Posted on 05/08/2004 10:21:47 PM PDT by upchuck
NORTH CANTON, Ohio (AP) - After the Florida punch-card debacle hurt the credibility of the last presidential election, ATM maker Diebold Inc. (DBD) decided it should expand into electronic voting. But Diebold has yet to realize large rewards for its shift into electronic voting.
Instead, it has reaped a storm of criticism and even a call for a criminal investigation by California's top election official, who banned the company's newest touchscreen voting computers April 30, citing concerns about security and reliability.
"In November of 2000, I was embarrassed for this country," said Walden W. O'Dell, Diebold's chairman and chief executive.
The Florida fiasco also inspired Congress, which appropriated $3.9 billion for an overhaul of the nation's voting systems - one that was to be fueled by technology promised by the likes of Diebold.
The Diebold ballot appears on a portable screen that voters touch and confirm, and votes are stored on memory cards. But because the machines do not produce a paper record for each vote, critics say proper recounts are impossible.
Computer security experts say the Diebold machines - and those of rivals - have been carelessly developed and are too vulnerable to tampering and malfunction. Other critics have questioned the close ties that O'Dell and other company executives have with Republicans.
The onslaught has slowed sales and forced the company to lower financial expectations for Diebold Election Systems, the subsidiary that makes the touchscreens.
North Canton-based Diebold supplied 55,600 touchscreen voting stations for the March 2 "Super Tuesday" primaries, mostly in Maryland, Georgia and California. A competitor, Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb., has installed about 36,000 screens.
Diebold's e-voting system was first stung by criticism last year when an unidentified hacker managed to obtain the company's software blueprints, known as source code, along with e-mails and other documents. That gave computer scientists a chance to evaluate the code and question its integrity.
And during the primaries, vote counts in Maryland were delayed because of modem glitches, and machines in much of California's San Diego County malfunctioned, potentially disenfranchising hundreds of voters.
Diebold argues that the security concerns are unfounded and blames human and mechanical errors.
"People forget we are a small part of a big process," said Bob Urosevich, chief executive of Diebold Election Systems. "Elections are conducted by state and local officials, not by individual vendors, and that seems to get lost."
Some county election officials agree.
"There are some security issues that were identified, and in many cases they have been fixed," said Jeff Matthews, director of the Stark County Board of Elections in Ohio. "To imply that insiders can change the outcome of an election is incorrect. It implies that election officials across the state are incompetent or corrupt and neither of those statements are true."
That hasn't stopped detractors from taking aim at Diebold's political preferences.
Diebold or people affiliated with the company made more than $325,000 in political contributions since 2000, mainly to President Bush or Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, according to the independent Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks money in politics.
In August, O'Dell said in a fund-raising letter for the Ohio Republican Party that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes" to Bush.
The letter was sent just as Ohio's top elections official, a Republican, was about to qualify Diebold as one of three companies eligible to sell electronic voting machines in the state.
"The issue won't go away. I feel very badly about it," O'Dell said told The Associated Press. "I made a misstep with that letter."
O'Dell, who has been a guest of the president in Texas, said that since September he has sworn off politics.
At Diebold's annual shareholders meeting last month, O'Dell said he decided to turn the $2.1 billion company's attention to voting machines because he believed it could help modernize elections.
While the election subsidiary has struggled financially, the rest of Diebold, mainly ATMs and safes, has thrived. Election systems was the only Diebold unit to post lower sales last year than in 2002.
Although Diebold's stock price appears hardly to have been affected, some analysts wonder whether Diebold will have the fortitude to remain much longer in the election tech market, which represents only 5 percent of its overall business.
"Election systems is a small part of the business, but it's getting 90 percent of the publicity," said Kartik Mehta, an analyst for FTN Midwest Research.
But O'Dell told shareholders that Diebold has no intention of quitting and "will ultimately produce the solutions that this country wants in a very fair and open way."
Diebold had expected its election systems revenue to grow to as much as $170 million in 2004, from about $100 million last year, based largely on revenue from Ohio's conversion from punch cards. The company now expects election systems revenue in the $80 million to $95 million range.
In an annual report filed in March with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Diebold said technical and security questions are likely to increase costs and may hurt sales because of delays in implementing the machines.
Meanwhile, the drumbeat of criticism is getting louder, with Ohio officials joining counterparts from other states in questioning whether Diebold systems are secure.
Ohio delayed for months releasing $127 million in federal money for new voting machines while lawmakers studied security issues; six of the state's 88 counties now have touchscreens.
On Friday, Ohio Gov. Bob Taft signed a bill authorizing up to 31 counties to switch to electronic machines for the November election. The state released only a portion of the money, $38 million, to pay for the machines this year and to educate voters and poll workers.
Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell still would have to figure out how to keep votes secure.
"Every time there is an independent test, security flaws have been identified," said state Sen. Teresa Fedor, a Democrat on the state's review committee. "It's an indication we need to slow down the process."
Diebold has "not shown they know how to build really secure systems, and to me election security is national security," said David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
"I don't think there is much likelihood of someone hacking into voting systems," Jefferson added, "but we do know with Diebold's system there can be some mischief."
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On the Net:
Diebold Election Systems: http://www.diebold.com/dieboldes
Help America Vote Act: http://www.fec.gov/hava/hava.htm
CA: Ban on voting machine urged - State panel says Diebold glitches tainted primary ^ 04/23/2004
Calif. Official Bans Some Voting Machines [Calls for Criminal Investigation of Diebold] ^ 05/01/2004
It isn't that elections officials across the state may be incompetent or corrupt. All it takes are a few elections officials who are incompetent or corrupt, and who hack into electronic voting systems to change the outcome. With no paper trail, there's absolutely no way to detect or correct such election fraud.
U.S. history is replete with examples of fraud by both major political parties. We must "trust but verify". It's not enough to trust the honesty of election officials or the security of all-electronic voting machines; we must be able to verify both.
I'm a software engineer and a digital circuit designer, and I am convinced that it is absolutely insane to base elections on electronic voting machines which have no audit trail and no means to recount the ballots. Diebold richly deserves all the grief it is getting. The company should have known better, and if it didn't know better it shouldn't have gotten into the business.
Actually, it's not so simple. The only way to make it simple is to have the paper ballots be the official medium; electronic counts may exist as well, but in case of discrepancy the paper ballot rules. To avoid deliberate introduction of discrepancies, then, paper ballots must either be entirely controlled by the voting equipment (perhaps viewed through a window) or a machine must read the paper ballots when they're physically inserted.
There's nothing inherently wrong with viewing-window-based systems, but the mechanics can be a bit tricky especially if there's a requirement (as there should be) to allow voters to inspect their printed ballot and reject it (getting a new one) if it's incorrect. In that latter case, there must be a mechanical means by which the rejected ballot can be seen to go somewhere other than the ballot box.
Frankly, I don't see any advantage of using such a system in preference to an optical-scan balloting system. Disabled voters can be accommodated in optical-scan systems via the use of voting terminals which will mark optical-scan ballots according to their selections. Their ballots could then be counted the same as any others.
Given that one optical scan reader can service a substantial number of polling stations, I see no reason for governments to spend the extra money required for captive-ballot systems which would seem to provide little if any real extra benefit.
Optical-scan ballots, with a few features added to prevent ballot alteration, seem like the most cost-effective and efficient means of running an election. What advantages do ballot-printing DRE machines offer that can even begin to justify their cost?
I have no problem with optical-scan ballots, and they may well be more cost-effective. For that matter, I like the punch card system which my county (Ventura, CA) uses. The voter actually punches out the holes with a positive-action lever machine; there are no perforated ballots or hanging chads, and the system is reliable and accurate.
I have no technical objection to touch-screen video terminals, just so long as there is a verifiable paper trail. Without that, they're shit.
As to what advantages a video terminal system might have over optical scan, there are some potential advantages if the right system was used. For example, see David Chaum's proposal for Secret-Ballot Receipts and Transparent Integrity.
Well, no sh#%, Sherlock! Recount paper receipts are an obvious requirement for such a system. That's the first thing that occurred to me when I heard of the things.
What dumbass spec'd this out - a government-idiot drone? Absolutely no doubt.
Diebold management must be a particularly incompetent bunch. I agree completely. But even more incompetent are the election officials in the localities where these machines have been purchased. They must truly be a bunch of losers if they can't see the inherent problems.
I'd independently invented the idea of a transparency one-time-pad, though I used two-pixel blocks instead of four-pixel ones. Interesting application, but I don't quite understand what it really buys. One of the requirements of a good voting system is that it be possible after-the-fact for anyone to prove how a voter voted--even the voter himself. I didn't see how the receipt could proof that a vote was counted without providing proof of how it was cast.
The voter knows how he voted, and he verified that the machine correctly recorded his vote by reading the printout before he separated the two laminated layers. Then he can verify that his vote as cast was included in the total (as described in Chaum's paper). But his receipt does not (and cannot) tell anyone else how he voted, just that his vote (whatever it was) was correctly tallied.
Perhaps there's something about the consistency checks I'm not understanding.
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