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Doubting Electronic Voting
twitter writes "The NYT is raising the alarm on electronic voting. After citing expert opinion on the need for a paper trail, they then quote election officials and vendors who dismiss that opinion as the ignorant work of dreamers. The reporter titles his article, 'To Register Doubts, Press Here' and seems less than convinced."
The article
Bon appetit.
So perhaps they've never heard of printouts?
My bank doesn't seem to have a problem with me transferring thousands of dollars electronically, but this reporter is nervous about voting?
We all saw what good a paper trail did in Florida in the 2000 USA presidential campaign. The problems run much deeper than just a paper trail in the USA. When people are cut off from voting by police roadblocks, and thousands of ballots are thrown away, or arranged in a confusing way to try to get people to vote for someone that they don't want to, there's more than just a paper trail problem.
Unfortunately, the US government runs its own elections, rather than a truely impartial third party.
Politics are a dangerous thing in America.
The best idea is not electronic vote casting, it's electronic counting. The most recent Toronto mayoral election used a ballot similar to those used in electronic test-scoring, where you use your HB pencil to fill in a blank. The votes were all counted within a couple of hours after the polls closed.
If you wanted to avoid confusing the easily confusable, you could have a touch-screen system that prints a paper ballot, with the blanks ideally positioned for the electronic counters. Efficiency and a paper trail.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Here, when we tested a new electronic voting machine that registered all votes in paper (and allowed you to see your vote "paper trail" through a small window), people found it MUCH worse than the system used in the previous election (and much of the rest of the country in that election).
Me, I think it was because the ads teaching people how to vote in the old machines were displayed nation-wide, *including* the places where the new system was used.
(8-DCS)
Whatever, as if it has to be a private company doing the polling, and whats to say the code does not send the data directly, encrypted to a key generated by the goverenment, to the government? In that event the data couldnt be tampered with.
I agree we need to take some precautions to safegaurd the electorial process...but that dosnt mean we cant use electronic means to poll. Just like there were concerns about the inital voting schemes, there are concerns about this one, but that dosnt mean we cant simply make desgin changes to ensure the integrety of the data. And since when has the government been MORE credible than the private sector? They have had just as many scandals, if not more.
In any event, the answer is to simply design in safegaurds....not go back to older ways just because your scared of technology...please
History will eventually show electronic voting to be the most excellent means for subverting democracy ever invented.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
it happened in florida in the 2000 elections. thousands of minority voters were deemed unqualified to vote because a corrupted registration system declared them to be felons. this occured because they shared a name with a felon others were barred having been convicted in the year 2009. if we can't get the registration right what chance do we have for the actual votes.
Check Yes: Happy confirmed position Saddam
Check No: Mad at you for voting against him Saddam
Remember, armed guards stood over them as they voted.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
5. Two words: Digital chads
4. Chicago motto: "Log in early, and vote often"
3. In the Mayor Daley election, even dead OS's like BSD can vote.
2. You can now use Grokster and Kazaa to steal votes.
1. "I'm from Chicago. Give me two public keys".
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
"When people are cut off from voting by police roadblocks, and thousands of ballots are thrown away, or arranged in a confusing way to try to get people to vote for someone that they don't want to, there's more than just a paper trail problem."
Sorry, but the roadblocks thing is a persistent urban legend. If there was anything to it, Gore would have sued over it. He did not.
Ballots thrown out? The only ones tossed out were ballots WITHOUT VOTES.
Confusing arrangement? The Democrats arranged those ballots, and they only confused idiots who did not follow directions.
Here in New York, we use a mechanical switch voting booth. Why isn't that considered unreliable, too?
A) Electronics hardware just isn't reliable enough. Especially when thrown to the whim of the public.
B) Software is even less reliable. Bug-free software is a near impossibility.
C) No system, hardware or software, is 100% secure. People could probably figure out ways to change votes remotely via electromagnetic pulses if they had to.
D) The human factor isn't completely eliminated. As long as humans have some role in the vote takin process, the results can fixed. Whether it be from software and hardware designers, hackers, or people mis-reporting the results.
E) Most people don't trust electronics, some people outright fear them. E.g. my grandfather refuses to use ATMs. What if this causes some people not to vote?
If you are old enough to remember the all mechanical machines where you flipped small levers to vote and pulled a large arm to cast your vote. The votes were mechanically accumulated and would sometimes get stuck yielding results like 2273 votes for one canidate and 999 votes for the other. What can you do then?
Free cell phone tracking
The two main points in electronic voting are:
The vendor's point of view (unsurprisingly) is that "bugginess" is only a hypothetical threat, and that it in real-life situations no glitches will occur.
This is very clearly horseshit. Every IT-implementation has bugs. Repeat: Every. The question is: how many of them can we tolerate ? If it comes down to a word-processor, or a webserver, or even telecom infrastructure: we can afford quite some. If it comes to medical facilities, nuclear plants, or, as in this case, political decisions, the threshold has to be a lot lower. You wouldn't want George W. Bush to have been elected by a bug, would you ?
The (currently feasible safeguard) solution of the paper trail sounds like an excellent solution:
a) the voter can immediately control if her vote was cast correctly
b) the same rule applies as with financial and legal records (where a paper trail has to be conserved)
c) the "black box" problem that is mentioned in the article is circumvented: the citizen doesn't have to understand how the e-voting booth works, but (see a) can control if her intentions match the outcome.
OK, generally I'm not one of those "everything should be open source" voices, but I do think that this is one case where this type of software should be required by law to be open source. The ramifications of any type of fraud is way to high. But more importantly, I think that a separate agency should be involved in the archiving/building of the source. After all, just because someone says "download our source code X" doesn't mean that X is what is actually running. The source should be baselined and backed up on releases, as well as checksums produced and verified for the resulting binaries.
In 2000, Arizona Democrats had the first online balloting in their primary. The link contains some analysis also.
Suicide Booth: You are now dead! Thank you for using Stop and Drop, America's favorite since 2008.
Require something that cant be falsified like retinal scanners eliminate security concerns. To eliminate privacy concerns, by law (or new amendment), all personal data should only be held until the results have been counted then irrecoverably destroyed.
Im sure there is a flaw that I am over looking (aside from the slippery slope argument), what is it?
Insert sig here (slashdot) Insert cig here (Lewinsky)
I'm sure an electroinc system would have worked so much better.
Yes, in fact, I believe in the last vote (actually a referendum on whether he should stay, hence the yes/no options), Saddam managed to swing the few floaters and scored 100%. Obviously he feels no need to further improve the voting process.
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Anyone who says a purely electronic system is the best idea is either totally ignorant of its inherent problems or has money to gain from such a system's adoption.
So when is the article going to come out about the dangers of trusting electronic news websites? Don't we need to remain firmly fixed to a concrete paper trail for news, lest history itself become so malleable as to resemble Orwell's 1984?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
VS.
"When you're dealing with computer scientists, they deal in a world of theoretics, and under that scenario anything is possible," Ms. Bonsall said. "If you probe a little further, the chance of these failures, the risk of that happening wide-scale in a national election is almost nil."
Paul Terwilliger, director of product development at Sequoia Voting Systems, one of the largest manufacturers of electronic systems, said that while no one disputes the need for safeguards, complaints about machines like his company's were uninformed. "I think the concerns being raised are 100 percent valid," Mr. Terwilliger said. "However, they're being raised by people who have little idea about what actually goes on."
I think I'm going with the doubters on this one, not with the people selling it. I also like the quote(s) that question the fact of "how can we verify there's been no tampering? And "if its so secure why can't we look in it?"
And in regard to Ms. Bosnall's quote, we're not so much worried about wide-scale national failure as we are with tampering .....big difference.
America gets scarier by the day.
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
I'm definetly a techno-geek, but I'm also a pragmatist. Electronic voting isn't going to solve any more problems than it creates.
A bunch of my concerns that haven't been addressed in the media:
* The hardware and software are proprietary and not open to public review. My paper has a full page copy of the ballots before every election so the public can review it.
* Not accessible. How do people missing vision or limbs use them?
* How are the results audited? Do the electronic logs go into the public domain?
* Is the incredible expense and TCO of these machines justified? Paper ballots are practically free by comparison.
* What about absentee voting? What wacky "voting method of the future" can we come for that?
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
The same argument could be made for the status quo of voting. The only way to make manual voting secure is to register every citizen, tatoo them and require a drop of blood for DNA testing before they enter the voting booth.
Except that this doesn't really address security and neither does your rant. This assumes that the voters themselves will be trying to commit fraud. This happens. It's still nothing compared to the problems that happen when the government commits fraud. I'm not even referring to the normal allegations of miscounts in Florida.
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Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
National Semiconductor and Unisys (two American companies) made a really good electronic voting system for Brazil, they've been using them since 1996. It has a tamper resistant paper trail, so it is completely auditable, unlike most of the systems described in the article. From what I've heard, the machines work quite well, and people are happy with them. (Please, if someone has actually voted with these, share your experiences)
I fail to see how having a paper trail with electronic voting is "dreaming", it strikes me more as "required", particularly if we want to consider our government democratic.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Any opinions on the following:
When one goes to the polls, you do the signup sheet thing. They hand you a card with a barcode on it. The barcode is not tied to the voter in any way. Only the voter knows their number.
Of course some algorithm would be used to generate the numbers and they would have large gaps. A good algorithm should prevent people bringing their own cards and hiding them in their pants, right? Smart chips could be used if people want to be paranoid (that would get expensive).
You go to a machine, insert the card. You place your votes on a touch screen. The software confirms your votes. Then it prints the results onto the card.
If you look at the card and see a mistake or for whatever reason, you go back to the main desk. They swipe the barcode, which cancels the vote and hand you a new card. If someone starts swiping invalid numbers the front desk is notified.
One can then bring the card home. After the election you can enter the barcode and check to make sure the database matches what is printed on the card.
This last one is important to me, because I feel it adds some accountability. If someone can get enough people to hand over their cards after an election an audit should be possible.
I've been up all night so this probably has holes in it, but what do you think of the overall process?
One could take the barcode thing a little farther and when the voter pamphlets are handed out there is a barcode printed on them that one can bring to the polls to make it easier for them to find the voter's name. One would still be required to sign (this isn't really any security, I assume it is allows some legal protection). If the voter does not have the barcode they would be required to provide some form of identification. I don't flat out like requiring identification, but this provides a way out.
This message is encrypted with Quad ROT-13 to protect the author's copyright under the DMCA.
"Except in the US, where it can make you rich and powerful. Just ask Michael Moore."
I'm sorry, did you really mean cynical and fat? He certainly is NOT rich and powerful. Why else would he have hijacked the Oscars?
He's nervous, beause with electronic voting, a paranoid, warmongering lunatic may be able to fix an election, get himself voted in, and start an aggressive campaign of pre-emptive...oh wait.
Unfortunately, the US government runs its own elections, rather than a truely impartial third party
An important point, though: the Federal government does NOT run any elections, period. Elections are the responsibility of the states. This was done on purpose so that the federal government could not rig elections for itself. Of course, as we've seen in practice, federal intrusion in state business has become so commonplace that federal action frequently affects state elections, from Federal voting rights acts to the 2000 presidential election. Of course, the ends could be said to justify the means for much of this federal interference. But there is a legitimate states' rights/federalism argument to be made against any federal interference in state elections.
It's pretty simple, really.
The threat model that the voting machine manufacturers want to work with is: "Given a particular system, how likely is it that it will get hacked?".
The real threat model is substantially different: "Given a particular system, how likely is it that it will be accused of having been hacked, and how damaging will that accusation be?" Much different scenario. Accusations, and the credibility they carry, are directly rebutted by evidence to the contrary. The simple availability of an irrevocable audit trail prevents challenges -- "they might be able to prove us wrong, so we better not challenge the results of the election."
No evidence, no risk of accusation, no credibility for the election.
None deserved, too.
Disclaimer: I _am_ a security engineer. This isn't a technical problem, it's a sociological one. Counting is easy.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Why is he ignoring the obvious: Yes, but you can tamper with paper, but realistically, how long does it take you to modify even 1000 paper votes?
Now, how long does it take you to modify 1000 electronic votes? Or 1000000?
I think a printout is whats needed. THe touch screen is only there to simplify choices for people so u don't get a mix up like in Florida. Its there to help illterates and others. Its not there to do the actual voting. If u had the touch screen which produced a printout, which the voter checks then puts into the ballot box. Then nothing can has to be stored on the computer. You could make each one stand alone and print onto special paper that changes each time. Of course nothing is perfect but its a start.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Your stupid aren't you? He is a multi-millionaire and has very influential powers. Maybe he's not powerful like your loved Neo, but being able to sway American opinion is just as great.
"I think that any voting system, if it is programmed and used properly, can be very reliable," she added.
/. need to comment on. For good or ill we are the pople who know just how hard it is to ensure that systems are always programmed and used *properly* especially when you users include every regestered voter in the U.S.
/. Even if we think that this is a good thing I think that it is time for some good old fashined letters to the editor.
<rant>
I think that this, like many other issues, is something that we at
The fact that people feel more confident about them says nothing about how tamper-proof or accurate they really are. The fact that they are made by private companies means that they have economic interests behind them. Private companies have a tendency to care who does and does not win elections.
I think that it is incumbent upon us to speak out about this to the wider world beyond
</rant>
The key points that opponents of electronic voting make are that a) there might be flaws in the system either by error or by design, b) that the machines cannot be easily inspected to check their operations, and c) that without a paper trail there is no way to check after the fact whether the votes were correctly counted or not.
The response from a voting machine manufacturer, however, is classic obfuscation:
At this point, the question arises - why are these critics wrong? What are they not understanding about the system? Rather than following up on this point, though, the reporter takes a completely different, and totally irrelevant tack, discussing public confidence in the machines. So what? Lots of people probably think that Microsoft invented the Internet. It doesn't make it true. The only conclusion I can come to is that the journalist did not take the time to understand the issue properly, and just got quotes from "both sides" and that was good enough.
Do experts in other fields (if I may be so bold as to count myself an "expert" in it) get as frustrated with journalists, or is it just a particular problem with science and tech journalism?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I'd like to see someone file a Freedom of Information Act request to see the code. The FOIA applies to the following documents:
I know there are arguments against this, specifically that the code is the intellectual property of a private business, and that it is protected by both US Copyright laws and the Berne Convention, but I'd like to see the courts wrestle with this one just the same. Knowing how our votes are counted is one of the sacred founding principles of democracy, and personally, I think it trumps any other interests in this case.
Unfortunately, this has little to no chance of succeeding while Ashcroft is Attorney General, since he's declared an effective moratorium on FOIA requests while he is in office.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
I don't see why voting has to involve a slip of paper. Why not have a line of buckets, one for each candidate, and you drop a small token into one of the buckets (or more than one, depending on your electoral system). To preserve confidentiality there would need to be a slot through which you drop the token, to stop you reaching in and removing some or looking to see who's had the most votes so far. Then counting votes is just weighing the buckets (and checking for invalid tokens).
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Um, like the old grey lady has any credibility at this point.
Troll? No, legitimate comment on the credibility of a "source" of information.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
For a glimpse into the potential repercussions of the Diebold e-voting machines used in the last federal election look here.
WARNING: This is really unsettling stuff and may cause you to lose (more) faith in the U.S. election system.
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
"your" right, I am the one that's stupid.
Anyone that I have talked to about Moore thinks he is a knucklehead, much less power to sway American opinion.
Womever you wanted to win or thought should win, the recount was unconstitutional in the way it was ordered. It was also unfairly counted because anything that had an "improperly" punched chad was disgarded, which tended be more Bush votes discarded. (Not that I wanted either side to become victorious down to such an infantile issue.)
The real reliability = "Integrity and Honesty of the System" ... unfortunately that will never be 100% - I think computerized voting with printouts (like an ATM receipt) of each vote and then the voter taking that vote and placing it in a ballot box. If a hand recount needs to take place you can do so.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
This horrible system helped my father escape a terrible life in a foreign land. This horrible system helped my father later free my grand parents from a terrible life in a foreign land. If it wasn't for this horrible system, I would not be alive to be writing this post.
P.S.: all across America people vote in a great number of elections on all government levels each year. Unless there is a serious security concern, there is not even a police prescence at the ballots. I know that in many foregin/poor/weaker nations they tell you all sorts of bad things about us. Just remember that it is a politician telling you those things. It's called propaganda.
Seriously, it'd be so easy to cheat with a system like this. Do people in favor of this know how powerful computers are?
I don't mind using scanners to count faster, but the day I have to vote online is the day I move to Canada.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
You must talkt to a bunch of knucklehead pro-war people who have never read his books or seen his movies. He sheds light on some of the dark areas of this country that they would prefer you not see.
He's not the best comedian and his funny skits often are a little retarded, but the spirit of the skit is dead on.
How about we get informed before passing judgement.
We have voted in belgium electronically for years now, never had any problems at all. The source code of their app is even available online. http://www.verkiezingen.fgov.be/Logiciel/Jites/NL/ Cdoku1.htm ;-)
They even have a flash example of the electronic vote, and organise tryout sessions for the elderly people who fear everything that has a screen connected to it
Sorry, didn't want to confuse anybody here. I simply think it's easier to blame a body of humans than a machine.
Plus there's another twist to it: the process of taking action (if you are so inclined). It's a lot more satisfactory to shoot the members of the Supreme Court than to punch a hole into a machine.
To quote the article: "70 percent of voters in the state's November 2002 elections...reported being very confident that their vote was accurately counted" Since when does voter confidence have any correlation with how secure/reliable the system is? The vast majority of the voters consider computers some sort of "magical" technology, and understand very little about how they work, or, more importantly, how they are programmed.
Sometimes I doubt your committment to SparkleMotion!
I'm sorry, did you really mean cynical and fat? He certainly is NOT rich and powerful. Why else would he have hijacked the Oscars?
Cynical? yes. It's really hard not to be considering our own 'voting irregularities'
As to his weight, I'll pass. I'm sure he is well aware that obesity is dangerous.
I have no idea if he is rich, he does however do a very effective job representing the common man.
As to being powerful, you bet he is. His power is the power of the people. Anyone who raises their voice and gets the kind of resonance his films have deserves to be called powerful.
Hijack the Oscars? I think not. Many Oscar winners stated their opposition to the war, and Moore did so eloquently.
I went and heard Moore speak a few weeks before the Oscars. He proudly stated his intentions of making a politically charged speech if awarded an Oscar, and received a standing ovation from a crowd of 6000+.
I believe that the people who really 'hijacked the Oscars' were the Oakland PD which kept the war protesters far away from the Oscars so the media wouldn't see them.
The only way you can possibly make electronic voting machines acceptably secure is to not network them at all. This isn't so much a measure to prevent hacking as it is a measure to control the amount of damage a hacker can do; if only one machine at a time can be hacked, then damage remains localized. Here's my idea for such a system:
The advantages to this system are many:
And one final note, particular to US elections: poll results should be considered classified information until the polls are closed in all fifty states. Timezones being what they are, this exit-poll crap is causing election results in East Cost states to affect West Coast states, however slightly, and that needs to be dealt with. Each state's results must be completely independent of the results of any other state, and measures need to be taken to ensure that.
The Federal Election Commission held hearings, asking people who had been unfairly denied the right to vote to come forward and testify.
The results: nobody testified.
On the OTHER hand, one of the two major parties DID put forth a concerted effort to invalidate the absentee ballots of a great many servicemen and women, on the demonstrably false assumption that the vast majority would vote for the "other party".
Mind you, if the group was just Military **OFFICERS**, it would probably be a good assumption. But overall, it was unfounded.
1996: Chuck Hagel wins "stunning upsets" in both primaries and the general election in Nebraska.
2002: Chuck Hagel gets reelected in a landslide, with 83% of the vote.
A single company programmed, installed and largely operated the machines that counted about 80 percent of those votes.
This company used to be headed by, and is still part-owned by, you guessed it, Chuck Hagel.
Coincidence, yeah right.
Oh, one more thing. Charlie Matulka, who lost the 2002 election, requested a hand count of the vote. His request was denied because Nebraska has a just-passed law that prohibits government-employee election workers from looking at the ballots, even in a recount. The only machines permitted to count votes in Nebraska are those made and programmed by the corporation formerly run by Hagel. Hmm, wonder who pushed that one through!
Matulka's comment:"If you want to win the election, just control the machines."
(most of the above info shamelessly plagiarised from that last link).
Now, this doesn't mean that you can't use electronic voting, just that the whole process needs to be completely open and exposed. The source code needs to be open, the hardware design needs to be open, you need independant and unbiased people to check that the open source code is actually what is running on the open hardware, the whole thing needs an open audit trail in the event that a recount is required etc. The whole process is a helluvalot more complicated than just a machine that counts votes. So people need to be given proof that their votes are not corrupted in any step of that process.
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... told the used truck salesman I needed a V-8, had to carry heavy stuff and tow a trailer once in awhile.
He said, "here's one".
Cool, I go to pop the hood, can't. The hood is welded shut!
What's this? I ask, I can't see the engine?
No, you can't.
How do I know it's a v-8?
Because we sayso.
But I want to look!
You can't.
How do I know you aren't lying?
You can ask my boss.
But you and your boss work for the same company, how do I know he's not lying?
Because he doesn't lie.
How do I know that?
Because we sayso.
Can I get an independent opinion?
Sure.
From who?
The dealer.
The dealer! He works for the same company!
That's it, all we have to tell you, take it or leave it.
grumble, go to the next dealer down the street.
Hi! I'd like to buy a truck! I need a v-8!
Sure! We have one right here.
Go to look, hood welded shut....
#$%^&*!!!!
Computerised voting is such a bad idea on so many levels I am amazed it's even gotten one positive comment. It's the mother of all voting scams, sophisticated fraud and manipulation potential to the nth degree, way past simple ballot box stuffing in the olden days. Way, way, way past. Now combine that with the "two party that is one party in reality" district and debate and "news" rigging, well, there ya go, millions of people who *think* they just voted.
The source code for any software that counts or processes votes should be open source so that everyone who is so inclined can take a look for themselves and evaluate the code.
Releases of this code should be signed by a non-profit in a manner similar to a key-ceremony used at CAs, and the hardware that runs the software should be auditable and designed to only run software that is signed by the aforementioned signer.
Anything less than this leaves a glaring black-whole where any sort of nastiness may occur.
As much as I hate to say it, a "palladium" style trusted system approach is probably needed to make electronic voting trustable. I'm not in favor of having my hardware in lockdown, but I sure as hell would want it on the equipment that chooses who is going to run my country!
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
I'm not going to try to figure out whether the /. consensus is "paper trail is needed" or not, but it does seem like this issue needs some action, not just snappy debate that is then forgotten when the next /. article about the SuperWhizBang graphics card is posted.
So the question is, what are we going to do about it? Who is the relevant advocacy organization? The EFF? Are we just going to talk about it or is this important enough to take some action, and if so then what action?
OK, the parent post sounds kind of hysteric, but it could be (sort of) true.
It's difficult to overstate the importance of having a fully auditable voting process. That's the main advantage of paper ballots, be they punch cards, "check the box," whatever: you can recount them. Someone else can recount them. We can disagree on the interpretations of those recounts, but we can at least observe the "primary source" and make a call one way or another.
Now, electronic voting would certainly have advantages. If people could walk through a "voting app" where they could see all of the choices for each office, and do a confirmation step before "submitting" their vote, that would be awesome, and way more accurate than what we do now. However, think of the system which will be used to achieve this: if it's good, the designing company will want to sell it everywhere. So the application will become one hell of a valuable peice of "intellectual property." Do you think we'll be allowed to see the code for it? No way! So no error checking that way; we just have to trust that every vote counted was processed correctly. That's a lot of trust. I don't suspect that any voting-machine-manufacurer would insert deliberate bias, but the lack of ability to examine the process for correctness is just unacceptable. It's too important to just trust some private company, whose interest isn't necessarily coincident with accuracy.
An open-source voting app would be somewhat better; any independent person could audit the code for correctness, but to verify its performance on an actual dataset would require re-establishing the same exact platform later, and of course maintaining a digital copy of the inputs.
In either of these scenarios, it seems outright necessary that there be a physical record of votes cast using the system that independent, non-computer-expert people could examine. Ideally, the machine would print a small "receipt" for each vote cast which could be collected and, if necessary, recounted and compared against the digital tally.
Yes, Saddam Hussein was killing at least 10,000 a year through execution and starvation. If this is not a war, what is?
If Moore's support of Saddam and his deadly war by opposing effective efforts to quickly stop him is not pro-war, what is?
In the week just before the 40 allies decided to stop him, in fact, he had 90 civilians in Kurdistan executed.
His war is stopped. Moore opposed any effort to stop Saddam's war against Iraq (which has actually been part of a longer-term war against other nations as well, including Israel, Iran, and Kuwait).
You need to look behind the "anti-war" label. For example, with approval of the "anti-war" people in Vietnam, the North Vietnam invaders were able to conquer South Vietnam and invade Cambodia and kill at least 2,000,000 people.... after the U.S. was out of the picture.
The main reason is actually political, not technical. Imagine a world where we have really foolproof and very convenient electronic voting (like everybody just voting from home over the Internet, provided that a good and secure protocol is invented for it). Elections would be hundreds of times cheaper because of lesser staff and organization costs. As a result it would become possible to have people vote for many more issues than just who is going to be a president (think Switzerland where almost everything is decided by popular vote). We would never have DMCA or any of the other strange laws pushed through by special interest groups and hurting the general public. Congress would suddenly lose 90% of its importance, becoming just a law-drafting institution without too much decision power.
Obviously this is something that today's rich and powerful would never want to happen, and they would fight long and hard before giving any of this power up.
When men used to be men
Well, *you* were not fooled by the self-serving obfuscation of the industry flack, were you? If anything, the quote made the flack look even more ridiculous by totally dismissing a valid concern.
I vote with bits and receive a unique, random number tied to my vote and encypted with a passphrase of my choosing. With this and an application or kiosk I can later "check" the vote in my hand. Later I can go online and review my vote to see if it was recorded acuratly. I can also count for myself everyone elses vote if I care to. If enough of us say hey I voted for X not Y the election is nullified. The only problem I see is sore loosers lying about their vote to throw the election. In this case if you want to register a problem you would need to reveal your vote via your pass phrase.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
In January, 2002 the State Elections Board approved two touch screen voting systems, the ES&S Votronic
DRE and the GBS Accu-Touch EBS 100 DRE.
This spring I raised the system integrity issues with the Board, and persuaded them to revoke the certifications.
It helped that after garnering over 10% in the last race for Governor, the Wisconsin Libertarian Party was able to place a representative on the Board, the only 3d Party State Elections Official in the US.
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
"Others note the hypocrisy of a radical socialist who claims to speak for the common man yet lives in a $1.9 million New York apartment and sends his daughter to a posh private school." -- http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/3/3
There are many upon many examples, this is only one of them.
As for the media not being able to record the protestors: What stopped them from walking down the block to the perimeter to do a broadcast
Yeah, I thought so.
".... and Moore did so eloquently."
You must have watched a different Oscar ceremony than I did. He most definitely was not eloquent, he was an loudmouth that irritated people instead of inspiring them.
Are people actually queuing to vote in the picture that goes with that article? Does that happen in the states?
Over here in the UK I've never seen a queue at a polling station in my life!
JohnSend fake stories to your friends with the Not True Times, just like Jayson Blair!
All I Want For Christmas Is My Constitutional Rights
"I think the concerns being raised are 100 percent valid," Mr. Terwilliger said. "However, they're being raised by people who have little idea about what actually goes on."
Somehow I just don't trust a man named 'Terwilliger' to *not* rig an election. He'd probably have our dead pets voting him in as mayor...
do not read this line twice.
Rich? You decide:0 /212203.shtml
"Others note the hypocrisy of a radical socialist who claims to speak for the common man yet lives in a $1.9 million New York apartment and sends his daughter to a posh private school." -- http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/3/3
I've seen this quoted from a few very biased fascist leaning sources such as the one you mention with no source listed. Until I see some more impressive information, I will reserve my judgement.
There are many upon many examples, this is only one of them.
Show me.
As for the media not being able to record the protestors: What stopped them from walking down the block to the perimeter to do a broadcast
I don't know if you noticed, but the media is really lazy.
Isn't that the same percentage of people who "voted" for Saddam Hussein in the last Iraq "election". I wonder if the "feedback" was tallied on a Diebold machine.
I work in market research and I have never, ever seen 99% of people polled agree on anything. This 99% of the vote statement should give anyone considering e-lections the willies.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
I came up with this solution in a discussion with some friends after the 2000 election fiasco:
Voting can be simple - touch screen, menu driven, programmable interface, whatever makes it simple. When you've done all your voting - your vote prints out as a sheet of paper (maybe a computer-card sized stiff cardboard.)
Printed on a laser printer - in text for reading, and bar-code for processing; say, 1 card for each election - federal (president senate and congress), state, county, etc. The card can be checksummed and the validation included in the bar code so that it is difficult to counterfeit ballots to stuff the box.
This gives you a way to hand-count the ballots or run through an electronic counter. If you ar less concerned over secret ballots, you could use the validation code to determine and delete a person's vote when that vote is challenged.
Each voter could read exactly what the ballot said (the name and position voted for) and reprint the ballot if they make an error. The computer could record "cancelled" ballots - even say "please insert the ballot into the cancel slot to print a new one", and not allow a new one once another person entered the booth to start voting. (I.e. you can't take the wad of ballots at the end of the day and revote the ones you don't like. And the serial code/ time stamp etc. would make that easy to track.)
There is always a paper trail of physical ballots that could be hard to alter, and a validation code, similar to a digital signature, that would make the level of effort needed to forge ballots much more complex than normal.
I do not trust a purely electronic voting system; too easy to rig.
Here in Canada they still use the hand-marked ballots and they're counted by hand and the results are tallied within a few hours - but we rarely have elections more complicated that 1 member of parliament or a mayor, aldermaen, and a school board. Ballots are short and simple.
Hmm... I have to disagree here. Many people I talk to would be on the inspired list, so I would say he both inspired and irritated people.
Hopefully he irritated people enough to start questioning the Bush regime.
The key issue I raised in my comment remains. Why leave the key point up in the air? Why blather on about an irrelevancy (what the manufacturers say the public thinks about the new systems)? If questions don't get on-topic answers, ask more specific ones.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."
-- Stalin (Former leader of the USSR)
So the voting machine manufacturers are now the ones who really run the country.
Great.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Guess that explains how a tool like Chirac got elected. Seriously, who the hell brags that their country's voting system isn't as meticulous as the US's?
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
After discussing with Dr. Dill for a presentation, the meaning of voter verifiable is very specific. It means that the voter can look at their ballot, and verify that their vote reflects their intention before they hand it in. Nobody I know can inspect the electrical charges to determine whether their vote was recorded correctly or not (or even at all!).
I happen to live in Johnson County, Kansas, one of the sites mentioned. There's two things to keep in mind there. 1. Its an off year so turnout is usually very low. 2. The feedback card is optional, so unless you have something specific to say, you're not likely to fill it out. 3. Its difficult to evaluate the system as a whole until the vote is canvassed. Even fraud can be user friendly.
The independent testers aren't exactly trustworthy either. There's only 3 nationwide. VoteHere machines were verified from these ITAs (VoteHere is currently facing a wrongful termination suit for firing a QA Engineer who put too many bugs on the 'Critical' list.)
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Why hasn't the open source community created an open source voting platform?
Really. Why haven't we done this? Consider:
* Free operating system (beer and speech)
* Free voting application (beer and speech)
Why wouldn't the government use this for voting? If it was peer reviewed by academia (including members of the academies) and business, then American geeks could at least be sure that the "black box" of the voting system, in fact, wasn't.
Sure -- there are still other problems with electronic voting. However, it would reduce the number of conspiracy theories, and would be one more killer app from open source.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
(PS: Snicker, snort.)
-kgj
The old adage "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" isn't always true, but it seems to work perfectly in this situation.
How relevant is speed in counting ? One day or one week is irrilevant, given that the old governemt/old president remains in charge until the count is done. There is no power/control void.
How relevant is counting cost ? Nearly zero. One can also reduce cost to zero by drafting people for voting-duty and pay them a symbolic token of presence. If one doesn't like that, maybe he/she could try some other system than democracy, you'll be surprised how good is once you don't have it anymore.
How relevant is potential for fraud ? Enormous, obviously. A machine can be hacked/modified in a thousand different ways to produce the desidered results.
It doesn't require a brain surgeon to draw a cross on a voting symbol on a piece of paper with a permanent marker. It requires a couple of corrupted individuals to change the result of millions of votes collected by computers, remember the credit card database theft that endangered millions of credit card owners ? Same thing.
MY good friend Jason Kitcat worked on a e-election project for his thesis and did a hell of a lot of research on this. I was stunned after talking to him recently that he too has become diillusioned with e-voting as it stands now. His main concerns were the ease with which ballots could be tampered with, especially where there is the political will... See here for more info: free-proect.org.
Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.
Sheep isn't a verb.
And when 50,000 largely black, largely Democrat voters are denied their legal right to vote because they were falsely accused of being felons by a computerized list that was inaccurate to begin with and encouraged to be more so by the Florida government, then saying an election was stolen isn't flamebait.
Well, it is, but who said the truth can't be flamebait?
The enemies of Democracy are
The "horrible system" mantra in your post is your contribution to this discussion, not the parent post's, yet you repeat it accusatorily as though to ascribe it to the parent. This tactic bears similarities to propaganda, not reasonable discussion.
The values of this country which you claim to hold so dear might just disappear if reasonable critiques of the politicial situation are met with disbelief and calls for abject adulation.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
That may, indeed, be a danger...perhaps.
But the initial result would be a more accurate estimate. Perhaps we need a dual census. The raw counts, which are used for politically biasing things, like redistricting, and adjusted counts, which are intended to be the best estimate of who actually lives there. This way there would be no "power bonus" for corrupting the estimates (which I agree to be easy... or at least it would be easy to create the appearance of corruption).
Unfortunately, the argument for the statistical estimate was that it would enable cost cutting. Which would undercut both the raw cuts *and* the statistical adjustment process. (Before doing a statistical adjustment, you want to get the best evidence you can get, as the adjustment process ALWAYS introduces new noise and uncertainty, even as it removes bias.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Wait. So you mean that because America votes for American Idol electronically, the contest must be rigged? No way! ha ha.
I live in Louisiana where electronic voting machines are used. You push your votes and push a button and it chimes and that's it. It's really creepy. There's a joke going around about LA lending some of these machines to Florida, but Florida having to return them because they kept electing Edwin Edwards.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
And as a system administrator, it was an unhappy joke. I love the good things that technology can do, but I am wary of making things overcomplicated and awkward simply for the want of technology.
The first thing is that paper ballot voting is relatively simple, unless you're from Dade county Florida. I stood in one line to sign the roll and get my ballot, and I stood in another to wait for a polling booth.
With the new-fangled voting machines, the number of lines I had to stand in was doubled. I stood in one line to sign the roll, and get a chit. Stood in another line to hand the chit to a poll worker behind one of the machines. The pollworker then took my chit and enters the number from it into one of the polling computers, and then handed me a receipt. Then I stood in the last line to wait for a polling machine to vote.
One I reached the polling computer, I was suprised to find neither a touch screen, nor a display with buttons on it like an ATM. There was no joystick or mouse. Instead, this machine had a device called a "scrolling wheel." To vote I had to operate this device which revolved like a analog telephone dial. The liquid crystal screen was covered with the finger smudges of frustrated voters trying to do the natural thing which was to press a button. However, with this device I had to spin the wheel around to select my choice, and then press a rather large red button to choose it. This was quite counter intuitive despite the fact I was raised around analog telephones. The sensitivity of the wheel was set quite high, and it was easy to miss my choice on the screen. In order to go back to my choice I had to spin the wheel the other way, often passing my choice from the other direction.
Another thing I didn't like about this system was that a computer only could manage a few machines so instead of walking over to any empty polling booth I had to wait to vote only a booth attached to the box my number had been entered. After mucking about with this I decided to talk to a couple of the poll workers about this new system.
The first thing I noticed is that the poll worker machines were connected to their polling booths with a simple serial cable. Some of these cables were taped to the floor and others were suspended from the ceiling with twist ties. I examined one of the cables and the poll worker scolded me because apparently the machines were attached in a daisy chain configuration and if one of the machines was unplugged then all of them would stop working. Then a technician would have to be paged to come to the polling place to reset the equipment and the votes would be thrown out as unreliable!
Viva Paper Ballots!
It was also illegal under Florida law to fail to honor the "intent of the voter", which is conveniently overlooked by most people taking your position. The Florida supreme court was charged with resolving this point of State Consitutional law and came down one way, the US Supreme Court came down another.
In my irrelevant opinion, Gore screwed up royally by asking for selective recounts which violated (or even appeared to violate) equal protection.
I'm not favoring either of the potential outcomes, just pointing out that FL law, like the election, came down to a choice between undesirables...
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
In fact, when the votes were counted after the fact, Gore lost even this unnecessary count he asked the Supreme Court for.
No, that's what CNN and other media sources concluded by deciding how the recount would have occured. Under Gore's proposed recount scheme, he lost. Under the full recount scheme ordered by the Florida Supreme Court -- you know, counting all the votes, like we're a Democracy or something -- he won. That's what the data shows. Gore won. But CNN said the opposite. Huh.
The enemies of Democracy are
"Wait. So you mean that because America votes for American Idol electronically, the contest must be rigged?"
If American Idol were subject to rigging by hackers as some fear happens with electronic voting, Linus Torvalds would win every time.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
70 percent of voters in the state's November 2002 elections, which were conducted on Diebold machines, reported being very confident that their vote was accurately counted.
Leaving aside for a moment the blindingly obvious fact that public opinion about whether a thing is true has no bearing on whether or not the thing actually is true, I have to ask...
Was this poll conducted on the same machines?
I dissagree, the article was beautifully constructed to alarm the reader:
It gave you the gist of the problem, no paper trail for audit, and told you that you should be alarmed because your elected officials, backed by vendors "experts", vaugly dissmiss the problem without proof and that the public is ready to buy into it. References were given that you should follow as a responsible voter. If there was any flaw it was in not persuing the reasons for dissmisal. Calling your opponents ignorant dreamers is not very convincing.
Another poster has done a nice job of explaining one large problem with a paperless voting system.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The blacks denied voting were Haitians and Cubans, and they were largely Republican votes.
Sure. When the Governor asked the private company paid millions to handle the database to be -less- accurate in determining whether someone was on the list, it was to disenfranchise largely Republican Haitan and Cuban votes.
That's an interesting conspiracy theory. You're suggesting they -didn't- want Bush to win? Why would Jeb do that? You're suggesting that Pres. Bush's campaign manager, who coincidentaly was in charge of the Florida election, was actually working against her boss? That's just strange.
The enemies of Democracy are
If you want to some solid examples of why not having a paper trail can lead to dramatic increases in vote fraud and higher rate of discarded ballots then you should read: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy Some may claim that the book is controversial but the author backs his claims with solid evidence and if you wish to do the footwork you can verify the facts for yourself.
The list was determined in this manner:
This is taken from a story by Greg Palast did for Harper's Magazine and can be read here. Even more details can be had in this article.http://www.rootstrikers.org/
"Untrusted" should have been "entrusted."
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
Whenever I read something like this I'm reminded of the "election" right after the revolution in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Everybody voted by computer, except that all the computers were all tied in to Mike Holmes/Adam Selene, who did the final count. It didn't occur to the auditors that if you feed honest figures in to a computer, the results could still be nonsense because the computer itself might be dishonest. It might even have a sense of humour...
...laura
(a) Each agency shall make available...
What does agency mean here? My assumption is it refers only to parts of government - possibly specifically only the federal government - and is not applicable to private corporations.
Who owns the private corporations that make these voting machines?
A friend of mine sent me a link to a very scary article. (I have no more verified the information in this article than I have that of the NYTimes.)
I find the idea that those running for public offices have or have had even partial ownership of the corporations producing these voting machines to be pretty frightening. There are many close elections in various states during every round of elections. All it would take to hijack a number of elections is code sending every 10th vote cast for your candidate to go to the candidate of the opposing party. With no paper trail, or public means of verification (and by public I don't mean the "independent" paid consultants this corporations hires to tell you it's safe) how do you know where your vote is going?
Why aren't these voting machines open source?
As long as you're willing to say the same for 50,000 immigrant (legal or otherwise) non-citizen voters, also largely Democrat, who cannot vote, but sometimes do vote, then we're cool.
(Clarification: Even if I take your 50,000 figure at face value, I don't think the inaccuracies in the list were deliberately engineered. Likewise, neither do I think the problem of aliens voting is deliberately engineered on any widespread scale. I consider both of these to be "error", not "corruption".)
Both parties practice various forms of swinging elections. Some are legal ("gerrymandering"). Others (deliberately disenfranchising legal voters, or designing systems that can be circumvented to allow illegal voters to cast votes) are not.
The goal of any electoral process is to prevent the latter, or at least to ensure that the "noise" introduced by corrupt officials is swamped by the "signal" of the legitimate votes.
In the case of Floriduh, the signal was so close to 50/50 that it was lost in the noise of both manual counting error, mechanical vote-recording error, human voter error in not verifying that their vote was correctly punched and/or in not following instructions on the ballot, legal "error" in that efforts to recount changed the result through mechanical ballot mishandling and the fact that human beings had to rule on whether hanging chads ought to be counted as votes or not, and corruption. Given the large sources of error in any vote, even in Floriduh, error introduced by means of corruption was probably the smallest error factor of the bunch.
Dr. Rebecca Mercuri wrote her thesis on mapping Common Criteria (CC) requirements to electronic voting technology. She makes some good points: new security functional requirements must be developed before this technology could be evaluated using the CC; the CC allows for this through the use of extended requirements.
However, I don't agree with her statements regarding the CC and what she calls counter-indications. She states that the CC should provide an explicit mechanism that prevents the inclusion of conflicting requirements, along the lines of forcing authors to include requirement dependencies or rationale for their absence. This is a bit ridiculous in my mind, since the mechanism is the evaluator. It's the security target evaluator's job to confirm that the security requirements are mutually supportive. If they conflict, the security target won't pass the evaluation (and therefore, neither will the product). There's absolutely no need for extra "if you include this, don't include that" spaghetti.
No, Gore lost even that. He only wins statewide if you count ballots without Gore votes on them:
You mean votes that weren't originally counted as having a Gore vote on them. The analysis of the ballots indicate that many of them were actually Gore votes. And the Florida court ruled that all legal votes, including undervotes, should be included in the recount. Under this "every vote counts" system, Gore won.
The enemies of Democracy are
The proof of how deadly dangerous these fully electronic voting systems are in the pudding. Check this story from Scoop, about Diebold electronic chicanery in the Georgia elections.
We need to Fight to prevent any voting system that does not generate physical evidence. And we need to Fight to ensure that any interested voter has the ability to assist with or audit the counting and recounts.
That's if we want to live in a democracy. And the only reason we've lost what we have is so many people are too trusting and too lazy to act.
Here's the top of their site. Here's their table of contents for the 2000 election. Here's their report on voting irregularities.
This might be the best report because it was written shortly after the election when the outrage was still fresh. Their later reports try to use language as neutral as possible. This report is still prominent on their site so I don't think they've renounced any of it. Here's a quote:
In total, over 100 witnesses testified under oath before the Commission, including approximately 65 scheduled witnesses who were selected for the two hearings due to their knowledge of and/or experience with the issues under investigation. The Commission heard testimony from top elected and appointed state officials, including the Governor, the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, the Director of the Florida Division of Elections and other Florida state and county officials. A representative of Database Technologies, Inc. [Choicepoint], a firm involved in the controversial, state-sponsored removal of felons from the voter registration rolls also testified.
We also heard the sworn testimony of registered voters and experts on election reform issues, election laws and procedures and voting rights. Also, the Chair and Executive Director of the Select Task Force on Election Reforms established by Governor Jeb Bush testified before the Commission. Testimony was also received from the supervisors of elections for several counties, county commission officials, law enforcement personnel, and a states attorney. In addition to the scheduled witnesses, the Commission extended an opportunity for concerned persons, including Members of Congress and members of the Florida State Legislature, to submit testimony under oath that was germane to the issues under investigation. Significantly, the Commission subpoenaed scores of relevant documents to assist with this investigation.
The evidence points to an array of problems, including those in the following categories:
1. If they weren't U.S. citizens, how could they have been eligible in the first place?
2. Half of the people who were removed from the rolls were caucasian, take whatever you like from that.
3. Many of the people had no criminal records.
4. Take a look. Apparently it was more important to get the felons off the rolls than to allow the innocent to exercise their franchise. Seems kinda backwards in the land of "guilty until proven innocent."
Along with all the military votes thrown out by LePore and the rest of the crooked Democrats, it's just more AlGore dishonesty.
No more crooked than letting party workers to prepare absentee ballots before they go out, and error check them when they come back in. Everyone in that election was dirty, and insisting the rules be followed to the letter is better than tweaking ballots once they've come back in.
This never would have been an issue if AlGore hadn't pissed on the Greens over the Florida Everglades, or even if he had won his home states of Tennessee or Arkansas.
Not sure what you mean regarding the first case. The main issue for the Greens was the attempt to get 5% of the national vote in order to qualify for federal election money.
And overall, no matter who you believe should have won, you miss the point of the article. The election system is already creaky, and adding more bells and whistles to it is only going to make it even harder work towards making it honest.
<ad hominem attack gleefully snipped>
Searching for Truth, Justice, and the Guy Who Boosted My Wallet a Few Weeks Back....
As long as you're willing to say the same for 50,000 immigrant (legal or otherwise) non-citizen voters, also largely Democrat, who cannot vote, but sometimes do vote, then we're cool.
:)
I haven't heard of this, how it happens, and on what scale. Feel free to provide links, since despite what some might think, I'll shit on anyone who tries to steal an election. You may note that the ones that actually steal an election, and a Presidential one at that, get the Three Alarm Chili version.
(Clarification: Even if I take your 50,000 figure at face value, I don't think the inaccuracies in the list were deliberately engineered. Likewise, neither do I think the problem of aliens voting is deliberately engineered on any widespread scale. I consider both of these to be "error", not "corruption".)
"Never blame on malice what can be blamed on stupidity" are wise words. But let's see... The government of Florida switches from a few-thousand-dollar contract to a million dollar contract with DBT Online to handle the list. Which included verifying the accuracy of the list. Which was clearly never done. Incompetence? Plausible. But when they are then told to -reduce- the accuracy of the name matching between their database and the Florida voter database (but still 100% on matching race!), I start to suspect a little more than incompetence.
The enemies of Democracy are
Vote Quimby!
*stuffs a $20 in your pocket*
*whispers*
Give me your verified ballot receipt and there's another for you.
There is a long history in the US of buying votes outright. This would just make it accountable.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Btw, in the previous election, it had been the GOP who got screwed by the system. The problem was that it is easy to vote for the top person correctly, but the votes after that were frequently mispunched because the ballot used both sides with the punches in the middle:
Bush O
O Buchanan
Gore O
It's easier to read here (since the name is the same size as the bubble and I can't get the spacing to come out the way I want it: the Os should be lined up with each other and farther from the names), but in the actual ballots it was hard to tell that Gore was the third mark rather than the second. The previous election (which had similar problems, but since the vote wasn't close, so no one cared) had Clinton where Bush was and Dole where Gore was. I'm not sure who the third party candidate that benefited was.
Regardless, the way to fix this is to count the votes as you go as NC apparently does (description posted above this). I think they are missing a step in that you should also check with the voter to see if the electronic vote is correct (i.e. if they don't hit submit, the vote is not added to the total, and they have a chance to redo their ballot). Apparently in NC, they only check to make sure that the vote is well formed (no overvotes), not that it is representative of how that person wishes to vote.
"No less so since the new witch trials began"
"They have not begin, sorry. There are not even any plans to begin them."
Exactly! There aren't any plans to have any trials at all, they're just locking people up.
How about a system using WORM chips. For each voter they pop a new WORM chip into the system, flash their name, voter info, and whatever choices they make onto the chip. Badabing badaboom, you've got a record. Plus they could make a nice little board im sure that they could pop hundreds of those things onto at a time and read them all and get the results quickly. Sounds good to me...
You're nothing; like me.
Yes, and he is right to be nervous. We should all be nervous. Case in point. 1996 and 2002 midterm elections. Chuck Hagel, who just so happens to own a company that produces the voting machine used in Nebraska wins a stunning upset by defeating an incumbant Govenor. Winning virtually every demographic even those that have never voted repblican... ever. Be afraid... be very afraid.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
"An undervote is an attempt to turn a ballot without a vote into a vote."
This is a stipulative definition that is inconsistent with Florida law.
The Florida Supreme Court faced a choice between two conflicting points of State Consitutional law (certification deadlines vs recognizing intent of the voter) and decided it one way. The US Supreme Court decided it differently based on questions of equal protection. Given the relative composition of the two courts, it is easy to argue that both decisions were, sadly, partisan.
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
They didn't even need the armed guards there, they system of voting they used actually had their equivelant of ssn on their ballots (each person is assigned their own ballow), plus they mark the box using fingerprints so it can be checked to make sure the person actually voted they way it was on the vote card
That's really funny. "trendy ways to fudge numbers" Lol. So now everybody who actually wants the right answer uses the sampled numbers.
And it's not changing the number of citizens in a voting district, and certainly not the number of voters who show up on election day. It's changing the number of congressmen coming from particular states. The republicans looked at the raw count, and at the right answer, and decided they liked the wrong answer better.
but if I recall from my history class, their has been at least 1 instance of presidents who won while recieving less of the popular vote (ironically, Florida was controversal then too - look up the 1876 election and you'll see) - its actually easy to do in theory, win the big states (population wise) in a close race, and get blown out in the smaller populated states
That almost sounds like a good idea actually. It would prevent a lot of dead people from voting for one thing, but that would of course throw the whole secret ballot concept out the window.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
The NYT is engaging in argumentum ad verecundiam, "argument from authority".
A paper trail won't stop fraud. In fact, it offers any number of ballot-destruction exploits. Open software and certified, well-tested systems will stop fraud.
Forcing a paper trail will encourage laxity in the software and system design, and more importantly will add a crushing expense that could be used instead to further test and harden the system.
Fixing elections with touchscreen voting isn't just a conspiracy theory. It happened in 2002 in Nebraska and Georgia. Read more.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
There is a good collection of links to the story about Hagel, and many other stories about the new electronic voting machines, at Seeing the Forest.
I have a new method of determining the "will of the people" at any given time. It works by averaging the thoughts of the entire US population and can miraculously filter out Mexican and Canadian thoughts. The result is perfect, real time democracy. I have determined that I shall be king in order to implement your will. No, I'm not going to tell you how it's done you silly ludite, just do what I say and trust me. This is so much better than that old way of sending electronic noise to vulnerable central computers.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Here's some evidence for ya:
www.gregpalast.com
-S
"I think the concerns being raised are 100 percent valid. However, they're being raised by people who have little idea about what actually goes on."
Mr. Radke of Diebold (on voter confidence):added that voters have more, not less, confidence in electronic machines. He pointed to a study conducted in February at the University of Georgia that found that 70 percent of voters in the state's November 2002 elections, which were conducted on Diebold machines, reported being very confident that their vote was accurately counted. When this question was asked in September 2001, before electronic voting was in place in the state, only 56 percent of Georgia voters reported being very confident.
The first essentially dismisses the opinions of computer scientist because they don't have enough info. The second uses the opinions of the general public to support validity of the machines.
You can't have it both ways! Certainly the general public isn't more informed about this process than a Stanford computer science professor. Maybe they feel confident that they touched the write box on the screen, but that's not really the issue here is it?
Yes, right, because the story about President George Bush not having seen a supermarket scanner before is exactly as relevant as police roadblocks on voting day.
???
If they could ever come up with a safe, verifiable, yet anonymous method of voting, I'd be willing to bet that voter numbers would increase immediately...I can tell you they would by ONE more for sure.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I'm complaining about it now.
And fuck you, I'm doing more than merely complaining, I'm active in local politics (both conventional and geurilla). So you can save your smarmy "if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem" attitude and shove it sideways.
Hammer of Truth
'cos if you have, e-voting fraud or even the results from the 2000 Presidential Election won't bother you so much... When IBM refuses to get involved in the vote tabulation business because of its perceived "shady" nature, that is sure to raise your eyebrows. And after reading this book, you'll never think the same way about the League of Women Voters again. They sure are making up for being excluded from representative democracy until this last century, big time.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
i've looked over this entire forum and not one person suggested the use of lottery technology.
you know - thats the slip of paper about the size of a dollar bill and filled in with dark ink or pencil mark. everybody knows how to fill out those lottery slips. even the old ladies with bad eyesight manage to fill out $10 or $20 worth of these things a week.
when the lottery slip is run through the reader, a slip of paper is printed out giving the voter a complete run down of who he or she voted for, mirrored in machine readable form. the voter can even keep the slip they originally filled out as a private permanent record of who he or she voted for. the machinery for this is perfected, reliable, and many states already have business relationships with the companies that manufature the gear.
plus there are all kinds of tools that can make voting more fun. at the voter's option, the voting machine can be asked to generate a random list of candidates. and voters can be randomly selected to win a grand prize. imagine how that would improve voter turnout.
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
the number one thing about voting in booths... etc.... is you have to walk up and actualy look someone in the face.... present ID to proove your who you are... and you must do so with another human being.
you can tell me a lot of things... retinal scans, and voice recognition.... but nothing is gonna beat a face to face confirmation.
sorry guys... but im not with it yet
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
I want my electronic voting system to be released under the GPL and get an md5sum of both the client and server binaries, which are posted publicly on the internet, as my reciept. Personally I think I should be able to vote from any computer connected to the internet at anytime I choose for all relevant (federal/state/local) items I would normally be asked to vote on. Voting is something that should not be once or twice a year but an ongoing thing. As society finds new obstacles it needs feedback from the public to make the right decisions.
But right now I'm more worried that people don't really care whether they make a right decision or not in our current economic/political climate, as long as they make the money.
Objectivist.
Hammer of Truth
joe_6pak: who r u voting 4?
L33T_1: only l00zers vote
L33T_1: got the results a month early off Kazaa
joe_6pak: who 1?
L33T_1: R2D2
If Al Sharpton was the point man, I think we can pretty safely say the claims were completely fabricated.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Everything is a verb, but you might have a point. Both sides have their suckiness though, to be fair.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
Paul Terwilliger, director of product development at Sequoia Voting Systems
A brother, perhaps, of one Robert Underdunk Terwilliger, a man known to have rigged at least one election, as well as having been convicted of attempteed murder!!!
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
Well, you do have to be registered to vote...so, there would be verification that you DID cast your vote....that would keep your from voting > 1, but, there needs to also be a way to make sure they cannot assoc. what candidate you voted for with your ID. Maybe if there was an encrypted key structure, that would not allow them to see your vote, but, would allow you to log in and verify it...??
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
In the case of paper ballots, it seems like error-checking should be used more (and earlier) than it presently is.
...)
1) Ballots should be designed such that they are human readable as well as machine readable (scantron-style is OK; require filling in the blank as well as choosing the right circle, and make the circles large and well separated
2) give half of the ballots to Consolidated American Votecounters, half to TallyMaster Inc, in round-number batches. Make them swap when they're done with each batch. Spot check various batches for agreement.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
We've done this already in Iceland back in 2001 if I remember correctly. I must point out that we have a sophisticated identification number system (is. Kennitala) and voters used smartcards, with their kennitala to vote. I was a part of the electoral commision for the elections (Reykjavík county elections for the transfer of the capital airport) and to my surprise the elderly, who I thought would have problems with using a computer actually found it better to use. The software had numerous accessibility options, such as enlarging the typeface.
The only networked part of the system was the voter registry, votes were counted at each polling station, verified by the regional electoral commision and then driven to City Hall and added up.
The only sad part about electronic elections is the lack of your typical election night suspension, the polling stations closed at 22:00 and the results were announced at 22:45.
The cost of the elections was about $450.000, higher than usual.
Here in Iceland we have a very sophisticated telecommunications system, 100% literacy, very high computer ownership and most households are connected to the internet with about half of them having broadband connections.
For more information: Statistics Iceland, a short summary of the Icelandic electoral process and Public strategies for the information society in Iceland (a bit dated).
The elections were a trial that was found to have been very successful, the next elections for local government will most likely be electronic (2006).
Neither Windows CE nor the previous OS were imposed by the government. Those were choices made by the bidding companies, based upon the requirements. There were other choices, but CE was considered a good choice since the source code was available to the developers (oh no!) and it could handle the graphic needs with less coding.
I also think your take on Unicamp and USP is too harsh. There are world-class experts in any one of those two and in many more places in Brazil.
The post you are commenting also made another mistake: the TSE does not design the machine, they just write the hardware and software specification.
Nevertheless, the real problem is really the lack of an independent audit. I belive the general public software illiteracy allowed the Court to get away with it. But it is changing, as more Representatives are listening to technical concerns.
And they'd also be right.
Neither side had clean hands. If you jump to the conclusion that one side is wrong, that doesn't automatically make the other side right.
But I have received more indications of Republican shenanigans than of Democratic...that makes sense, in Florida the Republicans were in power. It doesn't make them better or worse, it just gives them more opportunities.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The Wall Street Journal of December 1st, 2000 page one states:
"`Madame Butterfly' Theresa Le Pore wasn't always an embattled Palm Beach ballots chief. In the 1980s she moonlighted as a flight attendant on private planes owned by Saudi weapons dealer Adnan Khashoggi, a middleman in Reagan administration arms sales to Iran."
I'm sure that's just a coincidence, though. Read more here.
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
Concerns about the need for verifiable physical artifacts of votes are VERY WELL founded. Do are concerns that machines should be OPEN and verifiable.
Just for reference, let me point out that the paper ballot never stopped ballot stuffers. The weakest link in a security chain are the people themselves.
There is definitely a pontential for reliable, secure elections using electronic based voting machines. But the process MUST be open.
Points of order:
1) Votes must be recorded simulataneously to a secure/indelible medium. In the modern age I would suggest an array of CD drives. Each drive would record identical images. The votes themselves would be digitally signed using the location, time, machineID, as a hash.
The CDs themselves would note when they were inserted and removed and by whom (using smart Cards and fingerprints as accessors). The machines would report to a centralized database regarding all details of insertion and removal of voting CDs as well as how many voters cast their ballots on those CDs.
Vote counting would not utilize the central database. Instead, a disc from each voting set would be place in "cakebox" style stacks. The vote counter would than read the CDs, count the votes and verify the authenticity of previously reported statistics.
Lost CDs would IMMEDIATELY trigger investigations. As each CD has one or more physical signed copies, the votes should be recoverable. If the copies dissapear than those who voted in that precinct can revote.
2) After voting, the voter should be granted a small printed physical card bearing their name and when they voted along with codes for record verification. If a voter is uncertain about whether their vote WAS counted, they can check a election statistics online.
3) Machines must bear 100% Open Source digitally signed and authenticated. Voting source should be published an ENTIRE YEAR BEFORE an election. To allow for independent inspection and verification. Such source must be certified by contracted authorities to be accurate.
4) The machines themselves must accept TAMPER-PROOF modules that can INDEPENDENTLY examine the machines and authenticate the signed source.
Primary amongst our concerns should be election laws concerning PEOPLE.
1) Anyone knowingly tampering with election results should be subject to SERIOUS imprisonment. Tampering with the democratic process is worse than ANY crime murder or otherwise. Conspiracy to tamper with elections should elicit the same sentence.
2) Access to the vote should be vigorously enforced. Anyone who knowingly deprives someone of their right to vote should be sent to prison. This especially concerns bueraucrats who deprive vast numbers of voters through either malice or stupidity. Again conspiracy still applies.
3) Voting laws must stress that the speed of an election does NOT outweigh the accuracy of an election. If a re-vote is necessary, it should happen.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Aha,
This is the BIGGEST problem. It's NOT the Supreme Court's job to interpret Florida state law.
They can evaluate it as constitutional or unconstitutional. But like any appeals court, they don't deal with issues of "fact" only consistency of legal precedent.
By precedent the Supremes should NEVER have accepted the case, especially after a Federal District court dissmissed it as groundless.
There were no grounds for the "irreparable harm" argument for a stay of counting ballots. That would imply that continuing voting would take something from Bush that was his by legal right. The outcome of a recount was indeterminate and could just as likely certified Bush the winner.
There was no grounds for the "Equal Protection" argument was absoluetly farsicle. Bush had just as much right to ask for a recount Gore. The votes themselves are anonymous so their can be NO discrimination that one undervoted ballot can be treated differently than another based upon WHO CAST IT (ballots don't have rights, voters do).
The most weasly thing is that the Supreme Court never actually issued a verdict that could be used as case law. They basically published their findings informally and allowed the stay against counting to stand. They didn't have the guts to stand behind their verdict in an official way. That tells us all that they too knew that it was BS and baseless in law and precedent.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Open Source or Free Software is not enough to garantee fair/honest election.
I have a quote from Richard Stallman on that topic:
Don't let the computer/expert control the election. Information for Belgium in french: http://www.poureva.be/
Voting is the process of taking an active part in determining the course of the larger constituent group to which you belong. It is at its core a very social activity. Members of a democracy ought to, for both their own good and the good of the body politic, get out at least once a year to see what the hell they are voting on, and actually walk through it, engage with it, and decide whether or not to vote it into oblivion, even. You can't judge these things accurately from an armchair, indoors. e-voting, despite it's siren call of convenience, actually works, in my view, against civic participation, by both further removing people from the society to which they belong, and by casting FUNDAMENTAL DOUBT on the outcome of ANY election (paper trails needed, etc.).
I think that, long before we implement e-voting in the United States, we should consider either a voting holiday/weekend, or action to form smaller districts.
First, there is no argument I can think of for maintaining the current 12-hour polling period. We are no longer a nation captained by agrarian landowners, who can go off to vote and leave the farm in the hands of those unable to vote, for lacking property rights, or even basic freedom. The largest part of the voting public works 9-5, and the traditional polling structure, in terms of the time frame, put those voters at a disadvantage and inconvenience. Some people, in fact, when faced with the choice, can legitemately claim that work is more important than voting, as food is a nearer priority than choosing between rich people playing King for a Term.
Second, shrink districts so that the issues are more personal to the constituent, and the representatives more accountable. In fact, shrink both the districts AND the salaries--keep the reps at home working in-district, eliminating the need for pricey Georgetown housing. This may consequently price special interests groups right out of the influence game (not as easy to maintain 1,000's of offices all over the US as it is to maintain a big office in DC and get all the turkeys in one shot). Since the secrecy of a representative's voting while on-the-job is not at issue (they are public record, anyhow), the work of representation can be performed electronically, anyhow. Why go to DC anymore, except to see museums and bother the lonely resident of 1600 Penn Ave.
A simple proposal. It'll never catch on.... sigh.
Mmmmmm... Bold, yet refreshing!
I lived in Chicago. I am not an American citizen. (rest assured, I was there legally) When getting my drivers license I was asked if I wanted to register to vote. I pointed out to the woman that I was not a citizen and couldn't. She told me she could see that and asked if I wanted to anyway.
Why should a document who's supposed purpose is to enable someone to drive on the public roads have anything to do with voting in the first place?
An undervote is an attempt to turn a ballot without a vote into a vote.
When the voter circles the word "Al Gore" on the ballot, it's pretty damn obvious what they intended, even if the machine wasn't happy. So no, an undervote is an attempt to determine if the voter's intention was clear (in many cases it was) despite the machine failing to count it.
No, I mean ballots that never did have Gore votes. These are only "turned into" Gore votes by altering what is really on the ballot
Okay, for those few ballots, you're right. For the -rest- of the ballots, it's about recognizing what is actually on the ballot when it is obvious what the voter intended. If you count that, which, by the way, is what Florida law requires (determining the true intention of the voter), then Gore won.
So you're wrong.
The enemies of Democracy are
Of course, even if they didn't, you could read your account statements and raise hell if the numbers didn't add up. If your vote got changed inside the machine, no one including you would know. Voting is unique in that the transactions are anonymous.
No one but an idiot and future pauper would consider doing anonymous cash transactions electronically with the kind of technology used in voting machines!
If we did have a re-election would it be fair? I mean would people still have voted Nader if they saw mainly how it would have "almost" ended up the previous time. Would more people come out of the woodwork and have a higher turnout for the make up election? Overseas elections for people in the military?
It would be very difficult to just have a do over in this case.
SuDZ
You are right. I missed the coercion problem and that is at least as serious as the accountability problem. This is very hard to come up with a accountable system that is also immune to coercion.
How about this idea: make it possible to have fake votes entered into the system. The system knows they are fake votes, but when looked up after the fact they look like real votes. One can hand a card to one's boss that is a fake vote, they can look it up in the system and it shows them what they want to see. Only the voter knows which card is their real vote and which card is a fake vote.
This would also require either the ability to request a fake voter card at a polling place. This would most likely make the voter feel uncomfortable and what is stopping the polling place from handing out real voter cards when fake voter cards are requested. An alternative would be to allow the voter to print as many fake cards as they want after the vote, from home. One goes to a government Web site and you fill out a fake vote, it enters the vote into the system as a fake vote, and then allows the voter to print out the card. The cards would then have to be printable from standard printers. I don't see this as a real problem, because the serial numbers on the cards are the primary means to prevent people from bringing fake cards to the voting booths.
But then this makes the accountability much more difficult. Any organization trying to do accounting would have no way of telling fake votes from real votes. The system could also be corrupted into using the fake votes as real votes.
It would still be better than having no ability for any group that wanted to do some accounting of votes to be able to.
The only way I see of accomplishing this would be to have a way for the government to grant access to some organizations to do accounting and give them access to the real database. This then places trust on the government that I would rather not place. A corrupt government could then give access to the real database to large corporations who could monitor their employees.
The problem with not being able to bring the cards home, is it requires the government to cooperate with any accounting that is to be done. It requires that trust be placed on the government that the ballot boxes are not tampered with. In most districts most registered voters don't vote. What prevents the government from stuffing the ballot box? Even if the government did choose to allow an organization to count the ballot box after the vote, there is no way to know that it has not been tampered with. Right now the government only seems to grant access to the ballot boxes by court order. There is not much accountability on the ballot boxes themselves.
I think if there is some way that voters could bring home their vote with out being coerced it would make voters feel more involved with the voting process. It would allow the voter to see that their vote was actually counted. It allows some accountability. The fake vote is one idea; do you have any better ideas?
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O.K., I found a flaw in this idea and a solution.
The flaw:
Corporation A: "All employees must show up on election day when polls open (say 7:00am) and stay until polls close (say 8:00pm). Group A will go to vote at 10:00am, Group B will vote at 11:00am, etc. While waiting in line, if any member of your group requests fake cards, it shall be reported to management. A certain number of each group has been ordered to request fake ballots, we expect them to be reported. When returning to work, please return your ballot and report and suspicious behavior to your supervisor."
The solution:
The fake cards are available inside the voting booths themselves. No one other than the voter, knows if they took any, or how many. The only problem is that the staff would need to make sure that the booths did not run out of fake cards.
I realized, that the fake cards still does allow auditing. Voters know which card is real and which isn't. If an organization wants to audit and can get enough people to give them the correct cards, it should match the election results. If the organizations audit fails, it could be due to two situations. 1) enough people gave the organization their fake cards instead of real cards, or 2) the election was tampered with. A court order for the real database will determine which is involved.
So any organization can still do a preliminary audit that will allow them to get the court order if the election fails the audit.
There is also another issue that needs to be addressed with fake cards. When the front desk is handed a card, "I messed up my ballot." They need to scan it and verify that it is a real card and not a fake card, before handing a new real card to the person.
This also creates the situation, where an employer could bribe to gain access to a poll booth during the election and gain access to the machine. The employer takes a certain percentage of their employees returned cards and scans them (which wipes the vote, but tells them if they were given real or fake cards). If the employer could threaten that a certain percentage of employees will be checked up on, it creates a problem.
The only solution to this I can see, is to remove the ability to request a new card and thus, remove the ability to scan for real vs. fake cards. Once the voter prints out their vote to the card, it is finished. If enough voters say their printout did not match what they voted for, they would have to push for an investigation.
There are many places where the vote could be corrupted at the polling place (such as handing voters fake cards instead of real cards in certain districts, or handing all non-caucasian voters fake cards) or inside the database. As far as I can tell, all of these would fail an organization audit.
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I read that site. A whole bunch of suspicious fluff and no substance, no proof. I voted in the 2002 Georgia election. Those machines were secure. Very.
What these people don't take into account is that Max Cleland and Roy Barnes (the Georgia governor who was overturned by surprise) had, just before the election, offended some very powerful voting blocks in this state. Especially the teachers' unions.
Barnes had basically laid the blame for the state's education failure on the teachers, and tried to claim credit for things that happened before his time in office. Teachers didn't like that. And there are a lot of teachers that vote in this state.
Part of Cleland's loss was, I think, just from Georgians who were fed up with Barnes and the Democratic party in general. It also didn't help that Cleland had recently voted against a measure ensuring that Boy Scouts wouldn't be kicked out of public facilities rented to other private groups. That irked some folks I know. It also didn't help that both Cleland and Barnes had gotten very vicious and defensive about some of the "accusations" they claimed were coming from the Republicans. They didn't handle the race with poise and dignity. That hurt them.
This web page of yours was written by someone who just doesn't believe that the Democrats could have really lost. It's got to be the machines. It's got to be a conspiracy. When Democrats are losing power, all is not right with the world, and someone (other than the Democrat) has to be blamed.
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
In Georgia, exit polls showed Cleland winning. Until the 2000 and 2002 elections, exit polling was always accurate. Then, all of the sudden, it was wrong. That stinks of a fix. I suppose you don't care whether the election was legit or fixed as long as your guy comes out on top. I, for one want the election to be legit even if my guy doesn't win. Hagel should be kicked out of the Senate, and Chambliss should have to face Cleland again with an auditable paper trail.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.