Federal Panel [not NIST] Rejects Paper Trail For E-Voting

emil10001 writes "The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has rejected a proposal suggesting that electronic voting have a paper trail. The draft recommendation was developed by NIST scientists, who called out electronic voting machines as being 'impossible' to secure." From the article: "Committee member Brit Williams, who opposed the measure, said, 'You are talking about basically a reinstallation of the entire voting system hardware.' The proposal failed to obtain the 8 of 15 votes needed to pass. Five states — Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland and South Carolina — use machines without a paper record exclusively. Eleven states and the District either use them in some jurisdictions or allow voters to chose whether to use them or some other voting system." So ... accountability in voting will be a joke for the foreseeable future because it costs too much?
Update: 12/11 03:20 GMT by KD : Correction: It was not NIST that rejected NIST's recommendations, it was a federal panel chartered by Congress, the Technical Guidelines Development Committee.

Comments

First p

[Harmonious Botch]

Hey! Where did the rest of my subject line go?? It was there! I typed an'o', an 's', and a 't'! These dang computers are so insecure. I want a paper trail of my postings.

Re:First p

[Harmonious Botch]

Posting on slashdot probably has more effect than voting.

Great quote

[Daniel Dvorkin]

"You are talking about basically a reinstallation of the entire voting system hardware."

Um ... yeah, like the switch from paper ballots and/or mechanical voting machines to electronic voting machines in the first place?

Stupidest. Excuse. For. Shilling. For. The. Forces. Of. Evil. EVER.

Re:Great quote

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if it's not schilling for the forces of evil, it is unwise to admit to an error in judgement and simultaneously claim that it would be too costly to repair your error after the fact.

It shouldn't only be about cost.

[Kookus]

So what if there's a paper trail? It means absolutely nothing unless it's actually used, and is accessible by the people casting the votes! This is something that is wrong with the current system also!

I have no idea who I voted for in any election. I know who I thought I voted for, but I have no idea if it was counted that way. Where can I go to find that out? Let's say there is some way for me to determine if my vote was counted in a certain way. What about everyone else? Is there a way to make sure the vote they think was mine was exclusively mine?

I'd rather have the problems associated with receipts with ids on them that I can log online to see who I voted for instead of the current system.

Re:It shouldn't only be about cost.

[lawpoop]

There are three problems with logging online to see who you voted for:

1. You could sell your vote, and use the website to verify it to the purchaser.
2. Your boss or someone else could intimidate you into voting a certain way, and you would keep your job by showing your boss how you voted on the website
3. The fact that you cast a ballot and your receipt number shows a certain vote on a website may have nothing at all to do with the official tally.

See this post for my solution..

Re:It shouldn't only be about cost.

[Kookus]

What's a commercial? Why do the big race politicians spend millions of dollars (They sure aren't doing it to get their "message" out)?

You gotta be kidding me if you think they aren't already buying votes.

Let them attempt to buy elections, make it illegal, put out "honeypots", catch the rats and disqualify them from the race! Even if they could directly buy votes, think of how much money you'd need to spend just to sway an election... and there's no way you could do that without getting caught.

I sure hope someone's vote is worth more then a buck. Personally I wouldn't sell mine for less then a grand. Go ahead, buy the indigent! Hell, at least they'd actually improve their meals for a day, which is the best thing those politicians will ever do for them anyways... How sad is that?

Re:It shouldn't only be about cost.

[Kookus]

I'd rather be ignorant on a subject then a complete asshole like you.

Too Costly?

[gt_mattex]

So, disregarding the fact that their own scientists cited the machine's insecurities, the executives feel that the 'cost' of replacing or updating the machines is prohibitive for our countries (arguably) most important decision?

This whole things reeks of pork and the 'old boys' club'

Things have changed in two days

[DavidinAla]

That news article was from two days ago. Check out what happened since then: http://www.techliberation.com/archives/041383.php

Re:Things have changed in two days

[chrisb33]

Hmm... what's the relationship of that article to the original article and this one from a few days ago? What exactly are they recommending/rejecting?

Re:Things have changed in two days

[grantus]

"Hmm... what's the relationship of that article to the original article and this one from a few days ago? What exactly are they recommending/rejecting?"

The committee essentially reversed itself the next day. The second proposal was worded differently, making it clear that only future e-voting machines would be required to have independent audit mechanisms. The second version also addressed some concerns about accessibility of disabled people to the paper trail mechanisms.

So, in short, the story posted on slashdot is old and no longer valid.

Grant

Bad math or uncounted votes?

[mungtor]

"Members of the Technical Guidelines Development Committee, a group created by Congress to advise the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, deadlocked 6 to 6 on the proposal at a meeting held at the NIST headquarters in Gaithersburg. Eight votes are needed to pass a measure on the 15-member committee."

How do you deadlock 6 to 6 on a 15 person committee? Were the other 3 votes just not counted?

Re:Bad math or uncounted votes?

[onkelonkel]

Exit polls show the other 3 members were in favor of the motion, but there was no paper trail to verify this when the votes were recounted.

Story is out of date!

[Philom]

This story is badly out of date. The panel voted again the next day and reached a compromise that will require future electronic voting machines to have paper trails. See:

http://news.com.com/Panel+changes+course%2C+approv es+e-voting+checks/2100-1028_3-6140956.html
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1095

Re:Story is out of date!

[emil10001]

That's interesting, I submitted the story yesterday at noon, and hadn't seen anything new on it. But reading the update is also quite interesting, because the issue remains that the voting machines which are currently in place, and have no paper trail, will stay there as they are. The proposal that passed leaves it to the "next generation" of machines, and does not seem to affect the ones currently in place. So, this story is still relevant, because those problematic machines are still in place, and will stay there.

Not cost

[amigabill]

So ... accountability in voting will be a joke for the foreseeable future because it costs too much?

No. Accountability in voting will be a joke because that would be an inconvenience to the Inner Party achieving their goals, whatever those may be. Cost is simply an excuse for the public.

No price is too high for securing Democracy!

[Anonymous Coward]

... except when it's our Democracy.

Think about it, we spend more in Iraq each month than this proposal would cost, all in the name of "securing democracy". Not only that, it's perfectly clear at this point that the only "freedom" we are providing the Iraqis is the freedom to kill each other and our soldiers.

How the hell can anyone not support this measure? Or, more appropriately, how are the clowns who don't support it keeping their jobs?

Oh,

yeah,

the easily stealable elections...

Wasted money going electronic

[kherr]

When I voted in the last election my polling place had about a dozen plastic voting booth tables on metal legs and one optical scan reader that instantly verified/tabulated/secured the paper ballot (mis-marked ballots are rejected by the reader). Imagine the costs for that single poll station if there were a dozen complex electronic voting machines instead of the plastic booths. It's also easier to train poll workers how to replace pens and issue new blank ballots than it is to get them to understand complex computing machinery.

Whether or not you think electronic voting can ever work, from a simple cost-effectiveness standpoint it is an asinine goal to pursue. The purpose was to simplify the voting process, but this has clearly been a failure. Costs have skyrocketed and results are worse than from poorly-maintained punch ballot installations. Now we hear the reason not to abandon this crappy technology is because it would cost too much to return to verified voting. And thus, yet another self-spiraling government system of waste and fraud becomes entrenched.

Re:Wasted money going electronic

[gad_zuki!]

>Whether or not you think electronic voting can ever work, from a simple cost-effectiveness standpoint it is an asinine goal to pursue.

This is absolutey not true. Electronic voting done right works in many places, most notably Brazil. Theyve had some scandals but now they have paper verified voting. You vote and it prints out a slip of paper. The paper goes in a bag in case of contestment. (is that a word?) Not to mention Brazil is HUGE country. Its almost 200 million. We're at 300 million and we dont even have compulsory voting. So if those cats can get it right so can we. There is also cost savings here.

I believe Australia (or was it new zealand) had to open their voting machine code to satisfy a transparency law. From what I remember security researchers got to analyze it and produce a report to the government.

At the end of the day -some- machine will be reading a voet. Be it a simple scanner that reads dots and outputs its count onto some piece of paper. The idea that involving more humans into the process is good is questionable, to me at least. There has always been x amount of spoilage be it due to incompetence and fraud. Electronic voting isn't much better or much worse. In fact with better logging it could show us who is messing with the votes. Lets not be luddites here.

The problem here is the cronyism. You cant make voting machines in the for-profit/old boys club. These machines (or least their designs) need to be first developed by the government, tested by the government, open to the people, then sent to manufacturers. The top down approach of business approaching government with a machine designed in-house is terrible for this kind of application. There's more transparency in the defense industry than in the voting industry. The American implemention is just flawed . Better to address the flaws than dismiss electronic voting. The genie is out of the bottle.

Parent is insightful (or at least funny).

[darkonc]

It's a parody of how some votes seemed to just 'disappear' in some all-electronic jurisdictions.

This is one of those situations where knee-jerk moderating doesn't quite work.

Really Tired of this Crap!

[Bryansix]

I'm getting really tired of this crap! Putting the whole country on an optical scanning system would not be expensive at all. No more excuses. I want a paper with the name of the candidate I voted for right next to my mark. I want this to be audited randomly and I want random checks of the random checks. I want to know that my vote was counted. Otherwise this is just a fake democracy.

Conspiracy

[mulhollandj]

I haven't yet determined if this is a conspiracy of power mongers or just one of mass stupidity. I think both.

Secure tallying

[lawpoop]

I don't think the solution to current-day voting machine problems are a more secure way of voting. I think what we need is secure tallying.

Whatever scheme we dream up, such as punch-card voting, or a paper trail, the fact remains that we really don't know whether our vote will affect the *tally*. A paper trail only comes into play when the official tally is suspect for some reason. What we really need to know is that our vote is counted. Even if we have a bar-code on a paper receipt that shows exactly who we voted for, we have no way of knowing whether or not our little bar-code verified data gets in to the official tally.

Here's what I wrote the last time this discussion came up on slashdot:
"What I'm envisioning is some kind of method where votes can be tallied, and the running tally can be periodically published during the count. I imagine it would have some kind of hashing technology, like PGP, where tallies are perhaps encoded in a string, and the string is published. The hashing token, or whatever mechanism allowed a vote to be legitimately added to the tally, would be passed from one voter to another, after they voted. This puts the power to count votes into the hand of the voters, rather than a poorly-trained election volunteer, a partisan, or a hackable machine. Because of the constraints of the token and hashing, a voter can only vote as they are allowed, without destroying the tally hash string."

One problem with secure tallying is that you want to make sure that your vote is counted in the official tally, but you don't want others to deduce how you voted from the official tally. At this point, I imagine one voter passing the official tally to the next voter. That way you can be certain you have affected the tally, and the design of the system constrains you to only one vote. Periodically, perhaps every hour, the official tally is publicly released. Nobody can then figure out how you voted; they only know how the crowd voted in the past hour.

To satisfy the choke point of one voter passing the official tally to the next person, there can be multiple official tallies that are running concurrently, and at the end of voting, they are all added together in a master tally.

So ... accountability in voting

[nullchar]

So ... accountability in voting will be a joke for the foreseeable future because it costs too much?

And accountability in voting will be a joke because the first implementation was a total fuck up?

In software, the solution to this problem would be: eVoting 2.0
Changelog:

• Added verifiable paper trail for each ballot cast (not a total summary printout at the end)
• Replaced Diebold with open source hardware and software
• Restored confidence in democracy

Re:In short... Yes .. and ... no

[ShieldW0lf]

Committee member Brit Williams, who opposed the measure, said, 'You are talking about basically a reinstallation of the entire voting system hardware.'

You know, if each American who reads slashdot went out and smashed just ONE voting machine each with a sledgehammer, this entire argument would be a moot point.

I do think we need better accountability in elections, because it's terrible that we can't be certain in the country that's supposed to be the leader in democracy.

Is this a joke? America has replaced more democratic leaders with puppet dictators than Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia put together, and their own democracy looks more and more like a trick of the light with each passing day.

Why don't you understand vote fraud?

[CrayDrygu]

"I'd rather have the problems associated with receipts with ids on them that I can log online to see who I voted for instead of the current system."

Fine. In the next election, make sure you vote for the party I tell you to. I expect to see your reciept as proof you voted appropriately. If you don't, I'll break your kneecaps with a sledgehammer. And if I can't find you, I'll just have your family killed.

Or we could just, you know, *not* promote vote fraud. That would be OK too. Whichever you and your family would prefer.

Re:In short... Yes .. and ... no

[killjoe]

What makes you think they didn't cheat? It could very well be that they rigged to throw one out of ten thousand votes to go republican but it wasn't enough.

I am not saying that they did that, I am saying that just because they won it doesn't mean they didn't cheat. It could mean they didn't cheat enough and maybe next time they will.