Hardly Anyone Cares About Computer Voting Problems

Avidwriter writes "It's a sad thought that Roblimo explores in a NewsForge article about computer voting fraud and how you'd think all honest politicians would be working to make sure computerized voting systems are open source, and why open source wouldn't hurt well-run voting machine companies' profits. Not that most people care, since they don't even bother to vote, right?"

Comments

in australia I hear they have mandatory voting

[dreadnougat]

even if you vote "abstain", or you get a small fine (unless you CAN'T be there, ie are hospitalized)

At least it would stop the whining about voter turnout :)

Re:in australia I hear they have mandatory voting

[diersing]

Many countries do this, of course those same countries usually declare a national holiday and most business are closed allowing the population the time to carefully weigh all the candidates and dutifully select the nominee they want. Yes I'm lobbying for a day off

I got burned by this when my cruise ship pulled into harbor in Belize, only to find everything was closed until the polls closed at 6pm. Imagine my distain when I found out our ship pulled anchor at 5pm, the bastards!!!

Re:in australia I hear they have mandatory voting

[gantrep]

The duty of the government is to protect the rights and well-being of it's citizens. I do not believe I should be compelled to be anywhere or compelled to NOT be somewhere unless I have violated the rights of others. YES, I DO mean that I do not believe in the draft or in the way in the way the Jury duty is set up either.

Re:in australia I hear they have mandatory voting

[MikeFM]

I think people that show up to vote should get a tax break. That way if you had a voucher proving you voted (even if abstaining) you could write it off come tax time. Even if they only gave you $15 to cover your gas and time I think it'd still help motivate people.

Or to improve the college student turnout maybe they should offer coupons for a free pizza, drink, or whatever to each person that turned out? I'm sure you could get companies to sponsor the elections.

Of course I move every six months or so.. making it hard to get many chances to vote. I think maybe that's why I was refused voter registration during the last Presidential election (though the refusal had no reason writen on it).

Re:in australia I hear they have mandatory voting

[gantrep]

Though I support taxation, my take on it is almost backwards, in a sense, to yours. Taxation is not a duty of the people. The people have no "duty" to their government. The government has a duty to them.

The people, by their own consent, choose to create an entity for their own protection from threats foreign and domestic, etc. You see, the payment of taxes is by their own consent. No one can claim by his own authority, a right to the property of others.

This raises the issue then, how can taxes be imposed then on the minority of people who do not support them?

My answer is that participation in society should be voluntary, however for all practical purposes it is quite difficult to try to find somewhere to live under no governmental rule.

There is no society that is structured according to my ideals.

Why Should It Be Open Source??

[Anonymous Coward]

What difference will it make whether the software running these systems are open source or not?

You could easily manipulate these systems without having access to source code. Just manipulate the numbers behind the scenes, and voila..there goes the 'open source' miracle.

Look at this site, the source is open, but the voting (moderation) is closed and unchecked. What matters is that the people should be able inspect what goes on behind the scenes.

no kidding

[croddy]

the student government at my college switched to computer voting a couple of years ago. every semester it's the same story; some terrible problem with the system means we have to do it all over again, usually twice.

I've written to the voting committee, written editorials, but no one cares. they claim that it's better than paper voting because machines don't make mistakes.

once I voted 12 times. but that was because they were relying on cookies. that was fixed in the revote. once they used checkboxes instead of radio buttons, and I voted for everyone. but that was fixed in the next one.

people are lazy, and even if it's got problems, they prefer clicking on some web form to actually going and voting in person. I say if you're too lazy to get up and vote, then you probably shouldn't be voting anyway.

but nobody cares, machines don't make mistakes... yeah? well, I've got a 20 page study of georgia voting technology that disagrees.

it's high time we had an election server h4x0red to make people think twice about it.

Is it worse than analog vote fraud?

[Ars-Fartsica]

What could be worse than counting hanging chads for two weeks? Manual election systems prompted the Supreme Court to decide the last election. What could be worse?

physical proof from electronic voting?

[MikeFM]

I would think it'd be a good idea to have these electronic machines stamp out physical ballots that would need to be submitted and could be visually verified by voters as accurate. That way you could have the benefits of electronic voting (instant results, ease of use, and voting from more remote locations) and would still have a physical object to verify the results against should a recount be asked for. I'd go as far as barcoding each ballot so you could verify them against their digital version quickly.. to verify the machines are working properly in case of a recount.

nice theory but

[Nf1nk]

Concerns about the NWO and a belief that your vote just ges into a box to ignored at the politions leasure is only a factor in a small number of peoples not voting.
The fact is, most folks are fat dumb and relitivly happy. They can't be bothered with who is running for what office (or even what mst of these offices are supposed to do) and if they knew it is very hard to tell what major canidate is most likley to vote the way you would like them. As long as the wolf is not at their door and they can still spend money they don't care who is in office. To be fair at this point in the game the politions are so crooked and the parties so close in what they say (and more so in what they do) that it may really not matter.
So I throw my vote away on third party canidates in protest, but I do show up.

Are paper ballots any more secure?

[release7]

JFK might have never got into office if accurate vote counting was ever a priority.

I don't know about anyone else, but when I vote, there's these little senile old ladies who ask what my name and address is and don't ask for any ID. Give me some cheap sunglasses and a fake beard and I could cast several votes for me and my neighbors next election.

in Chile there IS mandatory voting

[SoTuA]

In Chile we have *somewhat* mandatory voting. It works like this:

1.- You _register to vote_ if you want to vote, and you are 18 or older.

2.- Now that you are registered, you MUST vote on EVERY ellection there is. If you don't like it, don't register. The only excuses is being hospitalized or more than 300 Km from your voting home (you register on a given district, and must vote there).

3.- When you go vote, you must provide the national ID card, and you are tallied against a list of voters for that particular place. After you vote, you must sign the register. (that's how they know you didn't vote and get fined)

4.- ???

5.- Profit! :)

But seriously, I say *somewhat* because you can always not register and mind your own biz. I am 26 at the moment and I'm not registered, although I'm getting enough interest to register. The drag is that you *must* vote on *every* election, and there's the slim chance that you get drafted to man the voting tables :o (now that's a crappy job)

Good reliable voting solutions

[einhverfr]

Here are the guidelines I came up for a fraud-resistant electronic voting system:

1: The traffic with the database server should be properly secured (ipsec, ssl w/client certs, etc.)

2: The data should be stored in an accountable way. For example, if the data is altered, there should be a way to determine this.

3: The system should allow manual verification of results.

So here was the system I designed:

1: Database server communicates with clients using ESP/IPSec protected communications.

2: Voting machines use touch-screens. At the end, the voting machine displays a list of candidates you voted for and asks you to confirm. Then when you do, it submits your data to the database and prints a ballot. The database also stores information relating to the ballot regarding which voting station you were at. You deposite the ballot in the ballot box.

The ballot contains: 1: An easy-to-scan bar code
2: A human readable ballot listing for manual verification. 3: The ballot serial number.

This gives you almost everything you get with the paper system as well as everything you get with the electronic system.

Re:Good reliable voting solutions

[RobinH]

Voting machines use touch-screens.

Have you ever setup touch screens? I do it quite frequently... they have to be calibrated before use, and periodically thereafter.

Now, if I were an unscrupulous voting machine operator, then no matter how good the software was, I could EASILY fool the calibration routines into thinking that real screen position X1,Y1 (vote for liberal) gets mapped to X2,Y2 (vote for conservative, nazi, etc.). The same could apply to the confirmation screen.

The fact is, the data you're entering (who to vote for) is transformed so many times during an electronic voting process (screen co-ordinates to memory locations to object references to PCI bus to telephone or network to ODBC to file, that there are far too many points for tampering. When I vote on paper, there's only myself, a piece of paper, and a pen involved. Maybe a ballot box. The only real place for tampering is the ballot box, and if you can't keep a friggin' box tamper proof, how do you expect to do the same with a computer?

Re:You're asking for too much.

[zenyu]

At least links give some response.. when's the last time voting had any effect whatsoever? Press link #1 for corrupt democrat.. Press link #2 for corrupt republican.. maybe even a rare extra option to Press link #3 for insane third-party canidate.

There are some elections that are competitive. I read an economist article where they asserted that in a couple of midwestern states and one tiny east coast state (RI?/DE?) your vote actually counts. The midwestern states had a non-partisan committee (or rather dual-party) to draw the district boundaries. The boundaries are normally drawn to benefit the current state party, witness Texas. To add insult to injury the state houses usually have even more biased districting that doesn't even take population into account. The small eastern state just happened to have one representative and a population evenly divided between the major parties.

It's not that the fixed nature of US elections is a new problem. Thomas Gilpin wrote about it in 1844, well off Pennsylvania paper maker. Senator Charles Buckalew described the major problems in such timeless words that when I first read them I thought they were written in the 1990's not the 1870's. And then there were better systems, such as the proportional representation during NYC's 20th century golden decades. In NYC the democratic machine defeated PR by appealing to the fear of communism, there were a couple communists elected, along with a dozen other minor party seats, but the Democrats real objection was with having only 2/3 of the seats, so opponents, especially Republicans could embarass them when they engaged in corruption. About 10 other cities adopted PR around the turn of the century and corruption dropped by 90% to 99% depending on who you listen to and how bad things were before. Cincinatti went from the most corrupt city in America to winning an award for being least corrupt in just a few years. There PR was defeated by appealing to whites fears of blacks getting representatives on the city council.

Proportional Representation was an English and French idea expounded by some of the same people that first understood how capitalism worked and wanted to apply those lessons to government. It's distinct from Parlimentary government. We could get PR state by state in at least the larger states, there are some federal laws to discourage it but I don't think they outlaw it. A state like California or New York has enough representatives that they could do it. Probably the system that would appeal most to Americans is one where anyone that won an outright victory would get their seat but seats where no one won outright would be split up between the parties in proportion to their tally in the overall vote minus the seats won outright.

In CA lets say they have 53 seats and the Democrats got 45% of the vote and 15 seats outright, Republicans got 44% of the vote and 5 seats outright, while the Greens got 5% and the Libertarians 4% and others 2%. Here's how it would go:

OS PRS Total
D 45% 15 9 24
R 44% 5 19 24
G 5% 0 3 3
L 4% 0 2 2
O 2% 0 0 0 - none qualify for seats

It's not as fair as pure democracy due to both rounding error as you can see with the Green vs. Liberterian party in this example. And, people not affiliated with a strong enough party get no seats. This also ignores the new dynamics that would emerge, I for one would stop voting for the Republicrats, but I would split my vote between the Green and Liberterian Ticket. Right now it would be Green locally and Liberterian nationally, but then again we probably wouldn't be in the current mess if we had PR. And this would change depending issues on the slate. I might vote for a single issue party on the state level if the others were ignoring the issue, say the education reform party, and then abandon them once the reforms were adopted. If I were a Brooklynite I would probably looking for a fusion Judgeship reform party so that legal winners would no longer be picked based o

People don't vote because nobody represents them

[Moderation abuser]

The major political parties policies exist to serve "the majority" they couldn't get into power without aiming squarely at "the majority" and therefore their policies are all very similar.

If your views fall slightly outside views of "the majority" you simply don't get any representation. You also have to remember that "the majority" has an *average* I.Q. of 100.

None of the major political parties views or policies represent my own, so should I be forced to vote for someone who doesn't represent me?

The top down architected democracies which we have at the moment basically don't work as forms of representation. They don't represent the people they are supposed to. Representation really needs to come from the bottom up where local views and issues can be expressed, which means democracy and therefore taxation have to be turned upside down.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

[Rogerborg]

You didn't vote? Then you don't care.

You voted using this system? Then you don't care.

The US electoral system is an obsolete farce. I care passionately, and that's why I won't support it by participating.

Re:People don't vote because nobody represents the

[GReaToaK_2000]

Then contact your local representatives and congresspersons. Is that too much to ask? No.

The biggest problems with the US political scene today is APATHY likes yours and laziness.

Did you know that in MOST states there is a "no vote" option. Go in. Select NONE of the switches (for those with decent voting booths, FL is OBVIOUSLY excluded from this category) and move the handle. You just voted for no one, BUT you increased the number of voters to hit that booth. This is recorded and denotes a no vote.

Personally if more people that whine about "no one represents my views" got off their asses and got involved there would be people to represent them. If more people like you did a NO VOTE then it would make things happen as well.

Who ever increased your mod falls into your category as well.

Get active in. The fact that there are SO MANY people like you in this country is how a childish, idiot like Bush made it into office. Americans dropped the ball on that one.

turnout, bah humbug

[cascadingstylesheet]

I'm not even going to address the computerized aspect here ...

But in a happy, free country, turnout should be low.

We don't, collectively, have to worry about politics that much, and that is a grand thing!

I vote, but frankly I'm pretty happy that no matter who wins, odds are pretty good that taxes and regulations will stay tolerable, death squads won't be roaming the streets, etc.

Turnout was 100% in good old Iraq, if that's what you want to emulate.

Maybe Bush really DID steal the election

[kindbud]

Black Box Voting

The source code for the software used in one voting machine was discovered on the Internet, on an unprotected FTP site belonging to Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems Inc. The software, when compiled and run in tests, showed that it appears to be the code used in the company's AccuVote-TS touch-screen terminals.

This software has been analyzed in detail at Truthout.org: How to Rig an Election in the United States. I think your stomach will start turning just a couple paragraphs in. No, let me start it turning for you: the backend database for this state-of-the-art touch-screen votiong machine is Microsoft Access. But that's only part of the story. Wait until you read about the hidden tables. More details here: How We Discovered The Backdoor. The actual code from the FTP site is here: Original Data.

I don't know about you, but I became a little nauseous reading this.... It's quite the yee-opener.

Some more on "problematic" election results:
Florida Ballots Project

Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

NY TImes: Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud, Experts Say

The most stomach churning thing of all, I think, is the Christian Right connection to Deibold and ES&S.

If you find this stuff credible, spread the word around.