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Evoting in India, Maryland
Anonymous Coward writes "EVMs are back in the news again. The BBC is reporting on the use of over a million Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) in India for Parliamentary elections in April. With a billion people and an electorate of 668 million, it is by far the largest democratic election exercise in the world. A picture of an EVM is provided." And Kierthos writes "An article on Yahoo! News mentions that Maryland's voting terminals will be wrapped in tamper proof tape, which 'just protects that malicious code physically', according to computer scientist Avi Rubin. Also mentioned are California's ongoing system of e-voting, as well as a point on whether Diebold should be banned in California after using uncertified software in last October's election."
I've followed the developments in Maryland closely, and what's been noticeably absent from every report I've seen on the subject has been any discussion of what the consequences would be if the tamper-proof tape shows tampering.
More to the point: can anyone disenfranchise a whole bunch of voters by just damaging the tape, deliberately or accidentally, while voting?
With the elections being as close as they have been, shutting down machines in a few heavily [democratic|republican] districts could easily change the results of the election. You may not know exactly what each individual machine has recorded, but it's easy enough to find areas that you can expect to reliably vote for one of the major parties. If you were to get the results from machines in Denver thrown out, for example, who do you think would benefit?
Twenties Retirement
The problem is that they don't want to take any risk--in particular, they don't want to risk not getting reelected. They probably figure if they help Diebold get the contract, Diebold will help them keep their jobs--it's the bureaucratic "I scratch your back, you scratch mine" philosophy.
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
True, true.
I'd say the difference is that electronic voting has the potential to make vote tampering that much easier and/or harder to track. Especially where there's no paper trail, you really have no choice but to accept whatever number the machine gives you.
Even assuming no fraud (unlikely) the severity of the mistakes varies....a mistake counting paper ballots might result in a small change in the final tally, but a typo in the program could reverse the results of the election.
Don't get me wrong; I'm all in favor of using computers to make things easier. (Otherwise, would I be posting to Slashdot?) But if we're going to move to e-voting, the systems need to have the strongest possible security and reliability...and so far, they don't.
Twenties Retirement
And the real problem with the 2000 election is one that is not often addressed directly, but is ceratainly relavant to the current topic.
All voting is a statistical process. No system is perfect, there will always be errors. Thus the system has a margin of error.
The 2000 vote was the problem it was because the vote was inside the margin of error, thus no amount of fiddling, recounting, whatever, could possibly resolve the issue. Statistically speaking, the vote was a dead heat and the only reason it had to be decided by the dead heat in Florida was because it was a dead heat pretty much everywhere else as well.
In terms of the "problem" this is indicative of the choices of candidates being a coin toss to most of the populace, which is, essentially, how we resolved it. By using technology to reduce the margin of error we can avoid the political brouhaha of coin toss elections by allowing one candidate to "win" by 20 votes or some such, but it does nothing to cure the political problems that lead to such dead heat elections in the first place.
Do you want Frog ala Peche, or Peche ala Frog?
Not to mention the problem inherent in such elections where a goodly portion of the voting populace look at the opposing candidates, flip their coin, look at it, then just say "Fuck it, it doesn't even matter," and stay home on election day.
Give us statistically descernable candidates and we just might have election results statistically significant.
Of course, to the candidates themselves such an idea is anathema.
KFG
Before diving in to what kind of design we should be using, I think some time needs to be spend deciding the design parameters. The solution should probably:
The Nevada Gaming Board has been cited as a good example of the kind of extremely paranoid testing and auditing that needs to go into a system this important. However, for a voting system we've added some new and challenging criteria- anonymity, ease of use, and fairness. None of these individually are difficult, but when combined with the testabilty and auditability become particularly challenging. How do you ensure that individual votes are getting properly registered while still maintaining the anonymity of the votes?
Personally, I don't see how all of these criteria can be met in a "remote" (e.g. web) voting system. However, I think these problems are all solvable with our current technology, if we are careful. In fact, I think that if a system were designed carefully, we could even come up with a system where we can, if necessary, confirm (validate) a region or even nation's voting results by storing individual voting results on voter-owned smart cards.
Assume we set up a system where every voter is issued a voting smart card that they retain possession over. When you go in to vote you stick your smart card in the voting machine. You then vote, and it records your choices on the card. Audits could then take place after an election by having randomly selected voters come in and stick their smart cards into a seperate vote validation system that retallies the results and allows voters to confirm their vote selection. Using statistics, you can set a threshold for when the error level is too suspiciously high, and require revotes in the regions with anomalous results. By using different vendors to provide the voting machines, smart cards, and vote auditing system, you can greatly increase your assurance that no entity has tampered with the voting results. Apart from the influences of the media... and politicians... and education system... and religions.....
On second thought, forget the whole thing. :)