Slashdot Mirror
From the Trenches of Electronic Voting
Avi Rubin, an expert on electronic voting systems, worked as a judge in two elections in 2004, and he worked the chaotic Maryland primary election yesterday. His blog article about a day spent with Diebold voting machines gives impressions from the trenches of electronic voting. From the article: "The least pleasant part of the day was a nagging concern that something would go terribly wrong, and that we would have no way to recover. I believe that fully electronic systems, such as the precinct we had today, are too fragile. The smallest thing can lead to a disaster... I can't imagine basing the success of an election on something so fragile as these terrible, buggy machines... As far as I'm concerned, the 'tamper tape' does very little in the way of actual security... I hope that we got it right in my precinct, but I know that there is no way to know for sure. We cannot do recounts."
There is a very simple, much more inexpensive and reliable method of providing secret ballots with anonymous voting. It's called using a printed ballot. Most precincts have a few hundred people voting, it can't take that long to count X's on a page. And having been a polling officer at a local election - twice - I know of what I speak. And yeah, we use electronic machines at our polling place. I'm not sure if they are accurate or not, but we do.
The simplest answer would be for the machine to issue a slip with each ballot that is dropped into a hopper after the vote. The slip would only display the vote, not who did. And to make sure it was anonymous, the hopper could be rotated regularly to mix the slips.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Supposedly, No. The design is such that it is supposed to prevent mapping precisely who voted for whom. This is a basic part of voting in the US (if not the world over). If it is easy for the powers to be to figure out precisely who each and every one of us votes for, it plays into the hands of a horrible form of corruption. It enables retaliation, even the threat of which is sufficient cause for some people to change their vote. That type of vote manipulation is not supposed to be possible.
Still, I may be wrong on this...but I would think any voting system that makes it impossible to do recounts would be unconstitutional.
You're kidding, right? The whole purpose of our election system is so no one knows how you voted. What you're questioning is the complete opposite of the way things are (supposed to be).
Therefore, in truth, they could in some manner confirm every voters vote with the voter themself?
See above. No, you cannot confirm with a voter how they voted. It's supposed to be a secret.
I know they're not going to do it, but wouldn't that data be available, therefore recounts are possible by confirming each voters vote with the actual voter? Example: The master record says you John Doe voted for Patty Sue, is this correct?
For the third time, NO! We DO NOT record the name of a voter with a vote. All that is recorded is a vote.
However, what Avi is saying is completely correct because even when we are told they can recount the votes cast, there is no way, currently, to verify if the votes were recorded correctly when cast. For all we know there is code somewhere which takes every fourth vote for one candidate and records it for the opposite candidate.
This is why a paper trail is absolutely, positively, 100% needed if we are going to be forced to use electronic voting machines.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Yes, in theory you could contact everyone. Why didn't they just do that in Florida? (that's mean, I'm sorry)
Without a physcial paper trail, which I hope could be verified by the voter, recounts would take a VERY long time.
Furthermore, even if you could reliably contact each person, who is to say they are going to tell you the truth? They may have voted for X, but once questioned can't remember and just say Y. That is why you have one chance to vote, no take-backs.
Finally, without a physcial, voter-verified paper trail; the software could invalidate an entire election. With the software controlling every part of the voting system, even the backup (if it is only electronic) one bug and the whole vote must be done over. With a user-verified, paper copy; even if the software screws up, it is the users fault for not checking the paper backup, and their vote is their vote.
Final note, really this time. If you give someone a reasonably simple voting mechanism, and they screw it up, that's ok. If you give them a reasonably simple, electronic voting mechanism, and it screws up, there goes the democracy.
Problem Exists Between Touch-Screen and User
:D
I was one of those 'disinfranchized' in the Maryland primary last night. Being a junior, I share the same name as my father except for the title. I heard some of the horror stories from my parents when they voted at their polling place, located just inside Baltimore City. After I got up to the judges to get my card to vote, I learned that I was 'Cancelled'. They let me do a provisional, however.
Chatting with my father, talking with a third election judge that was assisting everyone, and my own observations revealed a startling fact. Basically, the two judges manning the touch screens and the voter rosters are F-in' idiots. They had no idea how the touch screens worked. They didn't know you could scroll to see more names, so how many people were turned away, with them saying a voter wasn't in the system? My father had to point out and explain how to use the system. And he is NOT a judge, nor affiliated with the voting system other than by being a normal citizen voter. And that other judge 'politely' informed me of the other judges general intelligence as he was helping to set me up at another booth with the provisinal.
Most likely, the two geniuses knocked my name out when they were dicking around earlier, leading to my provisional ballot. Thankfully, as a Republican (in a heavily-Democratic Balt. City), this was only a primary. Having my ballot lost here wouldn't be as bad as in the general election. I'm definately worried about the general election, however.
I'm also curious as the the density of these 'voting irregularities', including the political makeup of the regions they are located. I'm not saying it's politically motivated; I'm just curious if the old addage about "Republicans have no heart, and Democrats have no brains" has any truth to it.
I hope that we got it right in my precinct, but I know that there is no way to know for sure.
Then you didn't get it right. There can be no "hope" in voting records. Either it's right and verifiable, or the voting system is a failure.
Developers: We can use your help.
After you sign in and are verified as someone is registered in the precinct (in California you can still vote a Provisional ballot even if you aren't registered, but it's a paper ballot), you are given an access card that has been activated by one of the polling place workers that allows you to use the voting machine. This card activates the machine and tells it, depending on the election, which ballot to display. It can also tell the system to display large text or to read the ballot to the voter, but that's incidental. Once the vote is cast, the card is deactivated and cannot be used to activate the voting system again until it is reset by one of the clerks.
The encoder is very limited. Basically, all you can do with them is choose the ballot (if multiple ballots), choose special options for visibility and sound and then activate/deactivate the card. That's about it. Adding personal information on the voter really isn't possible.
Now, I don't have full access to the internals of the system, but the only information that I can guess that the card passes to the ballot is the precinct number so someone can't bring in an encoder and vote more than once.
So, unless you type your own name in as a write-in vote, you're safe from someone finding out how you voted.
We have secret elections for a number of important reasons. One of the most important is that your vote can't be used against you. There are a lot of people who would like to be able to see how you voted and would buy an illegal copy of the database you propose. A crooked politician might use voting records of people whose votes he should work to suppress. An amoral employer might fire employees who didn't vote as the employer wanted. The stereotypical example is that thanks to a secret ballot, if a deeply crooked politician hired thugs to intimidate voters, the voters could vote for his opponent, then lie about who they voted for to protect themselves from the thugs. I doubt this happens in the US, but it's probably a very real concern in Iraq.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Besides the fact that voters could be disenfranchised due to a power outage, you also have the problem of hardware failure due to power outages or brownouts or spikes, which could result in the loss of the voting tallys that had been accumulated to that point.
Paper and pencil are power-failure tolerant.
For that reason alone, all voting should be paper and pencil based.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
The current difficulties with touch-screen voting are really just a 21st-Century continuation of the fine, American tradition of rigging elections. It's been going on for most of the time the United States has existed; the only difference being that it is much harder to be able to prove it's been happening and even harder to get a court to hear the matter. To paraphrase Joseph Stalin: "It's not who votes that matters, it's who counts the votes that matters". The argument over voting goes all the way back to founding of the nation. Many of the original framers of the Constitution felt that the populace should be prevented from engaging in free and fair elections; that the voices of the governed should be muted if heard at all and public sway of government policy should be kept to the absolute minimum. Hence the reason for the foundation of the Electoral College.
Voting has always been a class struggle. The democratic revolutionaries of the 18th Century were treated with much of the same disgust as any populist movement: the labor agitators or the original communist revolutionaries (I mean true communists, not totalitarianists, who simply re-instated a class system within a supposedly "communist" structure). Ruling minorities have always feared the "unwashed masses" would start considering self-governance. That very difference of philosophy forms the fundamental difference between "liberal" and "conservative" and the argument has gone on for centuries. For example: Martin Luther's proposed democratization of Christianity; the democratic revolutions in America and France; the anti-slavery movement; the labor movement; socalist & communist revolutionaries -- all sprouted out of the desire of the governed to have a say in their governance (if not do away with ruling classes entirely) and demand a greater share of the profits of their labor. Against which, of course, the ruling classes have fought with tooth & nail, sword & musket. And now, electronic voting machine. The rulers learned their lessons well: force is met with force, but if the masses are taught to believe they have a say in their governance, they'll tolerate all manner of injustice.
The various populist movements in the United States made strides in circumventing the barriers placed between the governors and the governed. By the 20th Century, the most egregious forms of vote fraud had been minimized--though not totally eliminated. Unfortunately, thanks to Diebold, Sequoia and others, those achievements have all been discarded. We have to simply "trust" that these ultra-conservative businesses will count the votes accurately -- even when those votes are in direct opposition to their corporate agendas. In other words, we can't trust them. The first instances of massive voting fraud via touch-screen electronics occurred in 2002, and the lawsuits over those fraud cases are *still* tied up in courts. Furthermore, now that the Bush Administration, with full complicity of the GOP-dominated Congress has stacked the State Supreme & Federal Circuit Courts with hard-right partisans who basically adhere to Machiavellian ethics (the ends justify the means), I'll be surprised if this debacle can actually get the judicious consideration it deserves.
America: Land of the Free Market and Home of the Brave Investor. Our "Democracy" is a sham and always has been.