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The State of Electronic Voting in Georgia
An anonymous reader writes "The AJC is reporting on the current state of electronic voting in Georgia. The article discusses both sides of the debate and mentions Bev Harris and her work at Black Box Voting. Is touch screen voting the best solution available or is a conspiracy afoot?"
I've yet to hear a cogent statement of the problem that electronic voting will fix.
Many of the statements sound similar to the first comments about office automation. Computing was introduced into the office "just because", without a lot of thought going into which procedures should be automated vs. eliminated entirely vs. left alone.
A paper ballot (be it punch card, pencil fill in, or what have you) can't crash, is a permanent record (yeah yeah, they can be destroyed, but so can anything made up of atoms. I'll drop a stack of paper from 5' and you drop a touch screen from 5', we'll see which one survives), and can't be easily intercepted or altered without evidence of tampering.
What problem are electronic voting advocates trying to solve?
We need transparency in the voting process if we are going to move to electronic voting. The current proposed system is simply unacceptable. Bev Harris is doing a wonderful job bringing attention to this train-wreck waiting to happen.
Currently, we have companies making the voting software which is not transparant, which have ties to political parties (from the top of the company, no less), and to top it off apparently can't design a decent, reliable application to save their very lives.
As I said before, THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE
I'm not worried about germs or anything... but seeing a bunch of finger-print crud on one place on the screen when you're about to place your vote might have some impact, not even considering the basic security concerns.
What's wrong with paper & pencil? Countries all over the world count those in remarkably small ammounts of time - do we HAVE to have an instant ballot in exchange for a loss of a paper trail and many layers of security concerns? This part is already redundant... but it NEEDS to be redundantly said to as many people as possible.
Ryan Fenton
Please note the USA flag just to the right of the post.
If you have images off, it's not going to take more than 5 seconds to figure out which Georgia we're talking about.
This is truly horrible... apparently Florida has decided that since it is not possible to do a recount for electronic voting machines, it is not necessary to attempt anything of the sort. Realize that the next election might be hacked, support Rush Holt's Voter Confidence bill, and don't forget to get the Diebold memos from the SCDC.
Free Speech, Free Software, Free Culture
One of the best arguments in the article is this:
"What we do know is that every condition needed for fraud did exist. The question is not whether it has happened. The question is whether it can happen."
Granted, there's no perfect security. But electronic voting companies seem to have a problem at least making an attempt to fix any possible vulnerabilities. When the Patriot Act passed 98-1 in the Senate, the lone dissenter (Russ Feingold of WI) said that it's not whether or not people have abused the law... it's that the potential exists. Sometimes it's really hard to teach someone the value of security until they've been victimized/directly affected by it. The problem, unfortunately, is proving that it happened.
With regard to Cox's response on a paper trail:
"It really adds nothing to the system, [and] the people who think it will don't understand the history of voter fraud we've had with paper."
Personally, I don't think removing one potential of fraud and replacing it with another really solves any problem. And suppose something does go wrong (massive failure, serious bug, fraud)? Is there anything to fall back on? And at least if you want to fix the elections, it makes it a bit more difficult.
The whole point of electronic voting is to get around the recount mess. The election officials don't want to wind up on TV like they did in Florida in 2000. So they devise a system that can't be recounted. They get the people that sells it to clam it is perfect, why would anybody need to recount?
They will not wind up on TV and the same people who have faked votes over history (LBJ in Texas, Daily in Chicago, etc.) can keep doing their thing. There is a long history of vote fraud in the USA. Those in charge just don't want it to wind up on TV and embarrassing themselfs.
Supposedly there have been a lot of "patches" installed right before election day here in Georgia. There is no source code overview that I can tell. They keep telling us the machines are perfect, but they don't tell you what deficiencies are being "patched" with all these "patches."
As far as I'm concerned, these "patches" are "patching" the election results, not the voting equipment.
The solution? "Lets use computers." Yet some how the assumption leaked in that the computers used to do the balloting had to be the same machines that tallied the votes as well. This is a paradigm that should be abollished as soon as possible. While we fix one problem (ballots not reflecting voter preferences properly), we introduce another (allowing increased access to the device doing the tallying).
The solution as the original comment said is to split the process. Use computers to create 'standardized' ballots, and to simplify/error check each voters choice making. And let the voter see a human readable ballot that they can confirm and turn in at a different part of the polling station.
Tallying can be done in a sepparate process, much the way scan-tron type ballots are counted today quickly and accurately.
Some thoughts / added benefits:
1. The paper trail. Voters see their votes correctly printed on paper. And the ballot machines can be used as a double check to make sure no ballots were destroyed. (added reassurance against tampering, since now it requires a coordinated attack both physical and electronic).
2. If you make the ballot human & computer readable (just like your account number on checks) you can verrify the ballot and not have to assume that the bar code the ballot machine produces matches the text.
3. If the ballot form is standardized then the voting equipment becomes commoditized. States / localities can choose the balloting and tallying equipment manufacturers to buy from independently and no one is tied to a given manufacturer for either device. They can even purchace from more than one vendor for the balloting devices. This will drive down prices, as well as letting the govornment take trustworthiness into account when purchacing equipment.
It would be great if legislatures could demand this type of system instead of letting each district try to 'roll your own' and get unknown results in terms of reliability / trustworthiness. It would also mean we wouldn't have to put anywhere near as much trust in the makers of the machines.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
I have a blog about the issue in Canada: Paper Vote Canada.
"Is touch screen voting the best solution available or is a conspiracy afoot?"
What sort of stupid question is that? Next up on Slashdot! Clothing! Does it cure cancer, or will it cause the downfall of civilization as we know it?
Correct voting answer - it fixes some serious problems with current systems, introduces some potentially serious problems, and is being pushed not as part of an Evil Conspiracy, but by well-meaning but niave people who seek a technological panacea despite not really understanding the concepts involved. It's cargo cult security - "these systems are secure, and they're electronic, so lets if we need security, we just need to make everything electronic!". Morons.
Stop posting about electronic voting in the US every other day. We're geeks, not philosophy or politics majors, and often not even american. A couple of those a year I can stand, but every fucking week you have 2-3 articles about electronic voting systems.
... mainly "I don't trust electronic voting", which is reasonable, but uninformative.
Amen to that.
I'm concerned about this issue -- it's a hot button for me -- but damn, the responses cover a very limited range, over and over
-kgj
-kgj
Is touch screen voting the best solution available or is a conspiracy afoot?
This totally misses the point. The point is not whether voter fraud has been committed, the point is that there's no way to tell if it was or wasn't.
Diebold's system is completely proprietary; we can't examine it to see if there are any "loopholes" or not, and we can't check its security. We can't go back and audit to make sure nothing funny happened. Adding icing to the cake, the Diebold leadership is openly pro-Republican.
To summarize; by adopting Diebold's system here in GA, we've privatized the election by giving complete control over it to a private corporation that's biased in favor of a particular outcome. To say it smells fishy would be an understatement of monumental proportions.
Instead of focusing on whether fraud occurred or not, we need to be demanding an election system that is auditable and verifiable to the people. Open elections are key to democracy; Diebold's system is anything but open.
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It can sound zealot, but I mean it. How can you accept a voting booth if you can't count the votes. Same in the code. If you can't see the code, it the source isn't open for every citizen to look at it, how can it be call democracy?
DON'T PANIC
While I really appreciate the work Bev and many others have done to bring this to the public's attention, I know in my heart it is not the fastest solution.
An act of civil disobediance is needed by MANY people across the US. Simply disseminate via internet simple instructions for how to adjust the votes on various types of electronic machines, and use them to cast an enourmous amount of votes for the least likely canidate in every single election. If this happened in even a few cases around the country the news and governement would have no choice but to take electronic tampering completely seriously. If it happened thousands of times in the next election I think Diebold, et al, would most likely backpedal to an open source and completely transparent system so fast it'd set their boardroom carpets afire.
Would I myself chance jail in order to commit an act of civil disobediance which could forever ensure the future of voting is fair and trustworthy for ordinary citizens? Just show me the simple instructions on how to get the job done...
Jonah Hex
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I actually have the same exact question. Now, I consider myself a quasi-decent programmer, and I could probably write a program in about 5 minutes, that can tally votes from people and will have 0 bugs in it. It'll take a little longer to make it flexible to more than just vote for one candidate, most votes wins (such as vote for 5 of 7 judges). Now I understand that the touchscreen program is most likely rather complex but isn't this just an I/O interface? Why are there even bugs in software that's supposed to log if you picked option a, b, c, etc. and count how many picked each option?
I would love to be enlightened as to why this is. Another somewhat-related question. I know of a school district near me that licenses software for about $50,000 a year (US$ for you international people) to keep track of students grades/test scores/keep this information confidential. Now I'm sure the software must have some added functionality, but how is it that software that can be easily written by a first year undergraduate student (I could definitely do basic data-base information, querying/searching/basic encryption last year), can cost so much and people will pay for it?
Choose conspiracy, and everyone denies what you just said on the grounds it's looney because they've been programmed by television and movies not to believe the whacko person spouting truth, instead of using their brains. Heck, even in school they teach you to use CNN or Reuters, BBC and other sources instead of the internet. Don't listen to the people with good information and proof that can be copied the world around kids, Fox is spouting about how some kid got killed tonight in a horrible way, and then there's commercials about RFID tags to keep the kids safe! Talk about a pide piper.
.50 cal hidden behind the red carpet tempts a bull.
Tell me this, 2 identical counties, in 2 different states. Both with records of voting unanimously democratic for a number of decades, all of a sudden one votes unanimously republican. The difference? The voting machines. When you trace back the money, the republicans have themselves knee deep in the whole mess. The democrats aren't much better.
Paranoia is one thing, Mr Funny, the scientific process is another. What I think is that our representitives have forgotten one thing; they're here to serve us, they are here for us, not for themselves. This is a republic of the people and for the people, and while many are asleep at the wheel so to speak, americans aren't dumb, just slow to anger. Everyone speaks of our political times as "interesting", in the tense of how a bull fighter with a
Sometimes I think a constitutional amendment stating that all voting mechanisms must be open to all to see, a paper ballot alternative must be available and counted, a paper reciept must be issued with every vote, and if 5% or 10% of the people want a recount or revote (via signed petition), one happens would be a good idea. But I understand it's our responsability to stop these freaks of nature from destroying our republic.
There's a lot of damned fine red blood on those red stripes, gallons of sweat on the white stripes, and billions of tears for stars with a dark backround on the American flag. I'd die before I'd let tyrrany be instituted in this country.
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