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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.
Depends... When's the next election?
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.
Exactly. It goes without saying that remote voting of any kind will NEVER exist, and even this system is way too easy a target for cries of foul from the losing parties. Anything from sabatouge, hacking, or even something as benign as a short-circuit of the system could happen, and the losing candidate will bring up all 3 if given half a chance, rest assured.
It just leaves the door wide open on challenging a vote, whether you believe someone lost fairly or unfairly due to the machine. I consider myself a reasonable person, and I would challenge it if I lost in a second.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
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
-T
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?
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.)
yeah, and a tetris for those who haven't decided yet and still need some time.. or quake! There are some possibilities.. with skins from the politicians.. "Humpz.. that bush guy fights like a wimpy girl.. He's not gona get my vote!" And of course a random-choise button for those who realy don't know or care.. .if you're the thirt in a row to cast the same vote you win! The possibilities of getting people actualy to vote!
Hmm.. Maybe a link with a casino.
Nobody expects the spanish inquisition!
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.
The next president of the United States: {FATAL EXCEPTION IN 0x0E4F}
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
As a techinal support person at a company populated by large numbers of non-technically orientated employees, such a situation wouldn't surprise me at all.
That's the very reason we do every bit we can to lock the computers down as much as possible.
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.
See the smudges from other people's fingerprints?
:)
Or the fist-prints from, um, enthusiastic voters?
That makes me smile - voting by kung fu...
But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
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.
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.