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Flaw in Florida E-Voting Machines
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like there are more problems with the new e-voting machines. How will they ever be ready in time for the November elections?"
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How will they ever be ready in time for the November elections?
By silencing anyone who talks about the flaws, of course! Do what I'm gonna do, bet money on bush being reelected. That way, if he is, at least it wasn't a total disaster.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
How will they ever be ready in time for the November elections?"
That's asking the wrong question! it's "How will the voters handle this?". Well, most will ignore it. They'll vote, and votes will be miscounted. Then someone will become president (exactly who doesn't matter). Then there'll be a small investigation into the voting failure, perhaps a story or two on slashdot, and then the country will keep on using them.
People just aren't interested in a system that works any more. If they have something to complain about and go "oh did you hear the voting in florida was rigged!" it gives them 10 minutes of conversation around the watercooler, then they go ahead with their lives.
Scuse the cynicism, but I suspect it's the most likely outcome
Considering that an electronic voting system is specifically designed to record and report voting activity, I'd say that a failure to do so consistently is more than a "minor technical hiccup" (as indicated by a spokeswoman for the secretary of state). An intermittent failure of a primary function is worse than an outright failure, as any programmer can tell you. Consider an intermittent failure of the brake system in your car....
In a strange way, I almost welcome all this attention focused on electronic voting systems. After all, the companies building them are pretty much doing what most other software companies do: Throw it all together as quickly as possible and let marketing and sales push it out the door. These are simply "average" software products coming under greater scrutiny. Maybe by pushing better quality here, we can force improved quality in other products (great leap of the imagination, I know).
There is a working alternative.
It's called pen and paper.
It works. It leaves a paper trail for later recounts.
It can be observed by everyone who is interested in the whole process, from printing the ballots to handing out the ballots, from getting the ballots back and counting them, from sealing the voting box to bringing it at the central voting office for recount, thus minimizing the possibility of rigging the election.
It keeps the single vote anonymous while at the same moment make every vote count. It keeps the voting and counting process at a speed a human eye can watch it and thus it's the most secure thing against voting fraud.
There is nothing wrong with voting per paper and pen. People not able to handle paper and pen have to get special support with all the other voting systems too. And you can easily design a voting machine that just pens the right point on the ballot for them. It's as complicated than a stancing machine with levers, a touchscreen or a device for people who can't see or read the ballot (noting wrong with Braille script on the voting ballot at all).
You have a nasty assumption that if it's not RED then it's always BLUE.
For the EU parliament. I went in, took a paper ballot, showed my voting card, recieved a small envelope, went behind the screen, used the pen there to check the box across my candidate on the ballot, put the ballot in the envelope, handed voting card and ballot in. Done.
How the fuck could e-voting make this any faster/simpler? After all, counting the votes is a highly parallelizable task, so the fact that you have 10x or even 100x as many voters shouldn't matter in the least.
All in all it took me ten minutes. No more, no less.
I guess it is too much to hope that the source code is publicly available, but really shouldn't it be?
lff
You know, what pissed me off more about the last elections more than anything else was the whole attention to shut down debate over the process. I mean, here we had a seriously close election whose results turned on exactly who won in Florida, and the entire push was to settle the matter as quickly as possible rather than as accurately as possible.
What was up with the entire "debate" over what kind of chad counted as a valid vote? If it was detached from 3 corners, it counted, but not if it was only detached from 2 corners, even if it was clearly the only candidate punched on the ticket?
More seriously, the decision was made by a Supreme Court containing individuals who - in any other court in the country would have had to abstain from voting due to a conflict of interest. (Some of the Justices were nominateed by G.W.B.'s father, for Pete's sake.) Why wasn't there more attention given to that failure of the process?
And, so, what I hate about the soundbite expression "Get over it, Al Gore lost" (although you did indicate that it was a joke - granted) was that it stopped debate and forced the result through.
Even if many like machines, because they relieve us of the burden of doing manual work, the relatively few ones ;)
..would you trust banks/govts/corporations
that -actually know- how machines really work would rather work manually then let a machine decide the outcome
of an election. I certainly do and I'm no luddite, on the contrary I call myself a computer geek
The facts are simple and important: computers can count very quickly, but they can be instructed to MIS-count exactly
as fast. Computers can even be instructed to turn your YES into a NO and your NO into a YES. It requires only a click
to turn 10 million votes from one candidate to another, regardless of what some self-declared "security expert" say about
the security of well maintained and programmed computers.
Hand counting of paper votes cannot as easily be corrupted. While with just one click you can tell computers to do anything
but you can't corrupt a thousand people without having some of them understand that corruption in voting process is against
democracry ; some will refuse to be corrupted, others will go to media and denounce the corruption..maybe nothing happens
and the election is rigged...but some people still know and can still talk, and paper votes remain to be counted a dozen
times if necessary (with and expecially without the help of a counting machine)
It is also important to check that each and every voter is given his/her voting rights. One can't just trust computers
to tell if a voter still have his/her rights or have lost it. With a simple click one could trick a computer into reporting
that 10000 ex-inmates are still in prison, or that 100000 people are alive and should have voted, while in reality they're
DEAD so they shouldn't be counted as voters to begin with.
Here is an example with CASH MONEY. Do you like your dollar bills ? Do you like to hold your money in your hands, knowing that your
money isn't going anywhere unless YOU decide to do something with it ? Indeed it's only a piece of paper, but a very
important one. Imagine a world in which paper or metal money doesn't exist anymore
to have all your money in their hands, stored as numbers in their computers ? What if a black-hat hacker attacks their computers ?
What if some corrupted individual working at a bank steals money from their computers, or simply -delete- your money from your
account because he doesn't like you ? Why do you think that banks are still using PAPER to keep their records ?
Fire can destroy paper money, you could lose it, anything could happen...so why do we keep money on paper with holograms
and other forms of expensive protection ? Because one could falsify money, one could destroy it accidentally..but you can't
destroy all the paper money with one click, you can't falsify all the money with one click, you can't take money away from
population hands with one click without kick-starting a bloody revolution.
Now back to vote : your vote is not money, but for some people it is more much more important then money. Why ? Because your
vote will direct trillions of dollars and a lot of power to some hands, because your vote will elect a politician, giving
him/her power to WAGE WAR in your name, to decide were tax money is going to be spent, to decide if a law needs to be changed
for better or worse.
Still want your vote and your voting rights to be counted or decided by a stupid computer ? I don't want humans to be taken
away from the voting process in the name of "progress" or in the name of "savings". It's stupid, it's dangerous.
If you lack the basic intelligence to figure out how to put an X next to your candidates name, correctly, an argument can be made you lack something basic needed to pick a candidate in the first place. I'm not entirely sure you should have to make voting so completely fool proof so that a chimpanzee could successfully vote if they were locked in a booth with an electronic voting machine for a few minutes and banged on it.
The one exception is I think at least one electronic voting machine, with paper trail, should be at each poll to allow the disabled to vote without assistance.
"Which makes it very easy to- count the vote"
Making it "easy" to count the vote doesn't count for anything if it also makes it "easy" to rig the vote. I really like the fact that paper ballots allow a lot of little old ladies and gents to be involved in the process and make sure its on the up and up. You switch to computers and there is no one that can keep an eye on things except hackers.
I read a little bit further and it seems that the site is mildly informative, but still falls to the same pits of idiocy that always keep me from supporting the Democratic party. That pit is the belief that I'm some uneducated moron eager to be stuffed full with half-assed propaganda.
Micheal Moore is a crackpot - I don't care what he has to say. Maybe he's right - but he's still a crackpot. He invalidates his message with his angle. He is the Democrat's Jerry Falwell. Falwell insists the world is 4000 years old, Moore insists that America is the great white satan. Pick your poison.
The Democratic party will be in serious trouble over the next couple of years, I think. They aren't winning votes as much as they're picking up the votes that the Republicans lose. I'll be voting against Bush (ie for Kerry) rather than honestly choosing Kerry for president. I only hope that McCain will run in 2008 - that is the guy I want as a leader. The Democratic party really needs to work at winning votes from people who aren't swayed by radical tripe that Moore spits out - and realize that Moore just reinforces the Loser's Party mindset. That is to say that Micheal Moore is the epitome of preaching to the choir. Anyone who gives him any credit couldn't possibly be lost to the Republican party, meanwhile anyone with any sense sees him for what he is. When I read some "informative" stuff about the corruption in the Bush administration - and I'm sure there is a lot of it - I always find this half-assed conspiracy shit that belongs on some schizophrenic's homepage, and if that's how the party tries to win votes, God help them.
And yeah, I know that these websites don't reflect the Democratic Party officially, but (to beat a dead horse) where is the leadership? Can't anybody publish a legitimate site without the propaganda targeted at highschool dropouts to provide some information? Micheal Moore is not information. Gossip columns about Bush meeting with people who openly and publicly disown Osama bin Laden is not information. John Stewart is roughly 1200% more effective at getting Kerry into the White House than ANYTHING I've seen the Democrats do in the last 18 months.
Oh well, off-topic rant disengage!