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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."
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.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
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?
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.
...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?
"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."
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
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
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.
Carpe Daemon
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.
-- Support a free market in the field of government