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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.
"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.
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.
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
There is a question, of course, about how long you might be locked up for doing so.
None of these high-tech whizbangs is trustworthy, and all of them are too expensive. Marking paper ballots with No. 2 pencils is a simple and effective solution. If the scanning whizbangs screw up human eyes won't.
How ya like dat?
No, we shouldn't. This would cause more problems that it would solve. Being able to prove to someone who you voted for would make it possible for them to buy your vote. Right now, you could take their money and then still vote for someone else, since no one will know who you vote for. This makes it much more difficult to conduct this kind of fraud.
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
Paper Ballot
Ink pen
Ballot Box.
Cheap, reliable, fair, honest.
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?
..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.