Slashdot Mirror
Maryland Tests Voting Machine, Declares Success
Dachannien writes "Capital News Service reports that the Maryland State Board of Elections has staged a test of its Diebold touch-screen voting machines in an effort to demonstrate their security and accuracy. A machine randomly selected from Maryland's voting machine warehouse was tested in a mock vote against two human vote-counting counterparts, and after counting fifty votes, the human vote counters had made several errors versus zero for the voting machine. But is this a legitimate test of the concerns of voting machine activists, or does it merely support a logical fallacy?"
We *know* computers can count very well. That's what they were designed for. The problem with the test they ran is that they tried to have a normal, successful election. Try this test: try to rig it. So it succeeds at the easy part, that proves nothing. I hope TrueVoteMD manages to flog the state on this one.
Holding the machine up to a zero-defect standard is the logical fallacy.
Any voting system has potential for fraud, mistakes, etc. The issue should not be whether this system has that potential, but whether it's any better or worse than the current system, which isn't that great. You can't tell me that it's not within the realm of possibility for a purely mechanical machine to malfunction, or be rigged.
If something bad doesn't happen with these new machines, I'd be very surprised. That would worry me far more than hearing about a perfect election with no mistakes, as that's evidence that someone is truly incompetent or lying.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Were they Diebold employees or something? That's simply not credible.
Point by point;
That depends entirely on who is doing the rigging. The conspiracy theorists on the left think that Diabold has ties to the right wing and may assist in election fraud...covering over any issues with technical hand waving and hiding any of the real details.
Having all parts of government -- including the electorial process -- open to examination in detail is key to ensuring that the conspiracy theorists are never right. For all we know now, elections are rigged everywhere. Closed computer systems just automate the process.
Also, as anyone who knows how to harden systems in the field or monitor existing code knows never expect your tools to do your job . Having the source leads to the potential for absolute accountability, though if those systems aren't checked -- closed or open -- you've lost any assurance that things are working as you would expect.
People make mistkes on paper all the time. That's what the dog and pony show in MD was staged to show...and they are right. What the Diabold system does not provide is complete transparency to the individual voter level let alone what the magic black boxes are actually doing. If *I* want to verify my vote, *I CAN'T* as a citizen do so with the current system. If President Carter wants to do the same, he can't either!
Paper can be ignored. Vote counts can be changed. Electronic methods can make vote counting both more accurate and more prone to fraud...transparancy and accountability to such a level that any part can be questioned and examined are needed. We haven't had that and we won't have that with the Diabold system as it currently is. That's the problem.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
We need to test the system when it FAILS. Just sitting here on the shitter I came up with this test:
1) set up two electronic voting machines. One works "normally" and another has been tampered with so that it sometimes records a vote that differs from the real votes. Don't reveal the probabilities or algorithm involved or which machine has been tampered with.
2) Set up two punched-card ballot where the candidates have been mislabeled. Don't reveal how it has been mislabeled or which has been mislabeled.
3) Perform votes on each.
4) Count votes.
5) Create a scandal: reveal that there was tampering. Ask the counters to perform an accurate re-count with this new information.
With the punch card ballots, this is trivial. Check the correct layout of names, find which machine had names swapped, re-count knowing which names are correct.
With the EVM, this is impossible. The machine has to be sent back to Diebold for examination. The hacker might've simply caused the machine to wipe all memory after 24 hours, hiding his algorithm completely. A closed-source third-party company gets to decide your election. Do you trust them?
after counting fifty votes, the human vote counters had made several errors versus zero for the voting machine.
.MDB files. Election Day hasn't even arrived yet and already people have been busy introducing systematic error into the pool of registered voters. Even if the 2004 election involves pretty blinking lights, and is the most precise ever, it will undoubtedly be a less accurate measurement of the desires of the electorate than the election we had in 2000. This is what Stalin meant when he said that those who cast the votes decide nothing, and those who count the votes determine everything.
Did the humans make random errors (degrading precision), or errors tending to favor one candidate (worse, degrading accuracy)?
This looks like a test of precision, not accuracy, and Maryland is confusing the two. I wrote a long post a few days ago in another story that's relevant to this one, and makes the point I'd want to make here, so I'll be a lamer and paste it.
* * *
The punch card system proved itself to be a very accurate method of vote counting, even under the extreme condition of a tie- to a precision of several hundred votes. Much attention was paid to the relatively few cards that had chads hanging, but the vast majority of the cards were quite unambiguous in their representation of the voter's intent. Unfortunately they occurred in equal numbers for both candidates. The entire system was at least as auditable as any vote counting system can possibly be.
People don't understand the difference between precision and accuracy. Precision means that, given a measurable X, your measurements are sharply defined. But that is not the same as accuracy- which implies that the measurements actually reflect the true value of X, and not the influences of other sources of systematic error- like air resistance, or the thermal expansion of the ruler you're using, or the political affiliation of the manufacturer of your measuring equipment. A measurement is only accurate if sources of systematic error have been minimized. Sources of random error- like hanging chads- merely degrade precision.
The outcry for computerized voting that followed the 2000 election- to "bring our elections into the 21st century" and similar nonsense- was most unfortunate. We are making the transition from an accurate but slightly imprecise system to a new system that promises only extreme precision with no guarantees of accuracy. What is worse, we are about to trade susceptibility to random error for something far worse- susceptibility to systematic error- which is fundamentally different from a human perspective since it introduces a huge motive for people to screw with the accuracy of the electoral process.
The 2000 election had its share of systematic error. There was that butterfly ballot, which confused both Gore and Bush voters alike, but had the effect of transforming Bush votes into Bush votes and Gore votes into Buchanan votes. There was the Florida felon purge, which knocked thousands of blacks but only dozens of Cubans off the rolls. The 2000 election is still bitterly disputed, but very few people still complain about the hanging chads, which were sources of random error with relatively nonpartisan effects. The sources of systematic error had a much more corrosive effect- they cast doubt on the very legitimacy of the outcome, since they gave the election the appearance of having been stolen.
I have no doubt that we have an ultraprecise election ahead of us- computers are good at being deterministic, after all- but as far as accuracy goes- we'll see. There are many who would love to insert some systematic error into those Access
and I'll say it again.
Without a Paper Trial, this system is not trustworthy.
I hate Diebold for political reasons, but I'd still be OK with the system, even though Diebold makes it, if it had a paper trail the voter could see and the Board of Elections could use in the event of trouble.
These people, OTOH, have a system I would trust:
http://www.sequoiavote.com/
This test was in a vacuum,so of course it wouldn't have any issues.
I remain unconvinced of the security/reliability of paperless ballots, epecially Diebold.
.
If I had a real
The failure modes, however, should be considered using a metric weighted for both likelihood and impact of failure. A miscount is random; vulnerability to it is roughly equally likely to be for or against the candidate who would otherwise win. Sabotage on the other hand, where deliberate vote tampering occurs to a directed purpose, is highly likely to be for an undeserving candidate-- almost by definition. As such, I'd consider vulnerability to tampering a bigger problem than an equal probablility of a vote miscount. And the most effective way to reduce vulnerability to tampering is to increase transparancy to (multipartisan) human observers-- which the proposed electronic methods need to work on.
I believe it is possible for electronic voting to allow for an improvement in both usability and security in the electoral process over current methods. I do NOT believe it represents that improvement yet.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
You can degrade accuracy by increasing precision.
Say all the Democratic voting districts still vote on punchcards while the Republican suburbanites vote on their brand new ultraprecise Diebold machines. This gets rid of the random error in the Republican districts. However it converts the random error from hanging chads in the Democratic districts into systematic error favoring Republicans, since random walks toward Republican candidates in Democratic districts are no longer balanced by random walks toward Democratic candidates in Republican districts. If you're going to use Diebold machines, you'd better buy enough for everybody.
Republicans are dispatching goons to polling places in poor neighborhoods to challenge the legitimacy of every voter who walks in the door. So this entire discussion is a bit academic.