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More on the Dangers of eVoting
blamanj writes "A lot of discussion has been focused on the lack of security in electronic voting systems. What hasn't been as widely discussed, is just how tiny the voting manipulations have to be to have an effect. In this months CACM (cite, pdf of original paper is here), some Yale students show that altering only a single vote per machine would have changed the electoral college outcome of the 2000 election. Changing only two votes/machine would have flipped the results for four states."
here's the fixed link
...unrealistic access to countless voting machines..
...yelping about a real problem in an unrealistic way which just galvanizes everyone who needs to know about it against the people who actually understand the threat and have a real case to make...
That kind of access is far from unrealistic, and the number of machines necessary is far from countless. The latter was kind of the point.
see that horse? It's dead. You can stop beating it.
OK sir, I'll stop talking about or caring whether my vote is being counted. Very responsible of me, thanks for the suggestion.
The only way people will rise up and kill it is if (when) some massive fraud or error occurs that totally fucks the outcome of a major race.
How do you know that hasn't already happened? Seems to me circumstantial evidence points to it happening in Georgia in 2002. Unless there's a paper trail (which I admit I think is likely, eventually) or someone spills the beans about manipulating electronic vote counts (which I think is inevitable), we'll never know.
That OTOH is a great point.
To me, talking about touchscreen systems is crying wolf. The problem is not touchscreens, it's the totally independent issue of secretively operated and maintained closed-source vote counting servers.
We don't need vote counting servers to have touchscreen voting.
The Baltimore Jewish Times is reporting that Diebold uses DES encryption in their voting machines, and the key is publically available!
http://www.jewishtimes.com/2435.stm
Why?
Because you don't have to story peoples' names or any other information! You just have a bunch of dna entries, but you don't know who they belong too, where they live, etc. You can't even figure out who is a voter from the database. If you have the dna from someone you can check them against the database, but you can't do it the other way around. So as far as the government or anyone else who might abuse voter information is considered, the database is just about useless.
What about removing, say, a convicted felon from the database? Just get a sample of his dna and pull the matching strand from the database.
The downside: First, electrophoresis probably doesn't scale well to millions of samples. It's a lot better than the old methods, but not really designed at present for large scale work. Second, getting the DNA is going to annoy voters. Probably the easiest thing to do would be to swab cheek cells, but still. Third, while I firmly believe this could eliminate almost all voter fraud, this is not some super-secure database. I mean, what method are you using to check whose dna is allowed in? Probably birth certificate and social security card. And as easy as it is to forge those, so would it be to get into the database.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
It gets the kids interested. Once registered, they usually talk about politics with their friends and sometimes even do research. Most people, even kids, feel kind of stupid showing up to vote when they haven't done their homework.
The hope is that they will come in and vote even if they aren't completely knowledgeable on every little issue. It's not a test, they can skip over anything they know nothing about. The typical American ballot is quite intimidating especially since you must vote for a variety of people and referendums both statewide and local. Don't forget to scroll down to the bottom where we get to vote on the definition of marriage and who should be the official local land surveyor. This can take you long time and if you are the kind of person who usually gets in the 90% on tests, it can make you feel kinda stupid.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
Except the Vote or Die campaign carries a political agenda along with it. Propaganda and education aren't the same thing.
I didn't attend the Vote or Die rally at my school (mainly because I greatly dislike P. Diddy, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Mary J. Blige somewhat), but the reports I've heard indicated that DiCaprio fully admitted his support for Kerry during his speech, and Blige's incoherent ramblings were something to the effect of the war in Iraq being bad because it leads to a cycle of domestic violence. P. Diddy at least spread around the criticism by noting that neither major candidate spent much time politicking to large urban centers.
We are talking about voter verifiable paper trails. You enter your vote on the machine and it prints out what you voted in human and ideally machine readable form so you can verify the machine did what you told it to do and there is a record that is put in a box like an old fashioned paper ballot. There are two forks here.
In one fork the paper trail is machine readable and it gets fed into an optical scanner which actually counts it. In this scenario the electronic voting machine is of marginal value though it can reduce errors, double voting for example or not filling in the ovals properly for an optical scanner. But the main thing they do is provide electronic assistance to the blind so they can vote without assistance. We are blessed with these machines partially because the handicapped, especially the blind, are rightly complaining they are denied their right to anonymous voting by most/all non electronic voting machine.
In the other more likely fork the electronic machine does the count, but their is a paper receipt for every vote so you can:
A. randomly recount a subset of the machines to verify that the paper trail matches the machine count and catch fraud.
B. If the election is close or their is a dispute you can do a complete manual recount and disregard the machine count if it appears suspect.
Venezuela recently had a hotly contested recall electon for Hugo Chavez and they used all electronic machines, but with a paper trail unlike the U.S. which is sorely lacking paper trails. Here is a good writup on some of the issues the Carter foundation found in trying to monitor and audit the election.
@de_machina
The truth lies somewhere in between, I think. It's hard for me to look at something like this: ... and accept the notion that Sen. Hagel has never once considered or talked to anyone about the possibility that election results might have been manipulated on his behalf.
From what I've read, it seems many of the employees of Diebold are pro-VV-paper-trail, and the resistance to it from Diebold comes from on high. That, and a philosophical commitment to bad engineering, exploitable vote servers, aggressive lawyers, and closed source (all of which seems to be in evidence), is all the guys up top really need to do. There doesn't have to be any coordination with the parties that manipulate elections, you just have to be committed to giving them the right tools to succeed.
Voting Machines, including DREs, are only a small part of the reason why this election will be a train wreck.
There are a few others of pressing concern.
1) Provisional ballots: The Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed by Congress to prevent some of the nonsense from Florida in 2000, requires that a voter who tries to vote but does not show up on the list of eligible voters be allowed to cast a provisional ballot, which will be set aside to be later verified and counted, if valid.
There are a number of legitimate reasons why this may happen -- a voter shows up at the wrong precinct for example, or has moved to a different precinct in the same county, or a different county in the same state, or their registration wasn't properly processed, etc.
HAVA, however, only requires that these prospective voters be given a provisional ballot; it does not require the states to count provisional ballots. In Ohio, the Secretary of State issued an order that provisional ballots will not be counted, and instead errant voters are to be directed to the proper polling place. This order was upheld, overturned on appeal, and overturned again in Federal Appellate Court about a week ago -- meaning the secretary's original order stands, and provisional ballots in Ohio may be collected but not counted.
Expect more lawsuits, especially if the vote is as close as it now appears it will be.
2) Absentee Ballots: All states allow for voting by absentee ballots, but most require that the ballots are returned by the close of polls on election day. Not postmarked, but returned.
A state cannot even print absentee ballots untill all primary election results have been certified by the state. Some states (can't remember which off the top of my head) have primary elections as late as October, meaning there's less than one month to certify primary results, print, mail, and recieve absentee ballots.
I suppose most of you heard about the 58,000 missing absentee ballots in Florida. They were supposed to mail out new ones on Friday, but even with overnight mail, there is no way those can be returned by Tuesday, 7:00 pm, at least by mail. There is talk about extending the deadline, but one can expect quite a few gripes in the coming weeks about lost ballots. Again, expect lawsuits.
Also of note, though purely anecdotal, is that in 2000 I was living in a former Warsaw-Pact country and requested an absentee ballot (Cuyahoga County, OH) through the US embassy in September. I never got my ballot. Expect more complaints, and yes, lawsuits.
3) Multiple voting: In most states, it's piss easy to get on the voter registration rolls, and much more difficult to get off them. This issue has already been raised in Florida this year, particularly concerning 'sun birds' who have residences there and in other states, notably New York. It is not difficult at all to cast valid votes in both states, provided one is registered in both states. This shouldn't be possible, but it is not unusual.
4) Experience. This is something that has largely been ignored by the media, but an unprecedented number of county-level election supervisors will be running their first national elections.
There are an awful lot of county clerks, board of elections chairmen, recorders, and elections supervisors who saw the writing on the wall after November 2000, and who opted for private sector jobs or retirement, early or otherwise, to avoid a Florida-type scandal. Not that their replacements are not competent, but they are rookies. Check with your local government to find out who is running this election, and how long he or she has been there.
All this is not to say that DREs are absolutely acurate and foolproof, but there are many more problems besides the physical mechanisms of voting, just as there were in 2000. Problems 2 and 3 happen every four year, for example; they just don't matter unless the vote is close.
This has been all well and good in the past because the margin of victory has been
It's not a bug. It's just an easy way to misuse the eSlate tablets. After selecting a straight-ticket, it takes you to the next selection box, which it the presidential race. Ol' Dubya is first on the ballot, so he gets highlighted. Pressing the selection button instead of the "Cast Ballot" button selects him.
I'm familiar with the issue because I work with the Travis County Democratic Party in Austin, Texas, the headquarters of eSlate and a county that exclusively uses eSlate machines.