Avi Rubin Has Some Optimistic Words About E-Voting

An anonymous reader writes "For more than a decade, Aviel "Avi" Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University in the US and an e-voting activist, has been a vocal critic of e-voting systems. In this interview Rubin talks about the recent US presidential primary election cycle and his thoughts on e-voting going into the November US elections."

Comments

The problem

[neokushan]

I can understand why people hate e-voting - it's susceptible to attack and/or manipulation, there's privacy concerns, etc. etc.

But I have to wonder, is it really all that different to paper voting? If someone wants to rig an election, they'll do it no matter what system you use.

I can't imagine it's significantly harder to rig a paper election than an electronic one.

Re:The problem

[2.7182]

I am optimistic, since encryption is so strong nowadays. RSA still is unbreakable. Of course there is more to security than encryption, but maybe in this special case those problems can be avoided.

Re:The problem

[Nursie]

It's a lot more effort and you have a paper trail. With a machine all you have to do is rig the counter.

Re:The problem

[DrLang21]

With rigging a paper election, you have to manually eliminate the paper trail, which is significantly more difficult than changing some bytes. Most people don't have a problem with electronic voting as a method. They have a problem with the absolute lack of a paper trail in so many of these systems.

Re:The problem

[__aarcfd8085]

I think the main problem with the system as it stands now is that with some e-voting systems that are set up poorly you cannot tell if rigging or similar has occured. In a paper system if all else fails you can still go back and re count everything.

An electronic system would allow, not just the finally result to be manipulated but the original data to be changed. You couldn't even tell if there had been any rigging.

E-voting is a lot better than postal votes though, they may increase voter turn out and allow the bed bound etc to vote but, if people can't be bothered to leave the house to vote then it seems they shouldn't vote I would say having a travelling polling station is a better solution for the bed bound voters anyway.

A good example is from here in the UK. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hampshire/6681209.stm where the royal mail lost the votes.

I would imagine that if you'r determined to rig an election you will manage it, there is no such thing as an infallible system.

Re:The problem

[Anonymous Coward]

>I can't imagine it's significantly harder to rig a paper election than an electronic one.

It's easier to detect that someone rigged a paper election: just read the paper.

As for the electronic version, you, the voter, don't even get the program's source, or if you did, verify that it's actually what is on the machine (or that the hardware isn't "flawed" - read: was manipulated). And think of all the non-geeks, they have no chance in hell not to get screwed. What are they supposed to do? Disassemble the program?

So basically: Who's to verify what the computer does? (except for the company that originally developed them - and why should _they_ do anything in the voter's favour?)

Re:The problem

[DrLang21]

E-voting is a lot better than postal votes though, they may increase voter turn out and allow the bed bound etc to vote

A system for the bed bound already existed and still exists. It's called an absentee ballot. You vote in the comfort of where ever you want and mail it in.

Re:The problem

[Swizec]

Because it's so hard to simply rig the final result of counting and if somebody wants to check the paper trail you can "rig" them ... I don't know about you, but personally I've never once bothered to see the actual paper trail of an election and like many others simply opted to trust whatever the news told me the result was.

Re:The problem

[Nursie]

"Because it's so hard to simply rig the final result of counting"

Actually, yes, that is hard when you have observers and counters of all political colours involved. Compared to a hack or a fix in firmware of a whole set of machines that renders the fraud very hard to detect, yes, it's very hard to get the complicity of thousands of people from different parts of the political spectrum.

Re:The problem

[Anonymous Coward]

"I can't imagine it's significantly harder to rig a paper election than an electronic one."

Yes, and:

* It's no harder to copy 1,000 CDs physically than it is to download them
* It's no harder to tap 1,000 physical wires than to break WAP 1,000 times

Everything is easier with digital electronics; that why we invented it.

To rig a paper election you need lots of big men with guns. To rig an electronic election you need one guy with glasses. Only governments rig paper elections. Corporations will rig electronic ones. People know when a paper election is being rigged. An electronic election could be rigged without anyone ever finding out.

Please please drop the fallacy that because something is equally *possible* with technologies A and B it must be equally *easy* on technologies A and B.

Re:The problem

[Swizec]

And yet they all happily comply to fucking The People in the arse on every possible occasion.

Re:The problem

[Nursie]

Eh, no.

I'm going to need a citation on that. Cross party vote rigging in the UK or US is not something that's even been mooted as far as I'm aware.

Whilst the political classes do constantly fuck the people over, having two or more groups of power hungry asshats tends to keep them honest, or at least keeps them at each others' throats watching for the other(s) to screw up.

Re:The problem

[lseltzer]

What nonsense. You never heard of stuffing a ballot box?

Re:The problem

[RCL]

Just make it available online so everyone can log in and check how/whether his/her vote is counted (after the elections) together with other statistics (how many people voted in his/her district etc).

I don't understand the problem with e-voting. Paper trail is no easier to check. Do you propose to check all the votesheets manually? I think it's infeasible, you will need a computer anyway, which will be probably even more prone to rigging than certified e-voting system.

Re:The problem

[Anonymous Coward]

In his book, Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! former governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura said that possibly there won't be another election. Possibly there will be a faked attack against the U.S. by Iran. (The idea of attacking Iran is to get more control over oil, so that the price can be made to rise even higher.) The U.S. has faked attacks on itself before. The Gulf of Tonkin incident is an example, Jesse Ventura says.

Possibly after the staged attack George W. Bush will declare martial law. There have been many, many efforts by Cheney and others in the Bush administration to make that more easily possible, former Governor Ventura says.

It's difficult to imagine that, after all the efforts to circumvent laws, those in power will let Barack Obama become president.

Re:The problem

[pegdhcp]

The rigging in regular -old fashined- elections will take some people who will risk their necks in the process. These people are more likely to have some political ambitions, which cannot be valid outside the contry. A common argument in our local politics, is that "You can be a doctor (programmer...) in any country, with some paperwork, but cannot be a politician in a country aside from your native one". Of course there might be exceptions, but this is a generally valid argument.

On the other hand you can use _only one_ programmer who can be more willing to live outside of whatever country we are talking about for a reasonable sum of money if the rigging will be done by IT means, which requires e-voting. Also IT methods make it easier to automatize all the process and make it easier to modify only necessary counts, and important ability that manual rigging lacks.

Re:The problem

[NickFortune]

I can't imagine it's significantly harder to rig a paper election than an electronic one.

Well, in the general case, the advantage of paper elections is that the attack vectors are by and large known and understood, and can be defended against fairly well. Neither scenario is foolproof, but there's an established body of best practice surrounding paper ballots that just isn't there yet for the electronic ones.

In the specific case of the current crop of electronic voting machines, a number of vulnerabilities have come to light that would seem to make it substantially easier to subvert the electronic systems. This is akin to using a box in a paper ballot with a trapdoor in the bottom so that one side or the other could tamper with the results more conveniently. Going back to my previous point, most people would recognise a trap-door in a ballot box as a bad thing, but not everyone realises that having a voting machine attached to a modem, or using an unsecured Access database is similarly a Bad Idea

Also, it's tempting, as some others have done, to apply the old notion of security as an absolute, and from there to reason that since neither system can be completely proof against rigging, both must be equally insecure, and therefore one must be as good as another. This is a bit like saying that since any bank vault can be opened, your valuables are just as secure under your mattress as they would be in a vault.

Really, until we have an open voting system, one that can be verified for hardware and software by all parties, and until the parties have the in house expertise to perform that verification, then electronic voting should remain suspect in my opinion. If you can't verify the integrity of the machine with the same confidence you would for a simple metal box, then we probably shouldn't be using them.

Re:The problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Your source is Jesse Ventura? What the hell is this, Digg?

Re:The problem

[Nursie]

"Just make it available online"

And open it up to being hacked even more readily?

"so everyone can log in and check how/whether his/her vote is counted (after the elections)"

So that thugs/corporate masters/Mugabe can sit people down and check they voted 'correctly'?

"Paper trail is no easier to check. "

Yes it is, because the trail is there. With "Push button, increment counter" machines it's a different story.

"Do you propose to check all the votesheets manually?"

What do you think happens in a recount when the vote is contested?

"I think it's infeasible, you will need a computer anyway"

How do you think we did it before the rise of computers?

Re:The problem

[Nursie]

Of course I've heard of stuffing the ballot box. That doesn't mean that such a thing is easier to achieve than, say, a biased company making closed source voting machines putting in a bit of code to ensure that their guy gets a better proportion of the vote than he would otherwise.

Stuffing the ballot box these days would require cross-party cooperation by observers and counters. Pretty unlikely, IMHO.

Re:The problem

[lseltzer]

>>Stuffing the ballot box these days would require cross-party cooperation by observers and counters.

No it wouldn't. I've worked polling places. Observers aren't looking at everything all at the same time. And once the paper is in there you can't tell which ballots are legit and which aren't.

You're notion of corrupt code in a closed source system is flat-out paranoid speculation, but there's a long history of ballot tampering at the precinct and it's easy to see how it could work.

Re:The problem

[DrgnDancer]

I don't know about you, but personally I've never once bothered to see the actual paper trail of an election and like many others simply opted to trust whatever the news told me the result was.

It's not so much that you will check the paper trail (though you could if you wanted), it's that the other side(s) can. If the Democrat Joe Snobbypant goes into the election with a 10 point advantage in the polls, and his opponent, the honorable Bob Crabbypanys, wins by half a percent, you can bet Joe is looking for a hand count. The reverse is also true. There are a finite number of people running in any given election and most of them have the influence to both ask for and get a look at the paper trail if things seem suspicious. Not to mention the money to get a qualified accountant to do the looking.

Re:The problem

[RCL]

"And open it up to being hacked even more readily?"

...

"So that thugs/corporate masters/Mugabe can sit people down and check they voted 'correctly'?"

No, why can't they make those things secure? Give everyone an unique ID or just use existing ones that you have in US (SSN?).

And about checking votesheets manually - if one has the ability to rig the machines, then one can easily render "unwanted" votesheets invalid by placing additional markings on them (e.g. checking more than one candidate - at least that's how they do in Russia) and manual checking won't help either.

The key advantage of e-voting would be an ability to personally check how one's vote is counted.

Re:The problem

[strabes]

Who cares which side gets elected? Government wins, grows, and takes more of our money either way.

Re:The problem

[jank1887]

at least the NSA is happy letting you think it's unbreakable... :)

Re:The problem

[ShieldW0lf]

Personally, I don't see why individuals should be having secret votes. Should our elected officials be making secret votes? No, so why should anyone else? People always talk about thugs and corporate masters... if a thug tries to bully you into voting the way they say, you refuse. If they try to behave violently afterward, they go to jail. No different from any other thug.

As for corporate masters, well, if we had a good and proper voting system, a real democracy with involved citizens, maybe we could start disassembling the economic structures that give those individuals such crushing arbitrary dynastic power and shift the power towards people we actually trust.

You know, following leadership instead of being ruled? Old fashioned, I know...

Re:The problem

[Timosch]

The point is that paper voting is at least partially transparent. I can become a polling clerk or so and I can hence see that noone is putting ballots into the trash bin. Of course I do not know what happens to the ballots after they've left, but at least I have *some* control. On the other hand, the huge problem with voting machines for example is that
1.) their implementation is kept secret - "security by obscurity" at its best
2.) I therefore do not know if the voting machine company can influence the result
3.) I cannot recount the ballots
Same goes for internet voting.
IMHO the big problem is not e-voting itself, but the lack of safety in the implementation. And as long as this is not guaranteed, I consider e-voting a threat to democracy. C'mon, is it so hard to walk some metres (or maybe kilometres) to a polling station?

Re:The problem

[Timosch]

Nothing is unbreakable. Except One Time Pad, if used correctly.

Re:The problem

[grumbel]

When you succeed in manipulating a ballot box, you have manipulated exactly one ballot box with a good chance of being catched in the process, if you try the same with electronic voting machines you can manipulate dozens, hundreds or even thousands at once without anybody having a chance of noticing anything.

Re:The problem

[0123456789]

Observers aren't looking at everything all at the same time.

True. But, to rig an e-vote, you can affect multiple voting locations (changing 10 votes in a hundred precincts looks less suspicious than changing 1 precinct by a thousand votes) with a single attack. To achieve a similar affect with ballot-stuffing, you'd need to stuff ballots in multiple locations, thereby increasing the chance that an observer will spot you.

Not to mention that ballot stuffing can be detected after the fact: "Why do we have an electoral roll of 5000 people, and 6000 votes?". For an electronic system, you can change, rather than merely add, votes.

Re:The problem

[Ihlosi]

Personally, I don't see why individuals should be having secret votes.

And that's because ...

People always talk about thugs and corporate masters... if a thug tries to bully you into voting the way they say, you refuse. If they try to behave violently afterward, they go to jail. No different from any other thug.

... you have a really rosy view of thugs and how many of them are caught. And once you're maimed/dead, or your property is vandalized, it really does you a lot of good that the thugs may go to jail (if caught). Or how about losing your job because you voted for a party that $BOSS didn't like ? Or people coming after you because you've voted a certain way two decades ago ?

Re:The problem

[natoochtoniket]

You gotta be kidding.

A major difference between electronic and paper ballots is in the probability that an attempt to change the outcome will be detected. To change one database can be done by one person, by remote access or even in advance, and leaves no physical evidence at all. To change hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper requires multiple people, with physical access, hours of time, and leaves lots of physical evidence.

The second difference is in the security model. Providing verified security for pieces of paper is a well understood problem. Banks and governments have been doing it successfully for hundreds of years. Providing security for bytes on a disk is not well understood, unless you consider the disk as a physical thing to be locked in a vault. If the systems are connected to any network, or if they run any software, all of the vulnerabilities of the network, software, and systems can be used by an attacker.

Re:The problem

[MadKeithV]

A mail-in vote.... why, would that be a "postal vote"? ;-)

Re:The problem

[smidget2k4]

And if you have the ability to "personally" check how one's vote counted, then your boss has the ability to "personally" check how you voted. If you have a private username or something that only you know, but your boss knows you have it, it is very easy to set up a "show me how you voted or you lose your job" scenario.

This is one of the reasons the current system was set up the way it was, where you do not leave the ballot box with anything. This was an issue in the past, and one that I would rather not welcome back.

Re:The problem

[jmhoule314]

>>Stuffing the ballot box these days would require cross-party cooperation by observers and counters. Pretty unlikely, IMHO.

When the presidential election keeps coming down to one state or one district it doesnt take many extra votes to win the whole election. Also, I dont really know how the hand counting works on paper ballots. From what I have seen on TV it looks like a group of people just counting and tallying. If you are a supporter of one side or the other I think that it would be pretty easy to pad the vote a little for your candidate. There is also all the absentee ballots from the armed services. Im sure that those could also be intercepted and tampered with quite easily. Furthermore, as the votes get tallied control of the data shifts from many districts up to just a few people.

Lets say for example(and I'm not saying this is how it went, or that this is what I believe), that with the Florida recount and 02 Jeb Bush's strategy was to simply delay the recount long enough for Al Gore to concede. If that was his strategy then it worked and is an example of one man swaying the whole presidential election. Of course the election had to be reasonably close, which it was, as they all are.

It is completely imperative for every citizen of the world to not trust its government or voting processes. If we just put blind trust in a system, designed by humans, which by definition is imperfect, we are inviting those who would do anything for power and money to game the system for their own advancement.

Re:The problem

[smidget2k4]

Or maybe you didn't vote the way the Police Chief wanted you do (that is, for him). Good luck having the police track down those thugs then.

Re:The problem

[Dog-Cow]

The key advantage of e-voting would be an ability to personally check how one's vote is counted.

That's the largest DISadvantage to e-voting. Period. Since you already quoted and dismissed the poster who tried to make the same point, I can only assume you are one of the most stupid people to ever exist, or you're a politician.

Re:The problem

[lenski]

I have been a "presiding judge" and let me tell you that where are multiple people watching what's going on all the time.

Which means that while manipulating paper-ballot systems is possible, it is by no means easy. Furthermore, paper ballot systems are intrinsically decentralized: To manipulate an election, one would need to manipulate the ballot boxes in multiple precincts, requiring the cooperation, or at least failure to observe suspicious activity by a much larger number of insiders.

Compare that to the implicit centralization of counting that occurs when a given county or state purchases its voting machines from a single vendor. A far smaller number of bad actors is required to do real damage with evoting systems, and worse yet, it's essentially impossible to recognize easter-egg or other malicious code, particularly with respect to proprietary systems.

This being slashdot, I assume you are already aware of the essential impossibility of detecting malicious easter eggs through classical black-box system testing techniques. Given that the proprietary vendors consider their code to be a State Secret (IMHO out of embarrassment over how piss-poor it tends to be given its criticality to democratic decisionmaking), black box testing is all the boards of election and their independent testers can use.

Consider further that boards of elections and secretaries of state have very limited time, funding to and technical skill to validate hardware and software systems that the vendors really don't want pried open for a look-see.

Re:The problem

[RCL]

I'm not stupid. I can't just believe that you have less freedom in US than we do in Russia. If only my boss tried to "check how I voted", I would have quit my job. We have the problem with governments rigging the votes, not the bosses.

Re:The problem

[ShieldW0lf]

If you want self-determination, you need courage. It doesn't come free. Personally, I'd rather die standing in front of a mob screaming bloody murder with a weapon in my hands than be ruled in this way.

As it stands, I don't work for bosses whose politics I don't like. I quit. Always have, always will. If I don't like what a group is doing, I don't give them one iota of my strength. In the absence of a system that grants any individual real political power, sometimes the best a person can do is refuse to be of any help.

Americans have always been such a bunch of hypocritical cowards. Joseph McCarthy didn't teach you anything, and the rest of the world is still dealing with your failure to take responsibility for your country.

Re:The problem

[ShieldW0lf]

And if you have the ability to "personally" check how one's vote counted, then your boss has the ability to "personally" check how you voted. If you have a private username or something that only you know, but your boss knows you have it, it is very easy to set up a "show me how you voted or you lose your job" scenario.

If you work for someone like that, and you don't quit once you realize the character of the man you're empowering with your efforts, you deserve to get your ass kicked. You're just making him that much stronger and passing the buck on to someone else to deal with.

Re:The problem

[RCL]

I can't believe that American people fear losing their jobs so much that they would agree to such things... At least in Russia the main threat comes from government, not from private business owners ("bosses"). That's why ability to check how the vote is counted is much more important (for me).

You can always change the job or even become a freelancer, but there's just no way for you to change the government that rigs the votes (unless you're a part of an organized paramilitary force...)

Re:The problem

[JebusIsLord]

In the US, you could have 60% of the ballots "faked" and still come up under the electorial roll. Gotta love those turnouts... do you guys really love freedom as much as you say you do?

Re:The problem

[Anonymous Coward]

One other consideration is that in many states (speaking of the US here of course), any election that is deemed sufficiently "close" is legally required to have a recount of the votes. Yes, it is possible to rig an election with paper ballots:
    *LBJ was JFK's running mate in 1960 because he could guarantee delivery of certain precints in Texas.
    *Anyone named "Daly" from Illinois being called in to help determine the outcome of an election.

Note that even with Daly, the Democrat's corruption was no match for the Republican's corruption in Florida.

But without that human readable paper ballot, there is no real hope of catching and correcting a fraudulent election. When one candidate manages an 85-15 landslide victory with virtual ballots, there will be witnesses to the substitution of ballot boxes etc.

The Reublicans like to complain that the Democrats want to emulate all the failed/failing social policies of Europe, but both parties seem to want to emulate the electoral systems of democratic heroes such as Mugagbe and Chavez.

Re:The problem

[mysticgoat]

I can't imagine it's significantly harder to rig a paper election than an electronic one.

It is a matter of cost and risk.

It costs a lot less to hire one black hat to compromise thousands of voting machines than to print up a lot of counterfeit ballots and get them put into play. With the voting machines in use in 2000 and 2004, the risk of getting caught was minimal since the security of the machines before the elections was inadequate and audit trails were non-existent.

So for that period, there was a strong business case for rigging elections. The cost benefit ratio was very favorable. And risk management was very easy to do— even if the fraud was strongly suspected, there would be no evidence that would stand up in court and zero likelihood that the parties paying for the fraud would be directly implicated. In retrospect, it is obvious that both elections must have been compromised. To assume otherwise would be contrary to the principles of free market capitalism.

What is needed is for elections to go back to procedures that increase the costs and risks involved in rigging an election. Adding audit trails to evoting machines would be a very good first step.

Re:The problem

[Nursie]

It's not just jobs.

It's fingers, toes, legs...

Unofficial vote "verifying" is a key method in the arsenal of corrupt dictators the world over and throughout history. It's been happening in Zimbabwe in the last few weeks.

Anonymity is the only defence, and that means no "log on and check" system.

Re:The problem

[Nursie]

And if you think your boss would be the only one interested then you're a fool. There are all sorts of social and physical pressures that can be put on people when there is a way, even by force, to find out how they voted.

Maybe the cheif of police is best friends with your local congressman, he could make your life very difficult unless you "voluntarily" show him how you voted.

This scheme would be a terrible weakness in a democratic nation.

Re:The problem

[Nursie]

"Americans have always been such a bunch of hypocritical cowards."

No, it's just a fact that when you open up a system to be abused like this it'll be taken over by gangs and cabals of the powerful to the detriment of the weak.

I'm glad you think you'd go down fighting, that's up to you. Personally my life is the most important thing to me and I wouldn't. And that is how the system goes into rapid decline.

Transparency in voting is a BAD thing.

Re:The problem

[Nursie]

And when that man has a gun?

Sorry, but this vote-checking has been used to oppress people many times and is one of the key things the secret ballot seeks to prevent. It stops people buying votes, it stops people forcing votes and it stops the associated violence.

Re:The problem

[gnasher719]

And if you have the ability to "personally" check how one's vote counted, then your boss has the ability to "personally" check how you voted. If you have a private username or something that only you know, but your boss knows you have it, it is very easy to set up a "show me how you voted or you lose your job" scenario.

There are systems where this is impossible. A simple system goes like this: You fill out _three_ voting forms. In these three forms, you have to give one vote to each candidate, and two votes for the candidate you actually want to elect. After the forms are submitted, you pick _one_ that is printed out and given to you as a receipt, including a random identification number. If your boss wants you to vote for candidate X, you can show him the receipt with a vote for X and you can still vote any way you like. All votes with their random id numbers are then published on the Internet; if the counters wanted to forge a single vote there would be a chance of 1 in 3 that someone has a receipt that can prove fraud.

Re:The problem

[Nursie]

Umm, if that system is known, then all your oppressor has to do is take your receipt and check online.

Look, it's like DRM, if you have *any* way to verify your vote then so does the local gang that are under the protection of the local ruling party.

Re:The problem

[Shakrai]

If you work for someone like that, and you don't quit once you realize the character of the man you're empowering with your efforts

Did you occur to you that not everyone has the ability to walk away from a job because the boss is a dickhead? It's not all that easy for many people (particularly in this economy) to find another one and if you have a family then you aren't just worrying about your own mouth to feed.....

Re:The problem

[Anonymous Coward]

One word: Punchscan.

Another few words: Aviel Rubin - not a JEW, by any chance?
Why would a JEW have such an interest in the voting system... I just can't imagine... Such 'chutzpah' Chaim...

America's government is owned by Zionist Jews. Acts on behalf of Zionist Jews. Invades countries on behalf of Zionist Jews, and takes YOUR tax dollars and YOUR children to do it.

Re:The problem

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not projecting the image you think you are, teenybopper.

Re:The problem

[lawpoop]

But I have to wonder, is it really all that different to paper voting? If someone wants to rig an election, they'll do it no matter what system you use.

Yes, it's almost completely different to rig a paper election.

Say you want to stuff ballots. First of all, you need to print extra ballots to stuff in the box. Then, you need people to fill them out. You need them to fill them out within a short amount of time, and have them all look a little different, in case there is an investigation later. ( i.e. you can't have 1,000 ballots with the same handwriting). That creates a pool of co-conspirators and witnesses, since you need a threshold of manpower to commit this crime, possibly exposing themselves to witnesses, and getting it all done one or a few days before election day.

Say you want to throw a few ballots in the river. Well, those poll workers know that they turned in several boxes for their district, and why aren't they included in the official re-count? Now the ballot boxes washed up on shore. Who threw them in the river? Were there any witnesses? Who had custody last of these boxes at the polling station?

Now say you want to electronically hack a voting machine system, with built-in modems or internet connections. These machines all phone home, or receive a special 'call', and within moments, one person ( perhaps sitting in the white house ) flips a 49-51% election, with no records whatsoever of the change.

Re:The problem

[Volvogga]

I'm sorry, I still don't get it. The hard copy has existed for years, so what's wrong with getting a dozen dot-matrix printers (ok, probably need something faster/better, but first thing that came to my mind), a ton of paper, and auto printing each and every network packet from the heads to the local server, machine diagnostic, routine execution, etc (whatever it takes really). There's your paper trail. Scale as appropriate from there.

I understand that in electronic systems, any part can be tampered with, but surely you can make that damn hard. Put some cameras in the booths watching the sensitive parts of the machines (not the screen/buttons obviously). Get a few nerds with opposite party associations to watch all the in depth stuff coming over the screens and out of the printers.

In addition, we already have people that are watching the regular votes, so why not keep their jobs. Teach them to monitor basic things... make sure everything's in correct placement, check for shenanigans, etc. From what I've gathered, we aren't talking about people booting IE up, logging into usvote.gov and entering their SSN here. It's a relatively closed system during the process.

Maybe after all that, the cost wouldn't be worth it? Maybe it'll take some much more robust and generally more badass software than what they're using now? Maybe the hardware isn't there at cost? I don't know... but I certainly don't see why the idea should be written off and not actively developed. I just don't get it.

Re:The problem

[Jackmn]

if a thug tries to bully you into voting the way they say, you refuse. If they try to behave violently afterward, they go to jail. No different from any other thug.

It is far more likely that you'll come up short a few fingers, and nothing will happen to the thugs.

Re:The problem

[digitrev]

Not if you do it the way it works in Canada. You get your voter's card in the mail and take that (or certain ID if you want to register at the polling booth) to the polling booth. You then go see one of the volunteers, and they scratch your name off a list and give you one piece of paper for each vote you have to cast (i.e. 1 for your councilor, 1 for your mayor, etc...). You then go behind a cardboard screen, place a check in the box to the right of the person you're voting for (for provincial and federal elections, both the name and the party of the person are on the ballot), then fold it up, walk back to a different table (with a volunteer watching you), and place the ballot (or ballots, for multiple votes) in the box.

When the polling booth is closed, the boxes are then taken to an area to be counted. Each party has a representative to oversee the ballots being counted, and if the vote is close, it's possible to ask for a recount.

To make a long story short, it would be very difficult to stuff the ballot boxes in Canada, which is why we don't worry about electoral fraud, but instead the politicians we're voting for. Did I mention that we currently have 4 political parties in Parliament at the moment?

Re:The problem

[digitrev]

That's why the counters are usually watched by scrutineers. Obviously, fraud is possible, but it's also possible to minimize opportunities for fraud. Besides, it's still a better system than the e-voting and mechanical methods certain states are using. Try checking out how Canada works: it's simple, and it still gets you most of the results by printing time at the presses.

Re:The problem

[nsayer]

If you want self-determination, you need courage. It doesn't come free. Personally, I'd rather die standing in front of a mob screaming bloody murder with a weapon in my hands than be ruled in this way.

Your courage is commendable, however misplaced. I am willing to die for a lot of things, but consider such an action as a last resort. Fortunately, anonymous and non-verifiable voting allows me to reserve that sacrifice for something more important than the freedom to vote how I choose without pressure, while at the same time insuring that I have that freedom.

Re:The problem

[nsayer]

The sole benefit of electronic voting is that the voting machine can prevent voter error by disallowing over-votes and warning against (but obviously still allowing) under-votes, and can provide a record free of any ambiguities (no "hanging chads"). If the machine simply printed out the votes that the voter cast in plain language on a slip of paper that the voter then folded and dropped into a ballot box on the way out the door, that would be fine. The voter could verify for himself that the paper record was correct, the paper record could be OCRed during any recount process (you do NOT want to use barcodes or any such machine-readable printout stuff for ballots as the voter could not, by himself, verify what it says), and the paper record is, in fact, what is the legally binding record of the voter's intent. That the machine could also keep counts on its own would merely be a convenience for when no recount is requested or required, but the primary role of the machine in such a system would be to make sure that the voter doesn't do anything that would accidently invalidate his vote on a particular question, and that the voter's intent is unambiguously recorded.

I mean, that's what the whole mess in Florida in 2000 was all about, no?

Re:The problem

[Strilanc]

A secure voting system, in the sense that every person can keep their vote a secret AND check that their vote has not been tampered with, requires every person to have a public/private key pair. It will be years, maybe decades, maybe never, before we start getting those kind of IDs.

Re:The problem

[Panaflex]

Uhm... it's the same here in my precinct.

It's those crazy people that believe that any goofball should be able to walk into a room and vote without ANY ID here in the US that should be blamed.

I'm sorry... getting an ID card is not a big hurdle.

Re:The problem

[AdamHaun]

I'm all in favor of courage and self-determination, but you're kidding yourself if you think that open ballots would ever work. There are a couple problems with what you're saying.

First, the perceived value of a single vote is usually much smaller than that of people's lives or well-being (or those of their families), even when that vote could swing the whole election. So once you open up the ballots it's very effective to *add* intimidation and harassment, which can be hard to catch or stop through legal means.

Second, refusing to associate with people because of political differences is way too extreme (and helps creates the problems I mentioned above). What's the point of having a peaceful way of resolving disputes (voting) if you're going to fight anyway? People form political opinions based on a little knowledge and a lot of information, and most of the time there isn't enough confidence to be worth disrupting the rest of your life over. If you take off the political lenses you find that people just aren't that different. And that's not to mention the practical difficulties of finding a new job, new friends, and possibly a new family...

Re:The problem

[ShieldW0lf]

Your courage is commendable, however misplaced. I am willing to die for a lot of things, but consider such an action as a last resort. Fortunately, anonymous and non-verifiable voting allows me to reserve that sacrifice for something more important than the freedom to vote how I choose without pressure, while at the same time insuring that I have that freedom.

No, actually, it doesn't. You live under an illusion. One day, you will see that for yourself.

Re:The problem

[[Zappo]]

I can understand why people hate e-voting - it's susceptible to attack and/or manipulation, there's privacy concerns, etc. etc.

But I have to wonder, is it really all that different to paper voting? If someone wants to rig an election, they'll do it no matter what system you use.

I can't imagine it's significantly harder to rig a paper election than an electronic one.

I wrote this reply many years ago (with a correction to a researcher's name in a follow-up post):

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6507&cid=940549

That was for totally electronic voting. I think all the points remain valid today. Schemes that use electronic machines at polling places seem feasible if they make correct use of paper audit trails (easily verified by the voter, and also by officials as needed for recounts or statistical verification of electronic results).

I should note that many of the steps that could be taken to make various aspects of paper-based voting provably secure, actually often are not taken in today's US election process.

The reason is possibly that there is not much perceived need to highly prove security against fraud in the current state of our democracy. However, eliminating paper would make it impossible to institute important protections in the voting process if/when they were to become necessary.

Re:The problem

[Opportunist]

Yes it can be. Let me illustrate in a simple parallel why.

Two words: Online banking.

ID theft for online banking scams is a big market today. It is impossible for a bank to determine whether the order issued from their customer's PC was issued by the customer or some trojan residing inside the computer. That's the first big problem: You can NOT verify that the person you think transfered (or voted) is really the person that did. You can now start to create the most elaborate system to verify what is being entered and transmitted, but when a trojan is sitting between you and the customer/voter, it can easily manipulate the transaction and neither side can identify the manipulation, because the trojan sits right between them. It's a classic man in the middle attack, but instead of the mitm sitting somewhere on the line, it sits right in the customer's computer.

Another thing to consider is why online banking frauds are such a big market: The ability to pull it off internationally. You needn't go to the person you want to steal from and get his bank card first to withdraw money. You can safely sit somewhere in a country ending in -stan, spew your ID theft trojans and wait. That's what I'd really take into consideration. I could very well see some countries having a very keen interest in having a say who gets elected in other countries.

If online voting becomes popular or at least accepted, expect some international attacks and manipulation attempts.

Re:The problem

[Opportunist]

And even that can be cheated by a clever system. Here's how:

We have 3 participants. The voter (v), the trojan in the computer system he uses to vote (t) and the election committee that's supposed to get the vote on their computer (c).

It runs like this:

v punches into his computer he wants to vote for party A.
t sends to c that v voted for B.
c tells t that they got a vote for B and want a verification from the one time pad issued to the voter to verify that he is really he.
t tells v that his vote for party A was transmitted and requests the OTP code.
v enters OTP code, believing his vote for party A was accepted.
t sends c the OTP code.
c accepts vote for party B.

How does a OTP avoid that?

Re:The problem

[Anonymous Coward]

My source is Jesse Ventura?

There. Fixed that for me.

Re:The problem

[myspace-cn]

But not specially crafted chips (at the doping level)

Although, you are correct, there are problems STILL with maintaining a proper chain of custody, and not having authority to enforce it against law enforcement.

Re:The problem

[myspace-cn]

Not true. Take vote caging. That was analysis of entire populations to target blacks, and democrats.

Conspiracy, absolutely.

Re:The problem

[myspace-cn]

Not only that. After the wrong candidate is sworn in, there is no RECOURSE.

Not only that. If you WANT a re-count, 100% you'll never get it. EVER.

Re:The problem

[Opportunist]

I also rarely bother to read the source of open source projects. But the possibility alone already decreases the likelyhood that some nasty backdoor is deliberately introduced in it, because if someone is suspicious/paranoid enough, he can and does look at it.

You can rest assured that as soon as even a hint of election rigging is in the air, someone will jump at it and start counting.

Worse yet, if there is no paper trail but a bad loser, he could always discredit the winner and decry that election fraud took place and nobody could slap him with the paper slips to make him come to sense and show he's just trying to cause a riot. Instead, you will have a lot of people following him and cry foul play, even if there was none, hoping to throw enough mud at the winner to make him lose his office.

A paper trail is necessary to keep things like that from happening.

Re:The problem

[myspace-cn]

A Simple way to fuck up the mail ballot, is to NOT DELIVER IT.

How will you know?

And if you know, what are you going to do about it.

Oh let's see, your going to do NOTHING.

And in the slim chance you do SOMETHING. or ANYTHING, what effect will it have on the election? NONE.

Your little claim that your MAIL-IN ballot was never delivered will not be grounds for a re-count, it will be just shoved aside.

Quit deluding yourselves.

Re:The problem

[myspace-cn]

Unless you were born before BIRTH CERTIFICATES, or you have ZERO FUCKING INCOME.

Re:The problem

[myspace-cn]

Full Disclosure: Your a presiding judge? What precint, City?

And I would have to say. multiple people, no matter how many can not see invisible electronics signals. Or specially crafted chips at the doping level.

Re:The problem

[myspace-cn]

Not possible with specially crafted chips, or chain of custody that travels hundreds of miles an hour down the road.

Even IF election fraud (not to be confused with the negligible voter fraud fake problem to cleanse the vote registration) is detected, they still have no power to stop it, or stop the candidate from being sworn in.

In short your full of shit.

Re:The problem

[myspace-cn]

Avi Rubin is totally full of shit on his pro electronic vote tabulation device stance. We agree there. But don't bring fucking racism into this. By doing that you lost the argument before you began.

Re:The problem

[RCL]

I think there's a contradiction here:

1) Democratic nation (e.g. one where voting results really matter) cannot be that oppressive. Ok, some particular police chief might try to "help" his friend congressman that way, but such behavior cannot be common throughout a democratic nation - it wouldn't be called "democracy" otherwise.

2) And if we're talking about non-democratic nations (e.g. dictatorships), then there's no need to check how people actually voted. You can rig, you run single candidate elections, you can do whatever you want - you generally don't care how people vote, you know the results will be in your favor anyway.


Ability to check your own vote make authorities accountable, giving more control into the hands of the people. Sure, it can be abused by some. But in countries where such abuse would matter (democratic ones), this is not likely to happen by definition. In countries where such abuse is likely to happen (dictatorships etc), there are more effective ways to control how people vote (and votes don't matter anyway).

Re:The problem

[myspace-cn]

There are less "regular -old fashined- elections" (sic) than there are real high technology vote tabulation device elections..

When you specially craft the hardware, it doesn't matter what the programmer does.

Re:The problem

[digitrev]

Excuse me? Where did I mention mail-in ballots? I personally think those are ridiculous. If you can't be bothered to show up, then you don't get a vote. Please note that this applies to anything you send by mail, not just your vote. What am I going to do about it? Not vote by mail.

Also, please stop using excessive capitals. There are bold, italic, em, and various other html tags you can use to emphasize your speech. Remember: caps lock may be cruise control for cool, but you still have to steer.

Re:The problem

[digitrev]

Not possible with specially crafted chips, or chain of custody that travels hundreds of miles an hour down the road.

What isn't possible? Election fraud?

Even IF election fraud (not to be confused with the negligible voter fraud fake problem to cleanse the vote registration) is detected, they still have no power to stop it, or stop the candidate from being sworn in.

Well, then what's the bloody point of an election? And who's "they" (as in they still have no power...)? If there's a real issue of election fraud, you'd better believe that the people who got shafted are going to call for an inquiry, get the legal system involved, etc...

In short your full of shit.

Am I full of shit? I don't think so, but that's your opinion. It's my opinion that you didn't really give this post too much thought, as is evident by your rambling, incoherent sentences, and blatant error in your last sentence, indicating your inability or unwillingness to proofread.

Re:The problem

[acheron12]

if the counters wanted to forge a single vote there would be a chance of 1 in 3 that someone has a receipt that can prove fraud.

Except this doesn't apply to coerced votes...

Re:The problem

[JebusIsLord]

Well actually I AM canadian (hence the sideways jab at our southern friends)... recently in Calgary an Alderman "won" the election after ballot stuffing... mail-in style. They noticed because the number of mail-in ballots for that riding seemed high.

I guess they DID catch it, and it WAS verifiable thanks to the paper trail, but still... it can and has been attempted.

Re:The problem

[digitrev]

That's good that they did catch. The question is, why do we need mail-in ballots? With enough advanced voting days, it shouldn't really be necessary. If you're out of town at the time...well, that's damn unfortunate, but life can be a bitch sometimes.

Re:The problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Your gonna have ta try a lot harder if you actually intend to defend your pov. If your feeling lazy, consider this practice. If you can't convince a adult (or someone close enough) of something you consider this vital, you aint gonna be able to convince your children when they ask why can't they do xyz.

Gathering data and spewing it out convincingly is a skill that requires much practice. Unless ya wanna wait until words are useless, and the serious shit/drama must begin, PRACTICE damn it!

Re:The problem

[azgard]

There is no contradiction. In the words of Linus Torvalds, "people can trust me because they don't have to".

It's the downward spiral that is the problem. Once people cannot trust that voting is not checked, they will fear retribution, and will more and more tend to vote for those in power. It's a positive feedback loop that ends with dictatorship.

I am from Czech Republic. During the communist regime, voting existed, and there was even a screen behind you could cast your vote (not that it would matter, the parties were preselected). If you didn't go to vote or went behind the screen, you got a black mark (which could mean problems at work for example). So now there is actually statutory duty to go behind the screen.

Trust among people (also called social capital) is a very important inner variable in any society. It can be earned by having trustful, fair and respected laws, and lost by big differences in power among people. So there is no contradiction, because to ease such laws will decrease the trust.

Re:The problem

[lenski]

Absolutely right, I agree completely that the insides of a system are essentially invisible.

See "Reflections on Trusting Trust", Ken Thompson's ACM Turing Award lecture.

For a good example showing how subtle is the electronic system security world, I cite the example of the Nevada Gaming Commission worker who hacked the *test* unit in order to alter slot machine code. His name is Ron Harris, I think. A quick google search will show some interesting stories.

I was a presiding judge for a precinct in a neighborhood north of Morse Road and east of I-71 in Columbus, Ohio. I forget its particular number, though. (after an 18 hour day, I got outside to my car in a freezing rain only to discover that my car had a flat tire! That part I remember...)

Re:The problem

[Teancum]

The main issue about e-voting fraud that is so much different than paper voting fraud is where the fraud must occur.

With paper voting fraud, it simply must happen at the local voting precinct level. This allows for thousands of dead people to vote for candidates like JFK and allows the 10's of thousands of votes for Al Gore to be added by poll workers being lazy and casting multiple ballots simultaneously (one of the chief reasons for all of the chad problems in Florida). Punch card ballots also could be manipulated by poking a stick through a stack of carefully aligned ballots that would either add votes for the preferred candidate or invalidate those ballots who voted for somebody else.

With hundreds of thousands of local voting precincts in the USA, some of this sort of fraud does occur in nearly every election. People do occasionally get caught, and legal penalties are on occasion also given to those who commit this kind of voting fraud.

With e-voting, the ballot fraud moves up the food chain and can happen at higher levels of government in addition to fraud at the precinct level. This is where some county tech decides to add a little bit of extra software to all of the machines in the county that causes a preferred party to have a few extra votes in key races over some other political party or philosophical point of view. It may not be much, but in tight races it may mean a difference.

One of the best defenses of preventing this kind of fraud is a full disclosure of the software used to operate the machine. I could go on about this, but that would create a whole separate thread.

Re:The problem

[sgt_doom]

This is a fairly adequate synopsis of the American voting situation as it now stands:

Four corporate entities now control between 80% to 90% of the vote counting (Hart InterCivic, ES&S, Sequoia, Premier Election Systems [formerly Diebold]) and these four are primarily funded by the Pentagon by way of "defense" contractors, etc. (Also, the votes from civilians and military from overseas are controlled or coordinated by Hart InterCivic as well.)

Also, as investigative journalist Greg Palast has so brilliantly pointed out, the Help America Vote Act legislation (HAVA) required states receiving federal funds to create cetralized voter registration databases (Section 303), which conveniently fall under the jurisdiction and control of the individual secretaries of state.

This gives extraordinary power to unregister voters - which did in fact occur in 2006 in California (and perhaps other states as well) where 40% of the voters who registered were "unregistered"......

Whichever way or vantage point one views it, the system has been extraordinarily well gamed......

Re:The problem

[dave87656]

But I have to wonder, is it really all that different to paper voting?

Yes. It is significantly different than E-Voting in at least one important way: paper votes are counted in the open and are re-countable.

Re:The problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the whole question is useless. Yes, it's bad when elections get rigged *in* *principle* but there's also the slight issue of what the heck it matters. In the US the two "electable" candidates or parties are always the same, and their policies differ in such minor ways (and the mostly in the package, not the content) that it simply is useless to vote in the first place. The old "If elections could change something, they'd be illegal!" rule still applies, *especially* in the US, and *especially* to federal and state elections. They are a complete joke, and in no way change anything for the majority of the population. Heck, the important issues don't even come up in the campaigns. So all I can do at this point: sigh!

Re:The problem

[randyleepublic]

There will always be voting fraud. It is inherent in the process. So the question is not, "How to eliminate voting fraud?" but "How to keep voting fraud to a minimum?" That is the problem with e-voting. One person in the right place at the right time can rig thousands of machines and steal millions of votes. Whereas by using procedures that make voting as labor intensive as possible, you make it infinitely more difficult to steal more than a few votes. Plus the more people that have to be involved, the better chance that someone will squeal. It is the nature of the process that makes it diametrically opposite from other very useful and secure e-transactions. Voting is unique in that there is no, and due to the nature of it, can never be an "expectation" to be fulfilled. When you buy something online, you initiate the transaction by first selecting an item to purchase. At that point you have created an expectation on the part of the vendor as to the amount of you payment. So the payment amount has to match the item price. Then you have an expectation for a delivery date and an item that have to be fulfilled. It the double entry mode of the transactions that make any fraud immediately obvious. Compare all that with voting. The is no and can never be an expectation. It's a single entry process. You vote and then it gets counted. If your vote gets counted "wrong", you have no way of knowing. All you see it the final tally. Bush won? OK, and you shrug your shoulders. Paper trails and all that other "security" horseshit means jack diddley. So-called security experts who claim to have inspected and approved the newest system are fools and liars. It is semantically impossible to secure voting e- or paper. So, make it labor intensive!

Re:The problem

[randyleepublic]

If someone told me to "Show me how you voted or you lose your job." I would exercise my second amendment rights and blow his or her fucking head off. Which is not to say I support this cockamamie e-voting scheme. I don't. This is just the wrong objection. You could go on line and check your vote. The total could still be wrong. Duh!

Re:The problem

[DrLang21]

No voting machine I have ever seen is networked. They are closed systems that in my State (PA) store the vote data on a SIM card. It has been shown that a certain optical scan machine (I forget which one) can be hacked to change the vote count by hacking a SIM card. All it takes is for the right person working for the Elections Department. Fortunately in that case there is a paper record of every vote, and a hand recount can be done. In my state, the only paper record is the printout of the totals at the end of the day. That disturbs me.

Re:The problem

[slashdotwannabe]

That's called a man in the middle attack. If the transmissions were based on public key cryptography, then the root or public certs would need to be compromised for this to work; MITM attacks can be defeated by securing the two endpoints of the transaction... i.e., in your scenario, V communicates directly/securely with C.

Re:The problem

[nsayer]

No, actually, it doesn't. You live under an illusion. One day, you will see that for yourself.

And so that's where we leave it. When two people each feel the other is deluded, any further conversation can serve no useful purpose. As the Dire Straits once said, "Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong."

Re:The problem

[Opportunist]

Good idea, in theory. In practice, the mitm is inside the client's PC. It's not someone outside the PC. And since encryption/decryption happens inside the PC, it's trivial to put the mitm before en- and after decryption.

I would attack the interface between user and program and present the user an interface that he cannot distinguish from the real interface.

Re:The problem

[Panaflex]

Born before birth certificates? Are you serious?

My great grandfather was born in 1830's... in the middle of a BFE Texas settlement. There were less than 1000 people in the entire western state at that time.

He's got a birth certificate. Can you believe it?

AND... if you don't have a birth certificate - you can actually get one made by the state (varies by requirements... but it's certainly possible!!)

You don't even need a birth certificate to register to vote usually... just a social security number!!

Getting a voter registration requires a SSN and a signature... not money. Hell, you can register at the library, the county courthouse, nearly any election office or political official's office, the DMV.

The point it - get registered to vote. It's soo freakin easy.

Re:The problem

[myspace-cn]

Not possible with specially crafted chips, or chain of custody that travels hundreds of miles an hour down the road.

What isn't possible? Election fraud?

Election fraud is possible with specially crafted chips and a broken chain of custody.

Even IF election fraud (not to be confused with the negligible voter fraud fake problem to cleanse the vote registration) is detected, they still have no power to stop it, or stop the candidate from being sworn in.

Well, then what's the bloody point of an election? And who's "they" (as in they still have no power...)? If there's a real issue of election fraud, you'd better believe that the people who got shafted are going to call for an inquiry, get the legal system involved, etc...

First off "they" is citizen oversight. Your really not up to speed here, not much time left to catch "people like you" up; before you get screwed again by the next election. (how do you like that shitty syntax!?)

Secondly,
The Legal System failed completely in the CA 50 where they did exactly that.

Yet still, "Bilbray was sworn in, with the intent that thereafter any and all actions taken by anybody would be void and without force and effect, due to the "exclusive jurisdiction" of the House concerning the Qualifications of its Members." (hat tip to Emily Levy at Bradblog)

In short your full of shit.

Am I full of shit? I don't think so, but that's your opinion. It's my opinion that you didn't really give this post too much thought, as is evident by your rambling, incoherent sentences, and blatant error in your last sentence, indicating your inability or unwillingness to proofread.

Now that you are completely debunked.

All you can do is sit there like a meth addicted drunken psychotic cyber-warfare Buddha (filled with SHIT) and do is attack my fucked up writing style, because of your unwillingness to seek the TRUTH...

YOUR Welcome to Shut The Fuck Up now, or make it worse.

Re:The problem

[myspace-cn]

Your propaganda ENDS HERE.

You have forgotten REAL ID has changed things--a lot!

Maybe it's possible to get a fake ID, but not a REAL ID.

Without a REAL ID it's not "soo freakin easy."

Let's also remember that hundreds of thousands of people don't even have an ID. I personally didn't have an ID for over 10 years.

So your not only debunked via real journalism, your also debunked by my first hand knowledge of the matter.

Born before birth certificates? Are you serious?

My great grandfather was born in 1830's... in the middle of a BFE Texas settlement. There were less than 1000 people in the entire western state at that time.

He's got a birth certificate. Can you believe it?

AND... if you don't have a birth certificate - you can actually get one made by the state (varies by requirements... but it's certainly possible!!)

You don't even need a birth certificate to register to vote usually... just a social security number!!

Getting a voter registration requires a SSN and a signature... not money. Hell, you can register at the library, the county courthouse, nearly any election office or political official's office, the DMV.

The point it - get registered to vote. It's soo freakin easy.

Re:The problem

[myspace-cn]

This isn't CANADA, it's the United States.

And here in California, when you register to vote, you fill out a form at the post office, and....wait for it...you mail it to the Secretary Of State.

Clearly it doesn't apply to "anything you send by mail."

Don't lecture me about emphasizing words. You can't grasp the simple fact that we are talking about electronic vote tabulation devices inside the United States of America's elections. The only thing that needs to be steer, is the manure you spread by acting like a drunken cyber-warfare Buddha.

Re:The problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue is not just one of which is harder to rig. Part of the issue is that paper ballots are easier for the average person to understand and monitor. E-voting systems require highly technical expertise to detect fraud and what if that expertise is politically biased or motivated? I ma for e-voting but I acknowledge the many issues that have to be addressed before it can be successfully implemented.

"Print" version, without the nasty formatting

[Anonymous Coward]

Version of the story without the crazy formatting that makes it work to read: E-voting activist more optimistic about voting systems.

Vocal Critic...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who?

Vote By Mail

[Anonymous Coward]

Oregon has universal vote by mail, and it works very well.

Re:Vote By Mail

[myspace-cn]

Does it?

Can you be sure your mail was delivered?

Optimism for a broken system?

[Futurepower(R)]

Quote from the article: "You do have to make sure that proper auditing is done, otherwise you're trusting the software and the scanner. A lot of states do very poor auditing, if at all."

He says, in the next sentence: "Yeah, I'm much more optimistic than I was a few years ago."

That doesn't make sense. The system is broken, he says, and then he says he is "optimistic". Is optimism the right word for a system that is not working, even after all these years? Should we be optimistic when a broken system is less obviously broken?

Re:Optimism for a broken system?

[DrLang21]

He's optimistic because many states have already switched to using paper records, and most of the states that dont have paper records yet have plans set to switch to paper records soon. Thus the biggest complaint about the system is being corrected. If you give no positive reenforcement before a problem is fully corrected, State governments will start to wonder why they even bother to try. Every small step in the right direction must be highly praised and every step in the wrong direction must be brutally scorned.

Re:Optimism for a broken system?

[lenski]

The system is broken but less intractably broken than a few years ago.

Prof. Rubin sees increasing awareness of the necessity of auditing by secretaries of state. For example, the secretary of the state of Ohio has just begun the processor implementing much better audit procedures than before.

There's still plenty of improving to do, though.

Re:Optimism for a broken system?

[lawpoop]

That doesn't make sense. The system is broken, he says, and then he says he is "optimistic". Is optimism the right word for a system that is not working, even after all these years? Should we be optimistic when a broken system is less obviously broken?

This is classic Geek thinking. Yes, the system as it is is broken. But now, the users are aware. I remember after the Florida recounts of 2000, everyone was clamoring for electronic voting machines, so we never have to deal with this kind of election dispute again. A few uberGeeks raised concerns on the internet, and nobody but slashdot readers paid any heed. Now, after shenanigans all over the place with this crazy voting machines, nobody is clamoring for voting machines. In fact, they're clamoring for *paper trails*.

Whatever happens in the near future with voting machines, the public is going to be much more critical of their acceptance, and vigilance in their monitoring.

It isn't any different

[MikeRT]

Unfortunately, a lot of people don't want to face up to the fact that a great many paper elections were rigged as well. Some of the bigger cities with their "political machines" are a good example of that. One of the things that doesn't help is that we have a whole faction that wants to eliminate all security from elections in the name of "not disenfranchising the poor and elderly." There are obvious flaws to the use of a driver's license as an ID, but that ID is far more useful than it is not for identifying potential voters and verifying their identities.

The solution?

Execute people who rig elections. Why? Rigging an election is a coup in a democratic state. It is an attempt to overthrow the lawfully established government of body politic. Maybe if people who rig e-voting machines and ensure that every dead person gets their right to vote recognized ended up before a firing squad it would be less palpable.

Some people may think I'm joking, but I'm absolutely serious. Bribing elected officials and rigging elections should get you a one-way ticket to the gallows because of the damage that those behaviors have done to the lives, liberty and property of many private citizens.

Re:It isn't any different

[neokushan]

As much as I love the idea of executing anyone who attempts to rig an election (For exactly the reasons you specified), what better way would there be to get rid of the opposition than to frame them for rigging the election?
That way, you not only discredit them for years to come, you actually permanently remove their opposition and are left with a very one-sided governmental system.

Re:It isn't any different

[drinkypoo]

I guess you missed the part in school about how violence begets violence and it never solves anything, only creates new problems. Killing these people is not necessary, just put them in federal prison - and eliminate so-called "country club" prisons. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. What does killing people actually accomplish? It has been shown not to be a serious deterrent to crime already.

Re:It isn't any different

[vegiVamp]

> are left with a very one-sided governmental system

Only because Americans for some reason still accept this two-party system of theirs. Most democratic countries have an almost absurd number of parties vying for power.

Additionally, obligatory voting means that most everyone casts a vote - even if you're not very politically inclined, as long as you're there anyway you're at least going to tell the current gubment wether or not you like them.

Re:It isn't any different

[Dog-Cow]

America does not have a 2-party system. We have a one-party system with 2 faces designed to appeal to most voters. It doesn't really matter whether a Republican or Democrat is elected to any one position -- the same people still have control. If we had term limits for Congress, we might get a real multi-party system. As it stands, it's literally impossible.

Re:It isn't any different

[lenski]

Elections were rigged, but in the majority of cases the thing that was rigged was the selection of who voted, not the ballots or ballot boxes.

When an election is based on paper ballot systems, it's far easier to manipulate an election using other means. For example, the number of dead people voting in such places as Chicago, etc.

The introduction of electronic voting brings in a brand new method of vote rigging, which is the content of the systems themselves.

So my counterargument is simple: "Oh great. With electronic voting, we have *yet another way* to rig elections."

The goal is to make vote-rigging and election manipulation more difficult, not easier. Unauditable, or difficult-to-audit e-voting systems are a step in the wrong direction by providing bad actors with a brand new tool for manipulating the democratic process.

Re:It isn't any different

[myspace-cn]

Nobody is going to execute people who rig elections. People that rig elections get away with it, or get a slap on the wrist, meanwhile the RIGGED ELECTION allows for the corrupt candidate to be sworn in and assume power.

Executing people won't stop that shit now will it.

YOUR FULL OF SHIT.

Re:It isn't any different

[myspace-cn]

Your argument has been proven as complete fucking bullshit. Election fraud is not the same as Voter fraud. Election fraud is rampant, voter fraud is not. Although voter caging is. Voter caging is where your name is scrubbed from the voter registration roll.

electronics by the nature of physics can not be audited, on that we agree.

Re:It isn't any different

[lenski]

Your argument has been proven as complete fucking bullshit

You really should learn to read, it's fundamental. My comment contains neither the phrase "election fraud" nor the phrase "voter fraud", idiot.

My comment describes what was done in several elections, the most famous of which was the stories of the Chicago election rigging in 1960. It probably didn't alter the outcome of the presidential election, but it came very close. Similar stories have been reported (ISTR) in Philadelphia, again associated with machine politics.

My argument is that elections have been subject to manipulations of various kinds for ever, and the introduction of unauditable voting systems, and unaudited minimal "paper trail" voting systems is a brand new attack vector, highly centralized in the proprietary code contained in voting systems. Entire counties and in some cases, states (such as Georgia) use the same voting system for all precincts. If someone is able to hack one, they're all hacked.

And that's why I refer to e-voting as yet another way to rig elections.

Assuming that when you say "voter fraud" is not rampant, I agree: There have been something less than 10 cases of voters being shown to try to vote mote than once in recent years. It's a well known misdirection by particular groups to manipulate public opinion to persuade legislatures to legislate restrictive voter ID requirements that tend to depress particular classes of voters.

Finally, I consider the phrase "election fraud" to be the union of sets of various manipulations that some people use to alter election outcomes. If you don't like that nomenclature, you are welcome to try explaining your position. If you can control your temper, we might listen.

Re:It isn't any different

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod Parent Up! People who steal elections also start wars, which is murder. Execute the murderers!

The problem with the voting system...

[damburger]

...is the voters.

Modern voters have grown up in a society that is expert at manipulating peoples will. Through control of the education system, advertising and mild censorship in the name of 'decency', most of the people voting today have been molded into being good, compliant voters who will never oppose the status quo.

Most people aren't strong enough to question their programming. Most simply slip into one pigeon hole or another and lap up the media viewpoints assigned to that pigeon hole (all framed so as to allow the basic principles of society to remain unquestioned)

Meanwhile, the environment dies, human beings starve and sicken in ever greater numbers, and carefully nurtured greed is all that consumes western man.

Re:The problem with the voting system...

[omar.sahal]

I agree, I wish I had mod points, please mod this guy up, if you have any problems with his views discuss them here first, instead modding down. Then mod down if you don't agree

Re:The problem with the voting system...

[ckthorp]

ROFLMAO. You do know that it is mod xor discuss, right?

Re:The problem with the voting system...

[Thanshin]

The modding system shouldn't be used to promote the moderator's opinions.

I could be strongly against his comments and still consider them informative or interesting.

In this case, I consider the post dogmatic and not very original while I agree with it. However I can't mod anyway because I've already discussed in this and other parts of this thread.

Re:The problem with the voting system...

[Anonymous Coward]

Call me an optimist, but I hate that this is the pervasive opinion of society on slashdot.

The thought that there is some brainwashing conspiracy going on behind the scenes that is making us drones to the world is pretty much nonsense. If it is true, then the second part of your statement must be false: surely a group that can successfully brainwash hundreds of millions of people would also be able to cure (and inevitably brainwash) all the humans that are starving and sickening?

Truth is the environment is not as bad as some make it out to be. It's not "dying", it's just worth looking into not killing it in the future. Human beings have a longer life expectancy and a greater quality of life than they ever have in the history of the human race. Yes, some groups suffer, but on the whole, we are better than we ever were. And what is "Carefully nurtured greed"? Capitalism? Wanting better for yourself than what you have? I guess you're right.

This brainwashing pool you seem to believe in requires something that just doesn't exist, a group that has the incentive and means to brainwash us. First, the incentive is pretty sketchy, and the means are even less so. I mean, I assume you mean the public school system brainwashes us, do they also control the private schools? Colleges? International schools? Public school teachers that don't teach solely the curriculum (They do exist, despite what you may think)?

Its not brainwashing. Most people don't care about the shit that this site goes on about. I'll bet, if you asked a large number of adults about their views on censorship, you would get a wide array of opinions as to what should be done. I'll bet most don't fit perfectly into the 2 pigeonholes, either. The reason it's not on the news is not because the all encompassing "POWERS THAT BE" don't want it to come up, it's that most people really don't give 2 shits either way. The news networks show what's important to people, not the other way around...

Re:The problem with the voting system...

[Hatta]

The voters and the candidates. Barak Obama couldn't even wait to become president before selling out on telecom immunity.

Re:The problem with the voting system...

[wrook]

One potential solution (not without it's own problems of course) is to make another pigeon hole. If you accept that humans are beings with a group mentality, it starts to make sense to reason with them on a group basis. Instead of appealing to them on an individual basis, appeal to them using their built in methods of group communication.

We see this every day. You've got teenagers thinking that gangster rap is cool because the marketing machine of the music industry moved in. New collectives come and go frequently. Many are intentionally built.

I think we often view the manipulative actions of religion, government and business as being somewhat evil. Usually this is because when large groups of people are motivated, corrupt people can position themselves to take advantage of it.

But I wonder if this must always be the case. Can large groups of people be motivated, using well known, tried and true techniques (i.e., using the language they understand), but safeguarding it against abuse?

I'm sure everyone can think of at least one instance where this was supposed have taken place. It would be interesting to reflect upon whether it was successful and whether or not changes could be introduced to make it better.
If one were successful in finding an improvement, I suppose it would make sense to try to convince the masses of it's benefits...

Man I'm sleepy. I wonder if I'm even making sense.

Re:The problem with the voting system...

[damburger]

Call me an optimist, but I hate that this is the pervasive opinion of society on slashdot.

You're an optimist.

The thought that there is some brainwashing conspiracy going on behind the scenes that is making us drones to the world is pretty much nonsense. If it is true, then the second part of your statement must be false: surely a group that can successfully brainwash hundreds of millions of people would also be able to cure (and inevitably brainwash) all the humans that are starving and sickening?

Behind the scenes? Try turning on a television. Or going to a school. Or looking out of your window. Advertising and propaganda (the same thing really) are everywhere and almost impossible to avoid. This isn't a clever or subtle brainwashing, its a brainwashing achieved through the brute force available to those who have control over nearly every means of communication, business and public institution.

Truth is the environment is not as bad as some make it out to be. It's not "dying", it's just worth looking into not killing it in the future. Human beings have a longer life expectancy and a greater quality of life than they ever have in the history of the human race. Yes, some groups suffer, but on the whole, we are better than we ever were. And what is "Carefully nurtured greed"? Capitalism? Wanting better for yourself than what you have? I guess you're right.

Woah there, bet you think I wasn't going to pick you up on that didn't you? Greed and bettering yourself are two entirely separate concepts. You tried to fudge them by changing it to 'wanting better for yourself' the second time around but you aren't fooling anyone.

Starvation is increasing, that is a fact. Quality of life is only improving for the western middle class and above, probably less than 1% of the human race.

This brainwashing pool you seem to believe in requires something that just doesn't exist, a group that has the incentive and means to brainwash us. First, the incentive is pretty sketchy, and the means are even less so. I mean, I assume you mean the public school system brainwashes us, do they also control the private schools? Colleges? International schools? Public school teachers that don't teach solely the curriculum (They do exist, despite what you may think)?

My fiancee is a teacher, so I know all about public schools. It isn't like she has a choice what to teach - it has to be based on what the children will be tested on. The same sort of people who decided that (rich people) also decide what goes on in private schools.

Its not brainwashing. Most people don't care about the shit that this site goes on about. I'll bet, if you asked a large number of adults about their views on censorship, you would get a wide array of opinions as to what should be done. I'll bet most don't fit perfectly into the 2 pigeonholes, either. The reason it's not on the news is not because the all encompassing "POWERS THAT BE" don't want it to come up, it's that most people really don't give 2 shits either way. The news networks show what's important to people, not the other way around...

People don't give 2 shits because those with a stranglehold on all the institutions of power (rich people, in case you weren't getting this yet) want them to be apathetic. That the rich control much of the environment we find ourselves in and the information we are exposed to is not a controversial opinion, let alone a conspiracy theory.

Re:The problem with the voting system...

[azgard]

Actually, most people are surprisingly resistant to propaganda. They are in fact behaving very rationally, but the system is skewed against them.

For example, take the two party system in the U.S. A lot of people would vote for a 3rd candidate, but they don't, because they are afraid of losing their vote. Is it a bad outcome? Yes. Is it rational? Yes! Because you are exercising more power if you vote for one of the parties. See also classic prisoner dilemma for another example how can completely rational outcome can be very bad at the same time.

Or why are people not interested in politics or issues? Again, it's rational. If you have a party system, you have to invest lot of time and effort to actually be able to change something. If you had a direct democracy, where people could just jump in and decide, without so much effort, maybe then they would actually start to care about the issues. In fact, Switzerland shows this effect quite well.

Or they may be afraid. Lots of people are afraid to voice their opinions, for many reasons. They may have children or mortgages, so they don't feel they have that much freedom. Again, it's a completely understandable reason.

Of course there are manipulations in the media. But people like you assume, because media are trying to manipulate people, that people are automatically accepting it. It's just not true. I grew up in a communist regime, and people simply didn't believe at all what was in TV. Also, the fact that there is not much real data what people are thinking plays a role (of course there are polls, but they are usually framed as media choose, so they are more or less worthless).

You know, sometimes people have good reasons why they behave how they do. It would be good if you would question yourself too, and tried to understand their reasons. But maybe you are just not strong enough to do that. ;-)

Re:The problem with the voting system...

[azgard]

I tried to convince masses of Slashdot (supposedly smart) of positives of direct democracy, and wasn't very successful.

As someone smart once said: "It's difficult to manipulate people so they aren't manipulated."

State of the union

[omar.sahal]

2001 - Banning real voters (using data meant to ban convicted criminals, but targeting democrat voters, mostly black people), recount proves Al-gore should be the president, republicans fail to get recount stopped in supreme court

2004 - One million Diebold voting machines, votes counted on private Diebold premises. Results known only to select individuals (media looks the other way, announcing no dimpled chads etc)

2008 - ? Whats going to happen this year Is this for real, i mean guardian say it is while the bbc say it isn't

P.S. Guardian is a bit left wing, BBC prone to side with Government/Official view.

I like this part OTFA, i think it's the way to go.

[MRe_nl]

"The National Institute of Standards and Technology [NIST] identified what I think is a breakthrough property in an e-voting machine, which is the idea of making it software-independent. That means designing voting systems where a software failure does not have any possible impact on the accuracy and integrity of the election.

If you start out with the goal of designing something to be software-independent, which is a different mind-set from designing something without that requirement, you design it very, very differently. You have redundant components.

Let me give you an example of a system that is software-independent. You have a system where voters use a touch screen to make their selections and the touch-screen machine, when they're done, prints out a paper ballot that they look at and has all the candidate choices that they made. The voter then takes the completed, printed ballot, and they put it into a scanner. The scanner tallies the ballots up and keeps counts of all the votes. Now if the software on that system fails, they wouldn't get a printed-out ballot that they could then accept and approve.

After the election is over, you pick a bunch of scanners randomly, and you audit them. You count the papers, and you compare the totals that the scanners ran, or you have a different independent scanner that you run the ballots through to see if you get the same answers.

In any stage of the process, a flaw in the software will either be caught and corrected, or it will prevent you from proceeding, in which case you can get the ballots pulled up some other way."

It's a matter of scale

[achurch]

In a sufficiently small election (say, a local election in a municipality of a few thousand people), you're right, there's not much difference. From the viewpoint of the required set of skills, it may even be easier to rig a paper-based election: just get one or two people in the right place, whip up a batch of fake ballots, and you're ready to go—no 1337 skillz needed.

On the other hand, when you're talking national or other large-scale elections, things flip around. With a paper ballot, you have to have people to handle things in every election district you want to influence; and naturally, as you add more people, you increase the risk of someone blabbing and spoiling your whole plan. With an electronic system, however, you only have to break the election software once if you do it in the right place. (Paper trails can help defend against this, but they're not necessarily foolproof; you just have to be cleverer.)

The gory details aren't as simple as this, of course, but that's basically why people worry about electronic voting as opposed to paper ballots.

Votes on brazil

[Anonymous Coward]

Here on brazil we have 126 millions votes... and more than 95% are eletronic.
everything have working fine until now.

Re:Votes on brazil

[MRe_nl]

Here on brazil we have 126 millions votes... and more than 95% are eletronic.
everything have working fine until now.

yours truly

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
Partido dos Trabalhadores

Re:Votes on brazil

[myspace-cn]

We are not in Brazil.

The basic premise

[A beautiful mind]

From TFA:

Can technology companies build systems today that are safe, reliable and secure with the votes cast on them?

Definitely. I've seen designs of voting systems that I'd be happy with. I don't think anything is totally secure. Ultimately, I think the goal is to do the best we can and not be perfect. When you're talking about 100 million votes, all cast pretty much on the same day across the country, there's no dress rehearsal.

I don't understand why is that even educated people miss the point. The whole fucking point of an election is that it has to be transparent and auditable. By transparent and auditable we don't mean to an electrical engineer and a computer scientist, but to a sane adult citizen!

How would you go on about auditing a voting machine, even if the design is open? You'd have to either trust a government or civilian organization to do the auditing or do the auditing yourself, requiring months if not years to verify the design and then verify that the machine you got in the voting district behaves like it is designed to behave! This raises the verifiability bar many orders of magnitude above simple pen and paper.

Remember, during an election, citizens and groups of society are in _conflict_. You can't trust* the government, you can't trust individual groups. What makes or breaks democracy is whether you, as a citizen, can verify independently at least the transparency of your local voting station, because if you can, you can be reasonably certain that other people will do the same in their respective areas and that the general elections are not rigged!

* Remember, democracy has to start somewhere. If you trust the government to conduct the voting process, then you're placing the means of controlling the government's composition in the hand of itself. The risk and temptation is just too high to do that. One thing that should not be government responsibility, but more of a civic duty is voting. In the absense of that, the bare minimum is to let the government conduct the elections, but at least verify it! When the government both runs the elections and through government is the only way to verify the transparency of an election, then that's not democratic anymore.

Re:The basic premise

[drinkypoo]

How would you go on about auditing a voting machine, even if the design is open?

Uh, who gives a shit if you're not allowed to perform the audit anyway? A completely legitimate recount of paper ballots was halted by the supremes in a clear display of partisanship. We can't even recount paper ballots in this country, what difference does it make if you have a paper trail with your electronic voting or not? They're never going to actually verify your vote, and if they did, they wouldn't care what the result was.

I would feel more optimistic if I thought the ballots actually meant something.

Re:The basic premise

[A beautiful mind]

So your solution is to just give up on democracy because "they'll never let you do that" anyway? Noone said it's easy, but it's doable and it is certainly easier than most people think it is.

Ballots would mean something if people wouldn't just give up and accept defeat. (Sometimes I wonder whether all the french bashing with the "white flag and surrender" isn't just really a projection of one's mental state to others for certain US citizens...)

Re:The basic premise

[drinkypoo]

So your solution is to just give up on democracy because "they'll never let you do that" anyway?

Well, not exactly.

My point is that when your system is broken due to voting fraud, you can't fix the system by voting.

I didn't say we should do nothing. Only that the poll box is no longer going to help us.

Time to move on to the next box...

Re:The basic premise

[A beautiful mind]

My point is that when your system is broken due to voting fraud, you can't fix the system by voting.

That's entirely correct. What the US needs is more people who can get above the level of petty politics and willing to be active in protesting, activism,...

Re:The basic premise

[Nursie]

"What the US needs is more people who can get above the level of petty politics and willing to be active in protesting, activism,..."

Good luck with that, you filthy, counter-culture, unrealistic, pot-smoking hippie.

Not my opinions, but I think you'll find most people will write you off as a smelly peacenik if you start protesting stuff. They have been well trained in this respect.

Re:The basic premise

[eddeye]

The whole fucking point of an election is that it has to be transparent and auditable. By transparent and auditable we don't mean to an electrical engineer and a computer scientist, but to a sane adult citizen!

How would you go on about auditing a voting machine, even if the design is open? You'd have to either trust a government or civilian organization to do the auditing or do the auditing yourself, requiring months if not years to verify the design and then verify that the machine you got in the voting district behaves like it is designed to behave! This raises the verifiability bar many orders of magnitude above simple pen and paper.

It doesn't matter if everyone can verify, only that anyone can verify. Say you have a complex voting machine only understandable with a computer science education. As long as such education is open to all, the system works. Not everyone has to invest the months or years it takes understand the system. As long a representative group does, transparency holds.

How many people really understand the way paper voting works: the lock boxes, unique ballots, authentication, secure storage & transport, multiple representative counting, etc? Very few. And yet the system works because anyone can learn about and verify these things.

A sufficient population of "experts" open to all can guarantee transparency. Co-opting a diverse population of tens or hundreds of thousands of experts, each with different backgrounds and agendas, including ones devoted to democratic ideals above individual politics, is simply not feasible when one whistleblower can bring it all down. Especially when the whistleblower need not be an expert when the corruption takes place.

Re:The basic premise

[A beautiful mind]

It doesn't matter if everyone can verify, only that anyone can verify. Say you have a complex voting machine only understandable with a computer science education. As long as such education is open to all, the system works. Not everyone has to invest the months or years it takes understand the system. As long a representative group does, transparency holds.

No. I've already mentioned that it's groups or individuals in the society fighting against others, that characterises interests in an election - it is not a "us vs. government" case.

Verifiability has to be distributed, basically at least one person from each party and/or candidate, plus a number of independent - as in not obviously invested in any party and/or candidate - observers have to be present and verify the results per polling station. The absolute worst is to erect barriers by using computerised systems. Using computers reduces the number of people verifying from tens of thousands to a group less than 50 - even if that - because under current conditions it's zero.

How many people really understand the way paper voting works: the lock boxes, unique ballots, authentication, secure storage & transport, multiple representative counting, etc? Very few. And yet the system works because anyone can learn about and verify these things.

While I have no experience with the US system, I did serve as a independent observer for multiple elections here in Hungary and I do have to say it's not that all complicated. People come in, you authenticate them by id, hand them the ballot, they go to the booth, fill in the details, put the ballot in the envelope, come out and place the envelope in the ballot box. The ballot box is clearly visible for all the observers during the duration of the election and after the polls close you count the results under the observation of the observers. When all is counted, we send the results via internet to the election center. The center publishes the election results broken down to the level of voting stations and you verify that the numbers you have in your hand match the numbers they have used. People also verify whether the tally adds up correctly.

There. Now try to compare this to electronic voting and try to guess at how many hundred steps could an attacker compromise the voting. If you use electronic voting you just might as well say "I don't care about people and representation - let's abolish voting alltogether and spare ourselves of a costly circus".

Re:The basic premise

[eddeye]

As long as a representative group does, transparency holds.

No. I've already mentioned that it's groups or individuals in the society fighting against others, that characterises interests in an election - it is not a "us vs. government" case.

And that's exactly my point. With enough competing groups, every interest has a check on it. Neocons winning elections? Peaceniks scour the code. Big oil supporting candidates? Here come the Sierra Club inspectors. My argument has precisely nothing to do with "us" vs "government" - a false dichotomy if ever there was one.

Verifiability has to be distributed, basically at least one person from each party and/or candidate, plus a number of independent - as in not obviously invested in any party and/or candidate - observers have to be present and verify the results per polling station.

Two points:

1. Which parties are so small they can't find one qualified computer-trained verifier among their number? Even the Amish aren't so technologically illiterate - they choose to live without much modern technology, but have shown themselves perfectly willing and capable of doing so when the need arises.

2. Your first rant attacks computerized voting of any kind. I'm keenly aware that entirely computerized voting with no audit trail is a bad idea. But a verifiable paper trail solves my problem and yours: voting machine prints marked ballot, user inspects and deposits, immediate results from electronic tally, hand count of paper ballots for "official" results. Voila, instant verifiability.

   "Wait!" you say. "You said expert-only verification was fine, but (computer-aided) paper ballots breaks that rule. What kind of bait-and-switch is this?" Sure, in the above example, everyone can verify the vote. But suppose the printed ballot were in ancient greek or hexadecimal or esparanto. Now only "experts" who know those languages can verify the vote. Yet the system remains secure because anyone can learn how to audit it.

   Which is a long-winded way of saying: thanks for proving my point. The problem with purely computerized voting where the only tallies are bits in the ether isn't that everyone can't verify the vote, it's that no one can. Once you make the vote auditable by a sufficiently diverse class of anyones, the problem disappears. Competing interests keep everything in check.

The absolute worst is to erect barriers by using computerised systems. Using computers reduces the number of people verifying from tens of thousands to a group less than 50 - even if that - because under current conditions it's zero.

The numbers depend entirely on system specifics. Some systems are zero, which is bad. Many systems are $LARGE_NUM, which is good. As I said, the key criteria is that the class of people able to audit and verify the system must be open, meaning anyone can freely join with training. Computers are not the problem - closed systems are.

The ballot box is clearly visible for all the observers ...and you verify that the numbers you have in your hand match the numbers they have used. People also verify whether the tally adds up correctly.

Key word: observers. Who observes? Not everyone. A few representatives from each group. Under my system it's the same. It just takes more to qualify as an observer.

I might add that your observers exclude people too: the blind, the infirm, the decrepit, the heavily medicated, narcoleptics, the lazy, the apathetic. Anyone who can't pay sufficient attention to the ballot box and counting process can't observe. The requirements in my system are higher, but the principle is exactly the same.

Now try to compare this to electronic voting and try to

Re:I like this part OTFA, i think it's the way to

[Nursie]

Why the hell would you bother with a seperate scanner?

Isn't that just introducing complexity and potential for massive amounts more errors?

Vote selling issue

[Tontoman]

One issue I rarely see address is that e-voting is susceptible to vote selling. Imagine a trailer parked downtown with a sign "Free $20 for voting" Inside is a bank of PC's. People come in and vote under the watchful eye of a guy who tells them if they vote the right way, they get the money. Cost of the trailer and the money would be paid for by wealthy interests who could stand to benefit by the corrupt politician who would be elected under this scheme. It is common for politicians to spend even more than this per vote http://blogs.usatoday.com/onpolitics/2007/08/straw-poll-fall.html

The conventional voting booth (with the curtain) on the other hand prevents vote selling because there is no way for a voter to prove he voted the "right way" to get the money.

Re:Vote selling issue

[drinkypoo]

One issue I rarely see address is that e-voting is susceptible to vote selling.

This is a trivially solved problem; you give the voter a piece of paper which can be used to verify their vote when combined with voting records, but which is not sufficient to prove you voted one way or another on its own.

We've been doing this kind of thing in cryptography for a long time, it's nothing new.

You are a shill or an ignoranus.

Re:Vote selling issue

[Lord Bitman]

Hi. You didn't read his post, or didn't understand it enough to post something vaguely related to it. Try again.

Re:Vote selling issue

[Anonymous Coward]

e-voting has nothing at all to do with remote voting. It's just an electronic voting machine as the voting booth - so the convention voting booth you mentioned still exists and the situation you describe makes no sense at all.

Of course voting procedures often have a process for mailing in a vote, for people who know they are going to be out of country/etc on voting day. That is just as susceptible to the $20 for voting technique anyway (of course a large number of people all sending in such votes from one area would show up in the counts very clearly...)

Re:Vote selling issue

[ericspinder]

People come in and vote under the watchful eye of a guy who tells them if they vote the right way, they get the money.

How to stop that? Give them even more money if they turn the guy in. Maybe something like 100 times what they can prove was paid.

Re:Vote selling issue

[drinkypoo]

The reason I did not respond to his actual content is that it was stupid. If you can tamper with an e-voting system at a deep level, you just change votes; it's a hell of a lot cheaper than the system he describes. You can do the same thing with an attack on paper-ballot polling places using high-resolution cameras installed into the ceiling of the polling place ahead of time. In fact, if you read between the lines you can see they already changed votes electronically in Ohio, as Diebold's founder promised.

Re:Vote selling issue

[Nursie]

"This is a trivially solved problem; you give the voter a piece of paper which can be used to verify their vote when combined with voting records, but which is not sufficient to prove you voted one way or another on its own."

If the voter has a way to verify how they voted, then so does the third party, which makes the voter subject to bribery or extortion.

"We've been doing this kind of thing in cryptography for a long time, it's nothing new."

It seems a lot like DRM to me.

No, you need two separate counts

[MRe_nl]

for redundancy and checksums, and it's a physical, anonymous (doesn't have to leave the voting-booth) verification of your vote.

This is slashdot, you should be aware of redundancy and checksums!;)

One e-voting system for you

[realnowhereman]

I really don't get why it's seen as so hard. Here, I'll make one up for you right now; this process would run for every voter. Each vote is not linked to the individual, so the vote remains secret, but is simple to trace:

  - "Please enter a 6 digit random number" = X
  - "Please enter your vote" = V
  - INSERT INTO Votes SHA1HASH( X || Now() ), V
  - "Here is a printout summarising your vote. The long number
      may be used at a later date to confirm that your vote was
      correctly recorded"

Now - how hard was that? Then you supply a website were the voter enters the long number and it shows me my vote. If what shows on the website is not equal to what I thought I voted for any significant number of people, then vote rigging has occurred.

There are a whole load of variations, but the principle would be the same in all. The voter can confirm that their vote was correctly recorded independently. The vote is stored using a secret number that is supplied/known only to the voter.

Re:One e-voting system for you

[kvezach]

I think it's a bit like crypto - anyone can make a crypto algorithm he himself can't break.

For instance, in your system, imagine Cousin Vinnie demanding your long voter number, or someone loosely affiliated with the candidates paying you to show you've voted the right way. Because you're using SHA1, collisions won't happen, and so you can't just give someone else's voter number to bluff your way out of it. If you were to use something that could collide, then you'd have to deal with the collisions themselves, and also the chance of the particular random number not just having a vote, but also one for the party you want, is going to be really low for practical collision probabilities.

You may design a balloting machine that uses proven cryptography to let the voter verify that his vote was counted without letting anyone else how he in particular voted. However, the mathematics that underlie these systems are nontrivial, and that would make the vote process itself opaque. The danger in an opaque vote-counting process is that the people or parties get suspicious that something iffy is going on. Whether or not anything iffy is actually going on is beside the point, the doubt is real in any case, and harms the perception of democracy.

A reasonable compromise is to have the e-voting machines print manual ballots (under glass) - essentially a really expensive pen (but one that can help the blind/ensure uniform format of the ballot/make sure nobody marks their ballot or chain votes/whatever). But then you have to ask whether it's worth it. (If you really want verifiability, the machine could use ThreeBallot or VAV schemes... if the people can understand them.)

Re:One e-voting system for you

[Hank the Lion]

Then you supply a website were the voter enters the long number and it shows me my vote.

... which gives me the possibility to sell my vote, because I can, at a later time, prove to someone else what I voted.
That is not what you want...

Re:One e-voting system for you

[realnowhereman]

What has vote selling got to do with anything? That's just as possible with paper votes.

Don't want the dodgy vote buyer to be able to verify my vote - don't give people the hash as I described - just keep it on a piece of paper in the voting booth.

This is missing the point - what I am saying is that it is trivial to make an e-voting system that can be end-to-end verified, with as much (if not more because of the option of letting the voter verify themselves) certainty than a paper system.

Re:One e-voting system for you

[realnowhereman]

I think you've missed the point. I mentioned SHA1 so you've focussed on that. The actual mechanics of the system aren't important - and it doesn't matter how opaque those mechanics are. It might require 100 PhDs to design - who cares? The point is that by making it possible to for the voter to confirm their own vote (or some independent party if you don't want voters to have the hash to prevent your vote selling concern) the system can be as arcane as you like but it is verifiable because both ends must be equal.

Re:One e-voting system for you

[Hank the Lion]

What has vote selling got to do with anything? That's just as possible with paper votes.

Only if you would be allowed to take your ballot with you outside the voting office.

Don't want the dodgy vote buyer to be able to verify my vote - don't give people the hash as I described - just keep it on a piece of paper in the voting booth.

And what use has it then?
The hashing you propose makes it possible to check the vote only to the original voter.
Once he leaves his hashed vote behind, no one can check anymore.

This is missing the point - what I am saying is that it is trivial to make an e-voting system that can be end-to-end verified, with as much (if not more because of the option of letting the voter verify themselves) certainty than a paper system.

Then, propose that the vote is printed out in clear text, verified by the voter, and put in the ballot box.
Hashing the vote as you propose does not give any benefits, as far as I can tell.
If you still see advantages in hashing, please elucidate.

Re:One e-voting system for you

[Leperous]

Don't forget to add the date and time. If there is some kind of e-vote-rigging going on, it's obviously (hopefully? less likely?) not going to be happening during the hours the polling station is open. You can chuck away any votes that didn't occur when the station was open, and flag it as a problem. You can also record how many people come into the polling station, for example with mechanical turnstyles that report back to voting HQ, and link this in to the numbers of votes cast in that station during certain periods later on.

Re:One e-voting system for you

[Quiet_Desperation]

Now - how hard was that?

Get Jay Leno to go out and ask random people on the street to give a 6-digit random number. You'll have your answer.

Re:One e-voting system for you

[lawpoop]

Then you supply a website were the voter enters the long number and it shows me my vote.

I don't understand precisely what you're saying, but if you can look up your vote after the election, then you're subject to intimidation ( Boss: "So you took off early to vote yesterday? Step in to my office and let's have a look..." ), or you can sell your vote ( "See Mr. Quimby? I voted for your brother. Now will you give me that raise?" ). So, if you can look up your vote in any manner after the election, it's not a secret ballot.

Re:One e-voting system for you

[Nursie]

If you make it possible for the voter to confirm their own vote then you make it possible for people to be forced to show who they voted for in order to keep their job/car/fingers. We do not want this.

Re:One e-voting system for you

[noidentity]

OK, so the attacker changes the votes but leaves the hashes intact, so you can still "verify" that your vote was recorded.

Re:One e-voting system for you

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you supply a website were the voter enters the long number and it shows me my vote. [...]

... and the government/employer/local mafia boss can verify that the voter voted what he was told/payed to vote by having them go to said website and display their vote.

The problem is much harder than you present it to be, because a voter must not be able to *prove* to an outside party what she voted.

I recently heard Ron Rivest (as in the "R" from RSA) talk about an e-voting scheme he's been working on. Cryptology is definitely involved, but not in the simplistic way you describe. And the end result is that it's very hard for a lay-person to really be convinced that their vote was counted properly.

Re:One e-voting system for you

[myspace-cn]

Except, one big problem.

I specially crafted the chips (at the doping level) with a backdoor. So your stupid fucking software can do and print anything it wants, the actually COUNT will be what I say.

Let's not even get into how fucking retarded allowing a NETWORK into this whole loop is.

Re:One e-voting system for you

[acheron12]

That tells you your vote was recorded, not that it was used in the final tally. There is a way around this using asymmetric encryption though: - for every voter a key pair is generated. The voter gets the private key; the public key is entered on a public list (not linked to the individual) - the voter can enter their vote at the polling station or over the Internet. Their vote is signed with their private key. - after the election the list of votes is made publicly available on the Internet. Each vote is matched to that voter's public key (not linked to the individual), allowing all observers to verify that all votes were signed with the correct private keys. All observers can verify that the individual votes add up to the advertised election result. - in addition, each voter knows their public key and can verify that their vote is as they wanted. This ensures that votes that are meant to count are counted. - in the event of a vote's being recorded incorrectly, or in the event of violent coercion, a voter can submit their private key to a public "compromised voting keys" list. If this list reaches a certain level (e.g. 1% of the population) the election is ruled invalid. - to prevent ghost voters from appearing on the list, in addition to the public list of votes there should be a public list of registered voters (not linked to the votes). By checking that these lists are the same length (possibly within some margin of error) it is ensured that votes that are not meant to count, aren't counted.

Re:One e-voting system for you

[myspace-cn]

Humans can't see ENCRYPTION, humans can't validate encryption because they can't SEE the electrons.

Encryption has no place in our elections, it's a further abuse of technology.

Re:One e-voting system for you

[myspace-cn]

Completely a bullshit fabrication. The ebay seller that "TRIED" to auction his vote was canceled, even if he did successfully sell his vote, nobody could validate it.

Furthermore, if a voter can't "sell" his ballot then why do we allow Senators to be lobbied?

Re:One e-voting system for you

[myspace-cn]

Not when your evading the chain of custody, then is when you want Sheriff Beuford T Justice to declare an terrorist emergency and fuck with (I mean manipulate the votes)

Re:One e-voting system for you

[acheron12]

That tells you your vote was recorded, not that it was used in the final tally. There is a way around this using asymmetric encryption though:

- for every voter a key pair is generated. The voter gets the private key; the public key is entered on a public list (not linked to the individual)
- the voter can enter their vote at the polling station or over the Internet. Their vote is signed with their private key.
- after the election the list of votes is made publicly available on the Internet. Each vote is matched to that voter's public key (not linked to the individual), allowing all observers to verify that all votes were signed with the correct private keys. All observers can verify that the individual votes add up to the advertised election result.
- in addition, each voter knows their public key and can verify that their vote is as they wanted.
- This ensures that votes that are meant to count are counted.
- in the event of a vote's being recorded incorrectly, or in the event of violent coercion, a voter can submit their private key to a public "compromised voting keys" list. If this list reaches a certain level (e.g. 1% of the population) the election is ruled invalid.
- to prevent ghost voters from appearing on the list, in addition to the public list of votes there should be a public list of registered voters (not linked to the votes).
-By checking that these two lists are the same length (possibly within some margin of error) it is ensured that votes that are not meant to count, aren't counted.

(formatting fixed)

Re:One e-voting system for you

[Anonymous Coward]

Too many people would enter "111111" for that to work, but I like the idea. I've always thought something similar, only instead of choosing your number, we give everyone an RSA key.

Enter SSN: X
Enter RSA: Y
Enter Vote: V
if(match(X, Y): SHA1(Y || Now())
return SHA1(Y || V)

This requires anyone stealing a vote to know both your SSN and have your RSA key. The only problem I see is people robbing mailboxes when the RSA keys get sent out to remove votes, but it wouldn't be very practical to vote for someone else on any large scale.

Also, it's a bit expensive. When has our government ever cared about that?

Re:One e-voting system for you

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you don't want your boss, local mafia, or anyone to be able to verify how you voted!!!

Re:One e-voting system for you

[Anonymous Coward]

- INSERT INTO Votes SHA1HASH( X||Now()), V

- SUBMIT whatevervoteyoulike TO central_election_outcome

- KEEP Votes FOR later_confirmation

This seems much easier to me than faking millions of paper trails/ ballots.

Re:One e-voting system for you

[lawpoop]

Completely a bullshit fabrication. The ebay seller that "TRIED" to auction his vote was canceled, even if he did successfully sell his vote, nobody could validate it.

What are you talking about? Nobody can sell their vote today, because we have a secret ballot -- you can't be sure that you're getting what you pay for. If we had a verification system like the parent was talking about, you could sell you vote because you could then prove to someone else how you voted.

The only reason the ebay guy got caught was because he offered his vote very publically -- on ebay. If he had offered his vote in private, would we have ever heard about it? No. If a party operative came into a poor neighboorhood and offered $100 bills for particular votes, do you think anybody would have any motivation to inform the authorities?

Re:One e-voting system for you

[Anonymous Coward]

Your system is flawed: your vote can't be changed, but fake votes can be added. A better way would be to do it like this:

Each election, after everyone has registered, you receive a random ID number. This number is between 1 and X, where X is the number of registered voters in your precinct/city/nation/whatever. No two people will have the same ID, and no one will be able to determine who you are based on your ID.

Next, you generate a public/private key pair and give the public one to the election office, who puts it on file next to your ID number. Come election day, you sign your digital ballot with your private key and send it to the election office, who verifies the signature, counts the vote, and sends you back a copy of your vote with a notice that it's been counted, all digitally signed by the election office.

Later, the election office's list of everything is published. All the IDs, public keys, and votes (regardless of whether the voter actually voted) are published. Everyone can verify their own vote (and everyone elses) via cryptography. They can also count the votes for themselves. Ballots are kept secret forever unless you come forward with your private key and make a claim that the election was cheated.

Re:One e-voting system for you

[jbn-o]

You don't think it's difficult because you're not addressing fundamental problems with so-called e-voting.

If I let you vote in such a way that you can verify your own vote later, I have also allowed someone else to verify your vote. This means someone can strongarm you out of whatever information they need to make sure you voted a certain way. Bullying voters leads to purchasing votes and forcing people to vote against their will. With anonymous voting only you know how you really voted, you can lie to anyone else you want or decide not to tell them anything and nobody will be the wiser.

Relatedly, if I let you vote from the website (in addition to verifying your vote there), your vote is meaningless. Currently any form of voting outside of visiting a polling place faces this same problem: how can other voters know you weren't pressured (maybe by an abusive roommate or spouse) into your vote? As more people vote from a distance this raises problems for trusting the authenticity of people's votes. In the booth you can choose to go in alone, vote your will, and leave. You have other people around you (polling place workers, other voters) which one would hope reduces the chance that someone will stand over you telling you how to vote and watching you make that vote.

Re:One e-voting system for you

[Anonymous Coward]

What about collisions?

Surely with millions of people voting, some combinations of random numbers and timestamps would yield identical hashes.

Even if these collisions are thought of as "acceptable risks" or an algorithm with a sufficiently long digest size is used, what is to stop someone from voting multiple times? Since the votes are not linked to the individual, there would be no way to confirm that any one person voted only once.

Re:One e-voting system for you

[SpottedKuh]

• "Please enter a 6 digit random number" = X
• "Please enter your vote" = V
• INSERT INTO Votes SHA1HASH( X || Now() ), WhatEverIWantToInsert
• INSERT INTO PublicDatabase SHA1HASH( X || Now() ), V
• "Here is a printout summarising your vote. The long number may be used at a later date to confirm that your vote was correctly recorded"

Now, realizing the Easter Egg in this system requires a large number of people recording how they voted and combining their votes in some centralized location to compare their sum to the recorded sum (i.e., it requires a random group of concerned citizens to conduct an election).

Unfortunately, the problem with even the best-designed e-voting systems can be the verification stage: how can anyone reasonably verify the results of the election? This is a simpler problem to solve when there are a whole bunch of paper ballots in a box that a bunch of competing parties can all count and come to the same conclusion.

Re:One e-voting system for you

[myspace-cn]

Your arguing the same point I am, did you not read where I said, "even if he did successfully sell his vote, nobody could validate it." I guess not?

The reason the vote is transparent, is that people could be easily threatened or killed if they voted a certain way.

Transparency, It's a good thing.

On the other hand electronic vote tabulation devices are a BAD thing.

And Senators shouldn't be allowed to sell their vote either, that's why we just got FISA.

Hopefully your seeing the pattern of corruption now.

Re:One e-voting system for you

[lawpoop]

You make no sense. Do you know what transparency means?

We don't want a transparent vote. We want a secret ballot. I don't want my boss or my wife knowing who I vote for. That's what we have now, and that's how it should stay.

However, we do want transparency in the votes and contributions of our elected officials. I think you're confusing the meaning of the word transparent.

Not at all...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's probably the only way to ensure relatively secure, accurate e-voting. It's not unlike existing voting booths, except in this booth is a touch screen that prints out your results. You then take it to the tally machine, just like you [still] do now [in many precincts]. You have a way to double-check your vote before submitting it.

Re:Not at all...

[Nursie]

Except you're introducing a computer scanning/OCR stage when most people have trouble making a hole in a piece of paper.

Re:Not at all...

[nsayer]

I would take a step back. Let the machine that prints out the ballot also keep the count, but have the paper be the legally binding declaration of the voter's intent. The only time you need to go to the paper ballots is when a recount is required / demanded.

As for the accuracy of the OCR, it's absolutely necessary that the printed piece of paper be verifiable by the voter before he deposits it in the ballot box, so barcodes are unacceptable. And it's not the same thing as OCRing Moby Dick. The OCR simply needs to distinguish between a handful of fixed words, not attempt to divine the meaning of a random page of text.

Vote Selling Issues Indeed!

[NickFortune]

One issue I rarely see address is that e-voting is susceptible to vote selling

Actually, this is an issue I see raised quite a lot; so much so that sets me to wondering: what's wrong with selling your vote? More to the point - what's so wrong with potentially being able to do so that's worse than one party being able to disenfranchise you wholesale, and leaving you with no possible way to prove it?

Because, personally, I'm coming to the opinion that I'd sooner see a small trade in black-market votes, with prison terms for those running scam if caught, than I would have my vote bought and sold by the people making the voting machine

Re:Vote Selling Issues Indeed!

[Cairnarvon]

Prohibitions on vote-selling made more sense in eras when factory owners ran for office and basically pressured their workers to vote for them by paying them a pittance for their vote. It was already illegal to threaten someone into voting for you, so they engaged in this sort of vote-buying to cover it up.
That's basically why many of these laws exist, though fully anonymous voting would render the point sort of moot. Of course, if people are given a slip of paper that states how they voted, it becomes un-moot again.

The second reason they exist is that in any healthy democracy there would obviously be no vote-selling or -buying, and these laws serve to keep up appearances by treating the symptom, not the cause.

Re:Vote Selling Issues Indeed!

[azgard]

Because you may also sell it for your life?

Seriously, somewhere in the comments above I explain. What if, for example, you would lose your job if you didn't vote a specific way?

The problem is the positive feedback. If you will allow small scam, it will grow bigger next time, because more and more people will "vote" for them.

Re:Vote Selling Issues Indeed!

[NickFortune]

What if, for example, you would lose your job if you didn't vote a specific way?

Well, yes. But the problem there is coercion of voters, not vote selling per se. And I'm not really suggesting that vote selling be legalised, encouraged, or even tolerated.

That said, if party in power can use the voting machines to steal votes wholesale, then the question becomes moot.

If we're ever going to have electronic voting (and long term I think the advantages outweigh the pitfalls) then we need some way for voters to verify that their vote has been recorded as cast. Otherwise the process will be subverted, and public confidence in the electoral process will plummet.

So the question isn't so much whether or not vote selling is undesirable - I agree it is not. The question is whether a validation system that could potentially be used as part of a vote selling shakedown is sufficient reason not to allow voters to confirm that their vote has not been falsely recorded.

Secret ballot

[qbzzt]

If they try to behave violently afterward, they go to jail. No different from any other thug.

No. If they try to behave violently afterward, you call the police. The commissioner of police, however, is from the ruling party you voted against. The cops are too busy and the D.A. doesn't think it's in the public interest to press charges.

This is more of an issue with votes than anything else because we vote for control of the system that stops thugs. Therefore, elected officials have the power to keep their thugs safe.

Optimistic?

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

He didn't sound very optimistic to me.

Violence never solves anything

[qbzzt]

I guess you missed the part in school about how violence begets violence and it never solves anything, only creates new problems.

I was sick that day. But here are some things I learned after I got better:

1. How the Romans dealt with Carthage, and after the Third Punic War were never bothered by the Carthaginians again.

2. The 30 years war and how Catholics and Protestants stopped killing each other over religion afterwards.

3. How Cromwell and the threat of a repeat performance caused the Glorious Revolution and turned England into a constitutional monarchy.

4. The reasons the US became independent prior to the decolonization that started in the late 19th century.

5. The reason that slavery got abolished.

Violence is not the ideal solution. But sometimes it's the only solution - and historically it did solve some problems.

Re:Violence never solves anything

[Anonymous Coward]

What bullshit examples. You're trying to compare murder to war? Try again please.

Why e-voting?

[smidget2k4]

I don't understand the need to get away from pen and paper voting. What wonderful benefits does e-voting bring us? The ability to vote from home? You have that, it is called an absentee ballot. Fancy touch screens? Who cares? This is an election, not a technology floor show.

All it really seems to bring us is a lack of transparency and an unnecessary addition of complexity. Keep it simple, keep it transparent, keep it verifiable. It is much harder to stuff thousands of precincts around the country than it is to edit a couple databases.

The only reason for e-voting I have seen is for accessibility. Handicapped people have been voting in this country for a long time now, and the current system seems to work. Yes, it is conceivable that the person ticking the vote box for them may tick the wrong one on purpose, but even if that happens every single time it affects maybe 10-15 votes per precinct? Just keep it simple.

Re:Why e-voting?

[nsayer]

Fancy touch screens? Who cares?

Those "Fancy touch screens" prevent over-votes and unintentional under-votes, and they make the record of the voter's intent unambiguous (no "hanging chads"). Eliminating voter error makes for a better election, since it more faithfully reflects the will of the individual voter, and hence, the electorate.

You can keep it transparent and verifiable while using technology to make it easier for the voter.

Yes, it is conceivable that the person ticking the vote box for them may tick the wrong one on purpose, but even if that happens every single time it affects maybe 10-15 votes per precinct?

Florida. 2000. QED.

Re:Why e-voting?

[myspace-cn]

Exactly!

MOD UP, this guy get's it!!!

Vote in the SUNLIGHT with NO ELECTRICITY.

For the disabled, either show up and help them vote or let them vote early on un-networked, highly audited, hardware controlled electronic vote PRINTING devices. (not to be confused with electronic vote tabulation devices)

Re:Why e-voting?

[cdrguru]

The problem in the US today is that in 2000 CBS announced Al Gore as the winner based on the results they had. This was taken to be official by a number of people. Gosh, it turned out they were wrong and in a couple of hours they retracted their claim. People that went to bed "knowing" Gore won woke up the next morning "knowing" that the election had been rigged and stolen. Everything that went on after that point was meaningless hand-waving to those people.

In 2008 if we have a close election it is a tossup as to who will announce the winner first - the election officials or the TV news media. The TV news folks pretty much have a requirement to announce a winner before midnight Pacific time. Otherwise millions of people will just turn off their TV sets and go to bed. The whole reason for staying up late and watching the commercials is to be one of the first to hear about the newly elected president. Should they not announce a winner it will cost them millions of dollars in 2012.

Therefore, no matter what, if we want official election results they have to be FAST. Counting paper ballots is not fast enough. Failure to have official results in a timely manner will absolutely result in the news media reporting a winner based on whatever results they have and their own speculations. Should there be a winner announced at 11:59 PM Pacific time and this result is retracted later there could indeed be a revolution in the US. Again people will know for a certainty that the election was rigged and stolen. The unelected bureaucracy can't have a revolution, so there will be FAST official results.

Do you get it?

Re:return to mechanical vote machines

[lenski]

Those of us in the election advocacy world are close to your suggestion, differing only in the voter checking process: We advocate strongly against ballot-checking outside the precinct, due to the well-known phenomena of vote-buying and extortion.

But you are right on in suggesting that the voter should be able to see his/her ballot, live on paper, before submitting it to the election for counting. This would be a perfect use of electronic systems: Print Ballots.

The voter can validate or invalidate the ballot, visually and *not* submit it for counting when it does not reflect the voter's intent. But this process must occur at the precinct. Once the ballot is in the box, it becomes evidence and should be treated accordingly. (This means implementing and following "chain-of-custody" rules, et cetera.)

Don't Worry About Voting: +1, Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the United States of America has collapsed.

I hope this helps the Obama fans.

Cordially,
Kilgore Trout

A possible answer

[snooz_crash]

Avi is right about a software-independant system. A problem, though, is getting to that point. The current slew of voting solutions are software proprietary and almost none of them have a tandem DRE/Optical Scan setup.

What needs to happen is a standardization of the paper ballot. With a designated schema/layout, any voting system maker can create to the specs and it would be possible to mix and match makers on the DRE (ballot creation - ballot tally 1) and the Optical Scan side(ballot tally 2).

The great thing about this type of system is that if the DRE and the Optical Scan machines are not electronically attached (wired or wireless), prior to upload (hookup to an external phone or ethernet) to the main tally service, the local judges can perform their own validation by noting the totals on the DRE as compared to the Optical Scan system.

http://www.2pv.org/

However, I do not have a solution to the under-staffing and under-training of these mildly complex systems as pertains to polling judges. The technophobic nature of these patriotic and generous people (forgive me seniors) should have a resolution as well.

Data integrity

[Yungoe]

No amount of e-voting data will ever have the same integrity of ballots I can see, touch, count and recount.

Re:Data integrity

[myspace-cn]

MOD UP!!!

It is harder to rig

[TheLink]

It's easier to change 1 million ballots electronically than it is to change 1 million paper ballots. That's what computers are good at. You can have all that crypto signature crap for all you want but a doctored box will just sign the forged results as well as it signs legit results.

You might be able to make it harder to fake by adding a lot of complexity but that brings us to the most important bit of elections that many people miss:

Elections don't just have to be fair, they have to be _seen_ as fair.

Don't ever forget that. You can explain paper ballots and how they can be done securely to Joe Sixpack, and he might even understand it while drunk.

Go explain all that fancy crypto stuff to a drunk Joe Sixpack when his favourite candidate has just lost by 0.5%.

I'm an IT guy and I can tell you there is ZERO need for electronic voting. Counting can be done in parallel. The more voters a country has, the more volunteers you can get for counting and the more observers you can have to oversee stuff.

The more spread out the counting the harder it is to fake it - if the paper votes can be faked substantially, the your country is as screwed as Zimbabwe or Myanmar, in which case it doesn't really matter anymore what system you use.

I repeat:
Elections don't just have to be fair, they have to be _seen_ as fair.

Otherwise you have a higher chance of riots and other nastiness (you can never avoid it totally - some people are just sore losers).

If the people from your favourite party observing the counting say - it sure looks like everyone was voting the other guy, a defeat is more likely to be accepted.

Re:I like this part OTFA, i think it's the way to

[Anonymous Coward]

In Rhode Island that is how we vote sans the computer printing the ballot part. We have paper ballots on which we mark our choices and we stuff them into scanners which tally things up. I cannot understand what the problem is with everyone else adopting these. You have computerized counting with a paper trail.

Re:Why e-voting? Because it is harder to rig.

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole reason to go E-Voting is because it is a heck'uva lot harder to rig. Having worked for Sequoia(LOL. they are all shit companies. Don't get me started on how much they suck.) and two county elections departments, I can honestly say three things.

1) All of the companies that produce voting machines suck, but they each suck in their own, unique and special way. The reason being that it is a no-growth sector and no executive worth their salt would ever go to one since they can make way more $CASH$ by doing business in another field.

2) It is way easier to rig paper then a DRE. I've seen a woman glue the tip of a #2 pencil to the bottom of her ring and mark a second candidate on the paper ballot when someone voted for the "wrong" candidate. As such, it gets counted as an overvote and is not counted. I've seen people flat-out toss ballots in the trash as well. There are so many ways to fuck with paper it is a joke.

The problem is that everyone thinks your rigging is going to happen in a big jurisdiction like New York or Chicago, but that isn't where it happens. They get watched like hawks. They are so worried about their image that they police themselves pretty darn well. Where it happens is in smaller jurisdictions. They don't have the budget to police themselves, and people think that rigging elections only happens in "big cities". Have you been to Nevada(outside of clark county)? They'll have one polling place for the whole damned county. They have no budget. They higher like six people.

When you have six people running an election it can get rigged regardless of paper or DREs. With DREs, someone has to know what they are doing. With paper, you just make sure you take out the trash before anyone else shows up. Compare that with a place like Chicago that has two floors in a highrise in the middle of downtown devoted to elections. You get that many people working on an election and your rigging is elimiated due to the fact that someone will talk when you need to bribe that many people.

Politicians love people because they can shout "Recount! Recount! Recount!" I'm not shitting you. They went paper because they *CAN* fudge it.

3) A lot of the fixes people propose are actually against the law. The federal government needs to review the system and give it an overhaul. Lots of the laws are there for good reasons(like no receipts for voters), but there are many that just get in the way(like being able to add a candidate after filling is completed due to them being friends with a judge). They also need to make it easier for vendors to supply us with patches. We've got software with bugs that can not be patched because the vendor can not afford to send it through certification. Certification is a joke anyways. I don't think I-Beta actually does anything other then collect a check and stamp the code "approved". Seriously, some of the bugs in the software we use is completely unacceptable, but hey, someone changed the law 6 months before an election and they had to rush the changes through so the counties could conform with the new laws. The real problem is in the legal system. Ok....I need to stop now.

P.S. Assholes like Avi Ruben don't care about elections. They just want to start a fuss and get paid to be a speaker. I have to deal with the academic idiots every election cycle, and all of them are clueless. They take about being experts and can't even be bother to read the statues half the time. The other half of the time, they like to bitch about the fact that you are running XP and microsoft might have coded SQL Server to rig the election. No, I'm not joking about that. I actually had someone insist that Microsoft could have coded SQL Server to alter the contents of the database without knowing the datastructure.

Here is a perfect example FTFA. "is it possible that Hillary Clinton should be the Democratic nominee? I don't think it's likely, but it's definitely possible." This dipshit doesn't even understand what a primary is.

Specially Crafted Chips

[myspace-cn]

To all you retarded pro e-voting wacko's.

You are aware of this document right? That was 2005.
http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/2005-02-HPMS_Report_Final.pdf

You do understand that the USAF is very concerned about hardware hidden logic. Right? Red Team Blue Team

You do know that eeproms are FUCKING MISSING!!

Look idiots, it's not linux vs windows, it's not software only, it's HARDWARE at the doping level.

It's lots of money to grab power and the enabling bullshit fascist corporate media enablers who won't do the most basic of journalistic investigation.

These electronic vote tabulation devices are nothing but trouble, Avi Rubin is full of shit.

Re:The problem - is retarded nonsense continues

[myspace-cn]

Teach them to SEE invisible electricity, and specially crafted chips at the doping level, Teach them to see broken chain of custody?

Where's the action? When a chain of custody is broken, what power does an observer have?

Oh that's right they have the power to watch the fuck fast-tracked onto a jet to get sworn in before the votes are even counted. (like in San Diego)

Oh that's right they have the right to watch people turned away that don't have a drivers license because they were born before there were birth certificates, and without that no drivers license, no passport, without that no ID, with no ID no vote registration. No passport no Birth Certificate, no ID no passport, no drivers license no Birth certificate.

Teach them to monitor things like STOLEN EEPROMS.

Teach them to monitor things like electronic vote tabulation device failures that are invisible (just because the parts are shit, or other reasons.)

Teach them not to use the mini-bar key.

Teach them to use an electron microscope and destructive reverse engineering, to search for specially crafted logic inside of chips.

Teach them to stop the local DHS from declaring a fake emergency to count ballots in secret.

Teach them to stop caging lists.

Teach them to inspect, and reverse engineer every inch of every wire, cap, transistor, coil from point a across thousands of miles to point b to make sure there's no man in the middle attack.

Teach them to CUT the NSA's FIOS splitter from accessing, and potentially manipulating data.

Teach them to get failures broadcast on the fascist media so the public is actually informed.

Teach them the cost of electing the wrong candidate.

You don't get it because this voting system is designed for you not to SEE IT.

Paper vs. Invisible Electronics

[myspace-cn]

Yeah paper voting is different, you don't have the potential for specially crafted chips (at the doping level) you don't have the problem of invisible signals (to the human eye) you don't have the problem of trying to do a re-count when your chip is fried. You don't have the problem of trying to do a re-count, when the original data was intermittent. Paper doesn't have virus's. Paper doesn't allow the fascist corporate media to speculate on a winner before everyone has voted.

The problem with Avi Rubin

[PseudoThink]

Educating the public about the concerns of poorly implemented e-voting is good. Publicizing inaccurate, blanket statements about e-voting (as Avi Rubin does) is BAD. It gives powerful ammunition to parties (GOP and DNC) who see e-voting as a threat, since their success relies on gaming our flawed, draconian plurality voting system.

Avi Rubin has hurt this country considerably by effectively lobbying against some really good e-voting solutions that could revolutionize our democracy. His generalized and often inaccurate statements (and those of his colleagues at other respected institutions) about e-voting have sidelined startups providing some great solutions. I'm not talking about monstrosities like the Diebold black-box machines (which are still in use, despite Mr. Rubin's statements), I'm talking about proven successful, OPEN-SOURCE solutions like http://everyonecounts.com/. These startups have to fight tooth and nail to gain acceptance with the public and government, as long as Mr. Rubin and his ilk are spreading their e-voting fearmongering campaign.

Did I mention that Mr. Rubin and his counterparts from other respected institutions have been awared millions of dollars of goverment grants to continue their campaign against e-voting, under the guise of academic research? Gee, one might almost think the government has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo in our electoral system.

Re:A possible answer -- a WRONG answer

[myspace-cn]

The current slew of voting shitdoms almost ALL of them HAVE DRE/Optical scan.

Optical scan is not safe.
DRE is not safe.

(We need something for the disabled to vote though) so DRE printing a paper ballot would be the obvious choice here. But NOT DRE printing paper ballots for ALL voters.

Optical scan should be outlawed.

Let's compare the electronic output of a DRE to the electronic output of an OP SCAN? I don't fuckin think so.

You can't SEE either signal. You can't validate either signal.

You can validate a paper ballot though.

Optical Scam

[myspace-cn]

For the Optical Scan wacko inside you.

http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/73/71732.html

Is this thread done.

Stick a fork in it?

The Pro-Electronics wackos going to lob more shit on or do I need to debunk every fucking thread?

Where's the "more optimistic" bit?

[argent]

Of course it's possible to design secure electronic voting systems. People have been saying that all along. The pessimism isn't about the idea of electronic voting, it's about the fact that inherently auditable voting systems never seem to get off the drawing board. For example:

Let me give you an example of a system that is software-independent. You have a system where voters use a touch screen to make their selections and the touch-screen machine, when they're done, prints out a paper ballot that they look at and has all the candidate choices that they made. The voter then takes the completed, printed ballot, and they put it into a scanner. The scanner tallies the ballots up and keeps counts of all the votes. Now if the software on that system fails, they wouldn't get a printed-out ballot that they could then accept and approve.

That is the classic "this is how an electronic voting system should work" example. It's not new, it's something that could have and should have been built into the model from the start: using the software to handle the part that's most subject to human error (marking up the ballots) and not the part that's most subject to software error (maintaining the audit trail).

The only optimistic bit in there about "electronic voting" is that the NIST has weighed in in favor of this kind of inherently auditable design. Most of the optimism is that almost all the states have opted out of "electronic voting".

Re:Why e-voting? Because it is harder to rig.

[myspace-cn]

Full Disclosure: You worked for Sequoia? What did you do exactly?

No way

[Orig_Club_Soda]

...Based on digital vote-machines so far, I'd say e-voting cannot be trusted. That is too great of a centralized influence on the process.

Also, considering how people tend to behave online, I'd say that the result of an e-vote would embody the negative aspects of society over anything else. People need to get out of the house and converse with other people - SEE other people, even if it is just the voting line. Dehumanizing the voting process is a huge mistake.

Re:A possible answer -- a RIGHT answer

[snooz_crash]

You are right about the current state of things. I was advocating the standardization of the paper ballot from a DRE or other tool.

However, the point is having a DRE print out a paper ballot. This makes the system "a computer assisted voting tool" as opposed to "a standalone computer tallying system." The printing physical ballot is a better voter verification than the current dot matrix tag along and that physical paper ballot represents the actual vote.

For sight disabled users, instead of a DRE as ballot manufacturer, an audio system with a input device would print out a standardized ballot, along with braille markings. (Yes, $$$$$$ - but it would be done right)

The printed ballot is then read by a separate optical scan and represents a 2nd system counting the ballots for the night.

Since the printed ballots are standardized, it doesn't matter who makes the electronic system. Physical ballots can then be counted either by hand or by optical scan and then checked against the first system.

Poor Solution in search of a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Pros and Cons:

E-VOTING:

Pros:

    * Sounds Cool!!!
    * Pads Local, State, and Federal officals & Corporate pockets with taxpayer dollars (oops - s/b a con)

Cons:

    * Really Expensive
    * Much easier than paper to defraud
    * Much easier to hide tracks
    * Centralized Control of results
    * No Audit trail
    * Not required to help handicapped voters
    * Impossible to make secure
    * Requires stable power

PAPER:

Cons:

    * Uncool low-tech solution
    * Boring method that your grandparents used

Pros:

    * Cheap
    * Everyone understands how it works
    * Can be made secure if the voters would update procedures and make sure enough people observe
    * Much more difficult to corrupt - requires distributed fraud on a mass scale and disposal of real votes
    * Can use an automated machine to fill out human readable ballots, enabling handicapped to vote alone
    * Can use an automated machine to count, even though hand counting isn't too bad (see Canada)
    * Works even if the power goes out
    * Confidence in results

The fact that many slashdotters still even consider electronic voting OK is highly disturbing. I guesspeople really like to be cheated and ripped-off.

Do US Internment Camps Really Exist?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do US Internment Camps Really Exist?

Trusting vote preparation hardware is a nicety.

[jbn-o]

I'm not sure that I understand your complaint. Auditing elections takes time, whether you do it alone or with others. I don't see a reasonable objection to putting in the effort to get the job done.

The advantage to auditing from voter-verified paper ballots is that such audits are possible. DRE (direct recording equipment) make such auditing impossible because you can't compare what some voter-verified component said versus what was counted.

Computers are great for preparing voter-verified paper ballots. They have many advantages to address real needs for illiterate and blind voters, polling places that handle ballots in diverse districts (where ballots aren't the same), and they can be programmed by free software hackers so counties can leverage competition among programmers (doing this will prove to be mostly a matter of getting the money to clear state certification examinations which are largely black box tests).

I don't have to trust the voting machine if all it does is prepare a voter-verified paper ballot which I manually spoil (return to the election judges) or register as my vote (usually deposit in a big box to be collected and counted later). Human counting doesn't have to be infallible, the ballots need to be voter-verified and recorded on something that can be recounted for any reason.

Secret ballots

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>Should our elected officials be making secret votes? No, so why should anyone else?

Because they're supposed to be accountable to us for their votes, because they work for us.

Sovereigns don't have to answer to others. That's what sovereignty is about. If the people are to be sovereign, they should get secret ballots.

Auditing your own vote

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>>"so everyone can log in and check how/whether his/her vote is counted (after the elections)"

>So that thugs/corporate masters/Mugabe can sit people down and check they voted 'correctly'?

Chaum came up with a voting system in which you could leave the polling place with a token that didn't reveal the content of your vote, but which would allow you to log in and check that your vote had been counted correctly, again without revealing what your vote was. You and the abusive spouse standing over your shoulder wouldn't see that you had voted for Elvis, but you would get evidence that whatever your vote was had been added to the totals unchanged.

This sounds impossible but it can be done with Crypto High Magic. The obvious problem is that nobody except a few cryptographers would understand this system's guarantees. In contrast, everyone understands looking at a ballot box before the polls open to make sure it's empty.

the problem isn't the computer, it's the people

[stanjam]

The systems in use now are horrible. Easily manipulated, and it becomes impossible to validate. Probably one of the worst problems is something I just learned, and that is the fact that one of the top people used in creating and programming the machines is a convicted felon who went to jail for putting sophisticated back door programs on financial computers. Hmm. Just the man you want programming the voting machines. Not to mention the code is proprietary. If anything should be open source, it is voting machines!

Olympic voting

[Anonymous Coward]

There's another side of election reform. The Olympics are coming up, and in events such as gymnastics, there are votes cast and tallied. Each candidate gets a score from 0 to 10. I think we could use the same for political candidates.

I would imagine this would prevent spoilers from taking votes away. Voters wouldn't feel they have to give their votes to the lesser of two evils to prevent the most evil from winning.

An easier implementation of this range system is to make the scores rougher, either 0 or 1. This is the approval system (look at wikipedia).

If we voted in the Olympics as we vote in Congress, imagine the difficulties. There would be frontrunners and spoilers. Maybe their would even be coalitions and parties.

Your blackmaier has to tell you

[Anonymous Coward]

what they want to do at SOME POINT.

Get evidence of that and have them chucked in jail.

Problem solved.

bravery and cowardice and votes and bosses

[reiisi]

Yes, maintaining personal freedom requires personal courage.

Yes, maintaining national freedom requires individuals maintaining personal freedom.

But there are limits. Particularly when the city manager or mayor is the boss that is checking your vote. He's not going to jail unless you can manage to get your situation and your evidence communicated up the line to a point where corruption has not taken hold. When the whole community has gone south, your defending your freedoms to death serves only as a lesson to others that, if they aren't prepared to die, they'd best abandon their freedoms.

There is a society where no one needs privacy, but that society is one where no one is still under the illusion that power over others can compensate for lack of self-control.

how to: rig e vote audits and win elections

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~hause011/article/Vote3.html

Re:A possible answer -- a RIGHT answer

[myspace-cn]

We're on the same page I think. The only thing I would add is if computer assisted voting tool's are allowed, they are to be considered a special circumstance, and not depended on for ALL PAPER BALLOTS to be PRINTED. In other words you only get to use it if you don't have hands, or eyes, etc. If you can manually fill out a paper ballot on your own this is the method used. Don't ask me where to draw the line, if it's that much of a question of drawing a line, then perhaps the disabled (not our fault they are disabled) needs to vote early, or at a specially controlled location with 24/7 citizen oversight and accuracy testing. e.g. testing to make sure the machine prints correctly.

Then, no OP SCAN counting. That shit just get's us right back to unvalidatable electronic vote tabulation devices that ALWAYS seem to have an OOPS over and over, fuck the reason why there's an OOPS, an OOPS is a FAILURE, and that means the election was tampered with.

Furthermore, the PAPER BALLOT that is PRINTED from such a machine, will be counted the SAME as any PAPER BALLOT that was manually created. And of course, something must be done to protect the Chain Of Custody, where citizen oversight has some bite, as opposed to the way it is now where Ren and Skimpy are jamming down the road 95+ MPH with a cop escort, or the ballots are alone with some bullshit official who's used law enforcement to clear the building to everyone except his cronies.

Think along the lines of Zorro. (IF you ain't seen Zorro go watch it) Where Zorro, protects the ballot box via guns and fights. I ain't saying we need guns and fights, but the principles of oversight have been lost due to ass-backwards laws and red tape.

Re:It isn't any different - You are wrong!!

[myspace-cn]

Go fuck yourself and your stupid psychology games.

You are wrong PERIOD, the ACVR agenda to purposely obfuscate the definitions of "election fraud" and "voter fraud."

Election Fraud, relates to the electronics, the machines, and the officials.

Voter Fraud, relates to fake voters. Again, PROVEN TO BE NEGLIGIBLE.

This is so that VOTER ID + REAL ID can be used to stop people from voting. The whole steaming pile of crap started by severalrat-fuckers shill organization (a fucking mailbox) that was setup to spread propaganda.

So you can consider the phrase whatever way you want, you'll still be wrong.

Whether or not I am angry is just a symptom of the bullshit going on in the United States.

This Unconstitutional shit MUST be stopped.