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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."
you can never be certain when duplicate events can occur.
I'll create an amusing sig when I have something meaningful to post.
Here in Minnesota we use the hand-marked optical scan system, and it's great. There's a high degree of confidence that your vote actually counts for something. That, coupled with a mandated recount in a random sampling of districts in each county after the election.
Now might be a good time to point people in the direction of Punchscan.org, previously chronicled on Slashdot here
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]
Having worked as an election judge in Maryland, which is now using Diebold machines, I just don't trust them. I have seen the printed tape shown at the beginning and end of each election, so I know the machine told me that it took X number of votes, and that that total matched my hand tabulated total from who went to each machine, but how do I know that when the button for candidate X was pressed, the machine actually recored it for X. I don't know. No one knows. And furthermore, there is no possible WAY to know after the voter leaves the machine.
It is a stupid system, and I am proud that someone with more authority than me is saying so. I believe all the politicians who decided that touch screen voting was a "great idea" should be voted out of office ASAP.
--David
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
Unfortunately, the idiots were too stupid to understand the instructions.
So, some good samaritans started the push to adopt e-voting machines as a way to protect people from their own stupidity. Yet, these samaritans lacked the technical good sense to understand the need for a paper trail.
That brings us here today. The old paper ballots were fine. They worked well. There was no need to replace them. More to the point, there is no need to protect a person from his own stupidity. If a person is so stupid that he cannot understand simple instructions, then his vote would likely not have been an informed vote: no vote is certainly better than an idiotic vote.
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;
The headline of the post makes it seem like the NIST thinks that paper trails are the answer. That is not their conclusion, in fact they say the current paper-trail systems don't work.
"The NIST is also going to recommend changes to the design of machines equipped with paper rolls that provide audit trails.
Currently, the paper rolls produce records that are illegible or otherwise unusable, and NIST is recommending that "paper rolls should not be used in new voting systems."
via http://www.bradblog.com/?p=3860#more-3860
We really should just use optical scan ballots. That is a paper trail voters have to verify, and the ballots can be meaningfully recounted. Then Diebold and the other vendors should be sued for knowingly selling defective products--possibly fraudulently.
Goddam funny that the federal government gets concerned with this just as Democrats are poised to take power in Washington, after several election cycles where it apparently didn't give a damn.
Whatever, it's the right thing to do, finally.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
NIST echoes what critics have been saying all along, that due to the lack of verifiability, 'a single programmer could rig a major election.'
I knew there had to be a reason the Democrats won congress! Hopefully they'll have this fixed by 2008!
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
"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.
... 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
While open source will be a critical part of the solution, most of the practical mechanical issues would remain:
Touch screen requires a complex GUI level machine with hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines of code. Even if the code is "open source" there is still that complexity there. Stuff to go wrong.
Some systems have no paper trail. Open source does not change this.
One machine per voting booth solutions are VERY expensive. Optical ballot systems allow my booth to be a curtain, pen, and table. I can then walk to a shared optical scanner and "cast" my vote.
I happen to take my time to vote. If I am standing in front of an expensive touch screen that they can't afford too many of, I am stopping others from voting. But if the only resouce I'm consuming is a table and pen, more people can vote at the same time.
I personally think the solution is optical scanning. These require very little software, which could easily be open source.
What ballot system would support instant runoff voting? That's the method in which the voter ranks candidates and then, if no candidate attains a majority, the least popular candidates are eliminated and the voters' second choices counted [1,2]. It prevents third parties from spoiling elections, like Ralph Nader was accused of taking votes from Al Gore in 2000 or Ross Perot from George Bush in 1992.
With instant runoff voting, it's safe to vote for third parties since you can choose a major party as your second choice. I think the emergence of viable third parties would really improve politics and governance.
But how do you actually collect appropriate ballots? I don't know of a simple way that "connect the arrow" paper ballots would work. One of the advantages of electronic ballots is that they could theoretical handle instant runoff voting elegantly. However, I doubt that the electronic voting system manufacturers are designing for that ability, especially since they seem to be funded by the two major parties.
AlpineR
I have a job reviewing the software that runs the elections. As a result I have several of the packages in question on my machine. The auditing I do has nothing to do with the election security. It is technical. None the less; I have looked at the security issue. I agree with the critics entirely. Electronic Voting without a proper paper trail is a sucking security hole. The Diebold software has several leaks in it including USB drive access. I have reviewed on package I would trust and it does use a paper trail. In general the critics of this methodology of voting without paper trails are more than correct.
Any election even with a paper trail, should have several other controls built in. The development of regionally accessible voting is a good step. This is where you can vote anywhere the election is being held. It makes stuffing boxes kind of hard. Another method needs to be 3 way tally. The voting totals need to be local, reported to a regional and to a central authority and the results compared. The paper ballots should automatically be recounted by machine and a certain number of them sampled for hand recount. The custody of the paper ballots should be under ARMED WITNESSED GUARD at a central location such as the State Agency. It should not be under the control of local officials. In general the election oversight agency of a State should be most carefully constructed with agents who are not subject to political whim for employment.
I have worked as an election official in the past. The number one concern of any citizen in an election should be that the election tally's and results are properly handled. A Former County Commissioner from my district was wrongly not certified for election because of probate Judge who was dishonest and it took a federal suit to over turn his ruling. He was placed in office about 13 months late after the hack the judge certified wrongly had pretty well looted the office. Election stealing is a very real issue and one of the highest concern for people with an elected government. In the election in question, the Probate Judge certified a box as valid when it had 1100 more votes (all cast were for one candidate) cast than the box had voters.
I cannot emphasize enough that any machine voting system that does not track with a proper receipt system and with other major controls is simply a machine to steal elections more efficiently. Such a system makes stealing easy and removes all evidence that it was stolen.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
Actually, there's another problem with paper trails that nobody seems to have yet picked up on. Federal law requires voting records, including paper trails, be kept for 22 months. But most of the ballot printers on the DRE machines use thermal paper rolls for the paper trail. The printing will degrade on these after a few months, or if the paper is exposed to heat they will become entirely illegible.
Either way, this could turn out to be a major problem if next summer some election official goes to check the paper trails from this past eletion and finds a cabinet full of blank rolls.
So, where are all of the cries of voting machine election fraud that caused the Democrats to win Congress?
Anyone?
Anyone?
[crickets]