Cringley on E-voting

Moot? by CoboyNeal · 2003-12-07 07:40 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

--

Have you seen my dubya?

Re:Moot? by Clever+Pun · 2003-12-07 08:47 · Score: 4, Interesting

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? by Zeinfeld · 2003-12-07 09:34 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

--
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/

Hmm... by autopr0n · 2003-12-07 07:50 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

--
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.

Re:Electronic Voting already exists and works by NortWind · 2003-12-07 08:07 · Score: 4, Interesting

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:Bad Invention by sydlexic · 2003-12-07 08:11 · Score: 4, Interesting

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? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-07 08:17 · Score: 4, Interesting

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? by mcc · 2003-12-07 08:56 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

--
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts

Re:Misleading by aredubya74 · 2003-12-07 08:18 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

--

RW

why no audit trail by TheSHAD0W · 2003-12-07 08:19 · Score: 5, Interesting

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:E-voting by splattertrousers · 2003-12-07 08:36 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

Why a paper trail is really needed by cait56 · 2003-12-07 12:50 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

12 of 275 comments (clear)