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Thursday, August 04, 2005

Well, they could start by ditching Access
Posted by Jill | 2:53 PM

And this is the technology platform to which we're supposed to trust our votes?

Diebolds latest electronic voting machine, desired by dozens of counties nationwide, fared worse in the
nations first mass testing than previously disclosed, with almost 20 percent of the touch-screen machines crashing.

Those software failures are likely to send Diebold programmers back to work and perhaps force the firm into weeks of independent laboratory testing.

[snip]

In all, 19 machines had 21 screen freezes or system crashes, producing a blue screen and messages about an illegal operation or a fatal exception error. A Diebold technician had to restart the machine for voting to resume. Ten machines had a total of 11 printer jams. Almost a third of all machines in the mock election had one problem or another.

Diebold officials say they plan to fix the problems and bring the machines back for a new mass test in late August. But they have confided to some California election officials that they arent certain what caused the touch screens to crash.

Douglas Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa and an expert on computerized voting systems, isnt surprised.

Diebolds touch-screen machines run software written by Microsoft, Diebold and at least three other companies who make parts such as printers, memory cards and the touch-sensitive screen itself.

Its essential, Jones insists, that Diebold take its software and hardware fixes back through independent laboratory testing. Otherwise, the patch risks creating a new and unpredicted problem.

Especially with this blue-screen problem, you dont know whether its the printer drivers, you dont know whether its Diebolds own code or whether its Windows, or where the problem is, he said. It brings into question the entire system.


Our election problems will only be solved when both parties can demonstrate that they respect the process. As it stands now, "he who run t'ings" controls both who has access to polling places and to the machines, as well as the actual counting.

When we hear things like "the humidity made the optical scan cards stick", or "The PC kept crashing so we had to put in a new smartcard" or any of the excuses that are made for tampering with voting machines after certification, it just sounds too much like "The dog peed on my homework."

Yes, the Democratic Party has in the past engaged in shady practices such as registering dead voters. But today, election officials, with the help of "black boxes" that more and more voters are using, and which few people, even those who wrote the software for them, really understand, have the ability of fix elections however they like. Given that the Republican Party has in recent years made it a practice to DISCOURAGE voters who might vote against them from even having access to the polls, it's difficult to trust them with computing equipment they don't understand -- or understand far too well.

Do we respect the process, or don't we? Is winning the only thing that matters?

(hat tip: Hoffmania)
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