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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.
They must hate freedom (tm).
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.
They have only taken the stance 'not for now'. Given the current state of voting machines this the right answer, IMHO. Once voting machines actually solve the current problems of paper voting, without adding new issues, I am sure Quebec will reconsider. 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).
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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.
No its not sad to see it thrown out. The Quebec electoral system is very simple. In the municipal election you have 2 vote (councillor and mayor), in the federal and provincial election you only vote once (for the member of parliament). So its very easy to count paper ballots, its done within 1-2 hours after the election closes in most cases. We have been perfecting paper ballots for over 200 years. So yes, they are much more reliable. Electronic voting in our system is pointless, its more expensive and has no benefits.
An election is not only about counting the votes, but the process being accountable and verifiable by every voter.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
.. 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!
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.
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.
http://www.elections.act.gov.au/Elecvote.html It's open source, it's verifiable, it's secure.
But doesn't even the most open, verified system still suffer from having the "Vote for Bob" patch installed at the last minute by an official-looking guy with glasses and a clipboard? I know, this shouldn't be allowed, but it seems to happen all the flippin' time! People just don't yet understand what's required to keep a computer secure, but it's pretty easy to understand "Don't let anyone steal or tamper with these little pieces of paper!" Security has to deal with what actually happens in the real world, not in theory, and out here in the real world, computers are a mystery to most election officials in a way that pieces of paper are not. This mysteriousness can lead to bad decisions about what kind of access is allowed.
OK, the Australian system is voter-verifiable, but if you're going to need to have all the voters bring back their receipts afterwards, why not just count the paper to begin with?
If I were an American, I'd be very frightened about voting using an electronic machine, given all the horror stories I've been reading. And as a Canadian, I'm quite happy with our paper ballot system, and I'll resist any attempt to replace it!
Then again, there isn't much of a pressing need nor want for electronic voting in most Canadian elections. Our electoral system is set up in such a manner that most elections can be performed easily with a list of options on a simple paper ballot. My understanding is that the Americans want electronic voting machines due to the complexity of American elections, with party affiliations, multiple offices, and so on being voted for simultaneously. For now, paper voting, at least for simple electoral systems such as used in most of Canada's elections, seems to be perfectly reasonable. It's easy to understand, it leaves a paper trail, it's difficult to tamper with and it allows for an easy recount.
So yes, I would agree with the ruling, that, at least for now, there is no point in implementing e-voting machines considering the complexities of security involved.
..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?
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.
You can't have exactly who was voted for on the receipt given to the voter. Coercion and vote selling are enabled by having this on the receipt, so you can't have it on the website either. The manual recount through the internal receipts is valid... but if anyone gains access to this you've got a nice list of who voted for who (assuming you can tie the UUID back).
One mechanism around this not to include the who was voted for on the receipts/public db, but use some anonymous value (displayed to the voter when voting). Unfortunately you can't then verify the count using the receipts as you don't know who was voted for.
Fun this one isn't it?
"If you unscrew Bill Gates' navel will the bottom fall out of the software market?"
The paper ballots are effectively useless because firstly, recounts are only done automatically if the margin of victory is extremely low. A clever hacker will make sure the margin is slightly greater than the trigger.
Secondly, many secretaries of state are instituting punitive costs charged to the candidate demanding a recount. It costs millions to challenge the count. A lot of campaigns find it hard to justify the cost, and may well not have the money left over.
And third, I strongly opine that even if the paper ballots clearly show that the electronic totals were altered, the news media will bury the story, if they don't simply report it as a conspiracy theory and bad methodology counting the paper. After all, Gore had the majority of the cast votes in 2000 per the media-sponsored recount done after the election, with bullet-proof counting methods and both parties staring at the process. To THIS DAY people don't even know that the recount was done, and if they do, they concentrate on the recount as per Gore's original request, where he barely lost, rather than the state-wide recount done by the Tribune-led media project, which showed he barely won -- if all the votes that clearly showed a choice were counted.
Fourthly, a HELL of a lot of "spoiled ballots" are being tossed these last six years, far more proportionally that were found before. I don't think people magically started messing up their ballots. There is a heavy finger on the scale, one that favors Republicans. Since they are spoiled, so-called, we don't count them again. Toss out enough "spoiled" ballots from poorer (black/college) Democratically leaning areas, and they have plausible deniability as to why the e-count doesn't match the paper count. And yes, since the computer would be printing the ballots, this should be a silly argument, BUT THEY WILL MAKE IT ANYWAY, and the assembled dopes of the media will swallow it, as they have all the other garbage in every major election since 2000 (statistics don't work anymore? Only Democrats lie to exit pollsters, only in close races? COME ON!).
Guaranteed, two weeks from now: Republicans will hold on to both houses. By slim margins. No paper trails. And all these polls showing that Democrats will win by landslides? Dismissed as conspiracy theories. Just statistics.
Sometimes statistics is the truth and smarmy little me say are lies.
"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
Advantages of electronic voting over paper voting:
1) Faster to get the results.
Disadvantages
1) Independant observers cannot observe that votes are being counted correctly.
2) Voters cannot easily understand or see how the system works.
3) Voters are likely to distrust a system they cannot see functioning.
I think the disadvantages greatly outweigh the advantages.
I don't know if you have ever seem a normal (non-electronic) voting booth run properly, but it is a marvel of common sense and simplicity. I don't understand why anyone would want to replace that.
I was trying to say most Americans are idiots
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and...
joke---->o
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you --->|
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
One thing that should work well would be to use a hybrid setup. Like:
1. Voter uses electronic system to vote and verify that the selections are correct (in large print and easily identifiable so certain Floridians can't complain afterwords).
2. Vote is recorded electronicly.
3. Paper receipt is printed for the voter.
4. Bubble sheet is printed and given to the voter. This should be verified by the voter and then given to the poll workers.
5. Poll workers run bubble sheet through scanner to verify.
6. After election, all bubble sheets are scanned again and compaired to both the electronic count and the scans done by the poll workers.
That should be at least as secure as the current non-electronic methods. Should also provide a higher accuracy rate.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
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.
There is also the fact that, in the US, idiots are allowed to claim special privileges because they are idiots. Remember the Butterfly Ballot fiasco? "The ballot was confusing, but I voted anyway, and now that my candidate lost, I want a re-vote because I'm not sure I filled out the ballot correctly."
E-voting does have one advantage in that it can give enough rope for idiots to hang themselves:
"You have selected Bat Puchanon, the Independent candidate for President. Are you sure"
[yes]
"Are you really sure?
[yes]
"Are you absofuckingposilutely sure? Because this is it for the next 4 years?
[yes]
"Really"
[yes]
"Thank you for voting. Have a nice day"
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
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 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
"An election is not only about counting the votes, but the process being accountable and verifiable by every voter."
:)
I just wanted to repeat that.
IMHO, that's the most important aspect of the electronic voting "debate." Paper-ballot elections can be hacked, and most certainly have been in the past; the fact that electronic systems can be hacked does not make them unique. (Although one could argue that, by the nature of a networked system, a single "hack" of an electronic system would have far more reaching impact than a localized ballot-stuffing effort).
The difference is whether it's possible to go back and, to the best of your/our collective ability, verify that the tabulation was correct and the votes legitimate. There is *no* way to do that with electronic voting, especially as advocated by Diebold & Co. Not only can you not tell if the votes are legit, but the very system used for tabulation and accounting is proprietary.
All told, this does *not* make for a safe, secure, reliable, accountable system that can be verified.
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
Unless the voter ID was given to you when you voted - say by being displayed on screen. If you don't provide any way to prove who they voted for, then vote-buying is still too risky. You could store the vote in a database as a counterpart number, which is the voter number encrypted with the voter's public key. To check the vote, they decrypt the entire list of counterparts (for their area I suppose, since downloading a country's worth of votes is going to use an enormous amount of bandwidth) with their private key, producing a list of seemingly random numbers (and they should be pseudo random, since using a consecutive base number is asking for trouble). They can now just check for their number and verify their vote. If they want to sell their vote then they have to be able to prove that their passphrase and vote number are valid, since almost any combination will turn up one match if the list is, say, 10 million votes per area. And if they want to change their vote they just go back to the polling station and type their voter number and passphrase in before voting to change their vote.
The problem I can see with this is people just typing in a random combination and hoping to change someone else's vote, or worse downloading the list and cracking it for all passphrases that change a democrat vote to a Republican, for example. This could be countered by the internal system storing information not made available on the online list, such as a (seeded) hash of the user's passphrase.
There are probably holes in this system, but I can't think of any except for the omni-present "the Government could rig it" problem. I don't think this would be any more serious than in a paper system; while the ability to change votes might make a tempting target for a trick - crack the hashes and change the vote - I don't think this would be easier than now, since standard SHA-1 still requires 2**69 operations to find a collision, more secure algorithms such as SHA-512 are available, and normally millions of votes would need to be changed to rig a national election.
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).
Being a Montrealer, and thus a Quebecer, I find the current system is fine. Not sure what a "Bubble Sheet" is, all we have when we vote is a small piece of paper with the names of the candidates (They don't even mention their political party on the paper), and a pencil. Go into the little booth, make your X in the appropriate circle, fold it up, drop it in the ballot box, go home.
What needs to be modernized? Is it just some delusion that because we'd be voting electronically that we'll get a more modern government?
"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.
Simple, they blame the federalists for vote rigging.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
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!