Slashdot Mirror
Electronic Voting Researcher Arrested In India
whatajoke writes "Hari Prasad, a security researcher in India who had demonstrated the vulnerability of electronic voting machines used in all elections in India, was arrested by the police on charges of stealing an electronic voting machine. The election commission of India has maintained that EVM are non-hackable. The election commission had previously provided access to the device to the security researchers for a day and asked for a hack in only that time."
I keep reading story after story of how easily hackable these machines are and my only question is why do they keep making easily hackable machines? Who are the geniuses making a voting machine that can be hacked? Why aren't they contacting these professors and researchers while they're creating the machine and say "Hey you're good at hacking. We're trying to create a voting machine that can not be hacked, can you help us?"
I just don't understand, it's like building a car that explodes at the slightest impact and then arresting people that expose it. Wouldn't it be easier just to make a better voting machine?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
So those few who do, are easy to eliminate.
Take your own country USA for example, as an Indian, I can't help but laugh when I see people being used as mere pawns in the bi-partisanship circus. The right and the left both are equally suckered in to believing that the other side is evil, and will be the end of your country if given a chance to govern. Very few realize that both are sides of the same coin. Same BS sold in different flavor.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
1) The voter gets to see the vote being cast.
2) Auditors and manual re-counters get to see the exact same thing the voter saw. This means it must be a tangible artifact.
3a) Audit all elections "to 5%" or "to the margin of victory" whichever is less. This provides a very high confidence any fraud wasn't enough to sway the elections nor was it enough to sway more than 5% of the tally. Do the same if any candidate is "close" to a significant threshold number, such as the number of votes needed to avoid a runoff.
3b) Random audits "to 0.5%" or some other high confidence interval sufficient to expose and deter general game-playing by a candidate who lost so bad that the cheating didn't help him. If a losing candidates know they have a 1 in 10 chance of getting a "very close audit" they won't try to play games.
4) Automatic recounts using different equipment PLUS a more thorough audit on any close election.
5a) Manual recounts on any close election on the request of the candidate who is within the "margin of possible error/fraud" that the audits show could exist.
5b) Manual recounts on any election where any candidate is very close to a significant threshold number.
It's not hard folks. Machine-readable paper ballots typically meet 1 & 2. The rest is a matter of spending money after the votes are initially tallied, not a function of the voting machines.
Auditing an election of, say, 3M voters where one candidate allegedly beat the other 50.5% to 46.5% to 3% for minor candidates need only determine that there's less than a 5% chance that the true election result had the winning candidate with 50%+1 votes to avoid a runoff. With a paper ballot satisfying #1 and #2 and generally accepted statistical analysis, this won't require a recount of nearly the entire pool of votes, only a random sample from each ballot box sufficiently large to rule out the need for a runoff.
If on the other hand the alleged winning amount was exactly 1,500,001 out of 3M votes, or if it was 1,499,499 and the winner wanted a recount to avoid a runoff, a full manual recount would likely be necessary.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Its beyond offensive and disgusting that any post that defends and advocates terrorism like the above does is moderated insightful.
The moderators should be ashamed of themselves here.
Who's advocating terrorism?
This is what was said:
Feels like terrorism against governments is the only meaningful life pursuit at this point.
Notice the "Feels" part? The poster was expressing feelings of outrage and his frustration with his inability to stop Governments from abusing their power. He was expressing the frustration that Democracies or Republics still do not prevent a Government from abusing its citizens. No matter how we vote or who we vote for, what letters we write that fall on deaf ears, or protest and get our asses kicked by the cops, it seems as though, we the little people get shit on. People who are trying to show how possible finagling of the voting process gets done and hopefully prevent some of those injustices end up being victims of the powers that be.
I'm sure with events in the present and past, many of us had fantasies of disintegrating Congress (See "Mars Attacks!"). Would we do it? No. The only thing we can do is express our outrage and impotence with regards to controlling a government.
The rich and powerful have been doing this since time began. They manipulate the populace with jingoism, bogus issues to distract us, and in the background, they're taking their power to boost their own pathetic (much wealthier) little life.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Machine-readable paper ballots have three major flaws:
1) cost and bulk
2) not usable without assistance by blind and those who can't use a marking pen
3) High waste or too costly with multi-precinct ballots or multi-language ballots, where a single voting station may have hundreds of different ballots and keeping a sufficient supply of each is difficult.
To help with #2 and #3, you can use a machine that prints the ballot "on-demand," either blank or, if the voter wants to use the touch-screen or other machine-input to indicate his vote, filled out.
The voter fills out the ballot if he didn't have the machine do it for him, examines it for correctness, and puts it in the ballot box as you would with a machine-readable paper ballot today. From here on out the system is identical to today's machine-readable paper ballot system.
This would allow those who cannot mark a ballot but who can read the filled-in ballot the ability to cast their vote unassisted.
Blind people could use on-site "reading" machines to verify the ballot unassisted or, if they didn't trust the government, they could bring their own document-reading hardware, or bring a trusted sighted friend to verify the ballot is accurate.
By printing non-common languages or outlying precinct ballots only "on demand" or only as needed to have a small supply of each at any given time, it would save paper.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You think Jefferson would be electable in the USA today? I think not.
You can't handle the truth.
I'm a professor at the University of Michigan, and I coauthored the voting study at issue with Hari Prasad. I've posted part of a phone call with Hari while he was in the police car, along with more details about the arrest.