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Electronic Voting: The Other Side of the Story
_randy_64 writes "We've all read about the perils of online voting. But in an article in MIT's Tech Review, noted technologist Simson Garfinkel looks at the other side of the story and comes away thinking that e-voting might not be so bad, if done properly. He mentions several ways that traditional ballot voting is just as 'hackable' as the electronic version."
Here's a non-HTTPs one for those of use who don't trust encryption technology in general, not just electronic voting :-)
n kel090303.asp
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_garfi
You know, like the author of "Practical UNIX and Internet Security."
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Most of these techniques of stealing an election, "stationing tow trucks outside the polls to intimidate voters; setting up police roadblocks (as was done in Florida in 2000); intentionally designing confusing ballots; putting people on the ballot with the same name as your opponent; and getting votes the old fashioned way--by buying them" can be used for e voting, too. In addition, usually three people view the paper ballot before recording the vote, no one person reviews ballots and records them. I still don't trust e-voting and never will. No system is perfect, how about some of you coders out there discuss the perfectness of your code. Unless you're coding "Hello World", I don't think so.
Just did a basic search on Simson Garfinkel I didn't know who he was... He's a writer for O'Reilly and has penned/contributed to some of their books "Practical Unix & Internet Security, 3rd Edition","Web Security, Privacy & Commerce, 2nd Edition","Database Nation (Paperback) "... damn he's been writing Unix security books since '91...
Here's my guess:
Chain voting is *not* a way to fraudulently change the vote, it is a way for a rich guy to pay voters for verified votes for the rich guy's candidate, which is impossible with a true secret ballot.
Rich guy somehow gets his hands on a paper ballot cast for his candidate -- maybe by going to vote himself and not putting it in the box. Rich guy can now go to someone about to vote, and say: here's a ballot cast for my candidate. You go mark your ballot for my candidate, but put my ballot in the box and bring me the ballot you marked. Rich guy makes sure that his ballot is marked in such a way that he can check that the ballot brought back by the voter is the newly marked one.
This way rich guy knows that the ballot cast by the voter was the one that rich guy marked, so he knows who the voter voted for, and can now safely pay him, and use the ballot that the voter just marked to give to the next paid voter.
This is bad if you think that being able to pay voters (which is in fact illegal) will result in the downfall of democracy. Personally, it seems to me that having politicians pay voters directly with their own money would at least be a bit more direct and efficient than the way they buy elections now, often using the taxpayers money... but I digress...
Simson GarFINKEL, not Garfield. Who's editor today, George W. Bush?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Although I'm not sure that vote buying or selling should necessarily be wrong, ie people are still responsible for their vote, they just choose and accept to give it in exchange for money. They'd have to choose and accept the actions of the person whom they elect that way.
From here about half way down
38 / March 2000 Illinois Issues
One major vote fraud technique was "chain voting," where a wily precinct captain would obtain a blank punch card, often by securing an absentee ballot, and punch in the "right" votes. He would then give the prepunched card to a voter -- sometimes solicited off the street with a few bucks or a bottle of cheap wine -- have him go in to vote, drop the prepunched card in the box on the way out and hand the precinct captain another unpunched card. The "chain" could go on all day, as long as cooperating voters could be found and friendly election judges didn't examine things too closely.
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Note that this method probably works with any paper voting system.
It would be interesting to have a system whereby a computer can be used to facilitate the vote (eg with photos of candidates etc) print the filled out ballot, and it also records the result. Then the paper vote count could be compared with the computer vote count. If they were different you'd know that some stuffing around had occured although you still couldn't rule out "chain voting". Hmm, maybe if the paper had a security tag that beeped if it left the room...and you could see people putting their ballots in, and they had no opportunity to hand blank ballots over to bodgy election officials without being seen by everyone else that is voting.
I think if we're game to use the internet or computers for banking we should be game to use it for voting. Also if we do stick with paper, a computer system that prints out the ballot would still help people who can't read or see paper or whom have dodgy handwriting. Ie it would still be better than paper alone.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
The article was extremely misleading in its claim that academics such as David Dill at Stanford are opposed to DRE voting systems. Dill does not *oppose* DREs, he just believes that they should produce a paper ballot, which should be used at least for a back-up or verification of the electronically recorded votes.
The article mentions a "chain voting scam" that backup paper ballots are supposedly vulnerable to, but it says nothing whatsoever about how the scam works. Does anyone know what this is all about?
By the way, please read Ensuring the Integrity of Electronic Voting.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News