NYT : CAN YOU COUNT ON THESE MACHINES? (Magazine Cover Story Up)

Can You Count On These Machines?

By CLIVE THOMPSON

Published: January 6, 2008


This article will appear in this Sunday's issue of the magazine.

Jane Platten gestured, bleary-eyed, into the secure room filled with voting machines. It was 3 a.m. on Nov. 7, and she had been working for 22 hours straight. “I guess we’ve seen how technology can affect an election,” she said. The electronic voting machines in Cleveland were causing trouble again.

For a while, it had looked as if things would go smoothly for the Board of Elections office in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. About 200,000 voters had trooped out on the first Tuesday in November for the lightly attended local elections, tapping their choices onto the county’s 5,729 touch-screen voting machines. The elections staff had collected electronic copies of the votes on memory cards and taken them to the main office, where dozens of workers inside a secure, glass-encased room fed them into the “GEMS server,” a gleaming silver Dell desktop computer that tallies the votes.

Then at 10 p.m., the server suddenly froze up and stopped counting votes. Cuyahoga County technicians clustered around the computer, debating what to do. A young, business-suited employee from Diebold — the company that makes the voting machines used in Cuyahoga — peered into the screen and pecked at the keyboard. No one could figure out what was wrong. So, like anyone faced with a misbehaving computer, they simply turned it off and on again. Voilà: It started working — until an hour later, when it crashed a second time. Again, they rebooted. By the wee hours, the server mystery still hadn’t been solved.

Worse was yet to come. When the votes were finally tallied the next day, 10 races were so close that they needed to be recounted. But when Platten went to retrieve paper copies of each vote — generated by the Diebold machines as they worked — she discovered that so many printers had jammed that 20 percent of the machines involved in the recounted races lacked paper copies of some of the votes. They weren’t lost, technically speaking; Platten could hit “print” and a machine would generate a replacement copy. But she had no way of proving that these replacements were, indeed, what the voters had voted. She could only hope the machines had worked correctly.

-snip

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06Vote-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin

Greg really has a good eye for the important stories.

memory cards!"

Worse than I thought.

for people. We need to be able to trust our ballots are being counted fairly and accurately. Only if the press stays on this story will it become important to our citizens. If they ignore it so will most of the Joe Blows of this country, unfortunately. Hard to compete with American Idol and Britney, but I'd like to see the media get as fired up about this as say, immigration.

There's no question in my mind that Ohio was rigged in 2004 - mechanically and by not having enough voting machines in poorer districts,etc. and all the little shit they did that combined to produce the result they wanted. Exit polls had Kerry as the winner and suddenly we can't trust exit polls again for the second time in four years. Only time in history...

Yeah, they fucked with the machines where they could and fucked with the voters where they couldn't get their hands on the machines. The Supreme Court broke my heart in 2000 and I was so angry after 2004, I don't know what I'll do if they steal it again.

:cry:

"If the machines are tested and officials are able to examine the source code, you might wonder why machines with so many flaws and bugs have gotten through. It is, critics insist, because the testing is nowhere near dilligent enough, and the federal regulators are too sympathetic and cozy with the vendors. The 2002 federal guidelines, the latest under which machines currently in use were qualified, were vague about how much security testing the labs ought to do. The labs were also not required to test any machine’s underlying operating system, like Windows, for weaknesses.

Vendors paid for the tests themselves, and the results were considered proprietary, so the public couldn’t find out how they were conducted. The nation’s largest tester of voting machines, Ciber Inc., was temporarily suspended after federal officials found that the company could not properly document the tests it claimed to have performed."

Let ten thousand questions bloom.

Maybe Ronald McD should be in charge of the elections.

Go to Starbucks, buy a copy of today's paper, make sure the magazine insert is in there! Buy it buy it buy it BUY IT!!!

Sorry, but this is so important what with the 2008 campaigns starting...