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."

Comments

Imagine that.

[2names]

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

Re:Imagine that.

[lazyl]

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.

Re:Imagine that.

[Phisbut]

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.

Re:Imagine that.

[abb3w]

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

Interesting.....

[boschmorden]

...but were those polled by e-voting machines? :)

I have said it before, and I will say it again

[YankeeInExile]

Electronic Voting is a solution in search of a problem.

Why this fetish for applying complicating technology to simple problems?

The point is...

[Decameron81]

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.

That's why they call it the 31337...

[CharAznable]

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.

I have a feeling...

[odano]

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

no fair

[pizza_milkshake]

it's obvious that the blackhat people tampered with the results of the poll concerning the tamperability of polls

A Survey at DEFCON about HACKING???

[Lord Grey]

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.

Black Box Voting

[james_in_denver]

It is amazing how trusting (or maybe it's just ignorant) the population is as regards e-voting.

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.

The thing I don't get

[dg41]

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.

Technology as utopia

[sgarrity]

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.

P2P voting

[revery]

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.

Accessible Voting

[Bondolo]

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)