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Schneier On Electronic Voting
Bruce Schneier of security and other fame has posted a web log entry on the problems with electronic voting machines. The post is an excellent one, and does a very good job of covering all of the issues associated with the machines. I think it's fair to say that at some point electronic voting will be ready - but it's not ready now.
November 10, 2004
The Problem with Electronic Voting Machines
In the aftermath of the U.S.'s 2004 election, electronic voting machines are again in the news. Computerized machines lost votes, subtracted votes instead of adding them, and doubled votes. Because many of these machines have no paper audit trails, a large number of votes will never be counted. And while it is unlikely that deliberate voting-machine fraud changed the result of the presidential election, the Internet is buzzing with rumors and allegations of fraud in a number of different jurisdictions and races. It is still too early to tell if any of these problems affected any individual elections. Over the next several weeks we'll see whether any of the information crystallizes into something significant.
The U.S has been here before. After 2000, voting machine problems made international headlines. The government appropriated money to fix the problems nationwide. Unfortunately, electronic voting machines -- although presented as the solution -- have largely made the problem worse. This doesn't mean that these machines should be abandoned, but they need to be designed to increase both their accuracy, and peoples' trust in their accuracy. This is difficult, but not impossible.
Before I can discuss electronic voting machines, I need to explain why voting is so difficult. Basically, a voting system has four required characteristics:
1. Accuracy. The goal of any voting system is to establish the intent of each individual voter, and translate those intents into a final tally. To the extent that a voting system fails to do this, it is undesirable. This characteristic also includes security: It should be impossible to change someone else's vote, ballot stuff, destroy votes, or otherwise affect the accuracy of the final tally.
2. Anonymity. Secret ballots are fundamental to democracy, and voting systems must be designed to facilitate voter anonymity.
3. Scalability. Voting systems need to be able to handle very large elections. One hundred million people vote for president in the United States. About 372 million people voted in India's June elections, and over 115 million in Brazil's October elections. The complexity of an election is another issue. Unlike many countries where the national election is a single vote for a person or a party, a United States voter is faced with dozens of individual election: national, local, and everything in between.
4. Speed. Voting systems should produce results quickly. This is particularly important in the United States, where people expect to learn the results of the day's election before bedtime. It's less important in other countries, where people don't mind waiting days -- or even weeks -- before the winner is announced.
Through the centuries, different technologies have done their best. Stones and pot shards dropped in Greek vases gave way to paper ballots dropped in sealed boxes. Mechanical voting booths, punch cards, and then optical scan machines replaced hand-counted ballots. New computerized voting machines promise even more efficiency, and Internet voting even more convenience.
But in the rush to improve speed and scalability, accuracy has been sacrificed. And to reiterate: accuracy is not how well the ballots are counted by, for example, a punch-card reader. It's not how the tabulating machine deals with hanging chads, pregnant chads, or anything like that. Accuracy is how well the process translates voter intent into properly counted votes.
Technologies get in the way of accuracy by adding steps. Each additional step means more potential errors, simply because no technology is perfect. Consider an optical-scan voting system. The voter fills in ovals on a piece of paper, which is fed into an optical-scan reader. The reader senses the filled-in ovals and tabulates the votes. This system has several steps: voter to ballot to ovals to optical reader to vote tabulator to centralized total.
At each step, errors can oc
sigs, as if you care.
What we need is a SIMPLE mechanism for voting. This leaves fewer chances for something to go wrong. Don't let feature/scope creep factor into designing a voting system, especially when it's a new from scratch system.
...yup...
... that counting poses so much problems if done electronically.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
He brought up one important point then that I didn't see in his blog -- accuracy is the most important thing.
This might seem obvious, but most people seem more concerned with knowing the results of the election on election night than having every vote counted reliably.
In soviet russia, You ask not what country do for you, but what you do for country!
Oh wait...
This isn't a statistical proof anymore. CNN rigged the exit polls to hide the extremely unlikely discrepancy between votes and its published exit poll numbers!!!
1 36
/least/ 462 men say they were for Kerry in the first sample, and the number DROPPED to a maximum of 455 in the second sample!
While this isn't tampering with the vote itself, it shows CNN is trying to help Bush cover the unlikely discrepancy! Perhaps we're living in interesting times and it was a one-in-a-billion discrepancy between votes and exit polls... but since we CAN'T VERIFY THE MACHINES my opinion is that vote tampering is much more likely than not and CNN covered the trail.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/3/3646/14
(backup that entire web page please, we never know)
Quote:
"Let's first look at the women. In the first sample, 53% of 1,963 people can be anywhere from 1,030 to 1,050 women in the sample (try punching numbers outside that range into your calculator, it won't round to 53%). In the second sample, 53% of 2,020 people is anywhere from 1,061 to 1,080 women in the sample. So anywhere from 11 to 50 additional women were surveyed.
Well, in the first sample, 53% of women went for Kerry, meaning an absolute minimum of 541 (541/1030) women to an absolute maximum of 561 (561/1050) women for Kerry. So in the first exit poll, somewhere between 541 and 561 women were for Kerry.
Now for the second sample. 50% of women going for Kerry means an absolute minimum of 526 (526/1061) to an absolute maximum of 545 (545/1080). So in the second poll, somewhere between 526 and 545 women were for Kerry.
So it is *technically* possible that, say, 542 women went for Kerry in the first sample, and almost all the women they interviewed afterwards went for Bush (say only 2 went for Kerry), and then you'd have 544 women say they're for Kerry. This is actually within reason. If we had the raw numbers, we could tell for sure. Or even percentages to the tenths place.
*BUT*..... With the men, in the first sample there were between 913 to 933 men, and 940 to 959 men in the second sample. So anywhere from 7 to 46 additional men were surveyed. In the first sample, anywhere from 462 (425/913) to 480 (443/933) men were for Kerry. But in the second sample, anywhere from 438 (438/940) to 455 (455/959) men were for Kerry! You had at
THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE. I've allowed for the biggest intervals possible that would still result in the given percentages. Something is very wrong here. This is mathematically impossible."
So can any statistician give us an idea of why that kind of thing could be happening??
Microsoft is pure dog-ma. FreeBSD is pure cat-ma.
Bruce Schneier won't be happy until every electronic voting machine is triple-AES encoded and guarded by a yarmulke-sporting, Uzi-wielding, Torah-babbling hebrew.
That's why we love him!
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
And nobody outside the geek community will ever, ever give a shit. I was talking to a nontechnical coworker last week about it, conversation went something like this:
Her: So, turns out your fears about electronic voting weren't anything after all, eh?
Me: Why do you say that?
Her: Well, there were no problems...
Me: Yeah? How do you know?
See, the lovely thing here is that this whole issue is just going to fade away because people by and large aren't sophisticated enough to realize that voter fraud can be taking place unless they see people squinting at punchcard ballots. And the media ain't going to look into it for the exact same reasons.
I'm Skyshadow and I approved this little ray of morning sunshine. Now go about your business.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
But in the rush to improve speed and scalability, accuracy has been sacrificed.
I never really understood *why* people in the US expect to know results "before bedtime". Do they really? Or is it just a sensationalist media creation, which tries to portray elections like a "game" - this was even more evident in this year's election coverage - with CNN's bank of wide screens and "more projections after the break".
Almost every other country I know goes through the tedious process of counting (and recounting) votes (electronic and/or paper based) and it's about 5-7 days before the results are known for sure.
What is the real need to know results on the same day (especially at the cost of accuracy), and when we have a few months at hand before major changes are affected anyway?
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Seriously guys, we can restart this in another 4 years, or 2 if you actually care about the house/senate.
Don't you think now is the oportunity to improve the system so that when election time comes in two or four years, the system has already been improved. Starting to discuss this again two months before the next election will not allow the system to be fixed/improved.
Oh wait, yeah: vote-selling, retribuition, targetted disenfranchisement, harrassment, intimidation, etc. Forgot about those. But hey, otherwise you make a really great point.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
How fricken hard is it to open up an encrypted database and do +1 for bush or kerry? Are these people fucking retarded?
Most of the voting software used during the 2004 Presidential elections were proprietary code by private corporations that have political interests on which candidate winning. It is unimaginable how these votes can be considered as legitimate when there is no method to trace accuracy.
Open source voting software such as this one should be replacing proprietary code from private corporations.
>Since when was [anonymity] important?
Although your post was already rated flamebait by someone else, I'll assume your question is serious, and answer it.
Anonymity is important in voting because without it, there can be two Bad Things: 1) vote buying (I pay you to vote a certain way, but I'll need proof that you really did vote that way) and 2) coercion (You better vote a certain way or else I'll break your mother's kneecaps).
Anonymity in voting provides assurance that for the most part things like this can't happen, because the bad guys have no way of verifying who you voted for.
If we can make ATMs that work well then we should be able to make voting machines that work just as well. In fact, why don't we get the people that Make ATMs to make voting machines as well. Let's see, do ATMs stand up to his four criteria?
Let's take that a bit further, why not turn ATMs into voting machines? They're already part of a large, secure, nation-wide network, they're built for security, and there's bazillions of them. Wouldn't it be great to just go to your bank to vote? That would eliminate the need to go to a polling place and should reduce the lines tremendously.
Sure there might be other problems with this approach, but banks already have years of experience securing and relying on ATMs.
--Not free as in effort, but I'm willing to try it. Free Flat Screens | Free iPod Photo |
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
Does anyone remember how India had elections several months ago and managed to do this with a simple system that can be used by people who can't even read? A billion people all voted using the same system countrywide? How everyone turns out to vote, and the poor people were the ones who decided the outcome of the election? We've been doing this democracy thing for a while, you'd think we'd have it figured out.
america just got pwnd!
The anonymity of voting is one of the most important ways to ensure that everyone can vote whatever he/she feels to be right. Not whatever he/she would vote on if everyone would know about the vote that has been casted. It doesnt mean people want to hide something, you still can tell people your vote, but anonymity protects YOU. General Anonymous voting is one of the requirements for a democracy to work.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
I hate to respond to AC Flamebates, but this is important.
Anonymity is important.
Who would think that they had a right to vote if they thought that they might lose their job based on who they voted for ?
Who would think they had a right to vote for whomever they wanted if they thought there was a chance that their life, or the the life of their friends and family, could be in danger if someone knew who they voted for ?
If you don't think it is important, you obviously haven't thought about it.
We sould digitize all these electronic votes so we can turn them into mp3's and download them. I wanna listen to Iowa!
I apologize if this is consider trolling, but I submitted this story a couple minutes ago and since it's relevant to this story I'll post it in here (since it probably won't get approved if this one is already up. If it does make it up just mod it offtopic):
... or they would be if this weren't a freaking voting machine!
Technical director Dr. Avi Rubin of the John Hopkins University Information Security Institute (ISI) has made a presentation regarding Diebold's voting machine source code (pdf) to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST has been playing a key role in the improvement of voting systems since 2002.) Turns out, amongst other major security problems, Diebold was using NIST's Data Encryption Standard (DES) to encrypt votes and audit logs. DES was developed in 1976 was proven breakable by a "brute force" system in 1998. NIST proposed revoking DES's certification last July and recommends AES or at least 3DES.
Read from page 13. There are some hilarious comments
No, we'll still go through the motions of having elections to keep the hoi-polloi satisfied.
CNN is trying to help Bush cover the unlikely discrepancy!
This is stupid on so many levels.
CNN is notoriously left-leaning. Even if you believe they are central, I defy anyone to explain to me why the fuck CNN would change numbers to suit Bush. It is pure insanity.
Let's apply Occam's Razor.
Perhaps the exit polling sucked balls? Perhaps the numbers they were showing were not correct and they updated them with the correct data? Perhaps the early voters were Democrats and the later voters were Republican.
All of these ideas are simpler and more believable than CNN changing exit poll numbers to help Bush cover up a stolen election while NBC/CBS/ABC decide not to report on such a thing. Ummm, yeah.
While I was listening to the election returns being discussed on CNN, NBC, etc, the one thing I heard repeatedly from the Bush camp in the early part of the evening was that the exit polling was skewed, and counting women and minorities proportionally high.
To me, it sounds like the same lefties that cried "stolen election" in 2000 are trying to find a way to claim this election even after Bush won it by 3.5 million.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Nader calls for US election recounts
Perhaps we're living in interesting times and it was a one-in-a-billion discrepancy between votes and exit polls... but since we CAN'T VERIFY THE MACHINES my opinion is that vote tampering is much more likely than not and CNN covered the trail.
The wacky Left's descent into madness is bittersweet for me. On the one hand, it's sad to see otherwise-reasonable people throwing their minds away like this. On the other hand, it helps insure that the party I support will retain control of all three branches of government for the foreseeable future. So, as saddened as I am by the pathology on display, please do rant on!
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
What we need to do is create accurate and easy to use voting machines that are extremely cheap to produce and are maintianed via an open source model. Preferably we write it for a physical chip that is archaic by todays standards so that its extremely easy to emulate, extremely cheap to produce, and will have less script kiddies using it on a daily basis. If i was designing a voting machine it would be simply 5 buttons, (4 candidates per screen and a more button). Also a big green/red/whatever button elsewhere that says "Record votes" You make your selection it moves to the next. At the end it tells you your choices and lets you go back as much as you want. When done you hit that record vote button and it prints a receipt. Id probably use a single 6502(i like these chips they are neat) cpu to accomplish this because thats all i NEED, I dont need no p4 running winblows or anything running linux to record my votes what is all that wasted functionality doing? I'll tell you what its doing providing hundreds and thousands of lines of unnecessary code that basically amounts to a huge liability. I don't trust linux or windows alike in that respect. What i do trust however is some miniscule "VoteOS" that was designed with nothing but voting and auditing in mind.
Its time we stop trying to produce canned solutions for things from piles of unnecessary code(linux, windows, qnx whatever).
The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." -August 28, 2003
link
don't call it problems with electronic voting but problems with the Diebold systems. Point the finger at the problem. The fact that it is electronic should not be an issue. One day we might like the fact that it is electronic. The issues here are with the current form of voting systems.
I don't really understand how polling several thousand people after they vote can really be a good prediction of how the rest of the 120 million people are going to vote. No one polled me after I voted and I live in Florida so this whole exit poll thing seemed like a joke to me.
A paper trail is not a sure thing....particularly a *machine-printed* paper trail. In certain districts that heavily favor a candidate by a large margin, printing a duplicate paper trail might be trivial. This is particularly true in situations where there might be a long period of time before a by-hand recount.
I think there should be some sort of hashing and/or signing throughout the day, with the hashes periodically given to poll workers and watchers (and perhaps the voters themselves) that could authenticate the paper trail later.
Of course we're so far off from clueful use of cryptography in voting that this point is not relevant yet. But it seems to me that these are the kind of problems cryptography was designed to handle, and it would be smart to start thinking that way.
It's pretty sad really. The first opportunity for me to vote for president was in 2000. Rigged. Now in 2004, another rigged election. This time it was a little less dubious to most. Will I ever get a chance to vote in a free election?
Except that CNN doesn't conduct the exit polling, they only report on numbers that are being fed to them.
The election was a fraud, but CNN wasn't the one committing the crime.
--
So can any statistician give us an idea of why that kind of thing could be happening?
Yes. Larger samples sizes are, in general, more accurate.
It's amusing how you separate the term "Left" with your (presumed) support of the Republican party. You do realize that Bush is perhaps the most Leftist Republican ever? The past 4 years have brought an enormous government, fiscally insane spending, and global intervention that ranks up there with the Soviet empire. Some of us libertarian minded folk see you GOP'ers as just a differnet flavor of Democrats. Keep that in mind when the US invades the next Middle East country on the neocon's shit list.
For accuracy, if you use the formerly general political terms, qualify the situation they are used in. CNN on the scale of industrial developed nations is right-center, in the United States of America it is left-center. Fox news, for comparison, on wide scale is mid-right, in the United State of America it is right-center.
We should all be smart enough to know this.
You have what's essentially a multiple choice ballot with two choices.
You have huge drives to register new voters, get everyone to the polls it doesn't matter who you vote for.
If I were to ask a large population a true or false question that none know the answer to, I'd expect my results to come back about 50-50.
The question asked on election night, as most americans saw it was "which is the lesser of two evils?" There was very little support for either candidate from the unwashed masses. Most were undecided going into the polls. I can only assume they did eenie-meenie-miney-moe.
How many people do you know who went to vote just to get out of work/school for a couple hours?
It's mostly noise, no discernable signal.
We need to return to the write-in ballot. The excuse of multiple choice being easier for machines to count is no longer valid. OCR can read a written ballot just fine.
If I'm undecided, or don't care and am just screwing around and write in "Pee Wee Herman", the noise is easily discarded.
This 51%-49% crap is absolutely meaningless from a statistical point of view. It's not representative of the People. It doesn't mean 51% think Bush is the best man for president, and 49% Kerry.
If we're going to hold on to this two party nonsense, why don't we be honest and just flip a coin every 4 years? Why continue with the charade that its a democratic election?
They need to return to the electoral system thats been used since the very first democracies in ancient Greece. Write the name of the man you want on the piece of paper.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The article author gives two suggestions for improving electronic voting systems:
1. Leave a paper trail.
2. Make the code open source.
In response to issue one, I don't think that's really necessary in pure technical terms. However, voting isn't purely about technology. You have to convince people that something has securely happened. You have to give some sense of honesty, even if a machine is handling almost everything. This is especially important to people who use rather buggy computers and operating systems at home filled with problems.
With issue two, I'm sure greed and corporate paranoia played into the decision to not release voting machine code as open source. But I agree that it will quell plenty of the critics to know exactly what's going on in the box. Will this happen? Possibly, but I doubt it.
So, in short, I agree with the writer -- but will those suggestions actually be followed? The easiest to implement is the paper trail. The open source could eventually become a government-provided open source solution to hardware vendors. With the varying touch screen technologies, that sounds like a can of worms to me.
FORTUNE FAVORS IRONY
solved. What benefit is there in continuing to report on problems with electronic voting machines that were recognized and corrected, without including this bit of critical information. Yes, the count was weird or wrong but investigation revealed why and the problem was either corrected or the discrepency explained.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
Because while maybe if we drastically change what is expected of evoting contractors we could someday reach the point where electronic voting is almost as secure and accurate as paper ballots kept in locked boxes, this point won't represent evoting being "ready" because there will never be a good reason for these things to exist. Electronic vote storage is a solution looking for a problem, and once punchcard voting disappears in 2006 evoting companies will no longer have "hey, look, there ARE voting methods worse than ours!" to prop themselves up.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I just hope that Congress doesn't institute secret ballots for its own voting.
This is unrelated to an anonymous public vote. When you vote, you vote your view. When Congress votes, they are supposed to be voting on your behalf, as your representative. Therefore, it is important to know which way a Senator or Representative voted in order to ensure that they are representing their constituents. In a public vote, you aren't voting on behalf of someone else, and therefore how you vote should not need to be known to someone else - other posters have already elucidated why this is important.
The main differences I see between the machines in the US and in India is that the machines over in India are *simple* and completely *hardware* based. Also look at the graphic of the machines (in several areas candidate names were replaced by well-known party symbols to cater to the illiterate population, which the picture doesn't show).
In the US, on the other hand, there's been a great deal of corporate lobbying to introduce *complex* machines running a complete *OS* (for Chrissakes!) with some machines even sporting a connection to the Intarweb. Their main argument for these "features" seems to be that they can be used easily by disabled people. It sounds pretty hollow, when you see that most people spouting these justifications either stand to profit from the elections (Diebold, Microsoft) or are getting paid to push them (politicians). And again, there are a zillion other ways to make the elections more "disabled friendly" without having to install the entire OS on it.
Granted, the elections in India were not completely without incident, but for a democracy with an electorate of 600 million people, a million voting machines and 543 constituencies, they were pretty darn effective.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
In what situation is a contest to the results of an action that equivalently decides the course of policy for a currently militarily belligerent nation considered to be worthy of consideration by you? The discrepancy reported, valid or invalid to some degree, between exit polls and vote counting results is exactly a sign of tampering with one or the other or both by some party (of individuals or political). Ideological debates are useless. With even the slightest understanding of history you know that the described situation, you know the influences involved. As a member of this site, you are familiar with the malleability of hardware and software. Do you continue to oppose discussion on the actions and possibilities of fraud?
"He's got a woody that won't quit and the pain must be blinding,"
observes a CIA source who's been tracking what he terms
"the strangest development yet"
in America's war against terror.
Read about it here.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
HUH??? Oh, I keep on forgetting that the range of debate in mainstream American media is so small that they use "left" and "right" in a completely different sense than the rest of the world. Everything is shifted to the right. CNN is definitely right-wing, when compared to something that is *actually* leftist.
It was posted elsewhere on /. that CNN regularly leans towards the Republicans. But, hey, thanks for using sober fact to reply to the parent instead of right-wing polemic...
Did he inhale?
Yeah, it's all a huge conspiracy. By the way, exit polls have a margin of error.
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."
With really accurate exit polling, it would be really hard for anyone to tamper with the election results.
It's amusing how you separate the term "Left" with your (presumed) support of the Republican party. You do realize that Bush is perhaps the most Leftist Republican ever?
Of course I realize it. I separated the wacky Left from the Republican party, but there has always been a Leftist part of the party, they're just not wacky. I don't have a problem with Bush's liberalism on economic issues so long as he retains the conservative social views that put him into office. Which he has.
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
Do you continue to oppose discussion on the actions and possibilities of fraud?
One side doesn't care because the fraud worked in their favor, and the other side doesn't care because they don't know enough math to understand what happened, and they think they'll sound like a tin-foil hat wearing loon if they believe in it.
Corruption wins again, ignorance stands idly by watching.
(Sorry, couldn't resist the ad pseudonym.)
Anyway, exit poll numbers are unreliable for a variety of reasons.
First, you don't know who is taking the poll and what their biases are. How were the voters selected - just the pretty girls, or people who looked safe? You never know.
Second, you don't know where the polls were taken. Were they only in urban areas, easily reachable? Were the areas chosen to be representative, or were they chosen with true randomness (out of a literal hat, for example)? Or were they chosen off the top of someone's head? The sites should have been selected at random and with a large enough distribution of sites.
If you don't do it randomly, but you pay careful attention to demographics to get an approximation of the overall population and their likely voting preference, you are still injecting your preconceived bias (that the pre-election polls were accurate) into the process. Garbage in, garbage out.
The sample size of 1000 or so is ok *if* it's an independently drawn sample. That is, the exiting voters should have nothing in common. By virtue of the fact that they all voted at the same time, and they were willing to answer a poll, they obviously have something in common, even if the areas chosen for the sampling were chosen well.
I suspect that there weren't enough people doing the exit polling. If you had 30 or more sites chosen at random, and then randomly selected people from those sites to ask, you might get a clearer picture. You'd still have error, and it could still all be skewed one way or the other, but at least you'd minimize the risk.
Overall, announcing the results of exit polls before the election is done is a bad idea, if only because it convinces the simple-minded that something is wrong with the system.
sigs, as if you care.
I would certainly sell my vote if I could. I really don't care about who wins the elections (all candidates are more or less the same) so if I could make a few bucks I'm all for it.
Also anonymity makes people less responsible for what they do. Most people I know refuse to talk about politics. They just vote once in a while based on which party had the best TV ads. Is that so much better?
By the way, exit polls have a margin of error.
Yeah, it's called 3%. The fact that the official counts were off by so much MORE than this is how we know there was vote fixing.
Don't confuse exit polls with the random phone polling that goes on throughout the rest of the year, they are a very different type of poll.
CNN is notoriously left-leaning. Even if you believe they are central, I defy anyone to explain to me why the fuck CNN would change numbers to suit Bush. It is pure insanity.
CNN is notoriously conventional-wisdom leaning and don't-rock-the-boat leaning. That conventional wisdom among the college educated (of whatever political party) is in some aspects "liberal" when compared to, say, that of those with only high school degrees, and the the major media almost exclusively employs college grads (Jennings being the exception) gains it accusations of "leaning left."
But conventional wisdom also says: "They would never rig the voting machines - despite the many ruthless things a side has engaged in, including faking evidence for war and voter suppression, and despite highly partisan hacks running the elections in OH and FL, rigging the vote tabulating machines themselves is just beyond imagination." And don't-rock-the-boat says, "We must make sure the sheep don't develop a fundamental distrust of their shepherds, or we (the current establishment, including particularly Time Warner, GE, Disney, Viacom) are all in trouble."
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Do you continue to oppose discussion on the actions and possibilities of fraud?
Hardly. If you read my post, you should have noticed that I encouraged the original poster and his brethren to continue down this road. Please, by all means, continue talking about this issue as long as you can. A party of cranks is much easier to defeat than a party of reasonable people.
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
CNN is an American news company. Thus, we can refer to it as being left or right based on our standards. If we were describing the BBC, you'd have more of an arguement.
I'd also like to point out that it's downright annoying having someone point out this obvious fact every single time it happens. It's getting to the Soviet Russia/All Your Base annoyance level. Get over it.
I am not even a citizen in that nation, I commented on pragmatic basis. Either way to say it is desperately needed or to say that only fools want verifiable recording of vote and verifiable vote results is useless. The action must be taken because the government of that nation is still declared as a democracy, and it is technically possible now unlike the past.
What kind of moron wrote this? CNN isn't called the Clinton News Network (ie, left wing) for nothing. It's fairly typical of most media outlets, they cater to the lowest-common dominator of public person because they are the consumers for their product and thus generate the largest revenue. Behind closed doors and within the accounting offices of these large businesses though, you can bet they're thankful for tax breaks the right-wing stands for. The same is true regarding celebreties, vocally they're mostly left-wing liberals (coincides with their pampered lifestyle and popularity with the masses), but secretly they're happy about any tax relief the right-wing can afford them.
So in other words, he can be a Leftist with regards to the budget and foreign policy just so long as he can enforce his evangelical Christian morals upon society? Sounds like the typical sell-out Republican. Gee, US troops are killing and being killed overseas, the administration is quietly pumping cash into the pockets of democracy-hating regiemes, the deficit is reaching astronomical proportions, and this nation has lost much in the terms of respect to the rest of the world.... BUT AT LEAST THE GAYS CAN'T MARRY! Yeah, sounds like you got your priorities straight... straight up your ass.
It's called a random sample. When people are chosen at random from polling stations, the result is representative of the views of the population to within a certain percentage with a certain confidence level. The standard with polling is to ask enough people the questions until the result is accurate to within at least a 3% confidence level with a 95% confidence level. That means that only 1 time out of 20 the actual result should be off by more than 3%. The odds of error drop very low very rapidly for higher percentages off, so as a result, the poll is accurate to within about 3%.
These are standard statistical procedures, and should be covered in any course on the topic.
in such a way that the voter can check his/her vote but nobody else can.
This is easy. Just let the voter enter a unique 4-digit number to go with the vote to make it traceable (for only that voter) on the list.
Complaints can be verified with help of the voter (and the printed, partially encrypted log).
Too many complaints (unlikely with this system), and corrective action follows (maybe re-vote).
>Since when was [anonymity] important?
Although your post was already rated flamebait by someone else, I'll assume your question is serious, and answer it.
Anonymity is important in voting because without it, there can be two Bad Things: 1) vote buying (I pay you to vote a certain way, but I'll need proof that you really did vote that way) and 2) coercion (You better vote a certain way or else I'll break your mother's kneecaps).
Anonymity in voting provides assurance that for the most part things like this can't happen, because the bad guys have no way of verifying who you voted for.
I still believe it shouldn't be annoymous. I each voter should be able to verify his/her vote as well as committee of people who oversee the process. Your vote would NOT be public domain so you wouldn't have to worry about being paid or harmed for your vote.
Each voter would have an ID card like a driver's license that they put into a machine and hit the button for who to vote for. You have 1 week to verify your vote or report a discrepancy such as losing your card/reporting it stolen.
You know what's really ironic?
People put more faith in the exit polls being correct than the counting of the actual ballots.
There are other EVM vendors as well which don't exactly appear to be on the up-and-up either. As I recall, the biggest one (besides Diebold) has the Diebold president's brother as its vice-president.
HMMM...
DNA just wants to be free...
Although in this context the only "range" that matters is the range between Kerry and Bush, and where CNN falls in that range.
This way, we have the ease of use of touch-screen machines, the audit trail of paper ballots, and insurance that the paper ballot matches voter intent. For extra paranoia, have the touch-screen frontend also count votes, ensure that the optical scanner and the frontend are made by different companies using no common software, and investigate any statistically significant differences in count between the two.
To save money on new scanner development, we could even use existing scanners like the ones my county uses.
Of course, this means that the touch-screen frontend only serves as a disabled-assistive and an ease-of-use device. Perhaps the money would be better spent on education to teach voters to fill in the scannable ballots directly. People with disabilities can use the age-old methods of bringing a trusted assistant along, or of requesting assistance from friendly and helpful precinct officials.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Even if you believe they are central, I defy anyone to explain to me why the fuck CNN would change numbers to suit Bush. It is pure insanity.
No. Even if they are left leaning, there is a reason for them to change the poll numbers to suit Bush: Otherwise their exit poll data would look inaccurate, due to the mismatch with the election result. After two well publicized failures in a row, people would stop paying attention to their inaccurate exit polls.
There are both legitimate and illegitimate reasons for them to revise their exit polls. If you are confident either way, you're an idiot. We do not know whether the revision was done for impartial (not left-right, but pro-journalist) reasons. Hopefully, the raw data will be examined by experts, and there will be a consensus that the revision was statistically sound. Until then, you don't know.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
I can't even think of how many times I have seen stupid celebrity worship and random bullshit on the CNN webpage instead of real news. Right now it's a flag-waving piece, "U.S. honors veterans", as the top story (while there's a massive battle on in Fallujah), along with some celebrity nonsense (Princess Anne, Justin Timberlake), something about the White House puppy (thank you, CNN, for keeping us informed), a story designed to shock and titillate ("woman pleads guilty to dumping girl's body in trash")... and a few real news stories. Being left-leaning, I used to think that this incredible lack of content was designed to cover up the incompetencies of the Bush Administration. But after following it for a while, I don't think that CNN slants left, or slants right. They just slant towards sucking.
It's easy to blame CNN. Unfortunately, people don't want to be challenged. People don't want to be woken up to reality. People don't want to be informed, they just want to be entertained. And increasingly, CNN gives that to them.
Occam's Razor doesn't apply to conspiracies.
Also, CNN is almost as bad as FOX these days. I don't know what anybody means when they say any of the major news networks are "liberal". They're corporate is what they are.
And yes, the first sentence was intended as a joke. The second bit wasn't.
Actually, the guy's right. Specific precincts do have vote totals that far outnumber registrations. Something fishy's going on here.
One side doesn't care because the fraud worked in their favor, and the other side doesn't care because they don't know enough math to understand what happened
Now you know why Republicans underfund schools!
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
Brazil has a nice, cheap, and very secure eletronic voting system.
In Brazil voting is mandatory, so about 90 million people have to vote on a single day. The logistic of it all is gigantic.
In an average 4 hour period after the end of the voting hours, please note that we have several time zones (and that the country is huge), we already know the winner. (People that dont have eletricity vote eletronicly (the urn can be powered by a car battery))
One of the things that make this possible is a central voter registration and legal system to controle it.
The voter has less freedom of where, how, and when to vote. For example, he must vote in his zone and section (or he can justify why he did not vote in any brasilian territory).
By
...counting posed so many problems when done mechanically.
Funny how much things stay the same.
I have a friend who semi-jokingly says he doesn't believe that world war 2 happened, because it just sounds too ludicrous.
I mean, seriously... an industrialized nation that is filled with some of the smartest minds in the world (i.e. Einstein was German), goes on a campaign of genocide because they decide all Jews are inherently bad people.
Truth is more outrageous than fiction. Go ahead and keep believing whatever is necessary to keep your faith in authority.
-------
Incite and flee.
2 root-level trolls on the same story? Wow, you're really outdoing yourself now.
No disagreement here, but how does that address the quoted point, trying to ascertain the left/right bias of CNN?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Does anybody know the state of those in Ohio? That could account for the discrepencies in registered voters vs. ballots cast.
Electronic voting machines are a solution in search of a problem.
Just what is it they are supposed to do better?
They have no reason to exist at all, paper trails are absolute nonsense and are only useful in a recount.
Every piece I've read by Schneier over the past few years hammers on the same theme: software is fallible, no system ever works that fails to retain a phalanx of expensive security wonks. He's more right than wrong, but he sometimes delivers injustice to the details.
Let's think back a ways, a long ways to the original tabulating machine.
Counting votes is not rocket science. If ever there was a category of software that could be substantially more correct rather than less correct, it would have to counting. If, after 100 years and trillions of dollars, we still can't build a machine that counts correctly, let's fold up shop and go home.
Now, if the source code remains concealed, it certainly becomes much easier to build a machine that does not count correctly, but that's not a software failure and let's not blame that on an inherent imperfection of software.
So can any statistician give us an idea of why that kind of thing could be happening??
Bush voters are a bunch of liars.
Left leaning? are you kidding?
Maybe in the USA it is considered left leaning - but the three days that Australia got 9/11 non-stop coverage, or the coverage of the iraq war or of the invasion of afghanistan it was a raging nationalist rah-rah fest.
Maybe you need a redefinition of the word 'left' to mean 'less far right'
To summarize for those of you who did not RTFA:
1) Require a paper audit trail
2) Open the code for wanyone to see
Why is #2 necessary if #1 is implemented? Would not #1 ensure that the election is fair? Of course, #1 is only used in the case of a recount, but I would expect if the elections were rigged in any significant way (ie. outcome was something other than it should have been) then a recount would occur. In the case where an election was altered but that alteration had no meaningful effect on the outcome I don't really care.
Moreover, by opening the code you inescapably harm the code owner's benefit to having either created or obtained that code. It would be far to easy for another entity to steal or improve upon that code to create a competing product.
For those of you who are truly paranoid there is another option: Move the creation of electornic voting software into the government itself. Make it part of the FEC and then open source it. Mandate that all elections use this software so that there is no competition issue.
This, however, is an unattainable and uneccessary endeavour.
Requiring a paper audit trail should clear up any real issues thse machine may have.
I'm sorry, but wtf? This was a statistical SAMPLE. Depending on how well that sample of people was taken, the confidence interval could be huge.
If I sample 30 out of a million people, no one expects that to be a demonstration of how those 30 people voted. Also, if I sample 30 out of 100 people, but don't choose well, no one expects that to be meaningful either.
As for this example, I'm guessing since they took two samples, they have two different groups of people they talked to. You could've had 100% Kerry in one and 100% Bush in the other. Why should numbers match up exactly, as you are trying to do?
Please tell me this is just a joke, right?
And no other state has partisan hacks running their elections? Really South Carolina, New York, Illinois (all renowned for their fair election practices in the past), were completely fair? (I'm guessing you'll say SC wasn't, but NY and IL were, but I'm not sure why).
I love slashdot on technical things, but I've got to give up reading any political crap here. Just because people are bright in some field doesn't mean they no shit in another.
Ah well.
Well...first of all Elections in India as well are not just at National level. There are elections for state government as well as for city , town and village councils(known as panchayats). This has a very simple explanation of the EVM used in Indian Elections.
Anonymity- It provides total anonymity because no one in any possible way can view during ar after the votes are casted that who was which vote casted by. So anonymity that is called for is met.
Scalability-Well the very fact that it is used for national elections in india the most populous democracy is , I think proof enough for scalability
Speed- This I feel is implicit , because any electronic voting system at any rate would produce results at a rate faster than the manual system. I guess that the problem is that they are trying to look at very compex software based implementations. This article posted on MSN sums it all up pretty well
Actually people are bad about voting in the wrong precinct in the state of ohio. The total votes in were around 665334 out of 1005807 registered voters which is about 66% voter turnout which is about right considering the national voter turnout. And I say this even though I voted for Kerry so you can consider it somewhat unbiased.
A poll with a 95% confidence level, such as this one, can still be off 1 in 20 times. It may not seem like that is likely, but this is probably what happened. It is not unheard of for a poll to be slightly wrong or even way off the mark.
The Dumbold Voting Machine for The Sims enables the simulated people in your virtual dollhouse to vote! It's an interactive "get out the vote" public service message, in the form of a free downloadable Sims object. This Sims object is an electronic voting machine that lets your Sims vote between four candidates: Kerry, Bush, Nader and Badnarik.
I've included informative text in this Sims object, which it displays in illustrated dialogs to educate players about electronic voting machines.
A major side-show is the "Monkey" item on the pie menu, which activates all kinds of cool easter eggs, and displays lots of in-game information and news about electronic voting machines.
Please give this Dumbold Voting Machine a good pounding on, and tell me if you have any problems (besides the usual problems endemic to electronic voting machines, which I've programmed into this Sims object on purpose).
At first look, it appears to be a fully functional voting machine. But it actually has a lot of fatal bugs and hidden features, just like real electronic voting machines!
The Dumbold Voting Machine web page describes and illustrates some of the easter eggs, including:
Baxter the Chimpanzee Erases the Voting Log. Vote or Die!
You punched out the screen!
Osama Bin Laden Scares the Piss Out of You!!!
Accidentally Voting for Pat Buchanan.
News about Black Box Voting.
News about CalTech-MIT/Voting Technology Project.
News about Diebold.
News about EFF.
News about Verified Voting.
Dumbold Voting Machine Operating Instructions.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Why is it that you are so proud of the popular vote THIS time? Everywhere I go I hear about this supposed couple of percent "mandate". Four years ago you definitely played a different tune when the popular vote was mentioned. Opportunists.
CPAs could audit the controls over the voting process in order to obtain a reasonable assurance that the information will be protected from fraud. These CPAs could also verify the totals. It's not uncommon for CPAs to tally votes for awards and elections (although I don't think they do it on a national scale).
You need #2 because the paper trail is only used in close elections, or situations that warrant a recount. If you can't ensure the accuracy and integrity of the system, the paper trail is worthless in all but the corner cases.
For example, suppose someone breaks into VotingMachineCorp's network and secretly modifies the source code to change the vote totals *after* the paper trail is printed. The only way this is exposed is if there is a recount.
I think fair and accurate elections better serve the public interest than fostering competition among voting machine companies.
No kidding. Most of the people I talked to who were polled after voting told me they lied to the exit poll takers. So they either lied to me or they lied to CNN -- either way, they lied. I tend to believe many people lied to CNN because of some of the statistics I saw on election day. One example was "% of people claiming to be liberal voting for Bush: 81%" and "% of people claiming to be conservative voting for Kerry: 75%"
Now, most people who consider themselves "liberal" didn't vote for Bush. As evidence, you may recall that many of Bush's attack ads went out of the way to use the phrase "John Kerry and his liberal allies in the Senate ..." The word "liberal" was not used as a positive modifier in the context of a George Bush-approved advertisement. Yet CNN's exit polls show the "liberals" claiming to have heavily voted for Bush, and the "conservatives" to have voted for Kerry.
I have no way of knowing how many people gamed the CNN polls. I certainly feel that the right to secrecy in voting grants me the right to tell the poll takers that I voted for Phillip J. Fry, if I want. Yet when CNN presents the numbers, I tend to forget that many people share my views on the invalidity of exit polling, and tend to believe them anyway. Color me human.
John
We have this crazy system in Canada...
;p
Voting is done with a pen on paper.
Then we count them.
We must be insane in Canada eh?
HUH??? Oh, I keep on forgetting that the range of debate in mainstream American media is so small that they use "left" and "right" in a completely different sense than the rest of the world. Everything is shifted to the right. CNN is definitely right-wing, when compared to something that is *actually* leftist.
For all the confused people out there, I think the prolem can be broken down thus: In general CNN is actually fairly right leaning. At the same time, in American politics CNN is fairly Democrat leaning. This can appear confusing, because their general position is probably to the right of who they usually endorse politically in the US. Most of this comes down to the fact that the US political system is mostly made up of pointless partisan bickering attempting to create a perception of a much larger divide than actually exists.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
In my county (it may be state-wide, I don't know) we have used what I would call electronic voting machines for years. The system works like this:
The voter physically marks his ballot (about the thickness of a postcard) with a pen. The ballot is then taken over to a reader and "read". If there is anything wrong with it, it is rejected, giving the voter an immediate opportunity to figure out what is wrong and cast a new ballot.
I've lived in different places and voted all sorts of ways, and this is the best system I've ever seen. It combines the speed of electronic results, but still keeps a valid paper-trail of the ballots cast.
From the looks of the machinery, the system is probably twenty years old (it may be older).
I am confident in this electronic system. I could never trust a system which did not include a physical ballot of some sort.
Proverbs 21:19
Anyone who has administered a system, a network, and has had to protect it against spam, intruders, at the same time as making it work, will agree that it is doable.
So why would it be any more complicated to have machines running - say - *nix, with one touchscreen that has big options, say, color-coded, with the candidates. Touch one, "Are you sure you want to vote for $CANDIDATE" ? Buttons "yes" and "no" on opposite sides of the screen.
Why not go one step further? One monitor per candidate!
And as far as security, hmm, well, it's a *nix. Those are pretty secure when you know what you're doing. So get a white hat to set it up for you. Get someone who wants to Make It Work.
oh, and don't forget PAPER TRAILS! logging works very well under *nix, thank you very much.. cronjobs can print stuff out too.
Technology has everything we want. People are too stupid though. That's what it comes down to. Too spoonfed.
Betcha we ought to show them a video on how it works.
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
Let's put aside for now that this anti-anonymity arguement is coming from an AC ;-)
Most people I know refuse to talk about politics. They just vote once in a while based on which party had the best TV ads.
This statement is very accurate. But how would getting rid of anonymity help this at all?
From comp.risks. Peter Neumann is a respected analyzer of risks.
.com]
Some 2004 voting anomalies
>
Mon, 8 Nov 2004 16:01:13 PST
For those of you interested in following a collection of reported problems
more carefully, here are just a few reported anomalies, collected from a
variety of sources:
* Palm Beach County logged 88,000 more votes than people who had voted in
the presidential race. (Teresa LePore of 2000 Butterfly Ballot fame is
the County supervisor of elections there.)
* A Franklin County Ohio machine error gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in a
precinct in Gahanna. The correct totals were 365 for Bush, 260 for Kerry.
* In Broward County FL, in balloting for Amendment 4, ES&S software for
tabulating absentee ballots began counting BACKWARDS once a total of
32,767 [2^15 - 1, in a signed 16-bit field] votes had been reached in a
precinct. When this was discovered, the corrected totals for the precinct
went from 166,000 to 240,000, and actually caused the statewide results to
be reversed on this amendment. Apparently the same flaw was detected two
years ago in the same software, and remained uncorrected.
Nick Simicich wondered in a long message to RISKS:
Do you suppose that they "fixed" this by making the 16 bit field
unsigned? Or do you suppose that they counted the numbers separately
using, say, floating point so that they could check the results for
large discrepancies? Or maybe that they checked the before and after to
see that the numbers increased when they added to them...or anything
else that they could do to make this self auditing? Nah...frankly, I'm
scared by the stupidity of this error. This is a problem that needs an
open source solution.
* The failure of the ES&S ranked-choice vote-counting software in the San
Francisco Supervisors' election that I noted in RISKS-23.58 turns out to
have been a hard-coded constant maximum number of voters that was set too
low. The fix was utterly trivial, but wisely required recertification by
the State. [Perhaps the same programmer wrote the Broward software?]
* Bev Harris reported that ``Jeff Fisher, the Democratic candidate for the
U.S. House 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... In Baker County, for example,
with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them
Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush.... Dick
Morris [famous consultant to both parties, now with Fox News] wrote "So,
according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry
Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa.... Exit polls
cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I
suspect foul play." '' [See http://www.blackboxvoting.org , *NOT*
* Incidentally, Ralph Barone noted an article on the internal database
structures of the Diebold voting machines, plus how to hack an election
and cover your trail afterwards.
http://www.blackboxvoting.com/scoop/S00065.htm
* There were numerous reports of screens "jumping" votes in ES&S and Hart
InterCivic machines, where casting a straight-party subsequently changes
the vote for the President before exiting.
* Also reported were many cases of long lines and long waits only in certain
politically skewed precincts, many legitimate voters who claim they were
disenfranchised, voters who were given special optical scan pens that were
not capable of being tallied, and so on.
Many Web sources provided running lists of reported anomalies, such as
http://www.votersunite.org
http://fairvote.
Perhaps the exit polling sucked balls? Perhaps the numbers they were showing were not correct and they updated them with the correct data? Perhaps the early voters were Democrats and the later voters were Republican.
/ results2004_lg.jpg
Well, from the 3d election results:
http://www.esri.com/industries/elections/graphics
It looks like most of the areas who voted for Kerry were in urban areas. Now, if the exit polls were conducted in mostly urban areas you can see how the results would be biased in favor of Kerry.
A Human Right
That graph shows Kerry with a 20 point lead in Pennsylvania. That's a landslide. Yet all the polls taken prior to the election (go back two months) didn't have Kerry anywhere near that. The final poll of PA had Kerry up less than 4%. That's nowhere near 20%. Of all the states where Kerry seems to lose a lot of ground, state polls taken just before the election are nearly identical with the final result.
Instead of buttons, we could use levers.
And instead of a screen we could use a big piece of paper that you shove in and align with the levers...
The idea behind the electronic systems and touch screens is that there are a myriad of rules in each state and county about how ballots are formatted and presented. The only way to create a system that can address all of those issues is to go with touchscreens and fancy graphics.
More interesting is supporting the handicapped voters and providing enlarged text options, and voice assistance for navigating the ballot.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
You're assuming that people don't lie at exit polls. They do.
Proverbs 21:19
The main advantage of electronic voting machines is that they reduce spoilage. They can lead people through the process and verify choices and prompt for missing choices.
The problem is when you say "Yes" it goes down the rabbit hole and you have to trust it from there. (I used an older lever machine myself which gives you the same impression.)
The "solution" to electronic machines is to use a paper trail for audit/validation. A paper trail can fail for two reasons. First, it may never be followed. Second, if people don't put in their ballot then they can sell their vote and have a receipt for proof.
So wouldn't the logical step be to go back to paper ballots but filled out by machine? You use the electronic machine to do your vote and you get a printed ballot that reflects your choices. You drop that ballot in the box and THAT is what is counted for the votes.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
To a conspiratorialist, anonymity was already lost, years ago. Think about it. If someone really wanted to know how you voted, wouldn't the hidden cameras be in place? Wouldn't there be a way of indetectably marking the paper ballots and matching their secret numbers to names as they are handed out, unbeknownst even to the volunteers at the polling place? I'm not saying this is happening, I'm just saying it's possible. I don't think anybody really gives a shit how you vote.
An anonymous vote is a lost vote. By insisting on the shadow of anonymity, those in power are able to maintain it forever. Even if you could identify your own vote with a 4-digit number of your choosing as one slashdotter suggested, the votes of thousands of imaginary voters could be added to the system and you'd never know it. The only way I can think of -- and I've thought about it a lot -- to ensure an accurate vote count is for everybody to see how everybody voted.
Yes, this will bring threats of retribution, and real retribution in the sense of lost jobs, family disputes, bar brawls. As for real retribution, I'm pretty sure that will only happen because those in power will finance it, in order to make sure the people demand anonymous votes again.
So, pick your poison. A nice sport we play once a year or so, can place bets on, and breaks the daily routine a little, or a real vote with real consequences that we'll have to defend with our lives. I have a pretty good guess what will win out. That's why I'm opting out of the whole system. I don't care for spectator sports.
In other headlines:
"68 Year Old Grandmother Gives Birth To Alien!"
http://dontgetyournewsfromtabloidsidiot.com
Proverbs 21:19
I'd go one further, let the electronic votes be added in real-time for entertainment value, so that people can hold their victory speach and so forth and so on, but let the paper trail be counted and make that outcome the legally binding one.
The best of two worlds, as long as you don't give the electronic result legal status.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
I don't understand why the US insists on computer voting. Here in the UK we can have an election with the results out the following morning. This is in a country with ~60 million people. The technology: paper and pencil. Nobody here is demanding electronic voting. Everyone agrees the voting system is safe and secure. That was until the government tried to move to postal voting, which is one of the forms of voting most open to abuse.
BEFORE THE HIGH COURT OF JUDICATURE AT BOMBAY
BENCH AT NAGPUR
Election Petition
Election Petition No. 01 / 2004
Shri Banwarilal B. Purohit
Versus
1)Shri Vilas Muttemwar
2)Returning Officer
3)Election Commission of India
DEPONENT
Shri Ravi Visvesvaraya Prasad
Son of Shri H.Y. Sharada Prasad
Resident of: 19 Maitri Apartments
Block A - 3, Paschim Vihar
New Delhi 110 063
AFFIDAVIT OF EXAMINATION IN CHIEF
I, Shri Ravi Visvesvaraya Prasad, Son of Shri H.Y. Sharada Prasad, born on 07 September 1960 at New Delhi, and Resident of 19 Maitri Apartments, Block A - 3, Paschim Vihar, New Delhi 110 063, the deponent named above, do hereby take oath and state on solemn affirmation as under:
(1) I say that my professional and educational qualifications are:
(i) Master of Science degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 15213, United States of America, acquired during the years 1982 to 1986.
(ii) Master of Engineering degree in Metallurgical Engineering and Materials Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 15213, United States of America, acquired during the years 1982 to 1985.
(iii) Lead Assessor Diploma (with Honours) in System and Software Quality Assurance of the European Union's BOOTSTRAP Programme of the European Strategic Programme for Research in Information Technology. The Honours Diploma was awarded in the year 1993 jointly by the University of Freiburg in Germany and the University of Graz in Austria.
(iv) Master of Science in Physics, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, 208016, acquired during the years 1977 to 1982.
(v) Member of the Research Staff at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 15213, United States of America, during the years 1985-1986, working on projects sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.
(2) I say that I am a technical and engineering consultant in the fields of electronics, microelectronics, circuit design, computer software, hardware, telecommunications, and datacommunications. I further say that I have nineteen years of international professional experience in providing engineering and technical consultancy and advisory services in these fields to multinational corporations, international organizations, and leading Indian business houses.
(3) I say that I have published several hundred articles on these subjects in leading international and Indian scientific and technical journals, scholarly journals, as well as mass media magazines and newspapers.
(4) I say that I write frequently on technical and management policy issues in leading Indian journals such as Hindustan Times, Indian Express, Times of India, Economic Times, Telegraph, Hindu Business Line, Observer of Business and Politics, etc. I further say that I am frequently interviewed by various television channels in India and abroad regarding technical and management policy issues.
(5) I say that at the invitation of the Hindustan Times newspaper, I wrote the following article on Electronic Voting Machines in April 2004 in the run up to the Lok Sabha elections in April-May 2004, based on my in-depth technical knowledge and experience:
In his article, "Press to Play" (Hindustan Times, Saturday, 17 April 2004), Kanishka Singh described the various ploys used by polling officials to have votes cast in favour of their preferred candidates by an electorate unfamiliar with electronic voting machines. Singh stated: "The problems experienced with EVMs in the December elections were many. None of them, however, are problems that can't be solved." But, in fact, there are serious problems with EVMs which cannot be easily resolved, more fundamental than the psychological stratagems used by polling officials to influence a technically illiterate electorate.
The reliability of the electronic voting machines manufacture
How about the first samples taken chronilogically in the east coast where the polls were opened first. Normally heavily leaning Democrat. Then the second sample was taken later in the day when the rest of the nation began to vote (aka: When those kook conservatives started voting) and surprisingly(or not?) a BIG swing in support for Bush began and continued that way through the rest of the night. I bet you if there were a third sample later in the day it'd be heavily Kerry, seeing in how the "left" coast results would come in last.
The 2004 election revealed many problems with electronic voting: lost votes, undervotes, overvotes, and votes rolling over into negative numbers. These links are taken from the group blog E-voting experts:
Yes, I'm French... Feel free to ignore this post (but replying by bashing France in general would be off-topic).
I think that the main problem is not the voting technology. It is the electoral system (in the US, and sometimes elsewhere).
The 2-level presidential vote is not really democratic... The people should be able to choose from many candidates. FWIW, in France, the presidential vote is usually a 2 round vote: on the first round, dozens of candidates (with a small limitation: each candidate has to be approved by > 500 county majors or MPs from several regions). On the second round, only the two candidates with the biggest votes (on the 1st one). So in the first tour, you vote for whom you like. In the second one, you vote against whom you dislike the most.
The lack of several (more than 4) realistic candidates at US presidential elections.
Most importantly, the lack of real constraining limits on the budget of each american party. IMHO, there should be a strong legal limit (of about a few dollars per voter) on the electoral budget. Since a campaign costs much more than a billion dollar, each of your candidate has to sell himself to big corporations... There are such limitations in France, but I think they are not severe enough.
I prefer the 2-round system used in France for the presidential election. (and yes, I am ashamed it did not work very well on the last presidential election, when Chirac faced an ultra-right candidate LePen; and Chirac did not understood that he was not really elected by 80% of the voters. He should have resigned immediately after his election, to let start a real vote.).
CNN has never endorsed any candidate. Heck, not even FOX News has endorsed a candidate.
Q:How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A:None. Obviously market forces will take care of it.
Looks more like we should just choose up corporate sides and use those for political boundaries. It is increasingly obvious that in most all countries around the world, the banking/industrial/military establishment runs the show, and these are by default now almost all transnational organizations. This is where the real political power lies, so why do we keep deluding ourselves that these obviously hacked and controlled "votes" actually have much meaning?
....almost, getting pretty dang close.
Let's just eliminate the redundant middleman of political governments and borders. Let's trash the expensive and unneeded bureaucracies. Then we can "vote" at the shareholders meetings instead. It's what the globalists want,they tell us that most openly, they could care less about who you are or where you live, you can see that, they could care less about borders, they move freely around and do whatever they want to do. Why not do the same?
Cynical? Yes. Realistic?
Even simpler explanation:
People will frequently lie if the truth is unprovable and lying will save them potential hassle.
When accosted by a journalist after voting, the quickest escape is provided by mumbling "Kerry" and walking away. It only requires a handful of voters per thousand to do this to generate the exit poll mismatch.
Another explanation:
Aggregate voting preference in the US is *very* location biased. Were pollsters staffing the polling stations in the boonies as much as in the cities? Again, it only requires a minor difference in focus to change the exit poll results a few percent.
"What kind of moron wrote this? CNN isn't called the Clinton News Network (ie, left wing) for nothing."
You are on to something there. I follow you.
"It's fairly typical of most media outlets, they cater to the lowest-common dominator of public person because they are the consumers for their product and thus generate the largest revenue. "
It is the "MOST" common denominator which generates the most revenue.
Lowest common demoninator is a term you nicked from your grade 7 math class. "Lowest" does not imply "most".
While taking a word which means something in 1 context and twisting it into a completely unrelated and non-applicable usage has widely been recognized as a completely valid and authoritative method of argument (amongst neoconservatives), it would still prove you wrong because the "lowest" common denominator you are denigrating voted for Bush.
Which by your logic would mean CNN should be called the "Bush News Network".
And Bush, if you don't know begins with a "B", dipshit.
"Behind closed doors and within the accounting offices of these large businesses though, you can bet they're thankful for tax breaks the right-wing stands for."
In fact... these media outlets are SO thankful, that they have a great interest in seeing the right wing administration which gives them these tax breaks (at the expense of future generations of middle class workers) they would do everything in their power to endanger the status quo by presenting leftist news coverage.
Because... behind closed doors... these media conglomerates (which I suppose you also think are controlled by Jewish athiests).. actually want to pay more taxes... wait.. that is a contradiction.. how about this:
Because the owners of corporate media conglomerates are all bleeding heart socialists. How else do you think they got so f*cking rich?
that doesn't work either...
lets. see.... I know. The corporate media conglomerates are right wing media outlets and actually spin the news to the right.
That makes sense.
They only appear left to neoconservatives because once in a while, rarely, they actually report on factual events. And facts, as everyone knows, are the inventions of the left.
The Right doesn't needs "facts" when it has "faith".
"The same is true regarding celebreties, vocally they're mostly left-wing liberals (coincides with their pampered lifestyle and popularity with the masses), but secretly they're happy about any tax relief the right-wing can afford them."
I think you mean "secretly they're happy about any tax cut that the US government can't afford, but the Right Wing can borrow and bill to future generations of tax payers (most of whome will continue to be middle class working stiffs)".
Since we are apparently in the mood to reveal the secret thoughts of third parties (who haven't told us, but being self-righteous pricks we will claim to know things we can not possibly know), I'll let you in on another "secret".
Secretly neoconservatives know that they are evil liers, but they are so good at lying they have fallen for their own deceit.
ohh... it wan't a secret?
I must be watching too much Clinton News. I should probably start thinking for a change.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
The memos may have been faked but they contained truthful information as verified by the person that typed the original memos.
The government has a word for that sort of event, and more than one agency willing and able to do it.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
Technologies get in the way of accuracy by adding steps. Each additional step means more potential errors, simply because no technology is perfect. Consider an optical-scan voting system. The voter fills in ovals on a piece of paper, which is fed into an optical-scan reader. The reader senses the filled-in ovals and tabulates the votes. This system has several steps: voter to ballot to ovals to optical reader to vote tabulator to centralized total.
A manual system has the same issues: voter to ballot to checkbox to person reading the checks to guy counting the votes to the central place holding all the tallies.
Computers just do it faster, make fewer mistakes and don't care who wins the election.
The problem isn't the errors, the errors can be fixed with better interfaces and solid code, it's the lack of proper checks in place to detect those errors and make sure the system isn't abused.
Interesting, considering the exit polls were sponsored by several major news outlets, including ABC, CBS, FOX, a couple of major newspapers.....
All of which, of course, would gladly help Bush steal the election right out from under the noses of the Democrats.
Seriously, even if all of the organizations were strongly right leaning, don't you think that some Democrat staff member might have leaked this information out to the Democratic National Committee? Don't you think that somebody would be raising hell about this besides one lone blogger.
One thing that conspiracy nuts never figure out- It is almost impossible for even two people to keep a secret for long. As the number of people in the know increases, the chances of it being blown goes up exponentially. And you expect us to believe that at least 5 major news organizations, of which maybe one or two has a real interest in seeing Bush re-elected, are all working together to cover up a major theft of the election?
More likely, he's pissed that he got burned by posting preliminary exit poll results that didn't match either the final election results or the final polls (despite many warnings that the preliminary results mean nothing at all) and is looking for a scapegoat for his mistake.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
1. Method of entering and recording votes.
.
2. Storage and delivery of votes for counting.
Voting with electronic storage of votes can be compromised in step 1 even if the local election staff is doing their job perfectly well. The e-voting machine could be compromised by the manufacturer and depending on their security level, by anyone else who has access to them including a monkey as well as in step 2
Voting by verified paper ballots can only be compromised in step 2, assuming any physical safeguards that may exist, such as seals on boxes containing the ballots and people in charge who may not agree with rigging the election, are somehow circumvented.
An ideal system may sign the paper ballots with a cryptographic signature so that it could only be compromised if both the manufacturer of the voting machines and the local election staff are.
Certainly there are better systems than unverifyable insecure DRE e-voting machines which have been plagued with bugs, hacked by a monkey and reportedly counted more than 100000 votes incorrectly and how-many-more due to more subtle and difficult to detect errors.
You're an idiot. It's not necessary to go any further.
"conservative social views"? How about adhering to the Constitution, which is black-letter law, instead of what some people think the founders might have thought?
(A conjecture that is likely incorrect, since they assume that the Founders were charismatic Christians)
Hint: Marriage is not the basis of our society. LIBERTY is the basis of our society.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
What's the point to using computers, when only one voting per year happens (in average)?
First hiring people and using paper for this voting process is less expensive, second less error prone, and it's probably even more user friendly.
And you can organize a paper ballot to be fully counted within hours per state (obviously you will use computers in the backoffice, but you won't need them to cast the vote).
The good ole trick from Julius Caesar works perfectly fine (since decades now): Divide et impera!
A party of cranks is much easier to defeat than a party of reasonable people.
You know, that's what our side was saying... until November 2.
And as a Republican, can you honestly say that you support this war? Or that you're happy with the $145 billion in corporate tax giveaways that Bush signed into law on the eve of the election? How about the enormous defecit that we're going to have to pay back over the next century? Do you have kids in Iraq that are getting shot at in some fool's errand of a war that benefits only the president's corporate backers? Do you really believe that Saddam Hussein was more of a threat than Osama bin Laden?
And most importantly, can you honestly call this administration "conservative" and keep a straight face? They've massively increased spending all over the place; they've dramatically curtailed civil liberties, and the two major, galvanizing issues around which they rallied voters are both attempts to force Christian ideology on the rest of the country. Right-wing, indeed.
I'd like to know why you support the GOP. I really would; I simply don't understand how a rational person can. You'll notice that I'm not posting this as AC; that's because I really would appreciate a response. Any chance you'd care to shed some light on the issue?
3. Scalability. Voting systems need to be able to handle very large elections. One hundred million people vote for president in the United States. About 372 million people voted in India's June elections, and over 115 million in Brazil's October elections. The complexity of an election is another issue. Unlike many countries where the national election is a single vote for a person or a party, a United States voter is faced with dozens of individual election: national, local, and everything in between.
Lets be clear about one thing -- One hundred million people DID NOT vote for President of the US. They voted for presidential electors in their given state.
There are no national elections in the US, only 50 separate state elections, plus the District of Columbia. There is little point then in designing an elections system that would be identical in every state, particularly as different states have different laws governing elections.
Try to remember how your ballots were arranged, if you voted. First, there was a Federal section, which had options for presidential electors (though your ballot may not have presented it as such), for Senate (in some states) and for Representatives. The next section had state offices, followed by local offices for county, city, township, school board district, or whatever jurisdiction applied. Following that, depending on the particular ballot, were initiatives and propositions, some of which were state-wide, some of which were specific to certain counties or other jurisdictions.
Most of the purchasing decisions for elections hardware, as well as ballot design and printing, and publications of voter information materials is done at the county level, and for a good reason. It is simply madness to expect one system could work for every jurisdiction, much less that materials could be produced centrally by the Federal government, or even state governments.
The fact is that DRE (direct recording electronic) voting machines are a bad idea, but not so much because of the reasons ably presented by Schneier as something much simple: They are much more expensive than existing systems and offer little benefit to justify the price.
``I think it's fair to say that at some point electronic voting will be ready - but it's not ready now.''
That is, in the US. In many other places, people have been voting electronically for years without major problems.
I think the problem with US politics is that they don't want to get it right.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I am somewhat frustrated that sites specific to vote error (fraud) are hard to find in specific catagories. Math, code, action, law etc... Don't get me wrong... /. rocks. I would just like to be able to find Evoting link sites without spending hours scouring the net... http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ and http://www.votersunite.org/ are doing a great job but if university types are going for the goods they need a clearer path... Any suggestions?
In the US, we prefer to reserve the right to sell votes to elected representatives.
I've heard that Kerry is considering retracting his concession, and that if you've personally observed "voter disenfranchisement" in Ohio, you should phone the DNC (202) 863-8000 or send email to: CKerry@Mintz.com.
(Interestingly enough, the Green Party is also legally allowed to demand a recount: the catch is that they've got to be able to pay the $100,000 price tag...)
Computers should not be used to counting votes for one particular reason:
Nearly everybody can count and thus verify that votes are counted correctly. The vote counting is open to anyone, so that YOU can personally check that the votes in your district have been counted correctly.
Even open source is not good enough, because:
1) Only a small percentage of people are able to uderstand the code
2) Even then, the code is not verified
3) You must ensure that the code has actually been used on the given computer (and OS)
4) You cannot check counting in real-time
However, you can personally verify that paper votes have been coorectly put into the box by the voter, and you can personaly watch the vote counting and see if anybody tries to cheat in real-time. Then you can note the votes in your district, and later check with the official nubers. Demand a recount if the numbers differ.
Sometimes the simplest technology is the best, in this case paper and pencil. A voting process must be fully transparent to be legitimate.
If electronic voting can't work without problems, explain India.
if the exit polls were conducted in mostly urban areas you can see how the results would be biased in favor of Kerry.
True. However that is a well known effect and about the first thing they have ALWAYS controled for. I can't imagine that they suddenly abandonded their standard practice of polling in a carefully selected mix of areas. If they had suddenly abandonded polling in rural areas then that would have been reported and would obviously have explained the results.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
How come I never get $4000 added to my account when I deposit $300?
Supposing CNN fails to portray the substantive arguments of either right wingers or left wingers, then a right winger, being more familiar with right wing ideology, will say "This news channel is left leaning, because it doesn't portray the best arguments of right wingers". This right winger, not being familiar with left wing ideology (because it isn't portrayed accurately on the news) will assume that CNN is portraying the best of left-winger ideology, and is therefore left wing. Left wingers will assume that CNN is right wing, for the same reasons.
(The above paragraph assumes that "left wing" and "right wing" are a reasonable way to describe a person's political beliefs. In actuality, things are more complicated. Political beliefs are a multidimensional space.)
News media tend to portray all conflicts as differences of opinion between groups of people who don't get along. Portraying everying as a simple "matter of opinion" tends not to make those with differing opinions uncomfortable, which makes advertisers happy. By avoiding facts and substantive arguments, they can avoid upsetting their viewers' subtle biases.
I think the grandparent post was saying that CNN doesn't lean left or right, but towards entertainment and away from education. By portraying nonsense, they are firmly nonpartisan. I don't watch CNN, so I can't say if this is an accurate assessment, but it seems to be true of most news outlets in general. One possible cause may be media consolidation.
-jim
Who else here got scared seeing an image link to a .cx domain?
Simple. The Democrats would rather have Bush now and another chance in 4 years. I suspect the Clintons.
Why is it that you are so proud of the popular vote THIS time? Everywhere I go I hear about this supposed couple of percent "mandate". Four years ago you definitely played a different tune when the popular vote was mentioned. Opportunists.
Well I'm a libertarian, so I don't really give a shit which one of the two major douchebags running actually won. I do, however, enjoy pissing off Democrats by pointing out the popular vote, since they were so convinced Bush was in office illegitimately.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
For accuracy, if you use the formerly general political terms, qualify the situation they are used in.
Sorry, I thought it was obvious since we are talking about CNN's exit polls of the UNITED STATES ELECTIONS.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
But conventional wisdom also says: "They would never rig the voting machines - despite the many ruthless things a side has engaged in, including faking evidence for war and voter suppression, and despite highly partisan hacks running the elections in OH and FL, rigging the vote tabulating machines themselves is just beyond imagination."
Interesting point if that stuff had actually happened.
1. No one FAKED anything to go to war.
2. No one suppressed voters.
3. Highly partisan hacks run every election in every state. This is what happens when you have FUCKING POLITICIANS running elections. Duh.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
No. Even if they are left leaning, there is a reason for them to change the poll numbers to suit Bush: Otherwise their exit poll data would look inaccurate, due to the mismatch with the election result. After two well publicized failures in a row, people would stop paying attention to their inaccurate exit polls.
Using this logic, the other networks would be all over this "story" like flies on shit. Making your competitors look bad is good for business. Why aren't we seeing that? Why aren't we seeing inquiries and stories from Kerry's camp?
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Notice the speed factor: people are very interested to know the results of an election as soon as possible.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Using an absentee ballot (even if you can go to a polling place) can help your vote count. In some areas, you can receive an absentee ballot without having to give a reason. Note: You should send off the completed ballot as early as possible. Also, it is a good idea to follow up if you do not receive the ballot soon enough.
Bingo.
Anything in a computer can be hacked. Period. And there is no way to tell that it hasn't been hacked. Period.
Paper ballots are plain to read. When you recount a paper ballot where the person marks in ink what their choice is, there is no hanging chad and no concern that the punch card or optical scanner or touch-screen software has a glitch that led the machine to systematically miscount. Most importantly, people can do a recount with paper ballots. If there is a question about the accuracy of the tally, it can be independently verified.
Paper ballots are still prone to election fraud: people can "misplace" them, burn them, etc. But fraud and systematic errors are way easier with a computer. As long as balloting is done by computer, every election will be clouded by deep uncertainty.
http://greenlightwiki.com/lenore-exegesis/Parliame nt_of_Attitudes
False Epiphany: A Grad Student Takes Dictation from the Muse
Here in Spain we count paper based votes (without the problems with accuracity you have) and at bedtime we know the results (well, at least 95% of votes counted).
We are only 40 million inhabitants so less people votes than in US but there are less people counting votes too.
I think that voting machines is a system with a lot of problems (nobody knows what happens in such 'black boxes') and the only 'advantege' is that you know the elected president in hours but your national elections are for 4 years! Are 12 or 24 hours more important than 4 years? I'd prefer wait for the _real_ result.
The US does have a 2 round system where you can select from a multiplicity of candidates who are, eventually, narrowed down to two major candidates. The first round is called 'the primaries and caucuses', and voter turnout tends to be limited to the most politically oriented. Which is how we ended up with Dubya vs Gore, then Dubya vs Kerry.
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In the US election we are voting for more than just President. There's also House of Representatives, Senate (in some states), various State elections, various State ballot questions, various County elections, various County ballot questions, and various city/town elections and ballot issues. So you have different ballots for every one of the 6000 or so counties, some of which have multiple different ballotas within the counties depending on the other localities within the county.
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Are you just voting for MP? Or are there Province, county, and town elections and ballot initiatives on there as well?
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Some views from the rest of the world http://integralnaked.org/forum/tm.asp?m=4620&p=1&m page=14&tmode=1&smode=1/
The Valley Spirit never dies.
It is called the Mysterious Female.
And the doorway of the Mysterious Female is the base from which Heaven and Earth spring.
It is there within us all the time.
Draw upon it as you will,
it never runs dry.
Posts: 360 Score: 15 Joined: 10/18/2003 From: mission, ks RE: Presidential Election of 2004 (in reply to crystal
"... I do, however, enjoy pissing off ..."
Troll.
I'm actually not a democrat, I just wanted the lesser of two douchebags to win. I.e., I care about my liberty more than my "safety".
You're a libertarian, so did you get what you wanted in this election? Probably not.
However that is a well known effect and about the first thing they have ALWAYS controled for.
This implies a level of journalistic integrity and knowledge of statistical methodology which may or may not be present.
A Human Right
As I said, they DID use proper methods in the past.
If they did something stupid like only polling in urban areas this year it would be a blatant problem that would have been immediately reported by someone.
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exactly. What happens when you boss finds out you voted for the other guy and now he wants to fire you or hold a raise from you because the other guy d id some policy that costs the companie more money.
There are an unlimited number of reasons why a person wouldn't want thier vote to be able to be tracked. And there are alot of situations were that person vote differently if they thought it could be.
Keep voting anonymouse. If you need id, then present it before the canidate goes into the booth and make sure it isn't asociated with anything.If your worried about recounts or votes getting tallied for the wrong person then encode it in a barcode or some other cryptic non human readable format and have them keep a copy then drop it inot another box or the mail if a challenge ever comes up.