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NYT Says Paperless Voting A Serious Problem
joshdick writes "In an editorial today, the NYTimes comes out strongly in favor of a paper trail for all elections, supporting a recent lobbying effort by Common Cause and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to pass H.R. 550. 'Electronic voting has been rolled out nationwide without necessary safeguards. The machines' computers can be programmed to steal votes from one candidate and give them to another. There are also many ways hackers can break in to tamper with the count. Polls show that many Americans do not trust electronic voting in its current form; such doubts are a serious problem in a democracy.'"
What I find interesting is that Diebold makes probably MOST of the ATMs that people use on a regular basis, so they actually do know how to make secure and reliable machines on secure networks (at least secure and reliable enough for banks) with the most intense paper trail systems known to man and beast.
The question, then, why did they suddenly begin making machines that had absolutely NO paper trail? This makes no sense at all to me. It would have been NO problem for them to include such a facility in their voting machines. And in fact it may well have cost them more to take it out.
So - were they given specifications to remove the usual papertrail devices? If so, from whom were those instructions issued? Maybe someone can help me out with a tinfoil hat theory involving some vast ___-wing conspiracy?
Oh - and I believe Bev Harris is the official 'go to' girl on this topic: http://blackboxvoting.org/
Anyone that has followed the vote results in Ohio knows that this is possible and has happened. The new lesson is: how to steal an american election.
Talking to Geeks is like eating jello with a chainsaw, interesting, but painful.
Reproduced from http://slate.msn.com/id/2107388 ------------ Remember the Cold War tale of Soviet and American scientists racing to solve the problem of writing in zero gravity? NASA spent a decade and millions of dollars developing the high-tech Astronaut Pen. The Soviets solved the problem another way: They used a pencil. The story turns out to be (mostly) urban legend, but the lesson holds true. Sometimes less is more. That seems to be the case as the world's largest democracy, India, and the world's most powerful, the United States, scramble to solve another technological puzzle: How to count votes accurately and transparently. While we in the United States agonize over touch screens and paper trails, India managed to quietly hold an all-electronic vote. In May, 380 million Indians cast their votes on more than 1 million machines. It was the world's largest experiment in electronic voting to date and, while far from perfect, is widely considered a success. How can an impoverished nation like India, where cows roam the streets of the capital and most people's idea of high-tech is a flush toilet, succeed where we have not? Continue Article For decades, Indians cast their votes by marking a paper ballot with a rubber stamp.* It took days to count the votes and months to sort out the allegations of fraud. Fifteen years ago the Indian government commissioned two companies to design a simple electronic voting machine--one that was inexpensive, easy to use (even for the illiterate), and tamper-resistant. The result is a machine that looks like a cross between a computer keyboard and a Casio music synthesizer. (See a picture of one here.) In fact, it's not much of a computer at all, more like a souped-up adding machine. A column of buttons runs down one side. Next to each button is the name and symbol of a candidate or party. These are written on slips of paper that can be rearranged. That means unscrupulous politicians couldn't rig the machines at the factory, since they wouldn't know which button would be assigned to which candidate. Also, the software is embedded--or hard-wired--onto a microprocessor that cannot be reprogrammed. If someone tries to pry open the machine, it automatically shuts down. After much testing, India adopted the machines for nationwide use this year. Voters show a paper ID card and then cast their ballot by pushing one of the buttons. A light glows red and a beep is emitted, indicating that a vote has been registered. Should trouble arise (and in India it often does), an election official can push an override button that shuts down the system. Indian elections are prone to "booth capturing." That's when thugs take over an entire polling station, tying up election officials while they stuff the ballot boxes with vote after vote for their favorite candidate. The electronic machines don't solve this problem entirely, but they help slow down the bandits. The machines are programmed to record only one vote every five seconds. Unlike the machines used in the United States, the Indian machines are not networked. Each one has to be physically carried to a central counting center. This takes more time, of course, but reduces the opportunities for mischief. Someone who wanted to throw the election would have to fiddle with thousands of machines, one at a time. Tampering with each machine is what some computer scientists call "retail fraud." "Wholesale fraud" is when someone rigs the software from the outset or meddles with hundreds of machines at a central tabulation center. Both types of fraud are troublesome, of course, but to different degrees. The Indian machines are vulnerable to retail fraud but, because of the basic design, are much less subject to wholesale fraud. American machines, by contrast, may be vulnerable to wholesale fraud. Our machines are far more complicated and expensive--$3,000 versus $200 for an Indian machine. The U.S. voting machines are loaded with Windows operating systems, encryption, touch screens, backup servers, voice-gui
That's the plain and simple of it. No one has ever been able to demonstrate that they'll save money during an election, nor that they're anywhere close to being secure. Diebold's machines are black-box proprietary and it's essentially impossible to determine if someone (say, a bought-and-paid-for Diebold exec) has tampered with the results.
I used to work with county and city elections. No machines were used, just a supervisory staff of elections officials and a horde of volunteers. All voting locations would count each box of ballots twice, each time by a different person, and if the tallies weren't exact they'd go through the whole process again for that ballot box. This would continue until two separate individuals got the same count for the box.
Afterwards, all of the paper ballots would be boxed and stored in a secure location in case it became necessary to do a recount. And again, all recounts were done by box, twice, and any discrepancies meant starting over from scratch for that box.
This wasn't a terribly expensive way of doing things. The primary cost was in printing and mailing the ballots (for mail-ins). The elections sites themselves were run by volunteers, and the supervisory staff was already paid for. Fraud was rather difficult to pull off on the part of the volunteers and the entire process was 'open source'. Individual citizen groups could demand to have a representative sit in on the recounts, as could any political party that was running a candidate.
Why, exactly, are we dumping a system like this for Diebold machines? It makes no sense at all unless someone is specifically looking for a way to fuck up the elections in their favor, or in favor of whomever happens to be paying them off.
And don't tell me that this system can't be scaled; that's bullshit. The system I'm speaking of here was used on the city, county, and state level. If it can be done by one state, it can be scaled for any state, and it's the STATES who run the elections, not the federal government.
1034-6728
A paper comes out in favour of a paper trail. I think I see a vested interest.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Part of the issue is privacy. If you can take the paper trail and use it to say "you" voted for candidate X, then you have violated privacy for that person.
I'm not saying that outweighs the fraud issue, rather, I am saying I can see their point.
Anonymity - for voting - is VERY highly valued here in the USA. People don't like it when other's know who they voted for.
The cynic in me sees this as kind of funny. It's up to the elected officials to change this right? The very officials elected by these machine...
Stand clear of the doors. The doors are now closing.
On election day, the discussion most commonly heard in the office wasn't about the candidates, the issues, or the country. The chatter was all focussed on one thing--the lines at the voting booths. People complained about waiting a full hour to get their voices heard while the others shared their similar stories. Inevitably, these conversations all led down the same road; the country needs to institute electronic voting via the Internet. The brilliant people in these conversations all agreed, correctly I might add, that this will not happen. However, they were absolutely wrong in their reason why. I don't know how many times I heard someone use the term "hacker" when citing their argument against online voting. Hackers? That is in no way the reason why we're not voting online! We're not voting online because of a percieved inequity in this country. The true reason we won't see online voting is because every voice in this country needs to be heard. In 1776, Thomas Jefferson coined the phrase, "All men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence--maybe you've heard of it. Anyway, the fact of the matter is that we're not all created equal. Some of us have computers and some of us don't. And for this reason, all of us don't have online voting. If any group made a case for online voting, it would be the republican party. Since the wealthier people tend to vote for the republican candidates, and wealthier people tend to have computers or reasonable access to one, it all makes sense. This notion would clearly be shot down by the democrats, vying for the poorer people's vote. Democrats would argue that online voting would leave behind too many people--those without computers or those that have eight kids and can't get to the public library to vote. I don't know what my stance is on this issue to be quite honest. I'm not convinced that the poorer contingency is voting anyway. But mark my words, the democrats think (or hope) they are. Let me just point out as well that I'm not casting judgment on either the republicans or the democrats. I'm just stating the facts. Online voting will not happen because of inequality. So thank Thomas Jefferson... because of him, we're lining up at the voting booths like it's 1776.
Finance tutorials and more! Understandfinance
The link to H.R. 550 is broken in the summary, but it can be seen here.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I know that being a computer geek, I'm supposed to in favor or computers doing everything, but I'm more than a little uneasy about this paperless voting thing.
I'm sure there are many, many advantages, but if I don't trust it, how can we expect the people who can't even figure out how to set up their email to trust it.
I would like to see a real 'go-slow' approach on this one.
i vote this the most shocking and undercovered story ever. i had no clue?
leprkan...
.. NYTimes comes out against paperless newspapers, suggesting they can be used by terrorists to organize attacks. They suggest homeland secuirty shut down these organizations.
NYTimes vigorously denies that their recommendation has nothing to do with lagging print sales, and the fact that everyone cicumvents their "registration" screen.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
and shout "LEWINSKI LEWINSKI LEWINSKI!" you liberals believe whatever you're told. http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0609-21.htm
As the Lorax once said, think of the trees!
Two words Open Source.
Electronic Voting can be used to create an unambiguous paper ballot. Beyond that, I don't want it right now.
In the mysterious future you could do a combination of unambiguous paper and digital as long as Joe Voter has a means to simply look at his/her vote and be sure that it went down as advertised.
Eschew Obfuscation
What exactly is wrong with making a checkmark in a circle beside the name of a candidate one wishes to vote for, and then counting such votes manually? It's a system that works very well in countries like Ireland, Scotland, Great Britain, Canada, France, Switzerland, most of Germany, Sweden, Finland, Hungary, Austria, Spain, most of Norway, Italy, and Greece, to name a few.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
We had electronic elections at school, and were all given paper versions of our votes as proof to ourselves that the vote had gone through fine. These we took with us.
Only problem was dozens of students had a printed version that showed their correct vote, but the onscreen indication showed an unrelated candidate. After asking about this, we were told "It doesn't matter". No answers to our questions like which candidate was the vote actually registered for? can we get a recount? can we see what the results are, where our vote fits in the final tally?
The board only gave us the answer "It doesn't matter, the system works". It's only a school election I know, but in the end it's breeding a group of people who learn to accept a "it's ok, nothing to see here, move along now" answer from authority. Me included.
"such doubts are a serious problem in a democracy."
Don't we live in a republic?
"A wolf's eyes can see into your soul"
My writing
A more serious problem in a 'democracy', or a 'republic', is the apathy. I read that something like 50% or less of people registered to vote actually register, and that many of those that ARE registered don't vote. (I also read the election results, even for 'small', local elections). In essence, those that don't vote are giving power to the minority, to special interests, and to others that they complain about. I suspect that a complaint against electronic voting, despite its flaws, is another excuse to avoid voting.
KOA
A Case for Traditional Monarchy
It doesnt matter how the votes were cast.
It doesnt matter how the votes were collected.
It only mattered who counted the votes.
1750+ fraudulant votes in election where the winner and looser were seperated by 120 votes don't matter.
If you live in Washington state, next time you go to vote, go ahead and vote a few times. The state doesnt care.
I would think it'd be easier to follow a digital trail then a paper trail. Are paper ballots less vulnerable to tampering with or more vulnerable?
Voting records are public so why so secret at the ballot box? An open electronic system would be much more secure then paper ballot.
IMO
*DrugCheese rants*
so what's the argument against doing both? instead of internet OR booths..internet AND booths
Now if you have some way to randomize this paper trail so that it can't be referenced back to any individual voter, then I might feel better about it.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Look, I've got about 20 replies to my post all saying the same thing. The paper doesn't have to point to the voter. It just has to point to the vote.
I agree and am aware of that fact.
Now, your job is to go sell that subtlety to the American public. Good luck! Perception IS reality here in the states.
No, you are wrong. Your vote is not in the public record. Nobody (not even the gov't) can force you to tell them who you voted for.
All voting disclosure is voluntary here in the USA.
Perhaps you are thinking of the "voting record" for congress critters? That is public.
Look, the reason for electronic voting must be cost. Cut down the lugging of boxes, hiring of halls etc. I can't otherwise think of a single reason that pen and paper isn't better...
Actually, no, I've changed my mind, the machines'll cost a fortune. I can't believe it's cost either.
I'm stumped. Why is electronic voting better than a pen and a cross on a bit of paper?
Deleted
such doubts are a serious problem in a democracy
Such doubts are *essential* in a democracy.
In case you were interested: BUGMENOT FF Extension
Electronic voting has been rolled out nationwide without necessary safeguards.
Well, yeah, that is not new
Quick recap: The goal of the paper validation is not because we want to cut down more trees. In fact, the goal of the electronic voting is for quick tallies and immediate results. Paper tallies are for "trueing" them up in the case of a recount.
The real question is: What will people do with the paper copies once they have them printed out and they believe their vote did not count properly? Are they going to go back into the voting depot and say "Look up my vote, I think you counted it for the other guy!"?
Not likely. The problem is, elections can be stolen whether they are electronic or not. The electioneer's must be trusted. And as long as we want to keep the voter's identity unassociated with the corresponding vote (anonymity), there will be a problem.
Paper trails may help, but who's going to be auditing them, especially if the voters will keep the only copy?
I guess I am glad it's not my decision to make and live with.
If an electronic voting booth is insecure, then the entire system is insecure. Printing ballots from an electronic voting booth is no guarantor of a secure election. What stops someone from rigging the machine to subtly misprint ballots (so they are misread or rejected in the counting stage), or prevents someone from stealing the machine and printing extra ballots?
Moreover, all counting is done electronically. Why is the software in the electronic voting booth any less secure than the current software used to scan and tally votes? Although paper seems more tangible and safer, it is not that much harder to mishandle, miscount, or synthesize as bits on a hard-disk. One could even argue that electronic voting can be more secure because it is possible to securely replicate and backup the data. Paper ballots can be discarded without a trace, but a well designed electronic system would flag (or reconstruct) gaps in the voting record.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Being a native of Utah *shh, I know, I know* we seemed to have gotten it somehwat right with a papertrail. Diebold actually made a machine specifically for Utah because we demanded it, which goes to show if you get a concerned and well informed public involved, good things can happen.
" Yesterday upon the stair I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. I wish that man would go away."
Complaints about paperless voting ignore that the input to the voting process is fataly flawed.
What is needed is for the voter to show some ID when they show up to vote. The system now is rife with fraud, dead voters, voting dogs, cats, hamsters, illegal aliens, etc. etc.
Absentee Ballots are another giant loophole. Fix the voting input process. Then we can worry that the "input" was recorded correctly.
Our friends at BlackBoxVoting.org have uncovered some serious flaws with Diebold's optical scan machines, too.
Full article is available at: Online Journal.org
If the govt becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law, it invites man to become his own law, it invites anarchy
Polls show that many Americans do not trust electronic voting in its current form; such doubts are a serious problem in a democracy.
Hmmm, methinks a lack of such doubts would be a far more serious threat in a democracy.
Here in Venezuela we had an electronic voting process recently, and the technology only added to the distrust.
In this case seeing is believing and the machines actually hide the physical vote. If you add the problems with the electors lists, as it happened in Florida and also in Venezuela, you end undermining the faith of the people in democracy and sowing the missrespect for the elected.
It was not clear here in Venezuela if the transmission of the data happened before or after the clossing of the process, if the transmission was unidirectional, what was transmitted and so on.
So, if you can not figure a system that can give confidence to anyone, you will end with a problem of the kind of Florida, but over the whole country.
So beware!
Electronic voting in other countries:
Australia uses open-source code for voting software. However, they don't require a paper ballot printout that goes to a locked box... so the software company that wrote the voting software says on their webpage that the voting system is still not trustworthy.
Brazil had computerized elections for their last election (of their current president, Lula). Paper backups were required, and Lula (unpopular with the US and corporations since he was a labor leader) won. However, after the election, a new federal law was passed in Brazil getting rid of the paper-trail mandate.
You need both open-source software (how complicated should it be to add 1 + 1 + 1.. etc...should this really be proprietary code??? no, not if it is doing what it should!!), and also you need printouts that get checked by the voter to go to a locked ballot box... that way if there needs to be a recount, votes you can trust (paper) are there to be counted.
I hope we change these electronic voting systems to make them more trustworthy. When I was in California I was part of an open-source software group (check Sourceforge) working to make software for US voting... but it needs to be accompanied by those paper ballots AND by voter education.
Regards,
Lori
The voter does NOT take the paper with him.
The paper is so the voter can verify who the machine says he voted for.
Then the paper vote is dropped in a sealed box.
If there is any question about anything, the paper ballots in the box are compared to the electronic record of the machine.
The voter does NOT take the paper with him.
That is a pile of crap. No matter how much trouble we have to go to, we should always manually count ballots in elections.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
Ah, I think you want an XOR there. Otherwise you get more votes than voters.
-T
The slate article even links to that snopes article. ..but you wouldn't notice, because you didn't even bother reading past the first few lines of the comment or TFA.
I'm in Canada and have voted every opportunity I've had....I don't get why voting seems to be so difficult in other so called democracies. What's the deal with punching holes in ballots, using machines, etc, etc.... The way we do it here is a person hands you a piece of paper with the candidates names on it, they cross your name off a list, you mark an X beside the one you want, and you drop it in a box. Later on someone counts up the votes. I've never even had to wait in line to vote once...then again I go in the middle of the day while everyone's at work...but even when busy the lines are no longer than a 5 minute wait.
This makes you wonder why there isn't a FEDERAL agency establishing standards and tests for voting machines.
Vote for me and I will immediately setup such an agency and make it damn easy for you people to vote me out of office.
Why the hell would we need proof of who we're electing to run our entire existance? That's just insanity, whoever thought of this should be forced to wear a sign of what religion they are and herded into camps to be exterminated!
If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up. - Comedian Mitch Hedberg R.I.P. 03/30/68-2/24/05
"the lines at the voting booths. People complained about waiting a full hour to get their voices heard while the others shared their similar stories."
Queues? Why would there be queues? Voting is a massively parallel process, one person's vote does not depend on the state of anyone elses vote. Increase the parallelism, more polling stations, more voting booths, no queues. Problem solved.
Deleted
A voting paper trail should have Four attributes.
First, votes are counted by counting the votes ON the paper, not in the machines that create the paper.
Secondly, you should have both machine readable and HUMAN readable votes on the same paper.
Third, Paper ballots should have an edge mark for each vote.
Four, Paper ballots should be of consistent weight, and size, and sturdy enough to stand recounting.
During recounts, only the human readable marks should be counted. (IE character scanners should be used).
Ballots should be sortable during recounts, in a fashion so that humans can rapidly verify the sorts by riffling stacks of ballots and eyeballing edge marks, and weighing ballots. (This will provide rapid verification that the machines are counting incorrectly).
I am radio-controlled?
Drill baby drill - on Mars
During the whole election process in November I was able to study the tabulating machine software. What I found scared the hell out of me. I have put up an account, along with photos of a real election databased being rigged. It is available at http://www.ucs.ull.edu/~isb9112/election/ I for one was not surprised that the exit polls didn't match the recorded values. Any steps which can be taken to reduce the possibility of such cheating should be applauded.
You are correct...it was solved. And the solution was to NOT have a paper trail and just trust the secret vote. There were NO mechanisms in place to determine whether there was ballot stuffing, fraud, or anything else we are talking about here.
It's hard to make things secret if you have to count them and audit them. Anonymity and audit trail just don't go very well together.
One thing is that is being done in California in certain counties is having elections with mail-in ballots. Seems like the turnout is a lot higher since it's easier for someone to vote and then drop their ballot in the mail. It's not high tech and it doesn't have sex appeal, but it's a lot less expensive than having paperless electronic machines and poll watchers in obscure neighborhood locations.
Why not use a system where a paper is punched and the punch is registered electronically? The card could be serialized to avoid fraud. Instead of a touch screen, display the voting options on a screen next to the card. IMHO, this would solve numerous problems associated, but still provide a "paper trail" to accurately determine how a voter voted. Heck, the cards could be provided blank and the device could even print the options on the card immediately prior to voting to ensure accuracy.
Something has swooped people over and made them so blind to these things and alot of other things that have happened and are happening.
An interesting thing is that if there is a conspiracy going on, then it is in the best interests of the people responsible for the conspiracy to make sure their plot seems like a conspiracy such that anyone who actually tries to say there is a conspiracy will be looked at like a loon.
The word conspiracy has connotations of weird people who believe in UFO's and cover ups and other crackpots. No one will take them seriously.
That is the advantage of conspirators.
Also the more complex and deep the accused conspiracy situation is the more insane the person trying to prove it sounds. Because who would believe anyone would goto such crazy lengths to do certain things in this world?
In my opinion, evil has all to benefit from making its conspiracy as complex as possible. Only the smartest people and the people with the most time on their hands will be able to find out what is going on. And that will make them seem like crackpot geeks with no life.
Try and google and see how many people have been tried and found guilty of conspiracy and fraud in the past few years. I think you will be shocked that there ARE MANY.
No it doesn't. Ignoring the sarcasm, there is a real reason why there isn't a federal government. It's something all you small-gov't states-righters Libertarians should be citing right now. It's the US Constitution.
Among education and other things, running elections is delegated to the states. It would be a GROSS violation of Federalism to create a Federal Agency.
Figures. Had to be an A.C. to support his politics.. Oh wait.. I fotgot to log in.
... Machines are unethical (meaning they have no ethics) and can't differentiate between what is right and wrong.
They don't feel and don't care.
Yet they can operate themselves and be (somewhat easily) manipulated.
I agree they can't overthrow paper voting system
The question is how much of an effort it would take to effect a change in something other than local election (because fewer votes would need to be fixed) or in the case of the previous Presidential elections, what keystones[1] would need to be adjusted. It's easy to say 2000's lynchpin was Ohio and in 1996, Florida, but some of that may have to do with when things were counted and in what order, rather than where. If you dredge up the red|blue map which appears on t-shirts, mousepads, and coffee cups, it would be interesting to find one which identified those areas where the differences were within a given margin, identifying them as a potential target. Depending upon the political climate, those may or may not be consist places to attack.
In terms of people not trusting the practice, can you blame them? So many things are untrustworthy, and as you can tell from some of my quotes|observations over time:
--"Bad coders can write bad code faster than good coders can fix bad code."
--"You don't have to be good, just good enough. (unfortunately, that's not good enough)
--"95% of the people in the business really don't belong. They are largely at a level less than a hobbyist; practically at a level of trial and error when an unfamiliar error stops them. But they like to do it and presume because they like it and can make things "sort of" work for other people, they are good...and likely, smart - a big ego stroke! Were architects, engineers, or physicians as sloppy as those 95%, there would be some serious problems in today's society."
Seriously: if you were to take all of the Slashdot society who write code for a living and gather them in a big room, then instruct them with this:
"All of you who are good coders, go to this side (the left). All of you who are bad coders, go to this side (the right)."
Which side do you think they would go to?
Do you think they would all go to the left?
Which side would you go to? Why?
Are you being honest with yourself?
If they all, or even most, go to the left, how do you explain all of the problems in the tech industry? The computer errors we hear about in the news?
________________
[1]]This is how some of the publishers used to tinker with the best-seller list. They discovered the key junctures where a quick count was used as data to extrapolate into the final rankings. It hasn't been that many years ago (less than fifteen years ago). Publishers just routed their books through those nodes and their books floated higher than they should have.
Here's how I would design it...
:)
Develop a government spec for a common machine printable paper ballot that is readable by both humans (english) and machines (with a printed 2D barcode). Define the exact specification for the 2D barcode in excruciating detail.
Now go out and competitively bid 2 systems: the voting machine, and the counting machine. The systems must be purchased from separate companies that operate at arms reach from each other.
The voting machine is responsible for generating the paper ballot in the defined format. The voter gets to look at the paper ballot and verify the human readable part before they put the paper in the ballot box. If they made a mistake, they can get an election official to destroy the ballot and re-enable the machine to do it again.
The counting machine is responsible for tabulating those ballots using the 2D barcodes.
If the election outcome doesn't match the exit polls, you do a manual recount using the human readable results on the ballots. It's printed, so there are no hanging chads or questions about what the voter intended. If after the recount, the counts don't closely match what the automatic machine read, you can determine if it was the voting machine that generated the ballots wrong (some 2D codes didn't match the human readable votes) or the reader didn't read the 2D codes correctly. Either way you can falsifiably prove who screwed up. You need a simple hand-held reader from a 3rd party to verify the accuracy of the 2D codes, or a government built one.
That's how I would do it, but I'm a lowly Canadian - we use a pencil and paper, and it works great.
Last time I looked, the voting system is a farce, money makes the laws and thousands of legitimate voters were 'removed' from the 'eligble' voting lists. Democracy went out the window a long time ago.
This post sounds like a troll, but only because you don't want to believe it.
If the binaries and tallies are all signed using strong encryption, particularly if it uses a good and trustworthy hash like md5, then all will be well, no?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
such doubts are a serious problem in a democracy.
The US "democracy" is a joke. The money buys campaigns, which wins the popular vote, especially when the population has been primed to accept "the lesser of two evils." So the money (er... the people who weild it) wins EVERY election.
Retired from software... maybe. Sort of.
Electronic voting is more susceptible to widespread fraud than less automated mechanisms. Fraud ? what fraud? YES on Venezuela we should go back to paper... Always the one with more money will have the machines to their side... for more info on the fraud go to http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20040817_3.htm
- - - - - .
States track who voted in what election, but NOT who they voted for.
As recently as the mid-'90s and possibly today, SOME states put serial #s on their ballots and recorded who voted with what serial #, making it theoretically possible to match a voter to a vote. AFAIK, it was illegal to actually make the match without a court order, and the data needed to do so was destroyed shortly after the votes were certified.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This article says that "The paper records are then stored, and can be counted after the polls close. "
If this is as I read it, then why have electronic voting at all? For faster news coverage and give instant gratification to the winner? I'd rather wait for the tally then succumb to vulnerabilities of electronic voting.
There are so many surrounding e-voting, at teh center is hacking and privacy. For me the issue of stealing votes through hacking is small compared to the larger problem of privacy. Now, this proposal is better than ATM style receipts. If you notice, this bill proposes a paper trail verified by the voter and kept by the machine.
But I still feel that if my votes are kept electronically, then my personal vote is a risk of being captured and analyzed. I fear the future that when after election day I get a phone call asking me why I voted for the person I voted for!
That's kind of a silly thing to say. As originally passed the US Constitution left all voting restrictions to the state. So in most states, in order to vote you had to be a landowner. If that were still the case online voting would be a cinch, since poor people couldn't vote anyway.
In any event I don't see any reason why we can't have both online and physical voting. I don't see how online voting is any more or less convenient than voting by absentee ballot.
In a 2 candidate race you discard the votes of 49.9% of the populace.
In a 3 candidate race you discard up to 66.9% of the populace.
In a 4 candidate race you discard the votes of up to 74.9. etc etc.
The people of course know that voting for anyone but one of the two leading candidates is futile, their votes will be discarded, which causes it to fall to Republican or Democrat.
There's no way that the spread of people's political beliefs can be represented by just two political parties, and if they don't represent what you believe, how can you vote for them?
The result is apathy.
Deleted
Voters don't keep the copy. They read it, fold it in half and post it into a secure ballot box like was used before any of this fancy technology. Then if there's a dispute they count the votes in the ballot box, the old fashioned way.
I am trolling
In America, we cast our ballot in secret, if we wish, but our vote is recorded next to our name. Look at the recent Republican caused fiasco in Washington State. They were able to look up voters and who they voted for.
Personally, I don't have a problem with keeping who I voted for a secret. No one in the Senate or the House has a 'secret ballot.'
Also, I don't trust a company to build the machines we vote on, when the same company is a heavy $upporter of just one of the political parties. Can you guess which one?
Microsoft unveils it new "VoteXBox 720" (Insert joke here)
The e-votes can be counted and released to the media shortly after the polls close.
If the audited paper votes mismatch, then you and the whole world know either the machines cooked the books, someone stuffed the paper ballots, or there was a miscount.
Cockroaches who rig elections hate the glare of the media spotlight.
Imagine these headlines from BIG CITY, USA, the year 2015:
"The polls closed 5 minutes ago, and with 70% of precincts reporting, it's still neck and neck."
"The polls closed 10 minutes ago and with all precincts reporting, the challenger wins 50.01% to 49.99%"
[The next morning]: "The audited results of last night's elections changed the outcome - 10 votes in precinct 5 changed to favor the incumbant and 1 vote for the incumbant in precinct 3 is illegible due to an ink smear. The state attorney general is investigating."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I don't know whether it's gonna be done or not.
What I do know is that the key reason not to do it is neither hackers, nor inequality, nor history.
It'd because the most basic principle to have a fair election is that people must be able to choose their ballot.
The second internet or any not in booth voting becomes significant, welcome back vote buying and coercion.
There were a few systems in use in Florida.
One was the punchcard system. That's the source of the "hanging chads" stories. (Actually, the source of these stories was that poll workers did not empty the chad collection boxes frequently enough and the punches worked inefficiently with jammed little bits of card). See this FAQ
Another was optical-scan ballots, on paper. According to at least one reporter, the optical scan systems were programmed to kick-out undervote/overvote ballots in some prectincts but not others (leaving "incorrect" ballots in the system to remain un-recountable, instead of corrected at the time the votes were cast). I believe this may have been reported by Greg Palast.
The question of paper vs. electronic voting is fairly simple: Which system is more likely to be hacked "invisibly"? I am old enough to be cynical. Developers know damn well that nontrivial software is essentially never perfect, even when everyone involved wants it to be perfect. Voting systems are nontrivial software systems where someone does *not* want it to be perfect. As far as I am concerned, the most perfect definition of "conflict of interest" is when county or state boards of elections are members of political parties and entrusted with choosing electronic voting systems.
To vote for Bush:
Dial 1-888-xxx-xx01
or text the word VOTE to XX01
To vote for Kerry:
Dial 1-888-xxx-xx02
or text the word VOTE to XX02
Vote as many times as you like!
Regular text messaging charges will apply.
There's no place like ~/
Actually the primarry supporters of the democratic party are the rich, well educated (Masters or Ph.D) and the the lower to lower middle class living in urban areas. The republican base is rural Americans and Business owners. Yes, a great many of the business owners are quite rich, but more than Republicans being party of the rich, they are the party of the financially independent, whether that be in the form of sustinance farming or multibillion dollar oil. Before I get modded a troll, remember I vote Libertarian.
Most voters haven't noticed, but on the back of every ballot paper is a number and the number is recorded against your name on the register when they give you the paper. You vote, vote gets counted, by hand in full view of journalists, political party representatives.
It is however a crime to even attempt to associate the number on the back of the ballot paper with an individual. In the event of suspected fraud it is possible to find out how an individual voted and then ask them if they really did vote that way.
Deleted
Polls show that many Americans do not trust electronic voting in its current form
:p
Were these electronic polls?
Oh, was that my outside voice?
Paper is not whole answer. here is why
1. Paper need to be traceable. Like money it need to have serial number build into the paper with lenght markers. Serial number are given to one machine and are recorded. Sign by both parties.
2. A receit to take home. That has all vote the machine counted so far time and dated. Is plain text how many people voted. Encrypted for each iteam. The key is publish went the polls close. You can then scan you voting receit to find out the information hidding on it.
3. The voting system need to be GNU. Fully open nothing hidden.
That would be a vested interest.
People complain about an hour's wait to participate in the democratic process(only once every few years, mind you), while they won't utter a peep about waiting in line for [insert favorite entertainment]. It goes to show how skewed American values really are. A FULL HOUR! OMG!!
Holy smokes...what a great idea! With the technology available today and FAR before these days of election 'screw-ups', why has it taken so long to actually use it?!?!!? For God's sake, the IRS can track your mopney from anywhere, not to mention the FBI, etc. Why would it be Soooo hard to actually actively audit a person's vote in a politacal election? Amazing!
Capt. Rob Blake
Paper ballots are necessary, because we have generations of techniques, technology, and sensibilities for finding evidence of fraud in their post-election condition. But, of course, we also have generations of ways to defraud voters with them as props.
For example, Washington and Florida states each have recent laws to prevent paper ballot recounts from interfering with a successful fraud. And remember that "hanging chads", and Florida's destruction of confidence in presidential ballots, are made of paper. Our Florida lab also produced 2004 "optical scan" results often reversing Democratic county registration rates in favor of Bush, while (hardcopyless) touchscreens tracked with registration and exit poll numbers.
Paper is a link in a chain. Paper ballots might not be the weak link, but they have their own weaknesses, some as old as fire.
--
make install -not war
So the winner of the election will be the person that the best hackers go for? Sounds better than what we've been getting.
I, for one, look forward to having Putin be our next president.
now they tell us...
As a former sceptic (my company has a financial interest in insuring the accuracy of those machines) I can tell you that 1. DRE is the future and 2. the machines are as good as anything we have now.
The reason for 1. is simple - HAVA and the ADA. The Help America Vote Act sets out $4bn for US states to modernize their voting systems, but requires that they be fully ADA compliant to do so. You can't be fully ADA compliant without an electronic voting system (think about the legally blind, the wholly blind, those who don't speak english, those who can't physically access a voting machine, etc.) Diebold's systems allow for multiple languages, aural voting for the blind, and for portable systems to be brought securely to those who cannot access the polling center (physically disabled).
Further, DRE increases accuracy - the most common voting errors are 1. inscrutable ballots 2. undervoting and 3. showing up at the wrong precinct. DRE can make ballots much more legible (color-coded, large type), can reduce undervoting (the machine makes you confirm that you want to skip a vote) and present the correct ballot for your precinct even if you show up at the wrong one.
As for issue 2., security - please note that Diebold's system, even if you don't agree with it, is no less secure than the ones we have now. Do you know what happens to your ballot after you cast it on paper - ballot theft and stuffing is all too commonplace now, and is harder with the electronic systems. Do you have any idea if the machine properly records your vote when you use an electromechanical voting machine- you don't, you just trust it because it is familiar.
You should note that some of the biggest sceptics (Avi Rubin @ Johns Hopkins) have changed their opinions considerably since actually participating in a vote. In 20 years, this will be a funny story in the history books.
I call bullshit. They were able to look at the precinct roster and see whether or not a voter had signed his name and thus received a ballot. They were not able to see how he voted. Go back and read the archived stories in the news if you don't believe me.
The only legal way to find out how a person voted is to ask him. The other methods involve removing a ballot from a sealed envelope, or watching over someone's shoulder as they vote. Both of which are crimes.
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
they didn't come out and say this in 2004 where it could have helped prevent another massive voting fraud that went massively underreported in the media.
the fact that "bloggers" knew about this and reported on it extensively online with their shoestring budgets, tells me a damn lot.
www.blackboxvoting.com was and continues to report about the enormous vote fraud of 2004. the CEOs of diebold and ES&S have even gone on record saying they will deliver OHIO to bush.
2000 and 2004 have been incredibly eye awakening and extremely shameful. the media helped deliver this country into the hands of criminals. and our inaction did the rest.
there is no law which compels citizens to recognize an illegitimate government.
and recently, the other 2 big liars who helped in the illegal iraq war, despite the millions of protesters against it, in britain and australia... both of those liars have been reelected with massive vote fraud as well.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
How does she have access to the source code to make that allegation?
emt 377 emt 4
This entire debate is made obsolete by VoteHere's (open source) software that creates an encrypted serial number for each vote. After you vote your code can be printed on a receipt and you can use the code online to verify that your vote was counted correctly. There are also analytical tools that can be used by election officials to search for fraud. This approach takes out the tedious, inaccurate hand-counting and gives mistakes a far better chance of being noticed. On top of that, it gives voters a privlege they have never before enjoyed - the right to certainty of their vote's integrity.
The software is designed to be installed on third-party touch screen voting machines. VoteHere has opened the source so that the public can be confident that nothing fishy is happening on that front.
VoteHere has all the advantages of any other system, together with no drawbacks. At least that's how it seems to me. I can't understand why it hasn't caught on more strongly.
So all this is really pointless, how about fighting for a proper democracy, then worry about counting votes when votes actually count. One person, one vote, how about that first?
DONT PANIC
If electronic voting was so unreliable, wouldn't a poll say that we did trust it?
Technically we're not a democracy like the article says. We're actually a Republic.
Let's see:
Diebold voting machines and tabulators are proven to be imminently hackable as early as mid-2003. Worst of all, a freakin 12 year old with just an ounce of insider's knowledge could do it.
Official 2004 election results show a sharp disparity between exit polls and the "official" results in the hotly contested swing states. The discrepancies in every other state are all within the margin of error, proving that (as everyone with half a brain and a little statistics training knows) exit polls are highly reliable.
The mass media puts a clamp on post-election coverage, except for a few scattered stories about long lines in Ohio and Florida and a great deal of poo-pooing about how there's bound to be screw-ups in elections of this size. Nary a single fucking word about the near impossibility of all those supposedly random "screw-ups" going in a single direction.
GODDAMN IT, PEOPLE...WAKE THE FUCK UP! Is it going to take a parade of little Hitler's shoving a baton up your ass before you realize what has happened?
Sounds bizarre, but I can imagine a scenario in Diebold going like this.
1. Technical guy says, "votes are stored on some portable media to be taken to a voting tabulation center."
2. PHB says "Okay, but what if the customer doesn't like our voting scheme?"
3. Technical guy says, "votes are stored on some portable media, along with the method in which those votes are counted."
The PHB retains her self-satisfied sense of belonging because she's just contributed in a meaningful and valuable way. After all they can't say "no" when the customer can define the counting system requirements! PHB thinks, "Data security. Isn't that something I need when I buy something online?????"
4. The PHB's PHB says, "You are a fscking genius! Letting the customer define the counting system requirements is pure genius! They'll have to pay us for it too!!"
A little more like Office Space than Watergate.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Read Preserving Democracy - What Went Wrong in Ohio. " "We have found numerous, serious election irregularities . . . which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters. . . . "In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio."
Think about that for a moment. The person in charge of vote counting in Ohio was also running the Bush campaign.
Injustice and conspiracy
> If you disagree with the parent, be a man and argue the point with him.
And what should the women here do?
They're not mythical, and I'm not new here.
Paper elections can be flawed also. We're not focusing on the issue: reliability.
Given that both electronic and paper elections can be subjected to deception, and given that we want to maintain the anonymity and the confidentiality of a vote, we only have one choice left: give the checking power to the people!
The idea is not new: tally sheets! To every vote a UUID or a Hash is generated that is unique to that vote. The only one to know that UUID is the voter (the machine doesn't link that to the voter id) and the machine. Once the election is over, a tally sheet is published (major newspapers, internet, whatever) with the UUIDs and the matching vote. Voters can check if their vote is registered correctly... if not the election can be considered void, or so.
This way we use the power of electronics to count the votes and give us faster results, give back the checking power to the people, and ensure a good decentralized audit method.
if there's no mechanism to use it to verify election results. Even if there was verified and found to be wrong would it make any difference in the outcome? The electoral college decides who is president anyway, so I don't understand why it matters.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
It's probably easier to stuff the paper ballot box with fake votes than hack the voting machine. After all, the paper votes can't correlate with specific people. Therefore, if you think you're losing, you can screw up the election results and cause a big legal mess.
Vote for Pedro
If you do manage to hack the machine, while you're adding fake votes you can print out a fake paper trail too. Then even if cryptography is used to stamp the paper votes to determine validity, you can generate the correct paper votes. Since the paper votes are anonymous, the only clue that fraud has occurred is if you get carried away and have more votes than registered voters.
Vote for Pedro
The New York Times says a lot of things...
Bungo!
The reddest red state of all. Why would Diebold's CEO care about altering Utah results?
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Not the problems, mind you, otherwise how we can steal more elections? We just gotta rid of the DOUBTS! We gotta have a LYING PAPER TRAIL! BRING BACK CHADS!
Can't have people doubting our wonderful "democracy", can we? We might start to look like, oh, some Eastern European country, or maybe Iraq, or Syria, or Nazi Germany (ALERT! ALERT! Godwin's Law Has Been Invoked! Connection terminaasdhweweudkj
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Interesting to hear Howard Dean talk about this several days ago as a bullet point on the Democratic party's agenda. Now the NYT comes out behind this "initiative". Surprise, surprise...NYT follows the lead of a far-left politician.
There's nothing worthwhile here. This issue truly is a waste of everyone's time. You're only being wagged by the political/media dog.
There is a lot of noise floating around the net about the trustworthiness of electronic voting. After the last election, i was getting about 5 links a day to stories about voting irregularities around the country. Some are dubious. Some are tinfoil-hat nutjobs. Some are very disturbing. Computer security experts tend to be very skeptical of electronic voting. A lot of them are demanding paper trails accompany e-votes. A lot of them demand that the the software that runs these machines should be open source, and available for peer review. I think all of that is reasonable, but still misses the point. Those measures can make elections harder to rig, but not impossible. Maybe still not even all THAT hard. Elections on paper ballots can be rigged too, after all.
In my opinion, the ONLY way elections can be trusted is by closing the loop, and allowing voters to verify their vote after the count. I would like to see a system where electronic voting machines issue receipts with a large, anonymous, random key. After the election, voters could consult the election results for their precinct, and verify that the vote matching their key in fact has their voting preferences in it.
The only major security risk I can think of in such a system would be issuing duplicate keys to duplicate voters. Say you and I voted for all of the same people. A compromised machine could issue us receipts with duplicate keys, and just record one vote. This is easily fixed. After the votes have been counted, I go to the GOP web site and look up my vote using my key. If it is recorded correctly, I click on the "confirm" button there. To be safe, I do this all again on the DNC web site. Later, when you check your vote, with your duplicate key, you see that someone else already confirmed it. You alert election officials to the problem.
I can not think of a way to rig such an election. Can you? Is this just naive? I would love to hear comments.
A better story would be NYT Thinks Paperless Reading is a Serious Problem! They want paid to read their Op-Ed pieces.
They are just trying to limit the ability of bloggers to fact check their stories.
If you are in need of an electronic device that can count accurately, and provide solid record keeping, why not follow the example of the State light years ahead of the rest in experience, Nevada.
If it can count the coins in and out, it can count your votes. In the 2004 election, Nevada tried a new electronic voting machine, and refused the Diebold version, because it had no means to keep a paper trail.
It was a breeze, a touch screen machine that had a glass panel on the left-side. When the touch-screen vote selection was completed, the voter looked over at the panel, and a print-out of the vote on a continuos paper tape spool was viewed.
If the voter was satisfied, a button finalised the vote, and the paper tape advanced into a lock box.
Quick, efficient and a permanent record of each vote. The election went off smooth.
Rush Limbaugh is a perfect real world example of an oxycontinmoron
The only place in the world where exit poll discrepancies are not considered to prove vote fraud is USA. If they did, the last elections ware clearly fraudulent where it mattered. The same kind of discrepancies are used to discredit dictatorships around the world however...
In USA the government votes for you!
Good luck.
Which is a bigger problem? Someone manipulating a few votes or someone messing up thousands or more?
By the time a country can allow people to force thousands of voters to _knowingly_ vote a particular way, AND get away with it, there are probably far worse things happening already in that country. e.g. Breakdown of law and order, evil dictator already in power etc.
Whereas right now the US system could theoretically allow people to _secretly_ add/modify thousands of votes. It doesn't require a breakdown in law and order or evil dictators or a totally screwed up country, but it could result in all that.
Sure the suggested system is not a perfect system, but the existing system is so bad, that replacing it with something better but not perfect would not be such a terrible thing.
The US people should get their priorities straight. They shouldn't be spending billions of dollars and thousands of lives choosing the leaders in Iraq. They should be spending it choosing the leaders in the USA.
Any talk about cutting cost, or not being able to afford better systems is just plain ridiculous. Given that the two main candidates spent hundreds of millions. Choosing the leaders of the most powerful nation in the world should be treated more seriously.
If the US can't even do that properly, perhaps they should also outsource the handling of their elections to India. India is the world's largest democracy. And their current election system is definitely more robust than the current US system.
Sheesh.
You want a paper trail, but you want that RETAINED at the voting both; NO copy should go to a voter.
Condorcet methods have their advantages, but they're somewhat vulnerable to strategic voting, and almost no one understands them. If you want a different system, use approval voting -- it's better, and much easier for Joe Voter to understand.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
The question, then, why did they suddenly begin making machines that had absolutely NO paper trail? This makes no sense at all to me. It would have been NO problem for them to include such a facility in their voting machines. And in fact it may well have cost them more to take it out.
Of course Diebold didn't want an audit trail, they didn't want it to be possible for someone to find out they stole an election, like they did in Ohio for Bush. Don't recall his name but the CEO of Diebold even had the balls to tell the media when Ohio bought voting machines from them that Diebolt was going to deliver Ohio's vote to Bush. They certainly did, Ohio was a key state and if Bush had lost it he would of lost the election.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Diebold was running an ftp server from which various items were freely available.
h tml 2 e
g +diebold+source+code&btnG=Search
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/dieboldftp.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/10/1172/905
http://www.google.com/search?q=diebold+source+cod
And Slashdot related stories about Diebold
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aslashdot.or
I'm not familiar with certification process of voting machines but maybe the State also has a copy of the source code.
If the govt becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law, it invites man to become his own law, it invites anarchy
If you can take the paper trail and use it to say "you" voted for candidate X, then you have violated privacy for that person.
There isn't a need to have a specific paper receipt tied to a specific person. When a person votes they could just check the receipt to make sure it says they voted for whom they wanted. I suppose the rolls of receipts can be changed later but with reps from different sides accompanying the rolls and witnessing the tabulation it would be harder to fake an election than if there is no trail.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The solution to all this voting nonsense is, obviously, a giant robotic brain which will govern all humanity benevolently. We could call it Multivac [wikipedia.org]!
I prefer Marvin, he's two brains. Say maybe I can borrow one of his for a brain transplant.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I won't tell you what my name is but I will tell you who I voted for.
Now some may be asking why I didn't vote in 1996. Just over a month before the election I had a bad accident that put me in a coma. Then about a month later I was moved to a rehab house for therapy. I planned on voting for Harry Brown though.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Voters should never be given a receipt showing how they voted. To do so opens up vote selling schemes and the ability to influence votes via intimidation.
Without a receipt, the person paying you for your vote or who is threatening you if you don't vote a certain way has no way of knowing if you complied or not (assuming that at least a few people in the precinct vote for the candidate you were paid to cast a vote for).
In evoting without a receipt you can't verify your vote either.
FalconI fear government more than I fear terrorists, for government is the true terrorist!
Should there be a Law?
Even if it's a likely showdown between two candidates, you can still mark your favorites as 1st, 2nd, nth choices, and still rank the two frontrunners in the order you prefer - *and your vote will always count no matter who gets knocked out*!
Now that's how I'd like it here in the States! Choose first, second, third and so on. Then, say there are three candidates, for each voter their first choice gets 5 points, second gets 3, and third gets 1, of course if the voter only votes for the first only that one will get any points. Once the voting is done then add up all the points, the person with the highest score is president with the vice president being the person with the next highest score.
FalconShould there be a Law?
In case you're forgetting, Diebold atms are the ones that caught the Nachi worm a while back. It apparantly got into their network through laptops used to update the atm machines and then spread through their "secure" network. I'm sorry, but if they're going to use ATM machines that run windows and don't even have unneccessary services turned off, I don't see how they could be considered remotely secure.
Remember, just because a product or service is popular doesn't mean that it is actually the best. In many cases the company that gets the contract is the company that promises the lowest cost. You can save a decent amount of money by skipping all that pesky engineering stuff and assuming that your atm machines are secure enough without it.
I don't remember there being multipages for voting. One page maybe two that's it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Talk of a paper trail is ared herring and jumping the gun. Whether or not there is a paper trail or not is irrelevant. The real question is whether the system has a 100% solide audit.
"Those who cast the votes decides nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything!"