NYT Notes Flaws In Current Electronic Voting Methods 121
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."
As a voter (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re:Absentee Vote! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The only "safe" voting machine is a ballot marker. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
hooray for Canada! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Software standards are just terrible, complicat (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Diebold considering open source (Score:2, Interesting)
We might be just like those in the 3rd world (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:As a voter (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The only "safe" voting machine is a ballot mark (Score:3, Interesting)
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 least, is how it is in the Netherlands). Part of the problem is that people keep re-inventing the wheel, usually poorly, instead of using the solutions others have already come up with. And part of the problem is that all these new systems are just _complicated_.
All things considered, I believe simple paper voting and counting votes by hand is the best solution to date. It isn't perfect, but the security implications are easy to understand, and there are established procedures that provide the desireable properties for voting systems (accuracy, verifiability, privacy, etc.)
Re:i am no luddite (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Diebold considering open source (Score:3, Interesting)
Electronic voting machine discussions on /. (Score:3, Interesting)
How telling is it that the overwhelming majority of
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.
Re:hooray for Canada! (Score:2, Interesting)
As someone who lives in the middle of this story (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Programmers (Score:3, Interesting)
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 moron who was running the show was just that: a moron. No, they always blame the developers, while their manager goes on to screw up yet another team somewhere else.
The reality is that you need a good architect, someone that understands not only what the system is designed to accomplish, but can account for most of the possible failure modes. There are plenty of good programmers out there (possibly some of them work for Diebold) but it's pretty obvious that Diebold's leadership is defective. Trying to hold the engineering team responsible for managerial failures serves no purpose.