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."
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!
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.)
I don't know anything about Canadian politicians. How would a mere Floridian know who to vote for?
I drank what? -- Socrates
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
But nowhere in his new column does he answer the question. I am disapointed.
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.
--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.
>> Not making use of technology in the information age just doesn't make good sense.
So you're the dumb F&*% that wants to put a web browser in my refridgerator?
Over-use of technology when there's no need for it is a bigger mistake than not implementing the "latest and greatest" when you have a system that already works.
(not to say that the US voting system works)
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Actually, here in Sna Antonio, TX, they now use the Devil-spawned touchscreens with no paper audit trail.
You enter your votes; the machine says "thanks." And off you go.
You can hope it stored your votes correctly.
You can hope it will copy the votes into the data transmission devive they use to collect those votes.
You can hope the central system that reads that device correctly collects and reports all the votes.
But you cannot *know*.
And not a blind, ignorant, tottering ex-NYC Floridian in sight to blame it on.
Hell, I would LOVE paper ballots over this system!
READ the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the other amendments! http://lcweb2.loc.gov/const/const.html
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.
Not to mention the fact that is cost effective, especially when compared to all of the electronic touch-screen systems they're implementing some of the California counties. LA is claiming the touch-screens are more handicapped accessible and are bilingual, but the paper methods are as well. And a paper trail is probably better than any electronic one.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
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.
And the ol' fashioned paper method may work for Canada, but there's only, what, 5 people that actually live there, eh?
Why do people keep bringing this up as a reason paper ballots won't work? The USA has 10 times the population of Canada; that means we have 10 times as many people to help count ballots, and 10 times the tax base to pay them.
Here's another way of looking at it: Let's say each precinct has 1000 voters, and requires 10 people to count ballots. It doesn't matter how many precincts there are. Whatever the size of the country, you just need 1% of the people in each precinct to be willing to count ballots.
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
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...
Please don't confuse the Canadian system with American system. We don't hold "Presidential" elections per se; the point of an election in Canada is to elect Members of Parliament. The Prime Minister is the leader of the party that wins the most seats, and is appointed by the party. The PM is never directly elected by the general electorate.
Thus, in the last election, Jean Chretien was not elected as PM (although he was elected in his riding to the House of Commons); he was the leader of the party that was elected to the most seats. Now, Paul Martin is the leader of the Liberal party, so he is Prime Minister. I see nothing spooky about this whatsoever.
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 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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.