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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."
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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 =)
The problem with electronic voting is just as much about transparency and accountability as whether it is more susceptable to fraud than a dead-tree vote.
With a paper vote, the system is intrincially very simple - the voter marks a ballot paper according to who they're voting for. The ballot papers can be counted by hand, and anyone who wants to can observe the counting.
With an electronic voting system, how can I check how it's working? Even if the source code is open for all to see, how do I know that the published source is what's actually being used? And how can someone who doesn't understand computer programming check that the system is correct.
Any voting system is vulnerable to fraud of some sort, but, imho, a system which anyone can understand is better than one which only a privilaged minority (geeks) can.
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
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.