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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
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.
Only one thing though: the 2000 election fiasco was caused by punched card ballots, not mark-sense paper ballots. That's why most voting jurisdictions are using mark-sense ballots nowadays, if only because they can be both hand-read and machine-read.
Several voters who lacked the most basic intelligence in comprehending the shockingly simple instructions on a paper ballot voted in Florida
Do you actually understand what happened? Do you know how punch ballots work? "Shockingly simple" isn't even funny as a joke. You're given a ballot card with perforations that mark off squares. You're given a round pointy piece of metal. Instructions: Poke out a square hole with a round stick. "Hanging chads" are of course rampant, and for decades, they have been a known problem with a well-established solution for determining whether you voted or not: If the chad is hanging by only one or two corners, you voted whether or not the machine can read your vote. Cue the 2000 election, and Republicans whining about Gore's whining for a hand count for hanging chads. Cue retarded insults like yours that ignores the fact that hanging chads have been around for decades with an established procedure for dealing with them. Cue the supreme court canceling the recount, without any constitutional authority to tell Florida how to run an election or to demand Presidential election results on any particular day prior to the electoral college's ballot.
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
"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 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.
Also, the way the punchcard and ballot booklet were loaded into the machine, the holes and the arrows didn't exactly line up. You had to guess which arrow was closest to the hole you wanted to punch. I remember thinking at the time how easy it would be to vote for Buchanan instead of Gore, although I had no idea how many people would fall for that.
I know I voted the way I intended because I held my punchcard up to the light afterward to make sure I'd hit the correct hole. But the elections office had never advised anyone to do that, and it wasn't part of the standard voting instructions. (Polling places also had prominent signs that said "No talking," which caused some voters to believe they couldn't ask questions.) Nobody had ever heard of the word "chad." I doublechecked the ballot only because it was so confusing.
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.Hey, it's Florida. We have a lot of older people with bad eyesight and impaired mobility, plus people whose first language isn't English. None of this is synonymous with "idiotic" or "unsure of which candidate they want in the White House." Voting isn't meant to be a dexterity/logic puzzle; in fact, U.S. law specifically forbids literacy tests as a prerequisite for voting. All an election is supposed to do is to record the intent of the voter, preferably as seamlessly as possible.