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Sequoia Vote Machine Can't Do Simple Arithmetic?
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Mar 20, 2008 09:02 AM
from the lessee-nothin-into-nothin-carry-the-nothin dept.
from the lessee-nothin-into-nothin-carry-the-nothin dept.
whoever57 writes "Ed Felten is showing a scan of the summary from a Sequoia voting machine used in New Jersey. According to the paper record, the vote tallies don't add up — the total number of Republican ballots does not match the number of votes cast in the Republican primary and the total number of Democratic ballots does not match the number of votes cast in the Democratic primary. Felten has a number of discussions about the problems facing evoting, up to and including a semi-threatening email from Sequoia itself."
Update: 03/20 23:30 GMT by J : Later today, Felten added an update in which he analyzes Sequoia's explanation. He has questions, comments, and a demand.
Related Stories
[+]
Sequoia Threatens Over Voting Machine Evaluation 221 comments
enodo writes "Voting machine manufacturer Sequoia has sent well-known Princeton professor Ed Felten and his colleague Andrew Appel a letter threatening to sue if New Jersey sends them a machine to evaluate. It's not clear from the letter Sequoia sent whether they intend to sue the professors or the state — presumably that ambiguity was deliberate on Sequoia's part. Put another clipping in your scrapbook of cases of companies invoking 'intellectual property rights' for bogus reasons." Sequoia seems to be claiming that no one can make a "report" regarding their "software" without their permission.
[+]
New Jersey E-Voting Problems Worse Than Originally Suspected 118 comments
TechDirt is reporting that the New Jersey e-voting troubles are even worse than originally thought. Apparently the "minor bug" which was supposed to be fixed is still not corrected, suggesting that Sequoia still doesn't know what is going on. "Ed Felten has received a bunch of 'summary tapes' from the last election in New Jersey, and while many of them do have the vote totals matching up correctly at the end at least two of the summary tapes simply don't add up, meaning that Sequoia's explanation of what went wrong is incorrect. Given how often the company has denied or hidden errors in its machines, despite a ton of evidence, we shouldn't be surprised that it was inaccurate in explaining away this latest problem as well. However, we should be outraged that the company refuses to allow third party researchers to investigate these machines. It's a travesty that any government would use them when they've been shown to have so many problems and the company is unwilling to allow an independent investigation."
[+]
IT: Hard Evidence of Voting Machine Addition Errors 275 comments
goombah99 writes "Princeton Professor, Ed Felton, has posted a series of blog entries in which he shows the printed tapes he obtained from the NJ voting machines don't report the ballots correctly. In response to the first one, Sequoia admitted that the machines had a known software design error that did not correctly record which kind of ballots were cast (republican or democratic primary ballots) but insisted the vote totals were correct. Then, further tapes showed this explanation to be insufficient. In response, State officials insisted that the (poorly printed) tapes were misread by Felton. Again further tapes showed this not to be a sufficient explanation. However all those did not foreclose the optimistic assessment that the errors were benign — that is, the possibility that vote totals might really be correct even though the ballot totals were wrong and the origin of the errors had not been explained. Now he has found (well-printed) tapes that show what appears to be hard proof that it's the vote totals that are wrong, since two different readout methods don't agree. Sequoia has made trade-secret legal threats against those wishing to mount an independent examination of the equipment. One small hat-tip to Sequoia: at least they are reporting enough raw data in different formats that these kinds of errors can come to light — that lesson should be kept in mind when writing future requirements for voting machines."
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Minor correction: (Score:2)
It's "Felten".
</pedant>
Re:Minor correction: (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Count from Zero (Score:5, Funny)
On the bright side at least the error will vanish as the number of votes approaches infinity
Re:Count from Zero (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the Republican tally was heavy one vote, while the Democratic tally was light one vote. Thus, your proposed explanation doesn't wash.
On the bright side at least the error will vanish as the number of votes approaches infinity
That's assuming that the error is due to the cause you postulated, which cannot be the case.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Is NJ an open primary state (like MI)? Why couldn't a Dem have voted for one of the Republicans? That "option" (counting the number of Ds and Rs) might be a tally of the party of the voter rather than a total of the votes for candidates in that party.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Count from Zero (Score:4, Informative)
What county do you live in? Here in Broome County they give us colored cards (green for the Democrats, pink for the Republicans) that we had out to the voters after signing them in. The voter then gives that card to the person operating the machine who sets the primary lever accordingly before hitting the entrance button that allows them to vote.
I've been running a polling place since 2004 and I've never had that mistake happen in a Primary Election. If you've seen it happen more then once or twice you should probably inform your local Board of Elections so they can address the problem. It just isn't supposed to happen that way......
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not sure if its just laziness on the part of the poll runners
That's possible. I've come close to pulling out my hair during past elections trying to get the other three people in my polling place to follow proper procedure.
As a random example, we aren't supposed to sign in more then two or three voters at a time. If you sign in more of them then that you'll invariably wind up with someone standing in line at the machine who realizes that he needs to be somewhere and decides to duck out of line without voting. Since we've already signed him in this screws up ou
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Minor discrepancy...MAJOR problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
it's like the Kempelen's chess machine (Score:3, Funny)
Re:it's like the Kempelen's chess machine (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe they should try running KDE instead?
Parent
Re:Minor discrepancy...MAJOR problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
You cannot prove correctness at all (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Arbitrary program code cannot be proven correct, true. However, program code can be designed to be provable.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
For all we know, the machines could be programmed to work perfectly, except on election day when subroutine X is used (on that day only).
But, we also know that thanks to compiler trickery, even studying the source code isn't enough.
Re:Minor discrepancy...MAJOR problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
However, the size of the discrepancy is 1/60 or so. That's 1.6%, which is enough to change the outcome of some recent US elections [wikipedia.org]. So is it of a significant size? Yes, it is.
Parent
Re:Minor discrepancy...MAJOR problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
He used the "look at the vote totals the machine printed" method.
Seriously, it has a picture of them. Did you RTFA and somehow didn't notice it, or do you like making uninformed comments? (Okay, that is a bit inflammatory. The first time I went to TFA, the pictures didn't load. But it still says in the text.)
Parent
Re:Minor discrepancy...MAJOR problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Lawyers (Score:3, Insightful)
Hypocrisy (Score:5, Insightful)
I love the double-standard here. The government wants to invade the privacy of it's citizens (discussed several times over on these very forums) and one of the typical responses is "Well, if you don't have anything to hide...".
But when an independant third party wants to verify that an important piece of hardware used in our political process can actually do the very simple math that it's required to do, the corporation who produces is has laws that it can throw in one's face to prevent verification of data. Shouldn't someone be pressing Sequoia with the "if you don't have anything to hide..." mantra?
Does anyone else here see the obvious double-standard that we've created for ourselves?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But when an independant third party wants to verify that an important piece of hardware used in our political process can actually do the very simple math that it's required to do, the corporation who produces is has laws that it can throw in one's face to prevent verification of data. Shouldn't someone be pressing Sequoia with the "if you don't have anything to hide..." mantra?
Yes and no. It appears that this is a contractual issue. The State of New Jersey signed licensing terms that does not allow an independent party to review the code. The state should not violate that contract.
Thing is, there is a limited market for voting machines in the US. There are only 50 states, it seems to me the states are in a pretty good position to negotiate the licensing terms. Why is it that New Jersey didn't specify in the terms that the code and hardware had to be reviewed by indepe
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
oh dear. (Score:2)
duck and cover, they are reaching for their lawyer.
sounds like this story is a might fine basis for some good ole' fashioned DMCA action. Pffffft, that was the sound of sequoia credibility dying a death...
Re:oh dear. (Score:4, Interesting)
What credibility are you talking about?
After all those neato stints that just about every voting machine company tried to pull their credibility is somewhere between a San Francisco Tenderloin crack hooker and a timeshare salesman for quite some time now.
Thinking about it the hookers credibility is probably a lot better then the ones of those voting machine vendors.
Parent
Software bug (Score:4, Insightful)
print array.lastIndex.indexNum
instead of
print array.count
The real concern here is not that it has a bug. All software has bugs. The concern is over what kind of QA was performed to guarantee our votes. If such a simple and obvious test case was not performed, how on earth are we to feel good about this machine?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What stupid thing the programmer may have done is irrelevant here.
This is supposed to be a secure machine for tallying votes. Either it is capable of counting, and providing a verifiable audit which matches the results it reports. Or, it's fundamentally broken and can't actually be used to count elections. I don't see how there is any middle ground.
There simply is no room for trying to acco
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe the votes were not placed? (Score:5, Informative)
Sheesh, why does this have to be so difficult. We can conduct trillions of dollars of business electronically, but we still don't have an effective digital voting system? I think the conspiracy here is by someone who hates technology likes to kill trees for paper balloting, not that digital voting is being rigged.
Re: (Score:2)
1. Land government contract
2. Do little or nothing.
3. Profit.
Re:Maybe the votes were not placed? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's hard to believe this is even an issue. The problem is that the people making voting machines (like Diebold) come from Banking sectors, where privacy and private, proprietary systems are the modus operandi.
Seems to me a good way to fix this would be to get some high-profile Non-Profs and top-brand CS schools (I'm thinking MIT, Apache Foundation, Cal Tech, Carnegie Mellon, Case Western, etc) all working together to gather some grant money, build the hardware and software solutions, open everything up for scrutiny, and produce a working product.
We can wave our arms over what somebody SHOULD build, but if we had a compelling alternative ready to go, it'd be a lot easier to pressure governments to do the right thing.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not a big fan of the argument that Open Source = Always Better and Closed Source = Always Worse, but in this case I think it applies. The voting machines' inner workings are hidden from view from everyone, including the government running the election. If y
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If those trillions of dollars had to be transacted via "secret ballot", I'm pretty sure that hundreds of billions of them would have disappeared. Somehow it's a lot harder to write error-free code when you know that nobody's going to be able to do something as simple as checking their bank statements to catch your errors.
Enough Already! (Score:5, Insightful)
On the whole of it, I have a big problem with the "Winner takes all" system anyway, with the majority giving the power to a handful to beat up on us all. Not even getting into how the Republicans and the Democrats systemically shuts out all other parties.
But if we are going to have voting, at least make it fair. Give equal time to ALL parties, not just the D-R club, and use paper ballots under tight security. At least make "Democracy" less of a joke than it already is.
Re:Enough Already! (Score:4, Interesting)
While I agree with you, I just have to point out that it's not all that hard...after all, the recent presidential election in Mexico was stolen the old-fashioned way.
Parent
Re:Enough Already! (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Evoting can work if the source and hardware design of the machines are completely open to the public.
That isn't enough because you have absolutely no guarantee that the hardware and software you vote on is equal to the hardware and software design that was published. And also you would still have a voting process that is basically a magical blackbox for 99.9% of the population, some experts might be able to verify it, but not the voter and this is a big deal, since a voter should be able to understand and verify the voting process. Good old pen&paper based voting does that, eVoting doesn't even get cl
A Common Problem. (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot Polls (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Slashdot Polls (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Corporate Death Penalty (Score:5, Insightful)
Open source how? (Score:3, Informative)
If Sequoia really were ready to commit mass voter fraud, I doubt they would have too many moral issues with violating the principles of open source while they're at it.
It's quite obvious what happened (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)