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The State of Electronic Voting In the 2008 US Elections
Geek Satire writes "Voting works only if you believe your vote gets counted accurately. The 2008 US elections have avoided many well-known problems of the 2004 and 2000 elections, but many problems remain. O'Reilly News interviewed Dr. Barbara Simons, advisor to the Federal Election Assistance Commission, to review electronic voting in the 2008 US elections, discussing the physical security of storing and maintaining election machines, the move from electronic back to paper ballots, and why open source voting machines don't necessarily solve problems of bugs, backdoors, and audits."
Purely by the fact you can't guarantee that every American's vote counts makes it a joke.
Mind you, McLame wouldn't have won either way, thank god.
I am hoping with an all Democrat government we will get a "Help America Vote" act that actually helps America vote.
It's a shame we have to wait until a party comes to power that benefits from better voting for the government to fix the problem.
Forget electronic voting, let's abandon democracy altogether, and start up "Internetocracy", where all major political decisions are voted on by slashdotters and Internet trolls! Want to bomb Iraq? Let's make a slashdot poll, and see if we should do it! I nominate Cowboy Neil as a viable solution to improving our economy.
The very fact that Barack Obama won the 2008 election has put the entire Diebold/Precision vote-theft fiasco on the back burner. Yeah states are ditching this dodgy technology by the score and that may have contributed to a more-honest election.
Still McCain, despite his supporters, ran an honest campaign and honorably conceded the election to his opponent. Surprisingly his constituents appear to be following in his footsteps and not calling for endless recounts or crying about being marginalized as citizens.
My vote was paperless. I have no idea if my vote was recorded properly or if it wasn't manipulated in some way after the fact. The only indication I have that it wasn't was the fact that the race was really close and several republicans lost seats largely due to "straight ticket" voting. (many people are hating republicans you know)
One thing will help stop some election fraud -- aggressive criminal prosecution.
Am I the only one that is completely confused by how difficult it seems to be to make an electronic voting machine and have it actually work?
When the only electable candidates are those chosen by the mainstream media, and controlled by special interests, I would say most emphatically that voting or democracy doesn't "work". Voting machines should be the least of our worries when it comes to the integrity of our political system.
NY had a real easy process this time, remarkably like last time and the time before, etcetera, etcetera. Thanks to much effort on the part of Voting System vendors, we now have these Big Honkin' (tm) Sequoia Machines (thankfully not in use in my county). They were sitting in the corner, while the Good Old (tm) Mechanical, no-power-required just kept chugging along, processing votes without a hitch. As usual.
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
Anyone happen to catch the election returns? I haven't been able to find anything on the internet how it ended... :p
In my poor benighted country we lack the technological sophistication of the mighty US of A, so we are forced to mark our votes on small pieces of paper called ballots. The poll clerk checks your ID, crosses your name off a list and hands you a ballot. On this ballot are printed in no particular order the name and party affiliation of the candidates. Next to each name is a circle. You place an x in the circle for the candidate of your choice. Then you go back to the poll clerk who places your ballot in the ballot box. If you mess up your ballot he will give you a new one.
Each candidate is allowed to have an observer at each polling place, and at the counting of the ballots. This system is fairly simple, fairly transparent, and all the votes get counted. It also scales well (more voters = more polling places). Why do you need electronic voting or voting machines or anything else besides a paper ballot and a pencil. I'm honestly curious why this wouldn't work in the US.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Electronic voting has bigger problems than TFA mentions... (FYI, the preceding link contains flash/video.)
"Voting works only if you believe your vote gets counted accurately."
God, not this fallacy again! Why do so many otherwise intelligent people think that as long as their own personal ballot got counted then all is well? Don't they realize that 1000 fake voters in swing state X can mean that their own vote, whether counted or not, is moot?
The electronic voting machines in New Jersey could be hacked in about seven minutes. The journal describes aspects of this election which make it different from most recent elections and includes a pro-con debate of the Electoral College. -------------- Sally The Best Social Bookmarking
I voted for DRE-700
load "$",8,1
How do you know the electronic machines weren't swinging votes towards Obama? With the amount of.. well.. outright adulation he received from the media, it wouldn't be surprising. Disclaimer: inflammatory post title not necessarily linked to reality :p
My point is that people see the Democrats' victory as some form of proof that elections weren't tampered with. This is obviously a flawed line of reasoning.
One way to tell if someone's opinion is overly influenced by political bias is if their conclusions change when the party/political label changes. I'd suggest some people try those glasses on around here occasionally.
"Voting works only if you believe your vote gets counted accurately."
How stupid can the summary possibly be? Your belief has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not something is true.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I live in a red state... probably the most red of them all. In fact, it was the third state called - you got it - oklahokma. Every district... red.
That being said, we have lots of republicans mainly because that's what their parents are, or church has told them to be.
My polling place was a church
On the side outside it says "Make sure you pray before your cast your vote." You can take that however you like. I walk in, on my lunch break, to cast a vote towards the popular vote as I know where I live it counts for nothing, and fill out the form. It is one of those "connect the line" charts.
Let me set a mood first... There is a woman around 90 years old who is reading the paper to validate people are who they say they are. This woman cannot see my face on my drivers license - she didn't even look, even though, for some reason it said "Check identification" on the line where I signed.
I over looked that
I take my form over to my cardboard booth and connect the dots
I take my form over to the machine to put it in... it looks like it is from the 60's and could probably survive a nuclear blast.
There is a red light on the machine. There are two statements on the machine.
"If the light is red, the machine is busy, please wait for it to turn green."
"If the light is green, please insert your ballot.
After waiting about 2 minutes with an impatient look on my face, a woman in her 70's comes over and in a very decrepit and very "talked down to" tone of voice she says... For the sake of my fingers, she will be Decrepit Old Lady - or DOL
DOL - "go ahead and put your ballot in, they looked at it this morning and said the light is just stuck on and will work just fine"
Me - "Ok, but is there some sort of way that I can tell who I voted for - I see some receipt looking things there coming out of the machine, will that give me my results?"
DOL - "If the machine makes a beep your vote has been counted." Me - "For some reason I highly doubt that, but given the record of this state, my vote doesn't count for much anyways. I can assure you my cantor would be very aburpt if I had to wait one second to vote"
DOL - "If the machine makes the noise, your vote is counted"
Me - "Again, I doubt that"
And I put my ballot in. Nothing got printed, the machine just made a noise. I think the moral here is:
If you leave the ignorant in charge, then whoever "fixes" the polling machine has complete control over your vote.
Ok, i'm done... Sorry for making it that long.
Despite what you are made to believe, America is not a true democracy. You are given few choices by media, by powerful conglomerates and whatever you can think of and you vote for the lesser of evil. Which one of the candidates your hear fell 100% in-line I'd like to ask you. I voted McCain but hate his "Call it a banana" speech on illegal immigration. But the alternate candidate, i.e., NObama, was much worse in my opinion. Yes I know I could write my vote in but how many of us really do this ? There is no point. And Cynthia McKinney, the screaming black idiot woman from Atlanta for president ??? C'mon, you've got to be kidding me.
After getting this off my chest, I voted in Northern Mexico for intents and purposes. My voting place had 2 electronic voting machines erect in the middle of the voting room. As any geek at heart, I asked the guy who were trying to hand me the forms what these computers are for. HE said, they are for electronic voting but it takes too long of a time to vote on these. I kinda suggested that I want to do that regardless and he said they are already broken. I dunno if he spoke the truth or just to convey me to mark my vote on paper and not to deal with me if the machine somehow crashes or something but as I waitied in the line for about 10 minutes and as long as it took me to fill in my vote, I have not seen anyone voting electronically.
Somebody long before me, made a comment that India nailed this electronic voting with big success years ago. I have one comment about that: When 90% of the population is barely literate to understand what they are voting for, I don't think they have as much worry that the votes may be tampered with. In US, we all know what a joke Diebold machines are and no serious investment in making voting software open source so that the regular Joe the programmer can understand about it and inform justness of it to the masses. Idon;t think this e-voting will happen in my life time and I am just in my forties, not planning to die anytime soon.
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
like she says: there "can" still be malicious code... but it is so much less damned likely in open source than in closed source, AND when it does show up, it tends to get found and corrected right away.
So, open source is not perfect, but it comes a hell of a lot closer to perfect than closed source will ever be.
um, what?
bugs are the result of human error, which occurs whether you're depending on programmers or 50-year-old polling station volunteers. open source e-voting machines facilitate public oversight to catch bugs/flaws in the voting machine software. closed source e-voting machines prevent people from analyzing the code that's counting their votes. that means bugs are much less likely to be caught/fixed.
backdoors, like deliberate voter suppression/election fraud, will always be a potential risk. that's why OSS is necessary. again, open source means there is a means for vigilant members of the public to scrutinize the code and ensure there are no back doors. no matter how good of a programmer the perpetrator is, you can't hide a backdoor forever in open source software. the more eyes that are on the source code, the sooner the backdoor will be found.
with something as important as e-voting software, you can bet there'll be tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of programmers, security analysts, code auditors, software testers, etc. pouring over every line of that code. compare that to the broken code-auditing system that the diebold machines went through, where the flaws with the system weren't discovered until the source code was leaked, discovered by a sleuthing citizen, and finally delivered into the hands of competent programmers to be analyzed.
--what the hell does that even mean? begging the question is not "analysis" no matter how confidently you repeat your non-sequiturs. unless you are advocating security through obscurity (and an honor system for the programmers), how is perpetual debugging/auditing and public oversight a "major security risk"? are Google's servers being hacked into by the hundreds because they're all running linux? is SELinux being used by the NSA & DoD because open source means backdoors and other security risks "can't be dealt with"?
maybe take some courses on information security/secure coding before spewing out this verbal diarrhea. in fact, take philosophy 101 while you're at it and learn at least basic informal fallacies. then maybe you'll be able to participate in online discussions without wasting people's time with specious arguments full of gaping holes in logic.
Voting machines should be the least of our worries when it comes to the integrity of our political system.
Oh, quit your whining - you have a choice between Democratic OR Republican!
This is actually quite simple - wherever you have several trillion dollars to hand out to the 'best' taker, there will be corruption. If you want to get the corruption out of Washington, you have to get the money out of Washington. It'll never happen any other way; no matter how many regulations they throw up, people will find ways around them. Humans are greedy and smart - well, except the politicians who think they're smarter than everybody else.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I would disagree with the thread's premise that we've avoided the issues of 2000 and 2004. These issues are still going on, this time in Minnesota. Senator Norm Coleman was ahead of Al Franken by over 700 votes when all the votes were counted on the 4th, and EVERY DAY his lead is getting eroded, and the recount hasn't even started yet. Somehow Minnesota precincts keep finding "missed ballots" for Franken, and the current lead has now shrunk to 288 votes. Every single "lost vote" found so far has gone to Franken, and not one to Coleman. That is exceedingly suspicious, especially given the fact that they use optical scanners in that state, and bad ballots are instantly rejected when the voter tries to cast them, giving the voter a chance to do a new one correctly. This isn't hanging chad Florida, but it is very likely fraud.
Additionally, you have widespread reports of people getting to vote without being asked to show any identification, you have black panthers with nightsticks patrolling Philedelphia polling places... voting really is an absolute joke these days.
I do believe Obama actually won the presidential election based on the huge margins, but most races are much closer than that, and it's really impossible to have any confidence in any close races anymore. And with black panthers in the polling places, I worry that eventually we won't even be able to trust the big wins either.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Where I live (Canada), elections are run by Elections Canada. All of them. National, Provincial, municipal. The voting machines are electronic and paper. You get a paper ballot which is a sheet with a list of names. You put your pencil mark beside the name you want. You put your ballot in a reusable cardboard folder. Only the end of your ballot is visible (with no marks or writing showing). You take your paper ballot over to a machine, and it reads your ballot and shows you (and only you) how you voted. You are prompted "is this correct?" and you either press yes or no. If no, it puts your ballot back into your folder, you try another machine, and that machine is checked for problems. If yes, then your vote is electronically sent as well as recorded by that machine, and your paper ballot is retained by the machine. The paper tally, the tally of all the machines, plus the tally of what the machines electronically sent are all verified. The speed of electronic voting, and the verifyability of paper ballots. Before voting you must show picture ID and should be on the voters list. If you aren't on the list, you can be sworn in and with picture id get on the list at time of voting to vote. I don't understand why every local Tom, Dick and Harry set up their own local voto-tron 5000. Why would you not want an open, vetted process where everything is verifiable and transparent (except for the ballot, voting booth and ballot box)?
I think everyone who is interested in electronic voting should take a look at this website. This group was originally just a bunch of computer scientists trying to apply theory to practice. In my opinion, they succeeded quite well, and I wish more people had heard of them.
Scantegrity.org
It is worth noting, for those interested in electronic voting and vote security that Barb Simons is credited in the effort to get the ACM to set their policy on electronic voting. Just as importantly the helped to move the League of Women Voters from their pro-DRE stance on electronic voting to the new SARA stance which calls for auditability and recountability.
I found her comments on Open Source in the article quite insightful too. Not that I am against it but t isn't a security panacea.
I agree with your argument that casting votes for multiple offices and legislative initiatives lends itself to electronic tabulation. Your argument that population is prohibitive to paper based voting is not, however, considering that the vote tallies from the major population centers of Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, etc. are available around the same time as the tallies from lesser populated areas in the same time zone.
Not that anybody likes CS theory; Computer Science is actually well suited for dealing with voting issues!
This including recommending the BAN of computers on security grounds.
Human vote counting systems can be developed (and even simulated and tested.) CS work on distributed systems could be useful (or at least prove impossibility of finding ideal solutions.)
Math nuts have been working on voting systems that beat the silly 2 party mess. Voters understand reality show/web ratings as well as Olympic ratings they can vote by ranking.
Me, I think a simple hand count of subsets (randomly defined) TWICE and then a repeat on sets that do not match would work reasonably well.
While we are at it, new problems could be proposed, such as limitations on redistricting instead of developing algs to maximize a party's influence at the expense of sensible district boundaries. Could be something as simple as limiting districts to 5 sided polygons or equal area (doesn't have to be easy to solve; you know parties will spend money on maximization software, the key is to make that less useful to them.)
Other issues such as digitally signing ballots (which would be a good idea as a method for validation of money; naturally, not 'fool' proof but better than the easy to duplicate stuff that exists now... They can clean $5 and reprint $100 bills from it and fool most places.)
Going a little off topic; I'd like to see a representation study showing what ratios are most effective for communicating with your rep. The foolish USA capped the rep count long ago - its not like the reps would be any less effective if there were more of them (at least it would cost more to bribe and lobby them.)
General rules or guidelines as well, like saying that power should be proportional to how diffuse the representation is, etc.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
If that's so then why don't you give all of your money away and live a life free from all that evil corruption? Go on, set an example for us.
Another complicating factor is that the United States is a federation of 50 independent state governments. The states run their own elections, with very little input or control by the federal government. The actual elections themselves are administered by the dozens of local boards of election within each state.
So, that's 50 sets of voting rules, written by 50 state legislatures, adjudicated by 50 state courts overseeing dozens of local boards of election each.
People from outside the US often think of America as a single people with a single form of government, and that's really only partially true.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
From the interview with Dr. Simons:
"You know I've heard people make claims that various elections have been stolen on these machines. It's a difficult--it's not a claim I would make because I think it's risky to make a claim when you can't prove it nor would I say that no elections have ever been stolen on these machines as some other people claim because you can't prove that either. And I think the problem is when we find ourselves in the situation where we can neither prove nor disprove that the election was--would be tabulated--recorded and tabulated and what we need to do is move to systems where we can prove things. And I think that's what we have to do and the fact that the 2008 Presidential election has not been contested the way that for example the 2000 election was contested doesn't mean we're out of the woods. There will be other contested races as we're seeing in Minnesota although there they're going to count it and there we will find out."
I think she's got this spot on. We need to move to system where one can prove the result. Once we can prove that a machine count and a human count produce the same result, it doesn't matter what's inside the "black box". We know it's producing the right outcome, so we can trust it.
As far as I know, none of the voting systems and procedures we have now -- optical scan included -- are designed around this concept of proof.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
No, not in Virginia. Each party running for office can send a select number of observers, the candidates themselves can observe (but only for a short amount of time), and the media can come in and take pictures. The orderliness of the polling place is extremely well-protected in Virginia law. The poll workers are even given limited police powers -- including the power to put someone under a form of house arrest for up to 24 hours -- to guard the polling place, if need be.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Is because the democrats won the election. Had the election gone the other way, you would be hearing stories 24/7 about: voter fraud, intimidation, rigged machines etc.
How is it possible for a felon convicted on 7 charges and who was trailing by 22% to win the election?
You can't handle the truth.
I think the problem here is how we're looking at the problem. There is nothing inherently wrong with a paper ballot. Given the right format it can be easily counted (electronically) and gives you the ability to easily audit the result. The problem is the interface to the ballot. Using pecil or what have you is prone to errors and can pose problems. So why not create an electronic interface that creates a filled out ballot that can be double checked by the voter. Why is this so hard?
Voting isn't a mess everywhere in the US.
I was a pollworker here in LA this year. The Inkavote system used, which is standardized across the entire county, is pretty close to what you describe: ID check (for new voters), cross your name off the list, get a ballot, etc. The only refinement is that we have a machine that checks to see if there are any obvious errors on the ballot: Ink where it shouldn't be, overvote (more than one vote in a race), or the ballot is entirely blank. This machine only validates, it does NOT count votes. Actual counting is done later at the ballot collection center.
The entire process is completely open and anyone who wants to observe may do so, from the moment we start setting up the polling place to when we finish taking it all down.
Of course the system isn't perfect, but it sure seems to work pretty well. Pollworking was actually quite fun since so many people were so enthusiastic about voting, especially in this election.
I'm a software engineer but I have to say the thought of using a computer for voting completely creeps me out.
I can't say I think every ballot got counted in this election cycle. I'd feel better if I knew for sure, but I'm fairly certain that most of my ballots were counted. That's better than previous years...