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

[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

[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

[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.

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?

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.

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."

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: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.

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.

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.