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Inside Electronic Voting Machines
Alien54 and several other people wrote in about a couple of stories published in a New Zealand webzine: an examination of an electronic voting system, and some less interesting political speculation about it. Diebold voting systems are in fairly wide use, and apparently provide zero security to keep election officials from writing in whatever election totals they want.
Some would also say that is the case with slashdot's voting (moderation) system. Closed, and opaque, with a half-dozen superusers overruling everybody.
I wonder why the editors never notice this hypocrisy.
Diebold voting systems are in fairly wide use, and apparently provide zero security to keep election officials from writing in whatever election totals they want.
So? There are traffic laws in place that prevent no one from speeding if they want to, yet people would scream to high heaven if they weren't allowed to break the laws there by technology limiting them to the speed limit. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
This should be of no surprise to anyone familiar with Diebold. You may have noticed that these guys are the makers of bank ATMs, among other banking and security equipment. Most of these ATMs, especially the older ones, use only 56bit encryption. 128bit is available in the form of a ridiculously expensive chip which also costs a few hundred dollars labor to have a tech come out and stick it in. Most banks, being the biggest cheap-skates in business, are unwilling to spend the money for these upgrades so, many of the ATMs that you regularly use likely have 56bit encryption at best.
Make a public domain design&software for a voting machine. Get five companies to build them. No one company can rig the election.
My only big design point is Dual Receipt, like a credit card transaction. Fast electronic count, paper count for them, paper count for me.
Start Running Better Polls
Three years later, and it seems that equipment manufacturers have managed to blithely ignore every bit of it. And apparently, so have the people purchasing the stuff.
United States citizens don't have a right to responsibly vote, they have a right to vote. If you open a door for literacy, why not require that people have certain moral standards? Why not require that they not be communists? Why not require that they be conservative or liberal or white or black?
More here.
Then again, it would only take one fraudster to falsly claim their vote had been miscounted.
Also, any system that lets the voter check their vote also lets someone forcing them to vote one way or another to verify that they've done as commanded.
I'm already not so sure I trust our current election system, and from what I've seen of computer security breaches, I would never trust a computerized system. Cheating aside, it would only take one malicious cracker, a bad hard drive or two, a broken communications line, a power failure, or any one of countless possible catastrophes to ruin the credibility of an election or make it impossible to vote. And there would be no hard copies to recount.
Access databases
Voting is one domain where Microsoft needs to step aside and let someone else do it right.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
But the Diebold machines leave *no* paper trail - there are no paper ballots to check againts. Once the database is tampered with there is no way to reconstruct the voter's intent.
Supreme Court also ruled once that Blacks were less than a person. Supreme Court rulings are often overturned by the Supreme Court.
.......
I fail to see how a literacy test is bigoted, or racist. Literacy doesn't mean English only (although I would recommend this) either.
Literacy means you can read and understand what you read. If you can't read and understand what you are reading, how the HELL are you gonna know who you voted for ANYWAY? Wouldn't you have to rely upon someone ELSE?
Perhaps that is what the vacant minded left is really after. Tell you how to think, vote, live
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
How can the voter verify that his number is unique?
And how can you assure voting is anonymous when the
machine can keep the votes ordered by time and it's
easy to note when a voter verified his identity?
Ok for the receipt to the commission, but I'm not completely sure about the receipt to the voter: let's say that some days before the elections someone comes to you telling how you should vote, "or else". And he requires that after the elections, you show him a proof that you actually voted as you were told.
This went so far in some areas of Italy that on the last (regional) elections the usage of photocameras and videophones were explicitly forbidden in the voting booth. And yes, someone actually tried anyways and was discovered (and his vote invalidated).
So, in some way, being unable to prove to someone else how you voted is not entirely a bad idea.
(of course it can be objected that the nasty guys could come after you anyways if the result of the elections is not the expected one, regardless of how you actually voted...).
No kidding, these things have the potential to be a disaster for the democratic process, enabling voting fraud on a scale never before seen.
Except in Florida.
I'm much funnier now that I'm a subscriber.
Electronic voting machines are a bad idea. There is NO reason to use them for general voting.
By electronic voting machine, I mean a machine with a display that allows you to select candidates and keeps the tally electronically. You the voter directly interact with this machine.
Ultimately there is no way to be 100% certain that the machine is doing what you want. The only real backup is a paper trail for a hand recount. These machines don't offer that. Result: the machine can make up numbers and you'd be hard pressed to tell.
Okay, so the machine can print out a verification receipt that you also file. That solves the problem. Of course, then what has the machine gained you? The voter still needs to verify that the printout says what it should (and what do you do if it doesn't?). This just adds an unnecessary double check that voters have to worry about.
You might as well just initially fill out a paper ballot and have a machine scan it. Machine scanned paper ballots can be simple for voters to use, simple for machines to scan, and simple for a hand recount. If a machine doesn't like the ballot it can reject it and a poll staff person can explain the situation ("The machine rejected your ballot. I can force it through, but one or more of your votes might be thrown away. Or I can shred this ballot and give you a new one. If you like, a poll staff member can help you fill out the new ballot.") This is exactly the situation here in Madison, Wisconsin and it works great. The ballots are really simple (there is a two inch arrow with a one in gap in the middle pointing to each candidate's name with, you just fill in the gap on the arrow pointing to your choice). It's easy to fill out. It's trivial for a machine to scan (it's like the fill in the bubble tests, but with much larger, easier to read fill in areas). The big arrows are trivial for a hand recounter to check. You can do occasional random hand recounts to verify that the automatic tabulators are working correctly.
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In the US (and other places, too!) there's this thing called a "secret ballot". A paper receipt that can be used to verify the actual votes once you've left the polling place can also be used by thugs to make sure you voted the way they wanted you to.
Any verification scheme has to be contained within the polling place to avoid this (very real) problem. We depend on having two election officials present, typically from different parties, to prevent systematic voter fraud.
[place clever signature here]
If you have dead people voting, then the non-electronic systems aren't perfect. What we can do is realize that both are flawed and just work at improving the systems.
We could have some hasing system to track where and who votes while still keeping privacy. Other stated ideas are open source code. What about using state-school run voting servers? Just having series of mirrors that politicians can't touch. There are many possibilities out there, so lets refine instead of announcing its failure.
right, but it wouldn't make much difference to the crowd here, as much as rigged elections in the real world make (none).
Think about it: How many people would it need to care about rigged elections in order for it to be brought to light ? There is lots of evidence that the 2000 elections were less than proper, but so far there has been very little response to these allegations. A normal reaction would be absolute outrage by ALL politicians and an inquiry that brings up every last bit of evidence. The fact that this has not happened shows that politicians are happy with the status quo (two parties, for outsiders absolutely indistinguishable that exchange the baton every four to eight years).
As if the only subjects you can differ on are abortion, healthcare and whether or not we should endorse a government religion.
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During the 2000 election mess, Canada just happened to have an election. We found out our results about 15 hours after ballots were closed.
This isn't a troll about Florida, etc. but rather a comparison. America uses punch cards and fancy voting machines and all that stuff.
Canada, OTOH has a piece of paper. With some names on it, and circles next to the names. you put a mark (check, X, your initials, whatever) next to the person you want to vote for. If there's a mark in more than one (and not just a small pencil mark like a dot. Something that actually looks like you meant to vote for more than one person) or no marks at all, the vote is thrown out. Everything is counted by humans.
So, why is it that they're looking for new fancy ways to (screw up) voting, when countries like Canada managed to use circa 1868 technology and have a more efficient (based on 2k elections) system?
Where did the perception that replacing a practical solution with a technical one erased all need for the practical precautions associated with that solution?
"We used to keep personnel files in a locked cabinet in a locked room, but now we just keep them on a SMB share with a null password."
"We used to keep voting half-way honest through careful ID and ballot controls, but now it's just Diebold's problem."
What gives?
-Peter