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?

[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?

[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?

[Bush Pig]

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

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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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

[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.

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.

Duh!

[Pingular]

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

Cringe-Worthy

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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: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?

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: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?

[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.

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.)

keystrokes

[mm0mm]

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

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?

[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."

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

[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?

[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: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

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.

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: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.

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 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: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.

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.

Can we just get a cringley icon?

[Vaystrem]

I mean, since everything this man says warrants /.

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.

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.

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?

[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: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: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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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?

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:Disaster

[XO]

And, a "miserable failure" at that.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.