Cringley on E-voting

alfredo writes "I am shocked that this story from I Cringley hasn't been sent in and posted at Slashdot. I thought the slashdot crowd would be all over this. Robert X Cringley has a take on the voting scandal a bit different than what we have seen in the past, and promises more to come."

Comments

Moot?

[CoboyNeal]

The touch-screen voting is by far the worst possible way to do voting. Most common folks can't say "electronic voting" without biting their cheeks, and to say e-voting, is somewhat redundant because e-voting could be mistaken for election voting. When I worked E-day for Ontario's elections in October, I remember it was e-this, e-that... everywhere.

So call it e-voting and wonder why there is confusion.

"So the U.S. government threw $3.5 billion on the table to pay for modernizing voting throughout the land, which is to say making it more expensive and more complicated. That's a lot of money and it attracted a lot of interest. One company in particular, Diebold Systems, went so far as to buy a smaller company that made voting machines just to get into the market. Diebold thought that being in the automated teller business was a good starting point for changing the way America votes."

Why not? They handle lots of money every day, why not give them valuable votes to control too? Oh wait a minute. They are republicans, these Diebold folks, aren't they? Once you take E-day away from little old ladies, you lose all honesty in it, imho.

And little old ladies are really the reason why elections have worked in the past because they are far better at auditing things than any automated paper-trail could be. If you would mess with the machine to fix votes, you could mess with the audit paper to fix the audit. So maybe Cringley's point has some surface validity, but it's moot, IMHO.

He concludes that a paper trail would be necessary for voting machines. That's fine with me, and everything, but the one thing in this article that grabbed me was when he said: "...there is lots of money to be made whether the darned thing works or not, and not much of a penalty if it doesn't work. Two hundred and seventy-five billion is a lot of money to spend on software development, especially if 72 percent of that money will be either wasted completely or used to develop something that doesn't work intended."

This could be seen as the fatal flaw of humanity: we don't care if we fail. We all die anyway, so who cares? Live life, make money and make love and make war and have fun and that's about that. Who cares if we just spent more money on a project that totally failed, when most of the world is starving elsewhere? What does it matter to us?

Personally, I'd like to devise a way so that it *would* matter.

Re:Moot?

[aheath]

I was less concerned about the money issues and more concerned about the lack of clear testable requirements. There is no way to judge the success or failure of electronic voting systems if there the requirments are unclear. I am looking forward to Cringley's next column where he proposes to answer the question of why auditing capabilities were not inlcuded in the touch screen voting machines.

Another concern that I have is the desire of government to jump from the trailing edge of voting technology to the bleeding edge of voting technology. The Florida election results clearly showed the problems with punch card voting. However, many of these problems were due to poor ballot design, poor maintenance of voting equipment, or poor training or poll workers and voters. (A large number of hanging chad problems were caused by the simple failure to clean out the chads from previous elections.) Boston, Massachusetts switched from lever driven mechanical voting machines to paper ballots and optical scanners. There were problems with the transition, but most of the problems were procedural in nature and not technical in nature. The combination of paper ballots and optical scanning has a very good track record. The paper ballots provide a nice audit trail that can be used to verify the results of the optical scanning and computer tabulation.

I live in Somverille, Massachusetts where paper ballots and optical scanners have been used for years. The systems is backed up by experienced poll workers. I've never heard of any problem, let alone a serious problem, with this system as it is implemented in my city.

Congress should have proposed moving to the best voting technology available that has a proven track record. This would avoid the issue of bleeding edge technology that has an unproven track record. The biggest problem with computer based systems that have closed source code and no paper trail is the inability to properly inspect and test these systems to make sure that they are as good or better than the technology that they seek to replace.

Re:Moot?

[Joel Bruick]

Although your post is mostly a rant about Republicans trying to steal elections through e-voting and the cliche "stop being selfish and solve world hunger," I think this sentence is important to comment on:

This could be seen as the fatal flaw of humanity: we don't care if we fail.

This is an absolutely fundamental part of the free market economy of the US. Unlike some parts of the world, it's not a huge black mark on your record if you fail. In fact, it's sometimes a badge of honor.

We're entrepreneurs that eagerly take risks, because those risks may just turn us into millionaires. Those risky endeavors are also where the huge innovations that change the world are created.

Sure, a lot of people that tackle this problem will fail. But it's the few that create real breakthroughs that will make us wonder how we ever got by punching holes into paper cards.

Re:Moot?

[Clever Pun]

The biggest problem with computer based systems that have closed source code and no paper trail is the inability to properly inspect and test these systems to make sure that they are as good or better than the technology that they seek to replace.

You know, this really concerns me. Even WITH a paper trail, it wouldn't be hard to lie to people. All you really need is one extra variable in your program, and the foresight to make sure that the numbers aren't *too* overwhelmingly in one candidate's favor. Pseudocode might look like this:

int x=((rand()*10)-4); //happens 60% of the time
if (x>=0) {
voter_candidate=foo;
voted_for=bar;
display "you voted for " && voter_candidate && ".";
submit voted_for; //submits 1 vote for voted_for to the electoral college
}

and the best part is, we might not notice until we have a string of politicians affiliated with one party that lasts a few terms! Give me pen and paper any time.

Re:Moot?

[bpd1069]

This could be seen as the fatal flaw of humanity: we don't care if we fail. We all die anyway, so who cares? Live life, make money and make love and make war and have fun and that's about that. Who cares if we just spent more money on a project that totally failed, when most of the world is starving elsewhere? What does it matter to us?

Personally, I'd like to devise a way so that it *would* matter.

excuse me if I am wrong, but isn't that what would be considered a lack of conscious? Ignoring the obvious problem of this being a social issue and involves groups of individuals. In anycase, this is the inherent flaw in being mortal, can't really see, and I mean have interest in, beyond your own death. Or most cases, the death of our immediate circle of relationships. Sorry for being so morbid, but its a subject most people don't like to think about much less talk about. Which is another manifestation of the problem.

And now back to the Up Beat Music of Desi, and his Congo Bongo Trio!!!

Re:Moot?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you missed the point. Because nothing is on the line when it's tax money, there is no risk. Losing someone else's money isn't the same as losing your own.

They just polish up their resumes and look elsewhere for work.

Scott Adams had a point in Dogbert's Management book that covered this. Attach your name to a monumental failure and everyone will want to hire you. Case in point, if your name is attached to a project that succeeds, too many people are trying to get recognized for working on it so the noise blocks you. Attach your name to a monumental screw-up and because everyone is hiding from exposure, you at least go down in history as someone with experience.

Like how George Bush has experience going to war.

Re:Moot?

[perljon]

In this country, we have a Representative Democracy. You probably already know that. No one in the world has a true democracy. There are philosophical reasons and technological reasons for that. Our forefathers thought that be creating a representative democracy, we would avoid mobs controlling the country and the resources of war and economy. The theory that there exists a class of people more capable of ruling than the common man is wrong. They make mistakes because they are men, and there mistakes are not worse or less than those that would be made by a direct election. Extreme examples include the Civil War, The Vietnam War, McCarthy Trials, or the way laws seem to get passed by corporations. I'm guessing that you are a liberal Democrat, so you may mention the Clinton impeachment or the most recent Golf War.

So, we have a government 'of the people' and 'for the people', but 'the people' stil are not allowed to rule themselves. They have to pick people to rule them. Obviously an improvement over a Monarchy or Dictatorship, but not a true Democracy. With the philosophical reasoning proven wrong by counter-examples, there still remains the technological gap. It was impractical to have an election every month in 1890 for every major issue. It is not now if we embrace electronic voting.

Now, in the age of computers, that means of a truer Democracy may finally be at our finger tips. But there are forces that stand to loose a lot of power from a True Democracy and they will turn us comman men against each other in an attempt to maintain status quo. Look at the polirization of the American people today. The Democrats blame it on the Republicans, and the Republicans blame it on the Democrats. It is just a ploy to keep you distracted from the fact that both parties are the same. I think we've seen proof that the wealthy ruling class is less capable of ruling the country. They are highly susceptable to bribes, corruption, and cold heartedness.

Let's go back to the founding fathers again... Who were they? Were they common men? Not really. They were British military officers and British appointed governors for the most part. They were wealthy men, landowners. So when the Revolution occured, it was the ruling class of the America succeeding from the ruling class of Britan. It was the ruling class of America that influenced commen men to fight. When the new government was created, the creators ensured that the rich ruling class of the Americas maintained wealth and political power. Even when the constitution was ratified, it was not done so by a popular vote, but a vote of representatives. In our American history, there is a class prejedice that says the common man cannot rule himself. The Democratic and Republican party is an establishment to ensure control is maintained by a ruling class. Look how difficult it is for a free thinking independent to get elected to office.

Free, uncorrupted electronic voting may lead to true democracy where a popular vote can decide do we deploy troops, do we go to war, do we raise or lower taxes, where do we spend our taxes, should abortion be legal, should there be racial quotas, etc. etc. etc. If electronic voting is allowed to happen, it may lead to a revolution of politics in the United States... It may lead to a paradigm shift where the United States becomes free, and is no longer a choice between two people that you would not trust babysit your dog. The government truly becomes "of the people."

We should not allow un-auditable electronic voting machines. But we should not resist them on the chance that they might be corrupt. Let the powers in place lie about the election results. The common man is not stupid. He will find out, and change will come.

Re:Moot?

[Zeinfeld]

I live in Somverille, Massachusetts where paper ballots and optical scanners have been used for years. The systems is backed up by experienced poll workers. I've never heard of any problem, let alone a serious problem, with this system as it is implemented in my city.

You forget that here in Massachusetts, cradle of the revolution all the congressmen, both senators, a clear majority of the state house and practically all the statewide officials are Democrats and the only reason that Republicans seem to get elected seems to be people prefer to have someone to serve as a counterweight to one party government.

The point is not what the outcome of elections are when they are practically a formality. Nobody expects Massachusetts to be voting for Bush next November. The only reason political ads run on the Massachusetts TV stations is that people in New Hampshire watch the stations.

I think the concern over Diebold is misplaced. Rigging the voting machines is a really hard way to rig an election, you need a lot of people to be in on the fix. Diebold management might be solidly Republican but there is no way they could trust their engineers to join them in a criminal conspiracy. Its just too many people.

Its not like the situation in Florida where Katherine Harris was reportedly involved with the office manager of Choicepoint, the company who now admits it rigged the infamous 'scrub lists' used to keep legitimate black voters of the rolls on the grounds their names were similar to (four characters matched) those of convicted fellons (many of whom were still serving time and thus not merely ineligible to vote, incapable of doing so unless the Florida authorities sent out a postal ballot). See my sig for details on the Florida scandal.

The way that the vote is rigged in every country is you keep the wrong voters from the polls. In the US that means keeping black voters at home if you are Republican. You make it hard to register, you make the polling stations inconvenient for blacks and easy to get to for whites. At one time the KKK would appear at polling stations dressed in their pillow cases etc. Today there are 'poll watchers' who tend to challenge the credentials of black voters, or be assigned to the polls in black areas.

Then there was a whole different set of tricks used by Mayor Daley in Chicago. Basically the scheme there was they used a machine, a highly organized political group which would vote for people so they didn't have to. 'Vote early vote often'. That is why Nixon tried to have the Illinois ballot challenged in the 1960, only his problem was that the rural vote had also been fixed for his side... Actually although the 60 election was very close in the popular vote the electoral college was a much wider spread.

Yet another way of rigging the result was the way the Republicans stole the 1876 election. Of course this was before the parties switched over and the Democrats became the progressive party and the party of Lincoln became the party of pandering to diehard seggregationists. So you could call this one either way. The fix here wa to have the Supreme court throw out the ballots for enough sothern states to keep Tilden out of office. In the end the South got the best of the deal, in return for keeping quiet the Democrats agreed to end the 'reconstruction' penalties on the South. Part of which being allowing the south to start establishing the institutions of seggregation.

Re:Moot?

[rot26]

I am looking forward to Cringley's next column where he proposes to answer the question of why auditing capabilities were not inlcuded in the touch screen voting machines.

I can answer THAT for you right now. He's going to (correctly) assert that the reason there is no paper-trail requirement is that the political establishment DOES NOT WANT ONE. The original vote tally is a one-time process, but the recount process can drag on forever, and THAT is what "they" want to avoid forever more.

Re:Moot?

[bheading]

The point is more than moot; I'm a software engineer and like most people here I love fixing problems with computers and electronics. But the important point here is that electronic voting is a solution to a problem which does not exist.

Having attended several election counts in the UK, I have to ask why you guys don't you do what we do - have the electorate mark their ballot papers as appropriate, and then count the votes BY HAND a a count session to which *all* of the candidates are invited ? This way all of the candidates can clearly observe the ballots being counted, and can quickly flag the official(s) in charge of the election if there's something fishy afoot. There's no room for any fiddling of the vote to take place, and thus no room for suspicion or paranoia. It's sane, understandable by the non-IT literate (in other words, the majority of the public) and there are NEVER any disputes about votes being counted wrongly. The views of all of the candidates are sought on the counting of erroneously marked or spoilt ballots.

Even better, since the votes are all simply deposited in a sealed box (opened after the count) parties who are particularly paranoid and suspicious about the count can put their own seal on the ballot box. That way they can be satisfied that no-one has attempted to interfere with the votesHow could this be achieved with electronic voting or even the existing mechanical mechanism in the US ?

Machine-based counting has only one benefit - the results are known more quickly. I doubt the election is cheaper to run, as the machines need to be maintained and the ballots specially printed to work with them. The worst problem with the whole caboodle is that neither the candidates nor the public can easily examine what the machines are doing while counting. In that respect electronic votes are *even worse* as you press a button and your vote disappears into a black electronic box - anything could happen to it, open source or not!

The single most important priority here is that the general public can see that their vote isn't being fiddled and have confidence in the democratic process. A regime where there is widespread discontent over the way the votes are counted isn't a democracy.

Re:Moot?

[RylandDotNet]

I actually think it's much simpler than that: it's about money. It's cheaper for Diebold to make a machine without a receipt printer than to make one with a receipt printer. The government isn't as fanatical about having a paper trail as a bank is, because a bank can lose lots of money if they don't have that paper trail. Nobody in the government is going to lose money, though, so nobody in government raised a ruckus.

Re:Moot?

[dolo666]

So instead of one band of idiots and their bloodline ruling class running the country, we have a million idiots voting in someone who has all the money?

Bush would not have been elected if he failed to raise the funds to get elected. Politics is not about people -- it's about $$$.

Come on. There is no difference between the ruling class of five hundred years ago, and the one that is in today. Today, the ruling class isn't necessarily related, so we don't have as much inbreeding going on, but after that, there's not much difference between George Bush and King Henry VII.

I'm sure Bush has even killed a few of his concubines and the CIA covered it up! :)

Bush rigged the election, stole power and now is going to give round two a go. You'll vote for him or the other guy, but it won't matter. They are both in the same ruling class.

If anything, it's worse because now that we have shareholders, we have a bunch of poor people with lots of money on paper. But they still have to scrape to get by.

If Bush gave 100% of his profits for elections to a worthy cause, they would be elevated to ruling class, and their cause would suffer the same as it does now. Nobody wants to wipe out poverty because it's profitable.

If poverty wasn't profitable, it'd be gone in two fucking seconds.

Re:Moot?

[SensitiveMale]

Like how George Bush has experience going to war.

Last time I checked, Bush is 2 wins for 2 wars.

Re:Moot?

[tassii]

Something similar to this happened in a School Board election down in virginia. Apparently the system subtracted on for every 100 votes.

Re:Moot?

[geekee]

"This could be seen as the fatal flaw of humanity: we don't care if we fail. "

No, that's the fatal flaw of govt. Businesses care if they succeed or not. In this case there was no real penalty for failure, so for Diebold failure was a success anyway.

Re:Moot?

[Tony Hoyle]

Has he won one? I missed that.

Afganistan is now run by warlords, has restarted heroin shipments and is manifestly *not* a democracy...

Iraq is a bloody mess and the war hasn't actually finished yet, but the news seems to be the US are too busy trying to find a way out before the next election to care about actually winning.

Re:Moot?

[Anonymous Coward]

"In this country,"...
which you don't directly identify. After some reading, I assume you mean the USA.
In this country, we are in a different country.

Re:Moot?

[dreadnougat]

Well according to Reuters, over a thousand war orphans (that's right, this war that you claim is lost) are protesting against terrorists and FOR the U.S.

Some loss.

(hint: it takes a while to recover from a war)

Re:Moot?

[John Courtland]

Not that I disagree, however, there are far more working class people than there are rich slobs out there. Eventually, the working class will have had enough, and that's when the future US history books will become really interesting. Will there be a paper revolution? Will it be a military coup? Will people just leave? The difference between now ans then is that we have the ability to stop oppressors in various different ways. If the proletariat ever become organized, the united states will become a far different place.

Re:Moot?

[perljon]

I wonder if you even read my post. My point was that in a true Democracy, the president would not be all that important. All the important decisions would be made by the public.

Re:Moot?

[fpp]

"(hint: it takes a while to recover from a war)"

Yeah, just like the U.S. has recovered from Vietnam. Oh wait...

Re:Moot?

[tassii]

Umm you must use a different numbering system that I do. By my count, he hasn't **won** anything yet.

Re:Moot?

[IamLarryboy]

"The common man is not stupid."

As far as I can tell this is the assumption upon which you build your argument that we should build "a true democracy." However, if this is shown to be false then your argument falls.

There is a saying, "In any sufficiently large group of, the vast majority of people are stupid." While, most people are capable of being quite intelligent, especially when confronted with a problem in their area of expertise, they can also make very very stupid decisions. People often act let their passions, their distrust rule over their reason. For an example we only need to look to the prisoners dillemma.

Furthermore, while an individual my be very intelligent on ones own. He may act rationaly all his life, however, when a whole bunch of rational individuals are put together the groups intelligence is only as high as the lowest member. The group can very quickly become a mob. Our intelligent individual soon become neither of those things. Instead he becomes the exact opposite.

What does all this have to do with your "true democracy?"

In your version of democracy we would have mob rule. It is that simple. If it were up to a vote would The U.S. have had the revolution? Only 1/3 of the population supported revolution the others where either indifferent or loyalists. Would we have universal sufferage? I strongly doubt it. Would slavery have been abolished?

These problems with your "true democracy" have been known since the time of Aristotle. In his republic he argues against democracy on these very grounds! Instead he argues for a Polity. A polity is much like we may understand western democracy.

However, as you say there is no longer a technological problem. I can only hope that we are wise enough to see that there IS still a philisophical one.

Re:Moot?

[corebreech]

Rigging the voting machines is a really hard way to rig an election, you need a lot of people to be in on the fix.

Why would that be? It only takes one well-placed person can write the malicious code and hide it in the software. Indeed, you may not need to be well-placed at all.

But even assuming what you say is true, so what? Look at the stakes. Look at all the past examples of election tampering, many of which involve large groups of people.

It isn't paranoia to be concerned about these machines, for this one simple reason: any other flaw in our democracy can be addressed by our democracy, but not this. Once we lose the vote to these machines, we lose the capacity to remove the machines from the process. It's a one-way street, and once we're on it, the only recourse will be violence, a la 1776.

So we should take great care to make sure we don't take that road.

Re:Moot?

[Mr. Slippery]

Bush is 2 wins for 2 wars.

Depends on how one counts, how one defines "win", and how one defines "war".

Is it one war, the "War on Terrorism", fought on two fronts? But terrorism seems to still exist, and Bush's policies have been a terrorist recruitment officer's wet dream. No win there.

Is there a war in Afganistan, and another in Iraq, with the goals of capturing or killing Bin Laden and Hussein? Both are still at large, and Americans are still getting killed in both places. 0 for 2 there.

Is there any war at all, given the lack of a formal declaration of such by Congress? Yes, I know the Constitution doesn't count for much any more, especially when a president gets it into his head to go bomb the fuck out of someone, but weren't Korea and Vietname "police actions" or somesuch rather than "wars" for just that reason?

So, yes, Bush's actions have lead to a lot more dead foriegners than dead U.S. servicepeople. If that's your measure of victory, he's batting 1.000. Of course, by that reconning we won in Vietnam.

Re:Moot?

[dolo666]

"Eventually, the working class will have had enough, and that's when the future US history books will become really interesting."
There is no evidence to support this. The poor have been poor for ages and lived that way for ages. Even New Rich are stuck in spirals of habitual patterns going back since the stone age that lead them back to the poor house.

Re:Moot?

[perljon]

The group can very quickly become a mob. But a group of representatives only moves the problem. It doesn't solve it. Universal Sufferage came about because activists changed the public opinion. Slavery has ended in almost all parts of the world without a military from another government forcing the issue. Via education and activism, these kinds of moral issues will eventually be addressed and resolved.

Only 1/3 of the population supported revolution the others where either indifferent or loyalists. You can't know what would have happened without a revolution. Maybe, we'd still have the government and society that we have today, but 1000's of people wouldn't have had to die for it. There are as many bad things that have happened as a result of minority rule as good things. The fact that representatives sometimes make right decisions doesn't mean that they don't make wrong ones too. My argument is that the populace will make as many good decisions and bad decisions as representatives. However, a popular vote would protect us from corruptions and abuse of power (representatives giving themselves exorbant raises and Presidents declaring war without getting declarations of war).

Re:Moot?

[kraut]

Amen! The first sensible post I've read on this subject in a long time.

What is the problem that electronic voting (or punchcards,...) are supposed to fix? Beats me, but having voted in two separate countries, picking up a pen and making a cross in a box never struck me as an incredible effort.

If it's speed - I know the UK and Germany manage to get their results calculated the same night, save perhaps a few straggling counts that go on until the next day. Given that this problem parallelizes extremeley well ;), I can't see why the US can't do the same.

Re:Moot?

[Anonymous Coward]

The government isn't as fanatical about having a paper trail as a bank is, because a bank can lose lots of money if they don't have that paper trail. Nobody in the government is going to lose money, though, so nobody in government raised a ruckus.

Also, the government REQUIRES banks to be really honest (ironic, eh?)

Re:Moot?

[Bush Pig]

This is how we do it in Australia, too. It is by far thye best system, and very difficult (though probably not impossible) to rig. I guess this is why the US politicians don't like it, preferring voting machines which are more error-prone and make it easier to "fix" the outcome.

Re:Moot?

[Bush Pig]

I think the US has recovered from Vietnam, but they certainly haven't got over it.

Re:Moot?

[Anonymous Coward]

have the electorate mark their ballot papers as appropriate, and then count the votes BY HAND a a count session to which *all* of the candidates are invited ?

It doesn't scale well to an election with 40--100 offices and ballot questions up for grabs.

Re:Moot?

[mr100percent]

link please? I must have missed it in Google news.

Re:Moot?

[plover]

Yes, "receipt printers" cost more than "no receipt printers". However, if Diebold can sell a printerless machine for $3000 and a printing machine for $4000, considering that the print engines have already been designed and cost about $100 each, don't you think they would try to sell the $4000 version?

Or perhaps I'm not being conspiratorial enough. Perhaps Diebold wants to sell $3000 voting machines, wait for the public outcry at a lack of printed audits, then sell add-on printers for $2000 each. Or, even better, perhaps they'll offer a $1000 rebate on the $3000 machines in trade for the $4000 printing machines.

I guess you're right: it is about the money.

Re:Moot?

[SensitiveMale]

Is it one war, the "War on Terrorism", fought on two fronts? But terrorism seems to still exist, and Bush's policies have been a terrorist recruitment officer's wet dream. No win there.

Not true. By using your definition, terrorism will NEVER cease to exist. Every arab terrorist could be dead and some Philippino muslim could blow up a bomb in a disco. So you could argue terrorism still exists. Bush's policies have made this country safer. How many attacks have occurred in this country since 9/11? what was that? Could you repeat that for the jury? NONE. Exactly. The same people who hated the US before the war hate us now. Big deal. We ain't gonna change their opinion in a few years. But the big picture is that they are on the run. that makes a huge difference. They no longer have a safe place to sleep at night and they always have to keep moving. As long as they keep moving they will make mistakes and we will catch them.

Is there a war in Afganistan, and another in Iraq, with the goals of capturing or killing Bin Laden and Hussein? Both are still at large, and Americans are still getting killed in both places. 0 for 2 there.

You may want to say either war will not be won until we catch a single man. That is ridiculous. What if they are dead? does that mean we can't win the war? Yes, Americans are getting killed in WAR not in our cities from terrorists' attacks. Big difference. As a former Marine, I can tell you that there is NO WAY that we can completely eliminate these tragic deaths. But we have succeeded in moving the front lines from our cities to their lands. And as long as the terrorists, from around the world mind you, go to Iraq to fight that that is what we want.

Is there any war at all, given the lack of a formal declaration of such by Congress?
Last time I check, Congress gave the president the authority to attack Iraq. president clinton, that is. Oh, and by the way, they ALSO voted and gave president Bush the authority.

And last time I checked we won just about every battle in vietnam. The politicians simply quit vietnam.

But my "measure of victory" is removing the terrorist and lawless regimes in afghanistan and iraq and replacing them with pro-U.S. democratic governments. And to win the wars, we must first remove the old militaries. We are doing that.

But the big "measure of victory" is how safe we keep our homeland. And no one can't say that Bush, Ashcroft, the military, and law-enforcement are doing a wonderful job.

Re:Moot?

[John Courtland]

But the past isn't in the future. People can more easily see how they're being fucked over now than ever before. Things will change soon, for better or worse, I'm sure of it.

Re:Moot?

[WindBourne]

Not only higher prices for the printer version, but also money for the paper itself. I am amazed that Diebold would not want paper on it, unless there are other issues (such as not wanting a mistake to be seen).

Re:Moot?

[Wolfrider]

o What is the size, in thousands, of the voting population in the UK?

o What is the size, in millions, of the voting population in the US?

--Ok, that's maybe an exaggeration, but you get the point. ;-) Not everyone votes, either (given the "quality" of the candidates these days, can ya blame us?) In fact in the last 30 years or so, I'd say the voting population in the US has gone *down* quite a bit.

--Besides, everyone knows that 'Mericans are lazy. We want the results *yesterday,* not 2-3 days from now. :-) Manually hand-counting that many votes is a *HUGE* undertaking, and would delay an already massive process.

--Now -- all that being said, I think your idea has merit; we just need to automate it a little... (G)

Re:Moot?

[bangalla]

Actually there is no enormous delay using pencil and paper. Polling stations expect an approximate number of votes based on location and previous polls and therefore has enough poll workers to manage the task.

I've been a scruteneer at a few elections and we usually see results within 3-4 hours of the poll closing. Each electorate is broken down so that there is an acceptable number of votes to count at each booth and the result is easy to check.

The only way I would be happy with electronic voting is if it was used as a fancy pencil and paper solution, ie. I choose my prefered candidate, get a printout which I then have to place in a sealed box. The figures from the machine give an instant result which is then hand checked over the next day.

Personally, I'd hate to leave behind pencil and paper as I relish the ability to write vitriolic statements about candidates on the ballot paper for their campaign workers to read at the count.

Re:Moot?

[Grizzlysmit]

I am looking forward to Cringley's next column where he proposes to answer the question of why auditing capabilities were not inlcuded in the touch screen voting machines.

I can answer THAT for you right now. He's going to (correctly) assert that the reason there is no paper-trail requirement is that the political establishment DOES NOT WANT ONE. The original vote tally is a one-time process, but the recount process can drag on forever, and THAT is what "they" want to avoid forever more.

Hmmmmm I think it primarily about fraud, but not the political fraud that most people will think of, call it program fraud, if you know your program is total crap, but you wish to sell it anyway, convince the customer that there is a really good reason not to include any features that would lead to discovery/proof of the fact that you've cheated them.

This sort of fraud is rather common, M$ have built their entire business on it, of course you cannot fool the geek/tech community, nor are the company in question's own techies involved in the fraud as such, but they can get away with it because, no one really listens to us properly, they seem to always assume that we're talking about some esoteric aspects of the matter that really aren't important in real/normal life.

And of course there are always people who are geeks or have geek type quals who help the lie: i.e. die hard VMS freaks who will swear black and blue that M$ is ok, because of the tenuous connection between VMS and windows NT; people with uni degree's in IT who never really understood half of what they were studying; and most of all those who have so sold there souls for the greater $$$$ to be had by being a pointy haired suite wearing type, that they will never break ranks with the pointy haired world.

Re:Moot?

[Mr. Slippery]

By using your definition, terrorism will NEVER cease to exist.

Bingo! That's the joy of a war on terrorism - it never has to end. Nothing like endless war to keep the people in line.

Bush's policies have made this country safer.

Nonsense. Bush's policiss have given more people than ever a motive to commit terrorist acts against the United States - and have made the U.S. government more of a clear and present danger to its own citizens than terrorism.

Last time I check, Congress gave the president the authority to attack Iraq. president clinton, that is. Oh, and by the way, they ALSO voted and gave president Bush the authority.

Which doesn't address the point that no declaration of war was made.

But my "measure of victory" is removing the terrorist and lawless regimes in afghanistan and iraq and replacing them with pro-U.S. democratic governments.

Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq was lawless (until we came in and destroyed the governments - sucky governments, true, but functioning ones), and Iraq had little to do with terrorism.

And why just Afghanistan and Iraq, in world full of nasty governments? Could it be...oil?

And if they're democratic governments, don't they get to choose whether or not they're pro-U.S.? Or do we again play the game of toppling democratic regimes that don't do our bidding?

Re:Moot?

[JimBobJoe]

What is the size, in thousands, of the voting population in the UK?

o What is the size, in millions, of the voting population in the US?

Doesn't matter, since both countries will break everything done into very small jurisdictions.

The US has 280+million
Ohio has 11.3 million
Franklin County has 1.2 million
Columbus has 750k
my pollworking ward has 10k
my pollworking precint (four pollworkers per precinct) has 850 registered voters and of those 850 registered, about 120 will vote in an off year election, about 300 will vote in an even year, 500 will vote in presidential election

Here in Franklin County we use machines, but with four pollworkers, I imagine we could count paper ballots up fairly quickly, even if 500 people vote. (After all, that's why there's four of us.)

Re:Moot?

[Mad Marlin]

This is how we do it in Australia, too. It is by far thye best system, and very difficult (though probably not impossible) to rig. I guess this is why the US politicians don't like it, preferring voting machines which are more error-prone and make it easier to "fix" the outcome.

Ballot-box stuffing. People used to manage to grab more than one slip, and vote extra times. That's why we don't do it that way anymore.

Re:Moot?

[zcat_NZ]

Here's my take;

All the other machines Diebold make, the 'transaction' is verified already. At one end of the transaction or the other, someone is quite likely to notice and complain if their ATM transaction got lost.

Ticket machine customers are generally going to notice if they get double-billed. Promoters are going to notice if they sold x tickets but only collected money for (x-n).

The paper trail exists to fix mistakes, not find them.

In the case of electronic voting, voters don't have any other way of knowing if the 'transaction' went through. As long as the results look plausable enough Diebold can simply ignore any minor glitches and pretend that their machines are quick, secure, and perfectly accurate. Having a paper trail and random auditing makes things so much more complicated for them.

Re:Moot?

[F34nor]

In that case every armed man woman and child walks into the voting booth and puts a hollow point throught he screen. Problem solved.

Re:Moot?

[SensitiveMale]

Bingo! That's the joy of a war on terrorism - it never has to end.

Are you insane? So because ANY insane bomber or shooter can mount a terrorist attack you are saying we can't win? so what should we do? nothing? Should we do nothing about crime since we can't eradicate it? Or literacy? We can't eliminate illiteracy so we should do nothing?

What is even MORE disturbing is that you think the current administration takes glee, or even hopes, in terrorist attacks.

Nonsense. Bush's policiss have given more people than ever a motive to commit terrorist acts against the United States - and have made the U.S. government more of a clear and present danger to its own citizens than terrorism.

Still waiting for you to list the attacks on American soil since 9/11. We are killing the terrorist and destroying their ability to launch attacks. The proof of this is obvious. NO MORE ATTACKS. but i've got a feeling that NO MATTER what Bush does, you will think he failed. And feel free to list how the U.S. government is "more of a clear and present danger" than terrorism. That is just a fucking stupid statement. I am guessing you mean the 'Patriot Act'. Well, I hate to rain on your parade but Bush DIDN'T pass the Patriot Act. BOTH houses of congress OVERWHELMINGLY passed it. So if you want to bitch about it, bitch to your congressman. THEY passed it.

And you may want to check that "motive to commit terrorist acts against the United States" attitude. Last time I check Syria and Saudi arabis were turning over terrorists to the U.S. Think that would have happened 6 years ago?

clinton decided to tackle terrorism with legal action. That failed miserably. The terrorists continued to commit terrorist activities that escalated higher and higher until the 9/11 WTC attacks. Yes, I consider the 9/11 attacks to be mainly against clinton's policies since they were shown to have taken OVER 5 years to plan and execute.

Bush has decided to deal with terrorism with the military and it has shown to be infinitely more effective. How do I know this? NO MORE ATTACKS.

Which doesn't address the point that no declaration of war was made

Who cares. Congress AUTHORIZED both clinton and Bush to deal with Iraq. and BTW, so did the U.N. Bush just didn't decide one morning to invade Iraq. You refusing to accept this shows you are refusing to face facts.

Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq was lawless (until we came in and destroyed the governments - sucky governments, true, but functioning ones), and Iraq had little to do with terrorism.

Keep thinking that. Afghanistan was about as lawless as a country could be. Iraq was about the same. About Iraq not having anything to do with terrorism, WAKE UP. Iraq was a BREEDING ground for terrorism. This has been documented. Terrorist training grounds were in Iraq. saddam was paying bounties for terrorist activities. The CIA has shown constant meetings of terrorist in Iraq. Moneys being funneled to terrorists.

Funny how you equate "sucky governments" with hundreds of thousands of mass graves, professional rapists, death squads, gassing the populace, mutilations, refusing to educate women, and terrorizing their own populace.

And why just Afghanistan and Iraq, in world full of nasty governments? Could it be...oil?

I don't think so. But you have used one liberal argument (the one about oil). I will guess that your next posting will include the other liberal argument (Bush was upset about Iraq trying to assassinate daddy).

I would wager that we went after afghanistan because the taliban were headquartered there and wouldn't turn over al quaeda. I would then wager we went after Iraq because Iraq was shown to have dealings with terrorists, al quaeda, and shown to have WMD (since the 90's) and they were willing to export or sell them. We knew Iraq had WMD and that is why Congress authorized BOTH clinton and Bush to d

Re:Moot?

[David at Eeyore]

Here in Oz, you front up to the Voting Place, the electoral people ask you if you have voted before on this day, you say "no", they look you up in their copy of the electoral roll, give you a voting slip (ballot paper)which has been initialled on the back by another electoral official, then they rule a line through your name after confirming your address and date of birth. You then take the ballot paper to a booth and armed with a pencil do the democratic thing! you then fold up the ballot paper and post it into the sealed ballot box, watched by another electoral official. All open and scrutinised by everyone there. A manual system can and does work well.

Re:Moot?

[Nick Barnes]

I strongly agree that a system with hand-marked paper ballots and open hand counting is greatly superior to any existing automated system, and as you say, it's almost certainly cheaper, and it can be arranged to provide final results in a few hours. However, you paint an overly rosy picture of our system in the UK. Abuses, including ballot box stuffing, can and probably do take place, and the "audit trail" which theoretically allows the security services to identify Communist voters, and has little other apparent purpose, is a shameful blot on the system.

Re:Moot?

[PinkyGigglebrain]

Iran, 1953, the US put in the Sha. Guatemala, 1954, US put in a dictator. Brazil, 1964, yet another dictator. All had democraticly elected goverments.

http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/2010/vietn am.htm#order

Re:Moot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, Russia have counted over 90% of the votes already. They had a voter turnout of just over 30%, so we're talking $BIGNUM ballots here. If Russia can do it, it can be done by the U.S

Modelling the U.S democratic process on Russia; HAH! Like that'll ever happen.

Re:Moot?

[fucksl4shd0t]

Still waiting for you to list the attacks on American soil since 9/11.

I'll bite. There have been numerous attacks, but I don't have exact figures on how many ANTHRAX MAILINGS went out. There were also a number of fatalities as a result of the ANTHRAX MAILINGS.

It's been two years since 9/11/2001. How many terrorist attacks happened on American soil in teh two years prior to that? More importantly, how many attacks against Americans have been made? Rest assured, the Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq have been attacked numerous times since we went there with our own guns blazing.

If anything, all Bush has done is gotten the terrorists to attack our soldiers instead, but then most of previous terrorist attacks (since about 1990, anyway) have been directed at military targets.

Except for the terrorist attacks perpetrated by Americans for Americans (the Oklahoma City bombing....)

Bush has wasted a bunch of resources and furthered a cause that has made it impossible for there to be a "pro-US" democracy anywhere in the world, except here in the US. Name ONE pro-US democracy. JUST ONE. :)

Re:Moot?

[CBDSteve]

Sigh. No, America does not contain 1000 times more people than the UK. It's not a case of being unable to count votes manually, but since the US has switched to electronic counting, it's unlikely to move back (no matter how much better the system works).

Re:Moot?

[fucksl4shd0t]

excuse me if I am wrong, but isn't that what would be considered a lack of conscious?

No, it doesn't resemble sleeping in any way. :)

Re:Moot?

[Crustydub]

UK: 60 million US : 290 Million and individual constituencues are all small enough for this not to be an issue, Everyone gets to see the piles of votes. the issue is transparancy and accountability. electronic voting is quick specially where proportional representation (the only really democratic system which we use in Ireland and is a brute to count but actually worth it) it's a simple case of whether you value democracy. Either way you can end up with an appaling administration, but at least you're to blame for your govt.

Re:Moot?

[sarabob]

chile, pinochet, 1973.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/382470.s tm is some fun stuff about how the CIA knew he was being "naughty" within days of being installed by the US.

Re:Moot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, in the age of computers, that means of a truer Democracy may finally be at our finger tips.

Bill? Is that you?

Re:Moot?

[royalblue_tom]

I think you are missing the poster's point, regarding what a war is about. Specifically:

1. Should we accept a mandatory draft?
2. Rationing?
3. Round up japanese-americans and put in camps?
4. Arrest and hold anyone without lawyers/charges?

These were common during WW2, because it was a WAR. However, a "war" on terror, by it's very nature, cannot end. Are you saying that until we catch every terrorist, EVER, that the government should have war powers?

No one is saying that we shouldn't be tough on terror, but that is an entirely different thing to saying that we are at war. That is why there has to be a declaration of war from congress. The Constitution even mentions additional things the government can only do "in time of war" - the Third ammendment springs to mind.

Re:Moot?

[Anonymous Coward]

My argument is that the populace will make as many good decisions and bad decisions as representatives. However, a popular vote would protect us from corruptions and abuse of power (representatives giving themselves exorbant raises and Presidents declaring war without getting declarations of war).

In this age of Media and Marketing, the state would end up being run indirectly by whatever group controls the media. So instead of just sending billions of dollars of aid to Israel and allowing our military to do their bidding, and teaching Israel how to build nuclear weapons, things could go much farther. We might end up building concentration camps and incinerators to help exterminate the Palestinians as punishment for owning Palestine for a couple thousand years when it clearly belongs to the superior race of "God's Chosen People". I hope you can detect sarcasm.

Re:Moot?

[axlrosen]

The point is not what the outcome of elections are when they are practically a formality.

Even if that were true, we still have Democratic primaries...

Re:Moot?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if they said the same thing when mechanical voting machines were first put forth?

Re:Moot?

[jafac]

"Diebold management might be solidly Republican but there is no way they could trust their engineers to join them in a criminal conspiracy. "

I don't think it's all that big of a stretch.
When MANY Rush Limbaugh listeners actually believe that ALL democrats are criminals, that the idea of the Democratic party is unpatriotic, that it supports communism and terrorism. . . there are a LOT of people who believe this. They believe that NOT doing anything in their power, within the law or not (because the laws that prevent this are unjust and unamerican), to stop the Democrats, is tantamount to treason. (Read the Anne Coulter book if you don't believe me).

Re:Moot?

[rifter]

Having attended several election counts in the UK, I have to ask why you guys don't you do what we do - have the electorate mark their ballot papers as appropriate, and then count the votes BY HAND a a count session to which *all* of the candidates are invited ? This way all of the candidates can clearly observe the ballots being counted, and can quickly flag the official(s) in charge of the election if there's something fishy afoot. There's no room for any fiddling of the vote to take place, and thus no room for suspicion or paranoia. It's sane, understandable by the non-IT literate (in other words, the majority of the public) and there are NEVER any disputes about votes being counted wrongly. The views of all of the candidates are sought on the counting of erroneously marked or spoilt ballots.

Because we tried that already and it failed. Did you sleep through 2000?

Re:Moot?

[rifter]

Here in Oz, you front up to the Voting Place, the electoral people ask you if you have voted before on this day, you say "no", they look you up in their copy of the electoral roll, give you a voting slip (ballot paper)which has been initialled on the back by another electoral official, then they rule a line through your name after confirming your address and date of birth. You then take the ballot paper to a booth and armed with a pencil do the democratic thing! you then fold up the ballot paper and post it into the sealed ballot box, watched by another electoral official. All open and scrutinised by everyone there. A manual system can and does work well.

And then you go to the next polling place, and they say "have you voted before?" and you say "no" and they mark your name off and watch you vote....

Riiiight....

Re:Moot?

[Mad Marlin]

And then you go to the next polling place, and they say "have you voted before?" and you say "no" and they mark your name off and watch you vote....

Actually, it usually went down like this: You "borrow" a whole book of the slips on your way to the booth, emulate the initials on the back (easier than you might think) and drop in as many slips as you can hold in your hand without it obviously looking as if you are holding more than one slip, about two dozen I would guess. Congratulations, you just voted two dozen times.

Re:Moot?

[dreadnougat]

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topN ews&storyID=3947150

Iraqi women, children march against "terrorists"
Fri December 5, 2003 02:14 PM ET

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Up to 1,000 Iraqis, including children orphaned by the war that ousted Saddam Hussein, marched through Baghdad on Friday to denounce guerrilla attacks and show support for U.S.-led occupation forces. Carrying banners blaming Saddam loyalists for "terrorism", the demonstrators marched down one of Baghdad's busiest streets before gathering in Firdos Square, where a statue of Saddam was famously pulled down as U.S. troops drove into the heart of the capital in April.
"We organised this demonstration because the terrorists now kill a lot of people," said Abdul Aziz Al-Yassiri, coordinator of the Iraqi Democratic Trend, a recently formed social group.
"They kill the children, kill women, kill the people, kill the police. They want to stop our plan for a democratic system."
It was the second time in two weeks that demonstrators gathered in significant numbers to back U.S. attempts to rebuild the country and denounce guerrilla activities. Another march is planned for next Friday, the Muslim holy day.
Most of those who marched were Shi'ite Muslims, who make up about 60 percent of Iraq's population but were discriminated against under Saddam, a Sunni.
Several dozen young children holding flowers marched at the head of the demonstration while women accompanying them held up placards reading "Terrorism blocks the future for children" and "Children -- innocent victims of terror".
At least four Iraqis were killed on Friday in a bomb blast on a busy street in eastern Baghdad. One U.S. soldier was also killed in the explosion, which occurred as a crowded public bus and a U.S. military convoy were passing each other.
Iraqi police and ordinary civilians have increasingly become victims of insurgents, who strike almost every day.
The Iraq Body Count, an Anglo-American non-governmental group, estimates that as many as 9,800 Iraqi civilians have died since U.S. forces invaded to overthrow Saddam.
Over the same period, more than 500 U.S. and coalition soldiers have been killed either in direct military combat, in accidents or at the hands of anti-coalition guerrilla fighters.
In the seven months since Washington declared major combat over in the country, the U.S.-led civilian authority has struggled to set up structures to usher in democracy, a task complicated by the dogged insurgency.
"No mercy to those who have no mercy towards people," screamed one protester on Friday. "We will go ahead with our democratic process despite these acts."

Re:Moot?

[derfel]

There's at least one problem with manual counts. When people with biases count, their biases will affect the outcome. Even if you have some agent keeping an eye on them, they can't catch every error that is made, intentional or not.

Machine based counting _could_ be more accurate, even though the people building and programming those machines may have biases. If two receipts were given to the voter, which he verified, then put one into another machine. If this 2nd machine then retallied the votes, the first machine's results could be verified. There could even be a third manual count. There should also be requirements on the voting systems such as that they be from different vendors, including serious firewalls between the developers. This is much better than having a few people of average intelligence looking at a fairly large number of ballots to determine if a chad is hanging, a mark is dark enough, or if there is a depression somewhere.

Re:Moot?

[yourmom16]

Bush's policies have made this country safer. How many attacks have occurred in this country since 9/11? what was that? Could you repeat that for the jury? NONE. Exactly

9/11 was about two years ago. How many terrorist attacks have occured in this country the previous two years?

E-voting

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple way to make it secure... The electronic machine FILLS OUT A PIECE OF PAPER CORRECTLY AND COMPLETELY. The person INSPECTS this for correctness before making it his/her vote. -- E-voting keeps the democrat from crying "hanging chads, dimpled chads... RECOUNT, RECOUNT, RECOUNT!"

Re:E-voting

[GerbilSocks]

I've worked as a volunteer at voting booths before and let me tell you... human beings can be one of the stupidest creatures on earth. Your idea of them inspecting it before submitting a vote simply won't work. Some could give a flying shit and submit it even if it was wrong. Again I reiterate my statement that human beings can be the stupidest things walking the earth.

Re:E-voting

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. I mean, why would you want them to recount the vote anyway? Then they might find out something like the president that won didn't actually win, and that the little dickwad is only in office because of legal action.

We wouldn't want that, now would we?

Re:E-voting

[splattertrousers]

Or even more simple: have the person fill out the ballot (punch cards, optical, whatever) and insert it into a machine right there in the little booth. The machine says who it thinks the person voted for. If the person agrees, then the person submits the ballot to the ballot taker. If not, the person rips up the ballot and tries again.

Solves the problem without making too many changes to the current system.

Re:E-voting

[TotalRebel]

What happens to the piece of paper if it is incorrect. Printing it out before it is recorded and saving it for recounts allows fraud by printing out more than one slip of paper by the voter and having more votes in the recount than in the election. If it is printed out after the vote is recorded, how does the electronic recorded vote be corrected by the voter and another paper receipt generated to be put in the recount ballot box. Also leading to the possibility of a voter putting multiple paper recipts in the ballot box for recounts. Both leading to how to handle the problem if the number op paper receipts do not agree with the electronic ballots. Not to mention the problem if the printer ever jammed. This would require the ability to reprint receipts and learn how a voter voted or create extra receipts. Thus a paper receipt could create as many probles as it solves. It also does not help stop fraud by multiple use of the smart cards.

Re:E-voting

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody likes a sore winner. You know damn well most people in Florida intended to, and thought they did, vote for Gore.

Re:E-voting

[Anonymous Coward]

What happens to the piece of paper if it is incorrect.

The same thing that happens to incorrect ballots today. If the voter makes a mistake, he gives the bad ballot to the poll workers, who dispose of it properly. Then and only then, the poll workers give the voter another blank ballot. As such, there is only one valid paper ballot in existence at any given time for any voter.

Whoever modded you as Insightful needs to have his head examined, because it sounds to me like you've never actually voted. This is a problem that has already been solved.

Re:E-voting

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes if they got that ballot from a poll worker, however the issue is that the printed receipt came from the machine and not from a poll worker. In electronic voting no ballot is obtained. only a smart card. The paper receipt would only be used for a recount. A voter could create several if the machine prints out the ballot for the voter to check before the vote is recorded. Then the voter could deposit them all in the recount ballot box or use one to prove how he voted for payment. I am a poll worker that has worked an election using electronic voting. Adding paper receipts could cause more problems that it will solve.

Re:E-voting

[Anonymous Coward]

Then the paper needs to be fed back into the machine before another one can be issued. This is really simple.

Yeah! Wooot!

[anaphora]

If anything encourages those 70-year-olds not to vote it's electronics. I think we should port this technology to the dmv, medicare, and the internet.

Re:Yeah! Wooot!

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhhhhhhhhh............ i,m not 70 and i don,t vote............

Re:Yeah! Wooot!

[TwistedGreen]

medicare? you americans have medicare? wow, and here i thought curing the sick was a business.

Re:Yeah! Wooot!

[Anonymous Coward]

Judging from your attempt at a post, I think we should all be very thankful for that.

Duh!

[Pingular]

I am shocked that this story from I Cringley hasn't been sent in and posted at Slashdot
It has... :)

Re:Duh!

[alfredo]

I waited 24 hours before submitting it. You guys are asleep at the wheel dammit.

I expected more from you, and you let me down.

I guess if you want something done, you got to do it yourself.

Re:Duh!

[Wolfrider]

--I hope people do realize that there is a Slashbox available for Cringely...? That's how I noticed it.

Cringe-Worthy

[Anonymous Coward]

The repeated bastardization of this columnist's name makes me cringe.

Some related links:

[npistentis]

http://www.why-war.com/ http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/story/783747 5p-8778055c.html

Hmm...

[autopr0n]

I can't imagine too many business owners liking those odds, but the picture does get darker. If 28 percent of software projects were complete successes in 2000, then 72 percent were at least partial failures. And in software, even partial failure generally means getting absolutely nothing for your money.

What does this mean? If you want a program that does X, Y and Z, and you get one that does X and Y, it could still be useful and worth the money you spend.

I think that when you look at lots of 'business' apps, all it has to do is get it close to right, it doesn't need to work 'perfectly' every time as long as it doesn't corrupt the data, and a lot of the QA work is simply mess with it until it gets stable, rather then having any kind of real proof that it works correctly.

That said, I think a lot of slashdot users, or at least me, noticed a lot of "hackwork" style coding with the Diebold voting system. Especially the use of Microsoft tools and MS access.

Its like they slathered together a bunch of components they already had, did a little debugging, and tried selling the the things.

What's frustrating about it is we all know that it's possible to do this simply, and well, but Diebold chose to do a crappy job and lie about it, rather then doing it right the first time.

Re:Hmm...

[mcc]

What does this mean? If you want a program that does X, Y and Z, and you get one that does X and Y, it could still be useful and worth the money you spend.

The problem here is, what if Z is the most important requirement for the project?

There are a number of different criteria that are desirous in a voting system. However, a few of them are absolutely necessary. The ones that are necessary are that it must not introduce statistically significant amounts of error, it must be anonymous, and it must be auditable and trustable. If you lack any of these qualities, you wind up with a system which is worse than nothing at all, becuase the system is not just flawed: it is potentially damaging.

Punch cards become an unworkable option because they violate the first of these. The potential margin of uncatchable error is large enough that it was larger than the margin of victory in the deciding area of the last presidential election.

The electronic voting systems currently being pushed have almost all of the desirable voting-system qualities, lack the last of the necessities: they are inauditable and untrustable. This is not just an implementation problem. It is a fundamental problem-- becuase any auditing methods for the system must themselves be electronic, and thus as susceptable to being cheated as the system itself. It is perhaps possible to create a trustable electronic voting system. However, it requires an absolutely obsessive-compulsive attention to detail, something along the lines of methods used on the Las Vegas slot machines mentioned on /. a few days ago, only even more so, becuase many of the slot machines' systems of ensuring fairness are made impossible by the voting systems' requirement of anonymity. You can argue that this is an implementation problem, and that the problem is just that the current implementors are just putting the minimal amount of effort into trust, and that's just not enough. But I would say it is fundamental because the amount of effort required to make the system trustable is so great that it is unlikely anyone will ever be bothered to reach it. People will always inherently want to cut corners..

You have to remember, it isn't enough for a voting system just to produce a correct answer. It has to to the greatest extent possible eliminate doubt. If you have a system which is not trustable, but by coincidence just happens to be accurate, it's still going to be a problem because the elected candidates enemies will be able to go around for that candidate's entire political lifespan claiming that they stole the election-- and really, who can definitively say that they're wrong?

Re:Hmm...

[JaredOfEuropa]

What's frustrating about it is we all know that it's possible to do this simply, and well, but Diebold chose to do a crappy job and lie about it, rather then doing it right the first time.

Diebold doing a crappy job is not the issue, and I wonder why Cringeley looked at this from an IT project perspective...

If Diebold does a sterling job and builds a system that exactly meets the system requirements, bug-free and with the source code made available to the public, then from an IT viewpoint they will have a 'successful' project. Even then, their voting machines are still flawed! The real issue (and the one that Cringeley does mention later in his article) is that the specifications have a fatal flaw in them. Or you might say: the requirements given to Diebold is incomplete, perhaps for rather sinister reasons. Not requiring due consideration for security, audit trails, and tampering, when ordering the development of electronic voting machines, is like asking a company to develop an ATM and specifying its functionality as 'The machine should dispense money when someone feeds it a bank card';

Re:VOT1NG ON TEH SPKOE!!!1

[Anonymous Coward]

Australians designed a system two years ago that addressed and eased most of those concerns: They chose to make the software running their system completely open to public scrutiny.

Although a private Australian company designed the system, it was based on specifications set by independent election Hot Cocks, who posted the code on the Internet for all to see and evaluate. What's more, it was accomplished from concept to product in six months. It went through a trial run in a state election in 2001.

Electronic Voting already exists and works

[emptybody]

In my town we "conect the dots" to mark our selections on a paper ballot.

That ballot is inserted into a machine that electronicly counts the votes and stores the physical ballot in a locked box.

Done.

Paper trail is present, no "hanging chads".
simple elegent. and easier to complete than filling in your name on the SATs (those Damn bubbles ...)

Re:Electronic Voting already exists and works

[emptybody]

One more thing.

This "system" has been in use for at leat the 16 years that I have been voting here.

specifics on the ballot:
two columns

QUESTION TEXT
ANSWER1......... >>>___>>>

ANSWER2......... >>>___>>>

Fill in the arrow with the supplied pen to indicate your choice.

That is it.
done
QED

Re:Electronic Voting already exists and works

[aheath]

The system you describe sounds exactly like the one that is used where I vote. The key lessong to be applied to all voting systems is "Don't expect what you don't inspect." If you can't or don't inspect the system, then you can't expect any particular outcome from the system. Any voting system should produce a locked box paper trail that allows voting results to be manually compiled and compared to the automated results.

Re:Electronic Voting already exists and works

[NortWind]

Even better, if you do something wrong (such as vote for 2 candidates, or miss the fill in area) the voting card validation box spits it back at you so you can try again. It protect the voter against mistakes.

Re:Electronic Voting already exists and works

[CGP314]

It protect the voter against mistakes.

Like voting for Bush?

Re:Electronic Voting already exists and works

[zsau]

When I voted when I was 18 (November last year), I put my ballot into a simple cardboard box. The laws of physics could be used to work out exactly where in the box it fell, so someone paying acute attention might just be able to work out who I voted for, but they would have to know things like the exact way I'd folded my ballot, how the other ballots in the box laid, what the air conditions were like inside the box, and any number of other variables. Not to mention that they'd have to open the box before it got moved, because once it's moved, there's a lot of other variables to take into account. Or the fact that because it was the first time I voted, I took longer to vote than the other people voting at the same time, so they'd still have to match what I looked like to who I was.

Security is still possible with a paper trail.

(Alternatively, they could've watched over my shoulder. Entirely possible, but they could do this no matter how you vote.)

Re:Electronic Voting already exists and works

[Anonymous Coward]

Truly, elegant and simple. That sounds too easy, actually!

The very simplest stroke of the pen - instantly recorded, counted, and stored securely.

Ultra cheap - ultra trustworthy - ultra accurate, AND ultra manageable.

What brand of machine is this, please? Or what town?
My voting officials down here in Georgia need this info now.

Re:Electronic Voting already exists and works

[innocent_white_lamb]

Even better, if you do something wrong (such as vote for 2 candidates, or miss the fill in area) the voting card validation box spits it back at you so you can try again.

This is "even better"?

What if I, as a voter, choose to deliberately spoil my ballot or choose to not mark it at all. No choice is just as much a political statement as any other declaration on a ballot.

The submitter was right

[The One KEA]

When you look at the matter as an IT project, you realize just how unlikely it was to succeed. I wonder what sort of answer he'll give next week.

Misleading

[mcc]

The American Civil Liberties Union said in California that certain counties in the recent recall election were disenfranchised by not having touch screen voting

No, The American Civil Liberties Union said in California that certain counties in the recent election were disenfranchised by using punch card voting. The fact that one of the alternatives to punch card voting is touchscreen voting does not mean that the ACLU was demanding the counties use touchscreen voting, just that the counties not use the punch card voting systems which had lost their legal certification anymore!

Cringely's intentions are excellent but he plays into the biggest, most disasterous, most helpful to the voting companies fallacy in the entire mess:

Recording method of votes and tabulation method of votes are entirely separate, orthogonal concepts.

The first has to do with, do you make a mark on a piece of paper, pull a lever, or touch a button on a screen? The second has to do with, are the votes recorded on paper and dropped in a box to be counted somewhere, or are they put on a hard drive to be just added together somewhere?

The first is what electronic voting salesmen are mostly selling the systems based on. The second is what electronic voting's enemies are mostly complaining about, as it alone is what makes almost all of the potential cheating possible. There's *no reason the two have to go together*! You could have a touch-screen voting machine which prints out a scantron sheet, which then is dropped in a box and counted like a hand-filled-out scantron sheet would have been.

A lot of the support for "electronic voting" has come from the fact its proponents have attempted as much as possible to prevent the false choice of "Punch cards VS electronic voting!" and hoping pieces of paper won't come to people's minds. But much of the remainder of the support on this issue have come from people using the advantages of touch-screen voting to sell "electronic voting", acting as if the touch-screens are inseperable from the idea of storing votes for tabulation on fragile, black-box electronic media, and banking on public confusion about All Things Computer to assume people won't notice this.

Re:Misleading

[aredubya74]

But much of the remainder of the support on this issue have come from people using the advantages of touch-screen voting to sell "electronic voting", acting as if the touch-screens are inseperable from the idea of storing votes for tabulation on fragile, black-box electronic media, and banking on public confusion about All Things Computer to assume people won't notice this. [emphasis mine]

It's not confusion - it's ignorance. The plebes that make up our electorate think computer = Microsoft Windows. They don't think of the thousands of different specialized computers that are used in everyday life.

The proponents of touch-screen voting are trying to capitalize on the most successful computing paradigm of the last 20 years: the point-and-click GUI. People trust that if you point-and-click, the program runs (the "click" being analogous to a toaster or TV power button - you click it, it works). If you drag-and-drop, the file is copied (or moved or run or deleted, depending on where you dropped it). People know how it should work, so they trust that it does work. That implicit trust is where it goes wrong, as we've discussed innumerable times ("Hidden bits can't be trusted").

Btw, I do like the idea of dumbing down Scantrons you propose. The point is to have an accountable paper trail, and that does it quite nicely.

Re:VOT1NG ON TEH SPKOE!!!1

[tr0llx0r]

The Aussie system is called eVACS (Electronic Voting and Counting System), and it runs on linux. Our company did some work on it. The main contractor is Software Improvements.

The whole system is open to public scrutiny - several people have reported bugs, including an academic. Nice contrast to the DMCA...

just wondering

[geoff lane]

You have to question exactly why it seems to be impossible to build a box that can accurately record keypresses - 'cus that's what we are taking about. It doesn't have to count or tabulate or generate reports; all it has to do is accurately record votes for a few thousand people.

And what is so difficult with printing a dated slip of paper containing the vote and a validation checksum proving the paper was printed at a given time on a particular machine and a specific vote or list of votes were recorded for that voter?

Re:just wondering

[AvitarX]

because if it accuratly records the time of the vote you break anoniminity.

When I heard about all the diebold stuff They said it kept everything time stamped as an audit trail. What I was listening to was talking about how it was an editable spread sheet so anybody could change it, but the first thing I though was, how is this anonymous?

If you can pay an election official to record the time that people vots and what machine, and then use FOIA to get access to the slips when it is done. You can enforce voting the way you want it to.

It breaks one of the most important parts of the election.

Re:just wondering

[Anonymous Coward]

You can print such a slip and keep it internal to the machine, but you cannot tie it to a specific voter because then someone would use it figure out how specific people voted; and you cannot allow the voter to walk away with the slip, at least not if it records the vote in plaintext, because then someone outside the voting booth will be handing out $20 bills to everyone who gives them a reciept showing they voted a certain way. Or employers will require employees to bring the approprite reciept to work as proof.

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

He went to a wuniversity and got a wegree. I think that makes him very wualified.

Now excuse me while I go look for nuclear wessels.

Re:VOT1NG ON TEH SPKOE!!!1

[xigxag]

it was based on specifications set by independent election Hot Cocks

Surely you must've known someone was bound to ask about this.

Re:Bad Invention

[sydlexic]

It's only bad because it lacks auditability. With a paper trail, any fraud could be uncovered.

As it stands, the owners of these companies (who heavily back the Republicans) have carte blanche to steal elections because we now have no way to prove it happened. We'll just keep having these funny little incidents where a white republican male gets 83% of the vote in a black district against a democrat incumbent (yes, it happened ... it was the former CEO of Diebold and the election used his machines). Sounds like an election Saddam would be proud of.

Why no paper trail?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now here's the really interesting part. Forgetting for a moment Diebold's voting machines, let's look at the other equipment they make. Diebold makes a lot of ATM machines. They make machines that sell tickets for trains and subways. They make store checkout scanners, including self-service scanners. They make machines that allow access to buildings for people with magnetic cards. They make machines that use magnetic cards for payment in closed systems like university dining rooms. All of these are machines that involve data input that results in a transaction, just like a voting machine. But unlike a voting machine, every one of these other kinds of Diebold machines -- EVERY ONE -- creates a paper trail and can be audited. Would Citibank have it any other way? Would Home Depot? Would the CIA? Of course not. These machines affect the livelihood of their owners. If they can't be audited they can't be trusted. If they can't be trusted they won't be used.

Now back to those voting machines. If EVERY OTHER kind of machine you make includes an auditable paper trail, wouldn't it seem logical to include such a capability in the voting machines, too? Given that what you are doing is adapting existing technology to a new purpose, wouldn't it be logical to carry over to voting machines this capability that is so important in every other kind of transaction device?

This confuses me. I'd love to know who said to leave the feature out and why?

ATMs? The CIA? Tickets for trains and subways? Building access cards?

All transactions which tie the individual to the action.

Why no paper trail in voting machines?

Maybe because voting is supposed to be anonymous?

Let me tell you a little story...

In the town where my mother grew up, the population was in the thousands. Not more than ten thousand, in the mid-thousands.

During one election, one of the parties came to my mother's house, and picked up my grandmother to go take her to vote, because they had been watching the poll place, knew everyone who showed up, and knew what the exact vote was, before the vote was counted, because of who showed up to vote. They knew my grandmother didn't vote yet, and made sure they took her to vote because they needed her vote, it was that close.

Now let me tell you another story. The first time I voted when I turned 18 here in the US, I noticed that the voting place workers were putting the signature cards in precise order on top of the voting machines (the ones with the arm you pull to close/register vote/open curtain). They placed them in precise order according to the order that each person went into the booth. On those cards was your signature, that they used to compare against your voter card. So they could go back, and according to the order of the cards, and the order of the registered vote, figure out what your vote was. Of course, this is supposed to be impossible, your vote is supposed to be anonymous.

Fat chance. If you believe your vote is ever anonymous, you are a fool.

I later was able to obtain more information that confirmed my theory about whether votes are anonymous or not, and whether they can be fixed or not.

The touch screen voting simply brings new technology to a problem thousands of years old. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

If you are an idealist, then you believe in the voting system. And if you believe in the voting system, you believe in anonymous voting. A paper trail obliterates anonymous voting, not just in small towns like my first story, but in all towns in cities, because of the breakdown by precinct making it possible to localize and fragment the US population.

For you younger folk, do you remember the 2000 election?

Remember the husband/wife absentee votes from two people in a foreign embassy in a small country? The husband was appointed by Clinton. The two votes came back, and were added in whe

Re:Why no paper trail?

[mcc]

Now let me tell you another story. The first time I voted when I turned 18 here in the US, I noticed that the voting place workers were putting the signature cards in precise order on top of the voting machines (the ones with the arm you pull to close/register vote/open curtain). They placed them in precise order according to the order that each person went into the booth. On those cards was your signature, that they used to compare against your voter card. So they could go back, and according to the order of the cards, and the order of the registered vote, figure out what your vote was. Of course, this is supposed to be impossible, your vote is supposed to be anonymous.

That's an implementation problem. Make it instead so that the vote paper trail is dropped into a locked box that's counted elsewhere, and the implementation problem goes away. Physical/paper voting systems are easy to change; call the local paper, complain to the city council or whatever, and you can probably get something implemented to fix that problem. If you find that no one is listening to a lone election monitor, or the town's too small for someone to "rock the boat", the ACLU will be more than happy to make some noise on an anonymous tip.. and oh, of course, you aren't trying to INSINUATE anything! You just want to ensure the process is as trustable as possible.

Yeah, watching who goes into a polling place is an effective method. But as long as there's a decent-sized number of people per polling place, you can't be *sure*. If 300 people voted in this one station, and 5 of them voted "wrong", how do you know which ones?

Absentee voting is ALWAYS problematic from the anonymity standpoint.

Re:Why no paper trail?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see it now...

Others standing outside the polling place, waiting for individuals to cast their vote, then when they come back, demanding to see their paper trail to see how they voted...

Union shop stewards collecting paper trails for the "bulletin board", "pool", "rally", or to show politicians how strong their solidarity is...and also conveniently having a record of how every union member voted...

Employers collecting paper trails for whatever excuse, to ensure that their pet politician will be elected, such as medical groups who would win/lose depending on whether a politician's support for a prescription drug bill, drug reimportation from Canada, or other pet cause would affect the medical group, and therefore each worker's job..."we just want to make sure there wasn't a mistake in voting (correct politician/wrong party for example, in the case of politicians nominated by more than one political party, which is very common, Republican/Conservative or Democrat/Liberal, etc., such as in NY where the Liberal party was bumped a spot on the voting line because they didn't get enough votes in the last election even thought the Democratic candidates mostly won...)

The potential for abuse because of paper trails is absolutely staggering if you think about it.

Of course, Crisp Cringle is hardly one to think about something before writing about it...

Re:Why no paper trail?

[spitzak]

The paper is put into a ballot box at the polling place.

It is not taken away by the voter, and thus cannot be used to show how they voted.

Have you even been reading any of the comments here?

Re:Why no paper trail?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, watching who goes into a polling place is an effective method. But as long as there's a decent-sized number of people per polling place, you can't be *sure*. If 300 people voted in this one station, and 5 of them voted "wrong", how do you know which ones?

In my first example, the town numbered in the thousands. There was only one polling place, in the center of town. The political parties had every vote counted, down to the last one, as the votes were being cast. Thousands of votes. After they closed the polling place, the party that picked up my grandmother knew the outcome before the town counted the votes. After the votes were counted, the party's count (which was discussed even before the town started counting) came out exactly the same. So the party knew, down to the last vote, exactly how the result would come out, simply by keeping track of who voted, and who failed to vote. My mother said that this was the situation for many years, as long as she was aware, and her mother told her (and eventually me and other grandchildren the same thing).

I was recently living near a town (in the US) that has a population of about ten thousand. Even though I'm no party worker or official, I could get a very good idea over election outcomes depending on who went to vote or not, especially since dozens of votes sometimes determined outcomes. After years of experience, and working within a party apparatus, I'm sure I could get much better at it, as could others, if one decided to specialize in that.

Re:Why no paper trail?

[Anonymous Coward]

The paper is put into a ballot box at the polling place.

Every one? To perfection? In every polling place? 100 million without missing any ballot boxes?

What happens when the ballot boxes get misplaced?

What happens when the number of slips in the ballot box doesn't match the number of votes?

What happens if a group (maybe anarchists) decide they don't like touchscreen voting, and decide to stuff the ballot boxes with different slips?

Or they decide to steal the ballot boxes? Or tamper with the ballot boxes after the polls close? Think it isn't possible? My friend's union delivers the ballot machines in my city, then picks them up after the election. It's more possible than you may think.

So do we throw out the votes of those that don't match the ballot boxes?

Do we throw out the votes if the ballot boxes are missing?

Do we scrap touch screen voting and go back to paper ballots if there are discrepencies between the vote count and ballot box problems?

Have you even been reading any of the comments here?

Have you? Read some of the other comments about your precious ballot boxes...

Re:Why no paper trail?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no reason a paper trail can't be anonymous. There's also no reason to ever allow the voter to handle a piece of paper that's part of the audit trail.

For the anonymity part, there is no record of which person uses which terminal. When I vote, I'm on my own from the time I get my ballot to the time I walk out. I could walk up to any terminal and use it. There's no way to know which of the dozen machines I used.

As for the paper trail, just run it under glass. No need to put identifying info on there. No need to let the voter touch it (thereby giving them a chance to alter it). The paper then runs through a second printer which either marks it as "verified" or "rejected". Then it runs onto a takeup reel. One long continuous roll. The takeup reel can even be stored in a secure container within the voting terminal to prevent tamering after the vote.

If you saw the polling place workers attempting to subvert the anonymous voting system, what did you do about it. Did you complain to the person in charge of the polling place? Did you talk to the clerk recorder? City council? Anything? Crap like that can only exist as long as citizens act like sheep.

When it comes to living in a small town, tho, there isn't much you can do about nosy neighbors. If you want to be anonymous, don't live in Bunghole, Idaho.

Re:Why no paper trail?

[Doc Ruby]

Guessing how people will vote, even in a small, close-knit community, is different from actually knowing. And shows why tiny communities' votes must be aggregated into larger ones, for the statistical method of majority rule to work. As for your interesting observation of the ordered registration cards stacked on the booths, the hole you found in the voting cryptological protocol also requires an ordered list of otherwise anonymous votes to be kept in the booth - does that actually exist? Have you reported this abuse to the FBI? You're voting and paying taxes to keep the FBI around to protect you, and your neighbors, from exactly that kind of fundamental abuse. Do something to keep your freedoms, or you'll have a lot more to be suspicious of. And your apocryphal story about a "Clinton" voter in the 2000 election has more loose links than the fact that the Clinton who had appointed ambassadors did not run in 2000.

I am a cynic, and I rely on the voting system to be a statistical model of the consensus of the people. The mechanics are less than ideal, but our job is to constructively criticize them. So we can achieve a "more perfect union". A paper trail might possibly work against anonymitiy, although not necessarily. Lack of it seems to ensure the inaccuracy of the statistical model, which is unacceptable.

Re:Why no paper trail?

[rjamestaylor]

• For you younger folk, do you remember the 2000 election?

  Remember the husband/wife absentee votes from two people in a foreign embassy in a small country? The husband was appointed by Clinton. The two votes came back, and were added in when everyone was watching. I forget the country, but I'm sure there is a record somewhere because of how close the election was. Those two votes were counted in the Clinton column. So the public knows that this husband and wife, who were the only two absentee votes coming from that country, voted for Clinton. And if you watched the votes for other offices as the vote was registered (I didn't), you would have been able to ascertain who they cast their vote for other offices, such as Senator, etc.

Are you saying that the appointees voted absentee for New York Sentor Hillary Rodham Clinton or are you confused about who ran for chief executive office in 2000?

Re:Why no paper trail?

[geoff lane]

Voting isn't supposed to be totally anonymous else where would be no need for electoral roles. There must always be a means to detect multiple votes or votes cast by people assuming other peoples identity.

In addition, it must be possible to match each vote to a voter should there be a legal challenge to the voting procedure.

Voting must be private and confidential but is rarely anonymous.

Re:Why no paper trail?

[fucksl4shd0t]

That's an implementation problem. Make it instead so that the vote paper trail is dropped into a locked box that's counted elsewhere, and the implementation problem goes away.

In fact, the whole thing is just an implementation problem. There is NO REASON why electronic voting, whether it's internet-powered or uses a voting booth, should be inherently insecure. Quite the contrary. I suggest that if we had internet-based voting we'd have more people voting!

First, instead of approaching it as a "programming" problem, why don't we approach it as a security problem? How do we ensure the accurate results of the software?

First, we need duplicate copies of all voting data. The logical thing is to provide hooks for anybody to get their own copy of the voting data (it's electronic, right? Why not?). That way, in realtime, as people vote, we can each get a copy of each record. Anonymity is supposed to be assured by the system, we'll assume it is.

Second, cash registers already print out receipts in a variety of ways. They print out a receipt for you, a receipt to put in the sealed black box (white and yellow receipts, respectively), and keep their own internal roll of transactions recorded. I suppose giving you a copy of your own vote is optional. :)

Third, it will be possible to compare the results of the "official" computers with any other computer, because the data has been replicated. It will be possible to compare the accuracy of the results using the paper copies.

Simple. IT's a security problem. :) It's all about making sure the integrity of the data is kept, and that there is a way to check it in case there is something wrong with the data. It's not about accountability (the usual purpose of audit trails). The only issue is making sure the data is accurate. (Well, and the reports)

Where is the open alternative?

[FullCircle]

If it is so easy (I personally think it is) why isn't there an open source alternative?

Base it on OpenBSD for security
Touchscreen input
Take the votes
Print out what they voted
Ask "Is this correct?"
Answer yes/no
Place printout into audit box on the way out the door

What is so hard?

Re:Where is the open alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an open alternative, australia is using it for their e-voting as is brazil.

Paper trails...

[aquarian]

Now here's the really interesting part. Forgetting for a moment Diebold's voting machines, let's look at the other equipment they make. Diebold makes a lot of ATM machines. They make machines that sell tickets for trains and subways. They make store checkout scanners, including self-service scanners. They make machines that allow access to buildings for people with magnetic cards. They make machines that use magnetic cards for payment in closed systems like university dining rooms. All of these are machines that involve data input that results in a transaction, just like a voting machine. But unlike a voting machine, every one of these other kinds of Diebold machines -- EVERY ONE -- creates a paper trail and can be audited. Would Citibank have it any other way? Would Home Depot? Would the CIA? Of course not. These machines affect the livelihood of their owners. If they can't be audited they can't be trusted. If they can't be trusted they won't be used.

Every one creates a paper trail? Have you seen it? How does it work? How is this different from any other kind of human-readable data dump, besides being on paper, and how do we know we can trust it?

I think the only way to do this is to require that the software be completely open source, with the code posted on the internet for anyone to audit. I've heard this is what the Australians have done. There's still plenty of money to be made supplying the hardware, and deploying and managing the system.

Re:Paper trails...

[Kwil]

I think the only way to do this is to require that the software be completely open source, with the code posted on the internet for anyone to audit.

False security.
Okay, so you know the code on the internet is good.
Do you know that that's what's being used in your voting machine?

Re:Paper trails...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I've seen it. It's called a receipt. When I go to a restaurant and pay with a credit card, the waitress brings me back a slip of paper with the total on it. If I see that she's got $1590 on there instead of $15.90, I kindly request that she do a recount.

why no audit trail

[TheSHAD0W]

If EVERY OTHER kind of machine you make includes an auditable paper trail, wouldn't it seem logical to include such a capability in the voting machines, too?

The reason why the voting machine doesn't produce an audit trail is that it's rather difficult to produce such an audit trail AND assure that votes cast will be anonymous. Elsewhere in the world people who voted for the "wrong" candidate faced retaliation, and the US voting system was set up to try and prevent that. Some systems that will "chop up" receipts have been proposed, but a failure in the mechanism might cause it to lose anonymity. I've proposed a method of having both audit and anonymity, but it's a bit on the complex side.

Re:why no audit trail

[stefanb]

The reason why the voting machine doesn't produce an audit trail is that it's rather difficult to produce such an audit trail AND assure that votes cast will be anonymous.

I don't think this is the reason the vendors have not included a paper trail (if only for the reason that I don't believe they're that smart).

But once again, why do not use the time-proven method of making marks on a piece of paper, and counting the ballots manually, under supervision?

People here have pointed out that paper ballots can be manipulated, and that the process of paper voting can be manipulated. However, these processes have been used for centuries, and the security vulnerabilities are well understood. I do not believe that the security implication of the machines and the new processes are well understood at this time.

I've not heard any really convincing argument why computerized vote casting is better, or in which way. Random assertions of "Jane Doe, 84, cannot figure out how to mark the ballot" do not instill confidence in me that any different process is necessarily better. I do realize that being able to include illiterates to make a competent choice is a laudable goal; I just think that designing the ballot to be usable without being able to read is a lot more effective approach than using an untested, poorly thought-out touch-screen display, and then claiming that "using a touch-screen is easier". (Just to give one example.)

Re:why no audit trail

[TheSHAD0W]

But once again, why do not use the time-proven method of making marks on a piece of paper, and counting the ballots manually, under supervision?

Because it gets to be a big problem in large elections. There's a LOT of votes to tabulate manually. Ballot boxes get lost or stolen.

Who is Cringley these days anyway?

[Osrin]

I was under the impression that he had sold out a long time ago, as far as I know a number of folks pen under his name these days.

It should come as no surprised when the unexpected is published under his banner.

Re:Who is Cringley these days anyway?

[Sargent1]

The PBS Cringely was the third InfoWorld Robert X. Cringely writer. There wasn't really anything to "sell out" about, as he wasn't the first (or last) Cringely, merely the one who kept using the pseudonym after he and InfoWorld parted ways.

keystrokes

[mm0mm]

don't worry, US congress will buy a bunch of this by 2004.

And I'm sure every employee is Republican also...

[Anonymous Coward]

...since Republicans can sniff out the Liberals, I'm sure every employee working there is a Republican also.

If there were a Liberal working there, there would be problems. But since they can be sniffed out, they don't have to worry about any one of thousands of employees blowing the whistle...

And since there are no Liberals among thousands of employees, the execs won't have to worry about serious jail time and bankrupting legal fees either...

Will It Really Make A Difference?

[Colymbosathon ecplec]

I'm sure someone will get their panties in a bunch over what I am about to say, but someone has to say it:

I ask, what difference will it make? The problem, as I see it, is getting people to go to the voting places in the first place, or to put it another way, getting people involved in the political process. My friend wrote a piece for our local paper, encouraging people to get involved (in addition to just voting), and I am sorry to say, it had little or no measurable effect. It is very discouraging.

Alaska Village invited to test cheap, clean nuclear power

Re:Will It Really Make A Difference?

[panurge]

True, true. The shocking thing is how extreme or special interest governments get elected while people who would clearly be disadvantaged by their election fail to vote. What percentage of registered US voters actually voted for Bush (or, for that matter, Clinton?)

It may be truly cynical, but I'm slowly coming round to the view that if the gap betwen rich and poor is growing, and the poor cannot be bothered to vote to stop it, they may not deserve anything different. (ducks)

Re:Will It Really Make A Difference?

[Colymbosathon ecplec]

Here's part of another related story posted to that site: "Normally, only a fraction of our electorate bothers to vote, due to a combination of revulsion and indifference, and it shows. How did American politics come to such a sorry pass? [snip]

Doing nothing is still worse than doing something. Getting into politics is like taking your seat in an airplane. The odds are that the person jammed in 2 inches away from you is someone you wouldn't let into your house unless you could train a gun on him. But does this deter you from flying? Of course not. Putting yourself in the proximity of the loathsome is the price you pay for traveling by air.

Look at it this way: American politics has remained essentially unchanged since our country's founding. It is an open sewer with ghastly objects floating in it, nameless horrors bobbing in its noisome currents. Yet if we did not dive in, what would happen?

Our plains would be transformed into endless fields of corporate-owned, genetically engineered crops with not a square foot of cover anywhere for a wild creature. Our mountains would be riven with ski slopes, and bedroom communities would cover what were once their foothills. Our seas would still shine, but the gleam would come from oil slicks and the eerie glow of radioactive waste. And our guns would be history.

So hold your nose, take a deep breath, and engage in the political process. It's putrid, appalling, and enough to make you want to run in the opposite direction--until you consider where that direction leads. Are there any questions from the press? I didn't think so. Thank you, and good night."

Re:Will It Really Make A Difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but do you really expect voters to choose between "I will fuck you" and "I will fuck you harder" when they go to the polls? Voting won't stop anything. You'll get more results sitting on your sofa watching Jerry Springer while waiting for economic collapse or armed revolution.

Re:Will It Really Make A Difference?

[Wakko Warner]

Does it really matter how many people are involved if the end result, and thus the entire political process, is called into question?

Voting isn't something that should be treated so cheaply. What other real way do we have to affect large-scale change in this country? What would we do if it were taken away from us?

- A.P.

disgrace

[ajs318]

The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. Most people are law-abiding but unimaginative, and would never dream that their elected representatives could have less than perfect motives ..... and by the time they noticed anything was amiss, it would be too late already. If someone could have the power to subvert an election, they would effectively have absolute power forever. The election process must be protected from any such interference. If we cannot have faith in the fundamental processes of democracy, then it makes a mockery of the whole of democracy.

Who is prepared to stand up to this sort of abuse of power and excess of authority? Perhaps it's time for everyone to get active, however possible. The very foundations of democracy are under threat.

Re:disgrace

[chromatic]

Most people are law-abiding but unimaginative, and would never dream that their elected representatives could have less than perfect motives.

How do you account for voter apathy and cynicism then?

Re:disgrace

[ajs318]

There are two groups of people not voting:

1. Those who trust politicians and expect everything to be OK in the end
2. Those who think all politicians are the same and that it won't make any difference who gets in anyway

A shock would cure the Type Ones, but may be too late to do anything about it. The only way to deal with the Type Twos is to get someone standing for election who actually gives a damn - but if not you, who?

Now available with Printed Receipt(tm)!

[Anonymous Coward]

So who decided that these voting machines wouldn't create a paper trail and so couldn't be audited? Did the U.S. Elections Commission or some other government agency specifically require that the machines NOT be auditable? Or did the vendors come up with that wrinkle all by themselves?

I would bet the manufacturers came up with the "no receipt" requirement. That way, when there is a fiasco with the next election about someone getting a negative number of votes and no paper ballots to do a recount, there will be a move to replace the paperless machines with machines that do have a paper trail.

It's all about repeat business.

Re:Now available with Printed Receipt(tm)!

[Anonymous Coward]

You've got it backwards. There is no "no receipt" requirement. It's quite the opposite. There is no "receipt" requirement. Seems like a subtle difference but it isn't.

Nobody told them it was necessary so they didn't include a paper trail. Simple as that. Sure all their other products have receipt printers but you can rest assured that receipt printers were part of the customer requirements from the start. Since there is no such "requirement" for voting machines, why would they spend the extra money putting in all those printers that nobody asked for?

The downside of a paper trail

[mclove]

Just to remind everyone who seems to be forgetting this, there is actually one very good argument for why there *shouldn't* be a paper trail for electronic voting: it doesn't just make it possible to audit machines, it makes it possible to audit PEOPLE.

Buying votes may be illegal, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen, and one of the main problems for prospective vote-buyers now is the fact that there's no way to ensure that the people you're paying to vote a certain way are actually doing so.

Then along comes the electronic voting receipt, which by its very nature *has* to be easily readable/auditable and *has* to have a very good system for ensuring it's authentic. Now, you can buy somebody's vote and be sure they actually vote the way you wanted. You can even do it a little more insidiously, perhaps, and in a way that might not necessarily even be quite so illegal, offering somebody some sort of small in-kind gift if they show you their Bush voting receipt, or even just an intangible reward like membership in a club or something.

In areas where people of one political alignment are vastly in the majority, voters who swing the other way sometimes need to keep their political preferences quiet, and this could make it harder for them to do that ("If you're *really* a Bush fan, show us your voting slip.")

Let alone the idiots who'll get the damn things framed to hang up in their house if the guy wins, the people who'll put them in plastic badge holders and wear them around their necks all day, protesters who'll publicly burn them, etc. I don't know, it just seems very wrong to me for there to be any record at all of your vote that can go with you outside of the voting booth.

Now with some paper ballot systems it's expected that after checking your receipt you'll deposit it in a box at the polling station (and not keep a copy for yourself), but even in that case people can pocket them / swap them with fake ones (which won't matter except in the unlikely event of a recount) or give some potential vote-buyer a discreet glance at the thing before turning it in.

The only way to get around these problems is to create a system where a receipt is human-readable but easily counterfeitable so that nobody can verify its authenticity except the elections board; I don't quite know how such a system would work, though, and it seems like it would have a lot of potential for confusing people.

So IMHO receipts are not the solution, open-source is the solution; open things up to public scrutiny and receipts become largely unnecessary. Or better yet, stick to paper ballots but use *good* paper ballots; fill-in-the-bubbles, perhaps, which have been used quite effectively in many places.

Re:The downside of a paper trail

[argent]

Sounds like you've been taken in by the word "receipt". There can be no question that this isn't anything at all similar to what you get at a store. It's the equivalent of the ballot itself, to be deposited in the voting booth just the way a paper ballot is now. Anything else is ludicrous.

Re:The downside of a paper trail

[Peyna]

Who said the paper trail would contain the voter's name? Current ballots don't have your name on them, why should we go away from anonymous voting?

Re:The downside of a paper trail

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe I don't know the meaning of "auditable", English isn't my 1st language.

But why the fsck would "auditable" have anything to do with being able to identify _who_ voted what?

And how does "auditable" have anything to do with "voting slips"?

A machine punches an anonymous(!) ballot behind plexi glass and puts it in the box. You never touch it and you don't get a slip.

What am I missing?

Boom, you lost.

[Balinares]

> Answer yes/no

- Answer No.
- Choose again.
- Choose the SAME one.
- Get new printout.
- Repeat.
[...]
- Stuff N printouts into audit box.

The day after, call for printout recount.

Boom, profit.

What is so hard? Designing a reliable system is, obviously.
Not fun, I know.

Re:Boom, you lost.

[RevMike]

Answer No.
- Choose again.
- Choose the SAME one.
- Get new printout.
- Repeat.
[...]
- Stuff N printouts into audit box.

The day after, call for printout recount.

Boom, profit.

You're right, but it isn't too hard to take care of this flaw. Every printout needs a serial number of some sort. When a "corrected" ballot is printed, it needs to contain a reference that states "Revoke ballots [prior serial number], ... [prior serial number]". Then only the last ballot will get counted in the recount.

Re:Boom, you lost.

[Anonymous Coward]

Touchscreen input (or whatever)
- take vote
- vote printed and visible behind plexi glass
- OK? press Yes/No
- No -> Paper (visibly) moves to the left through a shredder (or marked with a big black X or whatever) -> repeat
- Yes -> Paper (visibly) moves to the right into the audit box.

Computer does the counting. But a random x% of the audit boxes are manually recounted (if something's wrong-> more recounts). Every candidate can assign recounts to y% of the audit boxes (in area's they suspect something). Also the loser (or winner) can demand a recount (on his expense) if he still doesn't trust it.

I'm sure I forgot a few things and there are probably much simpler and better ideas. But I ca honestly not imagine why it would really be so hard to actually make it.

In any case, the first step seems obvious to me: open source and open design.

Re:Boom, you lost.

[strike2867]

Once you press yes it prints out a real printout, all the previous ones were to just to tell you the information you entered on the screen. They would even say, "DO NOT COUNT"

How is it hard?

[mindstrm]

For every vote cast, you print off a paper ballot, marked with only the machine ID, no identifying information. The voter is permitted to see this ballot through plexiglass, and decide if it indicates the correct choice. If they hit the "NO" button is it shredded, and they start over. If they hit "YES", it goes into a bin, and they can leave.
You audit hte machine by comparing the tally in the machine with the tally in the bin.. you don't need to be able to check every individual vote and decide which.. just knowing you have discrepancies is all that matters.

Re:How is it hard?

[TheSHAD0W]

Well, your system requires someone to build specialized printers, automated paper cutters and shredders and plexiglas boxes. Mine requires off-the-shelf hardware and the system runs entirely in software. If the printer jams on your system, the set-up has to be opened up and repaired, and that person has just lost his anonymity.

Re:How is it hard?

[argent]

One person here and there can "lose his anonymity" in any system, including the most rigorous paper-only one "sorry, the ballot box is full, here, stick yours in the new box", but the difficulty of doing this on a large enough scale to effect the vote is prohibitive. "They sure seem to be getting a lot of paper jams here today, I wonder what they're up to".

Re:How is it hard?

[Anonymous Coward]

The chopping, sorting, shredding thing is too complicated. Just run a single spool through two printers. It goes through the first printer and is displayed under glass. If the voter says "no, that's not what I entered", it runs up through the next printer which marks it as "invalid" and the voter starts over.

You don't want to destroy the incorrect vote. If there's a problem with the system, evidence of that problem must be preserved for analysis.

Either way, there's no need to chop up the receipts. Just roll them up on a secure takeup reel. This gives you several options for recounts. It can be done with OCR (since the font/media/layout is all controlled, extremely high accuracy can be achieved here) just by cracking open the secure takeup reel's container and running it through a reader (which would, of course, reject the invalid votes). Or it can be done by hand.

And there's always the option of adding another more standard receipt printer that gives the voter a hardcopy in addition to the pristine copy retained in the terminal.

Re:How is it hard?

[TheSHAD0W]

Problem with that is it produces an ordered record of votes. By observing the order of people entering the booth you could match people with votes, removing the anonymity.

Re:How is it hard?

[MrNixon]

Fine. Have a little blade at the entrance into the locked box that cuts the paper like a standard reciept printer. There's plenty of industrial-strength machinery out there that can do this. (Think newspaper presses)

Or, do it like we do here in Canada.

Use a pen to mark your ballot, and deposit into the ballot box. Then, later, someone opens the box and counts the ballots. No hanging chads, no questionable code, just a ballot with a mark on it.

Takes longer to count, but sometimes important things actually DO take some time.

Re:How is it hard?

[cev]

I don't understand why the voter should have the option of rejecting the paper printout. The voter is given the opportunity to electronically verify his vote before it is cast. He may then verify the paper receipt through a window (or whatever). He does not need the ability to re-confirm the vote after it is cast.

If the paper receipt does not match his vote, one may safely assume that the machine is broken or fraud has occurred. In that case, allowing the voter to reject the ballot does not "fix" the problem. The only solution is to remove the machine from service (disallowing the last recorded vote, of course).

CV

Re:Bad Invention

[steveha]

As it stands, the owners of these companies (who heavily back the Republicans) have carte blanche to steal elections

Or, Democrat "activists" could hack the machines to steal elections. Or, renegade Libertarians could hack the machines to give the election to the Libertarian candidate. Or maybe Ross Perot can finally win.

If there's no auditing, that is BAD, and it doesn't matter which political party you hate the most. Leave the whole Republican/Democrat thing out of this discussion.

steveha

It's "Cringely", not "Cringley"!

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, when people post someone's name in the title of a Slashdot story, the least they could is check if the name is written correctly.

But since this is Slashdot and more people write "Cringley" than "Cringely", maybe you should all petition to get his name changed.

Re:It's "Cringely", not "Cringley"!

[mirko]

Exactly my point : How can they misspell one's name ? Is this journalism ?

Re:It's "Cringely", not "Cringley"!

[sparrow_hawk]

You must be new here. This isn't journalism, this is Slashdot.

If you want "journalism," there are other places to go.

Re:It's "Cringely", not "Cringley"!

[mirko]

Well, fox and cnn are not exactly what I call objective...

Trying to get it right...

[AlabamaRoot]

Like many other readers the magnitude of failure in e-voting amazes me. In Europe they are starting a huge project to develop an e-voting platform which can be used from mobile ohones, ove the internet and presumably other channels. It will be interesting to see how that goes after following our domestic e-voting failures.

No paper record of vote, but pre-audited software

[Anonymous Coward]

The Australian Capital Territory Electrol Commission is on the web - and this page might be of interest

http://www.elections.act.gov.au/Elecvote.html

and it has links to the source code and the process of viting and FAQs. They appear to have a full disclosure and a public debate on this. It can potentially - arguably - be made a bit "more better" by printing the vote on paper.


From the FAQ:

Does the system print out a copy of my vote?

No. There is no need to print a copy of any votes. The Electoral Act 1992 does not provide for a "paper trail" of electronic votes cast. This is not required as the software for the voting and counting systems has been rigorously tested, independently audited, and published for anyone to see on the internet. In addition, audit trails and security systems will be in place to verify that the software used in production is identical to the tested and audited software, and to verify that the data actually counted is the data cast by voters in polling places. This approach is intended to ensure that there will be no way in which electronic votes can be tampered with. The system is intended to be more transparent and secure than the existing paper ballot method. ...

How do I know that what goes in is what comes out?

EVACS was extensively tested by the developers and the ACT Electoral Commission before the Commissioner was satisfied that it was suitable for use at the election. More information on testing.

A reference group, consisting of representatives from parties, MLAs and special interest groups, including ACT Blind Citizens Australia and the Proportional Representation Society, provided feedback during development and testing of the system. More information on consultation.

The Commission contracted an independent software auditing firm to audit the software code of the system to ensure that the software did not contain code that would have the affect of altering the result of the election. For example, checks were undertaken to ensure that no code had been included that would change the votes recorded by electors or would insert or substitute fraudulent votes, or would in any other way alter the election outcome. More information on auditing.

Election officials in electronic polling places account for barcodes in much the same way as they do for paper ballots. They provide records of barcodes issued, which are compared with the number of electronic votes cast.

Voter data on removable media is stored in sealed pouches for transport. Seals are placed on the pouches in the presence of scrutineers and removed in the same way, much in the way the seals on ballot boxes are used. Multiple copies of the data are made, which are transported separately to the counting centre. These multiple copies could be compared with one another to prove that no tampering had taken place.

Following the 2001 election the Commission surveyed a random sample of 95 batches of ballot papers, containing 4,640 ballot papers from the three electorates, and compared the written ballots with those that had been data entered. No data-entry errors were found. More information is in the Electronic voting and counting system review(pdf - 921 kb)

Why no paper trail? It's obvious.

[argent]

First, the reason there's no paper trail despite all of Diebold's other machines having a paper trail is that the Diebold voting machines aren't made by the same people. Diebold bought another company that was already making voting machines, and they haven't had anything like enough time to "merge" the two companies' engineering groups. You see this all the time in IT, some company (Cisco, for example) buys another company, and starts selling their product (the PIX, for example) with their name on it (so now it's the Cisco PIX), but it takes years to actually do more than piddle on it to make it smell like the parent company. Looking at the Cisco example, the PIX is still an odd-man-out product in the Cisco product line.

Second, it's not hard to produce an audit trail *and* assure the votes cast will be anonymous. You just have to make two decisions:

1. The auditable ballot is the real ballot.

2. The vote is complete when the auditable ballot is complete and saved, not when the "user-friendly" ballot is complete.

There's two basic ways of doing this.

One way is to make the touchscreen machines a more convenient way to generate your traditional ballots. That is, the touch screen produces a human-and-machine-readable form (OCR, punch card, whatever). You're taking advantage of the fact that the machine's card punch always punches clean through, that its printer always colors inside the lines, but no more than that.

The other is to let the user see the auditable ballot, but keep it inside the machine. Once it's printed, the user punches "VOTE" or "CANCEL" below the window, and the ballot is delivered (visibly) to the ballot box or the shredder.

Intermediate between these, have a printable ballot that's got a random machine-readable tag on it that the user can deliver into one of two slots, the ballot box or the shredder. After the machine has read the tag it verifies that the voter didn't just shred a blank piece of paper... but the tag is not stored after the ballot has been accepted and it's generated anew using an external entropy source (such as the timing of the voter's screen-taps or keystrokes) for each ballot, so there's no trail leading to the voter.

Any of these would work. The first one could be retrofitted to existing optical or punch card systems, which would allow for precincts to complete their votes even if their electronic machines are down.

Re:Why no paper trail? It's obvious.

[Anonymous Coward]

in any precint you have a precinct # and when the vote is done you have a count-of-votes as well as the ordered position of the votor.

each votor gets a slip of paper with precinct #, position (N of M, although M is not known at the time of voting), their voting results, and some type of generated, irreversable access code.

after the vote, any person can take the generated access code from their slip, access the results online, and verify their vote.

Also the first and last few votors can check and see that the final count (M) online matches what they know it to be (no extra votes were added electronically after the polls close).

why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why, oh why, does anyone think a paper trail will make any difference? As I recall there was a thorough paper trail in Florida 2000. In fact, the paper trail isn't the main issue here, so much as the accountability of those who control the process, and/or derive benefit from it.

Build a secure, open, and accountable system... I dare you. Then take it to Congress and offer it to them under Creative Commons or something. See whether they even look at it before tossing it in the trash. Cringley has missed the point entirely. And IT IS THIS:
As long as we allow those in power to decide HOW they come to power, we will also allow them to decide WHO is in power. And it will continue to be THEM and not the every day people of the United States. This is the issue, despite what most would have you think. People in power will keep their power because they think they know what is best for you, and because they like it. You will keep paying them to lead you to the slaughter, because you are a sheep who needs a shepherd.

You can have all the elections you want, but if the candidates are selected from the same pool of 500 rich white men... then the voting doesn't matter.

a) put a check in box A if you want a rich white man to run the world.
b) put a check in box B if you want a rich white man to run the world.
c) don't check either box and watch the rich white men rule the world.

Have fun selecting random boxes in your next "election," fellow Americans. The Bush dynasty (and their pals in texas, florida, georgia, oklahoma... you get the idea) don't care how you vote, as long as you don't think.

Re:why?

[crush]

As long as we allow those in power to decide HOW they come to power, we will also allow them to decide WHO is in power.

You don't take it far enough. As long as there is a mechanism of power in place then it will be used against the every day people of the United States. The idea that we need a massive, bloated centralized administration that makes decisions for us about morality and ethics is the root cause of the problem. Representative "democracy" isn't democracy at all, it's a temporary, elected dictatorship. Until we realize that and demand real democracy with mandated and recallable delegates then we'll just be choosing between different faces of power. Yes I believe in government and some degree of centralization for the sake of efficiency, but I don't believe we have to sacrifice democracy to achieve it.

You can have all the elections you want, but if the candidates are selected from the same pool of 500 rich white men... then the voting doesn't matter.

You can have all the elections you want, but if you have non-recallable, non-mandated "representatives" then the poor black/latino/asian women will eventually become indistinguishable, in terms of behavior, from the rich white men that they replaced and you'll just be selecting faces that are better at fooling you again.

Re:Bad Invention

[Anonymous Coward]

Why, oh why, does anyone think a paper trail will make any difference? As I recall there was a thorough paper trail in Florida 2000. In fact, the paper trail isn't the main issue here, so much as the accountability of those who control the process, and/or derive benefit from it.

Build a secure, open, and accountable system... I dare you. Then take it to Congress and offer it to them under Creative Commons or something. See whether they even look at it before tossing it in the trash. Cringley has missed the point entirely. And IT IS THIS:
As long as we allow those in power to decide HOW they come to power, we will also allow them to decide WHO is in power. And it will continue to be THEM and not the every day people of the United States. This is the issue, despite what most would have you think. People in power will keep their power because they think they know what is best for you, and because they like it. You will keep paying them to lead you to the slaughter, because you are a sheep who needs a shepherd.

You can have all the elections you want, but if the candidates are selected from the same pool of 500 rich white men... then the voting doesn't matter.

a) put a check in box A if you want a rich white man to run the world.
b) put a check in box B if you want a rich white man to run the world.
c) don't check either box and watch the rich white men rule the world.

Have fun selecting random boxes in your next "election," fellow Americans. The Bush dynasty (and their pals in texas, florida, georgia, oklahoma... you get the idea) don't care how you vote, as long as you don't think.

Systems Engineering & Software Engineering

[rwa2]

As someone who's studied both, it seems very strange how much they borrow from one another, and yet most practicioners I've met from each field has been thoroughly ignorant of the other.

From one side, Systems Engineering is quite an old field, mostly championed by the government itself to attach "best practice" management processes to increase the viability of major complex construction projects (since a lot of civil engineering projects were failing at the time). It's basically the simple process of structured decomposition of a complicated problem into a variety of simple ones: problem analysis, requirements, specifications, functional/structural decomposition, building & assembling components, verifying that your system meets the specifications/requirements, and finally validating whether your system actually solves the problem. As systems get more complex, doing all the bookkeeping to keep track of those handfuls of tasks becomes an information management project in and of itself.

Software engineering came along, and suddenly they were going through major SW projects in 1-2 year cycles, instead of 10-20 year cycles for bridges, dams, buildings, etc. Needless to say, the SW engineers gained experience in full life cycle systems engineering of projects much more quickly than most of the old traditional SE's could build in an entire lifetime. This was both good and bad... As you may well be familiar with, we've raised our SW engineers to enjoy reconstructing things on their own from scratch, and to be somewhat resistant to doing the research on how other related projects / fields have fared in the past. As a result, they've rediscovered many of the SE fundamentals on their own, but at the same time, we're going through the same mistakes that had caused massive project failures in the past to do so.

Re:Systems Engineering & Software Engineering

[Anonymous Coward]

As a software and hardware engineer with wide experience I think I understand the principle you're talking about.

I think software engineers have a flippant attitude that comes from the nature of software. Mostly it is non critical. Stages of the lifecycle overlap and there is parallelism. In other words there is leeway and slack such that mistakes can be made and dynamically solved on the fly. Even the most formal practices usually permit some degree of incremental dev.

Civil engineering, govermental planning, military and the whole systems engineering mind you speak of differs not only in the timescale of lifecycle but in its intollerence to failure. Its basically brittle. Tracking moving targets over time like budgets, tech growth and so on is the least of the problems on a big timescale operation I think, fact is you may see a generation of employees/coders come and go, documentation has to be spot on, something I've had an insight into when on defence related ADA stuff.

I guess my point is that systems level thinkers need to lighten up. Things happen faster in the world and people need to be more tolerant of mistakes/bugs. If people would accept this culture government organisation could inherit so much good from software engineering principles. Some European countries like the Nederlands and Germany are quite good at this, testing experimental technology in small trials (one town or area), study, feedback/referena, and into the next cycle.

The problem is with something like a national voting system is people perceive it as ABSOLUTELY SAFETY CRITICAL. More so than if it directly controlled a nuclear arsenal. Although it metaphorically _does_ have that power and should be treated as a very serious project I dont think Diebold have exercised any good SE principles at all in this, the code is lame, the consultation and test looks scrimshankingly piss poor and theres a lot of 'funny' unanswered questions about the design. If I lived in America I would feel very let down.

Re:Systems Engineering & Software Engineering

[ScrewMaster]

If I lived in America I would feel very let down.

Yes, but not by Diebold. There are any number of second and third-rate engineering firms out there, any one of which could have delivered this travesty, so picking on Diebold for being incompetent isn't particularly productive by itself. But, you know what they say about the man that hires a fool. The political process got involved in what should have been a straightforward engineering project, selected the "most qualified bidder" as usual, and that's why I'm feeling let down. I mean ... come on, we managed to develop the technology to place men on the MOON almost forty years ago ... and now we can't teach a computer to COUNT? Something is very wrong here.

nice troll.

[twitter]

Then along comes the electronic voting receipt, which by its very nature *has* to be easily readable/auditable and *has* to have a very good system for ensuring it's authentic. Now, you can buy somebody's vote and be sure they actually vote the way you wanted.

Wow, it's like anonymous balots never existed and can't be duplicated by machines that also tally votes electronically. Why not print out a ballot for voter inspection that's dropped into a lock box for hand counting if needed? Nah, we'd better go back to pottery shards, paper is just too easy to nail people with.

Why no paper trail?

[devross]

From the end of the article: Now back to those voting machines. If EVERY OTHER kind of machine you make includes an auditable paper trail, wouldn't it seem logical to include such a capability in the voting machines, too? Given that what you are doing is adapting existing technology to a new purpose, wouldn't it be logical to carry over to voting machines this capability that is so important in every other kind of transaction device?

This confuses me. I'd love to know who said to leave the feature out and why?

Next week: the answer.

The answer? Because it's cheaper. And because ultimately the only ones that can hold these companies responsible for their fraudulent behavior are the people of America, who are too fat and docile to do any such thing.

Compromising "rigorously/independently audited"

[GodSpiral]

A system using perfectly fair machines can still be compromised if you control the central server the machines report to.

A paper trail that informs the voter what he just voted for, and poll workers what the tally/results are for their presinct is necessary to prevent tampering with the reported vote tally.

Diebold is one of our GOP-supporting overlords. It would be difficult to detect if they passed a backdoor password/method that allowed/permitted selected GOP hackers to modify vote tallys, or spoof a voting machine to overwrite previously reported legitimate tallies.

One of the Diebold memos suggested that votes were sitting unencrypted on an open ftp server, so the impression is even someone with the most basic technical skills could browse and alter them.

Why a paper trail

[shiffman]

I think you're confusing two issues here. The issue in the 2000 Florida election was one of improperly marked ballots: punches in the wrong place, in too many places or only partly in place (the dimpled and hanging chads from punches that didn't go all the way through). So the reason to lose the punch cards for voting is that they were complicated, leading to votes not being counted or ballots being rejected due to multiple votes for the same office.

So let's accept for the moment the idea that punch card ballots are bad. I do accept this, but if you don't, pretend you do for the moment. Now consider the problem with their replacement: the touch screen system.

In a touch screen system, you touch to indicate your choices and then touch again to indicate that your choices are the ones you meant to make. You register on the machine that it accepted your vote precisely the way you intended.

What happens then? Without a paper trail, you are taking it completely on faith that the machine transferred your instructions accurately into its memory, that the votes for that machine were transferred accurately to the machine that collects up the votes from the local machines and so on down the line. At any point from the voting machine to the final tally, you have no confidence that somebody didn't play with the software or with the numbers. And if there's belief that there's a problem, there is absolutely no way to determine whether or not the final tally reflects the actions of the voters.

The idea of a paper trail is to have each individual vote written to a paper receipt. The receipt drops into a window, so the individual voter can examine it and verify that it reports their vote accurately (i.e. matches what the machine said they did). Once the voter has said that yes, the receipt is accurate, the machine drops it into a locked box, just as the punch cards are kept in a locked box today. And if there's any question about the vote, all these paper receipts can be collected and tallied, whether by hand or by some kind of optical scanner. And we can have some confidence that the numbers reported by the machines are in sync with what the individual voters saw on their paper receipts.

My point again is that the problems with the paper ballots in the past were with the methods of marking those ballots and their layouts. (Remember Palm County's butterfly ballots?) Those problems go away with a well designed voting machine. But now we have a lack of a paper trail of any kind.

As an aside, I'm sure the lack of a paper trail in the new voting machines was a way for the manufacturers to save money/offer local governments a lower bid. The paper trail should have been in the original RFP. That it wasn't shows the incompetence of those who set up the bid process.

Simple fix for anonymity

[cirby]

Use the machine.

Machine prints out two pieces of paper. One has your name, the other doesn't. Transaction numbers on both for future reference.

Compare for accuracy, keep the one with your name, toss the other in the ballot box.

Simple.

Re:Simple fix for anonymity

[Sneftel]

This, actually, is just as bad. Although one requirement of an acceptable voting system is that the voter be able to verify that their vote is correctly counted, another requirement, less obvious, is this: It must be impossible for an individual voter to prove how they voted to others. Without this requirement, a political party could truck 5,000 people who just didn't give a damn to a polling place, have them vote, and then give $50 to each person who could prove they voted for candidate Z.

No quite the OPPOSITE

[Anonymous Coward]

You say , ' Its like they slathered together a bunch of components they already had, did a little debugging, and tried selling the the things.' and I assume you were talking about Diebold.

But the article clearly _implies_ the opposite,

'If EVERY OTHER kind of machine you make includes an auditable paper trail, wouldn't it seem logical to include such a capability in the voting machines, too? '

I also find this very odd. From a software engineering point of view why would you not reuse the codebase you already had to solve this very similar problem. ??????

It must have been more work to actively remove the audit trail than to rewrite from scratch.

Seems twisted, any ideas?

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Be very careful of picking on a name you've never heard without doing even the most rudimentary research. You risk looking like a bigger jackass when it turns out that this guy is a well-known and respected name in the field.

Here's some information you could have gotten had you thought to click on the "about Bob" link in the article. If you'd spent literally two seconds doing your research you would have had at least this and would look that much less foolish.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/about/

This is his bio however so you should probably progress to the next step (warning this may take 10 seconds or more) and enter his name in google.

I'm suprised that this hasn't been posted before

[voodoo_bluesman]

This came out a few days ago, and even GrabTheMic, a fledling slashcode site had a post about it.

This is big time stuff here that needs to be discussed at the dinner table, and not just 'geek' discussion boards. Our very rights are at stake, and I bet that the majority of the nation doesn't even know about it or if they do, they don't know why they should care.

Get the word out.

My daughter's take, and my solution

[RealProgrammer]

Last night my daughter asked me whether we would have electronic voting. I said we would, but that there will be more controversy about it than we ever had about paper voting. She asked why.

I told her that computer people and academics have known for decades that the way to ensure the correctness of a process is not just to examine the input and output, but to let everyone see the inner workings of it.

That made sense to her. She's 15, headstrong, and as honest as a light switch. She asked how we can believe the voting machine company won't cheat unless we know how the machine works.

I also said the worst thing they'll try to do is to send the results over the Internet.

Then it occurred to me. They should send the results

• over the Internet
• And by telephone
• And by burning CD's and mailing them
• And by printing the individual ballots on paper, hand-tallying the votes, and carrying the results to Washington with briefcases handcuffed to little old ladies.

Overkill with quadruple checks, all of which have to agree.

Re:My daughter's take, and my solution

[fuzzybunny]

Fair enough. However, don't forget the boobytrap failsafe self-destruct device in the old-woman-handcuff-briefcase combo.

That way, the next time Diebold finds itself short 16,000-odd votes, they can

hijack the internet vote-transmission session

re-route the vote-reporting calls (a la Las Vegas escort service phone scam)

use coat hangers to fish vote CDs out of mailboxes
...all without serious risk of detection.

However, where it gets really interesting is when you start seeing a wave of exploding or spontaneously-combusting little old lady vote couriers all over town (a la Worms 2) because some idiot tried to grab their handbag stuffed full of vote audit trail receipts.

Cringe?

[|>>?]

Did anyone else read: "Cringe - E-vote" - nevermind.

and puts the peice of paper into the black drum

[Anonymous Coward]

so it can be anonymously counted. Don't forget this part.

Can we just get a cringley icon?

[Vaystrem]

I mean, since everything this man says warrants /.

Random voting

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand what all the fuss is about.

We would be a lot better off if we took voter registrations that were "unused" (person didn't vote) and entered a random vote for them. This would have a number of interesting effects:

- We could continue to delude ourselves that we were getting the election results we deserved. There would be a vote from every person.

- If you didn't vote, you would know that a vote was being entered for you ANYWAY. This would likely drive as many people toward voting as it would drive away out of sloth and lack of caring.

- Accuracy of voting would be about what it is today. Come on, do you really think it is statistically better then random selection?

A possible solution

[eean]

So each voter has a unique id, negating the possiblity of stuffing the 'recount ballot box'. The computer could encode everything in a bar code (id and votes), so re-counts could be done automatically in case the electronic system fails. And if /that/ system fails, the actual votes could be counted by hand easily, since it could be printed cleary on the card, perhaps in a system that makes hand counting easier.

One of the outputs should be declared the legally authoritative source, so it would make sense this would be the human-readable format that the voters themselves would be checking.

Another system would be to keep the unique ID thing, but to get another print out you would have to put the card through the shredder that recognized the ID. But really, thats not necesary.

Everything in the system should be open source as possible, from the video driver to user interface. so that groups like the EFF could check it out. The results could be stored on the machines themselves, sneaker-net could be used to bring the ballots in, perhaps encrypted by a private key unique to each voting machine. These encrypted results could be made available directly to interested parties, along with the public keys.

Instead of sneaker-net, each ballot box could run a server allowing any interested party to download the encrypted results. The problem with this is the possible security hazard of having the systems online at all, the advantage of the snearker-net is that it wouldn't have to have anything to do with the internet.

Another idea would be for every voter to have their own private key encoded on their voter registration card. The encrypted results could be made available using one of the methods above, public keys would be made available to the general public. This has the benefit of every citizen having a private key, which could be used for encypted online communication as well. Granted, if your the NSA this would be a disadvantage. The other problem is how the inital creation of the private key would take place. It would have to be done by some trusted party. Ideally, the voters themselves, though I'm not sure how that would work. Though really, at some point you have to trust your county clerks office, so they may as well do it.

Granted, lots of ways to do it. Not easy, but far from impossible.

Re:A possible solution

[eean]

Scratch the public keys encoded on voter reg card idea. Thats stupid, as it would obviously take away anonymity.

Logical Fallacy

[Prien715]

There are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics.

Article:
The bad news is that in 2000, only 28 percent of software projects could be classed as complete successes (meaning they were executed on time and on budget) while 23 percent failed outright (meaning that they were abandoned).

According to my math, that means that 49% of projects took longer and cost more than they were supposed to. Note later in the article, this 49% is considered wasted:

Article:
Two hundred and seventy-five billion is a lot of money to spend on software development, especially if 72 percent of that money will be either wasted completely or used to develop something that doesn't work intended.

But something's wrong. Let's come up with a product and let's call it OS X or Mandrake or Windows XP. All of the above were not completed on time. In fact, I'd say I'd rather have a polished late product than release something on time for the sake of doing so. (Name good software that was released on time someone?) So I guess all the money spent on all of them was wasted.

Someone hit this guy with a clue stick.

shock shock horror shock

[Anonymous Coward]

"I am shocked that this story from I Cringley hasn't been sent in and posted at Slashdot. I thought the slashdot crowd would be all over this."

How do you think Slashdot works? Why would you be shocked -- if you yourself had not submitted it until now, why the big surprise?

Most of the stories on Slashdot are submitted by people who read the site and have the motivation, however triggered, to submit summaries / links / whatever ... if everyone sat around being "shocked" that other people hadn't sent in particular things (remember, we all have different interests, schedules, favorite news sources, Cringely tolerance), then Slashdot would be down to reviews of books and the occasional MP3 player ;)

Audit trail?

[stubear]

With all the talk about an audit trail and how trivial it is, I have to ask, where's the audit trail now? I've used both the old mechanical lever machines and pen and paper ballots, neither provided me with a receipt to ensure that my vote actually counted. It would be just as easy and trivial to "lose a few votes" as it would be to alter the little 1's and 0's in an e-voting machine.

Also, how does one reconcile differences between the number of people signing into their precincts and the total number of votes cast? I've always had to vote on numerous things at a time so it's certainly possible that I could simply not care enough about a particular position to bother voting for anyone at all.

Voting will never be completely tamper proof. In my opinion Cringley brings up a more interesting point about software development processes than anything truly insightful about e-voting machines.

Re:Audit trail?

[BenjyD]

At least with pen-and-paper voting, you don't have to place blind faith in the people who make the pens that your vote will count. You fill in the ballot form, it goes into a locked, metal box with a seal you have to break in order to get at the votes. Tampering with the vote (unless you're a Bush) requires some time alone with the box and a crowbar.

The counts are always done in public, with eagle-eyed candidates and press around (for important votes, anyway). It's nowhere near foolproof, but cheating on a significant scale would be more obvious than using a closed-source piece of software that, for example, 'accidentally' loses every 50th vote for a candidate.

Re:Audit trail?

[argent]

The receipt, for the umpteenth time, is not something the VOTER needs to verify HIS vote, it's something that auditors need to verify that the totals reported by the precinct actually match reality.

The purpose of electronic voting is only to make that process more accurate. There is no other reason for it, and all the arguments about ease of use, cost, convenience, all that is a smokescreen. If it doesn't make the voting process more accurate and reliable then it shouldn't be used.

Re:Audit trail?

[mcc]

There are these things called "election monitors". You can sign up to be one, and when you do, you get to stand around at a polling station all day and watch. For the one location you are a monitor at, you get to stand there and watch the entire process take place. You know no one's lost a few votes because you saw the box just plain sat on the table all day and nothing happened to it.

Now, obviously, you can't watch everything. You can only be in one place at a time. But the idea is that a sufficient number of varied people sign up to be election monitors that organized vote fraud becomes very, very difficult. You can't plan ahead to commit vote fraud because you don't know whether you'll have a monitor. And if indications are that vote fraud is going to occur on a small scale at those precincts where no monitors showed up, you can easily solve this problem by just adding monitors. You may not be watching, but a significant proportion of the time, someone is.

You can't do this with electronic voting. You can't sit there and watch the electrons flow down the ethernet cable to the central server to ensure that the only electrons that go through are the ones that were cast by a voter. You can't look inside the memory of the computer and see if there's a rogue process quietly flipping bits. You can electronically audit the machines to ensure they aren't doing anything wierd, but this is far more complicated than just watching a locked box on a table, it brings up the question of how you can trust the electronic auditing process any more than you can trust the electronic voting process, and it serverely limits who can perform election monitor duties to those who can understand how the computer system works.

Cringley....

[mr_tommy]

Another week, another Cringley article! This man knows everything!

Oh Cringley, if only i were as wise as thee. Thou' truely does know everything there is too know about knowing.

Re:VOT1NG ON TEH SPKOE!!!1

[donnz]

Last thing I read the budget ran out before they implemented a paper audit trail. So, ho hum.

Different

[cubicledrone]

This isn't politics (at least not in this particular column) it's engineering. And one thing engineers of great big IT systems know

...is that engineers aren't invited to the meetings where the (political) decisions are made, and are summarily ignored before and after those meetings, therefore...

they are never on time, never on budget, and sometimes don't work at all.

'nuff said.

Spell it with me....

[ixache]

C-r-i-n-g-e-l-y, Robert X.

The name is written wrongly in the blurb no less than four times! But at least the submitter is consistent with himself...

I have to ask now more than ever : why is this particular mis-spelling so prevalent?

Xavier

Re:Spell it with me....

[nudicle]

also, it's disturbing that there is no audit trail of the submitter's keystrokes. For all we know he typed the name correctly but somewhere in the black box of his Win XP system and internet transit through unknown routers the letters were (purposefully?) munged!

Debunking Krugman's Voting Machine Column

[Nova Express]

Here's an article by Donald Luskin debunking the Krugman column, mentioned at the top of Cringley's artilce, just as he's debunked a number of Krugman's other columns in the past.

Re:Debunking Krugman's Voting Machine Column

[sparrow_hawk]

Yeah, Don Luskin's the guy to trust if you want to debunk Krugman.

Hush

[TwistedSpring]

Cringely should really stop writing. Just about everything I've ever read by him put me in a fit of rage over his failure to raise important points or his ineptitude on realising the fundamental problems in his own proposals. The guy can argue a point like a fish can ride a bicycle. In the past his ramblings have prompted me to e-mail him up to 5 times requesting him to stop filling the internet with this sort of mindless opinionated filth, or at least make simple corrections to his articles which he inevitably fails to do (and no, I don't adopt a conceited "I AM RIGHT" attitude in my mails, I just argue a point in a polite and formal manner, backed up with numerous reputable references). I can't believe he's held his job since everything he says is usually so much flamebait and pontification. I'll be modded troll for this, but I hope at least one or two people agree with me.

Re:Hush

[TwistedSpring]

Oh and i forgot to add what pissed me off about this particular article: he makes assumptions without backing them up. He asks "hey do any of these machines make a paper trail?!" and then says "no! they don't!" without providing any evidence of this point. Of course any voting machine doesnt make a paper trail available to the customer. When you vote by paper you don't get a receipt. When you vote on a voting machine you don't get a receipt. It's called confidentiality. If people got receipts from voting then they'd just be left with a big pile of unclaimed receipts in the voting booth that anyone could look at. So Cringely, give me some damn evidence about your information first instead of just plucking it out of thin air (or worse, just dreaming it up and then moaning about something you just thought of -- as in this article), and then don't waste half the article on one really insignificant point. I can't understand how the man can go on about every other device that Diebold has made leaving a paper trail, and then not ask himself "HEY! maybe theres some kind of REASON a voting machine doesnt leave one?! If I'm right in my assumption that it doesnt leave one anyway!". Christ.

[Bug #123456] Re:Where is the open alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

patch: get confirmation prior to printing.

Slashdot influence

[Doc Ruby]

Slashdotters are growing in influence. Now we bring puny servers to their knees, AND help focus public attention as alternative press, leading "mainstream" media to cover news stories that matter to Nerds. Congratulate yourself on helping the leaders to follow the people.

Voting Errors Mostly Human

[Maxwell'sSilverLART]

The Florida election results clearly showed the problems with punch card voting.

Actually, according to a study by MIT and CalTech, punch cards are comparable to other voting methods, and, depending upon who you believe, possibly better. Though I've been unable to find the study itself, I've seen it mentioned by Neal Boortz and others. (I've not been able to find the study; nonetheless, I've found Boortz to be accurate in his facts more often than not.) Punch cards actually come out on top of the other methods.

However, many of these problems were due to poor ballot design...

Enh; I don't know. The infamous "butterfly ballot" certainly seemed simple enough to me, and to the third graders to whom it was shown, and to the Democratic Party officials who designed and approved it, and nobody seemed to complain when it was published in the newspaper, but I'm sure I'm missing something.

...poor maintenance of voting equipment...,

Imagine that...you have to maintain a mechanical device. This ought to be a crime, at least of negligence.

...or poor training or [should this be "of"] poll workers and voters.

Poor training of poll workers? Admittedly, I've not been one, but it seems simple enough. If not, then this falls under the same "negligence" bit, as above. Poor training of the voters? As I said, the ballot seemed clear enough; if the voters couldn't figure it out, then I suppose we ought to be pointing fingers at the schools for turning out uneducated graduates. Further, if they couldn't understand, and couldn't be arsed to ask the poll workers for help, well, if they don't care that much, if they can't be bothered to check their votes, do we really want them voting? I don't mean that as flamebait--if you take the time to consider your vote, and act carefully to get it right, why should somebody else, who had no idea for whom they voted, have just as much say?

Re:Voting Errors Mostly Human

[Mr. Slippery]

The infamous "butterfly ballot" certainly seemed simple enough to me, and to the third graders to whom it was shown, and to the Democratic Party officials who designed and approved it, and nobody seemed to complain when it was published in the newspaper, but I'm sure I'm missing something.

At least four things, actually:

1. The ballot did not conform to Florida law
2. You, the third graders, and the Democratic Party officials probably did not see the ballot in situ. Palm Beach voters slipped the card into an angled frame, which created visual (due to the angle) and mechanical (it didn't always get fully seated) problems.
3. Even if Democratic Party officials had seen the ballot in situ, their failure to act does not deprive voters of the right to equal protection.
4. Using the instructions given on the ballot, it was impossible to vote for half of the candidates. The ballot told voters to punch the hole to the right of the candidate they choose.

if you take the time to consider your vote, and act carefully to get it right, why should somebody else, who had no idea for whom they voted, have just as much say?

Thing is, with the screwy layout you didn't have to carefully consider your vote if you were voting for the first guy on the list - who happened to be Bush. (No conspiracy about the design meant to be implied, it just worked out that way. Had it worked out with Gore in punch position 1, and a bunch of Bush votes being miscounted, I'm sure Democrats would be pointing fingers at "Republican voters who were too dumb to follow instruction" while Republicans would be crying for accessible voting.)

Re:Voting Errors Mostly Human

[thales]

"...if you were voting for the first guy on the list - who happened to be Bush. (No conspiracy about the design meant to be implied, it just worked out that way..."

It didn't just work out that way, it was required under Floridia Law. The Party that won the last election for Governor gets the number one ballot postion. A Republican won the last Governors's race so a Republican got the top spot on the next race. That WAS a conspiracy, but one by the Dems not the GOP The Dems passed the law when they controlled the state government to give Dems an edge in the next election.

Absolutely Necessary?

[Detritus]

Absolutely necessary or nice to have? My county has the Diebold voting machines and there have been no known complaints from voters or the county's election officials. The reaction to the machines has been positive.

The machines may have faults and deficiencies. That doesn't mean that they are worse than the previous system or are a clear and present danger to democracy.

In the past, I've voted in districts that used punched cards and mechanical lever machines. The punched cards are difficult to use for some people and are error prone. Mechanical lever machines have their own set of vulnerabilities and do not generate an audit trail. Even paper ballots can be subverted.

I'd like to see the problems with the Diebold machines, and their software development process, addressed before the next election. That doesn't mean that I am awake all night, worrying about some conspiracy of political operatives and uber-hackers stealing the election.

Re:Absolutely Necessary?

[Merk]

Two points: One, it's pretty clear from the memos that it doesn't take an "uber-hacker" to skew the election, it simply takes someone with the skill to manipulate an Access database. That's not a very select group. Two, unless your election officials know about the Diebold problems, maybe you should be worried about the results. It could easily be that they're simply saying "Well, the machine said everybody voted for the Nazi party member, hrm... well it is a computer, and computers don't make mistakes, I guess I better practice my German!" Just because you're not worried, doesn't mean they're not doing it.

Who votes doesn't count;who counts the votes does

[Simonetta]

It is becoming obvious that the 2004 US election has already been decided.

Bush will have been elected (not re-elected because he was appointed by the Supreme Count for his first term) by 51% to 49%.

The touchscreen voting machines have no paper record of the votes entered. They are made by a company that gave the maximum amount permitted to the Republican party. The CEO of the company is a conservative Republican. The Republican congressional representive in the district where the machines were tried in the 2002 election was elected by an 80% margin.

The software used to count the votes is closed and proprietary. Anyone who challenges it could be sent to prison for DMCA violations.

If the Soviets did this thirty years ago, the Republicans would jumping all over it as evidence of the total institutional corruption of the communist system. They aren't saying shit now.

I do encourage you to vote. It's a great habit that you don't want to get out of.

Just don't seriously expect it have any meaning.

Thank you,

If It Isn't Obvious To Cringe

[Master of Transhuman]

why no audit trail was included, I don't know what to tell him.

Seems obvious to me.

I agree with Cringley, for once

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with the voting machine development is not whether it was done using open or closed source. Cringley soesn't even mention open source. The problem is, the govt. didn't specify what kind of information was required, i.e. paper trail, to verify the machine is working correctly. The govt. through a lot of money at a problem without even understanding themselves what they wanted, and probably didn't write the contracts such that they wouldn't pay if they didn't get working machines. Therefore, they got a half-hearted effort from Diebold, who has been successful with similar machines, because Diebold was interested in maximizing profit.

Re:Are you lying? or just misinformed

[Anonymous Coward]

The Electoral College has only been around for a couple of hundred years. You can't expect every American to have heard about it.

True Democracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the common man isn't stupid. But he is poorly-educated. People choose not to educate themselves. That is fine, they can vote for a man who actually knows how a bill becomes a law.

A true democracy truly is a mob. Were we in a "true democracy," there would still be slavery. There would be no true United States, as the Confederacy would still be around. There would be no real civil rights. Immigration would have shut down long ago, meaning the loss of many of the inventions that have helped make America a world power. A mob is only as smart as its dumbest member.

I would even argue we need it now more than ever. With the power of the mass media, fads have unprecedented power. After 9/11, every person who even looked Arabic would have been put in jail.

I once was talking about the recall, and I said something to the extent of: "Our government was based on a series of checks and balances. Regular elections are a check against the power of the people." I would say the same about representatives.

Your post was optimistic. Optimism is good. But at some point you have to face reality. We need a representative democracy. We need representatives who will actually do the unpopular thing every now and then, because it is right.

Re:True Democracy?

[perljon]

But he is poorly-educated.
Really? We have almost 100% literacy. How educated is educated enough? A lot of people equate educated to thinking like they do. Is that how you measure it?

After 9/11, every person who even looked Arabic would have been put in jail.... Your post was optimistic. Optimism is good. But at some point you have to face reality.
That's pretty close to what happened any way, isn't it? All the people that are being held in the U.S. without trial because they have ties to the middle east. All the people being held in Cuba in violation of the Geneva convention... Representatives don't stop mob mentality. They paint mob mentality with a false coat of legitimacy... We don't need protected from ourselves; however, rising taxes and shrinking services is evidence that we need protected from the ruling class. Executives that pillage companies and make common men poor are proof that we need protection from the ruling class.

"Our government was based on a series of checks and balances. Regular elections are a check against the power of the people."
Under the phenomina of mob mentality, representatives don't provide that much protection. When the mob gets enough motion, nothing can stop it. (Nazi Germany). The only real check against mobs is the will of the common men of other contries.

There would be no true United States, as the Confederacy would still be around.
The United States is not more valuable than the rights and freedom of the men that live within its boarders. When the Soviet states succeeded from the U.S.S.R., the American policy was that is immoral to force federation on a people that doesn't want it. Although slavery was wrong, the succession of the Southern states was not. Forcing the Federal government on the Southern commoner who explicitly voiced there intent to rule themselves can't be justified, even with the slavery issue. If the civil war was only about slavery, then independence would have been given to the states after the slaves were freed. The civil war was about a cultural rift the formed between the North and the South caused by a difference in lifestyle. It's the same rift that is forming between the East Coast, West Coast, and the MidWest; between the Big cities and the small towns; between the Democrats and the Republicans. The Civil War was about one people using the military to omit it's will on another people.

how hard is it?!!!

[hellmarch]

i don't understand why making a computer voting system is so hard. you make a booth with a screen. people come in. people look at their ID and then they go into the booth. they slide their ID (either driver license or a special voter card) into the machine. it checks to see that they are registered and if they have voted already. if they are ok to vote the candidates come up on a screen. it will have their picture and their name so dumb people won't mess it up. you touch the person/option you want to vote for. the results aren't sent over any network. the same people that usually go pick up the punch cards go to each machine and get the results. the only stuff you need to send over a network is the check at the begining to see if they are registered and if they have voted yet or not. there are web sites all over the net that have voting things and they can remember if you've voted before. they work ok. why can't this type of voting work that well?

Why a paper trail is really needed

[cait56]

You cannot provide a paper record to the voter, because it would undermine the ability to vote anonymously. An employer/union/church/spouse/etc. could demand it be provided as proof that you voted correctly, not just that you voted.

When ballots were entirely paper there was a practice called "chain balloting" where a loyal party member would take their ballot out of the polling place and allow their precint captain to fill it in correctly. The next loyal party member would then take that ballot in, place it in the box, and take their ballot back out to the precint captain...

It was an illegal practice

The real reason that a paper trail is needed is that unlike normal commercial transactions, a voter must be able to vote when they show up at the polling place. You can't give them a rain check 1 time in 1000, or even in 1 in 10,000 due to equipment failure.

If we have a voting system that is dependent on power, it won't be long before somebody deliberately triggers a power failure in the portion of the state that was going to vote the "wrong" way.

Re:Why a paper trail is really needed

[dkf]

You cannot provide a paper record to the voter, because it would undermine the ability to vote anonymously. An employer/union/church/spouse/etc. could demand it be provided as proof that you voted correctly, not just that you voted.

The way to work around this is to split the paper ballot into two parts. One, the main ballot, has a large high-quality random number on it as well as the vote indication. It does not hold the identity of the person who voted, and it is delivered into the ballot box. The other part contains the name of the person who voted and that magic random number, but not an indication of how the person voted; that indication is the only record kept of the association between name and number. Maybe the machines produce a tally themselves, but it is always possible to get the ballots from the boxes and count them by hand in front of witnesses from all the parties on the ballot.

If any voter has any reason to suspect that a machine has miscounted, they can demand a hand count and also see that their ballot was correctly in the box.

The mechanism isn't perfect (assault voter in secret after they leave, steal their receipt, and then demand a hand count so you can match the receipt) but I seriously doubt that you can get closer given that you need both auditing and security. (There's other tricks you can add like writing a cryptographic signature of the ballot on each main ballot, signed with the identity of the election officer(s) running the polling station, but that's countering against different kinds of problems.)

Disaster

[handy_vandal]

It protect the voter against mistakes.
Like voting for Bush?

That's not a mistake. It's a disaster.

-kgj

Re:Disaster

[XO]

And, a "miserable failure" at that.

voting machine "black box"

[mabu]

We have black boxes on planes, even in cars now. The technology obviously exists where we could have these "black boxes" in voting machines, sealed and relatively tamper-proof. Of course, if these means are left to corporations like Diebold, they'd be one-use-only-type items that would be expensive and necessary to replace for every election, whereas the open source community would undoubtedly come up with just as secure a solution that was re-useable and exponentially more economical.

The key to getting the public to care about these issues has less to do with educating them to the technology or scaring the crap out of them to "do the right thing" but instead to focus on the fact that this is taxpayer money, YOUR money that needs to be wisely spent to insure that YOUR vote is properly counted.

Never attribute to malice...

[BobaFett]

...what can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Here is how I see it: Diebold makes sale kiosks for Home Depot, ATMs for Citybank, and voting machines for the government. Diebold comes to each customer and says, "We can save you XXX dollars on every machine if you don't need a paper printer in it".

What do the customers say?
Home Depot manager: "XXX dollars and no paper? Are you nuts? We'll lose ten times that on fraud!"
Citybank manager: "XXX dollars and no paper? Are you a complete moron? We'll lose hundred times that on lawsuits!"
Government bureaucrat (he does not care about fraud - someone gets elected one way or the other, the bureaucrat will have his job, and he can't get sued): "XXX dollars? What a great idea!"

Re:Are you lying? or just misinformed

[MacDork]

The Civil Rights Commission found no one who was unfairly denied the right to vote despite it being in their institutional and personal interest to do so.

That's funny, because this link says they found "it was widespread voter disenfranchisement, not the dead-heat contest, that was the extraordinary feature in the Florida election. The disenfranchisement was not isolated or episodic. And state officials failed to fulfill their duties in a manner that would prevent this disenfranchisement."

So I ask you AC, are you lying or just misinformed?

*voter-verified* audit trail...

[Goonie]

When people say "audit trail", they mean "audit trail where the voter verifies that the printout reflects who they voted for". That neatly deals with your scheme, at least as I understand it.

Re:*voter-verified* audit trail...

[WindBourne]

Not really. A paper trail would be used for close polls. If it was not so close, then there would be no reason to check. Also, I doubt that most ppl will check the print out. After all, do you currently check your ATM printouts? I do not. What is strange about this is that even if I were to vote X, but looked at the paper upon exit and it said that I voted for Y, then the company would simply claim that I was in err, not the paper.. In effect, it becomes a new hanging chad.

Re:*voter-verified* audit trail...

[rifter]

After all, do you currently check your ATM printouts? I do not.

I do, and I keep them as well in case there is an error later (and to provide records). You don't care of the atm deducted $100 from your account and gave you $20, but I do. Therefore I check. Conversely, if you care to check your slip after voting you can confirm the correct vote registered, else vote again after registering a spoilt ballot. But you will probably not check. That's okay. I will.

I think that the source shoudl be open to this software since our tax dollars are paying for it and we are using it. (This neatly leaves an out for the CIA software or the stuff that runs our nuclear missiles since we do not use it we don't need to see it. THough people who do use it shoudl be able to see it.) You will not read the source code. BUt I might, and others certainly will to make sure that it does not contain any nastygrams. I think to certify the software it shoudl be compiled from the publicly available source as well to leave out that hole.

Statistical Margin of Error

[Jswalden86]

The potential margin of uncatchable error is large enough that it was larger than the margin of victory in the deciding area of the last presidential election.

Potential margin of error? So did Democrat chads hang more often than Republican or Independent chads?

Sure, the small margin of victory did make any error all the more significant, but the error should have evened out over the large number of votes.

This is the key problem with e-voting: if the machines are hackable, there will be too few hacks, all with unpredictable impacts, to keep statistical error to a minimum. Millions of votes will, however, minimize the error from chads (or other current, fallible methods) to zero.

Re:Bad Invention

[sydlexic]

Sure, any of these things could happen, but it would be far easier for the people who control the closed, proprietary system to use it to further their interests. And all three major companies that build and sell e-voting machines are staunchly Republican. And, if you look at the history, many many more strange things have happened with e-voting machines that favor Republicans than Democrats or Independents.

Anonymous voting in Australia...

[SofaMan]

Remember the husband/wife absentee votes from two people in a foreign embassy in a small country? The husband was appointed by Clinton. The two votes came back, and were added in when everyone was watching. I forget the country, but I'm sure there is a record somewhere because of how close the election was. Those two votes were counted in the Clinton column. So the public knows that this husband and wife, who were the only two absentee votes coming from that country, voted for Clinton. And if you watched the votes for other offices as the vote was registered (I didn't), you would have been able to ascertain who they cast their vote for other offices, such as Senator, etc.


See, now this kind of creeps me out. Here in Australia, when you send in an absentee vote, you have 2 envelopes. You put your vote (or votes, if you're electing for more than one House) into the first envelope. The only info on this envelope is your constituency(ies). You then place this envelope into another envelope that has your indentifying info so you can be marked off the electoral roll, and send it in.

The person who opens the outer envelope has absolutely nothing to do with the person who opens the second envelope. The first 'opener' just chucks the inner envelope into a big pile and marks your name off the roll. The box with all these non-identifiable envelopes then gets carted off to the tally room, to be opened and counted by someone who has no idea who cast your vote.

I might add that here in Australia, we have preferential voting (rather than first-past-the-post), we still use paper ballots, mark our vote in pencil, which is then counted by hand, and can still produce a reliable result by election night. It's virtually immune from many of the technical problems relating to power supply, data transfer, auditing, etc. that have been discussed in this thread, and it still works reliably and well. It might cost a little more to run over time (though not much more, by the sounds of it), but nobody ever said democracy was supposed to be cheap.

FREE invention! This solves all the problems

[Anonymous Coward]

PUBLIC DOMAIN idea, go for it....

print a receipt with a UPS like tracking number on it, show all the results on a web site, by tracking number, so anyone can count the votes at home with a small program. You can check your vote by tracking number and have 5 days after voting to change it. The vote is not done till after said 5 days.

No big deal, DO NOT PATENT THIS, it's now public domain by posting it here, mark it down in case someone tries to patent it, save the date too.

Re:FREE invention! This solves all the problems

[Anonymous Coward]

We already government fund libraries to have computers available, and they could put up a 800 number people could call with their tracking number to get the same info if they are disabled or can't get to a computer for some reason.

Accessibility versus traceability

[ex_troll]

The auditable discussion is important but not that important.

What is probably even more crucial is a discussion about voting being accessible and easy. What's amazed me in the post 2000 election discussion is how fast we've stopped talking about all of the voters who were disenfranchised by having huge difficulties getting to a working election center.

The underlying reason why all of use really want to see internet voting is because it would be easier for us to vote. We can pay all of our bills online. We can file our taxes online. Why can't we vote?

The reason is because it is a really difficult security problem to solve. I'm just amazed there isn't more discussion about how to solve that problem than the discussion talking about a poor implementation of the short-term, band-aid solution.

Specifically, I thought http://www.eucybervote.org/xootic2000.pdf has described a really good start to how to really solve the security problem.

Re:Accessibility versus traceability

[argent]

You can't vote online because we can't be assured of your privacy when you're voting anywhere but a polling place. Note, that's not "you can't be assured of privacy" but "we can't be assured of your privacy".

Accessibility is a completely separate issue from electronic voting. Whether the voting machines are electronic, positronic, nanotech, or based on Lucas' glowing Jedi bacteria... you are going to have to get to a place where we can know you can't be coerced into selling your vote. And getting there is 100% of the "accessibility" problem.

Otherwise, we could solve all the accessibility problems now by going to universal postal voting. You pick up your voting form at the same place you do your banking or mail a package, wherever that is. You fill it out, drop it in the mail, you're done. Or you don't drop it in the mail, you give it to your local party-machine boss, and he gives you an envelope containing small unmarked bills in exchange.

Any kind of system that doesn't involve going to a secure polling place has the same problem, so forget it.

No, the whole argument about accessibility is a smoke screen. Accesibility has nothing to do with voting machines or electronic voting.

Re:Accessibility versus traceability

[ex_troll]

You have some valid points, but I don't buy this argument for the current US culture. I would agree that this is an issue in other countries in different places in their development and in the history of the US.

However, the problem that we are currently facing in the US is not coersion or local party-machine bosses. If this was the 1800s, I could agree with you. The problem we face today in the US is a week democracy because not enough people vote. If we want a new election system, lets address one of the biggest issues we have today. Touch screen versus optical ballet? I barely care. 50% versus 90% of a popultation voting. Now that is something that can make a difference.

http://www.vote.caltech.edu/mail-archives/votingte ch/Jun-2003/0162.html is an interesting archive of the same discussion we are having here.

Re:Accessibility versus traceability

[argent]

And again I tell you you're wasting your time, *and* you're missing the point, badly.

Electronic voting has nothing to do with accessibility. If that's your concern, you need to change the laws and customs, and once you've done that postal ballots will serve just as well as electronic ones. The problem *you* need to solve is not technological, it's social, and electronic voting is just a distraction from that... one that will mire you down in the same swamp that you're standing in right now.

It IS about money - but not being economical!

[monkeyfamily]

It's cheaper for Diebold to make a machine without a receipt printer than to make one with a receipt printer.

Worse - Diebold knows they can milk the contract for all it's worth by submitting shitty products to lock election commissions into an enless redesign / patch / upgrade / support addiction.

Re:VOT1NG ON TEH SPKOE!!!1

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno, it seemed pretty self-explanatory to me.

Re:Bad Invention

[Rich0]

This is one of the main benefits of the parlimentary system. I think that the US and rest-of-the-world systems both have their plusses and minuses, but I think a BIG benefit of the parlimentary system is that it tends to lead to a multi-party system with a coalition government. In general the US system yields a president with a lot of power and a congress that fights itself all the time. Note that quite a few prime ministers over the years have been strong leaders just the same - think Winston Churchill.

The nice thing about a parliamentary system is that all the battles are local - no big-money campaigns involved.

Re:Bad Invention

[volkris]

Yeah, there's a great idea:

We'll use the necessarily inaccurate count from necessarily failable paper methods to check the potentially perfect results from the electronic methods.

Keep paper out of it. It can easily be done and verified electronically; paper only reintroduces the significant margins of error that harm the process in the first place.

Re:Bad Invention

[sydlexic]

paper only reintroduces the significant margins of error that harm the process in the first place

wrong. maybe it feels nice to say that, but it's factually inaccurate. paper isn't responsible for ballot errors. it's a host of other factors starting with human ineptitude and/or corruption. speaking of which, no hanging chad ever managed to create -15,000 votes for a candidate from a precinct with only a few hundred voters. you can chalk that up to broken proprietary voting software. and if you had done the smallest bit of research on the topic (e-voting), you would know that's the tip of the iceberg.

Yellow Journalism at its finest.

[Artifakt]

Cringely closes this week's column with:

This confuses me. I'd love to know who said to leave the feature out and why?

Next week: the answer.

Guess what committee the Diebold chairman sits on

[Ponder]

Yup GWB reelection committee, and he has publically stated he will do anything to get Dubya relected.
Scared yet?

Here's why...

[artemis67]

I am looking forward to Cringley's next column where he proposes to answer the question of why auditing capabilities were not inlcuded in the touch screen voting machines.

I'll venture a guess at this... it's not that Diebold hasn't already thought of this, but that they are fulfilling the MINIMUM requirements of what has been requested of them. Then they get millions of machines out there, and there is another electoral controversy, this time involving e-voting machines. So a Diebold executive proposes that states invest in the next generation machine, which has a paper auditing trail. And then Diebold gets to sell two machines instead of one, doubling their revenue.

Look at it another way... every Microsoft product on the market could be revised and upgraded and improved in limitless ways... so why don't they? Because they don't have to. As long as they are growing sales at an acceptable rate, then they will simply sell the upgrades, which add a few more features--just enough to stimulate the next round of sales, and no more. The worst possible situation MS (or any other software company) could find themselves in is to sell a FINAL product, to which no future upgrade would ever be needed.

I'm glad we didn't see Cringly on Slashdot again..

[Anonymous Coward]

"I am shocked that this story from I Cringley hasn't been sent in and posted at Slashdot. "

I'm not shocked, and I'm somewhat glad we went more than 7 days without one of his articles. He's not a bad guy, but he's a person with an opinion, which is a commodity on Slashdot. Let's see more real news.

Interesting statistics hey ....

[Grizzlysmit]

Software development projects fail all the time, no matter what their size. The Standish Group, an IT-research firm in West Yarmouth, Mass., has been keeping track of this phenomenon since 1994, and the good news is that we are doing much better at completing projects than we used to. The bad news is that in 2000, only 28 percent of software projects could be classed as complete successes (meaning they were executed on time and on budget), while 23 percent failed outright (meaning that they were abandoned). Those numbers are improvements over a 16 percent success rate and a 31 percent failure rate when the first study was done in 1994. p>

I notice two things about it, they only refer to the commercial worlds development, and the improvement they mention, has a time frame of 1994 to 2000, which sort of matches "surprisingly" well (or not so surprisingly) with the commercial worlds adoptance of OSS.

Which fits because with OSS, your less likely to need to start from scratch, meaning you can pitch into an app which is already a success, and you just about cannot over estimate the benefits of the collaboration, as you really do save so much time and effort, but probably most important, the vital things that you have never been able to convince your pointy haired types mattered, (you know minor stuff like stability, actually working, instead of looking really like it would work), gets done. Of course the commercial world does give something back for this, mainly that finished look and feel, that really don't matter that much in the geek world but are vital in the Marketing World.

Ever seen a ballot in the US?

[wiredog]

In some states, especially ones like California where direct democracy is popular, there can be dozens of items on the ballot. Sure, if the vote was just "Select one of candidate A, B, or C" it'd be easy. But when you add in several bond issues, some highway votes, a couple of proposed laws, etc, it can become difficult to count by hand in a reasonable timeframe.

Re:Ever seen a ballot in the US?

[Firethorn]

Then use 'Scan-o-tron' ballets. Run it through the same systems that are used for standardized testing. As it's hooked up to a computer, you can quickly come up with x number of sheets voted for candidate A, y for candidate B, z didn't vote for either, and w were referred to hand counters because they filled in the blank. If the machine breaks or it's integrity is questioned, you can easily hand count the ballets in question, for the race in question, to verify the machine's accuracy. Matter of fact, I'd hand count a random sample of the ballets each year just to verify accuracy and integrity. To prevent ballet-stuffing, you need good control at the voting stations, which you'll need no matter what the voting system is. This generally ends up being assured by having 3 or more representatives at the station. One for each party with enough volunteers to have one there, and a hired neutral party.

The problem isn't with how the votes are gathered

[srussell]

Slashdot, home of the self-styled intellectuals. Where are the Condorcet and Approval Voting proponents?

The main problem in the USA isn't how we gather votes, although there are problems in some states (Florida). There is a more fundamental problem in that we aren't using the right voting mechanism. In the US, we use plurality voting -- a.k.a "first across the line" -- to determine who wins an election. This means that a candidate for whom only 30% of the people voted can win an election simply because there was no other single candidate with more votes.

This has a number of problems, but they can all be summed up by saying that plurality is one of the least fair, if not the least fair, way of determining the winner of a democratic election that you can get. Consider:

• Say 40% of the people vote for candidate A
• 35% of the people want candidate B
• 25% want candidate C

In the US, candidate A will win. However, what if all of the voters for C would rather have B than A? Then 60% of the population would rather have B than A, and the minority candidate has won.

This situation encourages strategic voting; that is to say, voters for C have to decide whether they want to vote honestly, for C, or whether they should vote for B just to make that they don't get their least favorite candidate, A.

This is why we only have two parties in the US, and why -- despite the large number of Greens and Libertarians, neither party has a chance of winning. We don't even know what percentage of the US population is Green or Libertarian (or anything else, for that matter) because they aren't voting honestly. They're voting for the lesser of two evils. This system practically guarantees alienation of the largest number of people -- the majority ends up with a candidate they don't want, unless they lie when voting and vote for the candidate that they dislike the least who also has the best chance of winning.

There are voting mechanisms which allow people to vote their true opinion without being alienated. The most popular are Condorcet -- complex, but the most fair; Approval Voting -- not as fair as Condorcet, but much simpler, and can be implemented with existing voting technology; and Instant Runoff -- less fair than approval, no more simple -- but better than plurality.

Many democratic countries do not use plurality voting, although plurality is the most common. For example, Australia, Northern Ireland, and the Irish Republic (among others) use single transferable vote[1]. In fact, 68 countries (~2b ppl) use plurality, 31 countries (~400m ppl) use single transferable vote, and two countries (~18m ppl) use IRV (instant runoff) -- this is according to International IDEA Handbook.

There is a huge amount of information about Condorcet and Approval Voting available on the web. The Citizens for Approval Voting page is a good start, if you're at all interested in improving voting in the US. If you're interested in the mechanics and mathematics of the systems, start with Condorcet -- most sites that talk about Condorcet are less about how to get it implemented politically, and are more about how it works, fairness tests, and how it compares to other systems. The Wikipedia entry for "voting system" is particularly useful.

E-Voting from an American

[boylek1]

It is unfortunate that an editorial that starts out taking an IT engineers view devolves so quickly to ranting. The fair, equitable, passing of elected positions from one term to the next is critical to our way of life. It is a violation of our inalienable rights to leave elections up to attorneys, media personalities, or national political machinations. I am in favor of auditable, verifiable elections that give Americans confidence in the transfer of power at any level. Conversely, I am adamantly opposed to anything to the contrary. Having said that let's set some facts straight: The government, Congress, does not buy voting machines nor pay any companies to develop them. Individual states, counties, and voting precincts are making those decisions. Comparing all software projects to already completed and sold software is a ridiculous form of logic. Though I and everyone else agree that changes need to be made, the statistics you are matching are a non-fit. There are already fixes required and underway. You need to research topics you express opinions on. California, Maryland, and Ohio all have changes they require to all electronic voting systems in their states. The changes are good, especially California's printout/audit trail requirement. Electronic voting - engineered well, manned by trained staff, and managed well by counties and states - is the most efficient and logical application of technology for this time intensive and hotly contested job. Let's keep debating the why, how and who of it but don't fill up the air with uninformed noise. There is too much of it already.

Re:The reason for no paper trail.

[eadint]

Hey whoever marked me as a troll you are a fucking turd and im going to hack your fucking account if i can find you. none of my comments were troling and my information is pretty solid.

Re:Bad Invention

[steveha]

I suppose, then, that Microsoft is writing the viruses and worms that attack Windows and IE? It "would be far easier" for them to do it.

Machines with no audit trail are at risk of fraud, period. You don't need to single out the Republicans as possible villains.

steveha

US Voting Is Archaic, Unfair, & Undemocratic

[meehawl]

Australia, Northern Ireland, and the Irish Republic (among others) use single transferable vote

I'm from Ireland - I grew up in a country with one of the more complex votings systems in the world. We're talking 10+ rounds of elimination rounds and recounts, and much anguish by marginal politicians over a few minor votes.

It's not perfect -- you still get arseholes elected to office - but at least most people's votes are counted... unlike the US where the majority of votes seem to be instantly cast away and you get candidates elected by minorities of voters.

With a preference system politicians at least have to make efforts to reach out to minorities and divergent viewpoints. Sometimes this leads to nasty political compromises, but oftne it leads to coalitions with similar viewpoints and ethics.

One effect I've noticed on a personal level however is that because of the tragically simple plurality voting used in most of the US, people in the US are honestly baffled by anythiong that resembles fair voting. Most of them just don;t get it. Mired in an artifically bipolar system designed to promote competition and bilateral conflict, many people seem to view compromise and multilateralism with suspicion or misunderstanding.

The way you learn to vote undoubtedly influences your social universe -- you form unspoken but deeply held opinions about what is possible and what is impossible within a "democracy". THe US needs a more modern voting system as part of a first step towards engaging people once more with the democratic environment rather than engaging in identity politics and the elimination of dissent.

Re:Bad Invention

[sydlexic]

I suppose, then, that Microsoft is writing the viruses and worms that attack Windows and IE? It "would be far easier" for them to do it.

that's a stupid rebuttal. I guess you failed the logic part of the SAT where you match the statements that are most alike.

Viruses don't help Microsoft whereas using doctored voting machines to elect Republicans directly helps the Republican owners of the E-Voting machine companies. For example, it helps them to get them and their friends elected to some of the most powerful political positions in the world.

Re:Bad Invention

[steveha]

using doctored voting machines to elect Republicans directly helps the Republican owners

And if Democrat "activists" doctored some voting machines, that wouldn't help them? Wow, you've convinced me. Voting machines with no audit trails are only dangerous in Republican hands! You get a gold star for logical reasoning!

Believe what you will; I've spent enough time on this. Have a nice life.

steveha

Um, what?

[autopr0n]

Where did you learn statistics? Bush 'won' the election by only a a few hundred votes out of millions cast in that state. In fact, different sets of requirements for counting ballots actually come up with different results (for example, if you were to count ballots where the person punched a hole for bush/gore/whoever and wrote down the same name in the write-in spot, then gore would have won).

There were over 10,000 votes that were not counted. And yes, different voting districts used different technology. So if districts that used paper ballots or un-hacked electronic ballots were more republican, then more republican votes would be counted correctly.

Re:Bad Invention

[volkris]

OF COURSE paper is responsible for ballot errors. It HAS to be. You even brought up hanging chads, which is just one specific example of how paper ballots are naturally imprecise.

no hanging chad ever managed to create -15,000 votes for a candidate from a precinct with only a few hundred voters

This has nothing to do with electronic voting; any voting system could have done the same. Errors that can cause this is just as present in paper systems.

Proud to be a Nevadan

[CrackHappy]

I have to say I'm proud to be a Nevadan, so far the only state that is REQUIRING a paper trail for auditing purposes for electronic / touch screen voting.

So NYAH NYAH all you other states, we kick ass.

Not only that, but we love standing up to the Federal Government, just look at the Yucca Mountain project, everyone here is raising holy hell about that, as we don't have ANY FUCKING NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS, and they're wanting to foist all of THEIR waste in OUR state, and with not too much concern for the safety of over HALF our citizenry, who do not live very far from this proposed nuclear waste dump.

Good job Nevada government!