Recent reports suggest trouble for Diebold, particularly in California. A recent
presser from Black Box Voting details how grave Diebold's future may be in California and elsewhere throughout the nation:
California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson has laid a subtle and elegant trap. Today, California threw Diebold Election Systems' pending certification into a tailspin, using Machiavellian logic designed to cast doubt on the federal testing lab process, the upcoming HAVA deadline and Diebold voting systems simultaneously (while standing neatly aside to watch the house of cards collapse).
More on the 'trap' inside.
Here's how the California trap works: In a terse letter to Diebold, State elections chief Caren Daniels-Meade writes, "Unresolved significant security concerns exist with respect to the memory card used to program and configure the AccuVote-OS [optical scan] and the AccuVote-TSX [touch-screen] components of this system because this component was not subjected to federal source code review and evaluation by the Independent Testing Authorities (ITA) who examined your system for federal qualification. It is the Secretary of State's position that the source code for the AccuBasic code on these cards, as well as for the AccuBasic interpreter that interprets this code, should have been
federally reviewed.
"...we are requesting that you submit the source code relating to the AccuBasic code on the memory cards and the AccuBasic interpreter to the ITA for immediate evaluation. We require this additional review before proceeding with further consideration of your application for certification in California."
And herein lies the trap. Federal testing authorities are supposed to rely on standards set by the Federal Election Commission. The FEC standards prohibit "Interpreted code" - thus, the AccuBasic "interpreter" is illegal. (The entire AccuBasic source code tree is written in a home-brewed language that Diebold programmers made up themselves, making it more difficult for certifiers to examine.)
The quick question would be - why hasn't this been stopped before now? Has the ITA bypassed/ignore the FEC statutes in question or has the FEC have both simply not scrutinized these machines to the upmost? Will Diebold lobby for a change in the standards?
With the increasing feeling of dismay with Diebold (as seen in California as well as North Carolina) and a belief that voting machines must be closely inspected to ensure that they are governed transparently, will 2006 be the year that the nation addresses the new technology processing its votes?
Back to the CA situation:
The ITA dilemma: ITAs have the choice of either recommending code that explicitly
violates FEC standards (placing an unsupportable liability burden on them) or admitting that the original certification was defective. If the ITAs retract their recommendation, it will effectively
strip Diebold of its federal certification, and may also affect its older products.
The Diebold dilemma: Diebold can refuse to submit its code to the ITAs, but that will lose the state of California, continuing a pattern initiated last week when two Florida counties dumped their Diebold machines. Alternatively, Diebold can submit its code and watch as the federal authorities sever their product line from the U.S. market.
If Diebold does decide to forego compliance with California's new standards, this could be a watershed for other states to follow. While Diebold faces the option of dodging federal decertification, the issue of an increased belief in the necessity of scrutinizing voting machines is becoming much more problematic. One sees this recently in the various pending class action suits against Diebold for their lack of honesty and transparency in regards to their voting machine products. Claims that Diebold's products were anything but top-of-the-line are still met with derision among Diebold's PR people, but more and more election boards are showing concern. In many cases, the problem isn't the suspicion of switching votes or instances of fraud but simple functionality.
As with any new technology, glitches will minimize over the long-term as use increases. For Diebold, the problem has not only been their flawed systems but their ambivalence to truly adapt and show concern in providing the ideal product. Indeed, in some cases they seem to delight in fleecing states in making the necessary upgrades. Their downright deceptive rationalizations for their systems' failures have no place in the business of performing public services. Imagine if bridges, planes or lines of communication had as much frequency of failure. We obviously don't use voting machines as often, but that should be even more reason for ensuring their integrity. The biggest benefit of increased state and federal scrutiny should be acquiring the ideal technology to perform the services needed. Whether it is Diebold or Election Systems & Software that are losers as a result, the bottom line is the same - open, transparent elections. No democracy can truly call itself by that name without them.