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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.'"
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.
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
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.
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.
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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.
Simple answer: They were not asked to. They build the machines according to specifications from the customer. THe customer didn't say he wanted a paper trail. The customer also accepted delivery of said machines without a paper trail.
Blame the customer, not the vendor who simply built what they were asked to.
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.
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
The new hotness: Presentation of facts as flamebait!
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
Wasn't it Diebolds CEO that said he would do anything to make sure George W. Bush would win Ohio. He was talking about sponsoring his campaign, but still. That sort of thing is just too weird for me to understand, that kind of conflict of interests would surely lead to thourough investigations? But democrazy is built on the premise that the people should be able to verify the process. But people are tool azy, who actually goes out to see the counting of the votes? So who'd notice that with e-voting there's no paper trail? Why isn't this all over the media? b.t.w. IANAAmerican
Banking is not reliable. It's just traceable and correctable. Over the last ten years I have lost numerous paychecks (electronic deposit) and had several physical deposits that ended up in someone else's account. I've also had a machine steal my atm card, and give access to my account to the next person who came along. That person withdrew $200 from my account.
Fortunately, it's very easy for an individual to track their funds, file a claim with the bank, and get matters resolved. My bank even sent me a picture of the guy withdrawing funds with my card.
It's much more difficult for a voter to determine that their vote was actually counted, so voting fraud and mistakes may never be caught.
..good point but man... That has got to be the fucking stupidest sig I've ever seen -- even on slashdot where the standards are so low.
As well they shouldn't. Since votes are anonymous, there is no way to tell whether the fraudulent votes were place for/by Dems or Reps. So they should simply be ignored and the final count accepted.
*AHEM* just like the supreme court did with the presidential election of 2000. Did you complain about that too? Thought not.
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.
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).
A lot of election supervisors didn't, or allowed the company's techs to test & give the A-OK, or just followed the testing procedure that the company told them to do (i.e., didn't do full-spectrum blackbox testing). None of which is conducive to confidence in the systems.
There were documented cases of company techies patching the machines ON THE DAY of elections, and in some cases not telling the election officials (admitting only after they were caught). Even if they were doing only "normal" bug fixes, it _still_ doesn't give much confidence in the system. You can find lots of news articles about these cases, although the story didn't seem to gain much traction in the press (i.e., not enough people got pissed off about it).
You seem to be either really naive or disingenuous about the possibility of voter fraud. When the results of a election can cost the public hundreds billions of dollars of taxpayer money & a steady erosion of civil liberties, don't you think it's worth making our voting process as robust as possible?
You mean because he has my name and address?
/. is kind of pointless. The REASON it is a bad idea is because nerd without enough to do in their lives will call me, but that's it. There is no incriminating knowledge contained in my easily publicly available information. It also doesn't give someone access to my voting records.
The best he could do is purchase it COD, and I doubt many places ship like that anymore. Also, all I would have to do is NOT pay for it.
If that is all that it took to steal someones identity or gather CC information, there is no harm in posting it.
A simple trip to the phone book will quickly give that information. Simply typing a phone number (which one shouldn't really TRY to hide, nor COULD they hide without going out of their way) into Google will return with their address.
The person who just called me pretty much proved my point. They could easily get my phone number with the information I posted. Big deal. Calling ME to tell me it is a bad idea to post my info on
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.
Blogs and opinion columns do not exactly make for reliable sources, especially when you're trying to support insinuations of the rather serious charge of electon fraud.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
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.
There would seem to be a risk of error and fraud, however.
How do you ensure that the person whose name is on the envelope is actually the one who sent the ballot? If ballots allegedly from the same person, arrive... what happens?
Furthermore, how do you ensure that the ballot actually makes it through the postal system? Would it be possible for some partisan postal workers to have slightly higher loss rates from areas dominated by parties they disagree with?
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Read you links further.
http://blaemire.com/whatis.htm
I assure you "voter history" doesn't include a detailed report of who they voted FOR, but more information like when in the past they have voted. This is very valuable information to people like Blaemire Communications' customers, they aren't quite as worried about the people who have NEVER voted regardless of their demographics as they are the people who both meet their target audience AND have at least decent voting history, especially if they ALWAYS vote.
OK, maybe I'm going about this the wrong way. Instead of trying to convince you using facts, I'll use anecdotes. Think about the last time the news or some cheesy newspaper reported on who/what some polically active celebrity voted on/for. Remember the last time that /. reported the voting record of Bill Gates just to prove that he is in bed with **** party? I don't, because it hasn't happened. Remember the last time you read that all of the people making over a million a year voted for **** (that wasn't just based on a stupid exit poll)??? I don't.
Don't you think that if our detailed voting records were truly out there that we would have heard who all these various people voted for? Don't tell me that you don't think that at least ONE prominent Republican voted for Kerry last November (or prominent Democrat that voted for Bush). Obviously I am not referring to Congressional voting records, that is an entirely different story.
I agree that it's good to get more people to vote, but here's what I don't like about the big vote by mail push: Voting in person creates community. When I was growing up, we would walk with my mom to the polling place in our neighbor's garage. While we were there, my mom would vote, my brother and I would play with their sample ballot machines (we had punch card machines then and the sample things let you vote for Red, Yellow, or Green for mayor), and we would spend some time catching up with the neighbors we already knew and getting to know the ones we were just meeting. Our neighbor was always the polling place, so she eventually did things like paint an American flag on the wall of the garage. When I went to vote for the first time, she took a picture of me signing in and hand-delivered it to me when she had the film developed.
You don't get any of those experiences--which both build community amongst adults and teach political responsibility to children--by filling out a form and dropping it in the mail.
When someone says to a criminal defendant that they're "committed to helping them defeat the charges against them", does that mean to you that they are willing to break into the jail, kill the guards, and extract the person with a helicopter? When implying that someone else might be unable to read, you might want to read the entire thread, yourself.
1) Diebold ATMs are not very reliable or secure. They just have brand name recognition in the banking industry.
2) The only reason they have any form of paper trail is because the industry regulators (major networks like Pulse, Star, Cirrus) require them to.
3) Actually, it would cost more for them to put it in. Diebold does not use anything that is standard, off-the-shelf. They build new stuff in completely strange ways. That way they are the only ones who can service it...
4) Diebold is stuck in the 1970's when it comes to ATMs. Those big honking bank ATMs running Windows XP? They're just dumb terminals. The switch has to download all of the screens and states to the terminal before it will do more than display "OFF LINE". It wouldn't suprise me if their voting system was designed similarly.
--- This
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.
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make install -not war
Any company that has voter history files (which I too have used in campaigns) obtains the information from exit polls and other surveys, or guesses based on party affiliation, demographics, residency, and other factors. The information is useful statistically for targeting campaigns, but it is not directly based on votes and is not always accurate on an individual level.
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.
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?
I'll be a bit more explict.
There should be a pile of paper, from which it should be possible to determine that there were 37 votes for Jones and 31 votes for Smith. The sum (68) should be less than or equal to the number of voters, which in turn should be less than or equal to the number of registered voters in the precinct. (there were problems with the latter two in a couple of recent elections, but I'm deliberately leaving the names out to avoid the partisan issues).
When Jones wins, but had 37 votes in a precint with only 25 registered voters, you have a problem.
Trusting Diebold (or anyone else) to simply give a tally is foolhardy.
hawk
sure, I'll agree with that. Nothing wrong with paper-only, except that we end up with goofy ballots like the butterfly design, where names don't quite line up with their respective dots.
the theory of electronic touchscreen machines is a good one- make it easy to select, in a standardized and unambiguous way, which side of an issue to vote for. I think that potential for standardization goes a long way towards making nationwide elections more uniform from precinct to precinct and state to state.
The whole point is that you don't have to have anyone counting the ballots, hopefully removing at least some human error from the process (losing count, miscounting, ballots getting stuck together, etc). Automated talliers that read scantron or punch cards do the same thing: they try to make it faster, with less chance of human error.
sorry, but I don't agree with you here. The point of using a machine might be to get a result more quickly, but the point of having an election is to count the vote the way the voter intended. Sacrificing the latter in the name of the former is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If, somewhere in the chain from voter's hand to final tally, there is a black box - an unauditable link in the chain - it's not possible to ensure that someone isn't monkeying with the numbers. In fact, that's EXAXTLY what happened this time, in a lot of counties in Florida, and at least a few in Ohio- exit polls said one thing, official tally said a different thing, a recount was requested... and guess what? there's nothing to count! It's all just bits on a memory card, and if someone changed those bits before they were counted the first time, it's still fraud even when the bits haven't changed when you look at them the second time around.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.