I was away for a week last week so I missed this, BUT IT IS FREAKING INSANE.

Diebold has admitted that it was faulty software that caused evoting machines to drop HUNDREDS of votes on their touch screen voting machines.

Uh. HELLO! is anyone else freaking out that this company has made and sold a metric shit-ton of these machines? and that a good part of the United States will be actually voting on them in November?

a wee bit of backstory: originally they suspected the vote counting servers as the drop point, pointing the blame squarely at McAfee and their virus protection suite. Now Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold, says:

In-freaking-sane. Ok really, how hard is it to make some software that counts how many times someone presses a button. I wrote a javascript to do it in 10th grade, and that didn’t drop any counts. Problem really is that Premier/Diebold rely on proprietary technology, and they offer no transparency in their source code. If they released the source code, then the community as a whole could view and judge it, and find these “logic errors” before they are even an issue. More eyes = less mistakes. No one person ever writes perfect code (ok maybe Toby does, but that dude is a machine).

I realize there are tons of intricacies in these systems, but I can think of at least 5 ways to simplify the whole system and make it safer, more secure, and more transparent. And if you’d like those ideas feel free to hit up newbiz-inquiries@barbariangroup.com, heh.