Slashdot Mirror
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."
I guess it would be something like this (qtd on Slashdot recently)
Well, it's a bit more complicated than that. I teach American politics at a campus where P. Diddy and crew just came through, and we talked about it in class after the rally. The point isn't simply to vote, but rather to take responsibility for your life. That entails being an educated voter, not a random one. That message is getting through to the kids, so I'm most definitely NOT appalled by it.
Agreed, it would be impossible to do this in practice. But as you suggest, the important point is that something like this could happen, even in theory. The implication is that electronic voting is much less robust than hand-counting, and certainly more opaque. It's been pointed out on Slashdot before that hand counting is actually not that difficult.
In a sense, I agree with you. It doesn't seem like electronic voting is going to go away, so there are probably better issues we could be pursuing, even in the area of the electoral process. On the other hand, saying "It's happened, there's nothing we can ever do about it" seems to be rolling over so The Man can tickle your belly, and that kind of thing never goes down well on Slashdot. We're an idealistic bunch, I suppose, but I respect your right not to be.
You make some good points but I suspect you are really addressing the wrong audience.
On a totally offtopic note, anyone else find it funny that bin Laden's intervention has probably helped Bush's chances of re-election?
apterous.org
eVoting might be the "wave of the future" but the future ain't here yet!
:) ...now, for this eVoting stuff...It's easy to spoof an e-mail and not get caught, but it's not so easy to spoof an actual letter and not get caught... I apply this same analogy to eVoting. You could attempt to forge a physical ballot (like the guy in Ohio who recently attempted to register celebrity's names as voters), but you would most likely get caught in the long run, whereas if you modify an "eVote" you can slide home-free into office.
One of the most troublesome states to meddle with the faulty "eVoting" system is Florida. In addition to this, there are thousands of absentee ballots missing.
I expect Florida to be somewhat troublesome come this November.
Politics is a crooked business to start with, and this eVoting stuff is just twisting it even more!
Maybe next time, but I hope they lay off of these things this time around!
One more thought:
Something fantastic may happen in a couple days on this issue: there may be massive electronic vote fraud in several states, and yet Bush will lose anyway! If that happens, I think some things might come to light about Diebold, Sequoia, et.al., or groups of GOP operatives connected to them somehow.
But if there's massive e-vote manipulation that throws the election to Bush, I think the opposite is likely to happen: there will be a massive clampdown by the GOP powers-that-be as they realize they can make our current one-party state a permanent affair, as long as they can keep their fake-election-toy under wraps.
IMO optical mark recognition (aka: bubble sheets), also made by Diebold and others, is the closest thing out there that allows for fairly secure vote protection while allowing for electronic tallying. I know that evoting is also about access to others but at the cost of a honest election?
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
Here in Canberra (that nice little capital city of Australia) we had electronic voting for our election, and it is now probably going to be the focus of a court challenge by a losing party.
Personally, I agree with the time honoured tradition of paper voting...at least there is some physical record of votes.
samuel
1. Can you identify any UI design flaws in the user interface described above?
2. What would be a more reasonable default selection in this case?
3. Are poor UI design and user error mutually exclusive?
We have e-voting because those in control know they can use it to their advantage. There was nothing wrong with a paper ballot with a box that you place a mark in next to the candidate you choose. They replaced it with error-prone punch cards and butterfly ballots because it was EASIER. If they wanted to guarantee the most accurate recording of votes, they'd use a paper ballot you marked with a pen, which was then counted by a human being, then recounted by a different human being. You know, like you had in high school? They don't do it that way anymore. They could, if they wanted to. They don't. And so we have systems that are open to interpretation and manipulation.
I'm not disagreeing with you per se, but this whole thing seems overblown. My state has a so called "motor votor" law. This allows anyone to both register and vote at the polling place without *any* form of picture ID. IMHO, the chance of problems from this seems many orders of magnitude higher than that from somone hacking an electronic voting machine.
A good illustration of this came in the inability of the far-right party that held power in India till this year to execute the agenda of their core base, and hew to a 'Common Minimum Programme'
To remind one of the reality of direct voting through electronic machines that did not get hacked in India might be to belabor the obvious, yet it is what happened. The close similarity of the Republicans and Democrats makes one feel they are 'oppo-sames'
-- Will program for bandwidth
If you know nothing about the issues, then your vote is a wasted vote. You might as well just write a computer program to randomly select the candidates and the propositions (in the state referendum) to support.
Furthermore, there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the paper ballots. The problem is not the ballots. The problem is the fool who cannot understand the simple instructions about how to properly complete the ballot. Because the fool did not follow instructions in 2000, the tallying committee discarded the fool's ballot.
If a voter is so stupid that she cannot complete a ballot properly, then the loss of her vote is no loss to democracy.
Will it help bush? I hope not. Many of us foresaw something regarding OBL happening immediately prior to the election anyway. The great masses of the brainwashed electorate won't be affected by this. It's only the very scant few that haven't made up their mind by now that could be affected. The anti-bush crowd is probably scared more by the bush adminstration than OBL.
So, in summary, I'm not convinced that bush has been helped at all.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Double books work for accounting, why not double accounting for machines?
Have 2 companies running software out of same machine, takes two touches to complete single vote, one on company "A" software, one on "B". If they match, good. if not..recount the paper! ATMs give a paper trail, why not these things, only they loop inside. It would show if someone starts rigging when the count is messed up. Just make a note of it, keep voting! If one set of numbers suddenly changes, the other machine takes note.
Reminds me of, "If I ask the other door...."
This mind intentionally left blank.
The KKK a bunch of sheetheads? You decide!
Because Diebold (or whomever) has enough insiders to NOT need such a worrisome feature. I think I read on /. about Nevada having a good system though.
Has anyone ever noticed the government's (or any big corp's) lack of tech and non-tech abilities? It may not be skills per se, as much as a very slow motion reaction to things. I really don't think the gov't knows/thinks this will be a problem until the system is used, at which point it is too late.
I almost bet we won't know which moron was elected in 2k4. First time in our history we'll have to have an interm president. *ponder*
What is happening is that two democrats have backed two draft bills (one in the house and one in the senate)
There is a lot of misconception about these actions, predictably spread by right wing propaganda. They are actually trying to clean up the draft legislation so that rich boys with sugar daddies in powerful places can't dodge the draft as easily as our current president did. This is a genius move because its popular with the majority of americans and it puts pressure on bush in an interesting way... I'll explain.
Now, I doubt very much that Bush really wants to reinstate the draft except as a last resort, because if he did it would crush his campaign entirely -- however, as a consequence of his abysmal foreign policy (e.g., inability to cooperate with other nations who also have large military forces available) has made it such that, in order to stablize iraq, it may be necessary to reinstate the draft to get sufficient manpower. However, if the draft is reformed so that rich boys can't dodge it, then bush will be in a really tight corner because the draft would hit his base hard -- essentially it will force him to reconcile and cooperate with the UN to get the necessary troops from other countries.
While it is unquestionably scary, I don't think its fearmongering, simply because the threat is quite real -- everyone with a clue was predicting a massive shortfall in manpower before this war even started. Iraqi troops might have outdated equipment, but they outnumbered the size of our invasion force by nearly 4 to 1 -- if they had bothered to put up a fight, this war would have been a LOT more bloody, most likely, we would not have ever gotten into bhagdad with so few men. Bush et al. were betting that they would not, due to the unpopularity of saddam, and due to the incredible US air superiority (useful but highly leathal to the civilian population), which turned out to be mostly correct ("mission accomplished"). Where they went wrong was 1) assuming that things would remain relatively peaceful without much work, in fact crime spiked uncontrollably which led to an atmosphere of lawlessness, 2) that us unilateral action against iraq was viewed positively by the middle eastern populace, dead wrong -- iraq is the world's hottest spot for extremist organized terror, and 3) that iraqis would unquestionably embrace democracy as america envisioned it -- wrong, they envisioned it their own way, and thus the rise of local leaders such as al sadr and the insurgency. bottom line is that the war was a big gamble, and at first it looked like we got lucky, but that luck went sour quickly (and if you ever go to vegas, things will probably turn out the same way).
This is getting to be a rather long post, but I want to mention one more thing. There is a reason that the democrats use "non-partisan" groups to repeat their platform points, while the republicans do not. The republicans platform is "pro-business", that means they take huge contributions from corporate interests, and correspondingly support tax cuts and other give aways to support their funders. The dems, are "for the people", but in reality they take almost as much money from big business as the republicans. The problem for the democrats then, is that there is an inherent conflict of interest -- they solve this by creating those "non-partisan" entities to repeat the pro-people messages, which puts some separation between their two sides, thereby relieving the stress somewhat. The republicans, on the other hand, simply don't view the corporate money as a conflict of interest, therefore they don't have to create that separation. Now, there are some instances where the republicans use "non-partisan" groups to promote their message, and more or less for the same reasons that the dems do, and in their case probably to capture support from more moderate voters, but its just not as important because their base is with the rich business owners.
There is another side to this also, which is that in this election season w
No voter fraud cases are being in any way instructed by anyone up-top. Most likely, those in positions even close to power don't even consider that the fraud could be happening.
...
... hopefully this is all over ...
Don't bet on it:
"Hi All,
A friend sent this to me... wanted to pass this information on... double check your votes before you leave the polling location....
From my friend Maryellen.
No joking around. Here's an important heads up
Yesterday a friend voted early at a polling location in Austin. She voted
straight Democratic. When she did the final check, lo and behold every vote
was for the Democratic candidates except that it showed she had voted for
Bush/Cheney for president/vice pres.
She immediately got a poll official. On her vote, it was corrected.
She called the Travis County Democratic headquarters. They took all her
information, and told her that she wasn't the first to report a similar
incident and that they are looking into it.
So check before you leave the polling booth, and if anything is wrong, get
it corrected immediately. Report any irregularities to your local Democratic
headquarters.
Make sure you pass this along to your friends
the airwaves by tomorrow
DON'T FORGET TO VOTE!!!"
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
"I'm more afraid of a glitch along the lines of "all diebold machines count an extra presidential vote whenever this combination of votes is chosen""
One vote per machine could swing the election? Hands up anyone who's never found an off-by-one error in their code? Bonus points if it's in visual basic (as Diebold use) which has it's own, built-in off-by-one errors (e.g. when defining arrays)
Call me old fashioned, but I would never trust a system that
a) didn't give me a paper confirmation of my vote
b) wouldn't give a visual printout to be put in the ballot
Given the past election, I can't understand how the land of the free can put up with a system that doesn't provide either. I've heard the reasons for not providing printout, they were plain stupid and not technically challenging at all. OK, I prefer a paperless office, and quite like trees, but still...
And why oh why is voting not compulsory? Democracy is not a right, it's a hard-won system of self government that implies some democratic duties to its part-takers. One of them is to go out and f*cking vote once every four years. If you don't, you don't participate and forsake your rights. Which is exactly what is happening now, but that's another story altogether.
Imo the US of A spends too much time defending its right to be ignorant and stupid.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
We need someone to exploit one of the many Diebold machine vulnerablities and use it to report every single vote as being one for Nader. They'd only have to hack a few machines to make the problem glaringly obvious. Bonus points for doing it in a "dead-heat" state where the effect on the final election outcome will be impossible to determine.
The point isn't to throw the election, but to show the world unequivocally that we aren't talking about theoretical possibilities, but a serious practical threat to American democracy.
The outcome would be short-term chaos, as the whole U.S. electoral process would be thrown into disrepute, but the long-term result might be to get all major parties to insist on voter-verified, re-countable paper trails, as were used successfully in the recent referendum in Venezuala.
On the other hand, the long-term outcome might be to round up and shoot everyone with the skills to exploit such e-voting vulnerabilities.
--Tom
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
just a simple statement... shouldnt the number of votes per candidate be a far more reasonible method of electing the president/vice. in the 2000 election it was clear that gore/lieberman had the most votes showing that he was the popular choice yet bush won because of the e-college system... having less votes bush should not have won
Because it's infeasible; in the US, generally all elections occur on the same day: federal, state, county, city, etc.. There may be fifteen presidential candidates (though you only hear of two or three), three senatorial candidates, two representative candidates, and so forth, for perhaps 30 or 40 offices. Judges, for example, are often elected, sometimes the head of law enforcement for the area (sheriff) is elected, various minor officials e.g. head of waterworks may be elected. This varies by region.
It's important to emphasize that the federal government does NOT run the election in any way; it's managed by individual states, even for federal offices. The reasons are historical.
There is a often also a referendum or three, to pass/repeal a law, there are measures to raise taxes to fund schools, emergency services. Why these often aren't directly government-funded, but are instead funded by locally levied taxes, is a long and tedious story. Suffice it to say, that's how it's done, it's not changing soon. Except, of course, there are some states that do it differently.
In other words, one of the biggest problems is that there are so many regional exceptions, any system has to be very flexible to accommodate the needs of 50 states, each of which is divided into multiple districts, each with their own particular needs or systems.
Each state, (sometimes subdivisions in each state) has different methods for doing all of these things.
When all is said and done, there can often be fifteen pages or more of choices to make.
Using the the 'X in the box' system would mean a ballot that was probably 50 pages long, and hand counting would be slow and tedious. Some states use optically scanned ballots with circles which are filled in by hand, but these confuse the same people who were confused by them in school.
In some states, using mechanical (and now electronic) machines, you can simply select the party of your choice, and vote for all of their candidates at once; but you still need to decide on positions (e.g. judges and commissioners) which are technically non-partisan, and so forth.
I'm not saying it makes sense, or that the system doesn't badly need reform, but at the moment that's pretty much the way things are. Electronic voting is the latest way to try and mitigate these issues. It's just being implemented very poorly.
A witty saying is worth nothing - Voltaire