E-Voting Report Finds Problems with Modern Elections

JonRob writes "The Open Rights Group has released a report on challenges faced by voting technology. Using the May 2007 Scottish/English elections as a testbed, researchers have collated hundreds of observations into a verdict on voting in the digital age. 'The report provides a comprehensive look at elections that used e-counting or e-voting technologies. As a result of the report's findings ORG cannot express confidence in the results for the areas we observed. This is not a declaration we take lightly but, despite having had accredited observers on location, having interviewed local authorities and having filed Freedom of Information requests, ORG is still not able to verify if votes were counted accurately and as voters intended.' The report is available online in pdf format for download."

Comments

whats wrong with paper tickets anyway?

[timmarhy]

give me one problem with paper ballots? seriously you nerds, this is a solution in search of a problem.

Re:whats wrong with paper tickets anyway?

[ajenteks]

The problem is it takes too much effort to steal an election if you use paper, duh!

Re:whats wrong with paper tickets anyway?

[gurps_npc]

Chads

Long history of people cheating them (While the current system sucks, a combo of electtronic + paper if properly done, can double our chances of catching fraud)

Takes too long to count.

Takes up a lot of space.

Costs a lot more money.

If someone is removed from the ballot, we have to reprint, which may not happen in time

Delivery must be assured with enough to all, which means a lot of waste

Blind people have issues

People that don't read english have issues

Ballot design for large number of possible candidates - people seriously want to be the guy on the top of the list, it gives a small, but real boost to their numbers

Oh wait, you just wanted ONE issue. Hm. Hard too choose just one.

Re:whats wrong with paper tickets anyway?

[Amoeba]

For something that is supposed to be a cornerstone of our country, you'd think that the money, time, and other issues you list would be minor problems when compared to the overall purpose and goal of voting and the importance of integrity of accurate count and auditing. As an aside, why is election day *not* a national holiday? A serious WTF?

Of all the issues you list (and I'm sure others could come up with additional problems) not a single one of them is an issue around the ability to tally the numbers with accuracy.

Re:whats wrong with paper tickets anyway?

[RealSurreal]

My council was one of those piloting electronic counting. The main stated reason for doing so was to save time. They started counting on Thursday at 10pm. They declared the result the following Tuesday. With a manual count the result in usually known sometime on the Friday.

Re:whats wrong with paper tickets anyway?

[Kadin2048]

but any paper system is fundamentally inaccurate above a certain size election.

I disagree. Paper systems make a certain amount of human error (feel free to call it 'stupidity,' I won't stop you) visible. Electronic systems hide it. They're not inherently superior.

The problem with the Florida ballots was a fundamental design flaw, combined with human error, combined with procedural mistakes.

You could fix many of the problems experienced in Florida, keeping paper ballots, by redesigning them and fixing the procedure. For example, the "dangling chad" problem of incompletely punched holes could be fixed by replacing the perforated-card ballots with optical ones, and giving the voter a big "dauber" type pen that they simply have to touch to the circle they want to fill in. Thousands of old people do this every day -- it's called Bingo Night. Do it with a UV-reflective marker and you can probably read them quickly using a machine. To prevent double-marks, just mandate that if you accidentally touch the marker to anyplace on the paper outside of a bubble you meant to fill in, you need to get a new ballot and start over. You could even have a 'test scanner' at the voting site that quickly scans a voter's ballot and checks for gross stupidity (double marks, marks outside the lines, etc.). If someone does manage to submit a ballot with two marks, it doesn't get counted, since the only person who can legally determine the intent of a voter is a judge. (I suppose you could put them all to the side and wait to see if the election is close enough to warrant bothering to look at them, but frankly I'd prefer that they just get thrown out. It's too easy to politicize the process of 'determining intent;' better to avoid it completely and only count well-formed ballots.)

Electronic voting covers up some of the inaccuracies of paper ballots and gives a false sense of perfection. They're not. You only think that the total you're getting is free of errors; there's just no way to look at a particular ballot and see if anything went amiss when someone was casting it. Last year when I went to the polls, there was a huge amount of confusion over one old codger who thought he was de-selecting candidates, when he was actually selecting them. I'm sure other people do similarly dumb things when voting -- but an electronic system just sweeps them under the rug behind a facade of digital faultlessness. It's camouflaging stupidity, not eliminating it. Just because the system gives you an output that's 1 or 0 doesn't mean that only ones and zeros went in; it's just being quantized down that way. You have no idea what's really going into it. All sorts of stupidity could be happening and you'd have no idea, just by looking at the output of an electronic voting system.

Hybrid electronic/paper systems are certainly better than paperless systems (which are anathema to democracy, frankly), but there's no reason, aside from a typical American obsession with instant gratification, to have the electronic side at all. There's no reason why we should be compromising our elections, introducing any unnecessary mysteriousness or opacity into the process, just to get the returns a few hours sooner. If it takes a few days to count all the ballots and make sure we do it right before we know the final results, fine! It's not worth the cost, or the risk, of e-voting, just to try to have the "final score" by 8PM on Election Day.

Re:whats wrong with paper tickets anyway?

[Original Replica]

accuracy (not to mention time) for e voting is a huge win. Chad is merely the most famous example, but any paper system is fundamentally inaccurate above a certain size election. Sometimes people forget this, but Florida was an excellent example that, with paper, there is really no meaningful way to define the "true" result.

Wait a second. They can't even get a machine to punch a clear hole in a piece of paper and you want them to impliment a more complex system? Hanging chads aren't "stupid voters" they are faulty machines. A paper system is highly accurate way to arrive at a true result. You count them all. sure it might take a while, but it will take less than the four years it takes to wait for your next chance to get it right. The Florida election was an excellent example that there are alot of people will to "misplace" votes and that will only be easier when there is no physical human-eye-readable trail.

Re:whats wrong with paper tickets anyway?

[Smidge204]

Chads

Use a pencil or stamp, not physical holes. No chads!

Long history of people cheating them (While the current system sucks, a combo of electtronic + paper if properly done, can double our chances of catching fraud)

Keyword IF. Given that electronic systems have been demonstrated to be laughably easy to tamper with, may as well just use all paper and be done with it. You can also serialize the paper ballots using UV reactive ink, barcodes or RFID tags to be sure none are missing when they're counted. Anything that is reasonably impossible for someone to read would work, so they can't associate a particular person with a particular ballot. (Before you ask, you don't have to hand out the ballots in consecutive order, either.)

Takes too long to count.

Paper ballots can still be machine counted. Use those "bingo card" markers (but in black) and you won't have any problems with half-filled circles or fills that aren't dark enough.

Takes up a lot of space.

I hear the latest electronic systems hold away into your shirt pocket when you're done with them. They're also indestructible and can't possibly be damaged if handled roughly or exposed to less than perfect storage conditions for any length of time.

Costs a lot more money.

Those electronic kiosks are also free for life, never need maintenance or replacement, specially trained handlers and tighter security.

If someone is removed from the ballot, we have to reprint, which may not happen in time

OR you can post flyers and signs at the voting places, and have the attendant (who checks if you're registered to vote and would presumably hand you the ballots) strike off the name with a sharpie.

Delivery must be assured with enough to all, which means a lot of waste

District FOO has QUXX registered voters. Send them 1.10*QUXX ballots. Have someone sign off that they received the alloted amount. And, as we all know from previous elections, there are ALWAYS enough machines to adequately serve everyone who shows up.

Hell, done properly with barcodes, you could even print ballots ON DEMAND. Each district gets to print some limited number of "emergency ballots" should they run out.

Blind people have issues

The electronic machines have special LCD screens that can telepathically project the choices into a voter's brain, too. Those touchscreens? High-res active tactile feedback so the blind guy knows exactly which virtual button he's putting his finger on.

People that don't read english have issues

How'd they manage to register in the first place? I mean, it's not like you can have one set of printed instructions posted somewhere, instead of reprinting them on each and every ballot, right? (I would hope we wouldn't need to translate the candidate's names, too... "George W. Arbusto" would probably be MORE confusing.)

Ballot design for large number of possible candidates - people seriously want to be the guy on the top of the list, it gives a small, but real boost to their numbers

If the ballots are serialized (see above) and/or machine readable data is supplied (Datamatrix 2D barcode, RFID chip) then the names on the printed ballot can be randomized. Need more space? We could even use MULTIPLE A4 sized cards. If they're RFID'd and/or barcoded then we can make sure we have a full set from each voter. I doubt we'll ever get that many candidates on one ticket, though.

Oh wait, you just wanted ONE issue. Hm. Hard too choose just one.

Yeah, especially when they're all closer to excuses than actual issues.
=Smidge=

Re:whats wrong with paper tickets anyway?

[mOdQuArK!]

There's nothing wrong with using a machine to print out the ballot - a machine could print out a nice easily-readable summary of each issue, and how you voted for that issue (and leave out all of the other choices). No problems with hanging chads there. Also, machines would be good for accomodating disabilities (and could still generate a 'standard' ballot).

In most of these cases, the big problems are when people are trusting machines to the _counting_ (not the printing). That's the process which needs straightforward hard-to-fake-or-alter physical tokens (the ballots), and redundant & cross-checked counting setups which don't require that any particular set of people (like the machine operators) be trusted.

Why I don't have a PDA

[EmbeddedJanitor]

For many purposes it is very hard to beat dead trees and pencils. Just because something can be computerised does not mean it should be.

The major reason that the unwashed masses don't really care about paper vs electronic ballots is that they really don't care about politics and voting. If this was to do with something important to most people (eg. What is on TV tonight) then you'd get people interested.

Electronic Voting Is a Bad Idea

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Well, it's more than a bad idea. E-Voting is probably the biggest threat to democracy since the second world war. I'm not exaggerating here. It's the apathy within we should be afraid of.

But I digress. Let's roll out an analogy here.

Let's say the government contracted out the counting out of paper ballots to private companies. Let's say again that these companies took your paper ballots into a huge warehouse with blacked out windows and wouldn't tell or show anyone how they were counting the ballots. They simply emerged hours or days later and announced the result. Would you be satisfied with this? Would you accept the result?

Let's soften the blow. Supposed the company allowed government inspector into the warehouse to supervise the counting. Would that make you feel more confident in the result?

Now, what is the difference between the warehouse, and the current systems of E-Voting. What is the difference between the warehouse and [b]any[/b] system of E-Voting, present or future? Why accept a computerized count if you wouldn't accept the warehouse. (Of course many people would accept the warehouse, but I digress...)

You know what the depressing thing is. Most people want E-Voting. Not because they think it's cheaper. Not because they think it's more reliable. It's because they think it's cool.

Voter-verifiable counting

[peacefinder]

For your consideration, may I present my[1] idea for a voter-verifiable counting system:

---

In addition to any other vote-counting or verification system, a county
elections office could take a full optical scan of the ballot papers.
The data from these scans would be made available to all who request it;
anyone could acquire the data and perform their own re-count with any
method of their own devising.

This would provide complete transparency for the automated portion of
the counting process.

The problem with optical-mark scanners, of course, is that the
scanner's internal software and firmware is vulnerable to tampering.
Such a tampered machine cannot change the ballots it reads, but it can
misinterpret them.

By providing a raw image scan to the public, we'd be enabling many
eyes to provide their own interpretation of the ballots. Any
optical-scan vulnerability would become moot. We would go beyond a
voter-verified ballot, and get to a voter-verified count.

This is technically achievable with commercial off-the-shelf hardware
for well under $100,000 per county in capital expenditures.
Specifically:

* Industrial scanners of sufficient reliability are available. At my
workplace we have a "light" duty commercial scanner with a duty cycle
of 8,500 scans per day; this machine cost around $7,000. If county
clerks were to have about 5 days to produce the scans, two of these
scanners could completely scan the ballots for all but the largest
counties. And, of course, heavier duty scanners are available.

* Since industrial scanners are not optimized for ballot reading or
even optical-mark recognition, it would be much more difficult for any
malicious entity to successfully tamper with their software to produce
inaccurate ballot image scans. It's much more difficult for software
to produce an incorrect image than an incorrect interpretation of an
image. What's more, these scanners are available from several
manufacturers; if one distrusts any or all scanner vendors, one could
simply scan the original ballots with a variety of different
manufacturers' scanners and compare the results.

* For the standard optical-scan ballot, a fax-quality scan would be
sufficient for a voter-verified count. Better scans are possible for
higher time, money, and data storage budgets, but I don't think they
would be necessary as a practical matter.

* The data storage requirement for an approximately fax-quality scan
of every Oregon ballot - approximately 2 million ballots with 100%
turnout - would be under 500 gigabytes uncompressed per statewide
election. (And ballot scans should be highly compressible even with
lossless and error-correcting algorithms.) Portable hard drives that
large are available for around $300. Most individual county ballot
scan datasets would even fit on larger iPods.

---

This brings up a couple other problems, of course. Foremost, the ballots have to be on ADF-feedable paper, and probably had best be marked ballots rather than punched-paper. Also, the question of what to do with a voter-made distinctive or identifying mark on the ballot needs to be addressed. (Distinctive marks could lead to buyer-verified vote buying.)

But still, it's a huge step beyond just trusting the county's optical-scanning ballot interpreter.

[1: Actually this is my brother's idea, which I have modified slightly.]

Is it really so hard?

[laron]

- Vote with a computer interface
- the computer stores your vote
- you get a receipt how you voted
- you check and fold the receipt and drop it into a sealed box.

After the election ends, the computer spits out the results.

In randomly selected polling places, the paper receipts get counted manually. If there are major differences, more polling stations will be selected for a manual count.

Add "open source" and you've got it

[TheAxeMaster]

Seriously, that's all they need to do. Print a small paper receipt and drop that into a box and the county clerks could even count them all manually, but at their liesure. We'd have an electronic tabulation immediately, no staying up till midnight waiting for results, people working late, etc. Open source the code for peer review and its a solidly secure, reliable system. Who exactly isn't getting this? Oh...the people in charge who are techno idiots. Right...

Great work Jason and everyone else

[GonzoTheGreat]

It is good to see the report out and see in measured words what those of us watching saw; that the preparation was below standard, procedures far from robust and the systems more black box than the public, candidates and parties happy to cope with.
I was proud to be part of this observation team and am looking forward to the next project I can give time to.

If anyone here wants to support the Open Rights Group either financially or buy volunteering to join in in further projects, scoot on over to http://www.openrightsgroup.org/support-org and sign up!