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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.
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.
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
>>Like a government of 100% Democrats will be any better.
Actually, the Palm Beach folks are Democrats, who control the election board in the county. And this LaPore is the same one who was there during the 2000 elections.
But that company sure has a good one going, IMHO. You have a device, it decides elections, it is 'self auditing', and if you want someone to review and audit the system independantly, it voids the warranty, etc. I'd love to see Ms. LaPore tell a judge the first time an election is challenged 'we take the answers on faith Your Honor and no, we have no way of knowing if it's right or wrong as there's no way to audit the data and nobody can review the machines or code because there are trade secrets'.
IMHO, I have a strange feeling the 'competitive bidding' process and technically written RFP's weren't exactly the top priority in Palm Beach County in making this decision. It makes one wonder what was.
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
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
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?
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
When are people going to wake up to the fact that republicans are trying to take away our liberties and rights?
Most thinking people realized that after September 11. The Republicans have turned that one act of terrorism into an excuse to make this a police state. People are being forced to show ID to fly. ISPs are being told to help the government spy on citizens. Phone conversations are monitored without warrants. People flying on airlines can be pulled aside, frisked, and have all of their belongings unpacked and searched without any probable cause.
I think that there are very few thinking people who don't see this.
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.
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
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.
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
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Simply untrue. There was no requirement to show a photo ID to board a flight. The "Patriot Act" was not signed into law by Clinton. Clinton did not approve "roving wiretaps." Clinton did not push for a national ID, but Bush is doing that right now in his "Operation TIPS" proposal.
I suggest that you read this ACLU summary of the changes the Bush administration has made since September 11:
INSATIABLE APPETITE: The Government's Demand for New and Unnecessary Powers After September 11
You will find that the voices speaking out in opposition to the curtailment of citizens' rights were Democrats while Republicans, Ashcroft, and Bush railroaded this legislation through.
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.
You didn't fly much, did you?
Yes, I did.
I suggest you get your head out of your ass and stop believing that there's any substantive difference between Republicans and Democrats on civil liberty issues.
Rather than resorting to vulgarities, read the article and come back when you have substantive comments on it.
By the way, comparing the Clipper Chip, which was to have an escrowed key available only after a search warrant was issued, to warrantless wiretapping is absurd.
Actually it's split pretty close to even three ways with independents holding a slight plurality (a few percentage points).
Testing, while helpful, isn't sufficient in itself. It would be trivial to create a system that gave proper results during all the tests, but was nonetheless compromised during the actual election (maybe by a secret backdoor, triggered by the date, or a particular "magic" input sequence, etc). You can't really trust a system unless you have examined it in detail and understand how it works.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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'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.
An ID was required for all flights taken from 1996 until present.
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.
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...
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.
I hope you don't do anything having to do with computer security for anybody I do business with. You sound like a "run IIS right out of the box" kind of guy.
Tech Public Policy stuff
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
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...
Do you really believe that that boneheaded "escrow" scheme wouldn't be abused within 6 months?
So, the fact that you believe that the Clipper Chip escrow system would have been abused makes it completely analogous to legalized warrantless wiretapping? I don't see things that way at all.
I notice that you didn't respond to that one
Nor did you respond to the ACLU document at the link that I sent to you. If you are going to ignore my postings, don't expect me to answer yours point-by-point.
You're a dupe, my friend. The Republicans have their dupes as well, of course.
You just keep telling yourself that in a few years when the Ashcroft Gestapo demands to see "your papers."
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.
I just love the way you arrogate to yourself the title of "thinking person", thereby smearing anyone who doesn't agree with you as stupid.
Glad you enjoyed it.
I bet you care, too, which is why you voted for Al Gore, who certainly didn't enjoy the priviledge of being part of the "ruling class" like W.
No, I voted for Gore over Bush because of his positions on issues important to me. I did not believe that the economy, environment, consumers, or minorities would have fared well under Bush. I did not believe that Bush had the intelligence or wisdom to lead our country. The intervening time since his appointment to the Presidency has done little to convince me otherwise. Everything from our backing out of the Kyoto treaty to Ashcroft's attack on our Constitutional rights to the funnelling of tax dollars into religious organizations (charities and schools) has convince me that voting for Gore was the right thing to do.
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:
There are still some possible attacks, and at least one has actually occurred in practice, but such a system is a good start.
But it certainly requires machines that don't have their warranty or support contract voided just because the cover is opened.
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'll start taking the ACLU seriously when they start defending ALL of the Bill of Rights.
Are you talking about your right to be part of a "well regulated Militia?" Yeah. Right.
You're only interested in the civil liberties of people who agree with your politics.
Nice flamebait, but I'm not biting. Bye bye, AC troll.
Actually, it was The Meaning of Life. If you're going to quote/paraphrase Monty Python, at least get the source right. :-)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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.
How about if you had no display on your phone, as the voting machines evidently have no method of feedback/confirmation?
Well, to use your analogy, my phone doesn't have anyway to verifying that Qwest completed the number as dialed. As in, I get a wrong number and I look at my display, it says 777-666-9999. Well, that's the number I wanted. So, I want to be able to audit Qwests switching software to make sure that that's the number that they completed. Oh, they won't let me do that? Well, I'm going to protest. I'm just sure that if a number contains 666, that their software replaces it with 333. I demand Qwest let me audit their software.
In answer to your analogy, the votes machines displayed what the user voted. They pressed the button on the screen for their candidate, and it lit up, or returned some other feedback. Al Bore, it said. Then they clicked the next button. So their vote was recorded, right? Just like when I looked at the lcd on my screen, it showed the number I dialed. And if I dialed the wrong number, or a voted voted for the wrong candidate, that's their own fault, not the fault of the machine.
I think what they are claiming is that the machine takes votes, and forgets to record them. But I'd wager that that's a little far-fetched to believe that the machine is burping and losing votes. I'd expect an Exchange server to have a higher rate of losing emails then a voting machine to lose votes. Unless, of course, the voting machine is run on Windows.
I thinks it just a poor loser who can try to blaim a machine for his lose.
-BrentIt's been done. The usual method is for the incumbents to buy off the opposition through poliical favors. . . jobs, high-pay/low-work consult gigs, favorable vendor contracts (and I do NOT mean to the taxpayer).
Tech Public Policy stuff
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
Ah, yes. Another symptom. Everyone who disagrees with your politics is a "troll".
Fine. I'll argue the point with you. I say that dismissing the ACLU's opinion without consideration, because you disagree with them on some other matter, is intellectually bankrupt. Now answer intelligently.
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
Are you willing to do the same for the NRA?
Yes. If you have an article from the NRA that is germane to this discussion, bring it on... After you read the ACLU article that I linked to and comment on it.
By the way, I own two handguns, a rifle, a shotgun, and an air rifle. I've been to the NRA headquarters firearms museum and have shot skeet and targets at pistol ranges. I am not nearly so closed-minded as you apparently assume I am.
He, as with most of his ilk, threw the Second Amendment out the window with a snide comment about "regulated militias" which shows that either a) he's never bothered to actually READ the fucker, and the debate that went up to its creation, or b) he does, in fact, only care about constitutional rights for people who agree with his politics.
As I said in the other post, I'm a gun owner. And I am well aware of the Second Amendment, it's purported purposes, court decisions, etc. Although I don't want to get into it here, my views on the right to bear arms are fairly moderate. I don't believe that the founding fathers would have wanted mentally unbalanced people to be able to buy machine guns nor do I think that they wanted to prevent a law-abiding citizen from owning a rifle.
Refusing to consider the points made by the ACLU because you dislike, or disagree with, their position on the Second Amendment is intellectually bankrupt. I don't agree with everything that they have done, but it does not mean that I should dismiss, without reading, everything that they publish.
You also failed to note one thing: The person who brought the Second Amendment into this debate was the one who wrote "I'll start taking the ACLU seriously when they start defending ALL of the Bill of Rights." The implication was clear as was the cowardly dismissal of an intelligently written paper that did not agree with the poster's views.
But the debate here is not about the interpretation of the Second Amendment. The debate is about the changes to the Constitutional rights of all citizens. Airport screeners going through your luggage, ISPs turning over your e-mail, and telephone company workers tapping your line without warrants are not based on your party affiliation (yet).
Thanks for the link. The box looks a little like a portable ATM machine. ;-) How would that change the responibility equation of the candidates?
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.
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.
You've got it dead right. Voting occurs in November which is 7 months from April. The receipt is a problem (though required in Republican rallies) as your boss could can you for not voting his ticket.
"Face it, a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.
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