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E-Voting Reform In an Out Year?
An anonymous reader writes "Most of us know the many problems with electronic voting systems. They are closed source and hackable, some have a default candidate checked, and many are unauditable (doing a recount is equivalent to hitting a browser's refresh button). But these issues only come to our attention around election time. Now is the time to think about open source voting, end-to-end auditable voting systems and open source governance. Not in November of 2012, when it will, once again, be far, far too late to do anything about it." It'll be interesting to see what e-voting oddities start cropping up in the current election cycle; Republican straw polls have already started, and the primaries kick off this winter.
Those of us who know and care -- and I don't mean me, I mean people like Dr Rebecca Mercuri, whose postgrad work has been right on this point -- have been trying to get that to happen since, oh, at least 1996 or so.
You can see the (total lack of) results, right?
The U.S. has unsustainable expenditures at every level of government, to the tune of probably trillions of dollars. For certain there will be concerned interests with billions of dollars at stake who will not consider elections fraud to be off the table.
Why not use semi-electronic voting where you use a pencil and a scantron-type ballot, primary results can be done electronically while there are paper records that can be counted by hand if the results are challenged. It seems to be the best of both worlds, preventing a lot of the flaws of e-voting while still allowing results to be counted quickly, easily and without bias.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I'm only partly through two of the links, but I just thought of something. What if BitCoins were used for elections? Wouldn't it guarantee that sending my coins to cast my vote would be guaranteed?
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
that would be a poll tax
This is how CT does it. You bubble in the form, feed it to the machine, and if there's a close race, they pull out all of the paper ballots and recount manually.
Additionally, the state picks a few towns and a few offices at random, and has people from other towns come in and hand count the results to make sure no BS has occurred.
Needless to say, we don't get many claims of election fraud in this state.
I helped with both forms of recount, one where some guy lost by 10 votes, and one random audit. On the recount, the difference between the hand and machine counts was a single vote (which is actually amazing considering how many X'ed the bubble, checked it, or otherwise failed to read the directions). On the audit, the difference was 3 votes. Both left a margin of error of 0.1%, which is pretty damn close to perfect. Multiple recounts may be needed if someone wins by 0.1%, but that's pretty damn rare. (The guy who lost by 10 votes lost by 10/1300ish).
It's really not that hard to keep elections honest, the people just need to demand it, everywhere.
Just because it's open source doesn't mean you can feel safe. There could be backdoors critical areas such as the compiler, or other places.
We know that government agencies would pay, bribe, or trick developers into sneaking a backdoor in. That's all it would take.
So who audits the code? How is it audited? In specific the kernel and compilers must be free of backdoors.
I don't care if they're printed by machine or filled out by hand but the end result should be a paper ballot that can be hand counted if necessary. Anything else is too easily manipulated. I'm not saying paper ballots can't be manipulated but it's far harder with them than with some electronic record.
Any voting machine which is closed source is equal to allowing a magician to count the votes.
First of all there must be a papertrail for any electronic voting machine. While the counting process can be automated, the voting machine should only exist to make voting easier, such as push a button to select a candidate. This should generate a receipt with a unique number representing the digital signature of the person voting. This would make counting easier and would also allow one to vote via the internet where they select a candidate, print out their receipt, and mail it in.
Using purely e-voting to elect government is akin to asking "Anonymous" whom they want for president, which would probably be the "Son, I am dissapoint" guy --- or worse. The only way that e-voting is useful is as a hybrid system with paper voting, that employs results validity through random and targetted sampling. Proposal: (1) When a citizen votes during an election, as the paper vote is dropped into the ballot box it is simultaneously scanned by an computer reader which is networked to central tabulation HQ.(If the vote cannot be read, it is not accepted into the ballot box) (2) When voting is finished, all voting staff and political party staff (from all parties running) get instant "un-official" print-outs of voting, with results described by each ballot box, across the entire voting area. These "un-official" election results can be posted online the very second voting ends. BUT, ballot boxes with paper votes are still securely locked down, as always! (3) Before results of the election can be officially announced, two more things must happen: i)a random sample of a significant proportion of ballot boxes must be counted by hand, and verified to be equal to or very, very close to what the "un-official" electronic results were, which were already posted online for each ballot box. ii)every party running in the election is allowed to request an official hand-count of a generous proportion of ballot boxes, at places of their choosing, with hand-count results to be verified against the original "un-official" electronic results. (4) If in the previous step above any of the hand-counting for any single ballot box is off from what the "un-official" electronic tally originally had reported, the electronic results are deemed VOID and completely thrown out. At this point, ALL paper ballots go to be hand-counted, to get the true election outcome. Advantages of this approach: (1) Costs WAY less to conduct elections, since much fewer paper ballots are manually counted (Except in those cases where electronic results are off from the statistical sampling, in which case all votes everywhere are recounted... and whomever designed the e-voting security is fired and plastered throughout the media as an idiot/crony). Governments could even pay a nominal insurance fee so that expenses would be covered in the case that the e-voting is hacked and all votes have to be counted (2) results are just as verifiable as classic paper-only election. If absolutely necessary, all paper votes can be counted. (3) complete but un-official election results can theoretically be released seconds after voting closes. No more watching tv news talking heads yammer all night as results slowly trickle in (4) If properly designed, the system can ensure secrecy of your vote Electronic voting can be helpful, but if the day comes that we allow government elections to go electronic-only.. that is the day we ALL lose democracy.
In the US it varies by state; each state makes its own laws regarding voting machines based on HAVA 2002. NC has a pretty strong law. Getting software changes approved is a long and complicated process. NC could not get an open source requirement passed in '05. But the compromise that resulted required vendors to supply their source code to a limited set. This was enough to run off the evil Diebold machines; they sued, lost and backed out of the bidding process; as did Sequoia, which was still in business at the time. We ended up with one vendor; ES&S. Their M-100 ballot scanner is a decent machine. With reasonable access control measures in place it is a secure voting device. The big problem I see with ES&S is their tabulation software; frankly it is terrible. I could change vote totals at will. The required audit would catch those changes but on election night I could send them up to the next level. Current Federal and state law make updating the software illegal. I worry about the two counties I worked in as PrintElect tech support connecting their vote tabulator machines to the internet for OS updates. They run winxp. By law they are not supposed to ever be connected to the internet but small counties with small IT budgets who knows. I agree problems should be addressed prior to election year but I doubt it will happen. Every state will vote with what they have in place now would be my bet. The M-100 runs qnx. -d
Open source is really irrelevant. You can never prove that the voting machine is running an un-altered binary produced from that code on unaltered hardware and with unalterable memory. It's not bad, but it doesn't guarantee anything, so if that's what you think is keeping voting from being equal to a magician counting the votes, then that's a false sense of security you're feeling.
The way you make voting secure is to take the part where you have to trust the machine's memory, with no way for the voter to confirm that its contents are correct -- the magician, essentially -- out of the picture.
Instead, the machine should simply be an enabler for printing a correct ballot. That paper ballot must be the only ballot that matters. That ballot can be machine readable, but it must also be human readable, and it must be the same markings that both human and machines read to determine who the ballot is for.
In this regime, it doesn't matter if the source is open or closed. It doesn't matter if the voting machine is compromised. Because now the "magic" is out in the open, so if the machine tries to pull any tricks, the voter has the ability to actually see that their vote was recorded incorrectly, and not put that ballot in the ballot box.
The enemies of Democracy are
I don't get this e-voting thing.
Even if the software is open sourced how can i ever know that the version running is the one it claims to be ?
I also don't understand how the count can ever be verified without compromising the anonymity of the vote. If you don't trust the system you cannot trust any kind of verification it would do nor any kind of output it would produce (including any paper trail). Does anyone have any insight on the subject ?
And i'm not even talking about software bugs. Even without any kind of malicious intentions we could still face plenty of problems.
Is it me being too paranoid or are the people talking about the subject not seeing the issues at hand ?
Or could it not be some form of social engineering to introduce a backdoor in all future elections ?
Honestly i'd love to see counterarguments.
Your vote doesn't matter. It can be on paper. Electronic. Audit-able. Or not. It still doesn't matter. Stop wasting time buying into the lie that it does, just because some douche on MTV spit some catchy slogan at you and you get a button for your shirt to make you feel like you've done your civic duty because you voted for one evil or the other.
In the U.S., isn't it the candidate that has the greatest corporate backing that wins? Only when the candidates are relatively equally beholding to the corps do human votes come in, and then it is just selecting among pre-determined "choices".
Until the fundamental problems with the U.S. electoral system are addressed, e-voting issues are just a distraction.
on the ballot they tend to have a (D) or (R) next to their name.
I won't trust voting till...
1) There is an audit trail
2) The code is up for inspection
3) You are required to show ID to vote
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
They key thing that will drive a solution, whether hybrid electronic/paper, or open source cryptographic voting, etc... is one thing:
The ability for a state to buy a fully integrated system, including all the support and delivery.
What companies are out there that can actually bid on a statewide e-voting contract to deliver, install, operate, and support the e-voting solution as a single entity?
If such a provider bids and then loses out against some proprietary/insecure/etc... solution, then there is real justification to go after the state bureaucrats who selected an inferior vendor. But without a commercial entity that can provide this on a "all you need to do is pay us an we make it work" basis, it's not going to happen. Then a less preferred vendor will win by default, just because there was nothing else to buy.
I really don't understand this. How, in this age of computing, when even the most sensitive information is tracked and protected digitially (bank accounts, health records, personal identity, etc.), we still cannot acurrately and securely tally a one-time vote total? With digital signatures, virtually unbreakable encryption, firewalls, advanced routing, hash codes, unlimited logging, we still can't be sure the count is reasonably accurate? To penetrate the digital safegaurds has to be exponentiallly more difficult than say, offering a bribe to the guy doing the counting.
Has JoeMonco weighed in on this at all? I can't form an opinion without help from JoeMonco.
The computer should print the ballot on paper, you look it over, then it goes into the ballot box. That should be the only form of computer voting allowed. Anything else means you can't see how you voted, and can't see them count the votes- and that means you can't trust it. It doesn't make any difference what kind of government you have if you have no say in it, or can't trust that you do.
It's better to assume politicians are corrupt and watch them, than to assume them honest and not.
Apparently I've missed the memo on what our voting process is doing wrong. It seems to me we are trying to create a complex technical solution because we can, not because we need it.
When computers are granted suffrage as full citizens then they ought to be allowed to record and count votes. Until then this work should be performed by citizens potentially familiar with the nature of the responsibility and conscious of the potential personal consequences of failure.
Don't call me a Luddite. I'm an IT pro with over three decades experience, and tech is the side my bread has butter on. I'm not opposed to computer programs as citizens as long as someone comes up with a credible way to implement that, which doubtless would involve a constitutional amendment. Until then some few things are just too important to compromise on for the sake of timeliness, efficiency and cost. Voting is one of those things. Votes ought be taken and counted by citizens and nobody else. We should not be so impatient that we cannot wait for citizens to record our votes; to count and tabulate them. To be so impatient is to surrender the responsibility and power of franchise in bulk and will end in trouble of the worst sort.
There is no way around the fact that machine recording, counting and reporting violates the precept of "One citizen, one vote." Anybody who's passed Introduction to Programming would know that. The output of any program is determined first by the programmer, second by the operator, and only then by the inputs as those two permit if the process isn't otherwise compromised. To say there exist some citizens who can audit the machines and code is to create a class of supercitizen qualified to do so and affect the votes of citizens in the main - it places too much trust in the code auditors and grants them more power in the body politick than "One citizen, one vote." Given the advanced state of modern technology it's also a false confidence. Anyone sufficiently skilled to audit the code knows that the underlying hardware can be compromised at the silicon or firmware levels.
Just don't do it. Groups of citizens should count votes at the most local level with diverse interests represented among them and watching each other. At each higher level interested and claimed neutral citizens should tabulate and aggregate them. Everyone participating faces the personal risk of prison or tyranny if cheating is detected or involved undetected. It's that important. It's not a perfect system but if we citizens fail in it at least it's our own fault. To surrender the power of voting through trust to machines crafted by unknown entities running code written by unknown entities audited by special citizens is just to surrender our franchise entire. Trust is for suckers. We may as well not vote.
Machines aren't citizens and they ought not count votes.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
What makes vote tabulation trustworthy is having multiple, independently-reported tallies stored in multiple formats. Just like balancing a checkbook (remember that?), the key is getting agreement on the numbers from more than one source.
For example, in the state of Virginia where I am a poll worker, we count the number of people who have been allowed to vote, and we count the number of votes cast on the machines. Each hour, we compare the two numbers, and call them into the Registrar who records them in a third system. If the numbers differ, it means that a voter walked out of the voting booth without properly casting a vote (this very rarely happens.) As a result, ballot-stuffing is nearly impossible. You'd have to "fix" the numbers on three different systems.
No technology is needed to achieve this effect -- just good processes.
The problem with paper is that it is actually a rather messy, error-prone medium. Paper gets jammed, lost, defaced, torn, etc. Paperless is far more reliable and controlled. (And no, throwing a scanner into the mix doesn't fix the underlying problems with paper.) While I agree that being able to physically recount a paper ballot might help in extreme edge cases, the cost will be a much higher rate of error in every other case. We're not talking the standard 80/20 split here, it's more like 99.5/0.5 (that is, a paperless process would benefit 99.5% of races vs. a paper-based process helping .5%.)
What I would like to see is a paperless voting tally that is digitally signed. The voter, on request, can get a printed receipt of the decryption key, which they can use later on via the web to verify that their individual vote was indeed included in the final result. That way, we don't need to perfectly manage the paper, the voter can have confidence their vote was counted, and we'll add yet another independent verification process to the mix, which is all to the better.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Voting or "e-Voting", voting has always had fraud.
Wikipedia has over 3600 hits on "vote fraud", but good old Google more lackadaisically says "about 25,000,000 results"...
Why are there no ID requirements to vote? You can't legally drive, can't fly on a plane, rent a car, visit someone in a hospital, get money from an ATM, or do much of anything without some sort of ID. I'll bet you didn't get an account with your ISP without verifying who you were, by at least telling them enough to get past the credit check.
How about this - no ID? Give us your word that you are a citizen, and you can vote on all "law" and "policy" issues (like "free speech", "gay rights", "abortion rights", "term limits", whatever.)
Want to vote on bond or spending bills? Tax issues? Anything that has do with spending money? Show an ID -A recent tax return with a > 0 number on the "Tax" line of your tax return would be appropriate.
E-voting is like global thermonuclear war. Call me old fashioned, but I like the idea of marking a paper ballot with a pen, and putting it a box.
Here in Taiwan, ballots are counted at the precinct level. The counting is done in public, with representatives of the major parties present. The whole process takes a couple of hours.
The whole idea of "machine voting" is stupid. It's worse than a waste of money, it invites all kinds of suspicion and dispute. There has to be a paper trail. No exceptions.
Using a machine-countable ballot may save time, and that's ok. But at least it leaves a record that can be double-checked by hand.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
The whole system where we vote for someone who , supposedly and rarely , is supposed to represent my interests as a citizen in the governing institutions is not a guarantee that my ideals and wishes as to what laws and projects go on will in fact be respected and the person i delegate to vote like we were told by them they would actually vote the way we were told they would.We're talking being honest with one's constituents..Now i do know we change our minds and with new info comes new positions on particular matters etc .. BUT ., i still don't get the results and the elected member never protects the citizens interest as they do promoting themselves and their private interests and those that run the money show.What to do ? Simple , give back to the people their right to be heard. Remove the voting from the elected members and let the people decide. Sit at the computer , browse gov projects and laws and vote on items in the government, be it house of commons , senate , chambers in the US , let the People vote on the law projects.Simple. Let the elected officials propose laws and budgets and orientations , give em just enough rope so they can do the day to day bit .. but on anything political and orientations and strategies , let the people vote. If you are not afraid of democracy now THAT should be the end goal, what you go towards to . Ultimately a system where all our voices can be heard on equal grounds for all on all matters. But democracy is in most countries a scam.Well here the Canadians got the shaft from Harper .. they are back at their old crooked ways again .. and there's nothing we citizens can do to stop the harm he's making to our country.Ultimately the Prime Minister is the enemy of the people.But the real good friend of big bucks Inc. Tourlou and so much for democracy .. we will never know it in our living days.
It's called a pencil and a printed piece of paper with the candidates on.
This is the system used in the UK and a lot of other countries in the world. It can't be hacked, it is fully human readable, and it is completely transparent so any attempts to hack it immediately become obvious.
The election results are typically known beyond doubt within less than 24 hours of the poll closing, and the final results are typically declared within a day or two.
Reminds me of that old joke/urban myth where the USA spent $millions developing a pen that could be used in outer space, and the Soviets used a pencil.
Agree that a paper trail should be mandatory, but I think it doesn't matter too much about backdoors, open/closed source, etc. The electoral audit should be in the same way that we audit the bank accounts. If I make a deposit with 1000 dollars to my bank account (i have a deposit in paper), when I check the results (account statement) should show 1000. In the same way that I don't care about what the bank is doing and what technology is using as far my balance matches my deposits and withdrawals, for a electoral system, if in every polling center I can do a audit based on the paper trail, the voting machine print the results and in the final report the results coming from that machine are the same, I don't care if they a running QNX, MS-DOS or CP/M 80. Obviously, in the same spirit that a bank should have security measures to taking care about digital security like data integrity, authenticate the user, etc, a electoral system should have it. If all the banks spend millions securing their systems and still have issues with people stealing money, thinking that an electoral system will be perfect is naif. The important issue is to know when something happens and having a contingency plan to detect and fix any digital issue. And of course, the stackeholders of the elections should be the ones looking _the data_, not giving this responsability to third parties. My two cents.
We already have a simple, secure, cheap voting method, in which the voter actually knows that their vote has been cast correctly, and counted correctly:
http://www.paul-robinson.us/index.php/2008/10/25/the_robinson_method_a_really_simple_way_?blog=5
Every time I post this on Slashdot, the idiots come out of the woodwork and pooh pooh it, presumably because they can't get their heads around so simple a concept.
It's very simple - the current voting system was DESIGNED for fraud. Putting little crosses on little bits of paper, with no way of knowing whether your vote was ever counted properly, or even worse, using a computer system to 'vote' on, is beyond a joke.
Have a look at http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ to see how fraudulent your current system is- anybody found responsible for trying to subvert DEMOCRACY should be imprisoned.
Did you just ask us for evidence of political corruption? Seriously? I'mma let you off light on this one, with only one insulting clue:
Diebold.
A voter casts an encrypted ballot in which the key they possess is useless to anyone wishing to find out what the vote was, but where there is one and only one key that can decrypt that ballot and produce a valid record. This requires that you have two machines - the one generating the key pair and the one doing the decryption, where both are tamper-proof, the link is unidirectional and the link is also tamper-proof.
Oh wow, when you said there were other methods to solve the veracity problem, this is not what I thought you meant. I'm sorry, but this is a hard fail.
If we had voting machines which were tamper-proof, and which could be trusted to record the voter's vote reliably, and rigorously obeyed all requirements like "destroy the encryption keys" or "don't change the voter's vote before encrypting it" then we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Your whole system falls apart because there is no way for the voter to be sure that the machine that encrypts their vote has encrypted the vote which they desired instead of altering it first. Or recording the encryption key for future recovery or editing. Etc.
All you've done is ensure that the link between the voting machine and the central database isn't vulnerable to modification en-route. Which is not the biggest problem with voting machines by far. The use of quantum encryption to solve this tiny portion of the problem is complete overkill while still not fixing the fundamental issue, for example.
Only paper ballots ensure that the will of the voter is properly recorded in said ballot.
The enemies of Democracy are
E-VOTING CANNOT BE SECURED - PERIOD
Yes you heard correctly.
IM-POSS-I-BLE to secure E-VOTING IS...
READ HERE for ONLY
FAIL-SAFE-VOTING
SOLUTION POSSIBLE:
http://goo.gl/mq3zh
People have been working hard on a way to make open source governance a reality, and the code is being built: http://metagovernment.org/
Metagovernment doesn't require buy-in from politicians. It is a ground-up movement to replace politicians by providing people with a new, open, free governance system to which they can gradually migrate.
If you can code, or even contribute ideas, the project could really use your help: http://metagovernment.org/wiki/Participate