E-Voting Glitch: 19,000 Voters, 144,000 Votes

nick_davison writes "The Indianapolis Star is reporting the latest case of 'interesting' E-voting results. Tuesday's Boone County election, using MicroVote software returned 144,000 votes from 19,000 registered voters. After much panicking and tracking down the bug, the actual number of votes turned out as 5,352. With yet another mistake, does anyone still trust closed-source electronic voting?"

Comments

check out BlackBoxVoting

[phooka.de]

Check out BlackBoxVoting. They even have the entire book for free as PDF. Very interesting read.

Personally I like the bit about vote-counting in France. Sounds a lot more advanced (read: secure) than the US way of doing it.

Re:What is wrong with an "X"??

[shippo]

Pen? We use thick pencils, with fairly soft cores, attached to the polling booth by a long piece of string! No change of the ink drying up, and little chance of the pencil breaking.

Re:What is wrong with an "X"??

[gunga]

1) We don't want to have to pay someone to tally all the votes. If its not computerized, someone has to count them all up. When there's around 100 million votes for president, that's a lot of minimum wage hours right there!

Are you serious? Are the people who count the votes not volunteers in the US?

At least it wasn't 250 extra votes...

[mev]

Having an extra 100,000+ votes clearly stands out as an error. I would have been more concerned if it was a small enough number not to be detected, but a big enough number to affect close races.

Re:At least it wasn't 250 extra votes...

[SoTuA]

Having an extra 100,000+ votes clearly stands out as an error. I would have been more concerned if it was a small enough number not to be detected, but a big enough number to affect close races.

So, how do you know the figure they produced later (5k votes) is right? The software has shown itself to be fallible (obviously, it's human made ferchrissakes!) but we only have the word of the company that "now it is ok".

I sure am happy my country still has "stone-age voting", making a single vertical line to cross an horizontal line beside the candidate's name with a soft lead pencil on a paper ballot. Votes are counted at each voting table by the people who staff it (who are chosen at random from the pool of people who vote in that particular table) and every candidate has a right to an observer to watch the vote counting, on every table.

yet another mistake

[HornyBastard77]

mistakes happen in all software, open or closed. this one was actually fortunate, because it was out there for everyone to see. at least with this incident these election officials will think twice before they can declare these machines 'virtually infallible.' once can also hope that there will be a thorough audit of how exactly the actual number of votes was lowered to 5352 from 144,000.

what causes me more worry are the bugs (features?) in these machines that are known only to a select few. i was hoping that after the elections last week more hue and cry would be made in the mainstream media about these machines by the candidates who lost. that doesn't appear to be forthcoming, though. pity.

Re:What is wrong with an "X"??

[Wudbaer]

Your objections are certainly justified; on the other hand Germany where I am living is doing all of its voting the traditionall pen-and-paper-ballot way, and we get first projections minutes after the voting closes, more and more reliable projections shortly after and very accurate (usually 0,x % to the official final results) inofficial final results the same evening (usually our voting booths close at 6 pm). The official results are available IIRC about 2-3 days after the vote.

The people staffing the voting booths and counting the votes are usually volunteers who get a small payment for their troubles. All in all our systems
seems to work quite well.

And even if Germany is far smaller than the US it has still a not too small voting population.

Re:What is wrong with an "X"??

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to be a hard core political junky.

There is a extremely large amount of vote fraud going on now with the paper ballots, mostly for local elections. (nobody in the big parties talk about it because it would cause too much trouble)

One of the big ideas of computer voting is you remove the ability to add, replace or destroy ballots in the time gap between voting and being tallied.

Open, closed, I'm the guy with the gun.

[Asprin]

Open-sourcing the voting software is important, but in my opinion, not as important as maintaining separate systems for ballot printing and ballot tabulation.

I wrote about it in this journal entry.

Re:Closed source?

[awol]

With yet another mistake, does anyone trust electronic voting full stop?

Or as some of the American Electorate might say; "with yet another mistake does anyone trust voting full stop". I think the source of the problem is the perception by various interests in the US that there is some form of money to be made in these systems. This is wrong. Get the _process_ of electronic voting designed right (I mean imagine the first elections back in the year dot. All those who vote for Trevor stand to the left, all those for Dave to the right, all those for Ug, um well, you just stand where you are... No dave, stop killing the people voting for Trevor... What do you mean you don't want to vote for Ug, well ok then you just stand over there... No I don't care who you want to vote for they're not here. Oh fuck it, this is too hard). Then the implementation simply becomes a question of reducing cost. There is no "marginal" profit to be had and as such there is almost no way that private enterprise can fund the development of these systems better than the state. The argument for free software systems is equally persuasive.

Then there is the deployment of the hardware/infrastructure to actually deliver the voting functionality to the electorate (and that is something that can get better and better over time as well). It is very expensive and the only benefits compared to the counting of paper votes are accuracy and cost savings (for get speed, it's not like there is a power vacuum before the result. so what if it takes a few days). If you can give accuracy then get out of the game and the only way to reduce cost is to fund on a cost basis which means the state should fund the system not enterprise.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Cartesian Join?

[ReadParse]

Sounds like somebody screwed up the SQL:

select count(*) as count, candidate.lastname || ', ' || candidate.firstname as candidate from candidate, vote group by candidate order by count desc

They should have added "where candidate.id = vote.candidate_id". I make this mistake often, but I generally practice my queries before doing them for the press.

RP

Here's how you do it right

[nurbman]

I voted in the Toronto election this week. They used a ballot where you fill in a line with a gap in the middle so that a scanner can detect it.

It looked like they used this machine to scan it: www.essvote.com

Very clean. The number of votes was called in and double checked against the smart card inside which connects by modem. Results 20 minutes after the polls closed and a paper trail if needed. Great stuff.

I give up

[ThisIsFred]

So far, I have either read about, or heard about the following problems with these electronic voting systems:

Machines crashing while the polls were open

Central collection point jammed with call-in traffic (understandable)

Machine inflates count almost 30 times the actual figure.

Alright, I give up. Let us at least try to put a positive spin on this issue. Were there any elections that didn't have problems when using the new electronic voting systems? And what was the ratio of non-problematic electronic voting to problematic electronic voting? I'd say that if more than half of the electronic voting machines had problems, the manufacturer should be sued. I'd advocate a lawsuit to get out from under any contracts that may exist for the installation and maintenance of this equipment.

An aside: Does anyone know whether or not computer scientists had any input at all on the design of these beasts? If not, then what a terrible waste of good talent. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong there, because I still think an electronic voting machine wouldn't be very complicated to design.

Re:Closed or Open...it doesn't matter

[0x0d0a]

Vote-counting is up there with life support systems in terms of how critical mucking it up can be. If you need to have three independently written programs doing the counting and comparing results, then do it. For something as simple as this, I disagree that common mistakes are acceptable.

Voting vs. electronic financial transactions

[Retired Replicant]

Why is it that millions of financial transactions occur each day with relatively good reliability, and the ability to track down and correct errors, but they can't seem to design a reliable system to count votes?

The main thing is that there should always be a paper receipt as backup. When you go to the ATM you get a receipt, when you use your credit card, you get a receipt. When you vote electronically, a matching receipt should be printed, signed by the voter, and retained in a locked ballot box. The receipts in the ballot box can then be counted if there is a question about the electronic results.

I think we need to consider keeping the ability to match voters to ballots in order to reduce the chance of ballot-box stuffing (either electronic or physical). Of course safeguards would need to put in place to restrict and prevent the abuse of knowledge about how someone voted. For example, after a certain amount of time, all ballots should be destroyed, etc.

Closed Source?

[Drooling_Sheep]

I'd trust closed-source voting before I'd trust open-source where a potential exploiter can easliy scan the code finding and exploiting bugs. Though I don't see how it can be so hard to design a secure voting system. You wouldn't want it to run on anything more than the most basic kernel though, so the best idea is probably to use a simple proprietary OS. And you could architect the thing so that it only runs some sort of registered instructions. Also, the whole thing would have to be closed-circuit obviously.

Making it too complicated

[Mr Bubble]

To my mind, the problem that these computers were meant to solve was the production of legible, non-ambiguous, easily tallied ballots that accurately reflect the voter's intentions in the booth.

I see a computer terminal that is very straightforward and relatively low tech. All this terminal does is display the choices, record the user's input, and spit out a chit with the voter's choices displayed in human and machine readable form. These votes could easily be placed through a bubble reader or cross-checked by humans.

This is tech people can understand and verify on the spot before they cast their ballot into the box. Is there really any reason to have that terminal record the votes, tally the votes, and wire the totals to centralized servers? How many points of failure/corruption do we really want here?