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Virginia Begins to Worry About Voting Machines
nonsecurity writes "Remember the unheeded stories about possible fraud with new electronic voting machines? Well it seems that someone is finally now taking notice. The Commonwealth of Virginia has been ready to take the leap with electronic voting machines, which many experts say are wide open to potential voting fraud.
Like other jurisdictions, Virginia had been shrugging off the concerns. But the Washington Post is is now reporting that Johns Hopkins Computer Scientists have been studying the issue and have found that the machines might be easily hacked and election result tampering is a very real concern. And apparently Virginia is listening. With next year's elections promising to be full of fireworks, it's good to see that people are finally taking notice of the issue."
The big advantage is that electronic voting will make election fraud, much easier to hide and so, less embarrassing for the free world's leading democracy.
Karma: Bad due to google bombing - Robert Watkins woz 'ere.
Anonymising the data makes it hard to ensure that everyone casts only one vote. Consider Slashdot polls an example.
Why are these machines connected to the outside world? Why can't all the polling locations be on a LAN?
--I'm not talking about dance lessons. I'm talking about putting a brick through the other guy's windshield.-
All voting software and results should be subject to scrutany by the OSS community. All fraud is shallow when subjected to so many eyeballs.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
And pray, how do you think one person one vote is enforced right now?...The Voting machines are intended to register votes, not verify people...WAY Wrong Analogy
Voting has never been about convenience, it's about doing your civic duty. American citizens have very little responsibilities in this country other than voting, paying taxes, and serving jury duty. Being lazy and not voting should result in an instant STFU award for the rest of the term. If you don't vote then I sure as hell don't want to hear you whining about the people running the government.
If we truly believe that open-source tends to provide better security, we should be developing open-source voting software. I'm sure it would take a while to get much notice from the government, much less "certification", but we could start a grass-roots campaign for adopting it through, say, universities in student body elections (a target screaming for being hacked) or maybe even local elections.
"The 2000 Florida presidential election showed the shortcomings of the current system."
The main shortcoming of the system is that it allowed Florida State Supreme Court justices to try and change the election rules after the election occured, and it allowed lawyers to lie in court in a wasteful attempt to overturn the election.
It works. The only thing we have to accomplish is prevent the sore losers from trying to mess things up.
... paper and pen? Put an X or a check by the candidates name. Real paper trails are easier to debug for tampering than the digital equivalent.
Let's give the voting machine contracts out to the makers of the slot machines. If anyone knows how to make an electro-mechanical device that is fraud resistant, it's those companies. Plus, just for fun, they could leave the little wheels with pictures of fruit on it. :)
Print out receipts.
That way, you vote electronically, you have your receipt, and you throw it in a box before you leave. Random audits of polling stations with those results compared to the receipts.
Just another failover idea..
Somebody (cue 200 replies) help me out here: why wouldn't you go open source for something like this? Other than some company with hands in the governer's pockets (and vice versa), I don't know a single good reason to give a private corporation control over the methods used to conduct democratic elections. Hacking and fraud by voters aside, what about fraud by programmers? Debugging tons of code is hard work - stealing an election is just a matter of a couple of "errors" in the right procedure; that 6% difference in a close race (or .2%, as in the last Presidential election) could be made to disappear, with nobody the wiser.
As for paper audits: if the perpetrators are smart, nobody would ever even suspect that we needed to audit an election...
My $.02
Web Design & Software Development
IMHO, anyone intending to fraud the elections would be aiming his ammo not at the voring machines, but rather at the counting machines. I can imagine that those are far easier to secure, but it's easier to bribe/bypass/eliminate 5 or 10 security guards at the center of the system rather than a few hundred guards at the leaves of the system... Why doesn't anyone ever question the security of the center of the system ? Especially with the most corrupt people being exactly there...
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
What's wrong with good old pencil and paper? No issues with 'chads', with electronic tampering, with software backdoors etc. Works fine here in the UK. Yes, I know there are more voters in the US, but surely the relationship or voters to overseers is linear?
Why do americans have this obsession about making everything more complicated. If you want a reliable solution to a problem use Occams razor. The simplest solution is usualy the best.
Voting on paper is cheap, reliable and it's very difficult to commit fraud, (a large number of people has to be involved), if you set it up right.
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
I'm as much of a technophile as the next guy, but there are still things in this world that require the paper trail.
One has to ask, what is the problem that we are trying to solve with electronic voting? Is it cost? I don't think so. Elections only happen once a year and the results are far too important to cut costs while lowering quality.
What we want to do is increase the quality of the elections by assisting the voters in filling out the ballot correctly. With the automated UI the voting results can be checked against business rules... that is, if you're only allowed to vote for two judges then you can only check off two on the ballot, etc. It provides instant instructions and instant feedback.
But regardless, you need a paper backup to do audits on the election. And most importantly, as we learned in Florida, that ballot must be in a human readable form which can not be easily damaged through normal handling.
The best solution I've seen suggested is to have an automated UI which queries the voter for responses, but the end result is then printed on a laser printer to a ballot sheet. The ballot sheet lists the names, with markers that are filled in(or line drawn between two arrows) to clearly identify the selections.
The voter may then review their ballot to insure it is marked as they wished it to be, and if so take it to a secure optical scan machine just like we use today.
One benefit of this system is that it provides a backup mechanism in the event of failure. That is, if the machines are not working the voter can still cast their ballot with the good old fashioned pencil. The automated UI system is there only as a convenience item.
Any system which only records results in an electronic manner is subject to corruption. The results have to be on paper for auditing and verification purposes.
Cost shouldn't be an issue, this is far to important to the stability of our democracy.
"Simple" is typically a subjective evaluation that has little to do with the appropriateness of a solution.
Lets apply Occams Razor to public policy. We can start with crime. Here are some simple solutions to stop crime:
Kill all the criminals
"Get rid of all laws. Without laws no crime
Both are simple. Is either solution anywhere near appropriate?
Occam's razor is not a safety blade.
The article talks about one problem that was their 5 years ago and was still there when reviewed. This was claimed to be fixed years and in fact was never fixed. Without open source voting machines, there is no way to gain the absolute confidence of the public, and a hacker somewhere is going to prove my point. You may think the newest version of an operating system is a big target, but it's nothing compared to the vote that decides who runs the worlds lone superpower. The only question is who will get the most votes in 2004, mickey mouse or daffy duck?
1) How fast does it really need to be? Most paper counting can be done by that night, or at least the early hours of the next morning. It allows people to get worked up with anticipation for a while ;)
2) I agree with your comment about getting people involved with the counting. I've thought of this myself: the more volunteers involved in the counting, the more people who are actually involved with the election. I see involvement like this as a means to help fight increasing voter apathy. In the long run, I think electronic voting will increase voter apathy, and thus decrease democracy.
The good old mechanical lever-type machines we had (:-( )in Marion County since time immemorial still look like better security design *and* better user interface design than anything else I've seen, be it paper or electronic. Definite visual and tactile feedback, Braille- and multilingual-capable, no electricity required, no system crashes, no possibility of erroneous multi-marking, and the counters locked inside a steel case -- what more is needed? (Okay the counters could be electronically readable via authenticated secure channel from a central tally office, but what *else* would you have?)
I'm pretty sure the parent of your post meant something similar to this method: you go vote very much the way you do now (by presenting your id and signing a sheet of paper)...then you assign your vote to a number (that is not associated with your name in any record) and you make those numbers public, so that you can check against them.
I agree that a system like thisis a MUST when it comes to verifying electronic voting. My big problem with it is that because of the paper trail, the individual VOTER may trouble.
Consider, we have a secret ballot for a reason--for example, to prevent your boss from pressuring you to vote for a certain candidate at the cost of your job, or to keep the local klansmen from going after folks who dared vote for a black candidate.
Under the current system, only you know who you voted for--you can always lie if pressured by someone to know how you voted. With a public paper trail, people with leverage can demand to know your receipt number, and CONFIRM what you tell them. This is BAD.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
The usual mechanisms (e.g. checking your ID at the voting station and checking off a list) protect only against voters trying to vote several times. They do not protect against any fraud by those involved in the collection and counting of votes. Right now, you have lots of pieces of paper to count, and a lot of people looking over your shoulder to make sure you don't cheat. With an automated system, it's hard to ensure that the system prevents anyone involved in the voting system (programmer, network technician, admin, et.c.) from changing other people's votes.
This just goes to show you what you get when you let hysteria drive your decisions.
Punch card voting machines are very reliable and secure, but because of some whipped up hysteria and misinformation, we're scrapping a perfectly good system for a nightmare boondoggle.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Canada does this. And it works. Perhaps takes a bit longer to report the results, because they all have to be counted by hand, but the system works well. It's also not confusing. No punch outs, no complicated UIs to learn. Simply put a checkmark in the circle next to the candidate's name. Just to make sure, they put an example of what the checked box should look like, right on the top of the ballot.
All ballots are put in a securely-sealed box, which is opened up in front of officials representing the parties and counted.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
If they're going to take my vote down on electrons, I want to get something I can take away which records that vote, so that it can be compared to the official records in case of an investigation. (For that matter, I could authorize an unofficial tally organization to recount my vote -- if enough people did that, irregularities might become apparent.)
There's lots of technicalities about signatures and timestamps and encryption and such, but the point is that if they're going to take away the property that my vote has a *visible* path through the system and can be *visually* verified and audited at each step in the process, then that's not OK and I want a way to make them prove that the vote tallied for me is the one I cast.
A voting system is both inaccurate and vulnerable if it allows corrupt officials to deny voting priviledges to those who are eligible.