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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."
The ones that says "click 'yes' if you are (insert deaming phrase here)" and as you move your mouse to click the no, it turns into a yes...
In seriousness, why don't they just put the canidates faces on the ballot? Or graphic representations of thereof?
Of course previous voters might take liberties with a sharpee pen on the voting screen.
User error? But the voters are the users - if the voter cannot use the system, then the system should not be used! It's not enough to just sit smugly and say "well, it was a user error", if you've already anticipated that as a problem.
If the users - the voters - will not be able to use the system, then ditch the system for something they can use. Surely that was the whole point behind ditching the punch card system? What's the point in ditching one system for another that the voters still can't use?!
The ways of gods are mysteriously indistinguishable from chance.
The better web designers do user testing. Industrial designers do user testing. Marketing gurus do user testing. You'd think an issue as important as, oh I don't know...choosing the leader of one of the most powerful nations in the world would involve user testing. Sad...very sad.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
This is a known limitation. The high-level process of recording votes is very simple: present a list of options, record the ones selected. Under the cover a lot of other things need to happen (security, communication, etc) but the part exposed to the workers should be painfully simple, and as close to idiot-proof as possible.
I'm talking about the connections all being large, brightly color-coded and distinctly shaped. Better yet, bundle all the wires required into a single cable, and have a single yellow plug which goes in the back, and securely locks in.
When designing a UI, take the dumbest user you can imagine, then imagine them drunk. If this user can't make the machine work, it's not ready for the general public.
The technology industry group, which is a staunch supporter of electronic voting technology, made that argument in a document that was distributed to "help journalists put election equipment-related snafus in context."
So this is standard practice in this day and age. Diffuse focus away from the real issue.
By now any advocate with money tries to cloak their position in an "infotainment" package that is ready-made, not requiring any expensive or embarrassing reporter leg-work to dig out all the details of an issue like ACM's position on e-voting, and is sure not to upset any sponsors of the media-outlet.
The unfortunate fact is that U.S. Constitutional protections against government suppression of free speech are insufficient to prevent the development of a lapdog press that relies on money and ratings.
There is absolutely no reason why the press must be factual, truthful, unbiased, complete, or even relevent to the issues of the day.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
We have electronic ATMs. Do we need them? No, bank tellers were fine. We can buy the latest bestseller from Amazon, but we *could* still get it from the local bookstore. I can make an online flight reservation, but in your world I should just call the ticket agent instead.
FWIW, I never said anything about not having a paper trail. I understand [some] voting machines have the ability for a receipt.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
----->>>>
Election Technology Council - ETC
The ETC is a coalition of companies dedicated to the development, delivery and support of electronic voting solutions to the American electorate.
Visit http://www.electiontech.org for more information.
----->>>>
On the about ETC page:
Council Members
Advanced Voting Solutions (AVS)
Diebold Election Systems
Election Systems & Software (ES&S)
Hart InterCivic
Perfect Voting System
Sequioa Voting Systems
Unilect
VoteHere, Inc
----->>>>
'nuff said
well I guess it depends on which side of the fence you sit. *Imagine* that you are a member of political-industrial family and you have acquired power. Now you see the opportunity to bring e-voting in to the mainstream. One of daddy's buddies makes machines to do this and well.. yeah he could bugger the tally a bit in a software glitch, if given the exclusive contract to make the machines and is awarded a patent or two... nothing dear old dad can't arrange... so how a bout it eh? no more bugsome voters and you can smile and make jokes throughout the campaign! You'll look better than ever! Really, any voting machines should be public property and the software either open source or at least public domain. Checksums and double entry score keeping should be mandatory. The law for hand counting states three people need to tally a vote so should a computer keep multiple registers and have a failover....
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
FWIW, I never said anything about not having a paper trail. I understand [some] voting machines have the ability for a receipt.
I was watching some news show this morning and they were showing off the electronic touch screen voting machines. they said that a third of the voters will be using machines like those and that in florida many of the old methods were replaced with these.
they then explained that they have paper print outs that are readable by the voter, some even behind a piece of glass so they could not be tampered with.
seemed like slashdot was getting all upset about nothing, those machines actually looked somewhat decent and accountable.
but then then right at the end they stuck in that these are all the Next Generation voting machines and would not be in place for several years.
I can see how most of the issues are user problems [... on credit/debit card machines at grocery stores, customers...] hit 'cancel' instead of 'OK', etc
That's because most debit card machines at grocery stores are deliberately designed to confuse the user into using their card in a way that costs the grocery store less. I started noticing this recently... in the past couple of years... and it started happening first in new machines but gradually older systems have been reprogrammed with the same scheme.
The motivation is obvious: If you use your "credit/debit" card as a credit card, the grocery store pays a credit card fee, you pay the amount on the ticket. If you use your "credit/debit" card as a debit card, the grocery store pays less (if anything), but you pay a transaction fee that can be over $3.00 in some cases.
So, to use it as a credit card: about half have a "credit" or "debit" button you can hit before swiping, so you select "credit" if it's there. Either way, you swipe, then it asks you for a PIN. If you enter the PIN it switches to debit mode, so you have to hit "cancel" at this point. Then it asks you to select "credit" or "debit". Sometimes it asks you to hit "credit/debit" then "credit", if there are other choices (like check-cashing cards). Then, it asks you if the amount is OK. This time you hit "OK" and it goes on to complete the transaction.
I'm not exaggerating, here. Almost every machine does this, and at least half make you go through all these steps.
So, I would NOT classify the problems you're seeing as user error. They're the result of customers being systematically trained to hit "CANCEL" as a necessary part of the transaction. This is a user interface design problem.
And that's just the deliberate design problem... sometimes there are actual bugs in the user interface as well.
For example, the machines at Home Depot in Houston are not all that agressive about the credit/debit card thing, but they will sometimes briefly switch to a screen asking you to swipe your card or hit cancel before bringing up the signature box: this appears to be a programming error, but it looks like there's a problem with the transaction and the first time it happened I hit "CANCEL" at that point, just in case... because I'd gotten charged twice at a pharmacy when it did something similar.
I'm a computer professional: I've been programming computers regularly for over 30 years, using everything from paper tape and punch cards to experimental OpenGL-based 3d user interfaces. I'm not a naive user who isn't used to a variety of user interfaces. Yet I have occasionally hit "CANCEL" at the wrong time. I'm not at all surprised that some people are regularly baffled by grocery store card readers. And these are MUCH simpler than voting machines.
I don't know who this ITAA is, but if they're telling people that voting machine problems are "user error" I wouldn't trust their judgement further than I could spit a Diebold executive.
While voting machines have the ABILITY for a receipt, the state of Florida has not REQUIRED manufacturers to produce receipts for the votes. Instead, they chose to CHANGE STATE LAW that required the ability to perform a recount. And you believe that this is a benign change?
Voting is not about convenience. It's not a commercial endeavor. It's the way that we are supposed to be able to select our government. The overwhelming motivations should be accuracy and security. Throwing millions of dollars at proprietary systems that have demonstrated numerous flaws is more than foolish; it's dangerous.
My home country Germany still has simple sheets of paper which have instructions on how many votes you have and where you just check one of the large boxes next to the names/partys. I have to admit that it's low tech, but it does not have the error rates of punching cards or deploying an electronic system that is vulnerable to simple attacks.
Now I understand that Germany is about the size of North Dakota (world population rank 15 whereas the U.S. are rank 4 CIA World Fact Book Link) but we have the first preliminary results after 6 p.m. when the voting offices close and the final results on the next day. If enough people help counting, I would imagine this to be possible in the US too. At least until they figure out a somewhat secure way of e-voting.
Of course I have no idea how many volunteers they have to help in the voting process...
Well, no one (or very few) will read this now, I know that. But I must say that if this machines are hard to use, assemble and whatever this is tha fault of whoever design them.
Brasil have eletronic voting in a national scale for some years now. Here we have mandatory voting, this means that every Brasilian must vote or at least justify (if you're away for instance). This includes a large portion of the population that is iliterate.
This means that in a federal election, like the last one that elected Lula in 2002, we have eletronic voting machines installed in places in the middle of the amazon jungle, that can only be reached by "donkeys", and those machines are sometimes installed and operated by people who are not intimate with any tecnology at all, and the voters sometimes can't even read.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Ok I admit I don't know a lot about voting systems around the world, but the one we have in Norway seems to me to be less error prone than punching holes in a card.
Here we have one card per party. Each card has the name of the party clearly marked on the top, and the names of the candidates for that party. If you're "pro" you can give additional votes to certain candidates and such (doing this wrong can easily invalidate your vote), but for a plain vote, take the card and put it into the envelope. Only way to screw up is to put multiple cards into the envelope.
These cards also have bar codes on them, which allows them to be machine read.
Of course this can only add to the image that most people already have of geeks being condescending towards anybody that doesn't understand what they are doing. The actual article linked from Infoworld only adds to this image.
Bullshit. This is somebody trying to shift blame away from themselves. The fact is, these poll machines are woefully inadequate and crap is flying. This e-voting crap just isn't going to work.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
thats actually the point i was trying to make. most "Journalists" are just parrots. They don't actually go out and colelct data, they just repeat what other "journalists" are saying.
"Nobody writes jokes in base 13." - Douglas Adams
I was listening to Bev Harris of blackboxvoting.org on the radio last night. Disclaimer, this is anecdotal, going on memory here, but it's the gist of it. She was saying that they ran an inquiry to the county level of all the counties in florida and ohio,because they are important swing states, to ask them a simple question. The precincts send their results to a central place someplace in the county where one machine tabulates all the precinct reports, then it moves upstream. They asked these officials if they had a record of who had keys for the room that THAT machine was in, over 90% said they didn't have it, and weren't sure who had keys. These machines are the "central tabulators" using GEMS and I believe slashdot covered the story on how easy it was to hack them babies with a two digit password access.
So not only are those machines easy to change the results in, but it's apparently easy for unknown parties to get access to the machines themselves!
I just looked, so here's a paste from her site about the problem in general with following the vote tabulation trail:
"Another subtle change:
It used to be that access to voting systems was granted only to certified and sworn elections officials, whose names we knew and who were accountable directly to us. Nowadays, such access is typically also granted to unsworn and undisclosed county computer techs, employees of vendors, and even temporary workers hired off the Internet by subcontractors of the vendor. These individuals are not only not sworn election officials, but often aren't even from the state where the election is held. They do their thing and then fade away, sometimes carrying data or disks from the election with them."
FWIW
I'm currently volunteering with the Kerry campaign in Brevard Co, FL (home to Cape Canaveral and KSC). In this county we have optical-scan ballots.
The last two days, I've spent about five-plus hours as a poll watcher. In this office, they use the same ballots for the early voting as they do for the absentee ballots. All of them are pre-folded - three or four folds.
About every 10 minutes or so, one of the folks in the office has to clear a paper jam. The ballot is counted...but then hangs up trying to go into the receiving box (the whole unit's the size of a 55 gal. drum, except plastic and with a square cross-section).
Unfolded ballots drop...but the manufacturer obviously DID NOT CONSIDER folded ballots at all. A cheap scanner or print that I bought that jammed that often would be returned for another brand within days.
Oh, and just to make me even more confident, I called the Supervisor of Elections a few weeks ago, and found out that the software that tabulates the votes is from everyone's favorite, non-buggy, no-back-doors maker, Diebold.
Wannaful, wannaful.
mark
I know that the majority of Slashdot thinks e-voting machines are evil, but give me a break. Do you have any idea how stupid the average person is? Have you ever walked your computer illiterate mother through clicking on "Start, Settings, Control Panel"? It takes 20 minutes just to do that! Who would think they could handle using a computer to vote any better?
Feel free to mod me down for this opinion, but I'm not sure if you should be voting if you're one of the 1% of people that just can't figure out how to do it. I mean, there are even people who couldn't properly hole-punch a card in the last election! How about people that accidently voted for the wrong name? People that voted for two different people? And these are on paper ballots! What hope do these people have of being able to vote through any mechanism? And should we care if they can't?
I'm a big tall mofo.
My mother worked in the last Canadian election as Returning officer. She basically ran a district in an election. She was in charge of making sure everyone was trained, renting the offices, highering the accountant, getting signs printed, etc etc etc.
I was in her office a couple of times and you would be suprised on the signs they have posted everywhere. It's like "Elections for dummies" in there. Everywhere you see a sign that tells you how to do your job. "If this happens, do a b and c. If this happens do x y and z".
I will not be suprised if these electronic voting systems come with big ass signs that say. "If machine is not on, make sure it is plugged in the wall. If machine is not on, and it's plugged in the wall. Please check that the socket has power."
The main thing that I noticed is that most people's job at an election office has been so simplified and so documented as to what to do that almost any person can do that job, regardless of personal intellect. If you can read and write, then you're qualified.
While I do admit that this doesn't help the geeks reputation of trying to be all high and mighty. They won't be the first people to assume that the people running an election are morons.
-Derek
Treat me like a marketing stat, and I'll treat your movie like a series of ones and zeros
You might be interested in reading Bob Edwards' book on Edward R. Murrow and the origins of broadcast jounalism; I just finished it, and it's quite interesting. I gather from it that quality journalism has always been somewhat the exception, less so in the early days than now, and has suffered enormously from corporate profit motives in broadcasting (ownership of broadcast networks by non-broadcasters, elimination of the FCC's Fairness Doctrine, corporate treatment of news organizations as profit centers, and massive media ownership consolidation).
I'm afraid we have many fewer "journalists" today than "people who pretend to be journalists on TV and radio but aren't really."
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
The bigger issue is that in presidential elections in the past, it's generally a landslide, so having ~5% of the votes going uncounted for technical reasons (i.e. voter stupidity) really didn't impact the election. So your point is that because the reason that people had problems with the butterfly ballots was their own stupidity that it wasn't a big deal? Perhaps we should add a mini IQ test to the ballot, that would really screen out the stupid people. Like it or not, stupid people have a right to vote and a ballot that is confusing or convoluted enough to elminate ~5% of the electorate IS a "big deal". Yes, with any voting system, there will always be some idiots who will mess it up. But the number should be south of 1%.
I sent this to Bartlett Cleland, the VP of Public Policy at ITAA. I suggest others do the same. His e-mail address is bcleland@itaa.org.
- - - - -
Mr. Cleland,
Please excuse me if you are not the ITAA staffer responsible for the e-Voting segment, and please forward this to the appropriate person.
Also, let me state at the outset that I am an IBM employee, not an IBM spokesman. My opinions are my own, though my position at IBM assures that they are informed.
I read an InfoWorld article this morning that discusses the press kit you're distributing and I'm writing to tell you that I, and virtually everyone else in the industry you purport to represent, is appalled by the stance you're taking. You are doing a disservice both to the industry and to the country as a whole.
Your press kit tells the world, first, that the IT industry is incompetent. You're saying that we are incapable of making electronic voting equipment that is properly designed for the task, and that we have to resort to blaming the users for not knowing how to use the systems, rather than performing proper requirements analyses and user testing to assure that such a crucial system -- a system designed to be used by volunteers without formal computer education -- will in fact function as designed.
I understand that the makers of the current crop of voting machines have botched the job in virtually every way imaginable, but if you want to support the IT industry you should properly be calling for them to use the appropriate tools to fix the problem, and to get assistance from others where needed, not working to convince the world that all of the IT industry is as incompetent as these few companies.
Even more seriously, though, your press kit will lead journalists to believe and report that the IT industry in general is in favor of e-voting when nothing could be further from the truth. Outside of the small handful of companies currently in the business of making voting machines, IT engineers are nigh-universally opposed to purely electronic voting. Moreover, if there is anyone at all in the IT security industry who thinks it's a good idea, they haven't spoken out. The senior IT professionals who have the deepest understanding of how one would go about creating a secure, trustworthy electronic voting system say, unanimously, that it cannot be done.
Papering over the failures of the current crop of voting machines paints the IT industry as incompetent, and supporting purely electronic voting, in the face of expert opinion that it cannot be done securely, damages both the industry and the nation. Please stop. Instead, you should be pointing out that more responsible portions of the industry are pushing for the creation of voting machines that produce paper ballots, are designed to be foolproof and are adequately tested both for security and usability prior to deployment.
Thank you,
Shawn
--
Shawn E. Willden
Senior I/T Security Architect
IBM Global Services, Global Smart Card Solutions
[ e-mail and phone elided to avoid massive spam ]
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
speaking as a budding interface designer... it's never the users' fault. never. you just didn't design the interface right. even if your users are "abnormal" (blind, deaf, color blind, short), well, you still didn't account for them. users are never "too dumb" or "non-technical," they're just naive and you didn't prepare them enough.
"it's the interface, stupid."
ok, ok, maybe this helpful journalistic organization is thinking like a programmer. in which case it's always the user's fault, never the program's.
- emilio
neurostyle dot net - it's all in your head
--I see a "press release" like this, it makes me wonder. I'm an old timey government corruption rabble rouser, been a hobby of mine for decades. I will fully admit I am a cynic and a skeptic by default on this sort of thing. Call it busted too much FUD in the past to take these things at face value. The expression is "smell a rat" and over and over and over and over again it always seems to be pointing to the same rat herd... onward, see if I am correct....
:
So I run a whois on itaa.org, right off the bat I get a personal DINGDINGDING BS BS CHECK FOR FUD AND LINKAGES TO THE SUSPICIOUS RATHERD alert because it's arlington virgina. Now that is just a city in the US, "so what?" sez anyone, well, it's "so what?" to me because so many times in the past I see this area come up, over and over again with various shenaningans with the ratherd, it's because it's retired and now consulting or still active or sheepdipped spook central, that's why "so what?" to me. Them boys got nothing better to do then to get their fingers in every smelly rotten and extremely lucrative pie out there where they can make a black market buck, it's their primary reason for existence now and has been for quite a loooong time. any sort of national security they play act at to keep the sheeps buffaloed. Oh ya, they got a long running congressional and judge blackmail operation going, that's another story for another time.... continue looking... this is fun for me, BTW....
That is my OPINION, and it's not relevant other than it got me to get looking at this....and itaa. I've obviously seen references to them in the past, but now I want to see if there's anything else. Freekin acronym overdose lately...grumble...
So now I go to google...simple query, really a broad cast look-see here,just for grins and giggles, I used itaa, cia as the search string
hmm, these guys sure busy, like back in 2000 when they had a meeting
first paragraph there
"Former CIA Chief Gates to Headline Global Information Security Summit
September 20, 2000
For More Information Contact:
Tinabeth Burton (703) 284-5305 tburton@itaa.org
Washington, D.C. - Dr. Robert Gates, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1991-1993, and intelligence analyst serving six U.S. Presidents, will address the inaugural Global InfoSec Summit on October 16 in Washington, DC. Gates' keynote speech will address the growing challenge of information security in the global arena. Produced by the Information Technology Association of America and the World Information Technology and Services Alliance, the two-day Summit brings together government and business leaders to forge the type of cross-industry cooperation necessary to build and secure a strong global economy. "
Well, cool, just a buncha good ole boys getting together deciding how they gonna run things and stuff. Funny though, government and corporate cooperation has a name as in a political system of ill repute, but we know not to say it out loud on a forum so as not to invoke goodwin's law.....
anyway, I am juiced now, these folks are interesting... lemme look some more...yes, I know, I should have previously known more about them, mea culpa and so what... I am learning more now..
--ok, s'more, didn't take long, now HERE is an interesting story Also a link there to interesting pdf with more links...
synopsis
Fatcat corporate industry group hires lobbying firm,err, "Independent IT association" whatevers... fatcat group with the cashola contains voting machine companies and defense contractors and "auditors" for electronic voting. They have this meeting,in which were outlined efforts to smooth over voter 'fears" and whatnot. It is allegedly not going to be called lobbying. "Prestigious" IT industry org gets paid nice sum of cash
I work for an ISP. And knowing what I know, there is no way I would let the fact of who I voted for get out on the Internet.
In a paper ballot, you give every voter an identical ballot paper, and they give it back to you with their vote on it. To emulate this electronically, you would need to issue a token to each voter which is revoked as the vote is cast. But that isn't quite perfect. Paper ballots can't be copied {well, they can; but you aren't allowed to take the ballot paper out of the polling station, nor to bring the necessary wherewithal to make a copy of the paper into the polling station, and let's assume the presiding officer is running a tight ship here}, so you know just from whether or not the paper is in the ballot box, whether or not the token has been revoked; and you know from whether or not the voter's name has been crossed off the list, whether or not the token has been issued in the first place. To be able to know which electronic tokens are valid and which have been revoked, every one would need to be different - and thus identifiable. Furthermore, you have absolutely no idea what is going on in transit between the server and the client and back. If you aren't actually sitting there in a polling station, then you can't supervise voters to make sure they are not misbehaving. They could be "printing their own ballot papers" {generating valid tokens for themselves}, or "stealing other people's ballot papers" {misappropriating valid tokens issued to other people}. How do you know, given the proliferation of Windows PCs, that a client machine has not been infected with a Trojan horse that hijacks its internet connection? You could maybe give out bootable CD-ROMs with a secure OS and client software on them, but then how do you ensure that your special protocol doesn't get reverse-engineered and misapplied between issuing the CD and the vote being cast?
The problem is simply that every time you fix one of the existing failure modes, you introduce some more new ones that you hadn't thought of before. Some of the limitations are not limitations of technology, which can be overcome by invention, but limitations of the universe, which can only be overcome by breaching one or more fundamental laws. At least the failure modes of paper ballots are well understood, and mitigated to the fullest extent possible.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Perhaps we should add a mini IQ test to the ballot, that would really screen out the stupid people.
I'd like to introduce you to Jim Crow.
"...Many state governments prevented blacks from voting by requiring poll taxes and literacy tests, both of which were not enforced on whites due to grandfather clauses. One common "literacy test" was to require the black would-be voter to recite the entire U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence from memory."
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana
"There are two sides of this issue: Elections officials say that (DRE machines) are one hundred percent safe and accurate, and on the other side, computer scientists say they're fraught with problems. The truth is in the middle. No system is 100 percent secure, nor are they rife with security breaches."
And what are Dan Seligson's qualifications in the area of computer technology?
The mistake InfoWorld made was to review this as a public policy issue having to do with technology as an issue on which reasonable people can disagree.
The DRE issue is one where the only people who have a right to have their opinions treated with respect are persons with expertise in computer security. If a person doesn't have this expertise, the best he or she can do is provide pointers to people who do have it.
I am not aware of any report by technically qualified people not on the Diebold/ES&S payroll that says that the technology packaged by this company (they are effectively one) is remotely close to adequate.
An IT publication is supposed to write about issues from an IT viewpoint according to the facts and informed opinions available.
On no-paper trail touchscreen voting machines, there is no support an IT publication should take seriously for the viewpoint that Diebold/ESS has provided its customers with anything but a total FUBAR.
Tech Public Policy stuff