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Deathblow To a Voting Machine
SiggyRadiation writes "According to their newsletter (my English translation here), the Dutch group that 'doesn't trust the voting computers' has won a round against the industry and the civil servants that seem hell-bent on reintroducing voting machines — NewVote, made by SDU — that the Dutch minister of the interior has suspended. Apparently SDU provided 5 slightly different samples of its machine to the Dutch version of the NSA (well... the very humble Dutch version anyway) for testing purposes. Of those five, four machines emitted radiation in such a way that the votes cast could be monitored. SDU's NewVote received its final deathblow when it became clear that the one machine that stayed within the radiation limits used a green-on-red color-scheme for its screen. And that would be a small problem for the 4% of all men that cannot distinguish between red and green."
Observer: "Looks like somebody voted for Dammechien Peteersrotmensenpoepjespiestnaaktgeborenzeldenthu
My work here is dung.
In fact, during the general assembly elections of november 2006 a lot of counties decided to revert to old-skool paper and pencil voting because of the same issues. Wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl has done some excellent work!
Yes, this is a blow, but in the end, electronic voting will overcome the shortcomings and the missteps and become they way to cast one's ballot. While there are presently insecurites and faults in the machines those will eventually be minimized so that they become more reliable and less fallible than traditional voting methods (which of course are less than infallible --but many don't want to acknowlewdge that.)
One of the many good points Rob made during his talk at last year's 23C3 in Berlin was to call the things voting computers as opposed to voting machines. Machine is associated with a simple, understandable and verifiable piece of gear, while computers are very complex, difficult to understand even by experts and unverifiable. Although the commonly used term (in Dutch) was machines, too, they exclusively referred to computers, and within a fairly short period of time everybody called them that way. In a way this was their first major success. Funnily enough, when they - much later - got hold of an actual device, the label on the back said voting computer, too: that's what the manufacturer had called them all along, internally, that is.
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"Of those five, four machines emitted radiation in such a way that the votes cast could be monitored."
Some tin foil would solve that problem.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
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This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
"NewVote received its final deathblow when it became clear that the one machine that stayed within the radiation limits used a green-on-red color-scheme for its screen. And that would be a small problem for the 4% of all men that cannot distinguish between red and green."
Good heavens. As a a person with good old-fashioned red/green colourblindness I assure you that this statement is false.
There is no way that 4% of men can't distinguish between red and green. There's some difficulty in some circumstances, but a green on red colour screen on a voting machine would almost certainly be readable. They'll use high-contrast hues.
The vast majority of red-green colourblindness results from a cone deficiency. In some circumstances it's difficult to make out some differences, but if I see a red shirt, I know it's red and not green. Green lettering on the red shirt would likely be completely readable.
However, I seldom see purple. Usually it looks blue to me.
The "Wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet" protesters has been manouevred into a corner by the industry and the state. The group's principal argument has always been this:
"Voting machines (without a paper trail) make it impossible to verify the fairness of an election"
In addition, they have gone to show how election results could be manipulated, and how cast votes could be read from outside the polling station. The protesters have had a lot of success getting a number of machines removed from the elections, and they have certainly managed to put the issue onto the political agenda and the public debates. However, with all this media coverage, they are failing to state, re-state and re-re-state their principle argument: that there is a fundamental problem with using voting machines. I have never heard one of their spokespersons state that fixing these small problems with the computers is not enough, and is basically a side-issue. The machine's proponents have taken this opportunity to turn the fundamental problem into a side-issue.
The press, politicians (who want to use voting machines) and the voting machine manufacturers jumped on the issue, stating: "You are right, there's an issue with certain machines but we'll get it fixed". When the machines get fixed, the protest group's role will have been played out. Any subsequent complaints about the fundamental issues with voting machines will be dismissed by the public as whining from a group who are just looking for any excuse to go on protesting.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
It's nice to see that someone cares about the secrecy of the voting process, but I would think that integrity in the vote count itself would take a much higher priority over this issue.
In some remote way, it reminds me of the military's concern long ago (and largely before my time) over the use of IBM Selectric typewriters, as the RF emissions (i.e. coils and motors starting and stopping, a primitive spark-gap transmitter in a sense) from the mechanisms could be detected and reconstituted into what was being typed from a short distance away.
ahref=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TEMPESTrel=url2 html-3260http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TEMPEST>
a few years ago this was a big deal and everyone was worried that the government was going to use radiation emitted by CRT monitors to reconstruct what was on the screen, people even made special fonts that minimized this by blurring and breaking up the edges of glyphs.
then LCD's became cheap enough for just about anyone to buy.
i wonder if these machines use a CRT monitor
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I love technology as much as the next guy, but what's wrong with paper voting? Canada uses it, it scales nicely, there's a perfect record of who voted for what, with a nice X right there. You can track ballots in, and ballots out. Nobody knows who put the X on the paper.
Pushy sales jobs make me nervous, and these things are being hawked like a $500 used car.
..don't panic
We want them gone because their integrity and reliability are in question, not whether they meet the "ADA" (or equivalent in other countries) requirements or that voter privacy might be violated.
In fact, having a machine that specifically reads voter responses for the purpose of comparing them with the machine's reported voting results might be an EXCELLENT thing. If the tally's don't match, we'd know something was afoot.
A Dutch citizen group "Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet" ("We do not trust voting machines"), released a report performing a secuirty review of the the Nedap/Groenendaal ES3B voting systems. Chapter 6 (page 14) covers "Compromising emanations" (i.e. TEMPEST). The Nedap machines are DRE systems, but are not a traditional touchscreen. They use an electromechanical touch sensitive full-face ballot interface (similar to the Shouptronic). However, the TEMPEST issues were not related to the input features, but rather the small LCD screen used to verify votes. Similar to many optical scan voting system readers.
While the subject of compromising emanations is one that deserves attention, ultimately what allowed relevant information to be interpreted from the emissions was that a major political party's name contains an accents, an extended ASCII character (Christen Democratisch Appèl) resulting in an emissions variation, something less likely to be a serious concern in the United states.
"Radiation"
Do not think your standard definition for radiation. Think more like spurious emission. It doesn't mean the voting machine runs on Plutonium... These types of emissions are released at some level from all electronic devices. It only becomes a problem when the emissions escape the device housing.
Report
Check out the full report. It's a pretty interesting look in this one particular voting machine.
Why don't we make a reality TV show out of the election?
Think about it. You get the candidates on TV, mebbe have them compete somehow. Have some experts in politics and government ask them questions that the candidates must answer. We can even have them tour the country making public appearances to try and gather support!
And here's the best part: The people actually get to vote for who gets to be President! Just send a text message to 1-800-VOTEUSA and choose your favorite candidate!
Imagine the ratings!