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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.
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
Read the article -- they noticed that the initial report was impossible: "People who had seen poll results on the election board's Web site called to point out the discrepancy. The error would have been discovered when the official count for the election is performed later this month, he said." The count was corrected: "Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch."
Do we need paper verification of every vote. Yes! Does Bush have 4,258 votes in Franklin County, Ohio -- no, he got 365.
It's a representative republic, actually.
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.
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We're talking about politicians here. You're saying you believe they're basically honest ? Respectfully, I think you need to see a bit more of the real world. Why do you think governments and laws exist in the first place ?
The reality is that a lot of people - not all or most, but a lot - are basically dishonest, and checks and balances need to exist in order to keep them at bay. That means you need to have an electoral system which as far as possible reduces the number of possible loopholes that can be exploitable people.
The best way to do this is exactly as you suggested - paper ballots, marked and counted by hand at a public count. If the candidates are paranoid about the state trying to swing the result, they can visit the polling stations and can put their own seals on the ballot boxes, and can confirm that the seals are present when they visit the count room before the counting starts. Tell me how you do that with any kind of counting machine, electronic or otherwise, paper trail or not.
[Sure the officials counting can be corrupt, but they'll have to be in a risky mood to try anything while the candidates and their legal advisers are observing the progress of the count... ]
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".
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
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.
There are hundreds of thousands of ballots still uncounted. Many of them in many counties, will clearly show that Kerry had a much larger number of wins than Bush in many states. Added all together, Kerry had quite a few more electoral votes than our corrupt media would have you believe.
What are you talking about? You honestly have no idea how voting works in this country do you?
First off, Kerry conceding doesn't mean anything. If the final STATE CERTIFIED VOTE TABULATION showed that Kerry actually won over 270 electorial votes, he would retract his concession speach much like Gore did in 2000. His concession does not preclude him from office if he were the actuall winner...
Secondly, the media was very careful this time not to forecast the vote unless it could statistically back it up. Kerry and the DNC have their own people doing this same thing.
With 99-100% of the precincts in a state reporting their totals to the state's election body, they can easily tell whether or not the KNOWN number of absentee/provisional ballets would be enough to overcome the KNOWN vote deficit need for a specific canidate to win.
At time you made your post, very few people doubt the state of the electorate. Not that it matters, the electorial college hasn't even "met" yet. They will do that after each state certifies its vote and exercises their state's electorial distribution laws. The media has nothing to do with it.
How did you even come up with your opinion? Did someone tell you that, or did you come up with that on your own?
-- No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats, approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.
"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).
Funny you should ask. My senior capstone is on this subject. There are six basic requirements of democratic voting.
Anonymity - this is obvious. The vote cannot be tracked back to whomever cast it.
Verifiability - the ability to go back and recount ballots.
Reliability - the count is done the same way each time and accurately reflects the intent of the voter. Punchcards are unreliable because of chads. Processes like optical scanning give different counts when run mutliple times because of borderline ballots
Usability - the design of the voting system reduces the likelihood of mistakes. Butterfly ballots are the obvious bad example here.
Security - the system is secure from tampering, such as system hacking or stuffing the ballot box
Accessibility - all of the above remains true for all demographics, such as the disabled. For instance, being blind should not mean that you can't vote anonymously
No system as yet developed fits all of these for a scale such as a national election in the US.
Other, less important requirements include cost,speed of tallying and administrative ease-of-use.
"They were able to check the machine that had malfunctioned"
No, the memory card malfunctioned. The machine worked fine. They know (as best they know for any of the machines) that the machine was correct because its vote totals add up with the paper sign up record...unlike those on the memory card. The issue is more that if the machine had malfunctioned, then it would have sent the wrong total to the memory card and *both* would have been wrong. If that had happened (or if there weren't two records, as happened in North Carolina), then it would have been major news, as the data would not have been recoverable.
The actual situation is bad enough. No need to dilute the point with FUD. Every time you do that, it allows opponents to point out the hole in the FUD rather than talk about the real issues.
Btw, I would be careful about using the term "printout." The Ohio machine does produce a printout (as required by Ohio law): of the summary results. The problem is that there is no vote by vote print out that is reviewed by voters as they cast their votes. Only the Sequoia machines offer that option. Even the Sequoia machines are not ideal, since they partially compromise privacy by retaining vote order on a per machine basis (it's a scrolling printout). They are simpler better than the ES&S and Diebold machines.
Votes need to be correct (cast as the voter intends); verifiable (i.e. the voter needs to be able to check the final form of the vote; no purely electronic system cannot do this, as the voter can't view the bits); and private (no one, not even the voter, should be able to verify that that voter's vote was cast later; otherwise, it allows vote selling, which is every bit as bad as fraud or miscast votes). This is all quite possible (the optical scan ballots can be used this way now; eVoting only needs the addition of individual ballots printed from machines).