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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."
More information on the French machines can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillotine
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. "
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.
Just look at the thing:
4 52.jpg
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.
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.
... people turn up and try to vote. The nerve of them.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
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?
I really think the article is misleading and/or didn't make his study correctly. I am a fervent opponent to electronic voting machines and I had to use these in my French town. So I decided to use them anyway but then I spent the day making people sign the paper version of the petition for maintaining paper ballots. I was outside a voting office and talked to every people coming out that had voted and asked them how they felt about that.
First surprise : 30% of the people I talked to signed the petition, based on their worries about the trust one can have in the system. In these 30%, there are two categories : people with a technical background who already knew the fundamental issues and also old people, who, contrary to popular belief, weren't afraid at all of a new machine but really had a problem with trust.
I have seen a lot of this shocking belief : "If it was not secure, computer people would tell us so". So I did, but most people are ready to hand over control to a small portion of the population. I also had a discussion with an official from the mayor's office telling me that these machines were totally secure because they were not computers but totally electronic machines (which is either nonsense or plain lie)
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
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. . . .
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).
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 has been very similar discussion in the Netherlands.
i sh
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
What makes you think paper ballots are more secure than computers? It's not computers that steal your votes, it's people. And the same people can steal or miscount them when using the paper version.
I worked in a vote counting team when there was a voting on whether Poland should join EU and have seen people who wanted to count vote as invalid just because someone wrote "EU SUCKS" on the ballot paper even though there was a mark in the next to "No" field and there was no mark next to "Yes" field. The directives for counting votes were clear about that - the vote is invalid only if there are no marks in the fields, there are marks in both fields, the paper sheet is physically damaged or the seal was not entirely visible. There were 7 people counting besides me and they all wanted to count the vote as invalid, I had to show them the exact quote from the manual.
With paper ballots you give the exact same power to a small portion of population - the counting team. It's all up to them. It's always up to the people.
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....
sounds like a UI design problem to me
Seriously! I mean it is like they put the instructions in some foreign language or something
Cordially Yours,
American
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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?
What makes you think paper ballots are more secure than computers? It's not computers that steal your votes, it's people. And the same people can steal or miscount them when using the paper version.
A lot of people asked me that when I proposed them to sign my petition. They told me that fraud was very old and couldn't be prevented entirely. I agree. In fact most of the frauds possible with a paper ballot are still possible with electronic machines. But now, there is another possibility to fraud : you only need collusion between two or three people in a private company manufacturing the machines in order to hijack votes in a whole country. I can agree to have a minimal trust in the government body organizing the elections, they are overwatched by people from a lot of different organizations, but I can't trust an IT company that does not publish any informations about their machines and that has been consistently been lying about some technical informations. Citizens should be able to certify by themselves the validity of the elections. Otherwise, it won't stay a democratic state very long.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
In some cases, you don't even need that. During the French elections, some old people unable to complete the different steps were helped by officials, in the polling booth. The vote secrecy is already badly screwed when you arrive at situations like that.
To a certain extent that has always been a problem. Creating an anonymous voting system that can handle every disability from blindness, deafness, dsylexia, just plain unable to read, down to outright stupidity* without help from somebody else is very difficult.
I'm not too terribly concerned about the occasional voter who needs help. I am worried about a voting system so unsecure that somebody with minimal knowledge of microsoft access can jigger the system.
*The universe keeps making better idiots, after all.
I don't read AC A human right
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.
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!
Yeah, those backwards, undemocratic Frenchies only had an election turnout of around 85%. Clearly they're not fit for US-style democracy.