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US Voting Machines Standards Open To Public
Online Voting writes "The U.S. Election Assistance Commission has published new voting systems testing and certification standards for 190 days of public comment. For all the critics of electronic voting, this is your opportunity to improve the process. This will be the second version of the federal voting system standards (the first version is the VVSG 05). To learn more about these Voluntary Voting System Standards see this FAQ."
- Printed voting receipt
- All code open source, all architecture fully documented and publicly available
- No person-vote information recorded in database (database lists people as "voted" or "not voted", as soon as person enters a vote it changes to "voted" and won't allow another vote, while a separate database increments a counter for a particular candidate. These two databases are NOT linked together.
- No timestamps to ensure manual matchmaking between people and votes are not possible.
Ah hell. I could come up with lots of other reasonable suggestions, but its not like any of this will ever be implemented.
Has anyone else noticed that more money and time and effort has been spent trying to make and use good, fair, electronic voting machines than it would have taken to just keep using paper ballots and have them counted like usual? Isn't the point to save money and time and make it more efficient? I think another point was to make elections less riggable and more accurate but Diebold killed that dumb idea behind a long time ago lol.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
prefer our Diebold Overlords. It takes all the guesswork out of the voting process. There's something comforting knowing the outcome of an election months before the day.
Too bad neither of the "major" political parties has the country's interests at heart, or we would have real, open standards for the machines themselves, and not just a voluntary fucking testing process.
expandfairuse.org
It could be PGP tagged.
Where does this fear of opening source code come from? Is there really a concern that some competing software vendor will copy their "tally up the votes" routine. I can see why banks and private companies want closed source, but why here?
The only answer I can see is that the machines are badly programmed or they have been rigged in some way.
...When you can simply bombard the numb populace with expensive television advertising, purchase stories in the "news entertainment media," bribe them by appealing to their greedy special interests, and manipulate them through churches and synagogues?
They don't have to hack the voting machines. They've already hacked the voters. Just as Plato predicted they would!
Anti-Globalism
Several generations of my family have worked for Diebold. They're a fixture in the community of Canton, Ohio. They're really good at physical security. Hell. They make most of the bank vaults and ATMs that you see.
But when it comes to voting machines, the only thing that separates the voting machines from their other products is strong bias. Tamper with an ATM at the factory, sure some FDIC bank will lose a few thousand dollars but the one doing the tampering gains nothing. Tampering with a voting machine, the perpetrator stands to influence an election in ways they see fit.
The game.
Dear grahamsz,
In response to your question, "Is there really a concern that some competing software vendor will copy their 'tally up the votes' routine", we here at Diebold take great pride in the quality of our product. Our "tally up the votes"TM routine is a prized trade secret developed through extensive research and experimentation. If our competitors could simply copy our unique technique for counting votes they could develop the same product without incurring the significant costs of researching how to count.
I'm sure you can appreciate the sensitive technical know-how at the core of our product. Only a few vendors have discovered the secret to counting votes. If this knowledge became public anyone could count see how we count votes which would take away our incentive to create a much valued product which serves to protect democracy.
God Bless America,
Tom Swidarski
CEO of Diebold, Inc.
I definitely recommend reading the guidelines. There's a lot of stuff in there.
My problem with the term "software independence" is that it is misnamed. The guidelines give a definition of "software independence" that does not actually mean the election's correctness will be independent of software. Their definition is much narrower -- to achieve what they call "software independence," all that is necessary is a software-free way to audit the count of recorded votes. This has two big weaknesses:
- Altering recorded votes is not the only way to tamper with an election. For example, this definition ignores the preparation and presentation of the ballots to voters. What about votes that are wrongly recorded, or never recorded at all? What if software failures are biased toward a particular group of voters?
- It describes a vote count that is less than fully dependent on software. A voting system that is vulnerable to software bugs in 99.9% of realistic situations still counts as "software independent," as long as it's not 100% dependent. A system can technically be called "software independent" matter how vanishingly small the chances are of detecting a software error, and no matter how much work it would take to detect the error, as long as someone can conceive of a procedure that would detect it.
I think this is kind of sad, because it means we can no longer say "software independent" to describe voting systems that are actually independent of software, as in not dependent on software, i.e. what most people would think the term means.I worked on the old mechanical voting machines in the early 90s. They were hard programed for with little keys that controlled the voting levers for each question. At the end, a giant summary sheet was printed out and totals were hand checked against number of people who voted and totals on the summary sheet. After the election was certified the machines had all the keys removed.
So how freaking hard is it to burn one PROM with the questions/canadates names to be displayed on the screen and a second PROM to contain the "Voting Control Keys"?
1) Certify the serial numbered PROMs
2) Seal the machines
3) Have the election
4) Certify the machine, print the summary sheet.
5) recover and process the machines results.
6) verify automated results vs summary sheets totals.
7) Certify the election
8) Wait whatever time needed for recount appeals
9) Break seals and pull PROMs and put in sealed storage.
Copyright (c) by the human race.
Wouldn't it be better to start with an open standard around the election process for information exchange and the like? This Already Exists and is "recommended" by the US Government. Why only recommended? Surely this exactly the sort of thing that should be enforced as a basic requirement. Its not like the US Government could claim "we can't enforce that standard as vendors might not want to use it" its the US frigging Government legislate is what they do.
So a good start on the standards but it would be good to see compulsion come in.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Bzzt. Thanks for playing. The United States of America is still a banana republic. What is so difficult about full and open scrutiny? The first principle of any electronic voting system is that it should be open. There can be no proprietary code. It doesn't matter if Joe Six-pack can't read it, as long as someone who is independent from the government and the contractor can.
This is utter silliness. So what if you review the code? So what if there are "open standards"? The code you review can be swapped out on election day any number of ways! I mean, you are all programmers, mostly. How can you possibly fall for this? And there is code on the point of voting, code at the accumulators boxen, running Windows may I add, code at HQ adding up the accumulators' totals. It's the work of a morons's minute to swap out vote totals, or change the code at the point of voting to simply flip the voter's choice undetectably -- printing out a "receipt" that is worthless as record of what actually happened. The code can be changed and then replaced instantly. Or more likely, why bother? Who the hell can tell what code is really running on the box? The problem here is you all have a religious belief that when you ask a computer a question, you'll get an honest answer. But these are dedicated boxen, controlled by humans who are extremely motivated to alter the results. You can't beat them. You can only remove the means. No computers system should ever come near an election.
Canada does (did? sigh) vote using a manual process with real time oversight by suspicious characters from both parties present -- you know, the process we decided was mad in Florida in 2000. Somehow they finish up their elections in hours. Although, really, what the hell is the hurry to finish an election? Why not take a week? Someone REALLY wants to alter those votes. They want it quick, unmonitored, and completely open to tampering, and somehow this is the Only Way To Do It?
This idiocy wouldn't stand if we didn't have Kourictainment for a news media... god.
The press release http://www.eac.gov/vvsg/News/press/eac-seeks-public-comment-on-tgdc2019s-recommended-voluntary-voting-system-guidelines-online-comment-tool-now-available says the VVSG will be open for public comment for the next 120 days. After the 120 days they will internally review/modify the document and then re-open it for comments for another 120 days. If you have posted some brilliant, insightful bit of wisdom here on slashdot for karma... PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO LEAVE A COMMENT IN THE RELEVANT SECTION OF THE VVSG. I am guessing comments that get posted in this first 120 day period will have more influence than those posted in the second 120 day period.