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US Voting Machines Standards Open To Public
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Oct 31, 2007 10:29 PM
from the now-you-can-see-it-coming dept.
from the now-you-can-see-it-coming dept.
Online Voting writes "The U.S. Election Assistance Commission has published new voting systems testing and certification standards for 190 days of public comment. For all the critics of electronic voting, this is your opportunity to improve the process. This will be the second version of the federal voting system standards (the first version is the VVSG 05). To learn more about these Voluntary Voting System Standards see this FAQ."
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Politics: Deathblow To a Voting Machine 140 comments
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I wanted to read it... (Score:2)
How about (Score:5, Insightful)
- All code open source, all architecture fully documented and publicly available
- No person-vote information recorded in database (database lists people as "voted" or "not voted", as soon as person enters a vote it changes to "voted" and won't allow another vote, while a separate database increments a counter for a particular candidate. These two databases are NOT linked together.
- No timestamps to ensure manual matchmaking between people and votes are not possible.
Ah hell. I could come up with lots of other reasonable suggestions, but its not like any of this will ever be implemented.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Counterfeiting voting receipt (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:How about (Score:5, Funny)
For one, you could get a discount on your union dues with a Democrat on your voter receipt.
Or you could use it to secure your job (since your boss won't fire you if he can see you voted Republican).
Or you could sell it to the highest bidder: exchage your Billary/Osama receipt for a $20 gift card (for example). Buying votes otherwise is a real pain: people take your money but can still vote for the other guy if you don't watch them.
Parent
Problems, not solutions (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The digital voting controls should be similar to traditional voting (count how many people entered/left and compare to number of votes), but NEVER record the voters identity on the ball
Re:Problems, not solutions (Score:4, Insightful)
It means the voter doesn't log into the voting booth. the voter should only walk up to the both press a few buttons get a confirmation receipt and then stick said receipt in another box. The voting machine then is reset for another voter.
Electronic voting should only make counting faster not a complex database system that records everything about the voter.
Indeed a regular computer system is a waste in such a case. no more than powerful than the newton, or early palm is needed, no full oS is needed. the least complex the better.
Parent
Re:How about (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The only valid reason for checking peoples' IDs at the voting place is try and make sure that each person is eligible to vote, and gets one and only one ballot. Beyond that, there is no reason to keep track of any voter's ID.
Re:How about (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Also there should be timestamps but on the voted database and not the votes database.
So Mr XXX voted at 1:15pm but not who they voted for.
I certainly much better now! (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Why the continued paranoia? (Score:4, Interesting)
The only answer I can see is that the machines are badly programmed or they have been rigged in some way.
Parent
Vote counting research (Score:5, Funny)
In response to your question, "Is there really a concern that some competing software vendor will copy their 'tally up the votes' routine", we here at Diebold take great pride in the quality of our product. Our "tally up the votes"TM routine is a prized trade secret developed through extensive research and experimentation. If our competitors could simply copy our unique technique for counting votes they could develop the same product without incurring the significant costs of researching how to count.
I'm sure you can appreciate the sensitive technical know-how at the core of our product. Only a few vendors have discovered the secret to counting votes. If this knowledge became public anyone could count see how we count votes which would take away our incentive to create a much valued product which serves to protect democracy.
God Bless America,
Tom Swidarski
CEO of Diebold, Inc.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
They could find flaws and then exploit them at the next election to make their candidate automatically win.
Of course its nonsense,
If it went through a standard *nix development cycle with alphas, betas and release candidates along with a x86 compatible testing program and allowing (audited) patches then it would be very secure.
Many people (especially conspiracy nuts) would be reading over the code.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
How would they do that?
Access to the source of the code running on your own PC is an excellent thing. It lets you modify it, confirm that it does only what it claims to do, find and fix bugs, and so on.
Access to the source of the code running on a machine that you have no control over is useless. You cannot confirm that it is the source of the running code. You cannot confirm that there are no hardware issues - intentional or otherwise - that are affe
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Re:I certainly much better now! (Score:4, Interesting)
Amen to that. I worked for a temp firm for a contractor to ES&S when they were prepping the code for audit by a 3rd party under the previous version of the voting machine audit standards. The code needed major cleanup to comply with the coding standards (for readability), and we were in a time crunch, so everyone dropped what he was doing and worked on sanitizing the iVotronic code. After it was done, we had beautiful code. All variables were declared at the top of functions and names that made sense. No more globals. Functions had meaningful names and headers describing purpose, input, output, method, etc., etc., etc. We sent that software off to be audited for use in US elections. Of course, that code was never compiled. And it never made it back into the production s/w vault.
Parent
big problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:big problem (Score:5, Insightful)
They're also good at providing alternative interfaces for the disabled (sound or braille) while still printing out a nice, clean ballot.
The only reason for COUNTING machines is for speed though, and since there's no easy way to make sure the counting machines haven't been compromised, we shouldn't depend on them at ALL except maybe for "preliminary results". For the final official result, we should still stick to the hand counting votes (especially if we have nice, clean, easily-readable ballots).
Parent
Re:big problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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You should print the ballot on a machine, verify that it really did vote for what you wanted, and then put it in a ballot box.
Re:big problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Some problems that are typical with regular elections:
- missing ballots for a given party make the thing go slooow
- you waste time finding ballots when there are many options (most countries don't have a two-party thing going on but instead have tens of partys)
- long time to cut ballots when you have elections for more than a single position (say, president and senators) - this factor also favors "block voting" for a party
- the signed-envelope system has loopholes that allow people to buy votes anyway
- you need people to supervise the whole thing, and no one wants to volunteer
- the whole process is so troublesome and complicated that people just want to get it done instead of actually thinking about the election they are making
Of course, the electronic counterpart isn't easy to build. But it could be better, it's not really that hard. You need an easy consistent interface, solid machines that won't be easy to break, and some kind of receipt showing that you voted. That's it.
Parent
Re:big problem (Score:5, Interesting)
To supervise the whole thing, we require people from multiple parties to be present at the polling station. It's hard to fiddle with something when it has to be verified by two (or more) opposing people at the same time.
I don't understand your references to multiple ballots. Is each party on a separate ballot or something? Why in the world would it be done like that?
Parent
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In Canada you usually have one contest.
This [nist.gov] is why hand-counting doesn't work in the United States. Chicago, November 2004: 10 pages, 15 elected offices, 74 judges, one referendum. That's 90 contests.
See more at NIST's ballot collection [nist.gov].
Works just fine in the UK (Score:2)
Punch cards, machines, everything else, just unnecessary. I never understood the whole situation in the US where you have people queueing and some unable to vote due to being in line too long.
Sweet (Score:2)
With Diebold's incompetence, this shouldn't be too hard to do, should it?
Re:Sweet (Score:5, Interesting)
But when it comes to voting machines, the only thing that separates the voting machines from their other products is strong bias. Tamper with an ATM at the factory, sure some FDIC bank will lose a few thousand dollars but the one doing the tampering gains nothing. Tampering with a voting machine, the perpetrator stands to influence an election in ways they see fit.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
The main difference is that the ATM is there for convenience. They're everywhere and can fit in places that banks can't. They also are available 24/7. Meanwhile, voting machines are much less convenient than absentee ballots, as you have to go to the voting precinct, rather than having them sent to you, resulting in you being able to fill them out anywhere and deposit in those seemingly ubiquit
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I for one.... (Score:5, Funny)
What a bunch of crap (Score:4, Insightful)
Why hack a voting machine? (Score:2, Insightful)
They don't have to hack the voting machines. They've already hacked the voters. Just as Plato predicted they would!
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This is the first I'm hearing about anything in the USA PATRIOT act that has anything to do with the Electoral College. Would you have any links to a fuller explanation of these added powers you seem to think the College has been given?
Software independence is required. (Score:4, Informative)
I definitely recommend reading the guidelines. There's a lot of stuff in there.
My opinion on "software independence." (Score:2, Interesting)
My problem with the term "software independence" is that it is misnamed. The guidelines give a definition of "software independence" th
Its not that freaking hard people (Score:2, Interesting)
So how freaking hard is it to burn one PROM with the questions/canadates names to be displayed on the screen and a second PROM
Why not start with an open standard? (Score:3, Insightful)
So a good start on the standards but it would be good to see compulsion come in.
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Still no access to source code (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Bzzt. Thanks for playing. The United States of America is still a banana republic. What is so difficult about full and open scrutiny? The first principle of any electronic voting system is that it should be open. There can be no proprietary code. It doesn't matter if Joe Six-pack can't read it, as long as someone who is independent from the government and the contractor can.
The reason that's not a requirement is that if the other requirements are defined correctly, access to the source code is irrelevant. If the other requirements are not defined correctly, access to the source code is also irrelevant, because there's no practical way to be sure what code is actually running on the voting machines.
The only reasonable way to do electronic voting is to define a system such that there is no way the software could manipulate the vote without being detected, no matter how mali
Code can be altered on the fly (Score:3, Insightful)
Canada does (did? sigh) vote using a manual process with real time oversight by suspicious characters from both parties present -- you know, the process we decided was mad in Florida in 2000. Somehow they finish up their elections in hours. Although, really, what the hell is the hurry to finish an election? Why not take a week? Someone REALLY wants to alter those votes. They want it quick, unmonitored, and completely open to tampering, and somehow this is the Only Way To Do It?
This idiocy wouldn't stand if we didn't have Kourictainment for a news media... god.
120 Days + 120 Days... Don't procrastinate. (Score:3, Informative)