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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
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.
____
~ |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.
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.
"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
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."
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
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!
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.
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.
Quick answer: the printed paper is shown to the voter before final casting for a visual confirmation check (make sure it says who they really voted for). After the voter confirms the paper receipt is cut off and falls into a big box of identical pieces of paper. No one can count backwards to see who voted for who.
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).
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.
he can't tell you who you voted for. but now he can order that $5,000 Alienware system he's always wanted with your credit card.
just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand!
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.
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
Enjoy your free subscription to Man Love Monthly.
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.
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.
My wife actually works for the county clerk's office, I assure you all you get with that CD is a wide variety of statistics. Nothing you could link to an individual. The lowest level you could get would be to link to to a specific precint (maybe at a specific time), but not to an individual unless the polling place was nearly deserted and you recorded who entered when.
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.
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 ~/
You know deep in his mom's basement you just got a really bad evil eye...
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
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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
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
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)