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Paper Trails Don't Ensure Accurate E-Voting Totals
An anonymous reader writes "In an new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation they say that paper trails increase costs and can actually reduce the chances a voters' choices are accurately counted. Congress is considering a 'Voter Confidence and Increased Accountability Act of 2007,' which would mandate 'voter-verified' paper audit trails."
Who are the "Information Technology and Whatsit Foundation"? Because it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they're a lobby group representing Diebold.
The article is totally worthless. It just states that some industry-sponsored organisation doesn't like paper trails. Let me guess, it's sponsored by the voting machine manufacturers or by Buy-An-Election Inc.
As to why paper trails are bad, they don't say, just that they will publish a paper really soon now. News at 11.
Information Week has given itself a black eye by saying nothing at all of any interest or substance about this issue, while hyping a report that it can't even describe adequately. All this means is that a "Black is White, Up is Down" paper will be forthcoming soon from an industry shill. The only news here is that this a self-inflicted reminder not to read Information Week.
... the answer is very simple.
The voter marks the ballot paper with a pencil. The ballots are counted by hand by human beings.
Completely transparent, complete audit trail, safeguards against all the failure modes discovered over the decades, results within hours, recounts within hours if needed.
Oh, and I expect it's cheaper than all this inappropriate mucking around with computers too. Computers aren't the answer to everything. This is one application in which they have no place.
"ITIF wants to spark discussion of how new technology can solve the problems. The report outlines innovations in voting machines that offer "end-to-end verifiability." It explains the cryptography the systems use and says that Congress should pass legislation based on S. 730 and H.R. 2360, which require verifiable audit trails without specifying that paper be used."
1. Not end to end. I can't do cryptography decryption in my head, and the vote verifier at the other end, he can't also do decryptions in his head. So any solution that involved cryptography isn't end to end.
2. One doesn't preclude the other. You can encrypt the electronic vote AND STILL HAVE THE PAPER AUDIT TRAIL to check the machine's cryptographic vote matches the voters intentions.
3. Papertrails, or ballots as we use to call them, have a proven track record of uncovering fraud in voting. To date the fraud in electronic voting is suspect but unproven. It is unlikely that fraud is eliminated in electronic voting, because fraud is *easier* not *harder* to do when votes can be changed so easily and untraceably on mass in a computer. So the lack of uncovering fraud is likely to be a weakness in the auditability of these machines. i.e. we suspect voter fraud because of systematic irregularities in key districts, but nothing can be proved because the lack of paper trail to verify against.
Why does he want unauditable machines? I see from his history that he's a professional technology lobbyists, but I'm curious why the FUD to keep the voting machines unauditable?
A technology company producing a report suggesting that plain old paper may be unreliable?
Im shocked. Really.
Up next - 'Republican Party publish report saying the the Republican Party is better than the Democrats'?
There are those who want us to delay replacing the Diebold (and similar) voting machines, forever if necessary, until we have a perfect solution.
Of course, there is no perfect solution. We only have adequate solutions.
Condorcet voting is mathematically better than simple tallies or "instant runoff" voting. But does anyone except mathematicians comprehend it? Would switching to it increase our confidence in voting or would people be suspicious and trust voting even less?
Paper is adequate. And what's better, it is something that mere mortals understand. And the attack vectors for paper are reasonbly well understood after more than a century of use of the "Australian" ballot style that we all use today.
The proposal by this group opens the door to FUD and infinite delay, and thus infinite retention of flawed DRE voting machines. Diebold would win, democracy would lose.
"I would have much more confidence in a cryptographic scheme that makes it effectively impossible for a voting machine to cheat. This is not all that difficult to accomplish and the necessary design criteria are widely available in the literature. A paper trail doesn't really help."
There is just one simple, practical, logical rule for machine assisted voting that anyone need remeber:
A machine that prints your choice is at worst a waste of money, a machine that counts your choice is at best a waste of money.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The likeliness that computers are capable of correctly counting 100,000 perfectly submitted votes more accurately than humans in an ideal world isn't exactly a surprise, but this isn't really the point because the world isn't ideal and it's not realistic.
Even if paper trails are slightly less accurate in the counting (something I'd dispute once factoring in less measurable quantities like corruption of officials and potential hacking), one of the most important advantages of paper trails is that they can be easily understood by virtually everyone who votes. A voter verifies their correct vote is recorded on a slip of paper, places it in a ballot box, and then the votes recorded on the papers in the ballot boxes are counted, with the process being vetted by people who have reasons to make sure it's being done properly. The entire process is completely visible and clear from start to finish.
This is quite different to voting through computer interfaces, where the ability for nearly everyone to understand ends at them pressing a touch-screen. The abstract concepts of what goes on inside the system are very difficult for most people to grasp, unless they have a relatively high education. Furthermore, very few people can verify and confirm that it's working correctly.
Trust of as much of the population as possible is of huge importance in elections, and systems with paper trails are the ones that are easiest for the majority of people to trust.
My opinion is that there is no 'secure' e-voting system.
I also do not see any reason to abandon paper-based voting, which still is not 100% secure, but much more difficult to 'hack' due to transparency by distribution of control.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Why the fuck do you Americans need to use goddamn voting machines?
Canada gets away just fine with using paper ballots. When you vote, you use a pencil to put a check in a circle next to the name of the candidate you're voting for. The circle is large and the text is large, to allow those with poor eyesight to get a better view of what's on the ballot, thus reducing mistakes.
What's more, the results for Canadian elections are near-instantaneous. They actually have legislation in place to prevent the media from reporting about the final results in the eastern and central provinces while polling stations are still open in the west! Why the fuck can't the US manage that?
Yeah, the American population is 10 times larger than the Canadian population. But that's irrelevant! Use 10 times as many ballot counters, and the system will scale just as well.
It's a mixed situation here in Europe. Some of our nations use the sensible Canadian method. Others are stupid, and follow the American scheme with doodad voting machines and all that jibberjabber. But really, we should all just use the Canadian method. It's the best, and safest, there is.
American's are not the only ones with long ballots. Germany has long ballots as well because you get to vote twice (your first vote and second vote). Then add in all of the tom-dick-harry parties and ballots become 24 inches long. In Switzerland folks vote every three to four months since it is a direct democracy. My point is the long ballot is not an excuse.
What I think is problematic in the US is that there is this automatic tendency to automate tasks and thus making it difficult for the people to carry out the task. Case in point the ballots with hanging chads. Why on earth is there such a ballot? Oh yeah so that you can save a few bucks on counting the votes. But who cares that the voter has to take a Phd on casting votes.
To put this in context. India in 2004 put in electronic voting machines for 348 million people http://www.kablenet.com/kd.nsf/Frontpage/A109B59D2C4BCBA380256E9400373E62?OpenDocument
I am sure its not perfect, BUT you have to think twice about this. In a country that is mostly poverty stricken and where people can't really read they have a working democratic system and 348 million people can vote electronically. And what was the population of the US? 300 million...
No, the problem here is quite simple the American voting infrastructure. It's not the fault of the people, nor the political system, but the folks who run the voting infrastructure! They need a good "flogging."
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Just vote for the MP?
You think freedom can be reduced to a popularity contest?
Up until recently, America was about voting issues, not people.
Some people find it incomprehensible that an elected representative of the people would find himself trying to implement the will of the people, rather than simply assuming that the election gave him license to implement his/her own ideas. (You do hear me muttering under my breath here, yes.)
This is entirely the point of having the people vote on so much.
It has something to do with the DIY mindset that also used to be rather typical of people from the USA.
joudanzuki
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I might be able to prove it's in the final tally. You, too, might be able to prove it's in the final tally. 99% of the voting population, however, have not studied cryptography and would have to rely on an expert to check their vote (and, of course, such a system would have to be designed to make it impossible for the voter to prove to someone else which way they voted).
An election is only democratic if the electorate is able to trust it. If I have a magic wand I wave and then pronounce the results, it doesn't matter if I am 100% accurate, because no one will trust it. And they shouldn't trust it, because there is nothing stopping me from simply making up the result.
In a paper election, anyone who doesn't trust the system can observe the entire procedure. They can watch the ballot box, from the point they enter their vote, watch the counting, and watch the reporting. Verification is not limited to the technorati, it is available to every single voter. This is why paper voting remains superior.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
WHY do people keep bringing up this corruption-laden idea of a take-home receipt with your vote printed on it, or some other way of verifying your vote outside the polling place?
As has been stated repeatedly here and elsewhere, taking home a receipt opens the floodgates for corruption. "Bring me a vote for Candidate XXX, and I'll pay you $10!" "Bring me a vote for Candidate XXX, or you might suffer an 'accident' in the near future."
You verify the paper ballot in the privacy of the voting booth; once verified, the ballot drops into a secure ballot box and serves as the permanent record of your vote. No name, no identifying information is on the ballot, and NO RECEIPT.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
Ok, let's say you receive your crypto token, and can prove at any point that your vote was counted all the way to the grand total.
Also remember that it's not enough to hold on for it for 5 minutes. You must hold on to it all the way to the recounts, at least. If you just prove before leaving that the machine still has your vote, then there's not thing to say someone can't flip the votes in the database later.
The problem is this: any proof of how you voted, can be used for electoral fraud by itself. E.g.:
- Someone else can demand that proof that you voted for their candidate, or else. Let's say Don Corleone, the respectable head of the local mafia group, is running for mayor. If you have your ticket that you can check at a terminal, then so can Don Corleone's goons for you. It makes an electoral racket as simple as a protection racket. You know, you only have one kneecap in each leg, it would be a shame if that were to change. Show your ticket proving that you voted for Don Corleone, and you have our "protection" so it doesn't.
- Outright buying votes. Let's say I've won the lottery jackpot and want to be governor. Or just mayor. It's as this: everyone who shows me a ticket proving that they've voted for me, gets 100$, no questions asked. (And I'll store the crypto token on a database of my own, of course, so several people can't come with the same ticket.) In fact, let's turn up peer pressure a notch: if you can also prove that your spouse (if applicable) and at least one parent or child of voting age also voted for me, you get an extra 100$. You know, just to have old retired moms call their sons and do the "you won't even do that for me?" sobbing act.
- Pure social pressure. E.g., if you're a student still living with your parents, whoppee, they can control who you voted for. You know, under the old principle of, "as long as you're in _my_ house, you'll do what _I_ say, young man. Now let's go to a terminal and you'll prove to me that you voted as I told you to." E.g., if you want to keep working at my office, better "voluntarily" prove that you voted for my favourite candidate.
Etc.
Yeah, I'm sure _you_ would bravely stand your ground, stick to your ideals, and never betray the sanctity of the free democratic voting. Maybe. But considering that elections have been won by a 0.1% lead before, the funny thing is: you don't need to get _everyone_ to cooperate.
Some of those aren't even easy to legislate against. E.g., how would you legislate against parents demanding to see their 21 year old son's ticket?
So, no. Please don't do that. The important thing about votes isn't just that they're counted, but also that they're secret and hard to influence. The moment all that remains is that they're counted, but someone can easily influence the voters and/or check what they voted... well, you might as well not bother pretending it's a democracy any more.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Worse. Not to launch into a conspiracy tirade, but who says the machine prints out the user's selection? In a perfectly—or even halfway competent—world, all it would take is one dishonest group of people (Diebold?) to code the system with two result columns. The first stores the user's actual vote, the one it can print out on request given an encrypted value, or present on a confirmation screen for the user. The other stores the desired vote; maybe on a statistically weighted basis for a specific candidate or party as to make the slant non-obvious. The second column is used for tallies.
Suddenly your printed receipt is absolutely worthless. Sure, you can rest easy the system correctly registered your vote, but it's the master counting system, and the values it receives, that matters.
Paper ballots require a massive concerted effort with hudreds, or even thousands of conspirators. With Electronic voting, since the code is closed (and even if it was open, we can't ensure that's the code they used in the final machine), it takes one manager with an agenda and a handful of hand-chosen coders to implement it.
There may be a way around this, but I sure as hell don't know what it is.
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