Slashdot Mirror
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."
If the "tamper proof" tape is what I think it is, that would only show if someone broke the seal. If this happens, does that mean all votes on that machine are thrown out as unreliable? That sure creates the possibility of someone, not liking how pre-election polls are showing their favored candidate, intentionally breaking the seal to throw a wrench as it were into the election. I must be missing something there.....
As far as the overall debate on e-voting, I like how they do it here in Alaska. It's the old "fill in the bubble" tests like you used to take in school. You fill in the bubble on the ballot, which the ballot itself is very well laid out, then when you're done you feed the ballot into an electronic counter which keeps a tally there on the spot. When the polls close, an election worker connects the machine to a phone line, the machine then dials out and reports the results for that precinct. Results are all in w/in ~2-3 hours of the polls closing, and there is defiantly a paper trail that can be followed, if need be.
Everybody talks about electronic vote - just look at Brazil. I'm 30 years old, have been voting for 12, and have never voted on paper. They've been doing this for a long long time there, and did so in the last presidential election 2 years ago.
t acao_na_urna_ele.htm
This is how we vote in Brazil (google translate from portuguese):
http://www.tre-mg.gov.br/eleicoes/simulacao_de_vo
Somehow, none of the articles ever mention that the Wisconsin State Elections Board decertified unverifiable touchscreen systems after I convinced them a year ago. Too far ahead of the curve, I guess.
The Executive Director's report
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
Each party has a symbol e.g. Elephant, Lotus, wheel etc. If you want to vote for the ruling BJP, you press the button next to the Lotus. That's how they have electronic voting even with the illiteracy problem.
If the best we can come up with in the US is diebold's tamper proof tape, then perhaps our jobs should go to india.
Come-on, it appears the whole world is doing this e-voting stuff.. let's join the 21st century.
The specs for the Indian EVM. This is definitely going to be the most widely deployed and used e-voting machine in the history of mankind. Seems pretty secure, except for the lack of a paper trail. But with 600 million eligible voters, I guess the lack of a paper trail means a lot of forests have been saved. Besides most attacks against the election system tend to be pretty unsophisticated , ie, boot-capturing and voter initimidation.
Looks like this machine will definitely go a long way in ensuring the fairness of Indian elections. Maybe I'll even vote next time.
more about me
Gerrymandering? (More on this via google)
Recently the election board or whoever was in charge of all that had at least one operatiopn recruiting tech people to get these things in shape and deployed. I wouldn't touch it with someone elses ten foot pole. Their whole opration seemed to be on a very last minute frame of mind. They were using timelines that gave only a few days from date of hire (date of job posting actually) to setting up machines in the field. I got no indication that any sort of security checks were being done on these people, and while I'm not a fan of adding more security clearance required jobs, should just any shmoe be able to get one of these jobs without being checked out? Seems fairly untrustworthy to me, and from my perspective, I would not want to be the one who signed off on a machine where something went squirrely.
And whats so difficult about having a printed voter verifiable receipt anyway?
I was in a Maryland high school the other day, and there was a pile of black containers labeled "Diebold" addressed to the voting board, sitting unattended in the cafeteria.
Each case was held closed by a wire lockout, available only to those elite groups who receive electrical supply catalogs.
I of course chose not to mess with them. Any come-from-behind victory I make on Tuesday will be purely coincidental.
Everyone interested in this issue should take a look at the VerifiedVoting Website.
Electronic voting needs to solve two problems: Guarantee that every vote is counted exactly and guarantee that everyone can trust that result.
As Schneier points out, there can be no trust without a paper trail for verification. So it is quite important to support legislation mandating such a paper trail.
Lenz Blog
This is a motivation issue.
The problem is that everyone in the system has incentives to distort the vote some way. You should evaluate any proposed technology by how much easier or harder it makes miscounting the vote.
Electronic voting. Lemme see. No paper trail. Software that nobody audited. Internal data and communication that nobody admits to having access to. Does that sound easier or harder to get away with shenanigans with than paper voting?
The other things that you mention all have the huge advantage that the people who build the system aren't expected to have huge financial incentives (ie bribes) for messing up. Except for finance, where (in the USA at least) a legal system that makes any doubtful outcome be ruled in the customer's favour makes banks be very concerned about getting things right.
Unless you know what problem technology is supposed to solve for you, you can't hope to evaluate whether technology will have a chance of solving it. Electronic voting doesn't have a hope in hell of improving visibility and accountability in the system.
Although the Baltimore Sun, our local oracle, is strangely silent on the voting-systems aspect of the primary, the Maryland Board of Elections is not. They've developed a special website to inform the citizenry of how "Easy...Accurate...Secure" the new voting system will be.
Peruse the training film (wmd only), download a registration form, see a sample screen. Above all, don't miss the FAQ. My nomination for Best FAQ is:
Q: How do I know the system will work properly on Election Day?
A: Each piece of equipment is prepared for the election by election staff and a public test is held to verify this process. Before this process and after the public test is completed, all equipment is sealed and secured until being opened by a bi-partisan team of election judges in the polling location on Election Day.
In addition to the Website, we've been favored by bus posters, billboards, and even a few commercials on local cable.
I am oh, so pleased to see even more of my tax money being squandered on these systems--this time just to tell me how wonderful they will be. I'm going to vote when the polls open Tuesday (it is a Democratic and Republican primary here), then leave immediately for a trip. I feel sure other Maryland Slashdot readers will have volumes to say about the experience.
Anne
DUCT TAPE: The Election Supervisors' Secret Weapon
It's a parliamentary system. Voters don't vote for the George W. Bush equivalent. They vote for their local Member of Parliament, who could be a member of a political party (usually is), or an independent. They usually do that vote based on how that MP's been performing (he/she's supposed to take care of that constituency) and they know that very well. And at the end of the day, the party with a majority support in the lower house of parliament gets to govern. It works.
Quebec (Canada) tried this in their 1995 referendum on trying to secede from Canada. Ballots were marked by hand and counted by hand. Each ballot had large circles labeled YES and NO. Only certain symbols were allowed (IIRC, they were an X, a check mark, a straight horizontal line, or filling in the circle completely). Anything else was to be considered "spoiled" (historically, an average of about 1% of ballots are spoiled, often by voters protesting what they see as a poor choice of candidates).
Some election officer took it upon himself to issue written instructions to his counters requiring them to be extremely picky in validating the symbols. For instance, if the check mark were drawn like a V (both strokes the same length), it was to be counted as spoiled. All the districts where he sent the instructions were ones which could be predicted to tilt toward the NO side. In some districts, as many as 12% of the ballots were disqualified.
According to a guy I knew who was an observer (parties get to have observers present at the counting), some counting rooms almost erupted into fistfights when observers loudly objected to the disqualifying of so many ballots.
The referendum lost, but only by a margin which was less than the estimated number of NO votes lost in this manner. (Not that that means anything, except to show how close things were.) The secessionist Quebec government "investigated," decided nothing was wrong, and spent most of their energies trying to sue a student group in Ontario for "illegally subsidizing" the NO campaign by bussing students to a pro-Canada rally in Montreal.
Election Commission of India is proposing Vote for nobody in this election.
Any idea how many democracies in the world give this option to the voters?