Slashdot Mirror
Hackers, Public Differ Greatly On E-voting
cweditor writes "Sorry to be touting one of my own Computerworld stories, but I only covered it because I found it so interesting. The Ponemon Institute surveyed 2,933 members of the general public and then 100 DEFCON and Black Hat attendees to get their views on electronic voting. 'The degree of difference was startling,' said director Larry Ponemon. It was the biggest split between 'experts and the public he'd ever found. For example, 83% of the experts said e-voting is less or much less secure against election tampering than paper ballots, compared with just 19% of the general public."
The experts know more than the general public. Will wonders never cease?
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
What data or insider knowledge does Joe Public have about how this wouldn't be secure? I think they assume its simplified and therefore more secure.
Electronic Voting is a solution in search of a problem.
Why this fetish for applying complicating technology to simple problems?
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
The point is that the general public doesn't know what happens behind the scene when they click on a button with their mouse. Maybe the reason those experts don't trust e-voting is because they know it takes only so much to be able to read and modify data going through the net.
Just my 2 cents.
diegoT
It's disturbing when technical issues become central to a wider political issue that involves everybody, yet very few people have the background to understand it or have an informed opinion about it. Software patents is such an issue. This one is too, and much more important. It's quite easy to lie and mislead the general public with it, since few people have the knowledge to see through the bullshit.
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
That e-voting isn't the only topic which hackers and the general public disagree.
News flash: General public clueless about an issue. More at 11...
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
How many of those that thought e-voting was secure are also Bush supporters?
Is why elections officials are so adamantly opposed to a paper trail? Sure, it creates extra expense in the short term, but it simplifies matters (by using electronic voting, hands down then the chad-bearing cards) and provides an auditable trail.
Sorry to be touting my own 14th post, but I'm only covering it because it's so damn interesting!
Actually, it is a good article, and it should be widely distributed. Obviously computer experts can see the flaws in e-voting, but it's the non-computer experts that we need to reach. Most people out there have no clue at all that something is wrong. An article like this, simplified a bit, could change a lot of uninformed opinions.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
To quote a popular saying, He who counts the votes, elects.
The only way to ensure the safety of ballots is to distribute the counting of ballots among a larger number of people.
The more centralized the ballot counting, the easier it is to corrupt, the more distributed it is, the more difficult it is to corrupt and the greater the likelihood of exposure.
And by distributed, I'm not talking about computers networks, I'm talking about people.
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain,
or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
I wonder, though, whether the situation would arise where an e-voting machine crashes? I mean, so many people trust BANK machines, and yet I've encountered several situations where I insert my card, nothing happens, it spits the card out, and I see OS/2 rebooting... I just hope the same doesn't occur in the polling booths. It might scare the old Floridians to see an OS booting up - these ARE the same people who couldn't figure out where to punch a card with 4 or 5 big circles on it.
I read somewhere that only 5% of the general public has a basic understanding of the concepts behind major everyday items such as a television or a refrigerator. Unfortunately I can't find the source of that figure (but paraphrasing Homer Simpson - "87% of all figures are made up anyways")
However, this underscores an important weakness in our society. When a TV or fridge was simply a consumer item, it was less important to know how it works. Now that large parts of our economy (finance, software, inventory, logistics), society (arts and culture) and democracy itself is largely controlled by computers this knowledge gap become increasingly important. People looking to control these sectors can increasingly rely on the general populace to not understand the issues involved. Just look at the bills passed regarding the use of technology (DMCA, HAVA, etc.) and you'll see that basic weakness exploited.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
A piece of paper by itself does nothing. The paper has to show the voter how they voted in a human readable way and a way that can be verified against the machine. However, if no audit is conducted, the paper does absolutely nothing but give voters a false sense of security.
I agree. Most Defcon attendees aren't even close to being experts, but the Black Hat convention is a completely different story. The kiddies at Defcon would be bored out of their minds. It's more for "grown ups" - for example, speakers wouldn't throw raw meat at the audience.
Since when are the attendees of DefCon (the majority of whom are wannabe hackers who try to look the part rather than learn it), a group of experts?
Yeah, but how much do these 'experts' know about how secure paper ballots really are? They should also interview a third group: those who are experts in the paper system.
I think a more telling question is: What "Paper Balots" did John Q Public think he was comparing to the e-voting systems?
And as usual we have a "game of telephone" going on here:
- We don't KNOW what the actual question on the survey was.
- The Computerworld article said "traditional paper ballot machines". (Maybe that was what was actually in the question. Let's assume it for the moment.)
- But when the Computerworld article's own author posted it to slashdot, he warped it to "Paper Ballots". And this thread is following his lead.
Now you and I know that paper ballots - the ones with the square boxes with hand-drawn Xes - are subject to some tampering, but it's hard to do it without leaving tracks, while a purely electronic systems is subject to all sorts of invisible breakdowns, from mechanical problems, software bugs, and malicious tampering.
But if you're talking "traditional paper ballot machines" you just completely dropped that system. Now you're talking about either punchcards, or optical mark sense systems.
What experience does John Q. have with either?
With punched cards, his sole reference point on reliability is the media storm over the presidential election in Florida. You know - the one where the democrats are STILL claiming the Republicans stole the election. Optical sense cards are subject to mis-scanning. Both can be hit by operational irregularities (such as not running one stack through while running another through twice.) Both are subject to cheating by replacement of physical ballots (as are all the other systems except e-voting without printed audit trail). Both are subject to exactly the same opportunities for accidental or malicious corruption of the vote counting hardware and software.
(And don't even get me STARTED on mechanical voting machines...)
So why SHOULD John Q. think that the e systems AREN'T better than the "traditional paper ballot MACHINES" - whose software has had more time for malicious bug injection and whose hardware and operational systems have been the subject of a recent major scandal?
IMHO John Q. may be right: All the objections except lack of an audit trail apply to the other paper ballot MACHINE systems, and they also have a better opportunity for misreading through mechanical failure or "user error" than the e systems. And since the audit trail is rarely checked, who's to say that the elections haven't been corrupted for decades.
IMHO the important thing about this flap is that it could lead to a less corruptable counting system than we've had since I became eligible to vote back in the '60s. The extra opportunity for unchecked vote corruption has lead to a move to eliminate the problem with the new machines by adding an audit trail, and to regular random surveilance of that audit trail. This, combined with the lower MECHANICAL error rate of the systems and the redundant counting mechanism will set a new, higher standard for the OLDER systems, and should lead to a much more accurate count.
Then, if we move on to eliminating the OTHER sources of election corruption (ineligible voters, multiple registrations, etc.), we might actually come up with fair and accurate elections within what remains of my lifetime. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Have you never heard of the "tyranny of the majority"? The United States is a Republic, not a Democracy, and the Electoral College exists specifically for this reason. Its job is explicitly to prevent the direct election of the President, because it's too important to entrust to the largely ignorant general populace. In high school, they teach about separation of powers and checks and balances; well, this is a check against the power of the people! The electoral college system was broken when the responsibility for choosing the electors transferred from the state legislature to the people; please don't break it any further!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz