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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."
Will there ever be a day when electronic voting will be viewed with the same or greater level of credibility as paper voting?
Hey everybody, let's march on Amsterdam for machine sufferage! You too Hedonism Bot!
-Bender
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
There's only two things I hate in this world: people who are intolerant of other people's cultures - and the Dutch.
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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.
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.
I really don't understand the US need to have votes counted so quickly. You vote in November. The president gets sworn in in January. Lots of time for counting.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The problem is that you don't want voting to be traceable. You want it to specifically not be traceable. You shouldn't be able to tell who voted for who. After things are said and done with, I shouldn't even be able to prove who I voted for (so I can't prove it to someone else who was coercing me). What you need is a system that you can verify with a high degree of certainty, that once you cast your vote, that it will be counted properly, and that the same will happen for all other votes cast. The only way to do this is with physical pieces of paper. Because you can be sure that once you put it in the ballot box, that it doesn't leave (you can have people watching the box). And that once the box is opened for counting, that they are counted correctly. You can do this by having people observe the opening and counting process to ensure that things are done right. With electronic voting, votes can leave the ballot box without anybody noticing (deleting records), and votes can be added without anybody noticing (adding records).
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
Paper ballots don't take days to tabulate, we use them exclusively in Canada and final results are always in within a few hours of the polls closing. Thats the final tally, not some estimate based on 5% of the vote being counted.
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.