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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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
You mean like these guys?
In soviet russia, You ask not what country do for you, but what you do for country!
Oh wait...
Well, if you _really_ stick to the facts, you still dont know who is the next president of the USA for sure, until december. But most people go for the unofficial result (which, usually doesnt change much). This last sentence of mine i think quite much applies to most democratic countries imo. Although, i have to add my personal feelings. I do not expect the unofficial results to be ready before i go to sleep at the election's night, but usually it happens anyway. I think in some countries like the USA, people should demand better verification of the elections. I think its not good enough just to say: here are the results. It wasnt good enough in Venezuela, thats why they had 3 paper trails of the electronical voting maschines, which were an open design. The good enough thing is to say: here are the first results, and here are the safety checks: lets perform those, and we'll see. Unfortunately the USA missed the very existence of safety checks. Voting needs to be open, reviewable by the public.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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!!!!
I never really understood *why* people in the US expect to know results "before bedtime". Do they really?
Keep in mind that the 2000 Bush/Gore race was the first of the television era where the margin of victory wasn't significantly larger than the margin of error in exit polling.
1976's Carter/Ford race, the previously closest race post-WWII, had a spread of 57 electoral votes. In contrast, Bush won in 2000 by only 5 electoral votes.
When the race is so close, it's much harder to accurately predict the winner quickly. It doesn't stop the media from trying, though; fast results are what the public has come to expect.
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.
I like everything you said, except one problem: 4 candidates per screen with a "more" button. Anyone who designs web pages or newspapers knows that people don't like going "below the fold/crease". A voter who is undecided (or lazy for that matter) is less likely to even see a candidate on the 4th page than one on the 1st page. You get the same problems with touchscreens, but the scrolling may be more intuitive for most people.
;)
Perhaps one solution would be to have the software randomize the order of the candidates, so it would eliminate the crease arguement altogether. You could have your 5 buttons then.
Each machine would still require a printer for our voter-verified paper trail, but coming up with a fast, efficient, inexpensive, and stable (no jams) shouldn't be THAT big of an issue.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
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
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.
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.
If the voting machines gave a paper receipt and the exit polls were based on people willing to show their receipt then you'd have a reasonably accurate exit poll. You'd eliminate the possibility of people not accurately saying who they voted for which I think is a known problem. You'd have to factor for any bias between people will to show their receipt and those not willing to show it but statisticians can work out that and other sampling biases.
With really accurate exit polling, it would be really hard for anyone to tamper with the election results.
The secret ballot is one of the fundamental requirements for the western election system. People have to be able to cast their vote in secrecy, so that they can't be threatened or bribed. Sure you can vote for whomever you want. Just be sure to vote for the patriotic choice, or you'll be arrested. Oh, and I'll give you $10 if you give me your ballot to prove that you voted for candidate A; otherwise you are fired. Exit polls are not part of the voting process.
What you are really proposing is a double counting system, where votes are counted two different ways, which I have no problem with as long a the secret ballot is maintained.
Bullshit. This is purely due to LACK OF INCENTIVE induced by government purchasing decisions being based on political favors rather than merit.
...
Yea, voting is so much more complicated than ATM transactions.
Unlike ATM,
there is no money being transferred...
or lookups to financial accounts...
or cash being dispensed...
or communications across different banks...
or printout receipts...
or
Bunch of friggin excuses induced by LACK OF INCENTIVE.
There should be a HUGE outcry about the accuracy of our voting systems from both Democrats and Repulicans alike because America is more important than a single political party in a single election.
FELLOW AMERICANS: let us remove our heads from our asses and fix this before it ruins our country. This is not a partisan problem because if voting problems persist, both parties will fall victom to it at some point.
For goodness sakes, we had people land on the moon decades ago and can't solve this? Bullshit.
Again, this is due to LACK OF INCENTIVE probably induced by government purchasing decisions being based on politics or incompetance rather than merit.
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.
So can any statistician give us an idea of why that kind of thing could be happening??
Bush voters are a bunch of liars.
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.
Any voting system that requires trusting any one counter is inherently flawed. No trust should be needed or expected. The counting process should be fully transparent. The counting of each election should be observed, checked, audited and verified, by people representing each candidate.
"It should be trivial to do the same with electronic voting--have it print out a paper "vote record", the voter inspects it, and puts it into the ballot box. Problem solved."
The problem is *not* solved, because someone up to no good can generate a whole slew of printed vote records alot easier than a manually generated ballot.
You cannot always trust the election judges, or the poll workers, or the people guarding the ballots, and the ease of replication of printed vote records greatly increases the potential damage by a rogue poll worker (or group of poll workers).
And to be clear, I'm not arguing against paper trails. It's just that the requirement of anonymity makes it very easy to forge paper trails (even more so if they are not hand generated). This is why crypto techniques are vital in the elections of the future. You have to be able to ensure that the paper trail is the same one generated by the voters.
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
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.).
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?
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.