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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!"
The first person who writes and validates a working, bulletproof software system for collecting votes wins $$billions.
That's the kind of patriotism we need.
Perhaps someone heard the interview on "Morning Edition."
Sorry I can't provide more details.
...but who's gonna teach Florida how to use them?
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I cannot support any voting system that's closed source. I want to know what the voting system is doing with my vote, and the only reliable way to do that and to maintain a free society is to be able to see the source. That doesn't mean everyone should be a contributor, but we should see what we're dealing with.
...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?
The reverse could also be said. Those that wish to unseat the incumbent wants something different.
The best way to elect our representatives is not through the use of technology, wiz-bang gadgets, open source software or even legal challenges.
Its gett ing Joe Six-Pack and the rest of the disenchanted voters off thier duffs and out to the polls. Rather than complain, execrcise the right to vote people. Had this been the case in 2000, we would have had a clear winner
If there so worried the voting software is closed source, why not start and open source project?
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.
I understand the possibility of fraud and such... we had electronic voting here in Georgia this last election cycle and it did very well.
If your disabled you can get assistance, and the machines can voice the choices as well for vision impaired.
There is a review at the end of the voting processing asking you to verify the choices you made are accurately represented.
Votes are transmitted to a central site and kept in the voting machines. They have multiple ways to prevent loss of votes due to power outages as well.
What this all leading up to is, how can the suggestion of printing out votes at the end of the day be meaningful? If the voter isn't there to review their votes who decides that anything nefarious hasn't happened?
If anything, a paper trail AFTER any voters have left is more of a risk that not having one. Suddenly you get back into the days of ballot stuffing, but instead now you just invalidate votes as needed. (or call for a new election, hoping your side turns out more this time).
Electronic voting still doesn't stop dead people from voting either, they just file absentee ballots.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
http://www.bestoftheblogs.com/2003_02_05_bestof.ht ml#90279110
This is an article about Chuck Hagel who is a nebraska representative. He ran for office and won in a very close run off, and controls a large interest in the private company that counted the votes in his runoff election.
The majority of the information in the above blog came from http://blackboxvoting.com/, which is a book about the future of electronic voting.
Just some fairly creepy stuff that's turned me off towards any sort of private computerized voting.
The problem here is that a paper trail is too easy to for other people to read.
Elections in Western countries are meant to be by secret ballot, people. That means your vote is anonymous. Why? Because people don't want other people knowing who they voted for. If someone voted for the 'Kill All Geeks' party, that's their right, and you can't condemn them for their vote (although you can certainly condemn them for their actions).
The best alternative solution to a paper trail would be to use a secure database that has public access. That is, members of the public can run a set of limited commands on it.. like
SELECT COUNT() FROM votes WHERE party='republican';
Or
SELECT COUNT() FROM votes WHERE state='alabama' AND sexuality='gay';
That way, the populace can access the database over the net and query it by SQL, checking the validity of the votes.
Preferably you'd use a proprietary database system to store the votes, as then you can be sure security is not compromised. A paper trail just opens up a whole bag of communist ghouls.
mogorific carpentry experiments
It's not a vote if I can't hold the ballot in my hand, look down and see "Al Buchanan" in the PRESIDENT column and say "1 for Al!".
The ballot needs to be:
Machine generated from a touch screen like device.
Machine and human readable.
Signed so as to be verifiable.
The ballot reciept, that's placed into the voting machine, is a random private key, handed to the voter before voting that is used to sign the ballot and ensure integrity. The voter can then take the receipt/key with them and use an Id number to check that their vote was actually tallyed.
This allows machine counts of paper ballots. It allows manual, human auditing of ballots and tally. It allows machine and human recounts of the ballots. It preserves the voting record for the election on something besides magnetic media. It allows "quick summary" for those willing to rely upon the stored, machine versions of the votes before physically counting the ballots.
This is the only way. You MUST have a piece of paper you can go back to and find a vote. Anything else is simply unacceptable.
And, no, it's not over the internet, but we know that will never fly anyway.
Personally, I think voting ought to be made as difficult and inconvenient as possible. If voting were like crawling over broken glass, only those who really really were interested would do it, and we'd get a better product. Keep the ignorant and lazy out of the electoral process, I say.
The fundamental issue is as follows....
Consider 2 elections. In one, you and I and everyone else have exactly a 75% chance of having their votes counted. In the other, the affluent young technocracy has a 99% chance of having their votes counted and the poor, old, or low-tech population has a 95% chance of having their votes counted. At first blush, the seond electiuon sounds more fair, but it is very clear that the first is totally fair and the second is terribly biased.
The problems in recent elections were not caused by technological failures. Dangling chads and the like are just a smokescreen and the recounts bore that out. The problems in elections are a lack of uniformity within the areas in which votes are pooled. Since the votes for president are done by electoral votes rather than popular vote, it is not necessary to have the entire country have identical machines and ballots, but this does need to happen at the state level. When I walk into my polling place, I should see an identical machine to every other voter in the state (randomly selected from the state pool). All the state ballots should be identical to every other ballot in the state. All the county ballots should be identical to every other ballot in the county, etc....
To do otherwise not only fails to solve the fairness problem, but it disinfranchises people for whom a mouse is a household pest.
No, kiss goodbye rigging the elections and nobody being able to prove you did it.
Here's a hypothetical example. Some guy runs for his state; nobody really likes him that much and all the pre-election predictions are for the other guy. Then he wins, although the 'exit polls' suggest that most people were actually voting for the other guy. Then it turns out that he used to be the CEO of the company that makes the all-electronic voting machines used in this election, and a few people think this is mighty odd but there's no way to prove anything because his machines don't include any kind of audit capability.
I wish this was actually hypothetical.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
However, when it comes to protecting the foundation of democracy we can't even be given access to the source code as it is a "trade secret." Here's an example of this privatization of democracy:
Well, thats what we have right now as far as getting laws passed. Note how much its like "crawling over broken glass" to submit those forms they presented to contest the DMCA. See where that is getting us?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
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
1. Any voting system running on proprietary code should be assumed to be rigged.
2. Some of the companies that make such systems (Diebold) are affiliated with far-right wing politicians.
3. Paper audit trails do not exist. Without an audit trail, the only recount available is done by software provided by the manufacturer. Worthless.
4. In at least one state, which one escapes my memory at the moment, it is unlawful for any agency except the manufacturer of the machines to recount votes made on the machines.
5. A far-right wing ex-talk show host, now a congressman, was the primary shareowner of one of the voting machine manufacturers.
6. Exit polls have become unreliable for the first time in history. Election outcomes no longer match exit sampling. Why? Either the voters decided suddenly, en masse, to lie to exit pollsters, or mathematics have ceased to function, OR the vote tallies have been tampered with. I'd go with Occam's Razor: the tallies are being altered, just enough to win; not enough to be ridculously obvious.
7. The Florida mess. I remark on this only in passing, for I saw it mentioned by another poster. There was no mess: there was a close race, and a recount was needed. As the Floridians were proving, a perfect hand recount was easily done. But they were stopped from doing so by a partisan, panicking Supreme Court majority. Not that the thousands of operatives flooding the courts and the media weren't slowing it down to a crawl -- staged riots, lawsuits, arguing extensively over each ballot -- anything necessary to stop - that - recount. The Supremes had no legal precedent to do what they did. Constitutional scholars almost unanimously denounced the decision as BS. But they did the job.
And yes, BS headlines to the contrary, Gore won by actual votes counted. If overvotes ("Gore" written in, and also punched) were to be counted, and they would have been, Gore won handily.
And to my mind more importantly, if the military overseas votes postmarked after 11-07-00 had been disqualified, instead of illegally approved, Bush would have lost. Lieberman should be denied a shot at the crown just for caving on that point. those votes were sent in by Bush supporters after the close election was over, for the sole purpose of tipping the scale. Disgraceful.
But to report this would be to invalidate the Bush support shown in the media in Dec. 2000, and shown Bush to be a manipulator and a sham.
8. Back to point. Automated systems are fine -- but some say: a paper ballot should be printed out whenever a voter uses an automated machine. The ballot should be filed just as the hand-punched ones are today. In case of recount, the paper should be matched to the counts in the automated systems.
But here's the kicker: if the voter never sees the paper backup, how will the voter know the vote was accurately recorded? The software could mark Danny Fatcat on the file and on the printout, and the voter who voted for George Orwell would never know it.
The only way around this would be if the voter could review the printed audit ballot before the vote is committed. What if it doesn't match? What is the recourse?
And what is the use of an automated system if there is a voter review of a printed ballot? Better just to use the paper ballot and run it through a scantron.
* I don't think an automated system can be anything but rigged. The far-right ideologues in the U.S. are far too fanatical not to get involved in the manufacture and operation of these machines. It's a matter of God's will, the defeat of evil, the end of the world itself. If they can shave off a few thousand people from the Florida rolls because they have similar names to lawbreakers in other states, they can do just about anything. This is a war, and they intend to win it.
The problem is I can't trace my vote back to where its been counted. Now if an electronic system gives me a vote reciept, then I can go to a web site later and say 'Tell me who "0304756745383834743646374" voted for'. If I've got that ticket in my hand and my votes don't match whats in the database, then I've got reason to complain. This has other problems because its trivial in small towns to figure out which IP address goes with which household but any verificaion system will have massive risks.
What scares me is I used to work for a largeish credit card company. They would lose records from time to to time. Thouse records invovled real money but sometimes they just disappeared without any ability to trace them. Everytime I've audited a system that logged in two places, some records just don't end up in both place. The best ones seem to have about one in a hundred million go missing, but they are still lost. I want the voting system to be at least that good.
Each voter is given a (numbered) balot form with one column of candidate names and one (mathcing) column of empty boxes into which may be entered an apropriate mark ("X" or numerically ordered preference) to indicate voting preference.
The votes are sorted, and the sorted votes counted. This is done manually.
Any disputed votes are examined by the returning officer and representatives of the candidates and assigned or discarded by cocsensis.
Whilst the numbering of the ballots, and the recording by hand on the master copy of the voters roll at the polling station of which ballot is given to which voter, may slightly compromise anonimity, it provides no convenient way to decern the vote of any individual.
The cost of the occaisional employment of large numbers of tellers is almost certainly less than that of the various "automated" polling systems and the audit trail far superior.
>>>>truth; beauty; unix.<<<<
...that a resolution "endorsed by computer scientists" does not propose an instant run-off system, whereby each voter ranks the candidates in order of her preference. (She can vote traditionally by ranking only one candidate 1, and no one higher).
The benefits are enormous. The system is much less open to manipulation, and it is basically the only way for minority voices to be heard.
One cannot overemphasize the fact that today a rational voter will always choose the lesser of two evils, without considering candidates that are not evil, based on the mathematics governing her vote.
Let me repeat this: If you believe that a vote for the democratic candidate is a vote for evil, and you believe that a vote for the republican candidate is a vote for evil, and there is a third candidate whose views you agree with precisely, and who you think could fulfill the office perfectly were she elected (but there is zero probability of this, as there was zero probability of Nader's being elected) then under today's system your only rational choice is to forego your preference for the third candidate and vote instead for the lesser of the two evils. That is, you will be rationally impelled to vote for a candidate with whom you do not agree, when a minority candidate exists who could better represent you.
This is no less than mathematical extortion.
You can either participate in a two-party system, or "throw your vote away." It is, in effect, a mathematical equivalent of having a voting booth in which you are to choose betweeen seven candidates by putting your token either into the republican ballot box, the democrtatic ballot box, or the trash.
Everyone who voted for Nader in our last presidential election placed their vote in the trash, since there was zero probability of Nader's winning. (Exception: vote trading.)
Read more about instant run-offs here, or do a google search.
Here in Allston, a neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, our votes were cast in a manner similar to many urban areas, with a mechanical voting machine older than I am, the kind that has a big lever that closes a curtain and a myriad small switches for selecting candidates or casting votes for referenda.
I know that these machines have many drawbacks: they cost a lot of money to maintain, store, and "program", though I've always assumed that to "rig" these machines too commit wholesale fraudulent voting would be to time consuming and complex to pull off. Hence, I had a certain amount of faith that the lever I'd pull would actually correspond to the name on the paper strip, and my desired vote would be tallied. I know also that this faith was rooted in sentimentality; I'd accompanied my parents into machines just like that when I was a kid, back in the Sixties.
Two elections ago, however, during a primary vote in September, there was a man at the polling place who was demonstrating a new system, produced by LHS Associtates of Methuen, MA, the "Accu-Vote" system. It used paper ballots, with small circles like on a standardized multiple choice test (like SATs, except without the need for the No. 2 pencil). There was an optical scanner that looked somewhat like a paper shredder, the kind that fits on top of a wastepaper basket. You fed the ballot through the scanner and it read the marks, ejecting the paper out the other end, into a bag, thus preserving a paper trail in case of a recount.
I filled out one of these sample ballots. There were "joke" choices on the ballot, and I intentionally mis-voted, to see how fault-tolerant the system was. Under "Mayor", I placed a check mark in the box next to "Fiorello LaGuardia". For "Board of Cartoon Characters", I put a tiny dot next to "Bugs Bunny". Under "Superhero Committee", I filled in the box for "Wonder Woman", intentionally overfilling the mark, and for "Sports Authority" I filled two boxes, "Babe Ruth" and "Jackie Robinson".
I went over to the company representative who was showing the demo system and handed him my ballot. He fed it into the machine and it was spit out the other side. Though I'd intentionally cast a faulty ballot, there was no indication that anything was wrong, and I showed him the marks I'd made, pointing out my screw-ups.
"Well, this is just a demonstration," he said.
"So, all this does is roll the paper through the mechanism?" I asked.
"Um, well, it's just a demonstration."
"You mean it's not a real machine?"
"Right," he replied.
"So the real machine would reject this ballot, right?"
"I assume that this will be the case." He didn't sound too sure. At this point, the police who work the election detail started paying attention to our conversation. I guess election detail is pretty boring for them.
"So who audits the code that runs this machine?" I asked him.
"I don't know, maybe the Board of Elections," he said. "I can give you the name of the project manager. Maybe he can answer your questions." He wrote a name on the back of a business card. I took it and thanked him for his time. I called a few times but never got a callback, and I doubt I'd get a satisfactory answer.
My fear is that it's trivial for this sort of machine to register a vote for Foo to actually be tallied as a vote for Bar. With the old mechanical machines, this sort of fraud would take days, considering the hundreds or thousands of machines and the dozens of people from the Board of Elections that set them up. However a "black box" system like Accu-Vote need only be programmed with fraudulent code once, after which that code is distributed to hundreds or thousands of EEPROMS or Flash cards or whatever the Accu-Vote uses to store its programming. The barrier to entry for wholesale voting fraud has been lowered, and if the winning margin is large enough, there will never be a recount.
The Accu-Vote system was deployed for the November 2002 elections here in Boston. If there was a public hearing about this change from mechanical systems, I never heard about it, and I read the Boston Globe every day without fail.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
We are using the least accurate of possible voting systems, the plurality system. That is one of the reasons why the last election went the way it did. Our system is the worst possible, the one most likely to produce anomalies that do not reflect the will of the people. We need a preference-weighted voting system that prevents votes from being wasted if one's first choice candidate does not win. Like the "Borda Count" method. Many other countries are going this way. Most scientists and mathematicians agree.
r oo m/v0.1/html/lab6/lab6.html
t m
2 &b tnG=Google+Search&num=200
Do the math:
http://www.princeton.edu/~matalive/VirtualClass
http://www.ctl.ua.edu/math103/Voting/4popular.h
Or do a search for Borda Count on Google:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Borda+Count%2
Read the explanations above and then..Write your elected representatives..
The RISKS forum/digest has had many, many articles on the potential and actual snafus of electronic voting; I thing the topic is a special interest of the digest's editor. Although the contributors are very much a part of the technology world, the mood there is pretty virulently anti-electronic voting unless there are old-school audit features such as paper trails. Closed source software is regarded very skeptically.
The most persuasive evidence is the actual experiences coming in from the field, around the planet. Many local governments are buying expensive new systems on surprisingly little information, and we may face problems like Florida's in no time -- but not actually realize it, for lack of auditing. I highly recommend flipping through the archive.
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?
Completely coincidentally, Nebraska has a new law that prohibits election workers from looking at the paper ballots, even in a recount. The only machines permitted to count votes in Nebraska are ES&S.
And completely coincidentally, Senator Hagel has won recent elections by surprising margins. See also this capitol hill newspaper report
there's more to this, but I can't find the links yet.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The problem with having a voting system based on open source code is we would end up with Cowboy Neal as President.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
Normally, I'm not the conspiracy-theory type, tending more towards occam's razor and healthy skepticism, but This article , on an admitedly rather left-leaning publication, if at all accurate in merely it's factual assertions, disturbs me to no end. And of course, there's no mention in the mainstream media.
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
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.
This is a very serious accusation you're making. Unfortunately, a single accusation by someone on Slashdot will not make a difference, even though it has been mod'ed to +5.
Why not just outline what needs to be done, in a reasonable logical list, as clear and short as possible? Like (IMHO);
Polling Booth: A) System is to be un-networked, for security. Only networked WITHIN the polling location, not to the "internet." B) all polling booths will use minimal hardware (save money for taxpayers, simple to code because of legacy code base, hard to hack because there isn't enough RAM for an exploit to be loaded). C) After minimizing RAM for prevention of exploits, checksum code after each vote is cast to insure security?
Polling Station Logs: A) Polling Booth "checks in" digitally date/time/unit stamped vote into database for polling station. B) Check-in's are done to a single, CHEAP (but reliable) PC running open source database like PostgreSQL. C) Backups are done to removable media frequently (USB drives every half hour?) D) Backups are IMMEDIATELY taken MANALLY to central database to update voting. (Bypassing internet hacks, and "physical hijacks" of data are ruled out because the next delivery will show that there is a substantial error). E) Digital Forensics is used to investigate any accusations of "ballot stuffing" where every backup drive, every polling booth, every poling location PC, and every central database that receives manual updates can be instantly checked both physically, and against each other, as well as by looking at low-level info that was "quickly erased" from all storage media.
Now THAT'S an idea. Just one off the top of my head in 2 minutes. Sure, there are better ideas, but my point is; take 2 minutes to come up with them rather than the typical 10 seconds to poke holes in them and criticize. Why not come up with ideas rather than trash those that exist? Anyway.... Rant Over...
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
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.
Sorry, I'm a little peeved at writing the same darn URLs every time this comes up.
- Technical description by the ACT Electoral Commission
- Comments by a user in the Australian Computer Society on how the system worked in practice.
- Executive Summary of how it worked.
- 1 MB PDF full report.
- And finally.... The Source
Jeez... I mean, it's been a while that this has been available. Posted several times onZoe Brain - Rocket Scientist
The company I work for is currently preparing a bid for pilot project that will allow the citizens of the largest Swiss state to vote via Internet and mobile phone, along with the usual paper method.
The main driver of the project is to increase turnover, especially for young citizen that are supposed to be more prone to vote via these "new" technologies.
Our (swiss) laws already incorporate specific requirements regarding e-Voting, including the ability to audit the process, the security of the whole system and the secrecy of the votes.
Swiss citizens usually have to vote or elect several times a year and the voting process is considered as mature, every step being supervised by committees containing members of different parties/lobbying groups.
The voting registers are held at the local level, and are continuously updated every time a citizen moves in or out of the city, reaches the voting age or dies, and are crosschecked by the higher authority. Voting material and voting cards are automatically sent several weeks in advance to the possible voters, they do not have to register themselves or require anything. So by design, we have no dead people voting or minorities prevented to vote because they did not register themselves due to lack of information.
e-Voting is considered here as a good thing, as it allows to streamline the counting process and should increase (our low) turnover by not requiring voters to physically present themselves to the voting booth (in some states, the majority of voters already use the generalized absentee (snail mail) voting process).
I find it quite surprising that a large majority of the US "geeks" has such a mistrust in the electronic vote in particular, and the ability of their authorities to conduct a fair and lawful election in general. Aren't the USA supposed to be the most democratic country in this world ?
If voting were like crawling over broken glass, only those who really really were interested would do it, and we'd get a better product.
That's one economic argument. Here's another: Concentrated beneficiaries hold a natural advantage over dispersed stakeholders. For example, insurance companies have a specific agenda to pay out as little as possible. Therefore, by putting a few thousand dollars into fancy dinners and presents for your state legislature, they can get a number of different state laws restricting any halfway fun activity passed. Can you imagine how much effort it then takes people dispersed throughout the population to organize against it? Voting should be made easier to offset special interests, not harder to encourage it.
--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.
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Open souce? Checksums? Backups? Redundancy? NONSENSE!
All we need is two things to ensure safe, accurate computerized voting.
1. Machines that produce a voter-verifiable audit record (paper ballot).
2. A law that says that anyone can call for a manual recount at any time, and if the electronic results are shown to be incorrect, everyone involved in building and installing the system will be shot. (If they're willing to risk our democracy, the should be willing to risk their lives. Conversely, if they're not willing to bet their lives on it, why should we risk our right to vote?)
1 - Voter checks in with a volunteer who checks off their name like they do now then tares off a random number from another sheet (numbers are given out on a first come first serve basis and are only assigned to poll locations)
2 - Voter goes to machine and punches in their number that they were given by the volunteer.
3 - Voter votes.
4 - Machine spits out a random number on paper that the voter can then take as their recipt.
5 - All votes are listed in plain text on a public internet server. The votes are arranged by the random number spit out to the voter.
This way there is anonyminity as there is several layers of obsfucation. Even if you controlled the software, the best you could do is associate a vote with a polling location. More importantly, there is checks and ballances: the voter can check the website and see if their random number is there and that it is associated with what they voted, and all the votes add up. If someone's number wasn't there, you'd know something was fishy. If the votes didn't add up or were different than what was reported you'd know something was wrong.
1. Endorse the resolution on electronic voting. http://verify.stanford.edu/evote.html 2. Most people don't seem to know what's happening. Tell them about it, and point them to the web page. 3. If you live in Santa Clara County, CA, contact the election staff and supervisors to let them know you consider this an important issue. http://verify.stanford.edu/dill/EVOTE/scco.html 4. email offers of help to "elections@chicory.stanford.edu". More ideas would be appreciated.