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

[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).

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.

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?

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.