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Hackers, Public Differ Greatly On E-voting

Posted by michael on from the head-in-the-sand dept.

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."

11 of 369 comments (clear)

  1. Imagine that. by 2names · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The experts know more than the general public. Will wonders never cease?

    --
    "I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
    1. Re:Imagine that. by lazyl · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Aw crap, ninjas!
    2. Re:Imagine that. by Phisbut · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Sometimes, the old fashioned way is the best way. We had a federal election a couple of months ago in Canada, and it was all paper & pens.

      People could come from 9AM to 9PM to take the piece of paper, go behind the curtain over there, mark the paper with the pen (make an X in a cirle next to the one you want to vote for... not all that complicated), and put the little piece of paper in the sealed box.

      At the end of the day, human beings opened the sealed boxes, with several witnesses (at least one representative of each party, plus other government officials), and hand-counted each ballot. Take one paper, show it to everybody, add 1 to the score of the guy on that ballot, put the ballot in a pile. Repeat the process about 500 times per box, for each of the thousands and thousands of boxes around the country. The whole process of counting takes about an hour, and there's very very few occurences of a party requiring a recount, because everything has been done in front of at least 10 witnesses.

      Where's the need for all that electronic voting stuff? Maybe it goes faster, and maybe the paper-way requires the hiring of more people (thus costing more in salaries), but consider the cost of buying the electronic stuff, then the cost of all the judicial stuff that happens because votes are missing or something got hacked or so.

      Go back to plain ol' paper & pens, and let democracy reign.

      --
      After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
      - The Tao of Programming
    3. Re:Imagine that. by abb3w · · Score: 5, Insightful
      since they only interviewed 100 experts to the 2,933 everyjoes,
      Error bars on statistical samples IIR are (N^0.5); thus, percentages have error bars of (N^-0.5). Thus, the 83% expert opinion on 100 experts is +/- 10%; the 19% opinion on 2933 everyjoes has an error of about 1.8%. So, even worst case, the experts are more than three times as likely to distrust the computer voting.

      "Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house." --Heinlein

      --
      //Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
  2. I have said it before, and I will say it again by YankeeInExile · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?
  3. The point is... by Decameron81 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  4. That's why they call it the 31337... by CharAznable · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  5. I have a feeling... by odano · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That e-voting isn't the only topic which hackers and the general public disagree.

  6. A Survey at DEFCON about HACKING??? by Lord+Grey · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.
    DEFCON is hardly the right place to be conducting a survey about the "hackability" of an electronic voting system. 50% of this year's attendees could probably figure out how to hack the vote before their third Mountain Dew.
    --
    // Beyond Here Lie Dragons
  7. The thing I don't get by dg41 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  8. P2P voting by revery · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.