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E-Voting: a Flawed Solution in Search of a Problem
blorg writes "In the promised follow-up to last-week's I, Cringely column on E-Voting (discussed on Slashdot here), Robert X. Cringely discusses his proposed solution to the electronic voting mess. The ideas in this piece have all appeared already on Slashdot, but this stands as a well-argued condensation of them into a single article.
In the article, he looks briefly at possible solutions for the auditability problem but ultimately argues that technology introduces more problems into elections than it solves. Instead, he suggests that elections can be run quicker, cheaper and fairer using the paper-based Canadian model."
Needs more ninjas
This dude is on the CANADIAN payroll. No wonder he thinks the "superior" "canadian paper model" is better.
This is yet another Canadian plot to intimidate, impersonate, and infiltrate our precious bodily fluids!
Vote Quimby!
Until more people get involved in the political process, the majority will be subject to the will of the minority-those that actually get out and vote, and get involved in election campaigns, writing to their representatives, etc.
-cp-
President Bush to Liberate Alaska!
I have to agree with Cringely. Any paper-base receipt is suseptable to abuse. Specifically, this allows someone to confirm how another person voted. Bought votes are possible this way.
I do like the old-tech method. Put an X next to the person on paper. It is cheaper, and give old people something to do. (They staff all the voting over here, providing a very valuable service.)
...now people will blame Canada for the outsourcing of voting ideas and materials.
YEAH!
I don't know anything about Canadian politicians. How would a mere Floridian know who to vote for?
I drank what? -- Socrates
because of some stupid people in Florida.
E-Voting, when correctly designed, can be empowering to diabled (blind) voters who no longer need a friend to read off the ballot and tell them how to vote. While I'm sure you could get braile ballots printed, it is a lot easier on the disabled person if they can just put on a set of headphones and have the choices read off to them by the computer.
I read the internet for the articles.
Being a Canadian and a having experience with the Federal voting system, it doesn't offer a bad user experience either. You file with Elections Canada when you submit your tax return, and when election time comes around you get your lovely elector card.
On election day you're in and out in 10 minutes, with one neat x, and merrily on your way!
-s
I'm tired of bombing the universe
I find it funny to see a story like this today, considering:
As of today, both our Prime Minister and Official Opposition were not elected. The PM who *was* elected retired and named a successor (hey, it's like a monarchy!), and the Opposition party didn't exist 2 weeks ago.
Spooky.
Having said that, when we actually do vote our leaders into office, yeah, the process usually goes off without a hitch.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Well, voting in the US is definitely broke and needs a fix. Not making use of technology in the information age just doesn't make good sense.
And the ol' fashioned paper method may work for Canada, but there's only, what, 5 people that actually live there, eh?
This comment was generated by a squadron of trained super elite albino ninja chickens for you.
Its not like voting matters much anyway. Didn't you read the astounding article on Gerrymandering
I wish I could underself my stand -me (prior art?)
Error: Id10t detected
But the 'Canadian Model' is not as sexy as a glowy touch screen computer voting system rife with viruses and fraud.
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
...perhaps a military/corporate junta would do the trick - oh, wait...
Cringley is 100% correct. Look at the cost/speed. All this voting machine crap is just patronage & graft unbridled. Read the Cringley column.
The Canuck system is 100% open, 100% low-tech.
I'm screaming like some kind of Cliff Stoll now, but this shit is getting ridiculous.
Canadian cost per capita: $1.81
US cost $3.27
Although the older machines left no paper trail the one thing they did leave is physical paper, we all remember the moronic media following chad ballots on the highway. With e-voting there are far too many variables to whole heartedly trust a machine as opposed to turning on the news to see a trailer being escorted with paper.
Now, not to sound trollish, but supposing an OS is chosen and that OS is problem prone, viruses, reboots, etc., what safeguards can be guaranteed against this, a power outage, etc.? Not many. Paper is paper unless there's a fire. or... //INSERT_JOKE_HERE// unless someone forgot to bring the Charmin.
Still, auditing in some form would be a good idea now because we seem to be entering a period when electronic elections can be subject to voter fraud on a massive scale.
This is what I don't understand... How would accountability be a 'good idea'? It should be a standard across the board. When I read articles like this firstly I look for tell tale signs like this... auditing in some form would be a good idea now The tone says to me... Hello I'm still mad I don't see Al Gore.
As President Kennedy once joked, his wealthy father might be willing to buy him an election, but he wouldn't buy a landslide.
When will people ever realize that nothing is impossible. Money talks bullshit walks and it doesn't matter how you got it what matters is that you have it.
MoFscker
We do why always have to here about the lawyer, political, EULA, UN, Patent, Copyright side of the issues and not the technology? Enough already the found a new Marsupial and the poles may flip. Google Tech for me when I want news for nerds I guess, but I miss the smart comments from many of /.
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
With a system like Canada's, the SC would have to step in and re-select W before the voting even "takes place" to ensure his continued reign. With e-voting, the "results" can be uploaded days beforehand. That's so less controversial, after all.
I think Mr. Cringely will be visiting Guantanamo Bay fairly soon.
Here in Brazil we have been using electronic voting for some years, and the results are always good. There have never been any complaints about legitimacy (?) of the results.
Also, I don't think that paper-based voting models can be quicker than that. Here we usually have the results at the end of the night of the voting day.
--
Francisco
São Paulo / Brazil
Yes, you Americans should adopt our Canadian system. Doing away with any semblance of a real opposition party was a great move. It really simplified the way in which we choose our government:
I elect:
[ ] The Liberal guy, for ever and ever amen
[ ] The Alliance, who want to send the Chinese back to Russia where they belong
[ ] The Bloc, running for Canadian parliament on the platform of breaking up Canada
[ ] The PC guy, even though the PCs haven't been a real party in years
[ ] The NDP, bringing together union rednecks and the transgendered since 1935
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
don't couNT on IT. look for emergencIE war (felonious corepirate nazi execrable vs. the rest of US) powers executive privilege invoked to preveNT tally?
Cringly has one small flaw in that, the scruitineers from each party do not count the ballots. The officials from Elections Canada do all the counting. The scruitineers are allowed only to observe the process, to ensure that there are no irregularities. In the three elections I scruitineered for, I did not witness any irregularities. And, in all three, no members of the public remained to watch the ballot counting. Voter apathy is probably as high or higher in Canada than in the US.
Julie Moult is an idiot.
Just as an FYI, right now the elections use a fairly simple system for voting.
You get a dot-card like the kind you had to do in High School with those HB pencils. Shade in the dot of whomever you want to vote for.
The paper is fed into a scanner which reads the dot and sends it over a cellular phone to the central office (or whatever).
I've always thought that this system was just fine. The convenience of immediate voting results, with the paper trail of paper votes.
http://www.chmodoplusr.com/
Some of us hosers have had a couple of elections recently: the Ontario provincial election and the city council/mayoral election.
I was most impressed by the mayoral elections. In Toronto (don't know about the rest of them), the voting was electronically tallied but had a built-in audit trail.
The ballot was pretty simple: you connected two parts of an arrow together that pointed at your choice of candidate. None of this Florida confusion, you literally pointed at who you were voting for! Then, the ballot was read by a scanner that was placed over a large box. The scanner confirmed that your vote had been counted correctly, and the box kept the ballot.
At the end of the day, the election TV coverage was almost farcical because almost all the results were in within an hour. If any candidate wanted to contest the vote, all the original ballots had been retained as part of the system.
Maybe that would be a good system for the U.S.
[homer voice]Mmmmmm, zamboni chicken.[/homer voice]
Have an electronic voting system that you use. When you are finished, you receive a printed paper copy of your votes that you confirm and place in a locked box. Theoretically, the totals for each should match. IF not, an audit should find the descrepancies.
Not perfect, but it would be a good intermediate to fullscale e-voting.
In certain parts of Florida in the Winter, most of the people there are Canadadian!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This is why the government should pay for adapted keyboards for the blind.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
But nowhere in his new column does he answer the question. I am disapointed.
...it must be said.
"If voting could change anything, it would be illegal." -- unknown
He is against recepts because they could be used to buy votes; however, if you don't let voters keep the recepts, then votes can't be sold.
Electronic voting is better than using a pencil iff voters are given a printed recept that they can read(and understand) and the recept is placed in the ballot box before leaving the polling place.
I quit voting some time back because of the rampant voter fraud that ALREADY exists in the system. The Canadian voting system is far superior then what we have now. As long as the ballots aren't counted in plain sight at the polling place BEFORE they are taken to the court house you will never have a fair election. We already have rigged votes. Voting machines are NOT going to make cleaner elections. It is just going to raise the scale of voter fraud one more notch. Florida was just the beginning.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
I think Cringely's right, but that doesn't mean the Canadian model is perfect.
;-)
Recent Canadian elections, particularly in the province of Quebec, have been subject to all kinds of abuse. While there is a balance of scrutineers, they're not necessarily balanced, so to speak. In the 1995 Quebec referendum on separation, there were serious irregularities related to rejected ballots. Vote tallys tend to be skewed in favour of the party with the most obnoxious scrutineer.
One can only begin to imagine the outcome of a scrutineer system in the US, where the concealed weapon factor comes in to play.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
--Mike--
I voted in the last 2 local referendum elections using touch screen. I go into the voting depot, they find my name on a paper list and I initial next to my name. Next a volunteer take a cartridge to an open voting machine, slaps it in, presses the big red button and I'm good to go. I press various checkboxes on the touchscreen, a yes/no pair for each question. At the end I get a review of my selections with the option of making changes. Satisfied, I hit the flashing red Vote button and viola my votes have been cast.
Now, there's no receipt mind you. Just put them on the web IMO.
(this was too easy)
The same Michael Moore born and raised in the US with a lifetime membership to the NRA and the same person who won the under-16 marskman award?
As a Canadian, I have to agree with Cringley, we were all laughing during the election of 2000 and still laugh at the e-voting system. We had an election call, a campaign and a vote faster than the count of 2000.
The one problem with his suggestion, as I understand it, is that the states are responsible for the design of the ballot in the USA. In Canada, the ballot design is dictated by Elections Canada (a non-partisan government agency) Every poll must have the same design for the ballot. The design is all candidates on a single piece of paper that folds 3 times. The candidates names are alphabetical and in white on a solid black background. The vote is marked in a white circle next to the name.
I guess to have a Canadian style ballot would probably require a constitutional change in the USA, with the states giving up some control over the elections.
Maybe that would be a good system for the U.S.
You mean, like, say, the Massachusetts ballot? The technical term is a "marksense" ballot, and I think about a quarter of the US uses it to vote.
Please help metamoderate.
While the push toward electronic voting seems driven by the notion that cutting costs is a good thing, it seems to me that elections are pretty damn fundamental to any democratic process and that we can certainly find other places to save a buck here and there.
Any election process is subject to potential fraud - whole cemeteries have been known to vote on paper ballots. But smallish precincts with paper ballots, a way for interested parties to observe the process, and some kind of challenge system just looks best, easiest, and least difficult.
I suspect it would be possible to persuade the electorate that a windows based voting system is safe and fair and so on - after all they mostly use windows in all kinds of contexts where they must trust it. But I don't believe that any closed source system should be trusted - there are simply too many ways to subvert it.
Open source systems based on complex algorithms such as we have seen discussed here previously are difficult to understand. It took me a couple of reads to figure out the whole process in the most recent one. These are not likely to convince most of the voters and rightly so.
The problem then is that paper ballots are simple, but probably expensive and slow. Closed source electronic voting makes fraud for those providing the hardware/software far too easy. Open source electronic voting may be secure, but how would you convince anyone of it?
Lets stick to boxes printed on paper where people can put their X.
Fair Voting System?!?! Fair and Accurate Elections!?!? How unamerican of them. I can already hear the bombs on the way!
Th
Wrong.
Jean Chretien retired, and the Liberal Party of Canada *elected* a successor.
Canadians voted for our present ruling Party fair and square it was pretty clear who the people of Canada chose.
This is the way politics work in Canada: we vote for people in our riding to represent us, who represent a political Party, the members of the Party elect their leader. In this case the leader of the Party with the most seats in the House was Jean Chretien, he then retired, and the party elected a new leader. When the Parties term is up, or whenever the Party chooses chose prior to the term, the Party calls an election, and the voters of Canada elect new people who represent a Party.
If you don't like what you see then *join a party and vote for your leader*.
Sounds pretty far from a Monarchy to me.
Now - back to the article - I think that the Canadian voting system is pretty good. But what Cringely fails to note is that in Canada, for our elections, we are *typically* only voting for one thing: who will represent us in our riding. Whereas in the US voters are voting for people to represent them, and NUMEROUS referendum items. Canadian votes can be tallied quickly because we have so little to add up. Even using the Canadian system US votes would still take a MUCH longer time to tally.
The problem with attempting to create systems that are usable by literally anyone without assistance is the Windows problem: if you try to make something idiot proof, eventually they'll make a better idiot who will break your system.
The point is not that people with handicaps are idiots. The point is that it's not possible to design a voting system that can accommodate 100% of eligible voters in such a way that none of them will need help.
I'd go farther and say that when it comes to voting, it is far more important to focus upon security and reliability over usability. IMO the "benefits" of electronic voting are far outweighed by the liabilities.
Arrr!
Clean! Clean! Clean for Gene!
First, Second, Neutral, Park!
Hie thee hence, thou leafy narc!
The other issue with the Quebec referendumb is the ambigious question.
A paper ballot system works ok when there is only one race. In the next US election, most voters will have 3 federal-level races. Many will have a long list of state and local contests. I think it would be a long and error prone process to hand count ballots, each with dozens of races.
Engineers, Programmers, Designers, LEND ME YOUR EARS!
Too long have we toiled under the idiotic yoke of marketing, always trying to squeeze just one more useless checkbox feature to differentiate our product from the competition! Too long have we been forced by pointy-haired management to build overly-complex systems and ship them before they are mature!
Now is the time to throw off the chains of mediocrity!
One product, one function!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
How to vote in 1 easy step
I agree wholeheartedly with your first paragraph. I would rather a small minority of well-informed, intelligent people who have really thought about the issues do all the voting. Why do we even want millions of people out there casting votes just because MTV told them to, when they really have no idea who the candidates are or what they stand for? Rather than all these campaigns to get people to vote, why don't we see campaigns encouraging people to educate themselves on the issues and the candidates? If, after they understand the platforms, people see a real difference in the candidates they will naturally want to vote. It is very clear to me that the people who don't vote shouldn't be voting, because they obviously don't care. Why do we want apathetic masses randomly casting votes? Isn't this the worst possible situation?
Maybe partying will help...
Here, in Belgium, we also face a growing use of e-voting in cities.
What's the result?
Older people getting some "help" from the IT staff, at the loss of the secrecy of their vote, various crashes due to the complexity of the system and - most importantly - elimination of the public scrunity of the counting, again left to the "supervision" of the federal IT staff.
The complexity and closed nature of this system is bad for our democracy so we proposed another, simpler solution (in discussion at our senate):
Goes like this:
Keep our proven paper voting system (big red mark in a circle left to the candidate's name) and couple it with a fast optical counting system so that we can have paper trails AND almost-complete results by the evening news.
Our government alreay has this type of machines for the mail and knows how to use them efficiently.
I guess the US too.
./configure --enable-shared --disable-static && make world clean
Minnesota also uses this system.
http://electionmethods.org/
Actually, Paul Martin WAS elected. In the exact same way Jean Chretien was elected.
Would Canadians please realize that you're not voting for a Prime Minister, you're voting for a representative to Parliament, and that person in turn has a vote for the Prime Minister.
If you have a problem with this, maybe you'd think twice before you vote for a party.
This is the problem too many people voting for the party, not enough people voting for the person. I happily voted in the Burnaby Mountain riding for Svend Robinson because he was the person in my riding who best represented my political opinions and had the best track record amongst the candidates. And to think the Canadian Alliance representative almost beat him out. Does anybody even actually go to the debates anymore? The two people who clearly understood what they were talking about were the Conservative candidate and Svend. The Canadian Alliance guy consistently showed that all he was was someone reading off a piece of paper that Stockwell Day handed to him and really didn't understand a thing of politics. If I wanted someone like that in Parliament, I would have voted for the Rhinoceros party.
Fact of the matter is the Conservative candidate was a clear concise talker who understood the issues and showed himself to be a good representer of his constituents in parliament. But alas he got the least votes. Why? Because nobody likes Joe Clark! And it doesn't matter anyway anymore because now the Tories and the Alliance are looking to join up. So everybody that voted for a party leader basically threw their vote away.
Canadian system works, but only if people stop voting for the party and start voting for the representative.
Paul Martin was elected in the same respect that Chretien was elected: In his own riding. In no official terms did anybody outside of his riding put an X on "Jean Chretien, Liberal". So if you cast your vote for the Alliance or the Liberals based on the leader, then maybe you should go understand your voting system before you cast your next vote.
Karma: Non-Heinous
Problem: People are actually going to vote Democrat.
Solution: Voting machines manufactured by a pro-GOP company that do not leave a paper trail.
Simple, no?
We use this system in San Francisco and while I couldn't imagine how you could be confused by this, I witnessed it happen.
I went to vote sometime last year (we vote a few times a year in SF) and I waited behind a guy who was having the ballot explained to him.
The poll agent asked him if he knew how to mark the ballot and he said, "Yes, you just circle the arrow." She politely told him that he needed to connect the two lines of the arrow, to which he added, "And then circle it!" She said, "No, no need to circle it. Just connect the lines." He seemed to have gotten this and took his ballot away.
I got my ballot and began voting when I heard the agent say, "Sir, you seem to still be circling. Don't show me what you've voted, but show me what you are doing in the sample area." He proudly said, "I'm circling the arrows." At this point, having already finished, I turned in my ballot and left.
Just because its idiot proof doesn't mean we don't have idiots that can't figure it out. There are no voter eligibility standards in this country other than being over 18. Remember 50% of the country is below average intelligence and some of those on the border probably couldn't figure it out either.
The last time I voted in a US election (in Chicago), the ballot had (count them) 3 Federal races, 6 or so State races, a bunch of County races, a bunch of city races, and close to a hundred Judicial races plus some other stuff.
All of these races vary by jurisdiction: a given county board may have to print up dozens of variations on ballots because of different municipal and school board elections.
Comparing this mess with a country where you vote for one race at a time is just plain silly.
Maybe we elect too many officials. Maybe other countries elect too few. Who knows? But to compare a paper election in the US, and say that someone else manages to count the ballots in an hour is just plain silly. It can't be done when you've got ballots that make legal paper look tiny, and several hundred voters per precinct.
Sure, counting paper ballots is easy. Know why the vote counters should have their hands checked? The old pencil lead under the finger nail trick to invalidate ballots by scratching a mark outside of the box. And someone who actually looks at elections could go on and on and on.
John Roth
The difference between Canada and the US is that up north we have very few elections and very few elected officials. On the Federal level, I vote once, for my MP (members of parlement) and on the provincial level, its the same. And the prime minister (who holds executive power) is choosen by the assembly (ie he is the leader of the party with the most seats)... And then we vote for mayors and city council members and that's it! And more than that, all of those elections dont happen at the same time.. they are all separate... And they dont happen on fixed dates..
So why wouldnt our system work in the US? I've seen american ballots where people are are to answer dozens of questions.. To vote at the same time for the president, senator, congressman, governor, mayor, a few judges, prosecutors, etc, etc.. And not counting referendums... No one can keep up with so many races and carefully look at the candidates to pick the best one. America needs less votes for more democracy. Ohh and the ballots in there.. Its pretty easy to count when there is only one question to be counted for the whole evening... even the whole year.... When so many questions have to be counted, its a whole different matter...
So let me recapitulate.. the solution is to less elected officials and separate various levels of elections.. One question at a time!
"From bondage to spiritual faith; ... "And may I add that the map of the territory Bush won was (mostly) the land owned by the people of this great country. Not the citizens living in cities owned by the government and living off the government."
from spiritual faith to great courage;
from courage to liberty;
from liberty to abundance,
from abundance to selfishness;
from selfishness to complacency,
from complacency to apathy,
from apathy to dependency,
from dependence back into bondage."
Link to more: http://across.co.nz/democracy.html
-SittingBull
There is another advantage of paper ballots. They leave open the possibility of spoiling one's ballot paper. One problem with all the various machine solutions is that they offer a forced choice. What is a voter supposed to do if none of the candidates are worth voting for? There is no box for 'none of the above'. In the UK, each spoiled ballot paper is inspected by the various candidates, or their agents in order to determine whether the voter intended to vote for someone, but messed up. This provides and excellent opportunity to send a certain kind of message to the candidates. I know people who claimed to have written things like "Which ever way you vote, the government wins", or "Don't vote, it only encourages them", or even "Stop wars, eat politicians". With a paper-based system, the only limit is your imagination. With those voting machines, the voter is little different from a lab rat pulling a level. Sure, paper ballots are slower to count, but they still seem to work OK in the UK, with a population of 60 Million or so. Results are usually in by the early morning. This suggests that the Canadian style solution does in fact scale well.
When you have the vast majority of computer nerds/geeks arguing against making a system computerized then you should probably listen to them. When a group that is almost categorically in favor of a certain idea is convinced to argue against that idea, you know that you've stumbled upon a special circumstance that deserves some further consideration.
Of course they are, they're all high now!
thats what its good for; makes ordinary folk feel warm and fuzzy and as if they are actually involved.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Will I leave a paper trail?
The UK has about the same system as Canada, and it works well there too (having worked at a polling station and on the count). One of the problems the US faces is they have around 6 times as many elected officials per head of population, so there's a lot more to be decided on each ballot paper. Therefore the simple 'put an X here then count it' isn't necessarily the right solution for the US.
Or maybe it is, and they should cut down on the elections for city dog catcher.
Cheers, Paul
The big fuss is that the e-voting systems are being pushed because the last US presidential election fell within the margin of error of the voting system. This created an atmosphere of crisis. So rather than having an evolution of voting machines, we are getting a substandard product of crisis politics. Even worse, the crisis is being used as a justification for a great deal of pork barrel politics.
The evoting systems are coming from a flawed decision making process.
The development of closed source voting systems is also very anti-democratic. Ideally, voting sytems would have each logical step in the process open for criticism and review. Electronic voting is part of the democratic process. So this is a very good place for people favoring OSS to show case their ideals.
There are no voter eligibility standards in this country other than being over 18.
Simply being eligible to vote does not mean that someone actually can vote. In order to vote, one must be physically and mentally capable of voting. My grandfather in his final days might have been eligible, and perhaps even physically capable of voting if someone wheeled him into the room, but he was nowhere near mentally capable of voting.
You can make the voting process only so simple, but it is impossible to make it so simple that everyone can figure it out. Some people are just... baffled.
The ______ Agenda
The reason this is being done is the same damnfool reason too many decisions are made - the idea that this touchscreen tech is "cool" and "sexy" (I am put in mind of IBM ad - "Cool costs me money").
Then there is the drive of the US media - witness the 2000 elections - "With 0% of the vote in, we predict a landslide for Gore".
There is no meaningful reason we MUST have the election results within hours of the vote - that is why the vote is in November and the transfer of office in January.
Personally, I wish there were a legal BAN on ALL poll predictions for the entire day of the election. They can talk about the election being held, they can talk about how many people are turning out, they can talk about Michael Jackson's Daycare date for all I care, but NO PROJECTIONS OF THE OUTCOME.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Well, I don't vote.. I think it's pointless.. But I also think our system of voting (USA) is poorly designed for the technology we have. Why don't we have a multiple options. If I want to vote via the interne from home you'd think that would be an option. If I don't have a computer why don't we have the option to vote via phone? Phone broke? Ok then you can walk head out to your local public school and do it the old fashion way. I mean how hard can it be to setup a simple system where you login and vote.. It just boggles my mind.
Paper is better, but it wouldn't make as much money for Bush's cronies.
I like this! How plausible is this though when both the ruling elitist parties would have to concede some power to the people to allow this to happen?
The problem e-voting is designed to solve is obvious: elections were getting too hard to fix.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I had an idea.
1) Mail every registered voter a barcode and it's cleartext alphanumeric number, before the election.
2) They can either go to a website or vote in person somewhere, they put in the number (or scan in the barcode), choose their votes, and affirm that they placed the vote.
3) All results are posted in plaintext to a website. People can check the list to verify that their vote was correct and counted, and they can run their own stats to make sure the counts are correct.
Voting is anonymous because only the voting registration people know which unique ID's go to which people, people get new ID's for each election.
Good luck getting mt dew on the ballot, succa! This is a two-party system, and both parties are beholden to the same peoples.
We don't want to worry about the people who unthinkingly crumple, tear up, or swallow the "receipt" instead of putting it in the box.
Instead, we could just have the printed paper scroll into a visible, magnified window on the machine. The voter clicks "that's what I wanted", the record rolls out of sight into the locked box, and the curtain opens. If they click "Bush? WTF?" it trashes that receipt & vote and they try again.
The confirmation could be given simultaneously into a pair of headphones so that the blind could use the machine as well.
At the end of the voting, 3% of voting machines randomly selected, plus another 100 selected by each party, would be validated with a count of the paper receipts.
Any issues with that? Voter-verified paper trail, confirmation of intended vote, reliable and foolproof design, and accessibility. If the thing runs out of paper or ink, the voter wouldn't be able to verify, and would complain - and hopefully it would be simple to refill (or, better, let the thing hold enough supplies for double the expected voters! It doesn't have to be lightweight).
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
You still need to use voting hubs.
All it shows is a nicely designed, user interface. A client that's unaccessable by the internet.
The person votes on the machine, and the votes are stored on a server there.
No outside hacking, and its the same voting.
The problems come because its a change.
But there are more problems with paper voting as seen in the last presidential election.
The tough stuff would be allowing feedback to congressmen, so they could present polls, and people could "vote for a bill" over the internet. You have hackers at play, and you have people's voting bias skewed because some people can't afford computers.
God spoke to me
This is really juat a paper ballot system with a balanced set of partisian judges. The same kind of system is in place in most non-metro places in the USA. In fact, it was the partisianship that played such a major role in FL. You know, the state that cost Gore the election? The state where the current president's brother is govenor?
Paper ballots, or hanging chads either can be disputed and either can cause the problems again.
What we need is an auditable system of balloting that will beep at us if our choices aren't clear. Perhaps Windows would be good for this! Are you sure? OK Are you really sure? OK Please review your choices and press SUBMIT.
Perhaps you could then recieve a reciept with the poll, the date, and the time you cast your vote, you sign it and tear off the part with the time and date (to eliminate the possibility that anyone could tell how you voted) and turn it in to the election judge. A simple count of how many ballots versus how many reciepts there are would be a good audit.
People like that should be dragged out of the voting precinct and publicly shot in the street. For their own good, as well as the good of society.
Evoting was mandated under the "Help America Vote Act" in the wake of the Florida coup. Consequently, the new Evoting systems are designed SOLELY to address the problem of undervoting and overvoting. Unfortunately, that is relatively minor problem compared to the security and integrity of the overall voting process. Nothing in these Evoting systems is designed to improve security or the integrity of voting compared to paper ballots.
Here in the US, those were the machines we'd been using in Maryland for the past few elections.
Unfortunately the state government decided these new (shiney!) Diebold machines were better.
DNA just wants to be free...
But a webcam? Now there's an idea.
Find out if there's a soda or a beer without opening the door! Find out if the Fridge Light really goes off when you close the door.
And, of course, you could do time lapse images of your lettuce turning brown. Or that cheese growing green stuff.
This is the same system we have in San Francisco. We have many other problems with our voting, but confusing ballots, not in the least.
Also, not sure about the mentioned ones, the type is really quite large, the ballot it's self is close to 11x17 (inches). Even in our recent Governor's race, no name was too small to read, or figure out which arrow to black out.
If you are one in a million, then there are six thousand people who are just like you.
Once someone has the card, and the card can be used to vote without verifying one card per user, then the cards can be aggregated to give one person more than one vote.
Picture a drive/walk thru liquor store owner with political opinions. Offer to trade a fifth of top shelf for a voting card, and wach people beg buy & steal them from friends. I bet given enough time one person could acumulate a lot of cards in a manner such as this.
Liberal riding associations select delegates to attend the party leadership convention. The delegates promise to vote for the candidate(s) selected by the riding association, at least on the first ballot. Deal making is rampant.
Also participating in the leadership vote are friends of the party, party hacks, etc. This is often around 30 percent of the delegate count.
NDP/BQ follow the same process.
The Reform/Alliance/Conservative party allows all members of the party to vote directly for party leader.
The person chosen as leader of the party becomes the Prime Minister if more members of that party are elected than are elected for any other party. There is no vote by the general population for the Prime Minister, just the leadership convention delegates.
This applies also to provincial parties.
Voting machines are really hopelessly obscure and not open in any way and fraud is so easy that it is laughable and ridiculous to even consider them. The criminals will love it. It's a perfect way to make voting meaningless and to ensure that the US eventually becomes a dictatorship. Good luck to the sheep who are willing to let this happen -- soon you will be roast mutton.
And would that error be who should have rightfully been elected?
Or is it an off-by-one error on the count?
[Two very different errors, in my opinion]
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Maybe it works in Canada, but here in the good old Sue S of A it would be a farce. Wasn't it bad enough watching the "scrutineers" in Florida arguing over whether the chad was hanging or pregnant or dimpled or swinging? You think it's going to be any different arguing over whether that's an X or a checkmark or a Y? Sure, technology has its errors, but at least its errors tend to be fairly distributed among parties. At least, if the technology is implemented properly.
I'd like to see more attention paid to voter fraud. With the current system, felons and non-citizens are able to vote with little chance of detection. Plus there are many people who are registered to vote in more than one place. I've heard people brag about voting twice, once in each place that they are registered in. A growing trend is for political hacks to visit all of the local nursing homes and retirement communities, where they "assist" the residents with filling out absentee ballots.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Actually, this has been implemented, in the 2000 Presidential election to disenfranchise thousands of florida voters(most of whom were likely voting for Gore) http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/12/ 04/voter_file/print.html
I remember having counted paper ballots for the French parliement elections a few years ago. Anyone could volunteer, or at least look over shoulders if the counting tables where already staffed. We were randomly dispatched, four on each table. We were given a batch of envelopes then #1 would open the envelope, #2 read aloud the name, #3 tally the count on a piece of paper, #4 check again, or something like that. Ballots were pre-printed under the responsibility of each candidate, but any piece of paper with just a name on it was accepted. Any identifying mark or message added on a ballot would discard the ballot altogether (not counted), but discarded ballots were kept in a separate bunch so that the discarding could be appealed. Each batch was kept intact and the results were phoned in to the interior ministry, which would publish them station by station the next day so that the party representatives could check again. We were home about two and a half hours after the closing of the polls.
Well said.
Back when I was living in Canada, I never voted for the particular party, I always voted for the representative of my district whom I thought served my needs best.
Unfortunately, this also has the drawback that if the party of your representative does not make it into power (assuming that your representative does), then your representative may have his/her hands tied when it comes down to issues involving your community.
-- Joe
Yet another one, someone who cannot make a worthwhile statement without implying that the election in Florida was stolen...
The only thing that happened in Florida was to prove that law exist for a reason and a court cannot just throw it out because it doesn't agree with it.
Why should "everyone" calm down? Because you used a touch screen voting machine, and were herded through with no one in jackboots watching over your shoulder? I don't think so. Nothing in the system you described allowed for any accountability or verification that the vote you made was the one that was actually tallied, and there doesn't appear to be a way to do so using that method.
Without an audit trail there is no way to tell if fraud is being perpetrated or not. So, no, I will not "calm down", and I would hope that you might would reconsider your air of superiority in this matter.
...to vote. What I think we all want to see is reliable, secure remote voting (i.e. over the internet). For the millions who simply haven't got time to go to a polling place (60 hour work weeks at dead end jobs to support your kids will do that to 'ya), this could make it possible to vote. Add links on the voting site supporting both sides of the issue, and you'll have a (relatively) informed populace. Just imagine if every minimum wage slave in America voted. Democracy might actually matter.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The electoral college. It made great sense even up until the late 1900's, but now with communication as fast as it is, it just isn't necessary. Why should my vote count any less than another citizen in California? It shouldn't. The basic idea is this: your state gets a certain number of electoral votes. Let's say you vote for X, who receives 45% of the votes, and loses to Y, who gets 55%. Your state's representatives at the electoral college give all of their votes to Y, and your vote doesn't count for a thing. I say to hell with the electoral college. One citizen's vote is just as good as any other citizen's vote.
Gotta get me one of these!
A lot of orations on the subject of eVoting (not Cringely's article specifically, but many others, as well as posts here) seem to take the stand that the technology in question is inherently evil and cannot work for whatever reason. To me that seems to come from the (mis)conception that all things electronic are emphemeral and can be easily manipulated to whatever end. However, large scale electronic system on the accuracy of which ride many lives and billions of dollars (like aircraft navigation, communications networks, financial systems like stock exchanges and banks) exist and function in an acceptable manner, and a reliable voting system should not be any more difficult to make. All that's missing is an honest attempt at doing so, which the current voting machines most certainly are not.
Furthermore, as we've seen with the sketchy fun they had in Florida, where not only was the counting suspect but the voters lists were allegedly manipulated to disenfranchise potential Gore supporters (or so I hear), as well as in this Slashdot story, that where there's a will there's a way. The system failed in the face of wide-scale subversion by the authorities charged with enforcing it and who's to say that any other system (electronic or otherwise) would have fared better. Instead of trying to decide how much or how little technology should be thrown at the issue, maybe people should wake up and smell the gangrene - it is entirely possible that American democracy is faltering in a serious way.
Even as you read this, your pants are strangling your loins! Aaa!
That is exactly what we have at my precinct in San Mateo County, California. It's great. It's not perfect, however as I overheard the following checkange between an elderly voter and a pollworker
Pollworker: Sir, you need to revote, you can only vote for one person for governor (this was the Recall election, btw)
Voter: Right, one person per column.
Pollworker: No sir, one person period.
Voter: What about the back?
Pollworker: Out of all the candidates, front and back, you can only choose one.
and if they can't, they shouldn't be allowed to vote. Even my mom has never had a problem voting, ever.
So the Left needs to discredit any election in which their candidate loses.Hence E-Voting.
The real problem with Canadian elections isn't the method of balloting, it's that
1. There is no separation of powers: the government is merely the majority party in the legislature... this means, of course, that the government can never be defeated on any legislative measure, and, it means that there is no independent review (outside an unelected and nepotistic Senate, that, in practice, conducts no such review) of laws before they come into force.
2. There is a lot of waste as a result of the legal fiction that we're a monarchy. The Governor General and the Senate are undemocratic sinkholes for where misappropriated tax dollars, nepotism and influence peddling get drunk together.
3. The method of election itself is contrived: members of Parliament are elected for ridings which they ostensibly represent (much like US congressional districts)... however, unlike the US Senate or House of Representatives, the elected MPs are required by party discipline to fall in line when sitting in the Commons. This, coupled, with the lack of separation of powers means that governing party brass always supercedes local representation. However, thanks to the myth of local representation, proportional representation schemes (that could lead to an actual legislative matching of popular vote to distribution of seats) are overlooked in favour of a single-member plurality system (i.e. most number of votes, majority or not). Even, then, IRV could be used, but, it isn't.
Finally, there's no impetus to change these facts. None of the federal political parties have any interest in doing so, since, reforms to legislative/executive separation would mean less powerful governments and the only reforms to the (completely unelected, I might add) Senate that have ever been considered would have replaced it with a body called the "House of the Confederation," which ostensibly would have provided for an upper house with 6 seats to each province -- like the US Senate re: 2 per State.... but only as an "advisory" body with no teeth for independent review at all.
The only thing that prevents Canada from being a total fucking dictatorship is that we're tiny and we're not as rich as the US. With the ascension of Paul Martin, however, I expect things to get much nastier and American in the Canadian politics.
if it works for mexico, lets try it here too . . . ...
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
I don't understand this idea of giving the voter a receipt as a way of auditing...seems pretty flawed to me.
The solution seems pretty clear to me (I must be missing something). The impression I get from reading the replies to this post is that Americans want electronic voting machines because they have to vote for so many things all at once (as opposed to Canada where we pretty much just vote for one thing at a time). At the same time, they would like a paper trail so that they can verify that the machines are doing the right thing. So why not have your electronic voting machines print a *readable* receipt for the voter to verify. But instead of letting the voter take it home (and sell it, lose it, whatever), have them put it in a locked box on the way out. Then, if someone suspects that the machine is not doing the right thing, they can open up the box and count the receipts (with a bunch of officials/witnesses watching). E-voting with paper trail, non?
I personally prefer the option to evote. Why get stuck in the past? People who wanna paper vote, can, but those who want to evote, should be able to. Better yet, kind of like online banking and online bill payment, I'd love to vote from home. But one thing that's really missing is a public accounting of the votes, where every citizen can hop online and check their votes against the votes database, and the whole database could be downloaded and counted by anyone - especially historians and university professors would love to dig such databases. That's the ONLY way to have accountability and assure no tampering with the results. I don't trust the paper counters - who gets to pick those guys anyway?
"Canadian system works, but only if people stop voting for the party and start voting for the representative."
What nonsense. The last time I did that I wound up helping Brian Mulroney to another term. Never again.
The person with the power is the PM. If you care about that (and I think you should), then vote for the party whose leader would make the best PM, regardless of what sort of dipstick might be the local candidate.
The American system where one can vote directly for the President, and where there are two effective houses (as opposed to one effective and one lame), doesn't force this kind of choice, and is generally superior. All they need is to diminish the influence of special interests and to make the head of state a largely ceremonial office apart from the presidency and it would be spot on.
Have people sit around and manualy count votes? Whats wrong with simple-scan tron sheets? And how do punch-cards not produce a paper trail? What does cringly think they were counting during the florida recount?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The parent post is pure nonsense. Electronic voting doesn't bring anything new to the table for the blind anymore than it does for people with sight. Equating reading off the ballot choices to telling them how to vote is ludicrous and listening vs reading by braile is no more difficult than someone who listens vs reading visually.
Yep, it's true. Except I think it actually lasted for a couple days until a reporter kindly pointed out what the acronym spelled. And I think it should read Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance Party. Now, of course, instead of CCRAP you can vote for CRCAP. No wonder they just call themselves the Alliance.
I have to agree with Cringely. Any paper-base receipt is suseptable to abuse. Specifically, this allows someone to confirm how another person voted. Bought votes are possible this way.
Cringley is perpeutating a misunderstanding about the so-called "paper receipts" - that the voter takes them home, and can show them to another person to collect his graft. This is NOT what they are about.
They are not "receipts". They are "ballots". They are the OFFICIAL record of the vote. They are collected in at the polling place and placed in the ballot box. If there's any question about an automated count, a manual recount of these papers becomes the final tally.
The voting machine helps you fill them out, so there's no issue of improperly marked votes (like "hanging" or "dimpled" chads, Xes outside the box, or lightly filled-in mark cards) and no ballots "spoiled" by over-voting or other improper marking. But after the machine fills out your ballot you can check that it did that part of its job correctly - and try again if it screws up.
The voting machine MAY also count your vote as it creates these cards, to speed up the report. But the marked cards trump the voting machine's tally, which means they're the REAL record.
So let's clear the air by calling them what they are - human-verifiable machine-printed BALLOTS.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Everyone gets to watch the count if they so choose, amazing! You could get real Democracy with that!
Naw.
As long as you're voting on who will represent you you only get a real Republic.
Now if you change the rules so you vote directly on all the issues, rather than electing people to do it FOR you, you'd have a Democracy.
But I bet you wouldn't want to spend as much of your life arguing and voting as your representatives do. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I agree with "A solution searching for a problem". What's the problem with voting with paper? It's worked for hundreds of years, and I'm not aware of any problems inherit in it. And, any problems there may be, won't be fixed by electronic voting. If anything, complexity, and more potential for corruption will be introduced. Technology is *not* the cure-all, or in this case, the appropriate solution.
Use the Arthur C. Clarke theory of a Perfect Democracy, anyone who wants to be president shouldn't be president. The election should just b a random lottery. No hanging chads, punch cards, angry floridians, or haughty Canadians.
Sometimes, I am so ashamed to be a Canadian. We try so hard to not be Americans that we blindly accept a rigged system of government and swallow it as some kind of "sober" and "considered" approach.
Bullocks.
There is no separation of powers in Canada. This is essential to a meaningful democracy -- you cannot have a legislature that is dominated by the government and still have democracy...
The independent review, consideration and enactment of legislation by actual, meaningful, local delegates and an impartial executive that is charged with making the laws happen is key to a system of governance that has a shred of a chance of doing its job representing people and not corporations and other special interests.
In Canada, the people with the real power were not selected by the citizens at all, but, by elites in political parties who are but a fraction of the voting populace.
When we go to the polls, we ostensibly elect local representatives, but, those representatives are tied to party discipline: what we get isn't a representative who is free to vote with the views of his or her constituency (especially not if he is in the government), but someone who is required to vote in line with the party he represents.
Fuck, we need to get off our asses and demand:
1. An independent, generally elected chief executive.
2. A parliament independent of the executive, with an elected Senate to represent all provinces equally and an elected Commons to represent Canadians proportionally.
3. An electoral system based on proportional representation and, whenever it isn't possible, instant runoff voting.
4. A ban on all election financing, replacing it with a single government paid bursary for candidates and mandatory television and newspaper coverage... thereby eliminating the need for fundraisers, influence peddling, and Cretien's braindead "incumbancy benefit"
C'mon, Canucks, rise up!
The question implied by the subject line (a flawed solution in search of a problem) is the fundamental question here: Why do we need e-voting?
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Is it just so the news media can report results faster? (um
Is it because the candidates and the voters need to know sooner? (well
Is it because the process is more reliable than paper? (yeah, right
Is it because it costs less? (er
In the (proclaimed) pursuit of cost efficiency, democratic efficacy seems to have been abandoned. What Cringely didn't mention about the system in Canada: in the recent Ontario elections, an typical urban paper based polling station employed about 600 people. Those people were all engaged in the democratic process. The people involved as party and candidate scrutineers are on top of that. Those people were all involved in the democratic process, too. There is an excitement of sitting around the tube and watching results come in -- all the people who do that, are also engaged in the democratic process.
With e-voting (presuming that it actually works some day) I vote during some window of time, the poll closes, and instantly I know the result. Not much buildup, very little process.
In a time when fewer and fewer people are bothering to vote, could it be simply because they no longer feel engaged in the democratic process? In terms of democratic efficacy, we need to know how (or whether) e-voting makes this any better!
He suggests the Canadian method?
Whew. I thought the U.S. was going completely to crap, but at least one state gets it right.
Way to go, Canada!
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
The one problem with his suggestion, as I understand it, is that the states are responsible for the design of the ballot in the USA. In Canada, the ballot design is dictated by Elections Canada [...]
The US is a federation of States - the first of which were independent countries that allied to form a common market and united political and military response to external powers. Many of the later states were also independent countries that joined the alliance (though some were created on land which was under control of the alliance.)
As independent, mostly-soverign, nations they each elect their own officials by their own rules. Similarly, their representatives, senators, and presidential electors are their own officials, also elected by their own rules (though with a bit more input from the federal government).
Indeed, that's why the presidential electors from SOME states are winner-take-all and from others are proportional to the popular vote. It depends on what the state decided.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
First off, I am a Canadian, and my better half is blind. I've seen how she votes, using one of those paper templates, so I have first-hand knowledge of how the system works.
Most blind people can't read braille--somewhere on the order of 6-10% are proficient using this method.
Accordingly, braille ballots are essentially useless from that point of view. The templates that are used are made of paper, and have circles punched where the voter is supposed to put the X that marks the spot. The candidates are listed on the ballot in alphabetical order; it is no big deal for the election official to read off the list, and the person can count down the appropriate number of holes to mark their choice without any assistance whatsoever. Sometimes the low-tech solution is the best one after all.
At the last election, when I received my ballot, the number on top of the ballot was dutifully recorded by one of people at the table. I went behind the screen, marked my X, and folded up the paper. When I returned to the table, the person ensured that the number on the ballot was the same, and then tore off the number and passed me the ballot to place in the box (in full sight).
A common practice in struggling 'democracies' is to provide the voter with a filled in ballot, and the voter gets paid when he or she returns with a blank ballot. The unique number on the Canadian ballot prevents that practice. If I had tore off the number before leaving the screened area, I would have invalidated it.
You exactly describe the system used in statewide in Arizona. Have used it in the metro areas for a couple of years and just recently went state wide. Seems a good solution to me.
The ballot was pretty simple: you connected two parts of an arrow together that pointed at your choice of candidate. None of this Florida confusion, you literally pointed at who you were voting for! Then, the ballot was read by a scanner that was placed over a large box. The scanner confirmed that your vote had been counted correctly, and the box kept the ballot.
That would be the Optech Eagle, made by Sequoia Voting Systems, and popular in Northern California as well. They also make touch-screen systems, but they do note on the home page that it prints a paper copy for voter verification (not a batch print), and that their machines got a green light from the Nevada Gaming Commission, which probably has stricter standards on condom vending machines than Diebold has on their voting machines.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
The 1.81 per capita Elections Canada budget cited was for a non-election year.
The budget for the year of the last general election was not readily available on The Finance Department's website when I tried to find it (it was listed with many other programs as "Other" in the Annual Financial report, and the budget seems to be devoid of concrete figures).
I used to sit in the courthouse as a reporter while the votes were being counted off paper ballots. went quickly, no fuss, no muss.
if somebody did try to steal the election, I would've just called my anchor/news director, and we'd have their ass wall to wall and ten feet tall with their crime in progress. hard to stay bought when it's in the open.
screw all the contracts to somebody's brother in law, use recycled comic pages to print ballots on.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
One doesn't suggest the other. I think Canadians generally trust the system and sleep well knowing that the ballots are counted in the presence of people representing opposing sides. They get properly inflamed when the rules are violated (such as posting the eastern results before the western polls have closed), and many people stay up watching TV until after the winner is declared. You don't honestly expect people to stick around all afternoon just to watch their ballot box get counted, do you?
With the talking heads filling 24/7 programming with "news", come election day they have all ready declared the winner long before the polls have even closed in some states.
Most people vote for the party or it's leader, *not* their representitive. Why? Because in Canadian politics it's your only chance to have a say in what essentially acts as our 'executive', and individual members tend to get forced to vote certain ways by the party.
As much as I prefer most Canadian politicians to American politicians, our political system doesn't have as much protection in terms of separation of powers, (we have only 1 truly active legislative body, the senate has little function), and our Consitution is easily usurped with the 'notwithstanding-clause'. It makes me very worried to think what would happen if the Canadian Alliance were to come into power (which to a large extent is probably why the Liberals have such a stranglehold.) If the people running the US were running under the Canadian model... well, it would not be good.
...Canada would be rhythmic gymnastics.
Chalupa
Canada's making us look bad...solution: Bomb Canada, invade and steal it's natural resources, pollute the rest but give them a tax cut.
Disillusioned with the state of politics in your country?
Join the land of Freedot, your friendly new slashcode-based system of government!
Bills will be posted as articles, discussed pseudonymously and voted on anonymously. The database will be world-readable for easy auditing. Your votes will not be traceable back to you. Your primary key in the vote table will be stored, encrypted, in your user information, and your private key will be stored on your ID card.
Every contributing member of society will have a home, and Internet access within a short walk in the city, or within driving distance in rural areas. Everybody earning enough to live above the poverty level will be assessed an income tax amounting to a small percentage of their disposable income. Taxes will be light due to having done away with the expensive and inefficient decision-making governmental machinery in favor of a cheap, effective, online alternative. The revenue generated will finance the
Great political leaders will not be those with the most money, but those with the best words with which to voice their opinions. They will be known not by their names, but by their online pseudonyms, and because no one will know who they are, the State will not be able to quiet the voices of those who dissent with the majority opinion.
As Ben Harper puts it, "When the people lead, the leaders will have to follow."
Does anyone want to front the money for a patch of land and a small army?
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
First, he brings up the stupid false argument against a paper trail by equating a paper trail with voter receipts. The paper trail everyone advocates is where the precinct *keeps* the paper ballot. There's no receipt that the voter walks out with.
Second, if this HAVA thing is all based on a creative reading of the act, "Well, they said auditable but they don't really MEAN it", why can't someone just sue? This is just the sort of the thing that Supreme Court is made for, to smack down Congress when they write a stupid law.
skkkoooonnnggggkkk ptui
When people vote they should enter a code word. Then they could go home, go online on their personal machines and enter their code word to ensure their vote was cast accurately. Is it just me, or does it seem that a 2nd week computer science student could write the front end for an eVoting machine in a matter of 15 to 20 minutes? A team of professional programmers could develop a voting system that includes proper security and transmits the votes to a database online is less than a week! While I am not a huge proponent of open source software, it would obviously need to eliminate security through obscurity. Then the only tough part is making sure that client machines are not altered to sway votes. See the first paragraph for my solution.
http://brandonbloom.name
I find it odd that the tech community seems so against e-voting. Perhaps its just the methods suggested.. IE closed code etc... But it surprises me that many seem to think its impossible to do right.... or even that it could be better than the current system. For those that suggest perhaps thats a good reason to doubt the ability of an electoric voting system I point out that those 'most' knowlegeable once also decried the posibility that the world was round, that the sun revolved around the earth and any number of other things that later prooved not to be the case. Just because computer geeks are having a ludite reaction to an encroaching technology does not mean that the reaction is a valid one.
given a working valid system...
Results are instant.
ballots cannot be incomplete or improperly filled out.
Certification can be more in depth.. cross checking with other databases to make sure dead people to vote for instance.
absentee voting can be made possible without mail in votes, and they can vote when everyone else does at electronic voting stations. Though I grant for that to work you need a national standard voting system that is always available ( permanent voting stations as opposed to temp ). Colleges, embasies, military bases and similar places would have permanent voting facilities to allow for people away from home to vote when needed.
All of those are problems that can be addressed and all but eliminated by an electonic voting system that are almost impossible to irradicate from a physcial paper voting system.
There is the possibility for fraud obviously... but so is there in the current system. In fact its rampant in the current system, especially in the mess of systems used across the nation due to no standard voting system in the US.
I think most people seem to focus on the possibility of remote fraud, and the possibility of a far more easily manipulated system. HOWEVER remote manipulation also means remote verification. People tend to evaluate the certification process based on the older system without thinking of the new implications for verification possible. This whole argument reminds me of the begining of E-commerce and the fear of credit fraud so bad no body would buy online.... yet how many people shop on amazon and e-bay now ?
In short the problem is solveable/manageable, and the potential gains in instant returns and far smaller inherent margian of error matched with the ability to make voting far more available far outweigh the potential problems in my opinion.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
It's important to realize that the controversy over electronic voting machines is with a very specific makes and models. Being against *all* electronic voting machines is very misguided.
Most electronic voting machines in Indiana are Microvote-464s. In my district, Elkhart county uses scantron while the rest use th 464s. Election returns come in within an hour from the counties with the 464s and hardly a dispute, whereas Elkhart county never comes in until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, and there's always concern over miscounted votes. Let's face it, Scantron is inaccurate.
First available in 1986, the Microvote-464 these sweet little machines don't leave a whole lot of room for election hanky-panky. A number of particularly good features:
The "screens" are paper. This has the distinct advantage that the machine has *no idea* of which candidate corresponds to which button. All the machine is doing is tallying how times a particular button is "pushed." (I put pushed in quotes because you can change your vote until you confirm your ballot.)
The machine is activated by a remote console staffed by poll workers. When they see somebody go into the booth, they hit a button to allow the person to vote. Makes it very hard to double vote!
When the sheriff's office preps the machines for an election, it is done in the presence of representatives from each party. There are several physically separate chambers in the machine, one of which has controls for a clock. The clock is set so that the machine can't be used at all until election day, and then that compartment is sealed using seals from the respective parties. Another compartment contains paper recipts for the votes for that day, which are constantly printed in randomized order throughout the day.
The Canadian PM is entirely different from the American President. The President was designed to form a balance against the legislature. It is common for Americans to give Congress to one party and the presidency to the other major party. This precents a run-away situation, like has happened in the last two years with the Republican controlled Congress voting for everything they desire with the approval of a Republican President. If there was a Democratic President, things would have been a lot different.
The pencil lead trick does not work becuase we use pens fuckwit.
We also have multiple people counting the ballot, and to spoil it you have to do more than write a
line somewhere on the outside.
Plus you'd also have to do this hundreds of times while being watched as you count.
So stopmaking up spurious reasons to defned your assine voting system.
Unfortunately, Brazilians speak Portuguese but since when did racist scumbags like you start caring about these things?
You could even do it with one monitor, and some sort of switch. Or maybe one sends to the other the apparent candidate, and that one asks again, with a picture, "this guy?"
Then they're already connected and phone in. Or am I nuts?
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Score 3? For what? Being wrong, at length? - smirkleton
IANAPS (I am not a political scientist) but let us think about IRV. First, consider that our system of government was at least vaguely thought out but the election process, with primaries and political parties just sort of evolved to suit government. Still the two are very much intertwined, and if you start changing one you will end up changing the other.
Now, the main problem with IRV is that it completely fragments the political process. The House would end up having like 30+ parties controlling it. I know it sounds great, all sorts of viewpoints represented from society in one grand forum to govern it. But doing this would, in fact, destroy Congress and American democracy because it destroys the majority. Our entire government is based on a majority, and without it Congress doesn't work. The majority party controls procedures, committees, and appointments.
There will still be a majority party of course, it just won't be 50 percent +1 (simple majority) of the congressmen anymore. But Congress needs a majority it is what the It isn't the same though, you have coalitional government, and this won't work under the Constitution. All sorts of things can happen like many small factions joining together or a large faction and a few small ones. But the key here is the small factions.
You see what will likely happen is that Republicans will elect 30 percent, Democrats 40 and the rest will be third/single issue partiers and a few independents. Now the Democrats and Republicans will try to form a 50 percent coalition so they will cater to the small factions' issues because they will determine majority. Do you see what IRV did? It turned our nice little moderate representative democracy (and yes the US is very moderate) into an unstable and extremist oligarchy with an agenda that can change everyday. IRV, with our current system will, give the people with the least amount of support the most power, and that's not democracy.
Yes, I am aware IRV works in many other countries, but they do not have a system of government based on majority rule like ours, it is usually parliamentary. Changing how we elect representatives in any way will require we scrap the Constitution and write a new one, and I do not want to see that happen, if you look at other more modern constitutions you will see why.
Slashdot comments can be accurate, highly modded, or posted quickly. Pick two.
Our elections have probably been fixed ever since we started using mechanical voting machines early in this century. Maybe even longer. Maybe now this blatant, large-scale electronic election-rigging will finally wake people up to the problem & they'll realize they're being conned. At least now most thinking people will know its rigged & some momentum for real change can begin to accumulate.
At least you get five choices taken semi-seriously. The states, only two parties get taken very seriously, which is ironic considering they're the two joke choices. One party with no stand on the issues whatsoever, exactly like the major opposing party but makes a feeble effort to do the right thing; and another party that still thinks we're in the early 1900s and sells out shamelessly to the highest bidder. Americans: Vote Walt Brown for President in '04.
Help us build a better map!
We still have a government that sucks, of course, but at least I feel confident it's the one that the majority of idio^h^h^h^h citizens voted for.
Christian Engström, Former Member of the European Parliament 2009-2014 for The Pirate Party, Sweden
There are positives and negatives to voting for the person and to voting along party lines. For the record, I follow the first approach generally, and have at various times voted Liberal, NDP and PC. Not infrequently I have voted one party for my MP choice, and then next provincial election voted another party for my MLA choice. No Reform down this way, so that never happened. (Yes, yes, I know, no more Reform, no more PC).
It's always a tossup. Because there is the person that you vote for, and then there is the party philosophy (the real one, not the one that you see in their brochures necessarily). The person of party X must hew reasonably closely to the doctrine of party X, so that definitely must also be taken into account. What do you do if the candidate from party A is individually better, but the party doctrine for party B is much better, even though your local candidate for party B is mediocre?
Especially if polls show that party B will take the province or the country, most likely, does it matter at all whether the local candidate for B is sub-par? They'll be recognized for their qualities (or lack thereof), won't be in Cabinet, and won't be able to frig things up anyhow. But because your riding is now one where someone from the new ruling party was elected, your riding will get more perks than otherwise.
You also have to take into account as to whether it looks like a minority gov't may happen, as occurred here in Nova Scotia. Then all bets are off. Do you want to do a prevent defense by casting a vote for the front-running party (whose platform you like), hoping that the possibility of a minority gov't can be staved off, or do you go with your favourite local candidate from another party (who will never get into power and you like their platform less) because you know that in a minority gov't they will still have useful ability to affect things in your riding? And because they are actually the more competent individual, will be better at doing that?
For example, last election (provincial level), it was pretty obvious that a minority was going to happen, but with the Tories being the ones to form the government. I don't like the overall NDP platform much, but they tend to be good representatives, so I have voted that way in the last provincial and federal elections, comfortably secure that the party itself would not win. So we ended up with the best of both worlds - a minority Tory gov't, but an NDP powerbase in HRM, with my MLA being NDP also, and now they have a bit of clout. Not to mention, the local Tory candidate for MLA had a record for failing businesses, so it was nice to see him not make it in.
One way to perpetrate a lie is to omit the truth
The NY Times, Miami Herald, and a few other liberal papers got together right after the presidential election and "counted all the votes" in Florida, just to prove that Gore really won. Guess what? They conceded that in every way of counting the ballots, G. W. Bush actually won.
Of course that was printed in a small by-line on page ten (or somewhere equally obscure) of the NY Times, I stumbled on it (years ago) while doing a search for something else. If they had determined that Al Bore won don't you think it would have been on page one, and for a month? Was it?
Get over it.
As to "security and integrity" in the voting system, it always comes down to this: "The people who vote don't count, it's the people who count the votes who do." - Joe Stalin
I'm Aime Watts, and that's the way it is.
Keeper of the terrible karma ---
Once this technology is proven, this could become a valuable electronic polling tool, not just an e-voting tool. People would be able to vote directly on important issues. Right now, people only elect officials, who look at unofficial news polls to see what the populace thinks, and then tries to act in a way that would get them re-elected. We can do better than this, the technology to accurately determine what every single person in the city/state/nation thinks on important issues just hasn't existed in the past.
Granted, the whole Diebold thing is grossly botched up, and is a major step backwards in terms of voting transparency.
Sometimes the low-tech solution is the right one.
I suppose that you could design an electronic, computerized, high-tech door stop that sat on a charger, and when you yelled out "door stop" jumped on to the floor, scooted across the room, and jambed itself under the door. But a simple rubber wedge works better (imaging chasing the high-tech one down the hallway when it malfunctioned).
The trouble in the voting situation, as Cringley points out, is that the low-tech solution is so much cheaper that companies lobby to replace it with a far more expensive one.
Even better: if you live anywhere West of Ontario you can find out who wins before you even go to vote!
I wonder how many people modded this up or down without catching the reference.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling