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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.
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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.
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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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'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."
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.
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.
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.
``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.
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?
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.
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
"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.
Wrong as wrong can be, my friend.
The best way is to hire good designers, hire good programmers, then hire good management and give them clear targets. A small, close-knit development team can do wonders. You see, the production of good software is as much a function of good management as it is engineering talent. You can hire the best, most accountable engineers on the planet, but put a fool in charge and you're still going to ship crap. And you know what? Nobody ever complains about the fact that the moron who was running the show was just that: a moron. No, they always blame the developers, while their manager goes on to screw up yet another team somewhere else.
The reality is that you need a good architect, someone that understands not only what the system is designed to accomplish, but can account for most of the possible failure modes. There are plenty of good programmers out there (possibly some of them work for Diebold) but it's pretty obvious that Diebold's leadership is defective. Trying to hold the engineering team responsible for managerial failures serves no purpose.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.