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Can America Trust Electronic Voting?
A anonymous reader writes: "The Sacramento Bee wrote an excellent article about the issues surrounding electronic voting. It was written by the Yolo County clerk/recorder and a professor of law at UC Davis. They quote sources such as Peter G. Neumann and Diebold's president Walden O'Dell."
... But the only e-voting situation I would trust would be an open source one. Even with paper reciepts, there's still an unprecidented oppourtunity for fraud.
at least not until proper and proven security measures have been put in place and that there is at least a paper trail to follow in the event that the votes are tampered with (a.k.a. Diebold).
The problem is not the technique, the problem is the fraudulous mentality of the management of these companies...
Frankly, I am not as concerned about electronic voting as I am getting Americans to actually vote in the first place.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Can America trust its voters (and those they vote for)? A quick look at some of the people in office, and one starts to wonder...
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
I don't want open source voting machines any more than I want closed-source ones. Okay, we can all see the code and look for trickery, but how do I know that the machine I'm about to vote on is actually using that code?
According to all the "media recounts", Bush won the election unless you counted the votes against methods prescribed by Florida law -- much like Johnny Carson's Carnac. I don't know if you understand US Presidential Elections, but our President is elected by the Electoral College not by the popular vote. Bush won by 2% in the Electoral College.
Bush and his government do not listen to the UN, detain prisoners with no charges, and therefore do not believe in democracy.
The UN does not dictate to the United States because we are a sovereign country. It would unconstitutional for President Bush to allow the UN to dictate to USA. The US does not detain "prisoners" without charges. We do, however, place into detention terrorists that have attacked or are plotting to attack the US or its military. It is very simple not become a guest of Gitmo, do not conspire with terrorist organizations that threaten to cause mass casualties. We do believe in democracy in America and brought it to many nations around the world. Two shining examples are Germany and Japan.
I understand that it is vogue in many minority "clickish" groups to engage in vitriolic hyperbole in regards to our President. Those that have underestimated our President's intelligence or will have found themselves on the losing side of not only elections but of history. There are many complaints that can be brought up about our President such as his love of big government programs but it is rare to ever hear valid ones from his foes, much to their electoral peril. President Bush main strength is that he is constantly underestimated and overly mocked.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
The real issue with the Florida 2000 election wasn't the ballots. There election wasn't tainted by bad ballots - the paper ballots were all countable. After the fact, we all found out who really would have won, had all the ballots been counted.
The real problem was the United States Supreme Court, which handed the election to George W. Bush.
Once all of the ballots had been counted, it was found that by a slight margin, Al Gore actually won Florida - meaning that he won both the popular and electoral vote.
Perhaps we can work on replacing the US Supreme Court with machines? Or, at least, with non-partisan judges - who are elected by the people of the USA, not appointed by Presidents (and therefore subjective in their opinions of presidential candidates who just happen to be the son of the man who gave them their job).
That is really Step #1 to getting a fair, balanced presidential election in 2004 - ridding the Supreme Court of the current judges, and allowing the American People to vote for new judges.
Most people are missing the point. An election must not only be fair but it must be seen to be fair.
I have no idea why the US has such problems with their voting. In the UK everyone votes on paper..... with a fucking pen. (No dimpled chads crap!) It is counted by hand and is never out by more than 10 votes in 30,000. We also have the result by the early hours of the morning.
The point is if you want to go and count all the votes yourself you can. The whole idea of an election is that it is open. For this there must be a paper trail. Why complicate the matter? The other point is that it is secret. Who I vote for is none of anyones bussiness. I would always be nervous with electronic voting for two reasons. I want to know that my vote has really bean counted and I want to know that I am anonymous.
As regards election fraud it is easier to imagine someone messing with an electonic count than someone turning up with a few suitcases of paper and trying to stuff them into a ballot box in fron t of the election officals.
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A system is only as secure as it's weakest link. Voting is mostly secure because everything is done physically. And to change the votes all over america physically would be impossible. But if you could controll votes from your home computer, you are more dangerous. I dont believe that electronic voting should be used unless it's on a closed network, off of the internet. Even then there is a risk that somebody could tamper with the process.
OMG OMG OMG WTF OMG WTF BBQ STFU RTFM, OMFG OMG OMG OMG ROFL LMAO OMG WTF STFU ROFLMAO
There's one problem with this scheme, namely lack of anonymity. Also if you give a receipt it opens the door to bribery, since an outside party can verify who you have actually voted for. Anyone with access to the database can also see who you voted for.
Voting has to be anonymous.
Why can we trust computers to handle hundreds of billions of dollars in international business, but not voting?
The problem in the equation is the involvment of our government, who have failed to earn our trust in the last few decades, not the concept of electronic voting itself.
-Z
how about we vote for which ballot system to use?
Hi all,
With more and more surprise I am reading all those articles about how the USA (nr 1 in IT in the world) is struggling with E-voting.
I am 30 years old now, the first time I voted was when I was 19 or 20 yo (first chance), and that was electronical. I have never casted my ballot on paper, ever. At the time, we are talking 1990, about 50% of The Netherlands was using voting machines, a few years after it was 100%. The first machines were installed in 1985.
Agreed, no fancy touch screens (how would that work?? 15 parties, up to 40 candidates per party - that can never be shown on one normal touch screen, thereby giving an advance to the party first shown of course), though a reliable, robust, and secure way to vote it is. It uses a panel with a huge number of buttons (one per candidate), a display to tell which candidate you are about to vote for, and a "Vote" button. That's all. No Internet connection (what is that good for other than allowing hackerse to access the machine). Never, ever has there been a dispute on voting security with these machines.They work, everyone is happy with it, and they are a great improvement on the paper voting.
USA is making a true fool of themselves.
How come they can not even design something simple (not easy, but simple as in few functions needed) as a voting machine? How can we ever trust their electronic "smart bombs" and whatnot? And their computer based aeroplanes? And more computer software which has to be tamper-proof and absolutely safe.
Electronic voting is not rocket science. Ask the Europeans about it, there the technology can be bought in from the shelf. Not fancy, though tested in several elections and found good.
Maybe they need another election disaster like Bush to realise it is time to have a look across the border and see how a real election is held.
Wouter.
The Florida election was a marketer's dream. A good marketer know that the way to score big is to find a problem, then make it five times worse than it is. Finally, it doesn't matter if the product you sell doesn't really do anything.
As for evoting, why can't we just let the technology evolve? For that matter, the technology should be designed anticipating evolution. For example, maybe the software should not be bought from the same company selling the hardware...keep the programs independent.
I apologize in advance to any system architect reading this, but this vision we have a perfect designed voting system is bunk. It takes several iterations and gradual improvements to get it right.
The first post in this thread mention OSS for the voting systems. OSS is more open to gradual improvements, and it makes it easier for the same set of programs to be run on different machines.
Evolution will happen, the evolution in the closed system will happen by voting districts losing all of their ballots. The Florida fiasco was just part of the evolution.
We dont live in a democracy though. The vote of the people is only considered by the electoral college.
The electoral college votes are really the only ones that matter. They dont necessarily have to "agree" with the peoples choice.
A true democracy elects its officials by the people. We, do not do that.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
I wish we were as concerned about who we vote for as we are how we vote for them.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
No, that's a big, big disadvantage, and should be avoided at all costs. Results should not be available before the polls close. If they are, all sorts of tricks can be played, in both close and not-so-close races.
If the race is probably going to go to one side or another, fewer people are likely to turn out. What does "probably" mean? Well, just turn on CNN, or Fox, or... and they'll tell you.
See the problem?
And that's before you get in to less subtle ways of, um, freelance electioneering.
Allowing any knowledge of how an election is going while it is still happening gives people an opportunity to undermine it.
I forget what 8 was for.
Yeah, except Clinton really is a Rhodes scholar and a damned smart chap, whereas Bush really is a C-student who barely scraped through college. And is also extraordinarily inarticulate most of the time (wonder how long he rehearsed his address to the U.K.)...
<joke>This is why I think we should either annex a new state of kick Florida out of the country. Once we have an odd number of states there be a greatly reduced risk of a tie!</joke>
But seriously, I think the parent poster is dead on here - no system is going to be perfect, and so it's important to have a system that's as tamper-proof and traceable as possible to minimize errors.
E-voting provides neither of these reliably. Even if the software was open source, how can the public be 100% sure that the binaries installed in the machines are made from the available source? There's still potential for tampering.
Granted, at least there will be much less potential for random errors and the like, so if anything goes wrong it would be more likely to be a deliberate tinkering than a typo!
But still, I don't see what the problem is with paper ballots.
"Here's a sheet cardstock and one of those Bingo card markers. Make a dot next to the name of the guy you wanna vote for and stuff it in the slot."
A 6-year-old can probably handle that. Hell you should probably put little photos of the canidates on there too, just in case the voter can't be arsed to read... they seem to vote for whoever looks the best anyway. (And with the choices in canidates, it's really just as good a system as any!)
=Smidge=
We Americans do not trust our government. We are very proud of that. It's an intentional act of will, and we believe in it more strongly than just about any other founding principle of our nation. Our very government is constructed in distrust of itself. We are taught by our parents, by our media, and by our government-run schools that government is a necessary evil and not to trust it.
But in spite of that, no, because of our distrust of our own government, we refuse to yield our national sovereignty to the U.N. or anyone else.
The question of whether we should use electronic voting or more laborious hand-counting also devolves to our basic distrust of government. Will it help or hurt? That's the question.
Saying we should hand-count because we don't trust the government misses the point entirely.
sigs, as if you care.
With atm's you have 3 forms of Paper Trail that are not available with the electronic machines as stated...
1. You have your money...
2. You have your receipt...
3. Later you get your statement.
Electronic voting provides NONE of these protections, which is precisely the problem. An ATM provides simple user level auditing of the transaction, which for the most part works well. With "Electronic" voting, there is no paper trail, no audit method... Votes can appear and disappear, and change without anyones knowledge.
The answer is obvious, Electronic voting should result in human readible paper that is placed in the ballot box to be counted. It can be counted on the fly, like they currently are in Washington State. But more importantly the results can be audited and hand counted. The very fact that they can, massively lowers the possibility of fraud, or conversly the fact that you can't massively increases the possibility of fraud.
Shocking as it may be, the US Constitution protects only US citizens and legal residents. What happens to others is a matter of foreign policy goals and international agreements, which may or may not coincide with the consitution, but are certainly not required to.
Government IS the problem.
NO FUCKING SHIT!
NO GODDAMMED FUCKING SHIT ON A STICK!!!
Do you FUCKING REALIZE the EXTREME TERMINAL STUPIDITY of what you're saying???
Why the fuck do you think that VOTING IS SECRET and HAS TO BE SECRET?
It's to frigging MAKE SURE VOTERS AREN'T BOUGHT OR INTIMIDATED into voting for a given candidate!!!
Sheesh! One wonders what goes through the heads of those youths nowadays!!!!
Please explain exactly how you come to the conclusion that electronic data is easier and cheaper to safeguard than paper records. You make a strong assertation, but provide no argument.
If I have a piece of paper signed by you (note that "signed" can still be a digital signature), all I have to do it keep it physically safe. If I have your input into a computer system, I have to verify all of the hardware and software that is ever involved with your record, as well as keeping the media (which is much more fragile than paper) physically safe.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Unfortunately, I can't see a method of verifying that your hashed vote is still there without having someone else be able to beat you up and do it... Same thing with paper voting, though.
Locked metal boxes with a slot into which you drop your ballot, with oversight from all the major political parties whenever the box is closed, opened, transported or stored.
These problems were very well-solved ages ago.
Given locked-box technology, your scheme is needlessly complex. Just print a ballot with both human-readable and machine-readable versions of the voter's selections, and also store an electronic copy of the vote. None of these should be personally identifiable in any way, or even timestamped. Hashing and signing are unnecessary. The voter drops the ballot in the box.
At the end of the day, the electronic votes are tallied, and that's the result. If anyone wishes to contest any part of the vote, that voting district's ballots can be machine-counted. If anyone wishes to claim that the machines are in error, the ballots can be hand-counted. Just for good measure, election officials should randomly select a set of districts for machine counting, with the results to be compared against the electronic totals. Significant discrepancies should invoke a system-wide recount. Also for good measure, election officials should randomly select a set of ballots (making sure there are some from every district) and both hand and machine-count them. Discrepancies should cause a thorough review of the system to determine where/how they originated, and might indicate the need for a system-wide hand recount.
Technology never provides security. Process is always the source of any security that exists; technology is only a means of making the process more convenient and cost-effective. Note that this is even true of the locked boxes, where the technology is only a means to make the oversight process more manageable.
For security, focus on process first, technology second.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
There is, as I suggested above, an exception (you're not on the roster index, you are at your "new polling place", haven't reregistered, have moved (there's some time requirement), but are still in the same county as before.... then you can vote provisionally, and asking for ID is cool in that case.
But, yes, in general, if I know friend Fred dies a few miles away, I could go over to his polling place, say I'm him, and vote as him. The catch there is the poll workers might know I'm lying, and there's gotta be some mechanism to deal with that potential, but....)
And since a copy of all the voters is posted, and even marked a few times during the day with marks indicating who has voted, you can come in late in the day and make sure you pick someone who hasn't voted yet. Nifty, that.
I'm a nature photographer.
Until the software and hardware is totally open for scrutiny, the answer it no.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.