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E-voting Trials and Tribulations
Alex Susor writes "This article is about the new digital touch screen voting system in Georgia, the first state in the nation to adopt this method of voting statewide. Demonstration machines were set up at the recent primaries to teach voters about the new system (to be in place for the November general election) and had some big problems." Compare and contrast to systems in Florida and Germany.
how long before this system is challenged by someone who lost the election?
I am the lord of the pun. Dance Knave!
..machines will work, considering that the movie theaters can't keep those movie ticket kiosks working.
ELECTION 2002 PRIMARY
New machines hit snags in Tuesday tryouts
By MICHAEL PEARSON
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer
machine
Louie Favorite/AJC
Touch-screen voting will be used statewide Nov. 5. Hall and Marion counties reported no problems with the system in their primaries.
Software problems and human error prevented some voters in Tuesday's primary from trying out Georgia's new touch-screen election system.
State officials promise the problems should be fixed before the statewide rollout in November. And they pointed out that the machines worked well in Hall and Marion counties, the only counties where real votes were recorded electronically on Tuesday.
In Fulton County, at least 11 percent of the touch-screen machines failed. Some froze up like balky home computers, while others got stuck in a mode that effectively locked up the machines, said Gloria Champion, the county's director of registrations and elections. No one was denied the right to vote because the machines were only being demonstrated for interested voters. The real votes were cast on punch cards.
Chris Riggall, a spokesman for the secretary of state's office, attributed the problems to errors by poll workers, a glitch in the Windows operating system that runs the machines and problems with electronic cards that replace paper ballots and ballot boxes.
Riggall said an extensive training program for poll workers, a planned software upgrade and ample technical support on Election Day should hold problems to a minimum. The training and software upgrade already had occurred in Hall and Marion counties, where actual electronic voting was near- flawless.
"Certainly the best measure of the performance we expect was in the two counties where we were configured to actually hold an election," Riggall said.
Hall County elections chief Anne Phillips said she was thrilled with the system.
"We had a really good day," she said.
But Fulton County officials said they still worry there isn't time to ensure a smooth Election Day. Commissioner Bob Fulton, a Georgia Tech engineering professor, likened the planned November debut to the liftoff of an unproven rocket.
"Once it launches, you don't have many options," he said.
The state purchased 19,015 of the touch-screen machines in May to replace a patchwork of older systems and head off a repeat of the 2000 presidential election, in which old technologies complicated tabulation of an already close vote.
Each of the state's 2,823 voting precincts got one of the machines for voters to try out on Tuesday as part of the secretary of state office's ongoing voter education campaign.
The most common problem was untrained poll workers unintentionally starting the machines in "election mode" instead of "demonstration mode," Riggall said. The access cards needed to display ballots on the machines weren't programmed to work in election mode, and poll workers weren't equipped to override the strict controls placed on machines in that mode.
In Fulton, poll workers also reported the machines mysteriously switching from demonstration mode to election mode, Champion said. But state election officials and the company that makes the machines, Diebold Election Systems of Ohio, said that's virtually impossible and instead suggest untrained workers were to blame.
"It's very difficult to create a problem with it, but sometimes they do it," said Mark Radke, Diebold's director of the voting programs.
The only other reported problem, Riggall said, was power cords improperly attached to the machines.
Diebold officials say its machines have been used in elections in Maryland, Virginia, Indiana and California with few reported problems.
Just to make sure, the Ohio-based company will send 387 support employees to Georgia on Nov. 5, including one roving technical support worker for every 30 precincts. Poll workers will be trained after the Sept. 10 runoff elections and will also have the benefit of a toll-free support line for immediate help, Riggall said.
Slashdot, come for the goatse, stay for the trolls.
See the smudges from other people's fingerprints?
Chris Riggall, a spokesman for the secretary of state's office, attributed the problems to errors by poll workers, a glitch in the Windows operating system that runs the machines and problems with electronic cards that replace paper ballots and ballot boxes.
WHY, oh WHY, did they choose Windows? Probably some M$ money...
No, seriously, I can't figure out how to operate those stupid touchscreen gas pumps to get a receipt... how the hell am I supposed to vote with this technology?
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Yelling at the 70-year-old polling volunteers that "My screen don't work! Hyelp!"
Anything you say will be held against you.
E-lections now?
you should really first develop a paper system that nobody challanges to not work properly, it's not that hard. power shortage and s*** is bound to happen somewhere even with ups. + the (illusion) of real privacy goes straight out of the window.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As long as there is a talking paperclip at the bottom of the screen to help people out, I think everything will go smoothly.
this was an interesting quote: In Fulton, poll workers also reported the machines mysteriously switching from demonstration mode to election mode, Champion said. But state election officials and the company that makes the machines, Diebold Election Systems of Ohio, said that's virtually impossible and instead suggest untrained workers were to blame.
And thus the political career of Harry Ass McGee begins...
From the article:
"Chris Riggall, a spokesman for the secretary of state's office, attributed the problems to errors by poll workers, a glitch in the Windows operating system that runs the machines and problems with electronic cards that replace paper ballots and ballot boxes."
A "glitch" in the Windows operating system???? Stupid poll workers around the average age of a walmart greeter! Gee, it's a miracle they didn't have more problems.
-ted
Until advertising is sold on the kiosks..
until pop under ads for the X10 camera appear
never ending pornsite loops to entertain grandma (since young adults don't vote.. I know.. I waited in line to vote last november, and was saddened by the turnout.. I was the only one under 40 it seemed)
I am the lord of the pun. Dance Knave!
Stupid sexy Flanders.
stick to pencil & paper and horse & wagon
I don't want to leave my house. Why can't I vote over the internet?
/. population agree's with me. Are you listening politicians?
Just mail me my username/password, i'll go to whatever website you want me to go to and vote. I'm sure 1/2 the
Al Gore: As you can see, the touch screen ballot has a row of square boxes with names on them with their party affiliations. Now what are the voters supposed to do? Are they supposed to scratch the box, sniff the box, color in the box? One lady decided to Lick the box.
..and what if you select the wrong button? Is there an UNDO?
$cat
-T
The nice thing about digital voting is that you know that there's a problem with your vote (a frozen computer screen, etc.) before you walk away from the booth. With the current system, how are you know if your chad is punched all the way? ;) Coding errors can be debugged. It's great to be able to _see_ the problem.
has power."
- Joeseph Stalin
With a computer voting system, there profile of risk for election fraud changes so radically that the folks used to policing these systems will never know what hit them.
We've already had one US election stolen by outright electoral fraud (I'll let y'all verify that Gore won from your own preferred, trustworthy news source).
This just opens up the door for more trouble ahead.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
I don't mean to sound like a Luddite, but I'm not sure technology is the best solution in a situation like this. Technology is great for many uses, but for a task as simple as voting, it is much easier and more practical to simply use existing methods which have been proven by their use in the past hundreds if not thousands of years. Voters who are not computer savvy will likely become confused by the unnecessary complication of the new voting machines and many are likely to cast their ballots in error, possibly voting for a candidate they had no intention of supporting. Clearly, in a situation such as this, current paper voting mechanisims are much more accurate and reliable. Furthermore, if voting is to be computerized, we're leaving ourselves vulnerable to all sorts of hacking and digital manipulation of the ballots which otherwise would not exist. It's been said many times here before that no computer system is 100% secure, and I, for one, do not want to trust my country's elections to the likes of Microsoft of Red Hat. Paper elections are much harder, if not impossible, to tamper with.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
I wonder if it's really legal to have votes counted by a machine that has secret software inside that voters are not allowed to examine?
Shouldn't voters in Georgia be able to file an FOI request to find out what's happening to their votes?
which is why it wont ever catch on.
can you imagine in chicago, the voter turn out would not exceed the registered voters, (or the population of the city)
thats why it wont happen
It seems that the problems they were having were based mainly on poll worker error. I don't know what they can really do about that. As they say, make it idiot-proof, and someone will make a better idiot! Daniel
I guess this says it all: "...a glitch in the Windows operating system that runs the machines..."
I usually wouldn't bash windows but this is not the right solution for this. Why would you rely on such complexity for a system that is supposed to be simple and easy to use? Just imagine how easy it would be to break into this system and change it.
A better solution would be to use an embedded microcontroller or other simple hardware device for each voting station and then connect that to a central database server running a much more secure operating system. I think that voting and it's integrity deserve as much mission critical attention as safety systems in an automobile. There simply shouldn't be any failure here. Relying on an OS with several millions of lines of code just to input a few votes just doesn't make any sense.
What really matters is that they use Instant Runoff Voting; please see:
The Center for Voting and Democracy
the Instantrunoff mailing list
and the California Instant Runoff Voting Coalition for an example of a good local activism site.
P.S. You can create your own web-based IRV web surveys with DemoChoice.org (also includes free downloadable php scripts for your own site.)
so now our election system is run by microsoft, yay! now because it's closed source, couldn't microsoft run a service in the backround that changes the vote tallies? or even some of the techs working on it. techs need access to the basic parts of the system, and im sure one could change the number of votes, it has to be stored somewhere outside of the ram. if its stored in ram and the power goes out, the election's screwed. there are so many places where this can go wrong it's sad.
This is good stuff.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
But what happens when all that oil builds up and blocks my keypress???
Unfortunately, designing anything for use by the general public isn't easy, as there will always be some people that will be confused, and in some cases rightfully so.
Assuming this new system is completely secure, there will need to be explicit instructions and examples to ensure even the most brain-dead person can cast their vote.
With some luck we won't see a repeat of the election insanity we saw in Florida and elsewhere.
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these voting machines!!!
Ok, if it works like this, can't you do this remotely as well, it should be rather easy make the conduct just before the real vote is given. Then just, voilâ and thank you!
Knowing the average voter ;))) no-one will notice :)
It would be nice to see someone with more knowledge write about his :)
(I'll let y'all verify that Gore won from your own preferred, trustworthy news source)
. recount.01/
Sorry buddy, you should read more.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/04/04/florida
Some florida newspapers did a full recount and verified the opposite of what you said. Wasn't all of this finally over two years ago now?
Who thinks that touchscreens in general are very unreliable and that the technology still needs a lot of work? Haven't any of the people involved in putting together these systems ever used an ATM or kiosk with a touchscreen that's been used more than couple times ?
...a beowulf cluster of these things!?
I will subscribe to your newsletter.
Though they blame the mistake on the Windows OS for crashing, it's stupid to believe them. Basically whomever decided to push this out there didn't test their product enough. Everyone who has used computers for any length of time realize that a closed system like this should have zero problems if properly tested no matter what the underlying software is, be it windows, linux, HP-UX, or mac.
What does this really mean? That the voting system should go back for yet more testing. QAing software is probably the most boring part of the job, but it's also the more important. If we are to even pretend that we live in a fair society then any voting system should work and work fairly. Be it paper or computer based.
Is America ready for a computer based system? I think a computer based system should be able to replace a paper based system. I think that possiably we should also use paper in addition to the computer system, meaning that they should actually print a reciept of your vote so that in the case of a recount, they have physical proof that you voted for (Gore and not Bush?) the person you said that you did.
This is really frightening. The poll workers couldn't attach a power cord to the PC? That is a really basic interface, and we then trus them to operate the mechanical systems that drive the legacy election process?
I suppose that one possible issue is that there might not have been outlets near the voting booths...
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Here in Brasil e-voting became a reality in all the country five years ago. But the system was runing in some states some time before.
The guy who developed the thouchscreen system didn't thought about blind people. Here in Brasil we have a numeric keypad wich contains the braile system so even who is blind can vote.
More information and some pictures can be found here
http://www.tse.gov.br
1- Easy to understand symbols for people who can't read
2- Built in bottle opener and free miniture bottle of wild turkey whever you vote
3- "black screen of death", which displays the following error: there was an error at memory address kkk084212: NO NIGGERS ALLOWED!
The next president of the United States: {FATAL EXCEPTION IN 0x0E4F}
The only way that "electronic" voting can work, IMHO, is if the workstation prints out a card with both human readable and machine readable information.
You make your vote, hit finish, watch the card print out, check the card, and drop the card in the ballot box. The cards are then collected and counted.
You can easily print out the voting information in one of those 2D barcode clouds like they have on UPS boxes.
If there is a need for a hand count, simply read the names off of the top of the card.
During counting, they should sample the ballots with a scanner to make sure that what the card says in readable format is the same as in electronic format.
This way, everyone in the process can easily check that the ballot says what the voter meant it to say. If there's an error, after printing, go back and get a new ballot.
Instant run-off voting is a step in the right direction, but it too is still leagues away from being able accurately representing the will of the voting populace. What about Approval voting? It is just one of many options out there.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
I was there for a brief stint in 2001, but no more.
not a new way to cast votes, but rather a whole new voting system.
This has been a test. Had this been a real emergency, we would have fled in terror and you would not have been informed.
http://www.rediff.com/election/1999/aug/24evm.htm
Though they were used in a countrywide election for the first time only in 1999
I voted early in Colorado Springs in 2000 at one of the local malls. They had touch screens and they seemed to work just fine.
/. is that it mentions windows bugs. Sure it's neat that a whole state is finally doing this...but it's nothing I'd call exceptionally newsworthy.
Why are people acting like this is some new technology? Why is Georgia having so many problems with this...it should be pretty simple / straight-forward.
The only reason this is even news on
--
It's like in Superman III, highly underrated movie BTW.
Just as dogs and cows who are inferior, retards should not be allowed to breed much less vote!
Compare and contrast to systems in Florida and Germany
Germany = state of the art open source based system
Florida = unauditable mystery box system
No surprises here, I would expect such systems in America's 'joke' puppet government owned by corporations verse Europe's 'real' and refined governments.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
The internet way is obviously far too susceptible to problems (as previously mentioned many times over and over). But having some kiosks would be wonderful (except for the initial cost to make em).
Many have mentioned concerns with old people, but one nice feature that computers have that paper does not is affirmation-- something that is insanely annoying in computer programs (eg. ARE YOU ABSOLUTELY SURE YOU WANT TO CLOSE THIS WINDOW?) but rather useful when voting (eg. ARE YOU ABSOLUTELY SURE YOU WANT TO VOTE FOR A DUMB TEXAN?).
- JustinWhat a sad commentary, that home computers should be the obvious metaphor for an unreliable piece of junk.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It had a touch-screen with a display that was probably about 18" high and 9" wide. There was a card reader to the right where you inserted your voting card. I'm not sure how the distribution of the cards will work. I don't know if they will issue every voter a card or if you get the card when you go to vote. It looked like it had a smart chip on it instead of a magstripe.
The user interface was pretty easy. It would present one or more categories and all the candidates for each category. You just touched the one you wanted. Once you selected a candidate, it greyed out the others. It took me a few seconds to figure out that if I changed my mind, I had to touch previous selection to undo it. There were "Next" and "Previous" buttons to navigate through the various pages.
At the end, it showed a summary of my votes so I could give a final yes/no to my choices. It printed out some kind of receipt, I think, but I didn't really look at it.
If I had to guess on the platform, I have to say that I did see an hourglass icon that looked just like the one in Windows. Maybe they're running WinCE or something. It looked a lot like one of those "pen computing" devices that never really went anywhere.
I would probably feel a little more secure about the system if it printed out a ballot that I then had to put in a ballot box, so it wouldn't be any worse than what we have now (from a fraud standpoint). It is certainly easier to use than the punch ballots we have now.
In Fulton, poll workers also reported the machines mysteriously voted for Bill Gates as congressman of Georgia.
I don't see anything in the article about how they are verifying that the computers' tallies are matching what people actually voted. Shouldn't this be done? I'd think the secretary of state would have thought of this. And shouldn't the "manufacturer" have test results/information available about this product? I know this is not an in-depth technical article, but how in the hell do they know the machines are/aren't working accurately? The article makes it sound like if there's no BSOD everything is working just GREAT, thank-you.
Since the other reply is an AC, here's the link:
. recount.01/
http://www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/04/04/florida
We've already had one US election stolen by outright electoral fraud (I'll let y'all verify that Gore won from your own preferred, trustworthy news source).
Sorry, but your prejudice against Republicans is clearly showing through.
On the other hand you're right, we've had at least one, if not many stolen by outright election fraud. The election of Kennedy v. Nixon is a perfect example, when the Democrats had whole cemeteries voting for their guy.
Or it could be St. Louis, where the polls were illegally kept open for hours by a Democrat Judge. Or Florida, where Gore tried to use a recount to steal the election. Or Chicago, that great Democratic stronghold, which for decades has been the joke of free elections. (Most cemeteries are a precinct all of their own in Chicago...)
This was settled 2 years ago. BUSH WON! Get over it.
- No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades really cramps his style.
Why the fcsk is it running microsoft windows. I dont want it to run linux either. Why oh why does this thing need a high-powered commercial os. ALL GOOD HARDWARE HAS ITS OWN OPERATING CODE. Why the hell is this machine different.
The idea of electronic voting is fine by me but every idiot can backdoor a windows system, now couple that with the unpatched vulnerabilities in windows and the fact that NOT ALL EXPLOITS get released. meerely they are kept by people with financial motives keeping it quiet.
Now we can ask does microsofts admitted backdoor keys give them (and through their eula) the right to screw with election votes LEGALLY!.
This is a totally proposterous solution to something that could be extremely effective but it cannot be done on the cheap and by cutting corners. THIS SHOULD BE A PROPER PEICE OF HARDWARE. Using your picmicro or whatever other microcontroller you want. I mean for gods sake you have to press a button and record the result you dont need a full featured and by that i mean buggy operating system.
This is screwed up. Forshame.
now we can all say microsoft owns the government... wait we already knew that...
hmmm
Would this make the actual vote calculation fast?
I mean, how long does a SQL query take?
Im reminded of that one futurama where nixon runs for president... "8:00 and now for the robot vote... 8:01 the robot vote is now closed"
I mean computer assisted voting.
You still have to go there but you vote on a
magnetic card using "light pen on screen".
Between your wish (what you want to vote) and you
the electronic counting machine, there are so
many computer and possible oriented bug that
you can not trust the election result.
The main issue is that human can not verify
what as been voted. You can not read your own
vote and even if you could, there is no garantee,
it will be read the same way by the "counting
machine".
If you understand french, you can go to read:
http://www.poureva.org/
David GLAUDE
Tonights top story, in a stunning write-in victory, Bill Gates has been elected Governor of every state still attempting to wrangle concessions from Microsoft Corporation.
On the negative side, Public Servants in the affected states will now be expected to work 80 hours per week. On the positive side, they will have all the free Soda they can drink.
If you read the article, you will see quite clearly that Windows is not the only thing blamed for the errors. First and foremost were the problems by the people running the polls. Apparently the ones in the county that had the most problems (only one county, not all of them) hadn't had all the training necessary to operate these machines.
Also note that the machines that had the problems had not received the most recent updates from the vendor, whereas the machines that worked well did have the most recent updates. So the fact is, the company must be doing some good QA work to get the upgrades ready in time, but upgrading machines across a whole state, and training workers across a whole state, takes time.
And lastly, the person who blames the problems on Windows was not a spokesperson for the company; he was a spokesperson for the secretary of state's office. I highly doubt he's qualified to make any sort of pronouncement as to the technical cause of these problems. Hell, he may have just been told that there were problems with the unpatched versions of the software running the machines, and assumed that the software running the machines was Windows. Nowhere do I see an official for the company that makes these machines blaming Windows, although I agree with a previous poster in that Windows is probably overkill for a situation like this.
Also, I think a receipt would be a good idea, with both the voter and the polls office keeping a copy so a manual count can be performed if necessary. That would make a good intermediate step before going to a totally paperless voting system.
I hear everyone saying people can DOS this and hack that but the truth is that "non-computerized" are just as vulnerable to manipulation as any other. This has been proven pretty recently with the last presidential election. Now these computerized systems should be so easy that anyone who has ever used an ATM can use it. And who said they had to be networked, let alone to the internet? Just have an electronic ballot replacing the mechanical ones now and printing out the results or write it to a cd (No network involved). So now can someone tell me: "What's the big deal?"
Let me get this straight. Microsoft is going to modify the OPERATING SYSTEM to manipulate the voting software written by an ENTIRELY different company, and this "secret patch" is supposed to analyze that software, know when it's not running in a test mode, and modify the vote to Microsoft's specifications. And on top of that, the machines will secretly communicate with Microsoft in order to know what the "right" election outcome is supposed to be.
Riiiigggght. Let me know if putting tin-foil over the voting booth protects your vote.
I find everyone's comment here funny. Why? Because OSS and sysadmins have been fighting that battle since computers began. So despite all the talk of how we're better than this, or better than that.
We still, when the rubber meets the road can't get the job done. Peer review indeed.
No matter how many times you talk them through the ridiculously simple process, the elderly are just going to do what my grandmother did: walk in, close curtain, open curtain, walk out. And if they're forced to vote on someone, they'll just rub the screen until their card automagically pops out or someone assumes they've had a heart attack and the paramedics rush in.
Oh wait, this isn't the pro-euthanasia article. Sorry.
I voted (my first time as I am 18 yay!) in the primary and got to see one of these thing first hand. Very nifty. The interface is VERY clean, and it takes no time at all. The old method however was to basically fill out a form similar to a scantron sheet (darken the bubble...) where you constantly wondered if it was dark enough. I'm all for faster, more accurate voting counts too. Talk about instant results! Anyhow, again, I liked, everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
Derek Greene
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Keep reading. The final tally showed that if they had only recounted the counties that the Gore team had asked to be recounted, Bush would still have won. However, if they had recounted every county in Florida (something Gore did not ask to be done), Gore would have won.
In other words, when they did the full recount (as in, what did the people of Florida really want?), Gore was found to have more votes. Bush lost Florida. And thus lost the election. But since we didn't find out about it until after he was already safely lodged in the White House, it was too late and you get misleading CNN headlines.
The nice thing about the above system is that, except for the printing, it could be prototyped by anyone with undergraduate EE skills. The circuits are dead simple, it adds speed to the counting process, it allows for double checking of results, and it doesn't require the voter to learn new skills.
With all those things going for it, there must be something wrong with the idea.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
First and foremost, we have to remember that this is a government venture. What that means is that you have to lower your expections by about 60 IQ points. I theorize that it might go something like this:
Step 1: Acquire, pay for, and install thousands of new, electronic voting machines. Ignore the obvious, like the inability to audit the manner in which votes are tallied and reported by the software.
Step 2: Experience initial problems during a "demo day" held at some point before the election. Disregard the notion that this may very well be the beginning of a very bumby road.
Step 3: Use the newly-acquired machines during the next election, experience more problems, and be sued by a public interest group questioning the results, and demanding a detailed audit.
Step 4: Be dissed by the company that manufactured the machines, who claims that disclosing the process by which votes are tallied and reported would result in disclosure of proprietary trade secrets.
Step 5: Be backed into a corner. Wonder why no one took this issue seriously during the initial planning.
Step 6: Scrap all 19,000 voting machines, kissing the $millions they cost, goodbye. Replace them with machines from a company with a more open disclosure policy.
Step 7: Lather, Rinse....but hopefully, avoid repeating the same sordid tale over again.
I think digitizing the voting process is an outstanding idea. Instead of inept people voting for the wrong person (i.e. Florida) they would at least be made to understand their ineptitude before it was too late.
Clearly, running on a consumer - grade hardware/software platform is unacceptable for such a system. How about the government contracts some development firm to build the systems to spec from the ground up? The same is done with all manner of military equipment (i.e. F-22s Avionics, Submarine control systems), so why not do the same to protect our revered (if not outdated) federal electoral system.
Once it is proven on the federal level, license the technology to state governments and such.
Raises an interested question doesnt it?
Do you trust the government more than Microsoft?
This was settled 2 years ago. BUSH WON! Get over it.
Fine. If the Bushies and their ilk will stop blaming everything on Clinton!
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
What is with you open sores weenies obsession with EULA's?
UPDATE election SET vote = 'Bush' WHERE vote = 'Gore'
Total paperless is just not a possiability yet. The thing that we need to go total paperless is a digital system that we can use to verify everyone's vote that is tamper proof.
Say that everyone carries around a disk of somesort that contains all the reciepts of everything we buy, and do. It is a digital replacement for the reciepts that we all carry around today. Whenever we buy something at the store or vote or do whatever we can put this in and it will copy it to the disk. Keeping a copy there for our later investigation. Also the company that we interact with keeps a copy and there is some sort of security key that can check to see if the 2 copies are the same.
So basically there should be a way to see if you change your copy or if they change their copy. So somehow we can prove forgery at either end.
AFAIK, this problem has yet to be solved but if we did have a way to detect forgery then I would trust in a totatly digital solution. It's already too easy to forge the current system.
You people should investigate the Canadian example. Everyone votes on the eve of the election simply by driving down to a voting station and marking an X in a box on a piece of paper beside the name of the person we want to win. In a matter of hours all the votes are tabulated and the winner is announced. If you watch the CBC during election night, you can watch the vote totals increase every few minutes.
We must be doing something right.
Fine. If the Bushies and their ilk will stop blaming everything on Clinton!
:)
Sure, if the Liberals stop blaming the Clinton legacy cooked-books-economy of the 90's on Bush.
From the Diebold Election Systems website:
e n_vote.jpg
http://www.diebold.com/whatsnews/images/touchscre
Here in Brazil we are voting eletronically for about 6 years, the system is a computer with windows CE, a printer, a memory flash card and two floppies developed by Unisys. Finished the votation, it prints a paper vote.
To me, it seemed to be very secure and simple to operate.
It will be used in presidential elections at 10/06 this year for about 80 million people.
The machine can be seen here http://www.folhape.com.br/hoje/31-07informatica-0
Ireland has a reasonably complex voting system. Each voter has a single vote, but can vote for several candidates in their order of preference. (Each constituency has between three and five seats). Even given that complexity, the system seemed to work well. There was about the expected turnout in each count center, and there were few concerns expressed about the usability of the system.
Some info is at http://www.environ.ie/electronicvote.html.
Obviously this new voting booth technology will keep stupid people from voting. I'm all for it!
I've got flamebait 2, and I'm trying to raise a serious point here: electoral fraud is a real concern in US elections, and computerizing the process is not going to make it more transparent.
Moderation is supposed to be for post quality, not for political or other content.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
I voted early in Colorado Springs in 2000 at one of the local malls
Californina had some counties that used them as well. IIRC some states on the east coast had experiments as well.
You are right, this is old news.
Latest results from Palm Beach county in the Presidential election: Abort - 66% Retry - 25% Ignore - 8%
Pen and Paper. Clearly marked.
Easy to use. Easy to count. Easy to Spot Errors. Easy to Secure.
Dosnt even need elctricity.
Why isnt it used?
Our local council in England gave Internet voting as one of the options this year, and I took them up on it. Apparently they had no problems with people haX0ring the system. At least, the Mozilla Party only got 5 seats ;-)
I would like to see more voting and more referendums take place, not on electronic booths, but on the internet. The technology is in place to bring countries closer to true democracy if the mandate was there, and to make it as secure as or more secure than ballot stuffing in regular booths. I guarantee the xxAA and M$ lobbyists would have a harder time bribing a country full of people.
~Ben
I would love to see this implemented nation wide. I don't think it will happen. Too many people in power have too much to lose from an IRV system.
Finding God in a Dog
1. We have a large network of vendors for the National Lottery... there was talk a while back about using this system for e-voting. It's secure, handles large numbers of transactions, uses proven technology, and each machine is capable of scanning hundreds of lottery tickets per hour. Most people in the UK knows how to fill in a lottery ticket...
2. It's extremely easy to get multiple votes in the UK. My girlfriend received two voting cards for the 1995 General election, and could easily do so again... so any electronic version surely must be better than the current mess.
The more advanced the technology, the more open it is to primitive attack
I had been advocating IVR without knowing what it was called. I found a very explanatory Flash demo of how it works at http://www.chrisgates.net/irv/
Kind thoughts do not change the world
I can see all type of problems if this catches on in Florida.
1) Be wealthy
This is enough in the US. Step 2) and 3) or not required.
We are thinking about this problem in general terms. I think most of imagine a pc running linux or windows with a flash interface. Although this is the most cost effective it is not really required. I would rather see a simple almost gaming console like approach.
You have to come into a voting center. The main reason is because the voter and the vote can not be linked in anyway. You have to come in and say "I'm here", then say "I voted", but the actual voting card is not connected to you ( other then fingerprints possibly ).
This portion is already in place and could be better automated. It is also a good use of the new federal id cards, if they come around.
The next problem is making sure the vote gets counted correctly and can be audited. My idea would be use a touch screen or whatever, but just have it print out a report that is fancier then a punch card. NO more hanging chad problem.
You see a very clear report, if you don't understand it you can read the information cards that explain it, or ask someone to look at it for you and make sure it okay. If people are really concerned about their vote they won't mind if a complete stranger, who is doing volunteer work looks at their vote. If you make someone say verify their vote 3 or 4 times in different formats, chances are anyone will catch errors, of course not everyone.
The reports have some kind of bar code, but a code that is verifiable via the eye. So you can look at the output of the report, and at the bar code and say that is okay. This could be done by a party that never saw the person who voted, so the vote would be audited before even entering the system. Of course if there is a problem the vote has to be thrown out, that is a scary thought. Or maybe they could look at the output of the report and re-type the barcode. Of course these procedures would need to be noted, and possibly video taped. They could be audited later to make sure they where handled correctly.
Then the report is scanned into the computer, record per record. At the same time it is put in a container. At the end of the day there should not be anymore records in the database, then in the containers. If you could scan these in again and see if one was missed, or one was counted twice.
At this point the counts are pritned out or electronically transfered to a central station where they can be aggregated and the winner determined. In the case of the presidency for the current state.
Electronics should be used to make it more accurate, and help humans, but I feel really bad about virtually voting. Having the piece of paper, the document is important to me.
I'm a DBA so I do trust the system, but I also no that when you start dealing with huge sets of data, the chances of error go up. If it can happen, it will, and with software you don't always no what can happen.
Also, I think the fact that CNN, etc. misreported the problem exposed how stupid it is to just not wait a day or so. I know we are all anxious to find out our new president is or whatever, but I'd rather not go through the Bush/Gore crap again.
Great, a proprietary system recording my vote. I have no way to audit it for correctness. Even if it was open source, if a problem is found, there is no way to recount.
Any voting system needs to be auditable and recountable. My local county (Dane County in Wisconsin) has a great system. The ballot is a big piece of paper with a broken arrow next to each candidate. Something like this: President
Albert Gore (Democrat) <-- ---
George Bush (Republican) <-- ---
Ralph Nader (Green) <-- ---
You use a provided pen to complete the line pointing to the candidate you want. You then take your sheet and feed it into the locked tabulating machine. The machine refuses your ballot if there are obvious errors and you're sent back to try again with a new ballot.
The result: The interface is easy for anyone to understand. The tabulating machines make it possible to quickly generate tallies. The system is auditable since you can randomly hand count the ballots in a particular machine to verify the totals. In the event of problems, you can simply hand count the easy to read ballots (unlike trying to read holes in a punchcard).
Unfortunately shiny computer screens are easier to sell that boring grey boxes and paper ballots.
Dude, Bush won if you didn't recount statewide. Bush won if you didn't recount in the contested counties. Bush even won if you ignored random votes.
Bush won by Gore's standard. Bush won by Bush's standard.
The only way Gore would have won is if you actually counted ALL the votes. Pshaa, like you can expect anyone to do that!
Chris Riggall, a spokesman for the secretary of state's office, attributed the problems to errors by poll workers, a glitch in the Windows operating system that runs the machines and problems with electronic cards that replace paper ballots and ballot boxes.
I wonder if they got some BSODs on those Windows boxes. I bet they are just locked up e-Machines running IE connected to IIS/ASP in the back room. Gimme a break. Maybe we need to have a vote on how to vote.
Its simple.
Cheap.
Highly resistant to fraud.
We Canadians have known it for a long time.
Paper and pencil ballots are still king.
Try applying Bruce Schneier's principles. What happens when electronic voting systems are compromised? The whole system is worthless - revote the entire thing.
With paper:
Failure = Single ballot: throw away
It becomes a lot of work to have an effect on the overall outcome of a poll.
Recounts are definitive because there is no dorking around with stacked supreme courts to see who wins the election.
And we know just as soon after the election who is going to be our leader - it doesn't take any more time (contrary to popular belief).
What a bunch of idiots, IMHO. Can't they figure out a way to use a system similar to what people have used for YEARS and just remove the issue of hanging chads, etc?
Now they want Granny and the other old farts to deal with touch screens and the likes. What happens when they touch two places at the same time or leave a hand on one part of the screen?
One step at a time folks. At least lets change this with the older generations in mind. Aren't they the ones who started this when a modified ballot style was used?
I mean really. Insert a digitized pad with LED's or something. If you push a button the LED will show you that you pushed it correctly and track your vote. When you're done, there's one last selection( done / not done ) and your personalized iButton won't eject til you select DONE. You won't be able to exit the polling place til you hand over the iButton.
Now who is behind all this new fangled voting system anyway? Some business is surely pushing it....
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Maybe not an obnoxious Clippy offering to "help" someone vote for President but just information buttons.
Not sure about an intiative? Click here to the entire text of it along with submitted Pro/Con statements.
Who are these candidates? Click here to view statements from their campaigns.
I don't see any reasons why the electronic voting machines shouldn't be able to include *already existing* information from the voter's guide.
For your information, many of the elections have had voter fraud. Gore isn't the first to lose the electoral vote while winning the popular vote. Bush is not responsible for the disgrace that was Florida in 2000, the county clerk responsible for the butterfly ballots was a Democrats; those votes alone would have given Gore a sure win, regardless of the hanging/dimpled chad fight.
And to combat the other thought in your head, all of the ballots were counted, some were counted 4 or 5 times. Some people either voted for two candidates for president, or couldn't make a hole in a paper card. Their ballots were still counted, they just didn't have a vote for the presidential race.
And, there is no solid proof that Gore won the popular vote anyway. Many absentee ballots from military personnel were not counted. They could have upped the numbers for Bush considerably, nationwide.
And meanwhile you ought to remove the tinfoil that's blocking the humor from penetrating your brain.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
"The newspapers' review also discovered that canvassing boards in Palm Beach and Broward counties threw out hundreds of ballots that had marks that were no different from ballots deemed to be valid."
"The papers concluded that Gore would be in the White House today if those ballots had been counted."
You were saying what about people reading more?
What this article does a good job of hiding is that out of the 11 manual count scenarios(differing standards for chads and whatnot), Gore wins in 9 of them. The 2 that Bush wins, and that the media focused nearly exclusively on, required that only part of the state be manually counted.
Oh, and then we have another outright lie from Racciott.
"He won the first count, then the recount, then the manual recounts, and was declared the victor this time by the media."
The manual recounts were never carried out thanks to the USSC. In addition, many Florida counties never carried out the mandatory recount. And I've already addressed the recount bit here. Sorry, but repeating that little tagline over and over doesn't make it true.
Electronic voting has been in use since 1996 in Brazil and helps us know the votes in record time. We do have 115 million voters and we can have an election summary in a matter of hours.
...
We have tested it and the americans sent a mission to oversee the elections in more than one ocasion. But the americans would never buy the technology from us, they would ever assume they have the worst ever system in terms of democracy.
So the americans can blame only themselves. But what to think about a country which accepts a fraudulent election that elected the second dumbest president in the USA (in terms of IQ, information widely spread)? Mr Bush only loses the trophy to his father, the dumbest president ever.
And I thought that Brazil was a subdeveloped country
beat me to it!
I would have sensed the humor in it -- if I thought you were kidding. I seriously doubt that you were. I think that now that you see the absurdity of it you are backpeddling with a "ha ha, I was just kidding".
I call bullshit.
Bushies and their ilk will stop blaming everything on Clinton!
He's blaming forest fires on Clinton? I thought Dubya was blaming trees that he wants to cut down.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Please tell me these machines don't have a PCMCIA slot...
How will the dead be able to vote now?!?!
So, the "big problems" were untrained staff turned some machines on in the wrong mode? Oh no... How will these "big problems" ever be solved?
Sorry folks, that's not good enough. Do a search for Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. It states that there's no such thing as a 'fair' election between more than two candidates. The fairness conditions are very sensible (for example, if everyone prefers A to B, then B cannot win); the conclusion is that the only electoral system that satisfies all the conditions is a dictatorship.
Instant runoff voting might work a little better (I don't know), but the point is that there's no perfect solution to the voting problem.
You can find some information on better solutions (particularly approval voting and Condorcet voting) at Electionmethods.org, including and explanation of why Instant Runoff isn't a much improved voting system.
If you can't botter yourself to go to vote, why politicians sould botter listening to you.
Republics are made of citizens, not of lawyers and politicians.
(sorry about the crappy spelling =)
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
The systems must be able to be used without having to reprove their correctness each time there is a new ballot.
Voting officials should be able to recount the votes quickly.
Brownouts, misuse, physical abuse, unitialized pointers, and chads in the family way should not erase or obfuscate data.
If that means a marker, a card, and an OCR machine then that is what the citizens should demand. If you want a computerized voting, it should internally punch a running log of votes on mylar tape. If the computer crashes, just run the tape through a reader. But citizens should demand better.
Hahahah...they act astounded that the computer crashed 11% of the time. DUH! They're running MS Windows.
If we're going to have computerized voting, it should be done using a Linux or *BSD OS. This way, you won't get crashes. Also, any software which the government uses or is used by citizens interacting with the government should be Open-Sourced.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Chris Riggall, a spokesman for the secretary of state's office, attributed the problems to errors by poll workers, a glitch in the Windows operating system that runs the machines and problems with electronic cards that replace paper ballots and ballot boxes.
1) It's running Windows. I hope it is the XP kernel, and I hope the software vendor made sure to strip out all unnecessary services. If you HAVE to use windows, 2000/Xp is the ONLY way to go.
2) Why would the spokesman for elections have such an unfortunate name such as RIG ALL?
Oy!
Just be happy Cynthia McKinney is gone. That bitch has caused more headaches and misery in my district than you can imagine.
If only I had mod-points. Guys look into this. It's so important that people understand the power of ranked voting. IRV is flawed, but it's a start.
Take a look at Condorcet's Method for information about an even cooler (although more complicated) voting system.
A speech...
The more things change, the more they will stay the same.
1) Microsoft will integrate the voting softare into the OS.
2) In Chicago, computerized voting booths will be set up in cemeteries due to high voter registration in those areas.
3) Florida election are a mess due to old people forgetting to hit the submit button. Younger people that immediately follow a senior citizen notice that the touchscreen have either the Dem (left) or Rep (right) icons continuously flashing.
4) Losers of elections will demand a manual recount of the digital votes. State officials eventually declare the vote to be 0xdead to 0xbeef.
5) RIAA and MPAA will attempt to stop the digital transfer of votes for candidates who are former musicians or actors.
Oh yes, the "good old days" of paper ballots. When seals on ballot boxes would be "accidentally" broken, ballot boxes would "accidentally" fall off the back of a truck into a swamp, and the county courthouse would "accidentally" burn down after the ballots had been counted and reported.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
If they can get these to display choices in a color-coded 36-point typeface, it might fly in West Palm Beach. (Of course the voters would still need their lawyer to drag their finger to the screen.)
Step 8: State CIO enjoys fond memories of the prostitutes and free drinks provided by the vendor during the RFP phase.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
I've worked the polls once before and i'm just commenting on my previous experience....it was a nightmare.
I'm sure my anecdotal experience isn't a statistically accurate sampling of poll workers, and i'm sure most are competent induhviduals.
-ted
I thought this was going to be about star trek deep space 9 for a moment.
Approval voting has some nice properties, but doesn't take into account something voters can easily express, the ranking of their preferences. Thus approval voting loses very useful information.
The best option for many kinds of elections is Condorcet voting. It's used by the uk.* Usenet hierarchy and, I've been told, by debian, but I've seen no confirmation of that.
I have my own rant about voting systems. (It's a bit rambling, but does anticipate and respond to some objections to Condorcet voting).
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
We were the first country to have 100% electronic voting (and the 1st to have any kind of it, I guess) . This year's election (federal and state representatives, state governor, senate and president) about 80% of the voting booths will be transmit the data and give the results a few hours later. ;). :)
Yes, we're poor but we know about digital democracy
BTW, we *don't* use M$ OSs on it. It uses VirtuOS sort of multitask DOS. Old but works
Adilson.
Faith can move mountains. I prefer dynamite.
In this site you can try and see how we'll vote in the next elections here in Brazil.
S imulaUrna/SimUrna.html
http://www.tse.gov.br/eleicoes/eleicoes2002/urna/
Maybe i'm late in replying to this story, and hence this post won't be modded up.. (and i don't have that +1 bonus yet :-) but i just thought of putting here the fact that India has successfully used evm's in its elections. more details can be found at here And it does not contain Microsoft software :-)
i guess they're not as ass-backwards as we thought...
at the end of the day, you still can't sleep with your technology...
Why does electronic voting have to be such a complex proposition? I would think that it'd simply be a matter of distributing sealed, plug-in-and-go boxes to voting locations, hooking them up to touchscreens ("voting booths"), and having a printer keep a written record of votes as they are entered (date/time stamp and candidate chosen). Of course, you'd secure things as much as possible inside and out, but you certainly wouldn't be taking PCs running Windows and connecting them to lans!
No connecting things to networks, no fancy gui operating system, no general purpose computers: just a replacement for punch cards.
Perhaps we're too ambitious? What are we really trying to do here with electronic voting? I thought we were just trying to get more reliable counts. Some people seem to think the goal is to have faster counts, or pretty-looking voting screens, or whatever.
Further, what software or hardware security concerns could possibly exist with a closed box? Of course, there are still concerns of physical security, or just old-fashioned fraud, but we have those now already.
Surely there is some consideration I'm missing here? Right? It can't be as simple as I think, otherwise someone would have already done it.
Another interesting paper was written by Peter G. Neumann, it can be found here.
See the Debian constitution for details.
Go read up opn Arrow's Paradox. Method doesn't matter; democracy is impossible. Funny how it works...
....a glitch in the Windows operating system that runs the machines....
Evil is the money of all root....
People like to pick a first choice as "their" candidate. Approval makes you say yes to some set, and no to the rest. I agree it has some mathematical elegances, but I prefer IRV and so do the majority of reform activists judging by the initiative measures which have actually made it onto the ballots.
Before you guys get too caught up promoting IRV, please read Chap 2 of Political Numeracy by Meichael Meyerson for some stiff discussion of the caveats of all voting "algorithms" including IRV (although he doesn't refer to it by that buzzword).
Sure, from a purely theoretical point of view. No real-world system is going to be perfectly accurate.
However, as a practical matter, the pareto imbalances upon which the proof of Arrow's theorem depends are very rare. When they do occur in practice, it usually means that the situation is similar to the 2000 U.S. presidential race, where the difference in the top candidates' votes is much smaller than the election's margin of error.
The fact is that IRV is the least expensive system that precludes the spoiler effect, and in doing so relieves the all-too-common prevalance of completely inaccurate outcomes, is the big win. I'll take a big jump in accuracy at a minimal cost any day of the week.
Condorcet is absurdly expensive for large elections. Can you imagine how long it would take to do a Condorcet count for the Governor of California, even from punch card ballots? (Hint: all of the ballot preferences have to be colected and centralized before the count can begin.) On the other hand, many districts in Canada do IRV counts of paper ballots, by hand. And they finish it by midnight, in most elections. Try doing that with Condorcet.
Approval is so different from the traditional plurality method that it is unlikely to be adopted for anything bigger than city council elections (for which it is already used in many districts, including my own.) Approval is already widely used for corporate board elections -- not exactly known as bastions of democracy, those.
Brazil has successfully implemented an eVoting system for at least 6 years.
Just like the electronic income tax system, this system reduced fraud rates. It has also increased voting and counting speed.
It helps most of people's voting, using only number data-entry and photos for confirmation, with a simple interface. It's good for Brazilian unlettered people.
The project is a success, merging industry and government into a really secure voting system - from electronic ballot box to transport and automated counting.
That's it.
That should not be impossible. Verification could be on the following lines:
This should guarantee to the voter that an accurate record of the vote has been retained (even if the software should be faulty or subverted), and the correctness of the count can be easily checked by looking at the audit slips in the tamper-proof container.