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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."
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.
... 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.
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.
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!
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
One factor is that ballots in the United States tend to be quite long, due to our multiple levels of government and the fact that elected officials serve set terms (with terms at the various levels being synchronized). In the general election next year, for example, I'll be voting for three federal office (President, Representative, Senator), a state equivalent of a Representative, city council positions, a county council representative, various other boards (e.g. school board), probably a dozen statewide referendums and maybe one or two local (city- or county-wide) referendums. And it generally takes a month to certify an election, even with an automated counting process (which is why Arnold Schwarzenneger hasn't been sworn in as governor of California yet).
What's it like in Canada? Does a general election include anything other than federal MP? Do you have separate elections for sepearate offices?
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?)
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
The third section of this article actually talks about Cambridge MA, which does exactly that. Somerville, next door (where I voted yesterday), does that as well. And Cambridge actually did have a hardware problem and rescanned the ballots.
As for the capabilities of this system, you can actually do ranking quite easily (and Cambridge actually does use ranking in their voting, although Somerville does not); you don't write numbers, but you fill in an oval in the grid for each rank, like on the SAT.
Cambridge City Council elections have an "instant runoff" system, which uses some algorithm that eliminates candidates who have either won or lost, and moves votes to candidates the voter ranked next until the right number of candidates have been chosen. It's what you'd expect for the city that has both MIT and Harvard in it.
Why not? Because they're nearly different companies... That is, Diebold bought the firm that makes the voting machines, and I doubt that Diebold the ATM guys made any sweeping changes to the new Diebold Election guys (DESI), especially since they made the purchase in January 2002..... yahoo .com link for more info
At least here in California, I can go to any polling place as long as I can confirm my identity
Not in my part of California. I have to go to the precinct that contains the address at which I'm registered. They have my name and address on a list, and they check it off.
If I go to the wrong precinct (last election my polling place handled three precincts) they tell me I'm not listed there and to go to the correct one.
I suppose if you were registered multiple times at different addresses you might be able to scam them, but you don't just have your choice of polling places. Not in Bakersfield, anyway.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
Power: The Edge machines have internal batteries good for a few hours, built-in. The machines are left plugged-in the night before the election to make sure the batteries are fully charged. You know you've lost power even if you're outside because a yellow bar appears at the bottom of the LCD, it goes red when your internal battery pack gets within ten minutes of failing. We also had a separate external battery pack. We also could call for additional battery power (we'd have hours) if it looked like we were going to run out. Finally, in case all of this fails, there's a backup plan involving paper and the box you dropped your absentee ballot in.
So, it's unlikely you'd actually reboot due to power failure. Still, Reboot doesn't seem to kill the results card in most cases. We didn't do that catastrophically, but we did turn (in training) the machine off and then on while the polls open/closed switch was left open, the right thing happens there (it notes it on the log, the counts stay there.)
I wouldn't want to try it during the period immediately after the user presses "Yes, I really want to cast this ballot.", it appears that some sort of NVRAM is written there. FYI, The results cartridge looks kinda like a PCMCIA card, not precisely, but that's the basic idea.
You don't need extra power to tally the results, etc. The machines have a small printer in the back, they print out totals at the beginning and end of the election (as determined by the turn of a knob.) The internal battery pack could run the printer. You've still got the results card, as well.
It was a little frightening that when I dropped off my absentee ballot, that there was no lock on the box to go to the registrar's office.
We had a small blue plastic seal, it's a little plastic doodad that connects the two zipper pulls, you can close the seal through the zippers but you can't open the seal without breaking it. It's just a small #'d piece of plastic, that seal should have been put on after the first absentee ballot was cast (after showing that first abs. voter that the box was empty), and should have only been taken off during the closing of the polling place. It's more likely they forgot (or didn't know to) put it on.
Similar seals are used to protect against various bits of tampering on the electronic machines and in the final "bag of results" that is driven to the registrar's office (or some local field centers). The one that protects the results cartridge has its code # paid special attention to.
If you didn't see a blue plastic thingee (it wouldn't have been big, like a master lock), it's worth mentioning it to the registrar, but more likely mistraining of the poll workers than actual malfaesence. (We had a mistake in our own implementation there, we used a yellow one instead of a blue one, but no real harm was done to the system thereby, it's just a piece of plastic.)
Note that losing an absentee ballot would be possible after the poll-workers open the box after polling, as well. As during the day during aan election, there'd be some chance another poll-worker would catch you at it, unless you're in cahoots. Still nice to lock the ballot box during the election, though. (If nothing else, it saves you from having to tell someone you won't retrieve their ballot when they cast it and then say they made a mistake!)
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