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Evoting in the News
key45 writes "Just a few days after California rejects Diebold E-Voting machines, and Ireland bans e-voting too, the Information Technology Association of America (which represents election equipment makers and other technology companies) released a poll showing that the majority of Americans trust those machines. The war for public opinion is on!" Reader theRG writes "The U.S. Election Assistance Commission held hearings on May 5 about the pros and cons of electronic voting machines. They debated whether or not machines should have paper trails, and what standards should be set. Meanwhile, NPR reports on California's recent decertification of Diebold machines and on one Ohio county's switch from punchcards to electronic voting." And finally, our own OSDN has a report from the election commission meeting: Joe Barr writes "Thom Wysong has a report at NewsForge this morning on the first public meeting of the new U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Questions like whether or not a voter verifiable audit trail and open source should be mandated for e-voting solutions were the order of the day."
More than half think that Saddam and Al-Qaeda worked together!
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
...please, PLEASE let there be a CowboyNeal option...
These sigs are more interesting tha
Do remember that Diebold is waging a 500k/month PR war and they're no doubt buying off whoever can be bought.
OTOH, I wonder how the results would have skewed if the poll question was preceded by "Who is Diebold?" and the question had to be answered correctly. Americans (of which I'm one) are uniformly ignorant of anything that doesn't happen on Survivor XXXVIII. It's easy to give a yes or no answer when you don't have to prove that you know anything about the subject!
What I find amazing is that in the face of arguably questionable performance, security, and auditing issues with e-voting machines, the vast majority of elections officials still want to move full steam rather than wait until a solid solution is developed. Remember, these are the same people that will be developing the ulcers on election night when their systems start shitting out garbage. They have to realize that they will be under extreme scrutiny. Why put yourself and your staff through this? Makes me think of payola, but that's not really realistic. Maybe the executive elections staff training is in Bermuda or Hawaii?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
released a poll showing that the majority of Americans trust those machines.
If we based everything off what the majority of Americans trusted, we would get someone like George Bush for President.
Oh wait, Damn!
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
Why is that at all relevant? Either the machines are reliable and trustworthy, or they aren't. This can't be altered by the opinions of a bunch of people who know nothing about it.
If the machines are not rigorously trustworthy, and provably so, they should not be used. End of story. What Americans think is irrelevant.
If the machines are totally secure and reliable, but most Americans don't trust them, they still shouldn't be used. The voting system not only has to be trustworthy, but has to be seen to be trustworthy. If machines are more reliable, faster and more secure than paper, then election authorities should try to persuade the public that they are reliable, but until the public so believes, they should not be used to determine the result of an election.
Well, This may be a bit inflammatory, but I think your comment demands some, umm, comment.
First, I'm going to ask for clarification. Is voting a game of big numbers or is voting a game of small numbers? Your comment supports the first then instantly switches to the opposite point. My one vote doesn't count, then, suddenly, we have a close race and it counts. Which is it?
I'll reveal my personal stance on the voting machines. Big, Bad Idea. The darling old ladies who serve as ballot judges in my local precinct have eyes like hawks, but they can't see potential voter fraud on a purely electronic platform. This is a clear case of a manufacturer using its superior resources to push an agenda against the public interest.
Plus, I insist that my vote does matter. It's not all presidential politics. Local referenda on city and county issues can directly affect my quality of life. In a race where voter turn-out is maybe 3,000 folks, my vote definitely counts. Heck, a guy of meager income like me can even swing an election through personal effort alone.
Time to quit bitching and get off the apathy wagon, kids.
Having an industry tell me that the majority of people are uninformed, misunderstand or are unconcerned about major failures of their product is not particularly presuasive in my book.
The Tobacco Industry Supporters Organization of America has released a study showing a majority of Americans think smoking is good for you and should be encouraged!
[Sarcasm] Yeah, those numbers are totally reliable and will definitely reflect the average American opinion. [/Sarcasm]
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
If you're in Maryland and want to help out, come join us at www.truevotemd.org. We have a lawsuit going to force the state to decertify the Diebold machines, and we're also planning a number of other public actions to raise awareness and put pressure on our elected and appointed officials. Linda Schade, one of the co-directors, was a speaker at the press conference that MoveOn held outside the EAC hearing.
--Paul Suh
Would you need a fingerprint scan to verify that you only vote one time?
How would the Voter Verifiable Audit Trails (VVAT)work? Could I check online to see that my vote was recorded correctly?
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
Can anybody enlighten me on why it is so difficult to insist that voters approve their ballot on paper? I guess some think that since it is a computer, it wont make a mistake and computers are here to rid us of paper anyway. It just confuses (and scares) me.
I am appalled at the absolute paranoia that these companies experience regarding their 'proprietary' software used to run e-voting machines.
Look, folks, it isn't that hard! If situation X occurs, then y (being the number of votes for Situation X) = y + 1. At the end, y = the number of votes for (candidate, proposition, measure, etc.) z.
Simple! *I* could probably program the stupid thing, and I've got CRAP for programming skills! Why does this need to be proprietary? Why does it need to be so damned EXPENSIVE?
Useless opinions, worthless observations, and more!
A huge chunk of "registered voters" don't even care enough to vote, even few more give a whoop beyond that. Of those who do desire a secure vote, I'm betting more than 70% think the machines are insecure, and it's this group that needs to be convinced.
Ireland didn't ban e-voting. We merely postponed it. We've already had e-voting machines used in an election two years ago (in a few consituencies on a trial basis). This summer, the Irish government tried to introduce e-voting in every county, and was met with protests. It was taken completely by surprise, and set up a commission to look into the matter and report back with a recommendation. I'm pretty sure that this commission was just set up to reassure the "Luddite" public, and tell them that everything was ok.
To everyone's surprise, the commission said that there wasn't enough time to guarantee the accuracy and security of the machines, and that their introduction should be postponed until such things could be guaranteed.
So, it hasn't been banned, just postponed.
My favorite voting method is paper ballots where you fill in ovals with a black marker and then feed them into a scanner. You get the advantage of nearly instant results after the polls close with the advantage of a full paper trail for a manual recount if necessary. And when they did a recount when the vote for our new high school failed by 29 votes, it changed it by 6 votes, indicating that some people didn't fill in the ovals correctly, but only a very tiny percentage.
:)
And, of course, our public education is increasingly geared towards teaching kids how to properly fill in ovals.
Of course, if we had had fully-electronic voting, I might not have lost the town election on Tuesday (I was a candidate for Selectman, which is roughly the equivalent of city council).
-l
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The bottom line is that (IMO), e-voting will win the day because
it looks slicker than paper votes
it's easier on polling officials
the lack of serious recount ability will make all election outcomes final, which will substantially reduce the uproar in contested elections.
In short, e-voting is pitched towards the masses. It's sad, but likely inevitable.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
http://csmc.ca.lwvnet.org/calendar.html
I think successful machines might yield greater turnout, which might clarify where people stand at any given time and provide a more accurately appointed set of leaders. In that sense, I hope we CAN implement more accurate voting, but I think we need to do it in such a way as to minimize the chance of corruption. Even if Diebold doesn't intend to leave the door open, so far they have and that shouldn't be ignored if we want this technological advancement to succeed.
> Your one vote makes little difference in the final outcome of the election.
I've always thought that this was an unfortunate existential conundrum. From a certain view, yes - in the end, the ordinary voter is just a speck of dust on the political landscape - but you could view every action you take in life the same way from the appropriate perspective.
I am only responsible for my vote, no one else's - and even if it only matters to a tiny degree, that is infinitely more than zero, which is fine for me right now. America is still an adequately free place in the sense that there are other forums besides the voting booth with which I can increase the awareness of my position if I wish. My vote and my actions can "matter" in this sense as much as I choose.
> Just consider all the dolts who blew Gore's chance in 2000 by voting with their
> heart for Nader.
Maybe if Gore had been more liberal he would have gotten Green votes. I wouldn't have voted for him in either case, but the moral is that this is just the way the cookie crumbles (ignoring the closeness of the results for simplicity).
You're ignoring the statistics of sampling. With a properly chosen sample group of 1000, you can predict with a certain confidence how correct the results are. For 1000 properly chosen people, most of these kind of studies have an uncertainty around 5%.
Which means that you might be able to interpret this as being (77 +/- 5)%, which is meaningful.
Very rarely, polls are conducted with significantly more than 1000 respondents. The marginal decrease of the sampling error beyond 1000 observations is too small to make a larger sample worthwile. 77% being in favor of e-voting machines is pretty damn significant, and it can be said that the majority of all 291 million Americans is in favor of them (of course, I'd need to know the standard deviation of the sample to be absolutely positive).
That doesn't rule out other errors, though, such as a sampling bias. If the pollsters picked 1000 employees of e-voting machines manufacturers, that would be a voting bias. So would be if they picked 1000 Slashdotters. However, arguing that the poll result is wrong because the sample was comparativelly small is wrong.
With the British presses high journalistic standards, I trust that The Telegraph on their own found the conclusive proof that Saddam worked with bin Laden. I also believe in Sasquatch.
If a completely random selection of several thousand people occurs for every one of these polls, why is it that no one I know of has ever been a participant? I suspect it is more like the Nielsen ratings, where specific individuals who are supposed to be representative are involved each time.
The other thing that wasn't clear is whether trusting e-voting in general means anything related to trusting companies like Diebold. The very action California took to reject Diebold, while not rejecting e-voting in general, sends the message that it is possible to have trustworthy e-voting.
We have come a long way toward getting paper voting to be relatively secure and reliable. In spite of that, we heard all about dimples and miscounts in 2000. We can't expect the first few trial runs of e-voting to instantly be problem free.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
There was no receipt, no way to determine after the fact whether my vote actually made it out of the polling place, or even if it was properly recorded. The machines should never have been allowed to be used in the first place.
-Matt
Personally, I spent Tuesday (local election) passing out the following flyer:
Will Your Vote Be Counted?
Diebold
Direct Recording Electronic "DRE" Machines
Though Diebold has gotten bad press lately, (it's costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign "contributions" to stay in business), their competitors are no better. Any DRE machine would be just as vulnerable to error, tampering, and fraud. Because they do not produce a permanent record of each vote, modern computerized systems are no better than the huge mechanical lever machines of 1890. Because there is no reliable way to even detect errors, the results of any election using these machines is open to question.
Voter-Verifiable Audit Receipt
For at least ten years, security experts around the country have recommended the use of a Voter-Verifiable Audit, or "VVA," to guard against these problems. If passed, Voters Confidence and Increased Accuracy Act would require electronic voting machines to produce a paper printout of each vote. This "VVA Receipt" must be made available for each voter to check before being securely deposited into a sealed container. The paper ballots would count as the actual votes, taking precedence over any electronic tallies in case of doubt.
Urge your Senator and Representative to support the Voters Confidence Act, also known as H.R.2239 (in the House), and S.1980 (in the Senate.)
How to Buy an Election
There are literally hundreds of ways to tamper with the vote when computers are doing the counting. Here are just some of the possibilities: Hire a programmer to create a "back door" program in the voting software which can alter the vote count on demand. In Fairfax County, Virginia, during the 2003 elections, voters in three precincts complained that the machines changed their votes. Testing showed that a machine seemed to subtract a vote in about "one of a hundred tries." At least two close races may have hinged on that one percent "error." Replace the vote-counting software through last-minute technical "service upgrades." Most recently in California, thousands of election computers were "upgraded" just before the election, replacing the certified software with newer, un-certified versions. Monopolize some criticThe Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
At the end of the day, the solution is super simple: add a receipt printer to the machine. White copy goes in the backup ballot box. The yellow copy is for the voter. The voter can validate his or her vote on the spot.
Why Diebold and these other jokers in the biz don't see $$$ for selling printers and supplies I don't know. That's more suspicious than anything.
-- $G
I caught a decent chunk of this radio show a couple weeks ago, and it really made the whole push for non-verifiable e-voting here in Florida seem pretty shady:
:(
An estimated 28% of U.S. voters will cast their ballots on electronic voting machines next November, but questions about security remain. A panel discusses the on-going concerns.
Joe Andrew, lawyer in private practice and former National Chairman of the Democratic National Committee
David Dill, Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University
www.verifiedvoting.org
Bev Harris, author of "Black Box Voting" www.blackboxvoting.org
Mark Radke, director of marketing,
Diebold Election Systems
Congressman Robert Wexler, D - Florida, 19th district
http://www.wamu.org/ram/2004/r1040324.ram
It's a very interesting conversation no matter how you look at it. Unfortunately in Realaudio only
Thanks for the reply. This is a very important issue here. Now, our thread is getting away from the e-voting topic, but this is a germane departure. The controversy over the machines is important, but it is also a big distraction. E-voting won't increase voter turnout. Voting can't get any easier than it already is.
You've created a paralysing feedback loop with you comment, however. Chicken, egg. Egg, chicken. Voter, system. System, voter.
Action is the only thing that's going to fix the system, cuz it aint fixing itself. Regardless of the philosophical constraints in our systems, concerted action is the only thing that makes things happen.
Complaining about the system is useful only to a very limited point. If it helps one discover ways to either cope better or effect change, then great. Otherwise it quickly becomes a psychological handicap that provides an excuse for inaction or even paralysis.
If the system encourages paralysis, the morally correct action is to acknowledge this, expend effort to overcome that paralysis, *then* change the system through further action. Simple, yes. Cliched, probably. True to my experience, definitely.
The voting companies say it would be overly expensive to add printed ballots to their machines.
But I guarantee you, if their software was made open source today, tommorow their would be three or four patches to connect printers to these stupid machines.
Selecting on a machine is fine. But we need to print the ballot in HUMAN READABLE format. In addition, ballots should not contain any machine encoding formats (like bar codes) that people cannot read.
This is the only way to gaurantee that the machines aren't being rigged to record something other than what the voter expects.
Honestly, I'm starting to think that the Canadian low-tech approach works best. Put an X next to the candidate you like. Canvassers count the ballots by hand. For all the money we spend on machines, we could afford to pay them well.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
In a conference call with electronic voting industry officials, Harris says:
I just don't like to put it in writing because if this thing winds up in the press somewhere inadvertently, I don't want the story saying the e[lectronic] voting industry is in trouble and decided to hire a lobbying firm to take care of their problem for them,"
If it comes out in the press, then his organization will not be able to act like they are the only organization that can speak with authority on any issue that affects the IT space.
Instead, Miller falls back on the tried and true tactic of discrediting experts and critics of the companies that he is paid to represent. I would bet all I have that if you took the 1,000 people they used for this very scientific survey and let them know how insecure these electronic voting machines are, they may answer the survey questions very differently.
www.displacedtechies.com
>>>A lobbying group whose members include manufacturers of the controversial electronic voting machines, released a survey that found 77 percent of registered voters were either "not very concerned" or "not concerned at all" about the security of election systems.
Oh yeah? Well I'm willing to bet that 100% of those surveyed were not qualified to make decisions on complicated technical issues, such as e-voting.
So that survey is MEANINGLESS.
All it proves is that the public does not understand the issues, not that the issues do not exist or that e-voting has no issues.
>>>Computer scientists say the electronic systems are so vulnerable to software bugs, hackers and equipment malfunctions that they should be scrapped and replaced with machines that provide paper records of every ballot cast. Despite reassurances from equipment makers, at least 20 states are considering legislation to require a paper trail.
Who should we trust? Reassurances from voting machine sellers, who stand to lose millions if their machines are banned? Or computer scientists, whose strive for unbiased analysis, and have nothing to gain?
And it pisses me off whenever any argument is made like "well, we've already spent a lot on these machines..." or "we don't have enough time before the election...". Bullshit. Just cause we've started off inthe wrong direction, does NOT mean we should continue down that same path once we've identified our mistakes. No matter what the cost, we must not allow our election process to be compromised. (at the very least, not let it be even more compromised than it already is)
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The Commission was created by the HAVA act that passed in 2002. Yet they are holding their first meeting now in 2004. Is anyone else bothered by this?
And, just to add to the other debate. I for one think that an opinion poll is only half the issue or less. It is important that the public trust the machines but only if they do so based upon truth not a well-run ad campaign. Unfortunately what this shows is that Bev Harris's Words are not reaching the public as a whole.
In part this is unuspprising. I recently chatted with my local elections official. He allowed as how the public doesn't think about elections except twice a year on voting day and on the day after voting day. While he worries about this stuff and wants funding and time to deal with it, noone else cares, they just want it to work.
This is in large part due to the fact that we have all been trained in this manner. Consider school (in the U.S.) in it we are taught all about the vot, all about the elections system and the holy vote. Little if any time is spent (in my experience) on other (continuous) forms of public participation (running for office, attending council meetings, etc.) As a result everyone is trained to think that the vote is everything and that, for the rest of the year its out of their hands.
The real issue is how can we override this perception/instinct. How can we shatter the blind faith that most people have in the parties?
You may want to ask voters with disabilities what they think, then ask Caltech and MIT what they have to say on the topic, then investigate other options. Just a suggestion.
John82's point that elections officials don't want to be the next ridiculed Florida Elections Commission is appropriate also, but a big factor is that the Republicans in Congress and the Bush Administration wanted to be perceived as "Doing Something" to fix the big embarassment that they came into office with. (Oh, and also the Diebold folks were big Republican contributors, so they of course wanted to help out their friends.)
One big advantage of competently designed electronic voting machines is accessibility for blind people, which is a real problem with most voting systems. This lets the election officials help out blind people, and others with limited sight or hand-eye coordination (e.g. old people.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
E-Voting isn't the problem. It's possible the have secure, verifiable, and recountable e-voting machines. Most people are simply ignorant of that fact. The problem is that the e-voting machines currently in use are not designed to support verifiability or meaningful recounts. The mass hysteria whipped up this past year has most people (including a lot of techies) misunderstanding the problem.
I understand why a paper trail is good... but why are people arguing against it?
The moment I enjoyed the most was when he very harshly dressed down one of the vendors, which had sent a board member who wasn't involved in day-to-day operations (having retired) and admitted he couldn't answer some of the questions posed to him. At the end of that segment, the chairman said something like "If we hold further such hearings, I would hope your company will see fit to send someone who actually goes to work every day."
E-voting won't increase voter turnout. Voting can't get any easier than it already is.
Truth be told, I'm not so concerned about increasing voter turnout as I am informing voters. I'd rather the people who can't be bothered to vote stayed home and left the decisions to people who care. Increasing voter turnout simply increases the number of uninformed voters. Make people care, and they'll find their way to the polls all by themselves.
Action is the only thing that's going to fix the system, cuz it aint fixing itself. Regardless of the philosophical constraints in our systems, concerted action is the only thing that makes things happen.
I agree, but sometimes the system is so fouled up that you can't fix it from within the system. In the election process, the only people who have the power to change it are in power because of it. They have no desire to change it because they will likely suffer from the change. The system has no way to change the system, so the change has to be made from outside.
There are arguments for changing the voting process itself, but I think the main reason people have lost faith is because of the end result. Choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil, and voting for an independent, or worse, writing in a candidate, has little to no chance of doing any more than not voting at all.
The election process is a paralysing feedback loop all of its own. If everyone voted, regardless of their feelings about why voting doesn't matter, how would we know there was a problem? Say what you like about "voter apathy", but it's at least got us talking about how to fix the problem rather than not knowing there is one.
Personally, I think we need to fix what our choices are before we fix how we make them.
People's desire to believe they are right is much stronger than their desire to be right.
Indeed, I hear that that group has been quite underprivileged for the past 200 years.