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."
It seems as if they blindly trust our gov't to protect them from voting fraud. It's my opinion that the voting booth is really (short of violence) the ONLY tool that the population has to control their government.
To trust the gov't to keep the vote safe is kind of like putting the fox to work gaurding the henhouse.
The right to a secure, private, verifiable vote is the very foundation our country was built on. It's a shame that more people don't take it seriously.
Visit the Open Voting Consortium" for more indepth thoughts and ideas on this topic.
This seems to be an example of how technology has been sold to us ("the public" in this story) as an always-win net gain.
New is better than old. Expensive is better than cheap. Big is better than small.
This attitude is dangerous. Our collective faith is being misplaced in science and technology - both of which are important, but not perfect.
Look at the graph in the article. The biggest fear of the voting public is "Declines in voter turnout because of fear or distrust of e-voting systems."
In other words, their greatest fear is that people will realize that e-voting is a recipe for fraud and will stay home. Their greatest fear is that people respond rationally to what I think most of us believe is the truth. That just astounds me.
The point isn't that the experts know more. The point is that it's unusual that the general public is so far away from the "expert" opinion on this particular topic. While experts usually have deeper insight why something is like it is and often have more differentiated views, normally the gist makes it to the general public as well, leaving a smaller gap between expert opinion and public opinion.
My wife has been terribly excited by electronic voting because it promises to be accessible. She takes great offense that because she is blind she has to get assistance to vote under the current system.
It's taken a while, but I've finally convinced her that being able to "vote" is pointless if the "vote" is not counted or they system itself is fundamentally flawed.
It's interesting that the local newspaper, the Berkeley Daily Planet took the position that being opposed to electronic voting was a scheme to disenfranchise the disabled. It took a while, but following many insightful letters, they finally admitted that electronic voting as currently proposed in Alameda had the more serious potential to disenfranchise everyone!
As technical professionals it's important we become informed as possible on the subject. That way when your dad or neighbour ask about electronic voting you can explain the dangers and current issues. The more the general public learns about electronic voting, the better off we all will be. (and these survey numbers will be more favourable)
-- "Most people prefer a popular myth to an unpopular truth"
Alternatively, what data or insider knowledge does Joe "Expert" have about the current paper process? They should have interviewed a third group of people as well: those who are "experts" in p-voting.
-IOVAR Web Dev Platform
Looks like he's already done his part by building crappy machines with no paper trail. Now all the GOP needs to steal the election is some average-ability hackers.
I am amazed that it's only 6 out of 10 computer security professionals. I attended defcon and the 'hack the vote' lecture. Anyone who saw that lecture has to agree that there are serious flaws in e-voting.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
If voting is anonymous it cannot be completely auditable and secure. The same can be said about paper ballots; however, it is harder to physically stuff a ballot with the required number of paper ballots compared to electronic tampering (once you are in, you can easily generate the required number of votes to tip the scale).
Optical scan ballots that are verified by the voter seem like a reasonable middle ground. When voting I know immediately if the machine accepted my ballot and the totals are electronically gathered for rapid accumulation; however, there remains a paper trail that can be used for recounts and an audit trail.
Home Automation & Linux -- now I know I'm a geek
That would actually be good. Hack the vote, not to throw the election one way or the other, but to clearly show the public what the problem is. If Mickey Mouse is elected president, that would illustrate the issue nicely, in a way that the public can grasp.
But you'd better not get caught...
#1 Don't expose voting machines to the internet.
#2 use fingerprint + SSN to log into the system (double bonus, you'd get a better database of fingerprints for law enforcement)
#3 Report your vote to a watchdog group after leaving the booth, whether they're private industry or media.
If the watchdog groups projected talleys are within an error % of the actual vote totals, then you can feel secure that the e-vote wasn't tampered with anymore than paper ballots probably are.
My vision of secure electronic voting involves lots of public keys of ridiculous length, a hard copy receipt available (hex or something printable with lots of redundancy to ensure that an unreadable letter would not mess with a re-count and a barcode like label on there to be easily read by a scanner is a re-count was necessary), a few datacenters around the nation that each receive the results individually from each vote (the vote is sent to each of them with a different key from the user's computer) and no user names or passwords are used, simply a code from you voting card coupled with your SSN and name, perhaps each voting card would be unique to the year (automated sending every year for registered voters, etc to not complicate the matter for regular voters). I cannot see where RSA encryption would be insecure, and our government can trust a LOT more sensitive data to datacenters. The results could be tabulated on-site at each of the data centers and announced. Hell, we could probably get away with a STRIGHT VOTE in stead of this Electoral Collage crap. If there is one week spot its in sending your voting card to you via the mail, but most people trust their tax returns with the mail and more sensitive data than even that! I'm not seeing how getting E-voting to work is hard, ad even if only a few use it at first they will convince others! This whole being stuck in the 1900's blows, lets modernize this "Democracy" for the love of pie!
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
It's disturbing when technical issues become central to a wider political issue that involves everybody
It's not just technical issues.
For example, a good friend of mine is 19 and he's going into the military this month. He has taken an oath to uphold the constitution of the US. I asked him if he ever read it, he hadn't. How in the fuck are you supposed to defend a document that you don't know? Most of my countrymen have not read the Constitution, but everyone and their mother has an opinion about the rights we get from it.
When I was a kid, my best friend's father once said "They need to take that First Amendment stuff and just throw it out the window!"
I was about 10 years old and I said to him "You were a grown up back in the 70s, if it wasn't for the First Amendment, you would have never found out about Watergate. The government could do anything and then cover it up. We NEED freedom of speech."
He just stared at me with a blank expression on his face.
Unfortunately, our system doesn't require people to know ANYTHING about the issues that they have the right make decisions about.
Experts are people that for whatever reason (personal or professional) have dedicated large parts of their lives to understanding a topic. If you wanted to know about guns who would you go to? Sarah Brady or the NRA? If you wanted to know about animal rights, who would you go to? Perdue or PETA? If you want to know about finances, who do you go to? The rich guy, or the one who invests the rich guy's money?
It's quite easy to lie and mislead the general public with it, since few people have the knowledge to see through the bullshit.
It's every other issue too, man. Guns, Animal Rights, Finances, eVoting, you name it. Most people only want to know as much as they need to. Just enough to get through their days without screaming too much.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Electing federal, state, local, judicial, school board, etc. and voting on publicly proposed propositions and constitutional amendments. We have hundreds of races all on the same ballot.
Having primary elections with different ballots for different parties, with different rules on who can vote in each race across each state.
Permuting the order of candidates listed in a race to eliminate any first-listing bias.
We handle all of this easily and foreigners who simply put an X next to a party in parliamentary elections call us stupid when we don't get everything perfect all of the time. Automated ballot counting in the U.S. is a must. We don't want to wait till 2020 to learn who is on the school board and who is the 53rd district Judge.
Thanks for your comment.
The Slashdot rule : if you post an unsupported opinion (the Republicans sux0r!!! Democrats are ph@gs!!), you're modded insightful. If you post actual news reportage that shows that in fact the evidence so far suggests that the liberal Democrats (Dean, etc.) have been pretty aware of this issue, but the Republicans haven't been, you're modded Flamebait.
For Republicans who can't bear to read anything critical about their party, here's something about some Republicans who have their heads on straight, from the St. Pete Times:
While Gov. Jeb Bush reassures Floridians that touch screen voting machines are reliable, the Republican Party is sending the opposite message to some voters.
The GOP urged some Miami voters to use absentee ballots because touch screens lack a paper trail and cannot "verify your vote."
That's the same argument Democrats have made but which Bush, his elections director and Republican legislators have repeatedly rejected.
"The liberal Democrats have already begun their attacks [sic] and the new electronic voting machines do not have a paper ballot to verify your vote in case of a recount," says a glossy mailer, paid for by the Republican Party of Florida and prominently featuring two pictures of President Bush. "Make sure your vote counts. Order your absentee ballot today."
The GOP tactic is the reverse of what Bush and state elections experts have said as they have repeatedly opposed Democratic moves, in the Legislature and courts, to require a paper trail on the machines.
GOP flier questions new voting equipment
Of particular interest in the article is this quote, though, on the official Florida GOP position with regard to e-voting:
"The governor certainly does not support that message," said [Jeb] Bush spokeswoman Jill Bratina. "People need to have confidence in these machines."
So the article says. But why on earth would they program it to make up numbers, instead of it saying "ERROR MACHINE WAS NOT RESET". Why would they program it to MAKE UP RESULTS if it knows it cannot display the correct ones? Not to me a conspiracy theorist, but this almost sounds like a coverup/excuse for bad programming...