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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.
RTFA The user made their selection and a paper ballot printed out (with both a bar code, and a printed candidate name) - this was then placed in the balot box. When it became time to count, it was done in public, the candidate name was read, and then the ballot bar-code scanned, making the candidate tally increase on screen.
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?
Any process can be subverted; paper-ballot elections were stolen through a large number of different means long before computers were invented.
Its pretty obvious when electronic ballots are used, too -- pretty much the same way that paper-ballot fraud is (pre-election polling being dead on except in precincts where machines from a certain manufacturer were used, counts for certain candidates in precincts above the total number of registered voters, etc.)
The media (and, following their lead, most of the public) may ignore these clear signs, but that doesn't mean they aren't there.
All of this is not to say that paper ballots aren't important: they are, because without them you've got nothing to reconcile a fishy-looking election too. And because of the long-history of paper-ballot fraud, we've gotten pretty good and protecting against the kinds of things that would mess up the paper trail, if there is a recount. We can't do that as reliably without paper. But we shouldn't pretend that paper-ballot based elections are somehow more pure, or have more obvious first signs of fraud. Short of going back and doing a recount, the signs of fraud are pretty much the same for paper ballots as they are for electronic ones.
They say with an election with many measures that instead of reading it aloud it could be put up on the projector and with enough observers any error would be spotted. But really all you need is one observer with a video camera of the running tally and the vote itself, then they can review it in slow motion later on.
I have described a system like this for a long time, only using OCR instead of bar codes. Bar codes are better though since the really important part is the running total that observers can match against the vote -- how the computer reads the printed vote is not important at all as long as the counts match what is human-readable. I'm glad they have created this system as it really shows how ridiculous the diebolds and others are.
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!
It's "ContainsKey", not "ContaintsKey". And you're missing a closing bracket, same line.
BTW, the PrintOnPaper() routine that's buried in the printer driver source code is: Hopefully there was a voter receipt printer and the voter could look at the receipt and verify that's who they voted for, then drop that into a box before leaving the polling station, then at least we could do a physical recount if someone contested the vote. Also, we should take 10% of the polling booths at random and do a manual count to check anyway.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
video can be tampered with
It does look fishy
well the full recount will happen January 16th So we'll get to the bottom of that. I personally think we won't find any grand conspiracy, but it will be good to just show people that sometimes things aren't exactly as they seem. Sometimes polls are off, and strange weird little things happen during elections that can only be attributed to random chance, rather than malice. We still, need to minimize any and all errors, sometimes they really screw things up Florida style.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
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?
Actually, your OCR idea is better - the machines should use the same "codes" that the humans do. There are fonts which are specifically designed to be human readable and still have a high degree of accuracy for typical OCR algorithms.
Computer Science isn't a science in the same way Mathematics isn't a science seeing as, you know, Computer Science is merely a subset of Mathematics...
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
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.