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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?"
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!
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);
}
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.
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...
Yeah, the IT director and the software provider "fixing" the problem is a little bit disconcerting.
LordBodak's journal.
"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
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).
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.
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
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.