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Los Alamos Reconsiders Touch Screen Voting
goombah99 writes "Los Alamos county, which boasts the highest geek PhD per capita in the world and considerable clout in secure computing, has voted to rescind its previous plans to purchase Touch Screen voting systems and will ask the New Mexico's secretary of state to address its concerns regarding an imminent state-wide purchase. They may get forced by the Clerk's office to use them anyway if the state makes its bulk purchase of Sequoia AvcEdge touch screen systems with a Windows-based WinEDS database. The Los Alamos position is welcome news since it casts the rejection of these systems in a more sober light; widespread right-wing conspiracy theories have done great harm by galvanizing election officials to be dismissive of re-opening their consideration of the issue. What won the day was convincing the county they had until 2006 to comply with HAVA, and that better machines with voter verifiable audit trails and even open source, were on the way. There is also more in the local newspapers."
was that the local officials saw a way to keep their skin intact. Defer the decision and allow a (new! in-depth!) study to recommend something else because the time-frame allows it.
Simon the cynic.
Physicists get Hadrons!
he he he...
I think this is the first time that I've ever seen CBS News, home of Dan Rather, called "right-wing"
*Sigh*
Better to do it right and build trust in the system than implement something with known flaws.
This is the future. It's only a matter of time until it's perfected. Let's be patient.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
And the only reason they have any traction is because the voting machines don't have a voter, human readable, verifiable audit trail to track the votes. Thus you open up all sorts of conspiracy theories because theres no way to prove to a reasonable person that the votes have not been tampered with either through error or design.
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Touch Screen systems just aren't reliable, there's no paper trail, they're closed source, etc. How Diebold has managed to penetrate so deeply is amazing to me. Are our elected officials really that stupid, or has Diebold really swindled them?
I believe electronic voting systems can work, but only highly secured, rigorously tested, and open source systems that leave a paper trail. If nothing else, a piece of paper that the voter can use to verify the votes he or she cast.
For now, I'll stick with punch cards or penis pullers, thank you very much.
Governments want traceability and backups in case the something goes wrong.
What I think the government wants varies according to how paranoid I'm feeling on any particular day. As a voter however, I want traceability and backups so I can be assured that the vote wasn't tampered with.
The summary implies that it's conservatives who oppose these systems. Read the linked story, and you'll see that the "conspiracy theory" is one that Republicans are behind some sort of sinister plot to fix the vote. If anything, this makes it conspiracy theory on the part of the left wing. Personally, I'll be happy if these machines never see use. Punch card ballots seem to be usable without major problem everywhere but Florida. Let them have the electronic voting machines if they want, and leave the rest of us with systems that've worked just fine for decades.
reprint of letter to the editor in same paper
Voting systems not ready for prime time
The country and our county are on a buying spree. At several thousand dollars a throw, new electronic voting systems are being purchased or planned for every polling place in the country. You might think that these systems, designed to be integrated into the heart of our democracy, have been carefully designed according to the highest standards of security and accuracy. You might think, observing the rush to adopt these systems before the 2004 election cycle, that the problems that have surfaced can't have been all that significant.
You would be wrong.
All of the recent election fiascos have occurred on machines that had been officially tested and certified by experts and checked again for "logic and accuracy" by county officials. Yet several jurisdictions have reported problems just this month. Boone county Indiana reported 144,000 votes had been cast, an exceptionally good turnout for a county with 19,000 registered voters. In Fairfax County, a seat was lost by a 1 percent margin, yet tests later showed the voting machines malfunctioned and erased "one out of every hundred" of the losing candidate's votes. California halted its certification process for one system when it was found that the vendor had altered previously certified software to fix bugs without telling the county. The Washington Post reports a lawsuit by the GOP after a malfunction during this month's election was fixed mid-election by technicians who removed the vote-containing machines for repair. Citing a 66percent malfunction rate, the Louisiana secretary of state intends to scrap all of that state's new touch screens.
Bugs are always present, even on the space shuttle. Mission-critical systems are not bug free - that's impossible - but they undergo multiple reviews and they are designed to be fault-tolerant using fail-safe, redundant subsystems. For electronic voting systems, this means open-source software and a voter-verifiable audit trail. Lacking these, these new systems are not ready for prime time, and neither Los Alamos nor New Mexico should be purchasing them.
I read the CBS News article in the included link, and I don't see the "great harm" anywhere in that article. I'm wondering if the submitter is showing a bias by his comments.
I am not aware of any solid proof that the right-wing has used electronic voting machines to ensure election, but it stands to reason that it has and will happen. Why? Because politicians on both sides have tampered with election results and methods for decades (centuries, millenia). So it would be quite naive to think that the right-wing wouldn't try to use whatever advantage it had. The left-wing too, when they are in power, would do the same thing. Power corrupts.
This is a non-partisan problem. Either side is likely to try to use closed-source technology to their favor. It is short-sided to think this is only a right-wing problem -- it's not. Whoever is in power will use whatever means are accesible to maintain that power. Therefore it is imperative that the voting method being used does not give them an obvious tool to corrupt in maintaining that power. Diebold (and other manufacturer) machines are bad news, no matter which side you are on. Elections are stolen routinely throughout human history. Don't give them another tool to do the job, for they will most assuredly use them.
Think about it: Do you really want to give politicians a method to hide voting result confirmations? To be able to say, "Here are the results and, hey whaddya know? I won!" and have no possible way to verify that? That's called power without accountability, and we all know where that leads.
The very fact that the officials have signed contracts that forbid any investigation of the equipment and that there are no verifiable audit trails makes me think that there is some truth in these "conspiracy theories".
When government is not open and transparent it is usually because those people who make up the government are trying to hide something, usually fixing things in their own self interest.
Would you trust your money to a bank that had no audit trail and whose systems and accounts were not open to independant audit?
I just don't see why the voting machine folks can't get the message. Simply include a cash register tape, just like most stores have!
Everywhere across the country, hundreds of millions of people get paper receipts with their purchases at the store. This happens, because Republican (and Democratic) store owners "Don't trust" the electronic tabulations in the machines and demand a verifiable "paper trail" from each of their cash registers. If store owners don't trust a $0.99 purchase to be recorded electronicly, why should we trust voting machines. It's simple, effective, and not expensive either. It happens HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF TIMES PER DAY.
Why can't everyone simply get a printout of their votes?...Why the foot-dragging...other than proving the conspiricy theories!.... To the voting machine folks, just add a paper tape, just like an ATM or cash register!....It's the right thing to do.
The fact that these machines are designed so carelessly and without regard for security is a danger, not to Liberals because of a vast right-wing conspiracy but to us all. These machines were designed by people with little regard for Democracy. The Diebold Memos more than show that. What endangers the sanctity of Democracy hurts us all.
Something intelligent here.
Hopefully now people in the press are beginning to realize that the concerns of engineers and scientists are fundamental concerns about the ability of these tools to be used to support free and fair elections. This isn't a terribly complicated problem that is hard to understand. People understand quite easily the issues of accountability when paper ballots are used in simple way.
Heck recently there was a story that made the local papers about an election worker that improperly broke the seals on some ballot boxes is some election. It turns out that the worker probably did nothing to change results and was just trying to find some papers, but people were rightly indignant that an elections official wasn't following an agreed upon procedure wich left the boxes open to tampering after the fact... With some of these computer system designs that same election worker could have physically done the same thing thousands of times without any one being able to tell. Of course, there wouldn't have been any newpaper stories since there would have been no evidence of the tampering unless the elections worker had come forward herself.
Computers are physical things. Similar rules should apply computers as they apply to paper ballots.
Read your link and missed anything that could be construed as evidence. The only fact is that there was a technical glitch. Everything else is complete speculation.
I mean, even think about it: if they were going to rig 16,000 votes, where would they do it - in a precint with a population of 600, or a population of 100,000? Which would make more sense? There's no way they "get away" with it the way it went down, and it was so blatant that there's no way it would have even had the presumably desired effect.
I'm not saying to believe everything "the man" says, but fuming over evidently nothing denies credibility to real causes.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
As far as I know there was a crackdown on Enron as a company.
ROTFLMAO!!!
Yeah, Kenny Boy is doing his 10 years at Leavenworth, even as we speak!
NOT!
Who would it benefit if the executives were thrown in prison for life and told to pay billions in damages (which they'd never be able to do)?
How about all the victims to come from the next set of CEO/thieves who will do whatever they want secure in the knowledge that if they get caught nothing really bad will happen to them?
One of the reasons we put people in prison is to discourage others from committing the same crimes.
Using your logic, we should be freeing all sorts of criminals.
(of course, if we are talking about non-violent drug offenders who never hurt anybody then I would wholeheartedly agree.)
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
You've got to be kidding me!
We've got evidence that Diebold tampered with results, we've got evidence that blacks were denied the opportunity to vote, we've got Katherine Harris and we've got the supreme Court and oh yeah we've got the Governor of Florida who just happens to be the First Retard's brother.
We could go on with how the war on drugs disenfranchised some hundreds of thousands of blacks thus preventing them from voting, in violation of the Constitution, or we could talk about how recounts were illegally obstructed and in some cases denied.
Talk about losing credibility! Damn body, where have you been these last few years?
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
I'm not sure that "Open Source" would help anything. Sure, others could audit the system, but there's still the opportunity for a unscrupulous person to insert a piece of innocuous looking code that is actually a major security breech. The only way to do this correctly (IMHO) is to contract with a third party that has no commercial interests, and will do the work and research to prove a safety level of ~95% or higher.
A good example of this situation is when DARPA contracted with Berkley to develop BSD into the primary ARPANet operating system. The code was built around solid research and engineering practices instead of a commercial interest to "ship it if it compiles". Take DieBold as an example. They were probably the lowest bidder in the commercial war for voting machines. What foundation do their machines use? Microsoft Access! And that's despite the fact that Access has practically no security features WHAT SO EVER! It's a completely wrong technology.
Now think about a design that ships out a sealed box to a voting office. This sealed box has connections for the network and nothing else. Once powered on, it will expose only an XML-RPC API over SSL for tabulating votes. It will also use the network to contact the main office and upload votes.
Data will be stored internally in an encrypted database, and all encryption keys and configuration information is permanently burned into the firmware chip. Minor actions such as uploading to the main office can be done via a "administrative voting machine" that would require a username and password. That same voting machine would be responsible for activating the individual booths. i.e. I can vote once, but after I confirm my vote, the machine will no longer accept a voting request until the operator tells it to. This allows the same physical security that is afforded by paper ballots today.
An extension of that physical control is that the voting machine and the primary box will share a secret via public key encryption. This secret code will be given to the machine once it registers over XML-RPC with the primary box. Thus any machine can be connected to the server, but only ones that the operator approves will actually get to enter a vote.
Similarly, the voting machines themselves should also be sealed boxes running out of encrypted firmware. There should be no way of changes the settings short of swapping out the physical hardware. This will ensure that the user isn't presented with their vote while the machine actually votes for someone else.
This whole concept though, still falls flat on the social engineering phase. Just like today, if the operator of the ballots is corrupt, there is very little you can do to prevent them from stuffing the ballot. (e.g. They vote multiple times themselves, or someone upstream at the voting machine provider modifies the firmware before it goes out.) In these situations, the only solutions are the same ones we have today. Make sure the number of votes and registered voters match. Do an audit of the supplier. Etc.
A good voting machine is possible. One simply has to remove parties with conflicting interests from the equation.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Here in the UK there are plenty of ticket machines at stations and airports that use touchscreens which appear to be made of toughened glass or very heavy duty plastic.
IIRC the touchscreen is covered with a material bearing an electrical charge. When a finger touches the screen, oscillators round the edge of the display measure the change in capacitance and a position is calculated.
I've never seen one broken despite being on streets in the British weather. The PoS operating system on the other hand, doesn't seem to be up to the job.
Best wishes,
Mike.
The receipt should never come in to the voter's hands. It should scroll underneath a clear window, where it can be viewed and checked. Pressing 'OK' should scroll the paper out of sight. Pressing 'Error' should lock the paper and screen so that a voting official can verify that the information on the paper does not match the information on the screen, and take that machine out of service. This would be so easy.
A vote is something else...there's lots of motivation to steal an election. There isn't any way of knowing, given today's operating systems, that no one has either hacked the code in ROM or loaded a hook that'll modify the vote as desired. For every measure you propose to thwart theft, there's a counter measure. That's just the intentional attacks. There are hardware failures to contend with as well. There isn't a straightforward way to backup a vote and know for certain that the backup is accurate. Distributed tallying/backup just introduces another error source.
Voting is an activity that is best left to humans doing the tallying. When properly implemented, it's trustworthy unlike what we're currently doing. I know this is /. heresy but there are tasks where a technological solution should not be applied - voting is one of them.
Care to provide any sources for your story?
Question - how did Democrats vs Republicans get into this? Are electronic voting machines that don't allow the voter to verify that their vote is correctly recorded somehow a Democrat/Republican issue? How did that come into this?
Your "evidence" is from a middle-aged freelance writer who found a Web site "on about the 15th page of Google" with this information.
Yes, we should all restrict ourselves to viewing only the first page of Google results. Especially if we're a freelance writer.
I fail to see how this could have anything to do with Bush "buying" the election.
Well, that's probably because you aren't middle-aged. The state government in Florida was obviously extremely friendly to the Bush candidacy, and it is measures of exactly the sort that have been shown to have taken place in Florida that have been historically used to deny people the right to vote in democratic/minority precincts.
Read history sometime. The south has been pulling shit like this ever since blacks won the right to vote. What happened in Florida is little better than what happened under Jim Crow.
Katherine Harris and the US Supreme court enforced the laws as they were written.
Actually, Katherine Harris has been found guilty of violating election laws in the past, so I wouldn't be too confident if I were you that she was innocent in the 2000 election. It is simply a question of the Bush bros. being unwilling to investigate her conduct.
And exactly what law is it that you believe the supreme Court enforced? Their guilt isn't in what they did, but rather, what they didn't.
And by calling the President names, I guess you don't really try to hide your bias.
Absolutely not. And why should I? The man doesn't bother to hide his many crimes against humanity or the Constitution. He steals from us in plain sight, and with a straight face. There hasn't ever been as contemptable a president as George Bush. It's not even close. The man is a monster.
You'll come around to my point of view here soon enough. And there will be plenty of time to rue the day this man seized the office.
You mean the war on drugs that Clinton increase spending by 10% each year on?
Yes. If you want to make the claim that the democrats deserved Florida for their complicity in the war on drugs, you will get no debate here.
That the nation is made to bear this humiliation on the other hand is very disturbing to me.
Maybe you don't remember that it was Gore who was limiting recounts to 3 counties where he thought he could gain the most votes, and it was Gore who was trying to block absentee ballots that were perfectly valid according to Florida state law.
Even assuming this is true it doesn't change the fact that this election was a fraud.
And a harbinger of things to come.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?