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E-voting to be a 'Train Wreck'?
An anonymous reader writes "The Seattle PI has published an AP story about the problems with E-Voting.
Her conclusion is that there will be so many problems with the more than 100,000 paperless voting terminals to be used in the November presidential election that the fiasco will dwarf Florida's hanging chad debacle of 2000."
First vote! Oh, crap! I pressed the Buchannon button!
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
I haven't read the article (and probably won't), but it's my opinion that the Bush administration wants paperless machines to be used so that they are able to stay in power; they'll take advantage of the 'flaws' in the machines so they can have four more years of imposing their will on the American people.
And yes, that is a tinfoil hat on my head.
This is what happens when politics get in the way of good technology. No doubt you have people at the bottom of this mess saying how wrong it all is and non-technical people at the top saying how it will all work without any clue.
Personally I would like to see qualified people certifying that the solution is valid and actually has the power and willingness to throw out the solution.
This could also be achieved by, instead of hiring someone to build it, make it an open contract and let the companies compete to win the contract.
They have also talked about a paper-trail but personally I would prefer to see a PGP trail, that shows conclusively it was sent from X machine and not created in the database.
Seriously, what is wrong with a pencil and a piece of paper? I'm Canadian, and we just finished going through a federal election using this method across all ridings.
You get a slip of paper with the candidates for your riding listed in alphabetical order. You write an X in pencil in the circle next to your chosen candidate's name. You fold the paper and slip it into the ballot box. Done. Never have had any issues with this system.
Is this somehow too complex for the US to use? I don't see the reason behind the technological fetish and all the issues it causes there.
The problem with E-voting is that there's no trail as the article suggests, how can we be sure that a vote cast for someone hasn't been tampered with. Given the importance of the decisions being made, I think it is unwise to trust a method that has been proven unreliable. It leaves too much room for uncertainty. In this particular instance I don't think that the benefits outweigh the risks.
Don't Chads actually dangle?
Train Wreck, relative to whom?
Not the media, that's for damn sure...
They'll be pressed to find a more enthralling debacle than what happend with Bush and Floridia last election - maybe this foreseen disaster will give them just what they need to keep everyone hooked.
Over on the Democrat political site MoveOn.org they are also pushing for voting with a paper trail.
They have a petition to sign... it would be nice to see a corresponding Republican site do their own petition, since I doubt any Republicans would sign a petition on MoveOn.org but at the same time I imagine there are plenty of Republicans who also see the dangers of closed-source, paperless e-voting.
There are a lot of conflict of interest issues here (as mentioned in the article) but I think these would actually be lessened if there were grassroots pressure from both major parties to use more secure and auditable voting systems.
This Like That - fun with words!
Pssst -- There are 308 MPs in Canada now.
Advocates of electronic voting say paperless ballots save money and eliminate problems common to old systems. But the technology brings a new breed of security concerns, including software errors and hackers, that critics say could render the results unreliable.
"Somehow, some way, people have always found a way to get into computer systems," said Kim Parrish, a 46-year-old insurance company worker who voted in Brooklyn Park, Md.
In California, new security measures range from random tests of touch-screen machines by independent experts to a recommendation that poll workers prevent voters from carrying cell phones or other wireless devices into booths.
The problems reported in California, though, were more basic.
When some San Diego poll workers plugged in machines, a screen for the Windows operating system and not the voting program appeared. Officials spent more than two hours getting all machines operating.
The problem, which apparently was triggered by a power fluctuation, affected between 10 percent and 15 percent of the county's 1,611 precincts, said Mike Workman, a San Diego County spokesman.
Officials said they were unsure how many voters had to leave for work before the problem was fixed.
In Maryland and Georgia, voters were able to use paper ballots on the spot while the machine encoders were fixed. Early voters in an Atlanta precinct also were given paper ballots because of machine malfunctions.
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if it can work in a country with a billion people (India), it can work in a country with 200+ million people.. :S I don't see what all the hullabaloo is all about.. We are talking about unconnected electronic voting machines with a battery back up... not thought-readers..
Voting has been screwed up since the very beginning. You have to trust the people working at the election districts who handle the ballots. I don't. Do you?
That said, the fraud usually cancels itself out, and a winner is clearly chosen. It was godawful close in 2000, which was the source of the problem then. There is very little chance that is going to happen again. After 52 presidential elections, we finally had one that was within 1000 votes - the closest before that was Nixon in 1960, I believe.
It may not happen again during your or my lifetime, in which case the usual election fraud won't be of any concern at all to the general public.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Does anyone else find it a bit odd that all of these stories involve her? I don't mean to deny the importance of the issues, but it's a bit off to see that she represents an apparent common thread.
After all, this article is more about her running around with a tinfoil hat than it is about problems with voting software.
It's a hoax.
The book discussed in the article has its own site, which might as well get its own slashdotting:
http://www.blackboxvoting.com/
There is a free online edition, which is cool. But it would probably be considered a political act to link directly to the PDF's
In case you want to buy the dead-tree edition, the site's "Order Now" link didn't work for me. There's always Amazon which should also stay up in case the main site goes down.
This Like That - fun with words!
Or perhaps more satirically (sp?):
Votes were not changed. The past was changed.
Once the vote is altered there is no record of the vote being altered. It is as if the vote always had been altered.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
If all else fails we can just blame Emanual Goldstien
That Canada had its federal election last week. I voted by putting a big X on a paper ballot, using a plain old pencil. By the time I woke up the next morning, all results were finalized and we had our government. A few ridings will be recounted, but it won't affect the overall result.
While it's true that the USA has 10 times our population, I still don't understand why so much money, time, and stress is being spent on electronic voting machines. Technology is NOT a solution to every problem, and in many cases it overcomplicates a classic, tried and tested method.
How would you feel if you spent hundreds of dollars on a robot that buttered your toast, only to find that it took more time to fill up the butter reservoir and clean the machine than it did to butter your toast in the first place?
His source: "reminded me of an email forwarded to me a while back". I bet VinceWuzHere clicks the attachments too!
I've long felt that politicians should have access to their community's opinion via electronic polls - however the potential for discrepancy in electronic format is just too much of a risk for real voting. Another way to express paranoia is "hightend awareness".
;)
Any security pro or hard core computer geek knows how easy it would be either internally or externally modify those results.
By hand and by paper are the surest means. You can always weed out a counter that stuffing the box. Only a pro could detect mischief in a computer system - unless, of course the eballot system were to go open source
I mean, c'mon, use a bit of common sense.
I know i've mentioned this before, but when I was a Massachusetts resident, we got these huge legal-sized sheets for our election ballots. To vote for the candidate/question of our choice, there was a black magic marker at the voting booth which we were supposed to use to complete the line between the arrows of who we wanted to vote for. This provides the paper trail that democracy needs.
Also, because we voted by drawing the black line, the ballots could very easily be scanned in and accurately tallied.
Nothing for nothing...this touchscreen stuff is a solution looking for a problem.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
However, if Bush should steal another election, then the voting machines have failed , probably because the evil Bush rigged them to count 5% of the votes for Ralph Nader!!!!! WHEN WILL THE MADNESS END!!?!?!?
This is magnified even more when one party has the majority in all chambers of the government. Plus, when your brother is govenor of the state that was in question, it looks ... really bad.
/weeps for my country
I say go back to good ol paper based methods. And if there is a dispute, keep the supreme court and congressmans' underlings away from the recount area.
Maybe the US should focus on making their President the person who actually wins the election and worry about optimizing the process some other time?
Aside from the fact that it seems this lady would give conspiracy theorists a bad name, isn't the problem in the name of the application: "E-Voting"?
Don't we want "E-Tallying" instead of E-Voting? I mean, I want to use a touch-screen kiosk and have my vote _instantly tallied_, with appropriate backups. I'm not looking to vote with my cell phone or anything, right? Who are giving requirements to these firms writing these systems, anyway? Sure -- if we're looking to do something like dial-a-vote, the system will of course be full of security holes.
Apologies for flying off-topic here, but what does it matter if we have paper ballots or electronic ballots if we aren't going to have elections in the first place?
The "precedent" is already set for suspension of elections. The bombing in Madrid, days before the pro-Iraq-war Anzar government got a swift kick out of office, shows how "Terror Sways Elections."
Nevermind that 90% of the Spanish people opposed Spain's entry into the Iraq war, or that the Nationalists suppressed evidence and blamed the bombing on ETA.
But that "liberal" New York Times bravely parroted the party line that Terror Sways Elections, so when ours are suspended, Cheney can say "Look, it's not just me, it's in the New York Times!"
Regardless of how you feel about the "Black Tuesday" scenario outlined above, the important point is this:
If you're going with the opinion that Terror Sways Elections, you're basically stating that terror is an effective political tool. Is that the precedent you want to set?
"We must not frighten voters or inadvertently provide any type of disincentive to voting," Diebold spokesman David Bear wrote in an e-mail when asked to respond to Harris' claims that the company's software is riggable and insecure. "While security is an important issue ... improvements can and will be made."
... improvements can and will be made."
Again, "While security is an important issue
Security is NOT "an important issue".
Security is THE issue.
If it is not secure, then we should go back to paper ballots which are trackable.
While I believe this is a hoax, several of these items are only accusatory in nature and prove nothing bad has been done. (If this were true,) I would reserve my own personal judgement until at least some court ruling or facts of the cases have come out. Especially since famous people and people in power seem to attract a disproportionate amount of false accusations. Being arrested and being accused does not mean you are guilty. The following points, this would be true for: 30 have been accused of spousal abuse 9 have been arrested for fraud 14 have been accused of writing bad cheques 12 have been arrested on drug related charges 4 have been arrested for shoplifting 16 are currently defendants in lawsuits 62 have been arrested for drunk driving in the last year
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The US independence on July 4, 1776. That was 228 years ago. Plus, at that time, there were simply fewer people. While I don't know what difficulties the US might have had with vote counting back then, the fact is that we've had over 200 years to get the paper-and-pencil method right.
Why? Humans are slow, and they don't think ahead. It takes a long time for people to figure out what's wrong with their methods, and they're slow to adopt changes to correct their problems.
Taking this into consideration, why should we be surprised that electronic voting doesn't work yet? OF COURSE they're going to screw it up! Even Diebold and their unethical behavior is par for the course.
You know how a lot of different kinds of software don't become "feature complete" until they've been around for about 10 years? I once read that in an article linked by slashdot (so it must be true *g*). Voting software isn't going to be any exception.
But feature completeness is only one part of the problem, especially when you have a system that (nearly) EVERYONE wants to hack. Computer security has been a problem for a very long time, and it doesn't look like it's going to get solved any time soon. We probably need another 50 years before things get figured out. Buffer overflows are only the focus of THIS decade -- once that's dealt with, who knows what's next.
So don't sweat it. The simple fact is that we'll be lucky if our grand children (if we're in our 20's) see reasonably good electronic voting machines. That's just the result of the way technology moves when humans are involved.
You have to trust the people working at the election districts who handle the ballots. I don't. Do you?
No you don't. By law any citizen can watch the count - including you - if they so wish. And in any swing district you can be sure there is both a republican party official and democrat party official there to make sure it is "fair" (read: they contest every vote they can).
Now, how are you as an independant citizen going to audit the voting machines? The only relevant way would be independant auditing of the source code. However, since it is closed source this is not possible, thus you get some machine counting god knows what. And most of the time you don't even have a paper trail.
As one post before me suggest, there can have a PGP trail to each vote that was casted. I whole heartedly agree to that suggestion. The underlying issues is not technology along. It is the fact that the technology makes it so cut-and dry. Never will there be any guess as who gets the vote from a ballot (or whether the vote is a legitimate vote). We will also never see again a vote with multiple selection of one position should the voter only choose one candidate. This leaves no more discussion room. No more chad issue, no more "who is this guy trying to vote for", and for sure, less (if not none) "idiot" votes in which voters check every single box available. Translation: Integrity of the vote now gets all the attention other problem gets. There are always challenges to the integrity of votes prior to the CIvil War! I think people should measure the success of an electronic vote by how many percentage of votes are going to be of "high integrity", which means only the qualified voters of the certain location can vote for certain people at certain places. In addition the statistics should be measured against non-defective vote with other mechanisms as well as other error factors that can be "elimenated" by going to electronic votes. Afterall, we're trying to make the election process more efficient as well as more accurate. I do not believe electronic voting will solve all the election problems, nor will it not having its own unique challenges. However, as people well trained of technology and the analitical skills, we should understand the gives and takes and go from there. I'm sure if we do all we can do we will come up fine, although never be perfect
Apparently the problem stems from voters in Florida and elsewhere who cannot write an "X" legibly in a half-inch square.
Just watch how many people claim the button for the candidate they wanted to vote for was broken.
But electronic voting has one important feature: it makes it easy to tamper with the results. That could well be the only thing to get Shrub "re-elected", and many will view the original Florida results as proof the election was rigged.
I don't look forward to the next few years. I see our brethren to the south starting a rather nasty and violent revolution to get rid of the corporate and government trough-feeders. The poor always outnumber the rich, but in the US they not only dramatically outnumber the rich, most of them have guns. It's going to be a lot messier than the last American Revolution was...
I know many think the idea of another revolution is a crackpot idea, but I really don't see it as avoidable. Too many of the people in power are so thoroughly clueless about how the majority of citizens live, and it's going to end up affecting everyone.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Especially after Florida, I'm amazed and sadenned that election fairness is not a larger issue.
It falls to the party in power when this is all put together to take the greatest risk. If they are sure this is going to work they should be inviting criticism and showing how they are addressing problems.
I may be wrong but I don't see much time devoted to reassurances with pro-active action.
Someone should ask Bush now if he will accept a 'tainted' victory should one occur. Get a clear point at which recount & repair methods will be taken.
Claims that the Bush Brigade is going to fix another election are too credible without a visable effort to create transparency, by the government in power.
ls
We have fuel efficient vehicles?!
Maybe its time to outsource voting to India
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
DAMMIT forgot the break tags
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They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
There is absolutley no reason not to have a voter audit trail
If we are fully aware that we are to be expecting problems, the very least anyone could do would be able to leave us with a voter audit trail. Some piece of paper that you have an ID number where you can check and make sure your number voted for your canidate. Once we start to have these problems, there is not going to be an answer to any questions being asked. The real question is why not? There is not a single good reason.
I see a lot of anti-Diebold stuff lately, like from Ruckus Society, Why war or indymedia, but they're all left-wing groups.
Isn't anyone on the right concerned about e-voting and what it could mean for election integrity? Is it just that the left is more concious of bad elections because of the 2000 elections? Or are conservatives just automatically pro-corporate? I would think that anyone who calls themselves 'conservative' would be against meddling with the voting process without good reason...
Yeah, right.
With all the problems wiht non electronic voteing from the last eclection you would think that going to a totaly unproven system would not be the smartest idea, but what would i know im from canada, we just put an X done to vote, thats much to simple of a process eh?
I have been doing this electronic voting since i became of "voting age" adult euhm lol.
never heard of any problems here not even seniors having problems with it, we had practice sessions in town/cityhalls (for those who wanted to try before the "bigday")
and if i understand correctly you US people can chose from 3 people of wish one does not matter.
here we have euhm a gazilion party's, greens soscialists comunists katholics liberals exreme rightwing moderat rightwing ect ect ect
they also manage to change names every so often.
but never were there any real problems with the voting part, some districs still use pencils and papers becauze they didnt have the money for computer systems. but thats prolly gonna change the next election run.
why not use the software our gov uses tried tested and found to be having no bugs. i'm sure if some oficial asks nicely our PM will seed a torrent
That presents another problem: if people sign their votes crypographically, they can be compelled to reveal how they voted. With the current system, if you were forced to say how you voted, you could lie and there'd be no way to tell if you were telling the truth. Having the machines sign the votes would do no good since they could change the vote cast.
I googled for a sample Canadian ballot, but I could not find one. How many items do you typically vote on? In the US, a ballot is frequently (but not always) several pages long with national, state, and local issues. Are Canadian ballots similar?
The paper/pencil tool isn't too complex for the USA, it's *too simple*.
Canada has 1/10th the number of people as the USA. Not only is the scale of votes greater, but consequently the complexity of relationships among the people, therefore the political groupings and representations. As well as the laws in proposition ballots. Part of the American complexity is the difference in ballot styles and subjects in different jurisdictions, like different states, as well as the deeper hierarchy for intergovernance. Moreover, Canada's party/parliament system produces more politicians by appointment, like members of the Candian "Senate", and the Prime Minister, than in the USA, where ballots must determine those.
All these basic differences are compounded by other cultural differences. Canadians are more likely to wait in an orderly fashion to learn the outcome of a change for which they've waited years, and which won't occur for months after they've made their statement. Americans want immediate feedback, or we won't even vote in as substantial numbers. And that makes us much harder to govern, including just getting a report of our selections of representatives.
However, a combination of pencil/paper and electronic counting/reporting would be a good synthesis of both the inconveniently inadequate Canadian system and the woefully inadequate all-electronic system. Optical scans of pencil/paper for immediate, unofficial reports, with binding recounts by cross-supervised volunteers, recorded to DVD, and federal investigations of discrepancies. Bionic ballots!
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make install -not war
What a lot of people don't realize is that there are already immense problems with current voting technologies especially punchcard and optical scanning ballots. This is mostly due to the fact that very antiquated machines are used to process the ballots. Think of it this way:
Say you have some number of feeders into 1 machine that reads punchcard ballots. The feeders end up feeding faster than the machine can handle so after some period of time, the machine gets jammed. Voter personnel then remove all ballots that were in the machine to be counted and some that "might have been counted" (since they don't know exactly on which ballot the machine jammed), and then they insert a control card which essentially tells the machine "don't count ballots who's numbers you've already seen, etc.."
And then they start feeding the ballots again.
Now imagine that this happens every 15 minutes on average. The amount of error that accumulates is phenominal.
They continue this process until they get some number of runs that agree, and then publish the result.
A friend of mine who has done extensive research into this at grad school, once requested the datapoints for all ballots tabulated in prior elections.
In a sample of 150,000 ballots, she received around 760,000 data points, which equates to 5 runs of the ballots though the machine....but where did the extra 10,000 come from?
I believe in her research she determined that there already was a 5-10% error in current voting tabulations.
The problem with pencil and paper is that it makes it too difficult for DEMO(N)cRATS to perpetrate election fraud.
Paper trails tend to do that.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
Voting is not the way to get hundreds of millions of Americans to make the most "intelligent" decision. It's the way to get us to agree to accept the winner, because we participated in the process. Unstructured mass communications offer accurate models of the mass activity only when resampled frequently, without feedback with alternate, biased models like polls and platforms. One-shot elections on a single day, amids a yearlong media circus, that control governance for the following 4 or 6 years, make for bad models. But they've gotten people to agree to accept a demonized "opponent" as their leader for centuries in America, no matter how stupid we are.
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make install -not war
This should scare everyone, no matter what their political affiliation.
There's going to be voter fraud BIG TIME this election, and paperless voting will only help that happening.
I seriously think we're going to end up with precincts that people not eligible to vote voting anyway, people voting multiple times, people buying votes, polls being left open HOURS longer than they were supposed to (judge in the pocket, get him to rule for you... Hey! Throw an election your way!)
OK, that's not much of a stretch. Those things happened in Florida, Missouri and Wisconsin last national election.
How many convictions did you hear about because those things? None.
This is gonna get a lot worse before it gets better, and there had better be some serious jail time for the people who are doing this stuff or it'll be impossible to hold an election.
I seriously think we're going to hear about precincts that end up with more votes than actual registered voters.
Yeah, they stole all those votes from Nader, costing him the election. bastards.
In richer Florida counties, mechanically defective ballots were returned for revoting. In poorer counties, the votes were discarded. There's clearly a political campaign agenda in those policies, in a state governed by one presidential candidate's brother, where the election is controlled by that candidate's campaign manager. And still manages to produce a victory by under 60 votes out of a 15 million population.
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make install -not war
Pencil and paper won't work in America because it discriminates against voters who can not read.
What's so damn hard about making a secure terminal to vote on? We have electronic voting terminals replacing the pen and paper voting for more than 10 years!
In the land of the free, where democracy and freedom of speech and choice is king, the same land that prides itself time and time again on it's prosperous technological supremacy, the problems with the pen and paper voting looked like a total joke. And now it's the electronic voting which is a problem? Do you people even WANT to vote at all?
With great power comes great electricity bills.
They thought they could do that by selectively counting chads instead of votes in Palm Beach County only.
Hey, Arnold!
Also, fiasco to whom? We know the either Bush or Kerry will win, and it doesn't matter which one. The election of 2004 will be about ballot access for 2008 -- which minor parties will get at least 5%, and which minor parties, if any, will get a large enough percentage to create a psychological mandate to snowball to displace one of the two major parties in the future. Remember, Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican, was a minor party candidate.
Regardless of whether irregularities go undetected, and regardless of whether Bush or Kerry wins, electronic voting is helping perpetuate the one-party Republicrat system in the U.S.
Are there any statistics on the percentage of errors benefitting one party vs another party?
If we can obtain such information, what would have to be the threshold for the errors to be statistically improbable of being mere mistakes--that is, what would be required to begin a full investigation?
Just because posting nonsense to Slashdot doesn't change the fundamental damage already demonstrated by eVoting in America, doesn't undermine the concept of jabbering irresponsibly. Keep those posts coming. Meanwhile, those of us who want our votes counted accurately will require that eVoting include proven reliable auditing, like paper trails.
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make install -not war
You sound like Diebold spokesman David Bear when he wrote "While security is an important issue ... improvements can and will be made." But common sense tells us that things don't get fixed unless people see the need to fix them. The saying 'Don't fix it if it ain't broke' reflects the human tendancy to not spend time and money on something that no one is compaining about. Saying 'don't sweat it' is a most counter productive strategy toward getting every citizens vote counted correctly.
Diebold also makes ATM machines, and I'm sure there's a paper trail there because the banks and public would never accept it otherwise. Is our banking system more important than our democracy?
Best quote in the article:
"You take away oversight - someone will steal. I guarantee it."
That makes sense to me. It seems to me that it ought to make sense to anyone, at any wavelength on the political spectrum.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
What's "odd" is that there are so few American journalists following her lead in covering the gory (pun intended ;) details of rigged voting. That does make it odd that Ms. Harris is so dedicated to her job - why shouldn't she just accept the privileges that the winners in rigged voting would hand her, along with the rest of the educated white professionals in America? Because she's smart enough to value her freedom, unlike the rest of the media, which would print fascist press releases anytime, as long as it's steady work without lifting anything heavy.
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make install -not war
Is it too early to predict that Dubya will be announced winner by the media and questioning this "fact" will be labeled "unpatriotic"?
Yeah, I'm a troll. Use your mod points to punish me accordingly.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
Instead of your demented ravings directly contrary to reality, how about citing a single example of eVoting machine suppliers sympathetic to Kerry? To counter the mountain of evidence that eVoting machine suppliers work to elect Bush?
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make install -not war
I feel very fortunate not to be living in the US anymore. I didn't feel safe. For example, I've received some threatening email from people who didn't like what I wrote on this page.
You can immigrate to Canada too. The most permanent way is to marry a Canadian citizen or permanent resident.
You can live and work here for a year if you get a TN-1 visa, which you can qualify for if you have a bachelor's degree and a written job offer, for a job that's on a certain list specified by the NAFTA agreement. Any qualifying citizen of the U.S., Mexico or Canada can work in either of the other NAFTA countries with a TN-1. The procedure for getting a TN-1 is very simple and inexpensive, and can be renewed each year if you continue to qualify.
During the dot-com boom, Canada established a special visa just for computer programmers. There was a shortage here, because all the Canadian programmers were going to the US to work. You'll need to find a Canadian company to hire you as a programmer and sponsor you for the visa.
Programmers don't make as much in Canada as they do in the US, but then the cost of living is much lower here (in Nova Scotia anyway) than anywhere I've lived in the US.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
How do you propose deciding that person, without fixing the process? Or are you saying that we're fixing the wrong problem, inconvenient counting, rather than accurate counting?
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make install -not war
where have non technical people been involved in adopting e voting? Where I live in Georgia, "technical" people designed and built the diebold e voting machine. "Technical" people in state government "approved" it, based on "technical audits". Based on the recommendations of these "technical" people, non technical peoples concerns were laughed at, ridiculed, they were assured "it just worked".
Big fat hairy lie. A complete falsehood, a fabrication. Technical people foisted this abomination on us. Bad people with a big brother political agenda, IMO.
Some things are better mechanised, others AREN'T. The big problem with simple paper ballots was the ridiculously designed election system, which insists on less than a 24 hour voting period, and to have it always during a normal workday, where either the rich boss class could go vote whenever they wanted to, or the completely non rich "welfare" class could go vote. they also control the debates, how any third party can get on the ballot or an independent, they also contro the media and who gets covered and who doesn't, brainwashing generation after generation that voting for criminal globalist party Candiate A over B will somehow result in "change for the better" and "choice". People in the middle with this voting scheme they were using before had a hassle, so it lead to the "technical" people in politics, based on THEIR decisions, to say "aww gee, looks like YOU got problems now" which they wanted to fix with magic voodoo "computers", and it turns out to be a complete congame scam, with the highly likely designed from scratch ability for the "technical" people who have a political agenda to *hijack elections* on a mass scale, instead of having to do it the old fashioned hard way, precinct by precinct, which was hard to do. Now they can do it from "technical" vote hijacking central command someplace. And now we are being told that if we just make it even more complex,and more expensive, that we can have a "paper trail" to "prove" the vote isn't hijacked. How do you do that when the people who are doing the vote hijacking are the people who design the system and run the candidates that THEY want, and insist on THEIR "technical" way of doing things? Vote 'em out? ain't that a catch 22 then? "Technically"?
duh, that's what we had before without spending thousands of dollars per polling place, a paper trail. Cost peanuts, worked as well as anything else, and at least they couldn't hijack ALL the polling places. Terchnically that is.
Just because someone doesn'tlike YOUR pet electronic gizmo doesn't mean they can't think for themselves or are somehow inferior to your excalted position as arbiter of all things "technical". A lot of us geeks think it's a better techncial idea to use KISS instead of rube goldberg gizmos run, designed, and profited from by crooks for something as important as voting. Crooks can be as technical as anyone else, being "technical" is ZERO guarantee you are honest or capable of seeing a big picture. Techncial people bring us efficient mass murder, spam, viruses and nowe sophisticated vote hijacking. Ya, they bring us some good, but they bring us just as much non-good.
I vote via e-voting and receive a receipt with a blind encrypted key that says perhaps the station, town and actual vote but not who cast the ballot.
With say 48 hours of the final talley ALL keys and there supposed votes are posted to the public for personal review. If the numbers don't add up or enough people claim their receipts don't match the posted data the election is nullified.
Can it be any easier?
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Now I'm not saying that there aren't serious problems with the current status of e-voting machines, but does all this doomsday talk remind anyone of the y2k hype? At least I still have my bunker ready for when the Diebold machines go haywire and start pillaging the countryside.
When the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee can steal close to 5000 documents from the Senate mainframe with impunity... who would trust any Republican influence over voting rules.
4 96 3.asp
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http://www.sltrib.com/2004/Mar/03052004/utah/14
http://www.sltrib.com/2004/Apr/04272004/nation_
Oh and remember the Florida election of 2000 when a private database company scrubbed thousands of eligible voters from the rolls? Well now one of the co-founders of Database Technologies is back in the headlines -- he's working with law enforcement agents in Florida to create what may soon expand into a national surveillance system. We talk with privacy expert Wayne Madsen, investigative reporter Greg Palast and a top intelligence official from the state of Florida.
A Florida law enforcement data-sharing network is about to go national. In the name of counterterrorism, the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security are pouring millions of dollars into the system to expand it to local law enforcement agencies across the nation. It's called Matrix, which stands for Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange. According to the Washington Post, the computer network accesses information that has always been available to investigators but brings it together and enables police to access it with extraordinary speed. Civil liberties and privacy groups say the Matrix system dramatically increases the ability of local police to snoop on individuals.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/0
The Florida company that built the database was founded by the man behind ChoicePoint and Database Technologies. The companies administered the contract that stripped thousands of African Americans from the Florida voter roles before the 2000 election.
Although narrower in scope than John Poindexter's controversial Terrorist Global Information Awareness program, Matrix may serve a similar purpose because it provides unprecedented access to US residents regardless of their criminal background. And states are eager to participate in the new program. On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security announced plans to launch a pilot program in state law enforcement data-sharing among Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and New York.
Americans would never stand for hand counting each ballot, because it's a ridiculous waste of time and money.
Paper (fill in the bubble) ballots with electronic counting (and hand recounts if needed) are the way to go. Yes, there are huge problems with these touch-screen systems, because they're made by idiots out to make money, and pushed by "gee wiz, isn't this neat" officials who don't know anything. but Hand counting ballots is hugely open to fraud and abuse. Sure, in theory you have people from both parties looking at each ballot. (now there's some real efficiency!) but the fact that they belong to a certainly party doesn't really mean are loyal to it.
Any fraud is probably canceled out by fraud in the other way, but, that's hardly any way to run an election.
If you're system is so perfect, I have a question for you. Do you ever do recounts? And if so, how much of a difference between count and recount is there?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It's been my personal experience that it doesn't matter what party the dolt is that does the fraud... One has to be able to trust the people counting the votes to make an accurate count. (I've seen my voting district, whose vote counters were [by law] made of equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, report that a gubernatorial candidate got NO VOTES, when I know for a FACT that he got at least four. The case was contested, since it apparently happened in other districts too, but the Powers That Be didn't allow a recount. Yeah... Yeah.)
Crooks come in all politcal persuasions.
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
The revolution will be over before it starts.
It seems all she can do is bash other people personally. It mentions that she even trashed Bob Woodward on her website because he didn't return her calls. That might qualify her for psycho-chick of the year, but it won't convince me to oppose e-voting.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
You misunderstand what I'm trying to say. I'm not letting people off the hook for making mistakes or saying that it's okay for Diebold to act unethically. Not at all. I'm just saying that the solution will take a long time.
But it'll take even longer if people of conscience don't act. It will ONLY get there through the actions of people who care about getting it done right and making it work.
Like any new technology, evoting will open up a new arena for criminal activity, both on the part of those who make evoting machines, and others who would try to exploit the technology for evil. This WILL happen, and those who want to do the right thing will have to be ever vigilant.
And, BTW, those who commit crimes SHOULD go to jail. I'm not saying "it'll take a long time" to make an excuse for people to do wrong things.
Oh, and as an obligatory slashdot comment, I really do believe that open source is the only way to go here, because it's the only way to get enough HONEST eyes looking at the code and making sure it's secure. Letting any company keep proprietary anything THAT CRITICAL is almost guaranteed to result in something criminal, because companies WILL fudge things to make deadlines, and what they fudge is usually security before anything else.
Can evoting take less than 50 years to get right? Theoretically, yes. Given human history, it's unlikely. Most probably, it will evolve slowly over time like every other technology. But it's possible for a few geniuses or a lot of geniuses to have some strokes of genius and design a system that is both feature-complete and secure.
But for comparison, let's contrast with Linux. I think Linus is a bona fide genius. Linux started in 1991. It got to be reasonable pretty fast, but only now is it becoming truly "enterprise quality" (ie. feature-complete). So with even the greatest minds behind something, things still take time to evolve.
Is there something we can do to speed things up? Certainly. Become a pair of the ever necessary "critical eyes" which will be needed to examine evoting software and point out its flaws.
-I never said the facts were real
-All I did say was it reminded me of the email
LIGHTEN UP, I was trying to inject humour!
Geesh!
... when I filed my protest at my precinct the first time we used the diebold machines. The elderly lady poll offocial had zero clue what I was talking about. Her response was "we can run it twice, then it's checked and verified" paraphrasing. She didn't get it. Next they made me talk to some diebold doofus on the phone, he KNEW what I was talking about but insisted it was an accurate count. I said "prove it, let's see the code, on every machine". Of course he refused, he said "sonmeone might tamper with it" I said, "who, you guys?". They wouldn't even admit it was accessible remotely via modem during the election itself, that has come out later.
You can't verify jack squat, you are forced to take their word for it, and so far what has leaked out shows they are liars with a serious political agenda to hijack the vote and to profit from that and the artificial creation of busywork jobs.
Pros:
Quick ballots counts. Since every vote is in a machine readable format every vote is electronically scanned and tallied.
Paper trail of every ballot. Since every ballot starts out on paper ...
Lower cost per seat than proposed evoting systems. One or two bubble sheet scanners would be enough to handle even the largest voting sites and for a fraction of the cost of proposed touch screen systems. Assuming that bubble sheet systems are of equal price as touch screen systems (IMO a scanner/counter might cost less than a touch screen system) compare buying two scanner/counters or 20 to 30 touch screen systems. The bubble sheet readers win that one hands down.
Easier to setup. Bubble sheet scanners can be previously setup so that on site workers only have to plug it in to an electrical outlet and go. Add in a cell phone connection for remote monitoring. I guess you could even build in a DC power unit with a battery. IMO overkill but in case AC power is not readily available. The setup per unit should be equal or a bit less than touch screen systems, but since many more touch screen systems need to be set up per site the bubble sheet wins. It's a minor win over touch screen systems but is compounded since much fewer bubble sheet scanners need setting up.
More durable than proposed evoting systems. Touch screens can get ruined very quickly. Also the average user tends to be rougher on touch screens when they are starting to fail. Harder screen faces are more durable but can crack from abuse, like poor shipping or dropped during setup.
Easier to train poll workers than proposed evoting systems. The only thing the poll worker needs to know is how to tell the voter how to insert to ballot. No navigation questions or use issues. Most everyone here has had the misfortune of working with the most clueless user that would easily get confused on the simplest touch screen system. Considering that most poll workers are of an age where computer use is not second nature and this problem is compound.
Cons:
It's electronic and is bound to fail sometime. While IMO bubble sheet readers are more durable than mechanical voting booths the scanner/counter is bound to fail. The ballots would need to be rescanned. A serial number (tied to the ballot and not the voter) could check for incomplete electronic counts.
No instant native language support. The touch screen wins here. The bubble sheet method requires a poll worker to help the voter choose a ballot from ballots in different languages. IMO a minor issue.
Think of it like a paperback book. It's a format that's been around for hundreds of years because it's the best thing we have. While electronic books have been around for a few years and have some advantages, paperbooks are still better and, in turn, will still rule until something better comes along. As Chris Rock would say: "Just because you can do something doesn't make it a good idea." Just because we can vote on touch screens w/o a paper trail doesn't make it a good idea.
I'll go back to my cave now. =)
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
I would prefer to see a PGP trail, that shows conclusively it was sent from X machine and not created in the database.
Yep, as I understand it, this was the fumble with our proposed system (Ireland) and it wasn't the engineers that were at fault.
Funny. I see it as the exact opposite. The problem is largely technologists (admittedly, those in corporations) pushing ill-advised solutions onto non-technical people.
Voting isn't easy. Every time this topic pops up on slashdot, we always get some arrogant IT yahoo that suggests their favorite technology as the "solution" to the problem; typically without any understanding of the issues or doing any domain research. And then you have the gall to blame politicians.
Voting is primarly a non-technical issue; but when technologists like the fella who wants PGP (or whatever their favorite technology is)
With all this talk of electronic voting vs. paper ballots (fill in the bubble or punch card or 'place an X here' or any similar ballot), it seems both approaches have serious problems. What's wrong with mechanical lever voting machines? They've been used since the 1890's with little trouble. Why not start manufacturing these machines again?
This is what happens when politics get in the way of good technology.
Yes, yes, I know will solve everything. The typical technologist that I talk to on this issue makes very little effort to really understand the problem domain, and potential solutions. Show me one implementation that is good. While there may be some good technologts out there, esp the verified voting people, they have yet to produce anything valueable. If you want to comment on the process, stop blabbering and document a solution; more than that, explain how it will address both historical problems (anonymous voting, collusion, etc.) as well as future problems (digital security). My guess is you will completely ignore all of the "simple" problems and by concentrating on the "hard" problems you will propose something totally junk. Did you think that perhaps the people at Diabold are doing well is beacuse they at least _tried_ to understand the customer's needs?
Have you ever noticed that McDonalds can't find enough volunteers to stay in business? IIt doesn't seem to stop them, and I don't see them bitching at all about it.
Elections are work. Work costs money. Does it cost more than a few cruise missiles? If not, then we can afford it.
Also you might get more volunteers if you did as virtually every other country does - make election day a statutory holiday. When people work a full day, they are not going to be able to volunteer, and are less likely to vote. Give them the day off and you won't limit your volunteers to just the retirees, and as a bonus you'll make it easier for the people who pay the bills to have a say in what is done with their money.
Yes, yes, I know (insert-your-favorite-technology-here) will solve everything. The typical technologist that I talk to on this issue makes very little effort to really understand the problem domain, and potential solutions. Show me one implementation that is good. While there may be some good technologts out there, esp the verified voting people, they have yet to produce anything valueable. If you want to comment on the process, stop blabbering and document a solution; more than that, explain how it will address both historical problems (anonymous voting, collusion, etc.) as well as future problems (digital security). My guess is you will completely ignore all of the "simple" problems and by concentrating on the "hard" problems you will propose something totally junk. Did you think that perhaps the people at Diabold are doing well is beacuse they at least _tried_ to understand the customer's needs?
We have just completed an election in Canada. Our results were available about 2 - 4 hours after the polls closed.
;), but I see no reason to bring computers into an election count.
We count the whole thing by hand, It works well and is very secure.
You just have to have an effective heirachy that counts from individual polls and feeds the results up the chain.
I'm a linux sysadmin, yeah big deal
PenGun
I'm sorry, but you have not explained this at all. I think you are just an ignorant technie who is spewing/promoting your technology-of-the-day without a damn clue as to what the real-world problems are.
Where in this fella's posts is one iota of intelligence? I see a bunch of finger-pointing and arrogance. Does he speak from experience here? It's complicated stuff.
Show me one technology solution out there which solves the problem -- right, there isn't any. Clearly it's the technologists who are unable to understand the problem; they keep pushing their shit without understanding the real-world concerns.
it's run by a Republican who raised money for Bush and promised in a 2003 fund-raising letter that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president next year".
..something you'd actually want to see. I don't want to see the result of e-voting's first failure. We've already witnessed the electoral college's first failure and it's none too pretty!
Putting aside the matter than Diebold's contributions are tiny compared to most lobbying groups, what about other e-voting businesses? I haven't heard anything bad about Unilect which is used in a several states.
Advanced Voting Solutions Inc., Election Systems & Software Inc., Hart InterCivic Inc., Sequoia Voting Systems?
Considering their successful use in India, this whole story seems to reek of a Democratic attempt to paint any elections they lose in 2004 as illegitimate.
Yeah, I'm a troll. Use your mod points to punish me accordingly.
-1, asked for it.
I just don't get it.. we've had electronic voting here in Holland for over 10 years and there have never been any problems.
Ok, they may not be as fancy as yours, but I think that is the key (it's just a big panel of buttons with a wire leading to a small box with some sort of flash memory in it).
And with full understanding that I'm replying AC to an AC half way down the story so noone will ever see this comment,
I scrutineered for the count of the "special ballots" in my riding. Special ballots are for all the people overseas who vote through embassies, or who are in jail or nursing homes, etc.
Out of 564 Ballots (by far the largest poll in the riding) we had 3 spoiled ballots. 1 had no inner envelope (improperly cast absentee ballot), and 2 were write ins for candidates not running in that riding.
Have you seen the recent polls? It seems likely that it will happen again. Kerry and Bush are pretty evenly split 50/50 in the polls right now. And the number of swing voters is significantly smaller than in the 2000 election.
All will go smoothly. There will be a landslide, 100% in fact, for a little known write in by the name of clambake (your's truly).
His simple, grassroots platform of emptying the US trasury into the pockets of the employees, investors and all the families related in any way to the E-Voting companies will resonate so strongly with the voters and on such a grand scale that he will become the first prsident elected who isn't even old enough to be eligible!
Bring on the recounts!
There may be more problems, but nobody will know, since there will be no paper trail and therefore there will be no problems... Perfect system.
is that there is no "None of the above"
and no way to indicate that I don't want ANY of these clowns in office.
With a paper ballot, at least I can mark every candidate running for a particular job and show that, NO, I DIDN'T FORGET THIS CATEGORY.
Not that I trust paperless voting at all.
I tried the machine last election--the first time they were used in Orange County, CA--but I'll be casting an Absentee Ballot from now on.
gewg_
I have yet to see evidence of Unilect tampering - you tell me. I have seen evidence that ES&S, Sequoia, and SAIC, the other players which, with Diebold, completely dominate the voting machine market, are tampering with the elections. None of which companies are competing with the others for the legit business, by offering paper trails or similarly reliable auditing. What does Unilect have going for it (other than a name that sounds eerily like "unelected")? We award important jobs on the basis of merit, not on the basis of "no track record".
--
make install -not war
How hard can it be to write voting software that increments a number by 1. I mean, a damn computer can increment a number pretty fucking well, don't you think? I'm a programmer and it boggles my mind the Linux kernel could be written in a distributed manner by developers around the world but DieBold can write a program to increment a fucking number by 1.
You should probably ask former slaves about how mandatory 'literacy' tests helped their voting. They were given literacy tests of exceeding and ridiculous difficulty. The upshot was that massive numbers were turned away from the polls.
Photos.
When I was young something like this was common in certain states....along with poll taxes (you can only vote if you come up with the money).
If you were white you tended to pass (often as not the people running the thing just said you passed if you were white) and if you were black you tended to fail (often as not the people running the thing just marked you failed).
My big question regarding e-voting is will a person still be able to 'scratch' vote if they are so inclined?
The point is that there is the potential for these tests to be abused.
Photos.
If Bush wins, he is going to be accused to rigging the vote no matter what. He can't avoid this accusation, no matter how silly it might be at the time. Don't upgrade the voting machines, and he obviously won only because punch ballots were used. But if electronic voting is used, then he obviously won because of the untested ballots.
There is no voting technology that can be used that would prevent such accusations if he won.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
We have races for federal, state, local, propositions, judicial, school board, etc. all on the same ballot.
We have had 135 candidates in one race.
We have primaries with different ballots for different parties, with different rules on who can vote in each race across each state.
We can have multiple votes in a race (party central committee).
We permute the order of candidates listed in a race to eliminate the first-listing bias.
We handle all of this easily and foreigners who simply put an X next to a single candidate in parliamentary elections call us stupid when we don't get everything perfect all of the time.
Having automated ballot counting in the USA is a must. Everyone agrees that there should be a paper trail with evoting in the future as soon as possible. The current debate is whether we should use the existing evoting machines now or go back to paper until verifiable evoting is ready.
In Belgium, where turnout is near 100 %, because mandatory, machine counting is not necessary.
You might tell me that's because the belgian population is 280 times smaller, but that would be an error. What the system needs is distribution. Just divide the country in provinces, provinces in counties (cantons), cantons in communes, and each commune in a number of bureaus. At that point, you have a few hundred to a few thousand people per bureau.
Each bureau has a president and witnesses. After closing time, they sit together and do the hand count. With a little organisation, you can get in done in an hour. Then the results are transmitted to the upper level, added, then transmitted to the upper level. It does not take a long time. Afterwards of course all the paper is taken to the ministry of interior for recount but that's annecdotical.
Actually, it now takes more time because we're in a transition to stupid computer voting, and the unreadable results can only be read in the ministry of interior and thus have to be physically shipped to the capital, which can take up to three hours.
to go back to hierarchical paper voting, I see no reason it couldn't be applied in the US, providing you take one or two extra mid levels.
...I'd have to say that in some cases yes, a paper ballot such as that used in our federal election could be potentially complex. However, not for the reasons most have stated.
The tired argument about the lack of scalability has been trotted out before, and that is not the reason either. It doesn't take long to count the vote (only a few hours)...it isn't like all the ballots go to Ottatwa and one room full of people count millions of ballots. Nor is human counting expensive--in fact it is probably as cheap or cheaper as scrutineers are volunteers who at mos receive a small stipend for a few hours work. In the US you'd just have more people counting in more polls.
The real reason paper ballots are not used universally in the US is because they are FAR more "democratic" in the US than in Canada. They vote for anything and everything. Americans vote for president, congressman, senator, govenor, judge, police chief, dog catcher, postmaster, various propositions, etc etc etc. In some elections a paper ballot would look like an income tax form!
To compare and contrast, last Monday I got a nice, neat little ballot on which I placed an "x" by one of four or five names. The whole process took less than a minute and there was no lineup at all. No need for complicated electronic or mechanical systems for that, even if there were a billion people voting. Apart from electing governments, Canada is not really democratic at all. Our government makes all the decisions. Police chiefs are hired like any other police officer, our judges are appointed, our senatros are appointed. Even our head of state is appointed--the Canadian equivalent of "President" is the Governor General. The Prime Minister (the leader of the party with the most seats, who only gets votes from his own riding) gets to pick the G.G. all by himself, and the appointment is ceremonially approved by the Queen of Canada (and the rest of the commonwealth).
Direct democracy makes a lot of Canadians uneasy--in fact in the 2000 federal election the opposition proposed a system that would allow citizens to initiate binding referendums. Despite the fact that the bar was set quite high the idea was mocked in the media and viewed with skepticism by the public. There seems to be a perception that referrendum and recall would lead to mob rule and chaos the like of which we see in California.
The only exception seems to be in city elections. When I voted in an Edmonton election a few years back I had to vote for the Mayor, my local city councillors, school board trustee, whether or not to close the Municipal airport and whether or not to close Keillor Road to vehicle traffic.
In fact we DID use electronic voting in Edmonton (but still with a paper ballot). Voters were presented with an A4-sized ballot in a matching envelope and an ink marker. The ballot was clearly divided into sections and we were to mark one choice in each section (except for councillor where we voted for the two top choices). We used the pen to fill in the "broken arrows" beside our choices. We then placed the ballot the right way around in the envelope and put it in what looked a bit like a paper shredder, which sucked the ballot out of the envelope and electronically tallied the vote (the ballot was retained in case a manual recount was required).
Results were available minutes after polls closed. We had no hanging chads, no crashing computers and no controversy about conflict of interest and potential for rigging the vote. And this was before residential hish-speed internet even existed...
Recently on a radio interview I heard the investigative reporter Greg Palast make this exact point, with the addition that the fiasco will be by design. Palast also said that, as bad as the electronic voting machines are, this year the real problems will be happening outside the polling place, with policies and programs such as the "Help America Vote" act, which are designed to disenfranchise voters the same way they were disenfranchised in Florida in 2000.
Palast points out that there is a decidedly racist agenda to these voting shenanigans, which he believes are bipartisan, and I believe he is also in favor of using simple paper ballots a la Canada, or using on-site optical readers the way they were used in the non-hanging chad parts of Florida in 2000
The point then is that the chaos likely to occur in November will cover up / give room to maneuver to those who wish the election to go a certain way.
Anyway, I've been looking all over the web to find that program to link to it, but maybe I actually heard it on a real radio this time, because it's nowhere to be found.
I did find a link to a Palast article from the San Francisco Chronicle that touches on this problem of voting disenfranchisement. It's subtitled "It's not too hard to get your vote lost -- if some politicians want it to be lost" Here's another link to an article in The Nation Magazine entitled Vanishing Votes
For those interested in more of Palast's writings, they can be found at www.gregpalast.com
Oh! I remember now. It was a video on CSPAN on the Washington Weekly program. It's an hour-long interview and call-in show with Palast located here
Seriously. I proposed this earlier, but for political parties like the Communist Party of the USA, or the American Nazi Party. If you want the job (even if you are constitutionally inelegable) I say that you are nominated.
*I* won't vote for you, but something does need to be done to wake people up about what the problems are regarding e-voting. I'm just glad that "mainstream" media sources are beginning to see this problem.
Yeah, here in Europe should start a "Voice of Europe" and broadcast into the US. Oh wait, it's called Euronews...
(Although BBC World would be better)
But hey, there's the Internet, and the US hasn't set up a national firewall like China's... Yet.
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
If there's no paper trail, who will know if there are problems of the undercount variety. (We've already had and detected problems of the overcount variety.)
If the point of the election is seen as convincing people that they chose the annointed winner, then all the e-voting system needs to be (from that point of view) is a convincing shell that can be manipulated to give the right answer. Can you, or somebody that you know well enough to trust, give any assurance that that isn't what is happening?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
However, the exchange rate is not as good for me as what it was when I was in Newfoundland for our wedding in 2000. Back then, it was 1.6 Canadian dollars to a U.S. dollar, now it is 1.3.
The Canadian economy in general has been doing better than the US economy for a while, which is why the Canadian dollar is stronger now.
But I don't know about the tech sector. I suspect it's not as good at the Canadian economy in general, because the market for Canadian tech is likely the same as the market for US tech.
Corel is a Canadian company, as is QNX, which makes a nice embedded OS.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Evoting!
... oh ya, and YOU DUMBASSES gave Hussein the chemical weapon technology that he used on his own people many years ago! You gave it to him to use on Iraq, but OOOOPPPPS I guess you couldnt really trust hussein!)
The modern way of fixing the vote, so that you dumbass dubya-fucker lovers can get that bastard in power for another 4 years!
How else could he possibly get elected, hell he wasn't really even elected the first time!
hmm lets see,
He's created the largest budget deficit ever in the world which YOUR CHILDREN will be still be struggling to pay off 20 years from now,
He's outright lied to the world, starting a war based on a lie ( NO WMD's EVER FOUND
He's destroyed your economy while other countries are taking off,
He's made more people around the world HATE EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU DAMN AMERICANS than any other president managed to do.
Dubya-fucker needs evoting. There's no possible way you bastards could be dumb enough to re-elect him legitimately.
Ballots and ballot books
Paper audit ballots, or in other words, a printed ballot that comes from the terminal and is in fact the actual "ballot" that you are turning in, is really the only way that e-ballots are going to work.
I like your idea on the surface and I agree that touch screen voting can simplify and offer greater flexibility compared to preprint ballots and preprinted ballot books. An idea I had was that the optical mark reader could also have a laser printer (driven by a separate SBC) built in that could print out different ballots and ballot books (say for different languages). The ballots could be postscript files and have a MD5 checksum to try to insure against tampering. The MD5 sum could also appear as some kind of watermark. To access the ballots a poll worker would just select a clearly marked key on something like PI Engineering's x-keys key strip (sans keyboard as in the picture).
The problem is that it incorporates another layer of technology which can break down or be tampered with. Keeping voting as simple as possible will help guard against fraud. It's harder to fake a preprinted ballot with a true paper watermark than hacking a touch screen system or altering a postscript file.
Fraud reduction
While a different evoting system other than what I proposed could possibly help decrease fraud I see it as a moot point. I suspect [with the system you described] more legal voters would be turned away than fraud would be stopped. Also IFAIK the SCOTUS ruled that an identification card can not be required to vote. By a possible logical extension it would not matter if that ID card is produced by the voter or accessible by a poll worker, it might not be legally allowed. With the more information a poll worker has to use to verify one's identification, the greater chance a mistake could be made. You mention photo verification: in Arizona a driver's license is good for an ungodly amount of time, I think until one reachs a certain age like 65. There are people with a license good for the next 30 years. If the picture the poll worker uses to verify the voter is from the driver's license (which is most likely) it could be of little use and possible be used to disqualify legitimate voters. The current system of checking a name and asking for an address for verification is hardly perfect but currently strikes a good balance between cost and vote integrity.
My point is IFAIK voter fraud is rare (less than 1% I'd guess) and has little effect on the final results. Now if you have stats showing something more like over 5% across the country I would rethink my position.
While the current voting system in the US is not perfect, it does work well. Any big changes in that system should be fully scrutinized and repeatedly tested. Big changes at a large monetary cost with minor rewards and the great peril of having untrusted election results is not a sound direction to head. While touch screen voting might come along someday IMO the technology is not ready today or for the foreseeable future.
Thank you again for your well crafted response. While I disagree with a few of your points it is appreciated.
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
A train wreck you say? Well, maybe our hindu friends would solve that with some prayer?
Surely Vishwakarma (the Hindu god of machines) will help prevent this train wreck...
You can't take the sky from me...
Maybe the USA should accept the offer of the UN to send observers... you people dont really want ambiguity in your elections do you?
Given that, the only practical solution is to do the ultimate count on the basis of a voter-verified human-readable paper ballot, which no software can screw up.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Paper voting has been the subject of infamous handling since voting began. Counting the votes, letting the people count the votes, etc, has been an art form since the birth of American democracy.
Both political parties have been playing games with the vote, there's been an understood rule that some cheating was expected ever since the end of a very bloody civil war.
Today, any decent political machine will put its partisans into the counting of paper votes. You don't even have to tell your partisans to cheat to swing an election. You can just tell them how to do it fairly and evenly and there will be enough with a desire to win that they will figure out how to cheat to manufacture ballots.
For example you could say, be careful holding the vote this way or your thumb might cause a chad to get knocked out, disqualifying the vote. But, the election workers, partisan, would start doing exactly that if they were counting a vote that went against their man.
Or, you might have accidently ripped ballots, a stray pen market that accidently blots a second vote, invalidating the ballot (ala the chad), a different mark, an extra hole, a rip, a tear, a piece of dirt. In close elections, a staf that counts 100,000 ballots and invalidates 1% of them just bought you 1000 votes.
"Letting the people count the votes" is really American slang for "let my partisans have a whack at them." It sounds good on the surface, but in reality it just means a brilliant machine is just working the votes, touching the paper, working it, changing it. That's not to say that Democrats are the only party that cheats just because things didn't work out for them in 2000. After all, Republicans used to do there sneaky things like have voters have to take tests to vote. To pass, white people know that 2+2=4 to white people, and black people to produce PI to 100 digits. Every now and then you get elections where it turned out that dead people voted.
The issue with electronic voting, thus, is not the "real" argument of security or ownership of the voting company, it's that, Democrats have for some reason has decided that the loss of their ability to work the paper ballot is not worth the gain. With a Republican owning the voting machine company, this is understandable. There's things he could do to swing a few votes his way, nothing really illegal, either. For example, he might say that screens with one font might wind up with 0.1% more republican votes, and that's enough to swing a close election.
This is my sig.
Canadians have guns too, but for the most part they're for hunting, and not for satisfying some sick obsession. The murder rates in Canada are much lower than in the US.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
So George W. can get to be president without winning the election again!!
Yay!
[sarcasm off]
Something about the La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo being unhappy with you right now...
The GOP-controlled US Congress appropriated
$6 Billion to upgrade voting machines across
the country. This was done to insure that
there will be no paper trail to audit when
GW Bush wins in November 2004 by a landslide.
The money has been distributed to the states'
voting districts, who have purchased eVoting
machines largely on faith from promises made
by the manufacturers. These manufacturers are
big multinational corporations that have ties
to the Republican Party, and whose CEO's are
friends of the Bush administration. (How else
would a $6 Billion get shoveled out of the US
Congress with the proviso "use it, or lose it"?
The voting districts spent the money without
having the scientific insight to question
the manufacturers, let alone properly validate
the equipment being deployed. They have rushed
into these purchases, and many have found during
the primary elections in the various states that
what they bought was pure crap.
I cannot say how the voting citizens of the USA
will react when they finally realize that they
have been disenfrachised, but I am fairly
confident that the US Supreme Court will uphold
the invalid voting results. The time is now
for the Democratic Party and others interested
in a fair election to request large scale UN
monitoring of the November 2004 election.
is squatting on it to make a buck www.blackboxvoting.org is the real site www.blackboxvoting.com is a leech!
mod me up plz to stop this bamboozlement!
thats not the real website.
the real web site is www.blackboxvoting.org
the turds at blackboxvoting.com are trying to jump onto the bev harris gravy train. their site is a crapfest which lacks substance. go to the real site folks!!
Lichtman and others have shown no cause of black voter disenfranchisement. Yet many people still claim that black voters were intentionally disenfranchised by Republicans even though Democrats were in charge of all the Counties in question. Given the tremendous amount of hatred directed at black Republican politicians like Thomas, Rice, Powell, Paige, etc., it is easy to believe that there would be a much wider bias.
Since Bush intends to start a war with North Korea and after the North detonates a nuke on US soil we'll all be under martial law and the elections will be cancelled - or Bush will win simply because the public won't unseat him during an "emergency".
This is his "October Surprise". Been in the works for at least a year now if not longer. The voting fraud plans are just a backup - and now they've been pretty much exposed, so Bush has to fall back on Plan A.
Seven aircraft carriers heading for the Taiwan Straits as I type (unprecedented in US history - supposedly for an "exercise" to intimidate China - which never needed more than a couple carriers in the past to be intimidated)and a fleet of stealth bombers also sent to the area. All the "tripwire" troops on the DMZ have been moved south of Seoul to prevent them from being wiped out in the first three hours of the North's counterattack.
(They started that last year which is why I - and everyone else who was aware of the move - knew the US was intending to attack. Those troops have been their for fifty years precisely to prevent an NK first strike. The only reason to move them is because the US intends a first strike - using the same "WMD" excuse they used in Iraq.)
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
My point exactly. After looking at this, I came to think that a really good "test" for this would be some very heavilly publicized minor election, particularly if you could get some "white hat" hackers to help participate. Something like the election for a college student body president, something big enough to matter, but minor enough that it only gives a scare of what it would mean on the national level.
/. are fully aware of the implications that election fraud can have on democracy, but for some reason trying to explain this concept to the general public is incredibly difficult.
Publicize ahead of time that this election might, or even is likely to be hacked. I mean, this is the point, and I think college students might even go along with this if is proves a point. Have a legitimate campaign, do some very heavy statistical sample polling of the student body prior to the election to find out just who would be likely to win if the election really were held, then have the hackers make the school mascot the winner of the contest.
Maybe I'm just wishing here, but I'm hoping that something like this doesn't happen (the school mascot of a major university winning an election) in a major contest, like U.S. Senator or even the President of the USA. The point is that most people here on
It is telling that the people really pushing for e-voting are politicians, and the people screaming that more caution should be given regarding expansion of technology in this matter needs a more careful reasoned approach are Electrical Engineers and Computer Science types. And this is not strictly because many programmers and circuit designers are getting grey hair either.
two different computer systems .. the other wireless to off-premise, ,this is the ONLY source code used to make the e-voting system.I've inspected the source - nothing malicious".
Sorry, but no way. introducing wireless into e-voting at all will just add to the hysteria. Remember, think like you are a typical person.
*News today* Wireless is not secure. People: Oh no, our e-voting uses wireless. I have just voted for Cthulhu instead of Kerry. YOU try and explain to them that the wireless element is just a back up and it is used in conjunction with fiber optic. It won't matter. We can't afford to use open sockets of any kind as far as Im concerned. For me its not about what encryption, etc we use, the average person won't get that. Sadly, yes, there probably needs to be a paper trail, or at least some bit of tangible matter that exists to say "I voted for him" We are still climbing out of a a world of paper books.. Also, there needs to be a security presence around. People need to know:
"Thats the electronic box I registered my vote at."
"Thats the security guard protecting my vote".
Also finally. In my opinion the whole system has to be open source to insure transparency.
Therefore, a third party "technical" group including people from OTHER countries with _no_ political affiliations with government can say:
"yes
"Yes, no more source code can be added".
"Yes, this is the open source gcc compiler used to compile that source code. I've inspected the source - nothing malicious".
"Yes, there are no more compilers here."
"Yes this is the open source architecture(computer, I think we should have one) on which the open source e-voting OS runs" - probably some version of linux.
"Yes, it has no ports or drives of any nature other that a DRM type port to connect to the MASTER computer" - no floppy drives, usb ports, anything..
"This is the giant lead safe where the voting computer is stored."
of course, the machine itself should be on _NO_ network. The machine (once voting is complete) should be literally removed from its safe and put into a armoured car and driven by military escort to the third party inspector group. so they can investigate that everything was done properly. The votes coould be counted before it is added to the master (supreme overlord cluster) computer, and again inside the master computer with all the other computers. and the results added up many times to insure accuracy. Then a board would convene to decide that since Cthulhu only got 0.01 % of the vote and the rest was evenly?? distributed between Bush and Kerry, they can assume that their attempt at secure voting may have succeeded.
This is how i think it SHOULD be. This is what people really want. This in a nutshell also reminds us why Open source is the way to go. No chance for paranoia to set in.
It's been my personal experience that it doesn't matter what party the dolt is that does the fraud...
Or alternativly that the two big parties in the US are not that different.
One has to be able to trust the people counting the votes to make an accurate count. (I've seen my voting district, whose vote counters were [by law] made of equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, report that a gubernatorial candidate got NO VOTES, when I know for a FACT that he got at least four.
Sounds a bit like Michael Moore's "Vote Ficus" campaign.
One specifically US issue appears to be the lack of an independent "civil service" to handle elections.
Professor Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins University spoke about the whole fiasco of eVoting at the USENIX '04 conference in Boston last week. He spoke of his experiences working on this issue in a panel session "The Politicization of Security," along with Gary McGraw of Cigital, Professor Ed Felton of Princeton, and Jeff Grove of the ACM. From what Professor Rubin said, the electronic voting is a very politically charred issue. Companies like Diabold developing technologies have strong political ties, and yes, the system is targeted for abuse. Professor Rubin spoke of how difficult it was to work with the government. He received tons of phone calls from both sides, Democrats and Republicans questioning him left and right. Professor Rubin's goal is to be partisan, and it's incredibly hard to do because the Democrats and Republicans can't sit on the same table together at all. There's so much fighting and bickering over the issue from both parties because the notion is "we don't want the other guy to win." Professor Rubin was called to testify in front of Congress about the technology and limitations of eVoting and the meeting time has been changed or cancelled so many times. The punchline from Professor Rubin was "Partisanship has never been worse."
But one reason I was enthusiastic about the move was that I really do feel safer here.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Theft, maybe, or "overthrow of the government by subversion", yes, but not a mere "train wreck".
I, personally, d/l the Diebold code about a yer and a half ago, from NZ, and inside of a couple of hours, found code that would be fine in development, or testing...but this seemed to be *production* code, and had a function "use this to install results from another machine", which I read as "to install the premade results you want....
They're looking into criminal prosecution in California, but here in Jeb Bush's state, "it's just small glitches", and "no, we're not going to replace them, or require paper trail". In fact, they'd *literally* decided that they don't *need* recounts with these boxes.
Treason, anyone?
The only asnser, other than lawyers, is to get the fsck out and vote the GOP out, *overwhelmingly*, to the point where there's no question.
mark
Actually, it was an independent write-in for Governor of Maine, about ten or fifteen years ago. It was bad enough that his political party wasn't "recognized" in Maine, but it would have been if this guy got something like 5% of the vote. Many people from the Democratic and Republican parties didn't want this to happen, so they would nit-pick every little detail, so that votes for him would be disqualified.
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
It's by Mark Fiore and available at the San Francisco Chronicle here