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Electronic Voting's Fundamental Flaws
phil reed writes "Given the latest fiasco in Florida's continuing attempts to implement a decent voting system, I thought it would be appropriate to alert Slashdot readers to the work of Dr. Rebecca Mercuri. She's been studying voting systems for many years, and has developed well-considered positions on what makes a good electronic voting system (and what makes a bad one). Her comments on the Florida 2002 election can be found in the current Risks Digest. And, if you think that creating a computer-based voting system is easy, she provides a suggested list of questions that should be answered by any developer." Mercuri's statement in Risks is well worth reading. With all due respect, she is wrong in some respects: it is possible to create a fully-verified electronic system. Start with completely open code and thoroughly examined hardware, create an audited system for installing the code on the hardware, and make it tamper-evident so that you know the same code is still there when the machine reaches the voting booths. Bootable, hologrammed, serial-numbered CD-ROMs with individual private keys would do the trick. Mercuri is thinking in terms of vendors selling proprietary "solutions", where she's absolutely right: there's no way to verify that what people punch in is what is actually recorded.
I worked for the company that initially developed the device used in Florida. Our company did the UI, for creating ballots, and the reporting system.
Ready to laugh? Target platform was a C++ CGI running on Windows 95 with Personal Web Server, using SQL Anywhere and Crystal Reports.
I wish I could write a full article about it, but it would make a lot of people angry.
And by the way: open code has NOTHING to do with making electronic voting. It's not a code issue. It's not a hardware issue, either. Retirees and people who can't master the 'Start' button run elections. Paper ballots fit their mindset. I know this. I travelled all over the country setting up the system. Most of the places didn't even have networks. And why should they? It was 1998 and they were still running Windows 3.1, or sometimes just DOS (Wordperfect was popular in several precincts).
You want successful electronic voting? Then don't let your grandmother run the voting machines.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
Yes this is off topic, but I have tried emailing about the flag Icon, but I get no respose., red,white, red,white,red.
/. is in can be difficult to find, but at least take the 10 seconds it would take to look up what it is suppose to look like, sheeesh.
the American Flag has 13 stripes.
red,white,red,white,red,white,red,white
I know Information about the flag the represents the very country in which
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
> To protect privacy, each ballot is identified by a single-use,
> random identifier known only to the voter. That way each voter can
> personally verify from the public data that his or her own votes
> were correctly recorded
There's still a weakness there that isn't present in existing systems:
One of the things we need from a voting system is to make it impossible
for other people to force you into voting the way they want you to. eg. an
employer firing you if you don't vote for their uncle, or something.
The way the current system works is to give no way for anyone else,
even if they're holding a gun to your head, to ever find out who
you voted for.
To me, that's one of the most important features of a democratic election.
If you can verify that your vote was recorded successfully from
outside the ballot area, so can someone holding a gun to your head.
- MugginsM
My daughter, who has lived in Iowa, tells me that there they use a hybrid system: a simple computer system walks the the user through candidate selection, but punches a card itself. There's still a physical record of the voter's choices, but without hanging chads or overvotes.
The hybrid system seems to be the best solution. The computer assists the voter, but it does not actually cast the ballot itself. To this lifelong resident of Cook County, Illinois, it sounds like a much better system than either hand-punched cards or a purely electronic system.
[this
Look what Google turned up... An Open Source (GNU) electronic voting initiative
Four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still. -C. Coolidge
In my voting place there were no problems with the voting.
Some points that I observed: the machines take 1 full hour to "warm up" as they were calling it here (boot). That seems like a long time, specially since in many places the people in charge were LATE at opening the doors, so the machines were not ready by 7am. Some acusations of boycot on this (about 50 poll workers were late by 1 full hour).
The code is propietary, cannot be audited, and the
voting machines DO NOT make a backup paper print of every vote.
In some polling places the workers unplugged the machines BEFORE they were shut down, so the data was LOCKED and it took almost a day for the company technitians to retrieve.
There was a severe thunderstorm in some areas that nocked off power and disrupted the voting... remember the machines take 1 hour to boot.
I am more worried about the lack of paper printouts as backup than about the organization problems. The later can be solved eventually, the former is not noticeable until you have a catastrophe of sorts...
Just some observations from down here for everybody to consider.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
I voted in the Tuesday primary and amazingly enough, I managed to do so with a minimum of fuss. It surprises me that we didn't actually have many more problems. After many years of using punch card voting, the state has inflicted a new computer voting system on us. The majority of the poll workers are elderly people who tend not to be very comfortable with new technology. The Miami Herald reported today that most of the poll workers received minimal training and it consisted of watching a video. If you were going to implement such a system, wouldn't you try it out or test it in a wide scale first?
Dade and Broward counties, where most of the problems occurred, are also two of the most populated counties in Florida with the highest numbers of elderly and poor people. Imagine implementing a whole new voting system without doing a wide scale dry run. The kind of massive problems that we witnessed here where to be expected. What also wasn't addressed where the kind of organizational details like having enough poll workers of both political parties at each polling place. That meant that some polling places could not open. We still had the usual record keeping problems, registered voters not appearing in the voter rolls and poorly trained poll workers. What is inexcusable is that with a new system being tried out for the very first time they did not have enough techs available to handle the inevitable problems. They didn't even have a good way to communicate to all polling places to stay open an extra 2 hours. Never mind that many of the voting machines were not ready on time and were sent out to the polling places without the right programming. Then strangely enough, the voting machines would not boot properly. Why weren't the machines tested before sending the out on the field? We are not counting girl scout cookies here! What kind of moron would take brand new untested technology and put it out to be managed by poorly trained technophobes and expect less that a complete disaster?
Before you start giving the poll workers a hard time consider the fact that they had to be at the polling place by 6:00 AM and that they would have to stay till poll closing time. There is only one set of people working the polling sites. There is no second watch. You go home after the polls close. After the last person votes you get to break down the machines and collect the votes and so forth. So conservatively, if the polling window is not extended like it was, the earliest you'd get out would be 8:00 PM. Thats 14 hours minimum. Then you add an extra 2 hours and you have to stay around till 10:00 PM. All this and you only had lunch around noon sometime. By 11:00 PM some of these old folks must have been hypoglycemic!
The problem is not only with the closed, non-auditable, poorly explained, even worse implemented voting system. Its with the people who picked it and the people picked to organize its implementation. To begin with the Florida government has to be the biggest group of imbeciles you could ever hope to put together in one room (that includes our esteemed governor, Jeb Bush). Their main purpose in life seems to be making other "more progressive" states like Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi look good in comparison. The only thing more screwed up than our voting systems is our child foster care system, which is also managed and organized by the same group of geniuses in Tallahassee.
My problem with a closed implementation of a voting system is that I have no way of knowing that the machine recorded my actual vote. I have no way of knowing that the machine simply didn't make up a vote or just make believe it never existed. I know no voting system can ever be completely tamper proof and fraud free. You may not need computers to tamper with an election but they make doing so much more efficient. Some of the polling places with the most problems where in poor black neighborhoods. At some of these only one vote out of thousands cast were recorded. All the other votes vanished into the ether.
All I want to know is how come Afghanistan, a 4th wold nation in complete ruins, managed to have an election and we cannot.
Alex