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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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
You don't get receipts, because that would invite fraud.
"Hi! If you vote for me, I'll pay you $20. If you pose as several other people, I'll pay $20 each. Just hand over your receipts when you're done, and once I've confirmed that you voted 'correctly', you get your $20".
This is one of the reasons why voting systems are harder to build than ATMs. With ATMs, you record who does what with a camera, and keep a strict log of every transaction. If there's funny business, you have a chance of convicting the user. In a voting system, you MUST NOT record who made which vote, and you MUST NOT give the voter any way to prove who they voted for. Voting systems are trickier than they appear, because they have really unusual security requirements... and because power is at stake, so people really DO attack security weak points.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
You know how to deal with that "problem"? Print-out occurs behind a glass plate. Voter can confirm vote on print-out, and push a button that says "Confirm". No take-home, no problem.
The problem is not with the recording. The problem is what a voter is allowed to take home. Which, as you said, should be nothing.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.