Do you trust Diebold ATMs?

Wells Fargo customers in California may have noticed the increasing prevalence of Diebold built ATMs in the streets. You can hardly miss them - they say "Diebold" in big letters on the front. For anyone who has been paying the least bit of attention to the news about electronic voting in the last year that name should set of loud warning bells. Do you really want to put your money into a Diebold build ATM? Shouldn't you count and recount the notes as they come out? What if it makes a mistake - who will believe you?

For my part I just want to walk down to my local Diebold ATM and slap a big bumper sticker on it that says: "Why trust your cash with a company that can't even count your vote?".

But there's something deeper there - why would a major bank like Wells Fargo buy Diebold built ATMs if they were untrustworthy? Surely if Diebold can build ATMs that handle financial transactions then they can handle ones that count your votes?

Think about it... and think about our financial system in general. Banks have computer systems that handle trillions of dollars in transactions every day. VISA merchants alone processes over 100 million transactions a day. The NASDAQ stock exchange handles an average of over 2 billion shares being traded every day. Worldwide just think how many times people go to an ATM and put money in or take it out every day. Now ask yourself, would banks trust their money to these systems if they were as insecure as Diebold voting machines? Would they?

Hell no!

Diebold is just one of thousands of other manufacturers make machines and software designed to process financial transactions and these systems are alarmingly secure and reliable handling billions of transactions per day. Every credit or debit card swipe, every ATM deposit or withdrawal, every check cashed, every wire transfer, every interest calculation. Day after day after day with a staggering degree of accuracy. Oh sure, there are errors but you know eventually they figure it out and there's an audit trail all the way to your bank account when its in your favour, just so they can get that money back. Just like the time I deposited a check and miskeyed giving myself a $1.2M bank balance - and it cleared. For two whole days I had a $1.2M balance... but it went away after that, sure as eggs is eggs. When someone wants to try and defraud the system and cover their trails they usually have to set up all kinds offshore accounts, front companies and laundering operations to do so and even then its usually just a matter of time and lack of international cooperation that is between them and the long arm of the banks looking for their money.

So when it comes to counting votes in the US election - just a measly 100 million votes in an average Presidential election - why is it that we have this antiquated, unreliable, easily defraudable system? Why can VISA Inc. process as many transaction per day as votes are cast in the presidential elections every four years and do it better?

I'll tell you why - its money. Its the same problem as finding energy alternatives to oil, or figuring out how to do sustainable development - there's just not enough money in it. No one really cares any more who gets into power be it tweedeledum or tweedledee, there's still just a few billion at stake and even then the bar for performance is set so low that once the contract is won its a cake walk all the way to bank. If every miscounted vote cost a million dollar penalty you can bet your life there would be an accurate vote count each and every election.

So here's my solution...

Every election every registered voter goes to an ATM and uses the existing ATM and banking infrastructure to vote. The exact details of how that works I haven't exactly figured out, but basically we're talking a one dollar one vote system. Maybe you deposit cash and get a refund later, maybe you are given cash on a card good for one day and deposit it, or maybe you take it out from the candidates account as a reward for being a good voter, maybe you just key in stuff on the screen and get your receipt. Whatever works and satisfies the criteria - when there's money to made companies will figure it out and make it work and the banking system will do the rest.

The important thing is you have the ATM infrastructure there already and its trusted each and every day by millions of users and more to the point by banks, so why not use it? You have smart cards, verification that's arguable more secure than that used at polling stations, plus photo records of each person who came up to vote (yes, ATMs have eyes!) and the bonus that ATMs are everywhere already and can be placed anywhere there is a phone line and power.

If Diebold and others can't figure out how to count votes using the ATM network then they sure as hell can't be trusted to count our money as it comes out of the machine - but maybe that's the point, maybe they can't be trusted at all with our money or our votes...