NY Times Endorses Open-Source Election Software 297
jdauerbach writes "On its editorial page today, the New York Times called for election system reform, saying among other things that 'Congress should impose much more rigorous safeguards, including a requirement that all computer code be made public. It should require that all electronic machines produce a voter-verified paper trail.'"
One more thing... (Score:3, Insightful)
And even then, there's nothing stopping Diebold, which has a lot of experience with hardened public computer terminals, from making the interface and infrastructure equipment that runs the code. Yes, they then lose the "lock in" that the proprietary software buys them, but if their other systems and hardware are that good, it won't be a problem. Heck, that kind of openness in the context of the election system code could even be a PR win for Diebold, as the problems become more and more public.
Unfortunately, too late anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
And after the vote is over, the topic will probably disappear from public consciousness anyway.
Re:Some thoughts (Score:5, Insightful)
Since the controversial company seems to favor the side that controls the entire government at this point, they have no real motivation to change things. Meaningful election reform won't happen until we have a split government. That is, when one party controls the presidency and the other party controls at least one of the houses of Congress.
Hopefully, in 2004 we can either bring in a Democratic president, and/or give the Democrats control of the Senate. The overall impact of getting away from the one-party-controls-all system we have at the moment will be a move back toward the center, where all the good compromising gets done. As it is now, we have one party pushing the country clear over to their side, with no meaningful compromise going on. No matter what party is in control, that sort of thing is bad for the country.
Computer Code Be Made Public... (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted, I'd prefer if it were truly open source, but I suspect that we're a bit of a ways away from GPL voting code.
Paper Trails Should be Mandatory (Score:3, Insightful)
Despite the inherent liberal bias of the "New York Times", the "Times" correctly asserts that all voting machines should leave a paper trail. Without a paper trail, we would have no way to verify the validity of the votes cast for a candidate. We also would have no way to identify tampering.
The issue with paper trails has been known in the academic community for a long time. Noted computer scientists from CMU, MIT, and other vanguards of American technology had signed a petition demanding that all voting machines leave a paper trial. The ACM finally officially committed to the cause recently (according to SlashDot). Now, the liberal print media has committed to the cause.
Perhaps, someone can explain why the Department of Defense is still allowing overseas military personnel to cast their ballots by Internet on servers without any paper trail.
Re:Nevada is ranked the best voter system (Score:4, Insightful)
Is that a surprise? That state that houses the Nevada Gaming Commission would have the most stringent requirements for electronic voting machines?
Re:One more thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
The only thing I could imagine being ok to sell with respect to voting, is facilitation. But the act of vote counting MUST be transparent. As a result the US government MUST OWN the code that counts the votes. This can never be proprietary.
They can buy communication and data storage and data security products from diebold to protect the voting data and its transmission. But the vote processing portion must always be open for complete public scrutiny.
Re:Yes... but (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm personally not so concerned with malicious tampering, although its entirely possible and feasible. I'm more worried about bugs, which seem to be the only constant in today's software.
Indeed the rules in place today do pander to the two party system, and there are some odd laws in various places. For example, no member of the Communist Party can be placed on the ballot in Kansas. This relic does little good; I'd be much more worried about candidates with secret ties to the Communists rather than a guy who's publicly Communist. Another ballot law in Kansas restricted parties with more than two words, like Natural Law Party, until the Natural Law Party. I can't recall the purpose of this law, but the good news is its gone.
Re:Yes... but (Score:3, Insightful)
It would be pretty hard to detect a spoof.
Re:Some thoughts (Score:3, Insightful)
Or, in the case of the federal government, gridlock - which is good for the people.
Re:Some thoughts (Score:5, Insightful)
The only safe paper trail is one that can be checked by the individual voters. If you are going to tamper with the electronic record so that every third vote for foo goes to bar then it is a trivial matter to make sure that the paper that you spit out at the end of the day matches the fiddled vote tallies.
That's why the only sane way to do electronic voting is to use whatever fancy dan front end you want, I couldn't care less, but at the end of the voting session you spit out a human verifiable paper receipt that is the official vote. This vote gets put in the ballot box and if anyone questions the integrity of the vote then you open the ballot boxes and count the votes by hand. In most cases the electronic count of the vote will be the one used. However, in cases where fraud is suspected there is a verifiable paper trail that can be followed.
This gives the voter a chance to read his ballot and make sure that his or her vote was cast correctly, and it makes it much more difficult to "hack" the vote.
sometimes low tech is best (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Paper Trails Should be Mandatory (Score:3, Insightful)
A nice Dutch comment on Diebold (Score:2, Insightful)
http://www.boomchicago.nl/Section/Latest-News/Boom ChicagoVotingMachine [boomchicago.nl]
Mirror: http://politiken.dk/media/wvx/3223.WVX [politiken.dk]
Let the Slashdot'ing begin ;-)
Re:Computer Code Be Made Public... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't care if the code is public or not as long as the polling machine prints out a human verifiable ballot that counts as my official vote in case of suspected fraud. Heck, the actual software that does the polling can be top secret obfusticated C generated by an Intercal front end for all I care. As long as I can look down at my ballot when I am done voting and verify that the machine tallied my votes correctly I am perfectly happy.
Public availability of the source code doesn't guarantee that the polling machine that I am using is working correctly, or that it hasn't been tampered with. Hard-copy ballots that can be hand verified in case of suspected fraud guarantee that folks wishing to fix an election at least have to work at it.
These are not public tests! (Score:5, Insightful)
These machines are tested in secret and because of IP law and NDAs you will never know the results. [msn.com] The Australians have open source voting machines. Its not that hard to pull off, that is if you CARE about elections. Seems many in power see fraud as par for the course in the US. [google.com]
So, please excuse me for not trusting my one lousy vote to the CEO of some company which is more secretive with its machines than a 16 year old girl with her diary. Pardon me for taking his partisan comments ("I will deliver Ohio for Bush") as just that: an inapropriate partisan comment.
No conspiracy theories needed. If you keep things secret, someone will find a way to abuse them.
>and that there is also a paper record
Err, people want paper tickets they can verify and put in a box for recounts. Attaching a printer to a voting machine at the end of the day is hardly a "paper trail."
Re: Paper Trails Should be Mandatory (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, I'd hardly call the Times "liberal", it's been pro-Bush for most of the Bush's administration and during the Clinton adminstration it attacked the sitting president on a daily basis - on the front page. Perhaps you are referring to Dowd or Krugman? These arn't part of the NY Times Editoral board, they are OP-ED contributors, pushing one position or the other, in the same manner as William Safire (Nixon's Speech Writer) and David Brooks are there to push so-called conservative positions. The NY Times is far less "liberal" than you think -- perhaps if you stopped listening to Rush Limbaugh for a while you might realize that news papers should be free to explore all sorts of positions, popular or not. A "liberal" news source would be the American Prospect.
Re:Are we sure... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:sometimes low tech is best (Score:3, Insightful)
B) Ballots are put into the wrong piles for who the person voted for.
C) Ballots are "miscounted".
D) Ballots are "lost".
E) Ballots are erased and re-inked.
Sorry, all of these can happen much more easily inside a black box than they can out in the open.
F) Your system forgot the write-in ballots which require someone to read anothers handwriting.
So you're saying the election might be stolen from a write-in candidate? Somehow I think democracy might survive if poll workers have to read handwritten names that are kept on record.
Paper ballots are actually much easier to screw around with than an electronic or mechanical system coded by an honest programer or designed by an honest engineer.
Unfortunately, honesty is not a verifiable attribute. There's no way for sure to know that the programmer or engineer really is honest. If the code isn't auditable, we have to take their word for it. Most likely honest is not acceptable in this sorry situation we've gotten ourselves into.
Annonominity (Score:4, Insightful)
Another important aspect is that the person's vote should not be "sellable". If this mechanism admits the possibility of a card to be sold, then it is a non-starter.
Re:Some thoughts (Score:2, Insightful)
Why is it that the US seems to want to dispose of the good ol ballot box? It works in almost every other democracy in the world.
A system that uses technology for fast results but is verifiable using tried and true methods seems to be the best of both worlds.
Re:One-Time IDs (Score:2, Insightful)
When I mail in my card, would I have to write my return address on the envelope? Even if I do not include my return address, if I mail it from my house, it can be traced back to me.
Re:sometimes low tech is best (Score:2, Insightful)
Even if the code is auditable, if it's not auditable on the specific voting machine you're using you can't trust it.
Another difference between the problems listed with the low-tech solution and the high-tech is a difference in scale. It takes more effort to do any of the problems with paper ballots on a wide scale than it does to have a system that simply changes the recorded totals.
Re:Some thoughts (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nevada is ranked the best voter system (Score:4, Insightful)
Come to think of it, *IS* Linus running this year?
Politics shifting left (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at the 2000 election. Look at current presidential polls. The country is pretty much evenly split.
Those of us on the right have been feeling the Republican party jump left for quite some time now.
The Republicans are traditionally the US's conservative party, in favor of (generally) keeping things as they are. The Democrats are traditionally the US's progressive party, trying to change things. The conservatives hold back the progressives so they don't adopt too many short sighted ideas while the progressives keep society adapting to new problems. So Democratic ideas get slowly adopted by the culture and the Democrats of 40 years ago are Republicans today.
Re:sometimes low tech is best (Score:5, Insightful)
I put bold tags around your enormous qualifying assumption, which you seem to gloss over as if it's a given. It is extremely difficult to create a properly designed high-tech voting system. The network of bluescreening touchscreens that lie in wait for many of us don't even come close.
Paper ballots have problems with hanging chads (if they're the punch-out type) or improper erasures (did he intend to erase "A" and vote vor "B", or did he vote for both of them?) or faint markings that may or may not have been intended to be votes.
Feh. These are sources of random error, which although undesirable, affects the outcome nowhere near as much as systematic error. [ucomics.com] In general systematic error has partisan effects, whereas random error in general does not- it mostly cancels itself out. 10000 votes affected by random error affect the election about as much as 200 votes affected by systematic error.
See this post [slashdot.org] and the reply to it for details. I don't want to keep repasting it in every thread. Maybe I'll start a journal.
And you're going to have errors when you start to count millions and millions of paper ballots by hand.
Like I said before, unless you hire outright partisans to count votes, these will be sources of random error.
Any candidate who lost by a narrow enough margin is going to demand a recount,
Good. I hope they do.
A recount for the Presidential election would have to be completed before January 2nd. Limited time means people rushing, which means more errors...
Not if your Daddy appointed a few Supreme Court justices. They can stop the recount and choose you as president before the outcome is even known.
I will though...and small opinion (Score:3, Insightful)
"I am not trying to imply that Diebold was purposely obfuscating their code for any reason..."
I WILL
I will state the diebolds actions to date, and what we have found out, are way more than enough evidence for a serious grand jury investigation that they have tried to obfuscate the code and that it is for some particular reasons, ie, the profits to be gained by controlling the US elections. Let's talk untold trillions of dollars and the most powerful nation on the planet, and what control of the political process is really worth as an incentive for criminality. No other possible criminal "prize" comes close to these potential profits of power and money. these folks should have long ago been investigated VERY seriously, not pseduo play acting investigastions, but serious and highly detailed investigations into attempted electioneering fraud, and RICO violations at a minimum, and if implemented honestly, would probably result in the indictments of a lot of diebold officials and some high level politicians and businessmen.
They are, IMO, attempting to hijack the national vote for massivepolitical and economic gain. They are far worse than Microsoft or SCO in this regard.
And it looks like they will be successful at it, because, frankly, the US people have hit a cognitive dissonance point of disbelief and little action with the sheer overlapping and overwhelming levels of corruption and malfeasance coming from the collusion of government and very large business in this nation. The people have reached a saturation point, gone beyond a pain threshold, been terrorized into sub servience and obedience. Not everyone but such a high percentage of the general population and an even higher percentage inside the governmental and justic system apparatus have been swamped into disbelief and inaction that nothing of any worthwhile results will come of this other than we will have a full bore dictatorship shortly.
It is 2/3rds the way there now, once they finalise their ability to completely manipulate the news, the casting of ballots, the count, the results of the count, and can also control any opposition from any scale by disappearing them or arresting them on bogus charges, then they will have completely won, and it sure looks like they are about exactly at that point in time now.
That is my opinion, based not only on just diebolds actions and realities, but on the state of the nation as a whole, the gestalt now. We have been kicked from so many angles simultaneously and continuously that there's no adequate defense other than curling up into a ball, metamorphically speaking. Yelling STOP THAT isn't working and hasn't worked. "Sueing" the perpetrators WON'T work as they control the justice system almost entirely. Relying on the "enforcers" to notice reality and act accordingly is beyond ludicrous, they just follow orders. Hoping that millions of drones in the bureaucracy will one day act in the interests of the nation rather than their checks is a lost cause, forget about it.
And I'm not being cyncical, I am trying to be as realistic and down to earth as possible.
There is no fix available following traditional business as usual methods. None. It has gone too far for that.
Easiest way I can think of. (Score:5, Insightful)
And the easiest way I can think of doing that is with a nice, old fashined punch card.
The voter chooses at the computer, the computer records the vote electronically, punches the card, and prints the names of the candidate chosen on it.
That way, the voter looks at the card, checks whether the person they've selected is printed on it and then drops it in the box.
Each machine can be verified by matching:
#1. The electronic count to
#2. The punch cards to
#3. A hand count
It's quick and easy to tally punch cards if that's request and if a hand vote is necessary, it's just as easy (but not as quick).
That way, any problems can quickly be tracked to the machine(s).
Eavesdropping the voting machines? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Politics shifting left (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know. I think one could argue that the president has done a good job of discrediting himself
Re:Politics shifting left (Score:3, Insightful)
Heads and tails is an even split too. It doesn't mean the people are split, it means there's no difference on issues that matter. We'll stay in Iraq no matter what. The gap between the rich and the poor will keep getting bigger. We will continue to imprison a greater proportion of our population than any other nation.
There is no help from either side, so a coin flip is as good as anything. That's why half the population doesn't vote in any election. It's not apathy, it's acknowledgment that it doesn't really matter.
Re:Politics shifting left (Score:5, Insightful)
The Republicans have their power because talk radio, FoxNews, 9/11 and a general confluence of events have made it fashionable and trendy for Americans to be right wing fanatics again. The Republican's have also become VERY good at milking the politics of fear to build that coalition. Remember the rhetoric, keep the Republicans in office or you and your children will surely die. 9/11 is the best thing that ever happened to the Republican party, they know it and they are milking it to the hilt and will in perpetuity unless Americans wake up to the con.
"The Republicans are traditionally the US's conservative party, in favor of (generally) keeping things as they are."
Thats a ridiculous simplification of reality and is ancient history thanks to the likes of Tom Delay, George W. and a pack of really dangerous neocons (Wolfowitz, Perl, Feith, etc).
The Republicans are no longer even remotely conservative. True conservatives are in fact getting fed up with the new Republican party, they just dont have any place to go. They are also being replaced as the Republican base by evangelicals, rascist Southerners who bailed on the Democrats when LBJ pushed civil rights, rural Americans and Fox News watchers who amazingly just don't get how dangerous, corrupt and dishonest the Bush administration really is (and of course Kerry is so pathetic Bush does almost look good by comparison).
Real conservatives are aghast at the massive spending and deficits the new Republicans are running. They only fiscal policy they like are tax cuts for the rich but they want those to be paid for by slashing spending, not massive borrowing.
The so called Medicare "reform" act was a gigantic transfer of money from tax payers to the health care and drug mega corps. Real conservatives hate that.
Launching wars like the one in Iraq which have nothing to do with defending America, and engaging in nation building there, are also anathema to conservatives.
Its a reason why a number of conservative newspapers are either endorsing Kerry or endorsing Bush only very reluctantly because they see Kerry as worse. The conservative paper in Orlando is endorsing a Democrat for the first time in 40 years. The last time they did that was LBJ because Goldwater was an off the deep end right wing extremist just like Bush/Cheney.
But, the fact is on most key areas the Republicans and Democrats are becoming nearly indistinguishable. They are both owned by corporations and lobbyists which means they are the ones that really make most policy decisions and it doesn't really matter that much which party is in power.
The two parties have a stock set of issues that they use to divide the American people, abortion, gays, tax the rich or tax the poor, and con us in to thinking we have a choice. But, once you get past those inflammatory issues they are really both about taxing ordinary working people in to the ground, spreading pork to their friends and slowly stripping us of all of our civil liberties, which is again all anathema to true conservatives.
Come on, Jimmy Carter said that vote was OK (Score:1, Insightful)
And if we can't trust Jimmy Carter, who can we trust?
Of course, Jimmy Carter also managed to negotiate that treaty with North Korea where Kim Jong Il promised to not build nuclear weapons...
Sheeple. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:sometimes low tech is best (Score:3, Insightful)
This is about the most stupid comment I've seen in weeks. It is not the total population of the country that's the issue, it's the ratio of vote counters to voters (given that vote counting works in parallel). If the US and Germany both employed the same percentage of their populations as vote counters, both countries would get the votes counted in about the same amount of time.
Get a clue, FFS. How can this have been +3 Insightful?
(The comment is also doubly stupid, because the US only has about four times the population of Germany anyway.)