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New Jersey E-Voting Problems Worse Than Originally Suspected
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Apr 07, 2008 02:38 PM
from the lazy-or-shady-it's-still-evil dept.
from the lazy-or-shady-it's-still-evil dept.
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."
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IT: E-Voting Undermines Public Confidence In Elections 155 comments
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Techdirt columnist, Timothy Lee, hit the metaphoric nail on the head, claiming that e-Voting undermines the public perception of election fairness - even when there is no evidence of wrongdoing. 'In a well-designed voting system, voters shouldn't have to take anyone's actions on faith. The entire process should be simple and transparent, so that anyone can observe it and verify that it was carried out correctly. The complexity and opacity of e-voting machines makes effective public scrutiny impossible, and so it's a bad idea even in the absence of specific evidence of wrongdoing.' Add to this the possibility technical faults, conflicts of interest and evidence of tampering, how long before the US vote is viewed as an electronic pantomime?"
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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.
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Sequoia Vote Machine Can't Do Simple Arithmetic? 254 comments
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.
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Here's the link that should have been in summary (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Here's the link that should have been in summar (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the scary part is that the small error is definitive proof that the voting machines are wrong, but that there is no mention of a method in NJ for the poll workers to go back and check out that there really were X number of votes for each candidate.
The thing that is important for the integrity of the election is that there is a verified paper "receipt" that the voter has checked and dropped into a box that can't be tampered with.
Sure, the summary print outs are "nice" for instant access to the results, but there isn't really a good reason not to have a bi-partisan check of the paper records at the end of the day.
After 5 or 6 election cycles are validated with this computer/receipt method, then we could start to put more trust in the machines... but Diebold and their ilk have proven time-and-time again that they cannot design voting machines that stand up to scrutiny of even the simplest checks (like Felten's comparison between total votes and reported number of total voters).
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What bothers me (Score:5, Interesting)
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Take a podium, put a mini-atx MB in a locked metal box under it, a touch-screen lcd on the top, and strap a printer to the side. The thing boots over the network from a server locked a cage in the corner of the room.
The software is not much more than a web page that displays the pictures/names of the candidates (or the text of referendums, etc), and allows you to touch the name/face of who you want.
The p
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
the end user, if they see a print out other than what they chose, can take it straight to the voting officials, tear off a special the code at the bottom, and they can hand them a paper ballot, and they type the code in on their workstation, invalidating that entry in the electronic tally.
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They're printed on 2-ply paper. Both receipts get impact-printed at the same time. There is no way they can differ.
if they see a print out other than what they chose,
They would get a chance to review their choices before printing, and a chance to view the receipt before it feeds out of the machine. If it is incorrect, they hi
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Eventually there will be a time when they stop asking, just like grocery stores stopped asking 'paper or plastic' and just give you cheap plastic bags that drop your groceries to the ground before you get to the car.
The fact that voting machine companies have refused to use an open model for handling votes shows that they are just in it for the money, they could give a damn if the election
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If you're just going to print out and count paper voting receipts anyway, why even bother with an electronic voting machine?
From the post you replied to, "the summary print outs are 'nice' for instant access to the results". Basically, the summary voting gives a sense of instant gratification that let's the voting public know who "won" the election the day after it is held. Computers can aggregate and publish the sum votes of millions of voters at the instant polls close and provide a result that meets the anticipated "instant-gratification" needs expected by the population.
Now, I think each polling place has an order of m
Re:Here's the link that should have been in summar (Score:2)
-b
Minor Big (Score:3, Funny)
Same story, different day. (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullsh!t (Score:5, Insightful)
And there's your excuse for you and the ~4 moderators let sleeping dogs lie.
It's partially your fault for not participating. Own up and get involved in the voting process.
Or, maybe you'll have another excuse for doing nothing.
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I hate bigs. (Score:5, Funny)
I guess I'm a dork for enjoying the second-order kind of humor in that statement.
where are the whistleblowers? (Score:5, Interesting)
I can imagine an effort by management to cut corners and maximize profits at the expense of quality and company reputation, but is there really no one in a position of first hand knowledge who knows better?
With the multitudes of avenues for anonymous communications, it's not like I'm asking someone to put their job on the line. (Not that it would be too much to ask. There are people out there risking their lives in a very real way to protect this country. You won't even risk a job you most likely hate anyway?)
Re:where are the whistleblowers? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ahh, so THAT was the question i kept screwing up when i tried to get a job at best buy. Who the hell knew that if you saw someone steal 20 dollars from the company they wanted you to say you'd do nothing.
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Can there REALLY be any question that something shady is going on?
((lol at confimation image of "booths"))
Why is anybody surprised? (Score:2, Insightful)
You have a "Perfect Storm" of apathetic voters, an administration that has displayed its contempt for democracy at every turn and aggressively appointed people who place ideology above honour and country to positions affecting all levels of government, a company that has exhibited at every opportunity a predilection for cover-ups, a House and Senate that have abrogated their role in the checks and balances equation, and a judiciary that has similarly abandoned its responsibility to remain independent of po
How hard can this be?? (Score:2, Insightful)
But getting the numbers to add up?? Come on - that should be trivial. If they're FBARing that, I have absolutely no faith in the rest of it.
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It's New Jersey... (Score:5, Funny)
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If the state government maintains strict controls on slot machines and has access to the source code of slo
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If the state government maintains strict controls on slot machines and has access to the source code of slot machines....why the hell doesn't it have a better grasp on voting machines?
Simple: Voting *costs" money and gambling *makes* money for the state. Voting machine companies aren't really held for any liability and casinos are.
Add some vendor-inaccessable accounting to the voting machines and fine the vendors for every discrepancy and see if the quality of their product changes, o
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Just to be fair, people have died because they worked for a slot machine company (one that sold to bars, etc, in Nevada, where they have the same or similar laws) and were going to whistle blow (testify in court, witness protection and all that) on them about the fact that the company had forced them to work on two versions
If only they really _had_ been stolen (Score:4, Interesting)
I get the joke, but..
One of the interesting things about the situation, is that New Jersey apparently does not own the machines. They neither stole nor bought them. They licensed the machines, and the terms of the license are what prohibits them from analyzing the flaws. Without the state signing a contract that prohibits them from auditing the machines, Sequoia would have had no muscle to prevent it, and Felten would have his hands on one by now.
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this is how they know that they have a serious bug, the numbers didn't mesh by a large enough number to be more than statistical chance.
Is it just me.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Zimbabwe (Score:2)
Then again, maybe they *were* using Sequoia's gear
Is +1 really that hard for a computer to do? (Score:5, Interesting)
But why aren't people outraged? I think it's because we, the people, don't believe our votes count anyway and so none of this comes as a surprise. There may have been a time when men with pistols and rifles might gather and demand a recount, but guess what? We don't have gun ownership any more... at least not the kind that we had in the past. And if a group of people with guns gathered together for just about any reason at all, I think the potential outcome would be easy to guess based on recent historical events.
I really don't think our votes count. They don't because of a variety of reasons prior to the ballot being printed. Independents don't stand a chance... even the people who are actually pretty well liked by most. The news media is incredibly biased. When debates are being held, lots of people are simply not allowed to even participate. Some states such as Texas even have laws that state you cannot participate in getting an independent on the ballot if you have voted in any party primaries. The end result is that we can "vote" for whoever we want... but the selection is more or less out of our hands.
If people really believed their votes counted, they would be outraged. The lack of rage is a pretty telling indication that the people aren't interested in voting irregularities in the least. If there were irregularities in their bank statements, their phone bill or their paychecks, they'd be outraged to the point of violence as is often the case when such issues occur. So if outrage is an indicator of how much someone cares when things go wrong, then I'd say people are more upset over [literally] spilled milk than they are over elections.
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Counting is hard. The 2010 US Census will cost nearly $50 per person counted. (!!!) No wonder Sequoia's machines have "trade secrets."
It's a good thing computers don't have to deal with multiplication very often. You'd think multiplication would be easy, because you can just add
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considering the amount of data they have to collect, hiring enough temp workers to go door to door in every city in America... it's no wonder it costs $50 per person.
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Ah that's the great thing. It's not "my" fault for not participating in a system that is clearly rigged to favor particular groups and particular parties. In fact, the opposite would be true... if I were to feed the corrupt system with my participat
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When a gov allows for hidden votes (Score:2)
To paraphrase an obvious progenitor of th
I'm a little surprised... (Score:4, Interesting)
Considering how many people get upset every time some article like this comes up and the expertise many claim that this hasn't occurred to anyone yet. I'm no programmer (outside of incredibly simple perl scripts) so "I" couldn't do it but I can't imagine that members of the Slashdot community would do any worse than these asshats. Besides, even if they did do a crappy job it would be open source so that security hats could look through it and point to all of the bugs for fixing.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/03/173241&from=rss
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2004/01/61968
http://openvotingsolutions.net/
Re:I'm a little surprised... (Score:4, Informative)
You mean, like the Electronic Voting Machine Project [sourceforge.net] and OpenSTV [sourceforge.net] and the Voting Software Project [sourceforge.net] and the Open Voting Consortium [openvotingconsortium.org] and Blue Screen Democracy [sourceforge.net] and probably a dozen other projects?
One problem is that voting software/hardware has to be certified by the state. A ponderous, time-consuming, and expensive bureaucratic nightmare not particularly friendly to amateurs (or even corporations, unless there's a good prospect for vast sales).
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Gambling Machines! (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope. (Score:3, Insightful)
The difference between the two devices is one is gaming HUGE income generator for Government. In order to keep the poor schmucks at the poker machines, they contribute to the scheme by certifying the devices. Voting infrastructure is all costs and the only people that benefit are the contractor and the representatives the contractor is paying.
You seem to have forgotten that government is supposed to be run more like a business.
even they are buggy... (Score:3, Interesting)
So they aren't a great example.
Its not like either party wants it fixed, they do far better crying an election was stolen than do actual work.
It also gives them an out, elections are the ultimate ego bitch slap, its no fun when people don't vote for you and you lose, it means people d
Well, duh. (Score:3, Funny)
BSOD (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing to point out is that Sequoia, or at least some of the companies that it now owns, has a history in the voting machine industry. Remember those big blue mechanical booths with the sliding curtains? Those things were as inaccurate as hell.
The argument for paper is good, but in many elections there can be thousands of individual ballots in a single county. If you overcome the logistic hurdles, then you have the problem of people doing the counting of thousands of ballots and compiling that information. I've spent many election nights reviewing paperwork from precincts that was just wrong - didn't add up or was off by an order of magnitude. These weren't people trying to hedge an election; they just screwed up simple arithmetic.
I studied this problem for years from a security analyst's position. In my opinion, a print on demand, image, scan, and destroy solution is the only practical solution. Sorting and storing tons of paper just doesn't make sense. Recycle it. Use barcodes on the ballot, steganography in the stored image, and encryption in the scan record to verify the match of the scan and the stored image to the print at the polling place.
Let's face it, we have exactly what the original GW warned us about, a two party system where the political aristocracy selects the possible candidates based on the influence of lobbyists. Their machines are calibrated to select issues and positions to give a 50% bias within the uneducated masses.
As a Libertarian, all I can do is sit and watch in disgust. This not what our ancestors had in mind, but they only had (much less than) 0.3% as many ballots to count.
Email thread from communications with Sequioa (Score:2, Interesting)
Here is my email thread with him-
Buttressed by the fact that the email I sent only to two professors has been distributed without my knowledge or consent, why would we allow analysis of our machines by unlicensed parties? We are not afraid of the results. In fact, as mentioned to you earlier, the report from the code review that is in progress goes to the State simultaneous to release to Sequoia.
Ed Smith
VP, Compliance/Quality/Certification
Sequoia Voting Systems
Co
that explains it (Score:2)
how hard could it be? (Score:3, Interesting)
They Can't Ban Sequoia (Score:3, Funny)
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That's not an oxymoron, that's a feature! (Rather like most proposals for electronic voting itself...)
Re:Man... (Score:5, Interesting)
So know you have politicians who think something needs to be done, companies lobbying them thinking they can make a buck, and when they do, it isn't enough, they have to cut corners, which then turns the same sour puss crowd that turns it into a We gotta do something again message that perpetuates the companies claiming give us more money and we can fix it.
The problem is that it is getting represented as worse then it is. There might have been a few problems here and there but the major ones you hear about are more or less citizen errors. Things like claiming disenfranchisement because someone passed out a flyer saying Vote on X day if your voting republican and vote on Y day if your voting for a democrat (ohio), people claiming disenfranchisement because cops are parked in the medium strip watching traffic 4 or 5 blocks away from a polling place, or that they couldn't figure out how to line up their cards properly and look to see if a hole was actually made on certain selections (florida). Now we have new jersey and Maryland where where Electronic voting seems to have made a couple of errors that would be somewhat par for the course if paper ballots where used anyways. But because it is electronic, it is receiving much more scrutiny.
In all, it isn't nearly as bad as it is being made out as. Still it isn't something that should be ignored either. The real interesting thing is that they areas having the problems seem to be more liberal in nature which is probably why you get the loud screaming if something doesn't go the way they hoped it would. (the perpetual underdog syndrome where we can raly the grass roots but claiming someone is mysteriously attempting to use the magic smoke in the decices to stop your vote from counting.)
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