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Interview with Voting Machine Company Reps
laupsavid writes "Here's an interesting interview with government and industry reps on the Black_Box_Voting site. I think it's funny (yet terrifying), almost like an extended Shark-Tank Unclear on the Concept item. They interview Paul Miller, Registration and Systems Manager of the Office of the Secretary of State. Black Box Voting is dedicated to informing people of reasons to reject electronic voting systems. I believe Bev Harris runs the site, and she claims to be an expert on accounting fraud. Also, see this area of the a site called Ecotalk for a list of instances of purported fraud by electronic voting."
Let me see here, they reject electronic voting due to fraud.. so what do they support, the fraud free special hanging chads when using paper ballots (in Florida)?
It's not like many of us vote anyway..
and hate it at the same time.
This interview (while somewhat hostile), does illustrate why I hate it - we have voting system companies that refuse to make their systems open that are, in turn, monitored by officials that do not understand how the systems can be tampered with.
I think our elected officials just aren't ready to handle technology, unfortunately.
Oh, any voting system that doesn't provide a hard-copy output of how I voted to be used as a check is a voting system I don't trust - a pure touch-screen system should provide a printout that I can confirm, and hand in, where it will be filed much the way traditional ballots are file. The actual counting can be purely electronic for all I care, until a recount is requested, in which case the paper ballots should be used - any tampering significant enough to alter the election should be trivially detectable using this system.
A technological solution to a problem is accused of shortcomings under the assumption that the manual solution to the problem does not have the same shortcomings.
In my opinion, anybody that presents an argument that electronic voting is particularly subject to fraud must factor in the amount of fraud that already goes on in non-electronic elections.
One of my favorite stories occured in a western state, I believe New Mexico. The local election official was suppose to set up the "tailor" files for the electronic vote counting system. Afterward, he was suppose to run a variety of test cases to make sure it all worked right. So on election night, their counting the ballots and someone noticed that the totals don't add up right. As I recall, a large group of ballots were being ignored. In a panic, they ID the problem and call the equipment vendor asking how to make the necessary changes. The vendor begs them not to change a thing and call a judge, pointing out that any changes made on election night will probably led to a election fraud trial. They call in a judge, who brings in reps from the handful of political parties. It takes days to fix the problem.
It doesn't matter wether the votes are tallied electronically, manually or telepathically; if we have no [realistic] way to make the vote counters accountable, then it's all for nothing.
In other words, the problem isn't the mechanism, it's the implementers.
Does anyone, other than Americans, use voting machines?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That might not be a bad idea. If only I had an oil corporation....
can be found here, where a commentary on this topic and how it affects regular Slashdot readers is given. While it's true that this affects all of us, this kind of situation may actually be advantageous when you think about it... what's important is that there is a consistency of incompetence that can prevent any truly 1984-style dystopia from ever coming to life. As Thomas Franklin said, "Those who give up a little liberty for security deserve neither liberty nor security." When things like this happen, the terrorists have already won. John Ashcroft, Ayatollah Khomeini, Mullah Abdul Omar, there's not much difference, they're peddling different movements of the same tune.
In all seriousness though, with some hard-wirded electronics (rather than software), it should be pretty easy to construct a virtually fraud-proof voting machine that resembles the old-style ones but isn't as expensive to manufacture or maintain.
I voted in the last election for governor in Florida with the new voting machines.
As they stand right now, they give me the creeps: They do not give you a print-out for backup. And there is no way to look at the code by an independent auditor because the republican Kath "Cruella" Harris declared the code a propietary secret. Only the vendor has the right to audit their own code and certify it as bug free.
An open system should print a ballot that goes into a ballot box as a back-up and it should be open for any independent party to review. If not how do we know there is no fraud involved?
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
Without a hardcopy of each vote as it is cast, a recount is nearly useless.
I propose that each voting station be issued a single unperforated paper roll of ballots, with the voting booths in a line. Each vote would be punched and signed on the same roll.
Instead of having a pile of cards that could be selectively lost or stuffed, the individual rolls would be easier to keep track of. Plus, hand recounts would be far easier.
This could be abused too, but I'm not offering perfection, just perhaps an improvement.
The more out-of-sight and automated a system is, the better is has to be. Just to break even.
If anything is hidden, there is at least the perception that evil-doers *can* do things they shouldn't.
While I don't necessarily trust either the Democrat or the Republican election officials, I do feel fairly safe trusting that both are in no mood to let the other side get away with much of anything.
I don't have any answers, but unless anyone can at most anytime publicly ask any election official just what they are doing and expect an explanation, there will be at least a suspicion that there's "funny business" going on.
Many ways to abuse this system. If your interested in voting fraud, a story can be found on the bbc website about implementing online voting in the UK.
There was also a discussion about election reform and voting voting fraud last summer and can be found on the cato site.
Or you can watch the even in Real video
-this comment would be modded up if I posted it earlier =)
Most European countries have voting machines. Our system (in the Netherlands) is electronic, but there is a printer inside the machine for backup.
If they don't count the ballots at the poll in front of voters then the system is wide open for fraud. It doesn't matter what system they use. Here in Texas they lockup the ballot boxes in a car and haul them to the county court house. How do you know that the box is the same box as what left the polling place. How is an electronic system going to prevent a "virtual box swap" of ballot tampering. We allready have ballot tampering. This makes it easier.
Why do people think that a electronic system is some how better then a pencil and paper? It isn't more secure and who cares if it takes all night to count the damn things?
This is why I don't vote anymore. I don't trust the system.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
Well, I live in Brazil, and the elections here have used electronic voting "booths" since at least 2000. In 2000, there was a big mayoral election here in São Paulo. São Paulo is an enormous city in terms of population (about twice the population of NYC) and in terms of spatial size (significantly larger area than Los Angeles, which is also huge). In that election, the reliability of the electronic machines got a better test than many would like to admit it got.
The two candidates in the run-off election were Marta Suplicy and Paulo Maluf. Marta Suplicy represented PT, the same Workers' Party built up by now-President Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva. Paulo Maluf is the strongman of PPB, a right-wing party concerned with further enriching billionaires like Maluf and imprisoning the rest of Brazil. Maluf was appointed Governor of the State of São Paulo during the Military Dictatorship in Brazil that ran from when the US military helped support a coup in 1964. This bit of history is extremely significant, and I need to expand on this point a bit here.
I found it funny that despite Colin Powell admitting to it, the US State Department released a separate statement recently saying that the US and Kissinger were not involved in the military coup in Chile that ended the elected Allende government and put Pinochet in power. But it is significant that nobody has ever denied US involvement in the 1964 military coup in Brazil. I guess the pictures of US Navy ships off the Brazilian coast supporting the military coup are hard to deny. Not to mention the fact that Castelo Branco, the first Brazilian Dictator, was trained at West Point.
When the first free elections were held in Brazil in 1985, Tancredo Neves, a legitimate anti-Dictatorship candidate, ran against Maluf, who represented the Military Government. PPB, Maluf's party, basically grew out of that-- holdovers from the Military Dictatorship. Interesting side point: Tancredo had foolishly taken on a VP candidate (José Sarney) who until only months before was pro-military. Tancredo won the election, but died on the night before he was to take office. This is generally accepted throughout Latin America as having been the work of the CIA. In any case, Sarney became President and real advancement of Brazilian democracy had to wait for several years.
Well, Maluf, having been a bigwig in the Dictatorship, still has friends in the Military Police. We know he had special Death Squads he formed and used when he was Governor of São Paulo, and he openly used the Military Police to beat, kill, and imprison striking teachers, among others.
So despite the fact that all polls showed Marta winning easily in 2000, I got a chill when I heard that the electronic voting machines would be guarded on the night before the election by the Military Police and that the MP would oversee the security of getting the results to where they would be counted. I said "I think it's going to be Maluf..."
Fortunately, I was wrong. Marta won by the expected margin. This was a bigger test of the security of the electronic voting scheme used here than most would like to admit. Even so, I'd like to see the whole thing made even more tamper-resistant. Digital certification and signature technology make this possible, and Brazil has a complete modern PKI (It's called ICP-Brasil --"Infra-estrutura de Chaves Públicas-Brasil"--, which means "Brazil PKI").
I think the key stats I've seen on the value of electronic ballot boxes from the US are these: in rich neighborhoods, where electronic ballot boxes are used, the error is on the order of one hundredth of a percent (I recall reading 0.03%). In the po'folks neighborhoods, where mechanical voting is still used, the counting error is on the order of 1% (I recall reading a stat claiming an almost absurdly high 3%). I've been avoiding the racial element in this, but we all know there is a strong correlation between skin color and income, and so there ends up being a strong correlation b
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
It's not the programmer that programs the machine.
Were trusting our democracy to these guy's! IMO there should be an open source voting project, maybe funded by some governments.
with electronic voting systems is that there are too many choices to make. they just need a vote button and one candidate otherwise its too confusing which person to vote for. this also solves the problem of vote rigging.
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
+3 for a post that looks to be written by a bot and with a link to a site that has nothing to do with the post?
It just takes one loser to bring a post above or below the default threshold. In this case some troll(s) were able to score a 3. If it took five or ten votes to increment a score, the trolls would have to work a lot harder to have the same effect.
Fractional moderation points would give a more reasonable accounting of what the majority feel about a post.
The purpose of a democratic election is not to determine a winner. Every conflict, democratic or not, peaceful or not, ends up generating winners. No, the purpose of an election is to make everyone agree who lost, and to generate (through a future election) a preplanned battlefield for a future engagement.
Only through this process can the costs of conflict -- which are often substantial, sometimes far greater than the value of what's being fought over -- itself be minimized.
Some engineers with no knowledge of politics imagine voting is a counting problem. Given hundreds, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of individual polling sites, how can the numbers be collated and reported accurately? How can the top scoring candidate be identified and informed of his or her success? In short: Who won?
They miss the point entirely: The problem is never the winner. The winner is not the one to doubt or challenge the system. The winner is always happy to win -- it's never the party in the lead that calls for a recount. No. The problem is with those to whom power has been denied. They are the ones that the entire system exists for; they are the ones who the process is designed to satisfy. We hold out a carrot -- you will have your chance again in some time -- and ultimately, a stick: You failed to convince enough people that your cause was worthy, that your message was true. We brought your message to the people, and they turned away.
That doesn't say "You won." That proves "You lost." This is why it is so critical to have a genuine paper trail for voting systems: Any idiot can tell you who won, but once the facts disappear -- once the finger rises from the touch screen -- there is no mark, no evidence, no proof at all. That doesn't mean the election won't have an outcome: Courts can quite easily, by fiat, declare that the voting system may not be challenged. By fiat, then, they decide who won.
Fiat -- legalese for "Because I said so" -- does not a proof make. Fiat declares a winner; it cannot prove a loser. Thus it fails, utterly and completely, to serve the purpose of the election system itself. Open and unambiguous access to the voting architecture is critical if we are to provide an election system that defies the sour grapes of a failed candidate. Anything less makes a farce of the election process -- why go through the rigamarole if people have no reason to believe the results?
The sad part is, most engineers have settled on the most obvious solution: Touch screen voting, with a human readable (but easily computer-auditable, through the use of the standard OCR fonts that have been on checks for decades) printout that is stored for recount purposes. (The printout is on difficult to forge official paper, and contains some piece of data that did not exist before the election, akin to POW's holding a newspaper.) At that point, there are a few choices -- have the touch screens also communicate to a central office, which collates votes and designates 5% of precincts randomly for immediate on-site audit, or perhaps skip the touch screen link and have each site read the votes from the printouts and only the printouts. Given a challenge, the computers speak the same language we do, and possess logs in the same physical format we can analyze. A challenged result can be answered with evidence -- and thus the challenge is not likely to be made at all, for that would be yet another failure for the candidate.
Elections without evidence see their legitimacy drain away like blood from a sliced jugular. Without evidence, it's not that the victor cannot be shown, it's that the challenger cannot be refuted. Shaking ones shoulders, saying "I'm not going to prove a negative", is insufficient. Blind touch-screeners leave elections vapid and useless, an exercise in futility that doesn't raise an eyebrow when precisely 100% of the (remaining?) population votes for Saddam.
It's honestly surprising that, in this d
and that is the true reason why they must be rejected. A society cannot claim to be a democracy unless it has free and secret elections.
An election is secret only if the voter is required to conceal his/her vote. This prevents votes from being bought (since the buyer cannot know if he actually gets the goods) and it prevents people from being pressurized into voting for a particular party (with online votes, a tyrannical husband can easily make sure his wife votes the right way).
Of course, vote by postal letter has the same problem which is why most democracies allow it only in case of unability to otherwise attend and also make it at least somewhat inconvenient.
ok, I read it, unfortunately what I expected. Shuck and jive and dodging the critical questions by the manufactureres rep. The election official gets a last minute Cd with the "upgrade" so it gets run. Who's verified the original program? "they did, trust them" Who's verified the Cd? "they did trust them" Who mailed it, was it switched, a man in the middle, what if the programmer is compromised through bribery and blackmail? "never happen, trust them"
phooie, it's a scam, a sophisticated scam
None of those get answered. I'm convinced it's corrupt, last election in the state of georgia, first all state wide computerised voting. Uh huh. Biggest political upsets since the civil war, and they also contradicted both the pre and post polling.
A "coincidence" I am s-o-o-o-o sure....
Yep, no fraud there, move along, nothing to see...
I harangued my poll "official", she was clueless. I asked how do you verify a recount if requested, She said they ran the tally program again. duh, if it was compromised OF COURSE it would still show the same erroneous numbers. You could run the recount program as long as you wanted to, it wouldn't matter. She had no idea, I honestly failed to be able to get her to understand this simple concept, most likely because of brainwashing of trusting the state and some unaccountable corporation, and being very unfamiliar with computers. So instead of fraud attempts having to be done at the local level, they can now be done more efficiently and widespread from a centralised location.
It's been going on before that, the gross results were being tallied at a central location, no audits there either.
The system is so broken it ain't funny, they just have become extremly slick in giving the illusion of elections.
Computers are good for some things, for elections they are *not*.
and probably a loser as well.
This is exactly the same syndrome that used to make people wary of e-commmerce back in the 90s: "it's in computers! I don't understand computers! Anything could happen!" And just like it's easier for the shop clerk to steal your credit card number when he's ringing up your purchase, it's actually a lot easier to rig elections when they're done manually than when they're done electronically (as Jeb Bush will happily inform you) because you can declare big chunks of those paper ballots "unreadable" and exclude them from manual counting, which is what happened in Florida in 2000 in a number of democrat areas.
Electronic voting is instant, traceable, and most importantly interactive: how much would all those idiots who accidentally voted for Buchanan in 2000 have appreciated a dialog box popping up saying "You are about to vote for X"?
TR and I were sitting here, casually discussing how simple a matter it would be for a few bozos to completely manipulate the voting and vote tabulation process using closed-source computer systems. You know, eliminate any possibility of a recount or investigation. No paper trail. Then we started looking into some of the electronic systems in use.
:
HAHAHA! This stuff is off the rails.
Why is a British company (De La Rue, parent of Sequoia Voting Systems) involved with U.S. elections? Take a wild guess at what De La Rue does! This company is a MAJOR vendor of goods and services to governments, international bankers, central banks, and THE Central Bank, the Bank of International Settlements! They manufacture tamper proof I.D. cards, passports and maybe even the cash in your pocket. I find it very interesting that a company with so many connections to elite government and banking circles, a company with access to the most personal information for hundreds of millions of people, would also be involved in producing closed-source, unauditable voting systems for U.S. elections. If this is some sort of nightmare, I've had enough, I want to wake up.
From the De La Rue ABOUT page:
De La Rue is the world 's largest commercial security printer and papermaker, involved in the production of over 150 national currencies and a wide range of security documents such as travellers cheques and vouchers. Employing almost 7,000 people across 31 countries, the company is also a leading provider of cash handling equipment and software solutions to banks and retailers worldwide helping them to reduce the cost of handling cash. We are also pioneering new technologies including tailored solutions to protect the world 's brands through to government identity solutions in secure passports, identity cards and driver 's licences.
Does anyone out there find it interesting that a gas pipeline expert and 15 year employee of British Petroleum was appointed to the De La Rue Board of Directors in September 2001? To the Board of Directors of the same company that is making voting machines for U.S. elections? Yes, as I type this, the Oil Junta in the White House is reveling in their massive (!and historically unusual!) mid term election gains!
Philip Nolan
Non-Executive Director
Philip Nolan BSc PhD MBA, 48, was appointed to the Board on 1 September 2001. He is Chief Executive Officer of Eircom, the Irish telecoms operator and was appointed in January 2002. Formerly, he was Chief Executive of Lattice Group plc. Lattice Group is one of three successor companies of British Gas, specialising in the provision, management and servicing of infrastructure networks. The company comprises Britain's gas pipeline business, Transco, as well as telecommunications and other businesses. Dr Nolan joined the then British Gas in 1996, becoming Managing Director of Transco in June 1997. He was appointed to the BG Board in July 1998. He spent 15 years with BP and in 1995 was seconded from BP to the role of Managing Director, Interconnector (UK) Ltd, the consortium formed to construct and operate the pipeline which links the gas network of the UK to that of mainland Europe.
From Elections In America - Assume Crooks Are In Control
Sequoia is another voting systems company that sends a cold chill down my spine. "Mob ties, bribery, felony convictions, and threats of coercion are visible in the public record of the election services company," according to investigative journalist and filmmaker Daniel Hopsicker, and reported in Spotlight.com. Hopsicker says that Pasquale "Rocco" Ricci, a 65-year-old senior executive with Sequoia, and the firm's Louisiana representative, recently pled guilty to passing out as much as $10 million dollars in bribes over the course of almost an entire decade." According to American Law Education Rights & Taxation (ALERT), Ricci is the president of Sequoia International, which also manufactures casino slot machines.
Enough for now. My head hurts.
This would allow vote buying. Currently, even if you give me $100 to vote for your candidate, I can go in and vote however I choose anyway, and you're none the wiser.
With smart cards and a web site - here's your $100, just hand over the smart card for a day.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
I'd feel a lot better about electronic voting if someone could download the code and review it, to make sure some programmer didn't get and 'extra' bonus that election cycle.
I realize there's no money in it, but w/ all the /.ers talking about how the current systems are rife with opportunities to tamper, I would thinks that *someone would be working on it, if not for their own amusement, for the good of free democracy.
Unless of course all you coders are to busy playing America's Army...
We should have know something was amiss when Brokaw read the final totals: 15% for Bush, 15% for Kerry, 20% for Natalie Portman, and 50% for the next President of the United States, "that goatse guy".
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The reasons for rejecting electronic voting systems are obvious: 45 More Legislators Lose Jobs To Increased Congressional Automation
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When the only record is in easily manipulatable form with no double-check possible, then manipulating it is trivial. With the amount of money that goes into ensuring that the vote goes the way that moneyed interests want, there is plenty of incentive to manipulate it.
Just ask Chuck Hagel, senator for Nebraska. Who before his surprise election (it wasn't what polls predict should have happened) a few years ago was CEO of the company that counts the electronic ballots in Nebraska. (About 70% of the vote.)
As for paper, I am sure that lots of people in Florida would like having the electronic tabulating machine spit out spoiled ballots immediately so that you get a second try at not spoiling your ballot. Machines which were perfectly capable at doing that were widely deployed in Florida in 2000. Better yet, the machines had a switch that turns the behaviour on and off. By flipping that switch based on how a given area votes, you choose which areas have a 10% spoil rate versus approximately 0%. It is no coincidence that by a large majority, the spoiled ballots in Florida (spoiled because someone, eg, did not fill in the bubble completely) were clearly intended to be for Gore.
Oh, and some of Jeb's tricks would work no matter what your voting system is. Tricks such as improperly excluding over 50,000 people (most blacks) from the rolls for being felons in other states - when most of them weren't. Oh, and when that exclusion had been ruled repeatedly in the courts to be unconstitutional.
Are these paranoid fantasies? I only wish...
The real potential for electronic voting is the opportunity to improve the voting system itself.
There are many voting systems possible besides simple "one man, one vote". In fact, "one man, one vote" is probably the worst of all (of course, Arrow proved no perfect voting system is possible).
There are some alternative systems here.
Here in Clark County, Nevada, the very same Ms. Ferguson from the article was our elections supervisor at one time. She came in to the job, stayed just long enough to throw out all our old machines that had some kind of an audit trail and bought brand new totally electronic, un-auditable voting machines which violate state law from Sequoia Inc.
She only got the machines approved by the most ridiculous of explanations: A Printout of the memory card is just as good a audit trail as real ballots. Read about it here in our local paper. What did Ms. Ferguson do after leaving Clark County? Why she went to Santa Clara County in CA, where she stayed just long enough to throw out any auditable voting machines and replaced them with fully electronic voting machines from Sequoia.
After that, where did Ms. Ferguson go? Why she accepted a position as a Vice President... of Sequoia systems!
Do I think there is some wild conspiracy here? Nope. It's just a case of a political hack on the take, who doesn't care about the laws of the state that she is supposed to enforce.
Plus, I think the Slashdot crowd understands full well how when you have critical software apps that are closed source, you are essentially outsourcing control of your apps. So any county that has these fully electronic devices has outsourced election security to the low bidder. Egads.
Never confuse feeling with thinking.
Our local voting for senator, congressman, county seats, etc. was done with paper and pencil. You fill in the bubble next to the person you want to vote for on each item. It takes 2 to 3 seconds to fill in each bubble, so I don't see how it'd be possible to accidentally vote for the wrong person, as it might with a touch-screen type system.
Whoever makes ACT tests could probably make some very easy to understand, very easy to count and re-check ballots that would cost a hell of a lot less than a lot of computer systems that are going to be accused of fraud anyway.
I think the problem is that after 2000 everyone (dems) panicked and threw lots of money at the problem, and now they have to spend it. I'm all for making everything digital, but when it comes to voting, i know most people would rather just fill in the dots and know what they're sending in.
Here in Brazil we've been using them for more them 10 years AFAIR and in 100% of our territory (which it's quite big and *very* hard to reach in some places). The secret is there is no secrets. 1) Despite the source for the application is not open to everyone, any political party (we have dozens of them) can have their own experts auditing the code. 2) Some machines print the vote so the citizen can have a copy. 3) A random % of the all machines are audited by an independent group. This way we can have precise and fast results. Actualy I can monitor the results on-line on my linux PC, thanks to a java application one can download for free. I believe it works. We just elected a left-wing president, personal friend of Fidel Castro ;)
Faith can move mountains. I prefer dynamite.
Seems like a good open source project to start. If only there was more time in a day.
Kurt
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
finally, someone advocating testing! unfortunately, it's a technical solution to a social problem. how do you say "we have a reasonable confidence that noone tampered with the machines (read: voting process) in last night's election"? the last election i voted in (municipal) the people tallying the votes knew that i (or anyone) could walk in and observe the process. if anyone yelled hanky panky, it was possible to completely reconstruct the original data set at a later date and answer the challenge.
the problem is not testing beforehand, but testing during the voting and after the voting, ie as the votes are being tallied. do you expect that even a small minority of the population could understand a runtime coredump/stack trace printout (a la MacsBug) even if they were available? the idea of counting votes marked on on artifacts and in the open is very hard to improve upon.
to the challenge of "but hey, storing the data in bits is an artifact!", i answer: look at the hard drive closest to you (may not be visible) and ask, how long is the warranty on it good for?
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One possibility might be to get as many people as possible to vote absentee - thus returning the voting process to paper form. Perhaps overwhelming the election workers as well. Not, of course, that that would ever be part of anyone's motivation.
If you go in to the election location and refuse to vote on a machine, do the election types have to provide alternatives? (Such as they might for someone who is visually impared, for instance.) If you get hauled off to court, could the potential for election fraud be used in your defense?
Perhaps volunteering to be an election observer/counter could work - including a demand to audit the software before certifying the ballots. It would probably be best to get people from both/all parties involved in this though. Or might they just toss out the votes from that precinct?
Probably though, the authorities would just find a way to toss you in jail for trying this, refuse to consider the problem and continue to sell out what vestiges of democracy remain to us.
I am in a class in which our final project is to design a remote pollsite e-voting system. We read a bunch of definitive papers, including those by Caltech/MIT, the California Electronic Voting Task Force, and the National Science Foundation.
First off, every source believes that there should be a paper trail as a backup. This is good.
Second off, every source believes remote internet voting is too insecure to be feasible at this time.
Third off, my team's research shows it is impossible to have 'remote poll-site voting', in which a voter can cast his ballot at any station or kiosk in the county or state, while protecting voter anonymity and without relying on an always-up internet connection at each poll-site.. The crux of the problem is this: you can't update a voter's record in a central voter registration database (to change him to "VOTED" or something) without the polling stations being connected to that database over the internet , or phone lines, or some kind of link. So instead, you would give each polling station its own copy of the voter registration database. But that means if someone tries to vote twice (once each at two different polling stations), the only way to ensure that both votes are not counted is to associate the ballot with the voter-ID..
At this point, it becomes a matter of trusting the government. Even if the ballot that is associated with the voter-ID is encrypted, do you trust the government not to decrypt those ballots before duplicate votes have been resolved and the voter-IDs have been stripped off? Even if the voting system was open source, do you trust the government to not use a forked version that *doesn't* respect your privacy?
Another scenario is to set up secure links (internet w/ IPSec, or private phone circuits, or satellite...) from the polling stations so you *can* update the central voter database in real-time. All of a sudden, the entire voting system is subject to denial of service attacks. People would climb poles to cut wires, etc. And if your system was designed to be "failsafe", so that voters could still cast a ballot even if the link was down, you'd be back at the voter anonymity problem mentionend above: those failsafe ballots would essentially be the equivilent of modern-day "provisional ballots", in which your name and identifying information are written right on the front of the envelope.
I don't see a cryptographic solution to the problem, as such solutions seem to involve the government holding all the keys.
The professor of the class is a brilliant man, and he admitted to me that this is a fundamental problem and that he was, in fact, hoping a solution might come out of his assigning it to a bunch of students with fresh perspectives.
Intercarve Networks, LLC
"It's not the programmer that programs the machine."
Have you ever seen a bit? Because all the DRE's are programmed on firmware. Even if we had the source, we still cannot be sure the provided code is whats on the firmware. Subtle compiler version differences, command line options, etc, can change the binary in large ways. Additionally, its pretty hard to inspect the ROM itself. On an outside against-the-odds shot, they could even resort to altering the binary of the compiler to recognize itself and the ROM, such that source code verification would be useless (similar to the UNIX login and cc hack). Even Open Source doesn't protect us from the manufacturers.
On the other hand, if the code is open, and the code is what's on the firmware, we've exposed the source code and all vulnerabilities. A lone hacker really poses little threa . Really, this is securty through obscurity, but most of the attacks out there rely on knowing lots of intimate details of the system, like compiler version, source code, etc. Without this information, it really is extremely difficult to find and exploit holes. This is something of a double edged sword, however. The certification authorities cannot find and report security holes either. Fortunately, most election officials are concerned with failures under normal conditions, not deliberate tampering. Somewhat odd, that we're concern with whether computers can do it right, rather than whether they can be tampered to do it wrong. I'd call that an argument itself against DRE.
So on the whole, I don't expect that Open Source will be approved.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
It seems to me that this debate about the problems with electronic voting only demonstrates the problems inherent in any democratic system. Mainly the problem of the voter being unable to verify that his vote has been counted correctly. Even with a paper ballot where you can verify the correct hole has been punched, there is still absolutely no way to verify that your vote actually gets counted correctly. Even if there were a list of each citizen and who they voted for, such a list could be fabricated.
somewhat hostile /.ers on privacy naive or even gullable; I actualy thought the the FLA election fiasco was basicaly much ado about nothing. After reading the article, allowing for editorial liciense on the interviewer side and giving the election officail the benefit of the doubt the only thing I can conclude is that Miller should be ashamed to cash his pay check. This Miller guy was not somewhat hostile, he was downright evasive unaceptable for a public servant. I could except answers like, "I don't know that's Joe Snuffy's area of expertice, let me ask him and I'll Email back an answer ASAP"
Compared to most of the vocal
I made my first 'puter by wire-wrapping from a schematic back in 1976, and there is no way I'd trust a system without a hard copy output for anything more inportant than internet surfing.
basicaly what I got out of the interview is
1. a company make the voting machines named AccuVote
2. this company issues updates on CD's and if the update is significant it's independantly tested but nobody seems to have a definition of significant.
3. the CD's arrive from a source that's not explained, and don't seem to be verified as coming from an authorized source. Something like doing a MD5 checksum to verify the cd might be usefull for accounting purposes.
4. the CD are load into the system and they do what-ever they do and nobody seems to be accountable for tracking the machines that are updates; or even verifing which files have been changed.
5. before the election's the system is tested for Logic and Accuracy and if this test is passed, it's assumed valid for live data. of course off the top of my head an election would need huge amounts test data to cover all of the different vote possibilities and possible user responses.
I'd also have to agree with the interviewer, touch-screen voting machines are untestable.
Seems a pretty sloppy way for a secratary of state's office to do bussiness if you ask me
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
If properly implemented, a combination of electronic and paper ballots can provide much better integrity than either mode can provide by itself. See Ensuring the Integrity of Electronic Voting
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
I've served as a Baltimore City election judge (Republican - in a Democratic-majority jurisdiction) a couple of times, plus I've observed (and reported on) all phases of the vote-counting process at one point or another in my career.
:)
Based on my experience and observations, the mechanical voting machines used in Baltimore were far more cumbersome and caused more problems than any conceivable "pen and paper" hand-count system.
I am not anti-computer. (Note that I am not using pen and paper to post this comment.) But I believe the voting process in a country that claims to have a freely elected government should be as open and obvious as possible to all citizens, even those who choose not to become familiar with complicated mechanical or electronic systems.
Besides, as others have pointed out, it's probably cheaper to pay a bunch of people to count votes every couple of years than to buy a bunch of expensive machines that sit in warehouses gathering dust 990 days out of 1000.
And suddenly, with machines - either mechanical or electronic - volunteer poll watchers can't just be anyone who can read, write, and do basic arithmetic. To be effective, they must understand how the machines work, so your pool of potential poll-watchers suddenly shrinks to the point where you are unlikely to have qualified ones at all polling places.
The only way I will be truly happy with computer-based voting is if I *and anyone else who wants to* can download every bit of data from every point in the process, from the number of votes cast in real-time at each polling place on election day to every number involved after the polls close.
A comparison between the electronically-generated "number of votes cast" figure and a physical count of people voting would serve as a rough checksum. After polls close, vote tally feeds from the polling places that went not only to an official office but also to outside organizations would help give me confidence that accurate numbers were being submitted. From the raw polling place data, political parties, news organizations, and interested individuals could perform their own vote counts, and woe unto the election authority whose figures didn't match those of the independent auditors!
A paper audit trail would also be good.
Or maybe, just do pencil/paper ballots... so cheap and simple... it wouldn't kill us to wait until the next morning to get election results, really it wouldn't.
- Robin
Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything. -- Joseph Stalin
When you vote in any election in Canada, you're given a real, paper ballot that you mark with an "X". No confusing ballots, no hanging chads, no closed source, just a simple voting system that seems to work. If you mark anything other than an "X" in the circle next to the candidate's name, the ballot is considered spoiled and rejected. Volunteers count the votes and the results are posted shortly after the polls close.
How well our system would work for a country with as many voters as the U.S. is questionable, but it is undeniably transparent as elections in Canada are administered by an independent authority known as Elections Canada. I have complete confidence in our voting system. The same can not be said for the quality of candidates fielded by the political parties or the process used to determine those candidates, but that is a separate issue.
It's not like many of us vote anyway..
That's strange, a lot of you whine about things like the DMCA and CBDTPA and Patriot Act II.
Of course, if you don't understand why election fraud matters, you might as well stay home on election day instead of providing another vote for the people who make laws like DMCA.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Find out why a computer science professor who has forgotten more about computers than you are capable of learning leads the opposition to electronic voting machines with audit trails existing only in your imagination here.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Get a cheap screen. Put some buttons on the side. The voter presses the button to go with the right candidate, as displayed on the screen. This interface is easier and more reliable than any touch screen I've used. And it's so damn simple and reliable...
When you're done, just like an ATM, you get a receipt (aka voter printout). The identical receipt is printed and stored inside the machine, and the result is electronically stored or immediately uploaded elsewhere. No one would ever make an ATM without that paper roll inside (or the receipts printed for the customer)... I honestly cannot think of any valid reason not to do so, except to deliberately enable fraud. The printers aren't expensive.
If you wanted to be clever, you'd put a number or bar code or somesuch on every ballot, and within maybe 30 minutes the voter could return to the machine, invalidate their old vote, and enter a new vote. If the voter gets a printout it's not as helpful if they can't do anything if they realized they voted incorrectly. But that correction process does add the potential for fraud (though of course the correction would be logged for future auditing).
Someone else suggested an even simpler system where the machine prints out a ballot, and the ballot is put in a ballot box (after confirmation by the voter). Create something both machine and human readable (machine by OCR, so there's no possibility for the vote being inconsistent)... not as fast to count as electronic results returned by a modem, but does that really matter? Higher accuracy than punch cards, and highly transparent (so long as ballot boxes don't get lost...)
Lastly, election boards should be running exit polls. Not for any official purpose or in order to report to the public, but as another safeguard against both fraud and mistaken results. If the results of that sampling are too far from the actual results, then something went wrong. It won't correct those problems, but it's a final way to check that there are no massive inaccuracies in the voting.
-ccm
If our voting is done using secret black boxes built by a company owned by friends of George Bush, Ashcroft will stay AG even if you and he are the only two Americans who voted for him. It's people like you who make people think Republican and tard are synonyms.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I could have done this 15 years ago with BASIC on a C-64 and a DIY cartridge port to interface with physical hardware. The majority of people here could do one without difficulty with a PC.
Given control of the voting machine record format, how hard would it be to write software to tabulate the results? This is well within the scope of a computer science class project or even a textbook exercise for second year programming students, and the results should be at least as reliable as the "high-priced professional equipment" Sequoia and ES&S sell.
So the burden of proof that there are "important trade secrets" in voting machine or vote tabulation software, or that the software available for audit even by government organizations is the same actually used in elections is on the people who are buying this shit on our behalf or selling it. It's for them to prove that their "black boxes" provide an honest count and it's OK to use the law to forbid the public from inspecting the contents of these "black boxes" Neither party has even pretended to meet it.
My default assumption is that anyone who uses the word "proprietary" and "our" to describe their voting technology has either the intent to commit voting fraud or to be an accessory to it, and the results of any election done with it are inherently suspect.
1 geek point for the answer to the question "Which CEO of a voting machine company went from that job to the Senate to the surprise of a great many people, including pollsters?"
You want an Open Source voting tech project? Start one. You won't need the greatest and hottest programmers to make this work. But don't expect any US jurisdiction to adopt it. There is no reason to believe that the "black boxes" from political allies of Bush using campaign contributions to market locally won't become universal.
As long as the mass media doesn't start asking the right questions about honest counts in elections, the public will never know. Given that the TV industry is composed of FCC-licensed broadcast stations, I don't think this issue will show up on TV news anytime in the foreseeable future.
Control over enough voting machines makes subtle manipulations possible, a few votes in one precinct and a few votes in another adds up to candidates chosen by whoever controls the machines in a "close race"
Things are getting to the point where only the uninformed automatically believe in the integrity of US elections.
So where is US democracy?
For those of you who'd like to take a shot at Open Source election tech, I suggest using html pages for the ballots and using Opera in /kiosk mode to display them. This separates ballot design from the actual programming.
I think even the most partisan Republicans agree with me the people who designed the Florida "butterfly ballots" shouldn't be allowed within miles of the actual software used to run a voting machine and count your votes.
Tech Public Policy stuff
1) The voting terminal prints a paper "receipt" with a unique reference number for the voter to take home. *
2) The voter can go online and double-check the integrity of his/her vote by enterring the reference number.
3) Voters and 3rd parties can double-check the integrity of the whole election by downloading the results for the entire range of reference numbers and tallying the results themselves.
Simple!
* Of course for security, the voter's identity is anonymous -- the only id is the reference number, which should be a unique random number from a known set which is slightly larger than the population.
It rather reminds me of the time I tried to find out why a bank had a certain policy. All the teller could say was that it was company policy, so I asked her to get the manager. He agreed that it was policy, which I already knew. When I asked him why it was company policy, he told me, "Because it's company policy." That's right! It's company policy because it's company policy because it's company policy. No matter how hard I tried, I never managed to get him to listen to my actual question, or to see that he wasn't answering it. Mr. Miller sounds just like this: "If it comes on a CD it's authentic, because it came on a CD."
Good, inexpensive web hosting
You can't have a discussion about voting machines without bring up the book Votescam. It's a story where 2 brothers discover vote tampering in Florida about three decades before the 2000 election. Check it out at VOTESCAM. Several chapters of the book are online.
Not just fraud - but what happens if the machines ust screws up? Without a paper backup, are the votes just LOST?
The problem with electronic machines is that they make this kind of fraud even *MORE* undetectable. How do you know whether a machine is skipping, say, every 8th vote for a particular candidate? Answer: You don't.
The IRS would put you in *JAIL* if you had an accounting system with no paper trail. Why is it that accounting for money is more important than accounting for votes? I think this says a lot about American values -- money is important enough to require a paper trail, while votes are not.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Unfortunately, we've moved to technology since then. The problem with technology is that it requires special skills to detect fraud with technology. Any idiot can look into an empty ballot box at the start of the election day and verify that it is empty, and can watch that ballot box during the day to make sure it's not stuffed, then watch as the box is opened and counted at the end of the day. But few poll watchers are techno-wizzes. Even the old mechanical clunk clunk machines were fairly easy to rig (just file a cog off the wheel for the candidate you want to lose, and the machine will randomly skip his votes, and few poll watchers were sophisticated enough to detect such fiddling). When we move to technology that is not easily audited by technologically illiterate poll watchers, we lose all premise of accountability.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Voting irregularity is a function of local political organizations, not technology.
The classic example of widespread voter fraud is New York City's Tammany Hall Democratic machine. The Tammany people would hide votes, pay voters, cut off non-voters from political patronage, etc.
Vote machine manipulation is by far the least common means of voter fraud. It's far easier to manipulate people than machines -- and you can't audit people anyway.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
This is an exerpt from:n ame=New s&file=article&sid=22
http://www.blackboxvoting.com/modules.php?
"They actually WANT us to use a voter-verified paper trail!
Avante produced the first voter-verifiable touch-screen voting machine, called Vote-Trakker. Harris interviewed Kevin Chung, Avante's founder, and though she's not finished yet -- she is putting this company through the same investigative process she used with ES&S, Diebold, and Sequoia -- Harris noticed something different. This company actually seems to welcome disclosure.
Voting machines can be a good thing, IF the right safeguards are in place. But most voting machine companies (and many state officials) fight paper trails and hand audits tooth and nail. It's refreshing to see a company with enthusiasm about safeguards. (Paper trail? Hand-count audits to verify accuracy? Full disclosure of known errors and key people?) All for it, says Chung."
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
2600.com has this story about a guy that worked for one of the companies and how there is no real auditing of a particular machine.
http://www.2600.com/news/view/article/1559
..in Canada we have PAPER ballots (everywhere!). You mark an X beside your candidate(s)in PENCIL. The ballot is placed in a box. When the polls close, the ballots are counted BY HAND at the polling station by a designated enumerator with witnesses from each party.
The system is almost incorruptable, scales nearly perfectly and is cheap. I sincerely hope that we never change that system.
Ballot-punch type voting machines seem to be a capital-intensive, unreliable solution to a simple problem while purely electronic voting systems are, by nature, far too opaque to ever be certain that the vote has not been compromised.
There is a period of eight weeks between the time that an election is held and a president or Congress is sworn in, and a similar period of time for more local officials. Originally this interval existed for transit reasons - it might take two months for a candidate from the far West (at the time, any place to the west of the Appalachian moutains) to get to Washington.
However, as communication and transportation has become faster, it has also served as a means to insure that close races can be verified by recounts. This has certainly been the case since the 1920s, anyway.
There is no imperative that the winner of an election be known immediately. The outcome of the 2000 election was not known for nearly two months (and it can be argued was not known even after that), yet the country did not fall apart. That the news-media doesn't have a Red or Blue person to fill the requisite slots is not a compelling enough reason
Electronic voting machines are fine; they can resolve a lot of the ambiguity inherent in any election, they reduce the amount of paper to be transported or stored, and they can often present the information in a form that is easier to follow than confusing paper ballots. But this is ONLY true if such machines are intrinsically auditable. This involves several factors:
While I do not have hard evidence for this, anecdotal evidence indicates that precincts that received no voting machines tend to have a significant shift in the voting patterns for that precinct, almost invariably toward Republican candidates.
This can be "masked" in the media as being a shift in the way that the county itself voted, but because there were no exit polls in the 2002 elections, it was almost impossible to tell whether the bias that showed up was in fact another significant lurch to the right, or whether some kind of voter fraud occurred.
What is so freaking difficult about counting votes accurately?? (1+1=2!) I agree with most /.ers here, there should be a paper trail definitely. I would suggest something like a ticket with a confirmation number, and vote info printed out after voting electronically. Similar to the money order or lotto tickets you buy at 7 eleven!
ie. A voting ticket automatically printed out after vote is submitted, with 2 parts, where one part you keep and the other is placed into a secured box.
I found them to be very cavalier about it all. I was very put off by that. Free elections are a serious matter, and every step should be made to make the process as accountable as possible to the will of the people.
As far as recounts go, many places don't even allow a recount if an election is not within 1-4% difference between candidates. Make your fraud greater than that, and you can't even check it under the present laws period in those areas. How is that accountable?
I want "None Of The Above" on the ballot. That's another form of accountability that is missing from our present system. If None Of The Above wins, both candidates are barred from running for that office for the next two election cycles. This is a needed failsafe to prevent bad people that the public doesn't want period -- from getting into office. I would be willing to bet that it would win at least 5% of elections the first time it got on a ballot.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
France has a very simple system: voters isolate themselves to put a printed bulletin carrying the name of their candidate in an envelope, then go to the desk; their id is checked with respect to the electoral roll, they sign in front of their name and case the vote into the ballot box.
The box is made of clear plastic and before voting begins witnesses can assert it is empty.
After voting ends, counting begins on the spot; neither the ballot box or the ballots are moved out of the room. Volunteers come to count and witness the counting. Counting proceeds by table of four people (at least in Paris): one opens the envelopes and keeps track of them, two count the votes on forms, another reads the ballot. Discounted ballots (handwritten messages etc...) are witnessed and signed by all at the table.
Volunteers from political parties and other people circulate around the tables to check for irregularities.
The process is actually fairly quick (it takes maybe one hour). The system scales up with the number of voters (the number of voting precincts is linear in the number of voters). What the system does not scale up with is the number of simultaneous elections (France seldom holds two elections at once).
Some rights are not rights if they can be traded away. Economic coercion is still coercion. Would you trade your vote to buy antibiotics for your kid, if you had no other choice? Damn straight you would.
Song writers cannot trade away their rights to some royalties on songs. This ensures that, no matter how sleazy their business partners, they are ensured some royalities from their work. Restricting their rights actually enhances them. (I think there's an analogy in software licensing...)
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Miller: "What you're implying is that there is a way for a programmer to know where a candidate will be on the ballot to give that candidate a benefit. That's impossible."
Harris: "Regardless of who sets up the ballot, the ballot does identify who is a Republican and who is a Democrat. So there would be a way for the program to know that. Why couldn't a programmer, for example, set the machine to wait for a couple hundred votes and then put, say, one out of every 10 Democrat votes into the Republican bin?"
Miller: "It's not the programmer that programs the machine."
Harris: "But whoever does it identifies, for example, who is a Democrat and who is a Republican, so regardless of who inputs that, the machine would be able to read and identify that too."
Miller: "I'm not going to talk about proving a negative."
Harris: "But the positive, which can be proved, is that every election system that's ever been used in the USA has, at one time or another, been tampered with. And what we do know is that $800 million has gone toward contributions to candidates. So certainly we can predict that someone will try to tamper with a programmer. And therefore, what I'm asking, is what safeguards do we have in place to make sure that, if someone tampers with a program or a CD update --"
Miller: "I think we've gone as far as we can go."
If you place your fingers on two or three pre-determined locations (e.g. opposite corners) while making a vote selection, then all current (or subsequent) vote are changed such that 1/3 of all votes go to your preferred choice.
This 'feature' would be essentially impossible to find in logic testing, and would not depend on the egg programmer knowing anything beforehand about what the vote questions would be, when the vote would take place or even how many 'test' votes were done.. All you would need would be someone who could make it to the polling station at the appropriate time in the voting process (beginning or end) to activate the egg.
Without a voter verified paper trail, it would be almost impossible to verify that such a cheat had been used. -- remember it could also be encoded in the prom firmware of the machine -- not just the truly soft software, and it could sit there for years, until an appropriately critical vote occurred (or an appropriately large bribe was paid).
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
Sure, testing is a wonderful way to put the system through its paces and determine if it behaves properly.
The first problem is that each company that builds these things claims trade secret protection to the whole system so there's no way to actually audit these to the public's satisfaction.
The second thing is while the system may be trusted, the individual machines might not be. We're not just talking about software, but an entire system. Suppose one machine in your precinct is deliberately compromised and only counts votes for candidate X. How do you prove this particular problem/issue? The system already passed verification and testing. The offending box can probably be very quickly and easily reset to behave well during the investigation.
No, the only way for electronic voting to really work is to create a printed receipt. (Of course then the counting can be compromised...and we go back around the vicious circle.)
In the end, there will always be a margin of error in the voting process. The only problem is if we're trying to make a decision within that margin.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Suppose we created an open-source electronic voting system that you could check your vote against?
You go to the precinct and cast your vote. When the vote is completed you get a paper printout and a hash value/confirmation number.
Then you could go back home and download the checker code. Punch in your precinct number and download the candidate list. Punch in your confirmation number and verify that it matches what you voted for.
I'm sure there are still ways around this system and probably more security measures that would need to be implemented to make it work, but what the hey, why not give it a try?
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
You're lucky! In San Francisco we have the ballots with a broken arrow between the candidate and the office. You fill in the arrow of the candidate you want to vote for. When it's slow, you get to use a little booth with a curtain for this. When it gets busy, they hand you a pen and you are free to find a seat in the common area and fill out your ballot. If you are lucky, you get a seat by a table, so you have something to write on. Otherwise you have to hold one hand behind the ballot while you write. While I was voting, less than half the folks actually got to use the little booths.
After the last Presidential election, six ballot boxes washed up in the bay. Officials claimed they had been taken to a pier for cleaning after they had been emptied, and they had washed away in a storm.
The power-hungry bastards aren't even bothering to make things look legit anymore. So you know things are crooked? What are YOU going to do about it, punk? That's what I thought: nothing. Now sit down, shut up, watch some TV and buy shit.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It's the worst kind of partisan rag. It's not a news source, it's a propaganda machine.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I don't think I've ever seen so few comments modded as funny as in this story. And such a topic is so open for humor!
Hey...
/.ers being among the most educated people in the world, I'd be willing to bet that less than 5% would have any idea who Paulo Maluf is or why I'd be worried about somebody tampering with the voting machines in the São Paulo mayoral election of 2000.
Somebody modded my post "Offtopic." I admit there's a good chunk of background information there, but the essence of my post is showing that Brazil's electronic ballot boxes underwent a very serious test in the mayoral election in São Paulo in 2000 and passed with flying colors. That seems to me to be right "on-topic."
I felt I had to include the background info in order for people to be able to understand the context. I was taught in American schools and I know they don't spend a lot of time telling students about what's going on in other countries. Despite
I ask that the modder please contact me. I'm guessing the modder either didn't read through my whole post or is a Malufista...
I consider the first of these two possibilities significantly more probable.
--Mark
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
a nice $40 to $50 will rent their smart card for the day.
Why make vote fraud easier? Read up on the political machines in the big cities during the 1800's and early 1900's. That's where the phrase "You can't fight city hall" originated.
Supporting a system without clear audit trails and checks and balances is foolish. Technology isn't a hammer and this problem is a nail. The gov'ment just needs to spend enough of our money to have enough election workers available on election day and paper ballots work great. It is in the interest of the powers that be to have a system that is broken as long as it keeps them in power. Replacing the system with one more prone to abuse is stupid
With an additude like that you will end up with the government you deserve. You seem to think if someone else will sell a vote you shouldn't care. You seem to believe making it easier for political machines to buy a vote with less of a chance of getting caught is okay because "then you'll probably wind up with the government you deserve... "
What about the people that want thier vote to be meaningful and to make a difference?
Will they get what they deserve? You clearly need to rethink your position or are you for returning to the days of open graft and political corruption on a grander scale?