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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.
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.
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!
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
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
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).
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.
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 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
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.).
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?
"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.
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'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...)
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