Doubting Electronic Voting
Posted by
michael
on Thu May 15, 2003 08:58 AM
from the clickez-ici dept.
from the clickez-ici dept.
twitter writes "The NYT is raising the alarm on electronic voting. After citing expert opinion on the need for a paper trail, they then quote election officials and vendors who dismiss that opinion as the ignorant work of dreamers. The reporter titles his article, 'To Register Doubts, Press Here' and seems less than convinced."
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Doubting Electronic Voting
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Free mirror (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.buddhanet.net/ | Last Journal: Friday December 13 2002, @09:32AM)
The article [nytimes.com]
Bon appetit.
Re:Free mirror (Score:4, Funny)
(Last Journal: Sunday July 29, @06:59PM)
s/French/freedom/g
IE: Do you speak freedom?
I took freedom in high school.
Would you like some freedom toast?
Re:Right..... and all financial transactions onlin (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.soraia.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday May 27 2003, @02:54AM)
He's nervous, beause with electronic voting, a paranoid, warmongering lunatic may be able to fix an election, get himself voted in, and start an aggressive campaign of pre-emptive...oh wait.
Re:Right..... and all financial transactions onlin (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/)
And when 50,000 largely black, largely Democrat voters are denied their legal right to vote because they were falsely accused of being felons by a computerized list that was inaccurate to begin with and encouraged to be more so by the Florida government, then saying an election was stolen isn't flamebait.
Well, it is, but who said the truth can't be flamebait [gregpalast.com]?
Re:Right..... and all financial transactions onlin (Score:5, Interesting)
As long as you're willing to say the same for 50,000 immigrant (legal or otherwise) non-citizen voters, also largely Democrat, who cannot vote, but sometimes do vote, then we're cool.
(Clarification: Even if I take your 50,000 figure at face value, I don't think the inaccuracies in the list were deliberately engineered. Likewise, neither do I think the problem of aliens voting is deliberately engineered on any widespread scale. I consider both of these to be "error", not "corruption".)
Both parties practice various forms of swinging elections. Some are legal ("gerrymandering"). Others (deliberately disenfranchising legal voters, or designing systems that can be circumvented to allow illegal voters to cast votes) are not.
The goal of any electoral process is to prevent the latter, or at least to ensure that the "noise" introduced by corrupt officials is swamped by the "signal" of the legitimate votes.
In the case of Floriduh, the signal was so close to 50/50 that it was lost in the noise of both manual counting error, mechanical vote-recording error, human voter error in not verifying that their vote was correctly punched and/or in not following instructions on the ballot, legal "error" in that efforts to recount changed the result through mechanical ballot mishandling and the fact that human beings had to rule on whether hanging chads ought to be counted as votes or not, and corruption. Given the large sources of error in any vote, even in Floriduh, error introduced by means of corruption was probably the smallest error factor of the bunch.
Yeah right (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Thursday July 17 2003, @12:54PM)
Unfortunately, the US government runs its own elections, rather than a truely impartial third party.
Politics are a dangerous thing in America.
Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.phoenixblue.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday February 10 2004, @01:24PM)
If you think politics in the United States is dangerous, check out the political situations in places like Ivory Coast. At least American citizens survive the voting process.
Re:No roadblocks, no votes thrown away. (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/)
If it happened, then there will be proof of it. Even the CIA couldn't cover up a roadblock of that magnitude; there will be thousands of witnesses. A handful of witnesses is easy to fake, or to silence, but you can't do that in the numbers that such a "voter roadblock" would produce.
Show me anything more than a hanfdul, and I might be convinced. But the previous poster was correct: if these roadblocks had really occurred, there would have been more than enough evidence for Gore -or, if not him personally, any number of voter groups- to sue. He has not done so. That, I think, is the most telling thing about this.
Just because we don't accept accusations without proof doesn't make us blind followers of The Establishment. "Innocent until proven guilty" is the cornerstone of our legal system. So prove them guilty.
Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://benrady.com/)
"a truely impartial third party"? Like who? What organization is responsible enough to oversee the elections of the most powerful nation on Earth and yet has no opinion one way or another on how they should go.
There is no "impartial third party". The U.S. electoral process isn't perfect but handing it over to Deloitte and Touche, or the U.N. or any other supposedly 'impartial' body is just going to make it worse. The best way to keep it legit is just to make the counters accountable.
Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Microsoft.
They would be truly impartial.
They would also be truly secure and trustworthy.
(Don't believe me, just read their latest press releases! So there.)
The US government does NOT run elections (Score:5, Informative)
An important point, though: the Federal government does NOT run any elections, period. Elections are the responsibility of the states. This was done on purpose so that the federal government could not rig elections for itself. Of course, as we've seen in practice, federal intrusion in state business has become so commonplace that federal action frequently affects state elections, from Federal voting rights acts to the 2000 presidential election. Of course, the ends could be said to justify the means for much of this federal interference. But there is a legitimate states' rights/federalism argument to be made against any federal interference in state elections.
Re:Yea, our "horrible system"..... (Score:4, Interesting)
Without the frontier, you can't run away from an intolerable situation. (The frontier was hostile and difficult, so the only people who went there were those who found the system where they lived intolerable..for one reason or another.)
Without accountability, one can't keep corruption in check. Without a check on corruption, trust rapidly falls. Without trust, economic growth first stagnates and then crumbles. (Well, technology is a strong preventative to that last...perhaps strong enough. Unfortunately, we'll see.)
Re:Yea, our "horrible system"..... (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/ | Last Journal: Sunday February 05 2006, @01:51PM)
You know, it's very hard to tell whether you're being sarcastic, satirical, or serious. I hope you're not being serious.
I don't know what it looks like from the inside, but those of us who don't live in the US look across the Atlantic and see a country where the head of state got in as a result of a fraudulent election run by his own brother; where civil rights are being progressively torn up and destroyed; which breaks solemn international treaties as if they didn't matter.
Wake up and smell the coffee! It looks to the rest of us asi if a tyrant has very successfully seized power over you, as a result of a minority riding roughshod over the interests of the majority.
As President Mugabe of Zimbabwe said, no foreign observer could possibly have found the last presidential election in the United States 'Free and Fair'. And he's a man who knows a lot about how to 'run' a democracy.
Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Interesting)
The paper trail in Florida DID help. The issue there was what standard you would recount by. Obviously republicans wanted a strict standard, since they were ahead. Dems wanted a loose standard, since they were behind and controlled the most populous counties.
The roadblocks story was shown to be baseless - the same with stories about police attacking people with dogs, etc.
Explain about the ballots being thrown away - never heard about that. Unless you mean the 'lost' ballot box from an overwhelmingly republican district in New Mexico. Or maybe you meant the military ballots that were thrown out.
Ballots arranged in a confusing way? Oh you mean the ones that the Democratic election officials designed in Palm Beach, that 10% of the retards making up the democratic voting block couldn't use properly.
And actually, most of the time the elections work fine because both parties are involved. Polling stations are staffed by volunteers from both parties. It's only when the government doesn't give proper oversite, like letting the redneck assholes run polling sites in Mississipi - where blacks really are still kept from voting in some areas. Or letting the unions run the polling sites in Chicago where the Democrat gets 100% of all ballots cast, or California districts where more ballots are cast than there are registered voters.
Ever seen the log book at an LA polling site - they let you walk in with no ID and simply sign a book saying you are an eligible voter. Most books will have at least one person named God, along with an assortment of John Does and various celebrity names.
You want to see what is wrong with elections here? Try going as a monitor to an urban election site in Chicago or Houston or Boston? I have been physically threatened more than once acting as an official observer. For some reason, local political bosses did not like me objecting to them walking into the voting booth with everyone who came in. And they really didn't like me pointing out that the person trying to get a ballot had already voted an hour earlier. Even had him on video tape. But since they bussed him and and were paying him for each receipt he had, he was determined to vote early and often. But apparently my pointing that out was racist. Ahh, good times, good times.
Re:Yeah right (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.no2id.co.uk/)
The illegal requirement by the Govenor of Florida that those non-felons had to ask him for clemency to return their voting rights (that they already had) despite being barred from doing so, and the cover-up of this, afterward?
What of the voting machines being tampered with so that in black regions, spoiled ballots were swallowed by the machine, without the voter being informed of the errors, while in white areas, they were returned for re-checking/submission? [see your retard accusation]
Here's to the UN overseeing all future US elections!
Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/~Asprin | Last Journal: Wednesday November 05 2003, @03:24PM)
We all saw what good a paper trail did in Florida in the 2000 USA presidential campaign.
Think that's bad? Imagine being pissed off at the results, absolutely certain you got rooked, but not even having a way to TEST whether the results are valid. At least in FL2000 there was a paper trail to argue about. Don't think there's any possible way 63% of your town voted for Mickey Mouse for Mayor? Sorry, Chuck, but the 'puter got that same exact answer 327 times in complete recounts conducted over the last 6 seconds. What are you going to do: go door-to-door and ask everyone to tell you honestly how they voted?
My biggest fear with electronic voting systems, however, is the ease with which their automation can be made universal.
If you assume that everyone gets their voting systems from the same 2 or 3 vendors, you can rig an election if you figure out how to electronically compromise 2 or 3 systems, and you can do it with much smaller numbers of tampered votes in each district because the software only needs to tamper where the voting is tight. A few here, a few there and BAM, Dennis Kucinich is your president.
(*shudder*)
It's much, much more difficult to do that sort of thing without e-voting because each voting district makes its own rules, and implements its own counting system. You'd need to plant spies in each district you thought MIGHT be candidates for tampering, and even if you guessed right, you'd have to hoodwink Ethel in each one (she's been counting votes in this district as a volunteer since the 60's and has breakfast with the City Council every Tuesday as a concerned citizen.) You'd need to study and compromise **MANY** districts to significantly rig an election in this way.
Don't get me wrong, it can be done, but it is difficult to inflict damage beyond a few isolated districts because the voting systems themselves aren't universal. Compromising a vote tally in Florida cannot automatically compromise a tally in California - they are separate systems, even if they use the same equipment. IMHO, Some things NEED to be slow and sloppy and messy. Proponents of electronic voting are ignorant of the capabilities and limitations of technology, and **grossly** **negligent** in their lack of understanding of the fundamentals of system design.
That or they're "gettin' paid".
At least there's no chad ... (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday October 22 2003, @02:14PM)
A.M.
I got your chad right here
Re:At least there's no chad ... (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem wasn't paper voting. It was using another computer technology: punched cards. Punched cards are designed for a machine to read and write. The last election demonstrated that they are not good for humans to write (uncleanly punched holes) or read (no visual feedback).
I see no reason to use any method other than marking a box with a pencil on a piece of paper. Use the KISS principle.
Re:At least there's no chad ... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.digitalelements.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday July 25 2004, @09:50AM)
Lets take a hypothetical situation: A new computer voting system is implemented. However, one of the towns in which it is set up configures the equipment improperly, the result being that the votes are recorded incorrectly. With a paper ballot, it is easy to see, just by looking at the ballot, whether the equipment is operating correctly. If a computer is used, you only see what the computer recorded, whether it is right or wrong. The problem I see is that you could have thousands of votes tallied incorrectly with noone ever finding out about it.
I do, however, see a computer solution that would be a hybrid of computer and paper ballots:
you walk up to the voting booth and vote on a screen. The results of your vote is printed on a thermal paper ballot. The ballot has a barcode that a computer can tally, as well as a human readable area stating who and what you voted for. you put this into a box, where the barcode is scanned and the ballot stored. The results of the scan are displayed so that you can see that the scan was correct. This system would allow you to tally votes by computer, but the ballots would be stored, so that they could be computer or hand tallyed later. Also, verification would be provided to the voter that his vote had been tallyed.
It's not about electronic vote casting. (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday December 13 2006, @06:43PM)
If you wanted to avoid confusing the easily confusable, you could have a touch-screen system that prints a paper ballot, with the blanks ideally positioned for the electronic counters. Efficiency and a paper trail.
Re:It's not about electronic vote casting. (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.abbamouse.com/)
Re:It's not about electronic vote casting. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's rather simple. Well-to-do areas tend to have voting methods with less % of error than more poor-class areas. Why is this I do not know, although I suspect it has to do with local property value rates, similar to education.
There was a substantial difference in the methods of voting. What needs to be done, is that there needs to be one standard, that is both simple and reasonably verifiable. I go for the pen and paper ballot myself.
Re:It's not about electronic vote casting. (Score:4, Interesting)
If there's an undervote, it assumes you don't care about that contest.
Re:Why is _paper_ necessary? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday March 03 2004, @05:38PM)
When we did it... (Score:3, Interesting)
Me, I think it was because the ads teaching people how to vote in the old machines were displayed nation-wide, *including* the places where the new system was used.
Whatever (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree we need to take some precautions to safegaurd the electorial process...but that dosnt mean we cant use electronic means to poll. Just like there were concerns about the inital voting schemes, there are concerns about this one, but that dosnt mean we cant simply make desgin changes to ensure the integrety of the data. And since when has the government been MORE credible than the private sector? They have had just as many scandals, if not more.
In any event, the answer is to simply design in safegaurds....not go back to older ways just because your scared of technology...please
Maybe. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's difficult to overstate the importance of having a fully auditable voting process. That's the main advantage of paper ballots, be they punch cards, "check the box," whatever: you can recount them. Someone else can recount them. We can disagree on the interpretations of those recounts, but we can at least observe the "primary source" and make a call one way or another.
Now, electronic voting would certainly have advantages. If people could walk through a "voting app" where they could see all of the choices for each office, and do a confirmation step before "submitting" their vote, that would be awesome, and way more accurate than what we do now. However, think of the system which will be used to achieve this: if it's good, the designing company will want to sell it everywhere. So the application will become one hell of a valuable peice of "intellectual property." Do you think we'll be allowed to see the code for it? No way! So no error checking that way; we just have to trust that every vote counted was processed correctly. That's a lot of trust. I don't suspect that any voting-machine-manufacurer would insert deliberate bias, but the lack of ability to examine the process for correctness is just unacceptable. It's too important to just trust some private company, whose interest isn't necessarily coincident with accuracy.
An open-source voting app would be somewhat better; any independent person could audit the code for correctness, but to verify its performance on an actual dataset would require re-establishing the same exact platform later, and of course maintaining a digital copy of the inputs.
In either of these scenarios, it seems outright necessary that there be a physical record of votes cast using the system that independent, non-computer-expert people could examine. Ideally, the machine would print a small "receipt" for each vote cast which could be collected and, if necessary, recounted and compared against the digital tally.
bound for corruption (Score:4, Informative)
Top 5 reasons for Electronic Voting (Score:4, Funny)
4. Chicago motto: "Log in early, and vote often"
3. In the Mayor Daley election, even dead OS's like BSD can vote.
2. You can now use Grokster and Kazaa to steal votes.
1. "I'm from Chicago. Give me two public keys".
Paper, what paper? (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday March 03 2004, @05:38PM)
Mechanical machines had problems also (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.gadgeteer.org/ | Last Journal: Friday February 15 2002, @12:50PM)
Paper trail: the solution (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://chickensh.it/)
The two main points in electronic voting are:
The vendor's point of view (unsurprisingly) is that "bugginess" is only a hypothetical threat, and that it in real-life situations no glitches will occur.
This is very clearly horseshit. Every IT-implementation has bugs. Repeat: Every. The question is: how many of them can we tolerate ? If it comes down to a word-processor, or a webserver, or even telecom infrastructure: we can afford quite some. If it comes to medical facilities, nuclear plants, or, as in this case, political decisions, the threshold has to be a lot lower. You wouldn't want George W. Bush to have been elected by a bug, would you ?
The (currently feasible safeguard) solution of the paper trail sounds like an excellent solution:
a) the voter can immediately control if her vote was cast correctly
b) the same rule applies as with financial and legal records (where a paper trail has to be conserved)
c) the "black box" problem that is mentioned in the article is circumvented: the citizen doesn't have to understand how the e-voting booth works, but (see a) can control if her intentions match the outcome.
Opening Arguments Please! *Ding ding ding* (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/~curtisk/journal/ | Last Journal: Wednesday March 21 2007, @12:13PM)
VS.
"When you're dealing with computer scientists, they deal in a world of theoretics, and under that scenario anything is possible," Ms. Bonsall said. "If you probe a little further, the chance of these failures, the risk of that happening wide-scale in a national election is almost nil."
Paul Terwilliger, director of product development at Sequoia Voting Systems, one of the largest manufacturers of electronic systems, said that while no one disputes the need for safeguards, complaints about machines like his company's were uninformed. "I think the concerns being raised are 100 percent valid," Mr. Terwilliger said. "However, they're being raised by people who have little idea about what actually goes on."
I think I'm going with the doubters on this one, not with the people selling it. I also like the quote(s) that question the fact of "how can we verify there's been no tampering? And "if its so secure why can't we look in it?"
And in regard to Ms. Bosnall's quote, we're not so much worried about wide-scale national failure as we are with tampering .....big difference.
America gets scarier by the day.
Misgivings (Score:4, Informative)