Slashdot Mirror
ACM Eyes Policy Position on Electronic Voting
while(true) writes "The ACM is preparing to take a policy position on electronic voting in government elections. It has a poll page up to get feedback from it's members and where they also explain their proposed position. The proposed position calls for a paper trail to ensure a physical record of the vote. Go there and place your vote if you are a member. The ACM Public Policy Committee could be a valuable ally in many questions that are dear to Slashdot readers in the US. They have already spoken out on issues such as the DMCA, DRM, and private policing of P2P networks."
In the summary (realizing it was a quote, but that's what square brackets are for in this context), you could have enlightened your audience with the actual meaning of "ACM", like so:
The [Association for Computing Machinery] is preparing to take a policy position[...]
#19845
When I voted just now, they showed the current results -- nearly 85% of voters strongly agreed with the ACM's proposed position that there should be a paper trail. Wow.
I can't help but think eVoting is a solution in search of a problem. Well not exactly, but it's overkill. The taxpayers are expected to shell out for expensive machines, that don't always work, and when they do work, aren't verifiably to be acurate.
Compare this to Canada. They used paper ballots with big boxes next to the canidates' names. You place a mark in the box, and your vote is cast. After the polls close, they dump out the ballot box in front of anyone interested, and a representive from each party examines each ballot and tallys the votes. When ever vote has been counted and everyone's tally agrees, they call in the count is official. They place a phone call, and they go home.
Simple. Cheap. Transparent. Effective.
We could learn alot from our neighbors to the north.
Wrong. There is in fact some piece of paper for every votor. Printouts from the system are useless, since they will just repeat what the system said the vote was, and can't prove they counted it correctly.
This is almost a "Delphi study". A Delphi study is
actually when you ask a number of professionals in a certain field about their opinion, or expectations, about a number of topics. Then you process the results, show the results to the same group of professionals, and ask their opinion again.
Something like that.
Well, they actually had paper trails, and it didn't change a thing. As it turned out, the courts ruled the recount illegal.
The recount was ruled illegal because it was a selective (partial) recount and not completed within the limits allowed by Florida law. There have been thousands of recounts nationwide. Many places require an automatic recount if the margin of victory is small. Let's not extrapolate the whole from one apparently misunderstood incident.
I voted too, but you know what? It worked. And there was a paper trail for the half-dozen or so recounts that have been called for. It was close but we were able to get things sorted out without getting the Supreme Court involved. My only problem is that they gave me a pencil to mark my ballot which might explain why my guy didn't get in :(
Why fix what isn't broken? You can probably tell where my ACM vote is going!
For those excited about electronic voting (positive or otherwise), or those excited about the prospect of looking for bugs in JSP java code... used in an actual voting proces!
Have a look at the source (Dutch site, code under "klik hier", english code/javadoc) of the voting platform used in the Netherlands for internet voting by out of country nationals during the last european elections. Its GPL, share and enjoy.
Nothing says "internet voting != secure" as a piece of proof of concept code that could have put for cowboyneal in the european pairlment ;-)
Having worked as an election official, I can tell you my state produces a paper trail that includes a printout of the system state at close of polls, and yet that printout is far from useless.
The paper trail doesn't prove that the machine operators and judges didn't do some tricks, such as falsifying signatures on the rolls for people they knew weren't going to show up and then voting "for" them, but that's a trick that is risky until the polls are officially closed, and it assumes all the judges and machine operators will collude. For some other possible cheats, the paper trail is very useful.
First, the time stamp on the print out is some proof that extra votes weren't loaded into the machine before the polls were opened or after they were supposed to be closed. It records the last maintenance dates when the machine was opened as well as the election day's use, so suspicious patterns of access have a chance of being detected, and there are presumably people who will ask why a particular machine was opened three times and stayed open for 45 minutes when the record show all the maintenance required was replacing an empty paper roll.
Second, one copy, signed by all workers, is supposed to be made immediately available to the press and representitives of the parties and independant candidates, and stays at the polling place. Tampering after this time, when the votes are aggregated above precinct level, is made more difficult because it can at least be checked against those precinct counts.
But, this only works if the press or other organizations get the counts for every precinct and process those numbers themselves as the election comission does the same thing with the electronic cartridges. If the local newspapers, parties and candidates don't check much, those extra copies usually end up being taken down from the polling place door the next day and thrown in the trash.
One of the reasons election fraud is still possible is the local party offices don't get enough volunteers to observe individual polling places, and the newspapers usually feel they are doing their job if they bother to call and ask me who won, let alone be standing there in person 5 minutes before the polls close. Yes, they've frequently been willing to take my unsupported word for the numbers, if they ask at all. I've also seen reporters whose math skills were so bad they couldn't check the totals even with the calculator I loaned them.
Who is John Cabal?