Slashdot Mirror
NY Times Endorses Open-Source Election Software
jdauerbach writes "On its editorial page today, the New York Times called for election system reform, saying among other things that 'Congress should impose much more rigorous safeguards, including a requirement that all computer code be made public. It should require that all electronic machines produce a voter-verified paper trail.'"
The New York Times wasn't hacked?
While I don't disagree in the least with the spirit of the concept of making the system(s) open source, it should be noted that, contrary to popular belief, Diebold asserts that its systems have been scrutinized, including at a source code level, by independent authorities, and that there is also a paper record:
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/375954
I don't know if the paper record is "voter verified", or what mechanism it uses, but there is apparently a paper record nonetheless.
Notwithstanding Diebold's CEO's extremely inappropriate campaign comments, I really do think they're trying to put out the best electronic voting systems they can, but are suffering from the same problems that any large, proprietary system suffers from when it languishes in the comfort of large government-guaranteed long-term contracts: namely, inattention to the details that need to be addressed, that sometimes get lost in not seeing the forest for the trees.
Perhaps opening the source to these critical systems and having it overseen by an independent election agency would be an idea worth considering...
How do we know that the code that is actually on the machines we're voting with is the same as the public code? Even if the public code is compiled and built, then tested to see if it's the same binary instructions as what's going on the mass-produced machines, how do we know that each, individual machine that actually ends up at the voting booth won't be rigged? Who's to say that some dishonest, partisan fuck won't change it at the last minute?
I think Badnarik's solution is the best. Get rid of the official ballots and let everyone bring their own ballot with them so that they can vote for whoever they want, not whoever the ruling government wants to let them choose from. And naysays... believe it or not, but that system is probably less prone to corruption than what we have today.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
I'm not convinced that Congress has the constitutional authority to make requirements on state elections like this. Perhaps if a state or county buys a voting system from another state it could come under the 'interstate commerce' clause, but that's a bit of a stretch, and prone to loopholes.
On the other hand, maybe they could claim they are implicitly granted this power under the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment? Any other ideas?
including open source software. If ever there was an arena crying out for inspection it's the voting process both in the US and worldwide. I for one welcome my open source voting software overlords.
Perhaps opening the source to these critical systems and having it overseen by an independent election agency would be an idea worth considering...
And even then, there's nothing stopping Diebold, which has a lot of experience with hardened public computer terminals, from making the interface and infrastructure equipment that runs the code. Yes, they then lose the "lock in" that the proprietary software buys them, but if their other systems and hardware are that good, it won't be a problem. Heck, that kind of openness in the context of the election system code could even be a PR win for Diebold, as the problems become more and more public.
The coming election is probably one of the most important ones in the last few decades, and nothing can really be done to save it from abuses any more.
And after the vote is over, the topic will probably disappear from public consciousness anyway.
When men used to be men
You're kidding! It endorsed an opposition candidate?? Are they even allowed to do that???
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Despite the fact we have groups tearing up voter registration forms, the actual voting system is the best in the nation. It records your vote in three ways. First, electronically, second it prints who you vote for in plain english on a piece of paper viewed by the voter, and once the voter reviews this paper and accepts the choices, the votes are encoded into a 2D barcode printed after the list of votes, this barcode contains the list of votes for which offices.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Software for something as important as democracy cannot be allowed to be hoarded by commercial interests. It is therefore imperative for the future of this great nation that election software be Free software, under the terms of the GPL. Anything else would be a grave mistake.
In other words, I'll be voting absentee anyway. Pen and paper don't malfunction; who made the decision that it's more important to get the wrong results the day after we vote instead of getting the right results a week later?
...is not the same thing as Open Source. If you doubt me, Microsoft has made their code "public" with shared source. This doesn't mean that Joe Hacker will get a chance to look at it, just that someone outside the voting machine company will.
Granted, I'd prefer if it were truly open source, but I suspect that we're a bit of a ways away from GPL voting code.
Find out about the Lexus Rx400h Hybrid!
It has been proven once and will be proven again, open-source just doesn't catch on. The government is going to do what governments do, and that is go with the proprietary, expensive "solution."
My sig would have been a lot cooler if
Despite the inherent liberal bias of the "New York Times", the "Times" correctly asserts that all voting machines should leave a paper trail. Without a paper trail, we would have no way to verify the validity of the votes cast for a candidate. We also would have no way to identify tampering.
The issue with paper trails has been known in the academic community for a long time. Noted computer scientists from CMU, MIT, and other vanguards of American technology had signed a petition demanding that all voting machines leave a paper trial. The ACM finally officially committed to the cause recently (according to SlashDot). Now, the liberal print media has committed to the cause.
Perhaps, someone can explain why the Department of Defense is still allowing overseas military personnel to cast their ballots by Internet on servers without any paper trail.
Actually, contrary to the subject line of the original posting, the NYT isn't calling for open source code, only publically available code -- the two are obviously very different, and clarity is useful. (Many e-voting experts use the term "disclosed source".)
So this voting system will require your DNA to be on file with the Department of Homeland Security, right?
Alcohol and Calculus don't mix. Don't drink and derive.
The NYTimes article doesn't say anything about Open Source. It doesn't even call for inspection of the source. The only thing that the article really says about electronic voting is that there should be a paper trail that can be verified later.
You're spinning what the NYTimes is saying.
(I would prefer an OSS voting system too, though)
Look people, using OSS over propriatary "black box" code is no answer to the REAL PROBLEM! To truly fix this broken election system, of ours we should use the ancient Babylonian system of CLAY TABLETS!
No hanging chads, unintelligeable markings or buggy software.
Besides, ever here of the Babylonians having such problems with THEIR ELECTIONS?? I thought not.
I've already developed an prototype using an 8' tall cardboard box, cookie cutters and a happy-cake oven. How much did this cost me? $42.95+shipping and handling. Eat that Diebold!
New York Times just wants citizens to "register" before casting their votes. Someday there will even be a website devoted to bypassing the registration of voters.
Could it be that Mozilla's plans to put on a large ad in the NY Times has caused the paper to be more open-source friendly/aware?
A company endorsing open source and President Bush at once?
I wonder how many Slashdotter's heads just blew the fuck up...
I really don't understand the infatuation with high tech voting. For something as critical as voting in a democratic election, I think the engineer's mantra KISS (keep it simple, stupid!) applies. Use paper ballots with the name and picture of the candidate in large print. Above their name, have a big checkbox, and indicate "Check here to vote for candidate". Count the number of ballots issued at each polling station, count the number of ballots that go into the box, and and count the number of ballots that come out of the box. Sure, it will take longer, but how hard is it to screw that up? It could be argued that using a simple enough ballot, anyone who fucks their ballot up is not "disenfranchised", they just fucked up, and it would rightfully be their own fault.
NO CARRIER
our votes don't count anyways....
There are two kinds of paper trails. One is a readable ballot that must be submitted into the ballot box, and the other is a sort of receipt to let you know whom you voted for.
The first kind is acceptable, and I believe the open voting consortium has this idea correct: the machine should print out a barcode, that can then be verified by another scanning machine. This barcode must then be submitted into the ballot box.
The second kind is flawed for two reasons. First, there is no way to verify that what the computer printed is actually what's recorded on the bar code, or what has been submitted electronically. Second, and more importantly, it provides an easy way for proving whom you voted for. I could tell all of my employees to bring in their receipts, and those who vote for candidate A will receive benefits. Yes, this is illegal, but we shouldn't make it any easier.
what's a sig?
http://www.boomchicago.nl/Section/Latest-News/Boom ChicagoVotingMachine
Mirror: http://politiken.dk/media/wvx/3223.WVX
Let the Slashdot'ing begin ;-)
TCAP-Abort
> systems have been scrutinized, including at a source code level, by independent authorities
These machines are tested in secret and because of IP law and NDAs you will never know the results. The Australians have open source voting machines. Its not that hard to pull off, that is if you CARE about elections. Seems many in power see fraud as par for the course in the US.
So, please excuse me for not trusting my one lousy vote to the CEO of some company which is more secretive with its machines than a 16 year old girl with her diary. Pardon me for taking his partisan comments ("I will deliver Ohio for Bush") as just that: an inapropriate partisan comment.
No conspiracy theories needed. If you keep things secret, someone will find a way to abuse them.
>and that there is also a paper record
Err, people want paper tickets they can verify and put in a box for recounts. Attaching a printer to a voting machine at the end of the day is hardly a "paper trail."
International election observers noted several issues with the US election process this year. One of the criticisms in their report is electronic voting without any transparency or a paper trail. One of their recommendations was also to use open source code software for the voting machines. Here's the link
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
I am a very liberal new yorker who gets the times every day at home. And if you read the technology section, in the thursday paper, you will quickly come to the conclusion that this most august of american journalistic institutions does not know its head from its elbow when it comes to comsumer electornics. ONe can only hope the editorial board is better informed.
It should require that all electronic machines produce a voter-verified paper trail.
At what point would you trust the computer with out requiring a manual re-count of the paper ballots? The whole point of moving to an electronic system is to eliminate the entire hand count in the first place. With paper trails, people will sue to have them recounted at least once EVERY SINGLE TIME. And if you say that a machine can do the recount, then who is to say the machine that does the recount of the paper trail has not been rigged? The only way you can be sure beyond a shadow of a doubt would be to do a manual count of the paper trail every time, elimintating the entire point of electronic voting. Of course, we have done without paper trails on mechanical machines for years, yet no one seems to have mentioned that.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I am afraid that even if the public pushes the opensourcing of the voting code, they will make it available under a "shared source" license a-la M$. That's better than closed source, but definitely is not enough. The general public might think it's enough, but it isn't since the code creators will continue to have exclusive rights over a piece of software that is of extreme importance to the society. The voting code must be available in the public domain or under a mini-license that could be compatible with all other common licenses like GPL, BSD, CC, CPL, et cetera. The Federal Government publishes its information in the public domain for the common good, why the voting code should be any different since it is intended to benefit the whole society? (whether this happens in practice or not is another story). The Federal Government should pay the code creators not just for the right to use the code but also for the transfer of copyright and then the code should become public domain (since everything coming out of federal agencies is publicdomain).
One of the major problems with keeping track of voting records is that you don't want to give away too much information to the public on who voted what, while at the same time, keeping everything hidden will draw cries of foul play, tampering, et cetera. So here's an idea - one-time voter cards.
Lemme explain. They would be plastic cards, about the size of a credit card, with a random ID and password on them in print - long enough not to be memorized by passer-bys, but short enough to make it humanly possible to type later on. Also on the card is a magnetic strip - think something like a credit card. Now, when you show up at a voting center, they hand you one out of a pile - it's in a sealed envelope, so they haven't a clue as to which one they hand you. You go in the voting booth, slide your card through the machine, and vote. A paper trail is produced with your barcode and adjacent votes - but not anything that could be used to ID you later on - and you slide your card again. It registers your votes on the card, and you leave.
Now, the votes are tallied, and the results are given. However, the election isn't over yet. An open database is publically produced, with barcode/vote combinations, and the voters then mail their cards to be tallied and compared to the database. If the paper trail doesn't match up with the card count, something has gone wrong, and all votes without cards, cards without votes, are cast out.
I know this still has some flaws, but I'm curious as to what the Slashdot community thinks. One thing I was worried about is that in checking on your barcode, you may become ID'd in that manner - although compared to other methods, I think the chance of something like that, for example, through an encrypted channel online, is a lot less likely. Comments?
If you can't differentiate between "its" and "it's", you start with -100 IQ points in my book.
Don't expect any progress on that front. The moderation system used to be a little more transparent than it is now, but the editors tightened it up in response to dissent like this post. You can read more about that post on k5. The post was ultimately modded well over a thousand times, and the editors changed the system to report moderation in percentages, not number totals, as a response.
I'm not convinced that Congress has the constitutional authority to make requirements on state elections like this
Read Bush v Gore, it's based on the equal protection clause.
In other news, John Kerry is endorsed by Jerry Springer. Talk about an endorsement. As if I needed yet another reason NOT to vote for Kerry. :)
Got that, Indian bigot?
NIST did a great job with the AES competition (to develop and standardize a new block cipher to replace the aging DES) - why don't they have a competition to standardize a electronic voting machine platform? There's no reason this shouldn't be done on a national basis.
I think that if we as a community put enough pressure on NIST, they'll do it. And since NIST is a non-partisan body, there's no good reason for congress to not support a design that is sponsored by NIST.
Such a process would promote both openness of participation and review of designs. The winning design could then be standardized and vendors could simply implement them to spec.
What people mean by "verified voting" is:
a) the voting machine produces a 'voucher'
listing the canidates whom the voter selected
b) the voter can, in the privacy of the voting
booth, review this voucher for accuracy
c) the voucher is placed into a ballot box
for the vote to be counted, the voucher
itself _is_ the legally binding vote
You are absolutely correct to rail against a receipt which the voter takes home with them. I've personally witnessed Diabold people purposefully mis-represnet verified voting as providing a take-home receipt. Worse, I've had people I've talked to randomly on the air plane talk about it as if it is a good idea!
The most important aspect of a voting system is that how one voted remains anonymous. If it is possible for an employer, spouse, parent, or anyone else to have someone 'prove' that they voted red or blue, then organized coersion is likely.
Another important aspect is that the person's vote should not be "sellable". If this mechanism admits the possibility of a card to be sold, then it is a non-starter.
There will be lots of allegations of election fraud and election screwups for the upcoming vote. The closer the races, the louder and more widespread the allegations will be.
However, we won't be hearing "The voting system is confusing and insecure. We need to change it!". We'll be hearing the Democrats say "The Republicans screwed with the results and stole the election!". The Repubicans will be making the same allegations about the Democrats. And both sides will be so busy pointing fingers and slinging mud, the process itself will be completely ignored and will remain as broken as ever.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
Are these the same authorities "from MIT" that did the SCO scrutinizing of Linux?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
And a paper count would still be necessary, as well as a recount. Always. I can't believe how Americans can be so stupid as not to realize this. It is standard procedure in any civilized democracy in Europe (or Canada).
Let's face the facts: US is run by an elite club of gooks with hundreds of billions of money who f*cked Afghanistan back to produce their opium after Taleban had wiped out it's production, they got their billion dollar oil pipelines there and went after Iraq, made billions in war/weapons, and now run the whole f*cking country. They stand, or/and are hoping to earn 23 TRILLION dollars exclusively to their own companies in Iraqi oil profits alone.
What you guys have in America IS NOT a democracy. It is a business-military-drugs-anything-for-money cartel that is running your country for the profit of a FEW hundred very rich individuals around the world. You guys probably lost democracy for good when Kennedy was assassinated by these guys for refusing to play their ball. You are so far f*cked, you can't even see it anymore. Yeah, take me for a loony for saying the truth as I honestly see it after investigating and following all US policy and businesses closely for 12 years.
A quick reply, sorry, but a thought for the slashdot mass to consider:
Why not have a machine that is electronic, but after using the touch interface or whatever, prints the result as a typical cash register would, with the following process: There is a trasparent cover so that the voter can confirm that what they voted is recorded on the reel of paper tape. Along with the text of the vote is a 'scantron' type encoding of those choices. The rolls (all bundled up after use) are delievered to a local counting center that runs the rolls through a counting device at high speed, quickly tallying the votes.
This solution insures transparency at each level, as well as a paper trail that is central to the process.
What do you guys think?
thanks,
james
(anonymous cause i forgot the login after many months)
I've been writing one letter to the editor every week or so on this issue for the last two years... while they've never published what I've written, I'm sure its letter writers on this subject that have convinced them that the issue is important. Unfortunately, they still get snowed with those proposing a receipt that one takes home. *sigh*
Wish we had that here in Venezuela las august.
The voting machines here for the presidential referendum produced a paper trail.Suddenly when there was a doubt of the transparenncy of the whole process (because the voting machines were black boxes, noone knew what the code on them did) the government refused to count the papers from each machine.
Instead, they performed an "audit" where a member of the national electoral council on TV announced that a certain number of boxes would be chosen at random...by another computer running who knows what code on it and after the program was done "generating" the number of the boxes to be audited he proceeded to open a Word document with the numbers on it.
Of course, when the audit was done nothing was found amiss.
Transparent indeed...
Diebold's "paper trail" is an end-of-day record on a long thin "cash register strip" showing how many votes each machine took in for each candidate and issue.
:).
...and:
Problem 1: it's glitchier than a Microsoft Windows early beta. I've talked to Alameda and San Diego County pollworkers who tried to collect these at the end of the day, only to find that in some cases nothing printed and in others the printout didn't agree with the on-screen end-of-day tallies! And that was different machines in a single polling location.
Problem 2: this printout isn't done as the votes happen, but rather as a single end-of-day "run" under polling place supervisor control. If the machine crashes at any time during the day (which happens often enough), that'll cause the tallies between the memory card "electronic ballot box" (PCMCIA) and printout to vary.
Problem 3: this printout isn't open to public scrutiny. I've seen Public Records Act/FOIA type queries for copies fought by county elections officials across the nation, probably because photocopying a 12ft strip of 3" paper is a bitch
As to code scrutiny by independent labs:
The Federal Election Commission approves testing labs for reviewing voting machine code and products. They're the only ones allowed to see the source code on this stuff. The two biggest are Wyle Lab's elections operation in Huntsville, AL and "Ciber Inc" (formerly Metamore) also in Huntsville.
First, all of the voting machines in current use are certified by these labs to standards written by the FEC in 1990. You heard that right. There's also a 2000 standard by the FEC but since all of our electronic voting machines were built prior to 2000, they can be re-certified under the 1990 standards "forever", until the vendors announce significant enough upgrades/revamps to trigger the Y2000 review process. Which NONE have seen fit to do so far.
It gets worse.
We have 13,000 leaked Diebold memos floating around that document, among other things, Diebold lying to the testing labs. In one case, huge amounts of customized code used in WinCE was declared to be "Commercial Off The Shelf" ("COTS") and not subject to source code review.
The exact phrasing of these internal memos and a security analysis of their implications can be found at:
http://www.equalccw.com/sscomment.html
http://www.equalccw.com/sscomments2.html
Ain't puked quite yet?
Diebold Corp. in Ohio bought Global Election Systems in 2002 (Canadian company) and renamed it Diebold Election Systems. Global's first voting products were written on Unix boxes, where they wrote their own "Accubasic" compiler for some core vote-tally processes. When porting to Windows, they went to great lengths to get Accubasic working on the new platform. OK, query me this: if I'm writing the compiler and I'm publishing source code for scrutiny that's run through that compiler, how in the hell is the source code reviewer supposed to know what's REALLY going on!?
Ahh, but this presumes "bad intent" on Global's part, which normally isn't something you presume. Except that Global was founded in 1988 by three guys name of Norton Cooper, Charles Hong Lee and Michael K. Graye, all three of whom have prior felony convictions in the US and/or Canada for stock fraud, investment scams and the like. By 2000, Global hired a guy name of Jeffrey Dean as lead programmer on the central vote-tally product (GEMS, "Global Election Management Software", still part of the Diebold product line). Dean was a charming chap - convicted of 23 counts of computer-aided embezzlement from a Seattle law firm in what a court called a "sophisticated computer-aided accounting fraud". He was literally recruited while still in prison by another Global employee also doing time. See also this document for more details on these clowns:
Feel free to send me an email if you ever want to say something on this topic that I could use while talking to a Free Software fanatic that believes having the source code is enough to guarantee democracy or to publish on our web site.
After a talk with Richard Stallman about the use of Free Software for Electronic Election, I emailed him. RMS sent me the following:
Free software is not enough to ensure that elections are carried out properly.
The software used in and for government should always be free software; the government should always have the freedom to run it, study its source code, change it to suit government needs, and distribute copies to others either unchanged or modified. That way, software owners will not have power over the government's computers. But that is not enough to ensure that computerized elections are fair and honest.
It is easy for a programmer to change a program so that it tells the user "You voted for Mr Smith" but actually record a vote for Mr Brown. Unfortunately, free software does not prevent this. There is no known way to prevent this.
With free voting software, a government election committee can study the source code. If the program has been published, anyone can study the source code. But there is no way to be sure that the program actually running when you cast your vote is the same program that you and the election committee studied. Someone could have installed a fiddled version an hour before the election and replaced it with the authorized version an hour after it ended.
To assure honest elections, we need physical ballots that can be used for a recount.
Don't let the computer/expert control the election. Information for Belgium in french: http://www.poureva.be/
Look at the 2000 election. Look at current presidential polls. The country is pretty much evenly split.
Those of us on the right have been feeling the Republican party jump left for quite some time now.
The Republicans are traditionally the US's conservative party, in favor of (generally) keeping things as they are. The Democrats are traditionally the US's progressive party, trying to change things. The conservatives hold back the progressives so they don't adopt too many short sighted ideas while the progressives keep society adapting to new problems. So Democratic ideas get slowly adopted by the culture and the Democrats of 40 years ago are Republicans today.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
Despite the inherent liberal bias of the "New York Times", the "Times" correctly asserts that all voting machines should leave a paper trail.
Could you take a moment to explain how the Times' "inherent liberal bias" affects in any way the legitimacy of its assertion that all voting machines should have some kind of physical verification system? What does liberal, conservative, communist, anarchist, or capitalist bias have to do with the legitimacy of voting methods (my own views on mass electoral systems aside)?
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Perhaps this is the one and only activity which would benefit from being outsourced. The US needs Democracy more urgently now, than at any time in the past. India, with an envranchised population five times that of the US, and thus the largest democracy in the world, has just had a trouble free mechanized election. Perhaps, just perhaps, using these machines would be a cheaper and better solution to producing a just and fair election result than the machines produced by a very partisan local manufacturer. Democracy, btw === 'Rule by the People for the People'. It's perfectly clear to this writer, who lives in the 'Rest-of-the-World', American Politics != Democracy. So much so I don't know whether to weep or laugh.
The New York Times wasn't hacked?
t ml
Think so... As wired posted it http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.04/hacker.h
the shop stewards and trustees are correct in pushing for this. Paper trails are the only way to ensure that everyone votes in the best interests of their union. Those that don't can be quickly identified and re-educated, walk the picket lines, and can be put to other productive uses before we fail to protect them over a company beef.
Sort of like in the old days, in the old country, where the town leaders dispatched transportation to pick up my grandmother because after counting who showed up at the polls, and after counting votes (while the polls were still open), they figured out who the two individuals were who hadn't voted yet, knew they would vote correctly (especially after the two votes would be tallied so they knew exactly how they voted), and knew that it was a close enough regional election that every last vote had to be cast and counted.
Similar to the NorthEast old lever machines, where they sign you in, give you a 3x5 card with your name on it, which you use to hand to the poll watcher at the machine so you could vote, and they placed them neatly, face down, in chronological order so that they could match the card chronology to the vote chronology (punch card chronology inside machines, relative worked at election board, counting votes during elections and basically reading newspaper all other times).
Paper ballots. Keep the union member history. Keep the employee history for corporations who have a lot to win or lose in an election (make a contest of it! candy bars or flex time for vote receipts!). Throw in some sneak, peek, no notice searches, book reading tracking/databases, free access to medical info for "research", gps phone tracking, rfid in shoes, pretty soon they'll be able to tell what brand tampon I use to plug holes in my rowboat!
The open voting consortium has this idea wrong: Most human beeing can not read barcode David GLAUDE
Don't let the computer/expert control the election. Information for Belgium in french: http://www.poureva.be/
It sounds like the Times agrees with what several of us discussed at Foo Camp:
http://shiflett.org/archive/62
....your quote:
"I am not trying to imply that Diebold was purposely obfuscating their code for any reason..."
I WILL
I will state the diebolds actions to date, and what we have found out, are way more than enough evidence for a serious grand jury investigation that they have tried to obfuscate the code and that it is for some particular reasons, ie, the profits to be gained by controlling the US elections. Let's talk untold trillions of dollars and the most powerful nation on the planet, and what control of the political process is really worth as an incentive for criminality. No other possible criminal "prize" comes close to these potential profits of power and money. these folks should have long ago been investigated VERY seriously, not pseduo play acting investigastions, but serious and highly detailed investigations into attempted electioneering fraud, and RICO violations at a minimum, and if implemented honestly, would probably result in the indictments of a lot of diebold officials and some high level politicians and businessmen.
They are, IMO, attempting to hijack the national vote for massivepolitical and economic gain. They are far worse than Microsoft or SCO in this regard.
And it looks like they will be successful at it, because, frankly, the US people have hit a cognitive dissonance point of disbelief and little action with the sheer overlapping and overwhelming levels of corruption and malfeasance coming from the collusion of government and very large business in this nation. The people have reached a saturation point, gone beyond a pain threshold, been terrorized into sub servience and obedience. Not everyone but such a high percentage of the general population and an even higher percentage inside the governmental and justic system apparatus have been swamped into disbelief and inaction that nothing of any worthwhile results will come of this other than we will have a full bore dictatorship shortly.
It is 2/3rds the way there now, once they finalise their ability to completely manipulate the news, the casting of ballots, the count, the results of the count, and can also control any opposition from any scale by disappearing them or arresting them on bogus charges, then they will have completely won, and it sure looks like they are about exactly at that point in time now.
That is my opinion, based not only on just diebolds actions and realities, but on the state of the nation as a whole, the gestalt now. We have been kicked from so many angles simultaneously and continuously that there's no adequate defense other than curling up into a ball, metamorphically speaking. Yelling STOP THAT isn't working and hasn't worked. "Sueing" the perpetrators WON'T work as they control the justice system almost entirely. Relying on the "enforcers" to notice reality and act accordingly is beyond ludicrous, they just follow orders. Hoping that millions of drones in the bureaucracy will one day act in the interests of the nation rather than their checks is a lost cause, forget about it.
And I'm not being cyncical, I am trying to be as realistic and down to earth as possible.
There is no fix available following traditional business as usual methods. None. It has gone too far for that.
too many people get the idea that they take the 'receipt' home with them
Why would that be "contrary to popular belief"?
I don't care whether Diebold has someone else looking at the code or not.
I care what the code does and how secure the system is.
Without public review, there is no way to determine EITHER of those. You're just relying upon someone else's honesty and integrity (in an election no less).
As others have pointed out, it's useless for the individual voter to verify his/her vote.
Ummm, how BLATANT does the warning have to be before you would choose not to use their service?
Great. Really. And I suppose that having a retarded 10 year old as police chief is okay as long as he's trying to do the best he can.
"the best
What the fuck? They're building a system to record votes. How complicated can it be?
PAPER has worked for CENTURIES. They can't match the capabily of PAPER? They are either incompetent or have an agenda.
"worth considering"? People here have been harping on it for months!
If you cannot provide the same level of security and authentication and validation with a computerized ballot that you can get from a fucking 1 cent PAPER BALLOT then you need to either fire that firm (buh bye Diebold) or re-evaluate your rational for computerization.
As noted in TFA, slot machines are held to a higher standard than voting machines.
Yet thousands of people hammer on slot machines every day.
And the easiest way I can think of doing that is with a nice, old fashined punch card.
The voter chooses at the computer, the computer records the vote electronically, punches the card, and prints the names of the candidate chosen on it.
That way, the voter looks at the card, checks whether the person they've selected is printed on it and then drops it in the box.
Each machine can be verified by matching:
#1. The electronic count to
#2. The punch cards to
#3. A hand count
It's quick and easy to tally punch cards if that's request and if a hand vote is necessary, it's just as easy (but not as quick).
That way, any problems can quickly be tracked to the machine(s).
An endorsement from a newspaper should mean about as much as an endorsement from a celebrity.
Highway funding, Dude...Federal Government can get it done one way or another.
Play Command HQ online
Should that be the scenario of a movie, nobody would believe it
Pretty scary.
Yep. Personally, I'd rather see a combination of instant counts, barcode/punch card, voucher used.
That way, the machines can instantly report the votes, the votes the machines reported can be checked by other computers via barcode/punch card on the voucher, and those numbers can be verified by people manually counting the vouchers.
Three levels of verification. With the human count validating the other two.
In the end, it all comes down to having a person being able to validate each, single vote.
First step, along with the source code, the vendor has to provide the OS and compiler specs (type, revision, etc) used to create the executables.
They also specify a hash or at a minimum, a CRC of the executables.
We can do our own compiles and confirm the accuracy of the hash/CRC. We then write a script that will go out and check over the voting system executable files. That goes onto a floppy and gets run against the in-the-field executables.
Complicated? Hell yes. But much of the work on the scripts could be done by the Federal Election Commission or other national body, who makes them available for download on their site. County elections officials take those script packages off the FEC site and put them on floppies or CDs. People who want to do an on-site code check run THOSE scripts on those media, so that no possible virus/worm/trojan/malware gets introduced. These volunteer checkers then get to take home the floppy or CD and check it against the FEC-published standard.
Upshot: reliable in-field code base checking without any possible malware introduction during said checking.
Jim March
Member, Board of Directors, Black Box Voting (www.blackboxvoting.org)
Previous election systems have been transparent and verifable at every stage, youre quite free to make sure that no one interfears with the ballet box and follow it when it's taken from the polling station to the place to be counted, and then if it's not to bussy probably find a place where you can sit back and watch the people watch the other people count the votes.
We need the same level of ability to verify that our votes have been counted in the modern age, as I think I've said before, the software, hardware and every other part of the machine that is used should be open to public inspection. Paper trail would be damn handy to stop someone changing the votes later on too.
When are you guys going to wake up to the question of eavesdropping? One I/O bit attached to a slightly long trace that appears to go nowhere, and the machine could squeal on every voter in real time. That may not make it easy to influence the first election, but it would make it easier to make the people who voted "the wrong way" to start feeling paranoid.
Let's say there are going to be ballots provided by the election officials (I just noticed someone talking about Badnarik*'s idea of every voter bringing his own ballot, never thought of that angle before). I'd rather have a slightly more involved, even if more expensive, elections process that invited two or more companies to supply the machines used *at every polling place.* In the fashion of the time-stamp cards in some workplaces -- like the Hallmark store I worked in during high school -- such a device could tell you with a satisfying "WHOMP!" that Yes, this vote has been registered on one side or the other, and visibly increment the "total votes" column by one. Then let the second machine WHOMP the same ballot, and finally put the ballot into locked box for later recount purposes if the two machines disagree.
The kicker: pay only expenses up-front, with a bonus going only to the most accurate machine. There will be votes that are lost / spindled / folded / mutilated; sorry. Mistakes and bugs may be inevitable, but that doesn't mean that "just any system" is good enough.
timothy
* My candidate of choice
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
You many not like what either of them want, and sometime the opposition will fight for the status-quo because they view it as being better than the change that is being proposed. But I highly doubt that either side would think of theirself as defenders of the status-quo.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
He is not the editor in chief of the "Times" as you say. He is the "public editor" aka ombudsman aka watchdog.
It seems damned obvious but nobody wants to do it for some reason:
- Voter selects candidates by touching the screen.
- Computer prints out ballot -- no mismarks, no chad; a computer-printed vote.
- Voter inspects ballot to verify it.
- If the voter is satisfied, he drops the ballot in the ballot box. If not, he has a poll worker destroy the ballot and votes again.
- At the end of the day, the computer-printed paper ballots are scanned and counted by computer.
Why don't people want this? Why do they insist on keeping the numbers in memory?All's true that is mistrusted
It was Gore, the Damnocratic Presidential Candidate in 2000, that did not concede gracefully. Well, actually he did concede, but then retracted his concession, then proceeded to drag the US Electoral Process through the mud by taking it to court, then attempted to cause a Constitutional Crisis by involving the US Supreme Court in a decision the Constitution clearly places in the State's hands.
He never did say he was sorry ...
these guys, FWIW
Someone had to do it.
Optical scaners has progressed from the days filling in small ovals on to computer cards with #2 pencils.
It is possible for a computer to see which box a X is in. Thus a person could mark and X in the correct box and feed it to the computer, it scans it to check if it is vaild, if it is the ballot drops into the box and the computer adds to the count.
If there is a question about the outcome just hand count the ballots.
Automates the counting process without taking away the option for a hand count.
This map was in a recent issue of Newsweek. It shows what voting technology is used in each county of the US.
From issue 10 of my late, great newspaper The Wisconsinite. That issue's feature story was on electronic voting systems.
How to build a better electronic voting system?
by Jason Haas
Like other laws with names that sound nice but whose language contains dark implications, the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) spells trouble for the future of voting in this country. As passed by Congress, HAVA distributes almost $4 billion to the states for the purchase of electronic voting machines (EVMs). But far from helping us vote, the implementation of throws the windows wide for new forms of election quandaries. Due to their design, the current crop of EVMs bring a staggering possibility for fraud and manipulation of voter lists,and even the reported poll results.
At the heart of the voting systems from one major manufacturer, the increasingly notorious Diebold, you will find Microsoft Windows. Practically anyone who has spent time using computers knows that Windows is an unstable and unreliable system that computer security experts consider to be rife with holes. It is easy for a person or even a malicious computer program to cause Windows to malfunction.
Viruses and worms acclimated to this system are commonplace. In 2003, a computer worm called Nachi made headlines for infecting millions of PCs around the world, as well as Diebold ATM cash machines. As they are essentially dressed up desktop PCs, Diebold machines carry the same security vulnerabilities as a plain desktop PC. Given that Diebold's EVMs are also based on this system, it is not a stretch to see how they too could be infected and disabled. There are deeper problem with electronic voting systems beyond these potential security failures. Since the machines are owned and developed by private corporations that claim copyright on the code, the general public cannot view the programming at the machines' core. Thus it is not possible for knowledgeable people to verify that the machines are counting votes properly. If a security problem exists in the machines, no one would be the wiser until the unit's manufacturer admitted the problem and released an update.
There are two solutions to this. One would be to continue to have the voting machines based on personal computer hardware, but replace proprietary operating systems with an open source system. While open source operating systems are renowned for their stability, more important to their use in voting systems is the fact that all open source software is created with and maintained through a process of peer review. Security problems are quickly documented and solved. This happens on a totally public basis, meaning no one is kept in the dark. The peer review process ensures that it is impossible to sneak in programming that would rig an election.
One immediate advantage to using open source software in voting systems is a significant cost savings over proprietary code. Unlike the systems used in major EVMs, the open source operating systems are available free of cost. A person or company can sell a copy of a particular flavor, but it is not necessary to buy it. There are no hidden costs or upgrade prices, as all updates to the core of the system and freely and widely distributed. I did just this, in fact. My previous career was as an executive in LinuxPPC, Inc., which developed a version of the Linux operating system for Apple's Power Macintosh and other PowerPC-based platforms.
Another form of electronic voting was recently used in the nation of India. The Indian voting machines use electrical circuits with a tiny bit of custom programming rather than commercial computer software. According to an Indian government web site, the machines cost about 10500 R ($230), while Diebold's machine costs in the neighborhood of $3300. Multiply that cost by a factor of several hundred or even thousand to determine the number required to fulfill a municipality's voting needs. This does not take into account the hidden costs of maintenance and repairs, or the in
-- haaz.
Obviously the moderator didn't read what this reply was to...
And if we can't trust Jimmy Carter, who can we trust?
Of course, Jimmy Carter also managed to negotiate that treaty with North Korea where Kim Jong Il promised to not build nuclear weapons...
On the other hand, it's only a matter of time before voting comes to the fundamental dilemma of security: Accessability versus Security. We want to assure that (1) everyone who is entitled to vote, is allowed to do so; (2) all votes are anonymous, and (3) votes may not be tampered with. I suspect these may be mutually exclusive to at least some degree, and a nasty trade off may need to be made.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Experience says that when there is much controversy over solutions to a particular problem it is often because the problem hasn't been properly defined.
Current definition of "The problem:" How to change government in a democracy with open, accurate elections which allow the voter to remain anonymous.
The solution is in the history of U.S. democracy. History tells us that a small group of elite folks (Founding Fathers) decided that the electorate could not be trusted (Electoral College) and that the best overall solution was a restricted form of democracy (representative democracy.) In the years since, the attitude of our ruling class has blossomed into a degenerate, self-serving incompetence-towards-the-whole which threatens the longevity of the nation.
Ask yourself why only the two parties can play and any third party or other outside group gets lead weights hung around the necks of their efforts. Don't think it's true? Go check the election rules for your city, county and state. Two-parties-only is the end result of many very suspicious rules and requirements for other groups or parties wishing to play. The same game of Restriction-via-Rubric-Rules exists at the federal level.
Redefinition of "The Problem:" How to get an entrenched (and very rotten) ruling class to open up the process to open, accurate elections and thus move closer towards achieving a true democracy? In most of the rest of the world -- and throughout human history -- such efforts usually result in civil war.
If you think any elite group will just give it up, open your eyes and your brain at the same time and witness the current bitterness over voting methodologies: When none of the players are willing to be open and honest, then none of the players _are_ open and honest. Bluntly, the last thing either party wants is open, accurate, direct elections.
Do we have a democracy or an illusion, a national delusion that we are a democracy? Has not representative democracy failed when a small group of the very richest individuals and corporations (hey, same group of folks, imagine that) severely restrict who can participate in governance?
You fix this by not sending the same rotten bastards back to Congress time and time and time again. One term and they reek with the stench of corporate cash. In other words -- and let me make this as simple as possible -- the focus on the Presidential election is a red herring, a sleight-of-hand, a trick of the light, a cheap trick, social engineering on a colossal scale, a setup for a SUCKER PUNCH!
So what did the Harvard Republican say to the Harvard Democrat? "You're either with me or against me! *wink wink, nudge nudge*"
Cheers and ciao.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
That's like saying Fox News doesn't have a conservative Bias or that CNN isn't liberal.
There's nothing immoral about being biased. Most newspapers slant one way or the other.
I would bet that atleast 4/5 of the employees at the Times are democrats. Most of the articles are either even handed or have a liberal slant.
Maybe the times doesn't seem very liberal to someone who is a liberal.. But to anyone else, it is easy to see.
they endorse registration free internet browsing.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
So why does a large related group of Chimp's split into seperate groups. After which the males from each group attack & kill each other (ala Jane Goodall observations). I think human language has evolved to reflect our behaviour not the other way around. The answer as to "why otherwise sane people group and attack each other" is something that is much deeper than name calling. The fact that your post labels a large chunk of the population as "sheeple" should show you that nobody is immune to the behaviour. The best you can hope for is to be aware of it and how it can be used. Sun-Tzu is a good example of using human behaviour. I notice that Bush uses extreme simplification when talking about groups. Everything boils down to, "you're either with us, or against us", I have no idea who is in the "us" group. To belive in "good" means also to belive in "evil". Most people think it is "good" to stop "evil", usually with any means they can. Yet everyone has a different definition of "evil" until they join a group with a "standardized evil". The "standards" are passed on down the generations since it is easy for children to pick up the "standardized evil" used by the family group and modify it in adulthood if you have to.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Ummm...Don't bother if the bank doesn't actually use Diebold.
Ed Craig "Who cares what you think?" George W. Bush, 4th of July 2001
He never did say he was sorry ...
Maybe after the Bush family apologizes for stealing a U.S. presidential election...
There should be a paper trail, but it should be encoded/encrypted somehow, as to keep a person's vote impossible to determine without cooperation of the government.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You are a fool then. Many a man is in jail right now because he "trusted" the people. Trust has to be earned, not given. Do you trust [used car salesmen, lawyer, drug dealer] too? They are part of "we the people" as well. It is also important to slap down those that criticize people who are in trust positions if they don't like the results. For example people who criticized the US Supreme Court in 2000 and try to perpetuate the lie that the election was "stolen". In fact if they let the Florida decision stand, Mr. Gore lost the election anyhow. He didn't have the votes needed.
A guy that really needs to be slapped down publicly is Michael Moore. As former NYC Mayor Ed Koch put it, his Farenheight 911 isn't a documentary, it is a lie. I think Mr. Koch is way to easy on him. It is a vicious set of lies and worse he charges a lot of money to listen to them. He laughes all the way to the bank.
Getting back to voting machines, they have never been perfect (anonymous paper ballots... yea right... sit in the back and punch a bunch to victory). Why do people want to hold the machine to nuclear standards and not the people voting? I think they should make absolutely sure that nobody can vote more than once. Stamp their hand with a dye that won't come out for 2 weeks. If they try to vote twice, lock 'em up for 5 years. Democrats would loose almost all their seats as I speculate they stuff lots of ballot boxes.
just because the software might be open to
peer review does not make a secure, reliable
eVoting system. The machine specifications
and attributes should be specified, as well
as the secure communications, back-end server,
and the database used. The FEC has not even
come up with standards yet, and the GOP has
pissed away billions of dollars on faulty
equipment.
I say, let a standards body define the software,
the hardware, and the process, all for peer
review, THEN spend the money on contractors
that will build to the specifications. What
we have in the USA now is yet another cash cow
for the big corporations to feed on, at taxpayer
expense and with generally poor quality.
Perhaps we should switch back to paper ballots,
or paper ballots with OCR, until REAL standards
can be defined (as F/OSS) and implimented.
And are the chips in the machine what they are supposed to be?
Complicated, Hell yes, and still insuficient.
Then again, a voter verified paper trail is incredibly easy, and completely sufficient. I don't care about verifying squat about the machines if I can check up on their results after the fact. Why do people even talk about requirements other than a voter verified paper trail? It's all you really need, and without it, nothing else is sufficient.
THIS is why VVPAT alone isn't enough:
http://www.equalccw.com/deandemo.html
Upshot: Diebold rigged the central tabulator to evade "spot checking" (such as the mandatory 1% manual recount in California). Only a 100% manual recount tells the whole story.
That only happens if the race is a nailbiter.
Rig the race so it's NOT a nailbiter...and...sigh. The "paper trail" might as well come in rolls and get used as asswipe for all the good it'll do.
This doesn't mean I'm against the paper trails! On the contrary, it's critical.
But so is honest software.
The Open Voting Consortium has put some thought into this issue. By running on absolutely standard PCs as the "terminal" and sourcing those on the local market, BIOS hacking would be more difficult on a broad scale and could in theory be checked for.
That link describes a way of changing the electronically recorded votes, after they were sent in by the precincts. Even a really easy way because the software was stupid.
But VVPT is still enough to catch it, and the only thing that can be sure to catch it. You can still compare vs. the VVPT after the votes have been sent in and totaled up.
Why is the VVPT useless if the race is riggged to not be a nailbiter??? If the polls leading up to the election indicate a nailbiter, and then I lose by a landslide, you don't think I'll demand a recount?
Of course you want to have honest software. A paper trail is the only way to know if you do have honest software, firmware, hardware, comm lines, technicians, etc, etc. Any complex system has all sorts of vulnerabilities. Even the system of droping a poece of paper into a locked box and having a lot of people watching when it gets opened has some vulnerabilities. But it has a lot less than most anything else, and we've got lots of experience dealing with them.
Just for a random tangent: "absolutely standard PC" and "sourced on the local market" sound mutually exclusive to me. I don't even know what "absolutely standard" means, but I'd assume all such machines should be identical, which I wouldn't count on being able to do in two different months from the same supplier, much less from different suppliers.
Also, it's not just broad scale hacking that's to be worried about. In an at all tight local election, hacking even a handfull of machines would be plenty.
"Absolutely standard PC" means a normal PentiumIII-on-up PC that you can get a nice stable Linux build for.
---------------
First thing: you'd be surprised at how many failed candidates don't do as much challenge as they're legally entitled to. Why? Because manual recounts across an entire county (or legislative district) cost money...and sometimes they've flat run out.
ONLY a failed candidate is allowed to contest an election - according to the courts, they're the only one with "standing". Put another way, vote fraud allegedly doesn't hurt the general public, only the losers. Which is crazy, but that's how the courts are ruling!
----------------
You're also presuming a LOT about the accuracy of polls. Just for starters, in 1996 a poll of print and broadcast journalists shows 86% in favor of Clinton and I think the imbalance is overall even worse today.
The sole national exit polling system we had (VNS paid for by multiple media outlets in a sort of "cartel") came completely unglued in 2000 and went out of business - and nothing has replaced it since.
Sorry dude, I want honest open-source software AND a VVPAT.
And two more things on top of those:
c) A commitment to public records/open meeting honesty on the parts of county election officials, which is a whole 'nuther issue entirely.
d) AUDIT TRAILS! Dammit, banks have known how to keep a record of every time money changes hands since the days of the Hudson Bay Company, Lloyds of London and similar 300+ years ago. Christ, longer than that, Jewish bankers in Europe figured this out 1,000+ years ago. CPAs today have published, standard ways of dealing with this. When VOTES change hands from the field to the central tabulator area to the central database and then to a manual recount, there are well-understood procedures to cope with the handoffs. We're not using them. Why not, we've got over 1,000 years of R&D on the subject.
Count votes like it's money because ultimately it IS!
"you'd be surprised at how many failed candidates don't do as much challenge as they're legally entitled to. Why?"
Because most failed candidates know they almost certainly lost fair and square. If your own campaigns research, or whatever indicators you like, suggest you're going to get trounced, and on election day you do in fact get trounced, you're not going to ask for a recount unless you're a complete jerk.
"You're also presuming a LOT about the accuracy of polls. Just for starters, in 1996 a poll of print and broadcast journalists shows 86% in favor of Clinton and I think the imbalance is overall even worse today"
What does a poll of print and broadcast journalists have to do with anything? Obviously the polls to look at are well conducted polls of likely voters. Certainly candidates who are behind in polls say they don't think polls are accurate; but you can bet their campaigns are simultaneously conducting polls on how they can turn the race around.
The loss of good exit polls is a very sad thing; they were a good entirely independent check on election results. But polling a sufficiently large sampling of likely voters in the days right before the election is pretty good too. It won't tell you how the election is going to come out, but it will give a losing candidate a general idea of whether there is a point to asking for a recount.
I want a VVPAT and an honest, open system (of which software is just one part). But without the VVPT, you don't know if you've got an open honest system. With it alone, you can know if you've got an honest system. Even if the VVPT shows the system to be honest, I'd like it to be open, but getting people to understand these things is plenty difficult; I'm not confident I can get everything I want; So if I've got to pick one thing to push for loudest, hardest, and first, there's no question: VVPT. If I get that and nothing else, at least I've got something. If I get something else and not that, I've got nothing.
Well between recent events in Nevada and California's new VVPAT bill signed by Ahnuld and effective 1/1/06, the VVPAT issue is basically won. Even nationwide. There'll be some drama and screaming left but it's really just "mopping up operations".
So I see nothing unreasonable in pushing on past that point.