Problems found in an audit of Diebold tabulation records from an Ohio November 2006 election raise questions about whether the database got corrupted during the tabulation of election results, says a report released today (pdf).
The document, from a team of researchers tasked with auditing the November election in troubled Cuyahoga County, have called for a thorough examination of the database to determine if corruption did occur and the extent to which it may have affected the election results.
Among the report findings:
Vote totals in two separate databases that should have been identical had different totals. Although Diebold explained that this was part of the system design for separate vote tables to get updated at different times during the tabulation process, the team questioned the wisdom of a design that creates non-identical vote totals.
Tables in the database contained elements that were missing date and time stamps that would indicate when information was entered.
Entries that did have date/time stamps showed a January 1, 1970 date.
The database is built from Microsoft's Jet database engine. The engine, according to Microsoft, is vulnerable to corruption when a lot of concurrent activity is happening with the database, such as what occurs on an election night when results are uploaded and various servers are interacting with the database simultaneously.
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According to the report, Election Director Michael Vu initially denied the audit team access to the raw vote data to examine because he said Diebold had asserted trade secrets protection over the data. By vote data, they're referring to the vote totals and election reports, not the machine source code. It's unclear why he believed the company had a right to assert such claims over such essential public records data.
The audit found more problems with the way the election was administered -- some optical scan ballots were scanned twice while others weren't scanned at all. This kind of problem isn't new to Cuyahoga. Two audit reports on last year's May primary in the county revealed severe data tracking problems by the election staff. And two Cuyahoga election workers were convicted in January of tampering with a recount in the 2004 presidential election by cherry-picking precincts for recount that they knew would match the election results. They were concerned they'd have to work overtime if the recount didn't match the results.
All of these issues led to the resignation of Election Director Michael Vu and the four members of Cuyahoga's board of elections. Vu's problems in Ohio haven't affected his job prospects, however. He was recently hired as assistant registrar of voters in San Diego.
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Diebold can't be blamed for corrupt election staff, as those type of problems exist in every voting process on the planet - at least those involving humans at some point.
However, Diebold can be blamed with adding yet ANOTHER layer of possible corruption to the process...the insecure and poorly designed voting machine.
Ohh, and we can blame them for wasting our tax money....
Diebold is a company, companies have private investors...those investors (and the company itself) want to make money.....all fine and good. But do we really want to pull all of this into our national voting process? Seriously?
Corporate companies commonly make trade-offs in products / services:
"It is easy to use, but it isn't as secure as it could be."
"That feature, while cool and driven by public demand, was dropped in the interest of time and money."
"We shouldn't explain in the changelog that vulnerability X was fixed. It looks bad on us...and it is better (in our minds) that we don't talk about it. Even if it ends up hurting a couple of our customers."
So lets ask...
Why are we attempting to combine the money making need of companies in with the general public's constitutional right of fair and open elections?
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