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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?"
When there's a choice between conspiracy or no conspiracy, always go with conspiracy. If it's true, you'll be right and prepared to overthrow the government. If you're wrong, oh well, no big deal, at least there wasn't a conspiracy.
here
Some profs doubt the reliability of the proposed voting equipment (!)
I believe there has to be some secure way of implementing touchscreens. Just because we use technology it doesn't mean we have to be stepping into unknown territory. Someone needs to sit down and think up a better way of counting votes but still have it be electronic. Some of you may cringe at the thought of your vote being counted as a bit but I cringe at the thought of a human counting votes in his head.
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
The _State_ of Electronic Voting in Georgia. It says it right there, duh... ;)
A touch screen voting booth that lets voters select the canidates they want.
After the voter casts their vote the booth prints out a ballot that's a machine readable.
The voter checks to make sure that the canidates they selected are recorded on the ballot and feeds it into a optical reader. It's this machine that actually records the voter's vote.
The touch screen machines and the optical reader should be produced by two seprate companies and operate on different networks and they should both keep a tally. If the two systems ever get out of synch we will automatically know that a problem has occured. If such cases we can fall back on the paper ballet. Since it was laser printed it will avoid all the problems Florida judges had with hanging chads and strange marks left by stupid voters.
This way not only do we get the benifit of a machine count but a paper trail to boot.
Our country is doing quite well as it is, so why do we need this "voting" business? That sort of thing can only harm our unity and national security
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
And I actually helped the local district preview the new touch screen machines at my college. The damn things are frightening - they don't look well built and the lack of a paper trail is scary. There is some murmur down here that Max Cleland lost his race (despite giving three limbs for his nation) because of "voting irregularities."
I hope the Republicans don't use these machines to pull a fast one - if we find out after the fact, we won't get to change Presidents, as happened in 2000.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
Its a joke, when the whole election fiasco was going on you had dozens of old people being paraded out onto national TV telling everyone how stupid they are. They couldnt figure out the ballot and thought they might have voted for the wrong person.
The "old" people I know were offended by the media getting these idiots and making them all look ignorant.
But you are right, the ballot wasnt confusing (I was in FL at the time) and election workers will help out.
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.
I spoke to Rep. Lewis about this issue at one of his "Meet and Greet" sessions several months ago. Contacting your representative *does* have an impact.
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.
I have a blog about the issue in Canada: Paper Vote Canada.
I made a post about this in the SCDC livejournal community, which I'll quote here:
Q: So why do people want electronic voting? What are the perceived benefits?
A: Electronic voting is largely popular because of the perception that it will fix problems like those experienced in Florida in the 2000 presidential election. The Help America Vote Act made tons and tons of federal money available for voting technology, and companies like Diebold rushed into production with shoddy products in order to capture marketshare.
Of course, the irony is that with paperless (read: un-auditable) machines, there is both an increased risk of vote-counting problems (as the Diebold e-mail archive demonstrates) and NO MECHANISM to recount the votes. In other words, if another Florida happens, we'll basically just have to flip a coin.
One of the most important arguments in favor of electronic voting machines is that they will enable the disabled to vote unassisted. For instance, DRE's can tell blind people the options through headphones. This is a noble goal, and it is a valid reason to want to have electronic voting machines. The thing is, why is it not sufficient to make an electronic ballot-printing machine, which then could be verified by a blind person using a simple barcode scanner, or which could be printed with raised letters? Why must the voting be completely electronic (i.e. Direct Recording Electronic)? Is it right to say that just because a blind person may not be able to verify a printed paper ballot on their own, that nobody else should be allowed to verify their votes either? There are certainly ways that ballots could be designed that would allow blind people to verify their votes without assistance, but even if this were impossible, that wouldn't be a good reason to eliminate paper ballots, it is merely an argument for machines that aid in filling out and verifying the ballots.
Finally, there are the arguments that electronic voting allows us to tally votes cheaper and quicker. My response is that we should take the time and money to get our elections right. Also, DRE's aren't more efficient at tallying our votes if they don't record our votes at all.
Unless we can build an electronic voting system that can meet these specifications before the 2004 election, I have little confidence in any vote cast using DRE's, and I recommend at least a temporary return to old-fashioned hand-written and hand-counted paper ballots.
Free Speech, Free Software, Free Culture
"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
Florida's enlightened judiciary has found a Catch-22 way out of a state congressman's lawsuit to require auditable paper trails in voting machines there.
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make install -not war
Read this article from the NYT.
There are many on slashdot who won't even register for nyt. Just read this and it will make you privacy panaroids cringe.
"This is a complicated business. Each party's databank has the name of every one of the 168 million or so registered voters in the country, cross-indexed with phone numbers, addresses, voting history, income range and so on -- up to as many as several hundred points of data on each voter. The information has been acquired from state voter-registration rolls, census reports, consumer data-mining companies and direct marketing vendors. The parties have also amassed detailed information about the political and social beliefs that you might have shared with canvassers who have phoned or knocked on the door over the past few years. While specifics vary, a typical voter profile like my own, for instance, would show my age, address, phone numbers; which elections I've voted in over the past 10 or 15 years and whether I've ever voted on an absentee ballot; and my e-mail address. It would include my New Jersey party registration (Democrat), whether I've ever made a political donation (none that I recall), my approximate income, my ethnicity, my marital status and the number of children living in my house. Thanks to the ready availability of subscriber lists, mortgage data and product warranty information, the parties might use records of the newspapers I read (this one), the computer I work on (a Macintosh), the men's-wear catalogs I receive (Brooks Brothers, Land's End) and the loan-to-value ratio of my home."
And you guys spew vitriol over website registrations? That's the least of your worries...
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.
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
The reason voting should always have a paper trail is because no one can make changes to 100,000 pieces of paper in three hundred different locations without some major difficulty. It would require massive manpower and a lot of time. Changing 100,000 lines in a database can be accomplished by one person in less than five minutes.
I don't trust anyone that governs me to sit the right way on a toilet seat, much less control an easily tampered file that keeps them in power.
(Apologies to Rowan Atkinson.)
I am an election judge for the upcoming primary in MD, and we had to take a class on our new electronic voting machines, made by Diebold. Unlike the system described in the article, the ballots themselves are not encoded with the ballots, simply the party of the person voting. If your card has bits set the certain way, your ballot will pop-up for which ever party is encoded on the card. The only problems are when the card operator punches in the wrong party, then I would have to go over to the machine and cancel the ballot.
The only problems with the system that I can see are human. If you work with another election judge and, for instance, encode the wrong cards repeatedly for the other party and don't cancel the ballots, but submit them, then you can tamper the vote. The same thing could happen with a paper system, but admittedly it is harder and slower to cast lots of fake ballots.
In the end, it's up to the election judges and the local board of elections to make sure every vote counts, just as it would be with a paper system.
Two places which have details on arguments against the current state-of-the-art of electronic voting are verifiedvoting.org and Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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?
A new technology.
The scientists don't want it and think it's unsafe. From my readings of major scientific magazines and journals, e-voting as it is being implemented in the US is raising major alarm bells.
People well-versed in computer technology think it's dangerous and unsafe.
Management (ie. the electoral officials) want it.
Companies (who will profit from it) want it.
Basically those who are usually the most gung-ho about new technology and most technologically literate think the idea needs careful thinking and the technology is flawed. Those who are the most technologically illiterate and those who stand to make money out of it are all for it. This is a case of management over-riding the concerns of the engineers who are waving red flags going "Danger, danger".
I see a disaster in the making here.
Oh well, it will all come out in the wash when lawsuits from losing candidates start. Or we have another Florida, except this time as another poster pointed out as there is no audit trail, we'll have to flip a coin to see who is President. Or I guess redo the entire election.
Wouldn't it be rather fun, if all the conspiracy nuts got together with all the hackers and gave ALL the votes in an election to the politicians who wants to introduce a paper trail in elections? If no such politician can be found, just make them all blank votes/write-in for 'Ficus'.
...
I mean, the other politicians can't really cry foul, because they said themselves "paper trails aren't nescesary" and in effect "we trust the effectiveness of the system"
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.