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Seeking The Source For Ireland's E-Voting System
WeeBull writes "Michael Cunningham from p45.net tried to request 'the source code of the electronic voting system first used in Ireland's May 2002 general election, plus any supporting technical documentation supplied to the Department of Environment and Local Government including the functional specifications' under Ireland's Freedom of Information legislation. The result wasn't what he expected ..."
The result wasn't what he expected
You mean he got everything he asked for, overnight, with no questions asked?
They don't even have the source code to software they used to run their elections?
Doesn't that mean that IF there was any fraud during the elections, that it is now impossible to prove whether or not it had to do with the software? Since the government doesn't have the actual code, any code they get from the authors in the future cannot be proven to be the code used in the election...
What a mess.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Americans have too been scammed by voting machines owned by corporations. Go figure.
t _G roup_Manipulates/secret_group_manipulates.html
w Me ssage?topicID=7.topic
http://www.americanfreepress.net/11_10_02/Secre
http://www.talion.com/election-machines.html
http://pub103.ezboard.com/fsoldiervoicefrm4.sho
You mean a company or government actually bought a piece of software without the source code!
What kind of world are we living in?
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
The site is not shaky. Plus he just posted about his cat being addicted to heroin.
Over in Germany, we use some of the least advanced voting machinery
imagineable. Paper and pencil. Votes are counted by hand, with peer
review, faxed in and published in detail in the newspapers.
So far we didn't have any real problems with fraud, ambiguous votes or
anything like that. And the results are usually in by the evening or the next
day.We have like 70 million inhabitants and I don't see a reason why this
shouldn't scale up.
So is there any real reason to replace that with a system that is not
transparent and where you have to blindly trust some tech companies?
What the hell do you mean by "the saurus"? Is Jurassic Park IV coming out or what?
Pencil marks can be erased thus creating problems with fraud, ambiguous votes and the like. I suggest that you guys over there in Germany switch from pencil to pen, and solve that particular problem.
See, the source code for Germany's voting system is open source, and I quickly saw a potential problem and proposed a solution.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
I can tell you that if I were told that I had to provide source code for a product to compare against a compiled version for legal reasons (such as this case, where election results can be compared) in an after-the-fact case where binaries were produced by a compiler compared to the original...
I'd have to quit my job immediately (probabally not tell my employer that I'm quitting either, just not show up to work), grab my family, max my credit cards/home equity loans, donate my household furnishings to charity (like Salvation Army), and move to a non-extraditable country in a real hurry.
Really. I can't even imagine the legal BS you'd have to go under if something like this came up after an election was contested by powerful interests. If something like this had happened in Florida during the last U.S. Presidential election, people would have gone to jail, even if they had been completely honest and just "doing their job".
The best possible outcome in something like this is that the developer would be made the sacrificial lamb in the following witch hunt, given a felony criminal record, and serving a year or two in jail.
Well, the best outcome would be that the government would admit that it screwed up, and the company that made the elecion equipment would back the software developer throughout the whole legal mess that would still mean a couple of years of being a legal assistant rather than a software developer.
Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I think with some of the past employers that I've had I would have been dumped immediately and the blame fixed straight on me. I've had to deal with lawyers as it is because of contract disputs, and I can't even imagine what it would be like in a public firestorm where this would really be an issue.
No it isn't similar...Hitler actualy won the popular vote.
I've just found this document - which appears to be the minutes of an Irish government selection commmittee debating the merits (amongst other things, search for neda) of this system.
Interesting quote: "The integrity of the electoral process will be assured for both the electorate and candidates"
Not all of the electorate it would seem.
Further on in the document
[emphasis mine]
"(2) No equipment may be approved for the purposes of subsection (1) unless a full technical description of the said equipment (including all source code and information regarding independent testing and verification relating thereto) has been laid before both Houses of the Oireachtas and a resolution approving a draft of the order approving the said equipment has been passed by each such House.".
Intesting hey?
Thats just one of the committee's opinion - and it looks like they got slapped down - but if I was Irish, I'd be finding out who this Mr Gilmore was & voting for him.
Secret Group Manipulates Vote Machines - The widespread use of electronic voting machines has severely undermined the integrity of elections in the United States. Behind the companies that make the voting machines is a small and secretive group of men, including a well-known U.S. senator.
Voting machine companies: Ownership disclosure, "private" vote-counting codes, potential for manipulation - This is an article about just three things: disclosure, conflict of interest and potential for manipulation. It is not a conspiracy theory or a political point of view. I think you'll agree with me: We don't care who wins the election, as long as it's who was VOTED FOR.
Senator Hagel campaign treasurer owns voting machine co. - Election Systems & Software, the firm whose machines were involved in the 2002 flubbed Florida primary election(4)-- and the recent huge flub in Dallas, where early voting had to be shut down when machines kept registering Democratic votes as Republican (See the 31 mistakes link, top of page) and the company that now makes the voting machines for most of America--is a private company that does not like to tell the public who owns it.
No, they didn't get slapped down. The government ran a large number of tests on the system, but because they only had it for the trial run, could not make the source public.
Hopefully (I am too cynical to say "presumably") the source will be made available on the pruchase of the full system. While this is less than ideal, it's a start. Incidentally, the relevant quote about making the source public is given in one of the posts above.
My gripe with this system is the choice of underlying system that is being used. I shit you not, it is a custom Windows embedded, and the database is a modified Access one. That thought does not fill me with confidence
Rational thought is the only true freedom
all sourcecode of the three systems used is available for download and public review on the site of the federal government.
o kunnl/broncodes/Cdoku7nnl.htm
http://www.verkiezingen.fgov.be/Nouveau/NieuwNl/D
(clik on one of the three software systems and then on 'Hier')
No, they didn't get slapped down.
:No, we were discussing the section. We were discussing section 35 and are now at section 36.
Quoting from the article I linked before:
Mr. Gilmore: I move amendment No. 39:
In page 33, between lines 15 and 16, to insert the following subsection:
"(2) No equipment may be approved for the purposes of subsection (1) unless a full technical description of the said equipment (including all source code and information regarding independent testing and verification relating thereto) has been laid before both Houses of the Oireachtas and a resolution approving a draft of the order approving the said equipment has been passed by each such House.".
Having lost the-----
Ms O. Mitchell: Is that the amendment we were discussing?
Acting Chairman
Looks like a slap. Smells like a slap. Probably a slap
You say:
Hopefully (I am too cynical to say "presumably") the source will be made available on the pruchase of the full system.
and also:
it is a custom Windows embedded, and the database is a modified Access one
So...you hope the source to Win CE & Access will be released to the general public hey?
...and let's proclaim that the President is directly nominated by IBM, CGEY, or whatever IT corporation wrote the sofware.
It would be as in the XVIIth century with the King choosen by God. Easy and cheap!
Then we can proceed to the next logical step: the revolution.
Christophe (Don't hesitate to point out my spelling and grammar mistakes, I want to learn - Thanks).
During last weeks general election here in .be, 44% of the people voted on a PC.
All registered polical parties participating in the elections, could appoint a few experts who were granted access to the source code of the program that was used...
In 1991 nobody except private company had the code.
In 1999 official expert asked for the state to own the code and suggest publishing it.
In 2000 they published partial code and documentation with most important security part removed.
In May 2003 they published full code (but no doc) of new system (AES added).
Feel free to download analyse and report problem to us
We have no way to check if that code was really in use. Because they use the same floppy disk to boot the system and to save the result, we have no way to make sure what was on the floppy at the begining of the election day. This is explained here but only in french.
But having the code is not enough... actually Richard Stallman had something to say about Free Software not being enough.
Now if you are Belgian and unhappy about the status of our election system, you can join or contact PourEVA.
I personally believe that if we want to reduce the repetitive task of counting the ballot, we could use optical scanning (and make test manual recount). But we should never put a computer between our vote and the expression of our vote. Paper and Pen rules.
Don't let the computer/expert control the election. Information for Belgium in french: http://www.poureva.be/
The introduction of electronic voting was a necessary step in ensuring the NICE Treaty was ratified.
Ireland had rejected the Treaty initially, and its government was astonished that the people didn't buy the party line. They assured the EU that they would have ANOTHER referendum (which may have been technically against the law) and keep at it until the populace did as they were told, and ratified the Treaty. (Also see Maastricht and the Danes in 1992)
Electronic Voting (while at the same time, eliminating "exit polls" which might have shown a different picture) allowed the Irish Government to obtain large "YES" votes in heavily populated areas that typically vote the party line, though not usually in numbers large enough to outnumber the rural population.
(See Divorce Referendum results for one of the few occasions that happened, and other places)
Since this is coming from an AC, you're either going "CONSPIRACY NUT!" or looking at the evidence with an open mind. Let's see how it's modded...
Behold our new king! Whose right to rule was handd down by root himself.
Commercial companies usually refuse to release sourcee code on the basus (reasonable) that others could rip it of, despite its being copyright, and it would be very difficult and expensive to trace and sue them.
Bit in this special cas, that doesn't apply. If every suppier of voting software has to provide the source of their system, any supplier who thinks he has lost a contract to a ripoff of his own system can obtain the source code and check it. Piracy would be trivially easy to expose, and a powerful ally (the Government) under pressure to clean up the electoral system.
So the usual excuse of Commercial Confidentiallity does not apply, and and any seller hiding behind it should be excluded from the tender.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Very interesting. Democracy electrocuted. More evidence the sociopaths have the reigns of the world firmly in hand.
The liberal media has been heavily documented as any google search will show. Also the democrats are the biggest cheats since Kennedy and before, and of course Clinton.
For both the government and the source code requestors, what guarantee do they have that whatever source code they are shown is actually the software that is running in the system on election day?
- Your bias is revealed when you call the Republican votes a "flub"
Not to mention his impugning "corporations". Jackass (the grandparent, not the parentbuy our accouNTing (using the pateNTdead eyecon0meter(gpl)), we've determined, that if there IS another 'electshun' we'll WINd dupe on the smelly end of the felonious FUDgeCycle(tm) wonce again.
I suppose more details of the electoral system are in order...
:-)
For General Elections (to the Dail - main parliment) Ireland has a multiseat-Proportional Representaion election system - meaning there are more than one seats available in each constituency.
Firstly each voter can vote in order of preference for every candidate - For example say there are 10 candidates for three seats (my case last election) You can vote in order of 1 to 10.
PR works by counting first how many ballots are cast, dividing by some ammount (IIRC Number of seats + 1). This is set as the "quota". Then counting takes place. Once a candiate reaches the quota they are deemed elected. Then the amount of votes over the quota is distributed to the other candates, going on the next choice of the voters concerned.
If no one reaches the quota, the person(s) with the least votes accrued currently are eliminated, and their votes are distributed to the remaining candidates.
This is a complicated system and electronic counting would be an advantage - sometimes it can take up to a week to recount a constituncy, last time there were three recounts in one case, with the final seat going to the candidate with three more votes than the other!
Electronic voting was used last time in three places, with the results out the night of the election, rather than a day or two later. This lead to some problems when a sitting TD (equiv MP) lost her seat, and was told rather cruely, normally you get the results of each count so you are prepared for the result, long in advance of the declaration.
In my opinion, ideally Electronic voting is the way to go. However I don't trust the machines or the companies who make them, regardless of the published nature of the code. It would be very difficult to catch fraud taking place, and personally I like the current method (pen and paper). It is very satisifing putting a 10 beside the candidate who you hate
tom.
the United States of America just switched to an electronic voting system.
In an unrelated matter, Bill Gates is now President despite not even being present on the ballot or this being an election year. George Bush was called a "sore loser" by the media; why can't he just accept that the recount clearly shows Gates ahead by 8 million votes?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
What of idiom?
We are the Federales -- we don't need no stinking Source Code.
Sen. Chuck Hagel admits owning voting machine company. Slight conflict of interest?
In January, 2002 the State Elections Board approved two closed source 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.
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
Your little rant forgets the fact that Florida was delivered by brother Jeb, and it was those stolen electoral votes that pushed W over the top.
"Your little rant forgets the fact that Florida was delivered by brother Jeb, and it was those stolen electoral votes that pushed W over the top. "
No, the Florida voters delivered Florida. Jeb had nothing to do with it other than campaign for his brother. Sorry, getting more votes than the other guy is not theft of electoral votes.
(The word "theft" is too often used, as it is here, for the act of campaigning against someone else. I keep hearing all the time how Nader "stole" Gore votes, and Perot "stole" Bush I votes....but it is not theft in any of these cases).
Why would we want the source code in the first place? It's probably not motivated by a GPL-like desire to build on it; rather, it's an attempt to verify the validity, honesty, or security of the code involved.
But at the point where one is concerned about a grand conspiracy to rig national elections and control the government, viewing the source is not nearly enough.
Imagine that we vote electronically in ominous black boxes once per year, and the boxes tell us who our leaders are. You request the source code to these voting machines, and the government gives you some source code. As far as you can tell, it's valid. But what guarantee do you have that that code is actually running the black boxes?
As I see it, there are three main possible points of failure. The manufacturers of the boxes could distribute the machines with false election code pre-installed, the government could substitute such malware to remain in office, or a technician specializing in the repair of the machines could covertly substitute the code. The three are not equiprobable, but in any of the three cases, requesting the source code does not address the problem. Even if you mandated that the boxes themselves display their own code, quinelike, on a screen before you vote, you still have no guarantee that the code displayed is the code in operation.
How is this any worse than a system of punch-cards or a mechanical voting box? Because these other mechanisms are hard-wired and validated locally before the election commences. Re-wiring them on a massive scale is not feasible. The same is not true of a more versatile solution like electronic voting; such could be rigged to behave correctly in all pre-election tests and revert to its more insidious behavior on election day during polling hours.
If you're worried about a conspiracy, requesting the source code is not nearly enough. You'd need a system designed specifically to thwart tampering, even by its creators. And even so, you can only solve for one or maybe two of the possible points of failure. Allowing electronic black box voting assumes a certain amount of trust in the system. I don't know how much trust is necessary, but if one is worried enough to request source code, one shouldn't accept the voting method to begin with.
I'd agree that having the source code open to all improves security and assures an accurate vote but there is absolutely no evidence to prove this. Many OSS projects have bugs in them regardless of the number of people looking at the code. To add to the problem, not only are there bugs in the code regardless of the number of people looking at it, the release schedule of most projects, "it'll be read when it's ready", there should be no bugs in the code. When the OSS community can prove open source code is more secure due to it being open then perhaps there might be an argument for opening source code for more applications. Until then it's mere speculation and assumptions based not in reality, but in what the OSS community wants to have happen.
It only stands in the way of the right wing to bring down separation of church and state
Yet another person who doesn't understand what separation of church and state means. England has the Church of England with the Queen at its head. America doesn't have a Church of America with the President at its head. That's all it means. It doesn't mean that America is atheistic or that all instances of religion must be removed from the federal government.
Just because the software is open source does not mean it is written by the "OSS community".
Alright!
So are you saying it would have mattered which rich, white born-again Christian the Supreme Court appointed? Think again. The Democrats have been failing to provide leadership on key alternatives since at least 1992 and as an "opposition" party they are about as useful as a dog rolling over to have its belly scratched. At least the Republicans attack from the front. The Ds are quite willing to stab their constituents in the back (DMCA, DOMA, PATRIOT, SSSCA, I could go on for days).
I do not have a signature
The following article appeared in Canada's Globe and Mail in January, and covers many of the issues stemming from the Irish voting system.
e ws /tech/RTGAM/20030124/gtfl/Technology/techBN/
http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/ArticleN
It's not the Democrats that are riding rough-shod on the constitution and civil liberties in the name of furthering their corporate-sponsored agenda. Oh, I get it. You were trying to be ironic.
"Trust us..." (Old expression meaning "Fuck You!")
The problem is self made and perpetuated by history. It's the difference between a simple lever which punches a hole in a piece of paper and which anyone can see and understand, and the incredibly bull-shit filled explanations of the process that most comp-sci majors will come up with to explain the code.
Every mistake that can be made in describing the specifications, the code, the inputs or the results will be made. From anthropomorphization to bald-faced blustering.
There is no field of endeavor which professes to be a profession where the fundamentals are so obscurely obfuscated and the advances are so incredibly unbelievable.
I don't trust comp-sci majors to install plumbing.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
As I see it, electronic voting machines are a sledge-hammer. They're powerful, affordable, so let's use them! Too bad the election is a problem that more closely resembles a screw...
However, Job Bush systematcially attempted to 'cleanse' the voting lists, in direct contradiction of a court order (See page 34 of The Best Deomocracy Money Can Buy, by Greg Palast). There are at least 40,000 ex-felons that are allowed to vote in Florida, so this is not an insignificant number, given that the election results were so close.
But there were some amaizingly slopply errors in the 'data cleaning'. For example, the state of Texas supplied a list of 8,000 convicts that were not eligilble to vote. The company overseeing the error, ChoicePoint DBT, called this a simple data error. However, the list was for misdimeanor convictions, so the people on this liste were eligible to vote. In fact after a 1997 law, even convicted felons in Texas are eligible to vote after doing their time. There were similar irrgularities for convicts from other states (Ohio, Illinois)
Standing up for the rights of 'criminals' may not be popular, but they do have rights and when one person's rights are denied, the rights of all are attacked. This too is not a abstract concept. One of the 'felons' on the Florida purge list was a Thomas Cooper, who was 'convicted' in 2007. There is also a Jonny Jackson, Jr., who was purged from the list because of a felon conviction by a John Fitzgerald Jackson. The voter lists were not verifed with the dilligance given a Visa card application.
Think global, act loco
Some honest leaders remain in Congress, but I have slim hope of this actually passing:
U.S. House Bill to Require All Voting Machines To Produce A Voter-Verified Paper Trail
"However, Job Bush systematcially attempted to 'cleanse' the voting lists"
This "cleansing" system was actually put in place by Florida Democrats, not Jeb Bush.
Thank you for not mentioning the common lie of "cleansing black voters": the cleansing of the lists did not take race into consideration.
Yes it does. Why? Because once you start intertwining religion with government, where do you stop. And what religion do you pick? Ok, so 90% of the US is Christian, well, which christian sect do you select to endorse? Church and state do not mix... look how well that worked for Great Britain for so many years (centuries.) Once you start combining church and state, you're only 2 more steps away from persecuting those that are not like you.
The government's own guide to the electronic voting system has this to say on the source code:
If this is not a publicly accessible server, why bother telling us where to find the source?
The other thing revealed by the document linked above is that the whole process makes heavy and totally unnecessary use of Microsoft software. We'll never have the source code to Microsoft Access, but that's the DB application which stores the ballots. Also, counting requires a bank of computers running Microsoft Window - surely this can not represent value for money for the State?
Maybe I'm a little unfamiliar with voting machines, so forgive me... What in the world are 200,000 lines needed for?
Are we talking about the interface software included in this count? Because last time I thought about it, it doesn't take 200,000 lines of code to place a ticket in one of several bins...
"So are you saying it would have mattered which rich, white born-again Christian the Supreme Court appointed"
The court, which includes a Black person and someone who is Jewish, did not appoint anyone. All the Supreme Court did was uphold the actual election, and shut off someone's illegal attempt to overturn it by tampering with the ballots. Why did you bring race or religion into it?
I'm glad the Court did defend the actual election result: it would be a dangerous precedent for democracy to fall pray to someone like Boies telling lies in the courtroom.
"Democrats have been failing to provide leadership on key alternatives since at least 1992"
You got that right. The problem of Democrats not providing valid alternatives to anything goes back decades.
"At least the Republicans attack from the front. The Ds are quite willing to stab their constituents in the back (DMCA, DOMA, PATRIOT, SSSCA, I could go on for days)."
You could have also listed the CDA (Communications Decency Act), the first major attempt to censor the Internet, put in place by a left-wing Democrat senator named Exon.
See Greg Palast's site http://gregpalast.com/ It's in his book and you can download the relevant chapter CHAPTER 1. JIM CROW IN CYBERSPACE: The Unreported Story of How They Fixed the Vote in Florida at http://www.gregpalast.com/bestdemocracymoneycanbuy chapter1.pdf
His conclusions? The polititions are lining up to do the same for the 2004 elections, and there's little you can do about it.
He's my local member of Parliament. A scarily smart and clued-up politician. They do exist. In Ireland, they're mostly in the opposition, but we live in hope...
Your Vote is Now the Property of a Private Corporation
Now recounts and audits are being barred so as not to violate the "privacy and trade secrets" of the the company whose software is used to count the votes. Check out some of the excellent commentary on this issue by "Thom Hartmann" at:
"If You Want To Win An Election, Just Control The Voting Machines"
"Now Your Vote Is The Property Of A Private Corporation"
An excerpt: (credit to Thomm Hartmann)
"Chuck Hagel was re-elected to his second term in the United States Senate on November 5, 2002 with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska. What Hagel's website fails to disclose is that about 80 percent of those votes were counted by computer-controlled voting machines put in place by the company affiliated with Hagel. Built by that company. Programmed by that company.
"When Charlie Matulka (the opponent) requested a hand count of the vote in the election he lost to Hagel, 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, he said, are those made and programmed by the corporation formerly run by Hagel.
Scary?
-Scott
"After the extensive re-counts and press and public misunderstanding of the problem, a judge friend of Bush's ordered that they stop bothering and declare Bush the winner, ignoring overwhelming public evidence that the Bush team had used every underhanded (and illegal) trick in the book to get elected."
Yes, there were extensive recounts already and Bush had won every count that counted actual votes. Evidence of tricks? No, there was none, none at all. If there was, the Gore campaign would have gone to town on it.
As for the "judge friend", what actually happened was that the Supreme Court shut down another redundant count that would have involved ballot tampering. It had everything to do with following the law and nothing to do with being someone's friend.
You'd think the voters are also interested parties in the election procerss, not just the political parties.
I worked as a vote counter in Sweden a few timees, and I believe anyone has the right to go look at the process and control count the votes there. And, perhaps as a result, nobody ever does...
Our system is similar.
You receive your registration card a few weeks before voting and are required to have it before voting. If you did not receive a card before elections day you can register at the polling place on the day of the election. You hand the card to an official from Elections Canada and that person crosses your name off the voting list and hands you a ballot. You place an "X" in a circle that appears across from the candidate's name and party to vote for that candidate. Anything other than an "X" results in a spoiled ballot. All ballots are kept for auditing purposes.
Then real people count real ballots and the results are known hours after the polls close. If a vote is close within a certain threshold then an automatic recount occurs. Candidates may also ask for a recount if they so desire.
Our entire process is transparent, auditable, managed by an independent authority, Elections Canada, and so simple that it's hard to imagine how one could manipulate the vote process. Any electronic system must have these features or it is ultimately unfair to both the candidates and the voters. That means no hidden source, no questionable voting interface, no secret machine schematics and auditable results that can be physically determined, a completely transparent process.
If our current system resembled the electronic system in terms of secrecy no one would trust the results, so why on earth are governments willing to hand over the legitimacy of an election to unquestioned third party?
It's not scary, especially when the so called "support" from your argument comes from a partisan nut-job web site, and not from any real journalists. These guys would be out to bash Hegel anyway, whether or not they have a reason to.
The only scary thing is that gullible Internet readers can believe that the opinions in extremist web sites are news.
I can tell you that if I were told that I had to provide source code for a product to compare against a compiled version for legal reasons in an after-the-fact case where binaries were produced by a compiler compared to the original... I'd have to quit my job immediately, grab my family, max my credit cards/home equity loans, donate my household furnishings to charity, and move to a non-extraditable country in a real hurry.
I don't get the problem. This can be pretty easily accomplished with any number of source versioning tools (CVS, perforce, clearcase, etc...), and an automated build process. It's standard procedure in any part of the software industry I've worked last 10 years, for many very good and non legalistic reasons.
Actually, it does in german.
"A scarily smart and clued-up politician. They do exist. In Ireland, they're mostly in the opposition, but we live in hope."
If they were smart, they would not be in the Labour party, supporting its destructive agenda of increased power by the state at the expense of the property and rights of average citizens.
"The official count was stopped because of a decision by the Supreme Court."
No, the count had been done long before the Supreme Court decision. Gore only wins in a statewide recount in which ballots without Gore votes are counted. Such a count would have been rightly contested.
Cost and voter work load are the main problems with the manual system.
I worked in the similiar Swedish vote counting system a few times, and it works very well producing results that are almost certainly exactly correct, and verifiably so. But it is a lot of work. And we only do exactly three elections every four years.
Bear in mind that the typical American voter can have 50 or more elections to vote in every single year, and you start to see the problem. Plus that at that voting volume, you have to consider how to make it easy for the voter to cast all these votes. Putting every vote in a separate sealed envelope etc could take an hour for some less manually skilled voters
"It's not the Democrats that are riding rough-shod on the constitution and civil liberties in the name of furthering their corporate-sponsored agenda""
Neither of the major two parties is corporate-sponsored. However, more than the opposition, the Democrats are dedicated to furthering the power of the rulers by grabbing more power for the government (look at the attempt to take over health care as an example, and resistance to reducing the amount that Americans are overtaxed)
Where do they vote 50 times per year?
Hagel didn't even disclose his ownership in the voting machine company, and won by a landslide. Go figure.
Even scarier - when President Bush was here a couple weeks ago, he and Hagel were total buddies.
I'd say we should expect Bush to 'win' the next election too. After all, Hagel's machines run Florida too and I doubt the Florida governor (Bush's brother) will call for much investigation into this severe breach of democratic trust.
Fuckin scary is all I think. I'll probably 'disappear' now, after posting this from Nebraska. Weird shit going on in this state, and nothing but herd animal mentality amongst the large majority of the population. Mind control, mass hypnosis, and the water has a funny taste lately...
"Not to mention the many blacks and minorities turned away from the voting stations."
This is just another urban legend, kept alive by those who really really wish it were true. In fact, there is no evidence of this. That anything like this occured is even denied by Al Gore, and the NAACP.
"The 2000 "elections" were a sham, and a complete breakdown of the democratic process"
No, they were a vindication of the democratic process, despite the Gore camp's attempt at vote tampering and filing frivolous suits.
" bush is an illiterate idiot,"
An opinion contradicted by the truth is still wrong. Illiterate? He can read. Show evidence that he can not? Idiot? Smarter than Gore, at least, as he showed by winning 3 debates, and putting forth policies that made a lot more sense than Gore's.
"but it's clear that the winner in this case did not get there fairly."
He got there they way all the other Presidents did: he won enough states to get enough electors.
"Fuckin scary is all I think"
You have no evidence of any wrong doing, none what so ever. You don't even claim any; just guilt by association. You are even scared that the President can be a friends with a senator. Shocking, that is!
" Weird shit going on in this state, and nothing but herd animal mentality amongst the large majority of the population"
Making up conspiracies is just your way to get around the fact that the voters voted in the best interest of Nebraska and the country, and you did not.
"Well the reason you never hear about votes favoring dems is because they are not bent on trying to control every aspect of political life in order to bring the bible to law."
Why is there a REVEREND as one of the major presidential candidates.... on the Democratic side?
"You're a fool if you think the 2000 vote was legal and constitutional."
No, we know it is legal and Constitutional because we know about the Electoral College, which does exist.... and in really close margins, can contradict the national "popular" vote totals (which by the way are Constitutionally irrelevant).
"The right controls the oval office, the senate, the house and most of the highest court appointments - so much for checks and balances"
Do you have any idea what the Constitution says about checks and balances? It is about Federal branches, not parties. It is not about putting checks and balances on the public, who has made informed voting decisions resulting in this.
"There's enough documented evidence throughout history that shows how vicious the right is and how they'll stop at nothing to impose their morality on everyone else."
The same history shows that the left is far worse at this.
Do you have any idea what the Constitution says about checks and balances? It is about Federal branches, not parties.
"Every popular tv and radio show (ala ross & tucker) have these neanderthal's foaming at the mouth with hate and disgust for anyone who is not a rich, white christian and doesn't blindly wrap themselves in the flag and say 'ok'"
Sorry, you are wrong. There are no racist anti-white TV shows outside of something sometimes on public access cable.
in an electronic voting system is a printout that gives the time and date of the vote, which candidate I voted for, and a cryptographic signature from the machine. Then the votes are revealed after the election and anyone with a computer can verify the signatures, and I can grep for my vote in the list. Then if everyone checks his own vote, he can raise a big stink if his vote isn't in the list, and he has a printout with a signed vote on it that gives proof of his claim.
Every voting system is based on trusting the government. The government runs the election, the voting booths, does the counting in paper elections etc, so no matter what the system - we have to trust that the government is not going to cheat us in anyway. The bottom line is they could if they wanted to ( I realize we could make a super secure system at some point that would bypass this, but the technology is not there yet, or at least the funding for it isn't) I think there is an obvious disadvantage to releasing the source: it lets other people get at the intricate details of the voting process. So if someone outside of the government wanted to screw up the voting, if it's possible you are giving them the resources to do it. We have to trust the government not everyone who can read voting systme code. Also, the government there says they don't have the code... that doesn't mean they couldn't easily get it.
"The really weird thing is that there are 520 million votes for Gates."
Due to the usage of voting machines with Intel Pentium microprocessors, the vote total was actually 520,000,000.996556 votes.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The web site and source code for the Australian system referred to in the article is worth a look.
It's quite simple. Intentionally, as the ACT states in their design goals (http://www.elections.act.gov.au/EVACS.html). The source includes the client and server application components--160 files and 12739 lines of very straigtforward C. (Of course, that doesn't include the OS/libs.)
I've browsed through a fair bit of the code, and everything I've seen is GPL. Ensuring accessibility to software used for public elections is, I think, a Very Good Thing. (I wouldn't mind seeing a law that required all election software be GPL'd.)
I'm in San Francisco. Apart from the high profile races there is typically a dozen city referendums, a dozen state referendums on the ballot, several lower profile city and state elected positions, such as insurance commisioner, district attorney etc, and primaries.
Here are the
27 referendums from last time as an example.
This is the kind of thing that more of us should do.
Maybe even do it so that the major parties and some independent group get to sign the code independently with different keys - so they can convince themselves.
Of course, this does not address the possibility of hardware/firmware tampering.
Hmm, have to think about it a bit more.
Any government going the electronic voting route should also mandate that at the very least, they get to keep a copy of software and hardware engineering documents on hand. If the company unexpectedly goes bankrupt or their CEO unexpectedly gets elected by a landslide, such items would be a necessity.
I'm waiting for electronic voting systems to get challenged in court. Maybe for the 2004 USA elections...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Regradless of the source, the implications of handing over the democratic process to a vote-counting computer, with no capacity for human oversight, should scare you.
It's akin to Terminator, when the defense systems were set up to run completely automatically, and then something went wrong, and there was no way for humans to intervene.
Heck, you even get a printed receipt from an ATM. Why not from a voting booth?
Or, in accounting terms, how can you perform an audit if there's no paper trail?
The fact that closed, paperless voting systems are even being considered tells me that Democracy might not be around too much longer.
I think that we in the Free/Liberated software world (and to a lesser extent the Open Source world) should come up with a way of running cryptographically signed code on our preferred operating systems. I know that most of you equate signed code with Digital Rights Management (DRM) but that is only one use and not necessarily a bad one. There are many other times when making sure the code that you are running is the code that you want to be running and not some Trojanized version.
From a DRM perspective, would it be such a bad thing to have code that is signed run on a Linux machine? For the people that want to pirate movies and music this is obviously NOT a good thing; but for the rest of us it could be. The reason that we cannot watch a DVD legally on our Linux boxes is because the DVD-CCA won't allow anyone to write a player and distribute the source code. If there was a way to verify that a program was running in an unaltered state then I see no reason that the DVD-CCA would not allow us to produce a Free Software player for Linux. They could be assured that the player would only play the movie and not make an un-encrypted copy of it because the program would refuse to run if it had been modified.
Another use for such a system would be online games. Cheats have almost destroyed some of the online gaming communities by giving programmers and script kiddies an overwhelmingly unfair advantage over those that play fair.
Getting back to the topic at hand, if it were possible to run cryptograpphically signed code on Linux then it would be possible to construct an electronic voting system where ALL of the code is available. This would eliminate the possibility of an obscure bug in either Micro$aft's operating system or database server either tainting the results, or worse, being exploited to influence the results of the election. I believe what we need is an electronic voting system where:
- The source code can be audited.
- The voter is given a piece of paper confirming his/her vote.
- The paper trail is cryptographically signed so we can tell if the paper was altered.
- The paper could be fed back into a machine that could recover the votes cast thereby ensuring the voter that his/her voate was recorded correctly.
This would also have the advantage of saving the taxpayers a lot of money. Not only could we run the program on commodity hardware but we could port the program to all of the languages of the world that are used in either a Democracy or a Republic. This would enable voting to take place in many third world countries that cannot afford to produce a program for electronic voting. Further the system could be used by the illiterate as they could be presented with pictures of the candidate and simply touch their favorite.I don't know if this is even possible from a technical perspective. If I can go into the kernel code (or the device driver code) then I could probably find some way around the protections. But I still think the goal of being able to run cryptographically signed code, that is released under the GPL w/ source, would be beneficial to all of the members of the Free/Liberated software community.
Restore America: Dr. Ron Paul for President!
The sensible thing to do is to use technology to make the existing system more efficient. Ie use scanners and optical recognition to count the ballot papers. Fall back to traditional counting if there is any doubt or if the technology fails.
The Irish Lotto (nation Lottery) is an example of such a paper/electronic hybrid system in operation.
The current system is analogous to having our votes shipped abroad, counted using an unknown system, by persons unknown with no outside review allowed. Having all the votes shredded and then a final answer announced with no possibility for recount.
Its amazing, when it comes to technology people in general are so clueless. Even very fundamental changes in the workings of our democracy can be changed with very little resistence.
For those that feel the call of open source ideals and development, wouldn't voting software be a perfect match? If any application needs to be developed "publicly" with open review and revision, I think it would be this particular application.
This isn't directly related to the post, but I'm wondering whether electronic voting stops people from deliberately spoiling their ballot.
In the UK, we still use a paper voting system in general elections, and I (and a number of friends) have deliberately spoilt our ballot papers in past elections, to indicate a RON vote (Re-Open Nominations -- basically, we believe that all of the candidates listed are total wankers, and want other people to stand instead.)
It would be a damn shame if the ability to vote RON is lost, since there will be no other way for people to register their disgust with the slime presenting itself for election.
Who was it who said that the best person for King/President/Emperor was the one who didn't want the job?
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
The good news is that ES&S / Sequoia / Diebold are owned by major GOP campaign contributors, so expect traditional Republicans to be elected, not Bill Gates.
Tech Public Policy stuff
You're right, we should be getting our news from the "real, non-partisan" journalists instead, as you suggest.
Where are they?
I am guessing you get your 'objective' news and perspectives from a 'respectable' source like CNN
(aka CNN/AOL/AOLTW Books/AOLTW Interactive/Time Inc./Time Warner Cable/HBO/New Line Cinema/Turner Broadcasting/Warner Bros./Warner Music Group/etc.)
Scary, I agree
The court, which includes a Black person and someone who is Jewish, did not appoint anyone. All the Supreme Court did was uphold the actual election, and shut off someone's illegal attempt to overturn it by tampering with the ballots. Why did you bring race or religion into it?
I didn't, dipshit. Lysol did in the post I was replying to.
I do not have a signature
I'm not sure I see the benefit of this. One of the key elements of out voting system is the "secret ballot" - the idea that who you vote for remains a secret, and that no one can find it out (not even you). The principle behind this is both to allow personal choice, and to eliminate vote buying. If we got a receipt that said our names and who we voted for (with a hash so we can check it's in the computer), it would open an entire industry of vote-buying. Agents would openly say "sign here to say that you'll vote for Joe, and then come back after the election and give me your receipt and I'll give you a hundred bucks." This would make our political system more corrupt than it is now. Without any proof of who you voted for (as we have now), vote-buying isn't practical, as it's so open to fraud.
If you advocate a receipt with a just a hash, so that you can check your name against the list of people who votes, I ask what the point is. Your hash may show up on a screen on a list, but how do you know that that hash was counted into the right vote collection? May as well save the paper and not do receipts, and just trust the government (as you'd have to anyways).
For my money, I think we should have a combination manual-electronic voting system. Use any of the current e-voting systems (or invent a new one) and use them for the counts, but modify them so that they also print a receipt with the candidate selected's name (in both man- and machine-readable form), and have posters in the booth that allow the voters to confirm the machine-readable portions (ie. a poster that says "If you voted for Jack, your vote should look like this". If any race is within X%, it would trigger an automatic recount using the machine-readable portions of the receipts, witnessed by people from all parties. If anyone wants to challenge that, let them do another recount using the man-readable portions of the receipts.
This system gives us a quick count, a papertrail backup and semi-quick second count if need be, and a slow but verifyable third count in really extreme cases.
Cue The Sun...
Actually it must have worked pretty well for Great Britain. At one time that little island was one of the dominant powers in the world! Now look at them. Not that I support state religion, but there is quite a bit of historical evidence that says that prosperity and national success are not harmed by a state religion.
I do not have a signature
The UK doesn't have a state religion.
It has two established churches: one in England and another in Scotland (but none in Wales or Northern Ireland). Queen Elizabeth changes religion when she crosses the border.
"The UK doesn't have a state religion"
Is there a special relationship between the government and the Anglican Church (forced payments, etc). I know other northern/western European countries do this.
"I am guessing you get your 'objective' news and perspectives from a 'respectable' source like CNN"
No, they are too far left-wing and cannot be trusted. Every journalist and news source is biased, but some actually make an effort to to objective, such as AP (Associated Press).
"(aka CNN/AOL/AOLTW Books/AOLTW Interactive/Time Inc./Time Warner Cable/HBO/New Line Cinema/Turner Broadcasting/Warner Bros./Warner Music Group/etc.)"
Only two of those divisions named are news divisions: Time and CNN.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Using that frame of logic, there is quite a bit of historical evidence that that prosperity and national success were not harmed by thinking the world was flat, or that the sun revolved around the earth.
"State religion" has sure held Iran back. It has also damaged places like Cuba, where the state religion happens to be Atheism: both these countries, and many others, have governments that put a lot of effort into torturing and otherwise punishing those who have a different religion than what the government mandates.
"You're right, we should be getting our news from the "real, non-partisan" journalists instead, as you suggest. Where are they?
Try Fox News; they are better than the nut web kooks.
"That's right. You never heard of Dade County's Democrat voting machine?"
What about the Chicago machine, with the dead and multiple voters? Remember that a member of that machine, Bill Daley, was one of those helping Gore try to fraudulently overthrow the election. The strategy included false testimony in court about what Illinois does in its vote counting.
it seems to me that an electronic system can only be trusted if each and every voter can verify their vote in a published database of votes, and that each and every voter can use the entire database to verify the results for themselves :)
unfortunately this requires that a sufficiently large proportion of voters are prepared to check their vote and report any anomalies, i would love for a statistician to prove me wrong but i suspect that the voter apathy that currently applies to paper voting will make it a reasonable risk to publish a 'fixed' database of votes; even if the required number of checked votes necessary to reveal skullduggery is smaller than i might guess there remains the problem of the ballot being secret and preventing undue influence.
for further reading i recommend articles i read in linux user & developer in jan and feb this year here and here and also by a fellow called Jason Kitcat.
i have seen advocates of electronic voting use the current apathy of voters as a reason for introducing such voting, often with the claim that voting that can be done at home will result in greater participation,
i believe that vote rates may go up, but the checking afterwards? if voters were more prepared to be a part of local democracy, be an election volunteer, vote counter, whatever; if they were prepared to 'stay up all night' then i doubt there would be the perceived need for a 'new improved system'.
thus the wrong problem is being tackled, it's not 'how' people vote, it's 'why they don't want to'.
of course the discussion on that can go off on wild tangents so i won't start it
They use a similar system in the Da'il (our Parliament) and the counting PC got SQL Slammer, because they'd left it on the Internet-connected network.
Of course, this should have rendered any vote counted while the machine was on the network null and void, but the media dropped the ball and the opposition parties weren't IT-savvy enough to realise what a big deal they could have made of it.
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
"Sure, the biggest conspiracies aren't hidden at all -- the US grab for Iraqi oil, for example."
That one is so well hidden that there is no evidence of it anywhere.
Hmmm. You could, but those questions are much easier to answer definitively than your general statement about church and state not mixing.
I do not have a signature
...there is quite a bit of historical evidence that says that prosperity and national success are not harmed by a state religion.
The issue of a state religion has nothing to do with prosperity. It is an issue of freedom. There is no state religion in the US so that all citizens are free to believe as they wish, and act according to those beliefs.
The proper meaning of separation of church and state is that each citizen's values should be shaped by her religion or other moral code, and all citizens should come together to form laws which express a compromise between those values. By placing all religions and belief systems on an equal footing, all citizens are placed on an equal footing as well.
TTFN
I live in the US of A. I am under no obligation to write software that counts ballots correctly for any other country. In fact, I would have no problem whatsoever altering teh ballots for another country if paid a signifigantly large sum of money. Or perhaps I would be willing to change them on my own personal whims, and tell nobody. The moral of the story is:
Don't trust your nations's government to people who are not under it's influence!
If you do, you'll be sorry. I don't work for any of the ballot companies now, but I'm always keeping my eyes out. One of these days I'll get a job there and, I make this promise to you now, your government will never be selected by it's people ever again.
Financial companies (in the US, at least) are obligated by law to keep paper trail of every transaction for many years...
Are the governments cutting themselves some slack in the, probably, most important field (like they do in other areas)? Or do the voters get a paper receipt documenting, how they voted -- so a contested election can be manually recounted (even if with a certain margin of error)?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You had the same machine configuration (not so important, but can affect compilation, including memory size and other drivers on your system)
You have exactly the same version of compiler, including service packs.
You have and know exactly what version each and every source file was used for the released version of software distributed.
Keep in mind that there are probabally some custom built software packages in this case just for this particular election. We are not talking about version 2.3.5 of The Sims, but rather a custom package for a specific client. I have quite a bit of experience doing things like this, and often time pressures to "get something out the door" are so huge that sometimes I have, in the past, compiled something, thrown it over to Q/A for a quick review, and gone right back to modifying the software to implement a new feature or work on a minor bug that (I hope) isn't going to be noticed by the customer.
If, and this is a big if, you have solid policy of archiving with a version control system (that is followed... as a disciplined developer I'm assuming that you are if you follow this) that totally ensures that every software module is checked in with source code, including all resource files and miscellaneous items that sometimes get missed when checked in (these sometimes get missed even in well documented projects).
I have had problems with problems like this all of the time even with open source projects where very active mailing lists are around. It is common for a developer to check something in with CVS only to have somebody else in the project to yell on the list "I have a broken file! Where is module XXXX.YYY that is found on the include path"
We are also talking some lawyers that are totally computer illeterate and don't care at all if two programs are completely identical in functionality. We are talking about somebody who is trying to convince a jury of ordinary people (not computer geeks) that two files are not completely identical. Unless you can get every checksum and byte count in the binary files to come out identical from the "release" file to the file that is compiled in the courtroom, there is no way that you can show that they are the same file.
Even something simple like a date stamp that gets put on the file internally by the compiler can even cause something like this to change.
In other words, I don't see how you can get this to be legally hold water unless you release the source code as well, which is much easier to prove hasn't been changed (or easier to show what has been changed to an uneducated jury). That is the whole point on why source code must be sent under circumstances like the election machines we are talking about.
Only two of those divisions named are news divisions: Time and CNN.
I think that is exactly his point:
The question is: Can Time objectively review a book published by AOLTW Books? Can a soon-to-be-released 'huge' summer blockbuster movie by New Line Cinema be fairly reviewed before its big release by a CNN film critic?
It also becomes deceptive as the divisons keep their pre-merger brand identities. How many people you know could automatically rattle off the 11 above brands as being the same company?
I will let you extrapolate this out to consider campaign contributions to associated brands/parent companies/etc.
"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporation which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country"
-Thomas Jefferson, 1816
I meant to say billion, the Earth's population.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
"I would, of course, rather that power be vested in the government, which is appointed by the people and answerable to them, that that it be vested in international corporations, which are driven by greed and are answerable to no-one. Your mileage may vary."
Why not have the power be vested in the people themselves, with minimal government?
As for the government by international corporations, this does not exist. You also show you know nothing about popularly-controlled business structures: Corporations succeed by providing needed services and products (not by greed; but by work), and are much more accountable than any government.
" Sure we are just a "third-world" nation but I don't see a reason why this shouldn't scale up."
There is much to be learned from experiments in the often maligned "third world". Unfortunately, things do not look the best for Brazil at the moment, as the new President is one of those "velvet-glove fascists" who believes in amassing unreasonable power, but at least without shooting anyone in the process.
It is an example of how political interests tried desparately to overthrow the election. Fortunately, they failed, and the election went on as it had in previous years.
"(Florida officials and ultimately, the supreme court), were able to sway the outcome."
No. The voters swayed the outcome. The Florida counters merely reported it, and the Supreme Court let the will of the voters stand. They did not "sway" it; they resisted sway.
""The wierd thing is that this is all documented and yet very few seem to care."
Because what you claim really did not happen, and everyone knows it is sour grapes from the losing side who has trouble dealing with the fact that they lost in November 2000.