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NYT Calls For Open-Source Election Machines
anti-drew writes "The New York Times Magazine has an interesting editorial (free reg. req.) calling for open-source voting machines. From the article: 'Electronic voting has much to offer, but will we ever be able to trust these buggy machines? Yes, we will -- but only if we adopt the techniques of the 'open source' geeks.' That's quite an endorsement coming from the Times. Of course, one of the justifications was that open-source enthusiasts are 'libertarian freaks, nuttily suspicious of centralized power', who would 'scream to the high heavens if they found anything wrong'."
open-source enthusiasts are 'libertarian freaks, nuttily suspicious of centralized power', who would 'scream to the high heavens if they found anything wrong'.
The same NY Times that got Adrian Lamo busted while he found a f**king open-proxy on their network.
First Vote?
It's most definitely not an "endorsement from the Times." Unless the Op-ed was written by the Times editorial board, it will have a disclaimer stating that the statements contained herein only represent the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of Times or its parent corporations.
MSDN Magazine has an article calling for closed source voting machines with .NET Passport validation.
Unknown host pong.
That comment reminds me of a history book of Las Vegas which noted the distrust that regular gamblers had against the electronic one armed bandits, who much preferred the electromechanical machines.
Use google and google at the prompt.
I am pro-lifechoice.
Of course, one of the justifications was that open-source enthusiasts are 'libertarian freaks, nuttily suspicious of centralized power', who would 'scream to the high heavens if they found anything wrong'."
;)
lets not kid ourselves here
Hey the whole bonus of a two party system is for the one to keep the other in check. If the nerds of America have to keep our voting system straight, then I'm sure we can find a few good nerds.
'libertarian freaks, nuttily suspicious of centralized power' i thought we were socialists? what's nutty about being suspicious of centralized power? it would be naive not to be. read a frickin history book. (or a newspaper, for that matter)
open source doesn't mean that everyone and his grandma has an CVS account. :)
I think it's a great idea... not a new one but it's probably new to the general public and the NYT clearly thinks there's nothing wrong with free registration required so there you have it! A national publication force supporting a public-trust open-source project. It's the only way to help ensure the public's interests are protected against corruption.
But the machines themselves are only part of the process. There must be audit and process supervision and that still requires people.
Forgot to mention...this was posted before I RTFA. There's a possibility that this was covered. Time to go find out firsthand...
Goo goo g'joob.
Of course, one of the justifications was that open-source enthusiasts are 'libertarian freaks, nuttily suspicious of centralized power', who would 'scream to the high heavens if they found anything wrong'."
For once they hit the nail on the head. Although I don't see why anyone might consider the statements to be any sort of insult. The so called "libertarian freaks" are just doing what every citizen should be doing: always questioning "centralized power". Technically, we give them the power, so why not ask why?
Click here
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
I could be mistaken, but wouldn't open source code for voting machines make it that much easier for someone to hack the machines if they so desired?
Wouldn't open source code for an operating system make it that much easier for someone to the hack a computer if they so desired?
The thing with open source voting machines is that anyone should be able to look at the code and notice a bug that would allow this. With closed source voting machines like Diebold's, the only ones who know if there's some backdoor or buggy code are the people who programmed it.
I think a strong argument that you could put forward would be that the current system of manually counting votes is the equivalent of 'open source'. Everyone knows what they do (count votes), and how they do it (by looking at each one and recording the number). I believe you can even watch them do it, if you'd like. Open source is pretty much the equivalent. You can see what the code is doing, and how it's doing it.
Speak before you think
alas, my memory fails me yet again (please, no lame 'upgrade' jokes), i know my explanation will suck due to lack of facts, but here ya are anyway;
there was *some guy* who placed some code into a compiler once, so that even if there was no malicious code in the actual souce, once compiled, the executable had a block of code enabling the original author to do things (i.e. a backdoor). if i remember correctly, even if you were to recompile the compiler, the code would once again be placed into the compiler (and therefore future copies of the executable), i know its extremely unlikely that it will happen in this case, but im just pointing out that it can happen.
There's a lot worse images we could have. They even chose libertarian instead of marxist.
Besides, I think the quote is fairly accurate -- just look at how much we jump up and down about 'trivial' licence details. In the closed source world they'd just pirate the software and forget about it.
It's an interesting piece, but it's not an editorial. An editorial states the opinion of the newspaper as a whole (actually of the Editorial Board, if you're feeling pedantic) and as such carries a fair amount of weight, as in saying, for example, "The New York Times has endorsed Kerry for President." This is just an opinion piece by one of the paper's writers, and is a lot lower on the food chain than an editorial.
A long time ago, Linus Torvalds gave an interview in Maximum PC in which he pointed out that some people thought that open source "somehow was tied to communism." This type of thinking is still around, I think, and it's part of what fuels the Ken Browns and Darl McBrides of the world. They see something that looks a little like something they've been trained to hate with unreasoning passion, and then the blinders go on and the brains turn off.
Fortunately, I think that people are finally starting to understand exactly what the open source software movement stands for and the benefits we stand to accrue from it. 'Communism' - either in its real form or the corrupted understanding that some people seem to have of it - simply doesn't enter into the equation anymore. Open source, to many mostly computer illiterate people that I know, looks much more like an exercise in free speech than an expression of the Marxist dialectic.
Open source voting software is the best way to deal with the problems in electronic voting machines. Will it be an absolute panacea? Probably not. But in any case, it will doubtless produce more trustworthy software than anything produced by a proprietary company using proprietary software development methods on a proprietary operating system with proprietary political causes and motivations.
You sir, are a dumbass.
It would be HARDER to hack an open source voting machine for several reasons.
First: Security holes WOULD get fixed. Diebold leaves their machines open to known exploits.
Second: If the machines were open source, you can bet your complacent American ass that every CompSci doctorate student or professor would try and hack it for prestege, then submit a patch to fix it. All that BEFORE an election.
Third: At least we would know how the machinese worked. Currently our knowledge consists of: The Machines fuck Up.
Fourth: we might get a paper trail. Florida election fuckups would no longer exist.
Yes. We all know that security by obscurity is one of the best methods of ensuring that systems are secure. That is why nobody has ever been able to hack into a system running closed-source software such as Microsoft Windows.
Sarcasm aside, if the software is not open-source, there will still be many, many people that will have access to the code. The difference is that the general public won't be able to check what the code does. Are you sure that you trust every employee of Diebold (for instance) to be honest?
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
No mention of an open-source voting project currently gathering a lot of support. Their idea is to keep what people trust about voting, and just computerize the parts that will make the process easier and more accessable.
Open Voting Consortium
Can't we all just get along?
Open source voting would allow us to work out all the flaws. When one company believes they know everything [Diebold], they overlook and become exploitable. Ugh.
is be suspicious of centralized power, especially the US government.
As far as being nutty people, I'll take advocacy for open source wherever I can get it thank you.
librertarian freaks? i think not. i'm a compasionate conservative anarchist.
Make $5250 Guaranteed!!! All you need is a PayPal account and $25. We'll do the rest. Click here to find out how.
I wrote something about this in my blog a while ago. I think putting your trust in the public is exactly what needs to be done. don't you?
If the New York Times were to print an article saying the sky was blue, it would be proof positive that the sky was some other color.
The quote in the article is that open source folks 'are often libertarian..', not are. There's a difference there.
Not that I think that is a fair description either, but given that it is a pretty accurate description of guys like ESR, it's not hard to see how such an opinion could be formed.
...that the source made available is actually the code running on the machine?
...but that wouldn't actually make it Linux.
I could write a closed-source proprietary OS and have it go:
printf("Kernel version: Linux 2.4.26\n");
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
I guess they read
If 10 voting equipment vendors publish their open source (remember, "open source" is not necessarily "free") software for inspection, then for each vendor, the other 9 vendors will have a strong incentive to inspect and criticize that 10th vendor's code. ("You really should want to buy *my* voting machines . . . their code sucks. Here, let me prove it. . .
I predict that competing commissioned salespeople can be even more nutty, suspicious, and enthusiastic than computer science professors.
Cem Kaner, Professor of Software Engineering, Florida Institute of Technology
Who do you serve?
Who do you trust?
[pause]
Who do you serve and who do you trust?
Sorry, had to be said.
I'm sure a lot of geeks will be convinced that the voting software would be safe if all the able coders can look at the voting software at their leisure and find bugs, if any. However, how do you convince the general populace this? Just saying there are random people in the world finding bugs in it doesn't seem convincing enough to a normal person who knows nothing about computers except that they can use it to get email and buy flowers. While I'm all for open source voting, I think it doesn't inspire the amount of trust necessary or as much trust as most Slashdot readers would think.
Already, Australians have used the open-source strategy to build voting software for a state election, and it ran like a well-oiled Chevy.
The last Chevy I owned was a '74 Vega, and it burned a quart of oil every 100 miles. I guess that's what he's referring to here.
Have you read my blog lately?
One of the biggest problems with voting machines is cost per use. Voting machines are relatively" expensive and are used at most twice a year, and often only once every 2-4 years. If they aren't being used, they are simple taking up room in storage (which costs money).
Cost Advantages:
NOW as distros like knoppix have proven, putting a full featured desktop on a CD is possible. That being said - putting your "voting machine" on a CD, and using standard PC hardware makes a lot of sense. You don't have to buy a bunch of larg proprietary machines that only get used ones in a while. The CD's can be verified. If one is careful it would even be easy to use hardware already in place - or obsoleted hardware. Such a system would also use a simple standard printer to print an encrypted voter verification (audit) record in case a recount is requested. This should eliminate the long standing problem with most other electronic voting systems (no real audit trail).
Development is spread out over a large not for profit group of programmers with the end result being free. The only real cost is the certification procedure each state decides to institute - and thus it is the state that becomes accountable. If a states procedures are not robust enough to catch dangerous bugs then it's their own fault. I would think that several states go in together and split the certification costs. Since the buy in price is almost nothing (essentially media) the states have more money to play with and spend on voter training AND certification.
Considering Diebold and others - this seems like a natural, easy and simple solution.
Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country - Come up with a simple, secure, reliable voting system on a CD that will boot from standard PC hardware.
SIDE NOTE: If my county uses electronic voting machines that do not have a paper trail - then I will vote by absentee ballot. I would STRONGLY urge any US voter to do the same.
cluge
AngryPeopleRule
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
voting machines. Someone has to provide tech support in case something goes wrong, or barring being able to fix it, idemnity. And who better to do that than the people who made the code?
Just because something is OS doesn't mean that everyone is going to steal your trade secrets. If I were on a local voting comittee, I would almost certainly give the contract to the developer, because their people have the most experience with the machines.
Food for thought for Diebold, but who am I kidding. It will take a long time before people come to see open source as something more than just a bunch of punk kids who don't know how to make money.
Publically verifiable code. Sure. The geeks who can read and understand it will, far more than current distros and projects. If only for the novelty.
But then what is needed is a strict, multiparty custody chain, to ensure that the specific, compiled, verified code, as well as the machines it is run on, are what was actually verified.
it does no good to verify codebase X, if what finds its way to the machines is codebase Y
I'm sorry to inform, but your slashdot account will be suspended until you have read what ESR has to say about Open Source security on this paper: The Case of the Quake Cheats
libertarian freaks, nuttily suspicious of centralized power', who would 'scream to the high heavens if they found anything wrong'
Hmmm...
libertarian...
suspicious of centralized power...
scream to high heaven if there is a loophole in the democratic system...
Wow, three compliments in a row, Thanks NYT!!!
There is a growing consensus that, in order to be trustable, election machines have to produce a paper ballot that can be hand-counted in case a recount is required. See, for example this article for a authoritative discussion of the issues by a recognized expert in the field.
Have you read my blog lately?
Its unfortunate the U.S. is just waking up to the massive threat evoting poses to democracy. As slowly as most local governments move I wager most of them are going to go in to the next election with machines that are easily rigged. I would now lob out the conspiracy theory that the Republican's are going to use them to steal the next election but I'm starting to have my doubts. If the Republican's hold the White House and both houses of Congress, and even better achieve their holy grail of a filibuster proof majority in the Senate, which is where I think rigged voting machines is most likely to come in to play, the next election will be meaningless because the Republican's will have a defacto dictatorship in place by then, especially if they are blessed with another 9/11 they can use as an excuse to trash whats left of the constitution.
The doubts I have about this scenarios is that I'm of the opinion the election was really stolen when the media, the DNC and DLC moved Kerry from also ran to front runner and all the Democratic primary voters followed along like so many lemmings.
With Kerry as the Democratic nominee we are faced with a situation where Bush may win no matter how awful a job he does, or how dangerous he is, because no one can stand Kerry, especially after the Republican's shred him with $200 million in attack ads. He is unfortunately a two faced hypocrite and totally unlikable. I'm pretty sure Karl Rove danced a jig in the White House when Kerry moved to front runner status. I find myself hoping that the Democrats will come to their senses at the convention in Boston and realize what a loser he is and throw the nomination to Edwards. He may be inexperienced but at least he is likable in a Clintonesque sort of way.
If Kerry does win I doubt the establishment will mind, he is after a spoiled rich kid and member of Skull and Bones so he will look out for the establishment interests first, and the people's interest not at all(except to get reelected). He really doesn't seem to differ all that much from Bush. He's pretty much a fan of the war in Iraq, the only time he wasn't was when that was necessary to get the Democratic nomination. He seems to be a fan of the Patriot act and intrusive big brother government, again the only time he wasn't was when that was necessary to get the Democratic nomination. As soon as he had the nomination sowed up he rushed to the center and his first proposal was for a tax cut for corporations. He is a man in the pocket of the establishment if there ever was one.
I hate to say it but democracy is in a state of complete collapse in the U.S. There is a very small group of powerful people who decide who will be on the ballot, the media en masse anoints them and by the time it gets to the voters they are little more than a rubber stamp.
Rigged, closed source evoting is just another level of control to make sure the American people don't make a mistake and elect somebody that might upset the apple cart.
You can look at Iraq at the moment and see this same process in action. Iraq was supposed to get sovereignty and a U.N. representative was supposed to choose an interim government. Instead the U.S. appointed Iraqi governing council suddenly picked the government with massive back stage manipulation from the U.S. and surprise, surprise they are picking a man who has been on the CIA payroll for years as prime minister. He is a carbon copy of Chalibi who was the U.S. man until he fell in to disfavor. The U.S. is even interfering in the choice of the figurehead president to make sure he is pro U.S. versus the previous frontrunner who wasn't entirely a fan of U.S. occupation.
Our government is great with the empty rhetoric about freedom and democracy but if we ever found a way to actually get it they would freak and the current plutocracy would put a stop to it in a heartbeat. I find myself truly wishing Nader had a shot at the Presidency. He would be a train wreck but it would upset a very entrenched and corrupted kleptocracy. I'd just like to see it and we could start a pool on how long he would last before he was assassinated.
@de_machina
...because Microsoft would be in charge of validating our ballots!
As bad as the old punch card system were, I liked the feeling of knocking out a chad, and then being able to see an actual physical representation of my vote.
With the amount that counties are already spending on these machines, it can't cost much more to add a printer.
sorry 'bout the mess...
At first I was going to say "Of course the government should adopt open source voting machines," but then I looked at the current situation:
* The government doesn't display the diagrams to locks it has in its buildings.
* Most of our miltary documents and weapondry are completely classified (can you tell me what exactly Area 51 does)?
* Some of our most cherished documents (like the Constitution) are protected by systems meant to place them underground in the event of a nuclear war (Google it). But how exactly does it work? Who has access to the documents afterwards? The secret shadow government that's up and running in case of an emergency (Google it).
Fact is, very little of government is open source anythin. And yet the US has gotten along for over 200 years. While that doesn't necessarily mean things have been done "correctly", it does mean they've been sufficient enough to keep the country going. The chances we're going to change course now is unlikely.
It seems you are confused about how open source works and its benefits. Imagine 3 detectives looking over a murder crime scene for clues. There is only so much that three detectives can do. Now imagine 1,000 detectives all looking over the same crime scene for clues. Your odds of finding clues goes up considerably. This is similar to open source. An open source voting application would literally draw thousands (including myself) of developers interested in looking at the code. The final code would be a version that ran through the "guantlet" and passed. You wouldn't put out just any-ole-code. That would be silly and _would_ defeat the purpose of open source and would make it easier for a crimianl to under-hand the system. The code that we would use in the voting machine would be the code that passed the communities scrutiny and thus most likely found all possible holes, espeicially those that a criminal would want to take advantage of.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
I fucking hate TNT.
You sir, are a dumbass. :-) Let's tolerate and behave.
Besides this part, your reply is a very good one. He very clearly told that he could be mistaken. No need to call names, ok?
Are they crazy? Were they asleep throughout the 20th century?
Actually, it is in your interest that you don't NEED to trust me and that even if I wanted to screw you, you would have ways to find out and deal with it.
I am sorry, but what was your point?
"Open-source enthusiasts, by contrast, are precisely the sort of people you'd like to see inspecting the voting code; they're often libertarian freaks, nuttily suspicious of centralized power, and they'd scream to the high heavens if they found anything wrong."
The actual complete quote is saying that open source paranoia and nuttiness is a GOOD thing
and notice the word "often" which is not in the slashdot posters quote. It changes the tone and the facts of the article.
If you can't trust the public with information about voting machines, why trust them to elect our leaders at all?
In Australia voters get a piece of paper and a pen.
Uh.............. that's it.
The counting takes a lot less time than it took the New York Times to organize the Florida recount, and the method supports unlimited error checking.
WTF is the problem? Let Bush count his votes and Kerry count his...whoever gets the higher number of votes wins! Yay! Even with dead people and Martians voting for Bush, there's no way he can count past his toes and fingers.
"the only ones who know if there's some backdoor or buggy code are the people who programmed it."
A correct statement but in need of a slight clarification. The only people who are likely to know about intentional rigging are the ones who do the build that actually gets installed in the machines. I imagine most of the geeks who developed the software in Diebold's machine would have no clue about any wrongdoing. The rigging is more likely to be done by a group resembling Nixon's plumbers who are highly loyal, believe what they are doing is right in some twisted way and able to keep secrets.
Thats why its extremely disturbing to hear about massive last minute changes in the software loads on Diebold's machines in the eleventh hour before the 2002 election in Georgia, which resulted in a stunning Republican upsets for the Senate and Governor, or in the last election in California.
@de_machina
Not as long as Linus is a republican! Gawd, I would just settle for a GPL program that gave me next weeks lotto numbers... hmmm. maybe they ar the same?
/me thinks geeks should be less distracted by computers and more involved in Politics .. Your country (USA) is quickly losing all of its rights.. a Vote for John Kerry isn't exactly a good one.. I hope you realise he is in the Order of Skull and Bones just like Bush.. many informed people are considering him a patsy.. I'm sure he will continue the Bush trend.. so in the end i guess all is lost. You can't exactly vote for Nader either because that just means Bush has more of an edge. The same goes for Canada also. The conservatives are no good. Paul Martin has yet to show his real face. He is heavily hooked up with big business and the elite societies. A vote for the Green party would be a moral one but i'm not sure it is of any help.. The next big 'terrorist' attack i fear for both of our countries.. and the worlds.. EU = Evil Union..
Instead of using the current electronic voting machines, I propose a significantly more robust and secure system:
Everyone email me their votes. I will tally them in my head and dump the results on IRC.
Mark an X, punch a hole in a piece of paper, write a name...and a bunch of your fellow citizens (from all sides of the political spectrum) count them, by hand. Any questions - "I demand a recount!"
Only recently has it gone into a black box. The magical computer.
A move to continue the 'openness' would be advisable, no matter what the technology.
And there's a reason the exact capabilities of military weapons are classified. If someone were to want to attack you, would you want them to know the exact maximum range of your guns and where they are deployed?
Well, if you're going to be that paranoid, then you need some way of confirming that the code running on the machine you're about to cast your vote with is indeed the code that you have access to. Also, you need to know that the hardware isn't compromised.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Through code review and auditing IS the answer.
Look at OSS today: yes, the code IS there, but NO, it is NOT inherently more secure than closed source, because few people seriously review the code. OpenBSD does it right: they have independent review of their code on an ongoing basis, and look at where it's gotten them. The security of their software is well above average.
Experiments have shown that it takes solid, talented auditors to expose weaknesses in any code: Joe Schmo can't just glance at OSS and tell whether it's good or not. So the answer ISN'T Open Source, it's through, independent code review.
They'd just be under /dev/null
Actually, regular voting is open source if you think about it. The ballot is checked off and goes into a box Everyone can see the process and how it works. Using proprietary machines is like giving your vote to an employee of a private company who hauls them off in a van and then reports the tally. If these machines were based off open source software, then you could possibly have a huge number of developers working on the project in their spare time that diebold could never compete with. Think of how many people would be going through the code to find mistakes.
I don't think we should imediatley switch over, but slowly as to allow many people the chance to look over the code and find bugs or backdoors. The system doesn't need to be that overly complicated either. We're not talking about installing a huge linux environment on these but rather something from emebeded linux.
Going open source shouldn't be the issue here, it's why we went to a closed source like diebold that is what's the question.
Electronic voting machines need to make human readable paper ballots that *can* be hand-counted. Anything short of that opens up the elections to all sorts of tampering that can be undiscoverable, even if the code is "open source."
You can collect the votes, in a variety of electronic methods, that will meet the needs of quick reporting, but ultimately the votes need to be auditable, which means being able to recount by some manual method.
The ballots need to be human readable so that they can be verified by the voter AND the auditor.
If the protocol is secure, then it doesn't matter if the code is open source, or closed source. Whatever. As a taxpayer, I would hope that they choose something that is as inexpensive as possible that provides a secure and auditable voting record.
"I could be mistaken,"
You were correct until you got past that first comma.
You seem to be missing the point of open source software. Anyone with the interest to do so can look at the code. If there is an exploitable flaw, it will be spotted and corrected. If the system allows someone to rig it to favor a certain candidate, that also will be spotted.
Only on
I love tartar sauce.
the answer is to NEVER USE COMPUTING DEVICES for voting (unless they are used to create a physical artifact like a punch card).
It doesn't matter if the code is open or closed. All the open code does is make it cheaper, simpler and probably more well-audited. But that doesn't solve the fundamental problems: nobody can ever know what goes on inside of a computer.
You don't know if the code you compiled from the voting machine website is the same as the code on the machine. Even if you got a computer expert to recompile all the code for all the machines and check with MD5, you still have no idea that the machine's screen isn't *lying* to you.
Human beings can't see bits and bytes and electronics. But they can see holes in a punch card or marks on a scantron. If the election is contested you can still count by hand, 50 times if you need to.
Open source software, great, sure, but make sure there's a paper trail!
Because only "nuttily suspicious" "freak" would be upset to find out there was voting fraud!!!
Here in the U.S. today is Memorial Day, the day we remember all the "nutty freaks" who fought and died for our country -- very many of whom fought to protect our freedoms. Some, in fact, even died to ensure the right to vote for those that had been denied.
There's a kind of haughty cynicism among those who write opinions like that in the NYT op-ed.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
I don't know about you, but I don't trust these geek people whoever they are. And the stuff they write and read on the internet! Oh, awful. Don't trust them, I tell you!
If it was a serious question... the answer is no. If it's open source, you will have a higher ratio of "good honest skilled people" vs. "bad people" trying to find security problems with the software.
If it's closed source, almost all the people looking for security holes will be "bad people".
(PS: Was this a serious question or a shot at Funny?)
I, for one, welcome our leftist journalistic overlords
Dawn of the Dead
I think that the idea of open source, paper trails... is that people are quite capable of policing themselves. Whenever we're required to trust the white middle-aged man behind the curtain, it leaves a certain distaste. Democracy should have democratic, open tools. If I could check my vote on a website, as with a lottery ticket, you'd be damn sure that I would if my candidate lost. Oh Yah, he did...
Perhaps this is exactly what we need as a democracy... people invested enough to check on their votes.
If every one of these voting machines printed out a line on some old dot-matrix printer in another room the instant every vote was cast, a technical difficulty would be a minor inconvenience instead of the catastrophe it is now, due to the audit trail. Cringely hints as much in this column: No Confidence Vote: Why the Current Touch Screen Voting Fiasco Was Pretty Much Inevitable
I mean, they are a democracy that's voting population absolutely dwarfs the US of A.
THey have an electronic system that, although not impervious to fraud, is simple, elegant, and cheap, and gets the job done. The systems are so simple that it would be very difficult in practice to actually cheat.. and if you could doctor one machine, the damage you could do would be quite limited.
democracy über alles !!!
we don't need no machines, please !!!
Lluis Vila
It's this kind of right-wing republican rhetoric that really pisses me off. Do not voice an opinion if you have no idea what you're talking about and are only looking to fill /. with your ignorant fear-mongering. I DID NOT cover my house in *aluminum siding* to withstand gunfire. You're a quack.
I did it to keep the aliens from reading my thoughts...
Would it be reasonable to expect a typical New York Times columnist, nuttily supportive of centralized authority, to "get it" when referring to open source? Still, I suppose we have to take it where we can find it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Better double-check the facts to make sure they're not lying again.
A friend used to be an election judge in Florida several years ago, and he described to me the electronic voting system they had in his county. I think it's the best protocol for electronic voting.
Voters were given a mark-sense ballot and a pencil. They colored in the bubbles for their votes, and then inserted the ballots into an electronic ballot box. The ballot box would read the ballot, display its interpretation of the voter's choices on the display, and ask the voter to verify. If any part of the ballot was unreadable or bubbled wrongly (i.e., they voted for both Bush and Gore), the machine would kick out the ballot and ask the voter to try again. Upon the voter accepting the verification of their ballot, the machine would drop the ballot into a locked bin.
This gave instant voter verification of the machine's ability to read the ballot correctly, provided the election authority with an instant estimate of the result upon closing the polls, and kept a paper trail marked by the voters themselves for any contingencies. I'm not sure if they routinely counted the ballots by hand to certify the result, but clearly that would be possible with this system.
>I could be mistaken, but wouldn't open source code for voting machines make it that much easier for someone to hack the machines if they so desired?
To amend the other posters: like modern cryptography, this issue shouldn't be about whether you can hide what you're doing so no malicious user can exploit that knowledge, simply because eventually someone will find a way into the system.
The system should be designed so that even when it is clearly visible what is being done, it's impossible/unfeasible to break into the system. Again -all modern hashing and encryption algorithms (=instructions) are fully public and viewable by all. The reason they're secure is that even when knowing all the information (bar the passphrase), it would take millions of machine hours to forcibly break the encryption.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
What we don't need is proof on how I voted. Too easy to manipulate someone that way.
--GW
If the shadow gov't is a secret how do you know about it?
He's got a point here. Whereas open-source exposes vulnerabilities that could be exploited, the reality is that it would take far too long for anyone to detect these vulnerabilities, publish them etc etc. And what do we do when you realise it's susceptible to fraud? Recall the president you elected 6 months ago? Even worse is the fact that even though you show a system is vulnerable is no evidence that someone has exploited it. You'd possibly be invalidating results with no partiicular reason. Lend me 2 cents, will you...
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
Have *you* really read and understood that paper?
Have you understood that the two major problems (wallhacks and aimbots) stem from the facts that a) in order to keep the GAME running smoothly, the GAMEplayer's computer needs to know stuff that the GAMEplayer doesn't and b) the GAMEplayer can cheat by taking advantage of the computer's superior reflexs and calculating abilities?
Did you even read the paragraph where ESR points out that the problems mostly come from trading off security for performance? Did you see the sentence where ESR states that "a closed-source program [...] is indeed a good idea for security -- but only if you're a hyperadrenalized space marine on a shooting spree."?
Or did you just skim the essay and then run off to post?
Yeah, thought so.
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
Where they one that got defaced by that Amo guy?
Ba-bah booie, baw baw booey, Howard Stern's penis. Bah bah booie.
www.reason.com, judging from the subj of your message... ;-)
;-)
Agreed with everything else you said though. And let them call us "libertarian freaks" rather than "dirty hippies"...
Paul B.
Voting isn't like other governmental processes. It's way more fundamental than anything the government does. That is, its openness and reliability are prerequisite to the political mandate upon which we (ideally) found our trust for the government to do other things behind closed doors.
1. Yes, you SHOULD be that paranoid, unless you don't care if people steal elections.
2. There have been various schemes proposed to guarantee the integrity of the code - basically, a super-secure source control system to keep people from making unauthorized changes, and an independent auditing body that oversees development, tests for bugs, and supervises the installation of the software, then seals the boxes. The idea being to have multiple, redundant levels of oversight for EVERY step of the process, and to keep that oversight transparent to the public.
Doing it right will take a bit of work, but it's definitely possible. It'll never be 100% secure, but way more secure than just handing Diebold a check and trusting them to act professionally.
Anything short of that opens up the elections to all sorts of tampering that can be undiscoverable, even if the code is "open source."
You must be new here if you've never heard of crypto...
The last presidential elections were completly done in Electonic Machines and the results were damm right. Jose Serra, the candidate of the ruling party (the one that the ones in power woudl have favored )lost by a 70 to 30 margin and Lula Da Silva, the opposition candidate (whose people had no way to turn the results in favor of him) won.
t h what reason do you invade other countries, support dictatorships and dictators like Pinochet and SADDAM? If you are not aware of the facts, SADDAM HUSSEIN was a creature of the US, and the WMA that he used against Iran and the Iraqui Kurds were provided by the U.S. in the REAGAN era.
The code is open to everybody to audit, everyone one can open up the machines to verify that the code they are using is the same that was audited. And a printed ballot is generated for every vote, just in case someons complains, so the results from the electronic machine can be verified against the printed ballots.
In the last US Presidential Elections, in Florida (a state whose governor is the BROTHER of one of the candiates, and the one who won in that state), the voting was manual. And the results were contested.
Being from a South American country, I was completly pissed off. If what happened in Florida, had happened in an underdeveloped country, everyboby would have cried "FRAUDULENT ELECTIONS".
What does make you, FUCKING AMERICANS, better than the rest of the world? Why do you believe that your country is an example of democracy, what makes you believe that you are a superior people?
Americans are the same as everyone else in the world, simple humans beings, without any superiority due to the fact that you were born whitin certain boundaries and I was born outside that boundaries.
http://yro.slashdot.org/users.pl
Wi
Why do everybody hates THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (not AMERICA, which is a continent)? I'm Brazilian, I have traveled all over the world and I never, EVER, meet someone who hated Brazil. But I meet hundreds of people that hated U.S. of AMERICA. Can anyone of you, yankies, explain it?
PENAROL: Seras eterno como el tiempo y floreceras en cada primavera.
Pen
Paper
sig fault
It's a voting system. No matter how secure it is you still won't be able to fix the type of user errors that result in votes for George W. Bush.
The key is not if the code is open source where anyone can submit modifications, the key is that the source code be open so anyone can verify any potential issues with the software. A second written record that is the official vote is also key. This way you can routinely recount a number of boxes to look for programming errors and actually conduct a 100% recount if required.
Of course, one of the justifications was that open-source enthusiasts are 'libertarian freaks, nuttily suspicious of centralized power', who would 'scream to the high heavens if they found anything wrong'."
Are you suggesting that it isn't true?
Why in the hell is this idiot anarchist rant modded +5 Insightful?
Pretty much every point is factually incorrect, and that's just the parts that aren't paranoid and delusional. Seriously, if anybody smoked more crack than the ranter, it's the mods.
A Republican dictatorship? The evil of the establishment? A kabal of kleptocrats?
This isn't Reed.
Registration Free Link to NYT Mag Article You can make a reg free link by searching for the article name on google news and copying the url.
If the electronic voting system can't be trusted beyond 1 tally, why use it at all? I'm all about integrating new technology into society, but it just seems like what we will end up with is a touchscreen that prints a ballot and counts the votes. If anyone suggests a recount, the paper balltos will be counted, and we will be back to square one.
And the people who successfully hack it.
-- vranash
Arnold the Govenator will progress in political power and skill and become a well known Sentator. Compared to Boxer/Feinstien, that isn't hard to do. People in the Senate will hear his constant pleas to let foreign born citizens be president and will eventually help him champion his cause with the millions of donations from Hollywood. After all, Arnie will do so much good, why wouldn't we want him. Meanwhite, Saudi Arabian backed US company HonestElections buys Diebold and continues its products. Next presidental election, many, many foreign born citizens run who were excluded before. The election is a nightmare to predict and oddly enough, a Saudi Arabian born citizen becomes president. The vote count is guranteed by Diebold, as it is today. Nobody can question it as there are no permanent records that Diebold couldn't fake. The US takes a change, perhaps for the better but definately not due to voter's desires. Now if you wouldn't trust a foreign owned Diebold, why would you trust an American owned one who has so much more at stake with each election?
Because, currently, there is no alternative .
Governments, at all levels, are not necessarily averse to open source tools. Linux and others are used in many state & local governments.
But there is no finished, deliverable, open source voting method. Right now. Today.
So when they looked around for an e-voting solution, what other choice did they have? Start a new project, which may or may not be done in time for whatever election they wanted to use it for? Or listen to the nice man from Diebold, with a packaged solution, ready to go.
Unfortunately, now they are finding out some of the problems in that choice.
bah! what endorsement? are we forgetting that the NYT is part of the liberal media. who needs 'em.
I think the issue here goes deeper than security. When software is created to enforce laws, they become the law. So the issue boils down to should we have laws that we can't review. If we have no way to check up on a law, then we really don't know what that law is and there is no way that we can allow this to happen in a democracy.
A minor point, but it has not been proven that it is computationally infeasible to break midern cryptography. We don't even know if factoring and discrete logarithm, for instance, are NP-complete. (Nor, famously, if P = NP or not.)
...suspicious of unchecked privilege.
>With closed source voting machines like Diebold's, the only ones who know if there's some backdoor or buggy code are the people who programmed it.
And the politician(s) that paid them to put it there.
And exactly what will guarantee that the people who progam the machines used the "open" code, not a copy they hacked for a fee?
You would have to have several people bring in a copy they checked, or trust, then run a diff on all the copies (so that even if you paid off almost all the people, you would still get a difference somewhere). Then compile and upload it to the machines under group supervision.
The biggest problem here is not reducing the number of people that have to be compromised to an insignificant number (such as one or two).
Patsy for what?
Why the snipe against EU. I have great hopes for it.
Geeks being "'libertarian freaks, nuttily suspicious of centralized power', who would 'scream to the high heavens if they found anything wrong'." is not a bug but a feature.
I think this internet thing sounds like a good idea
First off, fuck you NYT!
The Libertarian party is nothing but a means of dividing the left. Most Libertarians have very liberal social views, ie pro personal rights and anti government intrusion. This pro personal rights agenda, has been and always will the policy of the left. This is a liberal idea, you know like it doesn't take a freakin' genius to see that the "L-I-B" in Libertarain is the same L-I-B in liberty and gasp, astonishment from the crowd . . . yes, it's the same L-I-B in liberal.
And yet, these fucking morons who call themselves Libertarians fall for the dupe of the convervative right that wants to limit every damn thing anybody does and get into everybody's private lives by splitting from those who share their liberal values over petty minded nitpicking crap about fucking taxes. If you don't want to pay your goddam taxes then start a goddam business.
The Libertarian party is the best trick the right has ever come up with. For that, I applaud them. But for the NYT to paint the whole Open Souce community with this epithet I spit at them. You fucking pigs!
Well obviously a lot of people do, with much more their single vote. Next time you insert your bank card into an ATM check the manufacturer's name on the front. There's a fair chance it's Diebold. Personally I trust just one person, myself.
Jesus fucking christ! Why are there so many people posting that printing a receipt from a voting machine somehow provides proof on how an individual voted? Why can't the voting machine just punch a regular ol' card and give it to you? Why can't it just print out a register-style receipt and give it to you, without any name/number/individual identifier on it? So you vote for Kerry and the machine prints out a receipt that says "Kerry-D" and you go dump it in the box. At the end of the day, we get a nice report from the software that says "Looks like Kerry won, waiting for confirmation." So we all *know* Kerry won, but we're waiting for all the human counters counting up all the receipts that say "Kerry-D" "Bush-R" or "Nader-I" or whatever. In the meantime, we get our immediate satisfaction.
After confirmation, we can now archive *electronically* the voting record, which, if you recall doesn't include any personal identifiers. We also stick the other votes in whatever archival format. Ideally there'd be another count and a record-by-record count of the database to ensure the electronic record is identical to the paper record, any differences are noted, and the whole thing is cryptographically signed and proliferated to various mirrors and put up for download by the general public. So now we can all run our own reports on it.
What's so hard about that? It's about as cut and dried as it gets. We get all the benefits of having electronic voting, and we get all the error checking of our current voting system, and we lose *nothing* in the process (except a few bucks implementing the thing). But we gain in speed of reporting (but wait the same amount of time for confirmation, which we would have waited anyway), we gain the ability to archive every single election that ever happens, and we gain the ability to push those archives out to the rest of us for review. Democracy gets better! Hurray computers!
Like what I said? You might like my music
I hardly remember who said that - was it Microsoft? Don't listen, they don't know what they're talking about :)
Libertarians may be a pain in the ass (myself included), but they're good for Freedom. Founding fathers would have taken the NYT statement as a compliment, I do.
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
Here's another metaphor that supports the same position: food product packaging (in the US, at least; I'm ignorant of international regs) is similar to open source security. When buying a can of soup (or whatever), I'm entitled to a label that tells me what's actually in the can - both ingredients and nutritional breakdown. Unethical manufacturers *HATE* this, because it allows the consumer to make informed choices, thus giving us leverage on quality and price, but they simply aren't allowed to sell a product labeled "This is good for you; just trust us!"
;-)
(Just how much they hate it is evidenced by the occurrence of labels with weird arithmetic, such as a container I saw recently which claimed to contain 1.8 servings! They're still trying to pull something on those who don't read carefully, but at least the "open label" gives us access to the data - even if they try to obfuscate the source.
Well, the point is that they DONT know the bugs. They just know there ARE some (due to lex statistica).
If an attached printer produces the critical audit trail, then one must establish trust in the software that produces that audit, and all of its inputs. A bug in the keyboard handler could produce an audit trail that agrees with the electronic tally, but does not represent the voter's choice.
For the all-time scary software story, read about Therac-25
Ummm...what happened to the voting/counting process being open and open to insepction by anyone?
You would think that they'd at least give some source to fool USans into believing that they live in some sort of pseudo-representative democracy (as Bush claims that he was democratically elected and that the US is a democracy).
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
Jeez, people. All this demand for "paper trails" in electronic voting is just neo-luddite crap. How do you think scruitineering works in reality anyway? Most scrutineers will watch the count with their exit polls in their hot little hand and a fairly good idea about how that electorate has voted in the past (that's why they are often the oldest hands in the process). They might from time to time check the tallying process being performed by the various counters but generally the results are being monitored by all sides and everyone knows when something doesn't smell right, because it is so at odds with the result they expect. This is why exit polling and the like are an integral part of the process.
The whole thing is about trust. What is needed is an acceptable, _permanent_, _public_ record of the votes cast. We can even design a means by which this public record can store a means of allowing a voter to identify their vote (there should be no need to store the identity of the voter with the vote). That way if the returning officer has doubts about the result (via their own suspicions or complaints raised by candidates) then they can return to the public record and if the worst comes to the worst get those that are worried about the result to confirm their votes. You see, if the votes tallied are not the same as the votes cast then some of the complainant voters _must_ have had their vote recorded incorrectly. Identify one such voter and then the result in that polling station is clearly problematic and should be passed further up the process in the court of disputed returns (or whatever it is called in your jurisdiction). This scenario can only really occur in the case of fraud or a bug in the software. In either case, the CoDR should have the legislative framework to enable it to act upon the scenario and resolve the issure even if that means a new election for that station should be the result if it matters (remember a given polling station may have no impact on the result of an election, depending on the voting mechanism).
Needing to have a paper trail is really a lack of trust in using technology in the process. Which is fine if thats what you want, but in that case let it go and just use paper ballots. However, technology can really make democracy very effective in a number of ways... Simplifying the distribution of the voting apparatus to remote locations, counting votes on a huge scale, rapid and accurate results to name but three. That is without even considering the potential to have many more decision passed through plebecite vote if the tech could make it really simple. Which it can. I think?
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
This is really at the fabric of OSS.
Of course OSS is the choice for e-voting.
This is yet another slow and awkward tripup of a stumble of a walk for mankind.
We could have and should have been using e-voting with paper trails in a proper PUBLIC implementation many moons ago, but like most issues, paranoia and synicism are were too rampany in most of the Earthlings and alas here we are...
Seems redundant to me. Just punch the card and put it in the box.
Yep. Have read it. Have you? Or did you just skim the essay and then run off to post? ;-) It's a good paper and there's more than you pointed out. Reasons why Open Source based security models beat closed source. Yes, the point is there, but I'm not going to summarize it to you. Maybe you should try to read it again and this time understand.
I wouldn't say the same is true of both ESR and RMS. What RMS says and does is far more sensible than what ESR has been known to stand behind. For instance in this kerfluffle, ESR chimed in with an essay which contained this example:
But to those who know the history of the two movements it comes off oddly, as though ESR were trying to get credit for work he didn't do; to claim that the Emacs text editor was in any way an "open-source project" doesn't jibe with the timeline of what work started when. Emacs was started by RMS for the movement he helped found -- the free software movement. This work and the work of the other two examples ESR gives all occurred before the open source movement began, so it seems like a revisionist view to push aside the important philosophical differences of the two movements. I'm reminded of an essay by fellow open source advocate Mark Webbink (chief lawyer for Red Hat) on software licensing which dishonestly uses the concept of copyleft to break up various licenses for better understanding without giving any credit to the FSF folks or using the word "copyleft" which predates the essay by about 20 years. Torvalds may find some philosophical common ground with the open source movement, but the Free Software Foundation continues to tell us that they stand for a different philosophy than that of the Open Source Initiative.
In another instance, the differences between ESR and RMS were noticed by one Usenet poster (also this article which refers to personal attacks from ESR).
Digital Citizen
From the intro:
The Free State Project is a plan in which 20,000 or more liberty-oriented people will move to New Hampshire, where they may work within the political system to reduce the size and scope of government. The success of the Free State Project would likely entail reductions in burdensome taxation and regulation, reforms in state and local law, an end to federal mandates, and a restoration of constitutional federalism, demonstrating the benefits of liberty to the rest of the nation and the world.
The current Libertarian Presidential nominee, Michael Badnarik is a member, as are almost 6,000 others. New Hampshire is a very tech friendly state, considered to be one of the best places to live, no income tax, no sales tax, low unemployment... Join us! We're already making a difference in NH, and most of us haven't even moved yet!
Help achieve Liberty in your lifetime - join the Free State Project - http://www.freestateproject.org
Could be done in other ways too. E.g. the voting machines could print something like the receipts and the random small pattern of the voters could be checked after the voting if their votes were included correctly. It needs to be sophisticated a bit to include a good level of the anonymity of the voter and on the value of his vote but in the principle this can check the results better than the scrutiny of the code.
yup, i totally missed that line. nonetheless, it's noteworthy that the OVC is not trying to be a replacement for Diebold-type systems, but rather is stressing a different attitude towards eVoting (besides the idea that it should work!).
thanks for catching my error.
It's unfortunate that this article appears in the New York Times because of their role in promoting the invasion of Iraq based on lies (everyone from Judith Miller up the chain of power through Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. at the head of the Times organization should be fired or resign). Thousands and thousands of Iraqis died because of this war based on lies, hundreds of American servicepeople died because of this war based on lies and the Times was a big conveyor of the lies. As a result, all of their articles (even ones which call for reasonable measures like this article does) will be thought of as less than what it could have been.
Listen to the last segment of Democracy Now! today or read this chapter of "The Exception To the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers and the Media That Love Them" and you'll hear an argument for putting a social stamp of reduced value on the New York Times. I would rather people judge all articles in all publications ad-hoc, in a case-by-case basis and then promote those that call for reasonable things (like this article promoting electronic machine source code mostly does) and dismiss those that are lies (like Miller's articles promoting war against Iraq). But I doubt people will somehow become so independant.
It was proper to fire Jayson Blair and his superiors for his lies, but nobody died because of those lies. The Times apology is half-baked and there largely for political sake. At the Times, Sulzberger Jr., Miller, and everyone in between them at the Times still have jobs and the Times is still seen as the imprimateur of high quality journalism. It should be obvious to everyone now that that is shameful and inappropriate.
Digital Citizen
Why is there any pursuit of electronic voting at all. A manual vote count process re-affirms the concept of democracy, by the involvement of people in the full process and reflects that an election is all about the people and their choices about the future direction of their government. This desire to reduce human involvement in the election process just dosn't make any sence and dosn't reflect the importance on an inclusive election process. Electronic voting just seems to be a pointless excersize in achieving a cheap (with all its connotations) election and a cheap democracy. So what if it takes longer and costs more, the election process should include as many people as possible, after all it is all about people.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen