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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
a href=
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
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.
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
Where is the proof?
If it happened, then there will be proof of it. Even the CIA couldn't cover up a roadblock of that magnitude; there will be thousands of witnesses. A handful of witnesses is easy to fake, or to silence, but you can't do that in the numbers that such a "voter roadblock" would produce.
Show me anything more than a hanfdul, and I might be convinced. But the previous poster was correct: if these roadblocks had really occurred, there would have been more than enough evidence for Gore -or, if not him personally, any number of voter groups- to sue. He has not done so. That, I think, is the most telling thing about this.
Just because we don't accept accusations without proof doesn't make us blind followers of The Establishment. "Innocent until proven guilty" is the cornerstone of our legal system. So prove them guilty.
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
And when you hear a token hit the bucket bottom with a hollow, bassy sound, you know the person just voted for the Communist party. Arrest him!
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.
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
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.
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.
Skiing? Check out The Independant Skiers Portal
... 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
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.
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
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
"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.
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
"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
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
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
Considering the other decisions made by the courts and the FEC, I don't trust their word. I'd rather see the evidence myself. The only evidence I saw was newspaper reports stating that both things happened.
Now newspaper reports aren't exactly known as a source of real truth, so I don't put much credence in them. OTOH, in the absence of other acceptable evidence (which doesn't include the sworn word of apparently complicit officials)...
Still, the public word of the Supreme Court was:
1) You can't count the votes until we say so.
2) There isn't time to count the votes, so seal the evidence.
This causes me to doubt the veracity of the court system.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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!
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.
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/
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.
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:
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.
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).