EFF: Diebold Attempts to Evade Election Transparency Laws
| From: | EFF Press <press-AT-eff.org> | |
| To: | presslist-AT-eff.org | |
| Subject: | EFF: Diebold Attempts to Evade Election Transparency Laws | |
| Date: | Fri, 18 Nov 2005 00:27:03 -0800 |
Electronic Frontier Foundation Media Release For Immediate Release: Friday, November 18, 2005 Contact: Matt Zimmerman Staff Attorney Electronic Frontier Foundation mattz@eff.org +1 415 436-9333 x127 Diebold Attempts to Evade Election Transparency Laws EFF Goes to Court to Force E-voting Company to Comply With Strict New North Carolina Law Raleigh, North Carolina - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is going to court in North Carolina to prevent Diebold Election Systems, Inc. from evading North Carolina law. In a last-minute filing, e-voting equipment maker Diebold asked a North Carolina court to exempt it from tough new election requirements designed to ensure transparency in the state's elections. Diebold obtained an extraordinarily broad order, allowing it to avoid placing its source code in escrow with the state and identifying programmers who contributed to the code. On behalf of North Carolina voter and election integrity advocate Joyce McCloy, EFF asked the court to force Diebold and every other North Carolina equipment vendor to comply with the law's requirements. A hearing on EFF's motion is set for Monday, November 28. "The new law was passed for a reason: to ensure that the voters of North Carolina have confidence in the integrity and accuracy of their elections," said EFF Staff Attorney Matt Zimmerman. "In stark contrast to every other equipment vendor that placed a bid with the state, Diebold went to court complaining that it simply couldn't comply with the law. Diebold should spend its efforts developing a system that voters can trust, not asking a court to let it bypass legal requirements aimed at ensuring voting integrity." On November 4, the day that voting equipment bids to the state were due, Diebold obtained a temporary restraining order from a North Carolina superior court, exempting it from criminal and civil liability that could have resulted from its bid. EFF, with the assistance from the North Carolina law firm of Twiggs, Beskind, Strickland & Rabenau, P.A., intervened in the case on behalf of McCloy, the founder of the North Carolina Coalition for Verified Voting. In a brief filed Wednesday, EFF argued that Diebold had failed to show why it was unable to meet various new election law provisions requiring source code escrow and identification of programmers. North Carolina experienced one of the most serious malfunctions of e-voting systems in the 2004 presidential election when over 4,500 ballots were lost in a voting system provided by Diebold competitor UniLect Corp. Local officials were forced to re-run a portion of the election. The new transparency and integrity provisions of the North Carolina election code were passed in response to this and other documented malfunctions that have occurred across the country. The North Carolina Board of Elections is scheduled to announce winning voting equipment vendors on December 1, 2005. For the brief filed in the case: http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/20051117_Diebold_v_N... For this release: http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2005_11.php#004171 About EFF The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading civil liberties organization working to protect rights in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF actively encourages and challenges industry and government to support free expression and privacy online. EFF is a member-supported organization and maintains one of the most linked-to websites in the world at http://www.eff.org/ -end- _______________________________________________ presslist mailing list https://falcon.eff.org/mailman/listinfo/presslist
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EFF: Diebold Attempts to Evade Election Transparency Laws
Posted Nov 19, 2005 11:49 UTC (Sat) by grouch (guest, #27289) [Link]
Go EFF!
From their linked PDF:
"While further progress can be made, North Carolina has set a high, although certainly reachable, standard for voting equipment vendors who wish to sell their products for use in elections in this state."
That "further progress" may hint at the need to open the source of voting machines for public inspection, instead of just placing it in escrow with the state. I certainly hope they prevail against Diebold's attempt to avoid even placing the code in escrow.
Public elections should not involve secret code, only secret ballots.
EFF: Diebold Attempts to Evade Election Transparency Laws
Posted Nov 21, 2005 10:12 UTC (Mon) by janpla (guest, #11093) [Link]
Somebody should make an opensource voting program - it can't be that hard.
EFF: Diebold Attempts to Evade Election Transparency Laws
Posted Nov 21, 2005 10:57 UTC (Mon) by etroup (guest, #21786) [Link]
Someone has. See http://www.elections.act.gov.au/Elecvote.html
EFF: Diebold Attempts to Evade Election Transparency Laws
Posted Nov 22, 2005 0:45 UTC (Tue) by Richard_J_Neill (guest, #23093) [Link]
Why is it that voting in the USA is so complex? In the UK, it is simple, verifiably accurate, and never takes more than 5 minutes at a polling station. Why do we actually need anything more than paper ballots?
US Election Complexity
Posted Nov 22, 2005 23:19 UTC (Tue) by kbob (guest, #1770) [Link]
I only have experience with the US system, but it is my understanding that we have more elections than most places. In any given election, each voter will vote on candidates, measures and referenda at the Federal, state, county, city, township, and other levels. A typical ballot might have 50-100 items to vote on. Some of the items might have five or six candidates running for one office.
I usually allocate two hours to study the voter information pamphlets, and about 15-20 minutes to actually fill out the ballot. I live in Oregon, which has paper ballots, so I spend 15-20 minutes coloring in boxes to indicate my choices. I don't consider myself overprepared at two hours' preparation.
In the US, elections are held at many different levels, and the different levels have different, overlapping boundaries. For example, I live in a state, a county, a school district, a US congressional district, a state senator's district, a state representative's district. (I don't live in a city.) The school district boundaries don't correspond with any of the other boundaries. Nor do the state senator's, state representative's or US congressional districts. So the election commission has to create a vast number of different ballots, one for every possible subset of overlapping districts, and ensure that each voter gets the right ballot.
(subset isn't the right word -- any topologists want to help me out?)
I am not defending this system. I'm just trying to describe what it is.
kbob
History of voting machines
Posted Nov 25, 2005 6:46 UTC (Fri) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]
It has to do with (a) American elections being run at the local level,not by an overarching national or state electoral commission, and (b)
American business pushing 'solutions' at the individual electoral
officers, promising accuracy and long-term cost efficiency (ha ha ha).
Some counties in the US have been using privately designed and made
mechanical voting devices since 1891.
http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa111300b.htm
Originally mechanical voting machines were mechanical ballot boxes: step
into the box, pull exactly one lever, step out again. With this system
there is no ambiguity and a high degree of accuracy (providing the
machine works as advertised, and apparently the breakdown rate is high).
But in the 1940s (to cut costs? To make it easier to fake results
without detection?) manually punched cards were introduced, to be counted
by machine. The degree of error due to 'hanging chads' and the like has
never been reliably estimated -- but without a doubt it's far higher than
paper & pencil ballots counted by hand!
In Australia we happily used paper ballots exclusively until this
century, and they're still pretty rare (ACT only as far as I know, and it
runs free software!). The only decent grounds given for introducing
electronic voting machines, incidentally, were improved accessibility for
the disabled.
History of voting machines
Posted Nov 25, 2005 7:08 UTC (Fri) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]
A better history than the one I linked to above is here:http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/pictures/