Can America Trust Electronic Voting? 452
A anonymous reader writes: "The Sacramento Bee wrote an excellent article about the issues surrounding electronic voting. It was written by the Yolo County clerk/recorder and a professor of law at UC Davis. They quote sources such as Peter G. Neumann and Diebold's president Walden O'Dell."
Redundant, I know (Score:3, Insightful)
No! (Score:3, Insightful)
Not with these companies... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Redundant, I know (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps. But I've said this many times before (as have others) and I'll say it again:
Why does an e-voting machine have to be anything more then a fancy dumb terminal with a printer attached? Don't record the votes to a hard drive or flash card (or the worst possible idea: networked to some central server). The machine should be nothing more then a gateway to print a paper ballot.
This ensures that the ballot is filled out correctly, gives the user ample time to correct any mistakes (before printing the ballot) and lets them verify it with their own two eyes before they drop the paper ballot in the lockbox.
Said ballots can then be counted with OCR software -- or by hand if it comes down to a manual recount.
Open source or not, I do not trust the vendors of these machines ("I'm going to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush next year") enough to assume that my vote is actually counted on that hard drive. Even if they released open source code, how do you really know that's what's running on the machine itself? Once the election is over it's too late as Florida proved.
Re:Redundant, I know (Score:5, Insightful)
Why bother with electronic voting? We get our results around an hour after the polls close, plus there's much less room for voting fraud (and I'd assume it's cheaper).
As much as traditional voting... (Score:3, Insightful)
Frankly, I am not as concerned about electronic voting as I am getting Americans to actually vote in the first place.
The real question is (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The real question is (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously, my own experience isn't necessarily reflective of the whole of the US voting pool, but I have trouble believing that the majority of people actually do research every candidate before a vote...
Re:Can America Trust Electronic Voting? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:absolutely not (Score:5, Insightful)
According to all the "media recounts", Bush won the election unless you counted the votes against methods prescribed by Florida law -- much like Johnny Carson's Carnac. I don't know if you understand US Presidential Elections, but our President is elected by the Electoral College not by the popular vote. Bush won by 2% in the Electoral College [fec.gov].
Bush and his government do not listen to the UN, detain prisoners with no charges, and therefore do not believe in democracy.
The UN does not dictate to the United States because we are a sovereign country. It would unconstitutional for President Bush to allow the UN to dictate to USA. The US does not detain "prisoners" without charges. We do, however, place into detention terrorists that have attacked or are plotting to attack the US or its military. It is very simple not become a guest of Gitmo, do not conspire with terrorist organizations that threaten to cause mass casualties. We do believe in democracy in America and brought it to many nations around the world. Two shining examples are Germany and Japan.
I understand that it is vogue in many minority "clickish" groups to engage in vitriolic hyperbole in regards to our President. Those that have underestimated our President's intelligence or will have found themselves on the losing side of not only elections but of history. There are many complaints that can be brought up about our President such as his love of big government programs but it is rare to ever hear valid ones from his foes, much to their electoral peril. President Bush main strength is that he is constantly underestimated and overly mocked.
Re:Can America Trust Electronic Voting? (Score:2, Insightful)
The real problem was the United States Supreme Court, which handed the election to George W. Bush.
Once all of the ballots had been counted, it was found that by a slight margin, Al Gore actually won Florida - meaning that he won both the popular and electoral vote.
Perhaps we can work on replacing the US Supreme Court with machines? Or, at least, with non-partisan judges - who are elected by the people of the USA, not appointed by Presidents (and therefore subjective in their opinions of presidential candidates who just happen to be the son of the man who gave them their job).
That is really Step #1 to getting a fair, balanced presidential election in 2004 - ridding the Supreme Court of the current judges, and allowing the American People to vote for new judges.
the real point (Score:5, Insightful)
I have no idea why the US has such problems with their voting. In the UK everyone votes on paper..... with a fucking pen. (No dimpled chads crap!) It is counted by hand and is never out by more than 10 votes in 30,000. We also have the result by the early hours of the morning.
The point is if you want to go and count all the votes yourself you can. The whole idea of an election is that it is open. For this there must be a paper trail. Why complicate the matter? The other point is that it is secret. Who I vote for is none of anyones bussiness. I would always be nervous with electronic voting for two reasons. I want to know that my vote has really bean counted and I want to know that I am anonymous.
As regards election fraud it is easier to imagine someone messing with an electonic count than someone turning up with a few suitcases of paper and trying to stuff them into a ballot box in fron t of the election officals.
.
Black Hat Hackers (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Not with these companies... (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly right. It's not 'hackers' or 'crackers' I'm afraid of, it's the guys these companies are working for. And we sure as hell know who Walden O'Dell is working for! "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." How much more conflict of interest do you need?
Re:Now, really.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Voting has to be anonymous.
Electronics is not the untrustworty part. (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem in the equation is the involvment of our government, who have failed to earn our trust in the last few decades, not the concept of electronic voting itself.
-Z
voting (Score:2, Insightful)
USA makes a fool of themselves. E-voting IS mature (Score:3, Insightful)
With more and more surprise I am reading all those articles about how the USA (nr 1 in IT in the world) is struggling with E-voting.
I am 30 years old now, the first time I voted was when I was 19 or 20 yo (first chance), and that was electronical. I have never casted my ballot on paper, ever. At the time, we are talking 1990, about 50% of The Netherlands was using voting machines, a few years after it was 100%. The first machines were installed in 1985.
Agreed, no fancy touch screens (how would that work?? 15 parties, up to 40 candidates per party - that can never be shown on one normal touch screen, thereby giving an advance to the party first shown of course), though a reliable, robust, and secure way to vote it is. It uses a panel with a huge number of buttons (one per candidate), a display to tell which candidate you are about to vote for, and a "Vote" button. That's all. No Internet connection (what is that good for other than allowing hackerse to access the machine). Never, ever has there been a dispute on voting security with these machines.They work, everyone is happy with it, and they are a great improvement on the paper voting.
USA is making a true fool of themselves.
How come they can not even design something simple (not easy, but simple as in few functions needed) as a voting machine? How can we ever trust their electronic "smart bombs" and whatnot? And their computer based aeroplanes? And more computer software which has to be tamper-proof and absolutely safe.
Electronic voting is not rocket science. Ask the Europeans about it, there the technology can be bought in from the shelf. Not fancy, though tested in several elections and found good.
Maybe they need another election disaster like Bush to realise it is time to have a look across the border and see how a real election is held.
Wouter.
Re:Electronics is not the untrustworty part. (Score:5, Insightful)
--Dan
Re:The real question is (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, I passed the Crest Theater here in Sacramento the other day when they had the citizenship swearing-in scheduled. There was a line a block long of immigrants excited to become US citizens and in a way I felt bad for these people. How many do you think would turn back if they saw how much people born here took it for granted and, in doing so help create the corruption they always complain about?
Marketer's Dream (Score:2, Insightful)
As for evoting, why can't we just let the technology evolve? For that matter, the technology should be designed anticipating evolution. For example, maybe the software should not be bought from the same company selling the hardware...keep the programs independent.
I apologize in advance to any system architect reading this, but this vision we have a perfect designed voting system is bunk. It takes several iterations and gradual improvements to get it right.
The first post in this thread mention OSS for the voting systems. OSS is more open to gradual improvements, and it makes it easier for the same set of programs to be run on different machines.
Evolution will happen, the evolution in the closed system will happen by voting districts losing all of their ballots. The Florida fiasco was just part of the evolution.
Re:absolutely not (Score:3, Insightful)
The electoral college votes are really the only ones that matter. They dont necessarily have to "agree" with the peoples choice.
A true democracy elects its officials by the people. We, do not do that.
Re:California is on the right track... (Score:5, Insightful)
A Christmas Wish (Score:3, Insightful)
Real time results (Score:3, Insightful)
No, that's a big, big disadvantage, and should be avoided at all costs. Results should not be available before the polls close. If they are, all sorts of tricks can be played, in both close and not-so-close races.
If the race is probably going to go to one side or another, fewer people are likely to turn out. What does "probably" mean? Well, just turn on CNN, or Fox, or... and they'll tell you.
See the problem?
And that's before you get in to less subtle ways of, um, freelance electioneering.
Allowing any knowledge of how an election is going while it is still happening gives people an opportunity to undermine it.
Re:absolutely not (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, except Clinton really is a Rhodes scholar and a damned smart chap, whereas Bush really is a C-student who barely scraped through college. And is also extraordinarily inarticulate most of the time (wonder how long he rehearsed his address to the U.K.)...
Re:Can America Trust Electronic Voting? (Score:3, Insightful)
But seriously, I think the parent poster is dead on here - no system is going to be perfect, and so it's important to have a system that's as tamper-proof and traceable as possible to minimize errors.
E-voting provides neither of these reliably. Even if the software was open source, how can the public be 100% sure that the binaries installed in the machines are made from the available source? There's still potential for tampering.
Granted, at least there will be much less potential for random errors and the like, so if anything goes wrong it would be more likely to be a deliberate tinkering than a typo!
But still, I don't see what the problem is with paper ballots.
"Here's a sheet cardstock and one of those Bingo card markers. Make a dot next to the name of the guy you wanna vote for and stuff it in the slot."
A 6-year-old can probably handle that. Hell you should probably put little photos of the canidates on there too, just in case the voter can't be arsed to read... they seem to vote for whoever looks the best anyway. (And with the choices in canidates, it's really just as good a system as any!)
=Smidge=
Re:absolutely not (Score:2, Insightful)
We Americans do not trust our government. We are very proud of that. It's an intentional act of will, and we believe in it more strongly than just about any other founding principle of our nation. Our very government is constructed in distrust of itself. We are taught by our parents, by our media, and by our government-run schools that government is a necessary evil and not to trust it.
But in spite of that, no, because of our distrust of our own government, we refuse to yield our national sovereignty to the U.N. or anyone else.
The question of whether we should use electronic voting or more laborious hand-counting also devolves to our basic distrust of government. Will it help or hurt? That's the question.
Saying we should hand-count because we don't trust the government misses the point entirely.
Re:We have trusted ATMs for almost 30 years... (Score:3, Insightful)
1. You have your money...
2. You have your receipt...
3. Later you get your statement.
Electronic voting provides NONE of these protections, which is precisely the problem. An ATM provides simple user level auditing of the transaction, which for the most part works well. With "Electronic" voting, there is no paper trail, no audit method... Votes can appear and disappear, and change without anyones knowledge.
The answer is obvious, Electronic voting should result in human readible paper that is placed in the ballot box to be counted. It can be counted on the fly, like they currently are in Washington State. But more importantly the results can be audited and hand counted. The very fact that they can, massively lowers the possibility of fraud, or conversly the fact that you can't massively increases the possibility of fraud.
Re:absolutely not (Score:2, Insightful)
No fucking shit!!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
NO FUCKING SHIT!
NO GODDAMMED FUCKING SHIT ON A STICK!!!
Do you FUCKING REALIZE the EXTREME TERMINAL STUPIDITY of what you're saying???
Why the fuck do you think that VOTING IS SECRET and HAS TO BE SECRET?
It's to frigging MAKE SURE VOTERS AREN'T BOUGHT OR INTIMIDATED into voting for a given candidate!!!
Sheesh! One wonders what goes through the heads of those youths nowadays!!!!
Re:Some paranoia... (Score:2, Insightful)
Please explain exactly how you come to the conclusion that electronic data is easier and cheaper to safeguard than paper records. You make a strong assertation, but provide no argument.
If I have a piece of paper signed by you (note that "signed" can still be a digital signature), all I have to do it keep it physically safe. If I have your input into a computer system, I have to verify all of the hardware and software that is ever involved with your record, as well as keeping the media (which is much more fragile than paper) physically safe.
Re:No! (Score:2, Insightful)
They provide a means of auditing the electronic system.
Doing the electronic thing properly implies that it's auditable! Preferably by any voter. That means paper audit trails.
Re:Now, really.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, I can't see a method of verifying that your hashed vote is still there without having someone else be able to beat you up and do it... Same thing with paper voting, though.
Locked metal boxes with a slot into which you drop your ballot, with oversight from all the major political parties whenever the box is closed, opened, transported or stored.
These problems were very well-solved ages ago.
Given locked-box technology, your scheme is needlessly complex. Just print a ballot with both human-readable and machine-readable versions of the voter's selections, and also store an electronic copy of the vote. None of these should be personally identifiable in any way, or even timestamped. Hashing and signing are unnecessary. The voter drops the ballot in the box.
At the end of the day, the electronic votes are tallied, and that's the result. If anyone wishes to contest any part of the vote, that voting district's ballots can be machine-counted. If anyone wishes to claim that the machines are in error, the ballots can be hand-counted. Just for good measure, election officials should randomly select a set of districts for machine counting, with the results to be compared against the electronic totals. Significant discrepancies should invoke a system-wide recount. Also for good measure, election officials should randomly select a set of ballots (making sure there are some from every district) and both hand and machine-count them. Discrepancies should cause a thorough review of the system to determine where/how they originated, and might indicate the need for a system-wide hand recount.
Technology never provides security. Process is always the source of any security that exists; technology is only a means of making the process more convenient and cost-effective. Note that this is even true of the locked boxes, where the technology is only a means to make the oversight process more manageable.
For security, focus on process first, technology second.
Re:Redundant, I know (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, I have no problem with the current system of punch cards, and I think just about everyone knows to check for hanging chads at this point (I've never found one). Besides, people that get confused by butterfly ballots will just as easily be confused by hard to read LCD displays.
Elections are one of the most basic elements of a democracy and to turn an otherwise simple system into a complicated opaque electronic mess when there is no reason to is crazy.
That said, if it's going to happen these things better have a rock solid audit trail for when things get out of hand. Oh, if anyone wants to hire me to convert your e-ticket systems into voting machines, I'm currently available.
Re:Redundant, I know (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's look at these claims.
Humans are in the loop, either way. They better be, they are the ones voting. With computers, humans also have to be involved in writing the voting code, and hopefully reviewing that code in public.
How many state and federally designed systems do you know that work well? It's better to have a system where you can't just edit the total.
Re:Redundant, I know (Score:3, Insightful)
Explain to me how you purpose to implement a paper less voting system that is trustworthy. Even with the open source idea (which as we all know is automatically assumed to be better around here, and 99% of the time it is), I still don't trust it. For starters, I have no way of knowing that open source code is what's actually on the machine. I also have no way of knowing that the vote won't be vi'ed/notepaded/hex-edited to the other guy hours after I leave or that it was even recorded right in the first place.
Where I vote we use mechanical machines (that look like they came out of the 60s). The offices (President, Senator, Rep, Mayor, Governor, Dog Catcher, etc etc) are listed along the top. Below these you have several rows (for each party... democrat, republican, conservative, liberal, etc) with a list of candidates. Some candidates might appear twice (democrat and liberal for example), so you can choose which party line you vote for them under. If you vote a party line you just find the party name and pull down all the levers to the right of it. If you pull down two levers for the same election the first one resets itself. Thus you can't void your ballot by voting twice.
My only problem with this setup is once I pull the curtain and leave the booth I have no way of knowing that my vote was actually recorded the way I wanted it to be. A touchscreen/printer combo, as I have suggested (many times) would allow me to verify my votes before dropping it into the lockbox, yet it would still retain the advantage of the machines that I have described above (not letting me vote for GW and Gore at the same time -- thus voiding my ballot -- would also have the advantage of being easily programmed to display in virtually any language spoken by man), as it would refuse to print an invalid ballot. The ballot itself would need to be human readable (forget barcodes) but easily understood by OCR software. The bubble readers that we all used in High School would seem logical for this task. Easily human readable -- and scannable with an acceptably low margin of error.
I realize this is more work then a truly paper less system, but this is our bedrock of our democracy. Of all the things our Government manages to waste money on (and you can name three of your favorites right off the top of your head no matter which side of the aisle you are on) I don't think they can spend enough money making sure our elections are as fool/tamperproof as possible.
If you have a better idea I'm listening, but this is the best one I've heard/discussed so far. We just can't afford to screw around with this.
Re:More badly-researched rhetoric on voting machin (Score:2, Insightful)
There is, as I suggested above, an exception (you're not on the roster index, you are at your "new polling place", haven't reregistered, have moved (there's some time requirement), but are still in the same county as before.... then you can vote provisionally, and asking for ID is cool in that case.
But, yes, in general, if I know friend Fred dies a few miles away, I could go over to his polling place, say I'm him, and vote as him. The catch there is the poll workers might know I'm lying, and there's gotta be some mechanism to deal with that potential, but....)
And since a copy of all the voters is posted, and even marked a few times during the day with marks indicating who has voted, you can come in late in the day and make sure you pick someone who hasn't voted yet. Nifty, that.
No.... (Score:3, Insightful)