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Dutch Voting Machines De-Certified
Peer writes "The Dutch government has officially decided that it will no longer use voting machines (Babel Fish Translation) for elections. So it's pencil and paper from now on. Activists have been campaigning against the use of voting machines for some time."
Only when tampering with the machine will not make it possible to cheat the vote, and there are very few (although >0) designs that allow for that.
(rot13) rpbzbab@tznvy.pbz
I think electronic voting is excellent for surveys, no more than that. Where there is binary information that can't be physically viewed, there can be a flaw, a hack, a security hole. The only hole you will ever find in a paper is if you do it yourself with a punch.
Machines are good at two things:
Marking ballots.
Counting ballots.
But there must be ballots. These ballots must be human-readable at all stages between the marking of the ballot and the canvassing of the election. A human must confirm the ballot is what he intends to vote before actually casting it.
A machine that reads/speaks or writes/marks a paper ballot is invaluable to help the mobility or visually impaired and the illiterate and it can reduce costs in multi-precinct polling places or in polling places that use more than one language.
A separate vote-tally machine can greatly speed up the vote count.
However, you must have a human-readable piece of paper, plastic, or something else we call a ballot in case the vote need to be recounted by hand, and this ballot must be examinable by the voter before he makes his vote official.
Likewise, the ballots must be stored in a location that is protected from tampering until after the election results are final.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Punch cards.
We need to reinvent punchcards.
Make the ballot display on a computer screen and let the user select the options he wants. When you are done, I punches a human readable card with the results.
Those results are placed into another box by hand after the voter looks over the results. You do the precount from the computer booth, then you feed the cards into a card punch reading machine for the official vote.
recount all you want. you will also have a paper trail. problem solved.
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
To summarize the article, hopefully more readable than the Babelfish translation:
The Dutch government sees too little added value in using voting machines, and claims that developing new voting machines will be expensive, and won't solve the problem of the possibility of eavesdropping.
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
Or rather; when the possibility and scale of fraud possible with voting machines becomes equal or less than that of paper votes.
Let's not kid ourselves here; paper voting isn't perfect either.
Paper is easier to commit fraud with, but voting machines allow for much larger scale of fraud if they are hacked.
When we find a way to guarentee a limit to this scale, voting machines will become more reliable than paper.
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You may be able to make a machine that it's possible to verify the votes for, but how do you make a machine that nobody could tamper with. You could probably replace the entire internals of most voting machines without anybody noticing.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
We can't do this in the US, because that means disenfranchisement of those people who are illiterate.
I'm sorry, but if you can't figure out how to vote, then maybe, just maybe you don't really need to vote.
Once upon a time people had to care about who they were voting for, enough to learn how to participate in the process. If you don't care enough to learn, why should we tailor a system that caters to your illiteracy?
If that is what people want, why not put pictures on the ballots like all the other illiterate countries do?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
All for the low low price of only $1000 per voter. Seriously. Paper is cheap, and has served us well for many years. How much is too much for something that only does as good as paper. For the cost of electronic voting machines to be worth it, it has to be many times more reliable and accountable than paper. What is the true cost of purchasing, operating, and maintaining voting machines that we can guarantee are significantly better than paper. And even then, is going from 99.9% accuracy on the vote to 99.99% accuracy on the vote really worth spending billions of dollars on voting machines?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Paper certainly is cheap, and it's been around a long time--a much longer time than exit polls, on-the-spot reporters, and cable news. We've now grown to expect that a winner will be declared in State X fifteen minutes after the polls close there. Used to was, people waited days to know the election results. The famous (or infamous) DEWEY BEATS TRUMAN newspaper headline from the U.S. presidential election in 1948 is certainly an example of premature "certainty" in election results. After television arrived, people could stay up all night "watching the election returns" and retire to bed, exhausted, still not knowing the outcome. It takes a little longer to count paper ballots, but it's certainly worthwhile considering some of the alternatives. We just have to get over our desire for almost-instant gratification.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
I can't see why these companies don't come up with a decent design for electronic voting. It could be easy, traceable and could be much better then paper voting. For each person voting generate a unique person id. Then for every item voted on generate another unique vote id. Print a receipt to every person showing there person id and vote ids. Make this database of vote ids and what was voted for publicly accessible on the internet. This way I can determine if my vote counted and this can easily be audited by everyone! Next have a private database that links every vote to the person id. You could even have a third database of person id to identifiable information. This can now be audited internally to fight off multiple votes from the same person. Problem solved! Voting that is accurate and traceable.
And what happens when the difference between two candidates is only 0.05% after the votes are counted, and the loser demands a recount? Suddenly that difference between 99.9% and 99.99% accuracy matters very much.
In the U.S., the entire fuss over electronic voting machines began because the 2000 presidential election hinged on determining a majority that was within the error margin of spoiled ballots. The problem is that paper voting will always produce spoiled ballots. It doesn't matter how simple you make the process (e.g. "Just put in an X in one of these two boxes"), a certain percentage of the electorate (e.g. the mentally ill, the illiterate, the very elderly, the mentally handicapped) will screw it up.
So in typical fashion, U.S. politicians went overboard and tried to "fix" the spoiled ballot problem with electronic voting machines. The problem with that method is that you'll never get people to have 100% trust in computerized voting. Someone, somewhere, will always make accusations of vote fixing, even if you create a paper trail. So now the pendulum is swinging back to paper ballots.
I'm just hoping I won't see another presidential election so close in my lifetime, because no matter what voting technique you use, the loser will cry foul in a very close race. Fortunately it only seems to happen every 40 years or so (Kennedy's election being the previous example), which provides enough time for the fuss to die down.
Secret ballots are used in all (that I know of) democracies of the world for a reason.
What if someone threatened to kill you or do other harm to you or your family if you didn't show them a receipt showing that you did in fact vote as they wanted.
Having a receipt of who you voted for also opens the door to selling votes to the highest bidder. As it stands, there would be no way for the buyer to verify that they did vote as they wanted.
In a sane election system that difference would not matter anyway as both sides would end up with the same power. It's just insane to declare a single winner based on such a tiny difference, it leaves half the nation unrepresented.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
As a naive Brit who's only ever voted on paper..
If the only way an electronic count will be trusted is by a paper audit trail, then presumably those paper printouts will still have to be counted by hand to verify that they get a result acceptably close to the result the computer gives. In which case, what have we gained in using computers to do the count?
If a manual count of the computer-printouts is not carried out, then how does a printed copy give me the voter any reassurance at all? It would reassure me that I'd not accidentally voted for the wrong person, but could not prove to me that my vote has been counted.
I can understand the argument that if the source code to the program is open then I could inspect it, but most voters are unlikely to have the expertise to do that.
When we find a way to guarentee a limit to this scale, voting machines will become more reliable than paper. I disagree. Here's how to make paper safer than any machine will ever be:
Mark the paper with a pencil, put it in a box. All day long, party representatives are welcome to keep their eye on the boxes. At the end of the day, election officials do the counting, in the same place where to votes were cast so there is no possibility of switching in transit. The party representatives are there looking over their shoulder and doing their own count. If there is a dispute, there's an awful lot of witnesses.
Because the number of voters per precinct will be relatively low, the undisputed result will be known in a couple of hours at the most and because there were party representatives at every precinct, they know what the national total should add up to, so no chance for any shenanigans by the central authority there either.
This is how the Canadians do it, by the way. Nobody ever disputes an election in Canada.
No machine will ever beat that. The more sophisticated your encryption and tamper proofing, the more sophisticated the fraud - it's an arms race you can't win.
In this age of spyware, viruses, trojan horses and the like, anything is possible, especially when political power is involved. Plus, the way e-voting works is beyond the understanding of most people, so there is no confidence in the process.
Truth of the matter is, it's just WAY TOO EASY to tamper with the voting results and there is NO AUDIT TRAIL unless paper is involved. There should ALWAYS be a paper trail to audit the votes, period.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
As much as I love technology, I stand firmily against it's use in voting UNLESS there is a strong, physical, foolproof audit trail to back it up, such as paper ballots, that can be hand-counted (and should ALWAYS be hand-counted to verify the electronic votes are correct).
Yes, it takes longer and is not sleek and shiny, but truth being told, it's much harder to foil paper ballots than the electronic variety. Hell, if I knew that Brazil's servers had an Internet connection, I could throw their election from the comforts of my bedroom here in the States with just my laptop.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies