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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."
Was there ever a time when you could guarantee that every vote counted?
Yup, things are much worse now.
It to be that you could guarantee that your vote would count--so long as you were a rich, white, male landowner.
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.
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.
Because clearly, no one likes Republicans, and they only stayed in power due to vote manipulation. Just like how the faked the moon landing. And they were responsible for the JFK assassination.
Seriously, I would like them to abolish the two-party system entirely, and by proxy the electoral college. I really think most people are generally moderate in their views, but are forced to pick sides they may not wholly agree with and make assumptions about members of the other party, who may sometimes fall closer in line with their views.
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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?
I'm damn happy that Obama won.
But if you look at the Popular vote it was 53% Obama vs 46% McCain. While that is a large gap, it's certainly not large enough to say McCain could never have won.
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/president/
Was there ever a time when you could guarantee that every vote counted?
Sure.
It's easy as pie when the number of votes per polling place is small.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
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.
Sure. It's easy, really.
"Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote."
-Terrry Pratchett
How small would they have to be? My precinct has only 813 registered voters. Supposedly, 644 of them voted. How could I possibly know? Personally poll each of them?
a) As someone who's counted votes at a small location before, no. Easier, maybe, but you can't be sure that things are counted properly unless you have no more than about 100 total ballots. You'll certainly be able to get close enough that there's a clear winner though. But mistakes get very easy to make very quickly, especially with an activity as repetitive as sorting paper.
b) Small polling locations rule out malice how? Not only would it be trivially easy to swap sides of a few ballots, but it would be just as easy to attribute it to carelessness in the event that it was discovered. Especially when there are a bunch of senior citizens counting alongside you
I'd trust the reliability of the Scantron-style ballots long before something hand-counted. Touchscreens - only if there's a paper trail (preferably one that's easily read by both machines and humans, which is easy enough).
Writing safe-to-use software for electronic machines isn't overly complicated, given sufficient oversight both in terms of accountability and physical security around the machines that will run it.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
"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?
It doesn't matter so much that you could guarantee that as much as the fact that it was on paper and you could recount if you weren't sure.
You could... you know... not vote for either of them. My ballot had two third-party candidates listed in the presidential race, plus a write-in spot. I've seen pictures of other ballots that had at least half a dozen third-party candidates listed, plus the same write-in spot.
The problem isn't the lack of options, but all of the media telling us that there ARE only two choices. I'd bet just about anything that if, for example, Bob Barr (libertarian candidate) would have taken a fairly significant chunk of the votes had he been given equal airtime and if there wasn't the general perception that only two parties exist. Probably double-digits in the popular vote in one election cycle, and then becoming a legitimate contender in the second when people are aware that other options exist.
The two-party system is caused by the same sources perpetuating the stagnant economy - the plethora of 24-hour news organizations. Most people believe what they hear on TV*, so as long as they continue to be told that we're entering the second great depression or that there are two and only two candidates exist, people will spend or vote accordingly.
*which is the real problem, of course. But good luck solving laziness.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
so then just increase the volunteer-to-voter ratio. but i still don't think that provides a guarantee against election fraud.
between the voting location and each county's ballot-tabulating location ballots can be "lost"/"misplaced." and even if a ballot arrives at the tabulation building, there's no guarantee that the machine will correctly count the ballot, or that it'll even be fed into the machine. even if they're hand counted, human error or deliberate fraud could still cause votes to be miscounted. and between the county and state bureaucracy the numbers can be manipulated once again. each time the tabulation results are reported up the government bureaucratic hierarchy, you have new people handling the election results, which introduces yet more opportunities for tampering and manipulation of the figures.
you could monitor the ballot counters with surveillance cameras and review them after the election, but that's still only a limited guarantee that a vote is correctly counted. the best thing to do is for the final tabulation results to be uploaded to an online server so that each voter can check to make sure that their own ballot was counted correctly by the volunteers/civil servants. this puts the responsibility for assuring that each vote is counted into the hands of whoever cast the ballot. it also establishes more public oversight over the electorial process.
Correct. It's important not only that voters have faith in the system, but also that the system actually has a good record of counting votes. And that is a difficult task.
I think that having individuals check on their vote might work, but I don't see how you could do that and retain anonymous voting. I mean, you could retain anonymous voting and just let them check, but it would be nigh impossible for them to prove that their vote was counted incorrectly.
A blog about stuff.
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.
It benefits *every* party to have more accurate voting.
Not necessarily. It benefits the Republicans to keep turnout low by a number of means, which they regularly use, or have used. This isn't universally true of Republicans, though almost so of Republican politicians.
This election Charlie Crist, Republican governor of Florida, extended the hours of early voting and caught hell from members of his party because of it. They as much as admitted that high turnout would ruin any chances they might have.
There are plenty of cases of Republican Secretaries of State, for individual states, who distribute voting machines in such a way that precincts with large minority populations are underserved, precincts in which the democratic party has a higher percentage of supporters.
This doesn't mean that the Democrats are innocent of any of this sort of stuff, but recently the republican side has been much more egregious about it.
A blog about stuff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting/
I think that the two-party system is a natural outgrowth of only being able to vote for one candidate. Instant-runoff voting (a system where you can rank the candidates you want to vote for) would work out far better, if only because lots of people would choose their favorite third-party candidate as Number 1, and have an established party that they don't hate somewhere further down as a safeguard. In our current system, we waste our vote if we don't pick the winner. A duopoly follows.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_past_the_post#Effect_on_political_parties
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.
Again, no. Democrats even did it this election. How many states have they sued Nader in because they were afraid of there being an alternative to vote for? The only difference was the strategy employed. Republicans tend to do voter suppression in the form of intentionally making lines longer by removing machines from certain areas that lean to the Democrats, and giving the machines to areas that tend to lean Republican. Democrats outright prevent people from running for office so they can present themselves as the "lesser of two evils" to unconvinced moderates for the purpose of getting votes. Both are forms of voter suppression and both very actively deploy the tactics in every election.
IRV is used in Australia. Australia has a two-party* system. So clearly that isn't a ailver bullet.
*OK, one party is a fixed coalition of two parties - but that coalition is defined before the elections, and never changes, so really it's two wings of a party.
I'm certainly not going to defend the Democrats election tactics against the Greens. I've been in plenty of campaigns that were targeted by them. I don't know how many states they sued Nader in, I can't seem to find it for this election, it was 20 in the last one.
Democrats outright prevent people from running for office so they can present themselves as the "lesser of two evils" to unconvinced moderates for the purpose of getting votes. Both are forms of voter suppression and both very actively deploy the tactics in every election.
No they aren't both forms of voter suppression. One is voter suppression, the other is legal wrangling. The whole idea of getting Nader off the ballot is to get those people to vote Dem, not to get them not to vote. Again, I'm not saying that the Dems should be doing this, just that it isn't the same as voter suppression. Republican voter suppression hits Green supporters as well.
A blog about stuff.
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
Number the ballots sequentially, and have them printed by a central authority that puts anti-counterfeiting measures on the ballots.
When a voter arrives, grab a ballot at random (shuffled deck) and issue it for punch card voting.
At the end of the day, you know how many people voted due to the log book. You know how many ballots you should have. You know which number ballots were issued (but not to which voters to preserve anonymity).
This makes it harder to lose ballots because each step of the way up knows how many ballots there should be, and ballots can't be swapped for different ones.
That won't work. If I can find out how I voted, then somebody else can also. It's important that can't happen.
And it still doesn't solve the problem of actually knowing the vote was counted. You know it was saved correctly, but there's nothing stopping the software from disregarding the saved ballot and computing the results some other way.
Maybe not
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
Touchscreens - only if there's a paper trail (preferably one that's easily read by both machines and humans, which is easy enough).
Maybe not as easy as you think. Watch the videos; they've come up with some very clever ways that the voting machines can tamper with the paper trail.
I'd much rather use scantron cards, so that my paper trail can't be messed with. But there's a couple extra precautions I'd still like to see implemented:
1) Counting the ballots by hand should be mandatory. In fact, the people counting the ballots should have no access to the voting machine tally, lest they feel lazy and simply agree with the voting machine.
2) The voters should be required to feed the paper ballot into the machine themselves, to ensure that none of the vote counters are maliciously "losing" any of the voter's ballots. The design of the machine would also have to ensure that it couldn't maliciously spit out the paper ballot after the voter has walked away.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.
Maybe not as easy as you think. Watch the videos; they've come up with some very clever ways that the voting machines can tamper with the paper trail.
This was just an exploit of crappy programming and an ineffective paper log on Sequoia's part and not an indication that the principle of a paper trail is flawed. For instance, in the case when the voter leaves before actually casting their vote and it is then voided could easily be avoided by making the voter aware that their vote hasn't been cast until X. If they don't bother to ensure that X happens, it's their fault. It's equivalent to handing your ballot to someone without staying to watch them drop it in the machine. If that is still too complicated for people, there can still be an optional paper equivalent.