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Information Technology and Voting
ChelleChelle writes, "In an interview in ACM Queue, Douglas W. Jones and Peter G. Neumann attempt to answer the question: Does technology help or hinder election integrity?" From the article: "Work in this area is as politically loaded as work on evolution or stem cells. Merely claiming that research into election integrity is needed is seen by many politicians as challenging the legitimacy of their elections... One of the problems in public discussions of voting-system integrity is that the different participants tend to point to different threats. Election-system vendors and election officials generally focus on effective defense against outside attackers, usually characterized as hackers. Meanwhile, many public interest groups have focused on the possibility of election officials corrupting the results."
"Election-system vendors and election officials generally focus on effective defense against outside attackers, usually characterized as hackers."
Absolutely untrue. What could be more hacker-proof than a paper ballot system?
No, what election officials evidently want is speed and ease-of-use. Hopefully they also want accuracy and precision, but the evidence suggests that many don't value those as highly.
What election-system vendors want is money. They make promises regarding speed, ease-of-use, accuracy, and precision to get that money. They may have excellent intentions, too, but its the profit that motivates them.
"Meanwhile, many public interest groups have focused on the possibility of election officials corrupting the results."
That's always been a problem. It's just that now, the inner workings of many election systems are no longer observable. That makes it very difficult to verify the integrity of the election process.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Let's take a quick poll on /. to see if on-line polls are accurate. Remember, you're all on your honour to vote just once. Also, American citizens only.
FRIST POST
Warning: That question makes the assumption that "election integrity" actually even exists at all in the first place.
1) Sincere trust in the vote-counting process
2) Sufficient respect for the system to not make gratuitous accusations
To the degree that people rightly, wrongly or dishonestly don't buy into the system, there's no technology that can prevent that.
That said, that security researcher who is allways linked here, who argues for pencil and paper even though the blurbs always make him out to be a fellow source code-fetishist, is spot-on.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Technology hinders election integrity. How can you beat the integrity of a paper vote system, where the ballots are removed from sealed ballot boxes and counted immediately at the close of polling, with scrutineers from each party watching? There's very little scope for mischief.
Why bother bringing technology into the voting system? Polls are infrequent, so there's no real cost benefit to automation. It's not like voting is being done every day and needs to be automated.
Paid Q&A/Research
The amazing power of the microprocessor has become the "magic" of the 21st century. Security threat from terrorists? Make face recognizing, profiling, data sniffing software. Problems with elections? We need electronic voting!
While the concept of a truly programmable tool is an amazing and powerful thing, we have to remember that some tools are just not right for some jobs.
It has always seemed to me that Godel implies that 1) computers aren't great for security/intelligence work, and 2) computers aren't so hot as voting systems either. With logical systems you're faced with complete OR consistent, but not both...
The DRE machines are actually slowing down the voting
process, leading to long lines, with waits in the hours.
Many people can't wait that long and have to go to work.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Yes that's it! I think it's stupid to bring votes into a world were copying only takes a fraction of a second and where it's easy to monitor something AND it's easy to control and abuse things if YOU made the system, before you have the technical means to guarantee safety, whether it's for integrity, copying or the ability to have everything checked by independant(i.e. independant, not "independant") inspectors.
For the copying music industry, communities and various other businesses have already presented various ways to help their customers and to fight their customers with copying stuff. For the checking part I think it's possible but I also think it has been proven too many times that many people who are to handle this things don't have a clue about what is what when it comes to computers. About integrity I don't think it matches plain old white paper quite yet.
+1 Agree -1 Disagree
If people have no faith in the validity of the process - then the legitimacy of the results are shrouded in doubt - and then the basis of the democratic system starts to fall apart.
So by using technology the way the US is - no method to independently verify counts, no unalterable audit trail, lack of confidence in the integrity of the system - has not just hampered the process, but is severely damaging it
But my experience here in Orange County, CA with electronic voting was quite good. The click wheel interface looked the same as I remembered last election, and the device was easy to use. At the end of selection, it has you verify your votes on the screen in a final summary page. It then prints your votes on a sheet of paper and has you verify it again. Thusit has: ease of use, electronic counting, and paper trail for verification. I can't complain.
So while there may be a ton of voting systems that are flawed, it seems there are some excellent vendors out there. Now if only we could get more precincts to use the good systems.
Got Apathy?
Remember in politics truth is putty.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
How can they take offense to the people wanting transparency in elections? It is by the consent of the people that government is deemed legitimate, at least here. If the people demand to know elections are fair before giving that consent it is their prerogative -- some would even say, duty.
And with RovoCalls and voter list purging and obvious conflicts of interest all over the place, who really can be blamed for wanting some level of assurance that the procedures and structure of election administration itself has checks and balances -- and effective ones at that, not just some stuffed shirts who filled out their registration forms as D or R or another party, but whose real politics we have no way of knowing?
Someone had to do it.
.. of internet voting! Cut to four years later.... 'So, remind me again, how did we end up with a bunch of clones of Hank the Angry Drunk Dwarf running congress?'
You had the chance to use "beg the question" correctly for possibly the first time ever on Slashdot, and you didn't take it!
I got a music funny video in my email today that's entirely dependent on info technology, and which is all about voting.
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Like even more fraudulent Republican robocalls harassing voters, this time in Nebraska?
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I walked in prepared to wrestle with uncalibrated Diebold machines, and was greeted with the cardboard sheet and pen. It rocked. If you can't figure that one out, you aren't smart enough to cast an informed vote anyway.
When the tech is used directly by the people to communicate with each other, like live blogging from the voting in Ohio, it puts power in people's hands, which can outweigh all the tech power used against the people.
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Personally I think the second part of this paragraph is the most important. One of the huge problems with any use of information technology as a fundamental part of an election process is trust. Above anything else, an election system should be trusted by as much of the population as is possible, and to be fully trustworthy, the election process has to be fully visible and understood by as many people as possible.
It's quite easy for most people to understand a manual election. It's as simple as voters making a mark on a paper ballot, putting it in a secure box, and then having the votes counted afterwards. Any concerned groups from nearly any cross-section of society can examine the process, provide observers, and make sure it's being done properly.
Wrapping up the selection, verification and counting process inside computers reduces the amount of people who can understand what's happening by orders of magnitude. It doesn't really matter if the voting system is open source, well designed and administered, or whatever. It's always going to exclude the majority of the population from being able to fully understand how it works, and to trust that it's working properly.
It's quite possible that IT systems can help with elections, and they already are in some places, but I don't personally think they should be used at the expense of a manual process, and I don't think they should be depended on for anything other than an early indication of the result. Voting machines, when used, should always provide voter-verified paper trails that are always deposited in a secure box in a voter-verified way using a fully visible and voter-controlled process. Manual recounts should be mandatory if there's any reasonable doubt of the outcome by anyone.
The tech is, as usual, neutral. It's the technocrats, the people controlling the machine, who determine whether it helps or hurts us.
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Way I understand it, is that neither has been adequately addressed, despite all of the work that has been done (Ed Felton, Bev Harris, bradblog, the HBO documentary, RFK Jr, and countless others) that specifically states what the problems are w/the technology that is used. Instead, Diebold is whining "Trust us.", while collecting megabucks and going on their merry way.
The presumption that challenging the leadership (including the proprietary of that leadership) is somehow a bad thing is a holdover from the days of kings and dictatorships not true democracy.
Our leadership and voting systems systems are both human and falible. To presume that either has some sort of holy and inhuman infalability is to take the path to societal delerium. Merely claiming that research into election integrity is needed is seen by many politicians as challenging the legitimacy of their elections. To which the answer should be "yep" -- rise to the challenge or accept it's validity. That's the way of a true democracy.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Vote By Mail is the answer. To broken/crooked voting machines in polling places, at least. Then we've got to make sure the machines that count the votes aren't broken/crooked. But there's so much fewer of them, not operating in realtime, that it becomes a manageable IT problem rather than an IT nightmare.
We should probably replace the counting machines with humans, picked from random volunteers and OK'd (and monitored) by each party on the counted ballots, recorded on videotape. One step at a time.
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That a company that actually knew its ass-end from its elbows could put together a trustworthy voting system that could actually allow votes to be placed over the Internet and verified later by the person who placed them and no one else. If Google took a stab at writing a voting system, for example, I'm sure it'd be awesome and a lot less succeptable to fraud than even the paper ballot system is. I'm really surprised that they haven't done this yet just to prove what a technologically awesome company they are. They could probably even figure out how to make money with it...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I trust technology to let me send emails around the workcenter, I trust it to let me play games on my home system, and I trust it to let me write up form and documents and such, related to work. However, I have had more then enough problems with all of those, with corrupted documents, computer troubles related to gaming, problems with the email servers, and so forth, that I do not trust a computer implicitly to save my life or run an election. Computers are great tools, but they are not perfect tools. I frakking love technology, but that doesn't mean I implicitly support it. I also work with technology enough to realize that it is possible to get a computer to do whatever you want it to, if you know what you're doing. That means I've got little to no trust in the reliability of electronic voting machines and vote counting machines, and nobody else should either.
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to conviction
the Greens, the Libertarians, and the Socialists. Yes, the Socialists have done a hell of a lot--just look throughout History, especially Labor History, better yet, read "The Jungle". It demonstrates a complete failure of the free market. Third parties are really working to protect voters rights, while the democrats make speeches and then push it all under the rug and a majority of the republicans who deny a problem exists!
Became a U.S. citizen in the summer and voted for the first time in America today. I had registered a permanent absentee voter, and the process was very comfortable since I could vote in my own living room.
However, this is not a bullet-proof voting method. First, absentee ballots are verifiable by family members, which can lead to whole clans voting "unanimously". There's no way to prevent that without sacrificing absentee balloting, which would be a shame.
The other problem was more disturbing. The friendly polling station official took my absentee ballot and put it in some kind of sleeve or bag behind her desk. I was expecting much more respectful treatment of the ballot. Even stage magicians keep everything in plain view; I wouldn't expect anything less from a polling official.
I'd like to suggest that the voting computers are more complex than they really need to be. I mean, do you need a gigahertz processor to process checkmarks? So, let's think Keep It Simple, and pull an old old 80386 or so out of the dustbin, and use it as the starting point for a vote-collecting computer. It can't run Windows, so that means no "crackers" can use Windows vulnerabilities to mess with it.
Let's install FreeDOS, so we know that the Operating System is Open Source. There is a possibility that if it is stable enough, this part of the voting computer software NEVER needs to be upgraded. We all know that new features come with new bugs, so the simplest way to avoid it is to have the absolute minimum of features (therefore a minimal FreeDOS installation.
Now we need a vote-collecting program. Duh, most SlashDot readers could probably write something in ancient GWBASIC that could do that, and it would be Open Source, too. Unfortunately, the GWBASIC interpreter is a Microsoft program, not Open Source, which I think the FreeDOS team has not tried to clone. However, there is also an IBM program, QBASIC, which maybe IBM could be persuaded to release as Open Source....
Next, if possible, we would like the vote-gathering program to NEVER need to be modified. I am very suspicious of existing black-box voting machines that have their software modified for every election. It is like we are asking for the machines to be rigged to give someone the election. Consider a simple punch-card-counting machine. It has to know which punches stand for what/which person or thing being voted. And it has a clock. The software could check the clock, and during Certification Testing by election officials, work completely fairly. Come election day, it runs a modified program that gives away the election. How can we know, if we don't have access to the source code?
So the solution here is to try to never need to modify the vote-gathering program. One way to do that is to use a simple "template" document, that the voting program reads and displays to the voter. This template is the only thing that needs to be edited for each election. It contains the wording of any public initiatives being voted upon, it has page breaks for different screen presentations, and so on. It would also include "key" data for such things as Record #1 = Votes for Candidate Jones, Record #2 = Votes for Candidate Smith, etc. These record numbers refer to the simple datafile, why not a text file, that would hold the vote totals. This text file would have its data loaded for each voter, updated as votes are entered, and saved when the voter finishes. Its file name can be different for each election, based on the computer's clock, so old datafiles can be preserved for years before being deleted. The template file can always have the same name, but its entire content could be the first thing dumped into the data file.
The vote-collecting computer needs an Uninterruptable Power Supply, of course. And a special printer. We want a kind of "receipt printer" that can handle a huge roll of narrow paper. Like a tape recorder, this roll unwinds off the "blank" spool and winds onto the "printed" spool". There is a shield with a hole in it, so that only the most recently printed data can be viewed by the voter. As the voter declares that voting is complete, the next step is verify a display screen. If verified, and there are warnings about not being able to go back to change a vote after this point, the next step is to print it. The voter can compare the printout to the display screen. When that is accepted, then the voter leaves (and the saved datafile is updated, and a Form Feed scrolls some blank paper into the view of the next voter). Now we have a trustworthy paper trail for this machine, for each voting machine, in case of contested elections.
Since I didn't say that our old old computer processor is connected to obsolete hardware, we can imagine a
Actually, previewing before posting is the answer - to broken posts.
Vote by Mail is the answer to the question of how to vote.
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Here is the answer in it's simplicity.
Technology helps.
People hinder.
The IETF sets standards that govern the Internet. We need a comparable body to establish standards for hardware for voting equipment and befoe-and-after testing procedures to ensure software and configuration integrity, coupled with Open-Source software for the voting software itself. Open source software would ensure that the code doesn't have latent (or intentional) bugs. Robust before-and-after testing (e.g., external validation of the software integrity from outside the computer) by law enforcement personnnel would ensure they haven't been tampered with. The hardware standards (for keyboard, video, touchscreens, access ports for testing, etc.) would ensure that vendors can still make money selling the hardware, and independent testing would provide "Seals of Approval" for valid equipment. Is this so hard for politicians to understand? After all, voting and Habeas Corpus are the fundamental underpinnings of democracy. Let's solve the first with a federally-funded OSS project, while the courts restore the latter. --Carol Anne
... on whether or not the technology being employed is beyond the capability of the majority of the voters to understand.
Zero automation voting using paper ballots is fraught with possibilities for error, mostly due to the normal and expected error rates from human counting (and ANY automated system also has a certain error rate that is a function of its design), but including all of the fraudulent errors that interested parties on all sides are wont to insert into the machinery.
The problem with computerized voting systems is the leverage that the technology offers those who can subvert it. Whereas hacking a paper ballot voting scheme is pretty much limited in scope to the organization perpetrating the fraud (and as the number of participants in the fraud grows, so too does the likelihood that they will be exposed), the leverage offered by automation means that a handful of individuals can commandeer far larger blocs of votes, up to and including controlling the outcome of national elections.
Having most of the voting equipment made by a single manufacturer leads us right into the vulnerabilities of the monoculture, and having the designs and software be closed source proprietary designs means that when weaknesses are present, they will have much longer lifetimes than open source alternatives.
When the vast majority of the voters are clueless as to the risks inherent in the voting machinery they use, they are left with only blind faith (or ignorant assumptions that everything is fraudulent, and the accompanying miserable turnout to vote). When the bulk of the voters either understand how things work -- especially the error detection and correction mechanisms -- or have a reasonably large set of disinterested (i.e., they don't get their paychecks from those being elected or making the machines) experts that they can rely upon to provide the understanding that they lack, then automated systems can provide not only more convenient elections, but more secure and accurate ones as well.
But the way things are today, we're rapidly swirling down the drain. About the only thing that would awaken people to the problems that are gnawing away at our democracy would be for a major national election to be obviously thrown to an impossible victor in an undetectable manner. Eventually, that will happen. Then the political duopoly that runs this nation will either have to drag their heads out of the ground and change things, or lose their control over the government of the USofA.
Vote By Mail as practiced in Oregon is open to vote buying and voter intimidation.
I personally think the federal government should step in and remove all the canditates voted in (and overturn all the laws passed) since Vote By Mail was initiated in Oregon, under it's powers to ensure a democratic form of government in each state of the union.
Unlike absentee ballots Vote By Mail ballots are not invalidated by a vote on election day but are in leu of a real vote and so it does not have the same protection against vote buying as absentee ballots in other states do (where you can always sell your absentee and then override that ballot with a vote on election day.)
DENVER - The computer system that checks the registration of voters and allows them to vote was down citywide for around 20 minutes Tuesday afternoon. (Just pulled from www.9news.com)
The only way politicians would STOP treating the US as their own private empire and start listening to the people (whom they work for) is if the Justice (ha!) Department investigated ALL instances of voter fraud and charged ALL involved parties with TREASON. Of course all of the charges wouldn't stick, but I'm sure it would make most people sing!.
Find the ring leaders and, regardless if it includes the President of the US, publicly execute them for High Treason. They've shamlessly destroyed what this country was based on for their own personal gain. Execute them all.
Wait a minute. I got it. You could play with your magic nose goblins.
Information Technology and Voting
The two are simply incompatible.
Next?
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
I have posted links to Doug Jones' website on numerous occasions here on Slashdot and this seems like another good time to post them. His reports on the history and theory of voting are excellent.
In particular, I recommend his essay on Paper Ballots.
A Brief Illustrated History of Voting is another excellent essay.
There are dozens of technical essays on voting systems on Jones' main Voting and Elections site.
Things did move reasonably smoothly, unlike the fiasco in Denver blamed on the consolidation of precincts into "vote centers", newly revised ID requirements for voters, new registration verification software, voting machine failures, and power failures. The voting machines were on UPS, but registration list PCs were not!
You Denver folks have my sympathy!
where's the fucking speed? since there were so many electronic voting machines out there, why is it still taking hours to find out who won?
... just buy Brazilian technology on this matter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Brazil
One election day (08:00am to 05:00pm). More than 100 million voters. More than 80% of votes processed by 07:00pm (major results published). All votes processed by moon (same day).
I would like to lay out the fundamental argument against the use of computers anywhere in the chain of voting to vote counting. I don't take this from a luddite stance, but from a Information Theoretic stance. In Computer Science, we study what can and cannot be computed. We have found many limits in what computers can do. Unknown to most people, but there is no such thing as "verifying" a computer program. No process can detect all possible outputs from any sufficiently large computational system. Computer Scientists know this from very clever and fundamental arguments about how computation happens.
In "An Undetectable Computer Virus" David Chess and Steven White show that you can always create a vote changing program (called virus there) that no "verification software" can ever detect. They do this by a very clever argument which you can pursue in that paper, but the important thing to realize is that their results are not in doubt. You also should know that these arguments apply to every computer system that can ever be created. Therefore, if you use a computer anywhere in the vote counting process, you cannot be certain of the result.
I would like to point out that as much as I personally like open source software, it too falls victim to this very same argument. No computer is immune. No computer that ever will be constructed is immune. It is as impossible as traveling faster than the speed of light. Every computer system invented or YET TO BE INVENTED has this flaw. It can never work.
So, given that we can logically deduce that we can never trust computer voting, we are left with hand counting. We can use computers to double check our mathematics, but the marks should be on paper, counted by hand, tallied by hand, and only then added to a computer. It will be a chore, but it is the chore of representative rule.
Check the paper out at:
http://www.research.ibm.com/antivirus/SciPapers/VB 2000DC.htm
I'm going to take a few seconds to lay out the math side of the argument really quick. I'll try to write it for a layman audience. This is how we know we can never make a perfect "verified voting software" system.
Let us say that we have a program called BadVoteCheck. When you run BadVoteCheck, you input a "system" (Like for example Diebold voting code, or any other code you want to test) for BadVoteCheck to test. BadVoteCheck will only return true if the "system" (like a Diebold system) rigs a vote.
So we have
BadVoteCheck(System): This is our program that takes in voting software and checks it. It returns TRUE if we have software that doesn't count votes correctly.
System: This is the particular system we want to test.
BadVoteCheck(Diebold_Gems_old_version) should return TRUE because there was a way to hack the memory cards. I hope everyone can understand this. We are making a system to TEST for "Voting Accuracy".
Now here is the magic... I'm going to make a new program SneakyVoteChanger that works as follows
SneakyVoteChanger is
If BadVoteCheck(SneakyVoteChanger) then exit the program.
Otherwise fake_the_vote
So we run BadVoteCheck on this new program to see if it can "fake the vote" or change votes. However, doing this puts us into a bind.
If BadVoteCheck(SneakyVoteChanger) returns TRUE, this means that SneakyVoteChanger is a "bad voting program". However, if this does returns true then the SneakyVoteChanger program says "exit the program." Exiting the program is certainly not faking the vote. So then BadVoteCheck is not perfect this way, it makes mistakes.
Lets say BadVoteCheck(SneakyVoteChanger) returns FALSE. Then the SneakyVoteChanger says to "fake_the_vote". So BadVoteCheck isn't perfect on this side either. It doesn't get the right answer either way.
Obviously, we have covered both values for BadVoteCheck so the problem has to be in our assumption that we can create a BadVoteCheck. It is a contradicti
While I don't think computer application is better than hand counting necessarily, I don't think your argument prove that it is necessarily worse. The fact is hand counting has its error rates also. There is no way to verify it either except by hand counting it again. It would take an infinite iteration of this to make the error go to zero in the general case.
As other have said, it has the benefit of simplicity and trust, but it is not necessarily more accurate.
I think it is more profitable to analysis the election system in a game theoretic framework than a computational theoretical one. The crux of the matter is that many parties have differing motivations which can impact the result of the process.
Tell them that, if they are innocent, they have nothing to hide.