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NYT Says Paperless Voting A Serious Problem

Posted by Zonk on from the no-see-ums dept.

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.'"

5 of 417 comments (clear)

  1. e-voting machines are horseshit by slashmaan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:e-voting machines are horseshit by penguin121 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      yes, paper system has worked great for a long time, but you know what the problem is? its that people have no patience and want instant results. The very checks that make the paper system reliable and secure are the reason people want to replace it since they take time. I mean god forbid if we don't have the election results in full before everyone goes to bed for the night...

  2. Another way of thinking about it by tacokill · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Another way of thinking about it by wfberg · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      Part of me says "wait a minute, disassociating a physical ballot from a voter, isn't that a problem that has been solved a few thousand years ago, when the first secret ballots were cast in ancient Greece? Or was that Babylonia?".. But that part of me is just silly, I guess.

      --
      SCO employee? Check out the bounty
  3. Re:the paper trail...... by mOdQuArK! · · Score: 4, Insightful
    County election supervisors test and verify the machines to make sure they are working properly ahead of time.

    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.

    Also, I highly doubt any commissioner is going to let the manufacturers come out with a "patch" 2 months before an election.

    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?