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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."
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.
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
comment directly in my journal
The whole system is open to public scrutiny - several people have reported bugs, including an academic. Nice contrast to the DMCA...
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Do I make sense? Please report if not.
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.
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.
Imagine that...you have to maintain a mechanical device. This ought to be a crime, at least of negligence.
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?
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
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?
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?)
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.
SofaMan -- Occasionally Battling Evil With His Mighty Powers Of Indolence.
Yup GWB reelection committee, and he has publically stated he will do anything to get Dubya relected.
Scared yet?
-- Back to the shadows again...