Slashdot Mirror
French Voting Machines a "Catastrophe"
eldavojohn writes "The electronic voting machine has soured another election. Some French voters have reportedly turned away in disgust after facing up to two hours in lines to use the machines. Further, the article reports, 'Researchers at Paul Verlaine University in Metz said that trials on two of the three machines used in France showed that four people out of every seven aged over 65 could not get their votes recorded.' This article concentrates primarily on usability and efficiency, but surprisingly mentions little (aside from user trust issues) about the security embodied in the machines or whether it was satisfactory. I think all three aspects are important to anyone aiming to produce voting machines. The manufacturer of these particular machines is France Élection."
More information on the French machines can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillotine
No, France Election is not the manufacturer, maybe the importer or distributor. One of the manufacturers is the US company ES&S, which lead to many problems in the US.
that what should be the a simple implementation in modern technology is an unmitigated train wreck? Is there a single current voting machine that is considered reliable? Now for the scary thought, the people we trust to chosse are voting machines are making decisions about far more complex issues on a daily basis. I hate to say it, but we're doomed.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
sounds like a UI design problem to me
In the highest turnout since the sixties are unhappy with the machines. Quelle Surprise. Strangely enough none of the main stream media seem to have noticed this 'Catastrophe'.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
The turnout was reported at 84% - a post-war record and considerably higher than past elections. It could just be that capacity planning was to blame, rather than the voting machines.
French Revolution, Part 2.
If these machines were a total mess here in the US, why did they think it was going to work in France?
They only had three machines for everybody to use, and two of them were off being tested in some lab?
It's a wonder any votes were cast at all!
..did the world change just because the French said something was bad?
So the machines are discriminating against old people?!? How do the machines know? If confirmed, these could be some of the most advanced systems in existence!
Btw, what date do they become self-aware and trigger Judgement Day?
then it's probably very secure :-)
Seriously, developers of security-related software often neglect usability, either making their systems insecure because people just disable or work around security, or making their systems unusable by many people.
lol, so, you just go around making Beowulf cluster jokes about anything you can? Man, you're the craziest frenchman I've ever seen, I know it, I'm french too ;-).
And the USA don't suck as much as France, are you crazy? (based on my previous comment about your mental health I guess we can consider it a rhetorical question)
You just got troll'd!
I would have had trouble voting in a foreign language as well.
I didn't see anything that said the machines failed to function properly. If one is too stupid to grasp the concept of electronic menus then one isn't bright enough to making decisions about how the nation should be run.
I would not be at all surprised to find out that most of those 4 out of 7 people over the age of 65 have felt the effects of old age upon their minds. Sorry grey panthers. The elderly deserve respect for their time and we should all do our best to see to it that those in the golden years live comfortably. As a society we owe that to those who built the world we live in today as the following generations will owe it to us for our contributions to the world. That said, the right to make decisions in how society is run should be lost when retirement age comes.
I also think that drivers/pilots licenses should have to be renewed each year in person once retirement age is reached and that the renewal should require passing both vision tests and tests to measure reaction times. Every 5 years a driven test should probably have to be passed as well. The elderly are rarely in traffic accidents but it is not uncommon to find an elderly individual blissfully moving on after causing an accident behind them when they ran a stop sign or red light.
... people turn up and try to vote. The nerve of them.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
In Soviet Russia, voting machines didn't need human presence at all to record a vote.
What use is security if there's nothing to secure?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
You can call me old fashion but I am against all kinds of voting machines.
Democracy works when free elections can be held and its results checked by any common citizen.
I don't know in the US, but in Europe, any participant in the elections has the right to a representative in all the pooling stations. Any common person can count the votes and confirm its results. When voting machines exist there's no real way for this kind of direct check.
First, because even if the code is open source, only programmers can check it. This is unfair to any other kind of citizen.
Second, popular participation. The mobilization of thousands of people in election days, counting the votes is a blessing and a grant of democracy. I've been a representative in several elections and I tell you, people enjoy being there helping and feel proud of it.
Democracy is the power of the people not the machines.
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
I don't really see the benefit of these machines. Sure, you get the results a little bit earlier, but that's hardly important. So why are some countries adopting voting machines, while others don't even think about it?
What is the TCO of these things anyway? These machines are used maybe once a year. Will they still work in ten years down the line? Lots of motherboards don't due to failing CMOS batteries for example. It seems to me that given the rapid pace of changes in the field of computing and networking, it would be very difficult to maintain such a system over decades. Do voting machines use modems? What if everybody uses VoIP and cell phones in ten years?
In other words, they threw up their hands and surrendered.
[Their place in line, of course.]
Quelle surprise!
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Some French voters have reportedly surrendered after facing up to two hours in lines to use the machines.
Thats more like it.
I voted on the good ole paper & ballot box system, it took a whole 1 min.
My cousin, in another part of the country, had to vote on a machine. He protested to the head of the polling station, who laughed it off (after all, what does he know about machines, he's just an average electrical engineer), cause, you see, it's been validated by the ministry of interior.
Who's the minister of interior? Oh, that's right, that fascist hugging, Microsoft cocksucking, software patent supporting son of a motherfucking female dog (my apologies to our canine friends).
India's expertise in this area is unrivalled.
Those NEDAP computer are the same in use and contested in the Nederlands http://www.wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/Engli shWe Don't Trust Voting Computer.
Those are are the same computer aquired and never used due to public pressure by the Irish (see http://evoting.cs.may.ie/Irish Citizens for Trustworthy Evoting).
One word: Paper ballots.
There's no fucking point to this machines, esp. not in France, where we only have ONE question per vote, not 200 initiatives like in California. It's a highly parallelizable process. 90% of precincts had preliminary results before many electronic precincts had even finished /polling/, due to delays.
Translation? Anyone?
Someone screwed around with the language setting and got the machines stuck in French! I hate when that happens, look for "Anglais" to get back to sanity.
Nedap is. They had to change their machines in the Netherlands after the group Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet demonstrated flaws, especially with the LCD screen - it was possible to detect the selected vote remotely using a Tempest-like effect, if I understand correctly).
Anyways, I voted on such a machine, and saw how old people had trouble using it. It is also the first time I had to wait to vote (15 minutes instead of less than one), because their was only one machine and many people had to be told how to use it.
Two of the main parties called for their removal; I hope this is going to happen.
or at least, it should be
check marks on a piece of paper, that can then be scanned optically, is no more complicated than voting should ever get. it's not a prolem that needs to be solved more efficiently. the more important consideration when it comes to democracy is legitimacy, trust. and if you can't feel it taste it touch it, if it's a voting machine contraption, or an electronic doodad, trust goes down
and for good reason: all voting mechanisms are prone to tampering. even with paper ballots, boxes of them can get lost, they can be scanned improperly, etc. but the point is, the more complicated the process, the more attack vectors you present. KISS: keep it simple stupid. a valuable concept in programming, a valuable concept when considering the voting process
the problem with people, especially on slashdot, is technophilia: we are always trying, almost fetishistically, to mechanize processes, even if they don't need to be. in most cases, this fetishism is harmless. but when faith in democracy is on the line, our technophilia needs to take a hike
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Any electronic voting procedure is a cathastrophy. Plain simple as that. A electronic voting machine is a black box and it is impossible to verify the correctness of the result. Votes have to be counted in public! Nothing less. An electronic voting machine can help to get a faster estimate of the result but without paper ballots being produced and without paper ballots making the only official result a election is worthless. Plain simple as this. Any objection? - Martin
France Élection distributes all the machines used in France, the manufacturers are Nedap , ES&S and Indra.
France has better electricity than USA.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Tiens ça vote Sarko?(Score:1, Troll) by Nicolas MONNET (4727) Alter Relationship on Tuesday April 24, @09:08AM (#18851289)(http://slashdot.org/)
Tu aimes payer la taxe Microsoft?
Tu aimes les brevets logiciels?
Tu aimes George Bush?
Qu'est-ce que tu fais, exactement, sur Slashdot?
So people are voting for Sarko (ie Nicolas Sarkozy)
Do you like to pay the Microsoft tax ?
Do you like software patents ?
Do you like George Bush
What are you doing, exactly, on Slashdot ?
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
Before elections, there was quite a strong movement against the electronic voting in France among CS academic community. See the webpage of this guy: http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~dicosmo/E-Vote/ Sadly, the French love for automatization won again this time.
Oh c'm'on, you know what "aimes", Microsoft, George Bush and "taxe" mean!
hehe
Almost all of those 1.5 million people who had to use these machines would have had to have intended to vote for François Bayrou and had their vote cast for Ségolène Royal for this to have affected the result in any meaningful way.
While this is hardly a good thing, at least the officials were sensible enough to try a limitted approach rather than impose new voting machines on every single voter without a little testing first.
In India, we have been using voting machines for quite some time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_voting_machine s
Probably no election in the Western world can compare with the muscle power, booth capturing and other illegitimate means used in India. A number of people are illiterate and yet there have been no concerns raised about the machine's usability.
It has been used in difficult inhospitable terrain, using batteries where electricity is not available. Perhaps the mindset needs to change to accept this new mechanism of voting.
Yes, really, KEEP IT SIMPLE.
The problem with all this e-voting revolution we see now on First World Countries is the obscene amount of money they have at their disposal to develop such technology.
Too much money in this case has been translated into touch screens, fancy hi-tech networked machines that simply have no focus on usability. Take the Brazilian example in contrast, the first country to have a fully electronic election (2000): No money, no touch screen, no networked machine == No problems! 100.000.000 votes counted for in less then 10 hours.
Just my 2c.
Diebold bought up their surplus?
Here in France, a "Catastrophe" is something which is mildly irritating, like a crack in the pavement. So for example,
"Sacré bleu, c'est pas possible! Merde alors, c'est le fin de la civilisation! Il nous faut encore un révolution. Quelle catastrophe."
translates into UK English as
"Oh!"
India have been into electronic voting since a long time without any problems. Why not import some from there?
In France, as in several other countries, the law requires that the voting (the order of actions - checkings and such - to do to introduce the ballot. Not what the person actually wrote when in the booth) and counting process can be controlled and supervised by any citizen.
...oh wait... It's hapenning already. Then I guess we just have to wait that the current generation of 12-y.o. tech-junkies grows old enough to be able to vote and check voting.
If you want, you as an individual can stay in the voting room to be sure that the correct procedure is followed, and then can look at the counting and check if everything went normally.
To do so, the needed skill are literacy and some basic knowledge in counting.
Schools are obligatory up until some ge in most European juridiction per law.
Thus, the needed skills to supervise the voting procedure are supposed to be acquired by anyone of age above 4 to 7 y.o.
The machines used in Inda, although everything has been done to make them tamper proof, can't be controlled by anyone that has successfully gone through basic school.
Because of this, they would fail the requirement of being available to public scrutiny even if they run OSS on open hardware, because only a samll portion of the public would be able to understand them.
The solution would be :
- either wait a couple of decades until computer are so pervasive that any 7 y.o. can learn to understand them...
- or we find some "magical" procedure that can be understood and controlled by anyone who went through basic school education.
On the other hand, the situation in India seems different, not only according to the article, several region have too much illiterate (which would unable them to check the votes), it even looks like that some information *has to be hidden* by law : according to the article there have been controversies because the politician could obtain regional statistics based on the results of individual EVM.
(Which is something normal in most of Europe because the counting happens in the voting places [in order to be controllable by the voters] and the results are transmitted to the central counting, along with the ballot for archival purpose, in case a recount is ordered)
Strangely enough, in Switzerland here in the middle of Europe, it is possible to vote by mail (thus putting your identifying voter card and the envelope with your vote inside the *same* package, and then trust a *third party* organisation [the *national* mail service] to transmit the package to the central counting place, where you *trust* the people to check your identity and put the vote-envelope in the urn without peeking what you vote) and nobody has any problem with the level of trust that this procedures has, *BUT* everyone is picky about the security of electronic voting.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
French voting..... .....As well engineered as the Maginot Line!
"Not to worry, Mr. De Gaulle. The Germans will never come through the forest."
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
And you trust that the post office will transmit the whole package to its destination.
And you trust nobody will open the envelope, peek at you vote, put it again in a sealed evelope and enventualy send it to another place. Or loose it. Or make a fake envelope with his own vote.
This is only what make the difference between the vote-by-mail and the vote-by-computer. Even if currently most of the people just trust the whole procedure, you *could* go to the post office and be sure that your package is handled correctly, then you *could* go check that the people who control your identity don't peek inside the vote-envelope, finally you can end up your trip in the place where the counting happens to be sure that everything is counted as supposed.
The same things can't currently be made with the current knowledge of joe six-pack (Or Fritz Bratwurst. Or Hans-Rudi Rösti)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I strongly oppose the voting machines because there is a conflict of interest: the authorities who organize the elections (and thus buy the machines, test and certify them, etc) have a clear interest to manipulate the results in order to be re-elected.
Computers can be reliable, they are used routinely for tasks where safety is important (like nuclear power plants or banking transactions). However there are no conflict of interest: the guys who run a nuclear plant have a clear interest in not blowing it, the banks who run a online banking site have a clear interest in making it secure and trying to protect their customers from third-party attacks, phising, etc.
Furthermore in France the citizens don't have access to the specs of the voting machines (safety by secrecy...) which is outrageous.
The paper ballot is the only process that citizens can trust, because it is simple, the citizens themselves count the votes and they control every single step of the procedure.
Last but not least, those machines are exceedingly expensive and a waste of taxpayer's money.
Farmers running their bulldozers into McDonalds? Flaming cars? No? Then it's of no consequence. To the French, a catastrophe is when you personally are inconvenienced 30 seconds and everyone else is dropping dead.
I do not see the advantage.
As the original article and many others show, there are lots of disadvantages though.
But there is one big advantage to the traditional paper and pencil voting that nearly never is mentioned:
Everyone can immediately understand how it works. Everyone is directly and without additional knowledge able to understand the procedure, to control it or take part in its control, and to immediately understand any tinkering or irregularities that could happen. This is not at all the case with ANY electronic system. Nearly nobody of the voters will understand the ways how the system could fail, could be manipulated etc.
I think that the traditional system where many many helpers are needed to make elections work is an actual plus: all these people are witnesses of and active contributors to the democratic process, and they are actively supporting it (at least in my country, those "election helpers" are all working on a voluntary basis).
If you replace these people by a black box, you take away an important democractic element.
Again I ask: what for?
In my country (Norway) all votes are still counted manually. You go into a booth, and there you choose between lists for each party, one sheet pr party. So you just gotta take the right piece of paper, put it in an envelope, leave the booth and drop it into an urn. It's cheap, it's easy, and it's reliable. The only thing one has to make sure about is that there are enough lists for each party, which is a fairly simple deal. Counting is done manually, but it's done quite fast, since you can immediately tell which party the vote has been cast for. Now, in our system there are a list of people in the priority the party has put them in that district (we have a representative system, not one-man constituencies), and you can shuffle the order of the names and even strike out some names if you want, but that can be done after the ballots have been sorted per party, so the election result is pretty much clear a few hours after the polls have closed. I remember I was shocked witnessing the hopeless ballots from Florida in the 2000 election, with our system a recount couldve been done in a few hours.
Je demande un recompte!
They got especially suspicious when Bush got 51% of the votes.
I didn't have my registration card (moved), they had to look it up for me in the Returned to Sender Stack, signed it.
What took the longest was picking up each of the 16 ballots. Shitty recycled paper sheet stuck together -- except Sarko's, which kinda looked like someone stepped on it.
I voted in the french election, using old-fashioned paper.
Only 1.5 million of France's 44.5 million voters used a voting machine.
This looks like it came out of the "French Headlines" section of a journalist's template guide:
1. French (insert object name here) a Catastrophe!
2. French (insert object name here) a Fiasco!
3. French (insert object name here) a Miserable Failure!
4. French (insert object name here) Surrendered!
Get a box throw a picture of the candidates with their party and name on a screen and have a big fricken red button. If that person is who you like push the button. We are like fricken chimps picken ticks out of our hair do not want to adopt new technology. That being said my wife once chose to not vote for a candidate because he looked 'shady'.
Actually I think one problem is that the electoral "staff", people organizing the elections were improperly trained or probably not even trained at all.
WIll be hard to convince the French electronic vote is the way forward.
I think people who argue that these machines don't work, probably have never attended a "depouillement" to really see what a mess it is to open envelopes and count each paper.
-----------
Vincent
I live in Florida. Yes, point and laugh at me.
In the last election where I voted (2 years ago), we simplified the system down to 2 buttons for ammendments ('Yes, I vote in favor of this change' and 'No, I do not support this change'). For the presidency, we had 3 buttons, the Republican party candidate, the Democratic party candidate, and 'other'. These buttons filled the screen.
We had people that could not figure out this system. Really, COULD NOT figure it out. How, I do not understand, because there WERE ONLY TWO BUTTONS. Anyone that cannot figure out to touch the button that corresponds to their opinion after being told to do so more than twice (while waiting) is not worthy of having a vote. Also, on every step there was the option to go back, with a display of your choices at the end of every section (with the option to go back and change). Really, this was too complicated for some people. Really. Point and laugh at us.
Why are ATMs easy to use, ubiquitous, and for the most part free of fraud, despite the fact that ATMs have less government oversight than elections and there is every incentive to commit fraud?
Why are companies (like Diebold), well respected manufacturers of ATMs, yet are laughing stocks when it comes to election equipment?
You can't blame the problems with electronic voting on one party, or one manufacturer, because these problems happen in multiple countries with multiple manufactures and many political parties. You can't blame the problems on electronic record keeping itself, as electronic record keeping has improved reliability in financial institutions, and have greatly improved government services. No one would suggest that their government health system replace computer records with paper bookkeeping. No one would suggest that their bank, or the NYSE, switch to paper bookkeeping.
Clearly, there is something fundamentally different about elections, that makes fraud far more easy and desirable than in other sorts of human transactions. There is something unique about elections that make them especially prone to criminal manipulation.
Now, the real question is, why do we assume that paper elections are any more trustworthy? The social patterns that cause election fraud are a fundamental part of the election process itself, and don't have anything necessarily to do with the technology (like I said, there are many economic institutions and functions of government that run fine without fraud and use electronic record keeping). Perhaps that the real reason is that electronic voter fraud changes who has the advantage in election fraud?
Where as, in the past, labor unions, religious groups, and political groups with well-organized masses of people were able to vote more than once by using the identities of the deceased or identities of voters who moved without filing a change of address... where as now, election fraud tends to favor groups that have the money or are particularly technologically savvy. While elections aren't any more prone to fraud than they used to be, the status and power of the old school status quo is being challenged, and that is scary to most people (and especially offensive to the elite who have power in the current situation). It isn't so much that people oppose election fraud, as election fraud on a pretty large scale has been happening for generations - It is that people oppose the redistribution of power from the old-school political elite to the new school political elite. In the end, people love their Kings and Queens, and don't want to see any upsurpers steal the crown.
I like their no-nonsense attitude -- vote by cutting off the heads of the politicians we don't like.
We could use a few of those in the US.
We've a bunch of spare Nedap machines here in Ireland if anyone wants them. They're costing quite a bit to store, and from time to time some silly politicians keep getting ideas about trying to use them again. Fortunately the committee set up by the govt. to approve the machines (to end all the "annoying" discontent about them from "cranks") actually came back and said the software wasn't suitable in its current form. I believe the plan was to do something crazy like store all the votes in Microsoft Access databases; not exactly renowned for being suitable for fail-safe systems!
Mind you - our govt. have managed to end up with a lack of equipment for traditional polling this time around - and have had to put in a large last-minute order for polling booths (i.e. wooden screens with shelf).
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
and the number of cases where the intention of the voter is not clear is extremely low and usually can be made even lower by making the voting system easier still (e.g. have different voting papers for each vote and just let the voter put the apropriate paper in the envelope). Not a big deal at all.
Yeah, those backwards, undemocratic Frenchies only had an election turnout of around 85%. Clearly they're not fit for US-style democracy.
They surrendered?