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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?"
Have you tried MacroVote?
"There are more pleasant things to do than beat up people." --Muhammad Ali
I remember at our last national election, the voting was simple - make an X on a ballot and put it in the voting box.
I have to wonder, with all these punch cards, evote, and other problems - why don't they just stick to plain old pen & paper ballots? I mean if you can't figure those out, chances are you'll end up just stuffing your ballot into the funny "circular" ballot box anyways!
...That when they 'fixed' the problem, they did it right. Since they probably didn't want the local county's IT guy to look at the source and fix the problem, there's no guarantee they got it right this time, either.
Cogito ergo sum in Slashdot.
True politics
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
"I probably just put a decimal point in the wrong spot. I always forget some mundane detail..." lol
Personally I like the bit about vote-counting in France. Sounds a lot more advanced (read: secure) than the US way of doing it.
Is this how Bush was elected?
A lengthy collaboration between the county's information technology director and advisers from the MicroVote software producer ... showed just 5,352 ballots
So an IT director and a number of flunkies have rewritten the results of an election.
How do the good people of Boone County know that the new answer is correct? Because it's less than the number of actual voters? How can they trust the result of that election at all? And why should those too young to vote until next time bother to vote when next time comes around?
Here it is:
#include <stdlib.h>
int main()
{
printf( "%i\n", rand() );
return(0);
}
What matters is an accurate count. Why oh why is this so difficult? Press a button, tally a vote. Next voter please. Why is this even still being discussed??? Maybe I'm dense, but I just don't get it.
The new Indianapolis Mayor, Richard Daley Jr., said there is nothing to be concerned about. Indiana Governor Martha Daley called to congratulate him on his victory.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
When software is used to impliment a matter of law, the public must have an absolute right and need to review such software, even before one speaks of issues of software freedom. We don't make closed source or "secret" laws in this country, ie, laws that effect the public in general, and that the public is not permitted to know or examine, but yet will be held accountable to. We don't have anonymous or secret agencies enforcing laws and arresting people, ie, a secret police force. Yet, for reasons I cannot fathom, we now permit machinary with no public means of review to impliment laws, such as voting. No democracy can exist where voting is a secret or unaccountable process to the public that participates in it.
Sod that.
With yet another mistake, does anyone trust electronic voting full stop?
(I think that Open Source might be better, but to the majority of voters, electronic voting is the same thing irrespective of how visible the code is - and quite frankly, even with peer review on open coude this sort of bug might still happen)
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So 19,000 voters produced 144,000 votes. That's obviously an error, and was caught and corrected. What you really need to worry about are the little errors; if the votes are off by 500 or 1000 how are you going to know?
...
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.
Millions of eyes makes a bug fucking scary!!!
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.
I mean really, how difficult can this be. Lots of people vote, you add up the totals, we're not talking rocket science here. When was the last time your local ATM machine gave you $1500 instead of the $50 that you asked for. Doesn't happen too often right? Maybe it's because the banks are damned sure they're not going to give their money away. It's a pity the people in charge don't take democracy that seriously.
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The Amount_paid variable was used where it should have been Vote_Count...
"With yet another mistake, does anyone still trust closed-source electronic voting?"
This infers that open source == no mistakes. That's simply not true. It just means that there *may* be less mistakes as theoretically more people look at it. Think SendMail... that's open source, widely used, but that sure has had plenty of "mistakes".
Read reviews of shopping cart software
Don't forget the other traditionial Democrat block in Chicago.
Glad I looked for a post like this before I tossed in my immediate reaction: these guys are amatures, Cook County ILL has been running this way spanning three centuries and two millenia!
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
I completely agree that closed source is the wrong way to go for such a public venture as voting, but are there any open source products vying for contracts? i mean, we cant really wait around for govt to say "yes, lets use open source universally" if there are no projects out there for them to use.
If there is one out there, then it needs to be pointed out to the govt buyers.
one world | many people
even with peer review on open coude this sort of bug might still happen
But in that case we at least get to see the bug *and* the fix. Now someone has 'fixed' the count and but he could just as well have done that by inserting some hardcoded reasonable looking numbers.
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.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
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.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ok, not really.
With yet another mistake, does anyone still trust closed-source electronic voting?
Open source, closed source, it does not matter. Open source is not a cure for solid software development practices, and open source is not a synonym for solid software development practices. Likewise "closed-source" does not equate to poor practices.
One of the strengths of open source is the price. Free software probably means more people are using it than would otherwise, so the software is being tested more, and the pool of people available to fix bugs is also larger. This works for software that is generally useful, but consider voting software. Who is going to install the full voting suite (voting software is much more than a voting terminal) and then hold mock elections in their home? Granted, the importance of such software may bring out more people willing to try the software but you are still relying on people to do this in their leisure time.
The "many eyes" argument is merely a shotgun approach to quality control. What is needed is strong leadership implemeting a plan which includes rigorous and ongoing testing. Open source does not guarantee this any more than closed source guarantees its absence.
The software was released before it was ready. That's obvious. It seems to me that a closed source shop would be theoretically better positioned to meet an immutable deadline (such as an election date). At least when you own your employees you can mandate overtime and crack the whip harder. When the software is open source you cannot enter "crunch mode" and make the scattered developers put in long hours.
The fault was not in the development model but in the failure of the project leadership.
E-Voting Glitch: 19,000 Voters, 144,000 Votes
I hate the word "glitch", I really do.
It's an evasion, a pathetic euphemism.
What it really means is "bad programming", "fucked up", "profoundly fucked up", etc.
-kgj
-kgj
What is the ridiculuous complexity making these things so easy to fcuk up?
Combine it perhaps with a bar code scanner so that every individual can have a street bar code. Add a few simple checks like no more bar codes are counted for a paricular street than were issued.
I still don't see where this becomes a complex task compared to existing systems. Most of the components needed to build a system already existing.
Some one please tell me what I am missing.
As for the open source/free software issue. Perhaps the solution is that the requirements for the system should be published so that anyone can right something to conform. (Oh that's like having open standards).
We don't want to have to pay someone to tally all the votes.
If your vote is so important to why don't volunteers count the votes? Several states, Texas example, require a human readable ballot. Smaller cities may use hand counts. Most large cities use a machine/human readable "scantron" type ballots. They mark the ballots with a permanent ink marker. Marking more than one selection for the same race invalidates only the section of the ballot for that race. IF you notice you made a mistake you can get a fresh ballot. The spoiled ballot is destroyed while you watch. Observers from all parties can watch the election judges (the people that issue the ballots, destroy the miss-marked ballots and watch you put your ballot in the box).
In Europe and Canada most countries require a paper ballot. They limit the number of voters assigned to each polling place so the votes can be counted and certified within a few hours of the close of the polls. Usually they have next day official results. It does require lots of people to complete the process but most are volunteers.
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RP
Get off the open/closed source debate already. If you use electronic voting, you open the door to electronic voting fraud. Open source is helpful in this regard, but not as effective as keeping to paper voting. Think about it. You can pay people to commit fraud anyway, but the cost goes up with number of votes altered/subtituted/whatever. With electronic voting, one guy can automate the fraud process with much greater effect. You raise the efficiency of the fraud as well as the voting.
People will argue the supposed cost and efficiency advantages of e-voting. Think about the cost of counting YOUR ONE VOTE and compare that to what YOU PAY IN TAXES each year - then tell me it's expensive. It's been working fine for over 200 years, there is little to gain from changing and everything to lose.
The number 144000 has a great significance in many religions/beliefs.
Google on 144000
Personally I think that Judgement Day is nigh and that the AntiChrist will use an evoting machine to gain control of the world.
Or perhaps not.
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.
There's a point to be made here.
The fact of the matter is that open source software will do very little to help the issue of the untrustworthiness of electronic voting.
Simply put, being able to read the source code does you no good if you can't be sure that the binary that the voting machine is running was compiled from that code.
With a Linux distro, if I for some reason suspect Red Hat may be compiling back doors into xdm or login, I can go somewhere else. If I don't trust anybody, I can compile the damn thing myself and put it on my computer.
These machines, open source or not, are going to be provided by a company like Diebold. Do you trust them, even if they have to give you a copy of some source code which may or may not be the source code that they used in their voting machines? Are you going to be able to browse the source code on the very voting machine you're using? Are you going to be given the compiler flags used to create the binary so you can re-create it yourself, and access to the voting machine's disk so you can compare them?
It is necessary that any electronic voting system be open source, as a matter of duty to the public. It is not, however, sufficient.
The enemies of Democracy are
True. However, the idea is to avoid that sort of thing unless it is truly necessary, since even though there are good reasons to keep the details of military and espionage spending secret, the secrecy can be abused and used to hide unethical and even illegal actions. It's best to keep government activity public by default and only maintain secrecy if there is a compelling reason to do so.
I'm an Indiana voter, and the most recent elections in my county (Tippecanoe County, encompassing Purdue University) were a complete disaster. Yes, we can thank our good pal Diebold.
1 1l ocal_news1068529632.shtml
I went to vote at 7:00 am after the polls had been open for an hour and was turned away because of "computer problems." Apparently one of the "pick X candidates for city council" votes was not allowing a voter to pick multiple candidates. Our election board had to print up paper ballots at the last minute, delaying the opening of the polls for about two hours. When I finally got a chance to vote, it was the good-old-fashioned way: checking off candidates pen and paper, and counted by hand.
Okay, shame on us for not having a backup in place in case the computer screwed up. But the computer shouldn't have screwed up in the first place. Testing, people?
Elsewhere in our county, first the machine neglected to tally absentee ballots in a very close race. Then it was discovered that one of the voting stations put the wrong candidates on the ballot, which may lead to a special run-off election.
http://www.lafayettejc.com/news20031111/2003111
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
There was a minor fault in the vote rigging module. It's since been corrected. Move along, nothing to see here.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I would hope that any company that supplied software for something like counting votes would have to provide evidence of a complete testing procedure that would catch problems like this.
I mean, automated testing of a voting system can't be hard. Build yourself a little network of voting machines in the office, write a bunch of scripts that enter a certain pattern of votes and ensure the correct results come out the other end. Make sure your scripts perform a wide range of possible voting patterns, and do all the 'odd' things your users might do (try to vote twice, mash the keypad with their palm etc).
Or am I being terribly naive about the way the software industry does things?
It's not just that 19000 voters produced 144000 votes; it's that 19000 voters produced 5352 BALLOTS that produced 144000 votes.
Obviously, this was intended as the Chicago or Baldwin release of the software.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
>We don't make closed source or "secret" laws in
>this country, ie, laws that effect the public
>in general, and that the public is not
>permitted to know or examine, but yet will be
>held accountable to. We don't have anonymous or
>secret agencies enforcing laws and arresting
>people, ie, a secret police force.
are you serious? two words my friend: Patriot. Act.
get your memory checked now: http://www.thememoryhole.org
> We don't have anonymous or secret agencies enforcing laws and arresting people, ie, a secret police force.
Yes, as a matter of fact, in the U.S.A., we do have this.
And it's so much easier when you can rig an election.
What? Boone county is liberal? This is Lebanon Indiana. You make it sound like it's the San Rafael of the cornbelt.
If you want to see what it looks like, watch the opening minutes of "Hoosiers". Much of it was filmed here.
Boone county is mostly farmland; corn, soybeans, winter wheat, although much of the farmland that borders I-65
is being converted to industrial parks. There are clusters of new home developments, ugly self-similar brownish houses
made of styrofoam and pressed wood, packed together with no trees on what used to be soybean fields.
They might be considered bedroom communities but that's not representative of the majority.
We've recently gotten a Starbucks at the Shell station up on the Zionsville exit. That's about as liberal as they get.
Lebanon High School still has "Drive your tractor to school" day.
You have a choice on most ballots here of Republican, or Republican.
The same political structure and families have been in place for as long as I can remember.
The voting machines are electronic but not touchscreens. They're those big suitcases on
a stand with push buttons and red LEDs. The system has been in place for at least 10 years.
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.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
Back in the days when votes were counted by hand {or today, in countries where they stil are} the whole process was transparent.
If your country uses electronic voting, you should write to your representative and point out the necessity of opening up the process. Specifically, the need for the public to be able to examine mechanical drawings and software source code. Public scrutiny over the democratic process is more important than any corporate secret.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Fine. I will take this troll.
I don't think the author or anyone else is saying "choose OSS because it's bug free". I believe the point to be made is that Open-source can be inspected by anyone since it's available to the public.
I for one do not trust proprietary software for voting. Government should be transparent and so should the software used to elect those buffoons into office.
And I will go so far to say that not only should the software be OSS. I should be able to download the voting data and run my own analysis of the past election.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Lois, this isn't my Batman glass. - Peter
Are you going to tell me that some ivory-tower egg head (Homer Simpson says it best) hasn't come up with a highly reliable computerized voting architecture based around public/private keys, solutions to the Byzantine Generals Problem, and other distributed algorithms?
Kinda. Not public/private keys (voting is anonymous) but... Voter Verified Electronic Election is Ivory Tower Egghead stuff that you might like.
When you cheat an ATM machine, the ATM machine owner loses money. When you cheat an electronic voting machine, the machine owner may have no stake in the results or may even be benefitted by your action.
When an ATM machine cheats you, you know it, often immediately. When a voting machine cheats you, in a secret ballot system with the simplistic unauditable voting machines we use now, you never find out.
'This American Life' had a great story on Sunday about voting machines, specifically about Diebold's. The theme of the show was The Annoying Gap Between Theory and Practice. The show is supposed to be coming out in RA on Thursday here. /.'ers would probably enjoy listening to it.
:)
Basically they talked about electronic voting and some of its (many) drawbacks. Most
For anyone who doesn't know about 'This American Life', basically they are short stories (about 3-4 per show) revolving around a certain theme. The stories are real life stories from ordinary people in America. Many of the stories are funny, some are sad, and almost all of them are thought provoking. I'd highly recommend listening to a show or two.
And no, I'm not affiliated with the show. Just an avid listener
-- The Genesis project? What's that?
...to seeing Bush re-elected with a 2 billion vote majority.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
And I concur, it works very well.
The number of persons who would have to cheat to change a vote is high (at least four volunteers, plus the "overseers" from each parties and from the municipality); in addition, the "paper trail" remains behind to allow recounts.
And in presidential elections (with something like forty or fifty million potential voters, so big if not quite US-scale), projections accurate to the % are available the minute the polls close.
It's only drawback is that it require a non-ridiculous number of volunteers, who are (rightly, IMHO) not remunerated.
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You got it wrong. Open-source doesn't mean Linux-style development. You can have a company-regulated project, but still open to the citizens wishing to peek at the code.
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.
I love the Subject. OSS zealots, like myself, tend to miss the point from time to time.
What people need to realize here is that technology does NOT always solve a problem. Even if it appears to solve the problem it may create numerous other problems. Why put the election results into the hands of a few campaign-funding corporations? Our government has a history of setting up phony elections to install leaders in other countries, why make it easy to do so here. Read here or here. You can argue that Michael Moore is a wacko, he isn't, but history often has a way of telling us the truth behind the rhetoric.
LoRider
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.
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?
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"