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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."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
In may area in Michigan we do use pens to mark paper ballots which are then read through a scanner, these ballots can be sacnned, rescanned and hand counted if necessary. Make a mistake you can ask for a new ballot, forget to mark a candidate that you intended to vote for and your SOL. Sometimes it's a bit complicated because you may have to vote for 3 candidates out of 5 running for things like judges and school/college boards
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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
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