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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."
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.
..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?
The best electronic voting system I've seen uses a system similar to those Scantron tests I used to take in highschool. The format of it is a paper ballot with questions / candidates, underneath the question is instructions for voting, (ie. select up to 10 candidates from the following list). Directly beside each answer / candidate is a fairly large oval to fill in with pencil. The ballot box looks like a LaserJet 4 that takes paper in instead of spitting it out, the ballot is slotted so that the box will only accept it inserted correctly. When you insert it a simple LED display aknowledges that your vote was accepted.
It's simple, there is a paper copy if anything goes wrong and it enables mechanical counting of the ballots. I'm not sure why no one else can design a system like this.
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.
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.
You don't have to, it's already been done.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Sure they can. You do what the federal government did: place the power of drawing election boundaries in the hands of an arms-length, independant group (in this case, Elections Canada).
And it gets worse. If they know who your friends, neighbours and family are, democracy is dead and buried. All they have to do is create a different, personalised version of the list for every voter; showing their own vote, and those of their close friends and family, rendered correctly. My blue-rinsed aunt voted conservative
There's just no way to check a vote after the event. Any method you try can be subverted and the stakes are high enough that somebody will want to try. Better to try to make sure there is no need to check.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!