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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!
They aren't conspiracy theories. There is plenty of evidence about the Bush-Diebold connection. The theories are based on solid, classical campaign finance skulduggery and not on the technical merits of the system at all. There was a good SecurityFocus article on the register about it as well, focusing on the technical aspects. I propose the establishment of independent technical federal commissions to review all voting technologies.
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*
Imagine the fun you could have selecting a president by poking a picture in its belly, and being rewarded with a Pilsbury-esque "Tee hee! Thanks for voting for me!"
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.
the ultimate irony would be if the Los Alamos council used the Sequoia voting system to take the vote....
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
I don't CARE if the code is open source. That's just asking the voter to trust different people. AND there is no easy way to guarantee that this is the code in the machine. Also, it doesn't protect against breakdowns of equipment.
What is needed is a voter-verified paper ballot printout that goes into a separate locked ballot box. This way, after voting on the machine the voter can check the ballot to be sure that the voter's choice is correctly recorded.
Using the electronic voting machine reduces the error rate to near-zero. Printing the ballot reduces the counting problems (hanging chads...) because they are standardized, uniform and can be run through counting machines quickly.
With a system like this in place the security of the electronic machines doesn't MATTER.
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.
...to change the way they vote? Only in geek county would you have recursive voting.
I don't know that it was the conspiracy theories that made the election officials so dismissive of concerns about electronic voting. It seems to me they were dismissive of the concerns about e-voting before any of these conspiracy theories began to propogate. I think the main reasons why election officials like electronic voting so much is that it makes their job easier, and it seems all high-tech and modern. The concerns about it seem like the typical luddite worries about change to them.
If anything, I think that the conspiracy theories will do more to get their attention - after all, it's their job to make sure that people have confidence in the election results. Having a bunch of backwoods farmers saying "I don't trust the results from your damn computers" is one thing. Having Los Alamos computer scientists saying "I don't trust the results from your damn proprietary software" is quite another, and I think they are waking up to that.
We need your help!
HR 2239 is a bill which requires all touch-screen voting machines to produce a paper receipt which the voter can read and verify, then drop in a lock box. The receipts in that lock box are used in a recount. This bill also mandates a recount in 0.5% of districts chosen at random to verify that the touch-screen voting machines are reporting the results accurately.
Sign the online petition to support the bill. Contact your representatives, educate them and demand they support the bill.
We also need legal help with injunctions against the machines, starting with the 37 Diebold states. The organizers of BlackBoxVoting.org have 65,000 documents to make the case.
Keep the freedom to vote.
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.
Headline News
Council yanks voting machine funding
By ALLISON MAJURE, lareporter@lamonitor.com, Monitor Staff Writer
Revisiting a motion that had narrowly passed by a 4-3 vote last month, Los Alamos County Council rescinded funding for the purchase of 17 Sequoia Pacific "Edge" touchscreen voting machines by a vote of 7-0 Tuesday.
Councilors Nona Bowman, Diane Albert and Mike Wheeler opposed the original motion on Oct. 28. At a meeting Nov. 4, Councilor Fran Berting asked councilors to support her motion to revisit the issue. They voted 5-2 to do so with Councilors Geoff Rogers and Jim West opposed. In light of newly received information, Berting sought an opportunity for further discussion on the voting machines, as well as an opportunity to change her vote.
The 17 machines would have been purchased by the county as back-up machines for each of Los Alamos' precincts. The State of New Mexico has already funded the purchase of 19 "Edge" touchscreen voting machines for Los Alamos through federal funding received as part of the Help America Vote Act.
The HAVA was enacted shortly after the presidential election of 2000 when discrepancies in Florida called the count into question. Among its requirements is the provision of voting machines for the visually impaired so that they may vote independently without personal assistance.
During public comments, Kathy Campbell read her letter to the editor to the councilors and highlighted the fact that the proprietary software that tabulates the votes is not failsafe. Any tabulation errors indicated, would need to be researched by Sequoia Pacific technicians, because the software is proprietary, she said.
"Australia, Canada and New Zealand use open source software for their voting machines, which are reliant on an open source operating system such as Linux or UNIX," she said in an interview today.
Charlie Strauss also provided information for the councilors, saying the state deadline for the use of these machines is 2006, not 2004 as was previously asserted. He said, "There's no need to rush, we're going to have good machines soon," indicating that machines with a ballot-level voter verification capacity might be on the market shortly.
Strauss urged councilors to send a letter to the New Mexico Secretary of State expressing concerns about the validity of the "Edge" machine's output. He referred to New Jersey Rep. Rush Holt's bill, HR 2239, which is sponsored by 61 other congressional representatives, as useful for its language which objects to touchscreen machines made by Diebold, Sequioa-Pacific, ESS and others.
The councilors unanimously endorsed a motion to rescind funding for the voting machines and to draft a letter to the New Mexico Secretary of State, articulating Los Alamos' concerns.
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.
Touchscreen station sends vote to database. writes one record to a 'has voted' table, indicating voter registration number. writes a different record in a 'vote' table indicating the actual vote. (no common index, no datestamp).
touchscreen prints out scantron styled paper ballot.
you record 'has voted' in the database simply to indicate if anyone is gaming or circumventing the software. not only can you detect the problem, you can id the perp.
and if you think that's too much, then hell - just drop the 'has voted' table. it'd only be an 'early warning' widget anyway.
the paper forms would be collected in traditional ballot boxes for manual recounts should problems be seen. simply run the forms through a scantron reader for a machine recount, or count by hand. easy peasy japanesey.
no pregnant, dimpled, hanging chads - no worrying about ruined elections via computer hax0r1ng... simplified interface for the voters, hardcopy backup.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
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.
What is needed is a voter-verified paper ballot printout that goes into a separate locked ballot box. This way, after voting on the machine the voter can check the ballot to be sure that the voter's choice is correctly recorded.
If the paper ballot is used only as an audit trail then it is completely worthless. The voter has no way of knowing that what is on the paper acurately reflects what is tabulated. The obvious solution to this is that you actually count the paper ballots, but then the machines are just really expensive punch card punchers.
Anyone who thinks that voters are actually going to check their ballots is deluding themselves anyway. The ballots in Florida were NOT confusing, and if people had checked them their would not have been a problem. When you have a reporter ask someone if they are sure who they voted for and the answer is, "No." The problem is with the voters, not the counting.
Where I vote there are clear instructions, and people who will show you how to vote (on a sample ballot) if you can't figure it out yourself. Maybe what we need is to spend some money educating voters instead of building more expensive, more easily corruptable voting apparatus.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
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?
The whole points of execs, i.e. directors, partners etc., is that they ARE responsible for the actions of their company. They make policy, they make the decisions and unltimately they have to take the fall if their company is involved in illegal actions. That IS corporate law.
The real travesty in this case is that Andersons was brought down to stop the investigation going any further up the food chain, alegedly to members of the current administration. Bizarely in the case of Andersons the responsible partner was able to get off scott free by turning state's evidence and the normal employees paid for it instead. I have worked at Andersons and I know how much power and control over information an individual partner has over his team/division. It was very easy for that partner to keep his behaviour secret from the rest of the company...
and plenty more-- I'm sure you can come up with more than me.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
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.
When the CEO of one of the largest voting machine manufacturers (Diebold) sends out a fund raising letter saying he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year." you have to be at least a little skeptical. http://www.portclintonnewsherald.com/news/stories/ 20030827/localnews/140871.html
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.
As much as many of us would like to see open source prevail in the electronic voting system market (as the Aussies have decreed it must), it is not, by itself, a cure-all for the kinds of abuses it tries to address. Who's to say, for example, the the code that's published matches the firmware in the machine. I know my county auditor wouldn't know the difference. No, what's needed beyond open-source is a verifiable chain of trust from the published code to each individual machine. I don't know how to make that happen, but I'll bet there are some crypto gurus out there who can figure it out.
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?
Thank you for disecting the heart of the "conspiracy theory" issue. How can normally skeptical people call this a "conspiracy theory"?
Fact: A company is producing voting machines which are easily tamperable and which allow such tampering to go completely undetected except through observing anomalous results.
Fact: There are people who would benefit greatly from utilizing this ability.
Fact: The company in question has given a good deal of money to one of the groups of people who would benefit from exploiting the flaws in the company's system. Even stated that they want to help said group win.
How could a rational, skeptical person look at this and not think "something isn't right here"?
Perhaps you are right, and alleged skeptics have suddenly become convinced that everyone in politics (or just their favorite politicians?) have become saints.
The enemies of Democracy are
The same thing that happens if I accidentally mark the wrong name on my paper ballot. I walk up to my election official and say, "Excuse me, I've made a mistake on this ballot." My ballot is destroyed and I am given a new one. In the case of this system, each paper recipet could have a unique identification number. The election official takes your reciept, types in the number into his terminal, and the vote is discarded. The paper reciept is then destroyed and you are allowed to go back into the voting booth. What makes that so difficult?
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
wouldn't it also be fair to say that the "rich" 50% have at least 96% of the wealth, so therefore should pay 96% of the taxes?
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.