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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/
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
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
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.
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."
I probably should have pointed this out in my earlier post. But no, it's not taken seriously. I know of no other country that requires citizens to register with their State's Government in order to vote in parties' internal affairs - primaries.
In other countries, when you're registered to a political party, that means the political party concerned has your records and knows your affiliation, not the Government.
That's not to say elections shouldn't be secret, they should, but a large amount of people don't care.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
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
Ha!
The UK labour party decided (*cough* received financial inducements *cough*) to do away with such an arcane system as you subscribe, in favour of enforced postal votes (with no ability to check senders credentials), to be followed by SMS, Email and Digital TV voting systems...
Result... electoral fraud that would disgrace a banana republic
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.
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.
Basically... if the electronic voting machine spits out a piece of paper, and the voter puts the piece of paper in a box, and people count those pieces of paper to compare the count with the electronic result... what is the point of having an electronic voting system at all?
I just never understood why the US insisted on electronic voting... We do it with plain pen & paper up here in Canada, and nobody screams "FRAUD" every election...
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
Canada Population: 32,805,041 (July 2005 est.)*
Thats about 10X, fairly significant. The point is that you don't need to count all of them by hand...
You're right... it must take 10 times longer to count because there are 10 times more ballots... you sure wouldn't think about hiring 10 times more people to count the ballots... that wouldn't be a great idea, right?
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
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