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Dutch Commission Deals Blow To Electronic Voting
hcdejong writes "The Dutch commission that has been investigating the electoral process presented its final report yesterday (Dutch). The conclusions and recommendations are devastating to the current Dutch practice of voting electronically, and to plans for voting via the internet. Paraphrasing from the report: The deputy minister for the interior Bijleveld said in an initial response (Dutch only) that she would revoke the certification of the current generation of electronic voting machines. The minister plans to present an official Cabinet position on the electoral process in two months. The next elections (for the European Parliament, 2009) may see a return to paper ballots." Read on for a translation of some of the key points from the report.
Paraphrasing from the report:
Paraphrasing from the report:
- The current electronic voting machines do not comply with the basic requirements of an election (e.g. transparency, controllability, integrity).
- The paper ballot still offers the best way to comply with these basic requirements.
- The commission recommends using an electronic system to generate the paper ballot. The voter must be allowed to check the ballot before it is deposited in a locked box.
- Votes can be counted electronically (by scanning the paper ballots), with the option of a manual recount.
I don't know why but this shit seems really hard to get right. Electronic stock trading, bank transactions, military systems etc - no problem. Electronic voting - disaster every time.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
With a paper system, you're reduced to rigging the results one vote at a time. With electronic voting, you could change thousands of votes at once.
The questions are how easy is it to rig, and how easy is it to hide that it's rigged.
As long as electronic voting systems make both easier, they're no good substitute for paper voting.
We nearly ended up using the same kit here in Ireland. There was an initial trial (6 constituencies used the machines in a general election) but afterwards there was a big controversy thrown up. The government set up a committee to investigate, mainly with the intention of keeping people happy, but the committee didn't just rubber-stamp the system. The committee alleged the machines were OK but the software wasn't (things like no secure process to approve updates, collating all the votes in MS Access databases, nonsense like that).
Fortunately this was enough to scupper use of the machines in Ireland (as it was too much effort for the government to try and address even the very lenient concerns of the committee). Unfortunately, we are still storing the machines at a cost of millions of euro a year. Also the politician responsible for the mess got re-elected, cause his own constituency are happy that he's looking out for his area - national e-voting débacle is not in the minds of the locals.
The recommendations of this Dutch committee would be good here in Ireland. There are often spoilt or disputed ballots because we use PR-STV (you number your preferred candidates rather than tick a box). Also counting takes a long time - up to a week including recounts sometimes till the last constituency is declared. So machine filled-out ballot papers and machine counted ballots would be great - especially if manual processing of the ballots is allowed in parallel, or for a certain no. of randomly chosen constituencies, or in any case of a challenge.
But it's not likely the powers that be here would succeed in implementing it. Last time around they nearly ended up not being ready with enough simple partitions for the ordinary bog standard voting!
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Online voting has always seemed to be a REALLY bad idea for me. Too easy to manipulate a vote...to easy to call someone and have them log on (which brings up the "no campaining near polling places" rules)...just too easy. Voting should take effort - if you go somewhere and spend some time, it means more and you are more apt to make sure of what you are doing.
Agreed, at least in the US, there should be some provision for those who work long hours to go vote during the day (national holiday or something).
Not if it has an auditable paper trail. The voter walks to the electronic machine, votes, and then two copies of a reciept, matching what's on the screen, come off a receipt printer. One copy for the voter, one for the election auditors. If the paper count doesn't match the machine count then you have election tampering.
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I don't know why but this shit seems really hard to get right. Electronic stock trading, bank transactions, military systems etc - no problem. Electronic voting - disaster every time.
Because anonymity plus accountability is really difficult.
In other systems you have nice trails that you can follow in the case of fraud.
In voting you need to ensure voter anonymity and it makes it that much harder to verify results. Add in political corruption and pressure from moneyed interests and it becomes a very hard problem indeed.
I can tell you why: anonymity
In stock trading systems, bank transactions, etc., all parties are known in one way or another. Depending on the techniques used, if something goes wrong, the party that's wronged can prove who they are and that something didn't go as they directed.
That doesn't work with electronic voting, since it is supposed to be anonymous. There are many reasons for that: full freedom in casting your vote (no employers, governments etc looking over you shoulder to check that you voted 'correctly'), and also not being able to prove what you voted for, to avoid vote-buying (you can pay for a vote but you'll never know what you paid for)
It is very hard to build anonymity into an electronic voting system, and still have the same degree of tamper-proofness as a paper ballot.
It should be noted that in the Netherlands, you have to color a circle of approx 1 cm diameter red. It is easier to see what the intention of the voter was than with hanging chads.
Erwin
I am from the netherlands and well.. what shall i say.
Would there be any purpose in having a commision if they where NOT allowed to give a negative advice?
the entire purpose of the commision was to give advise about the direction we should move in.
If a commision does not have the freedom to draw its own conclusion without incuring risk to itself it would in my eyes only serve to keep the populous ignorant and happy about something that was already decided beforehand.
The problem with this is that it can lead to vote buying ... show your reciept... get $$$
Never let a voter walk out with a proof of what his vote was.
In not so nice circumstances this could be used to blackmail the voter, "You better vote for my candidate or I'll find you're daughter".
A paper proof that the voter has to deposit in the (back up) ballot box is all what's needed.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
In case you don't know Holland like Belgium is a coalition goverment, that means we do NOT have a single party who wins the election, unlike say Britain, France and the US.
For a long time now it has taken ages to get this coalition together, it is usually done by the largest party (but not a majority) exploring what other parties are close to its ideas and are willing to work together so they can have a majority. The problem is that this ALWAYS takes a lot of time, sometimes months. So who cares about the speed of counting, what does 1 day spend counting mean if the goverment then needs 2-3 months to get together?
We are so obssesed with instant results that perhaps we fail to realize that we add speed as a requirement when it isn't needed. "We need the election results as soon as possible". Why? "... just because". Drop the speed requirement and then see what kind of system you can come up with.
On a side note, the belgium goverment at the moment is taking a long time to form a new goverment, whole months have gone by without a party in charge (in the dutch system the current goverment has to stop and this leaves an effective power vacuum during formation) and yet the world keeps on turning. What about an experiment, we put all politicians in jail for a year, and see what happens. My bet is the same as usual, nothing at all, but at a greatly reduced cost.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Just let everyone vote on ATM machines. Or even better - hire a company that builds slot machines for vegas to make them. I guarantee it's harder to cheat a current vegas slot machine than the old-school paper voting systems.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
But this is just paper ballot voting. The only difference is the complexity of the used pencil.
Let the machine produce a piece of paper that you carry to the poll box, a piece of paper that you can trash to make a new one if you're not satisfied with the first. The procedure should never be that you have to complain to a poll worker when you're not satisfied with the printout. One copy for the voter, In addition to what others have said, that thugs or vote buyers could demand to see the receipt, and vote secrecy would be broken, also a receipt does nothing against vote-counting fraud. The receipt does nothing to prove that your vote was counted correctly, and gives you no way to correct an error.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
If you want to know how proper Internet Voting System works, then read Estonian E-Voting System - General Description
The only prerequisite for a country to use the system is that it has to deploy PKI at first...
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
I love people who automatically fail an idea because there's potential to abuse it. Yes, an employer could try to make people show proof they voted. Simply make that a felony with a $1,000,000 individual fine or $1,000,000,000 corporate fine, 10 years in jail and a $50,000 reward for proof and conviction. Want to bet how many people would bother?
Or hell...give the people the benefit of the doubt and start with the assumption that they'd be honest and show integrity. If you assume I'm a liar to start with, why would I care as much if i became one.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
We cannot trust the people running the system. That's kind of the whole point of the way the United States was set up in the first place. Assuming that we cannot trust the people running the system, we must minimize the number and severity of attack vectors that could be used to undermine the electoral process. Like my man Scotty said, and this might not be the exact quote; the more complicated the plumbing, the easier it is to clog the drain. Get computers all the way out of polling centers, because the risks greatly outweigh the benefits when the plumbing gets that complex... eventually you end up ankle deep in your own shit. Sure, analog voting is no guarantee of accuracy, but digital voting all but guarantees more devastating forms of corruption than would be worth attempting in the analog realm.
Election rigging should be considered and punished as the highest sort of treason. Democrats, Greens, Libertarians, Republicans, it doesn't matter - if you get caught stuffing or gutting the ballot box, you get life in prison... at best. Rigged elections are an attack on national security. What if it wasn't the Republicans or Democrats doing the rigging, but rather, the government of Russia or China? What would we call it then? And why should we treat it any differently when the attack comes from within?
Oppressing an entire population is never cheap.
--Jeckler (/. Beta IS GARBAGE!)
This whole issue wouldn't have existed without thorough research and lots of persistence of the group at "We Don't Trust Voting Computers". These men and women have dived into the voting computers used for decades in the Netherlands, found numerous serious flaws and made them public. They forced our government to install this commission, which has lead to the best possible outcome: no more electronic voting.
Thanks guys, you rock.
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...if I were exit polled, I'd deliberately give false answers to poison the data because I believe exit polling is inherently flawed to begin with.And it's people with attitudes like that which make it "inherently flawed to begin with."
Resistance is futile. Your technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. You will become one with the morgue
Why do we need electronic voting?
In new zealand we use paper ballots, you tick the box you want with a marker pen. Polls close in the early evening, and the result of the election is usually known later that night.
The paper ballets are anonymous, transparent, reliable, and cheap.
Remind me, what problem do electronic voting machines solve?
Great, so now the receipt is encrypted ..... you're adding all these layers of complexity apparently without a thought for the problem you're actually trying to solve.
I wrote some time ago how easy it would be to pull a fraud in a situation where a Big List of everyone's name, address and way they voted is published on the Internet. All you need is some advance knowledge of who knows who (which you can get from studying correspondence, CCTV records &c) and a big nasty DRM system. (Actually you don't need the DRM; you can do the whole lot with Open Source, but it helps with the "theatre" aspect.) Then you just make sure every individual gets a copy of The Big List in which their vote, and the vote of anyone in their immediate social network, is recorded correctly; but the votes of strangers are munged to create whatever final result you want.
The point is that a receipt does not help you. Not one bit. It is a complete red herring. It only shows how you voted; when in actual fact, what you need to know to be sure the result is accurate, is how everyone else except you voted.
Use pencil-and-paper, and have several people count the actual ballot papers by hand. Then the only failure modes are: (1) extra ballot papers getting into the box somehow, and (2) ballot papers being taken out of the box and not counted. Both can be minimised by using simple wire seals and independent scrutineers.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!