Cringley on E-voting 275
alfredo writes "I am shocked that this story from I Cringley hasn't been sent in and posted at Slashdot. I thought the slashdot crowd would be all over this. Robert X Cringley has a take on the voting scandal a bit different than what we have seen in the past, and promises more to come."
Moot? (Score:4, Interesting)
So call it e-voting and wonder why there is confusion.
"So the U.S. government threw $3.5 billion on the table to pay for modernizing voting throughout the land, which is to say making it more expensive and more complicated. That's a lot of money and it attracted a lot of interest. One company in particular, Diebold Systems, went so far as to buy a smaller company that made voting machines just to get into the market. Diebold thought that being in the automated teller business was a good starting point for changing the way America votes."
Why not? They handle lots of money every day, why not give them valuable votes to control too? Oh wait a minute. They are republicans, these Diebold folks, aren't they? Once you take E-day away from little old ladies, you lose all honesty in it, imho.
And little old ladies are really the reason why elections have worked in the past because they are far better at auditing things than any automated paper-trail could be. If you would mess with the machine to fix votes, you could mess with the audit paper to fix the audit. So maybe Cringley's point has some surface validity, but it's moot, IMHO.
He concludes that a paper trail would be necessary for voting machines. That's fine with me, and everything, but the one thing in this article that grabbed me was when he said: "...there is lots of money to be made whether the darned thing works or not, and not much of a penalty if it doesn't work. Two hundred and seventy-five billion is a lot of money to spend on software development, especially if 72 percent of that money will be either wasted completely or used to develop something that doesn't work intended."
This could be seen as the fatal flaw of humanity: we don't care if we fail. We all die anyway, so who cares? Live life, make money and make love and make war and have fun and that's about that. Who cares if we just spent more money on a project that totally failed, when most of the world is starving elsewhere? What does it matter to us?
Personally, I'd like to devise a way so that it *would* matter.
Re:Moot? (Score:5, Insightful)
Another concern that I have is the desire of government to jump from the trailing edge of voting technology to the bleeding edge of voting technology. The Florida election results clearly showed the problems with punch card voting. However, many of these problems were due to poor ballot design, poor maintenance of voting equipment, or poor training or poll workers and voters. (A large number of hanging chad problems were caused by the simple failure to clean out the chads from previous elections.) Boston, Massachusetts switched from lever driven mechanical voting machines to paper ballots and optical scanners. There were problems with the transition, but most of the problems were procedural in nature and not technical in nature. The combination of paper ballots and optical scanning has a very good track record. The paper ballots provide a nice audit trail that can be used to verify the results of the optical scanning and computer tabulation.
I live in Somverille, Massachusetts where paper ballots and optical scanners have been used for years. The systems is backed up by experienced poll workers. I've never heard of any problem, let alone a serious problem, with this system as it is implemented in my city.
Congress should have proposed moving to the best voting technology available that has a proven track record. This would avoid the issue of bleeding edge technology that has an unproven track record. The biggest problem with computer based systems that have closed source code and no paper trail is the inability to properly inspect and test these systems to make sure that they are as good or better than the technology that they seek to replace.
Re:Moot? (Score:4, Interesting)
You know, this really concerns me. Even WITH a paper trail, it wouldn't be hard to lie to people. All you really need is one extra variable in your program, and the foresight to make sure that the numbers aren't *too* overwhelmingly in one candidate's favor. Pseudocode might look like this:
int x=((rand()*10)-4);
if (x>=0) {
voter_candidate=foo;
voted_for=bar;
display "you voted for " && voter_candidate && ".";
submit voted_for;
}
and the best part is, we might not notice until we have a string of politicians affiliated with one party that lasts a few terms! Give me pen and paper any time.
Re:Moot? (Score:4, Interesting)
You forget that here in Massachusetts, cradle of the revolution all the congressmen, both senators, a clear majority of the state house and practically all the statewide officials are Democrats and the only reason that Republicans seem to get elected seems to be people prefer to have someone to serve as a counterweight to one party government.
The point is not what the outcome of elections are when they are practically a formality. Nobody expects Massachusetts to be voting for Bush next November. The only reason political ads run on the Massachusetts TV stations is that people in New Hampshire watch the stations.
I think the concern over Diebold is misplaced. Rigging the voting machines is a really hard way to rig an election, you need a lot of people to be in on the fix. Diebold management might be solidly Republican but there is no way they could trust their engineers to join them in a criminal conspiracy. Its just too many people.
Its not like the situation in Florida where Katherine Harris was reportedly involved with the office manager of Choicepoint, the company who now admits it rigged the infamous 'scrub lists' used to keep legitimate black voters of the rolls on the grounds their names were similar to (four characters matched) those of convicted fellons (many of whom were still serving time and thus not merely ineligible to vote, incapable of doing so unless the Florida authorities sent out a postal ballot). See my sig for details on the Florida scandal.
The way that the vote is rigged in every country is you keep the wrong voters from the polls. In the US that means keeping black voters at home if you are Republican. You make it hard to register, you make the polling stations inconvenient for blacks and easy to get to for whites. At one time the KKK would appear at polling stations dressed in their pillow cases etc. Today there are 'poll watchers' who tend to challenge the credentials of black voters, or be assigned to the polls in black areas.
Then there was a whole different set of tricks used by Mayor Daley in Chicago. Basically the scheme there was they used a machine, a highly organized political group which would vote for people so they didn't have to. 'Vote early vote often'. That is why Nixon tried to have the Illinois ballot challenged in the 1960, only his problem was that the rural vote had also been fixed for his side... Actually although the 60 election was very close in the popular vote the electoral college was a much wider spread.
Yet another way of rigging the result was the way the Republicans stole the 1876 election. Of course this was before the parties switched over and the Democrats became the progressive party and the party of Lincoln became the party of pandering to diehard seggregationists. So you could call this one either way. The fix here wa to have the Supreme court throw out the ballots for enough sothern states to keep Tilden out of office. In the end the South got the best of the deal, in return for keeping quiet the Democrats agreed to end the 'reconstruction' penalties on the South. Part of which being allowing the south to start establishing the institutions of seggregation.
Re:Moot? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would that be? It only takes one well-placed person can write the malicious code and hide it in the software. Indeed, you may not need to be well-placed at all.
But even assuming what you say is true, so what? Look at the stakes. Look at all the past examples of election tampering, many of which involve large groups of people.
It isn't paranoia to be concerned about these machines, for this one simple reason: any other flaw in our democracy can be addressed by our democracy, but not this. Once we lose the vote to these machines, we lose the capacity to remove the machines from the process. It's a one-way street, and once we're on it, the only recourse will be violence, a la 1776.
So we should take great care to make sure we don't take that road.
Re:Moot? (Score:4, Insightful)
I can answer THAT for you right now. He's going to (correctly) assert that the reason there is no paper-trail requirement is that the political establishment DOES NOT WANT ONE. The original vote tally is a one-time process, but the recount process can drag on forever, and THAT is what "they" want to avoid forever more.
Re:Moot? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Moot? (Score:3, Insightful)
All the other machines Diebold make, the 'transaction' is verified already. At one end of the transaction or the other, someone is quite likely to notice and complain if their ATM transaction got lost.
Ticket machine customers are generally going to notice if they get double-billed. Promoters are going to notice if they sold x tickets but only collected money for (x-n).
The paper trail exists to fix mistakes, not find them.
In the case of electronic voting, voters don't have any other way
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Moot? (Score:5, Insightful)
o What is the size, in millions, of the voting population in the US?
Doesn't matter, since both countries will break everything done into very small jurisdictions.
The US has 280+million
Ohio has 11.3 million
Franklin County has 1.2 million
Columbus has 750k
my pollworking ward has 10k
my pollworking precint (four pollworkers per precinct) has 850 registered voters and of those 850 registered, about 120 will vote in an off year election, about 300 will vote in an even year, 500 will vote in presidential election
Here in Franklin County we use machines, but with four pollworkers, I imagine we could count paper ballots up fairly quickly, even if 500 people vote. (After all, that's why there's four of us.)
Voting Errors Mostly Human (Score:4, Informative)
The Florida election results clearly showed the problems with punch card voting.
Actually, according to a study by MIT and CalTech, punch cards are comparable to other voting methods, and, depending upon who you believe, possibly better. Though I've been unable to find the study itself, I've seen it mentioned by Neal Boortz [boortz.com] and others [democrap.com]. (I've not been able to find the study; nonetheless, I've found Boortz to be accurate in his facts more often than not.) Punch cards actually come out on top of the other methods.
However, many of these problems were due to poor ballot design...
Enh; I don't know. The infamous "butterfly ballot" certainly seemed simple enough to me, and to the third graders to whom it was shown, and to the Democratic Party officials who designed and approved it, and nobody seemed to complain when it was published in the newspaper, but I'm sure I'm missing something.
Imagine that...you have to maintain a mechanical device. This ought to be a crime, at least of negligence.
Poor training of poll workers? Admittedly, I've not been one, but it seems simple enough. If not, then this falls under the same "negligence" bit, as above. Poor training of the voters? As I said, the ballot seemed clear enough; if the voters couldn't figure it out, then I suppose we ought to be pointing fingers at the schools for turning out uneducated graduates. Further, if they couldn't understand, and couldn't be arsed to ask the poll workers for help, well, if they don't care that much, if they can't be bothered to check their votes, do we really want them voting? I don't mean that as flamebait--if you take the time to consider your vote, and act carefully to get it right, why should somebody else, who had no idea for whom they voted, have just as much say?
Re:Voting Errors Mostly Human (Score:5, Informative)
At least four things, actually:
Thing is, with the screwy layout you didn't have to carefully consider your vote if you were voting for the first guy on the list - who happened to be Bush. (No conspiracy about the design meant to be implied, it just worked out that way. Had it worked out with Gore in punch position 1, and a bunch of Bush votes being miscounted, I'm sure Democrats would be pointing fingers at "Republican voters who were too dumb to follow instruction" while Republicans would be crying for accessible voting.)
Re:Voting Errors Mostly Human (Score:3, Interesting)
It didn't just work out that way, it was required under Floridia Law. The Party that won the last election for Governor gets the number one ballot postion. A Republican won the last Governors's race so a Republican got the top spot on the next race. That WAS a conspiracy, but one by the Dems not the GOP The Dems passed the law when they control
Here's why... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll venture a guess at this... it's not that Diebold hasn't already thought of this, but that they are fulfilling the MINIMUM requirements of what has been requested of them. Then they get millions of machines out there, and there is another electoral controversy, this time involving e-voting machines. So a Diebold executive proposes th
Re:Moot? (Score:2, Interesting)
Although your post is mostly a rant about Republicans trying to steal elections through e-voting and the cliche "stop being selfish and solve world hunger," I think this sentence is important to comment on:
This could be seen as the fatal flaw of humanity: we don't care if we fail.
This is an absolutely fundamental part of the free market economy of the US. Unlike some parts of the world, it's not a huge black mark on your record if you fail. In fact, it's sometimes a badge of honor.
We're entrepreneurs t
Re:Moot? (Score:3, Interesting)
They just polish up their resumes and look elsewhere for work.
Scott Adams had a point in Dogbert's Management book that covered this. Attach your name to a monumental failure and everyone will want to hire you. Case in point, if your name is attached to a project that succeeds, too many people are trying to get recognized for working on it so the
Re:Moot? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not true. By using your definition, terrorism will NEVER cease to exist. Every arab terrorist could be dead and some Philippino muslim could blow up a bomb in a disco. So you could argue terrorism still exists. Bush's policies have made this country safer. How many attacks have occurred in this country since 9/11? wh
Re:Moot? (Score:2)
Personally, I'd like to devise a way so that it *would* matter.
excuse me if I am wrong, but isn't that what would be considered a lack of conscious? Ignoring the obvious
Re:Moot? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:True Democracy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Really? We have almost 100% literacy. How educated is educated enough? A lot of people equate educated to thinking like they do. Is that how you measure it?
After 9/11, every person who even looked Arabic would have been put in jail.... Your post was optimistic. Optimism is good. But at some point you have to face reality.
That's pretty close to what happened any way, isn't it? All the people that are being held in the U.S. without trial because they have ties to the middle eas
Re:Are you lying? or just misinformed (Score:3, Informative)
The Civil Rights Commission found no one who was unfairly denied the right to vote despite it being in their institutional and personal interest to do so.
That's funny, because this link [usccr.gov] says they found "it was widespread voter disenfranchisement, not the dead-heat contest, that was the extraordinary feature in the Florida election. The disenfranchisement was not isolated or episodic. And state officials failed to fulfill their duties in a manner that would prevent this disenfranchisement."
So I ask you
E-voting (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:E-voting (Score:5, Interesting)
Solves the problem without making too many changes to the current system.
Re:E-voting (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah! Wooot! (Score:5, Funny)
Duh! (Score:3, Funny)
It has...
Cringe-Worthy (Score:3, Funny)
Hmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
What does this mean? If you want a program that does X, Y and Z, and you get one that does X and Y, it could still be useful and worth the money you spend.
I think that when you look at lots of 'business' apps, all it has to do is get it close to right, it doesn't need to work 'perfectly' every time as long as it doesn't corrupt the data, and a lot of the QA work is simply mess with it until it gets stable, rather then having any kind of real proof that it works correctly.
That said, I think a lot of slashdot users, or at least me, noticed a lot of "hackwork" style coding with the Diebold voting system. Especially the use of Microsoft tools and MS access.
Its like they slathered together a bunch of components they already had, did a little debugging, and tried selling the the things.
What's frustrating about it is we all know that it's possible to do this simply, and well, but Diebold chose to do a crappy job and lie about it, rather then doing it right the first time.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem here is, what if Z is the most important requirement for the project?
There are a number of different criteria that are desirous in a voting system. However, a few of them are absolutely necessary. The ones that are necessary are that it must not introduce statistically significant amounts of error, it must be anonymous, and it must be auditable and trustable. If you lack any of these qualities, you wind up with a system which is worse than nothing at all, becuase the system is not just flawed: it is potentially damaging.
Punch cards become an unworkable option because they violate the first of these. The potential margin of uncatchable error is large enough that it was larger than the margin of victory in the deciding area of the last presidential election.
The electronic voting systems currently being pushed have almost all of the desirable voting-system qualities, lack the last of the necessities: they are inauditable and untrustable. This is not just an implementation problem. It is a fundamental problem-- becuase any auditing methods for the system must themselves be electronic, and thus as susceptable to being cheated as the system itself. It is perhaps possible to create a trustable electronic voting system. However, it requires an absolutely obsessive-compulsive attention to detail, something along the lines of methods used on the Las Vegas slot machines mentioned on
You have to remember, it isn't enough for a voting system just to produce a correct answer. It has to to the greatest extent possible eliminate doubt. If you have a system which is not trustable, but by coincidence just happens to be accurate, it's still going to be a problem because the elected candidates enemies will be able to go around for that candidate's entire political lifespan claiming that they stole the election-- and really, who can definitively say that they're wrong?
Statistical Margin of Error (Score:3, Insightful)
Potential margin of error? So did Democrat chads hang more often than Republican or Independent chads?
Sure, the small margin of victory did make any error all the more significant, but the error should have evened out over the large number of votes.
This is the key problem with e-voting: if the machines are hackable, there will be too few hacks
Electronic Voting already exists and works (Score:5, Informative)
That ballot is inserted into a machine that electronicly counts the votes and stores the physical ballot in a locked box.
Done.
Paper trail is present, no "hanging chads".
simple elegent. and easier to complete than filling in your name on the SATs (those Damn bubbles
Re:Electronic Voting already exists and works (Score:3, Informative)
This "system" has been in use for at leat the 16 years that I have been voting here.
specifics on the ballot:
two columns
QUESTION TEXT
ANSWER1......... >>>___>>>
ANSWER2......... >>>___>>>
Fill in the arrow with the supplied pen to indicate your choice.
That is it.
done
QED
Re:Electronic Voting already exists and works (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Electronic Voting already exists and works (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Electronic Voting already exists and works (Score:5, Funny)
Like voting for Bush?
Re:Disaster (Score:3, Funny)
The submitter was right (Score:2)
Misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
No, The American Civil Liberties Union said in California that certain counties in the recent election were disenfranchised by using punch card voting. The fact that one of the alternatives to punch card voting is touchscreen voting does not mean that the ACLU was demanding the counties use touchscreen voting, just that the counties not use the punch card voting systems which had lost their legal certification anymore!
Cringely's intentions are excellent but he plays into the biggest, most disasterous, most helpful to the voting companies fallacy in the entire mess:
Recording method of votes and tabulation method of votes are entirely separate, orthogonal concepts.
The first has to do with, do you make a mark on a piece of paper, pull a lever, or touch a button on a screen? The second has to do with, are the votes recorded on paper and dropped in a box to be counted somewhere, or are they put on a hard drive to be just added together somewhere?
The first is what electronic voting salesmen are mostly selling the systems based on. The second is what electronic voting's enemies are mostly complaining about, as it alone is what makes almost all of the potential cheating possible. There's *no reason the two have to go together*! You could have a touch-screen voting machine which prints out a scantron sheet, which then is dropped in a box and counted like a hand-filled-out scantron sheet would have been.
A lot of the support for "electronic voting" has come from the fact its proponents have attempted as much as possible to prevent the false choice of "Punch cards VS electronic voting!" and hoping pieces of paper won't come to people's minds. But much of the remainder of the support on this issue have come from people using the advantages of touch-screen voting to sell "electronic voting", acting as if the touch-screens are inseperable from the idea of storing votes for tabulation on fragile, black-box electronic media, and banking on public confusion about All Things Computer to assume people won't notice this.
Re:Misleading (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not confusion - it's ignorance. The plebes that make up our electorate think computer = Microsoft Windows. They don't think of the thousands of different specialized computers that are used in everyday life.
The proponents of touch-screen voting are trying to capitalize on the most successful computing paradigm of the last 20 years: the point-and-click GUI. People trust that if you point-and-click, the program runs (the "click" being analogous to a toaster or TV power button - you click it, it works). If you drag-and-drop, the file is copied (or moved or run or deleted, depending on where you dropped it). People know how it should work, so they trust that it does work. That implicit trust is where it goes wrong, as we've discussed innumerable times ("Hidden bits can't be trusted").
Btw, I do like the idea of dumbing down Scantrons you propose. The point is to have an accountable paper trail, and that does it quite nicely.
just wondering (Score:4, Interesting)
And what is so difficult with printing a dated slip of paper containing the vote and a validation checksum proving the paper was printed at a given time on a particular machine and a specific vote or list of votes were recorded for that voter?
keystrokes (Score:3, Funny)
Re:just wondering (Score:3, Interesting)
When I heard about all the diebold stuff They said it kept everything time stamped as an audit trail. What I was listening to was talking about how it was an editable spread sheet so anybody could change it, but the first thing I though was, how is this anonymous?
If you can pay an election official to record the time that people vots and what machine, and then use FOIA to get access to the slips when it is done. You can enforce v
Why no paper trail? (Score:4, Interesting)
ATMs? The CIA? Tickets for trains and subways? Building access cards?
All transactions which tie the individual to the action.
Why no paper trail in voting machines?
Maybe because voting is supposed to be anonymous?
Let me tell you a little story...
In the town where my mother grew up, the population was in the thousands. Not more than ten thousand, in the mid-thousands.
During one election, one of the parties came to my mother's house, and picked up my grandmother to go take her to vote, because they had been watching the poll place, knew everyone who showed up, and knew what the exact vote was, before the vote was counted, because of who showed up to vote. They knew my grandmother didn't vote yet, and made sure they took her to vote because they needed her vote, it was that close.
Now let me tell you another story. The first time I voted when I turned 18 here in the US, I noticed that the voting place workers were putting the signature cards in precise order on top of the voting machines (the ones with the arm you pull to close/register vote/open curtain). They placed them in precise order according to the order that each person went into the booth. On those cards was your signature, that they used to compare against your voter card. So they could go back, and according to the order of the cards, and the order of the registered vote, figure out what your vote was. Of course, this is supposed to be impossible, your vote is supposed to be anonymous.
Fat chance. If you believe your vote is ever anonymous, you are a fool.
I later was able to obtain more information that confirmed my theory about whether votes are anonymous or not, and whether they can be fixed or not.
The touch screen voting simply brings new technology to a problem thousands of years old. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
If you are an idealist, then you believe in the voting system. And if you believe in the voting system, you believe in anonymous voting. A paper trail obliterates anonymous voting, not just in small towns like my first story, but in all towns in cities, because of the breakdown by precinct making it possible to localize and fragment the US population.
For you younger folk, do you remember the 2000 election?
Remember the husband/wife absentee votes from two people in a foreign embassy in a small country? The husband was appointed by Clinton. The two votes came back, and were added in whe
Re:Why no paper trail? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's an implementation problem. Make it instead so that the vote paper trail is dropped into a locked box that's counted elsewhere, and the implementation problem goes away. Physical/paper voting systems are easy to change; call the local paper, complain to the city council or whatever, and you can probably get something implemented to fix that problem. If you find that no one is listening to a lone election monitor, or the town's too small for someone to "rock the boat", the ACLU will be more than happy to make some noise on an anonymous tip.. and oh, of course, you aren't trying to INSINUATE anything! You just want to ensure the process is as trustable as possible.
Yeah, watching who goes into a polling place is an effective method. But as long as there's a decent-sized number of people per polling place, you can't be *sure*. If 300 people voted in this one station, and 5 of them voted "wrong", how do you know which ones?
Absentee voting is ALWAYS problematic from the anonymity standpoint.
Simple fix for anonymity (Score:3, Insightful)
Machine prints out two pieces of paper. One has your name, the other doesn't. Transaction numbers on both for future reference.
Compare for accuracy, keep the one with your name, toss the other in the ballot box.
Simple.
Re:Why no paper trail? (Score:2)
It is not taken away by the voter, and thus cannot be used to show how they voted.
Have you even been reading any of the comments here?
Re:Why no paper trail? (Score:3, Interesting)
Where is the open alternative? (Score:2, Insightful)
Base it on OpenBSD for security
Touchscreen input
Take the votes
Print out what they voted
Ask "Is this correct?"
Answer yes/no
Place printout into audit box on the way out the door
What is so hard?
Boom, you lost. (Score:3, Insightful)
- Answer No.
- Choose again.
- Choose the SAME one.
- Get new printout.
- Repeat.
[...]
- Stuff N printouts into audit box.
The day after, call for printout recount.
Boom, profit.
What is so hard? Designing a reliable system is, obviously.
Not fun, I know.
Re:Boom, you lost. (Score:3, Insightful)
You're right, but it isn't too hard to take care of this flaw. Every printout needs a serial number of some sort. When a "corrected" ballot is printed, it needs to contain a reference that states "Revoke ballots [prior serial number], ... [prior serial number]". Then only the last ballot will get counted in the recount.
A possible solution (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the outputs should be declared the legally authoritative source, so it would make sense th
Paper trails... (Score:2)
why no audit trail (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason why the voting machine doesn't produce an audit trail is that it's rather difficult to produce such an audit trail AND assure that votes cast will be anonymous. Elsewhere in the world people who voted for the "wrong" candidate faced retaliation, and the US voting system was set up to try and prevent that. Some systems that will "chop up" receipts have been proposed, but a failure in the mechanism might cause it to lose anonymity. I've proposed [slashdot.org] a method of having both audit and anonymity, but it's a bit on the complex side.
How is it hard? (Score:3, Interesting)
You audit hte machine by comparing the tally in the machine with the tally in the bin.. you don't need to be able to check every individual vote and decide which.. just
Re:How is it hard? (Score:2)
Re:How is it hard? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why no paper trail? It's obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, it's not hard to produce an audit trail *and* assure the votes cast will be anonymous. You just have to make two decisions:
1. The auditable ballot is the real ballot.
2. The vote is complete when the auditable ballot is complete and saved, not when the "user-friendly" ballot is complete.
There's two basic ways of doing this.
One way is to make the touchscreen machines a more convenient way to generate your traditional ballots. That is, the touch screen produces a human-and-machine-readable form (OCR, punch card, whatever). You're taking advantage of the fact that the machine's card punch always punches clean through, that its printer always colors inside the lines, but no more than that.
The other is to let the user see the auditable ballot, but keep it inside the machine. Once it's printed, the user punches "VOTE" or "CANCEL" below the window, and the ballot is delivered (visibly) to the ballot box or the shredder.
Intermediate between these, have a printable ballot that's got a random machine-readable tag on it that the user can deliver into one of two slots, the ballot box or the shredder. After the machine has read the tag it verifies that the voter didn't just shred a blank piece of paper... but the tag is not stored after the ballot has been accepted and it's generated anew using an external entropy source (such as the timing of the voter's screen-taps or keystrokes) for each ballot, so there's no trail leading to the voter.
Any of these would work. The first one could be retrofitted to existing optical or punch card systems, which would allow for precincts to complete their votes even if their electronic machines are down.
Re:why no audit trail (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think this is the reason the vendors have not included a paper trail (if only for the reason that I don't believe they're that smart).
But once again, why do not use the time-proven method of making marks on a piece of paper, and counting the ballots manually, under supervision?
People here have pointed out that paper ballots can
Who is Cringley these days anyway? (Score:2, Informative)
It should come as no surprised when the unexpected is published under his banner.
Re:Who is Cringley these days anyway? (Score:3, Informative)
The PBS Cringely [pbs.org] was the third InfoWorld Robert X. Cringely writer. There wasn't really anything to "sell out" about, as he wasn't the first (or last) Cringely [blancmange.net], merely the one who kept using the pseudonym after he and InfoWorld parted ways.
Will It Really Make A Difference? (Score:2, Informative)
I ask, what difference will it make? The problem, as I see it, is getting people to go to the voting places in the first place, or to put it another way, getting people involved in the political process. My friend wrote a piece for our local paper [alaska-freegold.com], encouraging people to get involved (in addition to just voting), and I am sorry to say, it had little or no measurable effect. It is very discouraging.
Al [alaska-freegold.com]
Re:Will It Really Make A Difference? (Score:2)
It may be truly cynical, but I'm slowly coming round to the view that if the gap betwen rich and poor is growing, and the poor cannot be bothered to vote to stop it, they may not deserve anything different. (ducks)
Re:Will It Really Make A Difference? (Score:2, Insightful)
Doing nothing is still worse than doing something. Getting into politics is like taking your seat in an airplane. The odds are that the person jammed in 2 inches away from you is someone you wouldn't let into your house unless you could train a gun on him. But does
disgrace (Score:3, Insightful)
Who is prepared to stand up to this sort of abuse of power and excess of authority? Perhaps it's time for everyone to get active, however possible. The very foundations of democracy are under threat.
Now available with Printed Receipt(tm)! (Score:2, Interesting)
I would bet the manufacturers came up with the "no receipt" requirement. That way, when there is a fiasco with the next election about someone getting a negative number of votes and no paper ballots to do a recount, th
The downside of a paper trail (Score:3, Insightful)
Buying votes may be illegal, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen, and one of the main problems for prospective vote-buyers now is the fact that there's no way to ensure that the people you're paying to vote a certain way are actually doing so.
Then along comes the electronic voting receipt, which by its very nature *has* to be easily readable/auditable and *has* to have a very good system for ensuring it's authentic. Now, you can buy somebody's vote and be sure they actually vote the way you wanted. You can even do it a little more insidiously, perhaps, and in a way that might not necessarily even be quite so illegal, offering somebody some sort of small in-kind gift if they show you their Bush voting receipt, or even just an intangible reward like membership in a club or something.
In areas where people of one political alignment are vastly in the majority, voters who swing the other way sometimes need to keep their political preferences quiet, and this could make it harder for them to do that ("If you're *really* a Bush fan, show us your voting slip.")
Let alone the idiots who'll get the damn things framed to hang up in their house if the guy wins, the people who'll put them in plastic badge holders and wear them around their necks all day, protesters who'll publicly burn them, etc. I don't know, it just seems very wrong to me for there to be any record at all of your vote that can go with you outside of the voting booth.
Now with some paper ballot systems it's expected that after checking your receipt you'll deposit it in a box at the polling station (and not keep a copy for yourself), but even in that case people can pocket them / swap them with fake ones (which won't matter except in the unlikely event of a recount) or give some potential vote-buyer a discreet glance at the thing before turning it in.
The only way to get around these problems is to create a system where a receipt is human-readable but easily counterfeitable so that nobody can verify its authenticity except the elections board; I don't quite know how such a system would work, though, and it seems like it would have a lot of potential for confusing people.
So IMHO receipts are not the solution, open-source is the solution; open things up to public scrutiny and receipts become largely unnecessary. Or better yet, stick to paper ballots but use *good* paper ballots; fill-in-the-bubbles, perhaps, which have been used quite effectively in many places.
Re:The downside of a paper trail (Score:3, Insightful)
nice troll. (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow, it's like anonymous balots never existed and can't be duplicated by machines that also tally votes electronically. Why not print out a ballot for voter inspection that's dropped into a lock box for hand counting if needed? Nah, we'd better go b
Re:The downside of a paper trail (Score:3, Insightful)
No paper record of vote, but pre-audited software (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.elections.act.gov.au/Elecvote.html
and it has links to the source code and the process of viting and FAQs. They appear to have a full disclosure and a public debate on this. It can potentially - arguably - be made a bit "more better" by printing the vote on paper.
From the FAQ:
Does the system print out a copy of my vote?
No. There is no need to print a copy of any votes. The Electoral Act
Compromising "rigorously/independently audited" (Score:2)
A paper trail that informs the voter what he just voted for, and poll workers what the tally/results are for their presinct is necessary to prevent tampering with the reported vote tally.
Diebold is one of our GOP-supporting overlords. It would be difficult to detect if they passed a backdoor password/method that allowed/permitted selected GOP hackers to modify vote tallys, or spoof a v
why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Build a secure, open, and accountable system... I dare you. Then take it to Congress and offer it to them under Creative Commons or something. See whether they even look at it before tossing it in the trash. Cringley has missed the point entirely. And IT IS THIS:
As long as we allow those in power to decide HOW they come to power, we will also allow them to decide WHO is in power. And it will continue to be THEM and not the every day people of the United States. This is the issue, despite what most would have you think. People in power will keep their power because they think they know what is best for you, and because they like it. You will keep paying them to lead you to the slaughter, because you are a sheep who needs a shepherd.
You can have all the elections you want, but if the candidates are selected from the same pool of 500 rich white men... then the voting doesn't matter.
a) put a check in box A if you want a rich white man to run the world.
b) put a check in box B if you want a rich white man to run the world.
c) don't check either box and watch the rich white men rule the world.
Have fun selecting random boxes in your next "election," fellow Americans. The Bush dynasty (and their pals in texas, florida, georgia, oklahoma... you get the idea) don't care how you vote, as long as you don't think.
Why a paper trail (Score:4, Informative)
So let's accept for the moment the idea that punch card ballots are bad. I do accept this, but if you don't, pretend you do for the moment. Now consider the problem with their replacement: the touch screen system.
In a touch screen system, you touch to indicate your choices and then touch again to indicate that your choices are the ones you meant to make. You register on the machine that it accepted your vote precisely the way you intended.
What happens then? Without a paper trail, you are taking it completely on faith that the machine transferred your instructions accurately into its memory, that the votes for that machine were transferred accurately to the machine that collects up the votes from the local machines and so on down the line. At any point from the voting machine to the final tally, you have no confidence that somebody didn't play with the software or with the numbers. And if there's belief that there's a problem, there is absolutely no way to determine whether or not the final tally reflects the actions of the voters.
The idea of a paper trail is to have each individual vote written to a paper receipt. The receipt drops into a window, so the individual voter can examine it and verify that it reports their vote accurately (i.e. matches what the machine said they did). Once the voter has said that yes, the receipt is accurate, the machine drops it into a locked box, just as the punch cards are kept in a locked box today. And if there's any question about the vote, all these paper receipts can be collected and tallied, whether by hand or by some kind of optical scanner. And we can have some confidence that the numbers reported by the machines are in sync with what the individual voters saw on their paper receipts.
My point again is that the problems with the paper ballots in the past were with the methods of marking those ballots and their layouts. (Remember Palm County's butterfly ballots?) Those problems go away with a well designed voting machine. But now we have a lack of a paper trail of any kind.
As an aside, I'm sure the lack of a paper trail in the new voting machines was a way for the manufacturers to save money/offer local governments a lower bid. The paper trail should have been in the original RFP. That it wasn't shows the incompetence of those who set up the bid process.
Re:why? (Score:2)
You don't take it far enough. As long as there is a mechanism of power in place then it will be used against the every day people of the United States. The idea that we need a massive, bloated centralized administration that makes decisions for us about morality and ethics is the root cause of the problem. Representative "democracy" isn't democracy at all, it's a temporary, elected d
Systems Engineering & Software Engineering (Score:3, Interesting)
From one side, Systems Engineering is quite an old field, mostly championed by the government itself to attach "best practice" management processes to increase the viability of major complex construction projects (since a lot of civil engineering projects were failing at the time). It's basically the simple process of structured decomposition of a complicated problem into a variety of simple ones: problem analysis, requirements, specifications, functional/structural decomposition, building & assembling components, verifying that your system meets the specifications/requirements, and finally validating whether your system actually solves the problem. As systems get more complex, doing all the bookkeeping to keep track of those handfuls of tasks becomes an information management project in and of itself.
Software engineering came along, and suddenly they were going through major SW projects in 1-2 year cycles, instead of 10-20 year cycles for bridges, dams, buildings, etc. Needless to say, the SW engineers gained experience in full life cycle systems engineering of projects much more quickly than most of the old traditional SE's could build in an entire lifetime. This was both good and bad... As you may well be familiar with, we've raised our SW engineers to enjoy reconstructing things on their own from scratch, and to be somewhat resistant to doing the research on how other related projects / fields have fared in the past. As a result, they've rediscovered many of the SE fundamentals on their own, but at the same time, we're going through the same mistakes that had caused massive project failures in the past to do so.
Re:Systems Engineering & Software Engineering (Score:2, Interesting)
I think software engineers have a flippant attitude that comes from the nature of software. Mostly it is non critical. Stages of the lifecycle overlap and there is parallelism. In other words there is leeway and slack such that mistakes can be made and dynamically solved on the fly. Even the most formal practices usually permit some degree of incremental dev.
Civil engineering, govermental plann
My daughter's take, and my solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Last night my daughter asked me whether we would have electronic voting. I said we would, but that there will be more controversy about it than we ever had about paper voting. She asked why.
I told her that computer people and academics have known for decades that the way to ensure the correctness of a process is not just to examine the input and output, but to let everyone see the inner workings of it.
That made sense to her. She's 15, headstrong, and as honest as a light switch. She asked how we can believe the voting machine company won't cheat unless we know how the machine works.
I also said the worst thing they'll try to do is to send the results over the Internet.
Then it occurred to me. They should send the results
-
over the Internet
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And by telephone
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And by burning CD's and mailing them
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And by printing the individual ballots on paper, hand-tallying the votes, and carrying the results to Washington with briefcases handcuffed to little old ladies.
Overkill with quadruple checks, all of which have to agree.Cringe? (Score:2)
Can we just get a cringley icon? (Score:3, Interesting)
Logical Fallacy (Score:5, Insightful)
Article:
The bad news is that in 2000, only 28 percent of software projects could be classed as complete successes (meaning they were executed on time and on budget) while 23 percent failed outright (meaning that they were abandoned).
According to my math, that means that 49% of projects took longer and cost more than they were supposed to. Note later in the article, this 49% is considered wasted:
Article:
Two hundred and seventy-five billion is a lot of money to spend on software development, especially if 72 percent of that money will be either wasted completely or used to develop something that doesn't work intended.
But something's wrong. Let's come up with a product and let's call it OS X or Mandrake or Windows XP. All of the above were not completed on time. In fact, I'd say I'd rather have a polished late product than release something on time for the sake of doing so. (Name good software that was released on time someone?) So I guess all the money spent on all of them was wasted.
Someone hit this guy with a clue stick.
Audit trail? (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, how does one reconcile differences between the number of people signing into their precincts and the total number of votes cast? I've always had to vote on numerous things at a time so it's certainly possible that I could simply not care enough about a particular position to bother voting for anyone at all.
Voting will never be completely tamper proof. In my opinion Cringley brings up a more interesting point about software development processes than anything truly insightful about e-voting machines.
Re:Audit trail? (Score:3, Insightful)
The purpose of electronic voting is only to make that process more accurate. There is no other reason for it, and all the arguments about ease of use, cost, convenience, all that is a smokescreen. If it doesn't make the voting process more accurate and reliable then it shouldn't be used.
Different (Score:3, Insightful)
they are never on time, never on budget, and sometimes don't work at all.
'nuff said.
Spell it with me.... (Score:3, Informative)
C-r-i-n-g-e-l-y, Robert X.
The name is written wrongly in the blurb no less than four times! But at least the submitter is consistent with himself...
I have to ask now more than ever : why is this particular mis-spelling so prevalent?
Xavier
Debunking Krugman's Voting Machine Column (Score:3, Interesting)
Slashdot influence (Score:4, Funny)
Why a paper trail is really needed (Score:5, Interesting)
You cannot provide a paper record to the voter, because it would undermine the ability to vote anonymously. An employer/union/church/spouse/etc. could demand it be provided as proof that you voted correctly, not just that you voted.
When ballots were entirely paper there was a practice called "chain balloting" where a loyal party member would take their ballot out of the polling place and allow their precint captain to fill it in correctly. The next loyal party member would then take that ballot in, place it in the box, and take their ballot back out to the precint captain...
It was an illegal practice
The real reason that a paper trail is needed is that unlike normal commercial transactions, a voter must be able to vote when they show up at the polling place. You can't give them a rain check 1 time in 1000, or even in 1 in 10,000 due to equipment failure.
If we have a voting system that is dependent on power, it won't be long before somebody deliberately triggers a power failure in the portion of the state that was going to vote the "wrong" way.
voting machine "black box" (Score:3, Insightful)
The key to getting the public to care about these issues has less to do with educating them to the technology or scaring the crap out of them to "do the right thing" but instead to focus on the fact that this is taxpayer money, YOUR money that needs to be wisely spent to insure that YOUR vote is properly counted.
Never attribute to malice... (Score:3, Funny)
Here is how I see it: Diebold makes sale kiosks for Home Depot, ATMs for Citybank, and voting machines for the government. Diebold comes to each customer and says, "We can save you XXX dollars on every machine if you don't need a paper printer in it".
What do the customers say?
Home Depot manager: "XXX dollars and no paper? Are you nuts? We'll lose ten times that on fraud!"
Citybank manager: "XXX dollars and no paper? Are you a complete moron? We'll lose hundred times that on lawsuits!"
Government bureaucrat (he does not care about fraud - someone gets elected one way or the other, the bureaucrat will have his job, and he can't get sued): "XXX dollars? What a great idea!"
Accessibility versus traceability (Score:5, Insightful)
What is probably even more crucial is a discussion about voting being accessible and easy. What's amazed me in the post 2000 election discussion is how fast we've stopped talking about all of the voters who were disenfranchised by having huge difficulties getting to a working election center.
The underlying reason why all of use really want to see internet voting is because it would be easier for us to vote. We can pay all of our bills online. We can file our taxes online. Why can't we vote?
The reason is because it is a really difficult security problem to solve. I'm just amazed there isn't more discussion about how to solve that problem than the discussion talking about a poor implementation of the short-term, band-aid solution.
Specifically, I thought http://www.eucybervote.org/xootic2000.pdf has described a really good start to how to really solve the security problem.
Re:Accessibility versus traceability (Score:5, Insightful)
Accessibility is a completely separate issue from electronic voting. Whether the voting machines are electronic, positronic, nanotech, or based on Lucas' glowing Jedi bacteria... you are going to have to get to a place where we can know you can't be coerced into selling your vote. And getting there is 100% of the "accessibility" problem.
Otherwise, we could solve all the accessibility problems now by going to universal postal voting. You pick up your voting form at the same place you do your banking or mail a package, wherever that is. You fill it out, drop it in the mail, you're done. Or you don't drop it in the mail, you give it to your local party-machine boss, and he gives you an envelope containing small unmarked bills in exchange.
Any kind of system that doesn't involve going to a secure polling place has the same problem, so forget it.
No, the whole argument about accessibility is a smoke screen. Accesibility has nothing to do with voting machines or electronic voting.
The problem isn't with how the votes are gathered (Score:5, Insightful)
The main problem in the USA isn't how we gather votes, although there are problems in some states (Florida). There is a more fundamental problem in that we aren't using the right voting mechanism. In the US, we use plurality voting -- a.k.a "first across the line" -- to determine who wins an election. This means that a candidate for whom only 30% of the people voted can win an election simply because there was no other single candidate with more votes.
This has a number of problems, but they can all be summed up by saying that plurality is one of the least fair, if not the least fair, way of determining the winner of a democratic election that you can get. Consider:
- Say 40% of the people vote for candidate A
- 35% of the people want candidate B
- 25% want candidate C
In the US, candidate A will win. However, what if all of the voters for C would rather have B than A? Then 60% of the population would rather have B than A, and the minority candidate has won.This situation encourages strategic voting; that is to say, voters for C have to decide whether they want to vote honestly, for C, or whether they should vote for B just to make that they don't get their least favorite candidate, A.
This is why we only have two parties in the US, and why -- despite the large number of Greens and Libertarians, neither party has a chance of winning. We don't even know what percentage of the US population is Green or Libertarian (or anything else, for that matter) because they aren't voting honestly. They're voting for the lesser of two evils. This system practically guarantees alienation of the largest number of people -- the majority ends up with a candidate they don't want, unless they lie when voting and vote for the candidate that they dislike the least who also has the best chance of winning.
There are voting mechanisms which allow people to vote their true opinion without being alienated. The most popular are Condorcet [electionmethods.org] -- complex, but the most fair; Approval Voting [approvalvoting.org] -- not as fair as Condorcet, but much simpler [electionmethods.org], and can be implemented with existing voting technology; and Instant Runoff [fairvote.org] -- less fair [electionmethods.org] than approval, no more simple -- but better than plurality.
Many democratic countries do not use plurality voting, although plurality is the most common. For example, Australia, Northern Ireland, and the Irish Republic (among others) use single transferable vote[1 [maa.org]]. In fact, 68 countries (~2b ppl) use plurality, 31 countries (~400m ppl) use single transferable vote, and two countries (~18m ppl) use IRV (instant runoff) -- this is according to International IDEA Handbook.
There is a huge amount of information about Condorcet [condorcet.org] and Approval Voting [mit.edu] available on the web. The Citizens for Approval Voting page is a good start, if you're at all interested in improving voting in the US. If you're interested in the mechanics and mathematics of the systems, start with Condorcet -- most sites that talk about Condorcet are less about how to get it implemented politically, and are more about how it works, fairness tests, and how it compares to other systems. The Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] entry for "voting system" is particularly useful.
US Voting Is Archaic, Unfair, & Undemocratic (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm from Ireland - I grew up in a country with one of the more complex votings systems in the world. We're talking 10+ rounds of elimination rounds and recounts, and much anguish by marginal politicians over a few minor votes.
It's not perfect -- you still get arseholes elected to office - but at least most people's votes are counted... unlike the US where the majority of votes seem to be instantly cast away and you get candidates elected by minorities of voters.
With a preference system politicians at least have to make efforts to reach out to minorities and divergent viewpoints. Sometimes this leads to nasty political compromises, but oftne it leads to coalitions with similar viewpoints and ethics.
One effect I've noticed on a personal level however is that because of the tragically simple plurality voting used in most of the US, people in the US are honestly baffled by anythiong that resembles fair voting. Most of them just don;t get it. Mired in an artifically bipolar system designed to promote competition and bilateral conflict, many people seem to view compromise and multilateralism with suspicion or misunderstanding.
The way you learn to vote undoubtedly influences your social universe -- you form unspoken but deeply held opinions about what is possible and what is impossible within a "democracy". THe US needs a more modern voting system as part of a first step towards engaging people once more with the democratic environment rather than engaging in identity politics and the elimination of dissent.
Re:VOT1NG ON TEH SPKOE!!!1 (Score:5, Informative)
Although a private Australian company designed the system, it was based on specifications set by independent election Hot Cocks, who posted the code on the Internet for all to see and evaluate. What's more, it was accomplished from concept to product in six months. It went through a trial run in a state election in 2001.
Re:VOT1NG ON TEH SPKOE!!!1 (Score:5, Informative)
The whole system is open to public scrutiny - several people have reported bugs, including an academic. Nice contrast to the DMCA...
Re:VOT1NG ON TEH SPKOE!!!1 (Score:3, Funny)
Surely you must've known someone was bound to ask about this.
Re:Bad Invention (Score:5, Interesting)
As it stands, the owners of these companies (who heavily back the Republicans) have carte blanche to steal elections because we now have no way to prove it happened. We'll just keep having these funny little incidents where a white republican male gets 83% of the vote in a black district against a democrat incumbent (yes, it happened
Re:Bad Invention (Score:3, Insightful)
Or, Democrat "activists" could hack the machines to steal elections. Or, renegade Libertarians could hack the machines to give the election to the Libertarian candidate. Or maybe Ross Perot can finally win.
If there's no auditing, that is BAD, and it doesn't matter which political party you hate the most. Leave the whole Republican/Democrat thing out of this discussion.
steveha
Re:Bad Invention (Score:3, Insightful)
Build a secure, open, and accountable system... I dare you. Then take it to Congress and offer it to them under Creative Commons or something. See whether they even look at it before tossing it in the trash. Cringley has missed the
Re:hmm (Score:2, Informative)
Here's some information you could have gotten had you thought to click on the "about Bob" link in the article. If you'd spent literally two seconds doing your research you would have had at least this and would look that much less foolish.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/about/
This is h