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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am officially gone from
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't worry, you'll be voting regularly after you've died...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Some would say that goes both ways. Mind the foam, please.
There is a war going on for your mind.
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.
And now the Democrat Secretary of State is redefining election law to say that registration and then absentee voting up to 5 days before the election is legal because by the time the paper ballots are recorded the voter would have been registered for the legislated 30 days.
Why stop there, why not let 17 yr olds that would turn 18 by the time the ballots are counted vote too?
What if in 30 days you plan to be a resident of the state?
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.
Yeah, in the future please don't use the term "3-way" and "George Bush" together. Thanks.
If you don't say anything, you won't be called on to repeat it. -- Calvin Coolidge
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
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
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
If there is a 5 hour queue at the time when the voting shall end - will these be disqualified from voting?
No. If you're in line when the polls officially close, you must still be allowed to cast your vote.
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
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/
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
This is, in fact, the current solution used in California, which has moved to optical-scan ballots.
Note that you can save a lot of time and money if everyone who doesn't need assistance just fills out the optical-scan ballot by hand. People who need the assistance can use a machine to produce a properly-filled-out optical-scan paper ballot.
The counting is then done by an entirely different machine. A random set of districts are required to perform a hand count of the ballots to verify the results. The important feature is that the paper ballots provide a later fallback measure if the optical-scan system fails.
"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
Incidentally, the mechanical lever systems bear the same major problem as electronic voting systems: they can be undetectably modified.
Except that you can detect their modification by testing them.
Electronic voting machines could have their modification triggered in dozens of undetectable ways. They do run the clock forward, and do a bunch of votes on it, so it's not going to switch on a specific time, but it could easily be triggered by specific ballot, or pushing the screen in a weird spot, or anything. And then, at the end, copy the correct software into place and wipe itself.
I'm not a huge fan of mechanical voting machines, but they at least either work all the time, or fail to work all the time. If you push a button 1000 times and it counts to 1000 in a test, you can be sure, mechanically, that's correct.
Yes, in theory, there could be some sort of clever linkage built into the machine as a backdoor, same as in an electronic voting machine, but they also do a quick visual inspection of the machinery before the voting.
Whereas there's no way to detect that in a computer:
a) The 'software certification' demonstrably not work. There is too much access to the machine, there are repeated instances of last-minute updates that demonstrate that no one takes it seriously, and poll workers have no idea how to check that.
b) Even if we could prove the software actually running was the right software, that does not exclude very clever backdoors that are actually in the certified code. Although at least we could track them down later...but they could easily be hidden as bugs, and unless there was some evidence they were actually triggered, what do we do?
c) Even if we know the software is perfect, and is actually what is on the machine...these things run Windows and the rest of the machine doesn't have to be certified. All you have to do is combine a 'rootkit' and a game 'trainer' and rewrite memory addresses. (Of course, is ignoring the fact that half such machines run Access, and that's easy enough to modify anyway.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
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.
This isn't some theoretical attack, it's a known weakness in the mechanical voting systems. You're just not familiar with the voting machine, so my description doesn't make sense.
The mechanical voting machine has a single large lever, a board full of toggles, and a curtain. On entering, you pull the lever, which closes the curtain. We'll call that lever state "voting". You then flip the toggles for the items you want to vote for. For example, you might flip "John" under the "President" column and "Yes" under the "Proposition 127" column. You can change your mind, but the system (ostensibly) prevents you from marking two toggles in the same column simultaneously. You then flip the lever to the other state, "not voting". This transition causes all set toggles to be unset and, in the process, increments an internal counter for each set toggle. This is all done with gears. It also reopens the curtain, so you cannot vote multiple times.
A toggle can be easily jammed with pencil lead. The toggle will appear to set and unset normally, but until the piece of lead is worked out of the system, the "gears turn, incrementing an internal counter" part fails.
or to achieve an even smaller risk of conspiracy: Two or more people of different, publicly known affiliations.
If you want to avoid a conspiracy then just let one person do it by themselves.
Cluestick, meet Geoffrey. Geoffrey, meet cluestick.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs