If RiverSoft made e-voting machines
These leaked emails from Diebold, reported widely on the web, but strangely not in the traditional media, make pretty scary reading. Diebold manufacture electronic voting apparatus (used widely in the US, including the 2000 presidential elections).
Read the excerpts to get a taster:
“Elections are not rocket science. Why is it so hard to get things right! I have never been at any other company that has been so miss [sic] managed.”
In response to a question about a presentation in El Paso County, Colorado: “For a demonstration I suggest you fake it. Progam them both so they look the same, and then just do the upload fro [sic] the AV. That is what we did in the last AT/AV demo.”
“I have become increasingly concerned about the apparent lack of concern over the practice of writing contracts to provide products and services which do not exist and then attempting to build these items on an unreasonable timetable with no written plan, little to no time for testing, and minimal resources. It also seems to be an accepted practice to exaggerate our progress and functionality to our customers and ourselves then make excuses at delivery time when these products and services do not meet expectations.”
“I feel that over the next year, if the current management team stays in place, the Global [Election Management System] working environment will continue to be a chaotic mess. Global management has and will be doing the best to keep their jobs at the expense of employees. Unrealistic goals will be placed on current employees, they will fail to achieve them. If Diebold wants to keep things the same for the time being, this will only compound an already dysfunctional company. Due to the lack of leadership, vision, and self-preserving nature of the current management, the future growth of this company will continue to stagnate until change comes.”
“[T]he bugzilla historic data recovery process is complete. Some bugs were irrecoverably lost and they will have to be re-found and re-submitted, but overall the loss was relatively minor.”
“If voting could really change things, it would be illegal.”
“I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded. Will someone please explain this so that I have the information to give the auditor instead of standing here “looking dumb”.”
“…They need this, to prove to the media, as well as, any candidates & lawyers, that they did not view or print any Election Results before the Polls closed. However, if there is a way that we can disable the reporting functionality, that would be even better.”
The tone of a lot of the emails sounds rather familiar, and reminds me very much of the sort of correspondence that used to go round at a certain, now-defunct, software company that I used to work for. As Ben says:
“The tone of the “managers” reminds me of companies I’ve worked for. They’ve inherited a ramshackle system of desperate, last-minute hacks, and take pride in their knowledge of how to work around all the problems. Look at how any problem report is answered by a long, rambling explanation of how the system works, followed by another improvised fix.”
Doesn’t exactly fill you with confidence for the democratic process, really, now does it.
10 replies on “”
It’s a good thing the U.S.A. isn’t a democracy. (It’s a republic.)
I don’t understand. Surely it is possible to have democracy in a republic just as it would be possible to have one under, say, a constitutional monarchy? Or is that not what the US election process is about?
(cf. 2. Government by popular representation; a form of government in which the supreme power is retained by the people, but is indirectly exercised through a system of representation and delegated authority periodically renewed; a constitutional representative government; a republic.)
Oh, nothing to do with this topic, but it just occurred to me that the comments were the wrong way round–surely they should go down the page rather than up–so now they’re correct.
While a republic shares some things in common with democracy, it is not a democracy in itself. The difference is that in a republic, the people elect officials who then make their *own* decisions about things, rather than each issue being open to a common vote.
Even James Madison spoke out against democracies: “Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
America tries to combine being a republic with the concept of representative democracy, where the elected officials are encouraged to make decisions based on the will of the people–but they don’t have to.
Because of this distinction, the “the people don’t want it” argument against war (for example) is flawed: the government, once elected, can do what it likes (within the country’s law).
(I understand that the democratic process of electing the officials in the first place is being compromised. :) )
Yes, that is true (I didn’t actually say that the US was a demcracy, I was referring to the democratic process, which is still supposed to take place in the US, regardless of how you define the concept of a republic), but I don’t necessarily agree with you that a democracy is solely the situation where a country is governed by the people. The dictonary definition to which I referred earlier gives both definitions:
1. Government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is retained and directly exercised by the people.
2. Government by popular representation; a form of government in which the supreme power is retained by the people, but is indirectly exercised through a system of representation and delegated authority periodically renewed; a constitutional representative government; a republic.
You say that once the politicians have been elected they are free to make their own decisions, and that is certainly true of the US, but it is also the case in the UK. Tony Blair is free to take the country into war whether the people agree with it or not–he only needs the backing of parliament (and can obtain that anyway by making the MPs in his party vote the way he wants them to). However, in spite of this, I would still call the UK a democracy.
Case 2 above surely applies to both countries, although one is a constitutional monarchy (with a figurehead unelected head of state), where the other is, as you say, a republic (with, of course, an unelected president…)
My dept. just got into a debate about this (especially since most of us went to “Rock the Vote” last night). America considers itself a democracy, however we are run more like a republic. There is no “true” democracy in the world.
I do agree Matt–in this case, I think that usage has defined meaning, rather than the other way around.
In other words, I think that “democracy” has historically meant Definition 1 above, but through time its meaning has changed to fit republics and constitutional monarchies like the US and UK as well, since they do a good job (usually) of retaining some democratic principles on a large scale.
(Sort of like how now some dictionaries list “imply” as one possible definition of “infer,” just because so many asstusks have been using the word wrong for so long.)
Yes, you are exactly right.
It’s probably because there aren’t (m)any(?) countries where the definition 1 scenario actually exists. (Can you think of any? Some European countries have lots of referenda, but I can’t think of a country that actually operates a “democracy” in the strictest, definition 1, sense of the word).
Thus the meaning of the word has shifted, in effect, from “government by the people” to “government on behalf of the people”.
All of which makes the concept that someone might be tampering with the means of electing those representatives all the more disturbing.
No, I think you’re right that democracy as a pure concept doesn’t actually exist anywhere.
Despite that, the pedant in me doesn’t want the word to start meaning something else. Just because pterodactyls don’t exist anymore doesn’t mean that we should start referring to canaries as such, just because they both fly. Etc.