Slashdot Mirror
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?"
This is anecdotal and certainly represents a small sample, but I've worked the polls the last three elections. These are the three in which we used electronic voting machines, but the voters had the choice to use paper ballots if they did not want to use the electronic machines. We get about 300 voters at the location (average) in each of the three elections.
Not one voter requested the paper ballot option.
As a second observation, in all three elections the county ran a 100% audit, comparing the output of the voting machines with the paper audit trail that they generate and present to the voter to verify that the paper printout matches their selection. No errors were found. I don't think you can do much better than that.
I do think that we should be moving to open-source software, and that improvements can be made in security, but note that what we really have here is a demand for a return to the old methods, where the tried and true ballot-stuffing techniques work. Note that most of the pressure comes from the same sectors who demanded the fraud-prone 'motor-voter' registrations and are opposed to requirement that voters identify themselves. There's a common thread here....
Another part of the problem is that most existing implementations are - frankly - crap. They offer minimal security, have frequently been reported as having errors such as non-zero counts, have poor reliability, provide minimal accountability and often provide no means of verification. This is wholly unacceptable. Nobody would accept that from a cash register in a supermarket, never mind a system that is mission-critical in a democracy.
Hand-counts can be reliable. For the longest time, the British system was entirely done by hand-counting, with very small error rates for a population of 60 million. The American system includes machine counts, statistical sampling, and other mechanisms for speeding up the returns, with different States using different methods. It is also worrying that the first returns are announced prior to the polls closing on the west coast, which will inevitably introduce bias and strategic voting. The British system isn't perfect, and has recently developed all kinds of flaws and fraudulant practices, but it can be used as a yardstick of what a democracy should minimally achieve.
Of course, a democracy has other dependencies. It's only meaningful if enough of the population votes for the votes to truly represent the population. The electoral college has the potential for distorting the consensus of the people and probably has. There is no ballot option to reject all candidates and re-open nominations. Media saturation and candidate funding warp awareness. The educational system isn't up to the standards needed to ensure the population have the breadth or depth of knowledge to understand the complexities of a nation or avoid the wiles of a skilled talker. If these flaws remain, then even a perfect voting system can never represent what the public actually want or need, which is what a democracy is about. Being heard has no meaning if you never learned how to talk.
To me, the question shouldn't merely be how we reliably count votes, but should also include how we reliably cast them. There may be no better solution than the one we have, I accept that, but I won't accept that this is known until it actually is.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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 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.
This wouldn't be a good idea, since it would allow people to sell their vote for money. The advantage of a simple paper based voting system is that only the voter himself knows what he voted, since there is no receipt and no way for a third party to find out how he voted. With the encryption key you also have the problem that votes become easily trackable unless somebody makes sure that nobody keeps record of encryption-keys -> names.
Hell, look at the Constitution. Even the *politicians* didn't have confidence in politics/government back then.