Testing Diebold in Pocahontas: Touchscreens
Thursday’s public test of the touchscreen terminals was similar to the the scanner test in that the same ten ballots were cast. As with the scanners, the computer was set for “Test Mode”.
I asked why they tested in “Test Mode” when the machine would not be used in test mode on election day. I might as well have asked why is the sky brighter in the daytime. Even the other citizen observer chimed in to help explain to me that this was only a test, so “Test Mode” was appropriate.
A bit later one tester volunteered to show me that a voter could not vote twice on the touchscreen because it would reject the voter’s card when he tried to use it the second time. She put the card back in the machine. It surprised her by accepting the card again and offering a new ballot. The other tester quickly realized that this unwanted development was made possible by the fact that they were in “Test Mode!”
I opined that it was now obvious that the machine behaves differently in its various modes and ought to be tested in “Election Mode”, but they just ignored my comment.
When the test was over, it was time to secure the memory card in the machine according to new SoS guidelines involving security tape. County auditor Bunda said that due to the Iowa wide run on security tape, it was on backorder. The voting machine would remain untaped for now.
Since I had to leave the test before the second set of touchscreens were put through their paces, I did not get to ask for my turn to participate in the test. I would have tried John Washburn’s advice by touching the corners and midpoints of the screen edges and would have tried touching the screen with unsteady hands.
Come to think of it, they were not testing any audio equipment. I could have blindfolded myself and tried to vote a test ballot. I wonder why that was not an option. The whole point of the Diebold TSX is that blind voters can vote unassisted by using the audio equipment.
May 26th, 2006 at 10:12 pm
Another thing I forgot to mention. At the start of voting on the touchscreen the machine required the operator to enter the PIN number. This number prevents unauthorized entry to the administrative functions of the computer.
Diebold is famous for sending all its equipment out with the same PIN number, making it useless for security unless changed by the local staff. They send out the PIN as “111111″ . Easy to remember!
At Pocahontas the PIN being entered by the testing team was . . . .”111111″ Maybe they plan to change the PIN after the public test. But it could have been reassuring that they were thinking about security if they at least had not let me observe as they typed in the PIN.
June 1st, 2006 at 8:48 am
Jerry - “111111″ is a huge advance over what they had before… before it was just “1111″ so the complexity added by the additional digits, well, that will make it a much much much harder code to break! (/sarcasm) Thanks for your work on participating in, observing and reporting about the testing.
December 15th, 2007 at 12:03 am
Your account of the testing process makes me physically ill. I can’t believe this is still happening! How can we pretend that our democracy is intact if people can’t trust that their votes are being counted?
California has banned all DREs. Ohio’s Secretary of State has called for a state-wide ban on Diebold machines. The guy who wrote the federal HAVA statute is in jail, because he took bribes to let Diebold write the law. The whole thing is rotten, top to bottom and start to finish. I simply can’t believe that conscientious Iowans would allow an election to go forward using technology that is simply unnecessary to accomplish the people’s interests in holding elections.
I’m in Oregon, so perhaps I’m biased, but damn it’s easy for me to vote. They mail a ballot to my house. I mark it in black pen. I put it in a different envelope and mail it back. On election day, they open all the envelopes and feed them through optical count machines in a room with glass walls, where everyone can see the ballots and watch how each ballot effects the totals for each candidate.
And then when you need to do a re-count, you have a big pile of PAPER BALLOTS to count. No memory cards, no shady companies running “security tests,” no chain-of-custody problems…
sigh. Thanks for standing up at the meeting you went to, but unless you have better news to report since this article, your vote has already been cast for you. Think about it this way: if they can cheat, they WILL cheat, because the stakes are too high to leave it up to chance. The only way to stop them from cheating is to make sure that everything is open and public. Open and public elections with electronic voting machines are simply impossible.