More Diebold voting kiosk news
Author: Bill Gerba on 2004-09-22 14:30:15
Just a quick note to all those following the Diebold voting kiosk saga: a new
article in
Wired illustrates yet another flaw in the
Diebold
voting kiosk system, this one allowing people to arbitrarily change
votes from a central collection area. Obviously the repercussions
for something like this could be catastrophic. At this point I'm
so disgusted by this debacle that I'm not sure of who is more to blame:
Diebold, for doing a half-assed job of writing software, or the
government, for doing a half-assed job of testing it. To be fair,
the decision of whether to use e-voting or not was something largely
left up to state and local governments (
mine
included), but even so, this issues should have been addressed long
ago... and if there wasn't hope of an immediate solution, the systems
should have been taken out of use until they were fixed properly, even
if that meant going back to paper ballots for another year or two.
The
damage that this sort of news does to the interactive kiosk industry is
very difficult to repair. All of the major hardware and software
players have devoted huge amounts of resources to the issues of
security and reliability (WireSpring alone has logged thousands of
hours working on security and stability for
FireCast kiosk and digital signage software),
however much of that is overshadowed due to the huge amount of press
"noise" generated from the Diebold problems. Ironically, even
blog articles like this one contribute to that noise, (in some tiny,
probably immesurable way), but I feel that it's more important to point
out these problem deployments as mistakes that the rest of us can learn
from.
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