Diebold Caught Again in Politics of Technology

A blogger on TechRepublic has started the quadrenniel complaint by the open source fringe that U.S. elections are won or lost because of the politics of technology.  A common whipping boy is Diebold (DBD).

What the open source fringe needs is a good old Boston ward-heeler political fight song:

"Now you citizens of Boston,
Don't you think it's a scandal
That the people have to vote and vote

"Vote for Walter A. O'Brien
And fight closed-source software
Get poor Charley off the Diebold machine."

(Apologies to Jacqueline Steiner and Bess Lomax Hawes, songwriters, and Walter O'Brien's heirs. O'Brien was the Progressive Party candidate for Mayor of Boston in 1949, dead last in the election best known as the real life version of The Last Hurrah of James Michael Curley. The popular Kingston Trio version of the song in the 1950s changed the words to George O'Brien because of Walter O'Brien's radical leanings. This of course is another conspiracy the bloggers can work on.)

I personally don't really care what kind of software is used inside U.S. voting machines but I hope people from outside the U.S do not get the impression from these conspiracy theory wackos (the name of another great Boston political figure by the way) that software -- open or closed source -- caused the voting problems in the U.S. in 2000 and 2004.

Just to refresh everyone's memory:

-- the problem in Fla in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 (to the extent there really was a problem in Ohio) was a turn of the century (as in 1900) technology called punched cards, not software.

-- In New Mexico, the problem was allegedly a matter of ballots not being counted at all, not in their being misread by embedded software.

Of course, to really buy into the Diebold conspiracy theories you have to assume one of two things happens. Either all the Diebold voting machines are rigged by Diebold executives in the middle of the night after the working stiff programmers go home, or you have to assume that the working stiff programmers are also Republicans.

(Maybe because they write closed source software, they must be, huh, Jack?)

Comments

[PK de C'ville:]

Can anybody provide Diebold's CEO's quoted remark (and source) to a Republican Party meeting from several years back?

If true, Diebold will have to deservedly live with that remark undercutting it's reputation for decades.

2008 Oct 02 09:21 AM

[zelduh:]

LOOK; if Diebold wants to get off the hot seat, then they should let the techies examine the program - inside and out. Voting is the most important and precious right Americans have - AND IT SHOULD BE ABSOLUTELY ABOVE REPROACH. In my book, THE TECHNOLOGY inside the machines should be completely verifiable and OPEN SOURCE. If you don't understand this, I must ask myself why I am deferring to you as being a reasonable source of legitimate information?

2008 Oct 02 04:51 PM

[zelduh:]

PK - you may want to look up "Walden O'Dell" on Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/

2008 Oct 02 05:00 PM

[DieHard:]

Just thinking about what software the banks seem to use when they give loans to people who, even they have human gut feelings that there is going to be a default, the computer says loan approved!
Look at this mess, rather than at a stupid person's quote about doing what he can to have GWB win!
Let's look at the "winners" in the losing banking situation and their software!
Wally is gone now, so get over it.

2008 Oct 02 10:57 PM

[User 274019:]

I don't trust a machine used for voting that takes my input and gives me no verification of how I voted. All these claims of rigging could be fixed if the machine gave the voter a printout of how they voted. NON of the machines I have used in the last elections have done that!

2008 Oct 03 01:01 AM

[The Mad Hatter:]

Why use a voting machine? In Canada, for Federal elections we still use paper ballots, and we knew within two hours of the polls being closed who won the election (which was October 14, 2008). Oh, and we had a "verifiable" paper trail - all those low tech paper ballots.

2008 Oct 22 12:17 AM

[LarsG:]

Some bloggers might go overboard with conspiracy theories (there are some pieces of circumstantial evidence out there, but imho far below the standard of reasonable doubt), but even if there is no truth in their theories that does not mean that electronic voting is not without problems.

You seem to set up a strawman argument here - "there is no conspiracy, so therefore there are no problems with electronic voting machines". The second does not follow from the first.

The problem is that at least some of these machines make it possible to commit voting fraud, with no way of detecting it or doing a proper recount. This should bother every person that is interested in having a voting system that we can trust, there is no need to believe in some conspiracy to see that the possibility of voting fraud is a problem.

2008 Oct 23 03:06 PM