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."

Comments

What do you expect ?

[foobsr]

The rest of the board is similar (link).

"Rhett Dawson is President and CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI). Immediately prior to being selected as President of ITI, Dawson was Senior Vice President of Law and Public Policy for the Potomac Electric Power Company. In the Reagan administration, Dawson was Assistant to the President for Operations. At the White House, he managed the staff and decision-making process for President Reagan and was responsible for three White House support units: the White House Office, the Office of Administration, and the White House Military Office. He also was Executive Director of two presidential commissions, the President's Special Review Board (the Tower Board) that investigated the Iran-Contra matter, and the President's Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management (the Packard Commission). During the 1980s Dawson was a partner in two Washington law firms. Earlier in his career, he was Staff Director and Chief Counsel for the Senate Committee on Armed Services, Minority Counsel for the Senate Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the Church Committee), and Minority Counsel for the Joint Committee on Defense Production. He is a member of the statutory Commission on National Guard and Reserve, and he is Vice Chair of the State Department's advisory committee on International Communication and Information Policy. Dawson received his undergraduate degree from Illinois Wesleyan University, where he was recognized in 2001 as the Alumni of the Year. He was awarded his law degree from Washington University."

CC.

Re:What do you expect ?

[JoelKatz]

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.

The basic idea (and I'm oversimplifying, I apologize) works like this:

1) You go to vote. You are shown a voter ID number on the screen. You are welcome to write it down if you wish.

2) You select your candidate of choice. If you wish, you are given a paper receipt providing cryptographic proof that the voter ID you were shown in step 1 voted for the candidate you chose.

3) If anything goes wrong in steps 1 or 2, complain loudly and immediately. This is equivalent to you not being allowed to enter the voting area or a machine displaying a candidate other than the one you pushed.

4) If you wish, you may opt to receive copies of paper receipts of other votes for other candidates too. (So that someone can't demand to see your receipt to prove you voted for a particular candidate, since you can get a receipt of someone else who voted for any candidate.)

5) When the results are publicized, the total number of votes is checked against the total number of voters. Any voter with a paper receipt not on the final tally knows their vote wasn't counted. (Though they can't prove it was their vote, of course, they can prove that *a* valid vote wasn't counted.)

6) The receipts can be scannable with barcode and groups may, if they wish, stay outside of voting areas and ask voters if they may scan their receipts. A church group, for example, could make sure all of its members votes are counted this way, though they could never be truly sure how each member voted.

Re:What do you expect ?

[sslo]

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.

Re:What do you expect ?

[foobsr]

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.

Re:What do you expect ?

[TheRaven64]

A cryptographic receipt cannot be lost, because you can then prove it's not in the final tally.

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.

Who are these people?

[jimicus]

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.

Worthless article

[Confused]

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.

Re:Worthless article

[VirusEqualsVeryYes]

As to why paper trails are bad, they don't say

That's textbook FUD for ya. Make a claim, let the news sink in, then follow up later with easily debunked reasoning far after everyone's stopped paying attention.

I've been interested in the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project for awhile now, and they have quite a few papers on voting issues, including discrepancies, statistics, technologies, reliability. One paper in particular (PDF warning) speaks of a study done on different methods of verifying user voting. For the mock election, they randomly inserted incorrect vote records, and thus tested different methods of auditing, to see how often voters noticed the discrepancy. With the paper trail, only 8% acknowledged any problem (i.e., realized that the machine voted wrong). For an auditing system, that's not at all counterproductive as the topical article would have you believe, but it's still pathetically ineffective.

A different kind of auditing system is advocated in the paper: one using audio via headphones to play back the recorded votes to the voter. 77% of voters caught the errors. Of course with every added system, there is inherent risk -- listening devices, accessibility, etc. -- and, of course, audio auditing is relatively untested, but this seems promising. This, however, assumes that the problem is with voters or the machines making an honest mistake and not with the machines maliciously changing votes. Thus, the best course of action would be to have both paper and audio: one to help the voter, the other to verify recounts and prove unreliability.

Of course, no auditing system, no matter the sophistication or rate of helpfulness, will matter if the machines themselves are designed to be corrupted and the vote counts manipulated. Ultimately, it will be far more beneficial to the American people if, rather than trying to force accountability and regulations on corrupted producing companies bought and paid for by corrupt political crooks, the machines are written and produced, or at least heavily tested, by independent committees.... May I suggest academic committees, such as this Caltech/MIT VTP, or similar groups? Their ultimate goal is to certify reliability, and since academics is far less motivated by money, they're far less likely to be corrupted. Or so goes my theory, anyway.

Re:Worthless article

[nahdude812]

Headphones would also be a substantial health hazard. There's no way I would put an object on my head which has been on the head of hundreds of other people just today.

The biggest concern is not with people making a mistake in recording their votes (though this is a concern, but one which is easily correctable with a good user interface), but with machines which may be tampered with to alter the outcome of the vote.

Even the marbles-in-a-jug thing is easily falsifiable since anyone with two marbles gets two votes, let alone with a hundred marbles.

The idea is that you have to make the "authority" on which vote is which an immutable record. That is to say something which can't be changed after the vote has been cast. There's nothing in the computer world where this is the case. Not even cryptography would suffice since the voting machine does all the cryptography, and it could easily show you one cryptographically signed vote and record a different cryptographically signed vote. If it has everything it needs to do the original signing, it has everything it needs to forge the signing of different data.

This immutable authority is most easily done as a paper trail. The paper can be shown to users through a piece of glass, and once confirmed, be fed into a locked audit box. Unfortunately even this is still vulnerable to a malicious machine continuing on to forge votes between users and feeding those votes into the box. At least the machine couldn't delete existing votes, it would only be able to add to them, and that would show up as more votes registered than votes cast.

So I think the current approach is that each voter would be issued an audit card as they enter the voting booth. The machine doesn't have these, and the user feeds the card into the machine for their vote to be recorded.

Re:Worthless article

[tbannist]

Oh that's easy. Paper trails are "bad" because people counting ballots are more expensive and less accurate than digital counting*.

* barring the presence of any bad actors in the simulation.

It's always the caveats that get you. See these guys are interested in "resilience against corruption". They're only interested in cheaper and more accurate because that's the only thing that supports their position.

I have to agree with you, the whole article screams "Industry Shills".

Anti-Privacy and Anti-Citizen

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Just a quick browse of their "ITIF in the news" page and it looks like they are big fans of Real-ID and RFID tagging in general. On network neutrality they appear to be in favor of just leaving it up to the FCC to determine on a case-by-case basis what telecomm companies are abusive and which aren't - no legislation required, and their justification seems to be that some of the proposed legislation has been over-the-top (typical FUD about preventing telecomms from 'innovating').

Who funds these people?

Yet again ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... 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.

Paper trails have the proven track record

[Anonymous Coward]

"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?

Crikey

[TechnoBunny]

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'?

The Perfect is the enemy of the Good

[karl.auerbach]

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.

Vote counting 101

[TapeCutter]

"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.

Re:Vote counting 101

[TapeCutter]

"How is your vote being printed on a piece of paper...."

The basic protocols of manual counting have been tried and tested for well over 100yrs. They are not perfect and are suscepible to "retail fraud" (eg: box stuffing, stand over tactics, ect), ANYTHING that can tie an individual to a particular vote opens the door to stand-over merchants. What is worse is that ANY counting machine is suceptible to "wholesale fraud" (eg: one person + one point of attack = flip an entire election any way you want).

The old fashion system is fast, efficient, auditable, well understood and extensively tested - most importantly the human counters MISTRUST each other by design. Before you reinvent the wheel try googling for "election observers" or "secret ballot".

Trust in voting systems is very important

[jesterzog]

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.

Paper Trails Ranked By Value

[Nymz]

High - When I buy anything with a credit card - (requires ID, receive receipt)
Medium - When I get $20 out of an ATM - (requires ID, receive receipt)
Low - When I buy a hamburger & fries - (no ID, receive receipt)
Worthless - When I vote - (no ID, no receipt, no confidence)

Why the fuck do you guys need the machines?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Why the fuck do you guys need the machines?

[WilliamSChips]

The American ballots are also ten times as long because we don't use proportional representation and therefore get to vote for more than just a political party.

Re:Why the fuck do you guys need the machines?

[ReallyEvilCanine]

You ever see an American ballot in a presidential election year? It's not just "Choose a president, a Representative and maybe a Senator". Along with the Federal level offices there's a multitude of State, County and Municipal positions to fill. Then there are the ballot initiatives; intentionally written as confusingly as possible, just getting through them can be a daunting task. One of the most credible reasons for poor American election turnout I've heard (after "It won't make a difference") is the fear of such an overwhelming task.

Re:Why the fuck do you guys need the machines?

[speaker of the truth]

What's ridiculous is that everything is done at once. If these terms are for the same length, have the State, County and Municipal positions done on a particular year, then two years later have the President, Representative, and Senator and then two years later have the State, etc. Also every election day should be made a public holiday that all but a very few have the day off for, and those that do work are given a special time (either before they work or afterwards) where they can vote outside of normal hours.

But of course the two major parties benefit from voter apathy as it helps ensure one of them will be voted. So the system is designed to maximize voter apathy.

Re:Why the fuck do you guys need the machines?

[ReallyEvilCanine]

What is it about your society that you aren't allowed to determine who should hold office, and instead allow some schmuck to appoint someone to do the job? Considering how many appointments already exist in the US and how massively that system has been abused this really shouldn't be a difficult idea for you to comprehend.

Re:Why the fuck do you guys need the machines?

[krgallagher]

"The American ballots are also ten times as long because we don't use proportional representation and therefore get to vote for more than just a political party."

Political parties are a big part of the problem here in the states. The framers of our constitution did not anticipate the rise of political parties, and George Washington spoke against them in his farewell address. The two major parties here in the US have consolidated power and intentionally impeded the ability additional parties to have any influence in elections or legislation.

One good example of this is the current rule on filibustering which has made the process to a simple administrative chore requiring a 60% vote to break. No longer can one man halt all other activity against the will of even his own party and stand for what he knows is right. Another good example is the change to eligibility requirements and governance of the presidential debates. Where previously the League of Women Voters maintained a fair and open debate process, now the Commission on Presidential Debates, an organization controlled by corporate sponsors, has created minimum eligibility requirements that include a 15% share of the popular vote "as determined by five selected national public opinion polling organizations." This puts the requirements out of the reach of third party candidates who need the national exposure that the debates would give them to garner that much popular support.

The last reference above has a great comment from Alan Keyes that I feel deserves inclusions here.

Regarding the criteria regarding who should be admitted to the Presidential Debates, Keyes said it wasn't a difficult question and shouldn't require too much imagination. Keyes went on to say that one reasonable criteria would be that any Presidential Candidate who qualifies for ballot position in enough states to have the possibility of winning the 270 votes necessary to be elected president - should be included in the debates.

Wait one minute here ok...

[SerpentMage]

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."

in other news:

[e**(i pi)-1]

In other news: Backups Don't Ensure your data are safe.

"In an new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation they say that backups can increase costs and can actually reduce the chances that users data have to be recreated."

Re:Why the foolishness do you guys need the machin

[Joseph_Daniel_Zukige]

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

Re:Why the foolishness do you guys need the machin

[TheRaven64]

Up until recently, America was about voting issues, not people. No it wasn't. That is the entire point of representative democracy, and of the Electoral College. You vote for people to represent you. You are meant to select a small number of people you trust to make decisions regarding government, or choosing a president. The move towards voting on issues makes it closer to direct democracy, which your founding fathers had serious issues with, believing it to be nothing more than mob rule.

Re:It is easily solvable

[frdmfghtr]

It is not hard to make a voter-verifiable paper-trail voting system. Publish a database of election results that includes a unique ID generated by the voting machine for each vote. Also print that ID on a paper receipt that the voter can take home after voting. Then the voter can verify via the internet if the vote was tallied with the right party/candidate. And it will also be possible to verify the totals by downloading the full database and doing the sums yourself.

On the same paper receipt, the candidate/party that was voted on can be printed. But it is better to hash that information together with the unique ID and encrypt it using a private election key and then print the result on the receipt (e.g. as a hex string). This generates a voting receipt that, when decoded with the public key, is verifyably a receipt of a vote that should have been counted for that election.

No, no, NO!

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.

Re:Why the foolishness do you guys need the machin

[XenoPhage]

No it wasn't. That is the entire point of representative democracy, and of the Electoral College. You vote for people to represent you. You are meant to select a small number of people you trust to make decisions regarding government, or choosing a president. And herein lies the problem. The ballot I voted on during the last election had nothing on it detailing who was in the electoral college. It only detailed the candidates and allowed me to choose one. I have no idea who's in the electoral college, and I'm not sure it would matter because I don't know those people. I don't have much trust in the president whom I vote for and they've been out campaigning. How am I supposed to trust these electors? Hell, according to wikipedia, most electors are nominated by the state political party, sometimes at party conventions.. How are they supposed to be unbiased?

While I was taught about the electoral college, voting system, and government while I was in school, it seems that the "real world" is a lot different. (surprise!) If I remember correctly, the electors don't even have to vote for the candidate with the most ballot votes, they can choose to vote another way, becoming faithless electors.. WTF? And I'm supposed to trust these people? I find a lot of problems with the system.. Personally, it seems that if a candidate receives the majority of the votes (citizen votes, not electoral votes), then they should be the elected official. However, as we've seen in the past, that's not necessarily true.

I have no faith at all in our political system. I vote because I want my voice heard. Apparently I'm not in-tune with popular opinion, though, because I have yet to vote for any of these elected officials..

The problem is like this

[Moraelin]

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.

Re:It's about the SCALE of the fraud and TRUST in

[Trifthen]

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.

Finally! A rational analysis!

[volkris]

Finally somebody getting around to speaking against the amazingly widespread myth that somehow a printed ballot is more accurate, more trustworthy, or more useful than an electronic record.

It's pretty incredible to see the Slashdot crowd speak of paper trails as if they were some sort of magic talisman ready to right the evils of the election system. Slashdotters of all people should understand that the whole point of digital computation is to improve precision of calculations far beyond what could be achieved by manual counts and paper trails, and that proper application of encryption and communications technologies can entirely reverse the weaknesses of either paper or poorly implemented eVoting.

It's so blindingly simple: a paper backup cannot possibly have the precision needed to resolve a close election. It's physically impossible. So what happens when the paper disagrees with the electronics? When the backup is more flawed from the start what good is it?

I could go on, but wow... it's so refreshing to see this story posted to Slashdot. I just wish the rest of the US would stop and think for a second to demand decent electronic voting systems instead of insisting on a broken solution to the wrong problem.

Error

[PPH]

In an new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation

You misspelled Diebold.