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Computer Scientists Rally for Reliable Voting System
Kim Alexander writes "Silicon Valley computer scientists, led by Stanford professor David Dill are asking Santa Clara county to purchase a new computerized voting system only if it provides a voter verified paper trail. Their concerns are based on the lack of adequate testing of these voting systems, and the fact that the software is closed-source and proprietary. Requiring a voter-verified paper trail will mitigate many of these problems. Dill's 'Resolution on Electronic Voting' has been endorsed by prominent computer scientists from all over the country, including Ron Rivest. Counties all over California and the US are going through a similar process. Patriotic nerds who want to do something to help protect our fundamental right to vote with confidence that our votes will be counted can help by contacting their state and local reps, writing letters to supervisors and getting informed!"
...Can only be possible with a sort of one-way encryption of a code, such as an md5sum. I'd hate to be able to have a vote traced back to me.
The next issue will be how to let the voter verify his vote (in the case of a recount, or contested count) without being identified as having voted one way or another.
What's this Submit thingy do?
I honestly half to say I'm not too concerned about the absoluteness of democracy (for lack of better wording). Democracy is not an end in itself, but a tool for protecting individual liberties - and like any tool it can be abused too. It's disgusting to hear people suggesting that if you don't like something isn't right in a democracy - you have no right to have any other recourse accept to vote.
What's right and wrong, good and bad, truth or lie is not decided by popular vote or public opinion - but by observable facts that exist independently. What I hope happens is that new technologies "force" democracy to become more free even if it tries not to. EG, a voting popluace would never shut down the internet - but it may be impossible to stop free mp3's any other way. A voting population would never shut down ecommerce - but this would provide the infrastructure to avoid unjust tax even if the mob desperately tries to impose it.
Well, I think a voting system with a voter-verified paper audit trail is probably actually better than having an open source voting system.
Look at it this way, even if you can see the source code for the voting system, you cannot be assured that it is installed, configured, and working properly in an actual election. Further, most of the population would have no idea what to do if they had the source code. The source code is no substitute for votes being actually recorded to paper, verified by the voter, and dropped in the ballot box, and with actual paper votes, the source code becomes somewhat moot, since you can see what you are voting for.
This seems an appropriate time to remind everyone of this.
http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/
The wisdom in computerized voting systems is certainly debatable.
Proprietary software, whose code cannot be publicly audited, and whose code cannot be independently tested, should never be allowed near voting booths (or sites)
And a paper trail? Will we visit everyone who voted to check their voting stub? And won't that identify who I voted for specifically in a way that can be checked and directly tied to me, defeating the purpose of a voting booth?
I hope the potential savings don't outshine the potential risks.
Suppose N people decide to vote on an issue. For simplicity, let's assume that the vote is A or B. You pick a random number that only you know. In order to vote, you add your number and your vote to a list. At the end of the election, the paper trail is shown:
...
1928787: A
7483978: B
1662656: B
etc.
Along with a tally of the votes. Every voter can verify that their number is followed by their vote. You don't know what the other random numbers correspond to, but if yours was 1928787 you know that your vote is there and was counted as 'A'.
This is the basic idea. There's more to it of course, but it can be done.
See charts for twitter trends on Trendistic
Almost.
I think technology can be beneficial in making voting more accessable. By having an easy to use computerized voting kiosk which prints a paper ballot that can be hand checked by the voter, you get the best of both worlds!
All the punch card reader systems so far have been closed source. Plus mechanical voting systems makers don't provide blue-prints. Why the sudden outcry now that the machines are more modern?
Vote for Pedro
I don't understand what all of the fuss is about. Here in Durham County, North Carolina, we use a voting system that is, in essence, something just like the multiple choice testing forms that we've all seen in school. Scantron, I think it is called. Instead of filling in the oval with a #2 pencil, one connects the beginning end (base of the shaft) of an arrow with it's pointy end by using a magic marker. The space between the two ends is detected as filled in or not by an optical scanning device. This way, there's a paper trail (the scantron type voting sheets) but the scanner/computer does the vote couting. What could be simpler than this? You slide the sheet into the scanner, it registers the votes, and then drops the sheet down into a locked container. Seriously, do we really need a touch-screen based one-arm bandit type machine that leaves no paper trail?
Do you mean a voting booth with an electric typewriter in it?
Otherwise, I don't know what you mean. 'Look, a shiny piece of paper with who I voted for on it' says the voter. Meanwhile, what went out over the wire, nobody is certain....
But ... who says this eagerness to get to the polls is correlated with the country's interests? It may have a lot to do with self-interest.
The Nazis were very good at climbing over broken glass (Kristallnacht).
IMHO, any voting system, computerized or not, must meet the following requirements:
- The voting must be anonymous.
- There must be a backup method that allows for tallying votes if the primary method fails.
- There must be a permanent audit trail to make recounts possible.
- There must be no way to associate a specific ballot with a specific voter (yes, this is the same as "anonymous" above but I feel it deserves special mention).
- Most importantly, the system must be designed such that its privacy and auditability are *readily apparent* to the *vast majority of voters*. You should not have to have a CS degree to be able to trust that your vote will be counted.
To me, to meet this criteria, any computerized voting system must print paper ballots which the voter can read and then turn in to a separate vote-counting entity. The system which solicits your vote and prints a completed ballot must be physically and logically distinct from the system which collects your complete ballot and counts it. I don't think open source matters -- if it prints paper ballots and the casting and counting functions are separate, it is easy to audit its accuracy.
NPR link ("State and local officials buy electronic voting machines in hopes of avoiding the low-tech messiness of pencil marks on paper ballots and so-called "hanging chads." But some computer scientists say vote-counting computers are inaccurate. NPR's Dan Charles reports.")
Now, "inaccurate" isn't quite the right word. Unreliable? Not robust? The problem being tampering, accident, or oversight, not the machines' native ability to add accurately.
*
Good for you, to have written.
The thing is that they need a hook of some sort. I don't think they're going to understand how important it is, unfortunately, until there is a tragedy. Similarly, you wouldn't have been able to get them to do a story on your criticisms of Space Shuttle heat shielding until, well, know. We wouldn't even be dumping punchcard ballors en masse -- and switching to electonic systems of questionable pedigree -- if not for Election 2000.
What would be wonderful, if it could be done, would be a comparison of actual voter intent with vote tallies. I know they do test runs (sometimes) but what the public would find compelling is a concrete "you screwed up this election" result. Kind of like the first time DNA shows we executed the worng person.
The errors made with electronic system, more often innocent than malicious, have been amusing so far. When something ugly happens, will we even catch it, let alone see it coming?
While the use of proprietry software and the lack of a paper trail can't help, the problem appears more fundamental. It you turn elections over to private companies to run, which is really what you are doing if you use these voting machines, there are huge conflicts of interest. Take Senator Chuck Hagel who won the last two elections, against expectations, where 80 percent of the votes were counted using machines supplied and run by a company he indirectly owned.
Even if there is no impropriety going on in this particular case, their is certainly the appearance of impropriety. The question of who makes, owns and runs the voting machines appears even more important than the software and proceedures used by them. Rather worryingly the use of exit polls in the 2002 election was almost non-existent, so there was no indepedent check on the results. Potentially the people who control the voting machines control the result of an election.
You are missing the point, the paper vote is not "papaer trail" but a hard copy for backup. I voted in Florida last election with an electronic voting machine. After making all my choices, I pressed the "vote" button only to get a greeting: thanks for voting.
Well, it felt like hmmmmm did I REALLY vote? Where is my vote? How can I tell I voted? Did the machine tabulated my vote correctly? I still don't know any of that for sure... we have to blind trust the voting machine as it is now. Something that gives me a very uneasy feeling.
On the other hand, if you produce a hard copy that you can review and then as a back up put it in a ballot box. Well, at least you will know the vote is there and it can be audited if the machine gets lost or damaged somehow.
Just my 2 cents.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
Exit polls are like the canary in the coal mine.
Your canary's just dropped dead, and you're telling me "well, you know canaries don't always live that long. Perhaps it was just old."
Times like this I'm glad I live in a country that still has hand-counted paper ballots.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
The electoral system isn't "antiquated". If the founders had intended the electoral college members to be nothing more than courriers, they could have easily done that. They didn't.
Ironicly, the electoral system serves to make sure that people are counted. Without the electoral system, nobody would bother to campaign in New Hampshire. Is it unfair that voters in rural New England have such a disproportionate impact on the election? In a sense, yes. However, it's the price that we pay for not having a country dominated by New York and LA with everybody in the middle pissing and moaning about how the City Slickers run everything, and deciding to secede from the Union.
The system failed once, resulting in a little fight you may remember from history... unless you were taught in a public school or something.
What's really interesting is to look at an electoral map of the 2000 election. Do that, and you see that while the majority of the *people* voted for Gore, the vast majority of the *country* voted for Bush. So, in most parts of the country people are happy. It's just the City Slickers that are pissed, and they aren't allowed to buy guns so who cares? :)
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Right, we can make people take tests before they get to vote, that will help keep the people to ignorant to go to school from voting.
And then if they don't like that we can have a vote tax so lazy vagrants that don't want to work can't vote.
"Personally, I think"
Please don't, somethings broken up there. You and your buddy Jim Crow need to go back to your y2k hideout.
Keep the ignorant and lazy out of the electoral process, I say.
Sounds a bit like an oligarchy, no?
The problem with this thought is that we would no longer be a government of the people, for the people, and by the people. We become a government of the educated and ambitious - the elite if you will. History is full of governments like this, rarely with good results.
Democracy, by its very definition, must involve the participation of the people. Even the ignorant and lazy ones.
Agreed...in my home voting precinct the old optical ballot scanners are used. Use a computerized kiosk, but print the completed ballot for record-keeping/auditing purposes with no personal information on the ballot...perhaps printed with magnetic ink in a machine-readable form for quick, error-free scanning and comparison to the machine tally. One could even print a receipt for the voter should they so desire one.
With all the millions of checks processed every day in a similar fashion, why can't magnetically-enhanced ballots be tabulated the same way?
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
--and did you contact any whistle blower styled news people in this state? Have you called this in, written a letter to the editor to the journal constitution, filed any ethics violations with the secretary of state? did you STOP YOUR VOTE at your precinct when you found this out? This is the first I have heard of this memory leak and reboot problem, and I have looked for info.
This election was flawed,and my guess it was thoroughly rigged, key races, key precincts, you can't tell if what the diebold guy told you is true or yet another scam, no idea what rebooting did. At best you know at your precinct how many bodies walked in the door, and what the machine told you there on the spot, that's it. No one knows what the real numbers are. No one even knows the real collated numbers, do they? It's all based 100% on this vague "trust us, we are the new corporate government, we would never lie to you". And do you really believe a republican governor got elected? In Georgia? And that cleland lost? Disregard personal left/right schisms, just the sheer common sense odds of it happening.
We are living in a high tech styled germany of 1936, that's my opinion. Orwell was wrong, it's WORSE than what he prophesized.
One last thing, why did you say "Fortunately, there was no big stink made about this after the election, even though two major statewide races had surprising (and close) results."
Fortunately? You think this is a GOOD THING? and you are a poll worker? I am GLAD that this is caught on the web here, I just MIGHT do something with this little post of yours.
have a GOOD DAY.
I can explain this. The voting software is written by one company, and opaque. If the company is corrupt, the software could contain instructions to favor one candidate over another.
The same is of course true for counting committees: if a committee is corrupt, it might favor one candidate as well. But the major difference is the amount of votes counted by the machine and by the committee: the machine counts vote throughout the country, while the committee merely counts votes for a very small area.
A single corrupt company could effectively grab power throughout the country, but a single corrupt committee has almost no impact at all.
The paper trail takes that power away from the company, and allows committees to perform a separate count. Granted, not all voting machines may be checked in this manner, but the company creating the machines does not know in advance which committees will be counting and which ones will trust the machines.
I consider a paper trail a *vital* safeguard for democracy.