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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."
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.
Just look at the thing:
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http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Image:IVotronic_img_3
It looks like total crap, no wonder that people have difficulties by using it. Why in Bill's name did they start a new design for that kind of machines, ffs. we have had ATM's around for years, just stick to it, they work and people know how they work.
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
No mainstream media. Yeah Right.3 6-900258@51-898967,0.html
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-823448,
It's not the parties who polled badly which complain, it's the electors. I am a Sarkosy elector (polled nice, thanks), and I can tell you I'm not happy with the queuing.
I'll just translate the last phrase from the article:
A 20 h 45, les derniers électeurs du bureau 5 font encore la queue derrière la grille. Les derniers ne verront pas le soleil se coucher.
At 8 45 PM [poll supposedly closed at 8], the last voters from poll place 5 are still queuing behind the closed doors. The last ones will not see the sun set.
The UI is actually very simple.
I was not able to vote because of my nationality (Swedish) but my French wife did. The machine she used was located in the suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt right next to Issy-Les-Moulineaux mentioned in the article. I don't know the brand of the machine she used. She only gave me a brief explanation on how it worked so the info I give here might not be 100% accurate.
First you go to an official and turn in your voting card. Then you go to the machine. You have nine numbers. Each of the first eight numbers represent a candidate and the ninth represents a blank vote .
Press a number and your candidates name appears on the screen. Confirm your choice. Go back to the official and say you've voted. The official put a stamp on you card and you're done. Next person can now vote.
My wife said it was a simple process but have a few big issues with it.
1. She does not trust that it will keep her vote anonymous.
2. There is no paper trail.
3. Only one machine available, so the waiting time was over an hour and a half.
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).
There has been very similar discussion in the Netherlands.
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Here, too, the manufacturer said it was not a computer. An investigative group said "give us one, we will convert it to a chess-playing computer". Impossible, said the manufacturer, but denied them a demo machine. Then, they borrowed one from a municipality, and converted into a chess-playing computer. This, of course, lowered some jaws.
Furthermore, they wrote new firmware for it that manipulated the election results, and showed various different techniques for making sure this was not easily detected.
The device widely used in the Netherlands has no precautions at all against manipulation of the firmware by unauthorized parties. The operating lock is a standard C&K lock for which almost all keys are the same. I remembered having such a lock in the junkbox and indeed, its key number is the same as on the voting machines.
But the flaw most easily exploited turned out to be around vote secrecy. The electronics are so badly shielded that someone with a radio receiver within a few tens of meters can detect what vote is being made.
After the usual initial denial, it has been taken up somewhat seriously by authorities. Operational procedures for guarding the firmware have been added (like sealing of the access lid to the electronics).
Furthermore, a certain range of one type of machine and the entire series of another brand were declared unfit for use, because the emission problem could not be controlled by the manufacturer.
http://www.wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/Engl
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.
I waited for a half an hour because I went in at 8 AM. Going in early also meant that I was called on to count the vote.
Our polling station still uses paper ballots, so the time it took depended on the turnout & not on any machines. As we let everyone vote who was in line at 8 PM, we had to wait until 10 PM to start counting. While waiting, I asked the president of the polling station what the average time was. His answer: 90 minutes on average.
A +2 hour wait was not exceptional.
The major time consumer when waiting is, as always, the verification of the voting rolls which is done by reading a long listing of registered voters. It can take them up to a minute to find your name when you forgot your voters registration card.
As there is no paper trail & the code is not open sourced I wouldn't want to use the machines they used in the areas around Paris where they used electronic voting machines. However, the wait had nothing to do with their use or non-use.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
France Élection distributes all the machines used in France, the manufacturers are Nedap , ES&S and Indra.
Well, you can see that in a different light:
All major parties are against voting machines since before the election. The only proponent party is the UMP, lead by Nicolas Sarkozy, who was French Interior Minister until a couple of weeks ago (and the French Interior Minister is the one that is responsible of organizing the elections).
And, well, all major medias have noticed this 'catastrophe' (le monde, le figaro, france inter, etc, etc)
That said, the right to make decisions in how society is run should be lost when retirement age comes.
Yeah. And criminals shouldn't be allowed to make decisions either, after all they aren't part of society, even 20 years after they've been released. They forfeit the right, and clearly have nothing intelligent to contribute anyways.
And for that matter, people who don't pay more than 5,000 per year in income tax shouldn't have a vote either; the people paying for government should be the ones who decide how its run.
Oh oh, and only university graduates should be able to vote; dumb uneducated dimwits shouldn't have a vote.
And and anyone under 30 shouldn't be allowed to vote. They lack experience.
And anyone handicapped shouldn't be allowed to vote.
And you've got to own real-estate. If your not a land-owner, you shouldn't have a say in how the country is run. Your just a tenant.
And of course you've got to be in the military to vote, people not willing to fight for the country shouldn't have any say.
Soooo... are *you* still allowed to vote?
Me, I'd prefer it it the other way: all citizens of age get to vote. (fwiw I'm against denying anyone voting rights, even criminals. Seems to me like too great a risk to democracy to make it THAT easy to prevent someone from voting.)
Sure it means a boatload of unqualified idiots and morons get to vote, but hey, its their country too. If they want to vote for the incompetent and corrupt incumbent simply because they recognize his/her name, that's their right.
If you want to improve on how well democracy works, figure out a way of making the voters you have choose better, not a way of eliminating voters.
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.....
Why wait until retirement age? most of the idiot drivers I see on the street who don't belong there are far far younger than retirement age. Mandatory testing on an annual basis would keep a lot of them off the roads.
It's even easier than that. You have paper ballots, each bearing a single name. You choose one, put it in the provided envelope and then drop it in the (transparent) ballot box. Counting is done manually, with ballots being opened by one person, read aloud by another and checked by a third. Two independent tallies are simultaneously made, each with one person counting and one monitoring. In larger precints, the ballots may be split among multiple counting tables. All is done in public, anyone can attend.
The only piece of technology involved is the mechanical counter on the ballot box. What need is there for more?
If you skip this summary and read the articles the problem was there were not enough machines that is what everyone was primarily complaining about hte long waits. This was caused primarily by a large amount of people voting. Any problems with machines is not getting any reporting.
That said there have been major fights leading up to the election about the electronic voting machines with multiple law suits from some parties while other political parties are saying they are great and bringing out scientists to explain how they work and why theses machines are safer and better then the pencil/paper method used in the past.
As for choosing the machines, you have two different sets of people. You have the choosers who are looking at machines from the way they are used and the current procedures that are in place and picking them based on that environment and funding available then you have all the people on the outside who have never helpped at an election and want to have machines that would stand up to the abuses and threats that a ATM filled with money and located in an unlit side street would have to face.
I really don't see what was wrong with the old system in france.
The old system was simple and foolproof when it came to counting etc. Take an envelope, one vote bulletin from each candidate, go in the voting booth, put the bulletin you want in the envelope, then you just held in above the slot while the guy pulls the lever and let it fall in.
The box was locked and made of transparent plastic.
Then to count the votes, they enlisted volunteers (people at your local voting facility often nagged you to come help after the poll, so it wasn't exclusive in any way shape or form) to count the votes.
Unlike the old american system with punch cards, counting the votes was easy and straightforward, and performed by humans.
Double checking the counts by recounting the piles of the various bulletins was also easy.
Given all that, I fail to see why they felt the need to move to electronic vote, which is much harder to get right, and can never get as transparent.
Anyone can understand how counting papers work and how the design of the old system was secure, whereas with an electronic system, you have to be a computer scientist with some knowledge of computer and network security to have a chance to know if it's secure.
And even then, you can't assess if the actual system is deployed in a secure way just by looking at the physical installation.
The delays had nothing to do with the parties in charge. Why do people think that they repeat this enough someone will believe them? The country addresses the amount of voters and supplies the machines to record the votes. It was the county that screwed it up. the county board of commissioners and board of electors designate polling precincts and what to equip them. It is in law 101.001 and similar. You can easily find this in any law site following Florida law or you can goto the state website itself. Further more, this information is freely available at the state elections site in PDF form.
This as well as many other problems have been investigated by the democrats, legal institutions, civil rights courts, newspapers and colleges. None of them have found any substance to them. Cops sitting in the middle of a road three blocks away and around the corner of a polling place isn't a civil rights violation. And the turnout for the election in 2000 was around 40% higher then it had been in the previous 4 presidential elections. Add to this, the networks telling you that your candidate lost when the polls weren't even close in the state and you have the sense of confusion that resulted. It is nothing but oversight and it was at the county levels (they were in charge of procuring the machines and setting the districts up).
and just to head of any other misconception still being floated around by sore losers, The Florida recount was recounted by newspapers and colleges and the result was Bush won Florida fair and square. Google for it, I'm not going to research 7 year old links to show something everyone should already regard as common knowledge.
sure,
let's not forget the almost 100.000 people that weren't allowed to vote (although they should have been), of which more than 90% would have voted democrate.
or the fact that the machines that returned your ballot (so you could redo it) in case it wasn't entirely correctly punched or whatever, were mainly distributed to (richer white =) republican counties and the machines that simply ate defected ballots and not even gave a warning were sent mainly to (poor black/hispanic=) democratic counties...
Chance favors the prepared mind...especially when you Question Authority