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E-Voting Undermines Public Confidence In Elections
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Techdirt columnist, Timothy Lee, hit the metaphoric nail on the head, claiming that e-Voting undermines the public perception of election fairness - even when there is no evidence of wrongdoing. 'In a well-designed voting system, voters shouldn't have to take anyone's actions on faith. The entire process should be simple and transparent, so that anyone can observe it and verify that it was carried out correctly. The complexity and opacity of e-voting machines makes effective public scrutiny impossible, and so it's a bad idea even in the absence of specific evidence of wrongdoing.' Add to this the possibility technical faults, conflicts of interest and evidence of tampering, how long before the US vote is viewed as an electronic pantomime?"
If they take away people's confidence in our elections, people won't care as much when they do away with elections altogether.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
When was there ever public confidence in politics?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I thought that ship had already sailed...
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
"...voters shouldn't have to take anyone's actions on faith." Well, that's always going to be the problem, isn't it?
In principle, the ballots being counted in public in front of everyone in the village will inspire more confidence than an obscure computer calculation. However, as the 2000 Florida debacle has demonstrated, hand counting has its own problems (e.g. error rates) which the voting public does not understand either. It seems to me that if the system artificially produces a landslide (e.g. via a winner-take-all-state-electoral-votes system), the public is happy that things went well. If the elections are close there is a lot of consternation and misunderstanding. On the technical level, ballots that are both human- and machine-countable but generated automatically (so there is less room for voter marking errors], look best to me. If the voting machine prints the ballot out but keeps no record otherwise that would be best. But just wait for a close elections and the voters will express lack of confidence in the results. The problem is the following: if you are trying to measure a large effect, then you will get the right result no matter what method you use and everyone will be quite confident you got the right result. If you are trying to measure an effect which is just at the level of resolution for your detector (or worse, as in the Florida case, below the measurement error) then there is no way to be as confident that you got the right result.
Sure, the polls might show that e-voting undermines the population's confidence in the system, but I'll bet that if we had a referendum on the issue we'd see that real voters actually support it overwhelmingly.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
the biggest threat to western democracy is not neocons, islamofascism, chinese technocrats, etc.
it's electronic voting
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=413698&no_d2=1&cid=21986758
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=409654&cid=21950000
democracy has plenty of problems, but one of democracy's greatest strengths is that by making the citizens it rules a part of the process, it inspires confidence in the government, it instills legitimacy
if you make the voting process opaque, you destroy confidence, you destroy legitimacy, you weaken people's faith in their democratically elected government, out of bad perception that their part in the process has been messed with, hidden
electronic voting must be universally rejected in all ways and all levels of government, asap
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
and that was with hanging chads. now Chad's hanging his flash card on the side of voting machines....
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Oh, this is complete nonsense. My chosen candidate has lost in many elections here in Canada, and I've never doubted the integrity of the process. I'm not happy he/she lost, but I've never had the slightest reason to doubt the process itself was fair and above board.
What was once true, is no longer so
I also discuss this in another comment, but the problem really arises not when your candidate loses, but when your candidate loses narrowly. This is quite justifiable: the smaller the effect (difference of support between the candidates), the less likely it is that your detection system (election procedures) can measure it correctly. There are two kinds of voter confidence issues: confidence that they system is free of biases, and confidence that, assuming it was free of biases, the system got the right result. It's true that electronic voting reduces confidence in the first property -- but I think the main driver for lack of voter confidence is their ignorance of the fact that even an unbiased system will get the "wrong" result some of the time. Since we lack an objective measure of the support of the candidates, there is of course no "right" result of the election beyond the actual results, but in the end I think that what happens is that when elections are close voters come face-to-face with what scientists have been facing for centuries under the name like "measurement error" and "scientific significance", they (the voters) tend to ascribe the problem to systematic bias rather than random error. It's true that less transparent systems make it easier for the voters to believe in conspiracy theories, but the underlying problem is lack of scientific thinking skills. I'd predict that after a close election voters will react the same way regardless of the technology employed (or lack thereof).
13% Confidant
36% Not confidant
51% George W Bush
If they just put the same untrustworthy electronic voting machines into big, heavy metal cabinets, with metal pull-levers for voting and a big red handle that commits the votes while it opens the curtain (just like we've used in NY for generations), no one would complain. And those freaks who did complain because the actual votes are counted by an untrustworthy device buried inside it would be treated like freaks.
Especially if the metal cabinets were aged in the factory with a little rust and scrapes...
But the vendors are used to scoring sales by just keeping the purchase procedure as closed as the IP in their opaque devices. The user themself doesn't figure into their business model at all, whether they're casting a vote or reading about the purchase on their behalf in their newspaper.
--
make install -not war
I personally like the little bubble sheets that get filled in. They are commonly called Scantron. Use a disposable paper mask that is pre-punched to match the sheet you mark on, and the voter takes it to the one or more machines for reading them in. Trackable, human readable after a fashion, simple technology that can be easily deployed for very large number of voters. Best part is one machine can service about 100 voting stations as cafeteria tables with dividers are all the voting stations are!
I prefer voting on those than the touch screen units. Especially when I have to wait 20-30 min to get my time to vote, and I am in a relatively small voting district now. When I was in a larger district it was a 1-5 min wait to get you ballot, and a 1-5 min wait to scan in at one of the two machines.
I also find that older folk are afraid of touch screen technology because they feel that it will break, or they are not comfortable with computers to start with.
Let me just sharpen my #2 pencil and vote!
Phil
Laugh, it's good for you!
I view it as an electronic pantomime, now. So do most thinking people.
See, these days, they don't even have to have the appearance of propriety. Witness Dick Cheney giving his Halliburton shares to charity when he became VP...or did he?
expandfairuse.org
Americans may not be big into knowing their history, but history has shown again and again that if politicians can lie cheat or twist their way around they will... It's a reality that is so pervasive that even that majority of Americans who never cracked their history book open in high school know it to be true. They may say "even when there is no evidence of wrongdoing" but what everyone thinks is "so we just don't have the evidence, and even if it isn't, it's going to happen." And that isn't perception, it's good ol' pattern recognition: if there's a way to cheat, someone is going to do it eventually.
please read the above comment slashdotters
Making citizens a part of the process only "instills legitimacy" when those citizens are fully competent, and the majority simply aren't.
i want you to look at and consider you fellow citizens, your fellow human beings. if, when you look at those people, you find something lacking, something untrustworthy, this is an antidemocratic instinct
the full inference of the comment of the man above is that there is the unworthy, a magical cut off line (which no one can determine, but that's besides the point), and then a special higher class of worthy people
this is a story as old as time. it's called aristocracy. it's called classism. it can be based on an arbitrary test for intelligence, a certain amount of money in your bank account, a certain genetic makeup
but the end results of aristocracy and classism is all the same: the french revolution
if you find yourself with antidemocratic instincts like the poster above, take a deep breath, step back, and fix yourself. you are broken in a dangerous, authoritarian, fascist way
you fellow human beings are your fellow human beings. beginning and end of story. you are no better than them. if you think you are, and there is a special class of people who share this superiority with you, you are a danger to society. YOU and your thinking is the seed to the downfall of democracy. and it is the same fear based pap that you often howl about coming from the right
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Open source the code, provide each registered voter with an encryption key sent through the mail (the real mail, so you have to send it to a real physical location), and maintain a database where each user can view his/her vote. Or, in the short term, just give everyone a receipt for their votes at the booth.
Who the heck's idiotic idea was it that companies could make software to count votes, and then not let anybody look at the software and see what it actually does because it's "proprietary"?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I don't see why we shouldn't do both. Fill out a paper card and have that fed into a computer. If the election was close enough that margin of error could come into play, then count both of them and compare the results. It would cost more but it seems like it's an important enough event to splurge on. If we're willing to accept hundreds of millions of campaign dollars going towards mudslinging and baby-kissing then we should spend some of that on a redundant way to determine the winner.
Scantron voting has its own problems. What about voters who don't fill the bubbles accurately enough? Who fill two bubbles? What tolerance do you set the scanner to? You need to find a good division of labour between the computer (who is good at some things), the voter and the elections officials (which are human and good at other things).
Just like computers are better than people at scanning the ballots and tabulating the data, they are also better than people at filling the ovals (also known as "printing a filled ballot"). You will get a lot less scanning errors and invalid ballots if the voter gives the selections to a computer and then the computer prints the result out. For some voters it may be slower than hand-filling of the ballot, but for some (the disabled, the tech-savvy) it may be much faster. If you want, you can offer people the option: fill your own bubbles or have a computer fill them for you.
"...how long before the US vote is viewed as an electronic pantomime?"
"it would mean we should trust whoever ends up winning an election to do a competent job, so why bother voting in the first place?"
and i'm the nut
huh
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There's already a simple solution to this problem. You stick the ballot into the Scantron machine. The Scantron machine tries to read the ballot. If the ballot is invalid, then it spits the ballot back out, and the voter either corrects it or has that ballot replaced.
This at least gets rid of the over-votes, and could get rid of the under-votes if the Scantron has a "possibly read a filled bubble but not sure" threshold (I really don't know).
One interesting tidbit from the 2000 Florida election that often gets ignored in favor of controversies over the felon lists and the nature of the butterfly ballots themselves, is that the machines they used were in fact capable of this! It was an optional setting, the machine could either take the bad ballot as-is but just not count it, or it could reject the ballot back into the voter's hand for correction. As you may have guessed, voting machines in the precincts with high rates of bad ballots had this option disabled, and ones with low rates of bad ballots had it enabled. But we weren't told that, and were instead just left to assume that the people in the high-error precincts were simply dumber than everyone else, and we just accepted it! But in reality, errors are common, but most get a chance to correct it when the machine spits it out.
That said, I do agree that the best thing to do is have the computer print out the ballot so as to minimize the possibility of error. It's really the best of both worlds: The accessability of a voting machine that lets you edit your choices, read more about propositions, and enforces rules like no over-votes, but you still get a human-readable paper ballot that serves as the vote of record and can be recounted by anyone with working eyes. And if you make the printed ballot machine readable -- I prefer an OCR-friendly font so it's the *same* markings that are both human and machine readable -- you can still use a machine counter to get your instant-gratification.
It's not that hard to design a working voting system that minimizes voter error, maximizes accessibility, and most importantly maximizes openness and transparency. Just... nobody that I can tell has actually come forward and put the pieces together in a real system intended to be sold.
The enemies of Democracy are
Keeping a door locked makes people wonder what's going on in there.
More at eleven.
E-Voting Undermines Public Confidence in Elections... who cares?
E-Voting Undermines Elections.
Now having said that... Electronic tabulation (by optical scan for example) of paper ballots, accompanied by statistically appropriate manual audits, would inspire happy confidence in this voter.
-- QED
Here in Canada, we vote on paper ballots, which are hand-counted in the presence of party representatives. We've also not generally had controversy around our voting process ala Florida.
In Oregon we use a Vote-by-Mail system that has been heralded as an enormous success in raising voter turnout and easing stress. I find the system terribly convenient as I drop my ballot into a collection site at 2am, but I'm still left to wonder if the ballot will ever make it back to be counted. And if not, how do I rectify that situation and make sure it was counted? I think about all the issues we have with voter registration, polling place contention, voting machine error, dangling chads and the like and think that we should have some system of accountability for our votes. Note: This is not a fully developed idea. There are some holes in my process. Why couldn't my ballot have a uniquely identifiable number on it that, once cast and counted, I could validate it? I could easily log onto a website or dial in to an automated telephone system, and verify that yes my vote had made it through the collection process and into the categories I wanted. I realize there would be problems in correcting the vote if it appeared incorrectly. Why not attach a pull-off tab that had my copy of the uniquely identifiable number on it? Or put the same serial number on the paper receipt that some states have required from the new electronic voting machines? Basically I just want to know that my vote counted and I see no other way to do that than to just "trust" that everything went according to plan. Anybody else have any ideas?
Oh, I hope you get modded up. Very insightful, and all good suggestions.
;-) More info here and here. Unfortunately, I can't find the article on it I was specifically looking for, describing a pilot program to extend it to several small villages and use the system for day to day direct democracy. Or I may be confusing Cyberyn with another South American direct democracy project of the early 70s, I first read about it a long time ago.
You may be interested in Chile's early 70s project, Cyberyn. It was a central nervous system for a planned economy. (I know you, not your favorite concept, but keep an open mind
Does anyone else know more about this project, or other direct democracy projects in other countries?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
My Fantasy Election
Place machines in libraries. Use them year-round. When elections come, boot off of a CD to a scaled down version of Linux specifically designed for the one task of processing the election. Close access to the physical box. Leave only the mouse and the monitor. (A touchscreen really isn't all that much easier than a mouse, and there's no point in wasting money.)
When the voter finishes selecting candidates and props at the voter station, a paper receipt with a bar code is printed. In addition to the bar code, written on the receipt is each of the selections for the voter to verify. S/he verifies the selections first at that machine, which immediately stores the vote as a listed but not yet completed vote. (If the voter does not confirm the vote, the vote is dropped.)
From there, the voter proceeds to a verification machine (also running on a scaled down version of Linux) at which s/he scans in the bar code on the receipt. S/he checks the vote again. If it appears correct, the voter confirms it there. To complete the vote, the voter inserts the receipt into a ballot box at that station where it is scanned again as a completed vote (thus generating a paper trail).
The computers all work together by creating multiple-output reporting when it comes time to count the votes. Each voter station machine, verification machine, and ballot box prints its own individual summary of the votes cast at the close of the polls. Each host machine prints a copy of the votes it has scanned in addition to the votes placed at each of the voter station machines it is responsible for counting.
By choosing an open source software, you'll allow countless thousands of programmers to inspect the code and ensure that it is safe. Furthermore, with only access to the mouse, there will be no way to hack into the computers. But, even in the event of compromised security, the voter-verified paper receipts will still be available. If any discrepancies occur, they can simply refer to a count of the paper receipts localized to those machines whose reports did not match up (or of which there is any reason at all to doubt). The final advantage is that rather than having a box that can only be used once every two or four years, you end up with something we need anyway: more computers in local libraries.
Am I dreaming? Is there something wrong with this? Has this already been suggested? I do not claim to be an expert, so I just ask: why not?
Why, it would probably be Walden O'Dell, former CEO of Diebold. Of course, he's not alone in the software world for wanting to keep software secret (I know that my firm is big on it!!!) but given his past, and the later revelations of the actual quality of the software and design, his motives are suspect.
Yes, I know, it was rhetorical. Still, running an election system on the Microsoft Jet database engine was pure folly. Come on: democracy hinges on an Access database?!?
Similarly in Australia. If you tried claiming that the federal elections were being rigged, people would think you were mad unless you had some incredibly good evidence.
its extent might not be 100% clear.
If the right to vote is only the right to go to the pulls and click on an option,
then we are fried.
If the right to vote includes the right for _that_ vote to get properly counted,
then e-voting is plainly unconstitutional as it cannot guaranty such thing.
I'd like to believe the right to vote includes the fact the the vote should get properly counted as well,
but dunno,
"I don't think electronic voting necessarily means opacity"
oh but it does, by definition. inseparably
anything on a computer is opaque. a disk drive has to be read, a processor has to cycle, a monitor has to project. something on paper meanwhile, requires nothing but a human being to understand what is written on it
eletronic voting is most definitely opaque. all of interaction with computers is an opaque process as compared to paper based media. paper is obviously inferior in many more important ways than electronics, but not when it comes to something stone cold simple as voting
this is where distrust can grow. in the sapce between who you vote for and who winds up in thw hite house: based on paper, i can trail, and trust, and verify. with electronics, so much can be hidden and quickly changed. trust evaporates
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
to say that point better than you just said it
kudos
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm a scientist by education, training, and occupation, and I deal with statistics and measurement uncertainty on a daily basis. I have absolutely no faith in electronic voting precisely BECAUSE the lack of verifiability makes it inevitable that a systematic bias will be introduced by a corrupt individual. Random errors in counting should be nearly negligible, and should be able to be kept down to around a percent or so. Also, if random errors of that magnitude are significant, they should be able to be dealt with by recounting ballots which have been secured in a publicly observed chain of custody. (Multiple measurements, smaller uncertainty.)
But the systematic errors are the real threat, because they give undue influence to lone individuals. There IS a "right result" in an election, and it is the one obtained by adding all the votes that were legitimately cast by voters in the election. And this can be obtained by using observable procedures which ensure the counting process accurately reflects the votes that were cast without systematic error.
I think you are viewing the problem completely backwards when you say that a less transparent system makes it easier to "believe" in conspiracy theories. The actual problem is that a less transparent system makes it much easier to CONDUCT a conspiracy. You don't need the consent of poll workers and poll observers to steal an election if you are using an electronic machine with no paper trail to do it.
I am quite confident that if I were programming or configuring a voting machine with no paper trail, and I wanted to steal an election, I would have the technological know-how to do this. And if I can do it, countless others can. The fact that electronic voting machines can be easily and invisibly compromised has nothing to do with voter perception. It is simply an objective fact.
i actually do believe that people are better and worse than other people, on a whole number of judgment calls
however, there is no one out there who can accurately measure those qualities in any trustworthy way
therefore, you have no choice other than to start looking at people as equals, and let things fall as they may. proof by outcome of life. no test can test for the qualities that are important in leading, for example. the only honest way to look at your fellow human being is as an equal. there is no magic test or projected characteristic that is a shortcut for making a determination of a complicated quality of that person. race for example. income another example. all failures at judging someone's true value
take a test for intelligence
can you even define intelligence? how incredibly complex a topic are we dealing with? do you honestly think it can be measured in such a way as to find the best leader out there?
your standard iq test has things for example that put value in manipulating 3D shapes in your head. there are autistic people who can do that. meanwhile, some guy fails miserably on an iq test for manipulating 3D objects in your head. ok. that same guy is extremely gifted in many leadership qualities: persuasion, instilling trust, etc. so what is the point of this stupid iq test again in determining worthiness in life? zero
so the idea of drawing people into classes in terms of good potential to lead or not lead, vote or not vote, is completely a nonstarter
it's not that people aren't better or worse than another. i believe in fact they are. it's just that there is no way to determine that objectively, so you can't go down that path in any moral or intellectually honest fashion
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Nice to see somebody noticing and describing one of the important pieces of the puzzle.
The purpose of elections in a republic is NOT because there's something "right" or "nice" about selecting the government officials and rules that are preferred by a majority of the voting population. (In fact, sometimes that's actually a bad idea. "Democracy" is often three wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.)
The purpose of elections is to increase the stability of the country and pacify it internally. They do this by attempting to figure out which way the war would come out, if it were actually fought over the issue.
To do this, elections must convince the losing side that they can't reverse the result by resorting to force.
That means they don't have to be perfect - but they have to be convincingly good enough.
- A wide race will be convincing. If the exact numbers are off it doesn't really matter.
- A really close race may come out wrong. But if it's close it also means a war won't reverse the result: Too many additional people will get annoyed and oppose those who try the violent option. So the losers might exhaust the peaceable remedies: Recounts, courts, etc. Then they gripe about it non-stop until the next election. And EVERYBODY tries to fix the system to be more accurate and avoid this hassle next time. Repeat until the elections are believable and/or the margin is broad enough that there's no serious dispute.
But the easiest way for an election to be believably fair and honest is for it to be VISIBLY fair and honest. Count the votes behind locked doors or inside a software-driven black box and you substitute trust for visible honesty.
Once the people stop trusting the elections their stabilizing effect is gone. Then losers may think they are strong enough to reverse the result and (when the winners start doing things that hurt their interests) morally justified in making the attempt. Then you are just asking for civil "unrest", comities of vigilance, death squads, coups, and civil or revolutionary war.
So it's far more important that the election procedures be VISIBLY honest and their approximate accuracy known than that they be dead-on accurate.
Which is what we're seeing now. Computerized black-box voting killed the audit trail and enabled the possibility that a small number of people could introduce large and undetectable changes to the result. Then came a close election with important issues at stake. Regardless of whether the black boxes gave an accurate count or were corrupted, there was no way to SHOW they were right - or close enough not to matter. So the losers were unconvinced.
Repeat after four years, and again after eight, adding in a foreign war, massive government spending, "security" intrusions on civil rights, and attempts by media conglomerates to swing the election exposed by comparison to uncontrolled Internet communication. Now you're starting to approach a scenario where large groups of losers start thinking "Maybe the elections were stolen. Maybe we've been conquered. Maybe there are enough of us to reverse this. Maybe violence will work. Maybe the system is corrupted to the point that violence is the only answer. Maybe violence is PROPER."
This is WHY it is more important that the elections be VISIBLY, CONVINCINGLY accurate than that they just be accurate.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Robert Caro's 2nd volume on LBJ details how LBJ stole his 1948 election to the Senate, with nary a computer in sight. The computer looks these days like it may make it easier to steal elections, but it's not as if it's creating the problem.
I'm the queer the atheists sent here to take away your gun!
At this point in time, everything to do with voting undermines public confidence in it. Since 2000 we entered a collective mindset which allows us to say that any election result not in our favor is due to some problem with voting. (Like lack of photo ID, or hacked e-voting machines, or chain of custody issues, etc.)
Some of that is funny to me, because the framework for vote allocation (winner takes all) and gerrymandering are pretty big hacks on the wishes of the people.
Nevertheless, I think there will be a time where you'll be submitting DNA swabs to vote on paper ballots with half a dozen carbon copies and people still will think of voter fraud as a problem.
I don't think a well designed voting should necessarily have to be 100% accurate. A hand-counting system isn't that accurate, but it can still be trusted as long as there aren't barriers from people being involved in the process to make sure it's being done reliably. What's important is that there's a reliable way to accurately re-count the votes to discover if there's a discrepancy, then deal with that discrepancy (if any) appropriately, without having to be concerned about the integrity of the voting records being compromised in the mean time.
A well designed hand counting system does this, because it's designed in a way that everyone can see and understand what's happening, and such that any stakeholder can assign trusted representatives to observe the process.
This definitely doesn't exclude electronic voting systems, however, but an electronic system should be used primarily to augment the counting process rather than being a final authority. The only plausible reason for an electronic system is to speed up the counting process because the media wants to be able to have it all nicely timed to announce the results on prime time TV.
Storing the votes electronically with no paper records is very bad, and doing this with closed systems that can't be examined is very bad. For either of these cases, most people don't have the qualifications to even understand the concept of how this works, let alone feel comfortable with trusting it. It's also difficult to audit, except for people who are very specifically skilled, and requiring that everyone trust a very small proportion of people is just bad.
If it's really necessary to use electronic counting methods to keep the media and the public happy, though, it's completely possible to do. All that's needed is a system where:
This way there's an electronic record and a paper record of the vote, meaning it's possible to have a speedy recount (even if it's by scanning a digital record on the paper slip), or a hand recount if there's any doubt. The fact that everyone can plainly see how the hand ballots were generated and deposited in the box makes it just as trustworthy as a more basic hand ballot. The only possibility of a discrepancy is if the machine recorded the electronic record inconsistently from the paper record, in which case the printed paper record in a hand recount should be authoritative, because that's the vote that the voter examined and confirmed was what they meant. Any significant doubt should result in a hand recount.
The idea is thought to have originated (as it was overhead in a restaurant in Crstal City, a short distance from the Pentagon) with Richard Bissell, former CIA Chief of Plans (and the guy from where those Mission Impossible-type of plans originated, and thought to be the major brain behind the eminently successful Marshall Plan after WWII), Henry Kissinger, Dov Zakheim, Admiral Poindexter and several others back sometime in the late '80s to early '90s.
It appears to have been successfully carried out now, and it should be full operational at this point: with SAIC, Hicks & Associates, Accenture, the various voting machine corps (Premier Elections Systems - formerly Diebold, ES&S, VoteHere, et al.) and their TIA network up and running - everything is in GO MODE for the 2008 presidential election! Good luck, America......
(snicker)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
IMHO, the method by which people get to influence politics doesn't matter too much. What matters is that people need to feel confident their opinion matters. One way to achieve this would be to ask the people more often. E-voting would enable just this. People wouldn't care if they couldn't verify 100% that their vote was correctly registered if the outcome of the whole election reflected anticipated public opinion (public opinion is quite closely measured already by various polls, etc.). E-voting could enable the public to influence decision making more often with voting on actual concrete issues, and not just votes of power. A bit like the early democracy in Athens where decisions were publicly voted for at the city square!
The voting system looked extremely fair. I had to show photo I.D. for Early voting, they brought up my information on their computer, and I was then given a voter's card (size of a credit card) to insert into the machine to be allowed to vote. I was given English, Spanish, and French as language options. Then I voted on a touch-screen. Then the screen suggested double-checking your vote, then I hit "complete ballot" on the screen. A reciept printed out within the machine beneath transparent glass, the receipt allowed me review my vote on paper. The reciept was printed in then I pressed o.k. on the touchscreen again and the receipt rolled through the machine away from where it was visible. A sound is made as the receipt rolls through.
i've mentioned cryptographic voting here before, there seem to be a lot of articles about electronic voting in general these past few months.
i'd like to start by saying that i reject this argument that cryptographic voting should be passed over because not everyone can understand the protocols well enough. My mom might not understand it, but she trusts me, and I understand it, and that should be enough. Maybe not, but maybe trusting me, and my cousin, and all of the newspapers, and all of the political parties, and anybody else, anywhere in the world who feels like it and knows enough, maybe that is enough.
You see, there will by many independent verifiers with cryptovoting, and even if I don't understand exactly how to verify it, it is extremely unlikely that every single independent verifier is lying to me.
furthermore, even if you don't understand the cryptography, you can download "steve's e-vote verifier 2.0." There would be many independently implemented, and competing softwares, and you could pick among them and run it on the published vote proof. i admit that this is a less visceral verification than most people would like, but it is another method that less crypto-savvy voters have to verify the vote. and again, any newspaper or magazine could verify the vote for themselves and publish their approval or disapproval.
beyond verifying that the vote was added correctly, which involves very complicated cryptography. there is the matter of assuring that my
vote is cast properly. With cryptovoting there would be a public list of all the people who voted, and all of their (encrypted) votes. i personally encrypt my vote (i must provide a proof that it is properly formatted) and can compare my paper copy of my encrypted vote to the publicly posted vote which is next to my name.
now as far as the paper hand count being auditable by anyone, i call bs. you must be the privileged few who have the political power to do the recount. there is limited access, which makes it much more opaque. with cryptographic voting, the only thing between you and personal verification is the study of math and cryptography. that may be a high hurdle for grandpa, but it's much more democratic than a requirement of privilege.
now the difficulty in explaining cryptovoting does make it hard to sell to people. but that is why we who understand these things should try to get the word out to our less technical friends and family. cryptovoting, done right, would give us unprecedented confidence in our election results.
please read more about cryptovoting, and if you agree with me, get the word out. check out this pdf for a technical description, and this video for another nice one. The video is the lighter of the two. These sources pretty much sum up the total of my knowledge on this stuff. Be warned: a little number theory is required to understand what they're talking about half the time. with that said, even the layman should find much of the video interesting.
Electronic vote counting simply doesn't belong at the voting booth.
Instead, what should happen at the voting booth should be ballot preparation, not vote counting. I have absolutely no problem with a fancy machine that has cool graphics and touch screen voting options in a thousand different languages. If you want to go through the effort of putting that together for a somewhat reasonable price, knock your socks off. I don't even mind this end of it being completely closed and propritary.
But the vote counting part needs to be separated from the ballot preparation. The only thing all of this fancy hardware is really doing is to assist a voter in understanding the rules of the election. In other words, not vote for multiple people if multiple votes invalidate your ballot, remind you of races that you didn't vote in, allow you to clearly note who you are voting for (no missing chads or fuzzy and inconclusive ballots), and provide a very clean ballot that election judges can use later for the vote counting process. Ballots cast should be on some sort of physical medium that has irreversible marks (so an election judge can't modify the results afterward) and human readable so the voter can have clear confidence in how their vote was cast. Any computer scientist worthy of that title ought to be able to figure out how to make something simultaneously human and machine readable... we aren't talking rocket science here and this is a decades old solved problem in the field.
One of my largest problems with the Diebold machines is that they have the vote counting take place in the voting booth itself. This opens up not only the traditional forms of voting fraud, but it also opens up new vectors of attacking the system and requires far too much in the way of securing the machines in order to ensure the integrity of the data. Besides, most of the security protocols aren't followed anyway, and those that are followed are a joke in many cases and have multiple methods of being circumvented. By its very nature at least in America, voting is done in private and away from the eyes of election judges. This is also done to ensure the integrity of the vote cast (by stopping coercion). But this act, by its nature, means that the machines can be compromised during the act of voting itself.
Let's look at what problems these machines are trying to solve:
I think it's time /. added a "-1 Tinfoil Hat" option.
It sounds like a simple program to me:
if(ballot == "Democrat")
switch(vote) {
case "Clinton":
clinton++;
break;
case "Obama":
obama++;
}
else
switch(vote) {
case "McCain":
mccain++;
break;
case "Romney":
romney++;
}
There. Now where's my large contractor paycheck?
You can't say that in the USA. Rigged elections are incredibly commonplace... with it being an "open secret" that dead people voting in Chicago gave JFK the U.S. Presidency over Nixon. This is the land where "vote early and vote often" is an often heard mantra.
With illegal aliens voting and homeless people in Seattle turning out in record numbers (in fact... having more votes cast than registered voters), yeah, there are a few problem. I guess Australia is just a bit more tame in terms of the election process.
This isn't to say that there aren't very honorable election judges in America... there are, but in a country this big it is very difficult to root out all of the corruption.
The elections are rigged. It's all a scam, at least here in the USA.
Andy Out!
is actually better than all the other options
in other words, a nation steered by hoardes/mobs of couch potatoes absolutely sucks
and yet every single other option you can think of is yet worse
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
has orders of magnitude more attack vectors than paper voting
you can tamper with paper votes, but it is cumbersome, slow, small in scale, and hard to hide, and requires the coordination of a conspiracy
on the other hand with electronic voting (and to a lesser extent mechanical voting), you have an order of magnitude more attack vectors. you can also do a lot more damage with the slightest of effort, quickly, with a lot of volatility and potential for permanent obfuscation, destruction, or scrambling and outright manipulation. you can cover your tracks well too, and you can quickly survey the landscape and tweak votes in ways that are hard to sniff out later. and all you need is one guy in the right place with the right skillset and 3 seconds of time
with paper ballots, with enough pressure, you could force a recount. but with electornic voting, no one knows what is real, and what is not. the process is opaque. it's electronic, it's quicksilver. ok, someone messed with the paper ballots. did they hide them in storage? burn them? letss look at hanging chads. ok, someone messed with the elctornic votes. what is real? what isn't? smoke and mirrors. you build me an ironclad system of trust and verification in eletronic voting, and i'll show you the smart teenager who can outwit it, mess with it, and completely cover his tracks
you need an army of conspirators working hard and long to mess with paper ballots to a large degree. you need one asshole in the right spot for 3 seconds to completely alter the results in any way you can imagine, including recreating plausible degrees of randomness, and you can cover your tracks completely
you're so worried about people and close votes, but you want to put your faith in a system that can be messed with in so many more powerful ways than paper ballots
when the next bush versus gore extremely close imbroglio occurs in another election, there won't be any hanging chads to look at. just some assholes in suits from some private company with questionable political connections telling us over and over that everything is ok and everything is verified and everything is squeaky clean. oh really? what you get after that is instant chaos, instant zero legitimacy in the government in the eyes of the public. out of the woodwork come all of the demagogues, spreading all of their lies, and public trust gets placed in the wrong hands
incredibly stupid of you if the thing you are worried about most leads you to choose a system which gives you the least protection from what you worry about
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
20-30 minutes? (1-5) x 2 min wait elsewhere?
Every time I've voted here in the UK (over the last 20 years) I haven't had to wait at all. Maybe there will be someone ahead of me in the queue at the desk, often not. So maximum wait is, perhaps, 30s to get the ballot. Walk to booth and fill in the ballot (using my British 'HB' pencil 8-). Walk over to the ballot box and post my ballot in. All done in a minute.
Generally the polling stations are open all day, and there are lots of them scattered about around town. You generally don't need to queue/wait at all because they each only serve a small portion of the local population.
the Florida results were still quicker (I think), even when having to go through a extended audit process.
That is a good system (in canada), until you get into the current position of the US. IE their is a growing distrust of the party's, so once you don't trust what is in a chosen political party's interest, then the hand count by the political party becomes meaningless. (ala a growing percentage of Ron Paul supporters general opinion of his chosen Republican party.)
So a system that works for Canada would do little to make the US system better today.
Since Canada's entire population, is lower than that of California. And California has also never had that kind of controversy either, we should copy their system instead...
Voting must be secret, counting must be transparent.
Both are necessary, but not sufficient conditions for democracy.
Or a credit card statement, or a copy of a canceled check.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
So you identify absentee voting as a problem because it allows someone to bully someone else into voting a certain way, and then you advise we switch all voting to become absentee?
Digital Citizen
...until they can do it over the Internet.
...only the other way around :-)
"The issue here is that YOU (not me) are writing off e-voting because it is easier to compromise. Easier, sure, but only *easier* (not possible as opposed to impossible)."
no voting mecahnism is immune to tampering. but you admit paper ballots are harder to tamper with meaningfully. therefore, you will choose the method that is easier to tamper with (by your own admission)
because you're interested in... drum roll please... better accuracy
wtf?!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
but apparently i can think about the possibility of tampering, while you won't think about it all... at the same time, confronting me with the problem of accuracy
(brain explodes in logic contradiction)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Hang on...how exactly do you have people voting that aren't on the electoral roll? Why are they allowed in if they've not had their name ticked off? Dodgy staff at the polling place?
You need more accountability in the process. Apart from having electoral officials sign everything (inital each ballot that goes out, sign the seals on the ballot boxes, etc.), what can a shady character do if representatives from each candidate are watching the process?
I have tried to post this many times as a main article on Slashdot, but for whatever reason the information never gets posted. Below is a link to a documentary that details and conclusively proves that there is widespread manipulation and illegal acts by election workers that render the electoral process in the United States invalid. This documentary shows that all vote totals that have anything to do with machines are easily altered (including how it is done) and shows that the recount process is a sham, because recounts are not comprehensive, only recount a small percentage of the votes, and the election workers admit on tape to providing the exact proportion of votes to vote recounters to make the recount percentages match the original totals. Anyway, watch the documentary:
http://cre8ive-design.net/blog/?cat=7
As far as dead people voting in elections.... well, they are on the election rolls. Their names just haven't been removed after they died. And of course this implies that somebody used the name and identity of this dead person in order to vote. Perhaps more than once and in more than one voting precinct. Yes this is illegal, but many precinct judges openly encouraged this practice for decades and is a common practice in the USA. Honest poll workers do remove these names and try to keep this fraud from happening, but with hundreds of thousands of voting precincts, some dishonesty does occur.
As for illegal aliens voting... the problem here is insane voting laws where you can register to vote but you aren't really required to prove citizenship... just residency of some sort. For some really weird reason, U.S. federal election laws specifically prohibit some sort of citizenship test and prohibit showing of national identification cards (like a driver's license) as proof of citizenship. This dates back to abuses in the "old south" where state election laws were written in such a way to prohibit blacks from voting and federal laws had to come in and reverse this blatant discrimination. If you have an American sounding name and have lived in the USA for more than 30 days, it is likely that you could at least bluff your way into actually voting in an American election, even if it is technicaly illegal.
Worse yet, the "motor voter" laws basically do the voter equivalent of an "opt-out" e-mail spam list. You have to essentially say you don't want to be registered to vote when you apply for a driver's license, and again citizenship isn't necessarily checked too closely. And of course once registered, who is going to question your right to vote? This is precisely why there is such a huge interest in illegal aliens right now in the USA, because they do represent a significant and growing block of voters... no kidding here. Many of the Mexican immigrants do become citizens legally as well, to really compound the situation and complicate the policing of this practice.
One other thing that is also openly encouraged in most American states is the ability to register to vote at the polling location on the day of the election. In fact, that is precisely how I registered to vote myself for the first time, as I signed my name and provided proof of residency (in the form of a college ID card without a picture, just my name). So yeah, you can have people vote who aren't on the election rolls. There are some procedures in many states with this policy to segregate these kind of votes (often called "provisional votes") to verify that the voter is in fact legal to vote, but stuff does come through that causes problems here as well.
There are some movements to try and reform election laws to require proof of citizenship and to help clean up some of this blatant fraud. But it takes time to make changes and the process of change isn't always pretty. Having officials sign everything doesn't necessarily fix any of these problems, and there is plausible denibility on the part of the judges on all of these issues if somebody here is committing voting fraud that make it so the judges haven't necessarily done anything illegal.
Ah, I see. Over my way you have to register either before or very soon after (recently set to 8pm on the same day) the election is called, so you can't just put your registration form in on the day. The electoral commission comes out to schools, so most everyone gets their registration in. I'm not sure about the proof-of-citizenship thing, since we had somewhat more relaxed authentication requirements, since a few teachers were there to witness everything.
Looks like a number of election-law changes will be needed to fix things.
Keep in mind that many of the politicians who are currently in office were elected under the fraudulent system, so there isn't really a strong motivation to get the system fixed when fixing the election laws will get somebody else voted into office but leaving things broken will keep the current office holders in place.
And touching the voting process in any way is always a political act, where unfortunately many of those involved with the changes are not necessarily looking at ideals but rather how it will help their political party or themselves personally.
You need some sort of pressing concern if you want to get people to change things. For example, we brought in compulsory voting when only ~59% of the population turned up one year, and preferential voting when the Country party split the non-labour vote. No doubt there will be something that forces change in the US.