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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."
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
The question is, why is this "technology" SO STUPID?!
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.
I really think that the problem here is just the implementation, Diebold is simply selling shitty hardware/software, and really getting away with it because nobody else sells this kind of hardware, at least that is well known and accredited.
It's a crying shame that anything like Florida happened in the first place, but this is the twenty first fucking century, we're smarter than that people...
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
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.
From the story:
" And the electronic voting trend is accelerating: In November's presidential election, at least 50 million people will vote on touch-screens, compared with 55 million using paper, punch cards or lever machines, according to Washington-based Election Data Services."
Unless there is much larger public outcry it doesn't look like the problems will be solved before a mass rollout.
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
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?
Yes, because only 50% of us vote but 100% of us bitch.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
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
no amount of technology will ever produce a voting system that all can use
Excuse me? Where I live we have this amazing technology:
a) A piece of paper printed with circles which are labeled with the name of the parties in big letters
b) A pen
c) An envelope
d) A ballot box
Any dork can use that and for those who can't, it's better when their votes are discarded
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
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.
1) Reliable software is very hard to make.
2) Mathematically provably secure software is impossible or very nearly so.
3) Reliable software that is mathematically provably secure and is affordable simply will never exist.
4) Our county and state gee-whiz government officials don't really understand this and are blowing wads of taxpayer dollars on a hopeless technology project.
5) Representative Democracy gets a big spiked shaft in its rear end.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
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.
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.
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.
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