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Paper Ballots Will Return In MD and VA
cheezitmike writes "According to a story in the Washington Post, 'Maryland and Virginia are going old school after Tuesday's election. Maryland will scrap its $65 million electronic system and go back to paper ballots in time for the 2010 midterm elections. In Virginia, localities are moving to paper after the General Assembly voted last year to phase out electronic voting machines as they wear out. "The battle for the hearts and minds of voters on whether electronic systems are good or bad has been lost," Brace said. The academics and computer scientists who said they were unreliable "have won that battle."'"
Every time you get the urge to use that tag, think of all the idiocy in the world - Sarah Palin might become president, damages for copying a CD are in the $100Ks, the patent system, the supreme court, credit default swaps, bankers not in jail, etc.
This story is nothing more than an "isolatedpocketofcommonsense"
Will that be paper or plastic?
welcome the return or our hanging-chad overlords.
Too bad CT won't do it in time to put Bob Barr on the ballot, since the state and court claimed that it would take too long to reprint paper ballots and reprogram electronic voting machines with his name, even though he met all requirements on time.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
The academics and computer scientists who said they were unreliable "have won that battle."'
Damn those stupid, fearful academics and computer scientists! Always standing in the way of progress!
Seriously, though, what's the tone they're going for there?
And due to low voter turnout, we figure no one cares if we phase out paper voting too.
God spoke to me.
I'm from VA and I've been voting on paper ballots since the 2000 election. We use an optical scan system that is fairly foolproof. It counts but there's a basket of paper ballots underneath it.
I paid Diebold good money for thousands of votes in those districts in that election.
If they don't deliver I expect my money back!
If the guy with his pilot's license says that his Cessna can't fly a tank, listen to him. If the majority of computer professionals say using a computer to replace paper ballots is a stupid idea, listen to them.
People who can't program their VCRs (how long before people stare at me when I mention "VCR"?) shouldn't make decisions about the suitability of high technology for mission critical tasks.
SIG: HUP
electronic voting machines are unreliable. It is the evidence itself which shows they are unreliable and prone to losing/changing votes.
Do a search and you will find issues from the current early voting process where machines aren't recording votes correctly. Add in the documented cases from around the country where votes were simply "lost", and you don't need an academic to tell you you need a verifiable paper trail, not the assurance of a company, that votes will be recorded correctly.
It's funny how you get a paper trail to prove your purchases at the grocery/drug/clothes/whatever store, but people are fighting tooth-and-nail NOT to have a paper trail when it comes to recording votes.
The simplest solution is to use an electronic machine for people to select their choices but at the end, provide a sheet with all their votes recorded which they deposit in a box. The machine votes are recorded but you have a paper trail in case electronic votes are "lost".
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Oh oh! This will be like 9/11 times 2000. That's right, 1,822,000!
Actually, 9/11 * 2000 = 1636.3636363636
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
The biggest problem with "e-Voting" is they tried to make it "all E."
Computer-assisted voting for the blind and physically disabled is a must.
A computer that takes the voter's choice and spits out a computer-AND human-readable ballot, plus a separate machine for blind people to use to read back their ballot to them, plus a separate machine to count the votes, would meet the requirements of allowing the blind and disabled to vote as much as the current high-tech systems do while providing the paper trail the old systems do.
As a bonus, non-disabled voters and voters comfortable with human assistance do not require the use of any technology at the time they cast their votes. If the power goes out, the polls can remain open. This means polling stations can scale to more voting booths very cheaply.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm still not convinced that electronic voting is a bad thing. I certainly agree that the current implementations are very poor but I think we should work on them rather than writing off electronic voting completely.
Elections should be based on the popular vote, not the outdated electoral college system and electronic voting is really the only way to make it happen.
The technology for making such a system already exits. I think the best approach would be an open source approach where the design of the entire voting system is available to any and everyone. Everyone from security experts to laymen could understand how the system works and help to improve it.
I've used the machines in MD, and I like them. They're pretty clear and easy to use. What I really don't like, however, is the lack of a paper backup. It's such a simple thing, just add a printout which can be easily read and, if needed, optically scanned. That way you can verify the vote totals if there are any questions, and you get the advantages of the machines. I'd much rather they spent the money to add the printers, if possible, than scrap the whole system. If printers can't be added, then ok, get rid of them because there's too much uncertainty over results.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
From Springfield's local paper:
Free Martian Whores!
Finally some rationality is returning to the electoral system. Maybe someday we can move to a fairer system of voting, like approval voting or rank voting. One can dream...
Voters don't care how they vote, as long as it's easy and they can have confidence that their vote will be counted.
Considering that these states implemented relatively untested systems in a slap-dash manner that showed no regard for the integrity of the vote, I don't think it's fair to blame this on "academics and computer scientists".
Done properly (as in, with a physical record), electronic voting is a good alternative to our increasingly antiquated voting systems. However, the combination of unscrupulous businessmen and ethically/intellectually-challenged election officials led these states to spend oodles of money on sub-standard products.
The predictable (and predicted) end result was a process built more around satisfying the vendors desire to push units than satisfying the public's need for a reliable vote. Then the manure hit the wind-blowing machine and vote tallies came out screwy. People started to notice this particular gov't boondoggle and what we're seeing is elected officials starting to sweat.
Unfortunately it appears the lesson they took from this was that e-voting is bad bad bad (look away and never mention it again) and they're going Luddite.
Maybe in 10 years they'll get the nerve to try again, this time with an open, verifiable system that we can trust. Or, more likely. some other snake-oil salesman will take the opportunity to bilk the public trust for more millions of dollars.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
The same Democrat-controlled state legislature originally blocked our previous (Republican) governor's efforts to get rid of these machines. Now that we have a Democrat governor, they're getting rid of the machines so as to take credit for it. They're doing the same thing with slot machines -- the previous governor tried to get slot machines legalized, and the state legislature blocked him. Now, slots are up for referendum with the support of our current (Democrat) governor and the Legislature who had previously opposed them.
Not that it makes a damn bit of difference (we're fucked anyway), but I just wanted folks to know all the facts before they start rambling about the evils of the Republican party here in MD. Maryland is about as solidly Democrat as you can get -- the huge black majorities in Baltimore City and Prince Georges County have ensured that for decades.
The only reason they're doing it is because people don't have attention spans long enough to wait 'til morning to know the result.
No sig today...
Look at FLA in 2,000 *no* system is without serious problems electronic voting can and should be done but with the following requirements:
1) No network!
2) Two receipts are printed one for the voter and one into a lock box a voter can always challenge their vote if they think things got messed up.
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
There are petition drives in place to do this in other states as well. Transparent Voting is a nascent group that wants to require paper ballots in Missouri as well.
They have the option to vote with machines, but the vast majority of balloting is old-school paper ballots (the "connect the head and tail of the arrow with a line" method).
One day we will have mathematical assurances that our votes are being counted properly by electronic voting machines. Cryptographers have been working on mathematically proven cryptographically safe voting schemes for years. (See also Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography.) Secure algorithms already exist, although they are not yet fully practical.
I repeat myself for emphasis: there are methods to produce a secret, secure, election that is verifiably correct to an arbitrary degree of certainty. If you don't understand how, do everyone a favor and follow the links and read the material.
We need to consider voting a cryptographic problem and a research area of critical interest. A CERN-like multi-national government funding agency should work to develop a practical, economical, open-source technological solution with mathematically proven security. Once it is developed we can distribute it globally for free.
Electronic Voting can be much better than paper ballots. We just need to stop being stupid about it.
The Electoral College system has been losing popularity in recent years (notably among Democrats, for some odd reason *grin*), but I actually think it's a good thing, and here's why: No election is ever going to be perfect. In order to declare a winner with certainty, you need a very certain tally of the votes. I think we should be able to get the counted results for an election to be *very* reliable, in terms of errors, but I don't think you can ever achieve *perfection*.
When you have extremely close elections, like in the 2000 USA election between Bush and Gore, (witness how much havoc was wreaked by "Hanging Chads" and other problems), it's almost impossible to get a nationwide total that people will agree is valid, particularly if the difference between the candidates is less than 1/10 of 1 percent. You get trapped in 'recount' limbo, and 'rules lawyer' hell (where advocates for either side try to argue why certain ballots should be counted one way or another, trying to guess the intent of a vote with a hanging chad, or trying to figure out if some votes were made by people illegally voting multiple times with the names and addresses of dead people, or the same person voting multiple times under different addresses in different precincts.
The electoral college system helps 'smooth out' our inability to get *perfect exact totals*, by making the election be a district-by-district contest, where it's usually easier to decide which candidate got more votes in an individual district or state, than it is to determine the exact national total of votes. It's sort of like analog vs. digital recording of data: theoretically, analogue would be an exact represention, perfect, but we find in reality that analog recordings suffer from imperfections which distort them; digital, on the other hand, while never a truly exact/perfect representation of the data, gives us a way to record the data in such a way that we can compensate for later distortions which are introduced during transmission or duplication, and usually get much closer to perfection than analog allows.
(I would like to note that, technically, right now, the 'districts' are entire states; I do think we should break it down into smaller districts, like congressional districts or something - I don't like winner-takes-all delegate allocations at the state level, because that's too 'low resolution').
With the electoral college, if there is a problem with voting in one state or district, you can at least narrow down the 'fight' over recounts, etc, to the state or district where there is a problem or extremely close contest and don't have to worry about any other states/districts. If we went to a popular national vote, if you have a close election, recounts and rules lawyering will have to go on in every single district in the nation. That sounds ugly, and expensive to me, and more susceptible to fraud/manipulation, because the nations attention will be spread out over every state/district, instead of just worrying if the votes in say, Florida, or Ohio, or New Mexico, are accurate, and if there was fraud in those individual areas. It allows us to focus on specific places, instead of *everywhere*.
There are other countries in the world? When did that happen?
Next you're going to be telling me they all don't speak English as a native language. Everyone can understand English if you say it loud enough.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I suggested to a friend that when a ballot was filed that the voter get a receipt with a UID , a Unique Identification number that could be used to check against the tallied votes which would be published with the UID and no personal information to determine if their vote was assigned properly. I don't trust the electronic or paper ballots, because the process is unnecessarily obscure with the stated attempt to protect the voter. Clearly there is corruption and if there is a CREEP, then there will be a way. I don't know how the systems are implemented, but I have never been given a way to verify that my votes were applied in the way I intended.
There certainly is no technical reason why computer voting machines cannot be made reliable and robust.
But, there are several compelling social, political, legal, and technical reasons why such machines are a profoundly bad idea.
Computer hardware and software is created by people. The people who create the technology can, either unintentionally or intentionally, introduce "bugs" into the implementation. Those bugs can be undetectable by any possible amount of examination, verification, or testing. Those "bugs" can change the election results.
Second, some people have huge incentives to change the election results. A programmer who is in a position to introduce a "bug" into the software might be tempted by a bribe of several million (or billion) dollars. What some people call a "bug", other people call a "feature". The ability to make the machinery report the desired election results instead of the real election results would be quite a "feature" indeed. In fact, there is ample evidence that exactly that has happened, in several different models and brands of voting machinery.
Third, in order to convince ordinary people that their votes have been counted correctly, you have to prove to their satisfaction that the votes are counted correctly. Proof of correctness of any computer software is basically impossible. There are two basic problems: First, the number of logic combinations is too astronomical to actually verify all of them; Second, even if a proof could be written, ordinary people cannot understand it.
Finally, it is not enough for the machines to be merely reliable and robust. To be used for voting, where many trillions of dollars are at stake and could be decided by as little as one vote, they must be absolutely correct, absolutely reliable, and absolutely secure. Any one of those is an impossible requirement. Attempting to meet all three is just ludicrous.
My solution:
Voter places X on a piece of paper in a box beside the candidate's name.
Voter places paper in a steel box.
Box is taken to a location where it's counted along with all the other votes in that area by hand, under the watchful eye of party representatives and other observers.
TV channels are told to wait until the morning and be patient because making sure the right man is elected is a bit more important than the ratings of their election TV show or the impatience of the audience. This campaign has been going for a year, I for one would be willing to wait a day longer.
It works all over the world and there's never a word about doubts about whether or not the vote was counted correctly.
Hell, the hand counting in Ireland goes on for several days thanks to the Single Transferable Voting system, and goodness knows how long to decide which parties are going to get together and form a government.
I agree that it's a shame we have to go 'luddite' and go back to something as primitive as pencil and paper, but at the end of the day it's the best way to ensure that democracy's integrity is upheld. As long as there a voter's intention is translated into something as delicate as a magnetic charge on a disk, there's potential for abuse.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
why does voting have to be so complex? Just make a basic electric logic system with buttons for obama, mccain, and various state/country props. It should not be normal computers, it should not be paper, because either are easily corrupted.
I'm not saying the system would be foolproof, but I am saying that simplicity is stability.
I liked the electronic voting. Not having the simple touch screen will turn off some younger voters, and make voting take longer. All we needed was a paper printout backup. Also, in Maryland I thank you could already fill out on paper if you did not like the electronic voting.
um no 9-11*2000=-21991 (see arithmetic precedence)
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
"Voters don't care how they vote, as long as it's easy and they can have confidence that their vote will be counted."
You missed something. It doesn't matter if they are counted but are counted incorrectly. Stalin said it best. It goes something like this... He who votes decides nothing, He that counts the votes decides everything.
My district in Northern Virginia only got its first electronic voting machine in '04, and didn't make the complete switch until '06. If they're going to wait for the machines to wear out, it'll be decades.
And too, prior to the electronic machines, we used mechanical booths not paper, which worked perfectly fine, so I doubt they're actually going back to the equally problematic paper (punch card, scantron, or other) ballot.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
We still use the wheel, and that's a pretty old invention. "Old" is not necessarily "bad", or "good". The question is, "is this the most appropriate way to solve the problem"?
The DRE equipment was NEVER appropriate for voting. Those kinds of things are just a magician's prop, and completely untrustworthy for voting purposes. If you want to make it easy for ONE person to steal an entire election, they're perfect. If your purpose is an honestly-counted election, such machines cannot be trusted. "There's nothing up this sleeve... nothing up the other sleeve... oh look, here's a fixed election!! Betcha can't tell how I did it!"
They're not IGNORING computer technology; they'll use computers to tally up the votes. The difference is, the information will be on a permanent record (paper) so that recounts and cross-checks can be done easily. You can use a computer well, or foolishly. The old systems used computers in a foolish way; now they're trying to fix that.
I think that the states should get their money back for many of the voting machines. Practically ALL computer-knowledgeable people understand that computers are easily rigged, and thus many of the existing systems are fundamentally untrustworthy. Quoting John Willis is unconvincing; he may say he's an "elections expert", but it's clear that he does not understand the fundamentals of these new voting systems.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Why scrap them *after* the Presidendial election?
If I were a conspiracy theorist, who believed that the results of the elections were rigged or riggable through electronic voting machines, I might believe that the delay in replacing them is to get one last election through before scrapping them, since they know the jig is up on that scam.
It's not as though coming up with, and deploying a paper-based system is anything new, or requires any special rocket science...
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
That's because you didn't use an electronic voting machine to do the calculations.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
A paper trail is a must in a recount:
It is the paper ballots that will be recounted, and if necessary, recounted by hand.
Also, a paper trail deters gaming the system because it becomes only a matter of time before someone does a random audit and the cheaters get caught. Sure, people may cheat the system in low-profile elections or change the votes for purposes other than affecting the outcome of the race, such as winning a bet or making a non-close race appear close or a close race appear like a landslide, but getting away with cheating in a big-name close race will be much harder than if there is no paper ballot to manually recount.
A good statistical sampling can work but only up to a point. If someone rigs the counting-computers to bump Candidate A's totals up 0.1 percentage point, it will be a lot harder to detect than if he rigs it to raise the candidate's votes by 10 percentage points.
A good statistical sampling can say "Joe Candidate got 54,232 votes +/- 543 votes with a confidence interval of 95%, candidate B got 53,602 votes +/- 472 votes with a confidence interval of 95%" that's a good indication that a full recount is needed. If either of the samples is significantly different than the reported totals then it's a good indication the counting-program is broken or compromised and the ballots all need to be recounted by another method, possibly by hand.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It wouldn't solve all ills, but I think it'd be valuable to encourage "Approval Voting". Third parties have basically no chance to get any traction under the current voting system. In approval voting, you can "vote for more than one candidate if you so choose. The winner is the candidate that collects the most votes."
It's not perfect, but it has lots of advantages. Existing voting equipment can be used (including paper counted by machine), and it's easy to understand. I think it's much better than our current system, while still being simple to understand and apply.
Citizens for Approval Voting and Americans for Approval Voting have more info, if you're curious.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Giuliani'd already?
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
I'm in Texas and apparently 23% of Texans believe Obama is a Muslim.
Well, 75% of Muslims probably believe that all Texans are oil barons (excluding these guys of course), so that's only fair.
The above statement is actually less bigoted than it sounds. I had a co-worker once who was an immigrant from Belgium. His biggest problem with living in America was persuading his parents that the America he lived in bore no resemblance to the America they saw on their favorite TV shows, Dallas and Miami Vice.
The phrase I prefer to use is "good sense".
What is New York State using?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Imagine a democratic society where for every important matter people can be asked to vote electronically..
Dystopia springs to mind. A quagmire of indecision, scored with a barrage of special interests vying for your vote on the issue of the day. Eventually only the people with nothing better to do will end up making the decisions, perhaps during commercial breaks on daytime television.
Seriously, how about voting on modified Point of Sales systems? You press a button (no fancy touchscreens, real buttons with labels next to them), the machine spits out a slip of paper with your vote on it. You check the vote, if there should be an error, the friendly shop assistant uses her key to cancel your vote. If everything is OK, you drop the slip of paper (let's call it "ballot") into the usual sealed box.
Once the election is over, the machine spits out the tally.
In a random 10% sample of all voting places, the paper ballots are counted manually. For every polling station where there is a discrepancy between the electronic tally and the manual recount, recounts will be performed in two more polling stations. In cases of doubt, the paper ballot counts overules the electronic tally.
If anybody feels the need, they can organize a manual recount in specific places. Either they count themselves (under supervision) or they pay to have the ballots counted manually.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Electronic Voting can be much better than paper ballots. We just need to stop being stupid about it.
"Much"? Anyway, it doesn't help that mathematicians can prove it is secure, if I can't.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I agree with that there exist (though still in theory) such methods. But: Most people will have trouble understanding them. How can you believe results of elections if you don't understand that the result is correct? And also, how can you be sure that politicians implemented the correct procedure, if you don't understand it? Compared to these methods, the paper ballot method is very simple and not much less secure.
So, until there are nanoreplicators that can change existing ballots in a closed box, I don't think these methods will be necessary. I still find them intriguing, though.
You can tamper with paper easily, that's why everything except the marking of the ballot has to happen in public (checking that the ballot box is empty in the morning, locked and sealed during the day and that nobody except legitimate voters throw anything into it. The counting also happens in public under the eyes of representatives of all parties. Thus it would be easy to manipulate the election, but it would be just as easy to spot the fraud happening.
But how do you know just what happens inside a computer? Can a voter really be sure that the results where not pre-programmed?
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
It's an eventual outbreak of common sense: they're not doing it for another two years!
Anybody want my mod points?
If your proof of security can not be easily understood by a person with an IQ of 80 upon the first time you demonstrate that proof in 30 seconds or less then your proof is not valid.
Period.
But since you are sure (and maybe you can derive said proof yourself), you will want to argu about it.
You lose the argument.
Period.
If you still want to argue and demand my reasoning you still fail and your much vaunted proof is not even good for toilet paper.
Because, much as you believe that e-voting is the way to go, you are missing the point.
It isn't about proof, It isn't about "mathematical guarantees". It is all about perception. If a significant protion of people have no faith in the system, then the system will fail. I picked IQ 80 as a cut off point, but there is no minimum IQ to cast a ballot, there is not even a literacy requirement that people be able to read the darn thing.
No matter how much you polish up your whiz-bang e-vote machine with "mathematical proofs", you are still polishing a stinking, steaming pile of dung. In addition, there is the little matter of "proving" that the "secure system" you have "mathematically guaranteed" is the actual system in use.
Paper ballots (regardless of the method of production) that allow for human recounts are far more trustworthy than anything that has a "mathematical guarantee". If you don't understand that , just go ahead and console yourself with the following:
"Half of all people have a below average intellect" (translated for the "smart folks" - every other person in the world is STUPID)
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
Because every thing you can do to tamper with a paper ballot will leaves a physical artifact. Americans don't trust computers because tampering with them requires a level of skill most people don't have, can be done on a massive scale with relative ease, and when it is done doesn't leave a physical trail. The only trace may be in the source code but, even then, if the computers were networked it would be possible to implant a virus to tell them all to vote a certain way, then have the virus self-destruct. Paper, at least, leaves a trace.
What's this? Another weblog? On transit?
Neither of the references I linked to are particularly complicated. They can be digested by reasonably literate people.
Who wants to take bets on how paper votes align with exit polls, while the exit polls somehow turnout wrong where voting machines are used?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Secretary of State blocking voter registration in California.
Making Votes Count in Florida
Are you adequate?
Well, I guess virtually the entire field of mathematics is invalid. Shucks. There was some good stuff in there. I don't know how I'll get by without the Pythagorean theorem. Too bad all those stupid people invalidated all of mathematics by being too dumb to understand it.
Here I was thinking that science was the study of reality. Now I see that reality is formed by the perceptions of the most remedial strata of our population. Thanks for the lecture in metaphysics!
Still doesn't solve the trust issue: As a voter it's no good for me that some mathematician guarantees the integrity of the vote. That's only marginally better than a corperation's guarantee.
And even if I'm in the minority that understands the underlying mathematics, I still have to trust that there are no bugs in the implementation or that nobody has tampered with the hardware.
With paper-and-pencil ballots I can see for myself.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
People believe in lots of things that they don't understand. For instance, most people have no clue how the banking system works, yet they place all their money in financial institutions. People believe in the constitution, but couldn't accurately describe what is in it. They don't understand regular encryption, but they trust it to send sensitive information online.
The problem with electronic voting is not that people believe it's insecure, the problem is that it is insecure and numerous experts have testified to that fact and problems have cropped up all over the place. If we could produce a system that didn't have problems that experts could verify then we would be set.
You can verify the algorithm has been implemented correctly because it would be standardized and open source. Just like SSL on Firefox.
Also, we don't need nanoreplicators to fraudulently manipulate a ballot box. Ballot boxes have a history of manipulation. The custodian of the box can open the box. Or he can stuff the box with fake votes. Paper ballots can never offer us a mathematical guarantee of correctness.
Electronic voting does offer us this guarantee when done right. You will be able to prove whether or not your vote will be counted.
With a paper ballot what you can see is your ballot go into a box. You have no guarantee that your vote is counted or that the ballot box wasn't stuffed with fraudulent ballots. Also, did you even read the references I gave? You seem to be under the impression that what I am proposing is that some smart math guys look at Diebold code and say "yup, looks good to me!". I'm talking about specific practical voting schemes. If somebody has not implemented the algorithm correctly then it won't work and everybody will be able to prove it. That's the whole point of using a proper cryptographic system.
"After all, the electoral college is unique to the US, yet other democracies manage elections just fine (actually better than the US, if I dare say so). This tells me that the problem isn't the system, but something specific to the US."
I'm trying to think if there are any other democratic countries in the world with a population as large or larger than the US? The only ones that come to mind would be India, and maybe Indonesia and/or Pakistan. . . maybe Russia (although, I think, calling Russia a democracy might possibly be pretty generous)? Now let me ask, do any of them have a national popular vote? I'm not exactly sure how those countries select their President or Prime Minister, but in many cases, the Prime Ministers of many democratic countries are not chosen directly by the people, but instead by the Parliament. The MPs are chosen on a district-by-district basis. Does any large population ( > 200 million citizens) democracy have any nationwide, popular-vote elections?
Let me be more specific. The references that I referred to demonstrate a cryptographic algorithm. If the algorithm is implemented incorrectly then it will fail and everyone will be able to prove it independently.
Of course people probably won't work out the math themselves, they'll have a client that implements the algorithm etc. People can use whatever client they wish, an open source or MicroSoft Voter or whatever. But an open source version would no doubt exist and people could feel free to use that.
Hope that clarifies.
I saved your first link and will read it first thing tomorrow when I'm at the uni. Right now, it's behind a subscription firewall.
Regarding stuffed ballot boxes: At the beginning of the day the box is publicly checked that it is empty and whenever somebody puts his vote into the box, a volunteer marks off an increasing count. When voting is finished, the number of ballots in the box has to match the number that the volunteer is at. This is how we do things in Germany. No ballot-stuffing possible.
Regarding making sure that my vote is counted: After I put my vote in the box, I can stay at the polling place as an observer. I can also observe the actual counting of the vote.
The key point I was trying to make is that with paper-and-pencil voting, everybody can watch the ENTIRE process of voting and judge for himself whether he trusts the results or not.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
I'm not knocking your intelligence, but if you use two different names in legal documents, you're asking for trouble - as your example clearly demonstrates. Your legal name is just that - your legal name. It does not need to be what you call yourself. And it can be changed - though the process is admittedly a pain in the ass - to rectify the problem. Choose your pain.
My wife, for example, has legally retained her maiden name for professional reasons (she's a doctor). What we go by socially - the Joneses - is different from what is on the title to our house, our mortgage, her driver's license, and so forth. It does cause some odd looks now and again - especially when the poll workers at our precinct are the parents of people I went to high school with, and know both of us from back then - but it beats carrying around a copy of her marriage license every time she does anything official.
Hand-counting is very expensive and humans are not infallible. Election workers in some states are paid and if they aren't broken, machines can actually count a properly-filled-in ballot more accurately than most people.
Machine vote-tallies with manual recounts for close elections and random full manual recounts and statistical sampling of all elections to deter and catch fraud and catch mis-calibrated equipment is a lot cheaper.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
most people have no clue how the banking system works
The banking system works???
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Ballots must be filled out in permanent-ink pen or marker.
There's good reason for this: pencil marks can be erased or easily smudged, and we'll be right back at the same old "hanging chad" fiasco that nearly ruined the 2000 Presidential elections.
Electronic Voting Machines: Because a $.02 Scantron and permanent marker is too cheap, too plain, too simple, too permanent, and just too damn hard to fill out.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Fact is that after 2000 our governments did what they do best. Have knee-jerk reactions to a problem.
There's nothing wrong with electronic voting systtems if they were to be done properly, which they weren't. Thus we've got nearly zero voter confidence in them ever working.
So, we're going to be stuck with more paper. Lovely. That worked out so well for Florida last time. Nevermind that the "evil technology" is in those optical scanner machines as well.
I remember earlier articles that gave me the impression that the voting machine manufacturers were resisting paper ballot print-outs for recounts because they didn't want any mistakes being caught that would make them look bad. It seems that strategy may have backfired on them as people won't trust the machines without the print-outs. Good for people. It's not often they have sense. Of course, I suppose the good sense in rejecting these machines will be balanced by the the number of people who vote for Obama Tuesday. We're still trying to recover from the Carter years and we already want to elect another naive liberal socialist with a solid far left congress to back him up. Sigh, I'm going to bed. Wake me up in 20 years if anyone is still alive.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Obama didn't crumple in the face of "gotcha journalism" with it's harsh questions like "What magazines do you read?" ("All of them" ... right).
That's because the Obama campaign doesn't play "gotcha journalism". If there is a tough question, they asks if it is really a question, refuse to answer it, and then cancels all interviews with that media outlet. Obama only plays to friendly crowds.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
So, to follow on here, what's your suggestion for voter verification? Let anyone who shows up vote, without any verification that they are who they say they are? Amuse me by explaining why positively identifying voters is such an evil thing. The county to my north has 25% more registered voters than living people of voting age. How to toss out the bad ones?
Paper ballots return but electronic voting remains since the ballots will counted by optical scan machines.
Sure you can recount the ballots... after they've been moved around, taken out of sight from voters for hours, and then only if a candidate manages to get the recount ordered. As for the systematic 3% recounts, there's no way to check it really is randomly selected, and again it happens on ballots after they have been moved around, etc.
Ballot counting should be performed right there on the spot, in the voting station as soon as the election closes. Anything else is madness.
"Here I was thinking that science was the study of reality"
Reality check time:
People are real - even the ones that are less intellectually gifted than yourself.
The last time I checked (which I admit was a few years back) smart folks used (and even invented) various forms of mathematics in an attempt to better model and thereby understand reality.
When your ever so elegant (or not as the case may be) mathematical guarantee - which after all is only a model - comes up against the reality you are trying to model differences will appear. Think of another old cliche if you will.
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice..."
In practice, enough people are evil conniving bastiches that they WILL defeat your e-voting system. And even the folks too stupid to understand the math behind your guarantee do understand "evil conniving bastiches" Now add to that the substantial group of people who must defend their "culture" from intellectuals to the point that even as children they humiliate, harass, and assault those who shows signs of greater intelligence. That group of people also know that your guarantee is nothing (to them) but a damned lie - because you are one of the "evil conniving bastiches".
So, the reason your e-voting plan fails is because too many folks will have no faith in it. Calling them stupid might console you, but why not ask yourself why you are so hung up on replacing paper ballots?
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
When you say that the implementation of electoral college is "analog vs. digital" you're basically conceding that the ideal solution is to count all the votes, but you argue that it is just logistically too difficult to count all those pesky little votes. Nonetheless, you argue that states are too "low resolution". You want congressional districts because those are higher resolution.
You know what would be the highest resolution? Counting everyone's vote. This obvious solution is exactly what we do for elections of senators, congressmen, mayors, and every other elected office in the land except the presidency.
In the name of "smoothing things out" you are perfectly willing to introduce a huge amount of error into the vote. Not because it's fairer -- you seem to acknowledge that it's less fair -- but just because it's easier. Dictatorship would be even easier, which is probably why it was so popular back in the day. But there's a reason why have a Democracy and morally we need to count everyone's vote, not count some people's votes and give them all the votes of other people simply because they happen to constitute a majority in an arbitrary geographical region which was gerrymandered by the political class in the first place.
Here's an idea: instead of taking for granted that we have a flawed election system, let's fix it. Let's invest in our election system to make it reliable and secure. There are cryptographic methods to that can verifiably ensure a secure, private, and perfect tally. That would address all your concerns about the integrity of the tally without arbitrarily disenfranchising people.
he gets it
Because a key issue of voting is that everyone believe that it is fair.
While cryptographic schemes for voting may be 100% effective, most people are not going to understand how they really work.
Everyone understands collecting clearly marked pieces of paper and counting up the results.
*I* don't really understand cryptographically safe voting and I've read Applied Cryptography. And even if I did *fully* understand the cryptosystem, unless I *personally* audited the code in *all* the voting machines, I would not have 100% faith that the crypto system was working properly!
However, I can have 100% faith in the accuracy of a recount of paper ballots where there's a Democrat and a Republican, looking over the shoulder of a nonpartisan primary counter.
Cryptographic schemes *MAY WORK*, but we should NEVER USE THEM--because most people would never really be sure they were honest.
--PeterM
Will be a dire warning, not a rallying cry.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Why am I so "hung-up" on replacing paper ballots? Wow, that's like asking why I'm so "hung-up" on Democracy. Paper ballots have an error rate of at least 1% even if nobody is deliberately tampering with the election. Cryptosystems have an error of 0% and if somebody does tamper with them it is immediately obvious to all observers because the math would fail.
And a well designed crytosystem would really, honest-to-god, expose tampering regardless of stupid people's opinions on the matter. In Physical Science there is a difference between theory and reality.
Finally, I want to remind you that it wasn't the stupid people that defeated our current iteration of E-Voting (which I oppose since it isn't a cryptosystem). It was smart people that fought long and hard to expose the inherent weaknesses and publicize the scandals due to E-Voting that finally managed to defeat it. The stupid people accepted E-Voting because they were told it was safe. Stupid people accept what they are told because they are too stupid to use critical thinking skills.
Seriously.
This should be the first time I'm actually able to conclude that Brazil is better than the US at something.
It's impossible for me to understand how can you *seriously* think that paper ballots are better than electronic voting.
Here in Brazil the whole voting process only happens on a single day and everyone must vote, since voting is mandatory. This should mean about 120 million voters. The whole vote counting process takes only a few hours and that's it. And it only takes that long because there's no networked transmission of the results for security concerns, so the voting machine actually needs to be physically taken somewhere.
Each person votes on a specific, preassigned, voting place and each citizen has a voting card issued by the federal government. Since voting is mandatory, everyone has that card. So voter identification is trivial.
This was done to *avoid* fraud. I mean, it's pretty obvious to me that a bag full of paper is much more easy to tamper with than anything electronic, specially since the voting machines run on open-source software.
Our laws actually *forbid* any kind of paper trail or any other sort of "proof of vote". Voting should be anonymous at all costs. This way, if someone tries to buy votes, they can never know if the person actually voted on them or not.
But in banking system, you don't have to exactly trust the ATMs and stuff, because you can always check your account balance to see if correct amounts have been transferred.
Ballot boxes can be manipulated on small scale, but it's hard to do it on large scale. I don't know how many people are involved in vote counting in U.S., but here in Czech Republic, I would estimate we have one voting booth and ballot box per 1000-2000 people (there are no queues during the vote), and this place is manned by 3-6 people from different political parties, who also do the manual counting together. So it would mean to manipulate ten thousands of people to alter the results significantly (which I think is impossible to keep in secret). We also have more scalable system than U.S. in that there are no "contested regions" which are enough to manipulate in order to alter the results significantly.
I would like to read that link, but it's paid-for paper. Maybe they should work on that first, if they want to get common people to trust this. :-)
Virtually nobody who goes to the bank online knows how SSL works. They just do it and understand that the connection is "encrypted" so people can't "listen in." They have absolutely no idea whether or not the cryptography is working. They would only find out if it failed after their bank account has been emptied. They operate the system on trust.
Despite all these people looking over other people's shoulder, paper ballots aren't even close to perfect. The best paper ballot system still has an error rate of about 1% before deliberate tampering with ballots. With a proper cryptosystem we could get an error rate of exactly zero. And should anything go amiss you will be instantly able to prove it and so will everyone else.
Obviously many people have neither the time nor aptitude to understand basic cryptography. Similarly most people don't have time to sit around in a voting office looking over people's shoulder validating ballot counts. But people believe that there exist people who do count votes and people believe that there are smart people who solve problems in clever ways.
Yes, banking works on trust, but the point is, you will find out that it failed. Not so with election - you won't find out they have been tampered with.
Can you give me a source for that 1% figure? I find it very hard to believe; from my experience, there is at most one (out of several thousands) polling places where the things are contested, but either a recount or another voting will fix this.
Also, I have my doubts about the methods from the paper, though I haven't read it. For example, how resistant is the technique with respect to attacks on votes that have been cast by people who, for some reason (such as low technical skills), cannot check the correctness of the result? If someone else is going to do that for them, won't this compromise anonymity of their vote?
You know, having a theoretically good crypto algorithm is nice, but the correct implementation is in another ballpark.
A customer makes a connection to the bank via SSL. How does the customer know whether or not this encryption succeeds or fails? He has no idea and he has no way of finding out.
The 1% error rate of paper ballots can be read here and many other places. Google "paper ballot error rate".
There are many techniques out there. Some allow for a voter to verify that his own vote has been counted correctly. Universally verifiable systems allow for a voter to verify that everyone's vote has been counted correctly. No, this does not in general compromise the anonymity of the vote.
Also, don't you feel a bit silly arguing against hypothetical weaknesses of cryptosystems when you haven't even bothered to read the basics? Here's another good paper by Microsoft. Here's another good one from Carnegie Mellon.
Please read these papers. You will see they have carefully thought through the issues you are raising.
Most of these systems operate on a server/client basis. The client can use whichever implementation he desires as long as it implements the algorithm. He can use Microsoft Voter or GNU Vote or whatever he wants. You're not forced to sit down at a voting booth with software you don't trust.
Thanks for the links, I will try to read them if I have time (I knew such proposal existed, I just didn't had the papers).
And no, I don't feel silly assuming hypothetical weaknesses in an unknown cryptosystem. Considering how cryptanalysis advanced in the last 20 years, I think it's quite safe to assume that some attacks to these systems will appear.