Slashdot Mirror
Avi Rubin and More on Electronic Voting
jgo writes "Johns Hopkins Computer Science professor Avi Rubin, posted his experience as an election judge on his website. It's an interesting read and exposes some potential security problems with electronic voting. At one point he held in his hand the five memory cards containing all of his precinct's votes." Rubin had posted his experience in the primary election earlier.
"At one point he held in his hand the five memory cards containing all of his precinct's votes"
whats keeping him from replacing one/all of them with doctored records. He complains that the voting machines could be tampered with, but there needs to be more safeguards than just the code.
How hard is it to add a little printer? it would be much more conspicuous replacing a four-foot stack of receipts with ones from the back of your van.
Human mistakes could affect results in voting machines.
The voting machines should be supervised by robots...with shotguns
From Professor Rubin's account: "If we continue to use the kind of insecure DREs that were used in this election, it is only a matter of time before somebody exploits them. And the worst part is that we may never know it." [emphasis added]
It seems that no one really wants to come forward and raise this as a serious concern for this election, despite the fact that it's entirely plausible. Unfortunately, it seems highly unlikely that anyone who dares cast doubt on this election will be regarded as objective.
... CANADA ! I'm OUTTA here. Later suckers !
(free weed, no guns (only laser warfare), and you can travel and not be hated... amazing).
Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate !
With stuff like this already being detected, and such weaknesses in the system (one man being able to "lose" or otherwise destroy or alter all votes in an entire precinct), non-open source electronic voting is a dangerous situation.
We're on the verge (or way past it) of the average citizen losing all power and control within their country, and electronic voting is just another step.
The only hope is for citizens and groups to adamantly insist on open source, safety procedures, regular audits, and paper trails. Unfortunatley, I see few if any of those things happening anytime soon.
Lose Weight and Feel Great with Isagenix
Glitch gave Bush extra votes in Ohio.
Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna.
Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.
..as people from Canada still sound like yanks to the the rest of the world. Of course, we can tell you aren't when we notice you aren't arrogrant and don't sy things like "It isn't like this back home...".
Also when you don't threaten to sue everyone we know you are from Canada.
How's this for a way of safely conducting electronic voting...
Give everyone a GUID, a complete random key of sufficient length that you can't simply guess and get a valid GUID. Mail it to them.
When a person votes, their vote is stored against their GUID, in a publically accessable database. Anyone can check that their vote has been correctly counted by looking up their GUID in the table.
Voting would effectively be pseudonymous instead of anonymous. (With a new pseudonym for every election).
When all of the votes are on one machine, one person can contol the votes. We need checks and balances.
With a manual system, it takes hundreds of people to count the vote. Sure, it takes more time, buit I can wait. Sure there may be a few people with nefarious intentions, but those few people might be able to throw a precinct, not a whole state (or country!) Usually when hand counting, two or three people count anyways, so there's even more checks and balances built into the system. Our country is built on checks an balances. We need that in the voting system as well.
I truly belive voting problems are the number one issue facing our country. If can't trust the vote, then we don't have a democracy. If one election can be stolen, the next one will be stolen as well. Very slippery slope.
Please watch this free 30-minute film about black box voting machines.
We have all been scared about Diebold and other black box voting machines, and for good reason. Apparently one of the central machines from Election Systems & Software Inc. tallied 115 votes for Bush in a certain county, while another machine tallied 365 votes for that same county. Which one was right? There is no way to tell, because "it is too hard" to add a printer to a counting machine. It is not like they have been doing that for 30 years. But who needs to do a recount when the machines are infallible, right?
Most infuriating of all is that Republican Senator Hagel, the former Senate Ethics Director, resigned after admitting that he owned Election Systems & Software! That's right, the same voting machine maker that 60% of ALL VOTES in the U.S. are counted on, the same one that provably miscounted votes in Ohio and other states, and the same one that refuses to print receipts to recount these votes. No wonder legislation trying to require printers on voting machines is taking so long to get through congress when congressmen can vote themselves into office without a paper trail.
Probably old news by now, but what the hell, editors can dupe stuff, why shouldn't i?!
/ 10083861.htm C T/MGArticle/NCT_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=10317 78939157&path= g litch_1.html a per/2004/11/05/a29a_BROWVOTE_1105.html
(found on dailyrotten.com)
http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/local
http://www.wnct.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WN
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/02/HNevote
http://www.nbc4i.com/politics/3894867/detail.html
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/news/ep
...for standardized, reliable, secure, auditable national voting procedures & infrastructure --
but we have plenty to use for Pentagon studies on psychic teleportation.
We walk into a grocery store and usually buy stuff instead of stuffing it in our pockets and running. We know it's wrong to leave without paying.
Why do votes need uber security check technology? Whatever happened to scrutiny by peers?
IMO, paper ballots are best because it is just tougher to destroy them. But, we should get receipts showing how we voted for our own records.
But, trying to turn the entire election process into zero possibility of error or fraud undermines the election itself and goes against the ideals of our society. People in general are honest - and those that aren't get caught eventually by honest people.
Suggesting that 'one person' should not be able to hold an entire precincts' votes just doesn't make much sense. People are often responsible for others. I suppose twenty people should all carry a piece of the nuclear football too..
--- We need more Ron Paul!
There is a question, of course, about how long you might be locked up for doing so.
clever idea
The scary part isn`t the stuff that you can trace back (i.e he exchange some of the memory cards for some containing results in favor of Candidate A or B), but stuff you can`t nor detect, nor trace back.
Remember, NO LOGS of the voting process are kept on these machines. Think of "Irregularities" in the code that add a vote for Candidate A when a certain vote pattern is met. Or as Mr Rubins said, physical tampering allowing you to "one could change a few bytes in the ballot definition file and votes for the two major Presidential candidates would be swapped. In that case, none of the procedures we had in place could detect that votes were tallied for the wrong candidates."
Great. Maybe this time no one abused the system. But think long-term; in 50 years, when e-voting will be predominant and everyone will be confident in it...
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
then you are simply naive, imho. It seems clear to me that no matter who you vote for, the powerful remain in control and the powerless carry the costs.
Words to men, as air to birds.
When's the last time you could make millions robbing a grocery store?
If you don't think Bush and his staff make millions on the war in Iraq, wake up.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
that Open Source is not going to be able to address.
The reality is that electronic records of the vote require the humans trust the machine. Open Source or closed, the binaries on the machine can not be directly examined, rendering the nature of the code used a moot point.
Voting by machine is voting by proxy. We must trust the proxy and cannot observe its operation. Subtle manupulations of the vote will go unnoticed, unless we keep paper records and perform mandatory audits.
This means the only electronic solution is one that records the vote on a ballot that both humans and machines can read. Those ballots can be machine counted and audited as we have always done.
What's the point really? Why not just use paper ballots and make them easy to use and read by both machines and humans and spend the money reforming the process to make it fast, taking humans into account.
Remember, there are plenty of old folks willing to do their civic duty. We can get fast and trustworthy results with a far smaller investment than we have made on electronic solutions to date.
This is not a hard conclusion to come to. The fact that it is ignored means those in power WANT IT TO BE THAT WAY.
It's wrong and we need to demand change continiously until we get it; otherwise, we lose our democracy.
Blogging because I can...
I'm as much of a geek as anyone here, but there are some problems that cannot be solved by technology. I don't care if the voting machine is open source, voter verified, paper backup... whatever, when the votes are counted on a machine, there is more chance for abuse. Single point of failure,
I am a voting Luddite. Vote on paper, count on paper. Distribute the load.
The idea is that the voter can verify that the printout matches their wishes. The printout is the master copy, not the internal count. The latter is just more convenient -- for the voter and for the tallier.
By adding a printer, you're conceding that the electronic voting machine may not innately be able to provide complete confidence in the result.
No piece of non-trivial software can ever be considered bug free, and therefore, no software ever deserves complete confidence. For that matter, hand-counting shouldn't have your complete confidence either. People make mistakes; shit happens. That's the whole reason for QC.
By conceding that the electronic voting machine's results cannot be trusted, you're saying that you have no basis upon which to reject a request for a recount of the paper receipts. In other words, you're back to hand-counting paper votes each time.
You should have no basis upon which to reject a recount. The paper ballots are the masters. If there is a serious challenge, then they should be recounted. But in any case: you should verify a selected sample of the machines' votes in every polling station to make sure that they are giving reasonable numbers. This is just the application of industry-standard quality control procedures to voting machines. It boggles my mind that electronic voting was ever considered without them.
To within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury. -- Tom Duff
H.R.2239 and S.1980, discussed further here, will amend the Help America Vote Act (an act designed to ensure consistent voting systems that meet certain standards be available to ALL voters in ALL jurisdictions), such that there is "a voter-verified permanent record or hardcopy" attached with each and every ballot cast by every voter.
.[1] Don't believe people who make it seem like companies like Diebold are resisting. They aren't. They'll build - and sell - whatever municipalities will buy.
Please, simply support this legislation.
Additionally, the electronic voting manufacturers, such as Diebold, already have the ability to add permanent, individual voter-verified paper audit trails to their products
The roadblock, as it turns out, is often local election boards. First, the new paper verification systems NEED to go through the government certification process - remember, it's the e-voting watchdogs who are chastising non-certified patches/updates being put into place; the paper audit systems need to go through the same certification process. Further, many municipalities can't understand why they should be forcing paper audit trails; after all, they think, they are just getting away from paper ballots - why should they be arguing for paper ballots (and all the headaches that go along with them, ON TOP of the headaches they already have from learning to deal with e-voting), so why should they go back to them?
Folks, so many people are involved in elections at so many different levels that there is literally no way that any central entity could rig an election across an entire state. Experts dealing with e-voting don't even have this on their radar. Their concern is more errors and failures. E.g., most of Ohio is still punchcard as it is (the majority of the 35 counties moving to e-voting pushed off the transition until AFTER the election because of problems), and someone like Diebold doesn't even have access to this equipment after the fact. Yes, an unscrupulous election official or enterprising hacker might be able to breach individual machines and potentially even a county - it's possible. But the likelihood of something like that happening on any significant scale, ESPECIALLY without being caught (the articles we're talking about here actually prove that the audit processes, be they what they are, do work) is very, very low.
That said, we absolutely should be ensuring that there is a permanent, voter-verified, paper record. It is absolutely critical to our voting process, even if the software is still proprietary on these systems (though it, too, should be open for public inspection). But the permanent voter-verified paper record alone eliminates the chances for any widespread fraud with the counting process itself, and at the very least makes any fraud easily reversible and/or detectable.
Contact your representative and senators, and urge them to support the above bills. It will be a lot more productive that imagining fantasies about Diebold "handing" Bush the election. (If ANYTHING remotely like that happened, there are a shitload of professors, campaign staff, scholars, journalists, and researchers who know a LOT more than you do who would be all over this in a heartbeat. Kerry's $300 million, two-year campaign didn't just roll over for no reason. Bush won, whether anyone likes it or not, and it wasn't because electronic voting handed anyone anything. The POINT here, is that instead of inventing wild conspiracy theories, we should be ensuring that there is voter verification and a permanent paper record for all future elections, because HAVA will require a shift to electronic voting for everyone - before that happens, we should make sure that it's veri
The machine doesn't just print out a paper record internally; what voting rights groups are asking for is a voter-verifiable paper trail: the voter can inspect the paper record of their vote. This paper record goes into a ballot box, just like a normal ballot. If the result is disputed, it's possible to have a paper recount.
Of course, this is still subject to security problems -- e.g. what if an election judge discards some of the paper receipts? -- but they are problems shared by traditional paper balloting. The thing is, it's a lot harder to get a corrupt election judge in every precinct than it is to get one corrupt programmer in every voting machine company, so widespread rigging is more difficult and easier to discover.
They want electronic voter sign in. The books will be replaced by an electronic sign in. This will be connected to the voting machine. So much for a secret ballot, so much for comparing the number of voters to the number of votes cast.
BTW, the owners and main programmers for Diebold are not just Bush pioneers, but are also Dominionist. Google the goals of the Dominionist.
photosMy Photostream
BBV is soliciting donations icw the largest FOIA request ever submitted
stolenelection2004.com
votergate.tv
Outrage in Ohio Was the Ohio Election Honest and Fair?
Kerry Won
Shoplifting the Presidency?
Ultimate Felony Against Democracy
Surprising Pattern of Florida's Election Results
votes for party president versus voters registered
exit_poll(gif)
Florida2004chart
openvotingconsortium.org
verifiedvoting.org/eirs
electionprotection2004.org
The Rise of Open-Source Politics
http://www.cpsr.net
Presume once congress & the administration are aware to the purported problems they respond rapidly with "Help America Vote Act - II".
Who/what certifies the data (or lack of) on the memory cards before the process even begins?
I voted on an electronic machine here in Atlanta, GA. Previously, I have voted using mechanical machines in NY and Pennsylvania. One big difference: less privacy with the electronic machines. It's not a particularly big deal to me, but some might feel weird about that. Especially if they intend to vote for a candidate that is very unpopular in their district.
I felt the process and UI was fine (clear, minimal opportunity for human error, etc.).
Main complaint (other than security concerns): the potential of the electronic machines was not realized. For example, there were several initiatives on the ballot here. One was a widely publicized gay bashing, er, I mean, marriage protection ammendment. Another was a lesser publicized amendment relating to judicial jurisdiction. (Both described here) I knew a great deal about the gay bashing measure, but hadn't heard of the proposed amendment about the courts. All they put on the ballot was a yes or no to the following statement: "Shall the Constitution be amended so as to provide that the Supreme Court shall have jurisdiction and authority to answer questions of law from any state appellate or federal district or appellate court?" Um, how about maybe?
It would be great if a more clear explanation could be added to the ballot. The electronic medium makes this crazy easy. It's no more expensive to do. The website linked above even has a very clear description that could have been used. (Of course, this opens up questions about potential bias that can be worked in to the description. However, I think something is almost certainly better than nothing.)
I think electronic voting will be a good thing if the security concerns are worked out. Will they be? That's hard to say. In the near future will most Americans think they are? Yes, almost certainly.
Here's yet another person who is an expert in political polling and exit polls, talking about why the polls were wrong (hint: it's not because electronic voting machines were rigged):
http://www.wm.edu/news/?id=4027
Notable quote:
I think the important thing about exit polls is they show us why people won and the dynamics of the race. The mistake most people make is they see polls as a horse-race, but they are actually the explanation of what happened.
The polls may have been wrong about who won, but they were right about explaining why people voted the way they did. If you don't have polls, you allow the elites and candidates to interpret the elections in their own interest. Polls, in many ways, are crucial to democracy.
If you look at previous elections, you can see that exit polls are always different the day after the election. Exit polls ultimately are always right, though they are never right originally. This is because polls have to be weighted with the actual vote to be completely accurate. The vote, of course, can't be factored in until the election is completed. If the exit polls are not "corrected" in this way, then the analysis of the election will always be flawed. So after the polls have closed, exit polls are always weighted for demographics and for the actual votes.
Don't you think that a person like this, and all the other veteran people who have devoted their lives to politics and elections, even SUSPECTED that there might be fraud on a scale that "handed" someone an election, that they have access to all sorts of connections, resources, and tools far beyond the lame (sometimes fabricated) charts (with no attribution whatsoever) that are being emailed around supposedly "proving" that exit polls only didn't match in states that use e-voting?
The reason why the mainstream press isn't talking about it isn't because they "don't want to touch it", or that they haven't picked up on it. It's just not true.
Stop focusing on really, really stupid comments that Diebold's CEO made in the capacity of a GOP campaigner (as if he can magically have a 13,000 person company rig elections in 88 counties and thousands of polling places around the states, on machines over which they have no control), and instead focus on what's important, which is ensuring that as the Help America Vote Act moves forward, and more and more electronic machines get installed everywhere in an effort to make voting fair and consistent for every American citizen, that we have a permanent voter-verified paper trail associated with every individial vote in every election. The e-voting manufacturers already have this capability. All we have to do is make it an umbrella federal law that ALL municipalities implement such technology, whether they want to or not.
BBV is soliciting donations icw the largest FOIA request ever submitted
stolenelection2004.com
votergate.tv
Outrage in Ohio
Was the Ohio Election Honest and Fair?
Kerry Won
Shoplifting the Presidency?
Ultimate Felony Against Democracy
Surprising Pattern of Florida's Election Results
votes for party president versus voters registered
exit_poll(gif)
Florida2004chart
openvotingconsortium.org
verifiedvoting.org/eirs
electionprotection2004.org
The Rise of Open-Source Politics
cpsr.net
Presume once congress & the administration are aware to the purported problems they'll respond rapidly with "Help America Vote Act - II".
A voting machine can be tampered with in many ways. Even if you audit the code of the voting software itself, you can not trust the machine.
F.e. you would also have to audit the toolchain (in binary - not the source), the whole OS, the means of transportation (exchanging CF cards or tampering with routers) and the backend. (How can you be sure the database isn't changed afterward?)
And you have to make absolutely sure only the revieved components are used on each machine.
This is perfectly not doable.
You can only treat such a system as a black box. A paper trail would make it possible to manually recount the results for some randomly selected machines to make sure the results match.
In Arkansas, your ballot is numbered and the number of your ballot recorded next to your name in the voter registration book. They can look at will to see how you voted. Entirely unamerican if you ask me.
Avi Rubin. The only thing more perfect would be if he'd given this report to an online TV station, it could be Rubin.Avi then.
I'm gonna change my name to Mpeg Smith in honour of him.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Why are we introducing the chances for errors into our most important civic institution? This is insanity! As another poster wrote there is no reason that a printout will accurately reflect how the machine handles your input, it's only showing you what was sent to the printer. We have so many other obfuscating problems as well, like magnets and code tampering and using phone lines to transmit results.
.5% in the polls. It'll be 10 people and 10 ballot boxes per precinct - tops. Wood is not expensive so don't go there.
/. so you've got more insight than most folks.
The real problem is taking the physical stylus out of the hand of the voter. I would only consider eVoting for disabled persons, and I would think the majority of them have few problems.
1) To avoid fraud, why not submit the ballot into more than one ballot box. One for each candidate on the ticket. If democrats and republicans have their own ballot box - they'll likely have the same number of votes - the incentive to cheat is removed without duopoly.
2) Allow all candidates nationwide to be on the ballot if they garner
Here's a nice page to Federal Contact Information http://www.eff.org/congress/ - tell them what you think - you're on
Stuff that matters.
And once Govenor Schwarzenegger wins the presidency and these shotgun toting robots refuse to listen about a little thing called the constitution, what then? :)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Damn... I wish I had mod points.
There is a consistent pattern of fraud and vote manipulation in this election. Read these articles, in fact, looking at them one of them is being hosted by me (I may get slashdotted).
We need to keep this issue in the forefront. if we let this election's shaky results go unchallendged, the next one will be even worse.
- Everyone is issued with a swipe card, it contains very little information, and physically it contains even less, just a serial number and locations of the nearest booths to your house.
- Every touch screen is identical, hardware and software country wide. There will be no reason for the software to have one different byte compared to another machine.
- You swipe your card thru the machine. You input your D.O.B, this is just to stop people from finding a bunch of cards and using them.
- Now the canidates for your area appear, no matter where you are voting, different state, different country(in a embassy or such) - remember all machines are identical.
- You vote. You confirm your vote. Your card serial number is sent to all other ballot booths and main servers saying dont accept this card again, Its used.
- Periodically each machine communicates with each other in the same room, just to share raw numbers as a backup. You could also share with other machines in different areas and states. Just raw numbers (and a timestamp) on how many times someone has voted on each machine not who they voted for. Later on these machines can communicate back with each other to check that the timestamps and the raw numbers that go with them still match.
- Once polling has closed the machines start sending the complete raw numbers and also the canidate vote numbers back to the main servers.
"Go into the hall of mirrors and have a bloody hard look at yourself" - HG Nelson
Make a donation to Blackboxvoting.org as they have just launched one of the largest, if not the largest Freedom of Information Act request ever. And those requests aren't cheap.
Why does there have to be a story about electronic voting EVERY SINGLE FUCKING DAY?!?! We get it: electronic voting is neither secure nor accountable. Maybe electronic voting should have its own section so we can block it the fuck out.
The same goes for stories about SCO, though they are only posted every other day.
Paper Ballot
Ink pen
Ballot Box.
Cheap, reliable, fair, honest.
No attributions, no information about what the data is, or where it came from. The exit poll numbers were all already adjusted, as they always are. So where's their data? Why does no one put their name on it? Face it: Bush won. (I didn't vote for him.)
See here and here for more details, including information on why exit poll numbers are always adjusted.
Also, those charts are even more worthless, since you'd need to see county-by-county and polling place-by-polling place data to have anything meaningful come out of it. Further, those states use e-voting machines by three different manufacturers. Are you actually alleging that ALL THREE e-voting vendors have found some way to add votes only to the Republican candidates, undetected. Yeah, rrrright. Do you think Kerry's $300M campaign, and the hundreds of experts who worked it for the better part of two years, just said "Oh, well! Guess we lost, even though there's proof of widespread fraud! Let's just throw in the towel and not say anything about it!" Wake up.
We do need verified voting, but I'm sorry to say that there was no widespread fraud in all e-voting states. It's just not possible. There are thousands of people involved, thousands of pieces of equipment, many, many, many election and other government officials at all levels in extremely disparate jurisdictions with different ways of doing things, with no way for any central entity to reach these machines after the fact. (And no, they don't come "preloaded" with votes for Republican candidates; the logistics of the way they're set up and the diversity of the the configurations also makes that impossible.)
Bush won. Again. Get over it.
Thats the way we do it in Australia too, works well.
But some people have a "need" to apply technology to everything.
"Go into the hall of mirrors and have a bloody hard look at yourself" - HG Nelson
Avi's not the only election judge recording his experiences. So are his minions: http://cs.jhu.edu/~mgreen/election_judge.html
The man knew what he was saying. While US election system is more robust to fraud than, say, popular votes in other countries (fraud can only occur on state level) with electronic voting this may change. One CIA agent will be enough to affect the vote of the entire states. Heck, CIA agents may not even be necessary, because there just may be a secret fragment of code in software which will basically go:Look at countries which merely have electronic vote counting systems (even though the ballots are actually paper), like Russia. Whoever controls the system wins, always, repeatably, with predetermined percentages.
In the US correspondingly whoever controls the companies that make voting machines will win. Right now these companies are controlled by Republicans. Democrats, take note.
It's ironic that some are paranoid that their purchases are tracked electronically, but that others are also paranoid that their votes cannot be tracked electronically.
Move along. These aren't the votes you are looking for.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
What else?
Test 1 2 3 4
Electronic voting is a convenience. It ensures there are no hanging chads, no double-votes, no half-filled circles, or ballots with coffee spilled on them. But, because people are inherintly selfish and self-centred, there ALWAYS has to be a backup.
/rant. :) Oblig Futurama Reference to close:
Really, there is NO reason to even have the option of 'delivering the memory cards by hand' and that being the only reporting done. Let's set up the voting machines with a mega-encrypted dial-up link to an undisclosed number and collection site, and have them report in themselves. The memory cards are delivered at the end of the day, loaded, and compared with the dial-up results reported. Finally, at the time of voting, a little paper slip with easy-to-scan barcodes and short human-language captions is printed, which the voter drops in a sealed box. If the dial-up and memory card results don't match, then the paper is counted.
It's really not that freaking hard to comprehend. E-Voting is nice and fast, but in the end, people only trust what they see, and if they can get a piece of paper that says "You voted for Kerry/Bush/Nader/Whoever", then they feel confident that their results are accurate. Someone can tamper with a dial-up...someone can tamper with a memory card... but to hack an encrypted dial-up DURING the election, hack dozens of encrypted memory cards AFTER the election, and then replaced thousands of paper ballots... that is stretching the bounds of believability.
And, as a final suggestion... what ever happened to counting the number of voters who came in that day, and making sure that total matched the number of ballots you had on hand? How does a district with 700 voters suddenly get 5000 ballots? And how does no-one notice?
Ok,
"MomCorp shareholders will now vote on the motion to aquire Planet Express..."
[Mom votes]
Yes = 99.7%
No = 0%
[Smart son votes]
Yes = 99.8%
No = 0%
[Average son votes]
Yes = 99.9%
No = 0%
[Dumb son votes]
"Uhhh.....uhhh.... ohhhh...."
Yes = 99.9%
No = 0%
Pat Buchanan = 0.01%
"The ballot was confusing!"
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Let's assume the worst-case scenario (from an effort point of view, not from an accuracy point ov view) and say that the votes are challenged every time and the paper ballots end up having the final say. How has the electronic counting helped?
Given that computers are less prone to make careless errors (OK, they don't make careless errors), even if they might be more prone to systematic errors, they give you a number to compare against. Let's say that the computer told you it had printed out 2,523 votes for Bush and 2,427 votes for Kerry. When the vote-counters counted it, however, they counted 2,525 votes for Bush and 2,425 votes for Kerry. The first thing that one should assume is that the vote-counters miscounted, and should recount. If a second recount (by different people) got the same result as the first human count, then we have a problem. The error could be: (1) the computer mis-counted, or (2) the computer mis-printed. Unfortunately, either one is possible. However, since the voters would be encouraged to look at their ballots prior to them entering the box, it would seem more likely that the computer mis-counted, in which case the human count should trump the computer count.
However, notice that the computer count still helps. It gives us a number to compare against. If the human count on the first count matched the computer count, there is little reason to suspect that both counts are wrong. (Although, theoretically, the computer could still have mis-printed and mis-counted in a matching way. This would be an unlikely accidental error, and a very risky deliberate hack since the voters can verify their votes before they go in the box.
Of course, this only works if the printed version can be viewed by the voter prior to it going in the box.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Very informative. Good work. Chuck Hagel alledgedly got famous eVoting his way in to Congress in the 20th century. 1 Pen, 1 Ballot, 1 photocopier, 1 Ballotbox for each candidate. Cheaper than the current crap and 100% fair.
Stuff that matters.
It seems like the major benefit of the electronic voting machines is that they provide a good user interface. Much better than your standard ballot. I think you could just have an interface that prints out a ballot. Then the voter could validate the ballot if they wanted to. Then have another machine do the counting.
You are arguing that the existance of a paper record would result in all elections being recounted. This is false. The point of an electronic system with paper ballots is to provide very quick results in most cases while still allowing for recounts and audits in special cases. At least one state requires electronic machines with paper ballots, and it works well, so your concern is misplaced. There are rules for recounts and audits, they don't just happen.
But without paper ballots, a significant fraction of the population will lose confidence in election results. (Go over to the dailykos blog if you don't believe me.)
With paper ballots, false concerns about elections can be rejected as false and this increases confidence in our democracy. What is do bad about that?
So far I haven't heard any mention the cost at all. I understand these machines are made with standard PC technology. Windows, access, etc... Who keeps them "windows updated, service packed, compatible with the latest Microsoft Access, and revalidates them every week or so". What happens when Microsoft Access moves on and doesn't do something it used to? How about the hardware, anyone out there still using a computer from four years ago - can you get parts? Is this just a gift to Diebold or what? I like the Canadian method, all you need is a few card tables. No need for such immense sophistication.
I might add that no current electronic system lets folks walk away with their paper ballot (the ballot is instead kept at the polling place in a "ballot box.") In some cases the voter doesn't even touch the paper ballot, but sees it behind plastic and approves it before it drops into a box.
So I agree with you, but the issue isn't on the table. (Yeah, you probably knew that.)
You do not even need a "serious challenge" to have a recount. There need not be suspicion of foul play. Many states require by law a recount whenever the vote is close within a certain range.
Shotguns are prone to failure. Then people will demand a re-shoot. The only verifiable solution is to equip the robots with laser beams. Frickin' laser beams, of course. On their heads.
Assuming people are so reliably trustworthy that you project: What happens when somebody accuses an honest election worker of fraud? How will that worker defend himself against such allegations?
For all parties involved, it is better to explicitly deny the possibility of undetectable fraud.
Also in Canada.
This only works where there is one thing to choose on the ballot. It would take many hours to tally votes for many positions as I assume is done in the USA. I am custodian in a school that has been used for federal, provincial, and municipal elections. It takes a couple of hours after the polls close to hand count the 'choose one candidate' ballots and finsh the paperwork.
For the municipal election in Edmonton, where we vote for mayor, councillors, public or separate school trustees and any plebicite issues, I feel we have an excellent system. The ballot is paper and your choice is marked by filling a gap in a 1/8 inch wide arrow with a sharpie marker. The ballot is in a privacy sleeve and is immediately fed into a counting machine. The paper ballots are there for verification. After the polls close the machine provides immediate results for the election officials, scrutineers (candidate representatives), and the media - to be compiled at a central location for the official results. The ballots and the voting machine are handled by separate people and transported separately to reduce the likelihood of tampering.
I think it is a simple and elegant solution and it has been used for several elections here.
Do what is right. You will please some and astonish the rest. --Mark Twain
Second you let machines count the votes...
...and the next thing you know you're strapped down in bed in a permanent dream state virtual reality with an army of robots harvesting your nervous system for energy!
Third you give the machines shotguns...
Fourth you give the machines control of SkyNet...
That's the not the future I want. (Unless I'm rich and the chicks are all hot in said virtual reality.:)
Take a look at: Florida Election Results which contains the county by county results of the election in Florida and compares these results to the percentage of registered democrats and republicans in each county.
Unless the people that compiled the tables are lying their hats off, it appears that their was either selective mass conversion of democrats into republicans in certain counties or there was election fraud.
This is not conclusive evidence of election fraud but it certainly needs to be better explained before I am willing to admit that "Bush won fair and square".
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Your mileage may vary.
If someone had swapped the counts in Ohio, would that have been such a bad thing? :-)
Or did they?! I guess we'll never know.
Seriously, I can't understand the intense desire to automate voting. Is the cost of voting such a large percentage of GNP that reducing the labor involved frees up a substantial number of workers to be involved in more productive endeavours? If not, then I would think that the loss of confidence in the process from having so much in the hands of machines rather than people would make automation be clearly the wrong choice.
I am continuously confused by the focus on electronic voting. The issue of secret code in the computer itself is fairly well understood on /. But other issues also argue against involving computers at any point, or at least at the point of the act of voting.
With electronic voting, you need to invest in hundreds or thousands of computers, monitors, etc. nationwide. These shouldn't be used for regular purposes (i.e. you shouldn't be using a election computer for office work and then haul it out to the polling station for the election) because they would need to be kept secure to prevent tampering. That's a significant cost, far more than paying for paper ballots and pens.
In my county (Multnomah County in Oregon) we use paper ballots. We fill in a little bubble on the scantron sheet with a pen, and seal it in an envelope. If you vote at a polling station you then drop it in a box; if you vote by mail (more than 99% of Oregon voters) you put it in another envelope that is provided and mail it in.
The votes are counted using scantron style machines, and we get them all counted within a few hours on election night.
Adding paper receipts is problematic and comparitively less beneficial not only because of reasons stated above (e.g. the reciept might not match the vote recorded, and you don't count the receipts unless there is a recount demanded (so that under non-recount situations the computer is effectively the only vote) - but also because it adds an additional level of complexity for the voter!
As a voter, I have to use the machine, get a receipt, and make sure it matches up - many people are not going to check that carefully, any more than they carefully check their ATM receipts (people leave those behind all the time, and hardly ever check them carefully.
With paper ballots, even counted electronically, the act of marking the paper is the act of voting; no need to compare a receipt with my intentions.
As a voter in DC, I was surprised to be asked "Paper or Electronic?" by the voting staffer. I knew I could ask for paper, but I was inclined to expect to have to do so explicitly. Very pleased with the experience. $0.02, ptd
I'm an animal lover -- they're delicious!
But in any case: you should verify a selected sample of the machines' votes in every polling station to make sure that they are giving reasonable numbers. This is just the application of industry-standard quality control procedures to voting machines. It boggles my mind that electronic voting was ever considered without them.
It doesn't boggle mine. Every solution proposed to date has the exact same flaws every other system had. Both are intrinsic to the system: that privacy is a requirement, and that human interaction with ballots are a requirement. Both are ready points of exploit that enable that most ancient of exploits to be applied to modern technology: the bribe.
In New Zealand we have party-appointed scrutineers looking over the shoulders of our (human) vote-counters; as a result, we're pretty sure that our votes will be counted correctly. And they're all counted by the end of election night -- no dimpled chads :-)
But our election system is much simpler than that of the US. I've seen your ballots - they've got vast numbers of choices on them, and this makes manually counting the votes much more difficult. Here, and I suspect in most other countries where votes are counted by hand, there are just two votes per ballot, so manual counting is relatively easy.
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
Why are there these cards at all? Shouldn't the electronic voting machine contact a local district with results via phone line. Make it work much more like a fax machine (transmit results to a location). If the phone line is dead then should a AUTHORIZED person only be able to remove data from the device..
Perhaps some of you would recognise this name, especially if you've been following the allegations of electoral fraud in the last two US presidential elections. I recognise the name from reading this article.
(If you can't be bothered reading about this, you can this Flash movie instead, or watch the start of Fahrenheit 9/11.)
As for the links in the parent post, those exit polls are just scary. From this, we know that (1) Ohio was a close result, (2) Diebold is based in Ohio, (3) Diebold is pro-Republican, (4) Diebold counted the Ohio electoral votes (essentially), and (5) at least six states that used electronic voting machines showed massive red swings against predominantly blue exit polls.
Will the US public still fall for Bush's claims to the legitimacy of his presidency? It depends if people do anything about it or not. Personally, I think that Katherine Harris, Jeb and George Bush, and the entire Diebold staff should all be thrown in jail for what happened in 2000, which amounts to nothing short of fraud - but hey, that's just me, right?
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
Sometime outsourcing not only reduces the cost, it could also improve reliability and security. Here is an example of security through simplicity and proper planning: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/349347 4.stm
What everyone doesn't understand/get: 1. The paper receipt is there as a justification tool against what's on the memory cards or electronic storage media. It doesn't guarantee though that the vote hasn't been tampered with. It could very weel be tampered with while the person is pushing the "vote" button. 2. The purpose of the DRE (touchscreen), is to prevent over and undervotes. Overvotes *confuse* optical scan machines. Remember the standardized tests back when you were in grade school? This is why they told you to darken ONE oval...the machines are intelligent enough to determine what's what...so if someone darkens two ovals for the same candidate, it doesn't count either...it records it as an error--in this case an overvote...so that vote doesn't count. DRE's prevent this from happening. You can only choose Kerry OR Bush...you can't choose both. 3. You can't just take the memory cards out and change the ballot or the results. It doesn't work that way. Different companies use different ways of encryption and verification. Basically, if that key on the memory card doesn't match one on the aggregating machine that also programmed those memory cards, as well as every file validity check --depending on the company, this could be CRC, PGP, MD5, and the list goes on--but the files just aren't there waiting to be modified/deleted/replaced. The machine/process ceases to work if one file is changed/deleted/modified in any way...period. That's how at least two company's technology works. One thing I find funny, is that since all this proverbial shit has hit the fan starting a couple years ago, Avi Rubin in one year has all of a sudden become it seems the world's expert on voting machines. There are very talented programmers who work on this stuff every day...and have worked on this every day for the past 20 years. And before you can understand the issues that may plague an election system, you have to understand the laws in whatever jurisdiction those election systems will be deployed in. And that's one HUGE issue that no one wants to address or take the time to learn. I'm pretty confident Avi Rubin doesn't know why some Florida laws prevent touchscreens from being used in say, Texas...and vice versa. Any jackass can get on 60 minutes and say "This sucks, that sucks, it all sucks, and my vote isn't secure." But it takes a person of a little bit more intelligence to understand why it is that way. Example: I hear arguments all the time (from Computer Science people like Avi Rubin) that say that relational databases and other technology like that should be used to validate votes vs voters coming into the polling place. Wrong. The whole democratic system in the USA is based upon the fact every voter should be able to remain anonymous in the polling place regarding what/who they voted for. Introduce a database to keep track of voter and their ballot results and you've just violated the very law/premise that our democracy stands on. My message to everyone including Avi Rubin and anyone else in Academia who thinks they are an election system expert after one year: Learn every state law...then try to build an election system that conforms to every single state law with the same piece of software. If anyone can do that within 5 years, I'll be very impressed... If you want a system that can't be electronically compromised, do it like the jurisdictions in the UK. They scan all the paper ballots electronically, then recount them by hand until the numbers match. That's the only way to ensure they aren't electronically altered, and that no over/under votes are incorrectly counted.
I agree with the benefit these machines offer to the handicapped, and their use by them is ok. You know that handicapped people must always vote via proxy. They have no choice really, so a machine proxy is no different than a human one.
The rest of us do not have this limitation and should not be forced to trust a device and the flawed process it brings along with it. Harsh I know, but democracy is based on trust. Breaking that chain of trust will do damage to our nation for obvious reasons.
The electronic machines all suffer the same problem; namely, they seperate the act of casting the vote with the record of the vote with the machine being the proxy between the two. Manual methods make the cast vote the record of the vote too. One act, not two, no chain of trust to corrupt.
We cannot use electronic records for the democratic process because they cannot be directly examined by the people. In this, these machines are not a dream for democracy, but a trojan horse instead. (The gift being misplaced trust and false representation)
Sorry, but these issues are too important to ignore in favor of nifty features, like spoken ballots and multi-lingual ballots.
The language of the land happens to be English. We cannot expose our already delicate democratic process to corruption for these things because the trust we depend on is too important.
Besides, for all the money spent, methods could be employed that achieve these goals without having to deal with the foolish tradeoffs electronic records demand.
It comes down to this really. Does it make sense to weaken the very process our nation is built upon just to make things easier for a few people when the changes put everyone at risk, when satisfactory alternatives exist?
Anyone that really understands the trust problem inherent in the use of electronic voting machines cannot easily say yes to that question. Ordinary people cannot know what instructions the machine is following at election time. Ordinary people cannot see the actual record of their vote, nor can they know it matches their intent. None of us can determine if that electronic record has been changed, unless physical media is involved.
A fully electronic democratic process puts a proxy between the will of the people and their government with no accountability. That's not American and it will result in corruption at the expense of the people.
This is not the kind of world we want to be living in --think about it.
Blogging because I can...
Q: Who benefits from these paper trail add-ons to electronic voting machines?
A: The same companies that supplied the defectively designed machines in the first place.
(How idiotic is it to supply a machine without a valid recount capability? Sounds pretty self-serving if you ask me, for them to benefit any further from this incompetence. Are Diebold lobbyists supporting these new bills by chance?)
Q: Now, who gets to design the add-ons?
A: The same companies.
And let me guess, further revisions will be needed as a result of future flaws...
I think the public and election officials are being played for fools, or they are being asked to design a system on the spot that they are not qualified to even describe the requirements for.
No, let's not send any more money down this black hole. Switch back to an all-paper system, repeal the HAVA fiasco entirely, and be done with this.
In the most recent posting on comp.risks, the lead article is a compelling summary of the issues surrounding evoting & contains a link to an extensive document that summarizes many problems from the past decades.
if you have the choice between paper or plastic go for paper until there is some peer review of these machines and their code...
All the torrents you could want.
ed2k://|file|VoterGate.The.Movie_256kb_This.Bloddy .Electronic.Voting.Machines_bush.-.kerry.-.ebook.- .divx.-.mp3.-.avi.-.windows.mp4|92329524|D72470B36 EAF477DEC60D6BC2A5A6D9C|/
Here's the deal:
;) Well, if the people cannot see their democracy in action and be assured it is untainted, would they feel obligated to continue acting as if it was?
Our democratic process is built upon 4 core ideals, all of which must be adhered to in order for the people to trust the process. This trust is necessary for the long term stability of the nation in that growing doubt will eventually undermine the mutual agreement we all live by. Think of it as breach of contract. We respect our government because it is by the people and for the people right? (You may not actually respect it, but you get the idea
If such a state exists and is allowed to remain unchecked, what we know as America today will erode until it becomes something less. We will no longer have a democracy.
These ideals are: Freedom, transparency, oversight, and anonymity.
Paper voting methods, combined with simple and time tested human factors, such as nobody being left alone and multiple parties present for counting, etc.. honor all 4 of these necessary bits. Their merits are time tested. Their problems are well known and can be reasonably addressed. History shows us they work.
If any one of them are not present, the process is subject to corruption which leads to doubt with obvious implications. History has also shown us that any potential for corruption will be exploited. As a race, we are bastards really.
Electronic records cannot be directly observed; thus transparency is violated. Ordinary people cannot observe and verify the process for themselves. Oversight is also comprimised in that electronic records, no matter their complexity, do not leave physical evidence we can examine later. Since these records require devices, that act as a proxy, to examine, we are forced to place our trust in the devices and their creators and anyone along the chain. Thats a lot of potential for doubt and corruption. How do you know it wasn't exploited in this last election?
Think I am crazy? Why not examine the record and put the matter to rest. Oh, wait... you can't because it's electronic! See the problem?
Electronic machines do reasonably adhere to anonymity. Enforcing their use violates freedom however. Allowing their use by segments of the population that would benefit would be ok, but only if people understand the differences in trust and are free to use either system. (Even this is subject to corruption.)
Contrast this with paper ballots. It's easy to make ballots that people and machines can both read while keeping error to a minimum. (No more than the error we see today with electronic means.) The act of casting a vote and creating the record of the vote is one act. There is no chain of trust between the voter and their record to be used for the tally.
The record of the vote cast is directly used to obtain the tally. (This is really important.)
When we create electronic records, we don't actually keep a record of what the voter did, we only create a record (if we even create that) of what the machine thought the voter did. Now one act becomes two. A chain of trust must be established and maintained between the voter and the record of their vote.
That's where the problem is. No matter how many checks and balances are placed within that chain of electronic trust, the chain remains and the potential for corruption exists. Remember, humans can easily see records marked on ballots --even if they are poorly made. No human can see the actual bits move within the machine that contain their votes and that's a big deal.
Read over your own post again. For each fix, you introduce another potential problem, but you miss the issue. It's not the type of code, nor how it is handled within the machine and the nature of the medium it is stored on.
An electronic record of the vote cannot be seen from vote cast through final tally. Additionally, the record does not exist in a physical form for later analysis.
Blogging because I can...
The elephant in the living room that no one will acknowledge:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10393
Also:
"Our video files have been attacked and taken out. Who doesn't want you to see this film? We are working around the clock to get the video files back online right away. Please check back soon."
http://www.votergate.tv/
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
~hylas
Finding a security hole isn't a problem if no one can exploit it, and you can't remote exploit a voting machine if its not connected to a network (I don't know if most voting machines are, but it doesn't sound like a good idea). Local exploits on the part of the voter should be easy to avoid (check for buffer overflows in the write-in slot code, etc...). Local exploits on the part of the election officials could be a bigger potential problem, but there has to be a vast conspiracy to effect a large election. Closed source systems can be subverted by a smaller group of people - the ones that wrote the original code.
I wouldn't trust open-source machines much more than closed-source, though. The electronic tally ought to be compared with a paper tally in all cases to verify the legitimacy of the results.
-jim
..is obvious. The tally is not human readable. It has to be filtered through the computers programming. Programming can make any output reflect any input. The amount of money and power that is represented by controlling the US government is simpy staggering. It is the largest potential jackpot a criminally bent individual or group can approach. The temptation is overwhelming,and now *they* have the complete technical ability to achieve that goal and to get away with it, the perfect crime.
A traditional paper ballot in a locked box is human readable/countable by anyone who can count at the end of the day. It requires very little in the form of specialised skills or hardware. It is very inexpensive. Challenges can be mounted and results verified quickly and transparently. Once you get into machine reading, whether tabulated bubbles or punched out cards or pure digitial like with the diebold machines-then you have your potential problems, and with the last few elections we can see we have new problems, and they look a lot more like "on purpose" troubles than accidental. They especially look on purpose given the revelations of what was found on diebolds website and published, and with other anecdotals showing some rather distrubing intent as to election honesty. The consortium pushing electronic closed source computer voting is a who's who of the mega-profits from tax money and governmental contracts military industrial complex. This is three serious alarm bells to anyone really thinking about this subject.
The old way had it's faults, but computerised has introduced faults above and beyond that can not be addressed without trusting what is inherently untrustworthy by it's design criteria.
I live in Ohio. My locale and many other areas of the state still have the old-school punch cards. And God$%#@it, thats the way we like it.
We had a record turnout in my County for this election, and no one I know had any complaints about the lack of tamper-friendly computers to fool with. It aint broke, so quit trying to fix it. Especially with friggin computers. Computers introduce too many extra vulnerability points into an already vulnerable system.
We've used these punch card systems for *years* and I for one see no reason to change. I insert my card, and make my selections firmly with the stylus. I then remove my card and look at the back, and then I hand it to the old lady and watch her drop it into the locked box. I'm done.
Can my ballot be tampered with or stolen? Sure. But I'd rather worry about that than the ease of tampering afforded by the computer voting machines. Its not hard to perform a slight of hand manuever with a few smartcards; a bit tougher to do it with 30,000 punch cards...
Have you guys seen this Thom Hartmann article yet?
There are certainly some funny stats that need to be looked at in THIS election...
Why don't you embrace your slashbotness instead of living in a dreamworld?
I'm a Canadian. All of our elections here have a very simple looking piece of paper. There is usually something like a big black rectangle, with the person's name and political affiliation in white. With their name in white is a white circle. If you want to vote for that person, you make an 'X' in the circle.
Each voting district has volenteers that tally up the votes and then report. The ballots are kept in locked boxes. There is a set ratio for number of ballots/people doing tallying to insure there is a prompt, fast result. In other words, it scales.
This works for a nation of approximately 30 million people, and the results come in just about as fast as they do in in the US. Surely this isn't that complicated a problem; in fact, it seems very suspicious that all this fuss is being made over something that is so trivially solved. You don't NEED a computer to do the tallying; it's just not that difficult to do.
If there's a problem, well, the ballots are right there, all those X's waiting to be recounted.
..don't panic
I don't think I did. I was mearly suggesting ways to address your issue with validating binaries.
I live in Australia. We only use paper ballots to count around 12 to 15 million votes (I can't remember the exact number of eligable voters) - we did only three weeks ago. I see no problem with it. It works for us, I don't know what the problem is in America.
Then again, we separate local, state and federal government, and therefore have separate local, state and federal elections. Voting in local elections is optional, state and federal isn't. From what I understand, one of the issues that makes electronic voting attractive in America is the loading up of state related questions on a "federal" ballot. I seem to remember hearing that some Americans needed 10 minutes to vote, just to work through all the state related issues.
When I voted recently in our Federal election, it took about a minute, with a couple of sheets of paper and a pencil.
That being said, electronic voting, with auditable procedures and software, plus a voter auditable paper trail, would be a possible optimisation, but not a complete replacement for manual counting of votes.
I think the broad issue here isn't that electronic voting can't be made to work in an auditable manner. I think the real issue here is why is there resistance to making it properly amd thoroughly independently auditable, via the addition of a paper trail ?
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Upon reading that last article (entitled "Broward machines count backward") it occurred to me that the most likely explanation for the "bug" is the use of signed 16-bit integers in the software.
The program could only handle 32,000 votes per precinct, at which point it began counting down instead of up. The (presumably rounded) limit is approximately 2^15. The countdown behavior might then be due to overflow, with the number being displayed as an absolute value or the negative sign being visually cut off in the display.
It's not very hard to type "long" instead of "int" in order to use a 32-bit integer. And since these voting results generally fit on CF-like memory cards, space is definitely not an issue. Obviously, the programmers didn't consider how their software would be used.
I'm only an undergraduate computer science student, and this kind of mistake seems unforgivable to me. At the very least, it shows extreme incompetence among the employees of Election Systems & Software, Inc.
The reason electronic voting machines are potentially a good thing has nothing to do with counting the votes, it has everyting to do with making sure that ballots are not spoiled, and that they reflect voter intent (i.e. no hanging chads).
Voting machines should therefore not count the votes. They should allow the voter to enter the choices, and print out a ballot, on paper, which is both human and machine readable, GRE/LSAT/multiple choice exam style. Those ballots then go in an envelope in a box, and are counted later. This is done using standard technology, or potentially by hand in case of a recount.
The voting machine makes sure no ballots are spoiled by not allowing multiple votes for different presidential candiates, etc. They also make it easier for people with disabilities to participate. They could count the votes, but such a tally would be treated as an unofficial exit-poll, and only the ballot count would be official. However, making the voting machines really dumb would strengthen voter anonymity.
Of course, such a system would ensure that elections were more democratic, which, judging by the 2000 election, HAVA, and all that's happened since, may make it a non-starter.
He said the exact same thing about memory cards, almost verbatim. Printers? They have those. Not enough of them, but they are out there. Who modded that up to 5?!?
Democraticunderground.com Forum Post
More Data (link also available within the above forum post)
I know that this is the standard argument for not giving the voter a receipt. But I just don't buy it. When you do a little game theory breakdown on the options, the risk to the public of vote buying "retail" with receipts is minor to the risks of wholesale election rigging without them. Conversely, the risks to a black hat of rigging a receiptless ellection is much less than the risk of buying votes in an election with receipts.
Therefore, if you favour honest elections, you should logically be demanding receipts.
-- MarkusQ
I voted in California on Tuesday, and nobody asked me for ID. Is it just me, or does that seem to anyone like an invitation to fraud?
Think about it. If I get hold of any other voter's name and address, I can go vote for him. All I need to do is to be sure to get there before he does and be sure that none of the poll workers know him. The latter may be the biggest challenge and risk.
In fact, not requiring ID allows party hacks to vote for anyone they know will not vote. Is that right? Obviously not. But guess which party will scream "racism" if we try to close this security hole? Funny how the desire for fair elections makes one a "racist" these days, eh?
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
While I respect your experience, having working in the industry, don't expect people like Avi Rubin to be satisfied because the situation is complex and you (meaning your company) have a handle on it. Rubin identified some real security issues related to the system. To be blunt, what is going to be done about it?
Many of us will feel more comfortable about electronic voting when there is a litany of respected PHds and security experts who express comfort. It is incorrigible that the machines are used in production before such assurance has been achieved.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
"A wrinkle is the fact that all the early exit polls pointed to a Kerry victory,"
This would actually be expected in most voter models. Republicans should get the early advantage in people voting on their way to work (the first hour or so); then Democrats get the advantage as people out of work or in odd shifts vote (those same early exit polls also indicated that 60% of voters were women--the mid-day housewife bump); then Republicans recover in the evening as people get off work. This is more a problem with watching exit polls throughout the day.
There is a similar problem with watching the actual results. Republican suburbs report first, then Democrat cities, and finally republican rural areas. Thus, for most of the election, Democrats are over counted.
A more critical issue is that some feel that the *final* exit polls were more Kerry than Bush in a number of eVoting states. However, I have not seen independent support of this. CNN's exit polls agree with the vote count. It is possible that they may have adjusted them to better fit the actual voter profile.
"The house of representitives elections are becoming insane, with a lot of stupidly safe seats. only something like 10% of house seats are competetive,"
Becoming? They were always like that. In general, most races that involve an incumbent are safe (incumbents consistently win over 95% of the time, except in elections like '92, when only 92% of incumbents won).
It is hard to overcome the three advantages of the incumbent: one, the voters have voted for the incumbent previously and it is difficult to make them change their vote (one of the reasons for negative ads is to break people loose from their previous vote choices); two, the incumbent gets to send postal mail at taxpayer expense (worth about $250,000 in money that a challenger must pay just to match the incumbent); three, it is more worthwhile to bribe (contribute to the campaign) of an incumbent who can definitely help you now (and who has a voting record that you can use to verify that helpfulness) than a challenger who might be able to help you (if victorious).
Gerrymandering actually *decreases* the safety of seats. The point of gerrymandering is to move all the opposition votes into one safe district and to make as many seats as possible where you can be competitive. As practiced by Republicans, gerrymandering creates urban districts and suburban/rural districts. Gerrymandering will also frequently pit incumbents against each other to attempt to reduce the incumbents of your opponent, thus creating competitive elections where they would otherwise not exist.
If you want to reduce the number of safe elections, look to term limits (reduces the number of incumbents), primary reform (eliminate the artificial separation between parties that keeps centrists from winning primaries--half their support is in the other party; this could allow two members of the same party to emerge from the primary; where the moderate would normally have lost), multiple candidate management (plurality voting favors the candidate with the largest minority in multiple candidate elections; it loses the secondary, etc. preferences; i.e. it forgets that the liberal prefers the moderate to the conservative and the conservative prefers the moderate to the liberal; plurality voting doesn't allow for compromise), and campaign finance reform (in particular, changes that allow a challenger to match the incumbent's finances).
There are a hell of a lot of places that voted to reinstate the Bush regime, that use the old fashioned system too.
If it comforts you to blame the machines, because the alternative is to realize the need to kill half your countrymen, by all means, be comforted.
Would Bev Harris be saying a word if Kerry had won?
Doubtful.
She's another Bush-hater looking for an outlet for her liberal rage.
Hey, Afghanistan had a presidential election a few weeks ago, its first ever, thanks to the actions of George W. Bush. Bush brings democracy and freedom. Democrats bring whining and oppression. Deal.
This article is very old (it refers to the primary on super tuesday, not the general election). It was on slashdot already some time ago, when it was actually timely. The link to the old article is here http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/03/14 56252&tid=172&tid=126&tid=103&tid= 17 /.'s search feature).
I remembered this article the last time it was posted, and was able to find it in 30 seconds of searching (despite the sad state of
As far as the code is open, the machines audited, monitored and managed by a third party (the neutral vote commissionee, I don't know who it is and what is his title in USA, I am Canadian), I don't see what is the problem using a machine instead of pieces of papers which can also be tampered, rejected, etc.
If there is some evidence for an actual fraud, please, expose the facts. Otherwise, it looks more than a lack of fair-play from the losers.
Achille Talon
Hop!
for reading too much into your post. Didn't mean a flame --I am feeling very strongly right now about the matter. It's hard to trust US elections and the elected, for that matter, while this issue goes ignored and unresolved.
Half of what I wrote was for others who happen to read the thread. Sorry about that too. --BTW, thanks for the binaries suggestions. I am researching a paper on this topic right now. Working through the trust issues on those will be helpful.
The paper trail won't help, in almost all cases, because there is no record of what the voter actually did. --We only have a record of what the machine thought the voter did, or worse what somebody told the machine to record about the voter intent. This means we can find out if the electronic results differ from the audit, but we cannot know if the audit differs from what the voters actually did, and that is a big problem!
I suppose one could design a system where the voter could directly examine the paper log and compare it against their choices. Without this, the audit is simply a feel good, but useless feature.
Even with the audit, electronic records allow for wide scale manupulation that can have an effect on the election yet remain below the audit radar, unless we perform a lot of audits, so the manupulation simply moves to the timing and depth of the audits...
Nobody is reporting that and they should because it really matters.
Paper ballots, as I wrote above are a record of what the voter actually did. Using machines to count them is OK in that we can compare the machine count to the actual record knowing it comes directly from the voter.
My main problem lies in the fact that technology really does not get us anything we don't have with paper ballots now, other than independant voting for the disabled who need it. Time is not a factor. It takes time to work through State issues, but that time is spent considering the matters, not marking well made ballots. Counting is similar really. If we obtain a fast count, it is not a trustworthy one. Manual counts have problems, but so do electronic ones. The number of audits required to detect problems is high in either case. Why not just do it right using paper and time tested human means?
I just don't see the need to vote by proxy, which is what we are doing when we vote electronically, when we have the means to perform perfectly reasonable elections manually. The increased number of trust issues simply is not worth the time or money, given marginal returns at best.
For some reason, the election of 2000 got everyone thinking about corruption, which is a good thing. The fancy technology and dollars seem like your typical American fix these days. Then come the bonuses, the networks can tie in to the system and give "up to the minute official results", or some other crap.
Good for you and your solid manual system. I live in Oregon where we do mail in elections on paper ballots. It's cheap, works fast, and is trustworthy. The rest of the country seems hell bent on having only the best it seems.
My gut says this is a smoke screen for more subtle, sinister things. The worst is the reports of electronic voting working in other countries without any hassles. Since all of the people are using them, how would they know any better really? It's not like they can examine the historical records of the vote now can they? Democracy is what the US stands for, or used to anyway. Shouldn't we be reading the results of our extensive studies on the issue? Recommendations?
No, we spend a ton letting convicted felons build the machines we are supposed to trust our democracy to. Damn..
Peace
Blogging because I can...
is dead on. Don't fuck around, you're in big trouble. I'm Canadian, and so easy for me to say, but fer fuck's sakes - enough of their bullshit.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
This is too important an issue to become a vehicle for self-promotion.
-FL
155,000 provisional ballots were cast in Ohio. Probably Democrat, but not quite enough to close the 130,000 vote gap. (Because about half were cast in counties which went Kerry.) But just in case. .
-FL
I wonder how many people this happened to who didn't call the toll-free number to register a complaint?
-FL
-FL
-FL
The receipt doesn't have to guarantee that the vote hasn't been tampered with. It does two things:
There must always be some record against which a vote collection and tabulation system's results can be verified. Otherwise, you have no way of knowing that something inside that black box didn't go wrong.
This is taken from a post I made a while ago to my own blog:
Just to keep it real, Nixon trounced McGovern (who btw was a highly declarated WWII vetran) with similar attacks on his ability to providea strong defense, McGovern choose to rise above the fray and lost horribly. But just remember only three years later Nixon had been impeached, due to his attempts to thwart the democratic process, and faced possible a prison sentence. Of course his veep Jerry pardoned him, a move that may have cost him the presidency. I say if anything can be proved let's impeach Dick Cheney first or at the same time. Matthew
Albania's greatest leader Enver Hoxha should be president of the United States Why? Because he transformed Albania from a 3rd world country to an industralized nation in the space of less that 40 years! He saved Albania for evil Nazis, likewise he could do the same for evil Islamic terrorsts. I have an Idea for Vice president the Ex-congress Jack Kemp because he's just conservative enough to offset Hoxha. HOXHA KEMP '08!
Hello world
This only works where there is one thing to choose on the ballot. It would take many hours to tally votes for many positions as I assume is done in the USA.
If several elections are taking place at the same time then all that is needed is for each voter to be given an appropriate set of ballot papers. Then the different elections can either be counted in parallel according to which is most important/time critical. In the USA most public elections are not time critical at all.
And what if your sample finds problems. What do you do then ?
Then you check everything. That's why you have a paper trail in the first place.
Anything that can go wrong with paper ballots can go wrong with paper records kept by a voting machine. In addition, we have failure modes caused by the electronic system, some of which will not be caught by the paper records. Thus an electronic voting booth that relies unequivocally and finally on paper ballots is, in the best case, at least as unreliable as the paper by itself.
It's really no mean feat to come up with a system that is guaranteed to be worse than the system currently in place--this is an enviable accomplishment of the blogging/techno-pundit community.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
I previously posted this idea, so I'll give the short version.
/sigh.
You track the ballots through the system.
The voting stations shred "blank" ballots, or ballots that need amending, after scanning them, then print "new" ballots with the the relevant selections on them.
The actual "balot box" scans and stores the balots *AND* prints an MD5 (or similar) checksum of the vote for the voter to take home and keep.
The polling place publishes a list of checksums later for the voter to check.
The software is open source, so anybody with a hand scanner and a laptop could verify the barcode/dot-splash.
Via means I will not repeat at length (use of UUIDs and cryptographically secure forward-only logging and such) any ballot can be traced through the system (which is why the "blanks" are chosen from a bin at random to start their process). Part of the information recorded on the ballot would be "balot definition file" checksums and the software versions/dates/sizes/whatever.
Polls and regions can be spot-checked. Whole piles of ballots can be re-scanned.
Finally, the individual voting machines send their logs via one means, and the ballot boxes send their results by a separate means.
There is sort of a diminishing sum (some people will check in and get their ballots, and maybe even go to a voting station, but they may then not cast their vote, taking the thing away with them instead) that is reasonable, and after that, or in the case of an increased sum of events, the alternate counting is generated.
None of the machines at the polls themselves are "networked" by anthing other than the ballots.
In short, you are "voting on paper" but you get a three-sided verification of events (not just a scalar number of 300 votes yea, 200 votes nay, from a town of 450 8-).
At the end of the night you have a pile of "recoreded" ballots, and a pile of "discarded" ballots and a heaping mound of confetti, several CDs full of logs. And an posthumus analysis of the logs and the results would *have* to match. If the total "Bush votes recorded" minus the total "Bush votes recanted" (remember the editing) from the individual machines is not in keeping with the number of "Bush votes cast" (remember, a statistically insignificant number of people won't stuff the paper in the ballot box scanner) the investigation is automatic.
Such a system can be "proved" internally correct to within a miniscule margin of error, or will reveal its internal errors and flaws to reasonable scruteny. Honest mistakes will be obvious (this voting software number isn't the correct one, ibid for the vote definition data file.)
You get all the benefits of machine voting (no hanging and pregnant chads, each ballot is a "perfect" print out) (consistent logging that can _demonstrate_ the paper flow) (voter receipts that don't allow for vote sales) while keeping the accountablility of real paper ballots.
But let's face it, at some boundary of any voting system there will have to end up being one or more people you "trust". After all, you don't need to rig the voting machine if you pay the guy who gets on the phone to tell the world what happened, to lie.
As I said, if you want the detailed plans and justificaitons, browse my message history.
As for profitability of the Open Source software? Screw that. The supplier makes his money on the nicely equitable (chargable) paper-handling systems (custom hardware scanner/shreders, ballot printers, etc).
This is totally doable, I have the base design, I don't have the risk capital.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Given the enormous stakes, I am not happy about the fact that the actual recording of votes is an invisible process controlled by nameless employees of a company that has a known political bias. A machine without paper verification could easily give every tenth vote to another candidate than specified with noone the wiser. The paper trail would allow me to verify that my vote was recorded correctly. Manual recounts of randomly selected machines (say, 1% of all machines, selected after the elections of course) would give me the confidence the machines themselves are working properly.
This would allow you to do 99% of the counting automatically, yet still have confidence that the results were not tampered with.
Now that you the people of the U.S. have replaced your old, error-prone voting system with machines that decide the outcome, shouldn't you be preparing to take the next step in automating your nation and start replacing your error-prone politicians with expert systems?
If anyone want to look at the sw in question, it's here. Note: this isn't the result of an illegal break in, THEY published it (without knowing what the hell they were doing...). I don't want to get into a personal piss-contest, but I have some experience designing sw, and I don't consider this to be an half-assed attempt of good design! That's my opinion, You may have another...
I don't have the guts to post it (if that is if I have it)..sorry...anyone??
I would like a receipt for my vote. I would like that receipt to have a progress tally of the current count on that machine. I want the average citizen to be able to verify that the vote cast, was indeed registered correctly. That does not occur now. There are ample examples of people noticing their vote is being reversed in the system. There is nothing in a district that uses electronic ballot systems currently that insures an accurate vote count, guarantees the votes cast are properly correlated to the intention of the voter and satisfies
an honest count.
I want the code to be a universally accepted system. If you want to exploit your connections with the powers-to-be and sell voting equipment, than market it on the merits of the hardware, just as is done across the board with computer manufacturers today with Windows-based systems.
With all the talent in our Universities and in the private sector in Computer Science, how did we all decide to accept that a few companies can dictate our Democratic process, with far-less-than-acceptable technology and insanely inept data management?
I would also like redundancy in the data, much like I have redundancy in my daily network and file servers. I don't want anyone making a decision on 'interpreting' my vote. I want the process to be publicly auditable. I have to account for the integrity of my daily, weekly and monthly backups. Why can't that same standard be met here?
I would like to know who is in control of all of this. What special interests do they represent? What access do they have?
Quoting Avi Ruben:
"It turned out that the new judge, Terry, was the security manager for the church where our election was held. He carried a large keyring to all the doors in the building. He was also in the same political party as chief judge Marie and her husband."
That's flatly unacceptable. It goes on in every level of government and public works in this country.
I've had 3 decades of experience with people who will go to any means to get what they want. My nephew will soon be sent over to Iraq serve a cause that has self serving overtones that are doling out BILLIONS of dollars to a select few who control everything that matters in this country. It has been amply seen by the populace that this administration is taking care of their own self interests to the detriment of the average citizen. I can't even be assurred that the simple process of casting ballots hasn't been hijacked today. Worse yet, those who attempt to question that process are met with resistance and disdain.
Whatever he meant, the owner of Diebold guaranteed the election to the Republicans. How have we come to lazily accept a system when it doesn't even meet basic standards of data integrity?
The fact that we are all expected to accept the current status quo, makes it distasteful and untrusted, in my humble opinion.
sig mind freed
Here is my little non-patented idea.
When everyone register to vote. They are given a voting number. At the polling station, there go to the booth and they enter their number and possibly present some verifiable ID. They get a ballot and place it in a "ballot marking machine" and they choose the option for their candidate. The ballot machine makes the required mark for the chosen candidate, say barcode plus an 'X' next to the name. There is a shredder right there if they made the mark on the wrong candidate. (We are talking Americans here). Shredding the ballot paper enables them to get a new ballot. They then insert this vote card in the 'ballot box' which has a slot to place the card in. The design should obviously make sure that they cannot place the ballot the wrong way, or that this should not matter.
There you have it. "Electronic" voting system which actually reduces the chance of spoilt ballots and leaves a paper trail.
As an added bonus, since vote counting can be done by the machine receiving the ballots, this can be updated real time, and allow people to mobilise their voters if need be, ike in the Florida 2000 case.
It appears that quite a lot of the actual counted votes in some of the opti-scan counties in Florida look suspiciously like the counts have been given to the wrong candidate. If not then why would less than a third of the dem voters vote dem while the reps get more than double (in Calhoun it's closer to 500%) the count of registered Reps. It almost looks like a systemic failure that occurred in a number of counties.
. htm m
d f / 2004pppParty.pdf
In Baker for example there were 8926 registered Dems but only 2180 kerry votes, while there were
3126 registered reps but they got 7738 votes. In Liberty the figures look even worse 1927 Rep votes from 320 registered (600% up) while there were 1070 Dem votes from 3597 registered (down to under a third).
Unless people honestly believe that the dem vote was only 25% of registrations while the rep vote was 250% then it would indicate the wrong tally was allocated to the candidates. Apparently the exit polls for Baker county were out by a massive margin as well. (In fact there were more positive Dem responses then dem votes and generally the exit polls run around 50%.)
Now it is curious that the worst of these data irregularities are in the smaller counties, but it would also be these smaller counties that may well have had less money for testing etc. In larger counties it appears that the Repub vote is around +5 to +10% over registrations while the Dems are -10 to -50% under. In Duval the reps are 29000 up while the dems are 80000 down compared to raw registrations.
If you reverse the figures then both parties are running a lot closer to the raw registration figures but with the Reps still getting an extra percentage boost compared to Dems over their registrations.
It is certainly curious why publicised faults and problems are all benefitting the republicans though. What are the odds of 200+ errors across the country (depending on which site you look at) almost all going the republican way.
The data is available from a number of sources but has been tabulated below.
A 'friendly' representation of florida data
http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats
Graphic of the worst 8 small counties
http://www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.ht
Raw Stats -
Returns by county
http://election.dos.state.fl.us/pdf/canvassing1.p
Registrations by county
http://election.dos.state.fl.us/voterreg/pdf/2004
By the way I didn't vote, I am simply a very concerned world/Aussie citizen.
With voting you want to have:
- everyone who votes must see his/her vote back on paper and on a public website, plainly readable (on the web, anyway).
- it must be seen to count towards the preferred candidate (correct tabulation, obviously).
- no one else must be able to identify the connection between te voter and the vote.
Solution: display a 4-digit unique number (either generated or chosen) to the voter when s/he has voted, and together with place and (slightly randomized) time of vote this is published on the internet.
Complain when something is foul, and if there are too many (partially) validated complaints: take corrective action (maybe re-vote).
The candidate whould not be screwed in a system which required a count of the paper ballots to verify the electronic tally in all cases. Compared to the amount of effort people go to to actually vote, and the importance of having a trustworthy outcome, a little bit of extra work is worth it.
-jim
Ah, the joys of getting to the truth in a digital age. I did not provide a link to the final "corrected" 1.5% figure (and qualified it with an IIRC) since I was unable to find one on a quick search. I have not been able to find one with a deeper search, though I have found the raw data on which the corelation with counting method was based. There is kind of a quantry researching things on the internet (boy, is that an understatement!). Things frequently go away / get edited, but apart from google cache, there isn't a good way to retain the information with its provenance. I keep local copys of many interesting thing on my hard drive, but mostly when the information (e.g. technical documentation) is useful without proof of authenticity.
To your other point, it would be interesting to see if there is a correlation between the exit polling descrepancies and where the counties are geographically. This would be a good cross check/sanity chek on the counting method correlation. Another interesting analysis that some people are doing is looking for correlation by candidate. If some people lie to exit pollsters (one theory) why would the supporters of one particular candidate in a specific region (e.g. Bush supporters in Ohio) be much more likely to lie than voters in general?
-- MarkusQ
It would take many hours to tally votes for many positions as I assume is done in the USA.
So? We can hire more people to count the ballots. If I'm not mistaken, Canada has a lot more people counting the ballots (and smaller precincts).
I don't see why my countrymen have this fixation on knowing the exact results yesterday. We already have exit polling which tends to be reliable, so we can still project candidates' victories overnight.
I don't see how knowing the results ASAP is more important than having an accurate count. If poll workers get tired, have them work in shifts around the clock. I, for one, would surely wait a few extra days until all the paper ballots are counted. Speed needs to defer to accuracy when it comes to something this important.
Thom Hartmann, host of a nationally syndicated progressive daily radio talk show, claims that evidence is mounting that the 2004 U.S. election results were hacked. 'When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how.' Hartmann offers more details in this article, saying '...I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play.'
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
There is a restaurant in Portland, Oregon called Brasserie Montmartre. At one time they had an illusionist there during dinner time. While you were eating you could ask him for a demonstration of what he could do.
We knew he would try to fool us, so we would watch very closely. Once, about three feet away from me, he pulled out a 6-inch metal disk and banged it on the table, and then made it disappear. The science of illusion is very advanced. No one watching has a clue how it is done.
But I don't think illusion is necessary. Any group of people who would kill 100,000 people and show no grief or remorse would steal an election by cruder means.
True Christians don't lie.
True Christians don't support violence.
Don't try to avoid awareness of your responsibility. Protest, or the blood is on your hands, too.
Hey Mr. Sharpy,
Sorry to butt in on this post rather than the one I'm curious about, but the old one is closed.
You mention in an earlier post that you figured out how to manually destripe a RAID array. I'm having fits with a RAID-5, and am wondering if you can point me in the right direction?
(Hardware RAID-5, lost it's config, parity information questionable though data should still be there.)
Thanks,
^t