Slashdot Mirror
Avi Rubin's Thoughts On e-Voting
nazarijo writes "Avi Rubin, a well regarded Johns Hopkins computer science professor and leading critic of e-voting, has written an account of his experience as an election judge on super tuesday. Maryland was experimenting with e-Voting machines. Rubin puts it this way, 'this was one of the most incredible days in my life.' He wrote his experiences immediately after the day was over, capturing his perspective on the subject. A very interesting read."
He was a election judge in Baltimore County, MD. Near the end of his story, Avi writes "My biggest fear is that super Tuesday will be viewed as a big success."
And here's what the local media had to say the next day:
Elections Officials Say Electronic Voting Successful
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
(I'm not normally a Karma whore, but the site looks like its normally a low-usage site)
My experience as an Election Judge in Baltimore County
by Avi Rubin
It is now 10:30 pm, and I have been up since 5 a.m. this morning. Today, I served as an election judge in the primary election, and I am writing down my experience now, despite being extremely tired, as everything is fresh in my mind, and this was one of the most incredible days in my life.
I first became embroiled in the current national debate on evoting security when Dan Wallach of Rice University and I, along with Computer Scientist Yoshi Kohno and my Ph.D. student Adam Stubblefield released a report analyzing the software in Diebold's Accuvote voting machines.
Although there were four of us on the project, perhaps because I was the most senior of the group, the report became widely associate with me, and people began referring to it as the "Hopkins report" or even in some cases the "Rubin report". I became the target of much criticism from Maryland and Georgia election officials who were deeply committeed to these machines, and of course, of the vendor. The biggest criticism that I received was that I am an academic scientist and that academics do not "know siccum" about elections, as Doug Lewis from the Election Center put very eloquently.
While I dispute many of the claims that computer scientists working on e-voting security analysis are deficient in their knowledge of elections, I realized that there was only one way to stifle this criticism, and at the same time to perform a civic duty. I volunteered to become an election judge in Baltimore County. The first step was to get signed up. I filled out a form at a local grocery store and waited for a call from the Baltimore County Board of Elections. The call never came. So, I called up the board and spoke with the head of elections and found out that there was a mandatory training session a couple of days later. I got on to the list for the training, and I attended. There, I learned that my entire county would be voting with Diebold Accuvote TS machines, the very one that we had analyzed in our report. It was an eery feeling as I trained for 2 hours on every aspect of using the machine and teaching others how to use them. Afterwards, I received a certificate signed by the board of elections and became a qualified judge. I was supposed to receive a phone call within a few days assigning me to a precinct, but I did not. So, I called up the board of elections and spoke with the same woman, who assigned me to a precinct at a church in Timonium, MD, about 15 minutes from my house.
I reported to my precinct at 5:45 a.m. this morning. Introductions began, and I immediately realized that it would not be a normal day. There are two head judges, one from each party. There were also seven other judges. The head judges were Marie (R) and Jim (D). Both of them mentioned that they read about me in the paper that morning, and were pretty cold towards me. It turns out that the Baltimore Sun ran a story today about my being an election judge. In there, I'm quoted as saying that the other judges in my training were in the "grandparent category" with respect to their age. My colleagues for the day, who were in that category as well, did not appreciate the barb and were ready to spar with me.
There are three types of judges besides the head judges. There are four book judges, one from each party with A-K and one from each party with L-Z. There is one judge assigned to provisional ballots, and a couple of unit judges charged with assigning voters to particular machines. I was the L-Z democrat book judge, along with Andy, a grandfather of many, a staunch Republican, and a fellow I grew very fond of as the day went on. To my left were Anne, the Republican judge married to Andy, and Sandy. Actually, there were two Sandys. One began as a unit judge, but early on switched with the other Sandy to be the democratic book judge on A-K. Bill was the provisional judge, and he is m
The next site to slashdot will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and start slashdotting it early!
Every 15 minutes or so, the unit judge would take the cards and give them back to us book judges. When a Diebold rep showed up, I asked her about this, and she said that it was done to give the voters a sense that nothing was being kept on the smartcards about their voting session.
The Diebold rep is basically admitting that at least some of the security and privacy promises in electronic voting are based on user perception, not reality.
Trolling is a art,
This is a great article. I don't like E-voting, but not because I fear of fraud or deceit -- I don't like the majority or the form of democracy our country has taken on in the last 100 years or so.
Not wanting to troll or start an argument, I just wanted to remind people that this country was founded on a Constitution that should severely limit what the federal government can do. Some of the Constitution's protection of natural rights extends to limit the individual State powers as well.
E-Voting is just one step towards "complete" democracy, where the majority makes all the rules. This frightens me more than I can explain on paper. The majority should never have any control over the minority (even over a minority of one) property rights or natural rights. If the majority ruled, 51% of the country can take away what 49% own. This is not America. This is not freedom.
Democracy unrestrained will fold into some sort of socialism eventually, as we have seen in the past 100 years. We need to hit the brakes and return to a strong local government and a weak federal government, and we need to do it now.
I'm not so sure about this electronic voting thing. I submitted my vote for Kucinich, and the local election board moderated me "-1 Troll".
Also, if you vote for someone more than 30 times in a 24-hour period, you get a "Slow down, Cowboy" warning. Except in Chicago.
Oh yes, totally ironic. How I dread the day when CowboyNeal is illegally modded into the Oval Office.
Moron.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Perhaps the lightest moment in the day came when one voter standing at his machine asked in the most deadpan voice, "What do I do if it says it is rebooting?" Head judge Marie turned white, and Joy's mouth dropped. My heart started to beat quickly, when he laughed and said "just kidding."
Who was it?? I know your reading this!!!
As an non-American I'm baffled by the practise of having voters register which party they prefer in a government database. The basic principle of an election is the secret ballot.
Why is this done? Why isn't it widely condemmed? Why do people cooperate instead of all claiming to prefer the monster raving loony party?
It's entirely desirable to fit the tool to the task at hand. There's not the slightest reason some /.ers yapping away needs the same level of validation as a federal election.
The whole concept of Internet Voting frightens the hell out of me.
The Internet has been around for what - 35 years now? And we *still* haven't solved e-mail spoofing and spam. Nor have we found a way to keep 5cr1p7 k1661e5 from busting into National Freaking Defense servers. How many times have we heard about Yet Another Batch Of Stolen Credit Card Numbers?
Still, some folks think those little "speed bumps" shouldn't stop us from using the same technology to select the leader of the free world?
Someone tell me this is just a bad dream. Please.
I love technology. But not for this purpose. And certainly NOT NOW. Not yet...
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Interesting (and worrying) article.
Here in Ireland, there is a major stink being made over the government's plans to introduce e-voting machines in the next election. They will replace *all* paper ballots everywhere in the country.
Some interesting related reading:
Experts warn about timing of e-voting
Pressure group outlines concerns about electronic voting
What worries me most about e-voting is the fact there is no paper trail. There has been talk here of altering the machines so that they also produce a printout of the vote made by an individual, but the government is resisting it citing expense.
I would rather the old reliable and transparent paper ballot system rather than the closed and opaque e-voting machines.
Patriotism - the last resort of scoundrels.
Avi Rubin was on Screensavers (TechTV) the other day showing the vulnerabilities of eVoting. He showed how back doors can be placed in the program and votes can be manipulated. Pretty eye-opening stuff.
100% Insightful
The primary elections are designed to narrow candidates in a specific party down. Therefore, if you're a Democrat you should receive a Democrat ballot and if you're a Republican you should receive a Republican ballot. Some areas have you register as a particular party, most just ask you what ballot you want when you vote.
Note that since this isn't necessarily kept in any databases, you can request whichever ballot you want. One strategy that some people try sometimes (although it rarely works with national candidateS) is to request the "wrong" ballot and vote someone "bad" as the primary winner, so their candidate will have an easier time in his campaign.
But electronic voting scares me. Voting is the only way we can directly impose our will upon the establishment. In the current system, every vote cast leaves a permanent, tangible, undisputable (unless some kind of hole punch is involved, anyway) record. Electronic voting leaves nothing that can be held or physically counted, just data on a hard-drive somewhere. Even with the most rigorous security, encryption and protocals, I'll never feel confident that the system is entirely honest and invincible.
Of course, paper ballots can be 'lost' or 'miscounted'. But the altering of an electronic election result could potentially leave no evidence: the only things that will been destroyed or altered never existed in the first place.
Unfortunately, it takes a technically-astute person to identify a potential security flaw like this. It also takes a technically-astute person to implement the flaw. To the average person, the whole situation seems alarmist. It's in the same category as astroids striking the earth: Sure, it could happen, but....
Only after a failure of the e-voting system, a failure that's obvious enough for the average person to understand, will the public demand either better controls or removal of the system.
what?
First, it's not about internet voting.
Second, what I don't get, is why can't we use electronics to print out a "ballot" with our selections done in the comfort of home, and just take this "ballot" to a polling place? The ballot would, of course, be something similar to a scantron or other paper form, but would also have human readable form of the contained data. Perhaps bar codes or their successors would suffice?
Such a system allows for a paper trail, quick and supposedly accurrate tally of votes, removes the painful sections of voting, by having people be able to make their selections at home, print the page, and verify their selections (or copy it to a floppy, or perhaps a CD) and such medium (paper, floppy, CD, soemthing else) could be taken to a polling place, quickly read, and the voter could verify their selections very quickly. Much easier than punch cards or voting machine du jour
Yes, those that do not have computers would still have to go through the current onus of voting, but, the lines should be shorter, as many do have computers at home or work.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I live in a country where phony elections were common in the last 70 years. Paperless elections are much safer than paper. why? ballots are lost before elections, voting booths get stolen after election day, if they coudn't steal them they use the g'old tactic called the "green vote".
When ballots are cast in remote locations it's difficult to get the results fast, the votes need to arrive to the accounting facilities where the totals are certified and sent to the central accounting facilities.
When they use the "green vote" (because it originates in rural areas) they take advantage of that delay and claim fake results with the stolen votes and booths. If recounting is needed because of a dispute, accounting facilities and storage can be hijacked or burnt to ground (it's happened a few times).
At least with paperless voting you need something more sofisticated and educated that a horde of gorillas that can barely read and write their names
You can't view this article as anything. The headline says it all, "Officials Say evoting a Success". If something does go wrong, those same journalists will gleefully use the quotes from those officials to tear strips from the dumb bastards.
I actually voted in Georgia, and I have to say that, by and large, the judges there were not as well trained as the ones described by Rubin. Regardless, I think this is a threat that will peak over time, and not in the next few elections. Once the procedures get established, and people get sloppy, I think we'll see some instances of fraud.
I have to say one thing though, it actually made voting feel kind of cloak and dagger. I've never spent so much time looking at a voting machine before.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Burn!
Kucinich got one vote all day. That ballot somehow failed to get into the sealed envelope I returned to the party that night. All in all, 3 points:
If electronic voting is unavoidable, much like Windows it's "easy to use", why not offer a few alternatives.
Open sourcing is always fun, why not a simpler machine based off standard PC hardware. An open source secured program running off of a LiveCD (to prevent permanent modification. If the CD's secure when it goes it, you can't make permanent changes at the station.)
Each vote is electronically signed, so if you want to add in a fake vote, you'd need to create the equivalent of a public key whose matching private equivalent just happens to have been generated, something fairly unlikely.
NO Networking. Besides everyone getting a hard-copy receipt (or digital copy if they feel like it, as long as it's a receipt, I don't feel what form is too much of an issue), all the data is carried by hand, and once more encrypted after voting so that it can only be decrypted at wherever they feel the votes need to be tallied securely. I mean, obviously decryption can be broken, but generally not too quickly if it's good, and unreasonable delays in the delivery of the votes would be a fairly quick sign something was amiss.
I mean, obviously there's no such thing as 100% secure electronic voting, but peer review as well as an electronic at-machine form of voter verification that requires the machine to authenticate a unique per-voter id just seems like common sense.
Was that an argument? Are you saying that unsecured moderation on a public news site is in any way similar to a computerised voting machine? Diebold sucks, but come on, really.
I don't see any point in refuting a comparison of apples and oranges, though I find it amusing that you think that comparison is a telling point.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I'm going to guess that
But by then you'll probably have ended up joining the Army for lack of better prospects in Bush's economy, so that you can lay down your life ostensibly to protect democracy in Iraq, and surely to protect Halliburton's contracts there.
While I'm sure that somewhere Mr. Jefferson is cringing at your example, please don't feel too bad: Fascists everywhere rely on people just like you; without you they'd never get beyond the Bier-Hall Putsch.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
After hearing about the security issues with the Diebold machines, I had some doubts. I'm no technophobe, but placing the future of our democracy so completely into the hands of a company which has been less than responsive to public critique is something I find rather frightening.
Turns out they didn't check for ID either. I hope I feel safer in November.
eVoting on machines that do not produce auditable paper trails are disasters waiting to happen. As in many other intrinsically dangerous situations, years may, and probably will go by with no apparent problems.
Our lives are full of protections that are seemingly "no needed." How often does an elevator cable actually break, for example? Does that mean we don't need overspeed brakes on elevators?
Or inspectors to see whether the brakes are there and working?
One little-noted contribution by Edward Teller was his almost single-handed insistence that civilian nuclear power plants be enclosed in containment buildings. This is particularly interesting because he was, of course, a strong advocate of nuclear power. And, of course, nuclear reactors are supposed to be safe in the first place, so why go to the huge expense of a containment building that isn't supposed to be needed? Then a Three Mile Island comes along, and we find out why.
Black-box voting is a disaster waiting to happen. The disaster probably won't happen tomorrow, or this year. And when it does happen, it probably won't happen in a district with plenty of careful, well-trained, honest conscientious poll workers.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I think that being an election judge was the best thing I could have possibly done to learn about the real security of elections.
shouldn't this be mandatory for anybody analyzing anything? i.e. get out of the friggin' bubble and see how it works in the real world.
I typed in my own name a a write-in candidate for a state assembly seat that was un-contested (held by Rebecca Cohn). The idea being that I should be able to determine if my vote was counted by examining a list of the write in candidates, and finding my own name (Goodman). I voted in Santa Clara County, CA on a Sequoia Systems electronic voting machine. Do any slashdotters know if detailed election results are available online? Or whom to contact to get such information. So far, I have been unable to verify, but it is still early.
Like rain on your wedding day!
Are you Corn Fed?
OK,so I'm not American, but that guy is one hell of a great patriot. Amazing how many people hate the guy when he's out to defend America's #1 institution. Oh wait... democracy was replaced by "don't bug me about my quasi-legal business practices" a few years back. Right.
How timely. I recently wrote an essay (read: rant) on why E-Voting is inevitable, and why we should all just suck it up and work to make the system better, instead of fighting it and trying to preserve an antiquated and inadequate pen-and-paper system.
There should be no question in anyone's mind that electronic voting
is the future. It is impossible to argue that moving to an electronic
system is not inevitable, any more than it is possible to argue in
favour of abandoning cell phones and reverting to tin cans and string,
or abandoning email in favour of carrier pigeons.
The benefits of electronic voting are obvious and numerous: real-time
tallying, greater security (a staffer couriering a box of ballots could
theoretically manipulate them, but a staffer transmitting an encrypted
database is powerless to alter it), elimination of ambiguous selections
(eg., "Hanging/Pregnant Chads"), less time required per voter, fewer
staff required to manage an election, and less paper waste.
No system is without its drawbacks, however, and e-voting's drawbacks
are subtle and insidious. The most obvious weakness of an e-voting
system regards securing the system against manipulation. Elections
hold an enormous amount at stake - indeed, entire political careers -
and thus the temptation for covert meddling is inevitable. The
people designing and implementing the system could be bribed into
embedding backdoors into the software.
A less obvious drawback of e-voting is that it puts at risk one of
the fundamental pillars of a democracy - anonymous voting. In order
to prevent ineligible people from voting, or eligible people from
voting multiple times, their identity would have to be verified
prior to voting. However, in order to support re-counts, the
actual votes themselves would have to be somehow tied to the people
that cast them (otherwise, the tally would simply be an integer that
increments whenever someone votes for them). If the voters weren't
completely confident that their vote was guaranteed to be kept
secret, the entire democracy could be undermined. With a corrupt
incumbant, people could be intimidated into voting for them, out
of fear that the government might quietly (or worse - aggressively)
discriminate against anyone who voted for their opponent.
These problems, and the others related to e-voting are not
insurmountable. The software used to run the system should be
completely public. This would prevent backdoors from being
inserted into the system by allowing anyone with enough
computer-savvy to personally inspect the code controlling the
system. In fact, virtually all software written by the government
should be made freely available anyway, since it is OUR tax
dollars that funded its creation.
The voter anonymity could be guaranteed by assigning eligible voters
a security public/private key pair, with the mappings held in escrow
by a special elections comission. The database would only be
accessible to a non-partisan staff of top-secret-cleared employees,
and would be destroyed after the election results were certified.
The complete widespread adoption of electronic voting is inevitable.
It is not a question of "if," but rather "when." Some jurisdictions
are already experimenting with some systems, with less than
encouraging results. One of their principal mistakes is that they
have contracted out the software for the systems, and the source
code is not being made available for public inspection. Consequently,
there are pockets of the electorate who don't trust the systems,
and indeed, the systems have already exhibited troubling symptoms
of bugs that may have been detected and corrected if the software
had been opened up prior to being deployed.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
Second, what I don't get, is why can't we use electronics to print out a "ballot" with our selections done in the comfort of home, and just take this "ballot" to a polling place?
How do you know that the ballot you are printing is the correct one? Just because it comes from what looks like the official voting web site doesn't mean that it actually is. What happens when scores of people show up with thier home printed ballots that are invalid? Have them vote at the voting station? Why not just have them do that in the first place?
What if, even worse, somebody slightly changes the online ballot to trick people into voting for the wrong person? Perhaps they switch the names, so that when voting for Person A, the scantron machine actually reads it as a vote for Person B. The machine accepts it without error and it looks to the voter like they've voted for who they want. Unless a ballot is given to a voter by an election judge there is no real way of knowing if it is valid and without hidden tricks. Even then there could be doubt about a ballot's validity.
It may sound like I'm being paranoid and overly critical about using technology for elections, but with so much on the line it would seem very likely that somebody with an interest in who gets elected could try to sway an election like this.
I have mod points, but I'm not going to touch this. I should coin a term for the irrational fear of other users getting karma from "whoring".
What? You figure one less easy point to a 'whorer' means potentially one less for something incredibly witty that you might come up with?
Give me a break. I wouldn't log out and back in to post this either, as I could careless if I get the points or not--it's simply the fact the information that might be useful for others. It's the information we are all after. I don't care if it was posted by an AC, you or your mom.
You sir are a WHORAPHOBE. Get a life.
'He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.' - Douglas Adams
The Slashdot editors should not have infinite mod points, but that isn't likely to change. What should change is the way they can do it so anonymously. I don't care if they get 5 anonymous points every once in a while like us, but the unlimited points should be accounted for. At the very least, everybody with unlimited mod points should have on their user page, an up to date list of different moderations (Insightful, Flamebait, etc), and what percentage have been meta-moderated as unfair. Right now all we have is a single static page that lumps them all together (moderations and even editors).
I swear I had the other tag in there... And I apologize, I hit submit and wandered off for food, giving into the lazyness and ease of use I mentioned.
The last paragraph nails it. We're all screwed.
The mechanism you suggest is hard to implement, because of the requirement that it should be impossible to associate a particular vote with a particular person. The paper trail you want is the one that gives you access to all the legitimate votes, but does not give you any clue as to who made any given vote. This is, of course, to prevent votes from being sold or coerced. Consequently, the transmission path from the person's home to the polling place must be absolutely secure, and if you want individuals to be able to do post-hoc confirmation, it must remain secure indefinitely.
Obviously, this problem is hugely simplified if the person carries their vote to the polling place in their brain, transmits it locally to the counting machine, and does without post-hoc verification.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
But when a bunch of gorillas steal a booth, you can SEE a booth is missing, you can see that a shitload of vote serial numbers aren't accounted for, etc. There is evidence, if not of who commited fraud, that fraud has indeed happened. With electronic stolen elections, it is much easier to cover tracks.
Over here....
I'll give you $100 if you prove to me that you voted for my candidate by showing me your ballot.
Yeah, but you only need one person like that. They can just send the flash updates to the gorillas who fuck up the votes without a trace, and then re-flash to the original firmware. With the touch screen ease that the rest of the american citizens use to vote.
I have been wondering lately if phsyically damaging these machines is not justified in a system that is supposed to cherish democracy. Civil disobedience is justified in some cases, and I believe that this is just such a case.
Remember, Americans: Bring your voter registration card, and a sledgehammer for Diebold. They are stealing our freedom to vote, the very democracy over which so much blood has been spilled, and the corrupted political process is encouraging it via awarded contracts and almost silent acquiescence.
This crosses political affiliations and affects all Americans. It must be stopped it by all means necessary or you will lose the ability to collectively affect the policies of your country, no matter how small your individual voice might be. This is zealous, without a doubt, but not all zealotry is bad. "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."
Live free or die.
If you think that careers are the most enormous stakes in an election, you're a little too close to the process for your own good. b-)
kind regards,
Jess
I am programmed for etiquette, not destruction!
Second, what I don't get, is why can't we use electronics to print out a "ballot" with our selections done in the comfort of home, and just take this "ballot" to a polling place? The ballot would, of course, be something similar to a scantron or other paper form, but would also have human readable form of the contained data. Perhaps bar codes or their successors would suffice?
I believe a printout isn't allowed to discourage "vote buying."
Think about it: how quickly could you get a free beer (free as in beer) if your could show your local operative whom you voted for?
YHBT YHL HAND FOAD
The irony in the song seems to be that none of the examples are actually ironic...
Except in the great, rebellious state of Georgia.
A republican can walk into the primary, vote the democrat ticket, then in the fall can vote the Republican ticket.
Allows all voters the opportunity to vote in November from the best offerings of the two major parties.
Some folks on both sides switch hit to put up a weak candidate for the opposition. I prefer to do it so that I can have the best from the other side should my party not win.
However, in THIS presidential primary, because a number of honest, highly qualified men did not even make it to "super Tuesday" on the Democratic ticket (Sorry, Joe, I'd have voted for you), there really was no reason to vote the blue ticket. Kerry seems to have things wrapped up. But the party bosses planned it that way. *sigh*
But hey, we got to vote for the lesser of two evil flags in Georgia. Because, after all, FLAGS are so much more FREAKING IMPORTANT then law and order, corporate corruption investigations, and national security!
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
While I did not serve in an election judge capacity, I am a Maryland voter and used the Diebold machines yesterday. I was impressed with the professionalism of the election judges and believe that Prof. Rubin is correct that competent, honest, committed election officials provide a vital line of security in what is by its nature (whether paper or electronic) an imperfect process. Today there have been stories of some isolated problems with voting machines, but certainly no widespread failures or security breaches.
When Prof. Rubin notes his mistake in coding the smart card, he provides an interesting illustration. When I reported to my polling place and signed in, I was issued a smart card. When I placed in the machine, an election judge stood nearby reviewing the "orange card" that listed my party affiliation, etc. He specifically asked "does the first screen list your party as XXXXXX?" It didn't - my smart card was improperly coded by the election judge. The judges immediately had me stop so no votes were entered, recoded the card, and ushered me back to the machine to complete my ballot.
I share the concern about the security of the transmission from the Zero machine to the Bd. of Elections and hope Diebold already has implemented some encryption. But since the machines aren't actively networked during the day, and based on what I saw at my polling place, I'm relatively unconcerned about the security risks.
In the traditional paper system, which was in place for a very, very long time, we never managed to work out the problems of lost ballots, unreadable ballots, etc. Remember - in Florida in 2000, every recount seemed to produce a new "total" number of ballots cast. While there are legitimate security concerns that should be addressed, I can't believe that the system is any worse or less reliable than before.
My hat's off to the Maryland Board of Elections and all of the volunteers that made this work. A committed, honest and professional job was done by everyone I saw and I'm proud of them and grateful for their efforts.
and from county to county as well. Sometimes the state sets the rules, sometimes local election boards do. This is an interesting point to remember. Not all elections will follow the same procedures that Professor Rubin's site did. This could introduce new risks or mitigate existing ones, depending on local procedure and policy. I think he made a note of that in his writeup as well.
I would like each ballot to be on a standard 8.5 by 11 piece of paper. The ballot could either be printed by me at home on my computer or printed for me at a polling station. If done at home I could fill it out days before the election if I needed. I would show up at the polling station have my voting information checked, my ballot is read through a scanner and I would receive a receipt confirming my selections. A person without a computer would follow the same steps except they would fill out the form at the station. I think this is a simply system with a physical audit trail that saves time and makes it easier for me to vote, as well as vote better.
Large numbers of ballots and ballot boxes going missing would throw serious red flags- the local news would catch serious shenanigans. Ditto burning down warehouses. (And e-voting doesn't solve these problems either: simply disappear the smart cards or machines.)
We already have very fast reporting, so the "Green" vote problem won't crop up either.
Where the US has been vulnerable in the past is voter rolls (Just how many dead people voted for Kennedy in Chicago?) and direct manipulation of voters (How many minority voters were "discouraged" in Florida last election?) E-voting doesn't solve these problems either.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
If X party has organized (For most states this means to have gotten enough signatures) then that party can issue a primary ballot.
If the party on an individuals voting registration is holding a primary, that person is allowed - as a member of that party - to vote in said primary election. If that individual opted to not list a party membership, then the only dis-advantage of this condition is that said individual may not be part of the primary election process.
Individuals whom do not choose a party membership can still influence whom is on the ballot through signature drives. Most states have a registered voter threshold after which a petitioned candidate will be listed on the final ballot. Finally, if an individual's preferred candidate still did not make the cut, there is a form to write in your candidate's choice.
Please, if I've missed anything huge, I apologize.
So whom do you fear most: someone who is evil and stupid, or someone who is evil and smart?
It's not a pack of commie-terrorist-hacker anarchists hijacking the vote that I fear. It's corruption from within the system that rigs the vote to keep itself in office. E-voting allows for a more centralized point of attack that can be manipulated by insiders.In the article there was no mention of how the local election officials could know whether the machines were tallying accurately. Maybe every third vote for Edwards was credited to Kerry. How would they know?
If the group in power were to conspire with the machine manufacturer to rig the next election, how would anyone know? Especially if they didn't screw up as they did in Watergate.You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
I don't like GW (which is why I'm posting anon) and I don't like democrats. The green party is psycho and the liberaterians are just as crazy.
What would happen if all of us Slashdotters banded together and really voted for Cowboy Neal? Even if we got 100,000 of us voting for Cowboy Neal, wouldn't that be a good way for someone to take notice of the fact that our government is broken and we want it to be fixed?
We should do something. Slashdot the elections or something like that.
-E
This story reminds me of an article I read (dead-tree) a while back on preventing terrorism.
The article was critical about all of the techno-solutions for preventing terrorism, and very much in favor of the simple solution: Make sure you have good people in the right places keeping an eye on things.
In a nutshell, Avi Rubin's article comes down to the very same thing. He had tremendous respect for and confidence in the people working at the election. He (still) had little respect for the techno-solution.
Yesterday I voted using an optical scanner, which I never truly appreciated until reading all of the e-Voting flap. I've always appreciated the fact that I've always known at least one of the poll workers, and they knew me. After reading this article, I appreciate that fact even more.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The subject says it all.
At least with paperless voting you need something more sofisticated and educated that a horde of gorillas that can barely read and write their names
More sophisticated and educated, but less numerous. The problem with paperless voting as currently implemented is that to tamper with the results you don't need a "horde" of anyone; you just need one or two of those sophisticated people to get the right level of access and abuse it.
I just sent an e-mail to my representative specifically requesting that he push legislation to either remove e-voting or demand a verifiable paper trail and auditable code on voting machines.
The text I sent:
In light of the recent heavy usage of electronic voting machines during the primaries, including many inconveniences, I decided to look into the matter more carefully. Due to many major security flaws in e-voting systems and many straight-forward openings for abuse, I am greatly worried about the current state of e-voting.
It is my hope that a law could be passed which would require the following of e-voting systems:
1) Code review by the NSA (or other governmental agency) to ensure that no backdoors have been added to the programs.
2) Paper trails of all votes cast, so that the ability of computers to change massive amounts of data swiftly could never be applied to the votes which are essential to our democratic system. (These need not be the primary counting method, but should be there as a safeguard in case of fraud)
3) Voter verifiable ballots. Currently, there is no proof for the voter as to how their vote was counted. If the votes were printed (see 2) and then given to the voter to place into a separate ballot box, the voter could easily look at the ballow to determine that the machine actually printed their vote correctly.
None of these requests are especially difficult to have carried out, none of these requests are unreasonable, and all of the requests are essential to the maitenance of our fair and reliable democracy.
It's not much, but it would be if everyone on Slashdot did it.
Hmmm....Slashdotting congress....that would be fun.
The ballot would, of course, be something similar to a scantron or other paper form, but would also have human readable form of the contained data.
Los Angeles County is using a machine now called the "InkaVote." The mechanism of voting is very similar to the old "Votomatic" punch card machines but uses a little ink pen to make a clear, unambiguous mark on the ballot. I'm guessing that the ballots will be optically scanned when they get to their final destination and are counted.
It's a good system, actually. Not too many people had to be given the guided tour because the interface is so similar to the old punch-card system. It is also very easy to "proofread" your ballot after voting...look at where you placed your marks and compare the number the mark is under with the numbers on the ballot.
No chads, no ambiguity, a truly binary result. I could live with something like that. I hope LA County keeps this rather than buy any more Diebold machines.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Yeah, you need a dozen educated, trained hackers who know how the system works. This might raise the cost of rigging an election somewhat, or who knows-- it might actually be a savings.
The best part is, when you burn down a polling place, you effectively let people know that the election is crooked. There's no such assurance with E-Voting.
OK, I know these things are a bad idea, so do you. Sadly, the mass media and the general level of understanding among the population in general is not going to change what's happening at the moment.
I fear that the only way any of the security concerns, raised by everyone from your slightly savvy Joe Sixpack to experts in the security field, will ever be addressed properly is to actually have someone go ahead and blatantly compromise some of these things.
I'm not an advocate of election fraud or system cracking but there is probably no other way to get the messege thru the spin and media brainwashing to the general populous.
I fear where all this will head. Anyone have an acounting of where all 32,000 keys are? Would having just one turn up missing be enough to invalidate an entire election? What was so bad about paper ballots anyway?
Complicating matters to simplify a process is counter-productive.
There is still an overall legal advantage to the two major parties, but this is slowly being corrected. Bottom line, if the majority of US citizens have a problem with it, it will change quickly. So, far, a minority of citizens care (heck a minority of citizens even vote). Truth != Troll
I live in a country where phony elections were common in the last 70 years.
Chicago isn't a country.
Good article.
I voted yesterday and it all went quite smoothly.
But I still object to e-voting because it replaes a process which is very simple technologically speaking, with one that is complex. Also, it's in the hands of a private company, and easily leaves open plenty of room for conspiracy theories if an election is close at all (especially since there's no paper trail).
I do not know the costs involved but it also seems like it would be a lot more expensive.
There's no accountability for posting trolls of flaimbait either, so it makes little sense to put accountability into the moderation system.
There is metamoderation, however, that if you actually care will provide you with both feedback and the opportunity to "right the wrongs" in a sense. All while being anonymous (which is good).
As someone posting as an AC, cearly accountability is not something you're interested in. That's hypocrisy!
=Smidge=
Imagine the benefits of having both. A paper ballot with a unique ID (and computer-readable technology), and an electronic ballot with the same ID. For a recount (or the verified, official count), do a cross-check, and only matching values count. Gives you the auditing capabilities of paper, with the technology requirements for speed and security. If you want to mess with the vote, you have to do a front-to-back sweep, because everything counts. That way, they compensate for their respective strengths and weakensses.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Amusingly, as a physician, the rules for how I can transmit simple data require both a stricter level of paper-trail (I have to document in the medical record the consent of the patient to release records and where I sent them) and a stronger encryption (sending medical information via unsecured Fax or modem is against HIPPA rules) than people tolerate on their votes.
In the case of states with a Caucus system (Iowa, for instance) the party itself pays for the organization of the caucus.
Bottom line is that if a law is passed forcing parties to run their organziation in a particular way, then that law may need to have provisions to pay for that organization.
I'm quoted as saying that the other judges in my training were in the "grandparent category" with respect to their age. My colleagues for the day, who were in that category as well, did not appreciate the barb and were ready to spar with me.
I was the L-Z democrat book judge, along with Andy, a grandfather of many...
One of the Sandys, Joy and I were the three younger judges who did not fit into the grandparent category.
The less than young judges had a good time constantly reminding me of who the careless judge was at this election. One of them commented to me that there are many young people who are incompetent and many old people who can manage an election just fine, thank you.
I know this is offtopic but WTF is up with this guy and the ageist comments? He doesn't come out and say anything negative about voter judges being grandparents but why does he keep mentioning their relative ages with respect to having grandchildren? Does he think that being a grandparent make one automatically incompetent? I don't think so Ravi.
Speak truth to power.
Why isn't there a project to create a Free Software electronic voting system that fixes all the Diebold issues? Seems to me we need an open system, visable source has proven to be far more secure than closed source, and it would be accountable to the public.
Where are the people willing to start a company that produces an open product with the flaws fixed?
That sounds like a winning poll option to me!
Actually...I'm confused about the giving out of 'Republican and Democrat' ballots. When I've gone to vote...you could vote for anyone...not limited to a party. Or was this just for primaries? I'll go back and re-read...may have missed that..
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
You have just described the 'caucus' systems that many States in the US use (Iowa for instance). However due to state laws that oversee the election process, the caucus (or primary - depending on the state) is standardized across the parties.
Basically, in a state with primaries, any party member may show up at one of the local meetings, and volunteer to become a delegate (delegates are those whom go to a party convention).
In a state with a caucus system, the voting process, and the party meeting are done at the same time, in an open matter. Everyone in a party has a chance to debate the issues before committing to a vote this is voluntary. At the same time, you are offered the opportunity to become an attendee to the County Level convention From here the differences cease again. The county convention feeds the state convention, and the state convention feeds the national convention.
See, not so different afterall! Of course, many American citizens don't actually know how it works either.
Can't you be in multiple parties?
A voter complained that she was a Democrat but had been given the Republican ballot
I havn't voted except in the 1996 presidential election, and that was an absentee ballot which i remember nothing of. Could someone explain to me why there are difference ballots for democrats and republicans, and why you register as an affiliate of one party or another? Why not just have the candidates party associated with their name? Why the different ballots? I can understand that a democrat might only want to vote for democrats, and vice versa, but i just don't understand this.
(and most others I've seen on the subject) is a comparison of the vulnerabilities of paper voting and paperless voting. The author points out several possible weaknesses in the electronic system, but would a security expert also be able to find weaknesses in the paper ballot system? I'm guessing yes. I'm not coming down on one side or the other, but I think part of the analysis is missing.
Evil is the money of root.
Toronto used them in the last several local elections, and I was a scrutineer (election judge) on the first.
The ballots are a large card, with a table of jobs and cantidates printed on them. The voter colors in the sharft of a broad arrow betwen cantidate and the position.
The cards are carrid in a folder to the recorder, who puts them face-down in the reader, which reads and totals them, and feeds them face-down into a box. The box is kept, for manual and electronic recounts.
At the end of the day, a printout is made for each scrutineer, another for the records and then the results are sent by cell phone to the master polling station.
By the time I got back to the cantidate's office, the results were on TV, by polling station, and they matched my printout.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
I thought the best way would be:
Instead of allowing people to vote via internet, have them show up at the sight.
A limited client is presented, they can only sign up one name while voting happens. A photograph of their face is taken and stored on disk too.
If they fraud with someone else's information, their picture comes up. The vote is cancelled and the real voter can vote... Maybe even use the photo for criminal investigation.
Online voting is just waiting for disaster, but electronic on-site voting can be secure.
And once it works in this country, they can be marketed to other countries as Democracy Boxes or something.
God spoke to me
nevermind, this is redundant and people already answered elsewhere.
buh bye.
How is voting by printout so different than the mail in proxies for people who will not be in their jurisdiction on election day. The local party office could start offering to mail in your proxy for you and give you a six pack on your way out...
While this has been possible for some time we don't see it happening.
Obvioulsy it's a little different as to get a proxy , you usualy have to apply for it well in advance and submit it a while before election day.
However the potentiall to bribe people into using this method of vote is there.
Just my $0.02
--Aaron Greenberg
The laws on that vary from state to state. In Ohio, where I voted yesterday, it's seperate "ballots" (we were using Diebold systems, too). In other states, it's all the same ballot.
There is no 'i' in team, but there is in fiasco...
Yes, the Minnesota ballots are cast this way. It's anonymous, secure and verifyable.
Why doesn't the voting machine have an interface with the curtain?
When you vote, the screen goes blank and the curtain opens.
When the curtain closes, the screen is ready for the next voter.
God spoke to me
:wq
The average person is simply mesmerized by technology. As the observation goes, it is, to many of them, "indistinguishable from magic." Put this together with "patriotism" (or to put it more exactly, the deference to authority inculcated by public schools, mass media, and so forth), and what have you got?
Avi's observations are scary! What we have is people ready to assume that because government and technology (read: "some very smart people) are behind all this e-voting stuff, it must be okay. Most people wouldn't even think to question, and as many would fall asleep listening to a discussion of the security issues.
As it stands, it seems likely that insecure machines will become the norm, and the majority is happy to remain in its stupor.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
I'm not sure Prof. Rubin's right about the smart cards not being a big vulnerability. If someone manufactures altered cards it's easy to come in with one in your pocket, get a legit card, use the altered card to vote and return the legit card. You couldn't stuff the ballot box this way, but you could vote a different ballot than the one you were assigned. This would get caught when checking the voting machine's tally of ballot types against the number of each type issued, but there'd still be no way of correcting the results.
The zero machine is the big problem. I think it's why Diebold makes such a big deal out of the security of the actual voting process: the zero machine makes the security of the voting itself irrelevant. That one machine tallies all votes, and it gets access to all of the PCMCIA cards that hold the tallies from the other machines. It's in a position to simply discard all the actual results and replace them with whatever it wants, and once it has there's no way to tell it's happened. I can think of several easy ways to keep that code undetected, too. Unverified code loaded at the last minute (after all the testing had been done) to fix a convenient bug, for example. Just disallowing updates won't stop me, though. Prof. Rubin mentioned using PIN 1111 during training but a different PIN when setting the machines up for an election. So, I put the result-replacement code into the zero machine before it's delivered to the state, but put in a check: if the PIN is 1111 then disable the replacement code, otherwise enable it. During training, during test elections, during everything that uses that special PIN 1111 the machine will behave exactly as if no malicious code was present. Set it up for a real election using a real PIN other than 1111, and suddenly code that's never been active before is active and waiting to force the results. Note that it doesn't have to be Diebold loading the code, anyone who can get enough access to the zero machine to load a program update into it could do this. Given Diebold's track record for doing on-the-sly updates to the code, I think there's a non-negligible chance of someone being able to slip their code into an update and have it go through even if we assume Diebold themselves wouldn't (and I'm far from willing to assume that).
The big danger in my opinion isn't so much that this is possible, but that it's possible without leaving any evidence it's happened. The one thing paper ballots do well is give us an audit trail from the actual cast ballots all the way through the final results. The results can be altered, but it's very difficult to alter them while keeping the audit trail intact and consistent. It's not the electronic voting machines that are the major problem, it's the lack of a verifiable audit trail. With paper ballots you don't need to trust the counting process to verify whether the final results are correct. With the current electronic machines this isn't the case.
Is there an open source evoting software project anywhere? Why don't us nerds show them how it's done? Write core software to configure the ballots, take the votes, tally the votes and build the proper security in. It could be made to be customizable for various hardware environments. And it should specify a reference hardware environment composed of off-the-shelf components. This could be useful worldwide and a nice civic contribution Such a project might bring open source into a wider public awareness. Just a thought!
First, I'm impressed by Avi's candor. His admissions of his own error, his discussion of mitigation of some risks, and so on point to someone, I feel, who is trying their utmost to be forthright and thorough. By the same token, clearly these doing really lessen the great danger of an e-voting machine. We need to stop for a moment and consider the sinister possibilities. When, say, Microsoft buys Diebold, purportedly for technology or such, who's to say they're not buying themselves a congress that will outlaw open source? That's only the most mild of such scenarios.
Second, I wonder if there's a sacraficial lamb out there who'd be willing to hack a Diebold box. If someone could successfully seriously skew the outcome such that people went, "Wait, that's *really* the result?" and then claim credit, that might be the death blow to unaudited evoting.
Third, I'd like to simply point out an analogy that's appropriate when consider that e-voting on super tuesday was "successful". Windows works pretty well when you sit down and use it, most of the time. That doesn't mean it's secure - witness the rash of viruses as of late - and it doesn't mean it isn't *disastrous* when that insecurity is exploited.
Thanks for doing what you can to keep the spotlight on this issue, Avi - America needs you.
If the voting machine is rigged, it can generate signed fake votes as easily as signed real votes.
The main point here is there is no way to count the votes without a computer intepreting them for you. Thus, there is always software than can be tampered with to change votes en masse.
It is important a real paper trail that can be hand verified is created. I also feel it is important the voter can do so himself at the polling place if he so wishes. This is easy with scantron sheets or the chad machines. It cannot be done with the electronic machines, as no one can see the bits on the card.
I voted electronically, and just doing it you can easily see that there is no way to know if my vote was even put onto the smartcard at all, let alone accurately. And then, there is no evidence that it was moved from the smart card into the small accumulator machine at all, let alone accurately. And has been said many times, there is no way to do a meaningful recount from the source ballots, as they don't exist.
That's called CHECKS AND BALANCES. The government was created in that way. Majority rule doesn't always respect the rights of others, and the Judicial branch is there to guarantee those rights. For this reason, a judge doesn't define criminal guilt, the judge is there to protect the rights of the defendant while guilt is determined by a jury of his peers.
You *have* heard of M2, haven't you?
"There were also some security issues that I found to be much worse than I expected. All of the tallies are kept on PCMCIA cards. At the end of the election, each of those cards is loaded onto one machine, designated as the zero machine."
All machines print their own tally report. The zero machine prints out an accumulated report. If a discrepancy occured it would be caught in the election canvas, which is done the day after the election. That is why you see "Un-official Results" in all reports until after the canvas. This is not a security issue...
The Founding Fathers didn't like the idea of political parties at all.
The Federalist papers are full of worries about "faction"s.
Eventually there was a grudging acceptance that they were a necessary evil to handle coherent candidate selection. Under the first draft of the US system, a President and a Vice President could be from different parties. This led to dysfunctional situations.
If you are worried about the insecurity of e-voting, and you are wondering what to do, join EFF. They are working hard to educate the public and our politicians on this subject.
Test 1 2 3 4
All this is very odd to me, in both the process and the execution.
The idea of the government paying for the counting of votes about internal party issues is unthinkable here - I'd go so far as to say it would almost certainly be illegal for our tax money to be used to pay for that. Can anyone set up a political party and demand that the US Government counts votes for their candidates?
The whole concepts of a 'voting machine' is alien to me. What's wrong with paper and a pencil? Sure there are procedural exploits that are theoretically possible, but no more or less so than with the machines, and we don't have any of this chad-dangling nonsense.
More importantly, the main reason we will not have voting machines here is simply cost. Why pay for something that is going to cost more than pencil and paper?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
>This is how Al Gore won the majority of votes in the 2000 election, but lost a majority of States: Gore's additional votes were "surplus" in states he'd already won the electoral votes of.
This is a really important point (from an informative and perceptive article, thank you!).
Zoom out from the 2000 election, on which everyone has an unchangeable opinion, to the general question of whether this is a good system.
Notice that if a state's electoral votes go on a winner-take-all basis, then a candidate needs broad support to win.
Imagine how this would work in Iraq. You couldn't win by appealing only to Shiites or only to Kurds. Anything over 50 point epsilon percent of the $FACTION vote wouldn't help get you elected. To get more electoral votes (if we inflict our system on the Iraqis), you'd need to reach out and get some majorities from $OTHERFACTION and $YETANOTHERFACTION.
In other words, it's a feature.
We anarchists like to say:
"Don't vote - it only encourages them".
Of course they don't need much encouragement, anyway, I suppose.
The fools who think voting is important forget the other great line, too:
"If voting could change the system, it would be illegal."
Now we can add to that: "or it will be electronic."
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
>I'm also curious why state legislatures no longer select their Senators. Obviously the "little guy" is going to complain that they dont' get to choose their rep's, but the Senators are supposed to be different, right?
That's a perceptive and important question which deserved to be moderated up.
The Founders imagined the Senate as a sober, deliberative body intentionally insulated from popular pressure. The theory was that it could be a balance against demagogues and mob rule. (Plus it was a way to provide small states enough power to make the Union palatable to them). The six-year term was done to implement that insulation. So was the selection by state legislatures.
By 1913 the smoke-filled-room process had become so corrupt that the 17th Amendment passed.
Someone familiar with the history of the debate should chime in here.
Closed source is fine when all that's at risk is your shopping list, or what pr0n sites you view, but national elections are another thing. For this, the mechanism for voting has to be user-verifiable.
Take a look at Brazil. 100% (I believe) electronic voting, using an OPEN SOURCE voting solution. There, if you have any doubts about the system, you just pull up the entire source code and look for the $republicans++ line or whatever.
Electronic voting could be the best way to defend democracy, but it has to be achieved in a democratic fashion. It can't be controlled by someone looking to make money from it. There have to be NO conflicts of interest. Just a single conflict of interest and the whole integrity of the system comes into doubt, and therefor the outcome.
Having electronic voting that's run by 3 companies spread across the US is a really, truly horrible idea. It puts the ballot paper in the pocket of the politician - surely exactly what it shouldn't be doing.
I'm done ranting now. I want electronic voting to be global. I just want it to come from the people, not some guys in suits trying to get more money.
If you can make sense of that, you're a better man than me :-P
Theres been some hacking of Las Vegas slots by the people who make the slot machines.
So I guess you have a point there.
If the makers of the electronic voting want a win for one side, they'd be able to script it.
God spoke to me
There's no such thing as a "stolen election"; there is no physical entity being carried off, so how can it be considered theft!?
Think progressively! These elections aren't being stolen, they're being liberated! INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE!!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
> that guy is one hell of a great patriot.
Amen.
It's not about waving a flag or beating up protesters. Patriotism is the quiet, day to day work of volunteering to register voters, discussing issues with other citizens, and volunteering as a poll worker.
Nobody puts up statues to them, but those grandparents at the polling place are democracy's first line of defense. Thank them the next time you vote.
You *do* know that metamoderating something the editors moderated unfairly does nothing to decrease their infinite mod points, don't you?
>>If recounting is needed because of a dispute, accounting facilities and storage can be hijacked or burnt to ground (it's happened a few times).
What is sad is thes same thing has also happened here in the USA. A few elections ago, several ballot boxes were found floating in the San Francisco Bay.
I forget...are we at war with Eurasia or East Asia?
Someone tell me what the holes in this scheme are:
You vote. Out pops a slip of paper with a random unique number on it and your vote and a URL http:/e-votingsomething.gov . If your guy (or gal) wins, you through the paper out. If your guy loses unexpectedly, you go to the library and bring up the URL on a browser, which asks you to type in the random number and tells you what vote(s) were associated with it. If it matches, you throw the paper out> If it doesn't you press the big red button on the bottom of the screen and mail photocopies to your party headquarters and the Washington Post.
Presumably the number can be made with a checkdigit or encrypted signature such that you can't fake your answer.
As Bob Cringely says, most of the companies making voting machines also make ATM's - so how hard can it be tomake them spit out a piece of paper?
-Greg
>but would a security expert also be able to find weaknesses in the paper ballot system?
Yes, but all you need for that is a historian.
Paper balloting has been through the fire and has had hundreds of years of debugging. The procedures are battle-tested. The vulnerabilities are known and so are the ways to control them.
The biggest differences are in the detection, response and containment stages of the security process. Detection of electronic vote fraud could be made difficult or impossible. Recounts without paper would be meaningless. Containment? Compromise the voting machine software and every polling place in the nation is suddenly corrupt.
You write as if this is a problem of perception. But weren't those elections truly insecure -- and therefore truly unreliable ?
Electronic voting is inevitable you say? But you fail to explain why . Is it simpler ? It doesn't sound simpler from your description.
You are correct, the secret ballot is central to our system of voting. You mention intimidation for voting the wrong way as the reason why secret ballots are important. You left out what I see as a more important reason. Many of the people following up your article suggest that the voting machine print a receipt, for the voter, so they will have confidence that their vote was recorded correctly. The problem with receipts is that this introduces the possibility of buying votes. Hands up if you know anyone who would vote for, let's say, Pat Buchanan, if they knew that a receipt showing they voted for Buchanan could be traded for a free drink at their neighbourhood Hooters? Aren't there yahoos, who by the time they were on their way over to Hooters, would have convinced themselves they would have vote fot Buchanan anyhow?
You suggest a special elections committee be charged with the responsibility to hold the private keys. I am not sure I fully understand this suggestion. And I don't think all the people who think they agreed with you, and yet suggested voters be given receipts really understood you either.
It seems to me that this system has some problems not associated with a paper system.
If I were an American why should I trust a " special elections committee "? In the procedure you suggest only the members of that special elections committee could verify the election. A small group is more easily subverted. With paper elections you have to subvert all the officials. And the procedure for verifying the election? It is not open and transparent. It relies solely on software, which could contain bugs or trojan horses.
Hasn't Diebold already been found to be running elections on their machines using versions of their software that were not the ones that had been certified ?
What if I misplace the document my key was issued on? Does that mean I don't get to vote? With the current system I would bring my passport, driver's liscence, provincial health card. The election officials would use one of those to verify my identity and issue me a ballot.
What keeps me from selling my voter authorization key prior to the election?
The municipal elections here in Toronto use ballots that are read by an optical scanner. The scanner reads the ballot prior to it going into the ballot box. The scanner is capable of detecting a problem with the ballot before the voter leaves the voting hall. This is a good thing. This system is easy to use. But, I believe, the official count is based on the paper ballot not the count kept by the scanning machine. This is the way it should work. No messy receipts. A verifiable audit trail. And to subvert the counts would require subverting all the officials.
Oh come on moderators! This is a "Snatch" reference.
It's actually kinda funny.
I forget...are we at war with Eurasia or East Asia?
Sorry, but comparing electronic voting with the French manual voting system, I must disagree with most of your post... BTW, I have served as a vote-counter, so I know what I am speaking about ;)
The benefits of electronic voting are obvious and numerous: real-time tallying,
Results of French elections are usually known a few hours after the votes, and after-voting polls usually give the result right at closure time.
greater security (a staffer couriering a box of ballots could theoretically manipulate them, but a staffer transmitting an encrypted database is powerless to alter it)
Votes are counted by groups of six persons with representatives of parties checking. Any voter can demand to take part. Results are then communicated by phone to the Interior Ministry, where they are published voting by voting center. Any of the dozens of persons having taken part in the counting can check that they match.
, elimination of ambiguous selections (eg., "Hanging/Pregnant Chads")
Voters are handed a slip of paper per candidate and an envelop. They vote by placing one of the slip inside the envelop. If there is none or more than one, the vote is invalid. I have yet to see an "ambiguous selections"
less time required per voter,
Voting takes less than a minute on average. I doubt an electronic system would be much faster.
fewer staff required to manage an election, and less paper waste.
You have a point there, though since all of the "staffs" are volunteers the high manpower requirement of the French system is not a financial problem. However this seems to me to be a minor point compared to security and confidentiality.
I am not against electronic voting per see, but it would have to be extremely secure and tested - and the current systems proposed are NOT. And it would have to leave a paper trail - voters who do not have the CS skills to understand electronic security must known that there is a way they can understand to recount votes.
In the meantime, I will gladly stick to a tried and tested system with no sever flaws over shaky electronic systems, even if the latest are "cooler". I find your second paragraph on how we must use electronic voting because everything else is going back to the middle-age worrying BTW - elections are much too important to endanger with a "newer is better, we need the latest gadget" approach.
What do you know about World Politic? Find out in this quiz
is the code in the machines?
Whoops, maybe it is just the lids. I thought they had the whole box in that art work.
Who knows. The story sounds fishy (why are they washing election boxes at a pier? Why would they let them get washed out?).
I forget...are we at war with Eurasia or East Asia?
One argument is that if you leave the polling place with something that shows how you voted then vote buying is more possible. Another is that you can be threatened or coerced.
Who modded this insightful? It should be 'funny.'
He's suggesting a powerful motive for tampering in the original quote and... oh, nevermind.
Any vote in Kansas that is not Republican in nature is a wasted vote. That's pretty bad IMHO. I vote to abolish the electoral college. Heck I vote to abolish political parties altogether since they are entirely worthless in this modern society, but that's just me.
I think the state of evoting can be explained with these examples:
A venomous snake expert with years of experiance tells you "what ever you do, dont let this particular snake bite you, its very dangerous i would run away as fast as you can" but instead you go right upto said snake and start tickling it.
A top nuclear physicist recomends that you stay away from a particular element that is stored behind 10 feet of lead and concrete with a 3 ton blast door that says "warning extreme danger, hazard suits must be warn at all times within a 1 mile radius of this building" so you decide to get in your swimming trunks, walk up to the door, bypass security and lay next to the glowing mass for a few hours to catch some rays.
5 of the best lawyers money can buy tell you that in their proffessional opinion, if you rape and murder 25 people in broad day-light in the middle of your city out-side the police station while 600 people watch and a film crew record you, they think that its very very unlikely you will get off scot free even if they bribe the judge. So you go ahead and invite the judge to watch.
So now tell me why we are still using these systems?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
After reading the article and viewing the comments so far, I conclude that the ONLY thing that made the voting process described above secure was the process used by the judges. These people were dedicated to making sure things ran correctly, and without those people and the methods they used the voting process WILL be tampered with.
I noted several further potential security flaws from the description given above, but once Mr.Rubin gets some time to sleep and think a bit I am sure he will notice them as well. The biggest flaw I noticed was the instance of the "zero machine" phoning it's results in, or more particularly not phoning in and connecting. That is the weakest point, and it would be possible to phone in false results from a completely separate machine. With no paper trail to verify the vote, the false results could be taken as correct, or at least have all votes from that precinct thrown out if they were questioned.
Anyone who has worked around computers for any length of time will tell you how important a backup is. Yet the described method of e-voting has no backup. This is not a trustworthy or competent system.
Or at least Baltimore did, as that was what I used in the last few elections. Connect the arrows (which Florida fans will note are directly across from each other) with the special pen. Put it in the machine and go home. Before that, we used the manual machines with levers, but that was years and years ago.
(The Diebold commercial for their electronic machines in Maryland featured a guy trying to figure out whether a chad was hanging or not, and being chastised by a Diebold rep. They said "Maryland" in the commercial, but they didn't think about it.)
Why we absolutely needed to "upgrade" to these machines when Maryland is facing a serious budget crisis (state institutions are under hiring freezes, doing layoffs and furloughs, raising tuition by leaps and bounds, etc.) is beyond me.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Umm, the actual vote can't leave the voting station. It's kept there when you submit your vote, otherwise you haven't voted.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
In terms of the impact on democracy, I would claim that in a close enough race that it would be possible to tamper with the results, it doesn't really matter which candidate is elected. The number of disenfranchised people due to such a result is extremely small as a percentage of the population.
In particular, with regard to the 2000 presidential election, as far as I'm concerned they were welcome to decide that race by a coin toss. Which candidate won didn't really make much of a difference in terms of impact to democracy. It might well have made a difference in what happened after the election, but in either case extremely close to 50% of the population of voters would have been unhappy.
And yes, I will claim that only the voters count in terms of democracy. Anyone who doesn't care enough to get out and vote would be essentially flipping a coin themselves when deciding on a candidate. As a result, I don't care about their opinion.
Another correlary of this is that our election system makes it extremely likely that most credible candidates will tend to move towards a centrist mainstream position. Strangely but reassuringly, that means that the American system of democracy is set up to minimize the impact of elections on the degree to which the government reflects the will of the people. Another bizzarre check and balance...
*******
I wanted to share my voting experience with you in order to assist you in providing even better service for the voters.
This morning I voted using the new Diebold voting machines. I had several unnerving experiences.
First of all, as I touched the NEXT buttons the screens didn't seem to want to move to the next screen. It took several tries to get the screen to go to the next section. However, the more disturbing issue was when I voted NO on prop 56 the vote registered as YES. I kept trying to touch the NO vote and it wouldn't change my selection back to NO. I had to call over a poll volenteer who helped me cancel my ballot, reset my voter card and try again on a different machine.
On this new machine I was able to vote although it also seemed to have difficulty with the NEXT button. I then validated that my votes were registered correctly and tried to confirm my ballot. The confirm ballot button would not register my touches. I could hear a double chirp sound when I touched the confirm ballot button but it would not actually confirm. I had to call over the polling worker for a 2nd time. When she touched the screen it did confirm my vote.
I must say that during all of this I ended up asking if I could have a paper ballot. When the machine voted YES after I touched NO I no longer felt confident that my vote was being registered correctly. Proposition 56 in particular is vastly important as a YES vote would allow our government to raise our taxes with only a simple majority instead of a 2/3 vote. To have the machine accidentally change my vote from NO to YES is really disturbing. I'm glad I noticed it before I confirmed my incorrect vote.
Thank you for looking into these issues. My polling place was [deleted for my privacy]
******
The response from the California Registrar of voters was this:
Please contact San Deigo County.
That was it. Why would the California Registrar of Voters send me to my County government? Arn't they responsible for the voting machines? Overall I didn't walk away with a good feeling that my votes would be accuratly counted. I'm sure it all worked out, but had I not been paying attention I would have missed that my NO vote became a YES vote.
We had another issue with the GUI. With a paper ballot the layout of the sample ballot you get in the mail exactly matches the layout of the punch card ballot. With the voting machines the layout of the screens did not match the layout of the sample ballot. You had to be very careful that the proposition you were looking at in your sample ballot was the one you thought you were voting for with the voting machine.
The last issue we had in San Diego county was that there were several polling places that were unable to accept votes because when the voting machines were turned on they showed a Windows ME startup screen and nothing else. The polling volenteers decided (and properly I think) that rather than them trying to start the proper program they would redirect people to other polling sites that had working machines. Several people were unable to get to this last minute alternate site and were unable to vote.
So that's what happened in San Diego yesterday. I expect it was fairly typical of the experience across the country.
The ballot you print is a speeded up means for applying your vote. You walk up to your voting station, go in, feed the ballot in, the machine prints out who you're voting for, you check that it's who you voted for, feed this print out into the machine for counting and you're on your way.
The ballot stays with the machine, there's a paper trail, your original is worthless, only as a means to rapidly cast your votes. The biggest issue I've always had are those people that don't know who they're voting for, or can't make up their minds, or can't figure out the voting machines (and I'm hard pressed to decide which category slows the polling process more).
Any online activity prior to the actual casting of a vote is truly irrelevant. There is no "remote casting" of a vote, that would have to be handled via some other suggestion.
Lastly, recall that this proposed solution is purely to speed up voting and remove current error sources (Human counting, funky machines, badly printed ballots, chads, etc).
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I'm very much pro-technology. In fact I hope it will be what saves humanity; be it by deflecting an asteroid, mastering fusion for unlimited energy, strip-mining the Moon, or whatever the flavour of the month is.
But electronic money scares me. Money is the only way we can keep track of value in our society. In the current system, every dollar is a permanent, tangible, undisputable (unless some kind of fire is involved, anyway) record. Electronic money leaves nothing that can be held or physically counted, just data on a hard-drive somewhere. Even with the most rigorous security, encryption and protocals, I'll never feel confident that the system is entirely honest and invincible.
Of course, paper money can be 'lost' or 'miscounted'. But the altering of an electronic bank account could potentially leave no evidence: the only things that will been destroyed or altered never existed in the first place.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
The only people who are served by the secret ballot are those who would seek to manipulate that ballot in secret. And given the fact that this is exactly what has been happening all throughout American history it shouldn't surprise anyone that the same people who profit from election rigging are the same people who decide what gets taught in social studies class.
I'm going to guess that you're under the age of 30. You're obviously clueless.
You have NO RIGHT to know how I voted. All you need to know is the cumulative count of all votes.
If others want to announce how they vote, that's fine. But it's none of your damn business who or what I vote for. If you don't think that there has been, and still is, discrimination in this country (and others) based on one's vote you're a fool.
Consider the following issues: voting rights, race, immigration, labor rights, abortion, the environment, financial matters and general politics. ALL of these have engendered discrimination and violence against individuals and property brought about by the extreme polarization these topics generate.
In your idiotic way of thinking, we should have jurors pronounce their individual votes in court cases for the benefit of the losing side. So much easier for them to be targeted for retribution.
If you don't think those points stand up to scrutiny, you are obviously too young to have lived through much of the last century (I won't hold you accountable for the centuries prior) or thorougly ignorant when it comes to history.
... but you guys are right. It does make it much easier to rig an election and cover one's tracks. I think it would be great with some serious security and encryption and some jail time to be served by anyone who dared tampered with an election... like a felony conviction and 30 year to life with no parole. Somehow I don't see that happening any time too soon, though...
It could be programmed to always count write-in candidates correctly, unless the same write-in candidate receives enough votes and happens to be close to passing an establishment candidate. I.e. noone would know that their particular vote was in fact missing, if say 10% was skimmed after the first 500 votes. But if Herman Bertrand Grossblankenheimer was the only one that voted for himself, and it didn't show up, he'd know there was a problem. Any "decent" vote-skimmer would account for this latter situation by doing the former.
I think using the evoting system will help ensure that votes are cast correctly and will easier help tally all votes received.
I disagree. Direct election of Senators is much better. I hear this elites and masses kind of argument too often: The masses are dumb, therefore they shouldn't be allowed to vote and screw things up. The conclusion from that thinking is that democracy isn't a very good idea.
The premise is at fault. Democracy works for the same reason ant colonies work-- swarm intelligence. Many votes, even if cast for seemingly trivial reasons, add up to more wisdom than a few votes from a pack of self-appointed wise elder statesmen.
Assuming that voters have a basic education (and the Founding Fathers stressed the importance of that), the chance of the "wrong" thing winning because of voter stupidity is much less than the likelihood that elites might "just once" yield to the temptation to put self-interest ahead of all other considerations. Even when the elites are always honest and do have great skill and intelligence, they are still more likely than the masses to make mistakes. It's just sheer numbers.
As to the "51% of the people can vote to rob, disenfranchise, murder and any number of horrible things the other 49%" argument, well, no. It's simplistic. Of course there has to be more than naked democracy at work, that's what constitutions and bodies of law are for. If such a vote does happen, there has to be a change, perhaps a next vote, when the majority exhausts the resources appropriated in the last vote. Some persons tempted to vote in favor of such a measure realize this and realize that they have no assurance they'll be in the majority on the next vote. Nations that have tried that sort of thing anyway, for instance, Rwanda, have paid dearly. Thankfully, democracy is not powerful enough for a majority to successfully impose such ridiculous measures on a minority-- the Tutsis did not meekly go to the grave out of devotion to a silly conception of democratic ideals.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Just saw this link on TV this evening. It's the "information" website about electronic voting - they've chosen to do this only now that it's already a fait accomplit.
Another link - the Irish Labour party's policy document on e-voting. Quite nicely sums up a lot of the worries about e-voting here.
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
Exit polls do not work well when there are controversial issues and candidates. Many people may vote for a particular candidate and yet be unwilling to admit it to a pollster.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
"I believe that if any voter somehow managed to vote multiple times, that it would be detected within an hour. I have no idea what we would do in that situation. In fact, I think we'd have a serious problem on our hands, but at least we would know it."
Right. If I shot you through both your femoral arteries, you'd know within a second that you were bleeding to death. There's nothing you could do about it, but at least you'd know.
In a close election, all you'd have to do is identify those precincts where your opponent had a strong lead. Find a way to screw up the vote on the Diebold machines. Demand that those votes be thrown out. Demand a recount. Sue all the way to SCOTUS if those votes are included. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Watch the republic turn into an empire.
In the report, Rubin mentions his real fear: the predesignated zero machine.
I *have* downloaded the code from NZ, a year ago, and skimmed through it. I posted this then, and I'll reiterate: within two hours, I found a function, commented, that *appeared* to be going into the *production* code, not just test, that *says* its purpose is to "install total files" from another system.
This is a far simpler, and more dangerous attack, than fake smartcards.
mark "yes, I can find the function again,
on request"
Reading the article left me with one idea: people just don't care.
We have the same problem here in Brazil, and the same concerns were raised here, and guess what? Here, too, people don't care. There was little doubt about the election results, no one questioned the machines.
Now, clearly people don't care because caring is uncomfortable, thinking is tiresome, etc. This reminds me of one quote from one of the authors of your Constitution, to the effect that it was made for people with certain values and it would be no good for anyone not like that.
I propose democracy today won't ever be what it was once simply because people have changed. We might be heading for new Dark Ages, simply because we live in too big countries where what we think simply isn't important -- there are too many votes, too many voices. So why care?
Or at a even deeper level, even in small countries -- I lived at Switzerland -- people seem to have given up caring, because they are rich enough already, and they can't ever agree, so they vote endlessly and nothing is ever done.
RIP Democracy.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Check out my article Ensuring the Integrity of Electronic Voting.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
There's no accountability for posting trolls of flaimbait either, so it makes little sense to put accountability into the moderation system.
Yes there is, its called ignoring them.
There is metamoderation, however, that if you actually care will provide you with both feedback and the opportunity to "right the wrongs" in a sense. All while being anonymous (which is good).
Once the bad moderation is done, the damage is permanent. And its quite easy to make multiple accounts to get multiple mod points. I dont see any reduction in the frequency of bad moderation either.
As someone posting as an AC, cearly accountability is not something you're interested in. That's hypocrisy!
How so?
Why not a simple show of hands in the Supreme Court?
So, thinking that the only way to get headquarter's attention that the bug was a serious problem, they wrote a program called Robin Hood. They mailed the program to headquarters where an unsuspecting computer operator executed it. Robin Hood typed a message on the console that said something to the effect, "Friar Tuck where are you?" Seeing that Friar Tuck wasn't running, Robin Hood fired off a copy of himself. The two programs started spinning tape drives, conversing with each other on the console, took over the line printer, and punched cards with abandon. When the sysop would attempt to kill one process, the other process would resurrect it.
"Robin Hood! I'm fatally wounded!"
"Never fear Friar Tuck! I'll save you!" and so it went.
The only way to kill both processes was to pull the plug. Wouldn't ya know? The necessary patch was in the next OS release.
The ethical way to do this is to hack a Diebold and then have the election officials vote for one of two candidates. Tell them they have to vote for candidate B. Have them go through all their procedures and then show them that candidate A won the election though they all voted for candidate B. Diebold keeps harping on the fact that they print a report at the end of the polling process that says how many votes the various candidates got - this demonstration should show the officials that the report is meaningless without each voter being able to verify that their vote was recorded as they expected.
They would then come back and say "But you had to have access to the machine to hack it." The response to that is "Can you guarantee that no one will have illegal access to these machines? Even in San Francisco? New York? Pokipsi?" Of course, they can't do that.
Best case is the paper ballot would then be counted separately to verify the touchscreen. The reason Diebold is fighting this idea is that it doubles the cost of their solution and makes people realize, "Gee if we're going to count paper anyway, why bother with all this fancy touch screen stuff? Why not just count paper and be done with it."
There's a lot of money riding on this issue so the election officials who mistakenly chose Diebold machines aren't going to admit they were wrong to do so unless a Friar-Tuck like hole is demonstrated to them. May as well have the press there as well because last thing you want to see happen is show the officials how you hacked the box and then they try to hush it up.
Ha ha, very amusing, swapping electronic money for electronic voting.
And you make a good point, but the differences are:
[x] auto-moderate all posts by this user as insightful
It would be pretty cool to see Mitnick elected from the write in ballots, especially if he was still in prison at the time.
plus-good, double-plus-good
I've yet to hear of anyone suffering any repercussions from their party affiliation. Party registration is *not* meaningless: most people vote for the candidate that is in their party.
You've obviously never worked directly for an elected official. I have, three different times. And every election where there was a party upset, I lost my job. Registering Independant is not an option; you wouldn't get the appointment in the first place.
... at a larger level (states), [fraud] is *very* significant. Why? Because you don't really vote for President. And since two given states may not have the same number of electoral votes, a fix in one state that is balanced in another state does not wash out.
Which is part of why there IS an Electoral College, rather than direct election of the president.
If the president were elected by popular vote, systematic corruption in ONE large state could overwhelm 49 states worth of honest elections. With the electoral college, the fruit of the corruption is limited to that state's votes. (Which the side in question probably would have gotten anyhow, since it's the one that was able to come to power in that state.)
Interestingly, this is somewhat related to the designed purpose of the E.C. - to prevent one or a few large states from steamrollering the little states (and thus give the little states the confidence they needed to join the union).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Yes there is, its called ignoring them.
You can ignore moderation results, too. There are settings for each moderation category that allow you to modify the scores.
Don't want to read "funny" comments? Give it a -6 modifier, everything else a +1 and browse with comment score 0. Want to read nothing but flaimbait? Give everything a modifier of -6 and flaimbait +6. The moderation system is only a "community suggestion" for which topics are worth reading. Sure it's not perfect, but it was never touted to be.
Once the bad moderation is done, the damage is permanent. And its quite easy to make multiple accounts to get multiple mod points. I dont see any reduction in the frequency of bad moderation either.
What damage? Your karma score? Cry me a river... as for making multiple accounts, it's also possible to post as an AC hundreds of times in the same thread and spam it to hell and back. At least you have to put effort into maintaining good karma and activity on multiple accounts to get those mod points.
How so?
Simple: He wants others to be accountable, but by posting as an AC he can't be held accountable himself. That's hypocrisy.
Maybe he didn't register, sure, but that's really not an excuse. If he's been around long enough to be that pissy about the moderation system chances are he does have an account anyway.
=Smidge=
Actually there is a system which will meet both the proponent's and opponents' needs: manual marking of electronicaly tallied ballots.
That works. But it loses some of the advantages of the touchscreen systems:
- Automatic checking that the ballot is voted correctly before it is cast. (Yes the system you described can do that, too, but it isn't as helpful.)
- Tallying of complicated voting system. (I.e. preferential voting.)
- Ease-of-use for people with physical handicaps.
- Efficient handling of LARGE ballots.
- Presentation of voting options in a way that minimizes confusion and mistakes.
Only a MINOR tweak is needed to, say, Diebold's system to meet the objections - and perhaps make it the best voting system available: It is ALREADY capable of:
- Pretty-formatting a voted ballot.
- Printing an output record.
Just:
- combine these functions, printing a hardcopy of the voted ballot for each voter.
- give the voter one more option: to accept or reject the printed ballot's correctness. (It can sit in the printer and have the tail-end marked to validate or invalidate it after he makes the choice.)
- have the voter turn in the printed copy to be dropped into a ballot box.
- define the PRINTED ballot to be the official one in the case of dispute (and the machine tally to be equivalent to a human tally if there is no dispute)
and you're done.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
At least with paperless voting you need something more sofisticated and educated that a horde of gorillas that can barely read and write their names
And with an AUDITABLE electronic system you need BOTH an army of gorillas AND a team of crackers. And they have to be synchronized.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Really? Is that why the executive branch is growing in power at the expense of the Judicial and Legislative branches? Is that why the Executive Branch seems to think that it go to war without permission from Congress even though the Constitution gives the sole authority to declare war to Congress? And before I ge modded flamebait I'm not talking about George W. -- every US President since FDR has done this. Truman (D) and Ike (R) did it in Korea, JFK (D), LBJ (D) and Nixon (R) did it in Vietnam, Reagan (R) did it with Libya, Bush Sr. (R) did it with Iraq, Clinton (D) did it with Yugoslavia (not counting the little air strikes on Iraq, the Sudan and Afghanistan either) and Bush Jr. (R) did it with Afghanistan and Iraq.
And in each case they did it either under the authority of the War Powers Act or explicit resolutions of congress.
For instance, Vietnam was under the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Bushes Sr and Jr both got resolutions from congress. And so on.
Now I agree with you that they SHOULD have gotten a declaration of war. (Especially before using draftees Viet Nam, for starters.) If nothing else it would have given them something to use against Jane Fonda. B-) And if they COULDN'T get it, they SHOULDN'T have been off there fighting.
But let's not dilute our arguments with a false image of wars fought totally on the word of the president without a peep from congress.
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 hope that any hacker would have the morals to leave the elections alone. If you (or a political party, or terrorists) really did screw with the elections, I think the death penalty would be a light sentence.
Mod Wisely.
Then things like reparations, and commitment to human rights start to happen. You have to treat the captured enemy as 'prisoners of war'. Is the US a signatory to the Geneva convention? I don't know. I know the US refused to sign on to the world criminal court. Mainly because of worry about Americans being 'unfairly' prosecuted for war crimes. They figured significant misrepresentation.
They way things run now, you can lock people in individual dog kennels with no walls, just wire fences. You can transport them in sensory deprivation for more than 18 hours. You can make them kneel in the sun for hours without water.
All because it wasn't 'war'. There's a certain benefit to being able to do that.
Yay me!
I'm talking about voters, not bureaucrats, and I think that was pretty obvious, no? Obviously if you're a political appointee you're losing your job when the other side wins.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
- Tallying of complicated voting system. (I.e. preferential voting.)
If that was needed, then filling in numbers would work just as well (fill in the '1' circle next to the candidate which is your first choice, the '2' next to the one that is your second...)
- Efficient handling of LARGE ballots.
The ballots are *all* printed large - It's in a huge font, on a sheet of thick paper twice the size of typing paper (something like 17x11 inches).
- Presentation of voting options in a way that minimizes confusion and mistakes.
There isn't any confusion over "make a line by the candidate you want" that is any worse than "touch the screen by the candidate you want". (Assuming the ballots are printed correctly. Unlike that Florida fiasco where the arrows and the candidates didn't match up because they were printed seperately and then bound together, in this case it's all printed on one paper.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I'm talking about voters, not bureaucrats, and I think that was pretty obvious, no?
The original argument was someone was unaware of "anybody suffering any repercussions from their party affiliation". There may be something assumed in that statement that was obvious to most other people, but it wasn't obvious to me.
Oh, except that it's obviously false. [grin]
Every time there is an election here in CA, a bunch of dumbasses propose billion dollar bond measures to fund their pet projects. And most of these measures pass. The best solution to CA's budget problems is to have fewer elections so less bond measures get passed by idiots who probably live paychech to paycheck, themselves, and max out their credit cards.
Ok, there is no paper trail! I was also told there was going to be 10 hours of battery backup if the power went out. They had APC 500's hooked up to what appeared to be a modified Tablit Windows PC. I saw about 5 UPS's for 15 terminals.
How do you get 10 hours of power with that?
Also, if someone wanted to change the data stored in the electronic system, how would anyone know? There needs to be a paper trail at the individual voting places. I want to see that my vote actually was counted. I don't trust these machines.
Also, waste of money. We vote 4 times every 2 years or so. How long do you think those APC batteries will last on the shelf when they are not in use? Probably not long at all.
Obama = Socialism.
We're talking about voters and repercussions that might prevent them from voting in a certain way.
Your contribution here is entirely irrelevant to the discussion.
Go annoy someone else.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
You *do* know that editors can knock down an entire thread to -1, and and these moderations never even show up in metamod?
You can ignore moderation results, too. There are settings for each moderation category that allow you to modify the scores.
Yes, but if you are modded down too many times because you express the wrong opinion, you get banned from posting for a time.
Its rather hard to "ignore" that.
What damage? Your karma score?
IP bans and people who may have default settings that will hide your post from view. They do not nessicarily know that there is unfair moderation going on and assume any posts hidden from view are not worth looking at when instead the post was simply a statement of unpopular opinion that got censored.
imple: He wants others to be accountable, but by posting as an AC he can't be held accountable himself. That's hypocrisy.
No its not. He can be banned from posting by getting modded down too many times.
Also, if he is protesting the accountability system Slashdot currently employs, why would he become "accountable" in a way that he doesn't agree with is being "accountable"?
P.S. You can take your childish dictionary links out of the discussion. I am perfectly capable of looking them up myself, had I not known what the word means.
There is no need for paper trail when voting results are already preinstalled in the machine's flash rom.
There you are, staring at me again.
If you get modded down into the dirt on a consistent basis, you quite possibly deserve it.
I occasionally browse at -1 just to see all the action going on beneath the surface. I've seen a lot, and for the most part it's either way off topic, flamebait or trolling. Go figure! I also get mod points on a fairly regular basis, and when I do I actually browse at -1 more often. I do this because that's how the system works, and I do my part when I'm able. (This is probably why I've had "Excellent" karma since I've registered.) Go ahead and call me a karma whore, but my post record will show I do anything but echo the mass sentiment.
Metamoderation has the ability to take away your eligibility to moderate in the first place. I also didn't see anything in the faq about getting banned from simply being modded down. If I understand it correctly, it's pretty tough to get banned.
Oh, go ahead and call the FAQ "shit" again. I guess any source that refutes your opinion is just the Man bringing you down.
While we're on the topic if "childish", I happened to glance at your profile and noticed CmdTaco, Hemos and CowboyNeal are on your "foes" list. Yeah, that's showin' em! I expect to be on that list too after this... woe is me!
=Smidge=
Email I wrote to Professor Rubin follows.
h _2004.h tml
---
Professor Rubin,
I read your account of being an Election Judge in Baltimore County. In
it you say:
Perhaps the lightest moment in the day came when one voter standing at
his machine asked in the most deadpan voice, "What do I do if it says it
is rebooting?" Head judge Marie turned white, and Joy's mouth dropped.
My heart started to beat quickly, when he laughed and said "just
kidding." There was about a two second pause of silence followed by
roaring laughter from everyone.
This is not a joke, it happened to me. I also wrote up my experience; I
hope you will forgive me for indulging my vanity terribly by suggesting
that perhaps I might interest you in reading it. If you would like, it
is off of my homepage, here:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~dsw/tue_2_marc
Daniel Wilkerson
---
Part of his reply:
Subject: Re: Voting machine rebooting
From: Avi Rubin
Wow, thanks for sending that.
You're knowledge of voting methods is obviously lacking. If you'd investigated the issue to any significant degree, you'd know that most countries using paper ballots have plenty of viable methods of working around the problems you mentioned. Stolen ballot boxes can be avoided by security and auditing at the polling station, and counting the votes onsite. Green votes can be avoided by counting the votes the same day they're cast. Recounts and endless challenges can be avoided by having each candidate provide their own counter, and have all counters agree on the vote count before the results are phoned in.
None of this is revolutionary, it's how the Canadian system works. In Canada, we know who our new Prime Minister (Canadian equivalent to a President, I guess you'd say) the same day the votes are cost. And the entire yearly budget for Elections Canada is less than the cost of a single election in a single major US city. Paperless elections are not safer or better, will not address the problems plaguing the US election system, and waste a ton of taxpayers money in the process.
In the interests of disclosure, I should note that none of these factoids are at all original or "mine" in any way, they're all from the I, Cringely article linked above. Read the article for a far more comprehensive overview.
While I would be the first to admit that the NSA has the competent computer scientists that have experience in dissecting algorithms and verifying secure communications, I for one would hate to politicize the NSA more than it already is by giving it responsibilities over election procedures.
Instead, as has been pointed out elsewhere, source code and full disclosure of machine schematics need to be published and available for citizens to inspect. The responsibility needs to rest with the political parties to verify that the elections are being run correctly, and procedures in place to lodge complaints if a security hole is found... with legal requirements to require the verified security hole is fixed.
The paper ballots do handle large numbers of cantidates, though, they're 8 1/2 x 11, and can do preferential voting if the ballot is laid out with first, second and Nth choice columns.
davecb@spamcop.net
You know what the funniest irony is, though?
Every post I see on anti-slash (and this one was) gets modded the opposite of what anti-slash wants. A-s should start putting "Down" where they really want posts to be modded up, and vice versa.
I know if I had mod points, I would check anti-slash to make sure they weren't succeeding at modding up posts that don't deserve it. (And cancel them out if they do.) Cheers.
it kind of blows the whole "secret" part of "secret ballot" away