How To Lose An Election 828
smooth wombat writes "CNN has posted a story to their site about electronic votes from Miami-Dade County's first widespread use of touchscreen voting machines that were lost due to a computer crash.: 'The malfunction was made public after the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, a citizen's group, requested all data from the 2002 gubernatorial primary between Democratic candidates Janet Reno and Bill McBride.' Other groups are challenging a state rule preventing counties that use the machines from conducting manual recounts from them." Reader fatwater adds a link to the New York Times' coverage.
Re:verification (Score:4, Informative)
So that you cannot be held personally responsible by a repressive regime when they find out who you voted for.
Correction (Score:4, Informative)
The rule exempts not prevents the machines from conducting manual recounts (from paper receipts). Slight difference.
Re:realtime paper backup? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Troubling times ahead (Score:2, Informative)
Many of us are not standing idly by http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ [blackboxvoting.org]
How can you have trust in a system that does not dare to have the voters verify that their votes are counted correctly?
Many of us don't trust the system, but are forced to use it.
How can you have "voting machines" that leave even the slightest doubt about what the voter wants to vote?
Ask Diebold and the Republican politicians that they so unabashedly support.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
The most important thing... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S0006
Shows some of the security problems with the voting machines. Even if the article is over a year old, it's still troubling: storing results in MS Access databases, introducing the ability to "correct" vote tallies and erase the trail. If voting machines are going to be computer systems, they need to be designed from the ground up for security, not just "secure enough right now". And not having any backup as in this story? Sounds like these machines were made by amateurs.
In Riverside County (Score:3, Informative)
- It's election night, and early returns suggest trouble for the incumbent. Then, mysteriously, the vote count stops and observers from the challenger's campaign see employees of a voting-machine company, one wearing a badge that identifies him as a county official, typing instructions at computers with access to the vote-tabulating software.
See also a reprint [commondreams.org] of the Independent UK article and a longer LA City Beat article [lacitybeat.com] on the event.When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The challenger demands an investigation. But there are no ballots to recount, and election officials allied with the incumbent refuse to release data that could shed light on whether there was tampering with the electronic records.
This isn't a paranoid fantasy. It's a true account of a recent election in Riverside County, Calif., reported by Andrew Gumbel of the British newspaper The Independent.
Re:This is why there need to be reform (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This is why there need to be reform (Score:1, Informative)
I've voted in Miami-Dade County since long before the iVotronic. Back then it worked this way: you sign in with a trained volunteer poll worker (usually a civic-minded retiree) who checks your ID and records your ballot number with your signature. You insert the card into the machine and over the red alignment pegs. You punch for your candidates and remove the card. If you're smart and prepared you check the card for loose chad and that the numbers punched correspond to your selections; it takes under 15 sec. I did it every time. If you are unsatisfied, you ask for a replacement ballot. After the the third ballot they tell you no. Assuming you chose to vote, you put it into a paper envelope recieved with the ballot. You hand the envelope to the poll worker beside the ballot box who detaches the perforated top of the ballot card, containing only the ballot number. He places the ballot number card into a separate box for auditing and hands back your ballot. You place it in the ballot box. The ballot you cast has no identifying mark. No politician can trace your vote.
I have worked for a few political campaigns. They usually purchase voter data. It contains name, address, phone number, party, race, number of votes cast (presumably ballots signed for) in the last five elections. Phone is missing from about 10% of voters.
Voter secrecy is as crucial as reliable and auditable voting/tallying systems. Secrecy and auditability are at odds, but the problem is solveable in the physical realm as I have described above.
I don't see how elections can be proven secure when they are virtualized by software. Nothing less than a voter-verifiable paper record is acceptable.
Call your Rep to support HR2239! (Score:3, Informative)
For more information go here: http://verifiedvoting.org/resources/hr2239_volunt
Or to read the bill in full: http://www.theorator.com/bills108/hr2239.html [theorator.com]
Let's get this passed so we don't have to worry about anyone monkeying around in quite possibly one of the most important elections this country has seen in decades-with two very divergent paths for the American people.
Re:Cat got your tongue Florida? (Score:4, Informative)
You can go doublecheck what you deposited last week but you can't (and shouldn't be able to) go back and doublecheck how you voted last week.
Re:Yup, yup... (Score:2, Informative)
Now, to be fair, a number of them were black; while you seem to imply that we should be ashamed that "felons" vote democrat, should we be ashamed that black people do too?
the reason printers suck... (Score:2, Informative)
But, printed paper reciepts are still the best, most tamper-resistant way to create a human-readable audit trail. They can be text so they can be read by humans or by OCR (works for checks, why not ballots?)
As I see it, the job of the touchscreen should be to provide a better UI to prevent mis-votes, period. Yes, it could count votes too, but only subject to audit - the paper ballot should still be considered authoritative.
Why? A number of reasons. One, the voting machines lack the physical security of the oft-compared ATM network, so they're vulnerable to tampering. Two, the systems and infrastructures in the roll-outs thus far seem to be "beta" quality. Three, their back-office systems aren't "hardened" against single-point failure well enough (the latest Florida fiasco being evidence of this point.) Four, the systems are proprietary and not subject to truly independent review.
In short, Diebold, Sequoia et. al. have shown that they are not ready for prime time. They don't "get" that the job their machines are being asked to perform has importance on par with, say, the Shuttle's flight control software.
So, paper redundancy is needed.
This won't get read b/c the thread is too big (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This is why there need to be reform (Score:5, Informative)
Probably the most famous real-world case of push poling was what Bush's campaign did to McCain in South Carolina. His campaign asked: "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?". McCain was campaining with his adopted Bangladeshi daughter - having semi-dark skin, this helped convince people that the question on the poll was, in fact, an illegitimate black child.
Required Reading for US Voters (Score:2, Informative)
Electronic voting could also be handled by DBT/Choicepoint. Perhaps the US elections could be held under the review of UN officials to make sure they're free and fair...
Links:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/events/newsn
http://www.infernalpress.com/Columns/elect
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010205&c
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChoicePoin
http://www.choicepoint.com/ne
Another Recent Article I Read (Score:4, Informative)
All the preferences were prechecked "Republican"!
Some of the immigrants complained to the Democratic Party officials in Florida and the Federal Elections Commission is investigating.
It doesn't get more obvious than this.
Why Florida is still part of the United States instead of Germany - or maybe North Korea - is a mystery to me.
Re:Tinfoil hat alert!!! (Score:3, Informative)
But Hitler did not yet hold the nation in thrall. Hitler's initial election into office and his use of constitutionally enshrined mechanisms to shore up power have led to the myth that his country elected him dictator and that a majority supported his ascent. He was made Chancellor in a legal appointment by President Hindenburg. This was a bit of historical irony, as the mainstream parties had supported Hindenburg as the only viable alternative to Hitler, not realizing that it would be Hindenburg who would bring about the end of the republic.
Re:Tinfoil hat alert!!! (Score:3, Informative)
Having refreshed my memory on Venezuela I see they are going ahead with a Chavez recall August 15, the recall being the thing Chavez has been resisting, not elections. He was elected to a six year term in 2000, though the elections were heavily disputed, just like America's 2000 election. Much of the blame then fell on electronic voting, provide by America's own Republican backed ES&S. Not sure why they would have trusted their election to a company with potential ulterior motives but they did and it was a disaster. A case study in evoting gone wrong.
The August recall will also make extensive use of electronic voting machines [cnn.com] this time by a little know Florida company, Smartmatic.
If Chavez is the dictator you say he is, and I'd say its 50/50, he will, no doubt, use these machine to insure victory. Of course, if he does rig the election using electronic voting he will just prove a dicator wannabe in the U.S. could do the same thing a few months later.
Oh, but wait apparently Venezuela's evoting machines will provide a printed record so I guess we would have to say their elections have a slightly better chance of being on the up and up than our own. Odd, that in a head to head trustworthiness contest between Chavez and his voting machines and the Bush family and their voting machines I would say Chavez wins.