Search Results for: voting

Avi Rubin, the John Hopkins computer science professor and leading critic of e-voting, has posted a fascinating account of his day as an election judge in Baltimore, Maryland, using the new Diebold machines.

UPDATE (11:00 AM): It must be noted that the polling place where Avi worked was not typical. Everybody seemed to know in advance who he was. One of the other poll workers just happened to be an experienced Diebold trainer. Very senior Diebold executives just happened to show up before the polls opened to make sure everything was okay.

Today is a major primary election in several U.S. states. In Maryland, it will be the first use of the controversial new Diebold e-voting machines that were the subject of several negative security evaluations.

Unless there are very large, obvious problems today, expect stories later in the week in which e-voting advocates say there were no problems with the new machines. What they will really mean, of course, is that they didn’t notice any problems, which isn’t too surprising since the machines are essentially black boxes.

Avi Rubin, a prominent computer security expert and e-voting critic, is working as a volunteer election judge in Maryland. I’m eager to hear what he has to say after spending a day in the trenches.

A group of Californians has filed a lawsuit in state court against voting machine vendor Diebold, in advance of the March 2 primary election.

The complaint asks the court to order Diebold to do three main things: (1) to refrain from further violations of state election laws and regulations, such as installing uncertified software for use in elections, (2) to implement the stopgap security measures recommended by the Raba report, in time for the March 2 primary election, and (3) to implement the longterm security measures recommended by the Raba report or else to withdraw the Diebold systems from use.

One of the challenges of blogging is finding things to write about. If you want to keep a loyal audience, you have to write regularly; and sometimes it’s hard to come up with several topics a week. Happily, whenever the well is about to run dry, I can always count on Diebold to fail a test or do something ridiculous. Thanks, guys!

The Diebold travesty du jour comes from Elise Ackerman’s story in today’s San Jose Mercury-News. The story recounts Diebold’s response, in California, to the recent Raba report, which demonstrated that Diebold e-voting systems were prone to several serious security attacks.

The story quotes Diebold’s spokesman:

Diebold representative David Bear said Thursday that the integrity of next month’s election was not at risk. “I think it’s important to reflect that the Maryland Department of Legislative Services concluded based on the Raba report that the election could be held successfully without any changes to the Diebold software,” he said. “They went on to say the software accurately counts votes cast.”

Here’s the opinion of authors of the Raba report, according to the New York Times:

Authors of the [Raba] report