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Super Tuesday Not So Super For Electronic Voting
October_30th writes "It's Super Tuesday in 10 states (including California, New York and Ohio) and various reports are coming in that the equipment built by Diebold and various other manufacturers is proving more troublesome than previously anticipated."
I hope they either fix them or go back to the paper system before the next presidential election comes up. I'd hate to see another Florida-type voting crisis get blamed on technology...
The people that used shoddy methods to secure their product, and then decided if nobody knows about the problems then they don't exist, produced a shoddy product that doesn't work wel ?
I am shocked
Georgia Tech student Peter Sahlstrom said he found 10 Diebold terminals sitting unprotected in the lobby of the school's student center Monday. Sahlstrom, 22, photographed the machines in their unlocked cases
This has zero to do with tech but will serve to give e-voting a bad name if one of these machines is compromised. Not good.
There won't be much of a trail to audit. And the trail that their is won't tell anyone anything other than what broke, as opposed to by how much.
Ignorance might not be bliss, but it's pretty antiseptic.
What's really quite disturbing is that the unreliability of these voting systems has been well covered in the mainstream press, not just the left-wing open source communist web blogs, yet the voting officials still have no clue or interest in considering the liabilities of using these systems. It just defies reason, and makes me lean ever closer to my paranoia / tinfoil hat and wonder about payola.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I am curious how many candidates are going to scream that the results were changed by nefarious means.
Some of the electronic voting systems have no hard copy audit trail or no open audit trail of the votes.
I really don't feel safe with some company "verifying" that the vote has not been tampered with out a proven (non electronic) audit trail.
What is wrong with counting crosses in boxes?
Sure speed of results isn't great, but in most countries with a good transport infrastructure it might take until the next morning, counthing through the night.
As the old saying goes, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
In this case, perhaps we shouldn't attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice... perhaps somebody wanted to make it easier to fix elections?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
The biggest problem with these devices is that they remove the voter from the voting process even more. As it stands today, many people think that their vote doesn't count.
When there is no physical record of the vote, only a few bits on a card somewhere, we'll become even more removed from the process. It won't be long until no one cares anymore, and voting becomes a simple formality.
And the fact that making it verifiable is so easy makes me wonder....
Fellowship 9/11
According to this article on The Guardian there are already questions about certain e-elections. The problem, as I see it, is that allegations like these can be made but it is impossible to refute them. Once the integrity of the process comes into serious question public confidence and participation can be expected to plummet.
-- Free software on every PC on every desk
are Americans more ignorant about the American politcal system than Europeans?
As an American, it wouldn't surprise me if that was true.
Have you tried Linux yet?
This is actually a very positive thing in my opinion. Not because it could have messed up election results, but because of the shift in attitude news like this could bring if its given fair treatment.
I think most people who read Slashdot know of the multitude of problems Diabold has and the conspiracies their organization is obviously wrought with. However, this has gotten little coverage in the mainstream press.
The only way the public at large will know of the new dangers faced by electronic voting is to hear about this more on CNN, ABC, etc. and not just online. There is still a sort of prevailing mindset with a lot of people that goes, "Ooh, its a computer, of course it can count better than a human."
Yes, because only 50% of us vote but 100% of us bitch.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
What the fsck do they mean "more than anticipated"? From what I've been hearing on NPR, watching on TV, and Reading online there has been quite a bit of anticipation about how these machines would fail in, various ways, to perform the task of executing a fair and free election.
-*The above statement is printed entirely on recycled electrons*-
I have just successfully voted in Northwestern Ohio using the same punch ballots that I have always used and the sort of thing that caused the Florida mess. I had no hanging chads, no dimpled chads and if the need arises, it can be recounted. Go figure.
If we have to move to a new machine aqnd of course we do, I'm push for a printout and scanner reader combination. Idiot-proof (heh) touch screen that prints out a scanner read ballot that is read at the end of the day.
Honestly, what's so tough about making electronic voting machines that actually work? We can put a rover on Mars but we can't count votes. I guess it's the simple things that get you in the end.
Let's look at what's required:
1. The person must be able to select the name of the person they want to vote for. (check)
2. Now count which person received the most votes. (check)
3. Announce a winner. (check)
I think I might have a stab at the voting machine market. Excuse me while I go out to my garage and build one.
One bad monkey spoils the whole barrel.
The problem is that the two actors involved here, the public (government) and Diebold, each have two completely different aims. The public want a secure, easy to use, verifiable, non-bullshit voting system to ensure fair elections. Diebold wants to maximize shareholder value. A closed process will NEVER produce the desired result under those circumstances. Diebold will say "sure it works, trust us." Trusting them assumes they're not maximizing shareholder value: big mistake.
It would be sort of like fully privatizing mail delivery. Sure you could set it up as a viable company, if you are willing to entire A) drastically raise postage or B) cut vast swaths of rural mail delivery. When you get down to it the aims of the public are not compatible with running postal service as a completely private venture. The aims of the public are also not compatible with running elections as a completely private venture.
That would mean treating electronic election machines, no matter who produces them, as an extension of public service. Almost as a utility, perhaps. Political parties are heavily regulated as would be a utility, why not the very machines we use to vote?
I mean really, why all the fancy computers with touch screen monitors, why complicated software? Grab the vote in from a keyboard, encrypt it, save it, done.
Which doesn't address the problem with the voting machines at all.
The issue is not the fancy interface. (So changing to a keyboard would just add the problem of how you are supposed to collect votes from people who don't grok keyboards.)
The issue is: How do you KNOW the software that grabbed the vote (from the keyboard, touch screen, or what have you), encrypted it or not, and stored it in the database, ACTUALLY STORED THE VOTE THE VOTER CAST, rather than making up its own vote?
And how do you KNOW that the database ACTUALLY SAVED THE VOTES THE VOTING MACHINES FED IT and ADDED THEM UP CORRECTLY, rather than making up different values or being altered by some human intervention?
The MAIN problem with computer voting machines is that, along with hanging chads and dimpled ballots, they've eliminated any paper trail (actually checked by the voters themselves) of how each voter actually voted.
If the software is broken or corrupt, how do you do a recount? Ask it to give you the corrupted numbers a second time?
(Interestingly enough, that's EXACTLY how Diebold proposes to do a recount: Have the database print out the corrupted values as separate printed paper ballots for people to hand-count. B-) )
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The tragic part is that this has very little, if anything, to do with Windows (although I understand much of the code is VisualBasic 6.0), and everything to do with simple crappy code. Really, I think it would be quite easy to program secure code in whatever M$ language these things use.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
What if someone manages to mess up the power supply in an area with voters for your political opponents?
Most communities already own these
Nobody wants electronic voting without a verifiable system of reciepts.
That doesn't seem like asking for a cure for aids by the end of the week.
Why aren't we seeing better voting machines or unified laws to cut down on the crappy operation of elections?
Steve
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I always thought the idea of having a receipt was bad because now vote selling is possible -- corruption galore!
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Perhaps the fact that we're voting on Tuesday is part of the problem. If all elections were held on a Saturday instead, then 1) Fewer people would have problems getting off from work to vote 2) There would be less traffic 3) There would be no shortage of potential polling places, as all the schools would be empty (personally, I've alway been uncomfortable with voting in somebody's garage). In short, perhaps if we voted on weekends, perhaps more people would turn out to vote, thus cheating in elections would be less effective?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I mean if voting could actually change anything it would be illegal... or at least that's how the Diebold engineers feel.
Well, sure, maybe an embedded Linux of some kind, but then Diebold would have to hire real programmers...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Um, a bit confused, here. Political parties are private organizations in the US as well, right? Doesn't that mean they can choose their candidate in pretty much any way they damn well please? Primaries, mail-in ballots, an all-night draw poker game among all interested candidates, or simply drawing a name out of a hat? I mean, a party can just declare a candidate by fiat, without having to even pretend choosing among a pool of willing people, right?
...iffy. Say a party has an internal rule that whomever is the party chairman will also be the candidate (as is the case in all larger Swedish political parties). It works for them. If you don't like it, you vote for another party. Why should a law be passed to forbid them of doing that? Same thing here: if a party wants to have different days, and the majority of members are fine with it, let them. If a majority actually feels it is a problem, they can presumably change the rules internally, switch to another party or create a new party with the intention of replacing the old one.
Now, I understand why you suggest adding rules for this. But first, telling organizations that by their very nature have _very_ different views on precisely things like elections how they should do them feels
Second, I doubt you can write any clear rules that will not penalize some parties. Say you have a rule that primaries must be held at the same day in all states. Then how about parties that are too small to have the resources to do so? Or even too small to ever want or need to hold primaries in all states at all? You will start to need a bunch of qualifiers to the rules, and probably start to classify parties according to size. And if you want to only regulate primaries, you will have a hopeless time defining primaries so they neither penalize other party systems, nor give openings to redefine the process so the rules no longer apply when they should.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Diebold is a lock and security company that happened to buy a terrible, untrustworthy little company for a forray into electronic voting.
You say "just happened" as if it were mere serendipity that the little company became part of the big company.
No, Diebold should have known what they were getting into when they were making the purchase. And even if they didn't know then, they had ample opportunity to not make the product available until the problems had been corrected.
They still have a responsibility for due diligence.
Some people, such as Orthodox Jews, restrict their activities on Saturday. You might reply "tough for them", but any change that makes voting harder for a significant class of people is going to be opposed by elected office-holders from any party that draws support from Saturday-observing people. That's why this proposal won't go anywhere in the U.S.
Here's a different proposal: make Election Day a national holiday. A lot of people would also take the Monday off as well. I think that democratic elections are important enough to be a national holiday, don't you?
The UAW (United Auto Workers union) negotiated a contract where Election Day is a paid holiday for their members. Good for them.
I'm Canadian, and I didn't know what it means. Not all of the /. readers are in N. America or Britain either, so it's always helpful to post an explanation.
This is happening because of panic. Pretty much anything can happen when policians panic. And it's not something the GOP did, either. We Democrats did it to ourselves and the nation as a whole.
Democratic politicians and media were paniced after the 2000 election, and were looking for somebody to blame. They chose the election machines. Do you remember all the news articles and politicians opining that everything would be better when upgraded to digital?
Do you remember any computer scientists being asked about it? No, of course not. Since it was about panic, nobody wanted to learn the facts.
Although, "we" computer scientists do bear partial guilt. An early feasibility study was run, and they botched it. They did mention problems and risks, but not in the summary or first paragraph.
I've written a blog posting on how current evote reform efforts aren't going far enough.
You know, that article doesn't go nearly far enough ... they don't
mention that by the end of this election season, somebody has quite
possibly been elected by a bug.
I'm more concerned with the physical security of the machines after the vote is taken. Why bother to make off with the machines ahead of time and apply some complicated hack to them, when one could much more easily spend the evening carrying a small electromagnet into the polling places in districts where the vote is heavily skewed to the side you oppose?
This becomes an even bigger problem if the votes are stored locally on each machine. With a ballot box, the pollsters have one entity to keep their eye on and protect. With twenty-odd machines per polling place, each with a different database, security becomes a logistical nightmare.
Does anybody know whether the machines work this way, or do they copy their data off to a central database somewhere?
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
When you fill in your voting form you get a receipt with a record of your voting and a unique number (generated on the spot). At any time you could visit a validation web site, where you would type in the number you were given and check whether the entry matches what you have.
That doesn't slove the problem. The issue is not whether YOUR vote is in the database correctly. The issue is whether the difference in the TOTALS for the various candidates or proposition yea/nays, is correct.
But it DOES create another problem: Such a reciept would let you prove to someone ELSE how you voted. Which lets him buy your vote.
(It's laws against vote-buying that keep us from getting access to the raw ballot output - which we could analyze to check the accuracy of vote totaling systems (even with paper and punched-card balloting) and look for voting patterns indicative of other means of vote corruption (such as runs of identical ballots from stuffing operations).
Such suggestions as yours come from a misunderstanding of the purpose of an election, and of checking its results.
It is not to see that your vote is counted.
It is not to see that the most popular candidate wins because that's "right" or "nice".
It's to convince the LOSER that he REALLY DOESN'T HAVE SUPPORT. So he doesn't go out and start a war to overturn the election.
THAT is why republics are stable - and why corruption in voting, or even the PERCEPTION of such corruption - leads to "political instability" (a politically-correct term for riots, vigilantism, and civil war).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This proposal gets floated so often that I can only consider it malinformation at this point--a pervasive meme which works to people's detriment.
Let's say, for sake of argument, that all 50 states have their caucuses and/or primaries at the same time. They start at the same time, end at the same time. What are we going to see from the candidates?
Well, Kerry would park himself in California for two weeks prior to the primary. Edwards would take New York. Sharpton would go for an inner-city like Baltimore, Dean would take Boston and everyone would be lobbing grenades at Kerry in a desperate attempt to keep him from getting God-knows-how-many delegates in one fell swoop.
Do you see what'd happen? The candidates would campaign only in high-population areas and would talk only about metropolitan issues. Because really, if everything all gets settled at once, it doesn't make any sense for Kerry to sit down at Gwen's Diner in Lisbon, Iowa (great food if you're ever in the neighborhood) and talk to the usual crowd of farmers, hunters and retired schoolteachers who hang out there.
These people are American citizens. They pay taxes. They get overlooked by East and West Coasters every single day of the year except for about one month every four years, when the East and West Coasters come to Iowa to ask Iowans "so, now that you've actually met $candidate, what do you think?"
If you make everyone vote all at the same time, what you're going to do is tell everyone who doesn't live in a major metropolitan area--and that's forty-eight percent of the nation--that their opinions don't count, that they're too minor to matter, and that since everything's settled all at once and fifty-two percent of the delegates are decided in the big cities, that the entire political debate will revolve around big-city concerns.
A campaign season exists to allow vigorous political debate to take place. It exists to make sure rural citizens, who have as much right to be heard as you, have a voice in political proceedings.
Not sure why, but I submitted the exact same story only with more info this morning. Oh well :) The radio station that I listen to has been reporting all day about the problems with the Diebold machines. Entire polling places were shut down in San Diego county this morning due to technical problems.
A reporter for KFI named Eric Leonard has done a series of reports on the problems that California has been having with Diebold. Ranging from legislators and state employees working for both the State and Diebold at the same time (conflict of interest anyone?) to Diebold refusing to release the raw data from the machines claiming that it's proprietary technology. My guess is that they have GPLed or OSS code in there that they don't want anyone looking at.
I'm in favor of electronic voting, but this is rediculous, handing control of one of the most important aspects of our "democratic" process over to a company that runs Windows XP on ATMs!
Hopefully this will be a wakeup call for the powers that be that maybe OSS voting technology is not such a bad thing after all.
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
What makes you think that there is no way for us to check if Diebold's machines really are clean? There are over 2 dozen security procedures built into their voting machines that cover the entire election process. These measures are easily verified by independant third parties and that can guarantee the process has not been rigged.
Easter eggs.
Example: Code to move 10% of the votes from "no" to "yes", or the D to the R, (or vice-versa), but only on election day, only in certain precincts, and only on candidates in particular ballot slots.
Code with such zingers would pass JUST FINE on the tests - and maybe get by even if you tested it with some extra machines during the election itself.
(Interestingly, though, one of the things that came to light is that these tests you speak so highly of usually aren't actually performed. Another is that, even in a state where an approval process was in place, voting machines were discovered (after the election) to have been running UNapproved versions of the software.)
So next time I suggest you don't talk about things that you clearly have no clue about.
Yo! Bucko! I've WRITTEN similar zingers myself. (Though only to play a practical joke, not to corrupt an election.) They work just FINE. And are damed hard to figure out even if you KNOW they're happening.
All of which begs the issue.
The point is not to make it accurate.
The point is to make it PROVABLE, even to a technical illiterate, that it IS accurate.
"Trust me, I'm an expert." isn't going to cut it when the issue is how Adolf Eichmann III became mayor of Chicago when he was polling 0.5% on the day before the election.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I believe they can use any method they want to choose their candidates, like you suggest. However if they want to take advantage of the state-provided ability to poll a whole lot of people, they have to do it on the day the state chose.
You know, they're always advertising for precinct workers. I think it would be a great service to our country if lots of us tech-savvy types took the day off November 2 and helped out.
Ug, why throw out what can work? Just use a publically available source model so that all the bright boys and girl in the world can make sure it's secure and go from there. Shouldn't we be able to see that our voting and the mechanisms that process it are correct, after all?
American's only vote when it matters.. like who's going to be the next American Idol.
That said, I would pay to see Simon tell Bush how much he sucks.
Clearly these electronic voting machines have serious problems. But it is also clear that electronic voting is going to happen, whether we like it or not. So what would be necessary for a reliable electronic system to include?
The most important issue seems to be a paper trail. But the machine simply printing a paper trail internally is useless, as the voter would never know if it actually reflected his/her vote. (As someone else pointed out, the machine could just display one thing on the screen while recording and printing a paper copy of something else.)
So what if the machine printed out a receipt for the voter, the voter can look at it to verify that it is correct, and then must drop the receipt in a box on the way out? Those boxes would be used for manual recounts, as well as a random sample of checks to make sure that the machines are recording the votes correctly.
Just a thought... It just seems to me that the voter must see the actual piece of paper that will be used for the recount...
The reason that a sequential transaction log would not be good is that by reviewing the voting logs or observing the machine, someone could then figure out who voted for what.
However an internal log which separated the paper into a bin after each entry would not necessarily be a bad thing (akin to the voter-verified ballot behind plexiglass mentioned elsewhere)
For the record, I'm an American. I just happen to listen to BBC News and World Report on OPB. I was hoping more Americans would argue against my point... sadly we appear resigned to our political apathy. If you have strong feelings one way or the other, please, I beg of you: register and vote. Make sure everybody you know registers and votes. Campaign for the person you think would do the best job. Don't just sit there. More than anywhere else, Americans get the government they deserve -- and that can be either a blessing or a curse.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Americans more ignorant about the American politcal system than Europeans?
As an American living in London I can say from first had experience this is true.
I remember having a conversation with a friend from France when she was explaining to me the details of the California recall vote. At which point I admitted to her that I knew absolutely nothing about the French political system. Do they have a King? I wouldn't know.
To my surprise, she wasn't the least bit surprised. She made a comment that I will always remember. "The politics of the United States affects the rest of the world, but the politics of the rest of the world does not affect the United States."
-Colin
"Who is the genius putting Windows on these things??"
The same genius using an Access database on the same machine without a password to store the votes.
From the diebold memos, the programmer doesn't seem too bright either, certainly has an unawareness of most security issues: "I could password-protect the database, but it would take ages to code, and I'd have to re-write the software to store the password"
Naturally, no mention of public-key systems, nor of translucent databases, has ever crossed the email-boxes of these people.
"Just tell me your votes" said the man behind the curtain, "I promise to tell you the right answer at the end"
Actually, one of the many sad parts is that every vote isn't counted equally.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.