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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.
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.
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!
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..
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
--
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.