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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.
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
>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.
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.
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
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.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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
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: