Slashdot Mirror
Hard Evidence of Voting Machine Addition Errors
goombah99 writes "Princeton Professor, Ed Felton, has posted a series of blog entries in which he shows the printed tapes he obtained from the NJ voting machines don't report the ballots correctly. In response to the first one, Sequoia admitted that the machines had a known software design error that did not correctly record which kind of ballots were cast (republican or democratic primary ballots) but insisted the vote totals were correct. Then, further tapes showed this explanation to be insufficient. In response, State officials insisted that the (poorly printed) tapes were misread by Felton. Again further tapes showed this not to be a sufficient explanation. However all those did not foreclose the optimistic assessment that the errors were benign — that is, the possibility that vote totals might really be correct even though the ballot totals were wrong and the origin of the errors had not been explained. Now he has found (well-printed) tapes that show what appears to be hard proof that it's the vote totals that are wrong, since two different readout methods don't agree. Sequoia has made trade-secret legal threats against those wishing to mount an independent examination of the equipment. One small hat-tip to Sequoia: at least they are reporting enough raw data in different formats that these kinds of errors can come to light — that lesson should be kept in mind when writing future requirements for voting machines."
God bless the American Voting System!
Paper Ballots - Paper Ballots - PAPER BALLOTS!
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Votes::Votes()
{
count = 0;
}
Votes::Votes(Candidate * pcand)
{
secretHandle = pcand;
count = 0;
}
Votes::operator ++()
{
if(secretHandle){
if(secretHandle->get_id()==GOOD_CANDIDATE) count +=5;
}
else ++count;
}
... How hard can it be?
Seriously, how hard?
Someone presses a button and a counter gets incremented. Big whoop.
Any error at all in a programming exercise that goddamn simple is evidence enough for me to call for a full on corruption investigation.
public boolean IsVoteTallyCorrect()
{
return true;
}
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
"Princeton Professor, Ed Felton was arrested today for violation of the DMCA..."
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
see another story about vote machine problems. If it was a NASA rocket motor there would be congressional investigations, news people camped out waiting for news of the investigation at NASA headquarters etc.
But this gets shoved under the carpet at every turn like a bit of dirt that not even MSM wants to report on.
It makes me sad to be American, well, sad that such things happen in America. We are supposed to be better than this. We were (I think) and I hope that we are better than this soon. It's disgusting.
The machines themselves are not complex pieces of equipment that take rocket scientists to develop or maintain. According to someone that should know, they are not even as secure as an ATM machine. How fucking sad is that?
Why, yes, I do have some suggestions. Where is the forum for me to submit them?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
What do you think the chance of this affecting the use of voting machines is? How often is anything of great significance altered due evidence being presented that it is inadequate?
Rationality is on the defensive. It certainly doesn't have much place in public policy any more. In every aspect of life, people are being convinced that the universe is not subject to laws which can inform our actions by predicting consequences, but that we are at the mercy of outside forces beyond our understanding, let alone control.
The 'Invisible hand' of the market means we must accept everything capitalism throws at us. The 'Intelligent designer' controls all life and we must not meddle with it. The natural rhythms or the Earth/Sun are responsible for global warming, so environmentalism is futile.
In the face of such a widespread campaign to render people helpless and reason impotent, no amount of evidence will achieve anything.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
is it troll month on slashdot?
If people can get past, can they get future? Best way to confuse a stoner
A fraud investigation is a good idea but that's not enough. There's a real possibility the companies involved can sleaze out of things because they have kept everything secret all along. Documenting the lack of evidence and lack of transparency is a good exercise on it's own because it will cast doubt on elections that use non free software and other impossible to verify mechanisms. The fact is they can't prove the election results are good or fair and that's unacceptable.
While it is a very good thing that we have people actively investigating and reporting on the accuracy of the new voting machines.
Are there any good reports as to how accurate paper ballot counting really is? And how far off do the two diverge?
The easy solution would be to have 2 paper print-outs: 1 that the voter tears off (like a receipt) and can examine to verify that they voted the way they intended, and 1 that is automatically ripped off and deposited in the 'lock box' for any audits or recounts that might need to be done. (I'm thinking a system that automatically tears the receipt paper and drops it within the sealed system--no human hand touches it, though you can see it through glass/plastic.)
That way, the ease of transmission and voting exists, there is a verifiable record that the voter can examine, and there is no concern over anonymity, since no order of voting can be extrapolated when the individual votes are separated from the roll. It works on all levels.
I can't get over--What is so hard about this!? Why are voting machine manufacturers having such a hard time getting a simple solution, and why are they so resistant to improvements on their designs?!
This is the single most important threat to our democratic system of govt.
These machines are flawed. We know this but continue to allow them to be used?
We spend TRILLIONS on defense of our country, only to contract the systems
which determine who controls it out to the lowest bidder? Nonsensical.
I can see only one way of ensuring an accurate count - store a voter's DNA.
Sign your ballot in blood at the next general election. Bloody democracy!
It's not the errors, it's the possibility of rigging elections. It's not the errors, it's the possibility of rigging elections.
I'm glad that my state still uses paper ballots, but as long as it's legal to count a vote without any physical record in any state, no national election in this country should be considered "free and fair." What's good for Zimbabwe, Venezuela, the Russian Federation, and Iran, should be good for the United States of America too, and shame on those who claim otherwise.
Whether it's Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, or John McCain elected this year, the rest of the world should bring as much pressure on them to reform our elections process as they have in those other countries. Stuff like this prove that people here are working more and more to push back against it, but if you care about what happens here yourself (and if you don't, I don't blame you) push your leaders to push our leaders harder on this.
Maryland Attorney General's report on voting system irregularities: press release at http://tinyurl.com/6ahena links to the report. Granted, it was written to address specific 2006 difficulties, but the security of the equipment was not even mentioned, nor was there a security expert on the panel.
Right now they have a matching grant challenge, so nows a good time to offer cash. But think about also being an advocate in your state for getting the laws to allow this system.
OVC not only has open code but it also has an open bussiness model. They won't require you use it on any hardware they offer. It runs fine on off the shelf equipment. Any company could use the code, states could use the code. OVC would simply maintain it and certify that it is being deployed correctly.
Open voting solutions is another open source project with a different bussiness model but open code.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
How fucking dumb are these people working for there companies?
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
what kind of programmer can fuck up addition?
seriously, how can any programmer fuck up addition?
They're using their grammar skills there.
Troll month. hehe. It is troll Tuesday, though.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Sequoia's Explanation, and Why It's Not the Whole Story ... ...
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1267
"Let's assume the Democrat party is assigned option switch 6 while the Republican Party is assigned options switch 12. If a Democrat voter arrives, the poll worker presses the "6 button followed by the green "Activate" button. The Democrat contests are activated and the voter votes the ballot. "
Then the following comment nails it:
"Rich Kulawiec Says:
March 20th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
I'm working through this explanation with a paper-and-pencil mockup, but meanwhile I'll note Sequoia's use of the right-wing code phrase "Democrat Party" instead of "Democratic Party". It seems to have become fashionable of late among some to use this term as a thinly-veiled insult, then deny that it's intentional. Given how carefully [at least some portions of] this explanation seem to be worded, I don't for a moment believe this is a mistake."
I'll just go ahead and increment: whySoHard++
:0
The irony of these crazy electronic voting madness, is that the two fundamental strengths of computers are:
A) accurately remembering stuff
B) accurately adding stuff.
So clearly...it's a hardware problem.
1 + 1 = 3, for sufficiently large values of 1?
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
What I find hilarious is the very same malware troll was in the SCO thread, where it would have been an ontopic troll.
It was modded offtopic rather than "troll". At least this time the mods got it right, any link to malware should be modded "troll".
I really should start going to the Biters Anonymous meetings again, I've been responding to the troll posts, at least to the extent of saying DON'T CLICK THAT LINK. But damn, it's like giving up cigarettes.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Has anyone ever done a study on how hackable traditional voting systems are? It seems to me that it would be pretty easy to clandestinely change the position of some names so that people punch the wrong hole. We're aware of the problems in the new machines but I would like to see just how secure they are compared to the older systems.
I don't think anyone would go to much trouble to tamper with the NJ Presidential primary. There's not enough at stake to justify the risk, and the discrepancies seen involve small numbers of votes. Thus, there are only two possible conclusions.
Either the voting machines are so unreliable that they introduce random errors, or someone is planning to tamper with the general election, and conducting a test run.
If done well, voting machine tampering would leave no evidence at all. We were lucky that some discrepancies showed up this time, because otherwise we would never have known. But now the bad guys know what they need to cover up. That's why it's vitally important that we get rid of these black-box voting machines and go back to a more primitive, more trustworthy system.
Is it really that hard to take X and add 1?!
I swear, these guys are being deliberately incompetent.
How dumb do you have to be to write voting machine software? This is probably one of the few applications that could be written in Brainfuck and still not contain bugs.
Who's with me in gathering together a "coalition of the willing" among democratic nations for the purpose of bringing democracy to the U.S.?
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
The guys that develop our voting machines should be held to the same standards that the Nevada Gaming Commission requires for cashless wagering systems:
http://gaming.nv.gov/documents/pdf/07jan11_techstds_kiosks_proposed.pdf
These guys have some ridiculously high standards to ensure the integrity of gaming equipment. Why can't we get similar standards for voting machines?
-ted
Yes Caltech and MIT have done studies on vote count accuracy. Surprisingly nothing beats hand counting paper ballots. However this sort of assessment is very hard to do because the nature of the error space is so fickle. e.g. machine counting is generally perfect except when it's not. So one has very non gaussian error modes that require huge sampling and unanticipatable conditions to discover.
Hand counting paper ballots is robust and adaptable. However even here it is hard to test under labratory conditions.
The most recent study is one happeing right now in Bernalillo county NM, by University of New Mexico and Caltech. Many different ways of counting ballots by hand are being tried (different numbers of observers, different ways of verbalizing, different ways of pre-sorting ballots, and different orders of counting races, etc...) One of the more remarkable findings so far is that teams of counters can have prodigiously different rates of counting (10x variation). This makes logistics of recounting hard to predict and hard to allocate resources for.
However even that study is flawed in part by the neccessity of time. You cant convince people to count a full election a dozen different ways. So you have to use shorter ballots or only count selected races and this will mask certain error modes.
Another kind of error mode those studies cant' examine is the one that happened in Washington state during the Governor's race. In king county, various piles of ballots were "misplaced" and later "discovered". It could be malice, but more likely incompetence and lack of procedures causing ballots to be stacked willy nilly in various store rooms or in different containers when gathered from all the precints.
I'm really please with Bernallilo County Clerk Maggie Toulouse for staging this mock recounts since these will iron out procedural issues and establish a lot of currently anecdotal human factors issues more concretely. Moreover the willingness to be som open about this and invite activists in is quite refreshing. Many clerks have a siege mentality--and of course this is because they have so many activitst making demands and too little money to staff their positions.
The typical clerks office pays less than $10/hour to new staff and your not going to get IT folks for that rate.
Send Maggie an email telling her she's got your respect: clerk@bernco.gov. Clerks really deserve a pat on the back when they do it right.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
How come a Coinstar machine can accurately sort and count at least four different coin variations, eliminating the coins that are outside of those tolerances, and a voting machine can't tabulate a simple column of votes?
Is it just me, or does it (apart from the security aspect) seem like it should be amazingly simple to write the code for a voting machine? If it should be so simple, why oh why are there always these oddball errors that officials and voting machine companies (sorry, Diebold, company) are unable to explain?
How hard is it, really, for an application to accurately add up several distinct columns of ones? And how in god's name can there be more than one "readout method?"
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
parent is informative and insightful
I still think they should all be produced on open source platforms on publicly owned hardware. Everyone can see the code, so no one can cry about it later. I don't think you will have any trust in the system unless you have transparency.
Do I get better or worse house odds using a one armed "voter" on election day than I do playing the slots in Atlantic City?
So while there are demonstrable instances of the voting system itself being broken, we have State Legislatures across the US worried that voter fraud is the true "threat to democracy" and demanding that voters show a valid photo ID before they can mark their ballot. Note yesterday's US Supreme Court decision to allow Indiana's voter ID law to stand. If they really wanted to fix the voting system, they'd deal with these fucked up machines. Voter IDs is not about defending our voting system from abuse, it's about disenfranchising sectors of the voting population.
I am sure that the lawsuit threats will keep them very comfortable as they are dragged out into the street and beheaded for election fixing, the Evil bastards. First them, then do the politicians they're fixing the vote for. Fuck the fucking fuckers!
Concerned Patriot in Phoenix
PS The Tree of Liberty is fucking thirsty.
REVOLUTION NOW!!
We can't blame the voting-machine companies entirely -- they aren't behaving out of character; they're doing exactly what they've been bred to do by our competitive marketplace. We live in a society in which to admit error is seen as a fatal weakness rather than a mark of strength. In the American corporate world, you only apologize when you've done something greivously wrong, and even then only under extreme duress, and without admitting fault. You never admit fault, because you never make mistakes. Fault is fatal.
So of course if anything bad happens, that defense mechanism kicks in--"Surely you're wrong, because it would be impossible for us to have committed an error!" A company without that instinct, led by people with a more reasonable approach to the world, would have been torn apart in the marketplace long before winning a major government contract, because there's selective pressure for trumped-up perfection.
Obviously we need to seriously rethink this whole electronic-voting concept and its current implementation. But we also need to rethink a society that kills the stock price of any corporation, or the reputation of any person, that admits a mistake. And yet I think I heard somewhere that before you can correct a mistake you have to admit it?
To err is human; so to claim inerrancy must be monstrous.
(Of course, none of this goes into the possibility of wilful tampering, which is a separate point. I don't discount the possibility, but I think what I've said still stands.)
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
how did bush win ohio in 2004?
DUH
i wish someone would assassinate them all..
Since it appears that the vote machine manufacturers are having difficulty programming a vote machine, why don't we help?
It shouldn't be that difficult to create--I dunno, libvote--to handle all the things we consider basic issues. We might even be able to tackle the security problems. Maybe even get a few user interaction experts to design a interface that doesn't confuse the less-than-tech-savvy crowd.
Release it under a permissive license, maybe even figure out a platform or two to run it on, with a simple installer so all the counties have to do is buy the hardware.
We can do this. Right?
In this case there are almost certainly multiple errors, one of which is the design error sequoia explained that causes the wrong ballot to be recorded.
Another plausible error mode here is the one the ES&S ivotronics had (and ones with old firmware still have). Certified voting machines are required to redundantly store the votes, usually 3 times, and there may be some effort to have these in different memory modules.
A while back ES&S had a bug that was triggered by a low battery voltage. The low battery condition would cause the logger to report this in the log. However the log entry was too long and cause a buffer over flow that over wrote the header of one of the redudant vote files. When the votes were read out at the precinct the machine did not notice the corrupt header and a second programming bug caused the malformed headers to cause other problems including mis-reported various things (like the maching ID) which then caused all sorts of downstream problems.
When the votes were read out by another method the corruption of the primary vote file was detected and it silently failed over to the secondary record. This produced a vote report that did not match up with the first one.
A reveiew of multiple systems was done by the Florida election supervisor who estimated about 1 in 7 machines reported wrong. He was fired.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This isn't hard evidence of an "error". An "error" is by definition unintentional. When simple counting is done incorrectly by a computer, for numbers that are small enough to fit in 32 bits, it isn't an "error". The computer is just doing what it was programmed to do. I cannot imagine a programmer being so incompetent as to program an increment instruction incorrectly. That cannot possibly be an "error." It has to be intentional.
The evidence reported by this article is clear, unambiguous, damning evidence of election rigging. There is no other way to interpret it.
.. to have trade secret protection on a voting machine. In fact, any protection that prevents the public understanding exactly how the machine works ought to entirely undermine confidence in the system to such an extent that systems whose design and software is not in the public domain should be banned from use.
It's not a bug, it's a feature. And much cheaper than bribing people.
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
1.) Use a short int in basic...
2.) Allow the user to enter the number of votes, but be sure to use a signed number, so that an enterprising voter could enter -1 and subtract votes from a candidate...
3.) Fail to debounce a switch so that noisy contacts repeat the vote several times in a row...
Because not everyone can be on welfare.
In all seriousness though, we need a gigantic DUH tag for this story.
and the rest of the people in charge of this company, and the corrupt officials who made the deals with them and the other shady rigged election systems, like diebold.
These machines are intended and designed to prop-up the parlour-game of democratic basis for American government. They are not meant to "work". They are meant to reduce the definition of "democracy" to merely "voting" for the general public - and then to manage that vote. If they decrease the confidence of a certain segment of the public in the whole process, then they are also serving their secondary purpose: The devolution of the US to Banana Republic status.
The coup was completed in 2000. The dramatic operations began 40 years earlier, but it took awhile.
You don't see this. You think you still live in the same country that you were born in, that you attended Elementary School in, that you call the same name.
But it just isn't true. Visitors to your country get it in a very short time - but most of them clamp their mouths shut - it is quickly apparent that Americans are uncomprehending.
This isn't just Republicans. Sure - the Republican leaders are the sharp and shiny spear-tip, slicing the American side. The Democrats are just as on board - the solid wooden shaft, following this through the body. The elite of these - Cheney's and Pelosi's - will keep their mansions and their millions, their holidays in Vail and Sun Valley.
They will never join the people who "voted". That would be to join Dr. King, or Mel Carnahan.
So what would these candidates do to secure a place in this lucrative game? Accuse and defame their opponents? Check. Launder money and hide assets? Check. Conceal conflicts of interest? Check. Break the law or violate the constitution? No problem.
I don't think anyone here imagines that these candidates are not interested in each and every vote that they can get. Yet at the same time, these electronic voting machines are not accurate - for whatever reason, they don't count votes accurately. The big question here is - if the machines aren't counting right and the candidates don't seem to care about it - what's really going on?
That's a very troubling problem. Greedy politicians trying to get aboard the gravy train and the vote counting machine which determines if they get elected or not is incapable of accurately counting the votes. I don't see it as a partisan issue; none of the candidates are standing up and pointing a finger at the defective voting machines. Not the Democrats, not the Republicans, not even the Independents. Given the candidate's strong need to get elected, what would it take to get them to ignore the voting machine problem? That's the real story - there's a much larger issue being hidden here.
Note the double-m's and double l's in my handle. I'm feeling pretty good about this . . .
Paper ballots got us grief in Florida and in other areas in 2000. Do we really want to go through that tripe again? How many years have passed and people still speak of conspiracy and fraud?
The fact is we need electronic voting. We need an absolute. Electronic voting can get us this but only if done right. Paper and OCR leave doubt, look at how many ways people of one party or another tried to "interpret what a voter really meant" Come on, how can we justify paper when you have government assigned persons deciding votes on a whim?
Provide a paper trail. Put the requirements to the same restrictions we put on commercial machines used for money transactions and record keeping. Why isn't that done now? Simple, this is government. There are rules for the public (and corporations) and then there is government.
While we cannot hold the voting machine companies blameless we must realize that the real blame are the politicians who are still attempting to "game" the system. They don't want a straight up honest system because they want to be able to cast doubt into any election that doesn't go their way.
No, the real problem with voting is that its all manipulated by TWO parties who in no way want the balance of power shifted. By that I mean they want no competition, they want no accountability. They simply want strife at varying levels so they can FUD their way into permanent office.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
- Hurrah, I say! Without a publicly verifiable audit trail and some way to know irrefutably that the audit trail is legit, just say NO to electronic voting. Period. Forevery. ... this whole trade secrets/proprietary/int prop thing is bull of the highest order. Well, second highest, behind the self-serving Luddite in the White House, whom I call President because it's traditional. With "leadership" like that it's not even mildly surprising these shenanigans are commonplace in such a core area.
- Electronic voting is an excellent idea that has yet to have an implementation that even pays lip service to thinking about tally confidence, in any usable device. Like Nursie mentioned, there is NOTHING proprietary in counting a button press
- From an Anonymous Coward who's sick to death with yet another "free web registration", and happy that at least SlashDot lets posting happen without demanding that stupid crap. I can take "Anonymous Coward" for that.
When are we going to give up on these stupid over priced, badly performing, and impossible to trust machines.
I mean come on, some people have suggested (NAACP) that they even reduce voter intimidation. That is in itself proof that these machines are not to be trusted. There is only one reason any political party that has in the past engaged in voter intimidation would stop - because they no longer need to because another avenue to cheat has opened up.
That and a dozen other reasons - we should just give up, and spend less on the better solutions. Hand counted, paper ballots - cheapest most accurate way to vote - why bother with these damn machines.
http://www.unfocus.com/
For President, Vice President, and Congressional votes, it really should be as simple as counting up columns. For other kinds of races, including local and county offices, you'll often have choices like "choose up to three of the following", or "vote yes or no for each of these". Some are even more-complicated than that.
You also have to detect "invalid" vote combinations, of course - voting for two presidential candidates, for example. That's correspondingly more complicated for the less-straightforward ballots.
So far, the optical-scan ballots seem to be the most reliable method. You still have the complication of the programming electronic tabulators to apply the vote validity check, but that's at least a lot simpler code than a full-on GUI for touch-screen voting.
Having said all that - you're right, it shouldn't be all that hard.
While there is a whole chorus of people saying "how hard can it be?" Being a very experienced software engineer, I can see some basic issues that need to be handled, but come on now.
It can't add. Think about that. It can't add. I'm not even talking about 876876 + 98895. I'm talking about N=N+1. I suspect that it is a reliance on Microsoft Access or Foxpro database engines by a software engineer with little real database experience.
The problem is so easy to solve correctly and cheaply, that I can't see it being caused by anything other than (a) incompetence: using some numbnuts newbe to do the coding or (b) more likely and worrisome, a requirement that the systems be able to be modified by the polling places.
OVC is not merely yet another touchscreen. It's a different kind of voting system. It's procedures are straighforward and simple yet at first blush may seem overly elaborate. In fact each of the seemingly simple steps in the process is a result of long deliberation by many voting system and security experts to foreclose various error modes and attack modes (e.g. chain voting, or secret ballot violations) while not making something too complex to operate and maintain. It also has to fail in a safe mode and be robust against operator error.
Here's the process:
1) voter makes selections on a touchscreen. These are recorded but this is NOT a cast ballot or a record of the vote.
2) computer prints out a paper summary ballot of the voters choices in an easy to read ballot-like format
3) also along the edge is a 1-D barcode encoding the selections in an obfuscated but not encrypted format.
4) voter can now cast this ballot by depositing it in a metal box. Or they can tear it up and ask to vote again. or they can walk out with the ballot if they like (it's not cast unless deposited so it's not a "receipt").
6) After polls close, witnesses and the election judge unseal the box, and hand shuffle the ballots to destroy any residual vote order.
7) then election workers, use a bar code wand to scan every ballot. As it is scanned the ballot is recreated on screen and the judge can compare any ballot she chooses to the paper copy. (this provides one of many random checks on the fidelity of the bar code)
8) as each ballot is scanned, the computer also checks the ballot creation record of the ballot generating machines. Every ballot must have a valid ballot creation session that matches the paper ballot. (the reverse is not true--there will be more ballot creation sessions than actually cast ballots since some ballots were discarded or taken and revoted.) This step is a partial safeguard against ballot stuffing, since an attacker will now have to modify many records and witness accounts to change the ballots (alter the machine records, alter the paper ballots, alter the turned in ballots, etc... And alter various anti-forgery measures)
Nice features:
1) nothing forecloses hand counting the paper in a recount since it's the official ballot not the electronic record or the bar code.
2) the untrusting voter can take the printed ballot to a third, un-netowrked machine to read the barcode back to him to see that it matches. Or she can leave with it and take it outside to some place that will also do this (say the ACLU or the Green party might have a booth set up offering this) Or she could take a cell -phone picture and decode it using some bar-code reader on the web. etc.....
It's a good test because even a single failure leaves the voter with deomstable official proof of an error. And it's robust because an error in the bar code discovered late in the process does not screw the election--you can still recount the paper ballots text.
3) the bar code is made 1D and short, deliberately so that it is information strarved. There can't be any diaboloical things hidden in it, like the voters identity or ways to tell other stand alone scanners to collude in what they tell the voter is in it. Also it allows very low tech equipment to read it (cue-cats wands $5)
As can be seen theres many onion layers to the security model. It's not depeneding of fool proof steps to remain that way. It's robust against operator error.
Additional features are that the touch screen can be just a commodity computer. it boots off an un mutable cdrom not a disk drive. So after the elections you can simply discard the computers. That is, give them to schools or state agencies or sell them on e-bay. These are not sophisticated voting machines. This frees up the monies normally used for secure storage and maintainece.
Since the voting terminals are cheap you can have many of them to avoid lines or problems with machine failure.
Since t
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This really has nothing to do with a voting machine's software being "closed source".
From the voter's perspective, there's no real solution to this problem but hand-counting of voter verified paper ballots. For me the ultimate solution to this problem is this: Voters walk up to a machine they had no part in preparing and (optionally) use it to prepare a voter-verified paper ballot. That ballot is then stored and counted by hand. This process makes the trustworthiness of the machine completely irrelevant. If any voter doesn't trust the machine to do this job, they should be given the freedom to fill out the ballot by hand (also handy when the computer breaks down or the power runs out). There are substantial benefits to using computers to prepare voter-verified paper ballots and there are substantial benefits to using exclusively free software voting machines but trustworthiness is not one of those benefits. Nobody can trust any computer they don't control and no voter is given the freedom to completely control their voting machine. Even if trusted voting machine software existed nobody would be able to know that their voting machine was running it.
Contrary to another poster's view on this, no audit trail would be sufficient to engender trust in any code because the preparation of the audit trail would always be in question.
The benefits of a free software voting machine lie in the government and public avoidance of monopoly (thus reducing maintenance cost and possibly increasing machine flexibility), and supporting business opportunities (politicians love it when they can say some project "creates jobs" in their district), and in turn leaving the body that paid for the machines in a position where they can make the machines meet their needs. All proprietary software distributors are monopolists. It is this monopoly that each proprietary software voting machine manufacturer works to protect; this is what's really at stake for those businesses. If any one of them were more user-focused than they are (ES&S is in a great place to be this user-focused since they don't depend on other software for their machines), they would see free software voting machines as a point of sale. They could be the best situated to compete in the maintenance market for their brand of machines because they've known their machines the longest, so ostensibly they know those machines best. Governments will think this way when it comes to purchasing support contracts whether long-term or ad-hoc.
Alas, competing monopolies is the way of things right now in the US. The voting machine makers have the country carved up like the mafia in The Godfather movies and they exploit county after county in every sale. I ought to know, I helped Champaign County, Illinois recommend a pair of voting machines to the county board. We saw demos from a few vendors (ES&S, Hart Intercivic, and Diebold via their local distributor) and picked the least worst pair of machines (ES&S).
Digital Citizen
Certainly all of the consternation over security and accountability of these voting machines could be easily solved if we were to rely on the most secure transaction methods available to the general public today, in the form of the bank ATM. Banks take very strict measures to secure the data in their networks, and are required by law, and investors, to keep exacting records of every transaction done every minute of every day. It seems more beneficial that instead of having purpose-built voting machines our propriety voting elections boards were to allow an open-standards voting collection mechanism. Access could be granted to every secure ATM provider in the country to report vote totals which would be cast by voters using their ATM or ID cards in every ATM available. If we can't trust the vote reporting from our own financial instructions, how would we be able to trust even the safety of our own currency? Probably naively, I believe that my vote should be as secure and trustworthy as my own money. If we can't trust the vote reporting from our own financial instructions, how would we be able to trust even the safety of our own currency? Probably naively, I believe that my vote should be as secure and trustworthy as my own money.
The latest news on this is that Judge Feinberg denied Sequoia's attempt to avoid the outside review of the machines. "Feinberg said she was confident ... that the attorneys for the opposing sides could draft a 'protective order' that would safeguard all concerns," says the news story.
Interestingly, the story doesn't list Felten as the one doing the review, but rather Andrew Appel, a different Princeton computer science professor.
It's Felten with an e. Not with an o. It's right there in the damn linked article. Get it right.
one bad thing about it is that it allows you to prove how you voted to a third party: take a camera-phone picture of the printed receipt behind the glass.
the paper tapes jam. 10% of the tapes in ohio could not be read. Look at the paper print-outs felton has. some are hard to read.
the paper tape maintains a serial vote order. the early and late voters are at risk of exposure of their vote by malicious officials. (a typical machine may have less than 200 votes, so vote-order reconstruction is not hard).
the tapes have to archival for at least a couple years in the even to lawsuits or recounts.
On sequoia and diebold tape systems a ballot won't fit in the viewing widow, requiring it to be inspected in stages by the voter. it's tedious. Studies have shown almost no voter does it, and when they do they don't spot errors. Particularly errors of omission.
The problem with a system like this is that it's more work for the polling place volunteers to replace the paper tape when it runs out, but it should be very very easy to count (the system could add little barcodes next to each name to make them machine readable for faster recounting if need be, but a person checking each one by hand would also work).
The accounting on whole rolls of paper tape should be pretty straightforward too. It'll be hard for someone to toss in another roll like they can toss in an extra 1000 votes because the number of rolls should be a small. In fact if it's designed properly, I suspect you could run a whole day on a single roll and avoid having to change them out. For true paranoia, you could have the machine print out some sort of crypto key (public key) on the roll when it first starts printing so you can verify that it came from a particular voting machine later on (and wasn't swapped out by an unscrupulous worker).
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Hopefully that helped clear it up a bit.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
you cannot count ballots correctly. Amazing!
...every analysis that is shortened, every corner that is cut, moves us further away from the truth until what is left is the Cliffs Notes of the news, or what I call strobe-light journalism, in which the outlines are accurate enough but we cannot really see the whole picture.What's more, the news media cut candidates like Joe Biden out of the process even before they got started. Just to be clear: I'm not talking about my husband. I'm referring to other worthy Democratic contenders. Few people even had the chance to find out about Joe Biden's health care plan before he was literally forced from the race by the news blackout that depressed his poll numbers, which in turn depressed his fund-raising.
And it's not as if people didn't want this information. In focus groups that I attended or followed after debates, Joe Biden would regularly be the object of praise and interest: "I want to know more about Senator Biden," participants would say.
But it was not to be. Indeed, the Biden campaign was covered more for its missteps than anything else. Chris Dodd, also a serious candidate with a distinguished record, received much the same treatment. I suspect that there was more coverage of the burglary at his campaign office in Hartford than of any other single event during his run other than his entering and leaving the campaign.
Who is responsible for the veil of silence over Senator Biden? Or Senator Dodd? Or Gov. Tom Vilsack? Or Senator Sam Brownback on the Republican side?
The decision was probably made by the same people who decided that Fred Thompson was a serious candidate... The Media of the Banana Republic at work. It is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the company that runs these "parties" to its own ends.
At least "In Soviet Russia" you knew the papers were all lies. Here, the papers lie down - just where they're told to.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
And I can't believe people are still raising this objection. If the choice came down to:
A. The system you describe where individuals could be pressed to vote a certain way individually or face consequences from known or knowable others who would be committing a crime which would be easy to prosecute.
B. The system we have now, where votes can be stolen wholesale and there's not a damn thing anyone can do about it.
...would you actually prefer B? If so, this seems very illogical. It's like saying "people shouldn't be allowed to carry money out of the bank, or even proof of how much money they have, because criminals could use the information". Yes, there are risks associated with A, but they are nothing compared to the risks associated with B.
--MarkusQ
What exactly does it do against an attack where, say, the barcode-reading machine reads the bar-code and pops up on the screen "R", but internally records "D"?
If the code doing that is subtle enough, it may just push "D" ahead of "R" - and if it's in a state where they already knew that it was going to be a close race, it probably wouldn't even be questioned unless the outcome of the entire election relies (in a big part) on the votes cast right there.
Not to mention that everything just became a lot more expensive, requires a lot more maintenance (I presume the ballot would be thermal paper, as you don't really want to end up running out of ink/toner, and it's a lot simpler mechanism used successfully in cashiers' machines all over the planet with very little breakdown - but all the same, now you have gears, heating elements, etc. to worry about).
I don't pretend to know the ideal solution, but the above seemed like a thought you skipped in your post - even though it must have been thought of at the working group.
In Australia we use paper ballots. We fill in the paper ballot, drop it in the slot and all done. No receipts given. Frankly I have a lot of confidence in the process. This is probably partially due to Australians having a fairly laid back attitude to politics; people make a lot of noise before an election (and afterward) about how this party or that party did this and that and stuffed the country, but when push comes to shove the differences are slight.
:)
We also have compulsory voting, which although can be a pain in the arse I believe is a good thing. Yes, you get those that do the donkey votes, but in general I'd say the outcome is indicative of national sentiment.
Mostly
Insightful? How is this insightful? It's just a repeat of the same conspiracy theorist trash that demonstrates a complete lack of knowledge of how elections work in this country.
Has the parent poster ever worked in a county/township clerk's office? Have they ever worked for a company that provides election systems or services? Have they ever worked for the Secretary of State's office in the state they live in? Do you know any of the history of election fraud in this country prior to the broadcast of "Hacking Democracy" (which has egregious errors of both logic and accuracy)?
The answer is "no," or they would provide something more meaningful than a simple repeat of the same trash that floats around all the blogs. But hey... it beats reading the original article.
The fact of the matter is that election fraud was rampant prior to electronic voting, which was brought in to address that and a myriad of related problems. The clarion call now is that we have traded small-scale fraud for complete subjugation of elections to companies that are beholden to the "power elite."
There are problems in elections, and clearly there are issues with the current crop of touch-screen machines, op-scan machines, and the problems with a certification process that is clearly a joke. However, for the parent post to get modded as "insightful" demonstrates how little mods care about saying something of substance compared with something that promotes the "hell yeah!" response from the unwashed masses.
Go work as a volunteer at the local polling site, and then come back and post. You won't see the full picture (or even a significant part of it), but you'll be a lot more informed.
Any voting machine manufacturer that allows its software to make those kinds of errors is either completely inept, or full of shit, or BOTH.
Besides, anything that is used to tally public votes should never be a "trade secret"!!! Any public that allows them to get away with that is a pack of fools.
So you are fro a federally mandated ID?
No thanks.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"One small hat-tip to Sequoia: at least they are reporting enough raw data in different formats that these kinds of errors can come to light â" that lesson should be kept in mind when writing future requirements for voting machines."
The lesson that they'll probably get out of this is that they reported too much raw data. The more they keep hidden, the easier it is to rig the system.
"How hard can it be?"
// or //
C++:
candidate.votes++;
candidate->votes++;
C#:
candidate.votes++;
Java:
candidate.votes++;
JS:
candidate.votes++;
PHP:
$candidate->votes++;
Perl:
$candidate{'votes'}++;
VB:
candidate.votes++
SQL:
Update Votes = Votes + 1 Where CandidateID = @CandidateID
As you can see, it's a damn near impossible feat, but scientists expect to take this from the lab to the mainstream within the next ten years. Everybody knows these maths don't exist yet and the equipment required to do this is vaporware.
But IANA-programm--- wait a second, I AM a programmer. The problem is that election officials and legislators ARE NOT, and they're the kind of people who think that the internet is actually made of tubes, and that email could possibly be taxed.
If the government has been hardening systems to survive the EMP of nuclear warfare since my parents were born, you'd think they could do a simple increment of an integer value. I bet the IRS doesn't make these kinds of mistakes.
The truth is, they can solve all of these problems easily; they're just too busy insisting the world's flat.
Move all sig!
it just doesn't add up
How exactly does a paper ballot or a voter-checked printed ballot require a federally mandated ID?
Does not compute.
That sums up the problem nicely. It's a shame more people in this country don't care about our electoral process.
-ted
The ability to coerce someone to disclose their vote (then reward or punish them for it) is a significant concern that's as old as elections themselves. That's why voters usually are not permitted to remove any paper ballot from the polling place. If you make a mistake, the election judge puts the spoiled ballot in a special locked spoiled-ballot box and gives you another. When you're satisfied with your vote, you must place it in the locked ballot box before leaving the poll. When the polls close, the ballot count can be audited: the number of ballots cast, plus the number of spoiled ballots in the disposal box, plus the number of ballots left over must equal the number of ballots issued to that precinct. That's a check against both ballot box stuffing and selective removal of "unfriendly" voters' ballots.
Coercion via cell phone cameras is a new twist on traditional strong-arm tactics. It's another good reason to ban phones from polling places (the first being the general rudeness of having a ringing phone and carrying on conversations in a crowded public place). As the parent suggests, if you're forced to do this, take a picture of what they want to see then spoil that ballot. Exchange it for a new one, and vote according to your conscience. Your "handler" sees you voting as ordered, but the ballot box gets the vote you wanted!
The ease of coercion is why I don't trust mail-in elections, or e-mail elections. There is no such thing as a secret ballot when the boss, pastor, union leader, precinct captain, spouse, parents, etc. can influence somebody to reveal their vote. While not a perfect solution, voting in a supervised polling place is the best deterrent we have against voter coercion.
My locality (maybe only county?) has scannable ballots, you connect the bars with a dark pen, and then you feed it thru a scanner and it drops down into a lock-box. No human hand touches it after it gets digitized, it's in sequential order (for the digital totals, different people finish their votes at different times). It appears there's no record of when whom comes into vote (that's handled via paper records too). I suppose a vote-volunteer/paid contract worker could keep track of who voted when in my precinct, but I'm guessing those old ladies who have trouble looking up my name alphabetically would have trouble keeping track of that information.
Locked boxes of ballots that can be easily re-fed thru the scanners to get totals are verifiable.
I'm pretty damn happy with my state's/county/locality's system, compared to this shit I read about.
I don't think they actually read the write-in candidates unless there's a significant number of them (ie: it might be relevant to the vote).
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
I don't really want to try too hard to justify the incompetence, but is it possible there was some sort of scenario whereby multiple ballot machines were attempting to update shared counters and the developers didn't cope with the concurrency very well? (Concurrency _can_ be difficult to get right -- especially for inexperienced devs)...
After going through the last two Republican caucuses in my state I can sincerely say that Republicans are not to be trusted. Now, I know we say Politicians aren't to be trusted but I don't have any first hand experience with the democrats or any other party.
Republican behavior however was atrocious and shameful. I have mixed feelings of either staying with the party and trying to reform it or find a new party. I'm a conservative with a slight libertarian streak. Constitution party might be my best bet even if I don't agree with them on everything I believe they are people who strive to be ethical and honorable in their actions.
Does anyone else wonder why Sequoia seems to think it's alright that the machine can't count the correct number of democrat/republican votes (and that this is a KNOWN DESIGN FLAW), but gets the total number right? The whole point of a vote is not to know the total number of voters... you want to know the number of voters on each side. If their machine can't figure that out correctly, and they were fully aware of that, why did they bother selling the machine? (and who the hell was stupid enough to buy it?)
Kinda of makes me want to dig up that thumb drive that has the software image for their voting machines. Well at least it's for the ones they built in NY.
Does anyone know if that made it into the wild?
Fiiltered:
You will need a copy of all the source code and all the Veriilog code which are the bluepriints for the software and haardware to prevent fraud. Instead of the computer comparing you with a picture you should compare the computer with a picture and if the picture is correct then you know that the voting result is also correct. Because some people are naive and think that if the source code is correct then everything is OK.
Imagine that the problem is in haardware. You press the keyboard and if you do this in a certain way so that when the timing gets right then the user is allowed to edit the results. Cool and interesting. There are many combinations with a keypad and maybe you will need a machine to do this. But anyway you get my point.
It is called a shaadow government. And the politicans did not order it. Don't blame innocent people when you cannot find the correct guilty one.
I see "Hitler" on his way back! Diissect the complete voting machine including all its chiips after that the voting is done. Reduce the number of CPPU instructiions. Make it simple so that even a 10 year old will understand what it is doing.
ASAT
In God we shall trust [and not in the chiips inside the voting machine].
--HPS
College-Pages.com - Online Colleges, Degrees, and Programs
I'd have thought it'd look more like:
Claim that the company is engaged in conspiracy to violate Civil Rights under 18 USC 1985. For good measure, name the corporate lawyers as co-conspirators.
Rigged elections, yet another infringement on our rights by the gov't. Add it to the ever-growing list of violations:
They violate the 1st Amendment by opening mail, caging demonstrators and banning books like "America Deceived" from Amazon.
They violate the 2nd Amendment by confiscating guns during Katrina.
They violate the 4th Amendment by conducting warrant-less wiretaps.
They violate the 5th and 6th Amendment by suspending habeas corpus.
They violate the 8th Amendment by torturing.
They violate the entire Constitution by starting 2 illegal wars based on lies and on behalf of a foriegn gov't.
Write in Dr. Ron Paul and save this great country.
Last link (unless Google Books caves to the gov't and drops the title):
America Deceived (book)
He who controls the money, control the machines.