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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."
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.
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
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?
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.
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
This also has a lot to do with bad punch voting machines. The voting machines in Florida, for instance, didn't punch through the holes completely in a small percentage of cases. In a close election, this can make a difference.
The one good argument for electronic voting is simply that it makes it easier for people who have real physical difficulty filling out other ballots. Apparently the electronic voting machines have been quite successful in this regard.
Overall, though, I agree with you. Especially since we don't need another damn voting fiasco around here.
If more Americans didn't have a knee-jerk reaction to the mere suggestion that some of their elected officials were corrupt; if such suggestions weren't met by derisive comments about "conspiracy theories", I would be inclined to agree.
But as long as the naive and/or the corrupt design a system, you can't expect it to work.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
I can give you a few reasons.
1) Accuracy. I secure evoting system should be 100% accurate. Unless you happen to have more than 2^32-1 voters in your district all voting for the same person. Now look at Canada. Count the votes 5 times. Do you think you'll get one result, or five? I'm betting on the five. Humans make mistakes. Granted, they will probably be close, but there have been elections in the US (not presidential, but the point stands) decided by literally 12 votes in a large populated area. A couple states in the US in 2000 were, IIRC, decided by under 100 votes.
2) Along with that idea: judgement calls. Maybe the person made a stray mark and didn't notice; was it intended as a vote? You have to decide. With electronic voting, the system says "ok, here's who you voted for" and you can rest assured that the machine recorded it correctly. (We're talking a good system here, not a Diebold system.)
3) Speed. We're an impatient country. If we can be told the vote totals right after elections close, we're happier.
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.
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.
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?
Product development and marketing is designed to make potential customers not think about this. For example, those self-contained iced tea making machines are actually no faster than simply boiling the water in a microwave, brewing the tea, and dumping it over ice, but that doesn't stop millions of people from spending $20 on the machine. Effectively, electronic voting is riding on the tremendous marketing behind technology over the last two decades, and it appears tons of people got hooked and are now being reeled in.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
They are __sponsoring__ the Diebolds to ensure that their side wins.
They know that out-sourcing and the redistribution of poverty, not to mention the federalization of protection, not for me and thee, but for some 'influential' people, is a sell; so hard that they aren't even trying.
That would be like trying to rally people around a battle cry of "Rape Nuns!"
Nobody's going to go for it any more than they went for the almost total absence of safety features in the Corvair.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Er, I am.
Perhaps I don't count for much in the grand scheme of things, but I'm of the breed of conservative that believes the word implies smaller government. My philosophy is that the government should get the hell out of my life as much as possible, and let me live it for myself. So, I disagree with Medicare, Social security, etc -- but am a very strong advocate of individual rights and the inalienability of said rights. That includes the right to my (and *every* citizen's) say in the running of the country through fair elections -- elections where each vote is counted exactly once, for the result (e.g. candidate or referendum choice) for which the voter intended. I also believe that people have the right to vote for whomever/whatever they wish, and as such votes should be anonymous but verifiable. This is one of the major problems with suggestions in earlier posts of signing votes with PGP or assigning each a number to verify with -- as soon as one voter can be tied to his vote, that anonyminity disappears.
Yeah, so depending on whether "being on the right" means "believing what President Bush & co. say" or "holding educated beliefes on what is/isn't the best way to govern," *some* of "the right" do have opinons!
--0x4a6d74
The urban legend is that serious, dedicated technical people are loathe to release any hackable/exploitable technology, at least knowingly. Those self-same semi-mythical people are also perfectly ok with not having a product at all until their technical standards are met. The equally semi-mythical people in marketing are loathe to wait to have a product to sell it.
The real world hates such classifications, of any type, you can find crooked people anywhere, and everywhere. What is important to remember is that e-voting is a chain of people, who must all perform honestly, and verifiably, for a trustable result. Any crooked people in the process throws the whole verifiably/trustworthiness aspect out of the window. That means we must have more stringent control and verification procedures than for say, money-printing(the mint) or Narcotics manufacturing(pharmaceutical companies, the high-security types, like Morphine Sulfate). Right now we don't have that, e-voting is done by a single company because we barely have a proper security model of the threats facing them, and very few suppliers. Perhaps one way to get trustable e-voting would be to have TWO machines record each vote, through two different computer systems, linked through two mediums(one fiberoptic, the other wireless to off-premise, for example) to two different tallying centers. Two seperate, double-blind tallies should be used, using the double blind method whenever possible. If anything, the only problem is that unlike paper vote, with its paper trail and such, where attempted fraud is perceived as likely, unless proven otherwise, we have an e-voting method, which is intended to save money, where as long as we can run a few cursory checks, and save that money, we are content. E-voting should also consider prime facie each vote to be a fraud, and include tally marks from each person from the two booth election officers who noted that the vote was valid, and where it was taken, down to all the relay points where the vote was passed. TCP/IP(even with IPSEC) is a bad choice for the network, as it is meant to route around failures, whereas an e-voting network should consider a network failure a breach of trust with a remote site, requiring to reestablish trust explicitely.
We would be better advised not to try to do e-voting on the cheap, e-voting can work, provided we treat each vote like an anonymized, but valid command to launch a nuclear warhead. It has practically the same importance that we validate where it's from, and who it is, except we don't know who it is, that information is only allowed to the voter who voted himself.
With electronic voting, the system says "ok, here's who you voted for" and you can rest assured that the machine recorded it correctly. (We're talking a good system here, not a Diebold system.)
Unbelievable. Are there really people here who think that some sort of error-free machine is possible? This must be true, it's what the computer says?
There is a trail; My recommendation is the following in this time of uncertainty:
1) Record your check-in time in the registrar's rolls as you sign your name. Check your watch and confirm the time you wrote matches your watch.
2) Take your sample ballot and a pen with you as you enter the "booth"
3) RECORD THE MACHINE ID AND THE TIME on your sample ballot. Hopefully, the current date/time is displayed prominently on your terminal - enter TERMINAL AND WATCH TIMES. If Machine ID is not visible, step out of line and see the supervisor.
4) Vote.
5) Record the time you finished voting (terminal AND watch times).
6) Inform your Supervisor of Elections you have recorded vital information and will be prepared to furnish this information if the election is in dispute.
Right now I would suggest everyone insist the Terminal ID and Date/Time be viewable by the voter, and the sample ballots include write-in boxes for Machine ID and Date/Time.
Accuracy: recount legislation is well developed to handle any close results where accuracy might be an issue
Again, do five recounts. Are you gonna have one result, or five?
As i said in another response: "I still think being able to say 'So-and-so got *exactly* 8,192 votes' is much better than 'So-and-so got 8,200 votes with a 95% confidance interval with a radius of 10', even if the next runner up is obviously behind."
Judgement: again, the legislation is well developed. Do some reading on the Canadian system. It's quite good.
It may be good enough, or even very good. But why not go to a system that is perfect? Enforced unambiguity.
Speed: are you joking? We had *very* fast results.
I'll concede the speed point. (Though electronic totals would probably be available within 30 minutes via the system I imagine, if not sooner.)
The question here is *should* it be done? Maybe not: you've got a hell's breakfast of disputable electonic and mechanical counting systems down south. Maybe you do need to go to a simple paper system that everyone can understand and thus *see* that it's working properly
I don't see why it shouldn't. It offers an improvement, and brings no real disadvantages besides cost. (And some challenges that I'm sure plenty of people would be more than willing to work on.) Elections are the absolute bedrock of a democracy, I see no reason to use anything but the absolute best system available. I think this is the bottom line. I don't want "good enough" or "very good"... I want "as close to perfect as we can possibly make it".
(Oh, and for the record, I'll take Canada's system before the mechanical systems we have now, and certainly before Diebold.)
Thank you for saying this.
I am adding my voice from the "Right" that feels that e-voting machines as currently designed (by Diebold and the few others) are a fraud of collasial proportions.
I also think that Democrats, as well as Republicans, are just as guilty of trying to cause this train wreck, and any voter fraud will be an equal opportunity exersize done by both parties.
While I don't think we can resonably expect to reduce the size of the American government to pre-Hoover Administration levels, it would be a nice goal.
I agree with you that government simply needs to get our of our lives. Last night I had a run-in with the Police that was absolutely stupid, and was really unnecessary. I hate to have to wake up with a Police officer shining a flashlight into my eyes at 1 A.M. and waking me up. For no damn good reason either. Too many people want the government to solve problems that are much easier solved by simply being a good neighbor and rolling up your sleeves and asking "how can I help?" The fact that I'm writing this message should show just how stupid that invasion of over 20 police officers into my home really was.
I support the invasion of Iraq on many levels and for many reasons. I think Bush is doing a pretty good job, and I'm litterally praying to God and thanking him that a President Gore wasn't around on 9/11. Do I think Bush is ready for asension/exhaltation? NO He is a good man in a tough job during difficult times, and his opponents have little to show how they would do things different other than sit on their hands and do nothing. Do I think Bush has messed up some issues? Absolutely! Do I think there may be a better candidate than Bush this November? I'm not certain, and I may in fact vote for somebody else. He still has several months to prove to me he is worth something in terms of getting my vote. In 2000 I didn't vote for Bush, but I didn't vote for Gore either. I did vote, however.
>Technical people foisted this abomination on us. Bad people with a big brother political agenda, IMO.
Here in California... the Democrat party and the ACLU FOISTED this up our collective asses. There was not a single Republican in charge of even the smallest dog pound out here when not 5 minutes after the 2000 vote, every Democrat went screaming into the streets - "We must have e-voting or else the poor minorities will get disenfranchised!"
and thus it happened - and they bought Diebold.
It is NOT a Republican conspiracy - as much as some would like to believe it.
and don't even get me on how useless your vote is in California.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
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.
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