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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.
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
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).
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!
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
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....
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
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
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.
(snicker)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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:
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