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E-Voting Done Right - In Australia
tehanu writes "After all the furor over e-voting in America, Wired News has an article about e-voting done right in Australia. An important factor is that all of the software is open-source. The company responsible actually seems to have given consideration to the integrity of the democratic process, too - from the lead engineer: 'Why on earth should (voters) have to trust me -- someone with a vested interest in the project's success? A voter-verified audit trail is the only way to 'prove' the system's integrity to the vast majority of electors, who after all, own the democracy.' They also have scathing words for Diebold: 'The only possible motive I can see for disabling some of the security mechanisms and features in their system is to be able to rig elections. It is, at best, bad programming; at worst, the system has been designed to rig an election.' In general they are 'gob-smacked' by the whole situation with electronic voting machines in the US right now."
Don't kid yourself: open source is nice, but it doesn't guarantee a fault-proof or secure voting system (suppose somebody installs wrong or malicious software on one of the machines?). The only way to do that is to provide voting receipts which can be counted independently, by hand -- and that does not exclude closed-source solutions.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
This petition is the only way to guaruntee that your vote will be counted--it mandates that machine give the voter a human-readable receipt which the voter drops into a lock box in case. In the case of a recount, the paper receipts are counted. It also mandates a manual recount in .5% of districts to verify the accuracy of the machines.
The petititions are linked to at the bottom of the VerifiedVoting site.
Keep the freedom to vote.
"If a voting system precludes any notion of a meaningful recount, is cloaked in secrecy and controlled by individuals with conflicts of interest, why would anyone buy it?," Quinn said. "At the very least give citizens the right to choose whether they want to use paper ballots ... thus allowing each elector to be personally satisfied as to the integrity of the process in which they are participating."
That just makes... sense.
Don't panic. It isn't on the company's website, it's on the ACT Electoral commission's website - the tar.gz is here, linked from this page.
The Austrailian ballot is where candidates (for all elections) are listed entirely on one ballot and you get to choose which candidate you want regardless of party.
It may bewilder some people that before the 1920's when you went to vote, a member of the Republican or Democratic party stood outside your polling in place and handed you a "Republican" or "Democratic" ballot. Said ballot would have only the party nominations for President, Senator, House Representatives, State Governor, State Senator, etc. As a result you "voted the party line."
The Austrailian ballot was introduced between the 1920s and 1940s in the US (different municipalities adopted it at different times). It changed US politics because now people could vote for a Democratic President but a Republican Senator. One major result is that since WWII there have been very few times when the party of the president coincided with the majority party of Congress. In fact the Bush administration which has had a Republican Congress for most of the three years it has been in office is an exception not a norm.
This could greatly improve efficiency of vote buying. The money for the vote could be transfered directly into your account.
Foreign readers might also be interested in checking out the Australian preferential voting system. This is, in my opinion, a much fairer system than the "first past the post" system of the UK or US. In the preferential system, votes for minority candidates are never wasted as the vote cannot be split. This would be especially valid for a presidential system as in the US. For more details, check out: http://www.australianpolitics.com/voting/systems/p referential.shtml
Election Systems and Software, the other major electronic voting company, is also, coincidentally, run by a big Repub' contributor. Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska has a stake in that company. Can you imagine that? A sitting senator with financial interests in a company responsible for counting votes? Unbelievable.
Sort of makes me think about how incredibly brazen Halliburton's role is in Iraq now. These people don't even attempt to maintain the illusion of impartiality. So, see, you're right -- this Australian company's ideas about the proper way to ensure confidence, they just don't apply. As long as our Repubs can fly under the radar, they don't care whether it's right or not.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
In most elections that I have witnessed in Canada, either municipal, provincial, or federal, there is ALWAYS a paper trail. I mark my ballot with a big fat X in the appropriate spot on a voting card.
Then the magic begins: the cards are each fed, as collected, into a vote counting machine. The ballots are held in the case a recount (automated or manual), and the results are known just as soon as it takes to communicate the results from each of the machines at each polling station.
We usually have the final, _official_ results within an hour or two of the poll closing time, and you can always go back to the paper ballot to verify the count. And who the heck has a hard time with a piece of paper and a pencil?
No hanging or dimpled chads here, and this to me seems the best of both worlds - technology aiding the speed of vote-counting (isn't that what this is all about, anyway?), but with the safeguards (and transparency) of a manual voting system.
Nobody says open source is better because it's open source. It has to be open source because is MUST be open source by principle.
Get that in your damn head. Every citizen (who cares) should have the right to get a deep insight into how his vote is eletronically processed. If you're not allowed to know how your vote is processed you have no democrazy.
Think of the implications of a true democracy.
Think of the masses voting on each and every topic.
How much does your average citizen know about foreign policy? Health care? Criminal and civil law?
A true democracy would be the worst form of government I could think of, unless you happen to have the exact same opinions as >50% of the population, you're fucked.
Realize that around 70% of Americans are christian. Now, lets vote on whether or not to allow that mosque or synagogue (sp) to open its doors on the corner, or whether gays should be allowed to parade, etc..
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
... the fact that you can read "the" source code doesn't guarantee that's the version of the software -- or even the software itself -- actually being run on the machine. Is there some audit procedure for the compile/link/install process?
licet differant, aequabitur
I dislike IRV as much as you do, but at the moment you can't blame Australia - no country is doing any better than IRV for their national elections.
Good methods (like Condorcet) should start in small organizations and work their way up, so that people are already familiar with how good preferential voting works.
Debian, for example, has already worked out lots of kinks and unfairness in their voting system by switching to Condorcet. Some "rules of order" books now advocate using Condorcet when possible. Encouraging this is what will get good preferential voting accepted, not pointing an angry finger at the government that's using a slightly better method than everyone else but still isn't good enough.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
... I dont think anyone thinks its a good idea that people can vote from anywhere other than a standard voting center, like schools and fire stations like you do now....
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms,
Aside from the double-meaning of my title (e.g. SI = metric system, something the US is also adverse to adopting), I see a couple obstacles facing the Aussie company if they want to break into the US market.
1) Imagine the outcry from Americans when they learn they're contracting a foreign company to handle their voting system. Oddly enough they won't have cared that Diebold's being all secretive and evasive about their own flaws while SI is open and honest and better suited to uphold the fair democratic system the US claims to cherish. To them I'd say ditch the NIH (not invented here) syndrome--if it works better than what you have, either make a competing product that's truly better or shut up about it.
2) Diebold will use MS' tactics, calling SI's system "un-American". Again, double meaning, but this time I mean because it's open source.
3) Watch Diebold play points 1 and 2 to the hilt, calling on its political ties to ensure SI never gets a foothold in the US. In so doing they pull a two-fer, by simultaneously kicking out a leg from under the democratic underpinnings of the US, as well as another leg from the "capitalist" system the US also claims to be, e.g. where companies compete based on the merits of the product and marketing, without political interference.
Incidentally, the Australian system requires you by law to vote. Maybe that's something the US ought to consider importing too. Argue if you want about being free to NOT vote, but voting is a duty, not just a right, and you should be compelled to do it. Just like you are to report to training if you get drafted, or filing a tax return--you're not free to refuse either of those without legal consequences, right?
What's sad about my writing this is that I have no influence in US politics, being a Canadian, but I seem to have more interest in your politics than the majority of voting Americans, who don't even bother to go to the polls.
The answer to your question is no. The technical legal reasoning for this is below. The practical reasoning for this follows. There is only one federal election: President(*). That election only occurs every 4 years. Creating a federal agency and bureaucracy just for that is pretty ridiculous. Because local elections happen several times per year (at least in my district, school elections are held in April, and general elections in November), the local election boards are much better equipped to run the presidential election.
*(Legal Reason) Because of the way the electoral college operates, the presidential election is technically a state level election. When you vote for president, you are actually voting for your state's electoral college members, who will then vote for their party's choice for president when the electoral college vote formally takes place in January. The constitution mandates that states shall select electoral college members in ways that the respective state legislatures shall establish. Obviously, for all states, this method is popular vote. In most states, the winner of the popular vote takes all the electoral votes, but there are a few states where the electoral votes are proportional to the popular vote (Maine and I think one other that I just cant recall right now). Anyway, because of that clause in the constitution (Amendment.. 12? or 16?), the states are essentially responsible for the presidential election.
Australians invented the secret ballot - which was referred to originally as "the australian ballot". Australian electoral processes have complete preferential voting - or automatic runoff. Upper house ballots are generally on a multi-member electorate - for the Australian Senate, 12 senators are elected from each state at large, this way you get more than just the two major parties, and they generally hold the balance of power.