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Voting Isn't Easy, Even if Cheating Is
Diebold also builds automated teller machines (ATM), the definitive model for reliability and accountability.
The AccuVote machines are what they are, not due to poor design or unintentional mistake. They are the result of a deliberate intent to enable fraud on a massive scale. Viewed from this perspective, the AccuVote design is very good. The real problem comes when Diebold realizes that it needs to become better at obfuscation and makes it harder to detect the fraud.
"Electronic voting machines with no paper trail are an insult to democracy," writes pieterh. "That they come with switches to bypass even the dubious 'safeguards' provided is hardly a surprise."
Paper trails, of course, are only as good as the people guarding the paper; readers familar with more recent allegations of vote manipulation may be interested in the 1946 confrontation in Athens, Tennessee (pointed out by reader William J. Poser) between WWII veterans and the election officials.
Reader Soong, though, provides a conspiracy-free explanation for the presence of such a switch:
Several readers pointed out that voters might better trust the machines as well as the process of electronic voting if regulation were more rigorous; as reader Animats puts it, "slot machine standards are much tighter":The ability to boot from different sources is a normal debugging feature, not in itself sinister. Should they have cleaned that up on the production model? Yeah, sure. But verifiability is ultimately a human concern anyway, not a tech one.
It all comes down to who you trust.
If you don't trust the polling place, make the voting machine tamper proof. But then you have to trust the guy who built the voting machine. You have to trust the guy who loaded the software on it at the factory or the elections office. You have to trust the guy who wrote the code. Even if you inspected the code, you have to trust him to give you a binary based on that and not pull a fast one. You have to trust his compiler to give him a binary without compiled in back doors. I feel like I probably haven't listed all the points where this voting machine chain of trust can break down.
The Nevada Gaming Control Board has technical standards for slot machines. They've had enough fraud over the years that they know what has to be done. Some highlights:Even if e-voting machines had a spec list that would pass at the Gaming Commission, Midnight Thunder is puzzled that tamper-proofing techniques aren't more evident on the Diebold machines:
- ... must resist forced illegal entry and must retain evidence of any entry until properly cleared or until a new play is initiated. A gaming device must have a protective cover over the circuit boards that contain programs and circuitry used in the random selection process and control of the gaming device, including any electrically alterable program storage media. The cover must be designed to permit installation of a security locking mechanism by the manufacturer or end user of the gaming device.
- ... must exhibit total immunity to human body electrostatic discharges on all player-exposed areas. ...
- A gaming device may exhibit temporary disruption when subjected to electrostatic discharges of 20,000 to 27,000 volts DC ... but must exhibit a capacity to recover and complete an interrupted play without loss or corruption of any stored or displayed information and without component failure. ...
- Gaming device power supply filtering must be sufficient to prevent disruption of the device by repeated switching on and off of the AC power. ... must be impervious to influences from outside the device, including, but not limited to, electro-magnetic interference, electro-static interference, and radio frequency interference.
- All gaming devices which have control programs residing in one or more Conventional ROM Devices must employ a mechanism approved by the chairman to verify control programs and data. The mechanism used must detect at least 99.99 percent of all possible media failures. If these programs and data are to operate out of volatile RAM, the program that loads the RAM must reside on and operate from a Conventional ROM Device.
- All gaming devices having control programs or data stored on memory devices other than Conventional ROM Devices must:
- Employ a mechanism approved by the chairman which verifies that all control program components, including data and graphic information, are authentic copies of the approved components. The chairman may require tests to verify that components used by Nevada licensees are approved components. The verification mechanism must have an error rate of less than 1 in 10 to the 38th power and must prevent the execution of any control program component if any component is determined to be invalid. Any program component of the verification or initialization mechanism must be stored on a Conventional ROM Device that must be capable of being authenticated using a method approved by the chairman.
- Employ a mechanism approved by the chairman which tests unused or unallocated areas of any alterable media for unintended programs or data and tests the structure of the storage media for integrity. The mechanism must prevent further play of the gaming device if unexpected data or structural inconsistencies are found.
- Provide a mechanism for keeping a record, in a form approved by the chairman, anytime a control program component is added, removed, or altered on any alterable media. The record must contain a minimum of the last 10 modifications to the media and each record must contain the date and time of the action, identification of the component affected, the reason for the modification and any pertinent validation information.
- Provide, as a minimum, a two-stage mechanism for validating all program components on demand via a communication port and protocol approved by the chairman. The first stage of this mechanism must verify all control components. The second stage must be capable of completely authenticating all program components, including graphics and data components in a maximum of 20 minutes. The mechanism for extracting the authentication information must be stored on a Conventional ROM Device that must be capable of being authenticated by a method approved by the chairman.
Those standards cover the possibility of an "alternate program" in a slot machine, and provide a way to check for it, with logs and an external program check capability.
The Gaming Control Board of Nevada was asked to take a look at Diebold, and Nevada rejected Diebold equipment as a result.
Voting machines need tough standards like that. They don't have them.
Several readers are for canning electronic voting for U.S. elections completely. Reader Iamthefallen wants to knowGiven taxi meters and electricity meters both have tamper seals, you would have thought that these would have visible tamper seals as well. If in doubt you could even have two tamper seals: one from Diebold and another from the voting commission, in order to ensure that both parties are satisfied with the state of the machine.
Similarly, slofstra writesHas anyone answered the question regarding need for automated vote counting in a satisfactory way?
Seems to me that manual counting of votes would be vastly more secure as it would take a huge conspiracy to affect the result either way.
Counting a hundred million votes is hard, counting a thousand votes in a hundred thousand locations is easy.
Sorry, I have never seen the point of these machines. Paper ballots are auditable, user friendly, and if electronics is put into the reporting system, can be counted in a few minutes and submitted. Voting machine are a perfect example of a technology fetish at work. It would make an interesting case study to examine the economic and sociological reasons why we sometimes buy technology that we don't need, don't want and further, serves no useful purpose.
(Augmenting electronic voting machines with a paper record is a frequently raised idea; reader megaditto, for one, asks "Is it that hard to put a thermal printer behind a glass shield?" A similar system is required in Nevada voting machines already.)
Paper ballots and electronic ones aren't the only options, though; lever-based voting machines have dominated recent American national elections. Mark Walling writesReader WillAffleckUW suggests skipping in-person voting completely; absentee voting is a good idea, he argues, not only in light of the flaws (demonstrated or alleged) in electronic voting methods, but becauseMy district switched to electronic- from lever-based. in 2004, at 7:15 when I voted on lever machines, there was no line, and just about as many signatures in the book. In 2005, the line was out the door and around the corner at the same time. The person in front of me took 5 minutes to use the electronic machine. People knew how to use the old machines, and they were reliable. These new things take the old people forever to use, and then they complain that they were hard to read ...
Not so fast, says reader JDAustin:absentee voters get a paper ballot that is not only delivered by a trusted source (the U.S. Post Office) who have a verified date/time stamp — and that the ballots can be audited, traced, and verified — now that is a reason to register permanent absentee.
Many thanks to the readers (especially those quoted above) whose comments informed this discussion.I suggest you take a look at the research into the recent Washington state elections done by SoundPolitics.com. They verified close to a 20% error rate in absentee balloting. The signature verification on absentee balloting is no verification at all due to non-verification being done by those who count the ballots. Additionally, the USPS is not a trusted source, they are just another government bureaucracy. The ballots themselves cannot necessarily be traced nor verified — and even when the signatures are completely different, they are still counted. Due to the nature of voter rolls, duplicate ballots are sent out all the time due to slight variation in a person's name, and the duplicate ballots counts are not caught until after the final tally has been done and the election finished. Finally, mischievous government officials can always delay sending the military their ballots so those serving overseas do not have time to get their vote in on time. This actually happened in 2004 in Washington state.
Permanent absentee is not the solution. Neither is electronic voting.
The true solution takes elements of the recent Mexican election to prevent fraud (voter ID cards, thumb inking, precinct-based monitoring and tallying) and combine them with the best paper-based voting machine.
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along
That's exactly what Diebold wants you to think...
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So which party/candidate would take advantage of this exploit first - the Democrats or the Republicans - both are ugly!
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
...I'd rather scratch me 'X' on a piece of pay-pur!! Yaaaaarrrrrhhhhh!!!!
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GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Again I say to the teeming masses of Slashdot: lever machines are the answer! They have been proven for almost 90 years! I know that many of us /.ers want a computer chip of some kind running Linux in absolutely everything, we need to learn that electronic is not always better.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
I have heard that it is geting hard to find parts for them.
C'mon, this is what got us into trouble last time. Remember hanging chads and butterfly ballots?
It should be obvious to anyone on this site that only open source code should be used in electronic voting machines. Undoubtedly, the most distinguished security researchers would all examine the code, and a very high confidence level could be achieved.
After reading through some of these... it's very apparent that securing these machines is an uphill battle. Do we really want to double seal the machines, tamper-proof the ROMS and secure the machines against a 20,000 volt discharge? Why do we need to jump through all these hoops? it's insane.
Good old-fashioned paper is the solution. It's cheap, it ensures a paper audit trail, and it's counted in public by thousands of real people who witness the count.
Of course you knew that.
- A private, confidential paper receipt, for each vote, that has:
- a voter-legible ballot that the voter verifies before leaving the vote,
-
a bar-code computer scannable version of the vote, and
- some kind of code or a non-serial 'serial' number that will indicate any missing paper receipt, or blocks of paper reciepts. We don't want a true serial number so that the vote remains secret and no one can tell who voted for whom by the serial number. Perhaps hashes of hashes?
- A secure, electronic, computer version of this receipt that has some kind of data integrity -- not just a tally of bits, but some binary sequence that has some kind of verifiable, tamper-evident integrity. Perhaps this digital ballot would have a hash stored in a seperate log.
This is just a preliminary brainstorm. Perhaps encoded into each vote's serial number would be a running tally? That would be one method of tamper-evidence -- by going through the votes, we should be able to tell where and when exactly the fraud happened. The tally should be consistent all the way through, and by the time the polls are closed, we have tallies for each booth.Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Countdown to ken thompson for president edit in wikipedia has started. I'm placing my bets on 10 minutes.
Well, if we let computers vote, they'll probably just re-elect Nixon.
Badass Resumes
Then build more! I bet that if a senior engineering class at Purdue (not even MIT) put their minds to the task they could build a mechanical voting machine that would not create the same level of controversy as Diebold's machines. There are not enough parts because people are not building them. Compared to the cost of computerization, building spare levers and new machines is dirt cheap.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
I'm a data manager in disease research.
We use paper.
We could have gone to electronic forms with laptops, but there are a number of reasons we don't.
The primary one is user-readability, and verification of intent.
The second one is programming limitations on error checking - what is a permissable response? When dealing with human subjects - and likewise, human voters, one notices they don't always do what you want, but what they want.
Should we have electronic voting machines? Yes. For handicapped people, definitely. But, naturally, those should have a paper audit trail.
But most voting machines would do fine with optically-scanned human-readable paper ballots. In fact, what they don't want you to know is they are just as accurate as the electronic ones, in actual practice.
Now, does this mean the vote is accurate? No, because we're humans. Some people insist on voting for two candidates, or write in Donald Duck. Some people change their minds part way through.
Heck, when I vote, I sometimes decide at the polling place, as I'm voting.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
So we know that Diebold is capable of producing secure ATM systems, and that money is the root of all evil in politics, and that we have insufficient voter turnout. So here's my plan for a foolproof voting system. :)
Each polling station will consist of one (1) secure Diebold ATM system, which is capable of accessing the bank accounts of the Republican and Democratic parties. Voters will walk into the voting booth, and withdraw $20 from the bank account of their favourite party. At the end of the election, the party that has received the most votes/withdrawals from their account wins. To cap it off, voters have a new incentive to participate in "the process."
Alternately, the system can be turned upside-down, and people remove money from the account of their least favourite party. Not only does one side win, but the other side is bankrupt!
The verification mechanism must have an error rate of less than 1 in 10 to the 38th power
...and 1 in 10^37???? Well, jeez, might as well just build it out of matchsticks and glue if you're going to be THAT lax.
10^38?
Because requiring an error rate of less than 1 in 10^39 is simply unreasonable to ask.
(Disclaimer: I'm a libertarian, not a supporter of either major party and arguably am as amused by the Dems as I am bitterly spiteful toward the Republicans)
There is a greater culture of voter fraud at work here. The Democrats in particular are quick to scream about voter fraud, voter disenfranchisement whenever an ID-less black person tries to vote and things like that, that go back well before Bush "stole the election." They even have been known to put in fraudulent votes in the names of dead people.
Both major parties are bad about this. The Republicans now have leverage that can allow them to kick the Democrats squarely in the pants for all of the years of having to fight uphill against democratic-lead voter fraud. They aren't going to give up on Diebold lightly.
As I have said before, I think that voter fraud by a normal voter should be a simple felony. Six months, permanent revocation of all voting rights, even with a pardon. However, any conspiracy should be legally classified as a conspiracy to overthrow an elected government because that is precisely what organized voter fraud is! It is trying to use the system to bring down an elected government.
Take a bunch of these Republicrats, especially a few rich and powerful ones, out and give them a firing squad for attempting to overthrow the United States government. That will put a dent into voter fraud like this.
Voting is easy. Do it early and often.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
In Canada we count our ballots manually and generally have results in under two hours after polls close. The USA has more polling stations (with 10 times the population) but not necessarily more people per station. In practice, a manual counting system could be implemented with only a modest increase in people. It could probably pay for itself in time and resources saved not installing/testing/servicing voting machines, and the inevitable audit trail (does anyone still count handing chads)?.
Ultimately what this boils down to is a trust issue. If you do not have a physical record of your vote that is impervious to digital tampering, it does not matter how much security there is. With digital voting there will always be the perception that somebody could rig the vote.
In a democracy, the perception of vote fraud is almost as dangerous as the actuality of vote fraud. If we all go into the booth and we all come out convinced that we've had our say and that it counted for something, then even when we lose, we can feel we were a part of the system. If we go into a booth and don't even have that basic reassurance, why go into the booth at all? Why work to change the system if you have reasonable suspicion that the system has been rigged against you in the first place? People in that mindset will either drop out of the system entirely, or seek to voice their feelings through alternative means (violence, etc).
We've had two national elections in a row that were close and had an air of suspicion about them. There are countless anecdotes of votes getting switched on the computers, voting machines dissapearing overnight, etc. Even if there's not actual fraud going on, all of that adds up to a suspicion of the system itself. We can't afford to have that suspicion if we want to remain a democracy.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
This has the possibility of making certain districts in the US top heavy with incarcerated voters. A lot of prisons (federal, state and local) are grouped together in close proximity such as near Beaumont, Texas. We are already have enough "crooks" in Government. Let's not give their incarcerated peers the ability to make this situation even worse. Can you imagine the campaigning for these voters?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
"When our government didn't send that Alaskan piece of crap republican straight to jail for threatening to quit if his state didn't get Katrina relief funds so he could build the famous bridge to nowhere..."
Uh.. As much as I dislike Ted Stevens, he did not demand "Katrina relief funds", and the "bridge to nowhere" actually is the only thing connecting a tribal land to the 21st century (it being "nowhere" is a matter of opinion.)
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Isn't the most safe option to have 3 separate company's develop -one- machine?
- One company develops the casing and only uses old fashioned electronic push buttons.
- The other two other company's each develop a counter module which are both connected to the same buttons.
This way, the final results should match.
If they do not match, the device is broken, or one of the two company's are attempting fraud.
By keeping the push button system simple, the connections to the counter modules can easily be veryfied by looking at them.
If the whole thing would be sealed and shielded by a glass plate and the wires would be clearly marked, everyone could in theory check the correctness of the machine.
This way, for fraud to be commited, the three company's would have to work together which is more unlikely.
Also, it is possible to prevent the company's from getting in touch with eachother.
A very important point here is: Keep it stupid simple.
Ken Thompson for President
I'd bet he would get plenty of votes!
ROTFL!
For those who aren't aware, Ken Thompson admitted to actually writing and installing a back door in the unix login program and the associated C compiler, as described in his 1983 Turing Award lecture.
This worked by having the compiler recognize what it's compiling and:
- If compiling login, insert the back door.
- If compiling a later version of itself, insert the compiler patch.
This has the advantage that, once you get it working, you can throw out the source code and it still propagates.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So all you really need is for an electronic voting machine to generate a very clear unambiguous paper ballot which gets posted just like a traditional ballot - but without any hanging chads and with everything spelled out (ie: no mention of people you didn't vote for). If the voter doesn't agree with it, they throw it away and redo it... or feed it back into the machine to get another vote, to avoid potential overvotes. When they're happy with it, they walk it over to a sealed box and deposit it.
On the paper, they have a nice 2D barcode that has all of the votes encoded within it. However, it has a plain English description of those votes as well. Boxes can be opened after the election and very easily (and foolproofly) scanned, incredibly quickly. Some small percentage of them are also hand-counted (there shouldn't be much disagreement in reading the English printout) and the totals compared to the scan-counted totals. Any discrepency forces a full recount.
So its the best of both worlds. Fast scoring, full paper trail, and no significant chance of fraud. Where's the catch?
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
The best solution I can think of with electronic votes is to use some form of public key encryption with an authenticating block encryption mode. One half of the keys would be provided on a TOTALLY random basis along with the voter card. The decrypting keys would be kept in a tamper-proof computer that is designed to be write-only with the sole exception of the count at the end.
The voter comes along and enters their vote. The vote is encrypted with their key. As nobody (at this point) has the decryption key, or another copy of the encryption key, it is impossible for the vote to be altered. A copy could then be printed out for backup purposes and placed in a regular ballot box.
So far, doesn't sound much different from anyone else's electronic system, right? Except that we're not tallying yet. Well, read on. The votes are collected in their encrypted form and kept in some secure system OTHER than the one doing the counting. They are then fed into the counting machine. The counting machine knows what keys are allocated to a given precinct, so tests each potential key against each vote from that precinct. Once a key is used, it is deleted.
If a vote has no valid decryption key, the vote is invalid and is rejected. This will include duplicate votes (the key has been deleted) as well as votes for which no key has ever existed. The (still encrypted) vote would then be output as a reject.
The votes are kept seperate and tallied. The output will be the tallies, the votes that comprise that tally, and the grand totals involved. The grand totals should be the same, provided the counters are working correctly.
Now, what basic checks can we perform, using this sort of system? First, let us say there is a recount. The recount would be of the votes placed into the ballot box. There should be exactly one such ballot box vote that is not spoiled or a duplicate for each and every valid vote printed by the tallying machine and the totals should match exactly. There should ALSO be exactly one spoiled or bogus ballot paper for every rejected vote, although further comparison would be impossible as the rejects are encrypted and the spoiled ballots aren't.
Ok, how do we know the software is valid? Well, we know that the vote that the user put in the ballot box matched the one they entered in the computer, and we know that there's a 1:1 between the results in the box and the results in the computer, so we know that the computer has to be producing valid data.
Then what happens when there is a discrepency? With two sources, how do we know which is the one that has the valid data and which does not? The votes are encrypted in a way that is essentially tamper-proof, the ballot boxes are not. The only way to resolve this is to make the ballot boxes reasonably tamper-proof. I'd suggest a wooden or metallic ballot box that has a lid that can be attached with spring-loaded bolts, where the only way to open the box is to cut it open. You want unique non-sequential numbers on RFID tags, to ensure that boxes don't go missing anyway.
After all that, you will have a more honest system than you do at the moment. You might even discourage those who would cheat the system from even being a part of it. However, ultimately, politicians are professional liars and the extremely rich will always be power brokers. The best system in the world can't clean up the human race, it can only clean up one very small part of the feedback loop. Which is better than nothing, but should not be assumed to be everything.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Again I say to the teeming masses of Slashdot: lever machines are the answer! They have been proven for almost 90 years!
And have been hacked for much of that time.
One hack consists of the election officials that set up the machine presetting the wheels for the guy you want to win to some additional number, and (if you think there will be a lot of votes) the guy you want to lose to the nines compliment of the number, then weakly gluing stickers with zeros on them over the counter wheels and locking the inner door.
The poll watchers see the zeros and lock the outer door. First vote for each candidate knocks the stickers off, and they fall to the bottom of the machine. (If no votes for the candidate, the sticker remains visible saying "0000".) You send one of your own guys in to make sure your guy gets at least one vote if necessary.
The outer door is unlocked and the numbers read. The inner door remains locked until opportunity for recount is over. The inner door is only unsealed and opened (probably by your guy WITHOUT poll watchers) when it's time to do maintainence and set it up for the next election, at which point he can sweep out the stickers.
Downside: If your guy dies, is fired, or moves on, or misses a sticker that gets caught in the guts of the machine, the fact that the scam had been used might be discovered by some opposition functionary (or honest worker) at a later time. Such stickers HAVE been discovered in lever-type voting machines.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Look, the honest truth is people cheat to gain advantage, so we must expect this, and mitigate it whenever we (as engineers) can. So, as such the perfect Nevada Gaming Comission approved paper trail keeping, encrypted output, design would still be vulnerable to fraudulent paper ballot injection. One candidate (be they crooked or not) would demand a recount, (thinking the equipment faulty) and the paper votes would return a slightly different result in their favor.
You can't trust a citizen to be non-political completely if the vote will affect them in any way. So, essentially you need to pay someone to be your referee. And it would have to be someone who wouldn't be affected at all by the result of the vote.
So by those qualifiers we can't guarantee, ever, that every element of the existing paper vote is secure.
Two copies of your vote, one right after the other, printed and spewed into two different physical ballot boxes. The second box would contain tamper proof seals and would only be opened in the case of a full manual recount by a third party. As well as two digital copies, signed with a hash which was printed on a receipt (and mailed to an email if you like) you could verify against the other copy sent to the national voting database. Might be marginally better.
That way you can count all the votes all night and as the final results are tallied any innacuracies between the national and local databases would have to be rectified before any results were accepted from the precinct with invalid data.
Democrats especially are worried about Republicans hacking the digital voting systems.
Republicans especially are worried about votes by ineligible voters (such as illegal immigrants and felons), multiple voting, and fake voters.
Of course if there IS such corruption, neither side wants to unilaterally disarm. But perhaps a simultaneous disarmament would work.
Would you support a compromise bill like this?
For all federal elections:
1: Electronic voting machines must produce a paper trail, printing a voted ballot that is both human and machine readable, delivered to the voter for confirmation then to be placed in a ballot box. They MAY count votes too, for a quick unofficial result. But the paper ballot is the official ballot, available for recounts, etc.
2: A national voter identification system is instituted, to insure that each voter is actually alive, legally eligible to vote, and votes no more than once.
- Voter elegibility is confirmed upon initial registration and periodically thereafter (which can be done by showing up to vote and presenting ID).
- The identity and elegibility of absentee voters are also confirmed in person periodically thereafter (and their registration suspended if they are not confirmed).
- Identity and elegibility of all currently registered voters will be confirmed within a prescribed time period (no more than four years) after passage, and those not confirmed will be purged. Voters subject to this will be notified of this reregistration requirement in the mailed election paperwork and at polling places when voting in person. Procedures to reregister under the new rules will be no more difficult than initially registering a new voter under the new rules. Timely assistance will be provided for the handicapped.
- Any voter at a polling may be challenged (by an election worker, poll watcher, or anyone present) to provide his voter identification information, and will be denied a ballot if unable to produce it. Such challenge may not be construed as intimidation or racial discrimination.
- After the passage of the bill, any non-citizen who commits fraud while attempting to register to vote, actually registering to vote, attempting to vote, or actually voting, in a state where such non-citizen voting is not legal, is permanently barred from naturalization. States are presumed to bar voting by non-citizens unless they have explicitly authorized it.
- (Suitable language to bar use of the voter ID for any other purpose, interception and arrest or tracking of persons on their way to or from voting, punishing or tracking inelegible voters who attempt to register but do NOT do so fraudulently, etc.)
Seems to me such a bill would be a win all around (except perhaps for any REALLY corrupt and successful machine politicians, and those concerned about a "national ID card".): The honest on both sides would support it, of course, since THEY have less to lose than to gain. The dishonest could save face by claiming to be honest, while obtaining some assurance that the unknown amount of corruption they believe their opponents are perpetrating would be suppressed as they give up their own, known, amount.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So I'm sent home with a barcode that -- from anywhere with internet access -- enables me to confirm my vote.
This same system allows anyone else to, from anywhere, force me to verify my vote to them. Your system is open to a different and entirely easier form of voting fraud -- paying off or otherwise coercing voters. Imagine if I offer to give you money if you come back with your barcode, and I can verify you voted for Bush III. Or, I threaten to break your knees if you *don't* come back with said proof.
--
"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
We've had the Diebold machines in Georgia since 2002 ... and ... Georgia has gone from one of the worst states ranked around 49 regarding voter fraud and miscounted ballots (with 94,000 undervotes in the 2000 election) to one of the best.
Since there is no way to check that the Diebold machines are counting corretly - or even that they're not making up votes on the fly to be a close match to the number of voters using them - all you've proven is that now that youv'e switched to Diebold machines you no longer can FIND fraud.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
OK we'll vote using the current system whether to change to the new system.
(later...)
It just came out 51% in favour of keeping the diebold machines. Looks like we're not changing.
So we know that Diebold is capable of producing secure ATM systems
This is a claim, incidentally, that has been made many times, but not substantiated. The banking industry is surprisingly clueless when it comes to security issues, and I don't think it's a safe assumption that Diebold makes ATMs which are significantly more secure.
I suspect that ATMs simply haven't undergone the level of attention that voting machines have.