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E-Voting Problems Are Mostly User Error, Says ITAA
grcumb writes "InfoWorld is carrying a story today which mentions a press kit being distributed by the Information Technology Association of America. Its purpose? To 'help journalists put election equipment-related snafus in context.' Most e-voting problems, they insist, are [l]user issues, where people who don't know how to deal with the new technology cause delays as they seek assistance. They don't seem to feel the need for journalists to understand basic system design issues (like making sure your computer and human processes work), why testing didn't identify these problems, nor why this is better than paper ballots."
These people need to learn some lessons in human relations. I am sure they have some valid points to be made, however, the way they went about it was condescending and insulting to the journalists. I mean, really, I cannot imagine telling journalists that I am going to "help journalists put election equipment-related snafus in context." Journalists feel that it is their job to collect info and put things into context themselves. The ITAA shot themselves in the foot.
http://www.busyweather.com/
this is the ITAA? Aren't they supposed to advocate GOOD software design? Guess what, if the user is making errors, then it's the problem of the software maker. Obviously they didn't design their interface right, obviously they didn't write their instructions well enough etc. The user isn't supposed to have to study a user's manual before voting.
Come on, this "blame the user" bs is getting really old. Appearently corporations are allowed to be totally incompetent with their own products, but it's always the users fault if they don't know how to use them......
Monstar L
A fundamental design feature of any voting system must be that the expected "user error" rate must be well, well below the expected vote differential otherwise the system fails in its primary task of capturing the wishes of the voters.
User error can be engineered away. Not by "genius" engineers sitting in some back room coming up with better UIs, but "average" engineers with clipboards field testing the system, watching where users make mistakes, and adjusting the system to compensate.
While it's fun to bash Diebold and everything, I can see how most of the issues are user problems. I worked as a cashier in a grocery store for years and if I had a nickel for everytime someone got confused on how to use the credit/debit card machine at the register, I'd be a millionaire. People didn't know which way to swipe the freaking card, they hit 'cancel' instead of 'OK', etc. They screwed up in ways I didn't even think were possible. So it comes as no suprise that user error is largely to blame for e-voting mishaps.
I think with any new technology there is a certain level of justifiable distrust, but sooner or later we all need to move on.
We all need to move on to a system where no paper trail is kept? Oh for Christ's sake you're a fool and a root cause for your nation's democratic demise! What is so hard with putting a mark in a circle on a piece of paper and have it either counted by hand or fed into a scanner?
I have yet to see any benefit from the electronic voting process besides profit for the people who sell them and a chance for the news to wrap up it's election coverage by 11pm (and look what ended up last time they tried that).
People like you need some real perspective. The voting period in India was a month long. In Afghanistan they didn't even start counting the ballots until days after it was over, and in Canada people still vote with a paper and pencil, and it is no more complicated than putting an X in the correct circle. Whether it is hand counted or run through a machine at least there's something available to audit if a recount is necessary, and rarely do pencils or paper break down and when they do it takes a hell of a lot less time and money to get them working again.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
...we do our voting by putting one piece of paper (a list, actually, as we do not vote for individuals) (we have a king, yes) in an envelope the people at the polling station give you. Then you put the envelope in a box. Then you leave.
By the way, the people at the polling stations are chosen from the different political parties.
Then the boxes are sealed and sent to a counting station (sometimes the same place as the polling station, sometimes somewhere else). There, the votes are put in stacks and counted.
And you know what? It seems to *gasp* work! Revolutionary system, huh?
Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you
Take a look here:
http://www.itaa.org/about/members.cfm
Diebold is one of their member companies. This group is just shilling for the e-voting machine manufacturers.
People should be marching on their state capitols demanding that the current e-voting machines be replaced with verifiable voting methods such as paper ballots until such time as everyone can be satisfied that the e-voting machines are fair and reliable. (Which probably means when they produce a clear paper trail.)
The foundation of our system of government is put at risk by sloppy or malicious coding and we all sit at home and go about our lives as if nothing is truely at risk. The degree of apathy that has been shown on this issue is astonishing.
Avi Rubin, the leading authority on e-voting, gave a great interview in the recent Dr. Dobbs Journel. I think what he says is something that every voter should hear. (His writings on e-voting are here.) The problem is not whether or not a certain political party or company has rigged these machines to fix the election, it's that the very design and nature of these machines makes it possible to do so in a way that is undetectable.
Up until now, if you wanted to steal an election, you had to coordinate the work of a large number of people in across a large number of states unless you could blame it all on a bunch of people voting incorrectly in one county in Florida. Now, you could subtley alter the programming of these machines and shift a small percentage of the results produced by each one. It would be almost impossible to detect.
It's not just the presidential race that is affected, its all the races. Think of the money that is controlled by these politicians and the incentives available to people who want to make sure they get the "right" political climate in the future. If this type of cheating doesn't happen this election, it will happen in another, and soon.
The only way to make sure that these machines can be trusted is to:
They say we get the government we deserve. If we don't raise hell with out state governments and election boards over the use of these machines, you can be certain of it.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
...do Journalists deserve respect? And since when do Journalists get tech subjects correct with out their hands being held?
"Journalism" these days (and perhaps always?) is a whole lot of sensationalism. Most news comes from a limited group of sources anyway, so its not like Journalists are doing all that much collecting of information. It's a phenomenon that's hard to see when you pick up your local paper (unless you pick up 10 papers a day, you don't realize that every paper has the same news articles from the AP or Knight Ridder), but the same principle is painfully obvious in the "blogosphere". Someone has a story, then the next day, everyone has the story (copied form the first blog).
"Nobody writes jokes in base 13." - Douglas Adams
In the UK, we have hand-counted paper ballots. We have had them since we started having elections. It is a system that everybody can understand, and it's evolved over the years to be surprisingly robust.
Each ballot slip is placed whole into the box. So it's verifiable if necessary, by re-counting. The fact of your voting is recorded, but in such a way as not to be able to link your name to a particular ballot paper. In case the ballot slips are secretly marked or anything like that, you can pick your own if you feel sufficiently paranoid {you aren't forced to accept the one the presiding officer gives you}; so it's secret.
Each polling station takes votes from an area no bigger than the volunteers working there could comfortably count by hand all the votes from. So it's scalable -- if you have more voters, you just add more polling stations. It's also quick -- in each polling station, there are only a few thousand votes to count. All this is going on in parallel, results are initially telephoned through and then the ballot papers are sealed back up in case they need to be re-counted.
The numbers involved mean that to "buy" an election, you would have to pay off a lot of people. So it's actually quite tamper-proof. And if any shenanigans are suspected, a recount can be ordered -- or, in the worst case the ballot repeated -- in just the known affected polling stations.
It is not clear to me how this system could be improved on without introducing new failure modes. Any kind of vote-counting machine is susceptible to tampering. Even if it is absolutely open to public scrutiny for the days when it is not being used for an election, there are stunts that could be pulled on the day. And even if the machine is verified by a hand-count, it will still takes the same number of people to hand-count the ballots after the machine is done, so what have you saved?
If you're going to rely on human honesty, it's best to distribute that reliance as widely as possible, i.e. to trust several thousand people to be just a little bit honest rather than trust a few people or just one person to be very honest indeed. After all, the majority of human beings are generally honest, and more so when the stakes are low. What benefit is there to dishonesty in counting a few thousand votes among tens of millions? On the other hand, if you are the managing director of the company that makes the only officially-approved voting machines, you effectively have every election in your hands -- and that is where the benefits of being dishonest do start to show.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Sounds like your run-of-the-mill OSS tech support, if you ask me. Why is it OK to blame "idiot users" when they have problems with complicated OSS, but unacceptable to blame them for not knowing how to use a TOUCH SCREEN?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Elections are run at the county level. The ONLY roll that the state government has is in certifying the results or picking the winner if no results come from the counties.
The infamous "butterfly ballot" was designed by a Democrat. All the counties that Gore requested recounts in were run by Democrats.
The "felon roll" was a list created by the state but it was up to the individual counties to decide what to do with the list. Many counties (including Broward and Dade IIRC) simply ignored the list. Others utilized various procedures to vet the names provided to them before purging their roles. It is estimated that there were still many thousands of illegal votes placed by felons in the 2000 election in Florida.
But hey, continue living in your "Bush stole the elction" cocoon. The facts are far too challenging.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Have you ever worked with poll workers?
I have worked with poll workers. I am a poll worker. I'm probably the youngest one in the state of New York (in my 20s). Well maybe not -- but I am the youngest one in my county by far (I guessimated the next youngest in her 50s at the class we had to take).
My point was that a statement like "clueless poll workers" is not helpful. Undertrained and overworked yes... but clueless? That's insulting and demeaning towards people that selflessly devote their time for the betterment of our country.
I would like to see the authors of that report try to be a poll worker. Deal with the people that don't understand what a Primary Election is (why can't I vote for the Democrat?). Deal with people that insist that they have the right to vote at your place even though the street finder (using the address they provided) shows them at another station. Deal with the rush of dozens of people that come in when the polls first open or right before they close. Deal with the guy with enough booze on his breath to ignite that calls you a "fucking dimwitted asshole" because you can't find his name right away because he slurred his speech and has no idea what his own last name is. Stay at the polls for an hour past closing trying to get through to phone in your results (beep... beep... beep...). Then talk to me about "clueless poll workers".
It's ashame that more people don't volunteer. What are you doing on November 2nd?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.