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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?"
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?
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.
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?
...
Are you serious? Are the people who count the votes not volunteers in the US?
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 you rather pay voting machine companies some 5'000$ per unit for a glorified Windows CE computer with an Access database that can be hacked by any pimply faced teenager with 100$ worth of computer equipment?
What a bargain
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
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.
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.
2) The US has turned into a nation full of people with a) no patience and b) a very short attention span. We want what we want, and we want it now! And dammit, if other countries can have computerized voting systems, so should we.
Not to rain on your cynicism parade, but quick tallying isn't just a form of political entertainment. The quicker the tally is done, the less opportunity for vote manipulation. In tightly contested elections, it reduces the problem of people forming immovable opinions about who won, and subsequently never accepting the legitimacy of the outcome (e.g. "Not My President").
Of course, speeding up the process of tallying at the expense of clear auditability is to cure the disease by killing the patient.
The answer, then, is optically scannable ballots: tallying as fast as any "voting machine" and auditability as good as any paper ballot.
Personally, if I were to design the system, it would look like this:
(1)Manually filled in ballot, optically scanned;
(2)Tallying machines running off of read only media, recording results to write-once media;
(3) Tallying media, original paper ballots securely stored for a period of several years;
(4)Voters could optionally tear off a bar coded tag from their ballot. They could then go to a specially set up election facility, present their tag and positive ID, then see how their vote was tallied on a secure, private terminal.
This last point will raise some paranoid objections; however I think paranoia cuts both ways in this instance.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Right. You simply do it by tweaking the database; much more efficient, and harder to trace with the opaque voting process provided by Diebold, MicroVote and others. One must admire progress, even when it simplifies fraud.
Weapons of Mass Analysis