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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?
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
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.
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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"?
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.