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."

Comments

His biggest fear was realized

[corebreech]

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

Here's the text in case off slashdotting.

[hardaker]

(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

"Trust us"

[grub]

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.

Re:"Trust us"

[skiflyer]

I dislike the machines as much as anyone, but I think that's an incorrect interpretation of the process. I believe what they're saying is, the privacy is there, we do this little song and dance so that it is evident to the voters.

Great article, but beware the majority.

[dada21]

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.

Re:Great article, but beware the majority.

[Stile 65]

Very well said. To (mis)quote someone with a sharper wit than mine, "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner."

Re:Great article, but beware the majority.

[duffbeer703]

Fortunately, we have mechanisms in place, like the electoral college to prevent such tyranny of the majority out of the executive branch.

Consider the 2000 election, where the overwhelming population of highly populous democratic states like California and the highly corrupt states like New York were not allowed to overwhelm the rest of America.

IMHO, the worst alteration ever made to US government institutions was the direct election of Senators. Instead of the highly intellectual and conservative Senate that we had during the 18th and 19th Centuries, we are left with the political pit of the modern Senate, which was resulted in a exponential growth in the size and scope of Federal government.

Re:Great article, but beware the majority.

[shystershep]

It's called the Constitution. If you really are frightened, you should try giving it a read. The checks and balances put in place to limit the actions of the government also limit what any majority can do, even if there were ever such a thing as direct elections. If you don't understand how the federal government is structured, we elect a president, we elect representatives, and judges are appointed by the president and approved (or not) by the representatives. There is no structure or mechanism for direct elections at the federal level, and I'm not sure where they'd fit in even if there were.

Now, the state level is another story -- especially if you live somewhere with idiotic laws like California. Referedums (i.e., direct democracy) are possible at the state level, and probably not a good idea except for very, very limited purposes. However, even if a measure wins with 90% of the vote, that does not mean it will become law. It still must pass the test of being constitutional. If the measure violates either the state or federal consitution, it is invalid and unenforceable. And at the federal level, judges are appointed for life and so are largely immune to political pressure. The US Constitution, and most state constitutions, provide protections to the minority and very strict controls on how anything can be taken by the government.

So while I agree that majority rule often == mob rule, and is something to be worried about, I have no idea how you equate electronic voting with what you call "complete democracy." Since the founding of the colonies, there has been direct elections at the local level, with representative democracy for the larger political units. Whether the ballots are made of pulped wood or ones and zeroes does not change the structure of government in the least.

And I am really confused by your statement regarding "the majority or the form of democracy our country has taken on in the last 100 years or so." One, I don't think the structure of our democracy has changed greatly in the last 100 years, but even more importantly I think the issues you claim to be worried about were worse 100 years ago than they could ever get today. Slavery and the horrendous treatment of the Native Americans, of the working class, and of every ethnic minority (e.g., Italian, Irish, Chinese, Africans, etc.) were possible 100 years ago, but are not today.

The real problem with electronic voting is the ease in which it can be manipulated without anyone ever knowing, not some imaginary bogy of mob rule.

Re:Great article, but beware the majority.

[Shakrai]

Fortunately, we have mechanisms in place, like the electoral college to prevent such tyranny of the majority out of the executive branch.

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 get 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.

That's my pet peeve. If it's worth fighting for it's worth debating in Congress and the streets (if Congress is debating it then by definition the people are debating it). Anyone else notice that since we stopped declaring wars we stopped winning them? Have we had a cut-clear victory since WW2? Why didn't Bush ask for a declaration of war against the Taliban? He would have gotten it -- and the world would have known we were serious.

That issue aside the Executive Branch continues to grow and usurp power from the rest of the Government. The larger picture has the Federal Government taking away rights and responsibilities from the states.

IMHO, the worst alteration ever made to US government institutions was the direct election of Senators. Instead of the highly intellectual and conservative Senate that we had during the 18th and 19th Centuries, we are left with the political pit of the modern Senate, which was resulted in a exponential growth in the size and scope of Federal government.

I'd tend to agree with that. I don't see it changing anytime soon though. John Q. Public is too ignorant to the fact that this nation was actually founded as a Republic. Most people don't understand why separation of power is a good thing. They probably couldn't even recite the preamble to the Constitution.

Re:Great article, but beware the majority.

[Eagle5596]

Fortunately, we have mechanisms in place, like the electoral college to prevent such tyranny of the majority out of the executive branch.

And if Gore had been elected over Bush, you'd be arguing for the abolishment of the electoral college.

While allowing for the majority to vote on individual bills would be useless, when it comes to elected officials, majority rule is more than appropriate, it is necessary. The electoral college is a method of disenfranchisment for people who do not hold the same opinion as the majority of those living in their states. This problem becomes increasingly obvious for those that live near a state border between states with radically different political opinions.

Consider an individual who voted Republican, and lived on the Washington side of the Washington - Idaho border. His vote is totally nullified by the electoral college, eliminating his opinion in the electoral college as Washington voted for Bush, yet were his voted counted a mile east, in Idaho, he would have been part of the Republican majority. The inverse also applies. The end result for the election was, even though Gore recieved .5% more of the popular vote than Bush, the oligarchical system of the electoral college swung the vote to be .9% in favor of Bush.

This is disenfranchisment of the minority opinion in each state, and is as wrong as was taxation without representation. The reason that congress and the senate are so bad these days is not a result of direct election, but because they are the ones with the most cash for campaigning, and the toleration our country has of such abomiable practices as gerymandering.

Re:Great article, but beware the majority.

[Anonymous Coward]

"A witty saying proves nothing"
- Voltaire

Re:Great article, but beware the majority.

[corbettw]

They probably couldn't even recite the preamble to the Constitution.

Sure they could. And they can probably do it to the same tune the Founding Fathers used.

Weee, the Peeeople, in order to foooorm a more peeeerfect Union....

Re:Great article, but beware the majority.

[spikedvodka]

I think Robert A. Heinlein put it best in a few different ways.

"A dictatorship is based on the assumtion that one man is smarter than a million men. One Question: Who Decides?

A Democracy on the other hand is based on the assumtion that a million men are smarter than one man. How's that again?"
(Time enough for love)

Then also of course
"At the end of the 20th century, the people realized that in a demoracy they could vote themselves bread and circuses, and the world went to hell afterwards"
(Beyond the sunset)

Though personally I like the observation that in any group of people the total intellegance is the lowest intellegance devided by the number of people in the group.

Re:Great article, but beware the majority.

[duffbeer703]

Executive military adventures abroad are not a 20th Century phenomenon.

Thomas Jefferson sent an expedition to the Barbary States... Tyler and Polk messed around in Mexico prior to the Mexican War and tested the border with Canada... Grant-Wilson had a military presence in China... the examples go on and on.

You see larger engagements today because the US's role as an "imperial" power has grown since the 1900's.

The actual meaning of "War" is a specific thing, with specific responsibilities. The Congress has walked hand-in-hand with the Executive branch to allow larger and larger military engagements without a declaration of War. The congress regularly authorizes the "use of force" without going to the level of a formal "Declaration of War"

The growth of the Executive Branch has everything to do with the strengthening of national political parties. Things like the direct election of Senators, the professional civil service and income tax are all responsible for that.

Re:Great article, but beware the majority.

[GnrlFajita]

mechanisms in place, like the electoral college to prevent such tyranny of the majority out of the executive branch.
Really? Is that why the executive branch is growing in power at the expense of the Judicial and Legislative branches?

I have two issues with this statement. First, I think the executive's growth in power is only at the expense of the legislature. If anything, I'd say the judiciary's power has increased as well. Second, the checks and balances still work, but are skewed by the effect of something the founding fathers couldn't imagine -- TV. TV == the bully pulpit, which gives the president the ability (and de facto authority) to set the national agenda.

And as for declaring war, the president does not have that power (although congress essentially tried to give it to him for Iraq -- and it was debated). He does, however, have the authority as Commander in Chief to order the military into action. The legislature then basically has a veto, in the form of funding, over permitting the military action. And as for not declaring war, even though it was not formally done last year, it was in the original Gulf War.

Re:Great article, but beware the majority.

[shystershep]

At the risk of being trolled, I'll respond. Do you have any idea what it takes to change the Constitution? I won't even get into your apparent belief that just mentioning God somehow violates a document written when religion wasn't a questions, but rather a simple a fact of life. To amend the Constitution, like the DOMA, takes a 2/3 majority of congress (house and senate each) just to begin the process. The president has no role, other than the obvous one of suggesting that his fellow party members follow along. Once the amendment gets a 2/3 majority in congress (or application by 2/3 of the states' legislatures), it's considered proposed. Once it's been proposed, a full 3/4 of the states must approve it.

So that begs the question, how can a president who actually lost the popular vote, facing a very evenly divided country, push through an amendment? The answer is, he can't. It's a election year politics, pure and simple. Everybody that is not running around in circles, panicked, knows that it's not going to be ratified (including Bush & co.). It's a sop to the religious right, nothing more and nothing less.

The PATRIOT Act is a hideous piece of legislation, but parts are already being attacked as unconstitutional. The DMCA, passed by the previous administration, probably violates the Constitution even worse (copyright is granted, and limited, in the body of the Constitution, while the Patriot Act violates 4th Amendment rights) and it too is being slowly picked apart by the courts.

As for just ignoring the Constitution, or doing away with it, you probably aren't aware that anyone who takes an oath of office, including the military, swears an oath to defend and uphold the Constitution -- not the president or any other part of the government. No the Constitution can't defend itself, but with everyone and their grandmother watching, how is anyone going to tamper with it? It's not all powerful or foolproof, and people have been debating what it means since it was written, but at the same time it is a powerful shield. You're right in that it won't protect anyone if everyone just sits back and takes it for granted, but not everyone is. The kind of hysterical panic that the Left is in now is just like the hysterical panic the Right was in under the Clinton administration. Everyone runs around yelling that the sky is falling, with absolutely no sense of perspective.

Read some history. Learn how things actually work. Then, if you still believe that everything is bad and the world is going to end, do something about it. Or, at the very least, you'll have some idea of what you're griping about, and make intelligent commments instead of ranting hysterically.

This electronic voting thing

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:This electronic voting thing

[wolf-]

Very true, In Chicago, breathing voters are disqualified. Only the dead need attend.

Re:Isn't It Ironic

[SatanicPuppy]

Oh yes, totally ironic. How I dread the day when CowboyNeal is illegally modded into the Oval Office.

Moron.

Hands up then

[squaretorus]

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!!!

Re:Hands up then

[Anonymous Coward]

Who was it?? I know your reading this!!!

The word is YOU'RE. Remember it.

I've noticed this pathetic usage creep into more and more postings both here and elsewhere. It is not correct and if I were in charge of hiring you wouldn't get the job no matter how qualified you were.

Yes, I'm a spelling Nazi and no, I don't care what you think. Either learn to spell or go back to elementary school.

US citizen prefered party registration

[throwaway18]

I slid a smartcard into the sleave and pushed a few buttons to designate whether or not this voter should receive a Democrat or Republican ballot

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?

Re:US citizen prefered party registration

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a "primary" election - voters were deciding who should run as the Democrat and Republican candidates in the November election. Only Republicans vote for the Republican Party candidate and only Democrats vote for the Democratic Party candidate.

Re:US citizen prefered party registration

[Shakrai]

Why is this done?

It's done so that in states with closed primaries you can only vote in the primary of the party that you are registered for.

In my state (NY) there are also laws that prohibit you from changing parties right before a primary election just to change who you can vote for. When I originally registered to vote I didn't choose a party -- then I joined the Democratic party. I got a letter saying I wouldn't be able to vote in the primaries for that year -- I'd have to wait until the next year after the general election.

If you don't like the idea of your party preference being on the rolls you just don't register for one. In my state there is a specific box on the form that says "Do not enroll in a party" -- there's also a separate box for the "Independence Party". If you don't want it to be on the rolls you just check off the "Do not enroll" box -- it's that simple.

Re:US citizen prefered party registration

[CodeJudge]

It's mostly because of the primary system, to prevent one party mucking with the other's primaries. In the situation where there is an uncontested candidate in party A's primary and a strong and weak candidate in party B's, voters from party A need to be prevented from showing up and voting in the B primary to make sure the weak candidate wins.

This could be fixed better by having the parties administer their own primaries, but that would be expensive.

Re:US citizen prefered party registration

[gl4ss]

*If you don't like the idea of your party preference being on the rolls you just don't register for one. In my state there is a specific box on the form that says "Do not enroll in a party" -- there's also a separate box for the "Independence Party". If you don't want it to be on the rolls you just check off the "Do not enroll" box -- it's that simple.*

however that(having an option for that) really goes against on why you have a closed ballot in the first place, to prevent people being intimitaded into voting someone they wouldn't(or at least prevent from voting someone) like to vote(by husband, wive, the mobster, boogie man or whoever..).

not that I'm a big fan of a 2 party system with nearly identical parties(that work pretty much as a cartel..). Though maybe I'm just stupid as I don't really see the point in why goverment is paying for elections that are an internal issue of the party(deciding who they should back). Maybe that proves some continuity regardless of who wins(stagnation..)..

Re:US citizen prefered party registration

[orthogonal]

Only Republicans vote for the Republican Party candidate and only Democrats vote for the Democratic Party candidate.

In some states.

Other states may hold what are known as "open" primaries -- possibly, depending on state law, at the discretion of the party holding the primary --, in which voters are allowed to vote in the party's primary regardless of their registration.

This year, Wisconsin's Democratic primary was open to all voters, and it was the votes of Republicans and independents voting in the Democrat primary that gave Senator Edwards of North Carolina a much closer second place in Wisconsin than in most other states. This edge by Edwards among non-Democrats was argued by his campaign to be evidence that he would fare better against Bush in the General Election than would Senator Kerry of Massachusetts.

Re:US citizen prefered party registration

[Rick Zeman]

It was a "primary" election - voters were deciding who should run as the Democrat and Republican candidates in the November election. Only Republicans vote for the Republican Party candidate and only Democrats vote for the Democratic Party candidate.

Here in ole Virginny we have open primaries. Anyone can show up and vote in the other party's primary. So, effectively, there was nothing stopping every Republican from showing up to vote for Al Sharpton or someone they'd love to see win last month's Democratic primary, especially since they wouldn't be wasting a vote at all since there was nothing else to vote for. It's really too scary of a system. It made it easy for me (a newly former Republican) to vote in it...too easy.

Re:US citizen prefered party registration

[Sique]

Why is this done?

It's done so that in states with closed primaries you can only vote in the primary of the party that you are registered for.

This reminds me of relatives of mine from the U.S. who couldn't understand the european concept of party membership. In a way it is comparable to the registered voter status, but a party member actually pays a membership fee to the party (and this money is one of the main ways for parties to finance themselves). I tried to explain to them that my brother is member of a party, but the other family members are not, but I failed.

I don't know of any european country that knows about the concept of primary elections. In Europe the parties don't have a canonical way to determine their candidates for office. It's mostly done during a vote on a party convention, and the people going to those conventions are determined by the local party groups of members by whatever method the single local party group thinks is fitting (Even if it is "who has the time to go to that convention?"). In no country I know of there is a general election day for primaries, every party takes the date it thinks it fits to call for the party convention.

Sometimes the parties have "base polls", which determine the outcome of an innerpartial debate, without settling the dispute at a party convention. But never are the countries' Election Offices in any way involved in those innerpartial things.

Re:US citizen prefered party registration

[Shakrai]

Why is chosing the person that stands as a candidate for the Democrats the business of the states? Why is it the business of anyone except the Democratic party in that state? Why doesn't the party decide - how come it gets the states to run elections for it?

The party does decide. A combination of superdelegates (party officials, party members who are currently in office in various positions, retired party members, etc) and pledged delegates (with the Democrats these are assigned to each candidate based on how much of the vote they took -- the Republicans give the winner of each state all of them if I'm not mistaken) will vote on the nominee for the Democratic ticket.

With all that in mind I can't understand those states that have "open" primaries. Why should somebody who isn't even a member of my party get to decide who is going to run for us?

As for why the party gets the state to run the elections to assign the pledged delegates who else should run it? Should it be a private election with no accountability? I don't see what the problem here is.

Re:US citizen prefered party registration

[orthogonal]

Why is chosing [sic] the person that stands as a candidate for the Democrats the business of the states? Why is it the business of anyone except the Democratic party in that state? Why doesn't the party decide - how come it gets the states to run elections for it?

Because America political parties are not as cohesive as European political parties, and a big part of the reason for that is that America has neither a Parliamentary system -- where the executive is a member of the legislature -- and because America doesn't have proportional voting.

For America readers: most European governments are Parliamentary system, so the leader of the government is the leader of the party in power, and the party in power is the party with a majority (or plurality and a coalition) in the legislature. As such it's impossible to have a situation in which the legislature is controlled by one party and the executive is controlled by another party. This allows the government to be less dead-locked, and it was precisely for this reason that America's founding Fathers rejected such an arrangement.

Realizing the tyrannical potential of string central governments -- having just won independence from Britain -- and wishing to ensure the power of individual states under the Federal Constitution, the Founders made sure that it was possible for the legislature -- Congress - to be controlled by a different party than the party of the executive -- the President. This was consciously engineered by the Founders to promote either dead-lock or moderation of opinion and vote trading, in either case keeping the central government weak except in those cases where there existed a true consensus of all parties. (Other features of American constitutional structure also reflect this desire to obtain dead-lock or consensus: the original provision of selection of senators by state legislatures rather than popular vote, allowing filibusters in the Senate, and the requirements of super-majorities in both the national legislature and a super-majority of state legislatures in order to amend the constitution).

Another feature, perhaps less consciously built into the american plan was a weakening of the Party system itself. In European countries (and Israel, but not Britain) with the system of proportional representation, political parties, prior to an election, make an ordered list of all their candidates. Voters vote for the party, not any particular candidate, and the party seats a number of candidates proportional to their vote, starting from their most visible candidates at the front of their lists. So if the legislature has 100 seats, and the Green Party gets 5% of the total vote, the Green party gets to fill five seats, and it must fill those seats with the first five persons on the (previously published) Green party list. The party has a lot of control over candidates in this system, as it can simply tell a candidate to tow the line or be put at the bottom of the list -- or taken off the list altogether.

America fills the legislature by geographically bound Districts, with the winner in each District the candidate with a plurality (except in Louisiana) of the vote -- Europeans frequently refer to this as "First Past the Post" voting, because the first candidate to get enough votes -- like a racehorse nosing out its opponents -- wins. In America, especially in the last ten years, most Districts are generally crafted to contain a majority of voters sympathetic to one party or the other, making most seats relatively uncontested. But the corollary of that is that one district can be a sure thing for one party, the District next to it a sure thing for the other Party.

As a consequence, America elections are decided more locally, and the Party has less power to control the candidate. Indeed, the candidate may depart from his Party's ideology in order to get elected in a District more congenial to the other party, and his Party will be able to do little, as it wants the seat in order to

Re:US citizen prefered party registration

[orthogonal]

So what's to stop the faithful of one party from simply acting as spoilers for another's best candidate (by voting for a less likely candidate) ?

Nothing. ;)

That's a legitimate worry, and it often does happen: "Hey I'm going to go vote for the most extreme candidate in the other party, to ensure that mainstream voters must vote for the candidate of my party!"

That's why some states don't allow open primaries, and many leave the choice to open the primary to the party.

However, also consider states (or counties, districts, etc.) where one party claims such a super-majority of the voters that that party's candidate invariably or almost invariably wins the General Election.

Such states would have included most of the American South for the century from 1880 until the 1980s, when the effective disenfranchisement of blacks (until the 1960s) and the long tradition of white Southern resentment of the Party of Lincoln (that is, the Republican Party) ensured that the Democratic candidate always won the General Election. Any Republican minority would then be forced either to abandon the Republic Party (thus ensuring it would never grow) or to be effectively disenfranchised, unable to vote in the Democratic Primary, the only election that really counted.

(Today, Republicans are ironically the majority in most of the South, as Southern whites left the Democratic Party in the 1930s, under Franklin Roosevelt and in the 1960s, under Lyndon Johnson, in large part because of the Democratic Party's embrace of Black voters and Civil Rights legislation (yes, even as early as Franklin Roosevelt, with Roosevelt's executive orders requiring equal compensation of black factory works, forced on him by black activists threatening strikes that might have crippled the war effort, and Eleanor Roosevelt's support for such things as the Tuskegee Airmen)-- which conversely means that few blacks vote for Lincoln's Party of Emancipation anymore.)

Another example is the nation's Capital, the District of Columbia. While its residents are not given voting representation in Congress, the 23rd Amendment finally gave District residents a vote in Presidential elections, and Congressional legislation grudgingly allowed the District to elect its own mayor by 1971. The District, in part by virtue of being 55% black, and in part because of a large proportion of Federal workers among its residents, almost always votes Democrat (its City Council includes two Republicans out of 13, one of whom, Catania, is gay, the other, Schwartz, a Jewish woman, neither representative of the Republican mainstream). As a result, one of its residents, the arch-conservative columnist Robert Novak, is a registered Democrat, simply in order to have a vote in the primary races in the city.

Re:US citizen prefered party registration

[orthogonal]

Do you know the reason why the U.S. did not go with a proportional style of choosing rep's.... I'm also curious why state legislatures no longer select their Senators.

Fortunately, these are related questions.

Remember that after the American Revolution, the American Colonies -- now States -- organized themselves under the Articles of Confederation. The reason that we still refer to the administrative subdivisions of the U.S. as "States" is that each considered itself, at the time, as a sovereign Nation-state -- tantamount to a separate country.

It was only in the face of a great deal of resistance -- resistance that was only placated by the "Bill of Rights" as the first ten Amendments to the U.S. Constitution are known, and notably the 9th and 10th Amendments that restricted the rights of the Federal government -- that the U.S. Constitution and its Federal system was accepted by the several States. Even then, in 1814, in 1828, and in 1861 the various States considered it within their rights to secede from the Federal government and go there own way. While neither the Hartford Convention nor the Nullification Crisis actually resulted in secession, 1861 saw the Southern States leave the Union until forcibly repatriated in the U.S. Civil War.

So proportional representation across state boundaries would simply not have been conceivable to most of the Founders, and acceptable to even fewer. Proportional representation might have been acceptable within a state, but much as the several States were jealous and wary of the Federal power, counties within the States were often desirous to maintain direct representation in the state legislature -- as they do to this day in each State. This was even more feasible then, given the relative smallness of the electorate, it being limited to property-holding white males over 21 years of age.

But it was to protect the interests of the States -- especially the less populous States -- that the Constitution created a two House legislature, one -- the House of Representatives -- with seats apportioned by population (knowledgeable readers will whisper "3/5ths Compromise" at this point), and one -- the Senate -- with two seats per state, regardless of a State's population. To further protect the interests of (even the small) States, votes for President were apportioned to the States according to the sum of their seats in the House and Senate, resulting in even the smallest States having three votes in the Electoral College.

Now, before I'm accused of rambling, here's the answer to your second question: yet another protection of State interests was to have state legislatures select a State's Senators: the Senators, under this plan, can almost be though of as diplomats, or better, plenipotentiaries sent by each State to the Federal government, deputized to negotiate as agents of their respective state legislatures.

But after the Civil War, the notion that the States were sovereign nations only voluntarily submitting to a Federal government was a dead letter, disproven by the slaughter at Gettysburg and in the torching of Atlanta. Furthermore, the period after the Civil War saw the opening of the Middle West (California had already been settled) and the knitting together of the country by the railroads, the common time zones that the railroads used to synchronize their timetables, and the rapidly growing industry that both built and prospered because of the railroads.

As the country became more closely knit by technology and the greater commerce that that technology fostered, further growth became increasingly dependent on regularizing certain things across state lines and across the country as a whole; these included standard weights and measure, the afore-mentioned time zones -- and especially laws regulating commerce. This was accomplished in a number of ways, but notably through the Commerce Clause of the Constitution; the upshot was to further weaken the 10th Amendment, which reserved to the

Uh, no.

[splortnik2003]

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.

Vote Early, Vote Often.

[blcamp]

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...

Re:Vote Early, Vote Often.

[wwest4]

The article is about electronic balloting, not Internet voting.

There's nothing terribly scary about the technology, but rather under what circumstances it is being deployed - the trust relationships are not properly arranged, because the system is closed and it is written and operated by a large corporation. Voters should not trust a corporation.

Otherwise, I'd say electronic balloting has a potential to be more secure and accurate than mechanical machines and plain ballot boxes.
The technology to do so exists now, it's just being employed poorly.

E-voting in Ireland

[PingKing]

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.

Screen Savers

[Shant3030]

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.

Tangibility

[Rexz]

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 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.

Re:Tangibility

[SlaveToTheGrind]

In the current system, every vote cast leaves a permanent, tangible, undisputable (unless some kind of hole punch is involved, anyway) record.

You apparently don't live in an area where lever voting machines are used. The only physical record of a vote is the bumping of a mechanical counter, sometimes. Yes, they're not being manufactured anymore, but they're still in significant usage across the country. Recount? Check the counter totals at your voting site again, add them up. Get the same number you had the first time. Have a nice day. Evidence of tampering? Perhaps detectable, if one knows where to look. Recourse? Minimal to none.

Eye Candy Security

[Lord Grey]

I think this snippet from Avi's posting highlights something fairly important:

In the beginning of the election, we printed a "zero tape" of each machine. I found this to be the kind of charade that a confidence man would play when performing some slight of hand. So, the machines printed each candidates name with a zero next to it. Somehow, that is supposed to mean that there are no votes counted on the machine? I don't know. I think I could write a five line computer program that would print the zero tally, and I don't see how that ties into the security of the election.

The average person out there uses computers. They don't necessarily understand them. People tend to trust a computer's output if it matches their expectations. The "zero tape" is a great example of that, and Avi's subsequent comment about it being "eye candy" is spot-on.

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.

My favorite quote from the article

[Benw5483]

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 guy seems to change his perspectives a lot after he sees it in the field. I think there is a lot to worry about still but if we have people like Rubin working to make it right then we'll get there eventually.

E-Voting

[Gr8Apes]

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.

Re:Isn't It Ironic

[wolenczak]

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

Typical Newspaper.

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

Re:Typical Newspaper.

[Anonymous Coward]

The question is not whether or not e-voting machines will prevent all fraud. The question is whether or not e-voting machines will be susceptable to less fraud than the paper ballots, and I think it is obvious that is the case.

Not at all. The real question is whether or not the e-voting system will be a vehicle for widespread massive one-stop-shopping and completely untraceable fraud as opposed to the small-scale fraud that you seem to feel they will prevent.

Re:Typical Newspaper.

[Paul Crowley]

Your "obvious" impression is directly contrary to that of pretty much the entire computer security community. Read what Schneier has to say on the subject, for example - stealing a bunch of ballots is one thing, but silently altering the entire result of the election without having to expose yourself by moving a single physical ballot and while leaving absolutely no physical sign that anything might be amiss is quite another.

Re:Typical Newspaper.

[Tackhead]

> Not at all. The real question is whether or not the e-voting system will be a vehicle for widespread massive one-stop-shopping and completely untraceable fraud as opposed to the small-scale fraud that you seem to feel they will prevent.

Furthermore, small-scale fraud is pretty much guaranteed to cancel itself out. A corrupt Republican stuffs 20 dead peoples' ballots in one precinct, and a corrupt Democrat gets another 20 corpses to vote in the next precinct. Net effect: ZERO.

Electronic voting practically guarantees that the corrupt side with the best crackers to win. The only proof of electoral fraud in an electronic system is likely to come in the form "A team of hackers for Our Guy knows it stuffed 100,000,000 ballots. We hired them and watched it happen, but the popular vote came out 101,000,000 to 99,000,000 in favor of Their Guy. Obviously, Their Guy also hired crackers to rig the election! We want a do-over!"

Personally, I'm OK with a society in which the Side That Gains The Political Allegiance Of The Best Hackers gets to rule the world. I think a society in which the Democratic candidate campaigns on a platform "We'll execute all RIAA members in exchange for your help in rigging the vote", only to be countered with a Republican candidate running on "We'll execute all RIAA members, and because we're also pro-gun, we'll let you pull the trigger on them in exchange for your help in rigging the vote!" would be pretty fucking cool.

Would it be a free society? Given the influence the techno-elite would have, it might be even more free than our present one. But I'd never pretend to call it a democratic one. I'm OK with that, because I happen to believe that democracy is overrated. The Constitution in its current form differs with me on that point. The one that governs the country in which I live says the society is supposed to be a representative republic in which the votes cast by the people for their representatives count.

Because I also believe in the rule of law , and because that Constitution is the law, however cool a society ruled by h4x0rz might be, I must therefore oppose electronic voting. Pisses me off to be consistent in my beliefs sometimes, but there you go.

Re:Typical Newspaper.

[SpaceLifeForm]

Furthermore, small-scale fraud is pretty much guaranteed to cancel itself out. A corrupt Republican stuffs 20 dead peoples' ballots in one precinct, and a corrupt Democrat gets another 20 corpses to vote in the next precinct. Net effect: ZERO.

You're not thinking outside the box (the ballot box in this case).

In your example, maybe it's a wash. But, at a larger level (states), it 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.

So, a supposed 'small fraud' can actually have very large effects. See Florida.

low-tech voting

[SenorFluffyPants]

I was a site manager at the New Mexico caucus, and we used straightforward pen and paper. Reconciling was a simple affair at the end of the evening.

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:

• low-tech voting works just fine and leaves an unmistakable trail
• mistakes happen with any method, but are much easier to catch via low-tech means
• Kucinich has been shorted one vote and it is my fault. Perhaps that one would have started the groundswell, but we will never know...

My "solutions"

[DarkkOne]

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.

Re:hmm...

[orthogonal]

I'm sorry but who cares if this artical [sic] [by computer scientist and election judge Avi Rubin, questioning the trustworthiness of e-voting] got slashdoted [sic]...

I'm going to guess that

• you're not yet of voting age;
• and that when you do reach voting age, you won't bother to exercise the franchise;
• and that your voluntary departure from the voting pool will -- oddly enough and for different reasons -- likely be appreciated both by politicians hoping for more passive, indolent "sheeple" and by those of us citizens who work hard to ensure a representative and responsive government.

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.

e-Voting in Maryland

[branchstudios]

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.

Disasters waiting to happen...

[dpbsmith]

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 check if my vote was counted...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

That man is a patriot

[GuyZero]

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.

E-Voting here to stay - stop fighting it

[Kombat]

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.

Re:E-Voting here to stay - stop fighting it

[corebreech]

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.

Impossible? To start with, we've already adopted cell phones, whereas we haven't yet truly embraced electronic voting. Moreover, cell phones don't present the kind of threat to our democracy electronic voting does.

It has to be said, over and over again, that once we lose the right to vote, the only way to get it back will be through violence. So it's important that we do everything we can to see to it that the right isn't lost in the first place.

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.

I think that's ridiculous. People register in different political parties all the time, without ill effect.

I would argue in fact that it is vital we publish the ballots that people cast. It is the only way to be certain that an election is on the level. The arguments we always hear against this doing this never stand up to scrutiny.

The only people who benefit from the secret ballot are those who seek to game the election.

Re:E-Voting here to stay - stop fighting it

[dnoyeb]

I my by chance play craps at the craps table. But I will not waste time in any electronic gambling machine.

I feel the same way about voting. Unless the code and the whole process is open sourced, as a transparent government should be, I will not support it no matter how secure they can prove it is.

Re:E-Voting here to stay - stop fighting it

[Smitty825]

Maybe you are just overthinking it...

Why doesn't each machine print out who each person voted for? That way, a manual recount can occur, any counting errors in the software aren't a major issue, etc.

To me at least, this is the most obvious solution

Re:E-Voting here to stay - stop fighting it

[GAVollink]

I used an electronic voting machine in the last election. It was great, and anonymous...

1. They hand me a piece of paper and a pen.
2. I fill in the bubble, next to my candidate
3. I put the ballot into the computerized machine, that keeps my paper ballot
4. If I filled out the bubble in-correctly, it beeps at me, and spits the ballot back
5. Assuming I didn't do anything wrong, then I can see the electronic "number of votes:" counter go up by one
6. I return the pen
7. I get a red "I voted" sticker

What's wrong with that? Why does every vote have to be cast directly into a computer?? I like the ballot reader method.

Re:E-Voting here to stay - stop fighting it

[amplt1337]

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.

Restating your premise doesn't count as a supporting argument. Anyway, I personally would not send privileged and powerful information, such as my vote, via a medium like email that could easily be intercepted or forged.

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.

Real-time tallying doesn't seem that important -- but perhaps it could be used as an election-protection measure, if every voter got a tally of the total votes after they'd voted. Tallies could be compared to ensure election integrity. As to your other points: there are other ways to eliminate ambiguous selections; staff requirements do not strike me as particularly significant; and paper waste isn't reduced by as much as you'd think. As to time spent voting, most of that time is spent reading the ballot and making a final decision, not physically coding the choices -- at least in my experience. I'll grant the rest. Mmm, skipping good points...

The complete widespread adoption of electronic voting is inevitable.
It is not a question of "if," but rather "when."

To me the question is not "when," it is "how." Perhaps electronic voting is inevitable -- I don't see it having tremendous advantages over other systems, but given our fondness for gizmos it probably is inevitable. I have no real objection to electronics being used in voting -- provided they are used in a way that is secure and verifiably honest. I think we share this concern.

Re:E-Voting here to stay - stop fighting it

[MindStalker]

You've obviously never lived in a small town. Or been part of a labor union. But there are plenty of people who would be professionally or physically damaged if their vote wasn't along the lines of what was expected of them. We are just lucky to live in a country were its not quite as obvious, probably because of the secrecy of our ballots.

Re:Isn't It Ironic

[SoTuA]

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

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.

are you a politician?

[Provincialist]

Elections hold an enormous amount at stake - indeed, entire political careers - and thus the temptation for covert meddling is inevitable.

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

Re:US citizen preferred party registration

[wolf-]

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!

I second Prof. Rubin's impressions

[Clemence]

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.

Not problems in the US

[edremy]

The issues you mention aren't really problems in the US.

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.

Techno-solutions to problems

[dpilot]

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.

Re:Isn't It Ironic

[roystgnr]

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 wrote my Rep

[Jameth]

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.

Re:I just wrote my Rep

[colinduplantis]

There is similar legislation already on the floor of the house and senate. The bills are, respectively, HR2239 and S.2045.

Write your CongressCritters!

Martyrs wanted

[st0rmshad0w]

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.

Re:Isn't It Ironic

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in a country where phony elections were common in the last 70 years.

Chicago isn't a country.

Homeland Security?

[henryhbk]

It is interesting to me that we have decided to spend billions of dollars in securing federal and other governmental institutions from terrorist attack, and yet a vital institution of the government is left relatively unguarded. Although the paper system before can also be flawed (see Florida), in the post-9/11 era, where we willingly made air-travel painful, have metal detectors and ID checks in all governmental buildings, truck-barriers out front we entrust our governmental selection process to an unencrypted storage and encryption system. This is not to say the prior system could not be manipulated, and the massivel volume of paper information made a true recount virtually impossible, but making a printout means that an individual machine, or spot audits can look for tampering.

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.

Free Software Voting?

[Captain Rotundo]

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?

Another Election Judge's experience

[davecb]

Actually there is a system which will meet both the proponent's and opponents' needs: manual marking of electronicaly tallied ballots.

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

YMMV!

[dejaffa]

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.

Vulnerabilities

[Todd Knarr]

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.

Avi's honesty, analogies

[MattW]

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.

Join EFF

[Catamaran]

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.

Re:I would like a paper form system

[Sique]

There is a counter example to the feasably of standard 8 1/2" by 11" ballots. In some states of Germany the elections to the local administrations (towns, counties, villages) use the so called "non genuine town part election" (unechte Teilortswahl). After reorganizing towns and villages and regrouping them to larger communities in the early 70ies the former villages got a fixed number of seats in the new town's councils. So the votes are counted in every former village separately to determine which candidates get sent to the town council. On the other hand the complete town council should represent the votes cast proportionally, so if one party wins more seats in the town council per winning them in the town parts than their quote is in the popular vote, then the other parties get a proportional number of seats in the now enlarged town council (those seats are called "Ueberhangmandate", roughly translated to surplus seats). (To make it more easy, groups that get less than 5% of the popular vote are ignored, except if they manage to get more than three direct seats).

On the other hand the voters have so many votes as the orinigal town council has seats. The voter is allowed to put the votes freely on the ballots to whatever candidate she thinks they should go without respect to the party membership of the candidates. If she thinks a candidate should definitely get some votes, she can even cummulate more than one vote (mostly up to three) to a candidate (but then she has less votes left for other candidates). If she thinks that's too complicated she can also cast a single vote to a 'list', a group of candidates for a single party or political group. A list basicly consists of the nominates of a single party for all the seats in the town council.

If she agrees with none of the candidates, she can also write the names of her own candidates in a free list.

Because the parties and groups have to nominate candidates for every seat to allow this list voting, the ballots can get extremly large. There once was an election for a town council in Southwest Germany where the ballots were about 4ft by 3ft (DIN A0), because about 20 groups had sent in lists for the 40 seats of the council.

After calculation all the proportions and giving underrepresented groups and lists the surplus seats the town council grew to 132 seats.

Normally such a complicated way of voting would call for an electronic voting system. But nothing beats the opportunity for the electorate to come to the voting booths after the booths have closed for voting, and watch the voting staff crew to open the sealed boxes and count the votes manually. This is controlling the democratic process at its finest. The local voting result will be announced to the autitorium before the votes get sealed again in a box and sent to the central election offices. The so called preliminary voting result (vorlaeufiges amtliches Endergebnis) is determined by adding the local results, and then the central election offices open the sealed boxes and again count the votes while the electorate has the chance to watch.

This is my greatest issue with electronic voting: You can't watch the count. From my experience nothing beats watching the count. In the former GDR (East Germany) the population knew the elections were rigged because enough people showed up at the election offices and watched the officials counting. Even though the people then only knew the local result, they could easily see the difference between the local result and the officially anounced one. If the official result announced for instance a 98,85 percent result for the ruling party in a town of 10,000 people, and you knew that your local office had counted at least 120 votes cast against them, then you saw the result being rigged. This showing up during the counting and collecting the results was done throughout the whole GDR in the last communal elections on May 6 1989, and the public uproar after the officially anounced result was contradicting the results the people were calculating themselves triggered the inner tensions the GDR didn't survived but for another half year.

My lessons are: However you vote, whenever you vote: Make sure you are able to watch the count!

Why are we scared of eVoting?

[dave420]

If you read the comments here, you'll see recurring themes - "I'm scared of electronic voting" ... "it's the end of democracy!" ... "you insensitive clod!" ... etc. The real point here, is people aren't scared of electronic voting, but of closed-source electronic voting.

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

Not specific to electronic voting

[Kinniken]

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.

Vote buying or coercion

[SpaceShaver]

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.

Re:anonymous receipts anyone

[Catamaran]

The short answer is that it is probably illegal because it allows you to prove to a third party how you voted and thus violates the secret ballot principle. Read the intro to Secret Secret-Ballot Receipts and Transparent Integrity where he describes a different type of receipt.

Re:anonymous receipts anyone

[travisd]

Think "$EMPLOYER says you're fired if you don't vote for $CANDIDATE and bring him the paper to prove it" or "hey, I'll give you $50 for every voting receipt proving a vote for $CANDIDATE"

My letter to the Calif. Registrar of Voters

[JustAnotherReader]

I had some issues voting yesterday and I forwarded my story to the California Registrar of voters. Here was my letter describing the very real concerns I had.

*******

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.

I fear he is not getting it...

[dillon_rinker]

"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.

Rubin's fear *exactly* mine

[whitroth]

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"