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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.'"
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
The fact of the matter is that, in large part because of the CEO's comments, Diebold systems will always be suspect, and any election that a Republican wins using Diebold systems will be looked upon with suspicion.
Since the controversial company seems to favor the side that controls the entire government at this point, they have no real motivation to change things. Meaningful election reform won't happen until we have a split government. That is, when one party controls the presidency and the other party controls at least one of the houses of Congress.
Hopefully, in 2004 we can either bring in a Democratic president, and/or give the Democrats control of the Senate. The overall impact of getting away from the one-party-controls-all system we have at the moment will be a move back toward the center, where all the good compromising gets done. As it is now, we have one party pushing the country clear over to their side, with no meaningful compromise going on. No matter what party is in control, that sort of thing is bad for the country.
...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.
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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.
Is that a surprise? That state that houses the Nevada Gaming Commission would have the most stringent requirements for electronic voting machines?
Badnarik's solution sounds like it rids us of the australian ballot. This bastion of privacy was established to prevent people from forcing votes one way or another, either through physical violence, buerocratic jobs, or the power of money. The ballots are public record once cast. They're supposed to be anonmymous, but anyone who wants to buy votes can find a strong path with Badnarik's solution.
I'm personally not so concerned with malicious tampering, although its entirely possible and feasible. I'm more worried about bugs, which seem to be the only constant in today's software.
Indeed the rules in place today do pander to the two party system, and there are some odd laws in various places. For example, no member of the Communist Party can be placed on the ballot in Kansas. This relic does little good; I'd be much more worried about candidates with secret ties to the Communists rather than a guy who's publicly Communist. Another ballot law in Kansas restricted parties with more than two words, like Natural Law Party, until the Natural Law Party. I can't recall the purpose of this law, but the good news is its gone.
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Open Source Sysadmin
It would be pretty hard to detect a spoof.
Or, in the case of the federal government, gridlock - which is good for the people.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
The only safe paper trail is one that can be checked by the individual voters. If you are going to tamper with the electronic record so that every third vote for foo goes to bar then it is a trivial matter to make sure that the paper that you spit out at the end of the day matches the fiddled vote tallies.
That's why the only sane way to do electronic voting is to use whatever fancy dan front end you want, I couldn't care less, but at the end of the voting session you spit out a human verifiable paper receipt that is the official vote. This vote gets put in the ballot box and if anyone questions the integrity of the vote then you open the ballot boxes and count the votes by hand. In most cases the electronic count of the vote will be the one used. However, in cases where fraud is suspected there is a verifiable paper trail that can be followed.
This gives the voter a chance to read his ballot and make sure that his or her vote was cast correctly, and it makes it much more difficult to "hack" the vote.
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
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."
I loathe to even discuss politics on this forum for fear of getting banned for life but I think there is a divergence for science oriented republican leaning members. They agree with republican principles except when it comes to open source. They see the beauty of the science of open source where as politically right people see it as anti business pseudo -communism (think bush not enthusiastically supporting the Microsoft lawsuit). I think that as they see it more as true democracy Republican will come around. Of course once that happens the New York Times will decide that open source must of really been evil.
"A good friend will bail you out of jail. A true friend will be sitting next to you saying, 'damn....that was fun!'"
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.
Why is it that the US seems to want to dispose of the good ol ballot box? It works in almost every other democracy in the world.
A system that uses technology for fast results but is verifiable using tried and true methods seems to be the best of both worlds.
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.
When I mail in my card, would I have to write my return address on the envelope? Even if I do not include my return address, if I mail it from my house, it can be traced back to me.
Please, put down the remote and back away from the TV.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
And who's to say the barcode has to line up with what it prints in plain english? If I were going to fix an election, I'd let the voter walk away thinking he picked whoever he wanted, then just credit it as a count for my guy. And I'd keep it EXTREMELY close, but just barely over the margin of error.
;)
Come to think of it, *IS* Linus running this year?
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.
....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.
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).
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.
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...
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.