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.

Comments

Holy moly!

[MaxVlast]

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.

Re:Holy moly!

[dubl-u]

I'd really like to know why private business has so much sway over government in these sorts of things.

See, there's this thing called "bribery". It'a a major factor in this other thing called "corruption".

You're forgetting Hanlon's Razor. Having done some contracts for government, the truth is often simpler.

Consider the typical bureaucrat, a lifer whose main skills are political. You've got a person who is risk-averse, ignorant of the outside world, and in charge of something important. They write up a nice request for proposal (RFP), and three months later they get back a bunch of proposals. They immediately throw out all the ones from small or new outfits, because even if they are innovative, they might not be around long enough. Then they pick the safest, shiniest one and send them a big ol' check.

If the bureaucrat is smart, dedicated, and careful, this system works pretty well. And honestly, a surprising fraction of them are. But generally a good marketroid can run rings around the bureaucrats.

To my mind the main problem is that bureaucrats say, "Gosh, I am a smart and broadly educated person; I can understand all this." But they don't, and so they get suckered.

Note that geeks are not immune to this. During the 2000 Election foofaraw, I can't count the number of people who said, "Gosh, I could hack together something much better than this paper ballot thingy." But electronic voting has a metric shitload of subtle, unresolved issues; some pretty smart people say it's either impossible or just very, very hard to do right.

So look it as a combination of naive geeks and naive bureaucrats, with some pretty ordinary businesspeople in between. The result is the same, with no bribery needed.

Eternal vigilence...

[digitalboy]

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.

trust

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Here patents would be useful.

[Krapangor]

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.

Question for Florida

[reallocate]

>>"...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"?

I can change the tallys!

[standards]

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.

Re:Sounds like a user training issue

[Daemonik]

Even if the actual voter doesn't recieve a reciept, there should be some hard data trail for use in lawsuits and such. "It's true because I say so" will only get you so far in a court of law, or in public opinion.

So what if the public wants to whine about changes in the way they interface with the government they elected to represent them? In a democracy the government is responsible to us, not the other way around. Large changes like this should be able to stand up to any public scrutiny and prove its reliability and accountability.

It's not like anyone would even THINK of altering the software in these machines so they automatically chose the winner based on whichever party has paid off the manufacturer the most. Nah, such underhanded tactics wouldn't get past the high ethical standards that our elected officials and business executives in the US are known for.

Re:Well

[BlueUnderwear]

Whoever orchestrated the purchase of these machines: a) has no business in office, and b) probably got a kickback from the manufacturer.

Why bother with a kickback? In this case, the manufacturer had something much more valuable than a mere kickback to give to the decision maker. Namely, the promise that from now on, he will win every election in his town...

Re:Well

[theMightyE]

Q:How can voters be expected to trust a voting mechanism when there is no accountability?

A:They shouldn't

Having a company 'guarantee' that it's voting machines are working sets up an entirely wrong set of incentives. To illustrate this a bit, suppse you work at VotingMachines Inc., it's the day after an election, and you find a bug in the code that could have affected the results. Assuming nobody else has ever been allowed to see the code, is it in your best interest to (A) quietly fix the bug for next time and not say anything, or (B) go public with the problem and have CNN show up on your doorstep the next day asking why your products suck so much and why anyone should ever buy one again. Ideally, people would be honest and go public, but realistically, we've all been in situations where we've had to make this kind of choice (OK, maybe not at this magnitude of importance) and have at least felt tempted to go the quiet route

Contrast this situation to the case of an open system. As a programmer for this kind of machine, your incentive is to fix bugs as soon as they are found and it would be impossible to hide the fact that a bug may have skewed the vote. Also, it would be possible to figure out if any given bug would have been likely to actually affect the vote count significantly enough to change the result of the election.

In my mind at least, it's clear that the open system sets a much stronger standard for public trust in the system, and given that vote fraud has been going on as long as people have been voting, ensuring that the public can trust a given voting system is as important a part of democratic action as the vote itself.

Re:Open-source audits are the key

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, what a wonderful, over-complicated system. now the union boss will know exactly who didn't vote on the party line, and whoops, did you just fall down a flight of stairs?

Conspiracy theory.

[BitGeek]

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.

This should be easy

[rnturn]

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.