner
The thing is that any candidate, no matter how great, can't win without running a campaign like these. Remember Kucinich from the Democratic Primaries? i didn't think so. He lost because most voters never got a chance to hear him speak. All we have to go by because of this is somebody's general mentality, which I think Obama should be the winner of. He makes empty promises, but then again, he wouldn't be able to get in a position to make any positive changes without some empty promises. Besides, he shows deep insight when addressing issues like abortion, whereas Mccain tends to answer bluntly in a manner that can get him the most votes.
Also, I liked how when it was Clinton vs Obama, Clinton's campaign said you couldn't choose between them based upon voting records, since they were so similar, and you couldn't judge him by his short track record, and you couldn't listen to what he had to say, in short saying you could only know Obama by whatever the Clinton campaign said about him.
I respect your decision if you vote for McCain based upon wanting to continue the war, but i cannot respect anyone who gives in to claims that Obama is a practicing Muslim (not that it should matter anyways), or that he's a terrorist (doesn't that go along nicely with the first thing?). Decide based upon their stance on issues, not on irrelevant facts thrown out by each side's hate campaign.
Woah, Seriously? They were faulty? Who woulda guessed.
Yeah... and Bush won Ohio by the skin of his teeth, on Diebold voting machines.... and wasn't someone high up in the company a Bush campaign supporter?.... hmmm
Yea, if you call 118,599 votes the skin of your teeth. Most wouldn't.
Pretty easy to tell if the vote was rigged. If one side goes to court to stop a state mandated manual recount and wins by a hand full of votes bet your last dollar on corruption.
You have to wonder how screwed up Diebold's (oh, sorry, Premier Election Solution's) management/communication structure must be if they missed several critical bugs which cripple non-updatable machines.
It's not like people have been claiming this all along! Diebold and comp all said:"nooo! You're just paranoid."
I'm not saying they rigged an election, but when you ask them for a SIMPLE way to print a ticket to double check the e-results, they said "no. What for?"
Diebold and Governments are a perfect match. They both live in denial.
Optical scan are just as prone to failure as the touch screens. The paper trail is meaningless if paper recounts are held up by Bush family friends.
I'd say that "clean" for diebold is a relative term, at the very least...
As a child growing up in Australia, I always looked up to Americans - with their amazing inventiveness and kind hearts, always willing to be the 'good guys' in a time of great uncertainty. These days, with a much closer Canadian vantage point, I can only sit back and wonder at the mastery of the few who have manipulated a once great country into what is now, an almost pitiful entity.
The society has been so dumbed-down and bibled-up that they'll swallow any nonsense. Be afraid to speak up and hold any of your leaders accountable! I know I'd be shivering in my boots in these Orwellian times.
After reading about the confirmed rigged (buggy) voting machines, I have very little hope for your, and consequently my, future. Sheesh - I mean, can you imagine an ATM... ahh doesn't matter, where's my vodka?
I can tell you right off the bat that these machines don't just drop votes, they change votes as the votes are being cast. I've had it happen to me and others I know. Good laws has been lost.
thats exactly what is wrong with the american people. in the 04 election, 54% of registered voters voted... PATHETIC.
"bibled up"
Ironically, people claim we're more "bibled up", yet 30 or so years ago, our nation was more God fearing, had more true Christians, etc.
We even used to have prayer in schools
I about guarantee you it's our *lack* of being "bibled up" that's gotten us to the point where we are now. The nation has lost it's fear of God.
Cheers
I agree that most of my fellow Americans have lost their will to challenge the leadership in Washington on the most critical points and at the times when it was most called-for. So many have become seduced by the corporate news media which tells them how to feel about issue X Y or Z. As long as "someone else" is doing the thinking around here, most people are content to sit by on the sidelines and watch this monumental clusterfuck of a political system trash the nation like a tornado touching down in suburbia.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Thf4rzZ_Vds
I've always wondered this too. I mean there is a team that can write software for the shuttle where people CAN actually die if you screw up and they DON'T screw up. How hard is it to accurately capture a users input, store it and transmit it? How hard is it to hire some testers. Hell just ask for beta testers, we'll do it for free if it means fast, accurate electronic voting.
Wait, didn't lots of people die because the wrong person became president (well, if... I wouldn't be surprised if Americans really did vote Bush).
You know whats worse? The CEO of Diebold had reassured republicans in the SUMMER or FALL of 2003 (you know like before elections), that he would ... "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president."
Its not like saying he was commited to a fair and clean election, or something, but specifically addressed the republicans when Bush was in power. Bush was the president, there is no slip of the tongue on that.
We gotta bring more awareness to the fact that the CEO said this. Its not a smoking gun, but come on man, doesnt that imply something? With all the evident / circumstances that support something odd about Bush, his cronies, and the elections. We got the privelage of seeing the most corrupt admin (evil even) EVER in the US.
Too funny that their spokesman is named Riggall.
It's a setup so the GOP can contest the election if/when they loose.
Is it ok to be scared that someone who can't spell "lose" is casting a vote?
So, can Diebold do anything right?
they do atms pretty good, all the current fancy bank of america atms are diebold.
really its just this that they fucked up
the key card locks at VT are diebold, they work pretty well, but I'm not sure how you'd screw THAT one up.
Engadget,
Please stay out of politics and stick to your wonderful reviews and notifications of consumer electronics. It breaks my heart to see such bias showing up on your usually even-keeled site. Being a long time reader and enjoyer of this site it is always disappointing to see you venture into this territory.
Your little blog blurbs fail to provide full and proper information about the truth behind what is going on with e-voting and the challenges that surround it.
Global Elections Systems was purchased by Diebold in 2001. Diebold gleefully purchased the company and it's voting machines to do what any good company does, diversify, and adapt to changing business. Before the merger, the machines had ALREADY been certified before Diebold acquired the company. Diebold thought they were purchasing a fully capable and tested systems from GES and was bamboozled by the executives who sold to company to them. Needless to say this has been a failed venture for Diebold considering all the bad PR that has been generated and the sheer fact that the revenue generated from these voting machines only account for 2.4 percent of the total revenue generated by the company...
Diebold has a 149 year history in physical security, safes, locks, and is a major supplier if not now the number one supplier of ATM's and 3rd party service in the world. They even manufactured plate armor steel during World War II for armored vehicles, AND partnered with IBM in the early 1990's co-packing their ATM's for the European market.
Chances are you used a piece of Diebold equipment today, or a piece of equipment that Diebold services and didn't even know about it.... Pretty much any bank, Federal institution, grocery store, pharmacy....uses Diebold equipment to either physically, or electronically secure documents data, money, Medicines.. you name it. The company secures the Hope Diamond at the Smithsonian Institution, along with the Charters of Freedom – the Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights and U.S. Constitution. The company also pioneered the first iris recognition ATM in existence.... and have been doing all of this way before this whole Voting machine boondoggle.
Sure, the voting machine is total junk, I agree that it should probably be removed from duty and never be used again. But instead of arguing and pointing fingers, I suggest someone do something constructive and make a voting machines that does it RIGHT. Diebold has lost that chance and has failed. There will soon be another opportunity once these machines are removed from service, There will be a "vacuum", a void to fill, once these machines go away, and I implore someone with the skills and integrity to to properly and HONESTLY fill that void, so something like this will never occur again.
Diebold gets no-bid contracts. How, exactly, is someone else supposed to make a better machine? Do it for free?
Sure, but you'd imagine that 7 years were enough time to have a look into these machines and fix them, right?
Ps: Just fill the void with paper ballots and pens, ok?
Gee, sounds like Diebold has a lot to be proud of. Any insight into why, after a century and a half of (what sounds like) great business, they felt the need to change their name?
Just because they've been making armor plating for 150 years doesn't mean that we have to repsect their voting machines. Besides, the fact that they have worked with other major companies and were involved in the war effort entails that they have probably have high connections in the political/economical world. Connections which would love to have slightly biaised elections.
it's because George Bush's last name starts with a "b", thats why he won.
There's Republican incompetence for you!
Republican COMPETENCE!. At least Bush Jr. was elected with this kind of competence. Why to spend gazillions in ads where you can bribe a bunch of low-qualified technician to "fix" this machine.
So can I get a refund from the last two elections for default equipment? I know I have the receipt here somewhere.
Umm that should be defective equipment. ooops
The ironic thing is that many states, including here in MN, have been using Diebold OCR's for ballet reading for years without any issues. We've had a solid reliable tech in front of us for years with a solid track record and yet we go for the more complex of tech.
The most simplest of solutions would be to create a touch screen unit that spits out a ballet\receipt that gets fed into an OCR system that does the tabulation. So not only do you get a hard copy that can be visually verified by voters who aren't incompetent morons, but you get a real honest to god paper trail for a recount if needed. I will be honest. At minimum any system that is used that does not have a physical paper trail and not some bullshit internal tabulation in the computer needs to be outlawed TOMORROW. As in ASAP. Absolutely NO one has proven this technology is even remotely ready to leave auditing up to something being stored in RAM.
This is going to be my first year as an election judge. Its going to be interesting to see these Diebold OCR's in action. I've heard they are fast and really reliable.
Errrr.... I think you mean "ballot". Ballet is something completely different.
:-/
I won't be seeing one of these when I'm old enough to vote! :)
Either that, or I'll see an improved version. I still won't trust that!
I work for an election authority who uses another vendor for our electronic voting system. The equipment that we use can be quirky, but I have not seen votes being lost.
I have limited programming experience, but I will warn you that do the software must comply with 50 different state election laws and must pass certification. I call it Frankenstein software development. If you want to provide updates your software needs to be re-certified which can take about a year.
I can go on, but it is 1am and I'm tired.
That all sounds about right
I have the right to my vote!!!
Failsauce indeed.
I'm so sorry Americans have had to endure the past 8 years thanks to this .. debacle.
I have the right to my vote!!!
Engadget doesn't use Diebold systems to receive comments, you don't need to be worried about one of your comments getting lost on it's way to the comment section
Let's see, they concealed faults that they knew existed, they provided machines that could have effected numerous election results, & probably did. Why then isn't the CEO, & other company exec's., of this company in jail? There have got to be several state or federal laws that they've broken. Maybe this is why companies donate so much money to different campaigns, to own our elected officials & protect themselves from any prosecution.. I've seen lesser offensives put people in jail, in a heart beat, but these people are so confident that nothing will happen that they have come out & admitted their crimes. They have undermined everything this country stands for & should suffer the full force & effects of the law..
Wow it's funny how one of the most simplest things to do, Vote is so damn hard, we're getting stupider or things are getting harder.
About fucking time.
Jeebus! A voting machine is just a counting machine! It's literally the most simple function a computer can perform. Whats the problem?
Diebold seems to be able to build ATM's that perform billions of trouble free transactions a month. Maybe use some of that tech?
faulty machines = faulty votes = faulty dumbass president
What are you talking about? Gore wasn't elected.
Bush was a C student, doesn't read newspapers, and is proud of his ignorance.
Whether he rightfully earned even a C-average is questionable. "Legacy" status--i.e. old money, and family connections--was the reason for Yale admitting him. Some say this status also confers the inability to score less than a C at Yale, but the truth of this assertion will likely remain as murky as the Skull and Bones legends.
Asked to name his favorite book, he cited the The Very Hungry Caterpillar on the grounds it influenced him as a child (the book wasn't published until Bush was an adult).
Gore is vain and corrupt as any politician: but on the criterion of not being functionally illiterate, he soars above Commander Bunnypants.
("That woman; I never interviewed her."--Bush's response, after the publication of Gail Sheehy's article in which she suggested he might have a learning disability such as dyslexia. Was Bush aware his utterance does not have the same meaning as, "She never interviewed me"?)
How about they rid of voting machines and do it like 99% of other democratic countries? Each voter gets a ballot paper, and a pen. Ballot paper goes in sealed box, which is checked to be empty before use by scrutineers from all parties. When polling closes at each booth, scrutineers from the parties are brought back in, the ballots are all dumped on a table, and election officials put them in piles for each candidate, with party scrutineers watching.
Its called transparency. The fact that people are questioning the integrity of the last two US elections should have rung warning bells long ago about these electronic voting machines.
We used to use paper ballots. But some people in Florida were to stupid to use them, which is what gave rise to e-voting.
@Charles R Hamilton
We used to use paper ballots. But some people in Florida were to stupid to use them, which is what gave rise to e-voting.
It was not the people using the ballots that were the problem. It was the fact the punches didn't completely remove the selection. And tallying those cards became an issue. Surely you remember the term 'hanging chad'. While I understand your point, insulting the people of an entire state for this only shows your lack of intelligence.
We working on ideas like this at GaTech back in 2002~01. While someone else has mentioned "security" being the key factor, most of the difficulty was in the options and variances in voting. You joke "Canidate[selection]++", but there are far more options than that.
This article just goes to show that if you can request the source code for a traffic camera, the populace should demand the source code and schematics for these devices. I do not trust an idiot programmer who dropped out of ITT tech to know what an "off by one" error is.
I've detected a theme here...if democrats lose, it's because republicans cheated. No proof mind you, but they cheated. Bush beats Gore/Kerry in a debate? He had an earpiece and was cheating. Gore loses election (and his home state), Bush stole votes and was cheating. McCain beats Obama at Saddleback? He heard the questions beforehand and was cheating. Sounds like my classmates...from second grade!
Your classmates in second grade cheated too? Arithmetic wasn't that hard now was it?
Al Gore might have invented the internet, but George Bush invented the voting machine. Cheney has the secret Diebold login....
This is why we need to insist that all voting machines and support machines’ code be freely available (open source). You get a few hundred thousand programmers scrutinizing these programs and we will find all the flaws (and back doors) before an election!
The ATM's aren't that secure either. A couple of times a month I read about an ATM somewhere being reprogrammed to think the 20's are actually 5's or 1's or something similar, all because they don't have enough security on who is allowed to reprogram them. Do a Google search for "ATM reprogrammed" and see for yourself.
This is exactly how Dubya won in Florida. Considering Gore got negative votes in some machines, their henchmen couldn't even rig machines right.
I'm surprised at how little outrage, or news coverage there is about this topic. Probably the news organizations have been bribed or threatened not to bring it up. Considering Rupert Murdoch owns FOX NEWS, it will never probably come to light there.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
http://blackboxvoting.com/s9/
You might remember that Florida used paper ballots in 2000. If you weren't foaming at the mouth that is.
We might remember because of someone posting on the topic ad nauseam.
In 2000 in Florida, the kind of ballot you received and how it was counted varied widely depending on what county you lived in.
The "butterfly ballot" was one among many stories overhyped at the time, now a mere footnote. Its importance is miniscule: compared to the Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore decision, or the Choicepoint database fiasco.
Over 50,000 "felons" were barred from voting: many of whom had conviction dates in the future, or other unexplainable anomalies. What they clearly had in common was their race (which Florida actually records in its voter registrations): over half were African-American.
Jeb picked the company with the highest $$$ bid to "scrub" the database, and somehow the result is that a group of overwhelmingly Democratic-registered voters are removed from the rolls. The story is reported in the European press as it's happening, but not in U.S. media until months after Bush's inauguration.
Oh, but the ballots were paper.
BTW, did I say they used paper ballots?
Die bold, Diebold
They're scumbags who made these machines. Bribed somebody to get the contracts, and deliver junk so that they can keep charging for updates.
If they sold machines that actually performed the extremely SIMPLE task they are programmed for, why would the government ever need to buy more?
There is no such thing as a level of incompetence low enough to cause this much waste. It's deliberate, and it's criminal. Somebody should go to prison for this.
The thing that I do not understand is that unless I missed it, CNN has not covered this AT ALL,.
This is what they are feeding on right now and will be for till the elections, heck the conventions are just around the corner they should have a team of reporters around the company, the CEO's houses etc.
So far the best/fastest system seems to be optical scanners,
Of course thanks to the little thing called "states rights": we can have a different type in every state, The only two things I would like to change is to demand that any FEDERAL vote must use machine X (states can use a different one for their stuff but most would just use the fed version) and that ALL eligible voters must vote (like Australia)
Mail in/(secure online-SS#) available as well,
Of course I would also like to see "none of the above", and then if THAT wins the next in line HAS to acknowledge in all formal documents, "President X serving by default for none of the above"
How come I can't find this on the political blogs?
You can admit your mistake, but you can't take back the past 8 years of failure in our government. We didn't elect Bush, your faulty machines did.