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."

Comments

This is going to be a close race.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Still not transparent

[Casandro]

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.

Re:Still not transparent

[TapeCutter]

"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."

May I just add that those who don't understand this are doomed to screw things up until they do.

Re:Still not transparent

[Ritchie70]

Where I vote, we do use optical scan ballots. They hand you a piece of paper and a magic marker, and you go connect the two parts of an arrow.

Once you're done voting, it goes right into the scanner, which will complain if there's a mis-vote (too many votes in a race, race missed, etc.) If you intentionally skipped a race, you can tell the old man by the machine that you under-voted on purpose when it complains.

I assume that the machine is not also a shredder, so the ballots could be recounted, either fairly quickly by scanner or, if different results are obtained from multiple runs through the scanner, by hand.

I think the statistical sampling is still a good idea though. It wouldn't catch minor fraud or error, but it would at least give you an indication that the result is probably about right.

Everything needs a sanity check. If you use your calculator to multiply 53 x 58 you know that should be somewhere around 50 x 60 so if you wind up with 13,592 you're going to try again. We should apply the same level of sense to determining who is going to run our country.

Re:Still not transparent

[karstux]

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.

I'd like to add that the counting must not only be manual, but also public. Everyone with an interest in the election, including the voters, must be able to verify the process. That can never happen with voting machines.

I don't get it. Nearly everyone with professional knowledge of computer science and/or hardware, including technology enthusiasts who'd otherwise embrace any new technology, advise against voting machines, because they know that the necessary level of trust and security is impossible to reach. Why don't the politicians for once listen to those who genuinely know better?

It's not like voting machines have any significant inherent advantages over pen-and-paper voting. I guess they are a bit faster in counting. But sacrifice the trust in democracy (and a couple of billions of dollars) for that little convenience? Absurd!

Re:Still not transparent

[foobsr]

Germany has one of the most complicated voting systems in the world, still we have official results in the papers, the next day

But with voting machines our trusted politicians would have the results even before the elections. Just figure!

CC.

Re:Still not transparent

[moxley]

"I don't get it. Nearly everyone with professional knowledge of computer science and/or hardware, including technology enthusiasts who'd otherwise embrace any new technology, advise against voting machines, because they know that the necessary level of trust and security is impossible to reach. Why don't the politicians for once listen to those who genuinely know better?"

I think that the answer to that is pretty self-evident:

It is because their primary concerns are not accuracy and "what the people want," I mean, it's not like the government and these people running for president don't have access to smart people and good technology (not necessarily electronic). It's not like they don't know what makes elections fair and verifiable and what systems are prone to manipulation.

Their primary concerns are control, keeping the status quo and pleasing their corporate/govt benefactors,(who are not "the people.")

So the real question then becomes: why is this tolerated?

Re:Why not vote publicly?

[Bender0x7D1]

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.

Give it up!

[zogger]

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?

Re:Give it up!

[he-sk]

I agree completely. What people forget is that the PUBLIC counting of the secret ballot is what gives confidence to paper-and-pencil ballots. You simply can't do that with computers.

I understand that lazy bureaucrats think that voting machines are the best thing since sliced bread, because in their mind sacrifycing an evening every four years to ensure the integrity of the vote is simply too much to ask for.

But every computer scientist who thinks that voting machines are a good idea should read Ken Thompson's paper on trusting computers (the C compiler with a backdoor without it being present in the source for the compiler).