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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."
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.
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Coder? Want to learn electronics? Microcontroller kits.
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.
Doesn't that open up a whole bunch of ways to do fraud?
In the post office, possibly:
"Here are the votes from the very (hated political party) area"
"Put them behind box over there, I will get to them next week"
"But they have to be counted by tomorrow"
"Yeah, so?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
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
No, it's not Microsoft's fault. It's the vendor's fault for adding extra complexity to a system that needs to be more reliable than your MP3 player.
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?
"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.