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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.
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?
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
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.
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 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 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
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!
Mark Fiore has an interesting animation about e-voting -- funny yet accurate enough to be scary.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.)