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States Throw Out Electronic Voting Machines
Davide Marney passes along an AP story about the thousands of voting machines gathering dust in warehouses across the country after states such as California, Ohio, and Florida have banned their use. Many of these machines cost $3.5K to $5K each. Local election boards are struggling to find ways to recover any of the cost of the machines, or even to recycle them. The picture in Ohio is the most confusing, as multiple court cases limit the state's options and result in a situation in which the discredited machines will nevertheless be used in the presidential election coming up in November. The state's new (Democratic) attorney general has just issued a rule banning the practice of election workers taking the machines home with them the night before elections.
Slashdot should buy at least one - and add a Cowboy Neal option to all the screens.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Get a refund. Alternatively, use them as catapult ammunition and return them manually.
Well, thank God for a Democratic governor in Ohio. The last one was gleefully happy that his state had been able to steal the election for Bush in 2004. I have seen so many reports that describe the theft, it's despicable. Back to a technology we can trust: paper.
1) Novelty themed restaurant, where you place your order by "voting".
2) Have a vote on what to do wuith them ... er, wait
Gotta say, the idea above about using them as trebuchet ammo is pretty appealing.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
would a Beowulf cluster of thousands of voting machines be?
Election workers taking machines home and keeping them in their garage? WTF?
How about locking them in somewhere and stationing licensed, bonded security guards instead? While you're at it make sure there are multiple guards from different agencies to reduce the chance of conspiracy.
Sure it'd cost some money to do this but then "freedom isn't free", and I'm sure election costs are kind of part and parcel of that.
... the better!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Even more are used in the 2004 election: Winner=George Bush
Now they throw them out just in time for the 2008 election because George Bush might win again if they didn't.
The voting machines that were discredited will still be used here in Ohio? Even though we know they're bad?
I'm glad I decided to never vote. It seems like it would have had literally no effect to do so anyways.
Of course not. With Linux it would not need antivirus software.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
http://xkcd.com/463/
xterm -n 8
I don't know about the machines in other states but the ones we used here in florida would with a few simple mods make pretty good digital text books for for the schools, there touch screen with a good clear easy to read display just load up some math, language, history books or whatever.
I don't like these machines either, and am glad they're gone.
But before you all go out into the street to dance, let me remind everyone that those paper ballots aren't exactly hand counted... those too are counted by... say it with me: ELECTRONIC machines. They have software. They are connected to a network. They have to store their results on media at some point.
It doesn't make one "bit" of difference whether a vote is tallied as a bit, or a missing (or hanging) chad... the integrity of an election, ANY ELECTION, is dependent SOLELY UPON the integrity of the people who carry it out.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
The thing about voting machines that always confused me, beyond running Anti-virus software on them, was what made it so complicated.
You have a voter, whose admission to the booth is controlled by the same people who have controlled access to ballot papers.
The voter is allowed to vote once.
You have a list of candidates/selections - this is a ballot. A voter can only vote for a candidate/selection from the list.
You have a list of ballots for a given election that a voter can vote on.
ADD UP THE NUMBERS TO FIND THE WINNER.
Adding in a "double check" of a paper validation (which could be done via OCR as the forms will be standard) also sounds pretty trivial.
When I first heard about voting machines I thought that it was about the most trivial problem that anyone had ever had to solve... and yet they've completely screwed up.
So seriously, can anyone tell me what is so hard about automating a paper process that has ticks in boxes?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
his way to a third term!
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I realize this is a joke but one has to wonder... wouldn't this be a great opportunity for the open source community to figure out how to salvage the hardware on these machines by replacing the software with something Open and less prone to errors?
Collector's Edition
This is totally wrong. Any geek knows that you should use a trebuchet.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
...because if George Bush was in a 3-way race, with Obama and McCain, he would probably win.
I'ts sad but a good thing. If you can't provide a transparent system, dont bother. The Diebold proprietry legacy should never have been approved and has set America back as a free voting nation. I would love to see a good doco on the whole fiasco. Or mabye not? It will be interesting to see how history reflects on this years from now. Such a wasted opportunity to modernise democracy.
Those who can, do. Those who cannot, sue.
There had to be a rule issued to stop this? Could we not have a simple "don't be a moron" rule? In what way does it not look bad if people are taking the easily-hackable machines home with them?
Florida banned them? Good news, but it's the first I've heard of it.
There is a war going on for your mind.
They pushed for loosy goosy standards and even pushed for losing the printer in the name of budget (ever seen a republican politician that really wanted a balanced budget without a law forcing it? Not since I was a child in the 50's has that been the case). Now, we are talking about throwing billions away. Sadly, this is probably the best option. I do not think that we can trust these machines. There is enough evidence coming out of Ohio to show that polls were messed with. Even now, a grand jury is investigating Karl Rove and his actions on the 2000 and 2004 elections. One top ranking state republican is coming out pointing fingers at Rove because apparently Rove( and some indications that both Cheney and Bush participated) threatened this man's wife that one of the 2 were going to take a major fall.
It is time to restore integrity to D.C. The last honest president was probably Jimmy Carter. Nixon, reagan, and Clinton should have done jail time. W. and his cronies should still stand trial and do life at Leavenworth.
They'll make it easier than ever to defraud the elections there
Just by having wait time to vote wouldn't that introduce a skewed result?
If there is a 5 hour queue at the time when the voting shall end - will these be disqualified from voting? Who is to blame?
Better bring a potty and tissue if you are going to queue for voting.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Since you have to double your efforts to get double the effect. And that increases your risk of being caught by MORE than double.
Whereas with electronic voting, doubling your efforts require a smidgin more effort and almost no extra chance of being caught out. Unless you're greedy. Even then, PROVING you were deliberately defrauding voters is much harder with electronic voting than paper voting.
Why not use them with rewritten open source code? Save the investment and have code that has been vetted.
Although there can be issues with the people running the election*, the problem comes with how much work it would be for someone to manipulate the election, and for the manipulation to be detected during for after the attack. So, the question becomes -- can a single person, or a small group without the cooperation of the majority of the election judges, rig the election with a reasonable chance of not being detected? The risk of this dramatically increases when the situation is entirely electronic.
With paper ballots, the boxes are inspected before the election starts by all election judges and poll watchers. The boxes are sealed and kept in public view through the entire election -- no one has enough time to unlock the box, break the seal, remove (x) number of ballots, insert the same number of manipulated ballots, relock the box, and reseal the box (with the identically numbered tag) ... without anyone noticing. I'm not going to say it's impossible, but it's going to look rather suspicious if someone spent more than 10 sec dropping their ballot in the box -- and there is no reason for a poll watcher to ever go near the box (unless they're voting at the time), or for an election judge to touch the box during the voting process.
Now, in many cases, paper ballots were hand counted before these systems went electronic. And, in normal practice, these voting machines are not connected to a network, but use physical media to transfer data between the machines and the counting system. (I'll leave it up to the security folks to decide which transfer method is more dependable)
*disclaimer -- I've been chief election judge for two municipal elections, using paper ballots.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I'm thinking that these things could be rebuilt into information kiosks, or something else useful, rather than just crushing & recycling.
I mean, touch screens aren't cheap, and I'd personally love to get my hands on a few. (eg, one for the kitchen to flip through recipies w/out needing a keyboard w/ all of its germ-hiding crevices ... a small PC or embedded system to drive a digital picture frame that's also a home automation control center ... I'm guessing others could come up with plenty of uses that'd actually benefit the states / counties / municipalities..)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
That may be true, but all of those problems with paper ballots occur between the election and final counting results, a limited length of time which can be closely monitored. Electronic voting machines can be tampered with weeks or months before the election even begins, and they can contain bugs that have been there for years. There's little that can be done for ballot theft/loss (in either system), but miscounting (intentional or accidental) can be rectified with a recount in a paper system.
Keep them for evidence in a case against Diebold. It's time we ended that sham company for good. If we can do away with ATMs at the same time, all the better.
I think they should give them to the College students as a pet project they would earn bonus points if they can find out how fraud was carried out, along with proof. Would even be a extra grade if they can find out which state / county used that particular box too.
I can dream damn it!
The machines probably work fine. It's the humans that need replaced. Why on earth did someone install antivirus software on a voting machine? They're not dumb enough to leave them connected to the Internet, are they?
So seriously, can anyone tell me what is so hard about automating a paper process that has ticks in boxes?
The problem is not that making an automatic voting machine is difficult. It is not. Making one that is accurate, reliable, and secure is a problem. Even that, however, is not the biggest problem. Getting the voting public to accept the machines as accurate, reliable and secure is the real issue. Take the /. crowd as an example (please). How many posters here think that the existing Diebold machines are secure? Virtually none, because they have been shown to be wildly insecure and cracking them is trivial for anyone with a modicum of technical ability.
One solution to the perception problem would be for Diebold (or others) to open their engine to public scrutiny. Any weaknesses, short cuts or plain old fsck ups would be revealed and the systems could be modified and demonstrated to be secure. This would lead to warm, fuzzy feelings amongst the cognoscenti and they, in turn, would help spread the "these are trustworthy" word of faith among the great unwashed. Problem solved.
However, if you are Diebold and you open your engine for everyone to see, you have essentially given your competition an engraved invitation to eat your lunch. They point out all your flaws, provide an alternative that doesn't have them, everyone flocks to WeMakeVotingMachinesRight and now you, Mr. President and CEO of Diebold, are out of work because EBIT went down the tubes due to lack of confidence in your product. The BoD might say, "Yeah, that public comment about delivering the vote in Ohio for Bush? We can let that slide as long as you are delivering dividends and an ever increasing share price for us." Do something that causes earnings to slide, though, and you are toast.
So, in short, there is no technical reason the problem cannot be solved. There are, however, serious commercial interests preventing such a solution. By "serious commercial interests," of course, I really mean, "people interested primarily in protecting their positions and salaries." NTTAWWT.
The ACLU has been busy the last eight years suing many states or counties that failed to deploy electronic voting machines, I'm surprised they haven't filed an injunction in these cases.
CLEVELAND â" The American Civil Liberties Union and ACLU of Ohio filed a lawsuit against state election officials in federal court today challenging the use of unequal, inaccurate and inadequate voting technology in Ohioâ(TM)s most populous county. Todayâ(TM)s legal action seeks to block Cuyahoga Countyâ(TM)s recent shift from using electronic voting machines to a system that lacks the ability to provide voters with notice of balloting errors and an opportunity to correct such mistakes. According to the ACLU, the use of this new system violates the Constitutionâ(TM)s Fourteenth Amendment as well as the Voting Rights Act.
#-#
Ad Astra Per Aspera
A rough road leads to the stars
So... Did anyone actually RTFA? So, it'd be nice to see how these districts re-coup the monies (tax payer monies at that) that they basically have now wasted on this tech. Which really, if they spent the time to actually fix or update the software [read:use linux] then they'd probably be alright for voting. Of course you'd need some sort of guard over the system head end so no tampering takes place, hire/get competent people at the polls [read: computer-savvy non-elderly folk]. I'm not saying its full proof, paper isn't even fool proof. Is that chad punched or not? But if time was spent to actually have technical people build one that actually had say the folks at Defcon take a look at it for testing the security I don't see why a viable solution couldn't be found. As far as hacking/cracking the voting machines I don't care who you are any cryptography can be cracked, the only issue with that is the *time* it takes to crack it. If it takes 100+ years to crack then its not going to happen anytime soon at least until faster machines come forth, or a better algorithm for finding the keys comes about. So the security issues are mote at best in the long run. My concern is with congress getting their sticky hands involved on who the vendors are, because at that point things can become tainted as money gets floated from one hand to another, etc etc. I'm just tossing ideas out there. I don't claim to know this tech inside and out, but don't see why this *wouldn't* work given time to fix the issues with it. Even if it has been 5yrs or so.
"When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty."
Sell them on eBay like Seattle did with the self-cleaning toilets. Though the toilets are probably far more useful.
I know it's a pretty alien thing to say on a primarily American forum, but I would suggest that the government make the voting machines. They pay for them now anyway, and the process could be open then. Just spec it to be open, let Diebold or some other company make the machines through public bidding. Some things do not need to be free-marketised, especially the ones that are crucial to your democracy.
If the government would design them (or pay designers to do it for them, more likely) then there would be no reason to keep the design a secret because the government does not need to compete.
It would be interesting to know who thought it was a good idea to have voting machines created by a company who has shareholder value as its bottom line instead of upholding democracy.
Get a fucking clue fags and watch as the next demofaggot candidtate gets trounced this election cycle.
It's because we make space for these (very) young souls to live that the country is as it is. The only way for people to truly learn is to let them make mistakes. 60 million hard-core bible people determined to not question and who believe their dogmatic sound-bite political realities without spending any real time to actually explore ANY issues which might create discomfort in their pretend belief systems. . . Those people are simply going to have to learn the (very) hard way. I'm guessing they will preside like the current crop of Zionists over a bloody massacre, and then will have to play the roles of concentration camp victims next time around the loop. Just listen to the seething hate in this guy's troll; That kind of energy is expensive; like mortgaging your soul at a high interest rate. He hasn't learned yet the basic and incredibly simple rule for leading a happy and fulfilling life.
The difference between his belief system and mine is that he has to continually lie to himself and seek the company of other cultists in order to maintain the bubble illusion about a bearded hypocrite/psychopathic fairy in the sky. OTH I've got buckets of proof for the system I see functioning all around me because I'm not scared to explore that which terrifies him. Now let's all stand back as this young'n vomits at us with some of that Christian Love.
-FL
Technicians across the country were predicting this, and patiently explaining what a bad idea these machines are.... ...but nobody listened. Or cared.
Honestly, the world really should start listening to its technicians. We know some stuff. And we are eager to help.
They have already done that and it is called pen and paper.
I understand that you see every problem as a nail, because all you have is a hammer. The problem is not how to get the best electronic voting system. The problem is how to get the best voting system.
And the 'best' should mean the best for the people and the voting process, not the best for the news media and Fox News.
The most important thing is accuracy, not convenience, not speed and to a certain level not even price.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I'm guessing Iraq is going to be picking up some wonderful "best democracy in the world" voting machines at low, low prices.
The optical readers can be easily hacked as has been definitively demonstrated to anybody with eyes. Go to the big Free Documentary Website, and watch "Hacking Democracy" again if you missed it the first time on HBO.
There is simply a situation of rampant criminal negligence being perpetrated all across the states. The Right Wing way of doing things is to chin-jut at and ignore the law when it doesn't suit them and then lie about it afterwards. They do it again and again and again, and being caught once or made to feel shame for being a shit doesn't work; they're like the little bully/problem kid in kindergarten. You have to MAKE them follow the rules because they're petulant kids with no sense of responsibility. And I'm not talking about Republicans. (Though, I would imagine these days that there are few real people left in the Republican party.) I'm talking about the brain-damage victims; you know the type I mean.
There is broad proof of discarded paper records of votes which the documentarians dug out of trash bins and manually counted to discover that, 'Yes' election fraud is entirely real. But so what? With responsible people, being caught is enough to fix the problem. With problem kids, they shrug at you and say, "Yeah, SO?" And since these twerps are in offices both high and low, nothing has been done.
The skinny: The data cards which plug into the optical readers are brought to and from the voting site by corporate monkeys for the voting machine companies, and it was demonstrated that the cards can be easily made to fudge election results just by doing a prior hack to them. Simple as pie. That, along with a few other big cons can indeed destroy an election.
Oh, and please don't point out that in a couple of highlighted cases of, "But Billy did it too and he didn't get in trouble", like in Canada where the voting slant was delivered to the Left. . . That stuff is totally irrelevant. Even a Right Wing ADD turd can think up the idea to rig an inconsequential election the other way to have something to point to in an effort to confuse the issue surrounding his own treason.
The only way to put an Obama in office, (because the illegal voting slant certainly isn't going to favor him), is to turn out in unanticipated numbers so that the hack is overwhelmed. This is what happened when the Democrats took Congress; there was demonstrable voting fraud, but just not enough. What a world!
-FL
The mere fact that someone was able to install the antivirus software means that there is a serious flaw in the design of the machine.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
At least for a short while, the voting machines could even be used for the same purpose as the toilets. But the voting machines wouldn't self-clean (except for their memories).
Local election boards are struggling to find ways to recover any of the cost of the machines,
Gee - if only there were some way for a customer who is sold a product which is unfit for its intended purpose to recover the money that was swindled from them.
Oh - wait! That would mean holding some corporations that give lots of money to campaigns accountable for their bad practices. I mean - how could they have known (other than listening to the thousands of information scientists, including some of the most prominent security analysts in academia and private practice, who said this would happen) that this would happen?
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Hey, don't forget the hundreds of locks that need to be changed too.
Your evaluation period for Productivity 1.0 has ended. Please purchase more coffee to continue using this product.
"They have already done that and it is called pen and paper."
Nothing wrong with using a machine, either, and like everything else, it should be an improvement. The problem isn't that they were using machines, the problem is that the software apparently sucked, and there weren't enough auditing procedures in place to satisfy watchdog groups (though lets face it, like you, short of pen and paper, some watchdog groups won't be satisfied with anything, no matter how well made). Machine does not equal bad here. Poorly designed machine equals bad. You're essentially taking a luddite position.
"And the 'best' should mean the best for the people and the voting process, not the best for the news media and Fox News."
What the hell does Fox News have to do with it? What did they have to do with states buying voting machines that suck?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Ha ha!
And there it is; that Christian Love, in all-caps too. --I'm never sure when I predict a mental melt-down and subsequent explosion if it will actually happen. Sometimes just having the prediction stuck under their noses is enough to shut these weird little fish down.
Though, I'm not convinced that this isn't just a clever Leftist troll trying to get me to point out the deficiencies in lower-functioning thinking.
Still. . . Assuming that this guy is for real, you can read a ton into the fact that he uses "Your" instead of "You're". If he can't even absorb and fix such a basic fundamental of written communication which when dropped conjures the image of actual drool spilling from his lower-lip, then how can he be expected to see and absorb any of the more complex aspects of reality?
These guys are both un-fixable and quite hilarious. I wonder if I can make him spin in rage so fast that he actually bleeds from his ears? Let's try! --I'm laughing at YOU because you're clearly damaged goods and you can't contain your rage when somebody pokes a hole or two in your barely held-together web of faulty reason. Spin, baby, spin! Maybe punch a wall or two. That will be ever SO impressive! Ha ha ha!
-FL
"Don't forget that people went to jail for rigging the recount in Ohio. The big question is, why rig a recount if the regular count wasn't rigged in the first place?"
Because you're looking for a political conspiracy where there is none. And your "Brad Blog" would know that too if he would RTFA he himself linked from. The women weren't convicted of conspiracy, they were convicted of negligence. The conviction was for, and I quote, "for rigging the 2004 presidential election recount to make their job easier.". This was a case of two elections workers being lazy and getting caught, not colluding in a conspiracy to throw the election. One of them was a Democrat. Their supervising board consisted of two Republicans, and two Democrats. And in the recount, Kerry actually gained votes, and Bush lost votes, something the court never disputed. The court also didn't allege that the recount was fraudulent. Their boss said they simply made some mistakes, but the prosecutor and judge stated they thought there was "more" to the story, and seemed to imply that they thought more election workers were cutting their workload in violation of election laws, and that the two convicted women were covering for fellow workers, who came from both the Democratic and Republican parties.
From the AP article:
The prosecutor did not claim the rigged recount affected the outcome of the election; Kerry gained 17 votes and Bush lost six in the county recount
The BradBlog took a negligence case and spun it as a conspiracy theory to suit his own political ends.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
eom
Turn them into MAME arcade machines and sell them on ebay!
Don't worry, you'll be voting regularly after you've died...
You don't need E-Voting machines for that. We use paper ballots here in Alabama, and every single election, there's always a scandal in some counties because according to the voting rolls, people showed up to vote who've long been dead. The dead seem to particularly love voting by absentee ballot in some of our counties.
Alabama county accused of voter fraud
Officials Investigate 3 Alabama Counties in Voter Fraud Accusations
VOTER FRAUD SPREADING IN ALABAMA, CRADLE OF CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
At least our officials are finally doing something about it. Of course, this wouldn't be a much of a problem if we made them purge the voter rolls more often. This seems to go on in a lot of states with an electronic database of voters, but with paper balloting for election day. Mississippi purged 100,000 dead voters from their rolls earlier this year to try and eliminate some of this zombie voting.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Barack Obama has selected West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd as his running mate!
Wow. So how come Google news doesn't mention this? no word yet.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
It's not hard to write such a program. It is extremely hard to prove that such a program is correct, and that it has no "back doors" by which it could be manipulated to produce incorrect results.
In fact, to prove that such a program is correct is completely beyond the current state of the art. And then, proving that the proof is correct is a second-order problem.
Only a very few programs have been proved correct in any meaningful sense. And errors have subsequently been discovered in several of those programs, and in the corresponding "proofs".
Examples of voting-machine programs that pass a-posteriori testing, but can be manipulated (by providing unlikely input sequences) to produce incorrect results, have been demonstrated.
And, because there is so much money and power at stake in every election, the people who produce the voting machines have a huge incentive to produce machines that can be manipulated.
What is the procedure if voters come to the polling station with hammers?
I'm gonna send these clowns a lesson by NOT voting!
Believe it or not, hand counting is NOT the most accurate way to count. When you start counting millions of anything, just about any counting method has an error rate. All we can do is audit.
for any counting technique with worse security properties to be used.
I agree here.
Any alternate counting method should be superior to hand counting in as many ways possible. Pure electronic voting may be easy, but it fails miserably on the 'auditable' factor.
I believe that OCR compatible ballot to be the best system currently available.
Just about every person in the USA today should be familiar with those 'fill in the bubble' tests from school. Heck, I'd use the same machines, even if only for recounts/auditing purposes. They're already owned, regularly tested and used. As a bonus, it wouldn't really matter if the machine cost a million dollars - because it's already being used to tally all the standardized school tests in the district. Spread the cost around.
I don't read AC A human right
>the integrity of an election, ANY ELECTION, is dependent SOLELY UPON the integrity of the people who carry it out.
Then the system is inherently broken.
Banks have procedures that prevent a crooked employee from stealing money without getting caught. Elections need procedures so that any party or concerned citizen can detect cheating and send someone to jail. Elections must not depend on the integrity of the people carrying them out, they must contain and detect the damage *when* someone of low integrity enters the process.
you could run an election...
Cluestick, meet Geoffrey. Geoffrey, meet cluestick.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
But then CowboyNeal would win every election! Uhmmm, I meant poll! Yeah, poll.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
It doesn't make one "bit" of difference whether a vote is tallied as a bit, or a missing (or hanging) chad... the integrity of an election, ANY ELECTION, is dependent SOLELY UPON the integrity of the people who carry it out.
Not true.
The integrity of an election depends solely upon eliminating every possibility of cheating without being detected. Honest elections depend on NOT TRUSTING anyone. As soon as any trust is involved, there is a possibility that the person who is trusted might not be trustworthy.
There is a reason why banks have auditors and "dual control" operations. Wherever there are large amounts of money, there will be temptation. If the tellers know that they will not be caught, at least some of them will yield to temptation, and the money will disappear.
That same reason applies to elections. In almost every election, the amount of money and power at stake is much larger than the amount of cash that any bank keeps on hand. If the procedures allow it, at least some of the elections officials will yield to temptation, and the election will be rigged.
Just send 'em all to Bush & Cheney, after all, they bought 'em!
Well shit! I would have gone with someone who's younger and in better shape!