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CA Proposes Rigorous Voting Machine Testing
christian.einfeldt writes "During her successful campaign for California Secretary of State, newly-minted California Elections Czar Debra Bowen spoke repeatedly of the need to use free open source software in voting machines to ensure the integrity of California's elections. Now that Secretary Bowen is acting on that campaign pledge, closed-source voting machine vendor Diebold worries aloud that rejecting its black-box voting machines could snarl California's elections. Diebold's concerns come at the same time that it is suing Massachusetts for declining to purchase those same voting machines." Quoting: "California's elections chief is proposing the toughest standards for voting systems in the country, so tough that they could [have the result of banishing] ATM-like touch-screen voting machines from the state. For the first time, California is demanding the right to try hacking every voting machine with 'red teams' of computer experts and to study the software inside the machines, line-by-line, for security holes."
Thoroughly test the voting machines before deploying them? Wow! Why didn't I think of that?
This guy's the limit!
One principal of a democracy is that everyone can verify the counting of votes.
Now unless you teach everyone how to program I don't see how you can preserve this principal.
31 machines out of 340 districts? How many were in each district?
Heck, from what I've read, they've had problems with more than 10% of the diebold machines.
At least with an automark type system you still have the paper ballots to fall back on, even if a voter might require assistance to fill it out.
When a diebold type device malfunctions you have the potential for lost and/or erronous vote information, not to mention that NO votes can be taken.
I don't read AC A human right
Any replacement system must preserve the strengths of a paper ballot.
This means
In practice, this means the voting hardware and software must be open to public inspection. The same goes for the procedures used by voting officials.
It also means to the extent possible, the entire process must be observed by interested and neutral parties. Obviously the actual voting must be done in secret but anything that doesn't reveal an individual's vote should be observed. Those things that cannot be easily observed, such as actual electronic count, must be repeatable by another method, such as a hand-count, with the same results.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
is that we seem to keep learning and re-learning that lesson. Back in the 1960 election, there was a lot of evidence that indicated that kennedy won chicago by having the dems cheat. Many systems were put in place to prevent that cheating. Now, with the new current system, the evidence is even more overwhelming and yet, we are back to trying to prevent cheating. In particular, it appears that Ohio, Florida, and even texas had massive amounts of voter fraud during the last couple of elections. I guess that our society will be doomed to re-living the same problems over and over as long as we have politicians like rove ( and the dem == before).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It's a shame you never saw any part of California besides Los Angeles.
The fact that you bought such a care tells me that you looked at the cars that did not meet the California emissions tests and said "No thank you".
What probably happened is that the majority of the people in the country with needs similar to yours thought that cars should meet California's tests. The few people that did not want the cleaner cars had different needs then you did.
You don't have a beef with California, you have a beef with the majority of AMERICAN citizens. And you personally were still offered a choice to pick another car, but decided not to.
Why don't you stop blaming California, and start taking responsibility for your own actions
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Interestingly, I can purchase a car in Connecticut, drive it to California, register it, and pass a smog check.
Vehicles with California emissions and vehicles without are smogged to different specifications, even here in California.
The restriction only requires new cars sold in California to conform to different standards.
I live in a county which has spectacularly good air quality, and it happens to be within California.
The worst air quality that I'm aware of in the US is in Houston.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Any electronic voting machines should be regulated to at least the same level as a slot machine. But for some reason we apparently believe that handling the $20 dollars we want to gamble in a casino is more important than the results of an election.
A casino would never field a slot machine (even a 1c machine) that was as insecure as a Diebold voting machine.
The security model for a slot machine is rock solid. The hardware and software (source included) must be submitted and approved by each jurisdiction. The security model ensures that if even one bit in the software has been corrupted, the machine ceases to function. The cash-in and payout of each machine is redundantly logged. The machines are completely power tolerant, meaning you can cut the power at any time; when the power is restored the machine will come back up in exactly the same state that it was in before power loss. The machine can print tickets (for a paper trail), as well as talk securely over a network.
Basically, all the requirements we'd like to see in a voting machine are the same that a slot machine already conforms to. There's no reason to re-invent the wheel here, most of the work has already been done.
Born and raised in Cal, yeah, there are 'kooks' for politicians sometimes, but these kooks are like 'let's see if we can make people happier by making their food less poisonous' as opposed to the kooks that think things like 'let's not tell people the air at ground zero is poisonous because then bin Laden will be even more satisfied with the results'.
We'll keep our kooks, you keep yours and we will both be happy. I hope.
I think that attorneys for the government should be able to demand to see source code for all the machines already deployed. If source cannot be produced (or it does not compile to the same machine code present on the voting machines) then those responsible should be rounded up and tried for treason. Seriously: at no point should *anything* related to how these machines tally votes have been regarded as a secret: that's simply not how voting works in the US.
I believe that California shouldn't have to demand transparency, I think that we citizens have implicitly expected transparency all along.
Donate to the Open Voting Consortium, they've been working with Debra Bowen and many others to fix the system.
don't panic-- clowns can smell fear.
That's not CA setting the emissions standard for your state, it's the auto companies deciding that the economy of scale on the changes that need to be made are a greater benefit to the bottom line if applied to the whole production line than either a) not selling cars in CA or b) setting up a separate production line for CA specific autos. CA has every right to set emission standards for their own state, and the auto companies have every right to deal with those standards in any way legal.
Your post (to me at least) smacks of bashing those damn hippies without saying so directly. If you're really pissed about the situation, place the blame on the car companies, where it belongs.
And this is again making an assumption, but you seem to be pissed that programmers are gonna be pouring over this code. WTF? Do you really think that this is some big negative inconvenience, or is it just west coast bashing? I just don't see the problem.
check to make sure the code works as intended.
The next step would be to check and make sure that the intention the code works with is the intention the people desire.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I suspect they'll really study software outside the machines, code which the manufacturer swears is the same as the software inside the machines, cross his heart. That's still an improvement over the current situation, but it's not good enough for democracy. If a computer is turning your ballot into a microscopic electromagnetic pattern rather than a human-readable printout, you simply can't be certain that your vote was counted. Software audits may make election hacking more difficult, but they'll never make it impossible.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Well, it'll cost the taxpayers a fair bit to do that kind of testing properly - looking at it that way, you'll get a dollar value of how much the taxpayers think a corruption-resistant democracy is worth!
This situation is unacceptable in critical systems' embedded software. Not only is the source subject to audit, but the entire compilation and installation process is as well.
Have gnu, will travel.
Perhaps you might not have heard the story of the king and the toaster?
This may not be quite that bad, but the point still stands: Don't use more technology than is needed to solve the problem. In this case, it's much simpler than you suggest:
In fact, if you were clever you could even combine steps 1 and 4, saving a line at the supervisor's table.
Oh, and don't give the voter a copy to take home, unless you want supporters for the "wrong" party to start getting their pillows replaced by severed horse heads. "I've got a very good deal for you, and all it needs from you is one little piece of paper . . ."
Even relatively sane, simple mandates like checking for a valid ID at the poling station get shut down.
Those laws are often struck down as unconstitutional, and for good reason. If you are an American citizen who doesn't have an ID (which you cannot constitutionally be required to own as a direct result of our right to privacy), you should still be able to vote. More practically, from a statistical viewpoint, people with lower incomes and the elderly are surprisingly likely to not have IDs. You might say, "Well, if they want to be able to vote, they need an ID," but if voting laws disenfranchise even one person who has done nothing wrong, they have already gone too far.