E-Voting Done Right - In Australia 485
tehanu writes "After all the furor over e-voting in America, Wired News has an article about e-voting done right in Australia. An important factor is that all of the software is open-source. The company responsible actually seems to have given consideration to the integrity of the democratic process, too - from the lead engineer: 'Why on earth should (voters) have to trust me -- someone with a vested interest in the project's success? A voter-verified audit trail is the only way to 'prove' the system's integrity to the vast majority of electors, who after all, own the democracy.' They also have scathing words for Diebold: 'The only possible motive I can see for disabling some of the security mechanisms and features in their system is to be able to rig elections. It is, at best, bad programming; at worst, the system has been designed to rig an election.' In general they are 'gob-smacked' by the whole situation with electronic voting machines in the US right now."
Re:Open source? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sign the HR2239 petition. (Score:2, Interesting)
Otherwise the vote-changers will leave the known test districts alone and only change votes in those districts not
being re-counted.
When I was in California, the voter's pamphlet had a grid on the first page with all the punch locations (a grid of numbers) I marked that while examining the issues and voted acording to that in the booth. There is a take home record for anyone who wants it.
Re:One Down, One To Go (Score:5, Interesting)
Good methods (like Condorcet) should start in small organizations and work their way up, so that people are already familiar with how good preferential voting works.
Debian, for example, has already worked out lots of kinks and unfairness in their voting system by switching to Condorcet. Some "rules of order" books now advocate using Condorcet when possible. Encouraging this is what will get good preferential voting accepted, not pointing an angry finger at the government that's using a slightly better method than everyone else but still isn't good enough.
Re:Oz... (Score:2, Interesting)
It's a good point you make, but I believe it could be expanded. I feel that any country, in order to serve its people to the best of its ability, should look to the rest of the world for examples. There are great things happening all over the planet that we can learn from and some of these are not even democracies.
Just look at Japan (democracy). For many years their motto was to "imitate and improve." Just look at their superior consumer products and high standard of living. Yes, the dictators of the the late 1800s and early 1900s nearly destroyed a culture, but they soon learned ways of balancing these two aspects.
Quinn (from the article) made a good point - maybe all countries should have some say in who becomes president of the US. We all have a vested interest. That way, if countries have a say in how others are run, perhaps the best elements of all countries will be integrated.
Holy crap, I've left out so much and I hope the ensuing discussion covers some of it!
Why, oh why, is there software at all? (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean, think about it. What do you really want the system to do?
State: Waiting for User
State: Present User with Options
State: Ask User to Confirm
State: Record User Choice
Four states. That's all you've got. Four states. Why, precisely, are they using cheap hardware for something that a pair of dual flip-flops could handle?
Honestly - think about this. The only reason there are "security concerns" at all is because they were too cheap to design a dedicated system, no software, just pure logic, that can be run on a logic checking system looking for races, possible vulnerabilities, etc.
Paper trail? Well, paper's not exactly THAT good (it does burn, and as Florida proved, it's not always verifiably correct). What about a write-once, read-many device? Like, I don't know, a CD-R, with packet-based writing?
Embedded systems are becoming so much more popular over discretes because hardware is cheap, and bad software is cheaper. But in a case like this, I don't understand it. An idiot could design dedicated hardware voting terminals, which don't even have the possibility of tampering. It's just incompetence.
(P.S.: Sounds like a decent business plan, doesn't it? "Tamper-proof Voting Terminals" - "No more software crashes, no more unreliable messes - works the same way, every time, guaranteed.")
Yes, I know things are a bit more complicated than I'm pointing out here. But it is still correct: E-Voting doesn't HAVE to be fundamentally flawed. It just is when they use cheap hardware. C'mon. Haven't they seen the i-Opener BBSes? Hardware based on the "limit possibilities by creative software" is screaming to be hacked.
Re:real democracy (Score:1, Interesting)
You're aware that the Anglican church in the US has recently elected a bishop who's not only gay but proud of it, right? "Christian" doesn't necessarily mean "blindly prejudiced".
and to the REPUBLIC, for which it stands... (Score:1, Interesting)
First, in order to determine who was sent to the electoral college, all the votes would have been counted by hand anyway (duh?).
The electoral college was set up for various reasons. One of them is obsolete: at the time of the founding of the United States, it was extrememly rare that there were any public figures well known enough to all the various areas in the country to be elected. So let's say 1 person was running for President from each state, and there are 13 states. Each person would get the votes from the people in their state, and the person from the biggest state would win EVERY TIME. If I live in Georgia, I flat out don't know who's better, this-guy from New York or that-guy from Delaware. But if you get a small group of officials together who are involved in government and know all the big players, then they can work out who gets to be president. The voters would actually VOTE for the ELECTORS, i.e. "I know Bob, and he's a smart guy. I wan't him to be involved in deciding who's president, because I don't want to have to pick from a list of guys I've never heard of," instead of voting for a candidate or political party.
However, this is the only reason for the college which is obsolete. Another was the fact that America was never intended to be a DEMOCRACY, it was intended to be a REPUBLIC (i.e. representative democracy). In fact, I would say that you, yourself, are evidence that the many are so uneducated that a direct democracy is unwise.
Plus, the electoral college balances out a major problem existing even today:Look at the map of who won which states in the 2000 presidential election. Something like 10% of the states voted for Democrats, but the popular vote was close to 50% Democrat. This is because most of the population is in a few urban centers. So, if you were to hold elections based on the popular vote, candidates would battle over a few urban centers (New York, Chicago, LA, DC, maybe a couple others) and take the attitude that the rest of the US could go to hell.
Now if you're living in an urban center, you may think, "Well what's wrong with that? We're smarter and better educated than those rednecks anyhow. We SHOULD decide." However, this does not simply ignore the idea that everyone should have a say in our country, but it also disregards the fact that the NEEDS of Alabama are different than the needs of New York. New Yorkers don't generally have any idea what Alabama needs, and are usually too interested in the needs of New Yorkers to care. In fact, people in New York City would in most cases vote for what's good for New York City even if they knew it wasn't so good for upstate New York.
So, if you get rid of the Electoral College, you have a system where the inhabitants of a few large cities get full control over the elections and will probably vote for a President who is bad for any other area, even the country as a whole, so long as it's good for those few large cities.
Not so smart, huh?
No Great Surprise Here (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sign the HR2239 petition. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is traditionally called the sample ballot. It will look different in every district, depending on your voting equipment. In my district, the sample ballot is the same exact sheet you see in the (electronic) voting machine, and is the same sheet used for absentee balloting (without "sample ballot" printed in 25% grayscale across it). They send out the sample ballots in New Jersey about 2 weeks before the election, so that one can review all the choices, and familiarize yourself with the layout of the choices, before entering the polling machine. The aim, of course, is to reduce confusing similar to the Al Gore/Pat Buchanan Florida problem.
Re:Australian voting system (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Obstacles to US adoption of SI system(Note: OT) (Score:3, Interesting)
On the draft issue--Canada also doesn't have a draft, and the couple times it came up in our history (WWI and II) it was such a contentious issue the actual draftees never saw action before the war was over. BTW, I never said I was in favour of a draft--just pointing out it's a cumpulsory duty that comes with living in the US (and other countries too).
The draft may have been a bad example, and ok, paying taxes is also necessary to keep the government running (and voting isn't necessary in the strictest sense)... how about jury duty? Just a month ago I had to respond to a request for possible jury duty in the next year. Failure to respond within 6 days without valid reason would've landed me with a sizable fine and/or jail. Unlike the draft, jury duty does not put my life in danger (leave aside hypothetical blackmail, because it can happen to voters too), but unless I have a good reason to refuse I may have to serve as part of a jury. I imagine the US has a similar system. Who *wants* to serve as a juror in a case involving criminal acts against children? Most wouldn't, but they aren't free to refuse serving their country in that capacity without a good reason.
I didn't mean to seriously suggest compulsory voting, but my point was to address the "duty to country" principle. No political system allows the people to be truly and completely free, not even the US.
BTW, I've been thinking maybe there should be a "negative count" ballot for elections. I think we've gotten too cynical of our politicians of late, so we can't really say we want so and so in office. However, I would LOVE if there were a "I DO NOT want this candidate in power" option, and checking off a candidate would DEDUCT a vote (or maybe just a half-vote) from him/her. I bet that would increase turnout substantially...
Re:Open source? (Score:3, Interesting)
Whatever the reader, it has to be a commonly understood format, or else someone could hack the format. If it's a barcode to be machine readable, you can still sell your vote to the guy outside the booth - he just has to have a run-of-the-mill barcode reader. That doesn't solve the problem.
The only way to solve the problem is have the vote receipt printed out in human and machine (barcode) readable formats, and then have them deposit the receipt into a ballot box, just like now. If there's a problem with the count, then you crack open the seal on the ballot box and count with the barcodes. If there's still a concern, count it with the human readable labels printed on the receipts. That solves the whole problem.
Re:Open source? (Score:2, Interesting)
Nice try... but someone holding a gun to your child/wife/relation's head doesn't really care about legal vs illegal already. Heck, someone who's willing to say they'll pay you X to vote for Y is already past the point of caring about whether it's legal for you to show them how you voted. Laws only keep honest people honest.
The only suggestion that I've seen possible would be a MD5 hash of your vote (probably seeded in some manner). However, how is the end-user supposed to know how the MD5 hash was calculated? The signature just says that *somevalue* was signed, and if you give people enough information to backtrack from the signature to what votes were actually recorded, we're back in the land of the non-anonymous vote with the ability to pay/threaten people to vote a particular way.
/. Heresy (Score:4, Interesting)
I think using computers to count vote is a mis-application of technology. My reasons are:
- Security. None of the operating systems and hardware in use are designed from the ground up to be secure. The reason is that security and ease-of-use are at loggerheads - get more of one you lose some of the other. One of the key features of every OS I've worked on is the ability to install a daemon somewhere in the message queue so you can remap devices to other purposes. For example, keyboard drivers are easily changed to morph a 'p' into a long sequence of instructions. No matter how well you try to detect a daemon/hook/wedge or whatever you want to call it, if the developer is intent on inserting his code and there are provisions for mapping into user space (I've yet to run on an OS that that couldn't be done) the code can be inserted. That means that open source, closed source, audited source, tested source are all susceptible to modification by a malacious bit of code. It just requires access. Touch screen/punch card/optical scan - it doesn't matter - if you're relying on a computer to do the tally and you can't guarantee that no one has inserted a daemon, you don't have a secure vote.
- Little gained. A lot of "improvements" to what's out there right now discuss the idea of a voter-inspectable audit trail. Voter uses a computer to vote and the computer produces a paper ballot that the user can inspect to make sure the computer isn't cheating. There are two things wrong here. First if a computer is going to tally the paper ballot, you're back to point 1. You've just moved the location of the fraud. If the computer is going to tally and the paper is just a backup, then in most cases, a fraud will go undetected. If the fraud is small enough to be within the bounds of statistical uncertainty but large enough to sway the vote, you're not going to catch it unless you hand count the entire population of ballots. Secondly, you're in essence using a machine to mark a piece of paper which a human can just as easily do - you haven't gained anything by introducing the voting machine into the mix.
I think the Canadians who just use a paper and pencil and cross-checked human counters to tally the vote have it right. The whole system is very simple. You mark your ballot, put it in a box. When the poll closes, at least 3 pairs of eyes look at it, one person is the election official, the other two are from opposing parties. When all 3 agree what the vote is, it's tallied as such. They can cross check tallies as they go so you're not running into a transcription problem down the road. The precinct reports its tallies to a higher level up the tree and the results are published so that the three (or more) counters can check the tally was accurately registered at the next level. Anyone who wants to can check the process from start to finish. Open, transparent, accurate and simple. Contrast that to encrypted keys, password maintenance, static discharge induced miscounts, lack of audit trails and the rest of the mess that characterizes the spectrum of American voting techniques and you have to ask - why the hell do we bother using machines to do this when we can do a better job by hand?There are lots of times that tech is part of a solution. Then there are times, like vote counting, where it is part of the problem. It may be retro and old fashioned but I think it's time we just used paper and pen again. It worked all the way up to the sixties and the country managed then. If our parents and grandparents could manage it, shouldn't we be able to hand count as well?
Re:Why not pencil and paper? (Score:3, Interesting)
That seems like more than just one choice, and pencil and paper worked just fine, thanks.
Strangely enough I don't mind waiting the weeks it takes to determine who gets that last senate seat (proportional voting makes for lots of counting), speed isn't the issue. Accuracy and resistance to corruption are much more important.
And more people means more voters, but it also means more counters. And since voting isn't compulsary over there, there should be a higher ratio of willing counters to voters.
Re:Why, oh why, is there software at all? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is all you need. Hell, the main reason embedded systems (real embedded systems, like Diebold's crap) 'look' vulnerable is because they've got all this extra crap, that people know has to be useless.
Quite frankly, people are willing to use technology because they now know that paper ballots are error-prone, too, and technology looks like magic, so it seems less error prone. What I'm saying is that we give them something that's like magic. The Diebold crap isn't magic. It's software kludged together to 'kindof' work.
(And incidentally, what I'm suggesting is not an embedded system. An embedded system is a microprocessor system embedded inside a device: hence, embedded system. What I'm suggesting is a discrete system - pure logic, no software.)