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| Diebold Election Systems, Inc. - Comp... |
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admin
Board Administrator
Username: admin
Post Number: 835
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, July 19, 2005 - 9:02 am: | 
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According to company sales information: "Our successful state-wide deployment of over 22,000 Diebold touch screen voting stations throughout the state of Georgia highlights the capabilities of Diebold from a product, service, support, and training standpoint on a large, comprehensive scale."
(See Black Box Voting consumer reports on Diebold):
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/1954.html
Products and services
- touch screen voting machines
- precinct-based optical scan voting machines
Parent company
Diebold, Inc.
Other subsidiaries of Diebold, Inc.
DIMS (Voter Registration)
Customers
1,297 locations -- for a complete customer list, click here: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/diebold/locations.pdf
Requesting submissions of information and links on the following:
Owners
Board members
Partners
lobbyists
Political donations made by this company
Locations
Contact info
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Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 2131
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? 
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, October 13, 2005 - 4:56 am: |
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Evaluation of the Diebold "DIMS" voter registration system, by Dr. Victoria Lovegren:
Problems with Diebold DIMS Voter-Registration System
1) DIMS allows the entry of bad addresses (incorrect street names). These bad addresses can be entered without notification by the system that the street name is misspelled. Only later are these bad addresses flagged as “Fatal Pending”—see “Fatal Pending” analysis on www.ohiovigilance.org). They should be flagged at the point of data entry, or, better yet, only valid street names can be “selected” from a set of county street names. They have the data because they flag it later. This is inexcusable.
2) DIMS doesn’t have a good means of preventing duplicate records for the same individual. (A BOE manager told me, when I discussed these two weaknesses, that the system was “not very forgiving.”)
3) DIMS “has some bugs”, as one clerk told me when I went to vote absentee. She couldn’t find me by looking up my name, and tried finding me by my address, which she was successful at doing. She related that she had to do that fairly often (look up people by their address rather than their name) and said that the new system still had bugs. I asked when they were going to fix the bugs? Before the election? “Oh, no, there isn’t time. They’ll have to fix them after the election.”
4) Many addresses were not “findable” on the website that the BOE posted the “precinct lookup.” This data should have come from DIMS. Many people were not able to find their correct precinct through the website because of DIMS-maintained data.
5) There were a number of duplicate precincts in the database with the same precinct number. That’s a database normalization issue.
6) There are several tables, apparently, where “would-be voters” are maintained: valid voters, with status of “C”, “A” or “I”; 2) provisional voters—voters who voted on election day (the same person might exist in this table as in the valid voters table, with a slightly different name spelling); 3) “fatal pending” individuals who are ineligible to vote because there is something wrong with their registration (bad street name, missing date of birth—see “Fatal Pending analysis”) This could be poor database design to have at least three places where people information is kept.
7) There may not be any history of a person’s status—“A”, then “I”, then “C”, etc. with the relevant date range.
8) There are many individuals with no voting history who are eligible to vote (“A” or “I” status—see “Cancelled Voters” analysis in www.ohiovigilance.org) The system has the ability to selectively purge voters—it should have tighter control of this function. The system should be more able to apply the NVRA vote-history requirement uniformly.
9) There are many cases of bad data—names of individuals are “dates”, etc.
10) There are many cases of bad dates—many with default dates.
11) I was told that DIMS does not have a place to put “cancellation date” for people that have been cancelled. I’ve been asking for this data and have been told three different things by three different people.
12) The system was supposedly designed for California and doesn’t fit the Ohio rules for absentee voter management (this was supposedly admitted to a manager in the Absentee department by a Diebold employee)
13) The system had lots of problems with the Absentee Voter module. Reports were said to print out every other voter at one time. The problems were instrumental in the enormous backlog of entry of absentee voter application requests and probably contributed to the alleged “boxes” of absentee-ballot requests that were never entered into DIMS.
14) When rejecting provisional ballots because the voter had been cancelled due to non-voting, the only rejection reason to record was “Not Registered”. They should be tracking rejection reasons at a finer level—e.g. “purged for not voting”, “purged for felon”, “fatal pending – bad address”, “fatal pending – no birth-date”, “voted in the wrong precinct”, etc. The “Not Registered” catch-all seems to be an attempt at not tracking very useful data.
15) When the old voter-registration data was converted to the new DIMS system, at least 600 voters were mysteriously dropped from the rolls. Not sure if this is a DIMS problem or a user error.
16) When old voter-registration data was converted to the new DIMS system, the cancellation date was not carried over. Not sure if this is because DIMS does not have a field for this data (if not, it SHOULD!) or if this was user (or management) error. I asked for voter-registration data with cancellation date back in mid November and have yet to receive it (Feb 2, 2005). I think they are hiding some Cancellation data. See Cancelled Voter analysis on ohiovigilance.org
17) I don’t think DIMS has a good mechanism for generating “warning” information for those individuals who will be cancelled due to not voting. They claim to have sent individuals cards telling them, after the fact, that they had been purged (this is disputable, given the fact that many people who voted provisionally were rejected because of being cancelled.) They must not have known. In any event, it would be good to notify people in advance. Does DIMS have any feature to facilitate notification of people. (Automatic printing of notification cards, for example?)
18) Generation of extract files that should ordinarily be routine tasks (e.g. joining data from what should be two tables) was said to be “difficult” and therefore unreasonable for me to ask. I was told by a programmer that she was having trouble doing an outer join to give me “cancellation reason” along with the cancelled voters’ demographic info. This should have been a two-table query, but she couldn’t do it. I finally said “just leave off the cancellation reason description.” Do whatever you can to get me ALL the registered voters.
19) The data in DIMS is very dirty. This can be seen by just observing the unrealistic data, the duplicates, the inconsistent statuses of voters, the bogus dates, the bad addresses, etc. We were going to go door-to-door canvassing people to find out if they voted, only to learn that entire blocks of community housing projects were abandoned and boarded up. Many individuals in the voter-registration system were supposedly living there.
20) I received a report from DIMS which listed the provisional voters who voted in the wrong precinct. Of the 2150 individuals, 365 had the “assigned precinct” (the correct precinct, based on their address) equal the precinct in which they actually voted. They were rejected for voting in the wrong precinct! I’m not sure if this is a procedural error in the evaluation of provisionals or a DIMS error. In any event, DIMS should not allow people to be rejected for “wrong precinct” if they are in the correct precinct.
These are just some of the voter-registration problems/weaknesses I’ve observed. The responsibility for them lies partially with DIMS design and hasty implementation (2 months before the largest election ever!!!) and partially with human error. Without access to the Diebold DIMS technical documentation, I relied on my skills as a data analyst and database designer to reverse engineer and make conclusions based on observing the “black box.”
Victoria Lovegren, Ph.D.
Founder, Ohio Vigilance
http://www.ohiovigilance.org |
Samuel Scharff
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Abacus
Post Number: 34
Registered: 08-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, May 17, 2006 - 12:12 am: |
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Sorry not sure where to post this, or whether it's worth posting...but just in case...
Utah testing of the Diebold touch-screen reveals new problems
by Black Box Voting March 19, 2006
http://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2006/1880
“It's common for polling places to have too few outlets for a bank of voting machines. The normal cure is to set up hook the computers up in a daisy-chain configuration, with one plug to the wall, and the rest of the plugs linking voting machines together.”
... this means the machines can be hacked by anyone with access to the local power distribution net.
Lehto and company discovered this in the investigation in Snohomish County.
“Sequoia touch screens are required to have their power cords daisy chained, forming a de facto network that third parties can use to tap into the machines or have the machines communicate among each other.”
“...However, when we examined the local pollworker’s manuals, we discovered that the machines at each polling location are required to have their power cords “daisy chained”, meaning that rather than plugging in each power cord into a surge protector which is then plugged into the wall, the machines are plugged into each other (“daisy chained”) and then one of them is plugged into the electrical outlet in the wall. Moreover, each polling place checkoff sheet requires the workers to certify that the machines are correctly daisy chained.”
EVIDENCE OF ELECTION IRREGULARITIES IN SNOHOMISH COUNTY, WASHINGTON GENERAL ELECTION, 2004
By Paul R. Lehto, J.D., Attorney at Law
paul@lehtopenfield.com
Dr. Jeffrey Hoffman, Ph.D.
http://www.votersunite.org/takeaction/mediaSnohomishCounty.htm
jehoffma@nmu.edu |
Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 2456
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, May 17, 2006 - 12:47 am: |
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Hi Samuel,
Thanks for posting this. When you want to post a news story the best place is to go to this forum here. Pick the category (in this case it would be Internet News & Blogs) and post, following the guidelines for what to put in the Subject line.
That'll make it easier for others to find. |
William Brandes
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Williambrandes
Post Number: 38
Registered: 12-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, May 18, 2006 - 7:24 pm: |
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I am going to post here and run with it. My wife was a poll worker this past May 2 in the Ohio primary. You might want to know that she/they were told to daisy-chain the touch screen ES&S machines used during the primary and they were, although, she was under the assumption that they did not need to be. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Anyone know more about this? William |
V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 311
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, May 19, 2006 - 5:17 pm: |
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William,
That is interesting. To my knowledge, Diebold has made no such recommendation. Why ES&S would is quite mysterious. I do know that Danahers are CAPABLE of being daisy-chained, and they were heavily done so for battery charging in our warehouse, but we never recommended daisy-chaining them at the polling sites unless there was a critical shortage of outlets. |
Samuel Scharff
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Abacus
Post Number: 36
Registered: 08-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, May 19, 2006 - 5:37 pm: |
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Of course they wouldn't have to be daisy-chained to be hacked...just plugging one into the power would suffice...
Don't know how far away, or beyond how many transformers, you could be and still be able to access a machine[s] - and have not the least idea how far into their innards you could reach...
Sequoia too
Is interesting, no? And the technology is well developed, has been used for control functions for years
Sam |
Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 2512
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, May 20, 2006 - 12:01 am: |
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Samuel, can you say a little more about this? Friends of mine in computer security have alluded to the power connection being a potential source of entry into a computer or network but I never understood how this might work.
Would this be the case even if my network tests as being secure?
Would using the powerline require special equipment/tools/know-how? |
Jerry Berkman
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Jerry
Post Number: 5
Registered: 05-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, May 20, 2006 - 8:20 am: |
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Catherine,
Ordinary power lines may be used for
the network, e.g. from Wikipedia,
"technology [is] able to use the current electricity networks for data and voice transmission. It includes Broadband over Power Lines (BPL) with data rates sometimes above 1 Mbit/s".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_line_communication
Also:
http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/HTML/plc/
http://glasnost.itcarlow.ie/~net4/kirwans/bband.html
I do not know if it is easily available.
If it is, and the DREs are daisy-chained and
have BPL, then one voter at one DRE
could signal all the DREs at that polling
site to modify the vote counts.
Or someone with access to the power line
could. |
Ruth Costakos
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Rcostakos
Post Number: 1
Registered: 06-2006
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, June 22, 2006 - 12:25 pm: |
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http://www.yuricareport.com/VotingProblems/DontEmbraceFaithBasedVoting.html
News Intelligence Analysis
Why Americans Should Not Embrace Faith Based Voting
for the 2006 Elections
My community may do it--but don't let it happen in yours
by Fred Silverman
This fall's election may be the last election where we enter the voting booth, pull that big lever, and register our vote. The lever machines are retiring. With the help of the Westchester Board of Elections, they will be replaced with new high tech equipment.
The new voting equipment that we will begin using in 2006 will likely be a touch screen machine. They are similar to a bank ATM. However, unlike a bank ATM, there will be no receipt and no record available to you of how you voted. It will be a mystery if your vote is counted for your candidate, another candidate or didn't register at all.
The machines we will be getting are probably made by one of two companies. I say probably because two companies account for more than 80% of all the electronic voting equipment sold. The companies are Election System Software (ESS) and Diebold. They are not really two separate companies since two brothers run both companies. These boys, Bob and Todd Urosovich started ESS in the 1980's. In 2002, Bob went over to run Diebold's election equipment division shortly after Wally O'Dell decided his company (Diebold) should be in the election equipment business. Mr., O'Dell, like the Urosovich brothers is very active in the Republican Party. In fact the owners of ESS are all very active in the Republican Party as are all the senior executives at Diebold.
If you think party affiliation doesn't matter in terms of who owns these companies, lets look at the case of one US Senator. Nebraska uses ESS equipment and when one of ESS's owners (Chuck Hagel) decided to run for the Senate, (surprise, surprise) he won - even though the polling showed he should have lost. When Hagel ran for reelection, he captured 83% of the vote on those same ESS machines.
Why adopt faith based voting (where all you have is your faith that it actually worked)? It seems our Westchester County election officials find the use of paper in voting to be a detriment to their operations. One of the commissioners told me recently that paper is a problem. “…paper leads to recounts and it's a real hassle. With touch screens, you don't have that kind of problem.”
Which is why we are moving from reality based voting to faith based voting. Just like so many other things in our country -- from evolution to global warming, we are moving from fact based knowledge to faith-based effort. Call me old fashioned, but I would like to know, for a fact, that my vote counted and that it counted for the person I voted for.
It is hard to have faith in a voting system that is designed and built by individuals who are active partisans - not bipartisan or above the political fray but deeply into the fray. There are a few other facts about the faith based touch screen systems we will be using.
o A Finish computer expert confirmed that the memory chips used to store the data from these machines are not empty vessels but rather have code in them which could alter election results.
o A computer programmer for Diebold acknowledged, in a recent interview, that the system is designed for outside manipulation. There are backdoors built into the software that allow real time intervention.
o The Department of Homeland Security listed Diebold's software as having a security risk (because of these back doors).
o In many contracts with local municipalities or counties, Diebold and ESS require a 24/7 direct phone hook-up from the mainframe (used to tabulate vote totals) to their offices (ostensibly for software modifications).
o In the 2004 election, eleven states recorded (thanks to ESS & Diebold) vote totals that differed significantly from exit polling. In all eleven, the vote totals favored republicans. As one pollster told me, the statistical chances of this are less than winning the lottery ten times in a row.
The list goes on and on. But these are facts, and in America in 2005, facts don't seem to matter as much as blind faith.
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FRED SILVERMAN (Producer/Director/Writer) founded Issues TV in 1999 to develop programs that focus on the human condition. Since 1985, he has been president of Silverman Communications, an independent production company. Silverman's most recent production was Who Counts? Election Reform in America. It was a semi humorous look at America's crazy election system with a focus on the 2000 presidential election and the debacle in Florida. The program received critical praise for its unique hybrid style, which combined the comedic talents of Darrell Hammond along with serious journalistic pieces. The program won several national awards including a CINE Golden Eagle, a Telly award and the Gold at Worldfest.
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From the Mailbag
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Mailbag
Post Number: 74
Registered: 10-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, July 28, 2006 - 2:28 pm: |
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Located by Jody Holder -- Wireless accumulation: From Diebold's own sales literature on the TSx:
quote:• Wireless accumulation transmissions speed the collection of post-election results within the voting location
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diebold wireless
