Avi Rubin and More on Electronic Voting 404
jgo writes "Johns Hopkins Computer Science professor Avi Rubin, posted his experience as an election judge on his website. It's an interesting read and exposes some potential security problems with electronic voting. At one point he held in his hand the five memory cards containing all of his precinct's votes." Rubin had posted his experience in the primary election earlier.
There problem is more than the machines (Score:5, Insightful)
whats keeping him from replacing one/all of them with doctored records. He complains that the voting machines could be tampered with, but there needs to be more safeguards than just the code.
How hard is it to add a little printer? it would be much more conspicuous replacing a four-foot stack of receipts with ones from the back of your van.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There problem is more than the machines (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you say the same thigns about the redundant systems on an aircraft, a nuclear power plant, cruise missiles, nukes? No? Ok then.
In the case of something improtant, no matter how well you've designed the system, you always have layers of redundancy. In this case, it's leaving a paper trail.
Re:There problem is more than the machines (Score:4, Insightful)
It's simply false that redundancy is an indicator of reliability. Did you know that the rate of deaths in twin-engine aircraft is an order of magnitude greater than the rate of deaths in single engine craft?
In the cases of aircraft, powerplants, and weapons, the designers of the system have carefully considered the failure modes of their system, and ensured that if there are redundant systems, that they are effective.
I work in the medical devices industry--before we can bring a device to market, we must convince FDA that the design followed an accountable process and that the potential risks to patients from failure of the device are suitably small. The procedures for documenting the process and performing the risk analysis are fairly well established and work well. Similar sorts of standards are enforced by the FAA, DOE, and the military for the systems they deal with.
The lack of such a standard for elections, and the complicit lack of a risk-management mentality, is glaring. But each of the aforementioned agencies seeems to have arrived at its procedures seperately and independently, after a spotty history of accidents, so it's not a big surprise that we'd have to re-invent the wheel yet again for elections. Multiply that by the fact that each municipality determines the standards for its own elections and there's a lot of re-learning to be done.
Presumably the intent of a paper trail is to reduce the probability that votes are lost or falsified.
So do the risk analysis: How likely is it that the electronic system will have its results lost or falsified? Now, what measures are in place for detecting a failure?
How likely is it that IF the electronic system fails, then the failure will be detected? How likely will it be that a failure is indicated when no failure has actually taken place?
Now how likely is it that if the failure is correctly detected, that the paper trail will provide useful results?
Get in the habit of asking these questions and you soon realize, the mode in which the vote is implemented doesn't matter, it's the process. Two systems can be wed to provide a more reliable whole, but more often when you tie two systems together you just have a larger system that exhibits all the failure modes of its components, PLUS all the failure modes of their composition.
At work I'm constantly shooting down hare-brained redundant systems. Typically we are considering some safety issue and a check that has been put into place to try to address it. Only problem is the mitigator is only effective in a very idealized case (oh teh noes!!! haxx0rs in teh yu0r voting boxxen!!!!1!!one), while a more typical falure takes out the mitigator as well. Considering the inherent unreliability of additional complexity, these schemes are less than worthless, and should be replaced with a proper design for the original system.
I find it absolutely hilarious that the huge push towards electronic voting was motivated by the perceived unreliability of paper-based voting systems in the 2000 elections, yet the techno pundits are insistent on wedding them to paper records like some kind of magic talisman.
Re:There problem is more than the machines (Score:4, Insightful)
And as far as hooking up a printer, it is just a layered bit of redundacy. And again, voting is important enough to have redundacy.
How redundancy can contribute (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's assume the worst-case scenario (from an effort point of view, not from an accuracy point ov view) and say that the votes are challenged every time and the paper ballots end up having the final say. How has the electronic counting helped?
Given that computers are less prone to make careless errors (OK, they don't make careless errors), even if they might be more prone to systematic errors, they give you a number to compare against. Let's say that the computer told you it had printed out 2,523 votes for Bush and 2,427 votes for Kerry. When the vote-counters counted it, however, they counted 2,525 votes for Bush and 2,425 votes for Kerry. The first thing that one should assume is that the vote-counters miscounted, and should recount. If a second recount (by different people) got the same result as the first human count, then we have a problem. The error could be: (1) the computer mis-counted, or (2) the computer mis-printed. Unfortunately, either one is possible. However, since the voters would be encouraged to look at their ballots prior to them entering the box, it would seem more likely that the computer mis-counted, in which case the human count should trump the computer count.
However, notice that the computer count still helps. It gives us a number to compare against. If the human count on the first count matched the computer count, there is little reason to suspect that both counts are wrong. (Although, theoretically, the computer could still have mis-printed and mis-counted in a matching way. This would be an unlikely accidental error, and a very risky deliberate hack since the voters can verify their votes before they go in the box.
Of course, this only works if the printed version can be viewed by the voter prior to it going in the box.
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Re:How redundancy can contribute (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How redundancy can contribute (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How redundancy can contribute (Score:3, Insightful)
Then if an automatic recount is trigger, simply scan the ballots, you will have a recount much more quickly (it hurts the stock market for the count to be in limbo for so long), and it's unlikely that two independent systems would fail, but at worst case, you can always hand recount.
There are rules for recounts (Score:5, Insightful)
You are arguing that the existance of a paper record would result in all elections being recounted. This is false. The point of an electronic system with paper ballots is to provide very quick results in most cases while still allowing for recounts and audits in special cases. At least one state requires electronic machines with paper ballots, and it works well, so your concern is misplaced. There are rules for recounts and audits, they don't just happen.
But without paper ballots, a significant fraction of the population will lose confidence in election results. (Go over to the dailykos blog if you don't believe me.)
With paper ballots, false concerns about elections can be rejected as false and this increases confidence in our democracy. What is do bad about that?
Re:There are rules for recounts (Score:5, Insightful)
Paper based ballot systems are actually quite quick to count. Certainly quick enough for governments where the results of the election take effect within hours of the polls closing. It is also perfectly possible to operate paper ballot systems in ways which make fraud very hard. (To the point where any kind of "vote rigging" would require hundreds of people to conspire in ways against their own interests).
Why should speed be considered more important than accuracy. Especially somewhere like the US where there is actually several months to count the votes.
Re:There are rules for recounts (Score:3, Interesting)
True, but it takes much longer to do a recount than to do the initial count. That's because most jurisdictions which use paper ballots count them at the precincts, which are staffed with workers who are already performing other duties. It's quick because there are hundreds (sometimes thousands) doing the work. Keep in mind though, that some elections have many contests (races for judges, propositions, party committees, etc) which can slow thi
Re:There problem is more than the machines (Score:5, Insightful)
Redundancy is necessary to prove that the votes were not tampered with. Let's say we had a voting proceedure something like this:
Each voter fills out a ballot and places it in a box. At the end of the day, an election official takes the box into a locked room, counts all the votes, then puts all the ballots in a shredder, then burns the results. That person comes out of the room and reports the results, which everyone is expected to accept as perfectly trustworthy.
This is what electronic voting is like, if there isn't a paper trail.
And why shouldn't we do a count of the paper ballots in all cases? It's not that much work, given that someone already has to manually verify the identity of the voters and look them up on a list as they come in.
The untrustworthiness of the electronic vote should be apparent with or without a paper trail. The paper trail lends credibility to the electronic vote (or at least it does if they match).
Electronic interfaces can be friendlier and mor e accomodating to people with disabilities, and they allow a rapid (and accurate to the extent that it hasn't been tampered with) count.
-jim
Re:There problem is more than the machines (Score:3, Interesting)
Also the ballots here were intended to be counted by machine.
When I say "paper" voting I mean a piece of paper which the voter marks using a pencil in some discernable way next to the candidate of his/her choice. You can't get any simp
Ever hear of Quality Control? (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea is that the voter can verify that the printout matches their wishes. The printout is the master copy, not the internal count. The latter is just more convenient -- for the voter and for the tallier.
By adding a printer, you're conceding that the electronic voting machine may not innately be able to provide complete confidence in the result.
No piece of non-trivial software can ever be considered bug free, and therefore, no software ever deserves complete confidence. For that matter, hand-counting shouldn't have your complete confidence either. People make mistakes; shit happens. That's the whole reason for QC.
By conceding that the electronic voting machine's results cannot be trusted, you're saying that you have no basis upon which to reject a request for a recount of the paper receipts. In other words, you're back to hand-counting paper votes each time.
You should have no basis upon which to reject a recount. The paper ballots are the masters. If there is a serious challenge, then they should be recounted. But in any case: you should verify a selected sample of the machines' votes in every polling station to make sure that they are giving reasonable numbers. This is just the application of industry-standard quality control procedures to voting machines. It boggles my mind that electronic voting was ever considered without them.
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Re:Ever hear of Quality Control? (Score:3, Interesting)
Big deal... I can watch the guy count. I can understand what he's doing. Without actually recounting it myself, I can't make sure he's actually counting it correctly. The fact that it's simpler to understand doesn't make it simpler to verify.
How do you determine whether your voting machine is working or not ? You have to employ an engineer ($$$), and then you have to trust that he's not lying to yo
Re:Ever hear of Quality Control? (Score:3, Interesting)
We're really talking about finding a technological solution to a social problem. Until the nation as a whole acknowledges in their heart every citizen's right to cast their vote and have it be counted, we're screwed.
Here's a simple low-tech step in the right direct
Re:Ever hear of Quality Control? (Score:3, Insightful)
The nation as a whole already acknowledges every citizen's right to vote, hence
Re:Ever hear of Quality Control? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ever hear of Quality Control? (Score:3, Insightful)
And is still being considered. That's what happens when you get self-serving politicians making very unfortunate decisions. After all that's been said about Diebold, security, the dangers of having proprietary software govern the voting process, and the lack of quality control, I can't believe that ANY government in the US is still buying. But they are.
Actually that would be an interesting OS project - voting software.
Re:There problem is more than the machines (Score:5, Insightful)
(1) the paper trail advocates argue mostly for the post-electoral controversy. The voter will confirm that his/her paper ballot matches the intended vote before it falls into the receipt bin. Thus, afterwards, if a hacker/act of god changes the electronic vote, one can verify them with the paper ones. It is much harder to inconspicuously change the paper printout.
(2) The votes would only be checked on seeing a noticable anomaly or severe difference of votes than one would expect.
(3) "you have no basis upon which to reject a request for a recount of the paper receipts." True, however, not if a politician knew this was futile, he would not sacrifice the time and sanity of people by asking for a recount. Case in point: Kerry steps down to Bush though he could have easily pressed legal action.
Electronic voting is not perfect, but with the right safeguards it can become a practical alternative to the time-consuming sole-paper methods.
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Re:There problem is more than the machines (Score:5, Insightful)
There are laws about how to determine the value of (we need a recount). Generally, if one of those laws applies, a party can sue for a recount, and if the judge agrees that the law applies, a recount is ordered.
Current methods of determining (we need a recount) include:
-- Was the vote sufficiently close that the margin of error in the vote tabulation system might have been enough to swing the vote? (Most systems have a reasonably well known margin of error. A few tenths of a percent of bubbles don't get read correctly by the bubble-sheet scanners, a few percent of holes don't get read correctly on punch cards, etc.)
-- Were the results of the vote significantly different from exit polls or opinion polls?
-- Was there evidence of fraud?
You're missing the point. (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, this is still subject to security problems -- e.g. what if an election judge discards some of the paper receipts? -- but they are problems shared by traditional paper balloting. The thing is, it's a lot harder to get a corrupt election judge in every precinct than it is to get one corrupt programmer in every voting machine company, so widespread rigging is more difficult and easier to discover.
Re:There problem is more than the machines (Score:3, Interesting)
We always get our results in a timely manner and, to my recollection, there have never been any problems with the vote counting.
Re:Their problem is more than the machines (Score:3, Interesting)
This only works where there is one thing to choose on the ballot. It would take many hours to tally votes for many positions as I assume is done in the USA. I am custodian in a school that has been used for federal, provincial, and municipal elections. It takes a couple of hours after the polls close to hand count the 'choose one candidate' ballots and finsh the paperwork.
For the municipal election in Edmonton, where we vote for mayor, councillors, public or separate school trustees and any
Re:There problem is more than the machines (Score:3, Interesting)
What's wrong with a pencil, a piece of paper, and a count process to which the candidates (and their lawyers) can be invited to ?
Because that would be, like, so untechnological. If ever there was a thing that *should be* untechnological, it'd be voting.
The US, in its wisdom and reliance on expensive stuff, thinks that plain old paper is not good enough.
You deserve what you allow the computers to get away with.
Re:There problem is more than the machines (Score:5, Insightful)
Canada does any number of things wrong, but I've got to say, the US fixation on a high-tech solution to a low-tech problem is mind-boggling. There must be lawyers involved somehow.
Voting machines are prone to human failure (Score:5, Funny)
The voting machines should be supervised by robots...with shotguns
Re:Voting machines are prone to human failure (Score:2)
drunk offcourse [mit.edu]
Terminate this! (Score:3, Funny)
Bad solution (Score:5, Funny)
Doubts (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems that no one really wants to come forward and raise this as a serious concern for this election, despite the fact that it's entirely plausible. Unfortunately, it seems highly unlikely that anyone who dares cast doubt on this election will be regarded as objective.
Re:Doubts (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Doubts (Score:2, Interesting)
Graphs.pdf [infionline.net] Clicking this link will start a download.
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Re:Doubts (Score:5, Interesting)
Then I guess it's just a big coincidence that exit polls have been fairly reliable, up until the point that digital voting machines began to be used. Starting then, exit polls stopped being used as a 'reliable' predictor for the vote.
Exit polls (Score:3, Informative)
This would actually be expected in most voter models. Republicans should get the early advantage in people voting on their way to work (the first hour or so); then Democrats get the advantage as people out of work or in odd shifts vote (those same early exit polls also indicated that 60% of voters were women--the mid-day housewife bump); then Republicans recover in the evening as people get off work. This is more a problem w
Re:Doubts (Score:5, Interesting)
Time to put the tinfoil hat back on, you paranoid pinko!
Seriously, someone has cast doubt [slashdot.org]. Blackboxvoting.org [blackboxvoting.org] blanket the country with freedom of information requests on election night. They currently need $50,000 to complete the audit. I gave [slashdot.org] $100. Let's see what we can do together as slashdot.
Re:Doubts (Score:4, Insightful)
VIVA.... (Score:3, Funny)
(free weed, no guns (only laser warfare), and you can travel and not be hated... amazing).
Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate !
Just make sure people know you are from Canada (Score:2, Funny)
Also when you don't threaten to sue everyone we know you are from Canada.
Re:Just make sure people know you are from Canada (Score:5, Funny)
"Oh, that's easy! If I find you in the morning passed out in my garden, you must be Canadian."
Re:VIVA.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow. Only 60%? How lucky!
It's like socialism without all the benefits of socialism.
Electronic Voting == Trouble (Score:5, Insightful)
We're on the verge (or way past it) of the average citizen losing all power and control within their country, and electronic voting is just another step.
The only hope is for citizens and groups to adamantly insist on open source, safety procedures, regular audits, and paper trails. Unfortunatley, I see few if any of those things happening anytime soon.
No more machines (Score:5, Insightful)
I am a voting Luddite. Vote on paper, count on paper. Distribute the load.
Re:Electronic Voting == Trouble PLUS (Score:3, Informative)
BTW, the owners and main programmers for Diebold are not just Bush pioneers, but are also Dominionist. Google the goals of the Dominionist.
Open Source won't help (Score:2)
F.e. you would also have to audit the toolchain (in binary - not the source), the whole OS, the means of transportation (exchanging CF cards or tampering with routers) and the backend. (How can you be sure the database isn't changed afterward?)
And you have to make absolutely sure only the revieved components are used on each machine.
This is perfectly not doable.
You c
Re:Electronic Voting == Trouble (Score:3, Interesting)
I saw earlier(trying to remember where it was exactly) a pretty reasoned explanation as to why the Canadian paper ballot solution couldn't be applied to the states. The consensus was that until the vote tally for the presidential election(and perhaps house/senate) became a federal responsability, it was unpracti
Gotta Love That Electronic Voting! (Score:5, Interesting)
Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. [cnn.com]
Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.
Re:Gotta Love That Electronic Voting! (Score:5, Insightful)
Also - it isn't curious how the machine errored on the side of Bush?
Plus there's no talk on what kind of bug could automatically enter in votes for Bush? I support point of sale software for a living, and despite the many bugs they do have I've never once, ever, ever, ever seen the programs I support enter line items automatically, or create invoices automatically - or even create more than one invoice when the user only wanted to create one.
Re:Gotta Love That Electronic Voting! (Score:4, Insightful)
A Suggestion (Score:5, Interesting)
How's this for a way of safely conducting electronic voting...
Give everyone a GUID, a complete random key of sufficient length that you can't simply guess and get a valid GUID. Mail it to them.
When a person votes, their vote is stored against their GUID, in a publically accessable database. Anyone can check that their vote has been correctly counted by looking up their GUID in the table.
Voting would effectively be pseudonymous instead of anonymous. (With a new pseudonym for every election).
Re:A Suggestion (Score:5, Insightful)
mod parent up (Score:2)
Re:A Suggestion (Score:2, Interesting)
People lose information like this quite frequently. My ability to vote should not be dependant upon whether or not I can keep track of a slip of paper for 2 years.
And most importantly, we shouldn't need to impose a system such as this in the first place. We should have secure, open machines with a procedural protocol so that there is little room for a malicious person to tamper in the first place.
This idea tries to patch up problems caused by eVoting machine
Re:A Suggestion (Score:2)
Give everyone a GUID, a complete random key of sufficient length that you can't simply guess and get a valid GUID. Mail it to them. [snip]
But who's checking for votes from dead and imaginary people?
The GUID would be based partially on voter precinct, so if the number of registered voters is less than the number of GUIDs for a district, raise the red flag. But that remaining problem is an old one: how does one prevent insiders from 'creating' new constituents?
Re:A Suggestion (Score:2)
The problem with not having an anonymous election is that there's always the possibility of coercion. eg.
Is there any way you can ensure there's no coercion? I'm not convinced. Furthermore, if you mail a unique ID to people (as you've suggested), you have no guarantee that someone's not going to run around mail boxes collecting them, or that everyone who's ha
Re:A Suggestion (Score:2)
When a person votes, their vote is stored against their GUID, in a publically accessable database. Anyone can check that their vote has been correctly counted by looking up their GUID in the table.
The problem with this is that people could easily sell their vote. And then the buyer could check with the GUID.. I still believe that the only good way to vote is with hand coun
Re:A Suggestion (Score:2)
Doesn't that defeat the purpose of having such a receipt in the first place? If there's no visible evidence as to which of your GUID's is the active one, how can you be certain that your intended vote is the one that's been counted?
Perhaps there's a way, but I can't see what it is. .
In Arkansas... (Score:2, Interesting)
Distribute the load -- count manually (Score:5, Insightful)
With a manual system, it takes hundreds of people to count the vote. Sure, it takes more time, buit I can wait. Sure there may be a few people with nefarious intentions, but those few people might be able to throw a precinct, not a whole state (or country!) Usually when hand counting, two or three people count anyways, so there's even more checks and balances built into the system. Our country is built on checks an balances. We need that in the voting system as well.
I truly belive voting problems are the number one issue facing our country. If can't trust the vote, then we don't have a democracy. If one election can be stolen, the next one will be stolen as well. Very slippery slope.
Will it scale with the US system? (Score:3, Informative)
But our election system is much simpler than that of the US. I've seen your ballots - they've got vast numbers of choices on them, and this makes manually counting the votes much more difficult. Here, and I suspect in most other countries where votes
Re:Distribute the load -- count manually (Score:3, Informative)
What are you talking about? You honestly have no idea how voting works in this country do you?
First off, Kerry conceding doesn't mean anything. If the final STATE CERTIFIED VOTE TABULATION showed that Kerry actually won
Black Box Voting (Score:5, Interesting)
Please watch this free 30-minute film [votergate.tv] about black box voting machines.
We have all been scared about Diebold and other black box voting [wikipedia.org] machines, and for good reason [cnn.com]. Apparently one of the central machines from Election Systems & Software Inc. tallied 115 votes for Bush in a certain county, while another machine tallied 365 votes for that same county. Which one was right? There is no way to tell, because "it is too hard" to add a printer to a counting machine. It is not like they have been doing that for 30 [wikipedia.org] years [wikipedia.org]. But who needs to do a recount when the machines are infallible, right?
Most infuriating of all is that Republican Senator Hagel, the former Senate Ethics Director, resigned after admitting that he owned Election Systems & Software [scoop.co.nz]! That's right, the same voting machine maker that 60% of ALL VOTES in the U.S. are counted on, the same one that provably miscounted votes in Ohio and other states, and the same one that refuses to print receipts to recount these votes. No wonder legislation [wikipedia.org] trying to require printers on voting machines is taking so long to get through congress when congressmen can vote themselves into office without a paper trail.
Re:Black Box Voting (Score:4, Insightful)
As has been pointed out, if one malfunctioned how can you trust the other? Or any of the rest? Yeah, we caught these two errors, since they cast thousands of votes more than were even possible but then how many errors were there that were not stupidly obvious? As the main article we're all talking about says - the scary part is we have no idea and now way to check.
Re:Black Box Voting (Score:3, Informative)
No, the memory card malfunctioned. The machine worked fine. They know (as best they know for any of the machines) that the machine was correct because its vote totals add up with the paper sign up record...unlike those on the memory card. The issue is more that if the machine had malfunctioned, then it would have sent the wrong total to the memory card and *both* would have been wrong. If that had happened (or if there weren't two records, as
More on electronic voting... (Score:5, Informative)
(found on dailyrotten.com)
http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/local
http://www.wnct.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WN
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/02/HNevote
http://www.nbc4i.com/politics/3894867/detail.html [nbc4i.com]
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/news/ep
We can't summon the will and the money... (Score:4, Insightful)
but we have plenty to use for Pentagon studies on psychic teleportation. [slashdot.org]
What the hell ever happened to honesty? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why do votes need uber security check technology? Whatever happened to scrutiny by peers?
IMO, paper ballots are best because it is just tougher to destroy them. But, we should get receipts showing how we voted for our own records.
But, trying to turn the entire election process into zero possibility of error or fraud undermines the election itself and goes against the ideals of our society. People in general are honest - and those that aren't get caught eventually by honest people.
Suggesting that 'one person' should not be able to hold an entire precincts' votes just doesn't make much sense. People are often responsible for others. I suppose twenty people should all carry a piece of the nuclear football too..
money money money money (Score:2)
If you don't think Bush and his staff make millions on the war in Iraq, wake up.
Re:What the hell ever happened to honesty? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, we shouldn't. This would cause more problems that it would solve. Being able to prove to someone who you voted for would make it possible for them to buy your vote. Right now, you could take their money and then still vote for someone else, since no one will know who you vote for. This makes it much more difficult to conduct this kind of fraud.
Re:What the hell ever happened to honesty? (Score:2, Interesting)
We should absolutely not. Voting is supposed to be anonymous - that means that there can be nothing that links any of your identifying information to the vote you made.
What should happen is that after voting it prints a reciept that you get to see. After making sure everything is correct on the reciept, you can press a button, which puts your reciept (with no identifying information) into a box with the reciepts of the people who vo
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It seems to me... (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a question, of course, about how long you might be locked up for doing so.
Re:It seems to me... (Score:3, Insightful)
Undetectable tampering (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, NO LOGS of the voting process are kept on these machines. Think of "Irregularities" in the code that add a vote for Candidate A when a certain vote pattern is met. Or as Mr Rubins said, physical tampering allowing you to "one could change a few bytes in the ballot definition file and votes for the two major Presidential candidates would be swapped. In that case, none of the procedures we had in place could detect that votes were tallied for the wrong candidates."
Great. Maybe this time no one abused the system. But think long-term; in 50 years, when e-voting will be predominant and everyone will be confident in it...
If you think America is a democracy ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:If you think America is a democracy ... (Score:2)
I hate to say it, but this is one problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The reality is that electronic records of the vote require the humans trust the machine. Open Source or closed, the binaries on the machine can not be directly examined, rendering the nature of the code used a moot point.
Voting by machine is voting by proxy. We must trust the proxy and cannot observe its operation. Subtle manupulations of the vote will go unnoticed, unless we keep paper records and perform mandatory audits.
This means the only electronic solution is one that records the vote on a ballot that both humans and machines can read. Those ballots can be machine counted and audited as we have always done.
What's the point really? Why not just use paper ballots and make them easy to use and read by both machines and humans and spend the money reforming the process to make it fast, taking humans into account.
Remember, there are plenty of old folks willing to do their civic duty. We can get fast and trustworthy results with a far smaller investment than we have made on electronic solutions to date.
This is not a hard conclusion to come to. The fact that it is ignored means those in power WANT IT TO BE THAT WAY.
It's wrong and we need to demand change continiously until we get it; otherwise, we lose our democracy.
Process already started to add paper trail (Score:5, Interesting)
Please, simply support this legislation.
Additionally, the electronic voting manufacturers, such as Diebold, already have the ability to add permanent, individual voter-verified paper audit trails to their products
The roadblock, as it turns out, is often local election boards. First, the new paper verification systems NEED to go through the government certification process - remember, it's the e-voting watchdogs who are chastising non-certified patches/updates being put into place; the paper audit systems need to go through the same certification process. Further, many municipalities can't understand why they should be forcing paper audit trails; after all, they think, they are just getting away from paper ballots - why should they be arguing for paper ballots (and all the headaches that go along with them, ON TOP of the headaches they already have from learning to deal with e-voting), so why should they go back to them?
Folks, so many people are involved in elections at so many different levels that there is literally no way that any central entity could rig an election across an entire state. Experts dealing with e-voting don't even have this on their radar. [cnn.com] Their concern is more errors and failures. E.g., most of Ohio is still punchcard as it is (the majority of the 35 counties moving to e-voting pushed off the transition until AFTER the election because of problems), and someone like Diebold doesn't even have access to this equipment after the fact. Yes, an unscrupulous election official or enterprising hacker might be able to breach individual machines and potentially even a county - it's possible. But the likelihood of something like that happening on any significant scale, ESPECIALLY without being caught (the articles we're talking about here actually prove that the audit processes, be they what they are, do work) is very, very low.
That said, we absolutely should be ensuring that there is a permanent, voter-verified, paper record. It is absolutely critical to our voting process, even if the software is still proprietary on these systems (though it, too, should be open for public inspection). But the permanent voter-verified paper record alone eliminates the chances for any widespread fraud with the counting process itself, and at the very least makes any fraud easily reversible and/or detectable.
Contact your representative and senators, and urge them to support the above bills. It will be a lot more productive that imagining fantasies about Diebold "handing" Bush the election. (If ANYTHING remotely like that happened, there are a shitload of professors, campaign staff, scholars, journalists, and researchers who know a LOT more than you do who would be all over this in a heartbeat. Kerry's $300 million, two-year campaign didn't just roll over for no reason. Bush won, whether anyone likes it or not, and it wasn't because electronic voting handed anyone anything. The POINT here, is that instead of inventing wild conspiracy theories, we should be ensuring that there is voter verification and a permanent paper record for all future elections, because HAVA will require a shift to electronic voting for everyone - before that happens, we should make sure that it's veri
Also, exit poll numbers NOT "fudged" (Score:2)
http://www.wm.edu/news/?id=4027 [wm.edu]
Notable quote [wm.edu]:
I think the important thing about exit polls is they show us why people won and the dynamics of the race. The mistake most people make is they see polls as a horse-race, but they are actually the explanation of what happened.
The polls may have been wrong about who won, but th
My experience with electronic voting (Score:3, Interesting)
I voted on an electronic machine here in Atlanta, GA. Previously, I have voted using mechanical machines in NY and Pennsylvania. One big difference: less privacy with the electronic machines. It's not a particularly big deal to me, but some might feel weird about that. Especially if they intend to vote for a candidate that is very unpopular in their district.
I felt the process and UI was fine (clear, minimal opportunity for human error, etc.).
Main complaint (other than security concerns): the potential of the electronic machines was not realized. For example, there were several initiatives on the ballot here. One was a widely publicized gay bashing, er, I mean, marriage protection ammendment. Another was a lesser publicized amendment relating to judicial jurisdiction. (Both described here [state.ga.us]) I knew a great deal about the gay bashing measure, but hadn't heard of the proposed amendment about the courts. All they put on the ballot was a yes or no to the following statement: "Shall the Constitution be amended so as to provide that the Supreme Court shall have jurisdiction and authority to answer questions of law from any state appellate or federal district or appellate court?" Um, how about maybe?
It would be great if a more clear explanation could be added to the ballot. The electronic medium makes this crazy easy. It's no more expensive to do. The website linked above even has a very clear description that could have been used. (Of course, this opens up questions about potential bias that can be worked in to the description. However, I think something is almost certainly better than nothing.)
I think electronic voting will be a good thing if the security concerns are worked out. Will they be? That's hard to say. In the near future will most Americans think they are? Yes, almost certainly.
What a cool name (Score:5, Funny)
I'm gonna change my name to Mpeg Smith in honour of him.
eVoting BAD (Score:4, Interesting)
The real problem is taking the physical stylus out of the hand of the voter. I would only consider eVoting for disabled persons, and I would think the majority of them have few problems.
1) To avoid fraud, why not submit the ballot into more than one ballot box. One for each candidate on the ticket. If democrats and republicans have their own ballot box - they'll likely have the same number of votes - the incentive to cheat is removed without duopoly. [investopedia.com]
2) Allow all candidates nationwide to be on the ballot if they garner
Here's a nice page to Federal Contact Information http://www.eff.org/congress/ [eff.org] - tell them what you think - you're on
Joseph Stalin once said (Score:3, Insightful)
The man knew what he was saying. While US election system is more robust to fraud than, say, popular votes in other countries (fraud can only occur on state level) with electronic voting this may change. One CIA agent will be enough to affect the vote of the entire states. Heck, CIA agents may not even be necessary, because there just may be a secret fragment of code in software which will basically go:Look at countries which merely have electronic vote counting systems (even though the ballots are actually paper), like Russia. Whoever controls the system wins, always, repeatably, with predetermined percentages.
In the US correspondingly whoever controls the companies that make voting machines will win. Right now these companies are controlled by Republicans. Democrats, take note.
These aren't the votes you are looking for (Score:3, Insightful)
Move along. These aren't the votes you are looking for.
It could just print out a ballot (Score:5, Insightful)
stats & charts (Score:3, Interesting)
Your mileage may vary.
From someone that works at an election company... (Score:3, Insightful)
Topical comp.risks post (Score:3, Insightful)
VoterGate video (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10393
Also:
"Our video files have been attacked and taken out. Who doesn't want you to see this film? We are working around the clock to get the video files back online right away. Please check back soon."
http://www.votergate.tv/
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
the problem with any computerised balloting.. (Score:5, Insightful)
A traditional paper ballot in a locked box is human readable/countable by anyone who can count at the end of the day. It requires very little in the form of specialised skills or hardware. It is very inexpensive. Challenges can be mounted and results verified quickly and transparently. Once you get into machine reading, whether tabulated bubbles or punched out cards or pure digitial like with the diebold machines-then you have your potential problems, and with the last few elections we can see we have new problems, and they look a lot more like "on purpose" troubles than accidental. They especially look on purpose given the revelations of what was found on diebolds website and published, and with other anecdotals showing some rather distrubing intent as to election honesty. The consortium pushing electronic closed source computer voting is a who's who of the mega-profits from tax money and governmental contracts military industrial complex. This is three serious alarm bells to anyone really thinking about this subject.
The old way had it's faults, but computerised has introduced faults above and beyond that can not be addressed without trusting what is inherently untrustworthy by it's design criteria.
It's all about "me, me, me!" (Score:3, Interesting)
This is too important an issue to become a vehicle for self-promotion.
Votes not counted in counties with Minorities. (Score:3)
155,000 provisional ballots were cast in Ohio. Probably Democrat, but not quite enough to close the 130,000 vote gap. (Because about half were cast in counties which went Kerry.) But just in case. .
-FL
Re:My Idea for non-electronic voting (Score:5, Insightful)
Ink pen
Ballot Box.
Cheap, reliable, fair, honest.