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Open Source Electronic Voting Progress Limited
An anonymous reader points us to a story about how the problems with electronic voting mostly stem from one source: the lack of mandated standardization. The LinuxInsider article goes on to suggest that once the issue of a universal voting platform is solved, the way is paved for open-source software to address concerns over accuracy and transparency. Though the article states that "no open source program for voting machines yet exists," it should be noted that such software was successfully tested earlier this month. Quoting:
"People debate the merits of e-voting for a variety of reasons, including suspicion of new technologies and a general distrust of politics, according to Jamie McKown, Wiggins professor of government and polity at the College of the Atlantic. 'Reports on e-voting security often de-contextualize the history of voter fraud in this country, as if boxes were somehow assumed to be better. You constantly hear calls for paper trails, and open and free inspection of voting machine source code. But it's a very thorny issue and one that has a lot of facets,' McKown told LinuxInsider."
The standard is already being set by the people. Physical and electronic records verifiable by open process and contained in a completely sealed box with tamper detection.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
I don't think its as much as a suspicion of new technologies as much as the objections of those familiar with it. Even those who works with computers at a basic level understand that its far easier to drag and drop a thousand doc files into a trash can on the desktop than it is to shred a thousand physical copies.
That is my biggest argument for paper ballots is not fear of new technology, but rather a safe guard of making it harder to destroy evidence of tampering. If you wanted to cheat and election, it is far easier to type an SQL command in a console than it is to dispose of or forge thousands of physical ballots without anyone noticing.
In a perfect world, electronic voting would be the obvious choice, but given human nature and politics there should be as many safeguards as possible against possible corruption.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Maybe paper and pencil might be the best tools for the job?
Anyone ever stop to consider that. I know it's blasphemous to say new technology isn't the solution to every problem at the High Citadel of Cowboy Neal, so burn me at the Karma steak...
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
In the open-source solution that is linked in the summary, a touch-screen interface produces a printed paper with a barcode for scanning. I think the barcode is a mistake as it's an unnecessary abstraction.
Instead let the voter choose between manual forms and machine forms which both look exactly the same. The only difference is that if you fill in the manual form you make marks with a marker pen, but if you use the touch-screen interface the form comes out of the printer with the spots already marked the way you selected on the touch screen.
The scanner scans both types of forms in exactly the same way. In both cases it looks for the same human-readable ink-filled spots.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Even if the machines are based on open source software, how do you know what has actually been deployed on the machine you use to cast your vote? Someone has to set up those machines. Any public code review or testing, no matter how thorough, is completely nullified if that isn't the software that ends up on the machine on election day.
Why do geeky people (myself included) like to wipe a new machine before they use it? Why do corporate IT departments have policies about wiping new hardware, or machines that have been infected with a virus? Simply because when you are using a general purpose computer, it is complex enough that no human can have any confidence in what it is doing unless they had control over the entire installation process.
D
The whole idea behind electronic voting is to speed up the counting process to have the results early. And that's exactly the reason why I don't want any electronic voting. With paper ballots I (that's me personally. Not a rhetoric "I", but just me, the person registered as "Sique" on Slashdot) can make sure that at least in my voting district there is no tampering with the votes. I can watch the whole process, registering of the voters, printing the ballots, distributing the ballots, sealing of the voting boxes, checking the identity of the single voter, handing the ballots to the voters, putting of the ballots in the box, breaking the seal, counting and charting the results, then resealing the boxes and sending them to the central election office, and recounting them for the final results.
I don't need any special abilities. I don't need to understand code, I don't need to understand hardware, I don't need to know about chip card formats or sending protocols. But I can verify that my vote gets counted exactly as I cast it. Every speed up of the process means I lose the ability to watch what happens to my personal vote, or I have to give up the anonymity of my vote.
Where I come from this ability to be able to watch an election was the reason we caught the election board of a complete country rigging the election, and we had enough proof to put them in prison. I don't see how we would ever managed it without being able to watch the whole voting process.
While I'm not this poor schmuck, my wife sometimes gets stuck with the onerous task of hand-counting votes for elections that aren't quite so complicated as a Presidential general election. Most of these tend to be a contest for a small-town mayor or some other similar contest where there is only one or two races on the ballot, or something like a school bond election.
Keep in mind that most of the people who are voting judges tend to be senior citizens, who frankly suffer slightly from dementia and other ailments common with advancing age. They tend to be people with free time, and generally manning a polling location isn't that difficult of a task. So are you really trusting the voting results to a bunch of people who can barely remember your name five minutes after you told it to them? In saying this I'm not saying my wife is a senior citizen, as she is in her 30's, but most of the people who she does work with are quite grey and tend to be retirees. This job does tend to be skewed for the elderly.
A true story is how my wife (since she is young enough and has done this for some time, is even head judge) sat down with her crew and counted out the ballots for one of these hand count races for nearly three hours after the polling location closed. All of the judges were given the full stack of ballots (they tried to count different stacks of ballots in a rotation to try and speed up the process) and then tried to compare the counts when they were done. Out of five judges, all five got completely different counts for all candidates. There was a "statistical average" for that precinct, but that is all it was. After dealing with this for yet another hour, (it was after midnight by this point in time), she simply got the other judges to sort of compromise between a rough average of what the counts were at... as they finally got the count within 10 votes for each candidate. The judges agreed and then signed the "official results" with the compromise tally. It didn't seem to impact the results of the election by being off by 10 votes, but that isn't always the case. That really inspired confidence in me that my vote really counted for anything. I guess it does in the long run, but I certainly understand the real need for recount laws after seeing this whole thing.
This is a tough problem. I asked my wife.... "How long would it take for you to process a Presidential general election with your crew by hand counting?" She looked at me real funny like I was trying to crack a joke, and then simply said "I'd just burn the ballots and pretend it never happened in the first place." She really didn't even want to think about the problems she would face in such a situation. After pressing her, she finally admitted that it would take several days or even weeks to count the results, and she wouldn't really trust the results either from her own precinct. She and I get into arguments over the reliability and accuracy of the Diebold machines she uses now, but openly admits that they are much better than what a hand count could ever possibly be. On this point and seeing her fellow poll workers, I'd have to agree.
Actually, there is such thing as an secure electronic voting system. You can use cryptography to ensure that a voting process is at least as resistant to tampering as one done on paper, if not more so. There's some very interesting papers on it.