8 ms·

Private equity controls the U.S. voting machine industry

118 points by petethomas 8y ago

darawk 8y ago
The problem here isn't private equity control of the industry...it's state & local governments choosing to actually use these things. PE can call a lemonade stand a voting machine, that's what it means to live in a free country, but that doesn't mean we have to use the damn thing. It's a joke. It's not like we don't know how to design reasonably secure electronic voting mechanisms[1]...these companies just don't bother. There is no reason anyone should ever be using these things. [1] https://crypto.stanford.edu/pbc/notes/crypto/voting.html https://crypto.stanford.edu/pbc/notes/crypto/voting.html
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  Does that private equity lobby state & local governments to use these machines? Probably.
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    If I sent an open letter to Congress and the Senate asking to be made dictator and they said yes, the blame would fall on a spot a little broader than my shadow.
    - craftyguy 8y ago
      > the blame would fall on a spot a little broader than my shadow. Can you explain what you mean? I've never heard that expression before and it's.. confusing.
      - tracker1 8y ago
        While lobbying can be bad, it can also be good. It comes down to the judgement of those holding office. For example, if I were running for a relatively high office that took a lot of funds to compete, I'd openly take funds from any legal source. And that might make me more inclined to meet with those organizations over given issues. However, it would be up to me to decide what is best for my constituents in my votes/actions over specific things. We talk all day about corruption of the money/companies, but way too little voting out all the congress-critters that should not return. More people need to start voting against incumbents regardless of party to stir the pot and get some new blood into things.
        dvtrn 8y ago
        "For example, if I were running for a relatively high office that took a lot of funds to compete, I'd openly take funds from any legal source. And that might make me more inclined to meet with those organizations over given issues. However, it would be up to me to decide what is best for my constituents in my votes/actions over specific things." It's a feature, not a bug...applied empirically to the modern electoral mechanism.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- philipov 8y ago
  I disagree with the notion that false advertising is a right characteristic of free countries. Free does not mean anarchy.
  - darawk 8y ago
    Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that. My point is that these companies ought to be able to sell 'voting machines' that suck, and we ought to be free to not buy them. They should not be free to make false claims about them.
    - 0x7265616374 8y ago
      absolutely agree on all three points. unfortunately it's well known that governments often go with the lowest bid for a plethora of goods and services, and it's all to easy to lowball a bid to push machines that suck.
      - olliej 8y ago
        In California at least there were ballot iniatives that mean the CA government must go with the lowest bid, even if it is from a company that has consistently run far over budget. Honestly I feel the solution to this is: lowest bid, but the company cannot charge more than their bid and needs to have completion/bankruptcy insurance. That way companies that routinely under bid will go bankrupt/have the bankruptcy insurance bills increase until it becomes unprofitable to underbid.
  - acct1771 8y ago
    It can. If that's what the people want. Unless the definition of free has changed. Which, in this world, it seems to have.
- abtinf 8y ago
  > It's not like we don't know how to design reasonably secure electronic voting mechanisms[1] It’s exactly like that. No one knows how to solve this problem. The link you added are merely class notes and assume away fundamental technical problems, without even getting into practical issues.
  - darawk 8y ago
    This one, then: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1264852?reload=true https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1264852?reload=true But I will also add that the methods described in my original link are perfectly viable from a technical perspective, just slightly impractical from a UX perspective.
rmrfrmrf 8y ago
...just the gatekeepers?
hnmonkey 8y ago
Is there a solid argument for not having more regulation on these organizations? We have so much regulation on slot machines and casinos for example because we know that a lot of money passes through there and there's high potential for money laundering. Why not have strong regulations around voting systems too? We know that if voting systems are compromised the impact could be devastating to the entire country - far more critical to America's security and continuity than regulation in many other industries. I just don't get the opposition to that. It seems like it's in everyone's best interest (those that are honest and are looking for a fair foundation to build from that is).
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  I honestly think that a lot of people in the US think it's more important that their party wins than having fair elections. So I don't expect a big push coming from the people who are responsible for these purchases.
  - 0x7265616374 8y ago
    when the "other side" leverages something controversial, it's a crime. when "our side" leverages something controversial, it's playing to win. the hypocrisy in US politics is strong at every level.
    - smolder 8y ago
      At the risk of sounding like a preacher (as a nonreligious person) I think a lack of moral guidance in modern life is a factor. What might've been controversial in the past, the idea that morality is an individual weakness rather than a communal strength, seems to be projected through all sorts of media.
  - mark_l_watson 8y ago
    You are absolutely correct, and some evidence is gerrymandering.
  - Spivak 8y ago
gok 8y ago
Uhg now PE is the new boogieman? If these voting machine firms were public companies, or family owned, or a subsidiary of a conglomerate, would that somehow be better?
- tlb 8y ago
  A family-owned voting machine company’s main incentive is to sell voting machines. A PE firm might be able to hedge themselves into vast upsides from particular election outcomes — much larger amounts of money than the sale of voting machines — and then affect the outcome.
camelCaseOfBeer 8y ago
Why can't we just vote online? These companies operate in secret with hardly any regulation, hidden from scrutiny. If there's no oversight in the polls, online voting would prove a revelation in transparency. Sure it'd probably get hacked and face problems. Compared to the status-quo, ain't nothin' but a chicken wing.
jimhefferon 8y ago
> Can we trust the outcome? Clearly not.
twblalock 8y ago
Maybe everyone should vote by mail, which currently is done by paper ballot. The current voting machines have problems, and I'd rather use paper ballots today, but let's not make the mistake of thinking that paper ballots are the ideal long-term solution. Remember "hanging chads" and voter confusion caused by the ballot layout in Florida back in 2000?
- Thlom 8y ago
  All this is solved in most democracies. Don’t use punching machines. Use separate ballots per candidate. The voter selects the ballot for her candidate, folds it and drops it in the ballot box. Simple and secure.
  - tracker1 8y ago
    So for locations that have say 50+ positions, with multiple party candidates up for election, you want to print off 100+ ballots and have the voters select and mail out 50 of them separately? Right now to reduce fraud, many mail in juristicions will have an envelope with a voter and specific ballot type (local districts include different water, power, school, fire, police, etc which may be different from someone on the other side of your street). And the ballot only has the ballot type/combination... the outside is scanned to match the inside, and the inside ballot is then separated/randomized to prevent tracking coordination. Do you understand how much crap would have to be coordinated between envelopes and ballots to support such a system? We aren't just voting for a single office, in some places it's over 50 offices, with hundreds of candidates.
- briandear 8y ago
  Voting by mail is fraught with huge problems. Zero proof the person filling it out and mailing it are actually the person they should be. Campaigns often block walk, “helping” people complete their ballots, for example. Also ballots get sent to dead people quite frequently. Voting by mail should only be done for those overseas and hand delivered to a consulate where ID can be verified. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-by-mail-faulty-ballots-could-impact-elections.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-... https://www.themonitor.com/news/local/article_983f423e-d3e9-11e8-9bd6-a7ddaa46a712.html https://www.themonitor.com/news/local/article_983f423e-d3e9-... https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/community/fort-worth/article219920740.html https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/community/fort-wort... A single person at a polling location committing fraud affects one vote, but a few people committing mail in fraud can affect hundreds or thousands of votes. “Helping” people vote, while not illegal, is definitely ripe for abuse. “Want to keep your social security checks? Here, sign this ballot.” In person voting with your thumb dipped in dye just like they do in developing countries along with photo ID, along with auditable paper ballots is a sure-fire way to eliminate fraud. Those that oppose this generally are the ones who benefit the most from the current system.
lsiebert 8y ago
Before I saw this today, I saw this opinion piece from the ny times: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/opinion/midterm-election-hacked.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/opinion/midterm-election-... I can't help but think, if private equity already controls the industry, that there is ample room for a startup or non profit or even a government owned business to disrupt the industry. Create real secure optical scan voting machines based on the best practices that have been come up with, and with independent audits and sell them with a contract where the machines are updated with security fixes for a fixed period. Sell the machines a bit like razors, The machines themselves are relatively cheap, but come with a required subscription to the security fixes for the lifetime of the machine.
- specialist 8y ago
  Los Angeles County is one of the few jurisdictions with the resources and heft to move the needle on their own. They're making their own OSS tabulators. I've been out of the election integrity game for a while, so I'm not immediately familiar with the scope of their effort. Any one wanting to reform USA's election administration stack should start in LA. Help their effort. Lobby to import their gear to their own jurisdiction. Study their effort, roadmap.
  - stonesixone 8y ago
    No, Los Angeles County's new tabulator isn't open source. Look what happened when someone tried to request the source code for their "open source" system (as LA County's press release called it). LA County replied that it's "exempt from disclosure" for a whole host of reasons (2 pages worth): https://osvtac.github.io/files/meetings/2018/2018-09-13/packet/LA_County_Records_Request.pdf https://osvtac.github.io/files/meetings/2018/2018-09-13/pack... https://osvtac.github.io/meetings/2018/2018-09-13/agenda https://osvtac.github.io/meetings/2018/2018-09-13/agenda In contrast, the City and County of San Francisco is working on developing and certifying an open source paper-ballot system.
    - tracker1 8y ago
      And that's not even close to the most shady action a government has tried with software that I've heard about.
stretchwithme 8y ago
I don't see why we can't use open source voting software, low cost PCs and old fashioned punchcard machines. The problems in 2000 were all about data not be correctly recorded. That was solved a long time ago. There never was a need to start transmitting the data electronically. Now we can use electronic gathering of the data AND automatic counting of the physical ballots to help prevent fraud. But replacing physical ballots with electronic vote collection wasn't really needed. But lobbyists saw an opportunity.
- stonesixone 8y ago
  The City and County of San Francisco has started funding a project to do just this. More info can be found here: https://osvtac.github.io/ https://osvtac.github.io/
- tracker1 8y ago
  scan-tron ballots are generally the best option imho. You can scale quite a bit at a polling station as well as not tying up one costly machine per person in queue. Coordination of ballots for localized districts is still one of the more difficult issues for both print and electronic voting though.
darkerside 8y ago
Why is it that Bloomberg has run an article so light on the details of the financial ownership of these companies by private equity firms (something they should be quite expert in), and instead mostly consisting of old news stories about how close some past elections have been (not their area of expertise and barely relevant if the idea is that the entire voting system can be wholesale rigged)? My guess is that it's because if you dig into the details, there is little actual control being exercised by those PE firms, making this a non story.
tracker1 8y ago
I'm not even sure there's a good answer. It's not just federal and state elections. There is a lot of complexity that isn't considered. Localized districts (water, fire, school, parks, etc) have weird and overlapping boundaries compared to other districts. Add in some gerrymandering and it gets horrific to write software against. While I'm genuinely concerned over security considerations, not to mention equipment. It's hard to coordinate even the paper/scantron style ballots. What bugs me more about the visual/touch computers is the time that those stations take relative to cost... a few cardboard privacy booths and scantron is much better, but we're spending billions on systems that are demonstrably worse. And anything over the internet is a non-starter now. In the end, I really hope that more states/districts realize how bad the cost/benefit of the computer voting stations are. Not even considering the coordination, lack of paper trail, before considering the relative consolidation and closed-source nature of the system. Disclosure: I work for a company that does ballot printing and other election services, but not voting machines specifically.
donbright 8y ago
democracy dies because people couldn't be bothered with the "mundane technical details". its like this is a flaw of intelligent civilization that Carl Sagan didn't think about. it's not global nuclear warfare, it's not climate change, it's not some mad virus... it's that the species becomes disinterested in performing maintenance because maintenance tasks don't produce a dopamine rush. the civilization becomes too incompetent to perform even the most basic upkeep on the structures they set in place - whether physical like roads and bridges, or social-political, like election systems. nobody becomes famous or wealthy for performing upkeep.
exabrial 8y ago
Open source software and hardware could be a solution for these problems me thinks. Or at least a requirement for shared source of both

118 points by petethomas 8y ago

The problem here isn't private equity control of the industry...it's state & local governments choosing to actually use these things. PE can call a lemonade stand a voting machine, that's what it means to live in a free country, but that doesn't mean we have to use the damn thing. It's a joke. It's not like we don't know how to design reasonably secure electronic voting mechanisms[1]...these companies just don't bother. There is no reason anyone should ever be using these things. [1] https://crypto.stanford.edu/pbc/notes/crypto/voting.html https://crypto.stanford.edu/pbc/notes/crypto/voting.html

prolikewh0a 8y ago
Does that private equity lobby state & local governments to use these machines? Probably.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  If I sent an open letter to Congress and the Senate asking to be made dictator and they said yes, the blame would fall on a spot a little broader than my shadow.
  - craftyguy 8y ago
    > the blame would fall on a spot a little broader than my shadow. Can you explain what you mean? I've never heard that expression before and it's.. confusing.
    - tracker1 8y ago
      While lobbying can be bad, it can also be good. It comes down to the judgement of those holding office. For example, if I were running for a relatively high office that took a lot of funds to compete, I'd openly take funds from any legal source. And that might make me more inclined to meet with those organizations over given issues. However, it would be up to me to decide what is best for my constituents in my votes/actions over specific things. We talk all day about corruption of the money/companies, but way too little voting out all the congress-critters that should not return. More people need to start voting against incumbents regardless of party to stir the pot and get some new blood into things.
      - dvtrn 8y ago
        "For example, if I were running for a relatively high office that took a lot of funds to compete, I'd openly take funds from any legal source. And that might make me more inclined to meet with those organizations over given issues. However, it would be up to me to decide what is best for my constituents in my votes/actions over specific things." It's a feature, not a bug...applied empirically to the modern electoral mechanism.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
philipov 8y ago
I disagree with the notion that false advertising is a right characteristic of free countries. Free does not mean anarchy.
- darawk 8y ago
  Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that. My point is that these companies ought to be able to sell 'voting machines' that suck, and we ought to be free to not buy them. They should not be free to make false claims about them.
  - 0x7265616374 8y ago
    absolutely agree on all three points. unfortunately it's well known that governments often go with the lowest bid for a plethora of goods and services, and it's all to easy to lowball a bid to push machines that suck.
    - olliej 8y ago
      In California at least there were ballot iniatives that mean the CA government must go with the lowest bid, even if it is from a company that has consistently run far over budget. Honestly I feel the solution to this is: lowest bid, but the company cannot charge more than their bid and needs to have completion/bankruptcy insurance. That way companies that routinely under bid will go bankrupt/have the bankruptcy insurance bills increase until it becomes unprofitable to underbid.
- acct1771 8y ago
  It can. If that's what the people want. Unless the definition of free has changed. Which, in this world, it seems to have.
abtinf 8y ago
> It's not like we don't know how to design reasonably secure electronic voting mechanisms[1] It’s exactly like that. No one knows how to solve this problem. The link you added are merely class notes and assume away fundamental technical problems, without even getting into practical issues.
- darawk 8y ago
  This one, then: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1264852?reload=true https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1264852?reload=true But I will also add that the methods described in my original link are perfectly viable from a technical perspective, just slightly impractical from a UX perspective.

rmrfrmrf 8y ago

...just the gatekeepers?

hnmonkey 8y ago

Is there a solid argument for not having more regulation on these organizations? We have so much regulation on slot machines and casinos for example because we know that a lot of money passes through there and there's high potential for money laundering. Why not have strong regulations around voting systems too? We know that if voting systems are compromised the impact could be devastating to the entire country - far more critical to America's security and continuity than regulation in many other industries. I just don't get the opposition to that. It seems like it's in everyone's best interest (those that are honest and are looking for a fair foundation to build from that is).

maxxxxx 8y ago
I honestly think that a lot of people in the US think it's more important that their party wins than having fair elections. So I don't expect a big push coming from the people who are responsible for these purchases.
- 0x7265616374 8y ago
  when the "other side" leverages something controversial, it's a crime. when "our side" leverages something controversial, it's playing to win. the hypocrisy in US politics is strong at every level.
  - smolder 8y ago
    At the risk of sounding like a preacher (as a nonreligious person) I think a lack of moral guidance in modern life is a factor. What might've been controversial in the past, the idea that morality is an individual weakness rather than a communal strength, seems to be projected through all sorts of media.
- mark_l_watson 8y ago
  You are absolutely correct, and some evidence is gerrymandering.
- Spivak 8y ago

gok 8y ago

Uhg now PE is the new boogieman? If these voting machine firms were public companies, or family owned, or a subsidiary of a conglomerate, would that somehow be better?

tlb 8y ago
A family-owned voting machine company’s main incentive is to sell voting machines. A PE firm might be able to hedge themselves into vast upsides from particular election outcomes — much larger amounts of money than the sale of voting machines — and then affect the outcome.

camelCaseOfBeer 8y ago

Why can't we just vote online? These companies operate in secret with hardly any regulation, hidden from scrutiny. If there's no oversight in the polls, online voting would prove a revelation in transparency. Sure it'd probably get hacked and face problems. Compared to the status-quo, ain't nothin' but a chicken wing.

jimhefferon 8y ago

> Can we trust the outcome? Clearly not.

twblalock 8y ago

Maybe everyone should vote by mail, which currently is done by paper ballot. The current voting machines have problems, and I'd rather use paper ballots today, but let's not make the mistake of thinking that paper ballots are the ideal long-term solution. Remember "hanging chads" and voter confusion caused by the ballot layout in Florida back in 2000?

Thlom 8y ago
All this is solved in most democracies. Don’t use punching machines. Use separate ballots per candidate. The voter selects the ballot for her candidate, folds it and drops it in the ballot box. Simple and secure.
- tracker1 8y ago
  So for locations that have say 50+ positions, with multiple party candidates up for election, you want to print off 100+ ballots and have the voters select and mail out 50 of them separately? Right now to reduce fraud, many mail in juristicions will have an envelope with a voter and specific ballot type (local districts include different water, power, school, fire, police, etc which may be different from someone on the other side of your street). And the ballot only has the ballot type/combination... the outside is scanned to match the inside, and the inside ballot is then separated/randomized to prevent tracking coordination. Do you understand how much crap would have to be coordinated between envelopes and ballots to support such a system? We aren't just voting for a single office, in some places it's over 50 offices, with hundreds of candidates.
briandear 8y ago
Voting by mail is fraught with huge problems. Zero proof the person filling it out and mailing it are actually the person they should be. Campaigns often block walk, “helping” people complete their ballots, for example. Also ballots get sent to dead people quite frequently. Voting by mail should only be done for those overseas and hand delivered to a consulate where ID can be verified. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-by-mail-faulty-ballots-could-impact-elections.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-... https://www.themonitor.com/news/local/article_983f423e-d3e9-11e8-9bd6-a7ddaa46a712.html https://www.themonitor.com/news/local/article_983f423e-d3e9-... https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/community/fort-worth/article219920740.html https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/community/fort-wort... A single person at a polling location committing fraud affects one vote, but a few people committing mail in fraud can affect hundreds or thousands of votes. “Helping” people vote, while not illegal, is definitely ripe for abuse. “Want to keep your social security checks? Here, sign this ballot.” In person voting with your thumb dipped in dye just like they do in developing countries along with photo ID, along with auditable paper ballots is a sure-fire way to eliminate fraud. Those that oppose this generally are the ones who benefit the most from the current system.

lsiebert 8y ago

Before I saw this today, I saw this opinion piece from the ny times: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/opinion/midterm-election-hacked.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/opinion/midterm-election-... I can't help but think, if private equity already controls the industry, that there is ample room for a startup or non profit or even a government owned business to disrupt the industry. Create real secure optical scan voting machines based on the best practices that have been come up with, and with independent audits and sell them with a contract where the machines are updated with security fixes for a fixed period. Sell the machines a bit like razors, The machines themselves are relatively cheap, but come with a required subscription to the security fixes for the lifetime of the machine.

specialist 8y ago
Los Angeles County is one of the few jurisdictions with the resources and heft to move the needle on their own. They're making their own OSS tabulators. I've been out of the election integrity game for a while, so I'm not immediately familiar with the scope of their effort. Any one wanting to reform USA's election administration stack should start in LA. Help their effort. Lobby to import their gear to their own jurisdiction. Study their effort, roadmap.
- stonesixone 8y ago
  No, Los Angeles County's new tabulator isn't open source. Look what happened when someone tried to request the source code for their "open source" system (as LA County's press release called it). LA County replied that it's "exempt from disclosure" for a whole host of reasons (2 pages worth): https://osvtac.github.io/files/meetings/2018/2018-09-13/packet/LA_County_Records_Request.pdf https://osvtac.github.io/files/meetings/2018/2018-09-13/pack... https://osvtac.github.io/meetings/2018/2018-09-13/agenda https://osvtac.github.io/meetings/2018/2018-09-13/agenda In contrast, the City and County of San Francisco is working on developing and certifying an open source paper-ballot system.
  - tracker1 8y ago
    And that's not even close to the most shady action a government has tried with software that I've heard about.

stretchwithme 8y ago

I don't see why we can't use open source voting software, low cost PCs and old fashioned punchcard machines. The problems in 2000 were all about data not be correctly recorded. That was solved a long time ago. There never was a need to start transmitting the data electronically. Now we can use electronic gathering of the data AND automatic counting of the physical ballots to help prevent fraud. But replacing physical ballots with electronic vote collection wasn't really needed. But lobbyists saw an opportunity.

stonesixone 8y ago
The City and County of San Francisco has started funding a project to do just this. More info can be found here: https://osvtac.github.io/ https://osvtac.github.io/
tracker1 8y ago
scan-tron ballots are generally the best option imho. You can scale quite a bit at a polling station as well as not tying up one costly machine per person in queue. Coordination of ballots for localized districts is still one of the more difficult issues for both print and electronic voting though.

darkerside 8y ago

Why is it that Bloomberg has run an article so light on the details of the financial ownership of these companies by private equity firms (something they should be quite expert in), and instead mostly consisting of old news stories about how close some past elections have been (not their area of expertise and barely relevant if the idea is that the entire voting system can be wholesale rigged)? My guess is that it's because if you dig into the details, there is little actual control being exercised by those PE firms, making this a non story.

tracker1 8y ago

I'm not even sure there's a good answer. It's not just federal and state elections. There is a lot of complexity that isn't considered. Localized districts (water, fire, school, parks, etc) have weird and overlapping boundaries compared to other districts. Add in some gerrymandering and it gets horrific to write software against. While I'm genuinely concerned over security considerations, not to mention equipment. It's hard to coordinate even the paper/scantron style ballots. What bugs me more about the visual/touch computers is the time that those stations take relative to cost... a few cardboard privacy booths and scantron is much better, but we're spending billions on systems that are demonstrably worse. And anything over the internet is a non-starter now. In the end, I really hope that more states/districts realize how bad the cost/benefit of the computer voting stations are. Not even considering the coordination, lack of paper trail, before considering the relative consolidation and closed-source nature of the system. Disclosure: I work for a company that does ballot printing and other election services, but not voting machines specifically.

donbright 8y ago

democracy dies because people couldn't be bothered with the "mundane technical details". its like this is a flaw of intelligent civilization that Carl Sagan didn't think about. it's not global nuclear warfare, it's not climate change, it's not some mad virus... it's that the species becomes disinterested in performing maintenance because maintenance tasks don't produce a dopamine rush. the civilization becomes too incompetent to perform even the most basic upkeep on the structures they set in place - whether physical like roads and bridges, or social-political, like election systems. nobody becomes famous or wealthy for performing upkeep.

exabrial 8y ago

Open source software and hardware could be a solution for these problems me thinks. Or at least a requirement for shared source of both