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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 link to H.R. 550 is broken in the summary, but it can be seen here.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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.
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
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.
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?
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[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.
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
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.
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