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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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
>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.