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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?
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.
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.
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.