Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
Here's how: "An often overlooked approach to getting the attention of your representatives is to get involved in their campaign. Very few people contribute money or time to a campaign, and those that do are rewarded by having the ear of the politician when they are elected. Even if they aren't elected, they usually have influence on those that are elected, and there is always the possibility that they will run again." Source
-cp-
President Bush to Liberate Alaska!
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.
California's Secretary of State announced last month that California will have a paper trail for its electronic voting machines (starting in mid-'05). It's a good thing IMHO. press release(PDF)
How to vote in 1 easy step
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
Today on NPR there was a story about a conference here in the PRM (People's Republic of Maryland) about e-voting. One salesman representing the company that makes all of Denmark's (I think) voting machines. They don't require a paper trail, and he thought the Americans were being silly. His machines are so accurate that if the entire population of the world voted, there would be one error on his machines. The population of Denmark is just fine trusting the machines.
I almost spit my soda all over the dashboard.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
US cost $3.27
One of the main reasons it's cheaper is because all elections are run by a single body, Elections Canada, but in the U.S. elections are generally run by individual counties, each having to make their own ballots and having their own procedures. This also adds to the problem where poorer counties would have to make do with older equipment.
It would be cheaper and more efficient if each state had a single body that administered elections, buying equipment in bulk, but most states "pass the buck" onto counties for budget reasons, even though it ends up costing taxpayers more in the end.
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.
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.