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Quebec Bans Electronic Voting
gfilion writes "The Chief Electoral Officer of Québec tabled an evaluation report that makes a troubling diagnosis of the problems that occurred during the municipal elections of November 6, 2005, in some of the 162 Québec municipalities that used electronic voting. He says: "Not only did the systems fail, but the corrective measure proposed were insufficient, poorly adapted and often came too late." There was a moratorium on electronic voting prior to the November 6 election, it will be extented for future elections."
Maybe the freezing temperatures affected their brains to where they can think clearly.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
It is sad to see electronic voting being thrown out with the bathwater. In my opinion it can work, however current attempts to make such a mythical machine. Many of the most-published and widely used e-voting machines are flawed, have no paper trail or the like. It is sad to see something as e-voting can't work properly in the age of computers.
This is seemingly the best solution to an all too common problem.
Electronic ballots are too risky and easily subdued to allow such important decisions rely on them.
"No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture." - Learned Hand
Now if we could just get a FAIR demerger referendum ... #*%#&#^@ Charest!
*golf clap*.
Honestly folk, count the f'int ballots by hand, stop throwing them out, etc.
We purport to have this great democracy yet we do all in our power to screw up the vote...
tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
So far I've read dozens of reports over the past 5-6 years about failed, hacked, and broken electronic voting machines.
How many failures does it take before those providing the crap equipment are sued and forced to FIX the results of their incompetent designs and testing?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
They must hate freedom (tm).
The problems with electronic voting systems--namely no paper trail--is the reason why many municipalities are switching to mark sense voting ballots.
Since mark sense paper ballots (filled out in pen to make sure the mark is clearly seen on the ballot) can be both machine-read and hand counted, this mostly avoids the Florida 2000 fiasco of difficulties reaching punched card ballots, complaints that electronic voting machines can be biased towards one candidate, and the numerous problems of the old mechanical voting machines.
http://www.elections.act.gov.au/Elecvote.html
It's open source, it's verifiable, it's secure.
Given the disasters we have seen in other places, I would rather have a slow system than one that can go wrong in so many ways (at this point in time).
I definitely agree. I find it highly ironic that even with all the things that do work on computers, something as seemingly simple as voting has some many damn errors in it. I agree that there must be a flawless, well dispersed implementation of E-voting, proven to work correctly AND with paper trails before it even touches a voting booth. None of this ship it out and debug it after the election crap.
.. where there's a company called EDS that has been regularly screwing-up government and council contracts by producing flawed systems, and yet still manages to get work!
Vive la Quebec!!
Yes. I definitely agree e-voting hasn't come far enough to be implemented in voting booths. As you say, paper ballets have been around for centuries and work just fine. Maybe eventually when e-voting is 99.99999995% error proof, has paper trails and works as it should, then maybe it could be implemented. However until then, I agree paper ballots are much better.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
"Quebec completely misses the notion of democracy"
I am from Quebec... Could you tell me exactly what are you talking about? How exactly are we missing the notion of democracy? It is quite a accusation to make without any sort of supporting facts...
The problems with electronic voting systems--namely no paper trail--is the reason why many municipalities are switching to mark sense voting ballots.
So that's what it's called.. we used exactly that in the last municipal election for my riding in St-Laurent Quebec.
... is not the banning of e-vote. Believing itself above the system, Quebec completely misses the notion of democracy, as much as aristocrats continue to cling to dwindling legacies in the 21st century.
Please explain how banning a voting system that so far has demonstrated countless flaws is bad for democracy? I am very happy my government took this stance. Last elections there were quite a few close races between representatives, some as close as about 50 votes. If this buggy electronic vote would tip the balance of power from a party to another, it is unfair and bad for democracy. Bug today is an exploit/abuse tommorow. Voting has to be transparent, accurate and there needs to be a paper trail.
Oh and, Quebec is one of the very rare provinces/states/territories in North America that is running serious studies about having a proportional representation modeled election and parliament. Something that could eliminate the "cartel" of a 2-3 party system we see throughout North America. Something good for every individual instead of a few partisans of selected parties. But yes, Quebec misses the notion of democracy!
I don't think the word "democracy" means what you think it means.
And in five minutes they'll be complaining about the ridiculous paper ballots that resemble the 'Dark Ages' and how much of a mess it is to do all of that by hand and how easily votes can be lost or miscounted. :) Can't please 'em all.
Are we saying that purpose built computer Hardware/Software cannot be made unhackable? Or are the companies being paid to not create reliable software?
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
i guess this isn't quite the same Luddite thinking as the WiFi ban at a canadian university: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/ 23/029224&from=rss
but it seems like a _ban_ is a little over the top
-- lol pwned
- Print internal and voter receipts containing UUID and votes in text and barcode form.
- Upload UUIDs and votes to a central, public database in regular batches, to preserve anonymity.
- Pollsters, turnstiles, and other means can be used to verify that the number of electronic votes matches physical voters.
- Pollsters can collect both UUID and manual polls, and compare for accuracy using the public database.
- Individual voters can verify that their votes were registered correctly using the public database.
Anything missing?
The thing with e-voting is having the computer containing all the data.
Why not handing out RFID ballots a computer which transfers the 'vote' onto the chip and the chip goes directly into a basket before anyone can 'scan' it (disclosing the preference).
After the day, scanning the whole box of chips would suffice to count all the votes in a minute (or two).
- Unomi -
But it was just a joke. Like communism, philospher kings (or even tech-kings) can only work in theory. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
In a sense, however, our democratic republic has similarites to the philopher kings of Socrates/Plato. In theory the populace elects those best suited to govern. Of course, in theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
...you should have added.
Vive le Quebec Libre.
Just couldn't resist. This phrase is so a part of our history.
As you say, paper ballets have been around for centuries and work just fine.
Won't someone think of the TREES!
..plenty to keep it coming despite security professionals and computer experts combatting it for years. Zombie nets and so forth.. Now compare that profit level with the potential of controlling governments completely through widespread and untraceable vote fraud.. No comparison, hence, why new shiny computerised voting has been pushed, IMO. this black box voting isn't an "accident", or just "sloppy coding" or "bad design", or "errors"m nope, it has been done *on purpose*.
In ye olden days you needed a ballot box "cracker" in every key precinct to try and rig an election..now? A few guys and some code and you ownzorz a huge government. Quite the ROI, isn't it? And once you own it, where is the incentive to really "bust" yourself over it?
Is the simple expedient of using computers to produce the ballots, then counting them by hand. Simple, and unhackable.
It's the unhackable part that our Fascists don't like.
Billydoc
In UK elections I have tried never to vote for a candidate I have never met in person, and I do not count television or radio interviews. The results can be surprising, certainly it has meant that in my case I don't support any party, only individuals. Electronic voting, electronic means of contacting the electorate, electronic fund raising...we might have more democracy if we didn't have any of them. If the only people who vote are the ones who can be bothered to turn out (provided people are given the opportunity and not disenfranchised as seems to be happening in parts of the US) what is wrong with that? Why should a good candidate lose because an ignorant person can be persuaded by a TV ad to press one button rather than another?
Pining for the fjords
And if you remember standardized tests, you best candidate will be option "C"
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
I am suprised at the amount of electronic voting problems in US & Canada that I read about on Slashdot.
A big democracy like India successfully used electronic voting in the last election.
Indian voting systems using basic $200 machine while US machines are $3000 systems loaded with millions of lines of code.
380 million Indians cast their votes on more than 1 million machines and the election, the largest electronic voting in the world.
The lesson here is to simply the system. Don't make the system overtly complicated. The more complicated the system, the more bugs it will have and more difficult solutions to the problems.
"Once you vote, your vote is publically displayed on a website using some kind of voter ID. You can go home, look at your vote on the website and confirm that it's registered correctly"
What you suggest has been suggested here many times before, and the response is the same - it lends itself to vote buying and coercion.
Scenerio #1: Candidate A offers $10/vote. Go to campaign office after the election, give some intern at a computer your document showing your Voter ID, he punches it in, shows you voted for the Candidate, $10 cash and out the door. Bump it to $50 or $100 if you live in a particular district.
Scenario #2: Your Boss is a Republocrat, and you are a Democan. Boss implies that it would REALLY be in your best interest to vote his way, since he can't in good conscience employ someone from your party. If you refuse to give him your Voter ID number, you obviously don't trust him, and how can he employ someone who doesn't trust him?
Scenario #3 (just thought of this): You vote for Nalph Rader instead of the Democan. The Republocrat wins. You call up the election commision complaining that there was fraud - YOU certainly didn't vote for Rader, but that was how your vote was registered! (Butterfly Ballots, anyone?)
It is exactly because of the long history of vote buying, coercion, and fraud that voting is anonymous and secret. If an individual vote CAN'T be tied to an individual voter, then that voter is free to make their choice without concern for how it will affect their job, or will they get paid for their vote.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
...but they can't stop the election rigging by way of gerymandering that is prevalent in Québec.
It just wouldn't be the same without the secret ballot.
People generaly don't actively try break emergency or medical systems, while this represent a genuine risk for voting infrastructures. If election were run in the same usage context of, say, office software, then there wouldn't be any problems at all. But they aren't, and a temporary ban on electronic voting until "best practices" are established is a damn good idea.
The ignorants here are the US who refuse to see any problems, even if the entire information security community have been warning them of important security issues for years now. Quebec lawmakers listened to their experts instead of the sales pitch given to them by commercial voting systems providers.
I also agree with my government to "ban" evoting. Even though it may seems absurd to some of you, the paper trail is very important when the results are close. We have seen it here, as dc29a just said, but we have also seen it in the US! When the vote is so close that it could change name of the winner, how can you be certain that it is really the one who has the more vote who won and not just the one who hacked the system.
I'm not against technology when it offers something more, but in this case, the risks are just too high. Whatever you think "democracy" means, I don't think I'm against it when I rather vote on a piece of paper rather than on some "not so reliable" machine.
my two cents
Good going Quebec, we certainly don't want anybody to have any question as to whether they said yes or no (again) to the next referendum.
Voting solutions need to be pure hardware.
Software can be patched to do whatever I want it to do-- including counting votes one way and then erasing itself after if a certain pattern of votes are entered .
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I did E-Voting last year and the process was simple, quick, and the machine did have a paper ballot that i could see be printed on the side of the machine. Now you say when these machines are error proof the can be used, but I sure have heard/seen alot of tampering of paper ballots why don't we ban them since they can be tampered with by human counters humans who are much more likely to make a mistake if it be intentional or not.
So far I've read dozens of reports over the past 5-6 years about failed, hacked, and broken electronic voting machines.
Don't worry, it's not that bad. Actually there was only one report about abused and broken electronic voting machines. The rest were slashdot dupes.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I've worked as a poll clerk in Canada (a long time ago, the first election I ever voted in). There is nothing wrong with paper ballots marked with a plain old pencil. As I recall, polls closed at 8pm, and we had everything counted twice and reported by 8:45pm. The system is completely accountable and there is basically no practical way to cheat the system especially with party observers present.
Americans seem preoccupied with goofy electronic systems with punched chads and flakey proprietary software. Just mark an X friends, it is the simple solution.
Very true.. We can split an atom, send remote controlled robots to Mars but can't make s simple voting poll system.. I guess this means all the Slashdot polls are flawed as well. Oh well..
Whats so hard about making a touch screen system thats not connected to any other computers or network. You vote and the machine then spits out a card that IT punched holes in. You can then look it over and hand that card in. Easy touch screen and has the paper trail and can't be hacked into from the outside.
Cool!
As a Montreal resident, not only is this possibly the first time I've seen Quebec in a Slashdot headline, but it's announcing something I agree with, too! Hurray!
It's nice election officials in Quebec did what seems like a pretty successful review; I'll be happy to approve optical scan voting when these problems are addressed. Until then, it's good at least some jurisdictions in North America realise a lack of paper ballots can prevent recounts.
I know it's a joke, but damnit! You can't say "just one" it is one too many!
Won't someone think of the TREES!
:)
Yes, the trees that were chopped up and mixed with resin to form paper ballots are now chopped up and incinerated to boil water to make electricity to power the voting machines. Let's think of the trees...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I disagree. Electronic voting will never be as good.
The good thing about paper voting (apart from the fact that it works and is well tried and tested) is that the general public (who after all have to put trust in the system) can understand how it works and have some idea about the safeguards that prevent tampering. They also understand that there are things like independent observers ensuring the process goes as it should.
Compare that with electronic voting where almost every voter has no idea how the system works, no idea how any independent observers would be able to verify that the system works, and no idea how to determine whether or not they can trust any part of the process.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
So that's what it's called.. we used exactly that in the last municipal election for my riding in St-Laurent Quebec.
It seems that many people are assuming that Quebec used the same Diebold electronic voting machines, when they were clearly not. This press release is outlining the problems of an electronic means of counting paper ballots, which are 100% verifiable if the counting machine fails.
Here's how the voting process went: After voting on a ballot that looked similar to previous elections, the ballot was inserted into a black cardboard holder, which was then fed into a rather simple looking machine. I was astonished when I later found out that these boxes were actually counting the votes as they went in. (And yes, I do live, eat, drink Pepsi and vote in Quebec)
If we have problems counting regular-looking paper ballots, how are we supposed to trust our votes to a machine?
As you say, paper ballets have been around for centuries and work just fine.
Won't somebody think of the dancers?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
As far as I can see manual counting of paper ballots should sit very comfortably with anyone who advocates open source projects - they seem to have the same advantages:
I'm sure there's more, but you get the idea.
I tell you, I'm not much of a programmer, but I am convinced that, given a year, I could design and program an effective voting software with: 1) A paper trail sufficient to be used for a manual recount. 2) Reasonable measures to ensure 1 voter 1 vote. 3) A barcode crypto scheme to tie #1 and #2 together so that every database record can, if required, be verified against every paper record. 4) A completely open and peer-reviewed code base.
But as many people have already noted, this problem is not technical, but political. They keep it political by leveraging the ignorance of the populace regarding all things technical. The classic magic black box syndrome.
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
Besides which, they keep shutting down paper mills in Quebec, putting people out of work. They could use a little support.
The failures themselves won't go out and fix themselves.
Average people, like you and me, need to demand change from our representatives.
How many slashdot posts have you made about electronic voting machines? How many letters have you written to your representatives?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Pen and paper voting works fine and worked fine.
Electronic voting is just a side-affect of the attitude that we need to apply technology to every single aspect of our lives for it to be considered truly 'efficient'...which IMHO, is idiotic and dangerous.
There is just way too many holes, complications and 'black-boxed' elements of electronic voting for it to be reliable and trustworthy at this point.
Im honestly in shock and awe that no one from Diebold is in jail at this point, given what happened during the last election and what took place afterwards as well, as far as evidence of machine tampering and malfunction / errant voter black-listing etc.
Voting is suppose to be simple, not brain surgery.
Why is it so difficult to match the number of registered voters in a district, with the number of recieved votes (to fight ballot stuffing) and to ensure locked ballot box security when voting is done (to avoid tampering)?
I think this is a smart move on the part of Quebec.
The Directeur Général des Élections (DGE) is in charge of all elections/referendum within Québec.
In Canada, federal elections are handled by Elections Canada. Rules are virtually the same (exceptions listed below).
Registration. Everyone is automagically registered. If you file an income tax report, you are registered UNLESS you specifically ask so (a part of the tax form asks for it).
When the election comes, the DGE sends out notices to everyone on the list. If there are mistakes, or you are not listed, you can ask to be properly registered at the local election office (usually, one by riding).
The part-time election personnel is chosed riding by riding. The incumbent hands out the "important" jobs (poll center supervisor, revision official, scrutineers) while the "less important" jobs (security, assistant revisor, poll clerk) are left to the other candidates.
Training for the poll workers lasts about 3 hours, and happens a week before the election. It explains what are the general procedures. We are also given a book that explains special cases, which we have to read (but are not tested). The scrutineer is given the ballot box which contains the paperwork. We are to meet 2-3 days (usually in the scrutineer's home) before the election to check that the contents are okay; we are to report discrepancies so they can be fixed in time.
We are given a list of all the people entitled to vote (about 400 per box), with those who voted in advance and those who moved-out or otherwise no longer voting there crossed-out.
On election day, at each poll you have the scrutineer, the poll clerk, and as many representatives as there are candidates. The representatives are there to watch that everything is done properly; they can question some aspect of the procedure, like question the identity of voters and question the admissibility of a ballot when counted (but in all respect, the scrutineer has the last word). And representatives can be expelled at will if they don't behave.
Showing ID is not compulsory. But in Québec, anyone can demand a voter identify himself; however, in Canada, election officers are specifically prohibited by law from asking for ID. What is interesting is that many people spontaneously show their ID when they come to vote, and we have to tell them they don't need to (this shows how people accept to show their ID in order to vote).
The situation is different in Québec because federalist parties were caught red-handed rigging elections, so when the law was put in front of parliament, they could not very well vote against it, given the huge amount of egg on their face...
When the voting begins, the ballot boxes are sealed after everyone present agrees that they are empty. The representatives can sign the seals, and note down the serial numbers.
The ballots are printed on stapled booklets, from which the ballots are detached. Each ballot has the list of candidates (or options for referenda), a space for the scrutineer to put his initials and two identical serial numbers.
The serial numbers are on different tear-off stubs; the first remains in the booklet, the second is kept on the ballot when it is handled to the voter.
Before handling the ballot to the voter (AND ONLY AT THAT TIME!!!!), the scrutineer marks the back of the ballot with his initials, with the stub with the serial number in plain view.
The voter votes, and either tears-off the serial number stub in plain view of everyone, and shows the scrutineer's initials (this is to insure that this is the same ballot that was handed earlier - in order to avoid "telegrams"), or the scrutineer does it for him without unfolding the ballot. THE STUB WITH SERIAL NUMBER IS TO BE KEPT!!!
The voter then puts the ballot in the box, a
Mark sense voting ballots IS what was used in Montréal, Québec when I voted in 2005... Sorry but even this technologie seems to be flaky. :(
There's a strong tendency among geeks and technology buffs to want to see e-voting, but I can't really figure out why. It's completely unnecessary and the proposed advantages of e-voting are precisely what make it unattractive. We like our voting mechanisms to have physical evidence that we actually did vote. We need it to be capable of being analyzed and understood by someone with a minimum of technical knowhow as an exigency of the fact that volunteers work polls, etc.
Essentially, we need to rethink the paper ballot, not think past it.
I'd love to know how an op topic remark is flaimbait!
Assuming that "Larus" is from the USA, then what is wrong is that not enough elections are bought in Quebec, and not enough Quebequais (spellink anyone? help?) are randomly attacking poor countries for dubious reasons....
/G
See? Complete lack of Democracy!
Obviously, when a machine with no auditing features is used in an election, there's a very high chance that whoever ordered or built said machine did so with the purpose of being able to manipulating the result. But that's not the only and not even the worst problem.
While the manipulation problem can be fixed by generating a voter-verifyable paper trail (NOT an easy problem, but doable), this still leaves us with the harder problem of secrecy (or potential lack thereof).
A voter who enters his decision into an electronic black box can never be sure that his vote is not secretly recorded and used against him later. The problem here is not only that this actually happens, the rumour that it MIGHT happen is already enough to make a free election impossible.
Why must all elections for all offices local, city, county, state, and nationwide take place on the same day?
We try to saturate all of our voting into one day, and for what? Why not have 4 election days a year, instead of one. The national elections will still be in November. State elections in February. City and County elections in May. Local referendums, bonds, and other non-candidate-oriented votes in August.
All dates above are arbitrary (so is the first Tuesday in November.) We're not stupid, we can keep up with 4 days. And then we can use paper ballots, because counting is exponentially easier. Why are we so hard on ourselves for one week in November?
... to live in a place where the government cares about fair elections. I'm hoping that my district advances to the point where everyone who votes gets a blue finger.
British Columbia held a vote at the last election as to whether we wanted to enact a proportional representation system, the verdict was no.
BC and PEI both have already had referenda on this topic, and BC plans to re-ask the question in 2009. Quebec, as you say, is looking into it. Ontario will have a referendum in 2007 on the topic, following the report of the Citizens' commission report, due out in early next year.
Four out of ten provinces, representing over two-thirds of the Canada's population, is not "rare".
Of course, as a proportion of (Canada + US + China)'s population, then maybe this could be considered "rare".
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
For the most part, as long as the hardware used is simple and not networked, opscans have been a pretty safe way of voting. There have been problems but usually on the tabulator side (different issue) and those on the scanner-side have well-known fixes.
Opscan however doesn't meet HAVA requirements for disabled voters -- which has been used as a trojan horse to push e-voting (not that there doesn't need to be support for the disabled). To meet both the needs of the disabled and the need for security, a system that has the look/feel of a e-voting machine but does nothing but print out an opscan ballot that gets thrown in with the rest is likely the future of voting for the next couple decades, once the scum fraudsters have been purged from the system.
This sort of "computer assist to human oversight" can be applied to other areas. For example, it is best if individual scanners are not networked (even more importantly that they have no internal cronograph-level clock) and just spit out a paper total count themselves. They could just as easily also spit out a mag card, such that instead of entering the numbers from the tab slips into the final tabulator, they can load the contents of the mag card and then just verify the numbers from the paper slip == less chance of keying error.
Someone had to do it.
Paper ballots make much more sense. Consider:-
The complexity of the data is about as small as it gets. There's nothing like an interest calculation or even an "age of customer" to be determined. All you need to store, per ballot, is something like a byte. There is only one thing you ever do with the data. Count it. It doesn't lend itself to complex data processing Once counted, there is rarely a chance that you'll need the ballot again. So, they don't need that mass storage benefit of computers. Paper can be destroyed, but a black box containing a hard drive with votes can more easily be damaged. See what happens when you put a piece of paper next to an electromagnet. There is no big requirement for speed. People can't vote if there's no electricity. Whilst it may cost more to hire hand counters, you only do it, at most, once a year. Defrauding a ballot box with paper at least has the possibility of more forensic information being available. Change the data on the hard drive - who's going to know?There are plenty of places where automated, computerised systems make sense. But vote counting works just fine manually.
Oh and, Quebec is one of the very rare provinces/states/territories in North America that is running serious studies about having a proportional representation modeled election and parliament.
n tation
And for those who don't know what Proportional Representation is. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_represe
If we are ever to fix our problems in the States with politics, we'd have to move to this type of system. I basically does away with having a 2 party system and you end up with being able to have many parties. Israel uses it and basically a new political party was able to get more votes than the two existing ones.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
TABERNAC!
Why bother with the expense of the machine then? What's so hard about having a booth with an indelible marker and having people fill out the forms that way?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
You're not a true Quebecois unless you drink Pepsi and eat Maywest and Lays for breakfast.
MABASPLOOM!
"How many failures does it take before those providing the crap equipment are sued and forced to FIX the results of their incompetent designs and testing?"
The results ARE fixed. Oh. You meant fix the machines, not the elections. Nevermind.
The spelling is "quebecois".
I did'nt vote for this.
Simple, they blame the federalists for vote rigging.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
a moratorium would be more appropriate. There are open source voting systems (google for "open source voting") developed by the Open Voting Consortium which can do it all - enable electronic voting, provide a paper trail and the ability to do recounts/vote verification by using the paper trail.
/. is, right? :).
To those who have knee-jerk reactions when they hear "electronic voting" and think "fiasco" right off the top of their head - open-source, non-vendor,non-proprietary electronic voting+paper trail ARE possible - _today_.
Now the hardest part about this isn't the technology, but rather getting off your bum, visiting congress.gov, writing your congress(man|woman) by email/letter, urging them to adopt open-source voting. Check out http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/ - it should make you a believer, even if you are technologically challenged (and who on
'A lie if repeated often enough, becomes the truth.' - Goebbels
I am a strong supporter of paper ballots and a strong opponent of electronic voting machines. That said, there are certain people (e.g., a person who is blind) who appreciate the privacy offered by an electronic voting machine that can, for example, read the ballot to the voter.
My solution? Have an electronic voting machine that can print out a completed ballot that looks exactly like all the other ballots that were filled out by hand. Of course, if I were to use such a machine, I would like a close friend or relative who has no physical challenges to verify that my computer-printed ballot reads in the way I intended.
Then you stuff the ballot into a locked box, and later the election officials count the ballots while being observed by community members, and call in the results, overheard by community members.
Voila- magic!
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
The link is to the evaluation report, not to the news of the moratorium or ban.... Anyone have a link to that?
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
with proportional representation in Quebec is that the power will then shift towards Montreal. Since Montreal has over half the population of the province, it will be trivial to overrule the wishes of the more remote/less populous regions, including the capital. That's the one gripe I have with proportional representation in Canada, there are too many regions which have special needs, but little population. those regions will essentially be ignored by the power base in the big cities such as Toronto, and Montreal. I don't want to see that happen, having lived in a more remote area of the province myself.
I then say unto ye, is it democratic to let a small area like Montreal dictate the future course of the entire province?
Although Quebec IS one of those rare provinces/territories/regions to NOT have any real right-wing parties... I'm sorry but the ADQ doesn't count.
. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S.
/03/03_200.html
/pfindex.html
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/ 042804landes.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diebold
2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry.
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0916-04.htm
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/ 042804landes.html
3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/private_comp any.html
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/ 042804landes.html
4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/m ain632436.shtml
http://www.wishtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1647886
5. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines.
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/031004Fitraki s/031004fitrakis.html
6. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-connected with the Bush family, was recently caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee.
http://www.blackboxvoting.com/modules.php?name=New s&file=article&sid=26
http://www.hillnews.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx
http://www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/000896.ph p
7. Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush's vice-presidential candidates.
http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_28/b3689130.ht m
http://theindependent.com/stories/052700/new_hagel 27.html
8. ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the U.S. and counts almost 60% of all U.S. votes.
http://www.essvote.com/HTML/about/about.html
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/ 042804landes.html
9. Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
http://www.itworld.com/Tech/2987/041020evotestates
10. Diebol
At the end of the day, it costs more money for that jurisdiction to do e-voting than it does to do it the good ol fashioned way, and that's hire cheap employment and just have them count it.
E-voting is only a hot issue because for medium to large jurisdictions (by number of registered voters and average turnout per election), it's ridiculously expensive to hire X number of people every election to just count ballots. They can hire a fraction of those people, just pay an election company X number of dollars per device they provide them, and they can record and tabulate election results without a gymnasium full of people counting ballots.
What I just described was the original intent of e-voting. But what every person with no knowledge of elections other than what NBC nightly news tells them doesn't ever understand is that some problems cannot be solved with technology. The reason the e-voting issue in the USA is so complicated, is because e-voting is trying to solve the issue of money, when what is driving that is the extremely convoluted and out-of-date election laws on the books. E-voting would be pretty damn simple if all you had to do was say:
1. Present a voter with a ballot in the nation's native language
2. Present ONE ballot style to EVERY user in X jurisdiction
3. Allow ballot to be tied directly to the registered voter
4. Only allow voter to vote in the jurisdiction of their residence
But, those four points I just outlined are illegal EVERYWHERE in the USA. If you do #1, you are disenfranchising those who don't necessarily speak/read the language, who are still allowed to vote by law.
If you do #2, one of the political parties will sue you, because for quite a lot of jurisdictions out there, you have to randomize positions on a ballot. Case in point, if George Bush appears as option 1 on a ballot in Dallas, Texas for president, likely he will NOT appear as option 1 on a ballot in Houston, Texas. Seriously. Does it matter? Probably not. But the political parties think that if you are listed as option #1 on a ballot more times than any other candidate, then you have an unfair advantage.
If you do point #3, it can be argued that each person's individual vote is no longer private...now the voter registration data can be directly linked to a person's party association, and more importantly their ballot that they cast...so someone can now go back and look at how this person or persons voted. If the wrong people get a hold of that info, think of union vote corruption...influencing someone to vote a certain way so that their family stays safe...things along that line. So, point 3 is also illegal EVERYWHERE in the USA.
Take point 4. Now, if someone is serving in Iraq, is on vacation, etc etc...you're now disenfrancising them because there's no way they can vote in Bismarck, North Dakota if they are fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
The reason voting is not simple, and anyone who says it is is an idiot, is because it starts with any one of the above 4 things I just outlined. Electronics makes it much easier to comply with those things, and it's cheaper...assuming someone has done their homework on the code logic, it's been audited, etc etc. But there's still a cost to that. Now you must put your trust in a machine and the company who made that machine...there's nothing wrong with doing that. But, that machine MUST be audited.
The perfect model for the e-voting case really is the gaming industry (casinos). Those machines are so locked down and audited. But the denominator there is money. With e-voting, there is no one common denominator. Money IS a consideration, but it's not the only consideration. At the end of the day it should be a risk analysis for each type of jurisdiction. I would argue that small jurisdictions would never need e-voting if only 2000 or less people show up in said jurisdiction to vote. It's a pretty simple deal to print that many ballots and hire a few people for a couple
Humans cannot be proven to be incorruptible and still have the knowledge necessary to build one of these systems. There are no programmers who were raised in Skinner boxes by turing machines, so any programmer may have undisclosed affiliations that would cause him or her to build vote-modifying malware into a system.
Here's a scenario to illustrate what I mean:
Smedley is a fanatic Democrat. He believes anything is justified as long as the glory of the Democratic Party is served.
Smedley is hired to build a voting machine, because he's a crackerjack programmer.
Smedley knows his source code will be examined. Smedley knows his binaries will be disassembled.
So, Smedley persuades Richard Stallman to put the Thompson hack into gcc. Then Smedley recompiles his employer's compiler and their disassembler with the hacked gcc. Smedley's version of the hack will both insert the malware in every executable and prevent display of the malware in any other program, such as disassemblers.
No amount of code auditing of the voting machine source can find the malware if the auditing tools themselves are compromised.
If the ballots were human-counted paper, you'd have to suborn thousands of volunteers in order to change the vote. But with Smedley's malware, two programmers (Smedley and RMS) can implement a vote-changing virus that will throw the counts in every machine simultaneously.
That's why centralized vote-counting strategies are no good. You need distributed counting by independent minds so that the inevitable corruption is limited, and hopefully cancels out on a larger scale.
Here's what we did in Toronto, and i think it is perfectly adequate. You get a bit of paper, and a pencil. you mark your X in the spot adjacent the guy/gal you like. you put the paper in a cardboard folder they gave you for privacy and hand it to teh clerk. the clerk feeds teh top of your ballot into a machine (s/he can't see your vote because of the foler). the machine sucks in your ballot out of hte folder. the machine then READS your vote and displays it on a small LCD only you can see. you verify and move on. If you got it wrong, you can re-do. if you f**ked up and voted in two spots or whatnot, the ballot is rejected. at the moment the polls close the accumulated votes are downloaded and counted almost instantly. making for quick, painless votes. could the machines get hacked? yah sure, but the humans involved in the process are just as hackable and always have been. so it won't solve corruption, but it at least doesn't make corruption EASY.
People are greedy or lazy, or worse - both.
The truth is, your employer cannot fire you from a job in the US for going to vote on national voting day. To threaten or actually fire an invidual because they performed their duty (yes, DUTY) as a citizen is tantamount to election fraud - no different than threatening or actually firing an individual because they didn't vote the way you wanted them to. Can you say "lawsuit"?
So, where does that leave us?
Basically, an employer can choose to not pay you for the hours you didn't work (if you are an hourly wage earner) - thus we are left with "greed" on the part of a citizen, who believes that their hour of time is worth more than their own voice (however small it is, of course) for government. People who work minimum wage jobs simply believe their voice is worth less than a double quarter-pounder value meal at McDonalds.
If it isn't greed, then it is simply laziness. Polling stations are open for some pretty long hours (12 or more, IIRC) on the weekday that voting is held on. Now, unless you are holding down two separate full-time minimum wage jobs, and they are located next to each other, I guarantee you that you have time somewhere in the day during polling hours to make it to the voting booth and spend 15-20 minutes voting. Now, you may get some pay docked (in which case if the money is more important, you fall into the category of "greed" - see above), but if you show up late and your employer fires (or threatens to fire) you - guess what? You have reason for legal action against your employer - lawyer up and make some bank!
Disregarding the cost issue (and it is something that should be studied, because cost is a big issue), having multiple elections per year sounds like a good solution - maybe it will get people more interested in their government and the process as a whole. Unfortunately, I doubt this is going to happen, as people seem more likely to choose to give up their voice in the process, in exchange for a little silver (and believe me, this doesn't just occur with only hourly minimum wage earners - you see it across all economic strata), or simply for the chance to sleep in an extra hour (or go home earlier).
Thus the sheeple get the government they deserve, and they shouldn't bleat about it when it doesn't suit them. After all, they didn't participate in the process, now did they?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
It seems that many people are assuming that Quebec used the same Diebold electronic voting machines, when they were clearly not. This press release is outlining the problems of an electronic means of counting paper ballots, which are 100% verifiable if the counting machine fails.
That's what we had in Montréal. But in other cities like Quebec City, they had actual electronic unverifiable voting machines. And that's where they had the most problems.
Works in Iraq and would work here to prevent multiple voting.
Preventing punching out non-punched chads or messing with electronic records would remain harder. Putting a guard on busses for the elderly should help cut down on the tire-slashing.
I live in Québec, and I'm *SO* glad this happened!! Vive le Québec!
how is babby formed?
paper ballets have been around for centuries and work just fine.
Rather than dancing (;-) around the topic, I'll just point out that there have been some rather large-scale problems with paper ballots, too.
Here in the US, recent elections have been followed by a number of news stories about boxes of uncounted balloots discovered days or weeks later. In each case, there were reassurances that "Someone had accidentally misplaced them", and that they didn't change the outcome of the election. Here in the Boston area, the last big election had a block of 10,000 ballots "misplaced" and then "discovered". Somewhere else in the country, there was a similar story about 20,000 misplaced ballots.
Well, maybe. But this does suggest the obvious question: When we read that only 65% of the adult population voted, how do we know that's accurate? Perhaps 95% voted, and 30% of the ballots were "misplaced", purely by accident of course. How do we know?
It's something to think about the next time you read about low voter turnout.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Our experiences in America indicate that we aren't grown up enough yet to have a machine-only ballot count. The machine can give us the quick-fix numbers that so many seem to value, but elections should be only be certified after a paper count *in the open*.
Canada's system sounds solid and reliable. Congratulations, and wish us luck, we need it.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
Paper ballots, electronic ballots... half the eligible voters in the US don't vote anyway.
A guy I know at work was showing off his newly-won naturalization document today. Even he's not voting.
Please mod parent up, VERY insightful.
Oh wow!
I believe the exact opposite, Montreal doesn't get its fair share. The more we'd invest there, the richer the province would be.
Mtl CMA population was 3.2M/7.2M in 2001. It has about 55 of the 125 electoral divisions. Far from "over half the population". I know it is normal for a coward to fear, but proportional won't change a thing for that since the population is well distributed amongst the divisions. I fact, I fear proportional would mean more minority governements. I don't want an Equality party that caters only to anglos, nor their counterparts.
Still, I have to say that Quebec has the best electoral system of all North America. Its stringent rules limit the interferences by companies in what should be a citizen duty. This is the real legacy of Levesque and the PQ.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
Maywest ? You surely mean Joe Louis, right ?
:wq
It is possible to trust a democracy on the internet.
Yes, no voting station, no paper, no physical presence. Because electrons allow one thing: to share data around.
An election on the internet could be verified in real time by all interested parties.
There are three elements to use:
* P2P servers
* electoral list
* PGP signature
Using those three elements, you could do something you can really trust.
Of course there are other matters now open to discussion. Vote selling is the first that come to mind... it might be the price of a modern Direct Democracy.
My Ruby on Rails project implementing those ideas: http://leparlement.org/
To talk and exchange on security: http://leparlement.org/security
Search for year 2000 election and the state of florida. Seems people can't punch holes either.. Maybe a machine that has a sharper cutting surface and not some piece of plastic poking the holes would be better. One can only hope
"Sometimes statistics is the truth and smarmy little me say are lies."
Sometimes, statistics tell the truth, and smarmy little men lie. Values voters, yeah, that's what happened, they voted their values, that's why the polls are off the mark.