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NIST Condemns Paperless Electronic Voting
quizzicus writes "Paperless electronic voting machines 'cannot be made secure' [pdf] according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In the most sweeping condemnation of voting machines issued by any federal agency, NIST echoes what critics have been saying all along, that due to the lack of verifiability, 'a single programmer could rig a major election.' Rather than adding printers, though, NIST endorses the hand-marked optical-scan system as the most reliable."
More sleight-of-hand. An election can never be 100% verifiable until and unless the complete list of every vote is published for all to see and verify (privacy protected by numbers and codes of course). Profit Makers and Election Riggers will argue differently, no doubt.
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
I *verbally* told them my name and address (I live in MD) ... no photo or other ID required. That has nothing to do with the paper-trail or other verifications that should be built into any voting system. But personally, I think the problem is deeper than paper-vs-electronic.
Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
I remember learning that an effective method of democracy was this, a representative democracy, because of the issue of people not being able to get to a poll to vote, and because people didn't necessarily have the time to learn all of the issues. Certainly information has grown leaps and bounds, and now a lot of us do have the ability to directly represent ourselves. After seeing a special on this very issue about people waiting in line for 5 hours to vote, seeing the corruption of representatives over and over again, and watching the corporations cheat and run america in their best interests, isn't it time that we, as the information community, try to implement a secure, more direct democracy? Just a thought
Vote buying. We've been over this. If you've got some code that will allow you to determine from the published results how your vote was counted, then I can ask you to tell me your code as soon as you've voted (before the results are published), use it to verify your vote the same way you can, and reward/punish you accordingly. Knowing that I have the ability to do this, people without strong convictions will vote how I tell them in exchange for the reward I offer or to avoid the punishment I threaten.
Yes, that would be illegal, and if I'm caught, I'd be in trouble, unless I just got my friends elected to a position where they can get me off the hook.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
"We" may have been over this before, but that doesn't mean you are correct, and it certainly doesn't mean you should be calling for people to be modded down just because you disagree with them.
Letting the voter verify that their vote was counted as cast, might, as you suggest, make vote buying easier. But it would also, as the GP points out, make stealing an election wholesale much harder. To make a rational choice between the two, you have to consider the relative risks, and doing so does not lead to the conclusion you're advocating. Even with receipts of some sort, vote buying is a very risky proposition, since by its very nature a lot of people would have to know about it before the election. If you want to buy ten thousand votes, at least ten thousand people will have to know about it, including who to vote for and what the payoff or threat is. If even a few of them blab, you're goose is cooked.
Conversely, without receipts, elections can be stolen by a small group of people with no witnesses except for the machines, and they can steal as many votes as they want--a million isn't that much harder than a dozen.
--MarkusQ
1 - Fail-safe. The machine can break, power can go out, etc. The paper ballot still exists and can be easily hand counted.
2 - Inexpensive scaling. Since you mark on paper the polling station can have 20 booths for people which are not much more than a table, curtain, and a pen; yet they can share one or two optical scanners. Touch screen systems require one expensive machine per booth.
Do the math. 20 expensive touch screen machines per polling station, versus 2 less expensive optical scanners.
This cost savings could be used in urban areas where there traditionally have not been enough resources for the election.
3 - Trustable. Any dispute can be settled by the actual piece of paper I wrote on. Optical scanners are based on technology used by schools to grade for decades and require little more than a motor, light sensor, and a very low end CPU. There is little to go wrong and very little which can hide tricks.
4 - Easy to use. I take a pen and fill in a box. Touch screen systems appear to suffer serious "alignment" issues which can cause votes to be mis-registered and which require frequent realignment in the field.
5 - Robust. There is no screen to be scratched, or broken. The voter never interacts with the scanner except to slide a piece of paper into it. There is no printer to jam, or foul, or have other issues.
I would also like to point out in that same show, they also show a scanner voting style machine being tested and that the thing can also be hacked. they took the memory card and a guy changed the software on the card (note the company swore there was no software on the memory card). the printouts, and everything that was produced by the machine then appeared to be completely valid even if the results where rigged. Only a hand count of the oprigonal scanned ballots would have shown there was a issue. but since the data from the actual peace of hardware gave no reason to do a hand count, this method would easily have been used to scam a election. And the best part is that this study says these style machines are the best, scary an't it.
I do actuality believe that a company could make valid and secure voting machines, but I have not heard of any yet that where not foolproof. My guess is the companies that supply's them just don;t put in the work required to make a secure machine. as that HBO special showed, here is a company that said there machines are secure and there is no code on there memory card,s tho someone showed there was and used this against the machine. but say there was no code on the card, maybe then it would be different, but the company in question chose to Lie directly to people about it instead of owning up and helping make there machines better.
this is where I like being Canadian, we have a agency called elections Canada (think thats right) that takes care of the voting at federal level (not sure about provincial level tho). Its not taken by the individual province and separate laws per area, nope one set of laws, one way one agency. Any place I have voted at just uses paper ballots, no machines or anything. Just hand counts, and guess what, when was the last time in Canada you heard mass issues of rigged elections and such.
... the potential for corruption is identical for paper ballots and electronic ones.
I call bull puckey.
The potential for corruption is massively greater when THERE IS NO WAY TO CHECK FOR IT.
When it can be detected (and is routinely watched for), trying to rig an election stops being a path to power and becomes a path to jail.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
When a single programmer can steal the elections, it's because the electronic voting system is poorly designed.
I don't understand why I can walk up to any bank ATM in the world, withdraw or deposit money with or without a paper receipt and have nearly absolute confidence that my account has been altered accordingly but nearly identical technology can't be deployed to capture my vote.
Elections can be stolen with paper ballot elections. However it is far more work to do so than with a fully electronic election. To steal a paper ballot election, especially if it isn't close, you would likely have to create a large number of fake ballots manually, and then selectively replace your victim's ballots. When there are many hundreds of thousands of ballots, this is a huge task, and cannot be done quickly. And to really cover your tracks you might want to shuffle the ballots, so they are not sorted by choice. Scrambling a deck of 52 cards is hard enough. Imagine hundreds of thousands of ballots. And of course all of these changes would have to match with the vote tallies. Any errors will be obvious, and could be considered evidence for voting fraud.
Contrast this with electronic paperless voting, where a single piece of software can replicate itself through many voting machines, as was shown possible by two Princeton professors. This code can then invisibly alter votes, and then eradicate itself after use. The fraud in this case would be undetectable.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
So, where are all of the cries of voting machine election fraud that caused the Democrats to win Congress?
Anyone?
Anyone?
[crickets]