Dutch Voting Machines De-Certified

Peer writes "The Dutch government has officially decided that it will no longer use voting machines (Babel Fish Translation) for elections. So it's pencil and paper from now on. Activists have been campaigning against the use of voting machines for some time."

Begs the question

Will there ever be a day when electronic voting will be viewed with the same or greater level of credibility as paper voting?

Some pedant has probably corrected 'begs' already.

Only when tampering with the machine will not make it possible to cheat the vote, and there are very few (although >0) designs that allow for that.

Re:Some pedant has probably corrected 'begs' alrea

For instance, one of these [wired.com] but with a human-readable bar code along the left side.

Re:Some pedant has probably corrected 'begs' alrea

Or rather; when the possibility and scale of fraud possible with voting machines becomes equal or less than that of paper votes.
Let's not kid ourselves here; paper voting isn't perfect either.
Paper is easier to commit fraud with, but voting machines allow for much larger scale of fraud if they are hacked.
When we find a way to guarentee a limit to this scale, voting machines will become more reliable than paper.

Re:Some pedant has probably corrected 'begs' alrea

All for the low low price of only $1000 per voter. Seriously. Paper is cheap, and has served us well for many years. How much is too much for something that only does as good as paper. For the cost of electronic voting machines to be worth it, it has to be many times more reliable and accountable than paper. What is the true cost of purchasing, operating, and maintaining voting machines that we can guarantee are significantly better than paper. And even then, is going from 99.9% accuracy on the vote to 99.99% accuracy on the vote really worth spending billions of dollars on voting machines?

Some of it is our own fault

Paper certainly is cheap, and it's been around a long time--a much longer time than exit polls, on-the-spot reporters, and cable news. We've now grown to expect that a winner will be declared in State X fifteen minutes after the polls close there. Used to was, people waited days to know the election results. The famous (or infamous) DEWEY BEATS TRUMAN newspaper headline from the U.S. presidential election in 1948 is certainly an example of premature "certainty" in election results. After television arrived, people could stay up all night "watching the election returns" and retire to bed, exhausted, still not knowing the outcome. It takes a little longer to count paper ballots, but it's certainly worthwhile considering some of the alternatives. We just have to get over our desire for almost-instant gratification.

Re:Some of it is our own fault

I really don't understand the US need to have votes counted so quickly. You vote in November. The president gets sworn in in January. Lots of time for counting.

Re:Some of it is our own fault

It is all part of their "I want it now." culture. Not to mention that on voting day they have to vote for everything from President (which they don't actually vote for) right down to the lowest municipale office of dog catcher in some places.

Re:Some of it is our own fault

Paper ballots don't take days to tabulate, we use them exclusively in Canada and final results are always in within a few hours of the polls closing. Thats the final tally, not some estimate based on 5% of the vote being counted.

Re:Some pedant has probably corrected 'begs' alrea

And even then, is going from 99.9% accuracy on the vote to 99.99% accuracy on the vote really worth spending billions of dollars on voting machines?

And what happens when the difference between two candidates is only 0.05% after the votes are counted, and the loser demands a recount? Suddenly that difference between 99.9% and 99.99% accuracy matters very much.

In the U.S., the entire fuss over electronic voting machines began because the 2000 presidential election hinged on determining a majority that was within the error margin of spoiled ballots. The problem is that paper voting will always produce spoiled ballots. It doesn't matter how simple you make the process (e.g. "Just put in an X in one of these two boxes"), a certain percentage of the electorate (e.g. the mentally ill, the illiterate, the very elderly, the mentally handicapped) will screw it up.

So in typical fashion, U.S. politicians went overboard and tried to "fix" the spoiled ballot problem with electronic voting machines. The problem with that method is that you'll never get people to have 100% trust in computerized voting. Someone, somewhere, will always make accusations of vote fixing, even if you create a paper trail. So now the pendulum is swinging back to paper ballots.

I'm just hoping I won't see another presidential election so close in my lifetime, because no matter what voting technique you use, the loser will cry foul in a very close race. Fortunately it only seems to happen every 40 years or so (Kennedy's election being the previous example), which provides enough time for the fuss to die down.

Count them where they are cast

Paper is easier to commit fraud with, but voting machines allow for much larger scale of fraud if they are hacked.
When we find a way to guarentee a limit to this scale, voting machines will become more reliable than paper.

I disagree. Here's how to make paper safer than any machine will ever be:

Mark the paper with a pencil, put it in a box. All day long, party representatives are welcome to keep their eye on the boxes. At the end of the day, election officials do the counting, in the same place where to votes were cast so there is no possibility of switching in transit. The party representatives are there looking over their shoulder and doing their own count. If there is a dispute, there's an awful lot of witnesses.

Because the number of voters per precinct will be relatively low, the undisputed result will be known in a couple of hours at the most and because there were party representatives at every precinct, they know what the national total should add up to, so no chance for any shenanigans by the central authority there either.

This is how the Canadians do it, by the way. Nobody ever disputes an election in Canada.

No machine will ever beat that. The more sophisticated your encryption and tamper proofing, the more sophisticated the fraud - it's an arms race you can't win.

Re:Some pedant has probably corrected 'begs' alrea

You may be able to make a machine that it's possible to verify the votes for, but how do you make a machine that nobody could tamper with. You could probably replace the entire internals of most voting machines without anybody noticing.

Machine-ASSISTED voting is cool

Machines are good at two things:
Marking ballots.
Counting ballots.

But there must be ballots. These ballots must be human-readable at all stages between the marking of the ballot and the canvassing of the election. A human must confirm the ballot is what he intends to vote before actually casting it.

A machine that reads/speaks or writes/marks a paper ballot is invaluable to help the mobility or visually impaired and the illiterate and it can reduce costs in multi-precinct polling places or in polling places that use more than one language.

A separate vote-tally machine can greatly speed up the vote count.

However, you must have a human-readable piece of paper, plastic, or something else we call a ballot in case the vote need to be recounted by hand, and this ballot must be examinable by the voter before he makes his vote official.

Likewise, the ballots must be stored in a location that is protected from tampering until after the election results are final.

Re:Machine-ASSISTED voting is cool

Frankly, the only reason I can think of someone wanting the illiterate to vote is if they are planning on tricking them into voting as part of their hoard.

having them vote may be democratic, but having the uninformed vote is not good for democracy, and its really hard to be sure you're informed if you can't check sources (ie, read).

Re:Machine-ASSISTED voting is cool

Picking on the illiterate in written form? Seriously? How can they retort!

Re:Machine-ASSISTED voting is cool

We count votes by hand here in Canada, and I haven't noticed any speed problems. It's so fast they created a law so that the results from the east coast couldn't be released until the polls on the west coast closed, because they thought releasing the results influence the west coast results. It shouldn't be hard to find enough volunteers to get the counting done within a couple of hours for each polling station. Maybe you have too many people going to each polling station. There's only 352 [www.cbc.ca] votes per polling station, so counting that many ballots shouldn't take too long.

Self-inflicted problems

Your problem, not ours, and entirely self-inflicted. The size of U.S. ballots is the problem. How the votes are tallied is beside the point.

In the last Federal election I was the first person to vote in my area (on my way to work), so I was the one who looked in the ballot box, certified to the Returning Officer that it was empty, and taped it shut. How much more democracy do you want?

In our last provincial election we also had a referendum on adopting a single-transferrable vote system for our elections. I voted yes, but not enough people did, and the referendum failed. We would have stuck with paper ballots (a paper trail is non-negotiable, IMHO), but most versions of STV require computers to tabulate the results in a timely manner.

...laura, proudly Canadian

Machines Voting

Hey everybody, let's march on Amsterdam for machine sufferage! You too Hedonism Bot!

-Bender

Intolerant

There's only two things I hate in this world: people who are intolerant of other people's cultures - and the Dutch.

A better translation

Google Translate gives a better translation than Babelfish:
http://www.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.minbzk.nl%2Factueel%2F112441%2Fnieuw&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=nl&tl=en [google.com]

I figured it out

Punch cards.

We need to reinvent punchcards.

Make the ballot display on a computer screen and let the user select the options he wants. When you are done, I punches a human readable card with the results.

Those results are placed into another box by hand after the voter looks over the results. You do the precount from the computer booth, then you feed the cards into a card punch reading machine for the official vote.

recount all you want. you will also have a paper trail. problem solved.

Too little added value

To summarize the article, hopefully more readable than the Babelfish translation:
The Dutch government sees too little added value in using voting machines, and claims that developing new voting machines will be expensive, and won't solve the problem of the possibility of eavesdropping.

Illiterate

We can't do this in the US, because that means disenfranchisement of those people who are illiterate.

I'm sorry, but if you can't figure out how to vote, then maybe, just maybe you don't really need to vote.

Once upon a time people had to care about who they were voting for, enough to learn how to participate in the process. If you don't care enough to learn, why should we tailor a system that caters to your illiteracy?

If that is what people want, why not put pictures on the ballots like all the other illiterate countries do?

Probably a very stupid question but..

As a naive Brit who's only ever voted on paper..

If the only way an electronic count will be trusted is by a paper audit trail, then presumably those paper printouts will still have to be counted by hand to verify that they get a result acceptably close to the result the computer gives. In which case, what have we gained in using computers to do the count?

If a manual count of the computer-printouts is not carried out, then how does a printed copy give me the voter any reassurance at all? It would reassure me that I'd not accidentally voted for the wrong person, but could not prove to me that my vote has been counted.

I can understand the argument that if the source code to the program is open then I could inspect it, but most voters are unlikely to have the expertise to do that.

Re:What's so hard about traceable electonic voting

The problem is that you don't want voting to be traceable. You want it to specifically not be traceable. You shouldn't be able to tell who voted for who. After things are said and done with, I shouldn't even be able to prove who I voted for (so I can't prove it to someone else who was coercing me). What you need is a system that you can verify with a high degree of certainty, that once you cast your vote, that it will be counted properly, and that the same will happen for all other votes cast. The only way to do this is with physical pieces of paper. Because you can be sure that once you put it in the ballot box, that it doesn't leave (you can have people watching the box). And that once the box is opened for counting, that they are counted correctly. You can do this by having people observe the opening and counting process to ensure that things are done right. With electronic voting, votes can leave the ballot box without anybody noticing (deleting records), and votes can be added without anybody noticing (adding records).