‘Daily Voting News’ For August 14, 2008

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If I lived in Butler Co Ohio I would be very concerned about whether my vote was going to be counted this November. If you recall Butler Co uses Diebold/Premier DREs and in the March primary and April recount over 200 votes nearly went uncounted. The cause of the problem proved to be a conflict between the voting system software and anti-virus software. Rather than take action against Diebold/Premier, as recommended by Election Integrity attorneys, the state sat back until the vendor sued them and nearly forced the state to counter-sue. But the county, and many others in the state, will be using the same voting system with the same software in November.

Diebold/Premier claims to have a software patch but also claims it will be years before they can use it because it has to have federal approval. Meanwhile, Secretary of State spokesman Kevin Kidder says, “We’ve never lost a vote because of the problems we cite in the counterclaim because election officials have caught them. We can’t prevent it. We can only catch the problem and correct it.”

As good as election officials may be they cannot and will not catch everything and when they don’t find a problem it means votes are lost or incorrectly tabulated. The solution should have been to force the counties involved to go to paper based systems. It’s too late for that now…

**”Daily Voting News” is meant as a comprehensive listing of reports each day concerning issues related to election and voting news around the country regardless of quality or political slant. Therefore, items listed in “Daily Voting News” may not reflect the opinions of VotersUnite.Org or BradBlog.Com**

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‘Daily Voting News’ For August 14, 2008

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7 Responses

  1. 3)
    teri said on 8/15/2008 @ 7:33am PT: [Permalink]

    It seems like every voting problem comes down to the source code issue- Can you report on that and do you think open source is good ? How come you don’t talk about that ? If open source was in place with paper ballots- wouldn’t that be better ? It seems like this subjecr is avoided on Daily News and your blog…

  2. 4)
    John Gideon said on 8/15/2008 @ 8:02am PT: [Permalink]

    Teri

    There are very few articles on Open Voting. I try to capture them when I see them but I do miss some also. It also depends on the content. Then too, when I get blasted by someone and accused of being in the vendors pocket because I do miss an article, it doesn’t make me want to go back and capture that article.

    I think Open Source is a good idea. In fact we worked with a group on the east coast in hopes of getting open source software into the NY voting systems. Unfortunately that failed.

    Now that I’ve opened myself for attack by our friend he can chime in and I will ignore his false accusations.

  3. Avatar photo
    5)
    Brad Friedman said on 8/15/2008 @ 11:44am PT: [Permalink]

    For what it’s worth “Teri”, I have spoken many times about Open Source being only common sense, if you’re going to use any computer with an election. The more transparency, the better.

    That said, OS is also a false solution in many ways, for a number of reasons. Just some of them:

    + There is no way to know that the OS examined prior to election is actually in use on any machine on election day. So people will have a false sense of security.

    + Even if the OS software is actually the same code used on election day in the machines, it can easily be hacked via other software (operating system, for eg.) and hardware (code can be executed from there as well). Again, offering a false sense of security.

    + A number of the open voting “solutions” I’ve seen presented use touch-screen systems and/or computer printed “ballots”. A computer printed ballot can *ever* work in an election, as it can be easily hacked such that most voters will never notice vote flips.

    That’s just a number of reasons why, though open source makes sense for transparency if you *must* use a computer in an election, it is ultimately no solution to the problem, anymore than touch-screens and “paper trails” were.

    Hand-marked paper ballots, counted publicly and transparently, are the only way to go, barring anybody inventing something I’m currently unaware of.

  4. 6)
    sam wiseman said on 8/16/2008 @ 1:08pm PT: [Permalink]

    {Ed Note: Comment by Brent Turner of Open Voting Consortium, posting as “Sam Wiseman” again deleted. Mr. Turner has been banned here for refusing to follow the rules and posting under multiple identities, spamming his advocacy for his voting company, Open Voting Consortium, in every post. If you are unable to follow the few simple rules for posting here, Mr. Turner, I can’t see why anybody would think your company, OVC, should be entrusted with counting *anybody’s* vote, open source or otherwise. – BF}

  5. 7)
    Floridiot said on 8/16/2008 @ 5:12pm PT: [Permalink]

    You can have any kind of source code you want as long as it’s backed up with precinct level hand counting and precinct to state level double checking (see if the numbers still match as reported) IMO

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