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Open Source Voting Software Success
elhaf writes "The Open Voting Consortium has announced that they successfully demonstrated the Open Voting Process in San Luis Obispo this weekend. OVC received a request from San Luis Obispo County on the previous Monday to provide software to run their January 12 straw poll. By Friday, they had the software prepared and Saturday's event goes down as a great success for Open Voting Consortium and the cause of transparent election administration. They used Ubuntu and their code is publicly available. Surprisingly, counting ballots is not rocket science."
Surprisingly, counting ballots is not rocket science
Of course not, however there is a lot of science involved in the process of mis-counting ballots... especially in a way that avoids the possibility of getting caught.
Those are valuable trade secrets worth protecting!
"[1] In case any techies want to see some code, here is the program for the voting counting program, written by Asheesh: http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/ad/voting_thing.tar
Here is Jan's code (if you want to run it and have some trouble, let me know and I will help you with it) http://user.it.uu.se/~jan/test/straw.tar"
I love the name.
Anything electronic can be pwned. This isn't to say that paper ballots can't be abused. Even so, we have a long history of dealing with election fraud where paper ballots are involved. We know what it looks like and it tends to be obvious.
New Hampshire has granted a recount for the recent primary vote. The ballots were paper and were scanned in. There is a consistent pattern of hand counted votes going one way and the machine counted ones going the other. It does look fishy. At least we have the original paper ballots to count by hand.
Dictionary _ballots = new Dictionary();
// What did I miss?
void VoteFor(string candidate)
{
if(_ballots.ContaintsKey(candidate)
_ballots[candidate]++;
else
_ballots[candidate] = 1;
PrintOnPaper(candidate);
}
void ShowResults()
{
foreach(string candidate in _ballots.Keys)
Console.WriteLine(candidate + " " + _ballots[candidate]);
}
It's truely a sign of how in-bred people are, if they are genuinely fearful of genetic diversity in the population.
Genetic diversity is what leads to a strong, resilient and intelligent population.
You elected someone because he looked just like your cousin cleetus, but "knowed how to talk a bit more smart" the last two times... and look where we are now... when will you learn?
Neither of which are actual sciences.
It just goes to show what statistics have long said...
In any country, close to 50% of people have below average intelligence...
Unfortunately sometimes it's mainly that half that can be bothered to go out and vote...
In any country, close to 50% of people have below average intelligence...
And, for that matter, exactly fifty percent are below median intelligence.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Everytime i vote in a slashdot poll!
For people concerned about racism you sure seem willing to collectively damn people based on incidental characteristics such as political party affiliation.
I guess pretending others are inferior makes other groups easier to ruthlessly smear and attack no matter what your motivation is.
would fail to compile, as main must be declared to return SOMETHING (void if your not following ANSI)
So, you fail it.
If this is the totality of the OVC system, I hate to say it, but it's not going to make it in the real world for quite some time. By failing to meet accessibility requirements, it's an instant non-starter in a real election. I'm also concerned that any vote tabulation software is required; shouldn't that be standardized code based on the ballot?
Let us live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry -- Mark Twain
How can you be sure that the program you are running really is the program that you think it is, and not a modified copy?
There is a lot of questioning the safety or security of these devices, even when they're open-source. The secret-ballot was not suggested for this nation by a gaggle of idiots, and done correctly by people who care about democracy (perhaps that's really where the issue is, concerning the lack of actual Americans these days as opposed to U.S. Citizens with vested interests). But, due to freedoms, we cannot hold Americans accountable for their nationalism or democratic spirit. Instead, we can work harder to manage more accountability for the voting process. Observe (I still hold the same stance concerning e-voting as I ever did):
.016 years, or perhaps a modest six days. consider that humans need to sleep, and you have eighteen days. count breaks, errors, and certain numbers having to count the same switch at the same time to verify it, and you have a multiply of that, perhaps exceeding a month. now pay them all or otherwise convince them to spend all their time for one month counting microscopic switches. now consider that you will have to either print and provide for them on paper, or have them record on paper, the status of the switches to be verified. now accomodate the 1,000,000 vote-counters. you already have all the materials you need to have done the ballot by classic ballot means and also at the very least quadrupled the expenses. i urge you to ditch the computer junk and ask people to turn out to the booths, instead.'
counting silicon transistors?
by eyenot (102141) on Saturday December 20 2003,
read any issue of 2600 and think about e-voting, then go have a heart-to-heart with your elected representatives, especially if they are democratic as the democrats intend to involve from-home e-voting in the upcoming democratic primaries.
'governor, this is a simple 64mbyte ram module. there are sixty-four million groups of eight switches in here. if you count each of these groups one per second, it would take you over two years. now consider that each little individual switch of on and off has to be verified. one switch per second, this would take you sixteen years, and would total more seconds than there are american citizens, almost twice as many. and this, just to count one storage device, dozens of which would be required to actually do the job of recording indexes, names, addresses, signatures and social security numbers, and other data that are collected in current ballots in order to ensure fair elections. there would have to be more storage, as well, to keep logs of all the electronic transactions required in order make sure the processes were secure and retractable, for the purpose of tracking down any offenders. now this task of sixteen years to count every switch in this chip has been multiplied by dozens, perhaps hundreds or even thousands. you may find enough volunteers to reduce the time required, but now reduce the volunteers, in the case of just 1,000 such citizens, by the requirement of ability to run an electron-scanning microscope and to work steadily at the task for as many as sixteen years. now find 10,000 electron-scanning microscope-operating humans who can work without stopping to eat, sleep, or drink for a year and a half and you're approaching the end of your problem. now find 1,000,000 such citizens and the work has been reduced to
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Oh, I would argue about how Bush was actually elected by Coca Cola (and Disney) by way of a tribunal court (which is exactly what happened!) But I've already been modded down, resulting in my first zero-or-lower-scoring-comment, in a comment mentioning exactly that same issue in another thread: so for all your complaint about the liberalism here, obviously you and cleetus get to wave the flag over your religious-political belief that he was "duly elected", because some mod somewhere shares your pew.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And for that matter, u r wrong. exactly wrong. consider 1,2,3. Only 1/3 is below the median.
Open Voting, right here in little ole San Luis Obispo! That's almost enough to make me want to go out and vote!!
In defense of the kooks, at least they don't believe Bush was ordained by Jesus Christ. They do seem to be a bit ahead of the conservative nuts in that respect. But don't get me wrong, I'm glad we can all finally agree that there has never been voter fraud in the entire history of this country.
Having the code open is just one piece of the puzzle. There also has to be stringent auditing of the voting machines and random spot-checking of them to ensure that the code being run is the exact same as the code that is published and open.
Lots of places still use paper and ink quite successfully. Sure, you can use computers to mark the ballots if you must, but how is that better? If polling stations are kept to a few hundred voters each, they can be counted in minutes by hand by all parties' scrutineers. Keep the ballots and they can be recounted any number of times. No software involved. Verifiable. Reusable hardware (well, sorta flexibleware) available from Rubbermaid for under a penny per ballot. e-voting has no legitimate purpose other than remote access. Even then it's questionable.
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
Yeah... because using teh Lunix is SOOO secure...