OK, Diebold, what's next? Are you planning to issue a "take down" for house.gov?
Via Cyndy Roy at American Samizdat
This probably doesn't make any difference. Diebold is a large company offering many products beyond their e-vote machines, and each division is responsible for their own security vulnerabilities. But Diebold ATMs were compromised by the Nachi worm in August. If this means anything for voting security advocates, it means that truely talented security professions are in short order.
Obviously however, some folks just don't get it, and this time it is the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials (CACEO). Claiming that Shelley had "overstepped his bounds", CACEO head and Shasta County Clerk Ann Reed called the decision "a major defeat for the disabled community, as well as the minority-language communities." Riverside County Registrar of Voters Mischelle Townsend said she could not say yet whether the CACEO would pursue legal action against the state, but the group will be meeting next week to discuss its response.
Comments: Groups like CACEO perhaps are our greatest hurdle because they are the people charged with running our elections (and purchasing this technology). Unfortunately, many of these people are simply in over their heads when it comes to technology issues.
CACEO is of course correct to be concerned with disability and minority-language access to the voting booth. The problem is that they view such access to be unaddressible by technology, when clearly it is not. Whatever solutions have been implemented to provide for these concerns on e-vote machines without printers can certainly be extended to e-vote machines with printers, and if to any extent it might not, no one would object to alternative methods of providing voting booth access to those with problems.
And this is the problem. We have thousands of people making these decisions on e-vote technology when too few of them have and understanding of the technology itself. In business when a similar problem is encountered, the solution is obvious: Hire a consultant to evaluate the options and separate real from imagined problems. The problem is that qualified consultants are quite expensive, and when product selection is at a county level, they are simply too expense. In Maryland, where the product selection was conducted at the state level, the consultant option was indeed used, and though I've previously expressed my reservations regarding what I consider to be their premature selection of Diebold, they at least appear to be on the right track on the security problems they face as a result of that selection.
- Apparently Gore Vidal doesn't think too much of E-Voting either. This interview is a worthwhile read for many reasons, but his comments on E-Voting are close to the end of it.
- According to two political scientists at Spelman College and Western Carolina University, voter turnout is directly affected by the distance voters live from their polling place. Moshe Haspel and H. Gibbs Knotts also suggest that "unscrupulous election officials could manipulate election results by rejiggering the locations of precincts to increase or decrease turnout in certain neighborhoods."
- Residents of Leeds and the Thousand Islands Township in Canada don’t go to the polls to vote anymore. They vote by mail and have found that the method substantially increases voter participation.