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."

Comments

Sleight Of Hand

[Spinlock_1977]

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.

And no ID verification to boot (at least in MD)

[galego]

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.

Direct Democracy

[conn3x]

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

Re:Direct Democracy

[Random Utinni]

The problem with direct democracy is one of time. The more detailed and complicated the world becomes, the more complex the problems and the solutions. It's why people specialize in tiny little areas of knowledge instead of knowing everything about everything... there's simply too much to know.

Politics and governance is no different. Specializing is a good thing, and representative democracy allows people to specialize in governance. We don't even let generalist physicians do surgery, let alone the average layperson. It's too complicated, and too important... so we give the job to a specialist. Same with government. We could let the average person make decisions about long term taxes, economic growth, foreign policy, and the like, but I think it's too complicated.

I'm in California, and we've got more direct democracy than pretty much any other state in the union. And every election we're bombarded with propositions. No one really bothers to read the text of the summaries, let alone the actual text of the proposed legislation. So people vote based on their instincts, the television ads, and what their friends tell them. These aren't well-considered or thought out reasons... just the reasons that people have time for. I try my best to wade through them, but I've got a job and a family, and there often just isn't the time.

If you've got the time to keep up with all the information that *should* go into making these decisions, more power to you. But I think that the vast majority of the population doesn't have the time, interest, or education to do the same.

Moderation isn't for squeltching points of view

[MarkusQ]

MOD PARENT DOWN

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.

"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

Optical scanning offers significant benefits

[hmbcarol]

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.

Re:because without a verifiable paper trail...

[Stellian]

because without a verifiable paper trail... you can never be certain when duplicate events can occur.

You are wrong. You can never be certain of anything. Your paper trail can be counterfeited or destroyed. Repressive governments used to steal elections long before e-voting came along. There's nothing inherently secure about paper voting, except that's been around for long, and people are used to it.
When a single programmer can steal the elections, it's because the electronic voting system is poorly designed.

Re:because without a verifiable paper trail...

[catchblue22]

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.