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NYT Notes Flaws In Current Electronic Voting Methods

Posted by Zonk on Sat Jan 05, 2008 01:32 PM
from the judge-carefully dept.
United States Government Politics Technology
dstates writes "The New York time has an informative article on electronic voting with some frightening statistics and interesting anecdotes. Printers on Diebold machines in Cayahoga County OH jammed 20% of the time, making paper trail recounts suspect. Crashing voting machines in California reportedly resulted from Windows CE sensing fingers sliding from one key to another as a drag and drop event, and the Diebold software failing to handle the event. Of course, rather than just ignore this unanticipated condition, the OS did the right thing for a voting machine and crashed."
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[+] IT: Diebold Election Results Released By AZ Judge 134 comments
Windrip writes "A judge in the case covering the nature of the database used in Diebold Gems software during Pima County, Arizona elections has ruled the DB is not a computer program (pdf). The result is that the Arizona Democratic party will have the chance to review previous elections for transparency and accuracy. ''The Pima County Democratic Party sued the county this year for the electronic databases from past elections. The party requested the databases and passwords be released according to Arizona public-records law. Pima County denied that part of the request, while turning over other records the party asked for. In closing arguments of the four-day trial that began Dec. 4, Pima County argued the databases meet the definition of a computer program, which is protected by state law, said Deputy County Attorney Thomas Denker."
Submission: NYT article on electronic voting by dstates (629350)
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NYT Notes Flaws In Current Electronic Voting Methods 50 Comments More /

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  • Absentee Vote! (Score:5, Informative)

    by rthille (8526) <web-slashdotNO@SPAMrangat.org> on Saturday January 05 2008, @01:34PM (#21924878) Homepage Journal

    In California, you can be an Permanent Absentee Voter, which guarantees a paper trail for your vote. I deliver mine directly to the County Registrar of Voters, but I believe you can drop them off an any polling place, or mail them, though they have to arrive by the deadline, postmark does not count.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by corsec67 (627446)

      or mail them, though they have to arrive by the deadline, postmark does not count.


      Doesn't that open up a whole bunch of ways to do fraud?

      In the post office, possibly:
      "Here are the votes from the very (hated political party) area"
      "Put them behind box over there, I will get to them next week"
      "But they have to be counted by tomorrow"
      "Yeah, so?

    • Re:Absentee Vote! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mOdQuArK! (87332) on Saturday January 05 2008, @01:47PM (#21925012)
      Unfortunately, being an absentee voter doesn't really guarantee you much more of a paper trail - not only is the anonymity protocol violated (there's no way to make sure people aren't forcing or bribing you to vote a certain way), but there is also no way for the counters to make sure all of the absentee votes make it to the counting table (or whether they have been selectively pruned).

      Also, many places use the optical scanning machines to sum up the absentee ballots, then add the votes to the database of the central tabulator machine being used to count the votes from the balloting machines.

      That being said, at least the paper is existing somewhere at some point (and the voter has had a chance to look at it), so it could be looked at as a marginally better process than the paperless machines. Absentee balloting is just the best of a bad process though.
  • I found one already without even reading the article:

    ...reportedly resulted from Windows CE sensing fingers sliding...

  • Software standards are just terrible, complicated (Score:5, Insightful)

    by compumike (454538) on Saturday January 05 2008, @01:38PM (#21924926) Homepage
    I am totally shocked that even Diebold could screw up this badly, making systems that crash under normal usage conditions. But the design philosophy they took is the wrong one. Look at the complexity behind these things! Keep it simple and they might have done much better. Why base something like this off of Windows CE? How many megahertz do I need to do a voting machine? Seriously, all of this extra hardware and software means more abstraction (which is considered a good thing in the computer science world), but it also means more abstractions that can be misinterpreted and misused. For a system whose job is so simple, keep the product equally simple.

    --
    Coder? Want to learn electronics? Microcontroller kits. [nerdkits.com]

    • I am totally shocked that even Diebold could screw up this badly

      At this point I wonder why Microsoft doesn't enter the market of voting machines. Even they wouldn't fuck it up this badly.

    • A vote counter could be done in 1980:s technology using Basic - except that you may want to use more than a 16 bit integer to count the votes or you will get a rollover into negative after 32767 votes. Not a big problem...

      Anyway - when it comes to voting machines the requirements should be that they are mathematically verifiable [tfhrc.gov] for correctness [correctnes...uction.com]. This essentially rules out Windows CE and a lot of other systems. Mostly since the complexity of those systems are too large.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Z00L00K (682162)
        Berkeley has produced a document that's even more specifically addressing the voting machine verification [berkeley.edu].
      • when it comes to voting machines the requirements should be that they are mathematically verifiable for correctness

        And how will that keep the printer from malfunctioning, or the ram from spiking under a very specific, untestable state (include temperature and a particular set of bits that causes the CPU to malfunction?

        Your solution sucks. The issues are not from mathematical failures, but from mechanical/electrical ones.

        These machines should consist of a single MCU which is connected to pushbuttons and fee
        • Why not just use paper? Any use of computers means that nobody can verify what software is actually running when they walk up to the machine on election day. There is no problem with paper and pen, and hand counting. It is completely verifiable, completely transparent, and with people watching the polling stations, ballot boxes, and counting, is actually quite hard to cheat the system. It's also very hard to do cheating en masse. Sure you could stuff a couple ballot boxes, but it is very hard to stuff

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      For a system whose job is so simple, keep the product equally simple.

      I have already proposed a new hardware solution: using a core component based on carbon nano-platelets, encased in a security layer composed on bio-cultivated fibres, coated by a impact resistance plastic polymer coating. This can be used to encode ultra-high resolution glyphs at the atomic level onto a wafer of specialised high contrast bio-cultivated fibre sheets. These sheets are collected in high security aluminium casings, with secured access points.

      For vote counting, these casings are accessed

    • "But the design philosophy they took is the wrong one. Look at the complexity behind these things!"

      Do you really think that the designers at Diebold are stupid? I don't. I think the unnecessary complexity is purposeful. Much like modern legislation, if you make it a bloated hypercomplex thing, it's much easier to hide and manupulate things in there. Now of course this sounds like conspiracy theory, but there is another very simple thing that occurred to me in the first ten seconds of reading the article.
    • I am totally shocked that even Diebold could screw up this badly

      Nah, I worked for 2 Fortune 500 companies ($LargeHardwareAndServicesProvider and $WeMakeHighendElectronics) and the arconyms SNAFU, TARFU, BOHICA, TAFUBB etc. were par for the course.

      Combine poor communications, bad management, short deadlines, sale of vaporware or processes, over selling of the product, political infighting and a blind gold rush mentality and this isn't really surprising. What is surprising is after all these years the custome

  • As a voter (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Z00L00K (682162) on Saturday January 05 2008, @01:41PM (#21924948) Homepage
    can I refrain from using the voting machine and request that my vote is registered by other means?

    Just curious since I can't vote - but is there legal room that allows it?

    What about disabled people that for some reason can't use a voting machine - what are their options?

    • A lot of the reason behind the push for voting machines was supposedly to be easier for disabled people to use to vote. After all, a blind person will have a lot of trouble with "scantron" or other "visual" type ballot.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by CastrTroy (595695)
        In Canada, disabled may get somebody to help them. Almost all polling stations have level access (so wheelchairs can access them). There are also mobile polling stations for those who are unable to travel to their polling station. I understand how a computer might help some disabled people, but it would probably be better if it was just used to mark a ballot which would be the same as those marked in pen by the non-disabled voters. Then they could all be counted by hand.

  • A minimalist open approach is needed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Bananatree3 (872975) on Saturday January 05 2008, @01:42PM (#21924964)
    Why the hell do you need Windows CE to count votes? Can't you just flash a chip and use basic hardware? The developers of this stuff are too lazy. They just want to open Visual Studio, make some code and then be done with it. They don't see that if you go minimalist, work from the hardware up and just use the bare minimum software needed to count the votes you get even better security.

    • Why the hell do you need Windows CE to count votes? Can't you just flash a chip and use basic hardware? The developers of this stuff are too lazy. They just want to open Visual Studio, make some code and then be done with it. They don't see that if you go minimalist, work from the hardware up and just use the bare minimum software needed to count the votes you get even better security.


      I think you're missing the point. [commondreams.org]
  • I understand the need for machines which make it easier for disabled people to vote, but the only "safe" machine is a machine which just marks ballots in a human-readable manner. The machine can ensure that ballots aren't created in an invalid state (multiple candidates when only one is allowed), and that non-vote selections are explicit (voter must choose 'none of the above' to proceed). The machine then prints the ballot in a human readable form and makes it available to the voter. The voter inspects it and either places it in the ballot box, or takes it to another machine which reads the ballot and makes the selections apparent to the voter (think vision impaired voter needing the ballot to be 'read' to them) and then after they confirm the ballot is accurate, places it in the ballot box.

    This still doesn't deal with the fact the many voters will vote without making 'hard' selections. Candidates at the top of the ballot get a 'bump' just by their position. There are other ways which a machine could subtlety influence an election, as well as marking some percentage of the ballots "erroneously" in hopes that voters wouldn't inspect the ballots closely and find the errors.

    In short, accurate elections with anonymous, non-voter-provable (to prevent blackmail/vote purchasing) votes are hard, but since they are the basis for our system of government, we need to do the work to do it right.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by RAMMS+EIN (578166)
      ``In short, accurate elections with anonymous, non-voter-provable (to prevent blackmail/vote purchasing) votes are hard, but since they are the basis for our system of government, we need to do the work to do it right.''

      The good news is that the hard work [wikipedia.org] has [wikipedia.org] been [wikipedia.org] done [votehere.com].

      The bad news is that none of the better systems have taken off yet. Part of the problem is that people really don't care. Part of the problem is that politicians actually don't _want_ to admit there is something wrong and fix it (that, at lea

  • I don't understand what's wrong (Score:4, Funny)

    by youthoftoday (975074) on Saturday January 05 2008, @01:50PM (#21925032) Homepage Journal
    Now, I'm not a US citizen, but the way I see it, Company X convinced officials A and B to buy these machines. The machines were bought, company X was paid by the taxpayer, officials A and B were paid by company X, the board, employees and shareholders of company X were paid. The voting machines went wrong so more money will have to be spent on them.

    Who cares about right and wrong? Rich people and public officials made themselves some money.

    Surely an American dream. What could be more perfect?

    • Election standards are below standard (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Bananatree3 (872975) on Saturday January 05 2008, @02:47PM (#21925614)
      Imagine Diebold going to NASA/Air Force and trying to peddle their sub-standard hardware for mission-critical situations. I'm sure they would be given the boot faster than they can cry in pain. Why should our nation's most critiqued software/hardware (Think: Space shuttle computer, NORAD tracking software) work 99.99999% of the time, but our Elections hardware/software is bought only on the good faith of some business executive?
  • I'm so very glad that we do our voting by putting a little "x" in a box and they're then hand counted by thousands of election workers while representatives of each party scrutinize each ballot to see if they're acceptable instead of this electronic no paper trail machines that screw up crap.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by vajaradakini (1209944)
        Electronic voting is there not here. Like I said, here we put a mark in a box and it's hand counted. No software to screw up, no voting machines that automatically register a vote for the party most friendly to the manufacturer of the voting machine instead of the opponent, not even any hanging chads! And wouldn't you know, it never took us a week to figure out who was in charge, all the votes are counted by the morning after. Although I really do like Estonia's idea, it would be nice to be able to vote
  • i am also no technofetishist

    sometimes, more tech thrown at a problem makes it worse, not better

    there is no compelling argument, NO COMPELLING ARGUMENT to use anything more than

    1. pencil
    2. paper
    3. optical scanner

    there is however, with electronic voting, AND mechanical voting something else:

    1. increased number of attack vectors
    2. loss of transparency in the voting process, and therefore mistrust in democratic results, and lingering lack of faith in government

    the only arguments for electornic voting are:

    1. kickbacks to officials
    2. increased business for a business that shouldn't exist

    no electronic voting. ever. anywhere

    accepting it means that people will begin to erode their fatih in democracy

    if they can't see it, smell it touch it, they won't trust it

    once again:

    1. pencil
    2. paper
    3. optical scanner

    anything else represents an eroding faith in democracy
    • Please mod the parent up.

      I've yet one single good reason for using touch screens that can't be (simply) solved by other means. My county uses paper ballots that are optically read. After they are read the drop in a sealed bin. Hand recounts are no problem.

      Technology does not always equal better. Sometimes it's worse.
      • *I've yet to see*

      • Re:i am no luddite (Score:4, Interesting)

        by CastrTroy (595695) on Saturday January 05 2008, @02:48PM (#21925620) Homepage
        My country uses paper ballots that are marked by pen, and optically scanned by the human eye. I don't see any reason why we need machines at all. Votes are counted so fast. That they had to make a law that results couldn't be reported before all polling stations were closed, because they believed the people on the west coast were being influence by the results from the east coast.
    • Right. And there is no good argument for using ATMs or computers either. Or the Internet, fuck it, who needs it.

      You tinfoil liberals are making me sick.
      • What an idiotic comment. I'm far from liberal btw.

        This is about voting, nothing else. Not ATM's and not computers. Voting needs to be 100% transparent, for the people running the election, the people running and the people voting.

    • In Brazil, electronic voting has been used for a LONG, LONG time - on all elections. There weren't any major problems or reports of fraud.

      There weren't any changes in perception by the people. Well, except for the very large lines we had to take when we still used paper ballots...

      Machines do break down, of course. The officials are trained to switch to paper ballots in that case. That do create extra lines and wait, but that's pretty much it.
    • Well, optical scan voting systems are a business as well. Diebold even has a line out. Don't indulge too much in the "evil corporation and corrupt government" line of thought. While I'm sure it is accurate in some cases, using it as a sweeping analogy just weakens your overall argument.

      Optical scanning seems to be currently in vogue in Ohio. After some controversy, Cuyahoga county (metro Cleveland) is in the process of abandoning its touch-screen voting machine for optical scanning. It won't be ready for th
      • Our ballets have a broken arrow (=== ====>) that you fill in to vote. They are a good 1.5in apart and easy to mark. If you don't mark them correctly, the machine simply rejects the ballot with a loud error beep, from there you can re-try.

        Simple.

  • Realtime Embedditis (Score:4, Funny)

    by arivanov (12034) on Saturday January 05 2008, @01:58PM (#21925116) Homepage
    Of course, rather than just ignore this unanticipated condition, the OS did the right thing for a voting machine and crashed.

    That is realtime ebedditis for you. A well known brain rotting disease which affects a specific portion of the programming community which most likely has a bit too much of Klingon blood in their veins. They can program a multitasking system only according to the 17th maxima of Klingon programming. "Klingon multitasking systems do notsupport "time-sharing". When a Klingon program wants to run, it challenges the scheduler in hand-to-hand combat and owns the machine." It looks like in this case they have also followed the other maxima of Klingon programming: "Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak. Bugs are good for building character in the user." and "Perhaps it IS a good day to die! I say we ship it!".

    On a more serious note this is someone strictly following the specs. There are systems where it if you encounter an unknown situation your spec says that you crash instead of trying to be original and let the watchdog sort it out. Quite common in embedded systems and standard spec requirement in things like voting terminals and ATM.

  • Propbably the most interesting part of the article: "Amazingly, the Diebold spokesman, Chris Riggal, admitted to me that the company is considering making the software open source on its next generation of touch-screen machines, so that anyone could download, inspect, or repair the code."

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by CastrTroy (595695)
      Or so that any polling station could compile their own version of the code, with minor changes, and load it on the voting machines so that they can mess with the results. I would trust electronic voting, if you could provide a way for each and every voter walking up to the machine to prove the the machine was indeed running the correct software.
  • Hart Inter-Civic prefers to criticize the test. [timescall.com] Apparently 99% accuracy should be good enough. Would they accept the same from their accountants and bankers?
    • 99% is more than acceptable in King County, state of Washington... In fact, the county executive is on record stating that an error rate of 1.5% is "accuracy any bank would envy"...

  • Cayahoga County???
    It's really Cuyahoga County [wikipedia.org]


    Not that I'm a spelling nazi...

  • We might be just like those in the 3rd world (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bogaboga (793279) on Saturday January 05 2008, @02:13PM (#21925272)
    It's good that these flaws have been noted but what saddens me is that nothing might be done. This is what happens in 3rd world countries. Do not laugh. This is serious business.

    These flaws were discovered at least 4 years ago http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2003/10/60713 [wired.com]. Like I said, nothing was done!

    After that, we go to those same 3rd world countries "teaching" them about how to serve the common man through democracy, accountability and the rule of law. Very sad indeed.

  • Well, congratulations the to NYT for the extremely timely reporting, more than a year after the elections they're talking about, and more than 3 years after the election when the HAVA voting machines were first used. Also, years after articles in magazines such as Harpers and many progressive sites, not to mention news report the day after the elections about voting machines failures, and statistical anomalies in the declared election results vs exit polls, not to mention anomalies such as number of undervo
  • ... if people are just fucking morons, how hard can it be to setup a vote which is hard to manipulate I mean really? Sometimes I think we should just have a national holiday for one whole week where everybody just goes, gets together and stands and gets counted openly triangulation of picture day via digital cameras, cell phones, etc. (multiple images everyone taking them, etc).

  • machines in Cayahoga County OH

    I would not expect the slashdot editors to know this but FYI it is spelled Cuyahoga County [wikipedia.org] not "Cayahoga" which is roughly correct phonetically but not correct otherwise. For those unfamiliar, Cuyahoga County is where the city of Cleveland [wikipedia.org] is located.

  • Electronic voting machine discussions on /. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by notnAP (846325) on Saturday January 05 2008, @02:54PM (#21925676)
    I love watching these stories and the threads that ensue.


    How telling is it that the overwhelming majority of /. users seem to despise the idea of technology in the ballot box? We're the group that one would think would be the first to welcome the modernization of voting, the elimination of the "arcane" technology of scribbles on paper as a way for millions of people to vote?

    Surely, we all recognize the benefits electronic voting could offer... With proper UI, disabled voters are given a voice undiminished by their physical limitations. Language barriers dissolve. Costs could be reduced. The environment is saved from literally truckloads of paper per state per election consumed. In theory, we could make voting easier via the internet or some other remote casting of ballots. The ease could even lead to a more democratic society, with voting happening more frequently - wouldn't it be nice if more people in local towns voted in town meetings than the vocal minority so directly benefited by the decisions made? The accuracy and speed of vote tallying would surpass anything we could do manually.

    And yet, the cries against anything more than optical scanning of ballots is so loud here.

    It seems an outside observer - or an insider observer trying to glean some wisdom from the group mentality - could infer one of two things from this behavior. Either this group of knowledgeable technophiles has managed to collectively do a 180 on this one topic, or the wisdom /. members collectively have regarding technology and the way soceity implements it leads us to the inevitable conclusion that while the theory of electronic voting is promising, its practice is doomed.

    So how could such fans of all things technology reach such a seemingly self-contradictory conclusion? Do we really despise the technology behind electronic voting? Or is it just that we realize there are two components when people employ technology: people and technology. And we do seem to like technology. Or would respect be a better word, that "we respect the power technology can give?" We fear the power the abuse of technology can win, and we know enough about this technology to see how easy it is to abuse.


    Disclaimer: I share what I seem to see as the majority opinion. I have counted ballots manually in the distant past, and I'm now employed at a company that prints paper ballots.

  • As someone who lives in the middle of this story (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dkleinsc (563838) on Saturday January 05 2008, @03:15PM (#21925854)
    First off, it's Cuyahoga, not Cayahoga. The county is named for the Cuyahoga River, best known for catching on fire several decades ago.

    Secondly, there were lots of reasons why this particular county was scrutinized: Ohio was to the 2004 presidential election what Floriday was to the 2000 election, and there were lots of reports of irregularities in Cuyahoga County. Cuyahoga Country is by far the most liberal area of Ohio, so a few thousand votes missing were likely to swing the election. Really the question still hanging over those election results is whether they were the result of incompetent poll workers or the efforts of Ken Blackwell (then Ohio Secretary of State and Bush campaign manager in Ohio). That's what the current Ohio Secretary of State Jen Brunner (a Democrat) is trying to determine.
  • I'm thankful for Diebold and the other screwups that engineered and produced these machines. Can you imagine what would have happened if they'd produced good machines (and I can't imagine that being too difficult) but that still didn't have a paper trail or a way to guarantee the votes? They would have skated in all 50 states and the democratic process would be in a big mess. Due to their incredible incompetence, the big media is waking up. Seriously, thanks Diebold or whatever you're calling yourself now!

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Wonko the Sane (25252) *
      No, it's not Microsoft's fault. It's the vendor's fault for adding extra complexity to a system that needs to be more reliable than your MP3 player.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ScrewMaster (602015)
      Wrong as wrong can be, my friend.

      The best way is to hire good designers, hire good programmers, then hire good management and give them clear targets. A small, close-knit development team can do wonders. You see, the production of good software is as much a function of good management as it is engineering talent. You can hire the best, most accountable engineers on the planet, but put a fool in charge and you're still going to ship crap. And you know what? Nobody ever complains about the fact that the mo

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