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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.
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.
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
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
(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 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.
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Incite and flee.
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?