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NYU Study: America's Voting Machines Are Rapidly Aging Out
Presto Vivace passes on a link to a report at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU's law school which says that many of the vote-counting machines set to be used in the 2016 U.S. general election will be past their prime by the time of the election, if not long before. From the report:
Technology has changed dramatically in the last decade, but America's voting machines are rapidly aging out. In 2016, for example, 43 states will use electronic voting machines that are at least 10 years old, perilously close to the end of most systems' expected lifespan. Old voting equipment increases the risk of failures and crashes — which can lead to long lines and lost votes on Election Day — and problems only get worse the longer we wait.
The first person at each machine at the next election will take some time, because he will be asked to update to Windows 10 first.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I truly don't understand why we're not *all* voting online by now. If I can spend or transfer every single penny I have in my bank accounts online, in an instant (and I can), then why can't I cast my vote online using the same security mechanisms?
DBD.
Let's purchase one less F-35 fighter and instead replace every voting machine in America. If people get butthurt, we can make the first vote on the new machines whether or not to purchase that single fighter plane or not.
Best news we've had all week.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
In Canada our voting systems have a design lifespan of one day, because they are made out of paper and cardboard. Still a lot more secure and reliable then the US system.
And let's not forget fraud...The black boxes are not trustworthy. I find it hard to believe that some of these crackpots are actually winning the vote. We need to go back to paper. It's easier to verify and very low maintenance.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The elections are rigged, anyway. The preponderance of the masses are too busy, sick, or lazy (or all of the above) to vote, and those who do are told who to vote for by the mass media. Even if an unprecedentedly huge 5% of the population were actually informed on the issues and voted for a candidate who'd actually make things better (or die trying), it wouldn't make enough of a difference in the election to tip the scales.
We don't like to admit it because we think we're "freer" than other countries that run faux democracies like Russia and India, but in reality, we're no freer than they are, and our elections are just as rigged, if not moreso.
When we arrive to vote there are at least three volunteers there to manage everything. They first validate our voter registration card sent to us in the mail or government issued ID against a list of registered voters for that polling station. Next they cross us off the list and hand us a paper ballot and some other piece of paper with our name and other information on it.
We then go to a private booth which has pens and instructions that clearly show how to mark the ballot and how not to mark it. When finished we return to the desk of volunteers and clearly show them that we are placing only one ballot in the box. They control access to the slot. Finally we give them the other piece of paper that they gave us earlier and they pass it through a machine that looks like a shredder but it has digital counters on it. I guess it is counting the number of votes and might even be recording who voted. I'm not sure about the who part or if that information is shared across all polling stations to ensure you only vote once. Regardless, it is separate from the paper ballot. The machine looks like it could last decades because it's not a Windows computer with a spinning disk etc.
At the end of the night the three volunteers count the ballots and report the results. We have three major political parties in Canada and I wonder if the volunteers represent each of the parties to ensure no cheating. I'll ask at our next election in October.
We have seen for some time now that the more affluent your voting district, the better chances are of having well-maintained, functional, and plentiful voting machines. Yeah there are lots of ageing voting machines, but they likely don't reside in areas that elected politicians and their cronies are concerned about.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
Anyway that's what I started voting on. Probably still works, harder to hack than something updating an MDB file. Had lasted at least 40-50 years when I used it.
But other organizations have done similar things in the past to affect change, so why not do it here?
Basically, instead of complaining about how unsafe and insecure voting is, start a website called something like 'cockblockthevote.org' and detail how to cheat at voting on a state-by-state sort of setup, where each state's districts will have the machines they use with a link to all the vulnerabilities and how to 'hack the vote' with that machine. I'm sure a bunch of the research can be done here on slashdot by just browsing election years and all the notes on things like diebold vulnerabilities.
A site like this would get change a lot faster than security experts whining about it, IMO. I would even donate to whatever group started doing it but the truth is I just don't have the time to DIY.
you said it, brother!
Face it, our voting machines are all rigged now.
How else can NOBODY vote for THAT GUY, but he keeps getting elected year-in and year-out?
Can't have the wrong lizard get elected, now can we?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Related is the voting revolution happening in the western US -- vote by mail, with scanned paper ballots. Colorado, Oregon, and Washington already send a mail-in ballot to every registered voter. Arizona and California are clearly heading in that direction. Once those "big five" western states have adopted, the smaller ones -- some of which already have permanent no-excuse absentee ballots -- are likely to follow along. I admit to being biased; I love that my polling place is my kitchen table.
One of the interesting things I've noticed is when I raise the subject with friends, the ones who are opposed almost always grew up east of the Mississippi, and are terrified that large-scale fraud will occur. There's a PhD dissertation for a sociologist or political scientist in there somewhere.
It is not going to be a big deal. People are disgusted and have stopped voting anyway.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If a voting system cannot last more then 20 years... it was defective to begin with.
pencils last for 20 years?
I worked designing ballot reading machines back in the late 80's. I enjoyed the work and we made some great equipment. Then the "hanging chad" incident came along and the Federal Elections Commission issued strict certification standards for ballot counting equipment. Once my company certified the machines that they sold, they ended all R&D and new product development. It was not possible to make incremental improvements without a massive retest and recertification, and the company (correctly) surmised that the certification costs would limit the playing field to the existing players. So, no incentive to build better machines.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Voting really hasn't changed in thousands of years, so I'm not really sure why the voting machines can be 'past their prime'.
What exactly do you upgrade on a voting machine? Its electronic or its not. If its electronic, you're already fucking stupid so I'm going to ignore you. If its not electronic, then just put a new sticker on the faceplate and move on because functionally theres no reason what so ever to upgrade, use it until it breaks, THEN upgrade.
If its electronic, and you need to update it, then you do, but you update it with another company that can make voting machines that don't suck ass instead of continuing to pay the company that sold you broken machines and can't be bothered to write software properly. You don't need a new voting machine because theres a new version of windows, you don't need a new version of windows, you don't need a new 'theme' for your voting machine.
There are pretty much zero reasons to upgrade a voting machine that isn't broken.
You don't have to upgrade just because there is a new version, and its really fucking stupid to do so if you do. When a machine is performing properly, use it until it doesn't.
If you have to 'upgrade' to get a functioning machine because the company refuses to fix its existing one, you just ban that company from doing any government business and you ban every single person above middle management from ever doing any business with the government or any business they work for from doing any business with the government. You make it impossible for those greedy manipulative pricks to ever be involved with tax payer money again. If that means they can't find a job and starve to death ... well, its good to throw some chlorine in the gene pool regularly, maybe they type of person will become a little less common.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I don't really care about age, I care about accuracy. If a newer machine is more accurate, more secure and quicker I'm all for it as long it is reasonable in cost. However given recent articles (Diebold anyone?) that have came out in the past decade or so that seems unlikely and the older machines are probably far more accurate, reliable and robust.
I think we should go back to pen-and-paper voting, with ballot boxes and manual counting. No practical purpose is served by introducing technology into the process of voting.
Actually, voting has changed. It used to be done by tokens placed into urns or people raising their hands in a town square. Then by marks made on paper.
Only fairly recently has it started being done by "machine" (punch cards, levers, or digital computers), and it's unclear why a "machine" is needed: it's expensive, difficult to audit, and easy to manipulate.
Whenever a machine fails there's a risk of lost votes. More importantly these machines are just insecure. We need voting machines with open source hardware, open source software, and encrypted, hashed, anonymous publicly available vote records. Ask for a password. Hash the password, the vote, the polling booth's number, and the time (in 15 minute increments) and make that immediately publicly available.
Each voter can then go to a publicly accessible website and enter where and when he voted and what password he used, and be told how he voted. If that bothers you add a unique password inside each booth the person can alternatively use to be told he voted differently, or allow entry of an alternate password to be answered a user-selectable vote.
The hashed verifiable votes will be proof against election fraud.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Other countries don't have party-political candidates for school crossing attendants and second assistant dog catchers and hence have nice simple ballots where you have to write one X in one of half-a-dozen boxes or - at worst (where they use the alternatively-unfair-vote system) - write numbers in a few of them.
In that case, bits of paper with Xs on and human counters are a nice, scalable solution given that its only needed every couple of years.
Oh and other countries, if they really don't like the result, have a civil war. The US prefers to have lawsuits which (while obviously better from a humanitarian point of view) are more demanding when it comes to audit trails.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
My voting precincts use scantron sheets for all elections. Simple, anonymous, secure. I mark my ballot, walk to the scantron machine and enter my ballot. If there's a problem with my ballot there's an error message. If the sheet is destroyed by the scanner I can fill out another sheet.
Why is this so hard for everyone else? I don't want online voting. It complicates a very easy task.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Or everyone could switch to the Oregon way of voting and use mail-in ballots. I've lived in places where I had to take my time to stand in line at voting centers. Hopefully never again. Being able to leisurely fill out my ballot in my home and then quickly dropping it off in a ballot box at the library or other such places is so convenient that I'm astonished everyone else doesn't follow this same model. It just works.
I can see why you might say that. On other hand, US Democrats believe that when Democrats design a paper ballot, then the state Democratic party approves that paper ballot, you end up with a paper ballot that democrat voters aren't smart enough to use. There are a lot of errors on those paper ballots, they say. They may well be right . They may have done a terrible job of designing the ballot, their committee who reviewed and approved the ballot may have been incompetent, and their voters may be less than competent as well.
I would rather add the additional support and funding necessary to provide photo ID's necessary- including sending advanced teams necessary to help secure birth certificates and ancillary documentation- than allow continued voting without ID.
In the presence of such additional support, would you still contend that it's racist to require photo ID? And on what basis would you make that claim?
"These people are too incompetent to secure a photo ID despite being offered all the documentation & processing assistance we can provide.... but we want to make sure they vote anyway."
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
(That's my first interrobang of the day.)
So, a system, vital not only to a process but to a nation's entire constitution and fundamental to its very sense of right and wrong, and the basis for its existence and the reason it's at war with other nations, is ten years old, and you want to replace it?
Here are the HUGE problems.
First, it's used, what, once every 4 years? So you want to replace the system with something new basically every third time. So the first is the test to see if it works, and the second is the fix that hopefully works. Sounds exactly like presidential terms to me. Maybe it should simply be replaced with each new president?
Oh wait, but the bill of rights is also more than ten years old. So are the planes and the guns and the houses and the voters.
Perhaps, just maybe, the system should be built to last a little longer than ten years.
Just a thought.
Oh yeah, there are a few satelites, telescopes, and infrastructure in orbit that are older than ten years.
And of course, those of us who prefer humans make basic marks on physical media are right about all of this and talked about the expense and untrustworthy nature of voting machines.
Here in Oregon, we vote by mail, and are joined by WA and CO now, with some other pockets here and there in various states. It's awesome, works, can be trusted, is difficult to fraud on a scale that would impact anything, and turnout is generally higher than the poll methods in use most everywhere else today.
We can actually manually count and evaluate every last vote if needed.
Blogging because I can...
there is no link to ballot 376 run through the scanner and your signature in the polling record book. the monitors are not allowed to bring in invisible ink or anything.
your having voted, period, no other information becomes public information and ends up on poll records for all political parties and independents that are willing to pay the fee and put the .csv file into a spreadsheet. nobody knows how you voted unless you tell people.
that's how it works in Minnesota, and anybody who does it differently becomes a drone test area. four quarters to control a drone at better bars everywhere.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
It's 2015, but electronic voting is a solution in search of a problem.
You can't really make an electronic system that protects secrecy, while also preventing large scale fraud, and most importantly, being auditable by citizens, not security experts, and right there on election day.
Paper vote has different versions, but most of them comply with that. There are some cases where paper ballots mislead, things like that, but all those cases can be improved by better, possible, citizens and party auditing.
Electronic voting _can_ be faster than paper voting, but you can only save the couple of hours (at max) it takes for humans to count the ballots at the voting table. It's a dumb trade-off to earn two hours (tops), and lose secrecy, fraud containment, and auditability.
If they are only used for one day every 2 years? Yeah I think a pencil can survive 10 days of usage.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
the ONLY reason we have to have "electronic" voting AT ALL, is because the TV news media wants the results before voting has even ended.
Paper ballots require that they be actually COUNTED. But with electronic systems, you can see where the voting is headed before the polls have even closed.
Which is great for TV media, because they get to turn the entire thing into a horse race, and keep you on the edge of your seat, eating popcorn, watching their holograms and pie charts, and of course their commercials, so that they can rake in money on election night.
So; since this whole thing is about benefitting Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, Disney, Sumner Redstone and whoever owns NBC, MAKE THEM PAY FOR IT.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
...if voting machines did anything, they'd be illegal.
Between the pre-loaded Diebold machines and the amazing "counting errors" they exhibit, you might as well be playing one of those carnival games where it's stacked a billion to one against you.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
What's the problem? Our felt tipped pens get replaced at (almost) every election.
EOM
love is just extroverted narcissism
Updating these expensive machines will be a hard sell to cities and towns used to spending money on machines like loaders and dump trucks and dozers that last for decades and only leave service when they are so broken down, they cannot possibly be used any more. Look at vehicle auctions for used municipal equipment and you'll see some horror shows that were considered "just fine" weeks before the auction.
Contrast with a voting machine used maybe twice a year for ten years. How is THAT used up and worn out? It spends nearly ALL of the time folded up and stored somewhere. It should be like new.
Sig for hire.
If you can not find volunteers to count ballots, then your democracy is already dead.
If you can not have a fair process for the voting system, then your democracy is dangerously dysfunctional, if not totally doomed.
If your voting system is like the USA, you are stuck in the past and need to become a modern civilization (see http://www.cgpgrey.com/politic...)
If you can not reasonably predict outcomes from exit polls you are heavily propagandized to the point where mathematics, science, and education have too little influence.... your democracy is going to fail.
If you think Nate Silver is a genius for simply being competent in a corrupted profession then your part of the problem.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
At least one other person here understands the motives of election officials.
Most slashdotters appear to be under the misconception that politicians want accurate and secure voting machines.
I can see the fnords!
The companies selling the voting machines.
I can see the fnords!
There are NO secure and verifiable electronic voting systems. All of them have flaws, back doors, defects, and vulnerabilities. The only even vaguely secure voting system is PAPER ballots. Every voter should mark a PAPER ballot. (If somebody wants to design a voting machine that then prints out a PAPER ballot to be verified by the voter, I suppose that would be OK.)
Paper ballots, unlike electronic ballots, can be re-counted. They can be examined for signs of tampering. Once the ballot is marked, it can be scanned and electronically counted. After the election has been certified, THEN the ballots can be destroyed.
And every poll worker must be required to certify that EVERY ballot has been sent in to the County Board of Elections; any "boxes of ballots" that appear the next day, a la Al Franken, should earn a LONG jail term for the poll worker responsible.
Voting machines are used AT LEAST 4 times every 4 years; primary for the presidential, general for the presidential, primary for the intermediate Congressional/Senate elections, general for same.
Now find me a district that never has a runoff, or a special election, or a school board or referendum election. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that a majority of all districts have at least one of these every cycle.
But the only voting technology that never goes obsolete are PAPER ballots. I sell and install scanners and document management systems, and I'm very comfortable recommending electronic systems. But for voting, only paper is good enough.
Computer based Voting Machines, while wonderful at getting results in quickly, will be functionally useless while the life of a Computer can be measured as 1, maybe 2 Elections. The cost of upkeep and replacement is simply too high. How many Polling Officials could be Employed, yes Employed and Paid, to work at an election for that $1b to replace the machines. Machines that would need to be replaced every other election cycle, assuming no-one finds flaws in the SSL version they use, or compute powers makes the encryption key too short. Paper and a Pencil works, it works in a bunch of states, it works in India's ~1.2b population, it can work in the US. Hire people to check and count, because they will have to do it anyway after the challenge to the e-Vote.
Why can't we do the voting online with iPads or our phones, share all of the raw data with third party auditors, aggregate it, and track all votes in real-time?
Yeah, I call it Chad. You got a problem with that?
Nope, but I thought you might, considering that most chads are supposed to be cut off...
EQ != IQ
Marks != Merit;
Voting != Democracy;
Democracy != Independence;
Economic mobility != Social mobility;
Casteism
Technology moves so quickly that any investment in voting equipment beyond the bare minimum to produce decent results in a reasonable amount of time is not worth wasting money on. At no more than one or two uses a year, voting machines are extremely under-utilized equipment. Even paper ballots that don't have alternate uses are a waste of effort.
The only way to get sufficient use out of voting equipment would be to shorten term limits to days and/or change the role of representatives so their purpose is to vote on whether or not a potential law should be presented to the voting public. That should keep them busy and increase the value derived from voting equipment investments.