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Unauditable Voting Machines
CustomDesigned writes "AP news has a
story on how the new proprietary voting machines for Palm County, FL are working (or not). It seems that voters are complaining that their votes weren't taken. The company claims that the machines are "self auditing", but won't say how they are "audited". The loser of a mayoral race is suing for a review of now the machines work. But doing so voids the warranty, so the election supervisor won't allow it. So, nobody knows how the machines work, but as long as we don't try to find out, the company "guarantees" that they do - whether they seem to or not. I don't expect are problems this fall, do you?" After the debacle, there was lot of noise about electronic voting systems, even ones which use open-source software and were thus completely auditable. Absolutely none of that talk has made it into practice.
Sounds like Jeb Bush all over again..
When are people going to wake up to the fact that republicans are trying to take away our liberties and rights?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
You decide........
RoseColor red={0, 0xffff, 0x0000, 0x0000};VioletColour blue={0, 0x0000, 0x0000, 0xffff};find / -name *mybase*|chown you
Who's responsible for these things? And how much of the taxpayers' money did they cost? I hope the voters pay attention in November.
I'd really like to know why private business has so much sway over government in these sorts of things. I'm quite certain that this county's contract is one of the largest orders that the company has ever gotten. How come the county, as the consumer, doesn't realize that it has the power in the situation, and instead of acting out of fear of the company, should act to protect the interests of its residents.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
As long as you don't open the box, it is alive. I love to see solid sciences adapted for use by the general public.
they also want to kill all the old people, and poison the water.
And starve the children.
Damn republicans...I wish they'd leave so the other 50% of the country could grow and prosper.
Evil is the money of root.
I hope that the recent corporate scandals (Enron, Arthur Anderson, Worldcom, Johnson'n'Johnson) will force people to realize that they can't assume everyone will always follow the rules. There needs to be a reliable & convenient means of verifying that rules are followed or people will break them, hoping they won't be caught. If these 4 giant multinationals could get away with accounting malpractice of such magnitude for this long, there are bound to be others doing the same who haven't been exposed yet.
Similarly, unless it can be proven to the voting population that the election process works as advertised, they should not accept any claims that it does so at face value. Doing so is just begging to be scammed by people willing to take the small risk of being found out, especially when the prize is, in many cases, a great deal of political power.
We are meant to take on trust that corporations always have our best interest at heart? I seem to remember it was a similar reason why we stopped letting kings and queens rule us.
... for people to figure out that US gov'ts don't want auditable voting machinery, because it won't manufacture the result they want. `The issues are too important to let the voters decide' - Kissinger
That's where they should take a lesson from.
They have had electronic voting systems for ages, and I've never heard bad stuff about it. Maybe they have something to teach here, in terms of audits, standard procedures and transparency.
Brazilian people will know what I'm talking about when I say that everyone takes corruption and influence traffic as something that does exist there, so one would have to be at least a bit carefull when implementing a system that doesn't give you phisical voting cards that you can actualy grab with your hands and show them. People will rightfully be wary of electronic voting systems if things are not transparent.
It basicaly gets down to a matter of convenience. In large countries like China, Canada, USA or Brazil, you'll take a substantial amount of time to know the results of an election in traditional voting systems. Electronic voting solves that. Brazilians know who their next president is going to be a couple of hours after the ballots have closed.
OTOH, it introduces the problem of easy tampering. With voting cards, there needs to be a guy (or a gang of them) that steals the votes while nobody's watching and replaces the same number of votes with the result he wishes, and besides being risky, it does not guarantee a result that he wants. With electronic voting, you can add a couple of zeros here and truncate a couple of zeros there.
How can such a system can be implemented without spartan audits, is beyond me...
Lay
Weakly typed languages will bring us armageddon
The obvious question is:
How can voters be expected to trust a voting mechanism when there is no accountability? I don't give two sh*ts about the machine being proprietary. If the machine's method cannot be audited publicly it has NO business being used for any public business.
Whoever orchestrated the purchase of these machines: a) has no business in office, and b) probably got a kickback from the manufacturer.
(Yeah I'm cynical. It's a hobby.)
"Nothing is so important that you cannot make fun of it." -Clarke
I think this is an excellent example of Black-Box testing ;-)
Come on then, make something useful with open source, make an open source voting system to show people that open source works!
The parent company subcontracts out the makers of the devices is called Penultimate Inc. They are a shady company that buys off politicians so no one asks questions when things go wrong. The Miami Herald has stories about them a lot:
Excerpt:
Penultimate, Inc., which equipped a Florida jail with automatic garage-opener gates that accidentally freed prisoners in a lightning storm.
They are building a parking garage at Miami Inrt Airport, which is three years behind schedule and 5 times the cost.
I really hate Dan Patrick.
I suppose they don't want the inner workings the box disclosed because they fear that the competitors steal their design.
But if they had a patent on this stuff they could agree to the disclosure without problems.
You see a good example would patent would come in handy and everybody would profit.
But they seem to be always at the wrong places.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Why not get Anderson's to do the Auditing... :-)
-- "To ask a question is to show ignorance; Not to ask a question means you'll remain ignorant."
>>"...information the plaintiffs are seeking is filed with the state Division of Elections...she couldn't provide it because it includes trade secrets of Sequoia Voting Systems Inc., which manufactures the machines."
Doesn't the right to vote take precedence over a perceived obligation to protect "trade secrets"?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Ok, let's get this straight, because some users of the machines think they should get a paper reciept confirming their vote we are worried that the machines do not work? Maybe it's because these things look like an ATM that people think it should function like an ATM - but typically in balloting you are not supposed to get a receipt. If you do, you can prove how you voted, which makes it easier to sell your vote (someone could sit outside a voting locations and pay money for receipts for their candidate).
I am sure the damned machines work fine. I think the company that makes the machines is being unneccessarily cagey about how the ballot machines function - it's not like this stuff is rocket science. I can't see their intellectual property being all that valuable - but hey, it's theirs to protect.
It also seems that the people who were responsible for make the purchase decicison for the ballot machines were privy to the details of their inner workings - but were required to agree to some sort of NDA. So I really don't see a problem here. Just seems like the normal whining that always accompany major changes to the public's interface with the government.
-josh
If I bought100 machines (Florida has probably many more), I could easily take one apart to find out how it works. This would solve the problem, as then the government knows (or should be able to find out) if those machines are ok or not. Trusting one company which says "Our products are fine. You can trust us." without any verification of that claim by independant auditors is just plain stupid.
By checking out one machine, they can lose at most US$3500 if they break it in this process. But they can win confidence for themself and the public in any case, if they break it or not. Last time I checked, US$3500 was not much for a local government like Florida, so why are they not taking that small risk?
>I mean really how much Lunix bullshit can you read in one day.
I guess this person doesn't want linux to push windows out the door... Bill Gates wouldn't be able to rape this poor AC's arse every day causing him to look elsewhere for his gay sexual fantasies....
I worked on an electronic voting machine for a few years. We did the reporting system and the ballot creation system - another company actually did the device and firmware.
There was no means with which to tell the user what they just voted for, but the system to audit votes (in case of a recount or whatever) was very good. The device itself had triple-redundant everything, and gobs of anti-tamper features. Neat device.
The project was cancelled for two reasons. First, no one could sell an electronic voting machine very well around '99. Local election officials want paper ballots. Then TPTB decided "there's no future in electronic balloting". They cancelled the project.
I just laughed and laughed when I saw them on TV testifying in the Florida election debacle hearings.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
I have some suggestions for you and your fellow "/. is dying/dead" poster:
- Don't come to /. anymore, don't read /. anymore, don't post on /. anymore, don't even think about /. Nobody forces you to come here, or is there some other evil scheme planned by the /. crew to force you into surfing to /. by tampering with your DNS server?
The majority of the people who are decent posters (and actually read what other people have to say) stick to the rules and have no problem whatsoever with /. policy.. Yes you might get modded down once or twice (perhaps often) that doesn't stop anybody from reading your post by changing their settings... take it like a geek, this is Real Life, stuff that you don't like happens...
My ISP got banned once, without me doing anything wrong. I mailed /. they sent a mail back with an apoligy and an explenation why it had happened... truly these are not the signs of evil in any form...
I'm sick and tired of your kind, the people who post something pseudo-intelligent, thinking that if they actually put some structure in their message that nobody will notice that it's pure bollocks...
It seems to me that you are an extremely bored bloke with no purpose in life. Stop wasting your time with useless crap like this, go read a book or watch a movie... hell even rearranging your socks and underwear would be a better use of time.
Sinecerely yours, Baykal E.
"The majority is always sane, Louis." -- Nessus
http://slashdot.jp
Like the problem is that there is a real issue with the machines, as much as two other things.
:ding: "you smell.. Im not taking your vote! No vote for you!" or something? Remember.. these people were too stupid in a lot of cases to understand how to poke a hole in a butterfly ballot or to follow a line to a persons name.. you expect them to make a bilingual computer screen work?
1)voters who claim their vote wasnt taken (how do they know? Did the machine go
2) SOmeone who wanted to get elected did not get elected, and knowing the machines were under an NDA or were otherwise inauditable at the moment (even though they apparently passed all their initial tests with flying colors) started screaming ITS THE MACHINES FAULT!
Great tradition we have started here.. "The people did not elect me by their votes.. I must challenge and challenge until I win!"
Cant we just go back to the days of dropping small rocks into boxes for votes?
*sigh*
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
(Lets Get) Phisical
Olivia Newton John
I'm saying all the things that I know you'll like,
Makin' good conversation
I gotta handle you just right,
You know what I mean
I took you to an intimate restaurant,
Then to a suggestive movie
There's nothin' left to talk about,
Unless it's horizontally
Let's get phisical, phisical,
I wanna get phisical, let's get into phisical
Let me hear your body talk,
Your body talk, let me hear your body talk
I've been patient, I've been good,
Tried to keep my hands on the table
It's gettin' hard this holdin' back,
You know what I mean
I'm sure you'll understand my point of view,
We know each other mentally
You gotta know that you're bringin' out
The animal in me
Let's get animal, animal,
I wanna get animal, let's get into animal
Let me hear your body talk,
Your body talk, let me hear your body talk
...a human's ability to bitch/whine/moan/complain about anything to do with voting.
Seeing how they can't blame machines for miscounting (the usual reason/excuse for a recount) they decided to blame a "confusing" interface. I wonder if there is a relationship between the political preferences of 8 affidavits and the party/person who lost the election......
I would like to see one of these boxes in use... I bet the interface is a simple ATM like one where you press this button for this action..... as simple as crossing a paper box.
oh wait.... this is Tampa, Florida - old people capital of the USA..... another case of technology being "bad" and confusing for old people ?
- HeXa
99% of voters don't even trust who there voting for, that is if they even know there name,
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
"They are a shady company that buys off politicians"
and this makes them different from most companies in what way?
That "Nigger: Yes/No" before voting
Asking if you want to recieve important voter product information in your mailbox
Uses CyberAge for verification
You have to agree to a long EVLA which basically states that your Voter Registration Card is property of Sequoia Voting Systems Inc.
Some say that the popup ads for republican candidates violates the 500-yards rule, though advertisers insist that this being a digital medium, the 700-yard long EVLA should be counted in the measurement
Voting System always seems to hang on important issues
Text-feild for write-ins has 3 character limit
Can't really get through the voting proccess without going out and downloading 17 VBRun dll files
Many voters complained of a lack of MP3 support
No confirmation message saying that your vote has been recieved.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Who cares really. Next time someone says "Your vote counts!" I'll remind them that all the votes (electoral) went to GWB in my state. Since I voted Gore my vote didn't count. Our electoral process is a joke. No wonder people don't vote.
Works well pretty much everywhere else. Clearly written numbers, or ticks, are unambiguous (no "chads") and leave a concrete paper trail that can be audited with ease.
Use the Slash poll for voting.
Pro: it's open source, so nothing's hidden
Con: CowboyNeal will always be one of the candidates
The expert ("Rebecca Mercuri, a computer science professor at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania") that testified in this matter founded NotableSoftware.com and has this statement
"I am adamantly opposed to the use of fully electronic or Internet-based systems for use in anonymous balloting and vote tabulation applications."
here. Go there for lots more information and links.
"Arse"? Uh oh, you must be one of those fucking mouth-rotted British queers. Look I dont care about Lunix or Windows either way. I am a mac user. OS X is the most brilliant operating system going. How many OS's can scale to 64 processors like OS X can? How man OS's are actually UNIX branded by the Open Group like OS X is? HUH FUCKWAD? I run my blogger on OS X, I get like 400 hits a day, ROCK SOLID. Every time i tried Windows and IIS, blue screens. Lunix, please.. who has the TIME.
Go back to your cloudy, rainy, drunken, pathetic existence. Shitbag. Be thankful we got Hitler off your back FOR YOU and just shut the fuck up
Enron-esque style auditing? So is anyone surprised that a bunch of florida-tards who can't figure out the complicated process of punch cards is now stymied by the equivalent of an ATM machine?
Oh, and big suprise, the loser is crying foul. Thats one out of the Al Gore playbook.
"I don't expect are problems this fall, do you?"
There are 72 comments, and everyone else seems to know what this means. Pardon me, but I don't.
I am curious, don't you guys have laws regulating how an election is performed? Where I come from there is no way in hell an unauditable machine would be let anywhere near the voting process. This should be an open and shut case. If it is not, then you need new election laws and you need them badly.
1). The adverage IQ is 100 that means half of the people who can vote have below adverage IQ however you measure IQ, thats just the way it is, who's to say you vote is better than somone elses.
2). They should really have thaught about this first, don't forget polititians have an adverage IQ of 90,
anyhow i think there should only be numbers on the ballot and any campains so that you have to know what your voting for!.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
You can have a go with an interactive demo here and view an automatic demo (with a picture of the machine) here . These may not be the actual machines used in Florida, but are likely similar.
As you can see it is a simple text-based touch-screen menu system (although elsewhere on the site they talk about showing pictures of candidates). A patent is (or at least should be) only applicable when there is something novel. They might have novel auditing stuff on the back-end, but there doesn't seem to be anything new here.
The bottom line: all voting systems have the potential for inaccuracy and abuse, and nearly all of them experience inaccuracy and abuse every time they are used. We have faith in the outcomes mostly because the overall result usually does not differ very much from our shared sense of who really "won."
As the Massachusetts state chair of the Libertarian Party, and a two-time candidate for public office, I have had an exposure to the voting process and the people who conduct it that many other voters have not had. Here's what I can tell you:
At every Libertarian primary, we collect stories of votes not counted, votes incorrectly counted, and voters confused or abused by the system.
In one case, some of our voters reported that they were actually asked to sign their ballots!
In others cases, five people in a precinct will swear they've voted in the primary, but only three votes will show in the official tally.
Then there's the actual abuse.
A fellow who used to work with another party once explained to me how unscrupulous operatives routinely abuse the system by taking advantage of the fact that Massachusetts law does not require voters to present identification when they vote.
I don't wish to give unnecessary detail, but suffice it to say that I do believe that some small level of vote fraud is present in most elections, even here in the United States.
It is interesting to note, however, that when one Massachusetts town tried to mitigate the problem by requiring voters to show ID, the Democrats successfully fought the practice in federal court by alleging that requiring identification is an unfair burden on the indigent.
For the most part, these issues arise not because people are malicious (although some inevitably are), but primarily because poll workers are well-meaning, underpaid, undertrained, and perfectly normal, fallible human beings.
These problems are usually too small to notice against the bulk of legitimately cast and properly counted votes, except when the total number of votes cast is small (like in a small precinct) or when the overall result is very close (as in Florida in 2000).
In general, it is not possible to get a "perfect" result from any voting system. The best that we can do is accept our imperfect knowledge and stand behind the result that most reasonably appears to be true.
That's not always easy. But if you want to make sure the result means something, the best thing to do about it is help to ensure that the result is not small or close by going out and casting your ballot for the candidates you like best.
Here in the UK electoral law is such that the methods and controls of the voting procedure are laid down in black and white in various legal instruments and the electoral returning officer (a civil servant) must certify that the election was held in full accordance with the rules.
I know little about US law but I would have thought that a similar set of conditions must apply. If so, the elections department *must* have taken steps to satisfy themselves that use of the machines would fully comply otherwise they would not be able to certify the election.
Assuming that US civil servants are upright honest citizens, we must conclude that the machines do infallibly work correctly.
Without open, clear auditability, these machines cannot even be defined as voting machines. It's horrifying that the public officials in charge of purchasing the devices didn't know of auditability being an absolute requirement. Now, Palm Beach County really has no choice but to open the black box!
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Isn't this a similar circumstance to making microsoft divulge their source code to a third party. This third party would have to sign a non-disclosure agreement, but what's the damage there.
I guess htey cannot guarantee there machines secure if someone knows how they work as then that person could find the backdoor. But still is this really security?
Am I missing something? Isn't just TESTING the thing all that's needed? I mean, put in a couple of thousand of votes and check the outcome?
Let's see, I create this voting machine and no one can see how it works.
Happily, I go into the booth to vote. I want Biff Emerson to win the election, so by hitting keys in a certain sequence it transfers 4% of the votes from other candidates to my candidate! After all, my candidat is all for voting machine contracts!
What's to stop it? Where is the public auditability of the system? Should we allow this type of potential in our voting? It sounds like a parallel to the old Enron/Author Andersen deal.
That's not quite an audit, what if you take 99 apart but do look at the one that doesn't work(or is rigged a bit!)
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Correct me if I am wrong but our votes do NOT count in a Presidential election. That is what the electoral college is for. Our votes are supposed to be used as a guidline for the electoral college to use, but they don't have to. If we all voted for candidate #1 and the electoral college voted for candidate #2, #2 would win.
Are people really complaining that their votes aren't being counted? How could they find out? If I push the button, the vote is counted, it's that simple.
For people to claim that they voted but their vote isn't counted is ludicrious. The only way for a vote not to count is to *not* vote. I can't believe the gall of people to claim that they voted, and their vote wasn't counted.
-Brent>
What sort of "Auditing" would you expect?
All it knows, I hope, is the count of votes, and when those votes were made.
Are you expecting a log of who voted for who? Wouldn't *THAT* be more of a problem than an "unauditable" machine? Even a log of what votes were registered at exactly what time would make it possible to figure out who voted for who.
The machines are probably allowing out exactly as much information as they were designed to; seems like anything else would be a problem.
- Steve
It's not difficult -
Use both systems, the electronic for speed and convenience and the paper for auditing and accountability.
Once the user/voter has made their choice(s) on the computer, they need to sign a paper printout (perhaps with audio for the blind, multilingual choices, etc) that verifies and validates what they've voted for. Perhaps with an ink fingerprint as an option for those who can't sign easily or for speed.
If there is ever a challenge, the paper gets hauled out (or perhaps is hauled out as a matter of course) and the results verified.
The system itself should be developed in the open and standardized nationwide for all levels of government.
I seriously have got to stop reading Slashdot before I've fully woken up - I read this headline as "Auditable Vomiting Machines". The worst part, though, is that my reaction was "wow, cool!!
I need some coffee....
"You may elect whatever candidates you please to office, if you will allow me to select the candidates." - William "Boss" Tweed
You may elect whatever candidates you please to office, if you will allow me to count the ballots with my self auditing voting machine.
This is just a small example of how business interests are over-ruling that of "the people."
Questions to ponder:
"Is this a good thing?" "Is this a bad thing?"
It's good in the sense that there are forces that can keep government in check. It's bad in the sense that they aren't being used that way... they only serve their own interests.
So what is preventing people from getting more involved in more civil liberties unions anyay? I was about to suggest the creation of entities that can have more pull with both business and government interests and then I realized they exist! There's EFF, ACLU and a lot others that do not immediately come to mind.
Maybe it's my age showing in that I see better where things are going and that it's not good. What I see is only natural when "the people" don't care about what's going on.
It's not out of control. It's not beyond our control and never will be. The question is only in how bloody the revolution will be. The more our government points guns at "the people" the worse it all becomes. Get active and make your voice heard and it never has to get "too bad" or too bloody.
Finally, public interest should ALWAYS come before business interests when it comes to "proprietary technology." A government should NEVER find itself in a position such as the one depicted by Robocop2 where the huge corporation literally forecloses on a major city in the U.S. Companies should not be able to hold the interests of the public hostage...and especially not their data.
This is the purpose of open standards. Open standards are best because there is no proprietary scheme which allows everyone to participate. Open standards are best because the public can 'trust' more in the sense that they know the contents and capabilities they are working with. Imagine there being some hidden code in a word processor document, unknown to anyone but the company that created the format, that upon a triggered event that license compliance is found to be too far out of compliance that important documents become inaccessible or destroyed as a result? Such situations could bring government to a hault at times. Do "the people" then take weeks, months and years in court to resolve the problem?
Sure, this is just a voting booth. The next time it's something even more significant.
"I AM THE GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ"
"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain"
Remember, Stalin said that voters decide nothing, that those who COUNT the votes, everything. Trusting some closed source software, given Microsoft's stellar record of producing bug and exploit free code, is INSANE!!!
The only difference is, a candidate can get screwed and never know how. Why am I not surprised? These machines were put in by the same biased, corrupt elections people who carried out the recount scams...
Democrats almost all of them, BTW. The "butterfly" ballot was designed and approved by a DEMOCRAT controlled board. The recounts ALL run by Democrats.
Not that I have much use for republicans anymore, because I don't see them as being significantly different or "better" than the Dems. Nor any more honest. Dems use government largesse to buy votes, and will comit mass vote fraud when they have to. Republicans run vast corporations that use largesse to buy GOVERNMENT actions, and use mass fraud to fool investors into buying their stock.
The end result is always the same. The individual, who is supposed to be SOVERIGN in this country, gets trampled...
Corporatism != Free Market
For voting, it is very important to have a way to re-count the votes. I think a literal paper trail is best.
I cannot imagine a better scheme than what Washington state is using now:
When you go to vote, you get a piece of heavy paper (or maybe it's light cardstock) pre-printed with the ballot. Next to each item you can vote for is a bubble. They loan you a fine-point permanent marker (a Sharpie) and to vote you just fill in the bubble.
When you are done, you take the ballot over to the counting machine. You feed the ballot into the slot. (If this is too technically advanced for you, the nice person watching the machine helps you.)
The counting machine makes sure you didn't make any conflicting votes: for example, voting for both Bush and Gore for President. If there are any conflicting votes, it refuses the ballot and spits it back out the slot. Then you get a fresh ballot and start over.
Assuming all is well, it counts up all the votes, and then drops the ballot into a bag. The bags are locked up and stored, so the actual paper ballots are available for a recount if necessary.
At the end of the day, the counting machine is plugged into a phone jack. It calls in to a computer and reports the votes it had counted all day. The votes can then be quickly summed and you find out how the election went quickly.
You only need one counting machine per voting location, and the voting booths are simple desks with privacy screens; the Florida voting machines cost $3500 each and you need one per voting booth.
The system now used in Washington state is easy to use, not expensive or difficult to implement, gives results quickly, and allows for recounts.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I really pitty the poor folks down in Palm Beach, first they get embarressed to hell and back in the 2000 presidental elections, now the taxpayers pay for machines that can't be audited without voiding the warrenty? WTF?
First off, the article doesn't say how the votes on these machines are counted. I mean, it has to spit out results somehow and somewhere.
Second, these machines were developed by a corp. Now-a-days when scandels are a dime a dozen, do we really need MORE CORPERATIONS digging their hands into politcs?
Third, These are digitalized machines. They have the potential to be hacked, crash, and lose data.
And since it's digital that means all three can happen at once or in any combination. I mean yeah it does have a coolness factor, but simplicity is key. It needs to be something that just *works*
Hey, i dunno bout those guys but i can *still* vote with our local lever machine even when the power is out.
If our lever-machine breaks, you'd be the first to know when you can't pull the lever down. Plus, even if it mechanically breaks, you still will always have the votes that have been cast inside prior to the breakage. And if you ever saw one, their monsterous and built like tanks.
If your gonna go digital with voting machines, do it RIGHT. Give the elderly something tangable that assures them that their vote counted, such as a watermarked printout. I mean their gonna expect this now since alot of floridians were so unsure if their votes counted under the old system.
They can't even get an independent review of the voting system's software and security features.
I'd like to know who's bright idea it was to purchase machines with these kind of restuctions and decided to buy them anyway....Oh the the conspiracy theroies one can weave.
Now floridians are going to see every tom, dick, and hairy who loses an election, bitching because the system was flawed, broken, malfunctioned..lets have a recount...a re-re-count, what's that? a hanging system? On to the supreme court!
If I were the people who had to use this machine, i'd demand my representives to get a refund and find a system that's more open. flexable and tailored to the people's choices and expectations.
But I guess that would require their local government listening to *them* instead of *cough*COMPANIES*cough*
I hope they get on the ball with this.
I may not make much sense, but maybe I can make some change.
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
And here I thought that most of the country were non-aligned.
If you think that "open source" software would make the system completely auditible, then you don't understand the issues.
... any voting system that uses magnetic media in the voting machines is inherently untrustworthy. You need to have a system that runs on paper-tape or something. If the program gets modified, there's evidence left behind. . .
Open source, closed source, it doesn't matter. If you can't do a recount, it's all just pissing in to the wind.
And beyond that
Does this mean that if ever Bill Gates runs for President, they will only count votes cast for a "modern" candidate? Scary stuff!
Say no to software patents.
This is exactly what I said when the first conversations were starting about electonic voting machines.
People may have trouble with paper ballots for a variety of reasons, but at least you can always go back and look at exactly what the person using the ballot did or didn't do. So they didn't punch the hole all the way through, or they punched two holes, or drew too thin a line... there's a lot more auditable data on a piece of paper than on a computer, especially if the computer's "trust" is drawn into question.
There are situations where electronics aren't appropriate. In a voting system you should have hard physical evidence of how many votes were cast for each person, so that recounts can be performed in close elections. Anonymity is a desirable quality in a ballot, but intangibility is not. If the chad-punching wasn't effective, then a method for unambiguously marking a ballot is needed. Replacing it with a system like this is simply begging for trouble.
I can only hope that both Bushes lose their elections by some tiny number of votes cast on these machines. We'll see the black boxes taken apart then, I guarantee it.
Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore (a registered democrat, designer of the delightful butterfly ballot we enjoyed so much in the 2000 elections and now responsible for these unauditable machines) has to be a Trojan Horse owned by Jeb Bush. In most parts of our society it is not possible to be that stupid and still keep your job.
Even if some public spirited citizen were to buy one of these machines, dissassemble the machine and the code, and publish the results to show that the machine does (or does not) do the job without cheating, there would be no guarantee that the rest of the machines are running the same code. Where the government uses a software based machine for recording votes, there must be some extreme means to confirm that it does this honestly - perhaps by using open source code and MD5 verification of the binary in memory before and after voting to prove that the proper code is being run.
The potential for subverting the process here is disturbing: Is it possible to install new code on this machine through a modem connection from elsewhere (as in widows media player)? Perhaps it is possible to dial into the machine and alter data (using the back door left for customer support)? It's hard to believe the public officials who bought this stuff even have a clue as to what could go wrong, and their acceptance of the manufacturer's insistance on secrecy is frightening. Printing a receipt for the voter would be a nice feature, but how does the public know that it truly reports the proper totals at the end of the day? What happened to "trust but verify?"
it's a Xbox, isn't it! I just know it.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Over in Germany, we have something that works flawlessly. Paper and pen. The forms are counted manually and the results are faxed from the local offices.
And how long does it take to get the results? We can usually vote till 6PM and get the results by 11PM on the same day. There are only 70 million Germans, but I don't see why this shouldn't scale up.
Despite strong standing in the community of an intelligent, technically educated constituency, the enormous political clout of voting manufacturers essentially hypnotized the politically defensive bureaucrats to freeze us out. At the end of the day, this too must result in debacle. If not now, later. The problem with chad was poor rules, poor technology and reliance on case law addressing a much older technology (hand-written ballots).
...
But the problem was not lack of accountability for absence of evidence -- most of it was there. It was simply a dispute over what it meant, and whether to look at it -- the stuff of which a political or legal decision can be made. Yes, it was a debacle, but the solution is worse than the problem.
There must be auditable physical evidence of a vote if the result is ever to have credibility -- and the public must believe in the technology. The virtue of paper ballots is its comprehensibility to the public. Having a machine with a "he-said," "she-said" dispute (and no physical proofs) of its fairness and the results is a recipe for chaos. Absolute chaos.
The way to begin was simple, routine engineering processes: define and agree on requirements; produce and RFP; accept only conforming solutions and iterate as necessary if requirements change over time.
Instead, Florida, for the most part, went with pre-made and cheap. The public never had any stomach to spend money to vote well, and took whatever was being sold. At the end of the day, these machines weren't even cheap. (And truth to tell, the total cost of ownership has yet to be measured or validated either.)
The public was frozen out of the decision in favor of "blue-ribbon" committees of non-engineers. For shame, all of us. Fool us once
I would suggest looking through the GNU.Free project for more information.
Jason Kitcat, the maintainer of the project, spoke here in Cambridge (England) a couple months ago. Very informative talk, explaining the merits and pitfalls of electronic voting.
The site contains numerous articles detailing most aspects of e-democracy in action. Most of the information from Jason's talk is available of the GNU.Free site.
I am concerned about any program, any piece of hardware, any treaty, any law that treats me as a consumer, not a citizen
4. The voter is prevented from voting for the wrong party...
???
Every voter would be issued a smart card containing a private key and a serial number, signed by the election authority. All cards would be accounted for. The voter's identity and the matching public key would be recorded in the voter registry. At the close of registration and before the election, the list of valid ballot numbers would be published.
At polling time, the user would insert the smart card into a voting terminal and make their choices. The smart card would generate a pseudonymous key pair which never leaves the card. The choices and a ballot number, signed by the ballot machine key and the election authority key, would be sent to the smart card, where a copy is recorded and a pseudonymous signature applied. The double-signed ballot would be returned to the machine and stored in bulk. For confidentiality, the voting machine would not record the identity of the voter's key. As far as we know, 512 bit RSA is still resistant to attack in the necessary window of a few weeks, and the strength used can easily increase given sufficient smartcard and bulk storage.
At the close of the election, the results would be posted in their entirety (200 million * 200 bytes = 40GB uncompressed, possibly collated by the last few digits of the voting machine key) so that a voter could look up their own ballot number and confirm that their choices were as they selected and that the signatures on the ballot and on the card match. Anonymity would be preserved through the pseudo-key arrangement. All unregistered cards would be read out to ensure they were not voted and are accounted for.
Ballots must be secure against addition, change, or deletion. The system is somewhat resistant to addition because the voting machine would verify the card is on the list of issued and thus votable cards, and refuse to work if the card is not. Cards can also be compared to the valid card list post-vote. It may be possible to issue false cards before registration closes and to vote them later, but the same problem exists with paper ballots and tighter inventory control can help. Losing ballots could happen if an entire voting machine "falls off the back of a truck", or more likely malfunctions, but many if not all such ballots could be recovered when people verifying their own ballot notice their ballots not present in the results.
Ballots are secured against post-vote malicious editing by being publicized. Pre-vote, a voting machine could ask the card to sign a ballot other than the voter voted. This could be prevented by allowing the voter to compose their ballot on a separate machine than stores the ballot, allowing a user to confirm their vote on a third machine if desired before it is recorded. Alternately, the user, given appropriate equipment, could compose their vote at home before going to the polling place.
Any possible attacks I forgot here that don't involve subverting the entire system end-to-end?
So with open-source auditing, a fair and accurate vote can be held. The problem is that the powers that be don't want that. It's far more important at the present time, IMHO, to change the voting system so that voters can more expressively state their preferences and so that races can handle more than two candidates.
-jhp
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
Why would anyone expect a government with no accountability to use anything other than voting machines with no accountability?
No voting technology will ever be perfect. That's why auditability and accountability are key, no matter what system is used.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
We can either know the candidate for whom any given person voted, or we can know the mechanism by which any given person voted, but we can't know both.
>>[The lawsuit] also seeks to allow an independent review of the voting machines and related software and security features.
>>Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore says such a review would void the machines' warranty and that they've been reviewed twice by labs appointed by the federal government and also by a state worker.
Sometimes, all you can do is admit that a mistake was made and fix it. Assuming the story is right and the facts straight (a BIG assumption!), someone should be figuratively pilloried for buying a system that can't be audited - that by EULA terms prohibits auditing! (amazing) - and new machines contracted that overcome this hole of mistrust.
Surely these cannot be the best voting machines available.
And given that this is a system required by every community in the USA, and many in the world, this seems like a great opportunity for an open source project. And no, I'm not running it, and I'll probably find out there's already such a project, and it's been in place for 3 years, and is due to deliver in 6 weeks....
--Imagine a beowulf cluster of Lunix-based voting machines.
If you have a ballot that is so close that multiple recounts don't give a consistent result then the difference in votes must be statistically insignificant. In other words the election that caused this problem was a draw!
It's customary, when you have a draw, to split the spoils 50-50, so each candiate should have got 13.5 votes each (OK so that means that Bush wouldn't have won - but thats not my point).
The fact is, those high court judges are so ignorant of statistical methods that they couldn't see a dead-heat when it was staring them in the face.
Democracy promises that every citizen has a right to vote (except those in Prison, under age, miss the bus, on vacacation, those who forget, etc...) and people think that means that every vote is sacred (reminds me of a song from Life of Brian). Anyone who understands the least bit of statistics will know that this is total bull.
Don't try to fix the machines, fix the system.
- Get 10 machines randomly
- Get 10 "voters"
- Have each person vote all options 100 times each
- See what each machine says
- Repeat 1,000 times
You know you drank too much last night when you read the title as "Unavoidable Vomiting Machines" :)
Berto
How difficult is to have a computerized system like this that *also* prints the votes on hardcopy? The voter checks that the printout is ok, stuffs it in a box, the box is sealed and reopened in case of litigation.
New York City had this very same scandal some elections back. The corp that won the voting machine contract made a deal that Democrats only would win elections. After it was discovered a few people went to jail and Dinkins lost.
Mexico's experience: in 1994 presidential elections, whole duplicated computer centers were found in the cities of Hermosillo and Oaxaca, with the same software as the legal centers, and manned by people from the ruling party. When found by the press in Hermosillo, the army immediately surrounded the place to stop people and reportes from nosing around. Lots of rumors afterwards, nothing confirmed of course, who is going to be tracking bits and bytes?
I'd go with the manual French voting system.
STANDARD ARTICLE TEMPLATE tbo Variables.Cat
Stuff like that tends to look unprofessional.
-braxton
Applying statistics to countable things is a Bad Idea. There were an actual, countable number of people who voted; therefore, there was an actual, countable winner. Like it was said before, this isn't rocket science.
I agree that the system is flawed, but it should be repaired in such a way that makes disparate outcomes while retabulating the data IMPOSSIBLE, not to suggest that voting is a statistical measure. Even if we wanted to decide the vote was actually a poll representative of the feelings of all voting Americans, it would be poor statistics. Moving actual, countable 1:1 phenomenon into the realm of statistics offends the sensibilities.
What's my solution? Electronic voting machines that fucking print out a logfile of votes into a locked cabinet. Why are people so damned compartmentalized they don't think a digital voting machine can't generate a paper trail?!
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
I always said the smartest thing to do was make a machine that has a nice touchscreen voting system, and when you are done it will ask you if [list of people] are the candidates you wanted to vote for.
If all is well, you hit "yes", and it will take your properly-inserted punchcard and make the punches for you. You could even put in validation with some kind of magnetic strip on the card (like having a unique number for each card, and then knowing x people voted and having y ballots).
Personally, I feel that eletronic voting is just one step closer to rigged elections.
You actually expected real change? Come on!
If those elements will shut the hell up, then perhaps we can avoid this debacle from taking place again
the problem with Florida (and the whole south in general) is that it is run by a corrupt "good ol' boy" network. They make sure that nothing is easy or simple, and thus guarantee the legality of their corruption. Its called plausible deniability.
notice that a rigged election in Florida, aided by the US Supreme Court, still hasnt resulted in any changes in the voting laws.
Also, since someone mentioned that electronic voting lets you know who was elected within hours, I need to know, what is the rush? In this matter, I think its best to have as close to 100% accurate vote counting than it is to have the results as fast as an internet poll.
I'm sorry AC, you are sadly mistaken... corporations do not have 'our best interest at heart'. The only interest a corporation has at heart is that of the stock holders and their profits. The only interest a corporations has in everyone else is the most effeicient method to gather money from them.
Everything else is secondary. Don't forget that.
Since you mentioned Canada... [snip] Up here in the tundra our federal elections are run by a national agency (called, oddly enough "Elections Canada"). It makes things fairly uniform coast-to-coast [snip] Do I understand correctly that each county in Florida is responsible for the federal voting in their county, and they can conduct the voting however the heck they want to?
Thanks to the wonderful (NOT!) "education system" here in the States, most of our citizens are woefully uninformed about how our federal elections work. In the U.S., the People do NOT elect the President; the States elect the President.
The Founders intended a relatively weak Federal government that would be little more than a loose federation of sovereign States, where the real power lies. To prevent a State from getting out of control, each County within that State was to have its own independent election board.
The Founders had an enormous fear of any one person or entity gaining ultimate power over the entire country. The President and the Congress were to deal only with issues which were common to all States, or with issues which crossed state lines.
Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, changed all of that nearly 140 years ago. The US is now very close to the same sort of tyranny that the Founders were escaping when they declared their independence two-plus centuries ago.
But there's still hope. Though the Constitution is largely ignored, misunderstood or "re-interpreted", neither it nor the Electoral College has been formally abolished -- yet.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
well, the way I see it, if you know your candidate isnt going to win, but you want your second choice to not lose, that means your second becomes your vote.
voting with indiference is just like not voting. those people should have used their brains.
The problem I REALLY have with our voting system is the whole 'electoral college' thing. Since votes are grouped in with the state majority, that means that a Republican in Illinois or a Democrat in Texas may as well not even vote, since their vote doesnt actually count.
But the greatest voter casualties are in states that are closely contested. If a state is won by a 51% majority, that means that a whopping 49% of voters basically had their votes discounted. Not very fair.
The electoral college was a pragmatic solution for a world where communication was difficult and slow. Since neither of these are the case in 2002 (and havent been since the telegraph was widely used), our system is terribly outdated.
When it comes to voting, we no longer need to settle for an approximation. We can have each vote counted, and take the majority winner. This will prevent a loss of votes in closely held elections, and will also get rid of the 'swing state' b.s. Politicians will then have to campaign on issues and performance rather than money and influence.
But that isnt going to happen anytime soon, anyway.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
The reason nothings being done... hmm... could it be that democrats cook elections just as much as republicans? And the two parties have a vested interest in the status quo? No?
Back in 2000 MIT demonstrated a secure, verifiable voting mechanism that would allow any citizen to audit the results in a few minutes without giving up the anonymity of the voters. The technology is there.
The fact that it hasn't been adopted is yet another in a long string of failures to perform their duty on the part of our government.
These failures are unacceptable to me, but most people just go about their lives believing what they're told and in denial.
How can you have liberty in a land of sheep? All it takes is a few wolves to convince the sheep that its for thier own good. (which is why we still have the income tax system-- the sheep said "OK" to it to pay for WWI, but the wolves didn't keep their word.)
Its a shame, really.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
... elections have nothing to do with the physical means in which you vote... it has to do with who counts them.
Virtually every company is honest.
The who;e "companies are scum" is the line fed to you to keep you distracted while the politicians pick your pockets.
Baa like a sheep for me.
Companies are answerable to their owners, customers, AND employees-- three constituent groups.
Government isn't even answerable to voters.
Baa Baaa.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Having worked in a few Swedish elections I feel pretty confident saying that there are very few, if any, errors.
Every vote is hand counted three times by independent teams. All the ballots are also available for inspection by any member of the public. I can't recall a single case of miscounting, though there probably are some.
In Sweden, the government keeps track of where you live. That may have its problems, but it also makes things like this work much safer and simpler. There is no voter registration phase, since they already know exactly who lives where and has a right to vote in which election. When you go to vote they have a printout of every voter in that district, and just check you off a list.
You probably have to ID, don't remember.
The only form of fraud you hear of is how party representatives go through institutions for senile elderly and cajole them into signing absentee ballot paper work.
I could go on, but it gets boring. My point is that if you actually try, you can devise a near perfect system. That you haven't seen or heard of one probably tells us more about the US, than about the inherent problems of counting votes.
It has always been a dream of mine, that voting and paying your yearly taxes ought to happen during the same event. Pay first, then immediately vote. Think about it. ;-) How would that change the responibility equation of the candidates?
But back on topic, how many people would trust an ATM machine that did not spit out a receipt? How many people would trust a bank that refused to issue a balance statement? I am not saying we have to identify each voter by name on the ballot - but we do need a paper trail in case we need an audit.
Yes, companies are answerable to their owners, customers and employees. Do you honestly think they present the same face to each of these three groups? How well informed do you think each of these groups are, on average? Why do so many large companies donate so much to the government? I am part of a business myself, so I agree companies are more honest than most people give them credit for. But your view is just as naive as his.
slashdot!=valid HTML
In Canada, we use this incredible invention called the "Pencil" and another called "Paper" to conduct our elections. These wonderous inventions are then counted by "hand." Amazingly, we can count 15 000 000 votes in under 4 hours, and there is rarely, if ever, a recount. You see folks, sometimes the low-tech solution works best.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
India has a billion people and they use paper ballots, hand counted at the precinct level. The only thing that these sophisticated voting machines are for is for political dirty tricks and other skuldugery. What's so hard about counting votes on paper? That's the most reliable fool proof way to do it. Not so much in a technical sense but in a political sense in that the responsibility is distributed among many people so that if someone wants to cheat or rig the election or bunch chads twice it's much more difficult.
If NYC or Chicago gin up a lot of fake votes, past a certain point it's irrelevant, the electoral votes go to the Democrat and that's it. In a nationwide vote system each dead voter counts so there's an incentive to fraud far beyond the present day system and one-party controlled counties like Cook in Illinois have the ability to make huge vote totals and much larger impact on the national election. In short, eliminate the electoral college and watch vote fraud skyrocket.
What about a machine that tabulated votes electronically, but also generated a paper ballot based on the preferences entered? Paper ballots could be deposited in a traditional ballot box. Anyone could see exactly who they voted for on the ballot that got printed, and if there was a question, they could recount the paper ballots. About the third time the paper recount exactly matched the initial electronic count, people would start believing the hardware. No more hocus-pocus "self-auditing" black box. Is this too simple a solution for the politicians to accept? Is it too fraud-resistant?
Ever heard of comp.risks? She's had a lot to say about this subject in the past.
Read it here
Unlike her, I do believe that fair and accurate election results are possible via voting machine. I believe this requires Open Source voting software and a way by the interested public to verify during the election process that the software that was audited by the public is in fact being used during the election, and that observers chosen by any and all candidates be running be allowed to monitor the internal processes of the counting machinery during the election.
Counting votes is NOT rocket science. Any company that asserts proprietary code and procedures used in counting them is automatically guilty until proven innocent.
Tech Public Policy stuff
This isn't because they understand technology, just that Hollywood didn't think the GOP worth buying.
I'm voting in the next election based on candidates' positions on the entertainment industry attempts to take our freedom to use computers and the Internet as WE wish, not as RIAA/MPAA dictates.
My county uses paper ballots.I expect my ballot to be counted accurately and honestly. Too bad nobody in Palm Beach can say the same.
Tech Public Policy stuff
not Palm County
IIRC, each state's electoral college votes are controlled by that state.
Most states are winner-take-all, some are proportional representation.
Also, I think in some cases the electoral votes are cast directly by the state's representatives, but any representative who decided to ignore things and vote against the state's results probably wouldn't last long.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
Just as we thrusted enron, worldcom, xerox and all others with "mis-calculated" books... Normally a warrantie of that kind can only be accerted by an independent body... which in that case doesn't exist. So the company warrantie is useless because it doesn't exist at all... How gullable are the americans... it is an amazement... cheers...
I've worked for a municipal election where we feed in ballot into a scanning voting machine (using a cardboard folder to hide the ballot), and it would tabulate the results, dumping the paper into a sealed bin underneath (Or reject the ballot, spitting it out to be fixed)
I liked that system. To me it seemed to allow the voter to know their vote was put in. And there is a paper trail. Oh, and the system will still work(tm) should the election site get screwed up and have no power.
But about the phone in part. I think there is two sets of vote counting. One for early results, which is handled by the phone in, and one for real results. The early phone in goes to the news sources, and post election parties. The actual legal results gets counted when the machine is taken back to headquarters, and the results read out.
After all, there are communication issues that happen. For example, gynasium construction can block cell phone signals, and there are random other failures. But hey, with 49 out of 53 voting stations having called in, and BossHog(tm) is leading with 34563 votes, you can generally guess the results well enough. Although, with a 15 votes lead, one is going to have to wait until tomorrow to party hardy.
So, your Evildoer(tm) will bugger up the results for news and party. but not the election. I think. And lots of people will be called to the floor upon any discrepency.
And really, you could always just use a one time pad for this. You load it up on the machine in a sealed manner, and on the central computer. After all, it's just one message being sent at the end of the night.
Please note, this all my humble opinion and from what I saw after one day of training, and one night of working the election.
Instead of dangling chads, now we have bits that can be say 0.4723 instead of 1 or 0.
Funkier still is the Quantum Voting Machine, where you state the *probability* that you will vote for a given candidate. Fence-sitters love these machines.
There have been problems where the total probability does not add up to 1. However, the voting overseers are not sure if all the possibilities even have to add up to 1 at the quantum level. Phsycisists are often not available to answer the tech support lines on such questions.
One lady go so fed up that she wrote in "Schroddinger's Cat" as a write-in candidate. "Even if it ends up dead, it will be better than the jerk currently in office."
Table-ized A.I.
The security reason was that the ballots had been left unattended, and there was no guarantee that they were not infected by anthrax. No really! That was the excuse given by the election department head, personally appointed by the mayor, of course.
Whatever San Francisco may have been in the past, it is now a highly corrupt conservative little city of hate. Though I kinda like it here...
One reason US elections are a mess is that the government here, at least in theory, does not keep track of where people live. That's why they have to register to vote before each election. You have to tell the authorities for each election that you claim to live in the district and intend to vote, and they don't have many ways to check if that is true. Thus the dead can vote, and people can register to vote in several districs etc.
Another issue is that while in Sweden there are exactly three elections every voter can vote in every four years, there are dozens of election every year, at least here in California. With perhaps 100 times as many elections, it gets hard/expensive to apply the same rigourous standards as in Sweden, and (I assume) Germany.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm not a resident of Palm Beach, Florida, but the 2000 presidential election showed that it is important to all US cititzens that the election systems work properly nationwide.
I have some proposals for how we as citizens can attack this problem:
Last time i checked IQ folows a normal distribution pattern, with 50% above the mode and 50% below the mode.
so The Median Mode and Mean/Average's should all be 100..
The reports outside of the "mainstream" news media was rampant with evidence that the "recount" was extremely partisan (and it did result in "finding" thousands of votes for Gore).
The technology was designed to keep the subjective human element out of the vote count process.
I'm not saying it's generally a good thing (because now there is a single point of compromise that makes the system untrustworthy), but I'm saying anything that keeps those partisan hacks in West Palm Beach from being involved in the process (beyond casting their own votes) is a good thing.
-bk
There is a well known country that is still in the dark ages when it comes to voting. For it is well known that the United Kingdom still uses hand writen marks on paper. A situation barely changed for centuries.
Of course, this system works. Is unambiguious. Hard to defraud. And can have all the votes for an entire country done in one night.
But it dosnt use spiffy new technology, or make a profit for any contractors other than balot paper printers.
without bothering with campaigns, expensive time consuming crap, polls, platforms and shit like that.
Think of it like buying a "preferred position" in a search engine return.
I pay the voting machine manufacturer more than the other guy, I win. Simple.
Its always been "Whoever has the most dough wins!" Its the Ameri-Canadian way.
And it worked for Mike Bloomberg and a whole bunch of other people too.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
- I think when you vote the machine should generate a unique ID for each vote, not just count them. Each individual vote should be permanently stored in the system by its unique ID and what was selected. Then the machine should give you the option of printing out your vote's unique ID when you vote so you can take it with you. It should also give you the option to print your selections in the poling system at the same time so you can prove you voted for what did.
- Once votes can't be changed once entered you need to make sure that people cant "stuff the ballots" by voting multiple times. For this, the records as to who checked in to vote (name, address) should be recorded digitally along with some verification system (a digital snapshot of you going to vote or make you sign something or some sort of biometrics) so if you vote more than once you can be held accountable.
Voting is very important and I'm tired of the political system being infested with unethical, unscrupulous politicians. I know vote tampering probably isn't to blame for the state of politics today but any cheating in the voting system just seems incredibly wrong to me and adds to the atmosphere of I think we should do our best to stop it from happening.Then, make it so that anyone can list out all the votes (not in any order) by unique ID and who/what was voted for. Individuals can then look up their vote based on the unique ID that only they know and make sure their vote is entered into the system properly. That way each and every vote in the system can be verified with the person who placed it without being traceable to that person.
Also, by enabling the printing of the ID and your selections at the poling place you could prove tampering if it occurred.
Then, each poling place should be set up so that it won't take more votes than the number of people who have been checked in. One way would be to, when you check in, have a single poling station designated as yours and turned on for you. Once you vote it's disabled until the check in computer turns it on again for the next person. Strict security measures would need to be in place to make sure that the check in system and the poling system had no way to communicate other than the signal to turn on since this could make a way for votes to be tied to those who placed them but such a system is possible. A one way (transmit only) fiber optic encrypted shared key system would be overkill but would do it.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
All that money spent just to eliminate a few dangling bits of paper. (chads)
sparkeyjames
If Sense were common everyone would have it.
... there is no Palm County in Florida. It is Palm BEACH County.
--- Ãther SPOON!
None of your statements support your conclusion.
The fact is that companies must be accountable, or they go out of business. Sometimes not right away, but rather soon. Enron is out of business. AA is out of business. Global crossing is out of business.
Yet we still haven't gotten an honest answer on the assasination of JFK. the election of bush was a clear violation of the constitution (on the FACE OF IT) and yet not only is the supreme court still sitting, nobodie's making a big to-do about it. (And I'm not a democrat, I'd have to say the ends was better, but the means was not justified-- I'd prefer Bush as president, but I'll take a fairly elected gore over a Supreme court selected bush anyday.)
Here in washington state the Mariners wanted a new stadium. It was put up to a vote- three times the electorate in SEATTLE voted it down-- the people who would benefit most from the stadium voted against it, and instead the state legislature went ahead and built it anyway, taxing the whole state to do so.
ARe they being held accountable?
Can anyone give me any examples of the government being held accountable? Clinton violated all his campaign promises and was re-elected, he even beat the impeachment-- which in fact, shows just how much a circus the federal government is. They can't even get their act together on the real stuff and spend all their time investigating clinton's penis.
No, companies that do not do a good job and do not do so consistently go out of business.
The government, never has that problem. Look at the last 20 years of Amtrack or the USPS.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
There was the episode with propsition 24 (the one to get rid of all immigrants). They had the voting scene with all the varied ways that people in Springfield voted - flush one toilet or the other, blow out one candle or the other and so on.
Seems pretty simple...then again so does punching the hole next to the choice that I want.
- When you vote the machine should generate a unique ID for each vote, not just count them. Each individual vote should be permanently stored in the system by its unique ID and what was selected. Then the machine should give you the option of printing out your vote's unique ID when you vote so you can take it with you. It should also give you the option to print your selections in the poling system at the same time so you can prove you voted for what did.
- Once votes can't be changed once entered you need to make sure that people cant "stuff the ballots" by voting multiple times. For this, the records as to who checked in to vote (name, address) should be recorded digitally along with some verification system (a digital snapshot of you going to vote or make you sign something or some sort of biometrics) so if you vote more than once you can be held accountable.
Voting is very important and I'm tired of the political system being infested with unethical, unscrupulous politicians. I know vote tampering probably isn't to blame for the state of politics today but any cheating in the voting system just seems incredibly wrong to me and adds to the atmosphere of I think we should do our best to stop it from happening.Then, make it so that anyone can list out all the votes (not in any order) by unique ID and who/what was voted for. Individuals can then look up their
vote based on the unique ID that only they know and make sure their vote is entered into the system properly. That way each and every vote in the system can be verified with the person who placed it without being traceable to that person.
Also, by enabling the printing of the ID and your selections at the poling place you could prove tampering if it occurred.
Then, each poling place should be set up so that it won't take more votes than the number of people who have been checked in. One way would be to, when you check in, have a single poling station designated as yours and turned on for you. Once you vote it's disabled until the check in computer turns it on again for the next person. Strict security measures would need to be in place to make sure that the check in system and the poling system had no way to communicate other than the signal to turn on since this could make a way for votes to be tied to those who placed them but such a system is possible. A one way (transmit only) fiber optic encrypted shared key system would be overkill but would do it.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Apparently 99% of people on /. don't know how to use the words they're, there, and their properly.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Or use quotation marks.
According to the article, the company that manufactures the machines is Sequoia Voting Systems Inc., who have been in the Florida papers for having a VP who has been indicted in an elections kickback scandal in Louisiana. You must read this URLon the subject!
Further research on the web suggests that an unwholesome number of people involved in selling election services and products have, not backgrounds in (say) accounting, but instead, backgrounds in (you guessed it) politics.
According to a St. Petersburg Times article:
"New York safemaker Jacob H. Myers invented a mechanical voting machine in 1892 and his company later became Automatic Voting Machines, which Sequoia acquired in 1984.
"[Sequoia is the] only company whose touch screen product has been successfully tested in an actual election in a large county -- the 2000 general election in Riverside County, Calif.
"[Sequoia] has installed other older systems in three Florida counties. Sales are down 90 percent after the 2000 election as local officials await federal funding before buying new equipment.
Sequoia is a subsidiary of Jefferson Smurfit Group, a leading manufacturer of paper products."
Jefferson Smurfit, who in reality only owns 15% of Sequoia, is primarily a manufacturer of paper and packing products, based in Ireland.
The remaining 85% of the company is owned by De La Rue of Hampshire, England, an enormous company of 7000+ employees with a background in secure printing (providing paper for over 150 national currencies, including of course the UK) and a strong interest (20%) in Camelot, the operator of the British lottery.
Other than not seeming to take their security as seriously as they ought to, DLAR seems like a squeaky-clean company, and probably has a bright future. Especially if they can keep U.S. elections secret from the population.
The guy gave a link to an ACLU paper and said 'this is something with which I agree.'
An AC refused to read it and said "I suggest you get your head out of your ass..." The AC called the guy "a dupe" and then went on to make desparaging remarks about the ACLU. You, he, or some other AC, even said "You're only interested in the civil liberties of people who agree with your politics."
What kind of fucking bullshit is that? The guy did not say Republicans should be strip-searched at airports but Democrats should not. He did not claim that it was okay to violate the rights of some group based on their political views. You completely made that crap up.
I used to think that George W. Bush was a stupid Republican. It's reading shit like this discussion that made me realize that GWB is a fucking genius in Republican terms.
which is the part you left out.
many states only allow voting in the primary election party slate by voters registered to vote in that party.
ie, a registered dumbocrat could only vote in the dumbocrat primary...
do you even know how elections work?
"...can you imagine a BEOWULF CLUSTER of these? That'd be some serious power!"
Touche. And no gig for the lack of accent mark. Slashdot doesn't seem to allow the use of "eacute;".
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Give up a little of the 'secret' in the 'secret ballot', and you might get somewhere. Develop a two-part ballot. When you mark the ballot, it marks both parts automatically. You sign one part. Deposit each part in a seperate box. When you do the first tallies, you use the unsigned ballots. If there are issues of potential fraud, you cross-reference the signed ballots with the people who requested ballots (here, you have to sign for one). If all else fails, or you see some particularly bizarre results (say, 90% of the ballots in a precinct show under/over-votes, or votes that vary wildly from national/regional/historical norms, you can even ask individual voters if the ballots recorded as theirs are correct. Also helps with Chicago voting.
It's just like a fascist dictatorship, without the punctual rail service!
Last time i checked IQ folows a normal distribution pattern, with 50% above the mode and 50% below the mode.
so The Median Mode and Mean/Average's should all be 100..
If the law allows for a candidate to ask for a recall, and the machines do not alow it, then the voting machines should be declared illegal.
So this voting machine manufacturer thinks their warranty supercedes the rights of the voters or the local laws where the machines are used. Seems like a judge ought to be getting these machines thrown out and the local government ought to be firing the bozo who authorized thier purchase in the first place. And perhaps the government's lawyers ought to be getting some serious looking into as well. They should have seen the potential for a firestorm in purchasing a machine with this warranty.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
A Fully Tested Open Source E-Voting GPL'd system is available on the web.
It was developed within 27 weeks for about $100,000 US. Multi-language, using standard COTS hardware and OS. (The compiler and OS had to be open-source too of course - Debian and gcc). It has been used in a state election in the Australian Capital Territory, the equivalent of the District of Columbia. There's an Executive Summary of how well it did, warts and all. A PDF of the full report is also available.
The whole point about e-voting software is that it has to be open-source. The hardware has to be available for inspection at any time too, along with the OS source and the compiler source as well. The situation as described in the original article has a strong piscine aroma.
Disclaimer I work for the mob that did the Aussie system - though I was busy making spaceflight avionics software rather than election software at the time, it was another team. They Did Good.
Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist