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eLection '04
My change of heart came while listening to an NPR story last night. Election results for one county in Michigan were held up for two hours because some volunteers with ballots were barricaded in the building by a bear. A bear! What century is this?
There are some fair concerns about moving to a more-than-just-dead-trees voting system. We have to consider what the impact will be on voter enfranchisement. A change that makes it possible for the rich to vote by telepathy, for example, while the poor have to drive a hundred miles uphill both ways (to access a non-telepathic voting booth) would not be exactly democratic.
Would it have been fair, in 2000, for the middle class to be able to vote from the comfort of their homes and jobs, while the poor and homeless had to get to a voting booth? I don't know.
But my best guess is that, by 2004, this won't be a question anymore. Plot the percentage of lower-income homes with internet access from 1996 to 2000, and then extrapolate another four years. So if it should be done, how can it be done? There are five key issues to solve: authorization, anonymity, data confidence, UI, and security.
I propose a system in which each voting booth runs a webserver which logs votes (without identification) to two internal media (hard disk and floppy would be good, see below). Once the polls close, each booth's computer can be totalled and sent over the internet to the state's central server.
Meanwhile, any computer that speaks https on the internet would become a voting booth of its own, running slightly different software.
Each state's official results could be in an hour after its polls close. Which beats the ten-day waiting period we have now for our overseas ballots.
Authorization isn't really that hard: When you register to vote, you (by default) get a password delivered by snail-mail a week before the election. Tampering with that mail is a federal offense, of course. On election day you use secure http to sign in from anywhere with your name, address and password. Lose the password? Sorry, you don't get the comfort of home/work; you go to the voting booth with everyone else.
Anonymity is trivial; any logs with identifying information either don't get stored, or get wiped immediately.
Computers crash. Data confidence means the servers write the votes to multiple media: network, hard drive, flash RAM. A dot-matrix printer makes a good emergency backup medium.
This system also needs a dirt-simple GUI for voters connecting from home or work. No butterfly webpages necessary; click a name, and get a confirmation screen that shows you name, party, (importantly) photo, and big "yes" and "no" buttons.
At the voting booth it can be even simpler, using touch-screens.
Security is, of course, always a problem. Secure http effectively eliminates the man-in-the-middle attack, so the main worry are that an attacker will be able to run unauthorized code on a government computer which could (read) correlate my name with my vote or (write) change my vote. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that a completely open-sourced system, from the kernel up, combined with clean-room installations at a secure location, can make these concerns minor by comparison to existing vote-fraud concerns.
(My vote would go to OpenBSD, Apache, and Mozilla, though of course good luck predicting what will be best four years from now.)
Also, net admins overseeing the effort need to have enough access to track and lock out attackers, but obviously they can't have access to change the election results. Lock them in a room for the day with a hundred video cameras tracking everything they do, like the officers on missile-launch duty. Many net admins will find this a relaxed and enjoyable work environment compared to their current jobs.
There are many problems that have to be solved -- please bring up the ones I haven't mentioned here, let's start the debate! My hunch is that they can be solved. And the overriding question must be, will it be an improvement over the current system?
Given that Florida's election is being decided by a 400-vote difference, with 19,000 botched votes thrown out, I'd say the impossibility of clicking on two presidential choices at the same time makes this system a huge win.
The broken user interface on our existing punch-cards system is probably going to give us the wrong President of the United States. How much worse could a digital system really be? I don't claim to have all the answers, but I know what century it is, and the time for Little House on the Prairie nonsense is over. Let's make this happen for 2004.
I'll give my last word to Andre Uratsuka Manoel, a partner at the internet firm Insite, in Brazil. (Props to TBTF for putting Andre and me in touch.)
Brazil has a 100% electronic election. On election day I go my "electoral section," identify myself, sign my name. The "section president" then types in my code and I walk to the booth which is in a corner of the room where no one can see my vote. I then type the number of my candidate, see his/her photo and press "confirm."
The voting machines store the votes in at least three different places: a floppy disk (which is locked), a flash card and the internal hard disk. There are written procedures for any kind of failure I could think of and back-up machines readily available. Those machines can connect to a phone line and send their results to the Election Court of the state.
The results are proclamed extremely fast. On the mayoral run-off elections that happened 2 weeks ago, results were out 2 hours after the election in the city I live in (Sao Paulo, with about 6 million voters) and 6 hours after it in the last city in which there was a run-off. In my home city the results came out a little after the election sites closed and the result was proclamed with the winner having 40 thousand votes more than the second place (0.4% of 1 million votes).
In the first round of elections in Sao Paulo, the third place contestant lost the ticket for the run-off elections by less than 0.1%. The one who lost didn't even think of contesting the results because no one thought there were any kind of frauds.
In the first round, 100 million voters (about the same as the active voters in US) in 5 thousand cities chose their mayors and councelors. All the results were proclaimed 30 hours after the voting closed.
This happens in a country that has a much lower level of literacy, technology-savvy and of money as the U.S. Remember that some mayors were chosen in places hours away from anyplace else (even by plane), i.e. in the middle of the rain forest. Those places don't have electricity.
Of course there were complaints, but not because of the electoral process. Mostly they were due to campaigning on the election day, voter transportation and coercion.
(Updates: Dave Riesz mentioned Riverside County, California, which has an electronic voting system already in place. Their 2000 primary turnout was the highest in 20 years, which may or may not mean anything. That led me to the California Internet Voting Task Force which looks interesting. Don Wegeng pointed me to RISKS thoughts by Douglas Jones. Brian Dunbar points out "Hurrah for Slow Recounts" by the always-interesting Ellen Ullman.
Lee Coursey passes along Elizabeth Ferrill's Discussion of Electronic Voting. James McCann, a programmer at VoteHere.net, says my description is "not terribly far off but very incomplete" -- I'll take that as a compliment -- check out his site and SecurePoll.com too. And finally, a story in Salon that makes my point better than I could: "Confessions of a Florida Poll Worker."
If you have more links or information, emailme.)
I'm a recent graduate in computer science from Carnegie Mellon. *I* have no faith in computers either.
I want voting to have hard records. It's very easy for a software program to add 10,000 to a location in memory. Hard to create 10,000 fake ballots and harder to insert them into the system without them being noticed.
Secondly, you extend the complexity of the system. How do you know the software in the system has no traps or backdoors. (If it's based around windows, how do you know that windows has no special trapdoors for throwing elections?) Secondly, how do you know that the software, when installed, is the same as what was written?
ANother problem, for those who suggest having a printer printing reciepts: If it is computer-readible, how will the user know if what was printed equals what they voted? Why can't the machine count the vote as for candidate X, yet print a recipt as if for candidate Y?
Finally, you have a lot more problems on the client side: Can you imagine a version of Melissa Virus, that's very innocous and tries to stay hidden. It waits till you try to vote. It waits for you to type in your password, then it secretly votes for who IT wants, not who you want. Hell, Windows 2004 might have this feature built into the OS!!
The problem with computers is that a small group of people, or even a single person, can subvert an entire election. That's almost impossible with old-fashioned paper ballots.
These are critical issues. None of the explanation above says how you're supposed to be resistant to these types of fraud.
The opponent (and therefore threat-model) for an electronic voting system is a HELL OF A LOT worse than that for E-commerce. You're describing how to be resistant to credit-card fraud, where there are small transactions and subversion of the system is minimal. Voting is different. Countries are going to want to subvert the system (Russia, China, Iran, France, organized crime..) and THEY have the resources to bribe, blackmail, and subvert the system from within. They're also going to analyze the system for subtle flaws, and they will break it.
Do a search for 'electonic voting' on comp.risks.
Security is HARD. Hasn't Bruce Schiener said that a dozen times before? This is why I hope we do not have electronic voting until we do truly know how to make it secure, a system, standardized by NIST, that's had people trying to break it for 5-10 years. Voting is more critical than AES, it should have the requisit analysis.
Scott
I have no problem with the state gov'ts appointing senators and voting for the president. IMHO, this would work just fine, and would have preserved the power of the states so that "President" wouldn't be such an important role. It would also cut down on the average citzen's democratic responsibilities so they could focus more on making the correct choice of state government.
However, since the so-called "states" have become little more than provinces of the Federal State of America, with no power to secede from or directly control the federal government, it is unrealistic to speak of going back to this older way of thinking (unless everybody suddenly wakes up and says, "Hey, we had a pretty good system, why did we change it?" - unlikely!).
There's a very simple way to cure the Electoral College problem: allow electoral votes to be split into percent votes (IOW, split each vote into a hundred votes). The states can then be coerced into splitting the votes along the lines of the popular vote in the same manner that the feds force all the changes that aren't strictly constitutionally kosher (I'm sure the public would be behind it, and the constitution has always lost out to public opinion in the past). This would prevent the abuses you mentioned, since the feds would still control the number of E.C. votes handed to each state, according to the census.
This would not be a substantial loss of state sovereignity (that took place long ago), just a superficial one.
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*sigh* technophiles. Touch screens that print out punch ballots. Its really that simple and they can use the old punch readers over and over. No login, no eye-scan, no tokens (how i hate that word), etc. Computers and networks aren't the solution to everything, you can get amazing results by improving on traditional methods with technology without completely replacing it.
Maybe Jamie has a TV playing a video of a fire in his/her's fireplace. Naww, its a 3D simulation of a fireplace running off a remote server through a T3.
For days we've heard about how there were 19,000 double-punched ballots that were thrown out in Palm Beach county. This story seems to come up right after mention of the confusing "butterfly ballot", with the implication that about 19,000 people:
... loop until they're happy with one), and
- got confused when trying to vote for Gore,
- punched the Buchannan hole
- realized they goofed and punched the Gore hole
- turned the ballot in, and
- the computer kicked it out as dobule-punched, so
- their vote didn't get counted, and
- Gore lost most of those 19,000 votes.
Well, it turns out that's NOT what happened.
It seems that Mary Matialin (a conservative commentator) got suspicious. So she actually CALLED the poll workers and ASKED what this was about.
It turns out that the 19,000 "spoiled ballots" were ACTUALLY people who:
- mispunched their ballot (in ANY way at all),
- realized they'd goofed,
- took the ballot to the election officials and said "I goofed. Please give me a replacement.",
- were told "Sure. Here",
- punched that one,
- (maybe screwed it up too
- turned it in.
So if any of these 19,000 ballots was a Gore supprter, Gore GOT the vote in question. (He might have missed some votes if the voter didn't realize until after they'd turned it in that they'd screwed up. But there aren't 19,000 worms in THAT can.)
You won't hear about this on the establishment media, of course. But Mary talked about it, and Rush Limbaugh picked it up, and put it on both his show and his web page. Here is the link.
(The page also makes an anaecdotal claim about Palm Beach county being a hotbed of Buchannan support, which could also explain its outlier status in the Buchannan count.)
(Again I'm not claiming to have checked any of this myself - just posting the reference for your perusal. Enjoy!)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Perhaps you mean a 'completely observable process', however I get your point and I totally agree with it. The only problem is that for the most part none of our elections are like this. The concept of having anonymous voting coupled with the sheer number of voters prompted people to design new systems with which to perform votes.
In moving from a system where everyone yells a 'yea' or a 'nay' to the ballot method we left out the ability for the community as a whole to observe what the actual vote was first hand - our current system leaves it up to someone else to count the votes and as such you automatically lose the sense of personal security in knowing that your vote was properly included.
By using a computer controlled method to register votes we are not losing or gaining any functionality over the ballot system from a voters point of view. If you can write an X and not click a button then you definately must have an interesting situation. What we are gaining however is the ability to open up the counting method so that there is no single point where it can break down. With people counting votes you have to ensure that the vote counters are sincere and you depend on their ability to perform their jobs perfectly. Now I don't know about most people, but I would think that the more people counting the better, since independant errors will decrease. By implementing a purely digital system, we would have exactly that in that the developers of the system would be able to see where the others made flaws - we have programs that can calculate launch trajectories to Pluto, I'm sure we can make vote counting systems properly. Also, since many places use automated counters now, what would the difference be? If many people work on the digital voting system there will be no opportunity for it to become flawed from a design point of view.
As for hacking, etc. one must be aware that the opportunities exist to maliciously affect ballot systems as well. 'Rigging the vote' immediately comes to mind. The security of a digital system would probably be easier to monitor than the ballot system anyways - it's a lot easier to determine that you have altered results from a digital source than from a bag of ballots. And as for punishment, well, you can just imagine what would happen if you were involved in a federal vote scandel of any sort.
I guess in the end I'm advocating the use of technology to make things easier for everyone and more stable. A punchcard never lies, true enough, but a computer only does what you tell it to.
UBU
Here in Brazil our elections are all done on computers now. This is a massive step forward from the previous paper ballot and canvas bag from 8, my 1st election. The computers - hardware wise - are very redundant, 2 HDs (redundant), some EM shielding, heavy duty LCD screen behind a few mm of acrylic, large, tough and clickity numerical buttons (with braile on them) and 3 other buttons (vote blank, correct and accept) - the CPU is an AMD (at least the one I saw). The software is a totally different matter that I won't go into since it would have to vary in an election in another country...
This is a perfect solution (with the exception of the software that really does need a better public auditing) to our election system 'cause we are obliged to vote - it's a law here, you must vote or loose a sliver of your citizenship. Being as such we are all given a 'Voters License' that is specific to a voting booth so all we do is show up at the correct location, someone specified types up our license and the booth is opened for voting.
Anyway, the whole software problem from up above is that this process allows vote auditing by someone. You can corelate (sp?) the voter's license and the vote cast. The brazilian government branch responsible for electoral transparency and privacy doesn't release the software's source code or present a valid working machine for reverse engineering even though they are obligated by our constitution.
Anyway, that works for our electoral system - at least in theory, I'd love to participate in a hack-a-booth contest. It's feasable but I don't know if it's practical for everybody.
--
All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
I'm against having people voting from their homes via computer, but I fully believe that each polling place needs to be fully computerized. The idea of waiting hours or even days for results to be counted is absolutely ridiculous with the technology that is available today. Each polling place needs a database server to provide authentication and to compile votes, a few computerized voting terminals, and a modem to transmit these results to the central county or state office when the polls close. The database server could be eliminated at each location if a dedicated connection were available, but that's unlikely in the fire departments and churches that are typcially hosting elections.
Everyone wants some kind of national push to develop 21st century voting systems, for everyone to 'get with the program' and get away from the punchcards, the scantron forms, or whetever else.
However, the United States of America is still just that - a Republic of United States. Voting is a right guaranteed under the Federal constitution, but exercised and controlled at the state level. In this sense, there are effectively 50 little countries voting here.
Imagine the European Union trying to pick a President/King/Queen/Prime Minister/whatever. Do you think Germany really gives a rat's ass how Sweden runs their voting? Or that France wants to be forced to adopt England's voting methods? Not on their life. They are individual countries with a common, uniting regulating body. That's essentially what the US is, with significantly more regulation coming to the states than an EU commission would have over the countries of Europe.
There will never be Federal Voting Standards. If you want your local voting standards changed, call your local election board and get things moving.
Oh, and here in Jacksonville, Florida (Duval County), we used punchcards this year, but there are already plans underway to move into computerized voting by 2004.
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I actually participated in the LA County experiment with touchscreen voting. The system I tried is actually the same system that San Bernadino County is using.
When I wrote up this article, I was unaware that the machine does not submit its results via the Internet or some sort of VPN, but each machine is taken back to the Registrar-Recorder and manually read out. So the security issues I raised in the original article may not actually be valid.
The thing that I must stress about the new touchscreen system is this:
If this touchscreen system existed in Palm Beach County, FL, you wouldn't see the kind of confusion that was rife there.
The punchcard ballot is what we have in Los Angeles County currently. It's archaic. It's time to bid it farewell, as it is time to say bye-bye to the Electoral College.
The touchscreen system I used at the test station in Van Nuys could be a great way to prevent debacles like in Florida from happening again.
Again, the link is http://www.msgeek.org/html/article .ph p?sid=15
---- Hey Grrl Geeks! Your very own geek news site has arrived!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
While person and paper might be simple, it is far from unmolestable. Were you asked for identification when you voted? I wasn't. I could have found all the info I needed to vote in my name in the phone book. Some consider it to be a legal problem to require anything to vote. Poll taxes and literacy tests were (rightly) thrown out. In at least some areas, this has be taken to mean that requiring identification is also wrong. So in quite a few areas, voter fraud is trivial.
Take a look at FL, and all the anomolies that are popping up there. Now they are saying that with nearly 6 million votes cast, the difference is less than 400 votes. I'm supposed to believe that Gore got 99.99% as many votes as Bush? I don't think that that's realistic at all without some outside influence pushing the totals together. It's just a little disturbing that this election might be decided by a few hundred "votes" when tens of thousands of votes have been thrown out for being double-punched (something which is easy to to do a ballot _after_ it's been cast.)
The simple fact is that this system is easily tampered with, and the amount of power and money that is at stake is capable of corruping a lot of people into being dishonest. We need a system which both allows people to verify that there votes were correctly included in the final tally, and also allows some random percentage of the votes to be audited after the fact to check for fraud. While secret ballots have advantages, one big disadvantage is that fraud is almost impossible to detect after the fact.
Um. There are any number of ways to prevent the sort of problem which plagues the ballots with the punch holes, which is precisely this: more than one hole may be punched, which invalidates that ballot. The extra hole may be the result of misaligning the card in the machine. The extra hole may be the result of mistakenly punching one hole and then mistakenly punching another one (which has the positive effect of nullifying your original mistaken vote, but does not allow you to vote in the affirmative for your actual choice -- and from what I understand the FL voters who punched twice were not offered replacement ballots). The extra hole may be punched after the fact by unethical persons wishing to invalidate your vote for whatever reason. There is no way to prove when or by whom the extra hole was punched or as a result of which error unless no ballots are accepted that have this issue (i.e. a machine reader will not let you leave the polling place without submitting a correctly completed ballot). It is my understanding that there was no such validation of ballots for persons leaving the FL polls, or if the ballots were obviously invalid that they were not replaced.
The best method for combining machine and analog certainties involves using a machine that only allows you one selection, and allows you to change that selection until you press a final "OK" button, which then prints a machine readable receipt, which you then submit to a collection box. The first machine can submit tabulations for instant counting. If there are errors in this process, the receipts can be machine read to quickly replace those results. And if there are severe concerns, or some sort of handcount is needed, there are pieces of paper which humans can look at and verify. This provides anonymity, error correction, and verifiability, nor can I think of a single way to tamper with this type of ballot. Anything less can always be looked at with suspicion.
I do not have a signature
McMicrophone: Retinal identification confirmed... May I take your vote?
Voter: Hmmm... What are the specials today?
McMicrophone: We've got three new parties available... the Darwinist Party Pack, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger Junior... the Posthumanist Party, starring Max Moore... and Martian Party, starring the head of Leonard Nimoy.
Voter: Uh, just gimme a large Green, a medium Democrat, and a Libertarian and NaturalLaw in small.
McMicrophone: Here's your ticket *bwop* , please pull forward to the next window.
You pull forward, and insert your ticket which contains your anonymous voting data. The Display comes up and shows:
You have ordered:
1 small Hagelin
1 small Browne
1 medium REFORM CANDIDATE
and 1 Large SOCIALIST
Hey! That isn't what I ordered!! Gimme the manager!
The Manager apologetically straightens it all out, with a complimentary order of fries.
Agreed. If these people can keep track of 15 different bingo cards at once, why can't they understand a very simple ballot?
You need to add a couple more things to this e-voting picture...
You need anonimity, so nobody can check on how you voted. Then you need confirmation, where you can check the official logs and see if your vote was counted properly. To avoid coercion you also need the ability to cancel your vote after you make it.
So, you vote. Nobody can look it up by any piece of ID that is connected to you, it's merely indexed by an MD5 hash, or something. Then you can use this hash at a later date at any public terminal to see if your vote is tallied for the right side. And once the results are announced, you can check to see if you vote is for the right candidate.
Then, if you let someone who can form the MD5 hash (someone with the original information) cancel an existing vote, the idea of coercion is mostly gone. You could vote at work (with the boss watching) then drive by a polling booth later and cancel your old vote and place a new one.
This means people could waffle and recast their votes, but if you made them do it at a voting station and they only got one chance, it wouldn't be too big of a deal. And if those voting stations offered anonimity in the form of private booths, etc, people could be safe from coercion while casting the real vote.
Whoa -- the Palm Beach system was indeed using validity-checking equipment? Ballots were checked for validity by a machine when the voter turned in their ballot?
Electronic voting will never be fully trusted. Much of the confusion in the current election is simply because computers tabulate paper ballots.
Do the opposite. Go to paper balloting with big print and boxes that have to be marked with a big 'X'. Then, these ballots need to be counted by hand in each ward. This is what is done in the overwhelming majority of countries.
An even better reform: stop holding elections for everything on the same day. It's not genuinely convenient to anyone. Compel state and local government to hold elections on a day other than the second Tuesday in November of even numbered years. This would shrink the size of the ballot enough to make paper balloting and manual counting easier. In Federal elections, there would never be more than 3 offices to vote for: a Presdient, a Senator and a Rep.
Even better, have three different election days, all at different times during the 2-year election cycle. One for the feds, one for states, one for local government. That way, there are only three things to vote for in Federal election, three in state election (except for Nebraska) plus state referenda, if any, and one day for local government, which usually means one or two candidates in county races, one or two in municipal races, a school board election, in some places a hospital and/or public transit board election plus county and municipal referenda.
Furthermore, make the FEC final arbiter of all elections. Take local government out of the process of deciding on voting methods. I think this would minimise corruption rather than make it more likely.
And, if you really want to bring American voting into the modern world, use Condorcet voting and/or proportional representation.
Here would be my reform - if I had the dictatorial power to impose it:
1) Austrailian-style manditory voting. No more griping about people who didn't register, or registered but didn't vote. It costs more, but it's worth it.
2) A paid half day off on election day. Give everyone a chance to get to the polls.
3) Condorcet voting for Presdents, Senators and Governors.
4) Allocate seats in the House to each state rather than drawing districts. If a state has only one House Rep, use Condorcet voting. If it has two, divide the state into two electoral districts and use Condorcet voting. For more than that, use party proportional representation to allocate seats, but also guarantee that any party or independent that gets at least the fraction of votes in the state equal to the number of votes divided by the number of seats in the House gets one seat.
That way, all Reps still represent a state, rather than being 'at-large' national Reps as the Germans have, but the number of seats in the House is still apportioned more reasonably according to voters demands.
5) Move all states to unicameral legislatures like Nebraska. There is no need for state government to replicate the silliness of the Federal government. This way, state elections are for a Governor, one Rep and whatever referenda are going on, and judges in those states where state judges are elected. Also, make state legislatures mixed district/proportional voting on the German model. States are small enough to support 'at-large' representation.
6) Elect a single board for county government by at-large voting for multiple candidates. This means your ballot lists all the qualified candidates and asks you to vote for as many as their are seats on the county board. County supervisors are chosen by the elected board.
7) Do the same for school boards, hospital boards and public transit boards, where such things are elected.
8) Do the same for municipal governments, unless they are elected on the "New Plan", where city commissioners are elected instead of appointed by the municipal government and there is no city council. In that case, go back to Condorcet voting.
9) Stop electing every damn office under the sun, especially judges!!! Elections for judges force judges to be biased. It is a travesty of law to do it this way. In California, we elect offices like state treasurer and insurance commissioner and this is stupid. These offices were less corrupt when they were appointed. I haven't seen anything brilliant come out of elected hospital boards or public transit boards either, and the first thing I would do to reform education is get rid of local school boards.
These reforms would bring the US in line with - in fact ahead of - most other countries in terms of sane, modern, reliable, unambiguous voting systems.
Two quick notes. You have to keep track of who voted (so people don't vote twice). This doesn't mean keeping full logs of every transaction, but it isn't possible to not keep any logs at all as the article initially states.
I'm increasingly disturbed with government and other agencies assuming that they can put critical information and services on the internet and expect that information to be reliably available. For example, my college insists on a 100% on-line course registration system. If your net connection goes down, you're screwed-- the registration day will be over before you can sort through the beauracracy or fix the connection. Any kind of electronic voting system needs to have a completely failsafe backup (like punch cards). A simple DoS attack on a voting machine shouldn't disenfranchise hundreds of voters.
-m
...well, the main one is assuring anonymity while also taking out any chance of fraud.
In addition to the suggestions you recommend, I would add this:
A voter comes up to the front of the line. They provide the necessary ID, and the electoral official marks their name off of the list (computerized, of course). Then the official gives the user some kind of token, perhaps a cheap smartcard-like device, with no identifying information.
This done, the user steps into the voting booth. The first thing they have to do is insert the token into a reader. This is why I prefer the smartcard approach; the reader can take the token completely into the machine, where the user cannot get it back by force without attracting a great deal of attention.
The user then punches in their vote and confirms it, like you said. Once they confirm, the token is rendered invalid (for example, a magnetic signature could be wiped) and then given back to the user. Because the token is now invalid, it cannot be used to vote again. And because you must get the token from an electoral official, who knows whether or not you've already gotten one, this prevents people from sneaking into the booth for another vote while preserving the secret ballot.
As an addition, the user can cancel their vote at any time before confirming it. In this case, the token is not rendered invalid. This gives the user the opportunity to request help from an official, perhaps because the "ballot" is not offered in any language the user can understand. Once you've confirmed the vote, though, there are no second chances.
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Oh yeah, receive passwords by snail mail? Are we not forgetting the problems with the ICANN elections?
Honestly, we need to keep the physical booths around for quite a while longer. Perhaps absentee balots can have an option of being web-based,... but let's not go too far.
Also, there is the issue of election laws. Specifically, the "no campaigning within 100 feet of the polls". So if this is all web-based, can we outlaw door-to-door campaigning?
They're very good ideas, but let's be honest. Convenience is not a primary issue with elections.
Yes, but what of the unintended consequences? Picture a thoughtful, middle-aged voter in the voter booth.
VOTER: "Hmm... I've heard some good things about that Nader feller. Maybe I should vote for him."
[Presses the Nader button, Ralph's mug gets flashed on the screen]
VOTER: "AIGH! Get it off... get it off!"
[Blindly stabs at the buttons. Nader's face is replaced by Bush's.]
VOTER: "Ahhh... much better. This feller looks like a good choice."
--
share and enjoy
Technology is not the solution to all problems. --locust
1) Given a identifying password
Just means I can go to X computers, and type X different passwords, and vote. Guess passwords would not be very hard; either they would be like a CD-Key/serial-number, and be generated, or they would even be simpler to guess:
Adams, Doug: abcdefg
Adams, Dougie: abcdegh
Adams, Douglas: abcdefi
2) As well, because the mail-delivered passwords are the only identifying feature, they could be bought, sold, traded, etc. Maybe not by me, but what if you are low-income, no HMO, little daughter is sick, etc. How much is the going price for a vote?
3) After voting electronically, going to a voting station, and saying, "I lost my password, ring me in!".
The best way would be the electronic touch-screens at the voting booths. That way, you don't need even to be literate to vote, just touch the picture of the candidate, and voila - you're too stupid to read, but now you have voted in an election. Voting still has to be done at a voting booth regardless of the electronic security you could put together, simply because of the ease of social engineering attacks.
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
Is this a joke? I thought it was funny, until I saw the "+5 insightful" and the serious replies. It seemed like fairly amusing mockery of the braindead illogic surrounding the American election.
... In an election this close, between two candidates that are both unsatisfactory, it's probably best that something random and meaningless decides it
* Small states and areas with low population density are not ignored
How so? Electoral college votes are still directly proportional to population, they just lump the whole state together when one candidate gets ahead of the others. The electoral college makes the state of residence of each voter relevant, so the candidates campaign on a state-by-state basis, rather than a voter-by-voter basis.
Unless the race for electoral college votes is very close, the small states are virtually ignored. More importantly, once a candidate gets over 50% of the vote in one state, he can ignore all the other voters in that state; they can neither harm him nor help him.
* In the case that something awful happens (the president-elect turns out to be psycho after the election, we've elected the Anti-Christ, or god forbid they die in a plane crash, etc...) the electors don't HAVE to go with the people's vote... they can break ranks and vote whichever way they want to. Remember, a candidate needs 50% of the electoral college to win, or else it goes to the House of Representatives - so in the case of a close election, a few defecting electors can change the process drastically. Not what we want to happen in a normal election, but it's there as a safety.
There is only a short span of time between the popular vote and the electoral vote. Electors are carefully selected for their party loyalty. The electors never have and never will change their votes when it makes a difference. In the case that something truly awful happens (the president starts committing crimes), the Congress will kick the president out.
Besides, valid or not, this argument amounts to "Thanks to the wonders of the electoral college system, the votes of an entire state may be completely ignored when a relatively minor functionary disagrees with their choice! Isn't that great?"
* It turns out that each person's vote is more powerful that way. You vote for a small portion of the big vote, but you have a much bigger contribution to your portion of the vote compared to if you just had a general popular election.
Nice doublethink. The total power of all votes is constant: they select a President. The only way for a vote to become more powerful is for it to take power from another vote. So, you're arguing that unequal distribution of the value of votes is a good thing?
* Finally, it's the only thing that prevents the presidential election from being a full-blown popularity contest. Basically, if we go to a direct-election system, we might as well change the position's title from "president" to "homecoming king".
Wow, this is almost profound in its utterbaselessness. What on Earth makes an electoral college system less about popularity?
Folks, the success of the Electoral College is PROVEN by this election
If serious, this is quite possibly the most moronic political comment I've ever read. The Electoral College strongly contributed to the two-party lock-in that forces you to choose "between two candidates that are both unsatisfactory" (remember "A vote for Nader is a vote against Gore!"?). This was a freak election, for both the popular and electoral votes to be so close. With so many states at 48%-52%, it could easily have turned out that one side had a strong majority (over 60% or even 70%) of electoral college votes, though the other had a slight majority in the popular vote.
If nothing else, consider that even with a "two party" system, a candidate can be elected with just over a quarter of the popular vote: just over half of the population in only those states needed to get just over half the E.C. votes.
Such strong pressure to keep to a 2-party system is natural because it gets so much worse with more parties. The formula for the fraction of the popular vote just less than what is needed to win (where V is the votes needed and N is the number of parties) is: V = 1/(2N)
So if there were 4 strong parties (let's say that Green and Libertarian came forward), one could win with only an eighth of the voting population behind him, if his supporters are well-distributed. If a dozen parties were seriously considered and everyone "votes their conscience", some crackpot with a well-distributed 5% of the population behind him could get a clear electoral vote majority, even though another candidate gets over 50% of the popular vote.
So if the majority of any state chose anything but support of the 2-party system, they are giving up a decent probability of having the electoral vote reflect the popular vote in favor of a completely random result based on distribution, not quantity, of support.
Now try and tell me that the Electoral College isn't at the root of the 2-party system, and the necessity of choosing the lesser of two evils.
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Authentication Issues
Passwords are one of the flimsiest forms available. At least with a signature there is a little real-time originality. It seems to me it is necessary that people shuld still physically visit the polls:
1. There is the opportunity to eye-witness the actions of the voter as (s)he presents ID, signs hte book, and proceeds to the booth.
2. There is no question as to what transpired at the poll, whereas a vote from the privacy of your own home invites the danger of mistakes (or accusations of mistakes) where no eye witnesses can verify anything.
3. Issues of equipment failure, verification of choices, answers for questions, are all kept public. Likewise, any imposters or similar frauds would have played out their actions before witnesses, making detection and reaction easier.
Computers used Right ;-)
1. Photo-confirmation of the Presidential-pick is a great idea. Those punchholes in Palm Beach couldn't be an issue, even if the choices exceed the ten that Florida dealt with.
2. Weighted Votes would be great: Rank the picks from top to bottom. The Computer could summarize your top pick, but also distribute the weighted results of the popular vote (i.e. Checking Nader, then Gore, then telling the others to smegg off).
3. We could view the web results not only by county, but by district. If a district htinks they have been misrepresented, they could check with their neighbors and contest the results.
That last one has a funny tie-in with this Florida thang... Even though two-thirds of America would like to disban the Electoral College, it was the very thing that drew the attention to Florida's irregularities. Ironic. Yet, we can only guess how much of this goes on in the other 49 states and D.C.
From today's Wall Street Journal:
A tied 1997 mayoral race in Honduras was settled by a law allowing ties to be broken by games of chance. The two candidates in San Juan de Opoa settled on soccer penalty kicks.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
If you can dictate under what terms I can contract my vote, then I don't own it, you own it and are just extending me a privilege to use it.
You're right -- you don't own your vote. And you can't sell it. And no one is extending the privlege to use it -- it is not yours to "use", or to transfer or sell or loan or otherwise dispose of as personal property. It is yours to vote with, or not, as you see fit. But no other choice exists -- you vote, or not.
It's not a car for christ sake, it's the method by which we participate in society, and the underlying principle to this method is that each citizen has exactly ONE vote, no more no less, to be used by themselves and themselves only, no matter how rich or poor they may be.
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
On ABC this morning they asked roughly the same question "Why don't we have a national standard for voting?".
The election official cited gave two reasons:
1) Different systems in different states and counties ensures that the vote cannot be tampered with at a national level. A single system runs into the possibility of a single means to affect the vote by tampering with the single system.
2) Money. As stated, local governments have to pay for the systems themselves. They do the best they can with the money they have but even well off large areas (such as NYC) as still using 40 year old voting booths because nobody wants to spend the money.
Slashdot aside, there are still large numbers of Americans who have little or no faith in computer systems - especially after this years' number of DOS attacks. The conspiracy theories regarding the "real winner" of a computer tabulated race would abound. Consider this: the punch card system, such as used in Florida, was first used in the US in 1892; the voting machine, (push the handle to the right of the candidate), was first used in 1896. We obviously adapt to new technology slowly in the world of elections.
Here in Story County, Iowa we have what I would consider to be the minimum standard for voting equipment.
You get a sheet of names (in large print) with an oval right next to the name which you darken with a marker. But more importantly, as I found out from the guy right in front of me, if you mismark your ballot (say by marking 2 presidential slates) the machine will not accept the ballot. The election official voided his ballot and gave him a new one.
I would add one additional feature by adding 'abstain' as an option for each contest/question -- this would prevent people missing one or more votes (for example, by forgetting to turn it over and mark the back).
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
Nope, this is a tired argument. Any one can get a new one and start over.
Its the immediate permenance of the mark that is valuable to the process. Its what makes recounts valid, and tampering easy to find.
You know what, we should have it so that every party that wants to has to okay the interface used. Then no matter what the interface, both parties can make sure their best interests are served by the ballots. It was sooo unfair of that Democrat who made those ballots so unreadable in Palm Beach, if only they had okayed the ballot before the election then they would have nothing to complain about... (warning, sarcasm at work here.)
No, they are not. Wyoming has less than 450,000 people and gets 3 electors, while California has over 30,000,000 people and gets 54 electors. I leave the math as an exercise to the reader because I'm too lazy.
Yes, each state gets an extra 2 votes, which does make smaller states more important. I forgot that. Nonetheless, the electoral college system makes whole regions irrelevant in the larger states, if they are in the minority: their vote is cast with the majority whether they like it or not. At the very least it would make more sense for every state to split up their votes at the congressional district level.
So by this system, at times the smaller states have influence far out of proportion to their populations, and at other times they are made completely irrelevant because one candidate can get over 50% support in a small number of populous states.
If anything, this just makes the results more random and unfair.
Arguably, the Electorial college is made up of well educated, intelligent people who can comprehend the instructions on a ballot.
But they are selected for loyalty by the party they are supposed to be voting for. Who they are voting for is a foregone conclusion, and in reality they are nothing more than minor functionaries in a vote-pooling system. Any argument for this system based on them changing their votes against what they promised is ridiculous and should be ignored.
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Look at the mess in Florida, and imagine that the voting there had been done 100% by electronic means. How would you deal with people who claim to have voted for the wrong candidate because the ballot was confusing?
Even worse, how would you deal with a hacked voting station? Security only goes so far; eventually a precinct would be hacked. With e-voting, there'd be no way to recount the ballots, no way to sort "good" ballots from "bad" ones, no way to identify which votes were bogus -- because there wouldn't be votes, just data.
Now, look at the precincts in Florida who finished their recounts within a few hours. What did they use? Good old fill-it-out-with-a-#2-pencil OPSCAN forms, just like you use with the SATs. Sure, the ballots are counted by machine, but there are ballots to be counted.
Food for thought.
-- He's fantastic, made of plastic....
The current system, for all its flaws, is a lot safer than anything running over the net.
I would love to see punchcard ballots replaced, but we want to be sure we replace them with something *actually* more reliable, not just something that might well be more reliable.
On the other "modernization" issue: The electoral college is a good thing, because without it, no one outside of CA, NY, FL, PA, and TX matters.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
What if the government published a DVD-ROM with all of the votes cast in the whole country, so that you could run open software to verify the count, and verify that your vote was counted correctly?
I've wanted something like that for years. (Actually, I wanted the raw punchcard data to go onto the net as a downloadable file.) Just raw card images in the order the cards hit the reader. Then you could:
- check that a ballot voted exactly your way appeared.
- get together with other supporters of your candidate and check that you all got counted
- check that the software crunching up the official tally followed the rules
- look for anomalies that might suggest voter fraud (such as a long run of identical ballots)
- look for anomalies that might suggest handling error (such as a repeated run of cards, suggesting that one deck went in the reader twice and another was missed)
and so on.
I have heard that there may be legal problems with getting this data published. Apparently this has been blocked by courts or legislation in the past, in an attempt to impeed vote-buying. (The raw data can be used by vote buyers to check that the sellers kept their part of the bargain.)
But it seems to me that concerned citizens wishing to determine that computer-aided vote fraud is absent would have an overriding interest in the open publication of the data. And that argument might be used to overturn any previous impediments.
FOIA, anyone? B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The ballot box was a Pentium PC with an LCD display, a numeric keypad, flashcard, and battery backup power. The voter punched the candidate's number and the name appeared on the screen, along with the candidate's picture and party name. Then the voter pressed a green key to confirm the vote or orange to erase and start again. There was also a white key for a blank vote. The "section president" (me) enabled the computer for each vote using a separate keypad.
Votes were stored to the flashcard immediately. After the voting closed, the PC printed in a built-in thermal printer the results, and print-outs were given to any party representatives who were present. Another copy of the result was pasted to the precinct door. I then delivered the PC, with the flash card containing the result, to a Justice officer from the electoral court.
Spare PCs were available for cases of hardware failure, and old fashioned paper ballots were also available, for cases of prolonged power outages.
This method was used in all Brazil this year. In some places the ballot boxes were delivered to the voting precincts carried in dug-out canoes.
Perhaps the system in USA would be more advanced if they hadn't been the first to adopt electronic counting. Seeing those people carrying punched cards in the TV brought me some deja-vu feelings. Last time I saw a punched card being used for computer input was in 1979.