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Touch-Screen Voting Snags Continue
Not every electronic voting machine misstep comes from Diebold; reader zznate points out that the Virginia machines came from Advanced Voting Solutions (dcw3 butts in: "The slogan on their home page really gives you a warm fuzzy: 'Helping Shape American History for over one hundred years.'"), as well as that the EFF won a decision for an accelerated court date of November 17 in their attempt to stop Diebold from shutting down sites that make the infamous memos available. Let's all hope this is the first in a series of many wins for the EFF against the Diebold folks and crappy e-voting schemes in general. Have you donated lately?"
Reader meadowreach writes points out more trouble on the other coast: "From news.com: 'As voters in California go to the polls, the state is launching an investigation into alleged illegal tampering with electronic voting machines in a San Francisco Bay Area county.' Diebold upgrades software without letting the state know? How reassuring."
Generic Guy writes "CNN is running a story about California not certifying the Diebold voting machines and instead opening an investigation into the use of uncertified systems. Maybe there is still hope for democracy in the U.S."
And from Cambridge, Massachusetts,
Peter Desnoyers writes "Cambridge uses an optical scanner system, where you fill out SAT-style ovals with a pen and the election officer feeds them into a scanning machine. From last night's preliminary results on the Cambridge website:
'In two precincts at 7:55 and 7:59pm the memory cards reached capacity. To ensure that every ballot was counted , the Election Commission has decided to rerun the ballots for 9-1, Lexington Avenue Fire House and 11-3, Churchill Avenue. We expect that it will take between one to two hours.'
I interpret this to mean that they took all the paper ballots out of the box and ran them back through the reader. (with a bigger memory card?) In the mean time, voters were able to continue voting and no votes were lost."
"Aww man, Windows crashed again. We probably lost 3000 votes due to the reboot."
"Don't worry about it, 3000 votes isn't enough to make a difference!"
OK, I keep hearing about the violations in election laws going on, but I never hear about people being taken away in handcuffs and being brought to trial. If the laws aren't being enforced, then they don't really exist. Might as well vote 50 or 60 times while you're going out; it looks like a free-for-all.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
using paper ballots that are scanned? You can have the results instantly and the ballots are locked inside the box in case of a recount.
Just because the technology of touchscreen voting is considered "cutting edge" doesn't make it better.
Really, you guys are getting all worked up over nothing. Polls clearly show:
Americans in favor of unregulated electronic voting: 25%
Americans in favor of strict auditing and accounting of electronic voting systems: -75%.
So clearly this is nothing to get bothered about.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Scantron sheets for voting? That's NOT a good idea. I'm currently working for a company that deals with standardized tests, and those things are a PAIN to clean up in the database becaues NOBODY can fill the damn things out correctly. I'd say at least a good 5% of them have messed up bubbles in the user/test-ID field ALONE. The answer fields usually fare much worse.
These aren't just 2nd graders, either. High school tests are usually WORSE in this aspect.
I don't vote. Otherwise I would be pissed off.
I predict, however, that even with all the errors and whatnot, the machines will still see fit to elect an affluent, politically moderate, white male.
I'll start giving out my votes once they start giving us candidates.
Line the two (or more) candidates next to one another, voters stand in line.
Each voter gets to walk up and hit the person they are against winning to, aka the one they do not want to win. Last man standing wins the election.
TruePunk | Games
... made by Diebold, it should be noted. They are the AccuVote OS models. This is not indicated in the article summary, however it is the case. I voted in Cambridge last night, and noted with mixed emotions the little Diebold logo as I slid my ballot in, and then the machine rejected it. (It worked on the second try)
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
I'm pretty sure it was a Diebold machine that I voted on for the gubernatorial recall election in LA County (they had early touchscreen voting down here). Does this mean I can have my vote thrown out and put Gary Coleman in the governorship instead? :P
One potential problem with the rollout of electronic voting hardware and software in this country is that many people automatically assume that electronic devices are more reliable and less prone to failure than the older voting hardware, when it certainly appears that this is not the case.
I'm sure that at least some non-tech-savvy election officials are content with the Diebold machines on the basis that "at least they won't have dimpled chads," or something similar. As a result, the people in the know (ie, anyone who knows the inherent unreliability and insecurity of the Diebold devices) should be making it very clear to everyone else that the superiority of newer technology ain't necessarily so.
While you could theoretically build a cryptographic system to do something similar, I'd rather not have a theoretic democracy!
(Petitions are linked to at the bottom of VerifiedVoting.org.)
Keep the freedom to vote.
So a few old goats in Florida don't know their right from their left. Big deal! It was hardly a symptom of a problem that, had it really been a problem, would have plagued the voting system since John Adams was elected president.
So now our politicians have decided that the solution to fix a complicated system is to replace it with an even more complicated system. How this kind of logic keeps these idiots in office, I will never understand, but it is clear that these new voting systems are not ready for next year's election.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I'm pretty sure it was a Diebold machine that I voted on..
Did it let you vote more than once? Change other peoples' votes? If so then it was indeed a Diebold..
Trolling is a art,
Electronic voting in the US is in horrid shape.
Seriously, why don't we get/license the well working system that was put in place in Australia? Yes, its not domestically produced, but the source is there and can be verified. If domestic production is an issue, do we have any reason to believe that all of the Windows code in the Diebold machines was written on American soil? Also, it works. When our own system can say that a switch could be considered, but for now I'd like my vote to be counted on software that has proven itself.
"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind." -- Bill Moyers
Would also make it easier to expose voter fraud...have everyone sign their ballot.
Blar.
I don't think I would ever trust voting over the net and I will always want to vote by absentee. Going to the polling place sucks. It caused me to miss more votes than not. I have been voting by absentee for 5 years and have not missed a single election.
I know, Halloween was last week. Its still funny.
This Modern World Comic.
Many SF voters mail in their ballots, which makes it easier with optical scan as they can all be processed immediately after the polls close.
I have heard rumors that SF wants to switch to touch screen, but if they propose this I'll lobby against it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
sulli
RTFJ.
"Unexpectedly"?? What, the servers hadn't been set up with the expectation that they'd be receiving results from lots of new machines at the same time?
...to a cemetery near you in Chicago! Now the dead can vote, even earlier and more often!
This raises serious questions about the accuracy of the count, no matter how many machines had to be fixed. One machine or twenty machines, if you've got to take one away for repair & then bring it back, the accuracy of the data must immediately be called into question.
If someone has to physically remove a machine, then something must be seriously wrong with it. What if they accidentally erased the data & then, in an effort to cover their mistakes, 'fudged' the votes?
On top of that, election officials made a stupid error -- a preventable error. [Some] memory cards were full before the close of the polls.
Election officials know exactly how many people are registered to vote in a given precinct. Therefore, they have the ability to determine the amount of memory they'd need on the machines. They should have asked the software folks, "how much memory will I need for each registered voter?"
Instead, voters are left to fend for themselves as inept voting officials stumble their way through technology.
This is completely absurd & inexcusable!
...to design a reliable electronic voting machine? Why does it need a full operating system basic on modern hardware? Why does it need a touchscreen? And for heaven's sake, why does it have to be networked? Maybe I'm just showing my ignorance here, but I would have approached the problem entirely differently. I probably would have ditched any type of video output for a number of labelled buttons, made a simple mainboard based on a reliable, cheap 8bit CPU, and had the results stored in EEPROM, not sent down a network. I also would make the firmware and hardware available to everyone, far in advance of the election. I also would have tested it under many bogus elections, and would have accepted input in the form of peer review.
I can't believe we can't make an electronic voting machine that is as reliable as a slot machine. If we're going to do it this way, I'll show my support for the older, mechanical machines. What are the benefits?
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
You know, I'm quite happy with voting on paper... why do we need electronic voting?
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
I predict for the 2004 election, there's just going to be 2 buttons:
;)
Bush.
Please send me on a rocket to the moon to work in a rock goulag.
And then Iraq will invade US and say they're liberating us from a leader who always wins.
it's not that hard, people!
You want 'electronic voting'?
Fine, here it is:
Registered voter gets handed a paper ballot. Completely human readable. Little circles next to each person/issue.
Voter enters the booth
Voter inserts paper ballot into the slot below the (oooh, shiny!) touchscreen.
Voter selects, each person issue they want to vote for. Change at any time.
At the bottom, the voter presses "Done". Maybe even a confirmation "Are you sure?"
Paper ballot is spit out of the slot, with the circles filled in for each item the person has voted for. The touchscreen is merely a printer.
Voter can verify the paper against what is on the screen.
Voter walks out, slides the paper ballot into a ScanTron. Said Scantron counts and tabulates as necessary.
The paper ballot goes into a locked box for future verification if necessary.
Done.
I have devised a machine that, when a user applies pressure to a compressed wood-pulp interface module, creates a permanent mark, indentation, or hole on said module with a stylus. This single-use module would then be delivered over a I.P.-over-hand network to a voting official, thus ensuring the voter that their vote has been collected. These votes would then be tallied by a separate machine that, by examining the mark, indentation, or hole in the aforementioned hole, would thus tally all votes. Providing the voter did not 'double-click' the stylus, and applied enough pressure while clicking, his vote should be tallied with correctly and accurately.
to put us all back in the voting booth with a punchcard and a poker? no doubt it is to have these systems be open source which is incredibly ignorant. what better way to get your system hacked than to let everyone with a political agenda see the source code. that might work in the real world where the hole will be found, reported and patched but in the voting world you can bet that the finder of any hole will keep it secret and use it to manipulate votes. open source in this case WILL NOT make anything safer but instead 1000x worse. can somebody please tell me the advantage to open source in this case?
And that someone is everyone.
These events prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the election companies are completely trustworthy, and public officials should continue to poo-poo the concerns of people who know what they are talking about. After all,They tested the machines all last week . Obviously electronic voting is working.
(Satire aside: This points out the problem very nicely; the "secretary of the county's three-person elections board" is simply not qualified to assess the ability of a voting system to perform in advance of the actual vote. This is intended as an elitist statement, it's just simple truth. "Secretaries of county election boards" should probably put a bit more trust in the concerns thousands of knowlegable citizens have with no vested interest in selling anything, and a lot less trust in companies trying to sell them snake oil. For one thing, they obviously don't know how to test these systems, or they would have found these problems.
"Stress testing", anyone? If the news report linked to can be trusted, this was nothing more then a bog-stadard "lack of resources" issue, the kind easily diagnosed by a knowlegable tester, and fixed in advance given enough time, but something that most people have no clue about. The idea of "stress testing" may be obvious to most of us, but we are not average.)
Why is this so hard? My calculator can increment by 1 for a heck of a long time with total stability. Is electronic voting screwed up for real technical reasons or for some behind the scenes scheming/politicing/pointyhairs?
Wait the GOP is suing? What about all that stuff I read on the internet that Diebold is in the pocket of the GOP? How can I believe anything I read on the Internet any more? Does this mean that Diebold is in the Democrats pockets?
Answer:Yes, it's ture, Diebold isn't in anyone's pockets - they are simply incompetent.
I will not vote on any machine that doesn't produce a verifiable paper trail at the time I vote. Neither should you.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
The use of computers for voting is such a bad idea. If you look at Diebold and now this, may be keeping it simple is the best way to go. At least with paper and pen you will not get a GPF error and have to reboot it.
"The most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose." - James Baldwin, American author
When Al Gore sued over voting irregularities, these same GOP groups were some of the most vocal in opposing it.
I hate hypocrites.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
nine were actually removed from the site, repaired, and returned, in violation of election laws
It's not a violation. It's the sheer power of technical progress! And you're supposed to like it.
Paper ballots? HAH! Nobody uses paper anymore.
Which canidate will you vote for: 'Carbon Copy Canidate #1' or 'Carbon Copy Canidate #2'? Just don't vote for the independent 'Carbon Copy that got stuck in the printer Canidate #3' cause he'll never win and you'll just be wasting your vote. What if your candiate loses? Doesn't matter, he wouldn't have done any of the things he promised anyway...
But seriously, the fact that the whole country is not in an uproar about this is evidence of the continued decline of our democracy. Quite simply, it appears no one cares anymore who you vote for cause who wins doesn't change anything. The last time I voted, I found half the canidates were running unopposed, most of the other voters were not only uninformed but seemed to have gone out the way to remain ingnorant of the issues, the canidates had almost no distinguishable differences from one another, and just about everyone of them was doing it not to serve the people but to serve themselves. The only difference nowadays is which special interest group gets its needs met at the expense of the public good this time around. Do your duty as a citizen: wipe your ass with your vote - at least it will make a differnce. Don't like the current system? Get yourslef elected by selling your soul to the lowest bidder, do your duty as an purchased official, and then wipe your ass with the consitution.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
When the first "electronic voting" machines went in, I think that they should have accompanied a paper-vote, or perhaps put out a paper receipt indicating the vote that could be stuffed in a ballot box. This way, you could use the physical (paper) votes to compare to the accuracy/loss in the electronic ones.
how else would a republican get in with such a massive majority for the first time in 30years, i had no idea that record unemployment and spiralling medicare costs was such a votewinner
expect to see more of this as the corruption spreads and there isnt a DAMM thing you can do about it !
What happens if you get to the polling place and you don't want to use their electronic system? Is there an alternative available?
** Pulls lever for (take your pick) Democrat, Green, Libertarian, Reform ** ... Machine: BSOD. ... Machine: "Thank you for being a good American"
** Pulls level for Republican **
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
Why not do what Brazil does? They have been having success for a while with computer voting. I know they're on the cutting edge of technology and that the USA only dreams of catching up.
The 3502 people who voted for "Elvis," even though he wasn't on the options screen.
Faster and Secure my ass... I wouldn't be surprised to see something like this happen.
And this is exactly why I started my SourceForge project at https://sourceforge.net/projects/kbvote/. My voting system is going well, I'm working on interface refinements now. Screenshots are at herrvinny.com. Any UW-Madison people here, feel free to email me. I'd like some feedback too; I'm only an undergrad :-). And yes, I did submit it as a story, but it was rejected...
I for one welcome our new voted-in-by-crummy-electronics overlords.
Seriously though, why is it so HARD for people to get it right? Voting is one of those things that should be summed up with this word: KISS.
Keep It Simple, Stupid.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
Okay, I work as one of two computer consultants responsible for overseeing the election tabulation process in my county. Yesterday's election was the first time we used the new electronic voting machines (iVotronic).
Things went off without a hitch. We began tabulating at about 6:30 and were done by 8:00. We used to use punch cards, and would normally get done around 11:00. So you can see why a lot of government officials are praising these things. They are faster, easier to use, and less prone to voting mistakes. Last year there were dozens of cards punched backwards or upside-down, hanging chads, and whatnot. That really slows things down a lot.
That said, I don't like these machines. There's a fundamental flaw in the construction that makes the whole thing insecure. Given the incentive ($$$), it would be incredibly easy for an employee of the manufacturer to slip some deviant code into the machine that said, "on election day make every fifth vote go towards this candidate".
I think the best analogy was one I heard on NPR the other day (I believe it was David Dill). The current process with electronic voting is akin to walking into a booth and telling your vote to a person on the other side of a curtain. Did he write down what you told him to? Who knows.
from the AVN web site
These things are wireless.
All those that think this is a BAD idea raise your hands...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
"First, I'll kick you in the nuts as hard as I can. Then you kick me in the nuts as hard as you can. The last candidate to fall wins the election. I'll go first..."
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
I was talking with one of the representative's legislative assistance the other day and said that the decision was made so that they always had a "real" record of what happened. As if to imply that digital records are not, in fact, real.
And yes recounts are very frequent in the county elections here and there has yet to be a problem with retreving information from those machines that I know of.
"If a quarter is two bits, then a dollar's a byte." -R Deric Miller
Whoever modded the parent down is still proud of his country but certainly not a concerned patriot.
Why should this be plagued with so much failure? How hard could it possibly be to write a client-side application that collects input from a user, validates it, slaps it in a database on a server somewhere, then pulls the results into reports through an admin app?
Is it really this difficult? Am I missing something?
Man, are these things a bad idea.
I knew that our touch-screen machines were hackable when last night's returns had Gandalf the Wizard leading Han Solo by 54% to 43%, with the remaining votes split among write-in and third party candidates Neo, Captain Kirk, and CowboyNeal.
I used one of these machines last night. I'm not really sure why these are better than our previous voting machines. The new machine was the "WINVote" machine.
Apparently our county spend $3.5 million on 1000 of these things. According to the washington post they "asked the vendor a lot of security questions". Apparently the wireless network these things run on is just 802.11b with WEP.
Should I just post my voting record now or do I wait for the local high-school student to do it?
Thank you for making the most logical, coherent, and well-composed response of the day. A toast to you, kind sir.
Funny, in Ohio (which purchased many of the infamous hanging chad prone punch card machines from FL at a discount), we've had no reports of voting irregularities.
Diebold is using the DMCA to serve takedown notices to service providers. Mirror sites in the .EDU domain are needed to keep Diebold's memo's online and availible to the world.
Go to why-war.com and find out how you can help.
Press any key to continue, any other key to quit.
I voted in the State/county election in question Fairafx Virginia and I can tell you these things really troubled me.
We have been using a combination computer mechanical system for years which I felt very comfortable with. Yesterday we walked in to find the new "WinVote" machines. They offered no privacy and were actually slowing down peoples vote entry by quite a bit (I saw most people take over 10 minutes to vote compared to one or two I would normally see).
The officials were telling me about how one machine stopped working and couldn't be revived. The others they had apparently been able to reboot multiple times to keep going. They of course didn't know how the vote count was protected in these cases. I have a guess though.
Before each person votes, an official inserts a smart card. The application restarts, displays some statistics and proceeds to allow me to vote. My guess is that the results are copied to the smart cards. In that case the state of the machine isn't really in question so long as the tally increases as the voter voted.
What worries me is the use of smart cards. Now these tend to hold a handful of memory (8K to 64K in general), and can run some code internally. My question is, if a machine crashes then could it alter the contents of the smart card? A write only smart card would not have enough room for a busy polling location. A card where a count is updated would be vulnerable to coding or transfer errors.
Like the user who asks for a database when they need a filing cabinet, I think this may be an idea to early for its time.
I'm not an expert but it seems reasonable. These machines are standalone units, not networked; they have hardcoded (machine-language) software on their chips, with no facility for modifying it or running an external program. To tamper with them you'd have to replace the motherboard with your own, on which you've embedded your own program, and even then it probably won't work since the machine has various safeguards for tampering. And these machines are extremely rugged and sturdy, and easy to use (I've handled them) and inexpensive (around $100 each).
Sometimes antique push-button technology is better than the latest cutting-edge stuff (anyway, who needs touchscreens, what's wrong with buttons?)
And I couldn't be happier. They have got to be the easiest non-touch-screen voting machines I have ever used in my 18 years of voting (haven't missed a vote yet).
Now before you go looking up Shouptronic you must know that the owner was convicted in 1979 of conspiracy and obstruction of justice related to an FBI inquiry into a lever machine-counted election in Philadelphia. Also, contrary to what you may read the machines do have a paper tape which records the vote as a backup to the magnetic tape which the votes are initially read from. If there is a challenge to a vote the paper tape is compared to the electronic tape.
Now, getting to my point, these machines are so simple to use I can't imagine why others don't use it (other than if they are no longer made of course). Essentially everything is laid in a grid pattern. Along the left side column are the offices. The next column is one of the parties listing their candidates. This is repeated for each party even if they only have one person running for one office (as happened yesterday).
In addition to the columns and rows setup you can have other voting issues, constitutional amendments for example, located anywhere on the ballot but usually are put along the right side. In the case of judges for our higher courts, when the vote is to retain them, they are listed in a separate box along the top of the ballot.
To cast your vote you simply press the square to the right of your candidate and a red led lights up signifying that is who you will be voting for.
One aspect which is interesting is any office for which you have not cast a vote has a flashing red led next to it. When you cast your vote for a candidate for that office that light goes out.
When you are done voting you press a big green button marked VOTE in the lower right corner. A bell goes off and the light which is above the booth goes out (it was turned on when you entered the curtains).
The size of this box you ask? Roughtly 3X3 feet (more rectangular than anything). It is portable, sets up in just a few minutes, has a clearly defined ballot and vote registration system and a backup paper trail.
Can't speak more highly of the machines.
When are they going to learn - separate VOTING mechanism from the COUNTING mechanism with a hard-copy recording device (punch card) in between.
The VOTING machine should produce a machine-punched punch card ballot.
Then deposit them in the box across te room for ballots.... ot stop at the reader to confirm your votes.
Then at the end of the night, the ballot box is opened and the punch cards tabulated by a punch card reader.
Both the VOTING and COUNTING machines should be stand-alone. I don't ever want either one connected to a network.
Were they using touchscreen machines in Bolinas, CA?
You know, I've voted using virtually every mechanism available (including punch-cards, scantron paper ballots, a touchscreen last night, and more).
My all time favorite are the mechanical voting machines (which IIRC were invented by Thomas Edison). They were still used in my home state as of about 8 years ago.
Basically, you hit the little lever next to the name you want. Write ins have their own lever and a little pulltab that you can write on. You can only vote for the exact number of allowed candidates (usually one), otherwise the lever just won't pull. The whole time, you're hidden behind a curtain. To open the curtain, you pull a big friendly lever, and all your votes are recorded.
Tampering is easy to detect as mechanical wear and modifications.
I'm as into computers as anyone, but these proved to be the easiest to use, most reliable and most tamper-proof. Why not switch back to them? If "retro" technology is better, why not use it??
The Labour Party (social democrats) in the Republic of Ireland has recently raised a stink in the Dail (lower house of parliament) about trial uses of electronic voting machines, referring to many of the issues being discussed here. Hopefully, they will either block their use or force the ruling coalition partners Fianna Fail (populist/republican) and the Progressive Democrats (libertarian) to weigh other options.
In Britain we ahve all our votes on paper and they are all hand counted and stored. We get our election results by the morining. Even for small Scotish islands. It is not such a big job to count a few votes. Each person can count several thousand per hour. This means that you need only need 500 counters per million votes and it is done in a night.
When the result is close there is a recount and I have never seen the second result to be out by more than 5-10 per 60,000 votes.
There is an important principle that every person has the right to have their vote counted. Errors above 1 per 1000 are not acceptable. The system must not only be fair but be seen to be fair. Furthermore there must be a permanent record of the votes cast. How else can we be sure that all was fair.
There will be a vote taken to determine if people are opposed to voting without an aduit trail. Please report to you local Diebold voting center to cast your vote today.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
so much more reliably when you replace "printer" with "pen" and "scantron" with "cardboard box".
Really, why do you need anything else?
[
I voted in one of these locations (Rose Hill). At 8:15am there were 3 machines down. They had a person manning each machine. Before I could vote, the guy (who looked about 75 yrs old) had to insert a smart card into the unit. In my case the guy was having trouble jamming it in because of the awkward angle needed to do it. It took him about 10 seconds to insert the card, during which time he was bending it a lot.
I wouldn't be suprised if he somehow damaged the smart card or the card reader built into the machine. This could be the reason the other units failed.
Since I'm an IT guy, I'm thinking about volunteering next year to help them out. If nothing else, I know how to insert a card into the machine.
"The whole idea behind these machines is that they are portable, so it made more sense to bring them to where you had the technology and the people to fix . . . these problems," Luca said.
Really?
I thought the whole idea behind the machines was that they would record and report votes accurately.
Silly me.
GMFTatsujin
... but Bob Terwilleger was re-elected as Snohomish County Auditor in WA last night.
Admittedly, if you look at his photograph you'll see he appears to have changed his hairstyle, and it doesn't mention a middle name of Underdunk, but I have my suspicions...
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
All this touch screen stuff seems to rule out a write in candidate does it not?
Or is there an on-screen keyboard for a write in?
What if you do not want to vote for the "party blessed" candidates?
What if a majority of the voters wanted to write in someone else?
My calculator can increment by 1 for a heck of a long time with total stability.
Not entirely true. While I agree that these voting machines should be little more than simple adding machines, consider the sources of user error:
Voters must accurately push the correct touch-screen entry.
On a calculator, this is equivalent to selecting the appropriate operation (ie. 'plus'). Accidentally tapping another button might not be immediately apparent.
Votes for multiple candidates must be tallied.
On a calculator, this is equivalent to multiple memory locations. What if you hit M2 instead of M3 when switching tallies? Now the wrong candidate has your vote.
Consider, also, a source of machine error:
Numeric representations are finite and/or approximations
In the article text, it was mentioned that memory cards filled up. This is like adding so many 1's that you get the all-too familiar "E" on your calculator. While most calculators can handle numbers that would easily cover the world's population several times over, it's worth noting.
Finally, two examples of accountability and verification:
Votes must be recountable
Most calculators store tallies quite well, but leave little means of tracing the input. If M2 contains the value "54", I can assume that 1 was added n times, but this is not always true. 54 could easily be 44 1's added to an erroneously entered 10, but I can't tell with only the final number.
The integrity of the processing software must be verified
Like any data-processing machine, someone's got to program it. If I programmed your calculator such that, after a memory location contained a value larger than 138,763, it omitted every other addition, would you notice right away? What if I "diverted" that tally to another memory location?
It's not only the stability of the machine, but the accuracy of the input on the first place. For the general public, however, it's mainly about the scheming to which you allude, and the last two points above.
I voted yesterday in Santa Clara County, California. They're testing these new touch screen machines. The papers this morning said everyone was happy with them. Good for them, but I had a problem with them.
First, while they were easy for ME to use, I could easily imagine someone with palsy pointing to the wrong circle and voting for someone else. Of course, this problem existing in the prior system, but it would have been nice if they made the circles a bit bigger.
But I'm just nitpicking above. My second problem is that I didn't get a reciept or stub. Although the machine said it recorded my vote, I have no proof of it. With a paper ballot (punch, optical, other) at least I can physically drop it into the ballot box, while keeping the top stub as a receipt.
A paper stub from a paper ballot doesn't mean too terribly much. But a printed stub from an electronic voting machine could. I've heard various proposals, but they all boil down to an anonymous cryptographic hash on the stub, that can be used to verify the count and accuracy of the vote.
Even my ATM machine gives me a reciept! If there are voting irregularities (and in some California counties, they occur with clocklike regularity) how the heck can anyone demonstrate it? At least with a paper ballot you have something to recount. With electronic voting what do they do? Push "recalc" in Excel?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Not 81. That was John Quincy Adams.
The enemies of Democracy are
The FCC, in long standing tradition, defines the Communication moniker of FCC to mean all things communicated, and has implemented a broadcast flag requirement on all forms of communication. Diebold, in an attempt to protect itself from destructive free speech, retroactively implemented the flag on the words Diebod, vote, poll, and all derivates of those words. The are currently asking the FBI to trace and prosecute any American who unfarily abuses the new Deibold flag by uttering of those words in any sentence Diebold disagrees with.
If you think this is funny or conspirist, catch up with the RIAA and MPAA.
Bah
I don't even know why I'm bothering, since electronic voting is such a hot-button issue here, but I want to point out that not everything went disastrously with the machines last night...
Arlington County, VA (right next to Fairfax, and yes, we are more than just a cemetary) also rolled out the Advanced Voting Systems machines in all precincts this election, and as far as I am aware, no glitches occurred, and vote totals were available by 10 pm. The most delayed results were, as always, from absentee ballots, which are of the optical-scan variety.
Arlington has been evaluating these machines for use for a couple of years now, so I guess the necessary training and infrastructure was far better prepared than in Fairfax, which seems to have converted quite recently. It is, admittedly, much more of a logistical nightmare to run elections in Fairfax than in Arlington, given that the former's population is over six times that of the latter.
Arlington chose the systems, I believe, because they were easier to distribute to precincts and to configure for each election, because they allow blind voters to vote unaided, and because voters found them easy to use. I'm sure the flashiness helped, of course, but there are valid reasons for wanting to upgrade.
It's also worth mentioning that the AVS machines do in fact have an internal printer to leave a paper trail, although unfortunately it is not voter-verifiable. In Arlington the AVS machines are replacing 1991-vintage Shouptronic voting machines which produced no paper trail at all, so in that respect this is an improvement!
In short: the glitches are due to inexperience, and if you're worried about not being able to do manual recounts, I'm sorry but in many locations you haven't been able to do that for a decade.
Which is why I'm building my own OSS voting system. Go to www.herrvinny.com for screenshots, and the link in my .sig has the sourceforge project link. Anyone want to help test it out?
Two trusted applications, one checks the voter's ID and issues a signed document which the 2nd accepts as permission to vote once. The key would have no data connecting it to the voter's ID and the key-gen app would not log any such info (well..how do we prove this? I dunno...)
Blar.
Process: Each voter (1) scans their ID/Drivers License (most states have upgraded to bar-coded ones) like an ATM card, (2) Machine asks "Democratic vote or Replublican vote or Indy?", at which point voter pushes !! 1 !! button. (3) Voter leaves.
Obviously the machines can't seem to handle this yet, but it's a platform I think they should aim for.
Those citizens without an ID card do not deserve to vote since they obviously can't even earn $10 to supply one, or they're too dumb to locate the Secretary of State's office in their area.
Because there are serious problems with that system. The software issues are virtually a red herring and do not make their machines trustworthy. Although it seems ironic to some, the same issues exist with free software-operated and non-free software-operated voting machines. Wired revealed big problems with eVACS but buried the description of the problems midway into their article and then posted their eVACS article under a misleading headline which is probably why you reached the conclusion you did. I commented on this system in that thread and responded to one of the system's developers when the software trustworthiness question was raised.
The Australian system you refer to does not allow the voter to verify that their vote was recorded correctly and there is no permanent non-computer record of the votes to recount after the election. Even though the article quotes one of the system developers saying as much, this showstopper revelation is midway into the article and then apparently ignored for the purpose of writing the article's title. From the article:
There's no way to determine if only the software you trust is running on the machine you vote with. Your /. post is vastly overrated (+5 Insightful).
Digital Citizen
This is intended as an elitist statement, it's just simple truth.
Whoops, that's "this is not intended as an elitist statement".
Because we all know that claiming to actually know more about something then somebody else will annoy some 15-year-old somewhere who knows everything. (Stupid anti-intellectualism.)
Obviously, I'm leaving out a lot of important details, but let me add the following for discussion:
The only way I would support electronic voting is if the voting mechanics were split into two roles: Ballot printing machines and ballot counting machines.
The ballot printers would need to be loaded with a list of voting options before the election, then, all they would do is show the options on the screen, let you pick your choices and print you a ballot listing your votes in a HUMAN READABLE AND EASILY OCR-ABLE FONT. No non-human barcodes or hole punches allowed!
After you visually verify that the ballot printer has successfully printed the ballot you want to cast, you take it over to the ballot counter, which scans the card, OCRs the votes you've cast, shows them its screen so you can see how they were recorded, awaits your OK and stashes the ballot in a sealed metal box. At this point, your vote is counted and you are done.
Notes:
You guys are probably going to find all kinds of problems, but I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on this.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
... I rather like the idea of a ballot which is somewhat difficult to complete correctly. Then discard all imperfect ballots. If you can't complete a ballot properly, then you aren't qualified to have your vote counted.
It is our information that there are irregularities," said Christopher T. Craig, attorney for the Republicans...."It's about voter integrity," he said.
A republican complaining about voter integrity. Chalk up one more horsemen for the apocolypse...
All your base are belong to us!
I think you hit the nail on the head. The only thing wrong with paper ballots that are scanned optically is that there is a record of the ballots, making it somewhat harder for the powers in charge to make sure things go the way they decided they will go. This seems to be the only reasonable explination for the rush to systems like Diebold's with no paper trail. It certainly isn't to help computer-phobic old people who can't follow written instructions.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
YES! Great attitude to have with regard to the right to elect government!
If you want to read it, the article url is here.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
To me as a programmer it should be nothing less than an inspection of the source and verification that the executable running on each machine is exactly what the compilation of that source produces. Anything else is open to fraud especially if there is no paper trail. As an example, if the source is not examined, it would be possible to write a program that works as expected during tests but on election day and within a certain range of voting hours, a special function kicks in that that converts say 10% of the votes for one party to the other party. That 10% won't raise suspicions but may be enough to alter the outcomes of many close races.
One can only hope that the people doing the certification are qualified and paranoid enough to insist on the highest standards.
The voting process itself was very easy. A voter board assistant put their smartcard into the machine -- after they'd verified that I was registered, of course. He took me through the process quickly -- the touchscreen showed my choices in groups (identical to this sample ballot (PDF)). I selected my choices on one screen, hit next, selected again. Once I had gone through the possible screens, it showed an overview with a blinking box for groups I didn't choose (I wasn't up on the choices for school board) and gave me an opportunity to go back. I hit next, and there's a big button labeled "VOTE". After I hit that there was (I think) a message saying my vote had been tallied.
The problems I noted, however:
- No verifiable paper trail for the voter
- No verifiable paper trail for potential recounts
- Wireless communication
- Little to no privacy (very small shields around the screen, and everything was turned to the wall)
- Smart card usage (how easy would that be to spoof?)
I have to wonder just what review was done of these machines, and how technical the level of review was. I think that any voter board choosing new machines, particularly for a county as populous and wealthy as Fairfax, should have access to a highly technical group to review and challenge the assertions of the supplier companies. I work in software, so I know better than to trust assertions of quality and security, but do the people selecting the machines have that skepticism? Or are they wowed by a easy to use machine?
Here in the Netherlands, we've been voting by electronic machines for quite a while now. So: why use crappy technology while proven technology is available??
Does that make a BSD user a BS-er?
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Im not talking the punch type either
in Oklahoma it looks like this
Option A == ==>
Option B == ==>
if you want Option A just complete the arrow
Option A ==---==>
Option B == ==>
it leaves a nice paper trail
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
All this talk about Diebold has made me think about how scary it would be if the computer voting systems were installed in my county. I wouldn't want to use them, I wouldn't trust their results.
I have a vague recollection of someone saying that you can request an alternative voting method if you don't like the one they provide.. all write-ins or something to that effect.
Am I remembering correctly? Can you say, "No thank you, I'll use a pen" if you're faced with those horribly broken machines?
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Do you think that they mean the kind that you lift the earpiece and say into the mouthpiece, 'Hello, Mabel?, get me election headquarters, please.'
Mabel: 'Right away Mr. Johnson. Oh, by the way, did you hear that Winifred just gave birth to an 8 lb. 4 oz. boy?'
Election Official: 'Really; that should make George happy. He wanted a son after seven girls!'
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
I await the day when the independant exit polls that the media conducts deviate by a statistically noteable amount from some non-verifiable voting machine. What will happen? The media's polls, while "unscientific" tend to be decent approximations, and the sampling error should be calculable. How much would the "real" results have to be off to raise eyebrows or, worse, to raise fists?
It still boggles my mind that the new election machine companies are against paper trails -- why is printing out a receipt and putting it in a box _just in case_ such a big deal?
When Greg Palast revealed that 64,000 Floridian voters were denied the ability to vote in the 2000 US Presidential election, what did the Democrats do to restore their voting rights? What did the Democrats do to verify Palast's story and expose Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris' fraud?
I don't trust the Democratic or Republican national parties. So I won't vote for parties that hurt me, assuming my vote will be counted accurately at all.
Digital Citizen
As if to imply that digital records are not, in fact, real.
They aren't per most people's definition. I could write a SQL query that changes a couple million votes in a database in all of about five minutes...how long would it take me to do that by hand with paper ballots?
There were two big problems with the new machines yesterday here in Mississippi.
1. The lines were very, very long... Now... we did have record turnout yesterday. But, not in the fashion that would cause 2 to 3 hour waits to vote. I was perfectly happy to wait an hour to vote, until I saw what I assumed the reason was that I was waiting. When I got to the front of the line, I saw that most people were standing at the machines for more than 5 minutes each. There's no way the old process would have taken that long. Of course, in my district, and at the time I went yesterday, most of them were older... but IT'S A TOUCH SCREEN WHERE YOU TOUCH A CANDIDATES NAME!!! I think (and saw) many people turn away from voting because of this wait.
2. I finally made it to a machine. First vote... (don't hate me for it if you don't like him) I clicked on Haley Barbour... his name did not check... instead, a democrat on the other corner of the screen checked. I clicked his name to remove it... Clicked Barbour again... same problem. This happened with about 6 candidates on the first screen. Finally, I was so frustrated that I had to call someone to help (which is bad because of privacy). She said that it had been happening a lot today and was supposed to be fixed. Then, she showed me how to "RUB" the machine so that the candidates would highlight (which worked most of the time, not all). I almost had to vote for a candidate in an uncontested race that I didn't want to. I said, "I don't want to vote for him." A vote helper person said, "He's going to win anyway."
Total time voting... 10 minutes.
Do the touch screens work? Not at this time.
Certainly every man at his best state is but vapor
It takes a fixed percentage of the population to count votes by hand. It scales 1-1.
Someone has convinced the people of the USA that democracy can be good, fast and cheap (in violation of at least one well-known law of nature) so they seek solutions that scale better than that. The result of that is Diebold.
Touchscreen is good in theory because it gives you instant feedback on your vote ("You selected Al Gore and Pat Buchanan for president. Are you insane?") It's also a relatively mature technology, deployed in large numbers into hostile physical environments (e.g. fast food restaurants).
--
E_NOSIG
The problem came when precinct workers tried to electronically send results from the 953 new machines to election headquarters, unexpectedly overloading computer servers.
At my job in a very small corner of the world we spend a fair amount of time in code review, quality testing, and load testing. How is something so incredibly important that people DIE for it be implemented so carelessly?
It rattles my soul and bones that my relatives died for people's freedom very much including the right to vote and it is being handled repeatedly so carelessly (intentionally or otherwise). The people running these elections better step up or I'm going to what my forebears did, and step up.
Speak truth to power.
The requirements for an ATM transaction are quite different from a voting transaction.
The ATM card itself greatly simplifies the whole ATM issue in that you use the physical card plus a PIN to identify the user. Additionally, it is built on the need for an ever-present network connection and only needs to ensure the integrity of the current transaction.
Finally, the biggest plus for an ATM machine is that you don't have to deal with the chaos that is programming in a new ballot every time.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Hi -
I've been reading about the elections and am rather annoyed about how hard it is to get find info, where can I find info on what went on where in yesterdays election? I realize the question is somewhat vauge, but you need to start somewhere to be able to formulate intelligent questions and the where to start is what is missing.
Considering that a large part of DieBold's (and several other e-voting packages) is built with M$ Visual Basic, I'm sure that this could be huge fodder for making the fun of Visual Basic and the quality VB programmers... if it was not for the fact that a community college CS student could write sharper VB code than the DieBold geniuses.
Wonder what it takes to get a job there? Wonder if they'll hold my SCO past against me...
ATM's, Gas Pumps, Grocery Store line-ups... everywhere where something electronic is used to make a calculation, a receipt is issued. Why not voting?
This is actually a big question, I mean, which would you rather have confirmed, that you were charged the proper sale price of your $0.99/lb head of lettuce, or that the person who is supposedly in charge of deciding the fate of your country/state/district was the one whom you (the voters) voted for?
How had would it be to print the receipt in duplicate, and have people drop a copy in a ballot box?
If it works for your local 7-11, you'd think that it wouldn't be a hard thing to print out a receipt for these machines...
Before anyone goes claiming Open Source code is necessary, just notice that the origin of the code base is not etiological to the problems encountered.
In fact, it could make the problem far worse, as open-source means the installer can modify the machines' behavior at will, and the installers will be independent entities not bound by a consistently traceable security agreement.
In other words, a recipe for disaster.
I remember the article in the Philly paper where a voting machine mechanic showed a group of reporters how to completely own a mechanical machine without anyone being the wiser.
My favorite part: using a propane torch to restore the seal so the machine didn't look tampered with.
Clear, Dark Skies
Where I'm from, in Brazil, there is already an electronic voting system working for years. I've been eligible to vote for seven years, now, and I have never used a paper ballot. The system can and does work. It's unfortunate that there's such difficulty in the United States...
Actually, the FDP did expose the fraud, and actually uncovered over 30,000 additional voters denied the right to vote. It was in the news here last year.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Sounds like a quick way to make a lot of money.
Great so far--it would have been nice if this had been covered nationally or if the national Democrats used this to help educate the public circa 2002 (where the Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress). It also would have been nice to hear Democrats nationally talking about this rather than harping on Nader (seeing as how the denied voters were collectively large enough to make the state and the election go the other way in 2000). But more to the point: Are these people's voting rights now correctly restored? Were they able to vote in the mid-term elections in 2002? Will they be allowed to vote in 2004?
Digital Citizen
You method can, and has, been implemented without a computer at all - you use a mechanical voting booth and store the results on a card.
The REAL solution for "electronic voting" is this:
1) A ballot-generating machine with a touch screen that walks the voter through the voting process and then prints a receipt that is human and machine readable.
2) A ballot-counting machine that ballots are fed into for counting, similar to the optical scanning machines currently used. Because the ballots it's reading are machine generated, it should be able to read virtually all ballots.
And there you have it - minimal voter confusion, counting machines are separated from voting machines (which are really just glorified pens), and a verifiable, recountable paper trail.
If at some point you REALLY want to eliminate printers and paper, instead of printing out a receipt, but a CD burner in each voting machine and burn each vote to the CD, also giving you an unmodified, recountable trail.
paintball
There is something that *no* computer based voting process cannot guarantee: Anonymity
Whatever way you set it up, a computer can always be manipulated in such a way that the vote itself can be ascribed to one specific person, a person that left an electronic trail and can be identified.
With this in mind, computer based elections are unconstitutional, aren't they?
There is no better way than using a piece of paper and a ballott. Use electronics and computers to to the calculations, not for anything else that touches the area of IDing a voter's personal vote.
I haven't been following this story so pardon me if the answer to this is somewhere on slashdot, but why are "the infamous memos" referred to in the original story infamous? I looked through a few of them but I couldn't find anything really glaring... is it the fact that their client emails are available to random people like me?
Totally. I mean, where do they get these programmers at??? Middle schools? preschools? Microsoft?
How can anyone with a Comp Sci degree actually make such terrible software, which should be SOOO easy..
With programmers like that out there, it's hard to imagine that computers can ever work at all...
Tibbon
tibbon.com
A system like this is going to have inherent immense complexity from the overlaying software right down to device drivers and firmware and complex systems are generally unstable and not very secure. Well designed systems for all the most mission critical systems are going to work on the basis of making things as simple as possible and laying down afew ground rules and double checking everything, then if you find a problem you dont just patch it up or work around it you figure out right down the basics what it means to the project and if you have to you start again after rethinking the whole thing.
2004 is going to be a great year for entertainment if the media runs this story, otherwise it will be another cover up and smug faced bush.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
it would be illegal.
Slashdot is my Mercer Box.
Why all this hubbub about electronic voting? What's wrong with paper? Honestly, if we can't, as a society, come up with an easily understandable way to vote on paper, what makes us think we can do it reliably with millions of transistors? It seems like overcomplicating something that ought to be really simple.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Would it be possible to use the mathematical technique of
zero knowledge proof to create a voting machines that would allow the following:
(1)Each voter could individually verify that his vote was used (as he voted) in the count.
(2)Anyone could verify that the numbers add up correctly.
(2a) But no one except the individual voter could know the individual votes.
If this could be done mathematicly and implemented in voting machine software, it would make backup paper trails unnecessary to prevent voter fraud!
I believe the zero knowledge proof allows a proof to be checked without knowing the individual statements of the proof! What is election vote count checking but a particular kind of proof checking! It would seem the technique might apply!
if bush is gonna still be here... i'm at least moving to Canada or England.... never considered the moon though... hmm
Tibbon
tibbon.com
When I voted I just about died when I read the words on the screen, "WINvote." Honestly, the first thought was, "This is going to be reliable." And go figure, 9 machines failed. I bet my write-in vote for one "Linus Torvald" for State Representative did one of the "WINvote" machines in.
Ironically, one of the old and reliable machines was totted down to the Smithsoian. These are the same machines that Flordia is too cheep to get. And now we are having problems.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
Questionable section of source code
from the new 'National Security' Patch:
While IDLE do
Vote(Republican)
EndWhile
Well, how do you know that there haven't been any problems?
Just practicing FUD techniques,
or am I ?
'All non-republicans please report to
the re-education center for thought cleansing, thank you.'
How hard can it be to design a GUI interface that collects people's voting selections and saves them to a file (or database)? This sounds like an exceedingly simple problem. Why are these voting machine companies having so much trouble coming up with a viable solution???
And why hasn't the EFF come up with a lobbying plan to lobby for open-source-only voting machines?
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Here's a thought. Suppose that the /. community tabulates a list of states and counties that use touchscreen voting well in advance of the 2004 elections. Further suppose that /.'ers living in those couties volunteer to work the polling places on election day. I'd venture that most /. regulars are jut a wee bit more tech-savvy than the typical people who monitor the polling places.
Helping staff the polls would at least allow us to prevent the worst abuses of the system (eg removing machines for repair and returning them), and also give a lot of tech people a first-hand look at how well/poorly e-voting systems are working. If the election is "stolen", there will be a whole lot of PO'd /.'ers ready to make noise about it.
You can't have a battle of wits against an unarmed opponent.
That's not what I'm addressing.
This is true only when you can be sure you are running the same software you inspected, such as downloading a free software program at home and running it at home. That is not the case with a voting machine because you don't control that machine even indirectly.
Voters cannot verify the software running on the voting machine. They can't reinstall the software to be sure only the trusted software is running on it and they can't inspect what's already installed to be sure it matches the trusted software from the website. The only software that counts for anything is the software installed on the voting machine at the time votes are taken or counted. Any other test is only useful to show how someone made a mistake. There is no guarantee that the trusted software you perused on a website is actually the code running in a voting machine.
Many voting machines have their software changed during voting day (illegally, perhaps, but it still happens).
Until someone has the ability to walk up to a computer and somehow determine the complete set of programs running on that computer at all times just by looking at the screen you will never have the assurance you claim. Not with free software, not with proprietary software. That is why this whole software issue is a red herring and a trap for /. computer geeks who think that sharing source code will fix all our electronic voting machine problems.
Digital Citizen
Due to Switzerland's interesting form of government they are at the polls a number of times per year for various reasons. They seem to have it all working over the web. (http://www.geneve.ch/ge-vote/) It's purpose built software that's required, not hardware. If they really wanted to go hard core on authenticity, everyone could be issued with a voting dongle (SIM card + USB adaptor).
I for one welcome our new Diebold overlords
Maryland doesn't use a punch card
We have a list of candidates, and a broken arrow ( <- - ) next to each name.
You are given a marker and you complete the arrow ( <--- ) for the person you want to vote for.
You then put the ballot back in its folder and bring it over to a box with a drop slot
Technoli
e voting could have been implemented decades ago, and they probably would have come up with a better name for it. NASA uses old proccessors for some systems because they are simple and have been tried and tested for years. e voting isnt about pushing the edge of what technology can do its about making the most an effecient, secure, easy to use system without blowing the bank or having anything to do with any party.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
"If you're still in the need of freedom and a life, then you should come to europe where everything is better!"
Do you have any concept of how difficult it is to emigrate from the US to any European country?
Last time I worked at a polling place, lawyers showed up from the ACLU, because there had been rumors of harassment at the polls and voters being turned away for bogus reasons. The lawyers had to be there all day and basically retrain the inept Polling Place supervisor. She was turning away people just cause they weren't on the register (there are many reasons why the wouldn't be on the register, but would be allowed to vote). The scariest thing to me was that the polling supervisor's best defense was "But I have been doing this for 30 years!" Electronic voting machines are horrible, and should not be used until the technical (moral, social, and political) problems are sorted out. But we are very far from having a perfect system. When I lived in San Francisco, there was an election where a whole bunch of dead people voted. Now that's democracy!
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscripti catapultas habebunt
Why is it so hard for electronic voting to be done correctly?! This should be absolutely intolerable. Enough people already do not vote, and this does nothing to increase voter confidence. Whatever government agency that is most responsible for voting and making sure of its accuracy should start an open source and open hardware project. Call it USAVote or something. By the time the 2008 elections come around, and probably before that we could have a secure, relatively problem free solution to our current problem.
Why is it so hard for our government to see and act on this? I understand money is what makes the world go 'round, and whatever private companies that do voting have given a lot of money to make sure they keep doing voting, but this is ridiculous. What if all the losing candidates got together to call for this reform? I think that could help bring more attention to this dire need.
Hax.
http://www.haxwell.org
What, you think the ATM network isn't held together with bubblegum and string? Banking industry is known for secrecy.
Yay me!
There have been cash registers, atms, etc. that can reliably do these types of operations for decades now? Why is a voting machine such a difficult problem, or is the govt. simply hiring the wrong people?
This is the letter to the editor I sent to our local paper, The Merced Sun-Star.
Yesterday after voting, I was given the wrong sticker by a poll worker. It said "I Voted" when it should have said, "I may or may not have voted." The uncertainty of the disposition of my vote comes from the fact that instead of marking a paper ballot and verifying that it was inserted into a locked ballot box, I touched a computer screen and pressed a flashing "Vote" button.
I asked a poll worker if I would receive some sort of paper confirmation of my vote, and she replied that I did not. How then can I be sure that my vote was actually counted, and that the system reported my vote for the proper candidates? Quite simply, it cannot.
As a computer programmer by trade, my bread & butter comes from the design & implementation of new computer technologies. But creating an all-electronic system with no voter-verifiable audit trail is one of the worst threats our democracy has faced.
First, how can I be sure that the software powering the voting device is free of defects? Next, how can I verify that my "ballot" is not corrupted in the transfer from the device to whatever central system is used to count the ballots? Finally, what happens if a recount is requested? By virtue of the fact it is a computer, a system making a mistake the first time is likely to make the same mistake the second time.
Our democracy is too precious to be entrusted to the hands of some overworked software developer answering to a bottom-line driven management. If we truly want honest and open elections, we must first insure that the technology driving it is open, honest, and voter-verifiable.
Regards,
John Anderson
...and Republicans just don't _do_ that kind of thing, and aren't as good at it as the Democrats. That's why there's such a big push to go to automated systems without audit trails manufactured by large Republican contributors.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The beauty of scantron is that we have a training program for it: Lottery Forms ;-)
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Here in the good old US of A, people can't know who you are voting for, so we would have to blindfold the candidates and lock the voter in a room with them. But then how do we know if people are voting more than once? I know I would! ;)
warning: This post is likely to contain gobs of dripping sarcasm. Consume at your own risk.
First, thanks for your response. I appreciate the feedback.
I think it's important to distinguish for whom this could be an improvement. For you and the other members of your development team and the independant lab that tests the voting machines and their software--yes. But these groups are all using the machines in the capacity more like a home computer user is using their system at home. You and the lab can change whatever you wish and make the system suit your needs (either by doing it yourself or getting someone you trust to do it). This is where free software is a must-have and a definate advantage, no question about it. Signed binaries are of course helpful and necessary. I have no problem with these advances in this context.
But for the public at large, it's quite a different situation. For the public using the machine strictly to vote, I maintain there is no opportunity to check the software to make sure it all matches the digitally signed binaries. In other words, even if some version of the voting machine software is completely trustworthy, how would a voter determine if the voting machine they're about to use is running the trustworthy software? How would they determine if the software running on everyone else's voting machine is the trustworthy version (which they need to know in order to be assured most people's votes will count properly)? I know of no way to look at a screen and discern this information. Therefore I find no advantage to public scrutiny for voting software or signed binaries. I don't see an advantage to non-free software or signature-less binaries either.
I feel sorry for you and all the other voting machine makers out there because, as I see it, you're all in the same situation--this is a no-win situation for the public and you have the unenviable task of producing a secure system. Nobody outside the development process can really know what software is running on those machines. And that's assuming the machines are somehow incapable of being altered by local polling place operators.
Yet another black mark for the Wired article. This wouldn't have changed my opinion of your machines, but it would have given a different view of the election. The picture they paint makes it look like you either vote with eVACS or you don't vote at all (possibly there's an absentee system, but I'm not familiar with Australian election law).
Noble goals all, in particular working to make it possible for the blind and illiterate to vote without revealing their vote.
Digital Citizen
Speaking from someone who's country is election mad, turnout hovers around 97% each and every time and elections are won by around 2.5% each time let me just point out that pen and paper is the ultimate solution.
Think about it: it's completely scaleable - want it faster? add more people. It's indistructable, it can be verified (yes even real-time while they're being counted like we do). Seriously this is trying to add the equivalent of an electronic list outside the fridge when just opening it up would work just fine.
To hell with me having to use a machine to check my vote. Just have it print scannable crap for the computers, and right next to it have it print in plain text who I voted for. I can quite easily see who I voted for on the card, and the machines can count the barcode or whatever. In the case a recount is needed, people can simply count the names instead of using a computer. A random 5% or so cards can be regularly checked to make sure the names match the barcodes. Having only the barcodes just leads to more crap to deal with.
I agree that we're seeing not only the dangers of "black box" items but a really bad development methodology as well.
The point was that the lessons from ATM development are not transferrable to voting machine development.
It's kind of strange how in the end we feel that the one item that is going to give us peace of mind is paper. So, how come we don't just simply start and end with that paper? (I think the big "connect the arrow" and scan your ballot before dropping it in the box approach is the way to go.)
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Unfortunely in this country being able to read is not a preresquite to voting. Rembember the famous(infamous ) buttefly Ballot controversy in Flordia 2000?
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
It has already been decidedhttp://www.metnews.com/articles/webe102903. htm
Oh and before you yell Bush this is the most Liberal Federal Court in the country.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers