Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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
1) Novelty themed restaurant, where you place your order by "voting".
Slightly offtopic:
In Amsterdam we used to have a bar called the "stock"-bar where the price of items was (inversely) determined in real time by the number of people ordering it.
Pretty nice idea, but people ended up drinking a lot filthy "exotic" drinks. I guess that doesn't invite people to come back...
Is there any problem with the actual voting machine _hardware_? I thought it was generally the software that was troublesome, in large part because it wasn't simple and public domain.
How hard would it be for one of these counties to write new software on their own? Is there really anything more to it than a window with a list of names, a radiobox by each, and a button saying "Yes, this is my final choice" which increments a counter by 1? It seems like it would take all of 5 minutes to write that up in your language of choice, and another 5 minutes to explain the 10 lines of code it would take to the state election board. It just isn't that hard a problem.
I really liked the old mechanical lever machines we used to have in Connecticut (up until the last election). It made it feel like you were really voting.
Another question is, why does a company who make ATM machines which don't lose a cent in millions of transactions and have a paper trail fail to do the same for voting machines?
Don't forget this wonderful youtube clip:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UvEuqYyDoE
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
Why not use them with rewritten open source code? Save the investment and have code that has been vetted.
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.
The voting machine hardware has problems, too. For example, you can change the software on them without anyone noticing.
Without going into details, there are many very difficult problems in making a working electronic voting system. Presenting radio buttons and using the result to increment counters is the tiniest fraction of what needs to be done.
Incidentally, the mechanical lever systems bear the same major problem as electronic voting systems: they can be undetectably modified.
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!
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."
During the 2000 the problem went down do Florida where they used a paper method and you had the hanging chad and bump issues where when people punched their choice on card stock the paper didn't compleatly punch threw causing the optical readers to reject the votes. And even visual inspection did the same thing, it was just to hard to tell.
Durring 2004 they used them a bit more however they may or may not have worked but the public was worried as they were insecure and didn't have a paper backup trail, to prove their vote. (I still don't know why they couldn't just put a high quality printer on it, and printed out their vote to make them happy.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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
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
That's not correct. You can undetectably modify a mechanical voting machine.
Suppose Eve, the attacker and a registered voter, dislikes candidate A. She shows up to the polls early with a piece of pencil lead in her pocket. She inserts the lead into an appropriate gap under candidate A's lever. While this doesn't interfere with the apparent operation of the lever, it actually prevents the mechanical operation that counts the vote. Future voters will think they're voting for A, but in fact are voting for nobody. As the pencil lead is soft, it will not last the whole day before it crumbles into dust and the machine returns to working order.
This does work, and the only way to detect it is to conduct careful forensic examination on the internals of every single machine (since you can't easily detect "this machine *might* have been tampered with).
There are actually potential approaches to provably secure electronic voting -- software assurance isn't quite as smoke-and-mirrors as you make it out to be (though yes, if you're running Windows, you've lost the software assurance game) and multiparty cryptographic protocols can help a lot. These approaches are probably tougher than conducting careful examinations of every mechanical voting machine in a state, and nobody has come close to actually implementing them.