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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."
It's a lot more effort and you have a paper trail. With a machine all you have to do is rig the counter.
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.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
...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.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
"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.
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.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
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.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
"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?
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...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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.
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.
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.
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.
>>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.
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.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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.
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?