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NYT Notes Flaws In Current Electronic Voting Methods
dstates writes "The New York time has an informative article on electronic voting with some frightening statistics and interesting anecdotes. Printers on Diebold machines in Cayahoga County OH jammed 20% of the time, making paper trail recounts suspect. Crashing voting machines in California reportedly resulted from Windows CE sensing fingers sliding from one key to another as a drag and drop event, and the Diebold software failing to handle the event. Of course, rather than just ignore this unanticipated condition, the OS did the right thing for a voting machine and crashed."
In California, you can be an Permanent Absentee Voter, which guarantees a paper trail for your vote. I deliver mine directly to the County Registrar of Voters, but I believe you can drop them off an any polling place, or mail them, though they have to arrive by the deadline, postmark does not count.
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I am totally shocked that even Diebold could screw up this badly, making systems that crash under normal usage conditions. But the design philosophy they took is the wrong one. Look at the complexity behind these things! Keep it simple and they might have done much better. Why base something like this off of Windows CE? How many megahertz do I need to do a voting machine? Seriously, all of this extra hardware and software means more abstraction (which is considered a good thing in the computer science world), but it also means more abstractions that can be misinterpreted and misused. For a system whose job is so simple, keep the product equally simple.
--
Coder? Want to learn electronics? Microcontroller kits.
Just curious since I can't vote - but is there legal room that allows it?
What about disabled people that for some reason can't use a voting machine - what are their options?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
It it incredible how much poor code is used in real life mission critical applications. Isn't annotations teached anymore? How about test-driven development?
Why the hell do you need Windows CE to count votes? Can't you just flash a chip and use basic hardware? The developers of this stuff are too lazy. They just want to open Visual Studio, make some code and then be done with it. They don't see that if you go minimalist, work from the hardware up and just use the bare minimum software needed to count the votes you get even better security.
I understand the need for machines which make it easier for disabled people to vote, but the only "safe" machine is a machine which just marks ballots in a human-readable manner. The machine can ensure that ballots aren't created in an invalid state (multiple candidates when only one is allowed), and that non-vote selections are explicit (voter must choose 'none of the above' to proceed). The machine then prints the ballot in a human readable form and makes it available to the voter. The voter inspects it and either places it in the ballot box, or takes it to another machine which reads the ballot and makes the selections apparent to the voter (think vision impaired voter needing the ballot to be 'read' to them) and then after they confirm the ballot is accurate, places it in the ballot box.
This still doesn't deal with the fact the many voters will vote without making 'hard' selections. Candidates at the top of the ballot get a 'bump' just by their position. There are other ways which a machine could subtlety influence an election, as well as marking some percentage of the ballots "erroneously" in hopes that voters wouldn't inspect the ballots closely and find the errors.
In short, accurate elections with anonymous, non-voter-provable (to prevent blackmail/vote purchasing) votes are hard, but since they are the basis for our system of government, we need to do the work to do it right.
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Is this the same band of rat monkeys at The New York Times who were busy ridiculing all of us in the aftermath of the 2000 and 2004 Presidential election who were crying foul and fraud and who were to a man and on every detail proven right?
And now they want to pose as the guarantors of our future democracy?
Why? So they can build back up their cred so when next racist Jews lust for Muslim blood they are better able to flip the switch?
God Damn The New York Times.
Now, I'm not a US citizen, but the way I see it, Company X convinced officials A and B to buy these machines. The machines were bought, company X was paid by the taxpayer, officials A and B were paid by company X, the board, employees and shareholders of company X were paid. The voting machines went wrong so more money will have to be spent on them.
Who cares about right and wrong? Rich people and public officials made themselves some money.
Surely an American dream. What could be more perfect?
-1 not first post
I am totally shocked that even Diebold could screw up this badly
At this point I wonder why Microsoft doesn't enter the market of voting machines. Even they wouldn't fuck it up this badly.
You just got troll'd!
I'm so very glad that we do our voting by putting a little "x" in a box and they're then hand counted by thousands of election workers while representatives of each party scrutinize each ballot to see if they're acceptable instead of this electronic no paper trail machines that screw up crap.
what's that now?
i am also no technofetishist
sometimes, more tech thrown at a problem makes it worse, not better
there is no compelling argument, NO COMPELLING ARGUMENT to use anything more than
1. pencil
2. paper
3. optical scanner
there is however, with electronic voting, AND mechanical voting something else:
1. increased number of attack vectors
2. loss of transparency in the voting process, and therefore mistrust in democratic results, and lingering lack of faith in government
the only arguments for electornic voting are:
1. kickbacks to officials
2. increased business for a business that shouldn't exist
no electronic voting. ever. anywhere
accepting it means that people will begin to erode their fatih in democracy
if they can't see it, smell it touch it, they won't trust it
once again:
1. pencil
2. paper
3. optical scanner
anything else represents an eroding faith in democracy
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Anyway - when it comes to voting machines the requirements should be that they are mathematically verifiable for correctness. This essentially rules out Windows CE and a lot of other systems. Mostly since the complexity of those systems are too large.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
That is realtime ebedditis for you. A well known brain rotting disease which affects a specific portion of the programming community which most likely has a bit too much of Klingon blood in their veins. They can program a multitasking system only according to the 17th maxima of Klingon programming. "Klingon multitasking systems do notsupport "time-sharing". When a Klingon program wants to run, it challenges the scheduler in hand-to-hand combat and owns the machine." It looks like in this case they have also followed the other maxima of Klingon programming: "Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak. Bugs are good for building character in the user." and "Perhaps it IS a good day to die! I say we ship it!".
On a more serious note this is someone strictly following the specs. There are systems where it if you encounter an unknown situation your spec says that you crash instead of trying to be original and let the watchdog sort it out. Quite common in embedded systems and standard spec requirement in things like voting terminals and ATM.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Propbably the most interesting part of the article: "Amazingly, the Diebold spokesman, Chris Riggal, admitted to me that the company is considering making the software open source on its next generation of touch-screen machines, so that anyone could download, inspect, or repair the code."
Why on Earth would you be surprised that Diebold machines malfunction?
They're designed that way.
Seriously, why would Diebold install working printers on them? What incentive is there for this corporation, whose financial and political involvement with this administration is well-documented, to do anything approaching ethical? Diebold fights this tooth and nail despite the fact that most governments are willing to pay extra for this added reliability. Either Diebold lacks the technological savvy to make the printers work reliably or they're intentionally sabotaging it.
Draw your own conclusions.
Hart Inter-Civic prefers to criticize the test. Apparently 99% accuracy should be good enough. Would they accept the same from their accountants and bankers?
Berkeley has produced a document that's even more specifically addressing the voting machine verification.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Cayahoga County???
It's really Cuyahoga County
Not that I'm a spelling nazi...
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
These flaws were discovered at least 4 years ago http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2003/10/60713. Like I said, nothing was done!
After that, we go to those same 3rd world countries "teaching" them about how to serve the common man through democracy, accountability and the rule of law. Very sad indeed.
I have already proposed a new hardware solution: using a core component based on carbon nano-platelets, encased in a security layer composed on bio-cultivated fibres, coated by a impact resistance plastic polymer coating. This can be used to encode ultra-high resolution glyphs at the atomic level onto a wafer of specialised high contrast bio-cultivated fibre sheets. These sheets are collected in high security aluminium casings, with secured access points.
For vote counting, these casings are accessed via a private key security method and the sheets are distributed through a double-pass grid based visual recognotion system. This system is based on ultra-low cost, long life bio-degradable wetware, each grid node containing a state-of-the-art high density neural-net based visual recognition system. The grid system collates the vote totals through a summation n-ary tree to the final local arbiter. These arbiters then declare, or organise further summation passes as required if any grid nodes are suspected of mis-computation.
I have already been granted a patent for this from the USPTO, so I'll sue anyone who uses a similar system. These items will be marketed under the trademarked names of Carbonomark(TM) and Organosheets(TM).
Well, congratulations the to NYT for the extremely timely reporting, more than a year after the elections they're talking about, and more than 3 years after the election when the HAVA voting machines were first used. Also, years after articles in magazines such as Harpers and many progressive sites, not to mention news report the day after the elections about voting machines failures, and statistical anomalies in the declared election results vs exit polls, not to mention anomalies such as number of undervotes bigger than the total number of voters in some precincts.
And as for the machines themselves, you have to try to make machines and voting systems as pathetic as these. Pure incompetence alone cannot account for this.
Our ballets have a broken arrow (=== ====>) that you fill in to vote. They are a good 1.5in apart and easy to mark. If you don't mark them correctly, the machine simply rejects the ballot with a loud error beep, from there you can re-try.
Simple.
Gone!
... if people are just fucking morons, how hard can it be to setup a vote which is hard to manipulate I mean really? Sometimes I think we should just have a national holiday for one whole week where everybody just goes, gets together and stands and gets counted openly triangulation of picture day via digital cameras, cell phones, etc. (multiple images everyone taking them, etc).
Obviously the operating system should know it's being used in a voting machine and drop all errors. It wouldn't be the application developer's responsibility to catch exceptions, oh no. Ah, another slashdot summary takes a half baked jab at MS.
The problem is simple. Using simple programmers, instead of licensed engineers.
If you have a group of engineers working on this, who are licensed and held accountable, this problem would probably not have happened. Nobody wants to have a finding of negligence/incompetence/criminal liability on their record.
But what's the worse you can do to a simple programmer? Fire them? reprimand them? and then on to the next 'code monkey' gig.
yeah seriously why the hell would you put Windows on a voting machine?!?! What a bunch of morons. The simpler the better. All it has to do is record a goddam vote and print something. You don't need internet protocols and windows update and Free Cell on it.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
when it comes to voting machines the requirements should be that they are mathematically verifiable for correctness
And how will that keep the printer from malfunctioning, or the ram from spiking under a very specific, untestable state (include temperature and a particular set of bits that causes the CPU to malfunction?
Your solution sucks. The issues are not from mathematical failures, but from mechanical/electrical ones.
These machines should consist of a single MCU which is connected to pushbuttons and feeds to a dot-matrix printer and a EPROM (not EEPROM) via RS-485 or SPI (each of which is run by a single MCU that only does that).
Which pushbutton means which candidate is *printed* on a card and placed next to the buttons.
Cost to construct: $10 of hardware+outer casing (which is presumably hundreds of dollars).
Chance of failure: extremely small.
Why this hasn't been done yet considering the amount of money poured into the process: because they like it to be the way that it is.
I should mention that the above procedure doesn't actually require an OS and can be easily represented by a finite state machine. In other words, this level of simplicity actually results in mathematically verifiable functionality automatically, while at the same time it actually solves the problem.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
``In short, accurate elections with anonymous, non-voter-provable (to prevent blackmail/vote purchasing) votes are hard, but since they are the basis for our system of government, we need to do the work to do it right.''
The good news is that the hard work has been done.
The bad news is that none of the better systems have taken off yet. Part of the problem is that people really don't care. Part of the problem is that politicians actually don't _want_ to admit there is something wrong and fix it (that, at least, is how it is in the Netherlands). Part of the problem is that people keep re-inventing the wheel, usually poorly, instead of using the solutions others have already come up with. And part of the problem is that all these new systems are just _complicated_.
All things considered, I believe simple paper voting and counting votes by hand is the best solution to date. It isn't perfect, but the security implications are easy to understand, and there are established procedures that provide the desireable properties for voting systems (accuracy, verifiability, privacy, etc.)
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Why not just use paper? Any use of computers means that nobody can verify what software is actually running when they walk up to the machine on election day. There is no problem with paper and pen, and hand counting. It is completely verifiable, completely transparent, and with people watching the polling stations, ballot boxes, and counting, is actually quite hard to cheat the system. It's also very hard to do cheating en masse. Sure you could stuff a couple ballot boxes, but it is very hard to stuff all the ballots across the country.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Imagine Diebold going to NASA/Air Force and trying to peddle their sub-standard hardware for mission-critical situations. I'm sure they would be given the boot faster than they can cry in pain. Why should our nation's most critiqued software/hardware (Think: Space shuttle computer, NORAD tracking software) work 99.99999% of the time, but our Elections hardware/software is bought only on the good faith of some business executive?
I would not expect the slashdot editors to know this but FYI it is spelled Cuyahoga County not "Cayahoga" which is roughly correct phonetically but not correct otherwise. For those unfamiliar, Cuyahoga County is where the city of Cleveland is located.
How telling is it that the overwhelming majority of
Surely, we all recognize the benefits electronic voting could offer... With proper UI, disabled voters are given a voice undiminished by their physical limitations. Language barriers dissolve. Costs could be reduced. The environment is saved from literally truckloads of paper per state per election consumed. In theory, we could make voting easier via the internet or some other remote casting of ballots. The ease could even lead to a more democratic society, with voting happening more frequently - wouldn't it be nice if more people in local towns voted in town meetings than the vocal minority so directly benefited by the decisions made? The accuracy and speed of vote tallying would surpass anything we could do manually.
And yet, the cries against anything more than optical scanning of ballots is so loud here.
It seems an outside observer - or an insider observer trying to glean some wisdom from the group mentality - could infer one of two things from this behavior. Either this group of knowledgeable technophiles has managed to collectively do a 180 on this one topic, or the wisdom /. members collectively have regarding technology and the way soceity implements it leads us to the inevitable conclusion that while the theory of electronic voting is promising, its practice is doomed.
So how could such fans of all things technology reach such a seemingly self-contradictory conclusion? Do we really despise the technology behind electronic voting? Or is it just that we realize there are two components when people employ technology: people and technology. And we do seem to like technology. Or would respect be a better word, that "we respect the power technology can give?" We fear the power the abuse of technology can win, and we know enough about this technology to see how easy it is to abuse.
Disclaimer: I share what I seem to see as the majority opinion. I have counted ballots manually in the distant past, and I'm now employed at a company that prints paper ballots.
>Windows CE sensing fingers sliding from one key to another as a drag and drop event
This is really annoying problem even on the desktop
It used to happen to me many times to me while double double clicking that I managed to move a whole directory tree around (especially dangerous when browsing c:\Windows and don't notice the problem right away).
The best Windows could have done was let the process crash but not the OS. I also don't see how an unexpected message would cause a process to crash Windows. That must have been some seriously horrible programming on Diebold's part.
First off, it's Cuyahoga, not Cayahoga. The county is named for the Cuyahoga River, best known for catching on fire several decades ago.
Secondly, there were lots of reasons why this particular county was scrutinized: Ohio was to the 2004 presidential election what Floriday was to the 2000 election, and there were lots of reports of irregularities in Cuyahoga County. Cuyahoga Country is by far the most liberal area of Ohio, so a few thousand votes missing were likely to swing the election. Really the question still hanging over those election results is whether they were the result of incompetent poll workers or the efforts of Ken Blackwell (then Ohio Secretary of State and Bush campaign manager in Ohio). That's what the current Ohio Secretary of State Jen Brunner (a Democrat) is trying to determine.
I am officially gone from
Just so you know, it's Florida, not Floriday. :)
-Mike
(Sorry, couldn't resist!)
I'm sorry; I don't know what I was thinking!
"But the design philosophy they took is the wrong one. Look at the complexity behind these things!"
Do you really think that the designers at Diebold are stupid? I don't. I think the unnecessary complexity is purposeful. Much like modern legislation, if you make it a bloated hypercomplex thing, it's much easier to hide and manupulate things in there. Now of course this sounds like conspiracy theory, but there is another very simple thing that occurred to me in the first ten seconds of reading the article. "Why was there only one tally server doing the counting? Why not enter the information into each of two or more separate tally servers? Would that expose even more "errors"? Tallying votes securely should not be a difficult thing. Here on slashdot there have been dozens of well thought out ways to do that. The only reason that makes any sense for Diebold's "blunders" is that they are not actually trying to count the votes securely and accurately. So while some may say: "Don't attribute to malice what can be more more easily explained by stupidity." I'm saying that multi-million dollar high profile contracts like these are not engineered by teams of incompetent fools. This cannot be attributed to stupidity, other than using Diebold or ESS machines in the first place.
We are all just people.
I'm thankful for Diebold and the other screwups that engineered and produced these machines. Can you imagine what would have happened if they'd produced good machines (and I can't imagine that being too difficult) but that still didn't have a paper trail or a way to guarantee the votes? They would have skated in all 50 states and the democratic process would be in a big mess. Due to their incredible incompetence, the big media is waking up. Seriously, thanks Diebold or whatever you're calling yourself now!
I am totally shocked that even Diebold could screw up this badly
Nah, I worked for 2 Fortune 500 companies ($LargeHardwareAndServicesProvider and $WeMakeHighendElectronics) and the arconyms SNAFU, TARFU, BOHICA, TAFUBB etc. were par for the course.
Combine poor communications, bad management, short deadlines, sale of vaporware or processes, over selling of the product, political infighting and a blind gold rush mentality and this isn't really surprising. What is surprising is after all these years the customers have never learned after having been burned so many times.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
you're an idiot. windows CE is not full blown windows.
The New York time
Can anyone edit at all? This is just retarded. It's The New York Times.
Wow. Just wow.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
Just so you know, the democrats have controlled the city of Cleveland for decades. I don't think it was a state-issue at all, especially since the Cuyahoga County Election Board was AND STILL IS incompetant. The new termers can 'investigate' all they want, but the truth is they won't find what everybody wants to paint as the reasons.
Sorry, I used to live there and still know some of those folks personally.
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
Damn straight.....you need Minesweeper.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
American voting system has a huge social flaw that makes electronic voting attractive despite all the added flaws. Vote counting should be a compulsory duty similar to jury duty, and not left in the hands of a few volunteers. All the money wasted on voting machines should be allocated for compensation to citizens called to their vote counting duty. That is how many other countries manage to have results minutes after the polls are closed without the need for flawed technology. Furthermore, citizens may be encouraged to participate in the voting process more willingly if they see themselves as part of it and see that they can trust it. Forget about technology, make vote counting every citizen's duty.
The elections in USA have been proven fraudulent, yet Secret Service and americans have done nothing about it. The fraud will continue and elections will favor the candidates of big corporations. http://www.electionfraud2004.org/ElectionFraud2004.pdf
People like Ron Paul aren't given a fair and equal chance.
The hanging chad problem was a confirmation problem: confirming that the punched ballot card would be tabulated by the voter as intended.
I've never understand why this isn't broken down as a two step process. To me this is a separation of concerns problem.
One concern is to produce an accurately punched ballot (intentional, complete, unambiguous). This step has no memory of voter actions.
The other concern is to verify that the punched ballot reads back as intended when tabulated or manually verified. Few voters should be allowed to escape without obtaining a green light from the ballet confirmation test. This step has no input buttons. It scans the ballot, displays a summary of what it read (and any problems detected), and provides a green light (or not).
1) voter marks ballot (punch card)
1a) provide a manual mechanical punch for determined voters wishing to do so (highly unlikely to fail, and serves as a backup if the fancy technology fails or engenders controversy)
1b) provide access-enhanced display screens with automatic punch for voters who can't or don't wish to do (1a)
2) voter presents ballot to a (secret) vote confirmation reader, which indicates the selections detected on a screen, and notifies the voter of whether they have cast valid votes in all available races (this machines has no other inputs)
3) validated ballot stuffed into secure ballot box under oversight of voting officials
Notes
The auto punch should display an image of the confirmed punch pattern to be verified before pressing print (aka mangle) which remains to be verified by the voter after the machine spits out the auto-punched voting card.
The auto punch has no memory of voter actions whatsoever.
Every screen presented by the auto punch should correspond to printed posters which anyone can corroborate as accurate. It should be possible for any voter to download these posters off the internet prior to the election. There should be practice software available which allows users to walk through the autopunch procedure. The practice software should be able to print the desired punch card pattern, which a voter would be able to carry in and visually duplicate (in secrecy).
Every race on the ballot has exactly one mark, for a candidate, or for no-vote. There should be *exactly* one possible punch pattern for every possible voting preference (combination of votes).
The ballot confirmation machine can maintain "pre-counts" to focus manual recounting on the close races. At least one non-close race should be challenged (at random) to verify reported pre-count accuracy.
I personally like the punch system that physically removes shards of paper. Ink is subject to fancy chemistry.
Summary
The official vote (ballot) is a physical object which is physically altered by the vote selection.
The ballot has exactly one physical state to represent each allowable voter preference.
The voter can determine in the weeks before the election what that pattern will look like according to the voting preference, and every carry a printed likeness into the voting process.
Any machine that touches the physical ballot displays the ballot pattern it 1) intends to stamp, 2) or detected during read-back.
There is an issue with the pre-counter being tricked into counting the same finished ballot more than once. This shouldn't matter, as it mostly exists to get quick results so we can watch the concession speeches and head to bed.
Double counting will show up on the official count later. It should be armed to count once by an election official for each person who enters the booth.
The main difference is the voter will leave the process with far greater confidence that their physical ballot indicated their preference in a way that must later be counted unambiguously.
Everyone seems to be voting for your mother! Its a landslide of pubic hair!
I still live in Cuyahoga County. The executive director of the Board of Elections in 2004 and 2006 was Michael Vu. Vu is a Democrat. He resigned from the Board of Elections in February, 2007. All four members of the Board of Elections--two Republicans, two Democrats--also resigned.
I'm well aware that the Democrats have controlled the Cleveland area since forever, and I'm definitely not in the "it's all Blackwell's fault" camp. I do however find such obvious conflicts of interest problematic at the very least. One of the reasons I listed Jen Brunner's party affiliation was to make it clear that this could just be a partisan thing.
Or, of course, the Cuyahoga County Election Board being incompetent. My question in that case is why no one at the state level has done something about it.
I am officially gone from
yeah actually I was planning on basing my vote on whether or not this next square is a bomb...
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
I'm fine with simple paper ballots, but there definitely are issues with them for the disabled. Also, you have trouble with ballots which can be 'spoiled' to a variable extent. If 'spoilage' were simply binary, then deciding when to just throw out the ballot (at least for the spoiled contest on it) would be easy, but since it's not, you get people arguing about 'the intent of the voter'. Ballot marker machines are supposed to solve that.
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There is no problem with paper and pen, and hand counting.
It's fantastically expensive, and hard to back up.
It is completely verifiable, completely transparent, and with people watching the polling stations, ballot boxes, and counting, is actually quite hard to cheat the system.
There can only easily be one copy, so it isn't easily verifiable, transparent, or independently watchable. Only one group can be responsible for keeping track of the actual votes, and if they lose any, then they're gone. The difficulty in making copies adds a single point of failure.
actually quite hard to cheat the system. It's also very hard to do cheating en masse.
Be in charge of the "independent" agency responsible for doing all these (ridiculously expensive) hand counted polls by undercutting all of the competition on price. Do it for free, or pay for the privilege, even. Then be really good at not being caught taking bribes when you report the results, or at losing some of the ballots that you know are going to end up in favor of the guy you don't want to win.
It'd be a lot harder if the results coming out of each area were themselves a matter of public record. No losing them, then.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Go back to punch ballots and require chads to be completely removed. Throwing money and techechnology at it is not the answer. I know its a foreign concept to most of you but we need to throw personal responsibility at problems of the individual vote validation.
Why can't they use something like this: http://www.slate.com/id/2107388/
More information here: http://www.eci.gov.in/Audio_VideoClips/presentation.asp
and
http://www.eci.gov.in/faq/evm.asp
And the 2008 results are just in -- it's the write-in candidate, our new president, William Henry Gates!