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Early Voting Problems, Open Source Alternative
Techdirt makes note of some problems cropping up already for early voters in the presidential election. CNN covers some of the issues, including machines in a West Virginia county which recorded some votes incorrectly because of an alignment error. A lengthy discussion of the problems was also featured on NPR. Reader Rooked_One points out a related story at NPR about a voting program called PVOTE, written in Python and only 500 lines long. "Pvote is not a complete voting system. It is just the software program that interacts with the voter. Other necessary functions, such as voter registration, ballot preparation, and canvassing, are not part of Pvote. It is especially important that the voter interaction be correct because it is the only part of an election that must take place in private, whereas all other parts of an election can and should be subjected to public oversight and verification."
We're going to have a very close race and it's going to be more acrimonious than 2000. And when it hits the fan, they're going to be looking for a goat. Guess what, not who, it's going to be?
Folks are NOT going to be pleased that there's no paper trail or any other way to audit the machines. I may have to go and buy surplus paper voting machines and make a killing.
Even if you have a short programm you still cannot guarante that it works because there's still a system surrounding it. In fact you could even manipulate the CPU hardware to give you false results.
The _only_ practicable and moderately secure way to do an election is by pen and paper and manual counting. It's done all over the world and it works near flawlessly. Everybody, not just programmers, can watch the process and see what's happening. There's no "black magic" involved and it's completely transparent.
As soon as there is some form of technology involved, people will cease to understand it, therefore making the whole system intransparent and prone to manipulation.
Everything in Oregon is weird. We can't pump our own gas, we don't pay sales tax, and we do all of our voting by mail. It makes no sense, and it's ripe for corruption (though nobody has called the "C" word so far. At least not lately)
But it's kind of nice. No computers, no machines, just fill out your ballot and mail it in. I got my ballot in the mail yesterday. I've plenty of time to research the state and local ballot, so I can make an informed decision.
The Internet is generally stupid
By doing a COUNT() on some database field? :|
You can recount electronic votes, as long as the machine prints out a receipt that you verify and drop into a receptacle.
Have you ever heard of a bank that gives away free money because they can't seem to get their ATM's to work correctly. No? That is because these voting machine problems are not real problems. They are manufactured. It's BS.
The 2008 elections in the US is only a test. It tests the prejudice/intelligence ratio in the american public.
If enough people vote for McCain/Palin, that will be a green light for more war and more corruption. In other words, it will prove that the "system" is working and that the american people is willing and ready to accept more BS.
I hope the US does not end up with Palin as president. Not only because I disagree with her views, but because she is an idiot. I mean that in the most polite sence, because she is really, actually and factually an idiot. There is no other word to describe her.
It would be nice for us "foreigners" to have a sane person "over there" for a change.
People on Reddit.com and Digg.com are saying that George W. Bush may declare martial law rather than abandon his extensive corruption. Perhaps by pretending that Iran attacked the United States?
That's good. It means that the trusted computing base is only a POSIX kernel, a C standard library and a Python runtime. Only about 100MB of source code to audit to ensure that this 500-line program runs correctly.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Here's some reasons:
1. Avoid undue pressure. As most everyone knows, the city of Chicago is run by the Democratic machine. If you publicly were to vote Republican, you'd probably not get your garbage picked up or any of the other services the city provides. According to my wife, her grandma used to go vote (in Chicago) when it was busy, and tried not to be noticed, because she wanted to vote Republican but still wanted her garbage collected.
2. Make it harder to sell your vote. If I give you $500 to vote for McCain, I have to just trust that you did it. If it's a public vote, I can check.
3. Variations on vote selling that don't involve money. ("I'll break your legs if you vote Republican.")
4. Family pressures. Despite voting Republican in every presidential election since I could vote, I'm probably going to vote Obama, not because I like him that much on the issues, but because he seems more flexible and smarter than McCain. My mom is a staunch Republican and has kind of figured out I think this way. It's bad enough to get the weekly harangue without the tumult that would result if she knew for sure who I voted for.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
Vote this way or get fired, shot, killed, beaten etc.
That's why we have anon ballots
simple solution
machine prints ballot showing who you voted for and preferences and etc. the machine makes no receipt no records only prints one.
then that Ballot gets folded and put into a box that is in the open such as http://www.nancarrow-webdesk.com/warehouse/storage2/2007-w46/img.75405_t.jpg
then you have an independent group that does the counting
not bipartisan independent every party and ind can put reps in there to watch you have 2 people watching it at all times
also consider preferences and multi-candidate seats (and bin the EC)
What if your millionaire uncle tells you you're gonna vote for x, or you'll be out of his will?
What if your employer tells you you'd better vote for y or you'll be fired?
If your vote is public, all sorts of nasty stuff can happen because of your vote, and just knowing that it might will already influence your vote.
Simple answer: NO!
There is just to damn much failures and corruption in the voting system and the politicians.
Instead what really needs to happen is that the American public need to tell the government how and on what to spend their tax money on, in this "for the people, by teh people" country.
Because when it gets right down to it, that's really what the elected official has to work with, the peoples tax money. And if the people are defining how the money is to be used, then that will eliminate the majority of the voting and political problems.
include a statement as to how the government is to use your tax money when you pay taxes.
I think the idea here is that by using as much non-custom software as possible, and since packages from any reputable source will be digitally signed (debian packages, windows packages, etc...) and that the signatures are part of the voting machine verification process to which all are privy.
The installation will rely on software which is widely used and tested in other applications, and code to which access is controlled by the gatekeepers of those applications (as enforced by digital signatures)
The problem for the bad people is to:
1) become contributors to a key package.
2) make contributions of vulnerabilities in such a way that they are not spotted by the maintainers of the components.
3) ???
4) Profit!
This is a much, much, higher bar to getting a hack in, than just finding any issue in 100k lines of custom application code, as is present in current commercial implementations.
or.. they have to make use of vulnerabilities which are un-known (0-day) because anything else will be patched. still a lot higher bar than today.
The voting machine people should welcome their
open source overlords, because once they become just widget makers, the bright lights will go look somewhere else!
Why not simply make voting a public action? I'm voting for Obama. There. Done.
Because that opens it up to vote buying and voter intimidation.
If Bill Gates promised everyone $1000 to vote for him, he could buy 56,000,000 votes which would put him in the White House.
For intimidation, you don't have to intimidate everyone - just a small percentage in a few key states. Imagine if the CEO of WalMart told their employees, "If you work in Ohio, and don't vote the Right Way, you'll be fired." Even if it isn't an official, enforceable policy, it will still have a large percentage of employees worried for their jobs come their next performance review - and they will vote accordingly. With over 2 million employees, even 10% of WalMart employees changing their vote could affect the outcome of the election.
That's assuming that people with baseball bats don't just show up at your house and tell you How You Will Vote - Or Else.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
Security-ly speaking, when it comes to voting machines, the software itself is a "hard point", meaning that it is actually quite difficult to leverage in such a way as to alter voting results *without suspicion of foul play*--even if it isn't open source.
Strangely in this case, the hardware itself is a soft point. (meaning everything from NVRAM to the touch display) It's trivial to misalign a touch screen on purpose, for example, and it can always be passed off as an error without drawing any meaningful suspicion.
So, while this python idea is of course a good one, it is a mistake to believe that it would actually fix anything on its own.
Why can't the US do what we do in Canada? You don't have to make this complicated.
In Canada, we show up to our polling station with our voter card, show the card and receive a ballot. We take the ballot, which has the names of the candidates and their party in large font very clearly, and put an X in the big circle beside the candidate we're voting for.
Thats it! No fancy machines, no complicated forms, and no computers to go wrong or be hacked.
See this image:
http://www.elections.ca/yth/images/sample_ballot.gif
I'll Find You Peer, If It's The Last Thing I Do!!!!
I hope that I am not the only one who is amazed that 500 lines of Python code and a 200 page thesis paper that explains my methodology gets me a PhD at Berkley.
I hope he did something else, that I don't know about, like recompile and harden a Unix kernel/ develop his own minimum OS for it to run on and dig through the bugs to determine the security flaws that would exist if he was to use Python.
For the first time in my life, I am glad that I am not pursuing a graduate degree in computer science. If that is what it takes, I think Cmdr Taco should get a PhD for for giving us Slashdot. It is 10x more practical than "pvote" and is soundly implemented. When I think about it, Slashdot was near the front of web 2.0 because he provided a geek means of social interaction, maintains relevance to those in the computer industry, and wastes my time when I am bored.
Crap! I just kissed my karma good-bye.
we should give Open Source a go at it. But I don't want a half baked job. If Open Source goes for it... It's ALL or NOTHING. Plus it is not like we didn't give all the others a chance.
But how do you know that the machine recorded your vote correctly? It could display your vote correctly, print out a correct receipt, but secretly increase the other candidate's tally. If just, say, 3 percent of votes get misattributed, chances are that no one will notice and no re-count will take place. The election will still have been tampered with in a significant way.
Don't whistle while you're pissing.
Almost every place I've ever voted has had optical scans, generally of the connect the arrow type. They mail out sample ballots (marked sample and on different paper, no funny business there) several weeks ahead of time. You walk in with your voting card and/or proof of ID (the laws are getting stricter and require both in many places, now), the volunteers (almost always old people, setup so representatives of both major parties are present) mark your name off as voting and hand you an official ballot. This ballot should match the sample you got in the mail, or there'd be PR hell to pay.
You walk over to the booth, generally a portable table with a cardboard privacy screen fitted around the top. There's a pen of the proper type in the booth -- you can ask to have it replaced if necessary. For each race or proposition, it tells you how many you can mark -- for some state races you can select multiple candidates and the top X number are picked -- and you mark what you wish. For most candidate races (in most states) there's also a blank entry you can mark, and write-in your choice.
You don't have to vote for all races or propositions. If you screw up, you take the screwed up ballot back (using the privacy procedures below) and they give you another. (I've never actually screwed up, but this is what the prominently posted instructions say to do.)
When you are done, there's either a privacy cover (if the cards are printed on both sides) or instructions tell you to turn the marked sides in. You leave the booth and return to the sign-in area, where another volunteer takes the ballot and feeds it into an optical-scan machine right there -- you watch them do it and hear it beep and increment the ballot count. Again at this point, if it fails to read (tho I've never had that happen), you can get a new ballot and try again. The ballot itself is deposited in a lock-box for recounts, if necessary.
Many states have a no-reason-necessary early voting allowed policy. You can either request an absentee ballot and either mail it in or take it to an authorized polling place up to poll closing time on the date of the main vote, or go in and early-vote at the county recorder's office. A few elections ago I did just that, requesting and getting an absentee ballot in the mail, which I filled out, sealed in the provided envelope, and dropped by my normal polling place on the day of the vote. They had a lock-box for them. It was much more convenient than voting as normal, but I missed the voting ritual and it felt kind of weird watching the results come in that nite having not actually voted that day.
States differ in how they check the ballots, but Arizona (where I am now) at least, requires an audit of several (IIRC two) percent of the precincts, randomly chosen (the "random" process of choosing them is encoded in the law, with at minimum witnesses from both parties, both to the choice and to the verifications, the audited precincts are not known previous to the vote so can't be avoided that way). These audits hand verify the count of the optical scan machines.
This system seems pretty reliable to me. I still can't understand why the entire nation doesn't just go opti-scan, as the machines can be used to count and get quick results as necessary, while the paper trail is there for anyone wishing to verify things.
The biggest problem I've heard about, doing it this way, is the lock-boxes disappearing a couple of times. Each one holds a few hundred votes. Of course, there's an accountability trail, but as they say, **** happens. Unfortunately, that's a problem for pretty much any after-the-fact verifiable system. But those cases are few and far between, it seems, and I've not heard of any of them actually affecting an outcome. There have been a few cases of other oddities as well, but nothing even close to the unverified touch-screen issues that seem to come up every year.
BTW, I've worked with touch screens, and whoever came up with the idea of having the untrained public v
Duncan
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master,
and if you use the program, he is your master."
R Stallman
And considering they worked well for 100 years, there is no reason to switch. Of course, money changes people's minds, which is why we see that next year New York has scheduled to completely remove them and replace them with unreliable crap.
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
The best voting machines I've seen use jelly beans and glass jars. Put the RED jelly bean in the RIGHT jar to vote for the REPUBLICAN. Put the BLUE jelly bean in the LEFT jar to vote DEMOCRAT. Put GREEN jelly bean in CENTER jar to vote OTHER. To ABSTAIN your vote, EAT JELLY BEAN. Which ever jar has the most jelly beans is the winner.
Oh... btw, with this voting machine corruption tastes oh soooooo good.
greed@All_Evils:~#
Apart from transparency, the other possible advantage of open-source is community involvement. With the success or participation seen in the Linux and Mozilla community, you would think that with something as import as voting. There would be an non-profit organization setup to create systems to achieve these goals.
Pvote sounds like a good start. The most important part of any electronic voting system is that it prints a paper copy of the vote that has been cast.
Obviously, the program could be comprimised to print the vote correctly but record something different but if a recount is requested the paper should be counted. If there is a discrepancy it should be investigated.
Political parties have a fairly good idea of how the vting will go (at least in Ireland and Britan) In the case of Ireland the Tally Men - the people from the parties who watch the counting process, will know to a fraction of a percent how the voting is going and the local knowledge will spot if the votes in a box from a particular area are not going as expected. I'm sure that the American political parties are at least as spohisticated as that.
Basically, you let a machine do the grunt work and have a paper trail to ensure that it is accurate.
a worn gear in a mechanical voting machine to do the same. A human could 'mis-count'...
the solution is always the same, multiple counts should be routine. Ideally, another computer system could OCR the printed receipts... now sure the bad people can modify two systems, but it's starting to get complicated
Voting isn't a (*(&^ing nail, stop trying to throw your coding hammer at it! This has gotten to be an example of obsessive compulsive disorder with these schemes. This is crazy. Open source or not, unless there is an independent deep forensics investigation of every single computerized voting kiosk at the end of the vote period, including disassembling the chips on the machine and all that stuff, it can *not* be verified in a timely, cheap and thorough manner. Oh, a "paper trail"? Why yes, let's look at that "new idea" to "insure" and "verify" the computerized vote! A plain empty box CAN be verified at the start of the voting day by many people looking inside and going "yep, empty!" And a paper trail is exactly what you get start to finish with plain paper ballots, no stupid computer and expense needed. Yes, examples in the past of ballot box stuffing, still way easier to keep tabs on it then running everything through obfuscated layers of chips and code. Paper ballots and empty boxes are WAY MORE the lesser of (in)security evils when it comes to voting, let alone being loads cheaper when it comes to co$t$. Empty box per precinct=ten bucks max, what do these computerized schemes cost, and how much has been wasted on them so far and how much "irregularities" do we get to read about and enjoy before this sinks in as just a bad idea overall?
Why not simply make voting a public auction? I'm voting for Obama. There. Done.
there, fixed that for you...
First off Germany has a relatively simple ballot, its only complex because it's evaluated in a complicated way. The US to begin with is large with diverse kinds of governing bodies, and has far far far far more elected offices. So comparing it to German elections is silly.
Second Pvote is not 500 lines. it's 500 lines sitting on top of hundreds of thousands of lines of interpreter code, device drivers, and the tens of millions of lines of Linux.
Third writing a voting system, while non trivial, is not the hard part.
The hard part is twofold
1) creating a viable bussiness model for it's distribution, component agregation, certification, and service it.
2) designing a voting PROCESS so that you don't have to trust the third parties that build or maintain these or the people that operate them. Things have to be transparently secure.
Now the OVC system OPen voting Consortium has had a python based system for years. it's open source too. But more importantly it is designed so we dont' have to trust the programmers (it produces an intermediate paper ballot and physically separates the vote selection hardware from the vote counting hardware ---just as optical scan does.) And it has a well thought out and viable bussiness model that will allow for it's practical distribution and maintainence.
That is what the world needs. so if you want to help. Donate to OVC. They are struggling right now not because they can't write code, but because they have to win acceptance at the state level before any company is going to start marketing the system.
OVC has a very clever bussiness model in which the software is free and open, but companies support it's development through fees paid to certify their OEM component based systems as compliant with the OVC standards.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Open voting consortium
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
As others have pointed out, private voting is a precaution to prevent bribery or intimidation of voters.
The fact that voting is not explicitly required to be carried out with pen and paper, and votes to be counted manually, is a vulnerability that is currently exploited, under the pretense of following technological progress.
Even if some democracy were pretty old and required papyrus ballots where votes are cast with a pointy stone, the tampering resilience would, imho, still outweigh the extra overhead.
But there you have it: Voting machines. Even if the voting software were entirely flawless, you couldn't possible have nearly the same level of security as hand-counted ballots (with everyone being able to watch and verify the process). Manipulation is still possible at the hardware level, or by direct data modification.
Why not simply make voting a public action? I'm voting for Obama. There. Done.
Because that opens it up to vote buying and voter intimidation.
Call me irresponsible. I don't vote. Dem Rep Ind other...I've been around a while and all I see is the country and the world getting more and more screwed up; even while "democracy" is breaking out all over. But...correct me if I'm wrong...Don't they have curtains at voting machines so your vote can't be observed? If you choose to talk to an exit pollster...and tell them the truth...don't the consequences fall upon the voter for choosing to make his/her choice public? If you close the curtain, make your choices, and leave there's no way for anyone to know how you voted, unless someone's breaking into the ballot box and checking your check marks immediately after you voted. If that's not how it works, then the whole election scam/scheme is even more of a waste of time than I had ever thought.
Indeed, the secret ballot is a more sacred institution than 100% accuracy and reliability.
The voting process is way too important and way too tempting to those who would corrupt it to abandon a simple, verifiable paper ballot for an all-too-easily-hacked computerized system. Reliability should not be abandoned for convenience in an area so vital to a functioning democracy.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I love the way people ignore the flaws with paper voting and highlight any slight flaw with electronic voting.
If someone wants to tamper with paper ballots there are countless ways of doing it, especially for counters. You can stuff the ballot box, you can spoil ballots, you can replace paper votes.
Those are just as likely as someone getting through a tamper proof seal, opening up the voting machine, connecting up your own software and then replacing the information with your own that hopefully matches a voter tally you've no way of predicting. All whilst hoping people haven't noticed that you're taking 20 minutes to do a 30 second vote and are ignoring the funny noises being made.
I'm not saying it's without flaws but potentially it can be far more secure than paper voting. Want a paper trail? Have the voting machines phone home every time a vote has been placed and store voting results locally and remotely via a secure connection. Have the remote servers (read only) access to the memory and file system of the voting machine and check at random intervals to ensure the software passes checksums.
Ultimately at some point you're going to have to trust that someone isn't corrupt. The coders, the counters and to some extent the voters.
If you want total anonymity of voters, you're leaving yourself open to election fraud, it's impossible to completely eliminate it because at some point, you're relying on a person or a group of people not being corrupt. This is the same for any anonymous method of voting.
Where I vote, the counting process is simple and plain public. No "selected people allowed to watch" or such complicated bullshit. If you want to, you just enter the election office and watch the election officials counting the ballot. I never saw a problem with that.
I'm getting tired of all recent posts about eVoting and it's problems.
I wish to invoke Occam's razor and simplify the whole thing.
Problem: We want votes tabulated faster, and more accurately, but we do not fully trust automated voting technology yet.
Solution: Both automated and paper trail voting record.
Here's what I envision. A closed network at each polling place. 1 server connected to multiple terminals. The voter walks in, taps the screen and casts their vote. The client sends this info back to the server, and kicks out a small scrap of paper with their full vote tally (just office: name) and a 1- or 2-d barcode with the same information on it. The voter drops that little piece of paper into a vote box.
Now, when voting time is done, we use the server to tabulate the vote, and submit it up the chain to a larger server via a secure method (gpg encrypted xml file, a VPN connection of some sort, whatever) with only the vote tallies themselves. Candidate A got x votes, Candidate B got y votes, etc. along with an indicator as "this info came from this precinct" attached.
Now, assume there was question as to if this info was correct. We go back to the paper box, and rather than recount by hand, just have the voter scan that paper ballot, confirm the information is correct (it's printed right there, obviously), and confirm it. While this step would take time, it would ensure a papertrail of real votes. Then, resubmit the data.
I voted yesterday. This is the first time I've voted early. I, too, had concerns about the veracity of the process. I spoke to one of the poll workers, and he explained there is a paper trail. I saw that in action. After running through the touch-screen process, my ballot was printed on a paper roll, and I had time to examine every choice made. I also had the option of changing my vote prior to finalizing it, even though the printing process had begun. The machine printed a barcode at the bottom of my printed ballot, and the roll scrolled to blank paper for the next voter in line. The paper was under plexiglass, so I was not able to actually touch the paper. Overall, I felt the process was secure enough. BUT, my opinion would be the oppsite without the paper trail.
..and trust. Computerized voting verification is PhD level software AND hardware guys with electronic microscopes per every single machine per every single precinct and district and so on, to even start to verify. Paper ballots start to finish, anyone who can read and do simple arithmetic, ie, most of the voting public, and it can be verified. One group is pretty small and couldn't be done realistically, the other group is how we did it for hundreds of years and could still work just fine as long as there is a minimum interest in the results.
Any voter can be present at the end of the day to be a witness to the count with paper ballots, and you can volunteer to be an official as well, which means the group of people you need to trust is only one person, which is YOU, and the guy standing next to you only has to trust one person, himself, if he is a witness as well at the end of the day. Versus how many people could look at machine code or C code or any other obscure "language" and then how do you verify all the chips on the computer? Who guards those computers during the non voting period so they aren't tampered with, versus staring at an empty box? No guards needed on empty boxes, because it is unlocked and opened at the beginning of the day and anyone there in line can look at it, and typically the first person in line signs off on it, I have done that myself "yo, empty!".
NO ONE can just stare at a computer voting terminal and "verify" it without deep forensics, it can't be done, if anyone can do it they can apply to Randi for his million buck prize because you'd have to be 100% psychic to do that. And if you want to insure some vote using something similar to how we conduct electronic transactions with money, it throws the entire concept of anonymity out the window, because you must tie a vote to a single individual, then you still wind up with the machine count having to be verified and back to the forensics, it just adds a further level of complexity and possible points of compromise. Nuts.
KISS works for a lot of things, no need to rube goldberg it up just because it is possible. Voting is too important to trust it to being just a videogame. If people got spare time and want to code and can't come up with a project on their own, no problem! They can go check out sourceforge and find something else to work on.
What you're talking about is often erroneously referred to as a "paper trail". That term is harmful because it is too vague. Diebold sells a DRE (direct recording equipment; the computer records and tabulates the votes it collects) which produces a "paper trail": a long receipt-like strip of paper which ostensibly lists all the voters who used that machine since the last session. The problem with this is it is not voter-verified. Only the election judges get to see it and therefore it is entirely useless, truly nothing but a waste of paper.
What voters need is better described as a voter-verified paper ballot. A piece of paper clearly listing their vote(s) which will be, as you said, manually counted by human beings (never computer counted).
Nobody needs election returns faster than humans can count them. Retention enables recounts. We should retain these voter-verified paper ballots at least until the next election, if not as long as possible.
We also need the software the machines run to be completely free software because free software voting machines allow counties to make the changes they need to handle changes in their electorate. If some district wants an election that isn't counted as first-past-the-post, they will need the freedom to change their voting machines to accommodate this. Nobody should have to beg the proprietor for improvements to their voting systems. Counties should be able to get expertise wherever that expertise exists and only a free software voting system enables this.
A few years ago I served on the appointed committee to help the Champaign County board select a voting machine. We saw some voting machines demonstrated for us, tried them out, and decided what to recommend to the elected county board. The entire affair was picking the best of the worst. The allowable range of debate had been narrowed for us before we began when we were informed that we were only allowed to consider equipment approved by the state of Illinois. Toward the end of our tenure we learned that one of the machines we had been allowed to choose (and ultimately did choose, an ES&S optical scan reader/printer machine for preparing ballots) was not yet so approved. That machine has been deployed in at least two elections since we made our recommendation. Voters can optionally use it to fill out the voter-verified paper ballot before depositing their paper ballot into another ES&S machine which counts and stores the ballots.
Digital Citizen
The presidential race probably won't have as many problems. The polls are predicting an Obama shut-out.
I seem to recall that that media predictions were a major contributor to Gore losing the election in 2000. Never stop running until the race is completely over.
We are all just people.
While Germany has fewer elected officials a ballot can still be non-trivial with Bundestag, state and community elections all on the same day. Popular initiatives are on the rise in recent years and several states have complicated their ballot (IRV and a process we call Kumulieren/Panaschieren), so the ballot will get larger with time.
The argument that one needs voting machines, because of the many elections is a total non sequitur to the complaint that people don't trust machines to count their vote. And rightly so. The only good reason for voting machines is helping disabled people that have problems with a paper ballot. Even then a print-out of the vote should be counted manually.
Just throw more hardware, err, I mean man-power at the problem if the number of ballots is too large. There's also no reason that local, state and federal elections have to be on the same day. Having state initiatives on the ballot with a federal election is suspect as well. Spread them out throughout the year and the system will scale better.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
What polls are you reading!? It's not even kinda close right now, unless you look at that one outlier poll with an unrepresentative sample of younger voters.
Even the mainstream news outlets, which only call it for a candidate when they're 10% ahead, show Obama winning. The most likely EV total is 375 (and you need 270 to win).
That said, you're right that both candidates and the news would rather we treat it as if it's close. After all, if people don't bother to vote, the election could swing big time.
But I expect that people actually will vote and that it won't even be kinda sorta close. Rather, there will be lots of recriminations in the Republican party and McCain will come off as the next Goldwater (at least in terms of EVs).
One points out a related story at NPR about a voting program called PVOTE, written in Python and only 500 lines long.
from __future__ import obama
If you have 1) you do not need 2)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Good hat there are no states where you can only vote per mail and thus make this possible.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Dude, the OVC and Pvote are not competitors.
The OVC uses Pvote as part of their system.
The problem with simple manual counting is actually that a significant number of ballots will be spoiled as cast. That is, there will be lots of ballots marked in such a way that the counters will disagree over what the voter intended. And, furthermore, there will be cases were the ballot design, intentionally or otherwise, will lead more voters who want to cast one particular vote to spoil their ballots than some other particular vote, meaning that discarding the spoiled ballots will favor one option over another.
This comes down to the fact that, after the ballot is separated from the voter, it is too late to get the voter to fix anything, but before the ballot is separated from the voter, anonymity requires that nobody else see it. Machines can solve this by examining the ballot and making sure that it is clear before the voter leaves.
The other problem is that blind people have the right to vote, and can't use pen and paper effectively without human assistance. And they have the right to have an anonymous ballot, even the only blind voter at that polling place.
A secret, paper ballot is 100% accurate and reliable. The voter makes sure that their selections are correct, (although some do mess this up), and then it goes into a sealed box that is monitored by representatives from all parties. All sides can count the ballots and a mismatch in the counts results in a recount.
It's fast, simple and proven. I have no idea why everyone is so wrapped up in the idea of touch screens and electronic voting.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
First off Germany has a relatively simple ballot, its only complex because it's evaluated in a complicated way. The US to begin with is large with diverse kinds of governing bodies, and has far far far far more elected offices. So comparing it to German elections is silly.
First off, Germany has about a quarter of the inhabitants of the United States, and while it is not geographically as large as the U.S., regional variations in government make it far more comparable to the U.S. than centralist democracies like France.
Our voting system just seems fairly straight-forward because we did what any computer scientist would do, we divided the problem into multiple manageable sub-problems.
We have separate elections for:
- European Parliament
- Chancellor / Bundestag
- Ministerpraesident (governor) / State parliament
- Mayor / City council or Landrat
The first three are dead easy, the last one completely depends on where you live and can require square-meter Paper-Ballots from hell with fifty candidates or _substantially_ more.
And that's the trick. Make those elections which are most important to the well-being of your democracy the easiest to fill out.
Oh. And make voting matter in states that are not swing-states. And make voter-registration a non-issue perhaps. That could be helpful as well.
This is so obviously true. It's too bad that Congress doesn't get it. They're planning on passing a law to take away the right of secret balloting in union elections. I guess this will allow the labor goons to implement 'quality control'.
The _only_ practicable and moderately secure way to do an election is by pen and paper and manual counting. It's done all over the world and it works near flawlessly.
Paper ballots are prone to all the problems inherent in any physical writing medium: stuffing, tampering, switching, loss, defacement, mutilation, illegibility ... just to name a few.
Manual counting is so notoriously difficult to do without error, that one must perform multiple, independent counts just to verify the accuracy of a tally.
Paper ballots are no panacea, and have their own, very long history of problems, abuses, and issues.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I think you may have a reading comprehension problem. The link you provide does not say OVC uses pvote. It says they both use pre-rendered interfaces. The same is said on the Pvote site.
This has been solved long time ago in Debian - every vote is public, BUT all personal information is replaced by a hash. At the time of voting you get issued an unique identifying string that only you know. In the public tally your vote will be next to that string, so you can verify your vote, but noone else can link that vote back to you. You can even give someone a different hash providing total deniability.