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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.
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.
You believe you can trust in paper just because it is widespread and been in use for a while. But there are inherent problems with paper too - ballot theft, miscounting etc. You can't ignore problems like an overzealous volunteer counting a few hundred more votes for his favorite candidate.
Electronic ballot machines were brought to eliminate these problems. But in an attempt to make them more fancy they took on more inherent security risks. My two cents is - electronic voting systems ARE better. You only have to make the machines open sourced to strengthen the security.
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
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
Actually, it's not Ohio Governor Ted Strickland you need to really thank for this, it's Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner who came in with Strickland (who had previously specialized in election law).
By comparison, her predecessor Ken Blackwell was one of those involved in guaranteeing the electoral votes of Ohio would go to Bush. Which of course had nothing at all to do with the fact that white suburban precincts had plenty of voting machines and about a 10 minute wait while poor black urban precincts had 5 hour waits and college campuses closer to 6 hour waits.
dear god, ken blackwell and the 2004 election can make you really embarrassed to be an ohioan.
This is totally wrong. Any geek knows that you should use a trebuchet.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
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.
But there are inherent problems with paper too - ballot theft, miscounting etc.
Thank you so much for reminding me of the 'pregnant chad' debacle. I hate you. I hate Florida too.
While this is certainly true, having physical ballots allows for a meaningful recount, assuming nobody's actually destroying the ballots in question. While it's true that an electronic machine will produce a 'ticker tape'(analogous to the receipt tape in a cash register), presumably the altered software on such a machine would alter this output as well. Therefore, by decoupling the act of casting the vote from the act of recording a vote, you add the potential for more reliable consistency checks.
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.
Ahh yes, but the key point here is that I filled out a physical piece of paper that is *also* stored and can be counted later. Yes, cheating can and does happen but it's a lot fucking harder to fill out millions of bubble sheets and methodically insert them into various districts while removing the good ones than it is to have a piece of software print the physical sheets for the manual recount for you -- oh wait, there are no physical recounts because that doesn't exist w/the new e-voting machines.
You can't ignore problems like an overzealous volunteer counting a few hundred more votes for his favorite candidate.
Which is why standard counting practices include having multiple unaffiliated people count the same ballot stacks independently to confirm any recorded result.
t*9.81 m/s^2
Hand in your geek credentials!
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.
Long waits definitely skew the results if people waiting in line are at risk of losing their jobs due to showing up late for work or taking too long of a break to vote. Last time I checked, Ohio has no law requiring employers to give time off to vote, and I know (second hand) that if there is such a law it gets ignored frequently.
I am officially gone from
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.
No, electronic voting machines were adopted as a result of the Help America Vote act, the primary goal of which was to prevent easily-misinterpreted ballots, particularly for the elderly or disabled.
While there are problems with paper ballots, for sure, their failure modes are a lot more graceful. In general, when electronic voting machines are maliciously altered, the fact that they've been altered is undetectable and there's no backup data that can be used to fix the problem. Further, their operations while running are difficult to audit.
Problems like a counter adding an extra hundred to his candidate have known solutions and are easy to audit -- they install cameras in every counting location and only permit counting in groups.
You believe you can trust in paper just because it is widespread and been in use for a while. But there are inherent problems with paper too - ballot theft, miscounting etc. You can't ignore problems like an overzealous volunteer counting a few hundred more votes for his favorite candidate.
Paper can be misused as well... But at least people generally know how paper works. It's a physical medium. You can count actual objects. You can find actual objects that have been stuffed in a waste-basket, or see actual object being stuffed into the ballot-box. We've had a couple hundred years of trying to accurately count paper ballots and have generally worked out the bugs.
The big problem with electronic ballots is not that any given machine was insecure or poorly designed, it's a fundamental lack of understanding when it comes to electronics and computers. Large chunks of the population still don't know what a hard disk drive is, or how software works, or how easy it can be to tamper with an electronic device like a voting machine. People don't understand why it is ok to bring one of the old paper-ballot machines home before an election, but it isn't ok to bring an electronic one home.
Folks here on Slashdot are generally fairly familiar with technology. Folks here typically at least know what source code is and why you might need to be able to read it in order to certify that a machine is or isn't secure. Many, many people out there have absolutely no idea what source code is.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
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.
Of course you're confused. You only remember the last thing you heard. But I can't blame you for having the same problem that most people in the US seem to have.
There were a LOT of problems with the 2004 election and not just in Florida and Ohio. There were problems identified in many states. In Texas alone, in areas where paper ballots were still being used, after the election, many [uncounted] ballots were found in trash dumpsters across the state. Ostensibly, they all came from democratic areas.
But this recalling only the last thing you were told problem isn't limited to voting issues... if people recall the times and events leading to the invasion of Iraq, you will recall that we were told all kinds of things we were expected to forget. And even during the 9-11 attacks, there were news details such as 5 miles of debris from the "heroic" crash of one air liner... the 5 miles part was never repeated, of course.
The short memory of the people in the US is a growing problem. It will allow people to lie and pull the wool over the eyes of the US public over and over and over again and for most people, it will seem like "the first time ever!"
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
Really, I live in Brazil and every single election here is electronic now.
I has became much safer, although there are still some problems (the biggest one being the design of the voting machines not being open). Many problems like vote interpretation (yes, that can be problematic once you can write anything on the ballot), illiterate voting (allowed and obligatory here) becomes much easier, person-vote matching.
One doesn't know beforehand which voting machine goes where and some of them have paper trail.
Electronic voting is also prone to failure, but but it is harder and more expensive to compromise. The methods change.
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.
In Belgium I once was a wittness in social elections. These elect the uniun representatives and some other people.
The process was that one person took the paper that said they could vote, another person wrote down who visited. Another gave the person a voting ballot and one person said the persons name aloud. That is 4 people for just giving out the ballot. A person was only allowed to touch one sort of paper and the person calling out the name was not allowed to touch anything.
There were also representatives of each union who were not allowed to touch anything, but could intervene if they saw something that was not according to procedure. They would then tell this to the president of that sitting and to the other unions who then had to all agree with the measures taken by the president.
Counting was done in different stages.
1) Counting the people who got a ballot
2) Counting how many ballots were there. This can not be higher but can be lower then the amount of people
3) Counting the actual votes.
Much more counting before and after. Was it foolproof? Absolutely not, but it was foolproof enough. And this was done in almost each and every company in Belgium.
A similar procedure is used for national elections where there are no voting computers. It works and it is auditable by anybody. There are traces all over the place so if something goes wrong and things DO go wrong. And it is cheaper in the end, even if you have to pay "volunteers".
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
But there are inherent problems with paper too - ballot theft, miscounting etc.
Yeah, but those problems can not be applied on a global scale, are trivially to be understood by any voter and are trivially to detect, just stay at the voting place and look at the box. Also counting is done by multiple people, so deliberate miscounting is easy to detect as well. To sum it up, paper voting (the one with a pen, not the one with obscure lever machine) is *by far* the most secure voting mechanism we have and most importantly it is the *only* voting mechanism we have that can be verified by the common voter.
Electronic ballot machines were brought to eliminate these problems.
Electronic ballot machines don't solve any problems, they introduce a shitload of new ones and most importantly they introduce a system that is trivially be manipulated by third parties and impossible to understood by the common voter and thats where the crux is. A voting system has to be understood by the voter, if it can't, then you can throw you democracy right out of the window, since your whole democracy will depend on the trust of a tiny few people who control those machines.
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
"Get over it", my ass.
The "now" is that another election is approaching. It's apparently obvious even to you that if our elected officials are trusted to handle these elections responsibly, they are quite happy to do whatever the hell they want and "irregularities" sprout up like mushrooms after a rain.
So... for this time around, do you want to shout and bitch and moan and demand a fair election? Or do you want to just turn on the TV, drown out any possible responsibility you might have as a citizen and let it all happen again?
The American electoral process has become a disgrace thanks to our indifference.
With paper you need to get an army of individuals to skew the results of a vote enough to matter with things like ballot dumping and intimidation, etc. There's a reason instances of intimidation goes down in areas where these machines are used. Why intimidate voters if their votes don't count?
With electronic voting machines you just need one guy to reprogram the machines - and no one can know that it happened.
The incentives are never going to be in the right places to allow these types of opaque processes to be used for voting (unlike banking, where someone's going to jail if the money isn't properly accounted for). You can't look in these machines and confirm anything - you can only assume that the source code posted on some website last week, is actually the source code compiled and running on the computer (a fool's assumption frankly).
These machines can never be as tamper resistant as hand counted paper ballots. All they do is make it easier to smaller numbers of people to affect many.
http://www.unfocus.com/
"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