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Mycroft
Skeptic Friend
USA
427 Posts |
 Posted - 11/07/2006 : 21:56:07
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http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/11/13/8393084/?postversion=2006110309
quote:
Rage against the machine
Diebold struggles to bounce back from the controversy surrounding its voting machines.
(Fortune Magazine) -- Here's a five-step plan guaranteed to make an obscure company absolutely notorious.
First get into a business you don't understand, selling to customers who barely understand it either. Then roll out your product without adequate testing. Don't hire enough skilled people. When people notice problems, deny, obfuscate and ignore. Finally, blame your critics when it all blows up in your face.
With missteps like those, it would be hard to succeed in the gumball business. But when your product is the hardware and software of democracy itself, that kind of performance gets you called not just incompetent but evil - an enemy of democracy. And that is what has happened to Diebold Inc. (Charts) of Canton, Ohio, since it got into the elections business in 2001.
Read it all.
This is great journalism; Fortune Magazine has a great writer in Barney Gimbel. He presents the business side without any apologetics, whitewashing or vilification, then he presents the critics side without minimizing their concerns or being alarmist. Most of all he gives the kind of depth to where the reader understands where the problem came from, how this company got sucked into it, and exactly why our elections are as secure (or insecure) as they are.
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Original_Intent
SFN Regular
USA
609 Posts |
Posted - 11/08/2006 : 22:18:07 [Permalink]
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Good article. Too bad it is just a lousy rotten idea and they spent so much money on it. I never went fot the "company is evil", or other conspiracies about it. Just always thought it was a sttupid move.
Peace
Joe |
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Mycroft
Skeptic Friend
USA
427 Posts |
Posted - 11/09/2006 : 13:38:49 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Original_Intent
Good article. Too bad it is just a lousy rotten idea and they spent so much money on it. I never went fot the "company is evil", or other conspiracies about it. Just always thought it was a sttupid move.
Peace
Joe
The truth is US elections have never been particularly secure. Voting is done at the county level, there are more than 3000 counties across the US, many of these counties have multiple precincts, and each precinct is as secure as its volunteer staffers make it.
The typical precinct volunteer is that elderly, retired, neighbor of yours that's really friendly, knows everybody's name, likes to be helpful, and sees the good in everyone. If you ask him about vote security he's likely to say something like, ”yeah, well I suppose someone could cheat, but nobody handles those ballots but me and Roger and Dave from the Lions club, and none of us would do anything like that!”
Really, when you think about it, what makes our elections most secure is that fixing enough precincts to where it would make a difference would involve too much work and too big a conspiracy to make it feasible.
What happened with Diebold and other voting machine manufacturers is they entered a market where security really wasn't that large a concern, then the 2000 elections and Bev Harris with her Black Box Voting came along and raised awareness so that the consensus became that security should be an important concern, and the manufactures got a black eye for not thinking that way all along.
They built a product to record votes, and it does that very well. What they didn't anticipate is that they would be expected to have provided (retroactively) a product that would record the votes, and then protect that record from tampering.
Ironically, now that awareness has been raised on the issue, electronics offers us the ability to create vote security in a way that is unprecedented. The current generation of voting machines are poorly designed, but now that there is awareness has been created, new machines can be designed to incorporate encryption tools and data back-ups to make vote tampering extraordinarily difficult.
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