MetaFilter posts tagged with votingmachines

"Something — something — happens every election.”

Miko — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 06:51:55 -0800

“I’m an old computer nerd,” Diener said. “I can do anything with computers. Nothing’s wrong with computers. But this is the worst way to run an election.” NYTMag piece on electronic voting, voter confidence, and the impact of old-fashioned problems like printer jams, befuddled voters and volunteers, and interface design flaws. By Clive Thompson.

20 Amazing Facts About

Postroad — Fri, 31 Dec 2004 09:00:07 -0800

20 Amazing Facts About Read this and cry. Or move to another country.

oh, the irony.

Espoo2 — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 20:43:22 -0800

Diebold does it's part to protect the Constitution.

DOWN FOR THE COUNT

jonah — Tue, 27 Jul 2004 19:40:51 -0800

DOWN FOR THE COUNT At around 8:50, Soubirous’s campaign manager, Brian Floyd, received a call from an election observer in Temecula informing him that the vote count had been stopped – apparently by Registrar Mischelle Townsend herself. The reason was not made clear. So Floyd and another Soubirous campaigner named Art Cassel jumped into a car and drove to Townsend’s office to investigate. Sure enough, the counting area appeared to be near-deserted. But then they noticed two men huddled at one of the vote tabulation computers.

This is real, folks.

troutfishing — Sun, 28 Sep 2003 08:26:44 -0800

How to hack an election 1.12: Diebold tries to silence incriminating evidence : Diebold, maker of proven-to-be hackable voting systems, plays global whack-a-mole, in effort to scare ISP's into taking down websites with incriminating material. They used the DCMA to shut down BlackBoxVoting.org.

But the incriminating data just keeps popping back up on the Net, and Gun-and-Voting rights activist Jim March calls the bluff and challenges Diebold “Diebold: You are cordially invited to bite me. Bring it on. Make my day.". March has created a legal strategy/toolkit for voting rights activists who want to fight Diebold, a company which has knowingly - for 10 years - sold security-compromised voting technology, and whose CEO, an aggressive Republican fundraiser, has said he is "he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." In internal memos published by Scoop, Diebold's officials admit that their voting records database is (and has been for a long time) hackable ( [anyone can] "access the GEMS Access database and alter the Audit log without entering a password" ) but that this isn't necessarily a problem because "It has a lot to do with perception. Of course everyone knows perception is reality." For background to this story, see my summary of Mefi posts on the Voting Fraud story, from this thread. Diebold's funky voting systems are in the process of being "Certified", in Maryland and elsewhere, by SAIC, a company convicted of major frauds within the last decade and which has extensive ties to the Bush Administration, the CIA, and which "proudly lists DARPA in its annual report as one of its prime clients.", and owns Network Solutions, Inc. SAIC has not, it seems, noticed the GEMS database story (see main link). If Diebold systems win certification, we can expect an awful lot of This sort of thing. Computer security expert Dr. Rebecca Mercuri has some pointed analysis on the subject.

You can join the effort to demand truly secure voting systems at VerifiedVoting.Org by David L. Dill, a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. Go team.

Tampering with democracy

dogmatic — Wed, 09 Jul 2003 08:08:20 -0800

Are our elections fixed? Diebold Election Systems makes electronic voting machines being installed throughout the US. The problem? The systems contain serious security flaws that could possibly have been the reason for major swings in vote counts and discrepancies with exit polling. Also, a step-by-step guide to manipulating Diebold results -- and covering your tracks.