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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."
...but were those polled by e-voting machines? :)
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
ever gone to a hacker con? all those kids do is play dance dance revolution. id hardly call them experts
This merely illustrate the point that it is much easier to fool the masses.
Of course, that would change when they find out their next president is Mickey Mouse.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
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)
i.e. "Sheeple"
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Who do you is going more afraid of electronic voting ?
Hackers and the public can't even agree that "hackers" are NOT "crackers", "warez d00dz", "skript kiddiz", or any such low-life.
it's obvious that the blackhat people tampered with the results of the poll concerning the tamperability of polls
...till then they'll just argue over the hanging chads...
This would be the same "general public" that uses Gator to store their passwords and really believe that someone they know would suddenly send them a poorly formatted email message with an executable attachment of a naked Anna Kournakova? Where's the "in other news, the sky is blue and water is wet" post?
I disagree with what you say, but I'll defend your right to say it to the death - Voltaire
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.
[runs away and hides]
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
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.
Tell a lie long enough and people will take it as truth... or something like that
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
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.
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
that people are in fact SHEEPLE, and can be herded where ever, when ever by TV and the printed press...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I would think that most of the general public who support e-voting would be democrats.
Especially sad is that the companies and lobbyists who push this sort of thing can easily pay off "experts" to convince the public that their way is better.
Expert opinion is so clouded these days with money from various sources that the public has very little objective truth to trust. Educated "Experts" need to start realizing that the money they personally gain is a wealth of freedom lost by the people, and the "People" need to start realizing that anti-intellectualism is fueled by their own laziness to be skeptics.
Coz right now, our current situation is sad.
It's not necessarilly that the experts think that e-voting is secure.... rather, they probably see far more security problems with paper ballot voting than the general public does. The public perception isn't helped by the fact that most security problems with paper ballot voting probably goes undiscovered or underreported.
Any surprise?
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.
Now where are these 17 so called "experts"?!?
And what are they experts in? Solitaire? :)
SBC stands for Stupid Bell Company
AT&T stands for All Telephones Tapped
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.
Crud
:)
"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."
Misread that statement as "more or less".... for once I thought maybe somebody saw the light.
From the number it is apparent that this cluelessness can be found in both parties.
-jim
But I don't understand why the system has to be at all accessible. Granted, I know jack about these systems. But it seems that everything necessary could be placed on the hdd, have a separate system outside that validates voters.
Then process the vote on the hdd. Later the hdd's are removed from the systems by security personnel and taken under watch to a secure location where they are loaded into a database. Then the votes are tallied.
The system has no network connections to exploit, no interface ports to make use of and anytime the cover is tampered with an alarm would sound.
I don't know...that's probably just crazy talk.
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.
Meanwhile the general public thinks, "Wow, cool, the miltary can zap missles!"
So too with evoting. We here at /. are well versed in the issues. We've seen a few mainstream news stories about it recently, but mostly it's been the geeks saying, "Whoa, this is terrible stuff!" The general public thinks, "Hmm...just like an ATM, great," without thinking about the implications of no paper trail, unauthorized tampering, uh, maybe authorized tampering, and various chilling comments from CEOs of evoting companies.
The general public will catch on that Star Wars anti-missle technology doesn't yet work when the first bomb reaches their home. Oops. But the general public won't ever catch on about evoting problems unless the media publicizes it much more than they have been doing. After all, if a bomb gets through a shield, it can ruin your whole day. If an election is bought, it's 50-50 that John or Jane Q. Public wanted that candidate anyway and thinks nothing of it.
AFAIK, in the US of A, the elected administration chooses closed source methods/implementations of e-voting. That is plain madness and gives way not only to intransparent, uncheckable elections and manipulations.
Not when Diebold, a huge contributor to the Republican party, is the lead in these systems (without paper trails).
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"
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
As long as the e-voting system prints out a piece of paper to keep track of the vote e-voting will work. If no paper trail is kept problems like this will occur and more 2000 Florida debacles will occur.
I'm sure that it comes as no surprise to anyone here that the technical complexity and procedurally delicate nature of paper ballot voting is far beyond the understanding of the average DEFCON and Black Hat attendee. I can't imagine why you'd would expect otherwise. Now if you'll excuse me, I must look into getting my VCR to stop blinking 12:00'
83% of the experts said e-voting is less or much less secure against election tampering than paper ballots ...
The 17 employees of Diebold who attended DEFCON and Black Hat could not be reached for comment.
Got your attention with that? Well, so did Mr Ponemon, with his hot girl in a short pink dress walking around the con asking us if we wanted to fill out a survey.
Maybe she has a PhD in statistics. Dunno.
The latest Slashdot meme.
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.
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
Dear humans,
You are stupid.
-The computer
to me.. Why is electronic voting such a difficult thing to do securely? I don't get it.. I'd say I know abit more about security issues on such a topic than the general public and I can't see any hurrdles we simply couldn't overcome.
Just look at Diebold, they are going to create electronic voting machines but they can't even keep their ATM machines operational.
At least there will be music to play with when they crash.
Get your Unix fortune now!
This, ironically, shows why the average person should not be allowed to cast votes on most issues. It is alarming to consider that, on a referendum to adopt electronic voting, people who couldn't successfully configure an e-mail client have votes that count just as much as those of skilled computer professionals.
DieBold employees and and Florida RNC delegate members.
Why they just can't have us all raise our hands when they call out a candidate's name and count the raised hands from space is beyond me. Why make it so hard???
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Always some nice irony when someone does a poll about how the polls can be tampered with... Which do you think were more accurate, the responses that came by mail, or those which came online?
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."
d e+ quotel y/aa121 800a.htm
I've attributed it to him in the past, but it's probably not. Hooray for google leading me to the right page.
http://www.google.com/search?q=count+votes+deci
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/week
top2politicians ----------- rank title in out 1 John Kerry 126,000 100 2 George Bush 124,000 87,543
Meet new people, and kill them.
It's the implications, not the simple facts, that are urgently important. Like "83% of doctors agree that unprotected sex transmits AIDS, while 81% of the public does not". This isn't just a survey of public ignorance: that ignorance has dire implications for the election less than 3 months away.
--
make install -not war
That will all change once I.P. Freely is elected.
You're lucky to be medicated, because the risk here is not just a casual fact in a vacuum. That 83/19% difference is regarding the relative risk between electronic and paper ballots. That's a question that experts will answer accurately, even if drunken amateurs won't. If you're going to disregard the experts in their field of expertise, just quietly have another drink until the bartender cuts you off. They're always having all the fun.
--
make install -not war
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
#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.
Incidentally, the vote counting is also open to the public, if I'm not mistaken, so anyone can go and witness for themselves that the count at at least one polling station was free of shenanigans.
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
Not every place relies on an optical counting system.
In France, and I believe most European countries paper ballots are counted by hand. I you don't believe in the system, you can actually come during the counting and check up what's going on.
Even better, you can actually be a part of the counting teams.
Yeah, but at least you can see a chad. Kinda hard to take apart a DRAM and peek inside.....
What's wrong with putting an X in a little circle with a pen, I'll never understand. Sure, you need people to count the votes, but surely the US has enough people dedicated to democratic principles that they would volunteer a few hours every four years, to count ballots? It's worked in Canada for a hundred years or so...
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
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
Apparently many legislators think Americans are too dumb to count votes by hand...
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
It was the biggest split between 'experts and the public he'd ever found.
Which I take to mean that either the experts aren't doing their job teaching the public, the public isn't doing its job learning from the experts, or this whole democracy experiment is doomed and we ought to revert to a meritocracy if we really want the best government.
But we'll probably just stay with the status quo, where the public is convinced to vote to keep those currently powerful in power the next time.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain.
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?
These aren't the sigs you're looking for.
Yeah but this one is real?! +1 ironic
love is just extroverted narcissism
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
I have to put something here, because slashdot doesn't believe in (nt) meaning (no text)...
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
I'm not saying that a pen-and-paper election wouldn't work here in the US, but people should be aware that Canadian elections are different from the US, and thus ballots there are usually much simpler than US ballots.
Canadian government at both the federal and provincial levels is a parliamentary system. That means that elections happen at somewhat arbitrary times (the government can call elections whenever it wants, within certain parameters), and that provincial and federal elections don't necessarily coincide. When a Canadian votes, s/he votes for his/her local MP, and the MPs then vote for Prime Minister. Thus, on election day, a Canadian often has only a single thing to vote on: the local MP (or, if it's a provincial election, the local MLA). This makes for a simple ballot.
in the US, almost all general elections for the year fall on the same day each year. Thus, in 2004 every American will face a ballot that has, at minimum, choices for both president and member of the House of Representatives. Around 2/3 of the states will also have a Senatorial race on the ballot. Almost everyone will also have to vote for state legislators, and a number of state governors will also be up, along with various mayors, city counicpersons, county executives and so on.
This means that US ballots are MUCH more complicated, and thus harder to tally in the pen-and-paper way. It also means that, unlike in Canada, a uniform, nationwide ballot is impossible.
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.
is pretty obvious. Easy tampering with election results, in a way that's very inconspicuous and less susceptible to suspicion (people believe it's much safer than paper). It doesn't even have to be similar to the communist-ran elections in the late 40s/early 50s - when the communist parties were made victors without even passing the electoral threshold - these days you can influence the outcome of an election by mingling with one-digit percentages (which are generally within the error margins of polls).
The Raven
Question 2: Which NFL division is most likely to win the all star game?
I would think the Pokemon Institute would favor some sort of "card-based" voting system.
Reading Slashdot is ruining my spelling and grammar.
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."
Windows of course Google cache
Get your Unix fortune now!
It's just a glorified counter!
Not e-voting per se, but the roll-up of results from different regions of Russia is fully electronic. The elections are now not much more than a silly farce there. Whoever controls the KGB (aka FSB) and central elections commission (Centerizbirkom) wins the elections. :0) That, plus full control over media (which US government also has, but not to such a degree) and you have a perfect combination for "controlled democracy".
I'm actually looking forward to e-voting. I'm sick of the crappy, ancient lever machines they use here for voting. I feel like I'm in the 19th century when I'm using them. I think we'll eventually get the e-voting security stuff worked out and it can't come too soon.
Jim Lynch
Tech Analyst and Community Manager
Here in Brazil we have eletronic vote for a decade now, and it seems to me that the situation is the inverse: the general public is skeptical, but most techs find it trustful.
Yes, your broadband connection is valuable to a spammer or DDoS'er, but how valuable? According to this article you could rent a botnet of tens of thousands of computers for $100/hour. So one owned zombie by itself is worth maybe $.01/hour. Not very valuable compared stealing a presidential election. That could be done by tampering with as little as a few thousand votes in a swing state with many electoral votes.
It wouldn't, of course.
People don't choose not to vote because it's difficult, they choose not to vote because they perceive that their vote doesn't count. And in a first past the post system like the US and the UK, they are correct, most of the votes are irrelevant, the only ones which really count are those in marginal seats.
The true solution to the turnout problem is to introduce a voting system where every vote really does count equally. That means proportional representation.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Who said ( in the absence of audit ) that it was written "correctly" in the first place?
if( vote for party 1 )
p1++;
else if( vote for party 2 )
if( ( current_time mod 2 ) == 0 )
p2++;
else
p1++;
How would you know?
emt 377 emt 4
Surely they don't believe e-voting is safe? If so they must believe traditional voting systems are just as or more unsafe. Why?
The biggest difference between classical voting and voting engines is the level of trust.
With classical voting, your trust your eyes or eyes of an idependent person. You vote, sit in the voting hall, watch that nobody tampers with the box, and wait until the votes are counted (and ensure that they are counted correctly).
Try this with voting engines! If you cannot verify that they are counting correct, do you trust it?
And why have voting machines at all? To have the statistics two hours earlier? To help the disabled? To have less expensive polls (why should that be the case?)?
Unless somebody gives a good reason why voting machines are better than the traditional paper voting, I am against it.
Voter turn out in the US averages about 50% on leap years (Presidential election years), and maybe 35% otherwise. So how many people polled really matter?
Technically speaking if they don't vote, then their knowing or not knowing how voting works doesn't make a difference.
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.
I think it is following the myth that computers don't make mistakes.
In this more modern age when the majority of the population has regular exposer to computers in one way or another (Home, Office, or at least ATMs) that they would know better. Especially when most of them use MS products.
Maybe they assume that the software used in the electronic voting machines will be better than what they use at home?
I wonder how much of the general population realizes that these machines are running Windows XP?
This isn't just a matter of deliberate voter fraud, what about machines crashing? What percentage of voting machines can we expect to crash and lose all their data?
I wonder if we could trick MS and Diebold to start using the slogan: "Diebold Voting Machines: Because you want the reliability that you've come to expect from Microsoft."
Nobody died when Nixon lied.
I'm meeting you half way you stupid hippies!
Is why elections officials are so adamantly opposed to a paper trail?
Never mind that!
Come look at the shiny new touch screen voting machine.
Isn't technology cool?
It will solve all our problems.
Did you have a question?
Nobody died when Nixon lied.
I'm meeting you half way you stupid hippies!
News/Press has the freedom to not report, not keep the public informed, betray the US Constitution and the US public. Just another failure in freedoms' safeguards. If the public is at 19%, then I feel 100% sure the next President of the USA will be GWBush and that is what global special interest and the USA corporate news media wants for US. Well it could be John-JohnFK, still the same USA condition. Who gets elected has already been detemined (if it is really 19%).
... OldHawk777
HAVE A NMFD
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Understood. I was attempting to reinforce the argument in that a re-write of the data is not needed. The machine could miscount from the very start, and there is no way to know outside of extensive code audits and security ensureing that the binary on the machine matches the code reviewed, OR as you suggest, having the machine print the ballot.
I like the print the ballot option, the issues about intent ( hanging chads ) and such are taken care of, the voter could verify that their intent was correctly captured, and the printing could be OCR'able for quick machine counting, then hand counted in the case of wanting to verify, spot check, or recount.
emt 377 emt 4
You know what would be funny as hell?
If one state had a legislative vote that sent its electors directly, rather than having a popular vote at all!
Some states do not have any strong law that there be any election, others have it in their constitutions.
I think it would be just funny as hell if it turned out that a legislature can send the electors directly, and if they did, it was 100% legal, etc.
People might pay more attention to the local politicians they elect, if the national government was directly elected among the legislators of the several states!
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Was I the only person who read this as "The Pokémon institute surveyed..." at first?
Oper on the Nightstar
Based on this evidence: The 2000 election caused a fuckload (excuse my french) of problems for the democratic party. 90%+ (opinion) of the general population don't know anything about technology and don't care either. This translates into a general democratic population, who feels they were robbed of an election (they weren't), and who don't know anything about technology (so they assume it's all safe). Therefore, I believe that most democrats who don't know much about the technology (read: most democrates) would be in favor of electronic voting since it would theoretically improve their chances of another 2000 not happening. Got it?
If people could vote from the comfort of their own computers, there would be a lot more people voting. Those votes would represent a broader cross-section of the population. Hackers are lazy. We all see the problems with e-voting, and want to take the easy road (paper and pens).
The truth is, electronic voting could be more secure than ten witnesses and a secretary counting paper ballots. It's our job as hackers to solve the problem to encourage a better democracy.
Is anybody up to the challenge?
MakePassword.com Mp3 Blog
...Don't look now, but I think you wrote it!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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
That's not evidence. That's rampant speculation.
Republicans have the same issues as democrats. Even if the resolution last time helped Republicans (by tossing out votes for the leading Democrat), it still was both scary and controversial. Say what you will about evoting, but it doesn't allow for 2000 to happen. No paper trail means no recounts and thus no hanging chad issues.
The 83% number alone pretty much precludes there being a big margin between democrats and republicans. Apparently a majority of each think that evoting is safe.
Who would expect experts to know more about a subject than the general public?
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
Actually its a lot harder to hack into. I have been to the DieBolt, the maker of Some of the Evoting machines, I know the machines. It basically works the same way NSA keeps machines offline and manually have to transfer files.
SimonTek
And that is the very reason why they should question it in the first place, for God's sake! Anyone who is even remotely intelligent would never agree to use a voting method which she does not understand, or otherwise she does not deserve suffrage (or even the right to live in democracy, for that matter).
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
and its own ballot colour. That is what we do in Denmark. Of course wandering between rooms could get tedious, so it would probably not work for more than 4 or 5 elections. Is that common?
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
In other words, you're assuming that because most Democrats feel they were robbed of an election, they'd assume that electronic voting would be a MORE secure way of voting, rather than a LESS secure one. The problem with that is that most Democrats who have heard anything about electronic voting associate it with 1. the Diebold president's promise to deliver Ohio to the Republicans, which proves he's a Republican and in context suggests (falsely, of course) a rather sinister potential mechanism for doing so, and 2. the fact that the number one proponent of electronic voting seems to be Jeb Bush, who promised to do everything he could to deliver Florida in the last election (again, false sinister connotations; I doubt that the Republican activitists repsonsible for the irregularities with the voting rolls and with closed roads, etc. on Election Day 2000 in north Florida were acting under direction from Jeb Bush) and seems to have succeeded. So I provided you with some print evidence from a non-partisan news source (well, partisan with regards to voting machines, true, but to my knowledge neither Republican nor Democratic) that in fact Democrats tend to have mixed feelings about electronic voting - on the one hand Kerry naively seems to think that some kind of encryption can resolve the issues, on the other hand, many Democrats as I have just pointed out are suspicious because they see much of the motive force behind electronic voting coming from Republicans, whom they don't trust with their elections. On balance, it looks as though most Democrats are against it.
So my point is that your assumptions are wrong, the reports in the press suggest that the main perception is that as classes Democrats are anti-electronic-voting and Republicans are pro-electronic-voting. Such perceptions tend to be self-fulfilling, of course: if a Democrat hears that a Republican is for something, often he will take a position against it without thought, and vice-versa. With regard to the actual party leadership, though, the perception is wrong, or at least over-simplified: as an example, in Texas, at least, despite the (Republican?) Secretary of State's myopia, BOTH party platforms hold the sensible position that electronic voting machines must provide paper trails.
And I'm still short of sleep, and it's still sixteen years since I was actually in that class, so anyone who mods me insightful at this point deserves to have their mod points taken away. Is their a statistician in the house?
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Plebiscites / referenda are pretty rare here, and when they do happen it's a big deal - usually not something that can wait until next time there's an election coming up.
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
The actual question was: "Based on what you know today about e-voting systems, how would you compare e-voting to traditional paper ballot machines in terms of accurately recording and reporting your vote?" I just shortened it to "paper ballots" here because, well, I was trying to cut down on words for the short space available for postings here. But the link to the full story was available for anyone who wanted to see the details.