Diebold Election Results Released By AZ Judge 134
Windrip writes "A judge in the case covering the nature of the database used in Diebold Gems software during Pima County, Arizona elections has ruled the DB is not a computer program (pdf). The result is that the Arizona Democratic party will have the chance to review previous elections for transparency and accuracy. ''The Pima County Democratic Party sued the county this year for the electronic databases from past elections. The party requested the databases and passwords be released according to Arizona public-records law. Pima County denied that part of the request, while turning over other records the party asked for. In closing arguments of the four-day trial that began Dec. 4, Pima County argued the databases meet the definition of a computer program, which is protected by state law, said Deputy County Attorney Thomas Denker."
Good. (Score:2)
Re:Good. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Or maybe the judge is one of the rare of his/her breed which actually suffers from an ailment which seems to disqualify most from their profession -- common sense?
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Then it would be defective by design (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do I in any case guess that this database is either MSDE or SQL Express?
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I thought Diebold used Access.
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Why do I guess that it's Microsoft Access?
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Access confirmed in the court ruling (Score:5, Informative)
The arguments about an Access database being a "program" are probably related to the ability of MDB to contain queries (aka stored procedures).
GBF files are encrypted / compressed MDB files. The dockit claims that "a gbf file can only be created and opened by the GEMS program", but I suspect it unpacks them to a temporary file somewhere before it opens them up with the normal library.
Other little GEMS (sorry, couldn't resist the pun)...
* "Microsoft has warned against using the mdb format for some critical applications, such as election management software."
* Each expert witness endorsed a statement that the GEMS software has significant security flaws.
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So, I'd say that an
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By nature, Access is not secure and doesn't let you control how a 3rd party (to whom you give the mdb file) will use the data. For that you want a real multi-tier database app.
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You are also right about the reporting capabilities. Access is a de
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Never assume conspiracy when pure stupidity will suffice.
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You really ought to read through the entire decision, not just to be accurate. It's very nearly both an indictment of the significant security problems with GEMS and Diebold stuff in general, but fairly well-written decision. Plenty of tidbits showing how clueless the election
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I'm actually a bit horrified if this shit is going to be used in a serious election processes.
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This is about as serious as an episode of Guiding Light.
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Too bad Microsoft can't realise that! Of course, it's hard to impliment Dumb Restrictions on Music (DRM) without making your data file format (wma) also be a program. I can't understand why a plain word processing document should be a program though.
I'm surprised that they haven't come up with a photo file that your can write a virus in.
Data should be data and code should be code. The judge gets it, but unfortunately way too many compu
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Perhaps, the way that you refer to "dataset" if it is just that.
One could easily argue, that any sort of logic that is used within a stored procedure within a database could be considered a "program." Where exactly does the line between database/stored procedure and program lie?
I would argue, any sort of data integrity checking done within a stored procedure in a database wou
Hey now! (Score:4, Funny)
Not again! (Score:3, Insightful)
Concentrate on solving the problems not trying to figure out some loop hole or proving some conspiracy and blaming others for not doing well at the polls.
I really wish there was a third party candidate that had a shot at winning.
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Why does the Elections Office want to protect the data so much? Either they are protecting their own negligence or wrong doing. Either way, neither of those have a place in elections.
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Because of people like you, You can call everything a conspiracy theory and denounce it as crazy, but I'd rather have checks in place to make sure anyway.
There isn't any reason to go crying over spilled milk, but at the same time we should be working to make sure it won't spill again. This is one of the ways to make sure our next election is fair.
Take the 2004 election (Score:4, Insightful)
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Rigged elections are "spilled milk"?
Subverting the people's will is "spilled milk"?
The results of an election affect our nation's policies, as well as the lives of our civilians and military members for years.
If democracy has been subverted, it needs to be rectified immediately, and not delayed until the next election cycle.
Re:Not again! (Score:4, Insightful)
Accountability is important. There is not nearly enough of it in the American government, at any level.
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Accountability is important. But after all these recounts and investigations there has not been anyone charged with voter fraud, just accusations and innuendo.
Politicians have been breed to win elections, not to solve the problems
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the data can be evaluated and stats worked up.
If someone was fooling with the vote count they would have to be very careful
in how they entered the data. Stats can be run one the distribution pattern and
non-random sequence of entries can be looked at closely.
Hell - every election voting database should be accessable on the net for any
election, so that ANYONE can run the numbers and take a look. look what happened
2004 election - someone w
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It's tricky to make the data public. We are trying to balance between a secret ballot and voting fraud. Database analysis makes it increasingly easy to tell exactly how people voted (esp in smaller districts) which puts people under pressure.
I do not think it is a powerful conservative group. It is a powerful wealthy and corporate group. The conservative is just a sha
Agreed... But... (Score:2)
I agree with virtually everything you've said save for losing on abortion. I don't think that losing on that issue will motivate people as much as you think, and losing that will be a severe blow. Realize that the left's 'base' is very different than it used to be; they didn't grow up without abortion as a right, and don't necessarily understand what it means. Further, there are a lot of cultural issues pushing them away from activism.
The best for the left - and government in general - will be to have quic
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The "abortion" decision is not only about abortion, despite the fact that Movement Conservatives really really want it to be. Roe V Wade is about *privacy*, as was the previously significant decision, Griswold V Connecticut.
The "left" is about keeping government the hell out of the most se
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There is no freedom under the extreme left or the extreme right.
We need to get the country back to the extreme middle.
The conservatives are blinded by the abortion issue (and sort of by the gay marriage issue) and do not see the rest of the republican parties values are antithetical to christian values.
As an FYI-- I'm not the only quasi-liberal who feels that way on abortion. On my way to a vacation last year, I sat n
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So long as you folks keep thinking that way, the Republicrats will always be this country's only two-winged party. Stop worrying about whether or not your candidate is going to lose.
No vote is ever wasted just because the candidate it's cast for loses. But if you vote for a candidate that will pass laws against your interests, then you have indeed wasted your vote in the most foolish way possible.
I split my vote between the Greens an
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Why Trust? Audit! (Score:2)
Look, all institutions with significant finances require rigorous auditing. We require it for business - why not for our government? They say that no one wants to see how sausage or laws are made: but it's exactly that opinion that keeps us out of the loop and powerless.
More controls. More transparency. Fewer single points of failure. It's the only solution.
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Well, the death penalty for hired sock-puppets wouldn't hurt, either.
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Both wings voted for the Bono Act, the DMCA, the PATRIOT act, Bankrupcy Reform, all which I was and am vehemently against.
From my perspective I don't see any damned difference between the Democrats and Republicans. Both are for th
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Personal Safety, However, is NOT Passe (Score:2)
/. exclusive - the DB schema (Score:2, Funny)
democrat_vote_total TINYINT,
republican_vote_total BIGINT
);
Re:/. exclusive - the DB schema (Score:4, Funny)
third_party_total BOOLEAN
Whoa! (Score:2)
A judge who knows the difference between a database and a program. Now, if I can find a heterosexual masseur, I've seen anything I thought could not exist.
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I have two of them in my immediate family, fwiw. Glad I could help.
Cheers,
Nathan
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If guys figured this out, there would be many, many more heterosexual masseurs.
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A simple remark (Score:5, Insightful)
From The Article (not the PDF) (Score:4, Insightful)
I pretty much think that this is the point; and it is an important point, because without the ability to call "bullshit" then you lose the legitimacy of the votes. Any corporation wouldn't trust an accountant to maintain the books without auditing them periodically, this is basically the same thing.
also, the systems can already be hacked (quite easily I believe)
I'm All For Transparency in E-Voting (Score:1, Funny)
Because the only way Dennis Kucinich or Cynthia McKinney will ever win an election is when some smelly fat slob in a penguin t-shirt games the machines.
Programs, Data, fuzzy distinctions (Score:5, Interesting)
But the database program is just data to be interpreted by the CPU.
Data vs. document is a spectrum. There is no clear distinction. We tend to think of documents as just information, describing some structured knowledge, which is true. But by contrast, we tend to think of programs as containing primarily step-by-step instructions. But those instructions don't execute themselves. They're input to something. And moreover, not all programs are instructions. Consider Prolog, where the functions are described in terms of logical relationships, and the step-by-step instructions are inferred by the interpreter. Just because the Prolog program doesn't include instructions, per se, doesn't make us say it's not a program. At the same time, the distinction between a Prolog program and an expert system knowledge base (in term of form and function) is not clear.
Everything is just data. What makes it meaningful is the order and interpretation that we impose on it.
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The principle difference, though, is that code is functional while data is expressive. You can argue that this is a f
Re:Programs, Data, fuzzy distinctions (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, you're referring to Von Neumann architecture. The other architecture is Harvard. Harvard has separate code and data memory (mostly - you still get the convenience of immediate mode addressing in Harvard). But code can only work on data memory - it cannot work on code memory. However, it's only really useful for speciailized computers running the same code on different data (e.g., signal processing - the data is transformed the same way all the time, so the code can reside in ROM, while the data comes in from whatever source is providing it).
The Von Neumann architecture (code and data are intermingled, and one and the same) is your standard computer architecture. However, the behavior is used very often. Think every time you call exec() or CreateProcess() - the OS has to allocate memory, copy the code to memory (i.e., to the OS, your executable program is data), then tell the processor to run the code (now the data is code). Or even consider the bootstrap program - it has to find the OS loader program, which it copies off some storage to memory (data), then runs it (code). It's this architecture that makes modern computing possible...
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I don't know if "processed" is the correct word to use, but gets sort of close. Maybe just "when it exists as" would be a better term to use. Which still doesn't make a whole lot of sense either, but these concepts tend to get weird when we try to represent them as text.
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Only if you live in the Microsoft world. A horse is a four legged animal, but having four legs does not make a cat the same as a horse.
A program is executable data. If you can execute it, it's a program. If you can't, it's data. A WMA file is a program, a n MP3 or OGG file is data.
If Microsoft would learn that data as data should NOT be executable they wouldn't have so much trouble making their stuff secure.
To crack a program with pure data (text file, MP3 file, etc) involves
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It's not such a straightforward distinction.
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You can use WMA's DRM to write a trojan; execute the trojaned WMA file in Windows (won't work in Linux, haven't tried it with Mac) with any media player I've tried including Winamp and you're hosed. But you can't write a virus afaik with an OGG
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We (voters) have a need to collect said data, and used (paid for) your (vendor's) machine/program to do so. We still own the raw data, and the information contained in. Dump the table of votes, in comma delimited form, and burn it to a DVD, which is then MD5 (or something) as "official", and can be published.
No proprietary information needs to be revealed to anybody. Just a list, one line per vote, and answers voted on.
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Candidate choice for office [4 choices]: 1,1,4,1,4,1,3,2,1,2,1,2,1,1,1,2,2,2,3,1...
is generated from real votes and not just from
Just base metal or dried pigment until viewed (Score:4, Insightful)
How very Hinduistically existential of you, actually. Quoting from a recent Natl. Geo. article, Faces of the Divine in the January 2008 issue (which I received earlier this week, thanks apparently to time-traveling magazine editors):
So I suppose what you describe would be the CPU's darshan of the code. (Though one could probably make a reasonable argument about which is data and which the program on the basis of specifically how dynamic the darshan needs to be to make sense of it.)
I find it somehow reassuring, and deeply cool, that certain wisdoms of the ancients can be perfectly relevant in wildly different contexts. It's also humbling to find how much our supposedly "primitive" ancestors got right in areas that we have forgotten or set aside. :)
Cheers,
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But the database program is just data to be interpreted by the CPU."
You get points for clever-sounding obfuscation. Good job.
A set of data is a program if some automatic mechanism is capable of interpreting that data to provide:
1) Sequencing.
2) Decisions.
3) Iteration.
That is the minimal definition of a program. A collection of semi-random data that is not processable by such an automated mechanism automatically disqualifies that set of
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Security by obscurity? (Score:5, Insightful)
A step in the right direction (Score:1, Insightful)
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The US and its people have a sick world view of "we run the place". That shit needs to stop. I do
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data vs. code can be point-of-view issue (Score:1)
All data can be stored in a database.
Some data are programs.
If I store my C code in a database that does not make it "not a program."
Election results are typically not a program.
However, I could design a machine that takes this data and interprets it as instructions. For example, I could design a plotter that took the candidate's name as a change-of-direction instruction and the number of votes as a draw-a-line-this-long instruction. If I do this then the election data becomes a prog
The craptaculous /. edit (Score:3, Interesting)
Those of you truly interested in this story should read the firehose version [slashdot.org].
I think the links in the firehose version of the story are more apropos to this post's tags.
Of particular concern to me is the replacement of one the original post's links with one that references a newspaper I consider to be a parody of press oversight. I would never source that bloated, piss-stained, corporate catamite in any post I write.
So, when /. writes "Windrip writes", they're lying. I didn't write what was posted on the front page of /. I didn't even provide one of the links in the story.
Nevertheless, of particular interest to /. readers might be the forensic study conducted on the DB. I found it here. [azag.gov]
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
Or at the very least, read the post and have a look at the links. This is particularly damning of /. editors:
While they're at it .... (Score:4, Funny)
What happens when we find out Al Gore won? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Yes, don't you love how those scheming, conniving Republicans, who had only to push around a few bits to tweak the results, manipulated the elections to throw both houses of Congress to the Democrats last year? What a brilliant way to throw people off the scent! Now if they can just get Hillary in the White House, their diabolical strangle hold on power will be all but unbreakable! MUHAHAHA
Re:DIebold Defeats Democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Prime example: Imagine the world today with a President Bush vs. a President Gore or President Kerry.
Both parties may share some of the same social diseases, and the fringe reactionary kooks of both parties are still reactionary kooks, but A==B? No way.
Re:DIebold Defeats Democracy (Score:4, Insightful)
Close races are close races.. can go either way.. that's when manipulation is useful... If there is no doubt that someone was going to win, and they didn't, manipulation would be kind of noticeable wouldn't it ?
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There's an argument that the great democratic "landslide" should've been a lot bigger: Ohio's 2006 Vote Count Now Includes A Higher Percentage Of Uncounted ballots than in 2004, And A Statistically Impossible Swing To The Republicans [electionfraudblog.com]
And you may joke if you like, but a lot of us were seriously afr
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Re:DIebold Defeats Democracy (Score:4, Informative)
Diebold is the corporation's choice for subverting democracy.
Imagine a world where people vote, but the votes don't matter because the corporations have bribed both wings of the single party in this plutocracy. They just sit in a machine controlled by puppets of the Corporation. We are living this dream.
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The two parties in the two party system are just tools. If you really want their masters, you must talk to corporate and syndicate entities.
InnerWeb
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Honest, I didn't mean to shoot him! I didn't know the gun was loaded.
And you base this opinion on what, precisely?
Myself, I think that's insanely optimis
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The fact that Diebold's central tabulator used Microsoft Access [equalccw.com]?
(Reported in several stories, notably a DVD called "Invisible Ballots")
That their hardware [blackboxvoting.org] is some of the most programmer-friendly ever (straight X86 CPU, SDcard, CompactFlash sockets)?
(This is a simplified, smaller version of a larger report. A quick Google search will reveal more.)
WindowsCE OS?
(Same report as above)
Executable Scripts on the ballot-definition CF cards?
(Demonstrated in "Invisible Bal
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And for some reason, you're assuming that this is solely a matter of incompetence and not corruption, in spite of evidence that the problems with these things skewed the election in a particular direction?
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In my heart of hearts, the execrable security performance of the top three electronic vendors is reflective of intentional misconduct. I simply don't say such things publicly as if they were factual, since it is possible that they were simply a bunch of putzes going for HAVA money.
It's a near statistical impossibility that in all but one instance, the variances between exit polls and the "of
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Ah, I get it. You're stuck on the "innocent until proven guilty" slogan. But you ain't the judge, and we're not at present talking about throwing anyone in jail: there is no reason we need to apply the criteria of the
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In a word, yes.
I am very active in the central Ohio voting reform movement, and it is important to distinguish between statements I believe to be true versus statements that are demonstrably true. It's too easy to fall into a variety of traps and this work is far too important to lose credibility due to hyperbolic speech.
There is also the legal thre
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What? I keed, I keed...