E-Voting Glitch: 19,000 Voters, 144,000 Votes 601
nick_davison writes "The Indianapolis Star is reporting the latest case of 'interesting' E-voting results. Tuesday's Boone County election, using MicroVote software returned 144,000 votes from 19,000 registered voters. After much panicking and tracking down the bug, the actual number of votes turned out as 5,352. With yet another mistake, does anyone still trust closed-source electronic voting?"
MicroVote Sucks (Score:2, Funny)
Re:MicroVote Sucks (Score:2, Funny)
There no longer seems to be any reason to vote. Since our corporate overlords now control the elections, and control the candidates anyway, we should simply let them choose directly.
Re:MicroVote Sucks (Score:4, Funny)
And I quote...
# Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
# Feel free to suggest poll ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past polls first.
# This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
Good to see the legal system is getting some ideas from the fine folks of slashdot!
Macrovote - a politicians prayer (Score:2, Insightful)
Macro-vote, for a macro generation!
Simon.
Re:MicroVote Sucks (Score:3, Funny)
What is wrong with an "X"?? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to wonder, with all these punch cards, evote, and other problems - why don't they just stick to plain old pen & paper ballots? I mean if you can't figure those out, chances are you'll end up just stuffing your ballot into the funny "circular" ballot box anyways!
Re:What is wrong with an "X"?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What is wrong with an "X"?? (Score:4, Insightful)
1) We don't want to have to pay someone to tally all the votes. If its not computerized, someone has to count them all up. When there's around 100 million votes for president, that's a lot of minimum wage hours right there!
2) The US has turned into a nation full of people with a) no patience and b) a very short attention span. We want what we want, and we want it now! And dammit, if other countries can have computerized voting systems, so should we.
My thought is that we should all vote on those bubble sheets that are used for every standardized test given throughout our public school system. Everyone who came through the public schools will be familiar with them, and those that didn't are most likely products of private schools/home schooling and thus smart enough to figure it out!
(Tongue only partially planted in cheek)...
Re:What is wrong with an "X"?? (Score:2)
Re:What is wrong with an "X"?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Are you serious? Are the people who count the votes not volunteers in the US?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What is wrong with an "X"?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Unlike letting us keep our money to spend it on food and shelter -- that doesn't put money back into the economy. No, wait....
Re:What is wrong with an "X"?? (Score:3, Insightful)
This shows a serious lack of understanding of economic theory. Money never leaves the economy. In fact nothing matters less than that. What matters is mostly what people produce. If people spend their time making some cool consumer goods, someone will get to consume these, which is good. If they do some science, it is good because we will learn something. If people spend their time counting votes, this is
Re:What is wrong with an "X"?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What is wrong with an "X"?? (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe it was just me, but I thought it looked more like a gigantic shredder.
Re:What is wrong with an "X"?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Open source != Open Access
I develop an Open Source application.
I refuse to accept ANY submissions to my application.
Anyone can look at the code that I produce, anyone can use the code that I produce, but. . .
I don't accept any submissions to my source tree.
Open source is not some magical, collaberative coding software. It is not an Integrated Development Environment.
Its just a license whereby I agree to share my source code with the world.
Re:What is wrong with an "X"?? (Score:5, Insightful)
So you rather pay voting machine companies some 5'000$ per unit for a glorified Windows CE computer with an Access database that can be hacked by any pimply faced teenager with 100$ worth of computer equipment?
What a bargain
Re:What is wrong with an "X"?? (Score:5, Interesting)
The people staffing the voting booths and counting the votes are usually volunteers who get a small payment for their troubles. All in all our systems
seems to work quite well.
And even if Germany is far smaller than the US it has still a not too small voting population.
Re:We don't want to have to pay someone to tally a (Score:3, Insightful)
If your vote is so important to why don't volunteers count the votes? Several states, Texas example, require a human readable ballot. Smaller cities may use hand counts. Most large cities use a machine/human readable "scantron" type ballots. They mark the ballots with a permanent ink marker. Marking more than one selection for the same race invalidates only the section of the ballot for that race. IF you notice you made a mistake you can get
Re:What is wrong with an "X"?? (Score:2)
I always thought the "bubble sheet" method, which is used where I live, was a great bridge between the need for the low cost electronic calculation of votes, the ability to easily audit, for almost anyone could use and see who they voted for before submitting their ballot. Is there an active patent that's keeping the US from standardizing on it? Does any know of any problems with the "bubble sheet" method except, of course, the inability to vot
Re:What is wrong with an "X"?? (Score:5, Insightful)
2) The US has turned into a nation full of people with a) no patience and b) a very short attention span. We want what we want, and we want it now! And dammit, if other countries can have computerized voting systems, so should we.
Not to rain on your cynicism parade, but quick tallying isn't just a form of political entertainment. The quicker the tally is done, the less opportunity for vote manipulation. In tightly contested elections, it reduces the problem of people forming immovable opinions about who won, and subsequently never accepting the legitimacy of the outcome (e.g. "Not My President").
Of course, speeding up the process of tallying at the expense of clear auditability is to cure the disease by killing the patient.
The answer, then, is optically scannable ballots: tallying as fast as any "voting machine" and auditability as good as any paper ballot.
Personally, if I were to design the system, it would look like this:
(1)Manually filled in ballot, optically scanned;
(2)Tallying machines running off of read only media, recording results to write-once media;
(3) Tallying media, original paper ballots securely stored for a period of several years;
(4)Voters could optionally tear off a bar coded tag from their ballot. They could then go to a specially set up election facility, present their tag and positive ID, then see how their vote was tallied on a secure, private terminal.
This last point will raise some paranoid objections; however I think paranoia cuts both ways in this instance.
Re:What is wrong with an "X"?? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't agree with #4, because it allows someone to verify they voted a certain way. This would allow the mob or some other coercive organization to pay for your vote, you give them your slip, and then they check the result. Currently, it's pointless to try and influence voters this way since you can't proove you voted with the mob.
Re:What is wrong with an "X"?? (Score:5, Funny)
b) a very short attention span.
I am very well capable of keeping my attention fixated on a point that is well worth my....Hey! Another article on Microsoft doing something bad!
Re:What is wrong with an "X"?? (Score:3, Funny)
He said votes, not voters...
Re:What is wrong with an "X"?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What is wrong with an "X"?? (Score:3, Insightful)
How does presenting the ballot questions on a tiny screen reduce the complexity? Here in San Francisco, you use a sharpie to connect a line, then you feed it through an optical scanner, which will give it back to you if ther
Re:What is wrong with an "X"?? (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a extremely large amount of vote fraud going on now with the paper ballots, mostly for local elections. (nobody in the big parties talk about it because it would cause too much trouble)
One of the big ideas of computer voting is you remove the ability to add, replace or destroy ballots in the time gap between voting and being tallied.
Re:What is wrong with an "X"?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What is wrong with an "X"?? (Score:2)
IMO - any computerized voting must (under all circumstances) produce a paper receipt, but can still produce a vote count report at the end of the day. this way, if the machine crashes or there's power loss or some other fault, the lost votes can still be counted if they get dropp
Let's just hope... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Let's just hope... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let's just hope... (Score:2)
OSS voting isn't a bad idea, but it's not going to be run like Apache. It's going to have to be s
Blackadder (Score:5, Funny)
True politics [powertie.org]
Reminds me of Office Space... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Reminds me of Office Space... (Score:2)
Of course, when keeping track of votes there should be no freaking reason for using a decimal point. Same goes for other characters like multiplication and subtraction.
If you grep the source tree for * and - and get any hits, the code should not be released.
check out BlackBoxVoting (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally I like the bit about vote-counting in France. Sounds a lot more advanced (read: secure) than the US way of doing it.
I've done vote-counting in France (Score:3, Informative)
The number of persons who would have to cheat to change a vote is high (at least four volunteers, plus the "overseers" from each parties and from the municipality); in addition, the "paper trail" remains behind to allow recounts.
And in presidential elections (with something like forty or fifty million potential voters, so big if not quite US-scale), projections accurate to the % are available the minute the polls close.
It's only drawback is that it require a non-ridiculou
So ... (Score:5, Funny)
Accounting (Score:5, Insightful)
So an IT director and a number of flunkies have rewritten the results of an election.
How do the good people of Boone County know that the new answer is correct? Because it's less than the number of actual voters? How can they trust the result of that election at all? And why should those too young to vote until next time bother to vote when next time comes around?
Re:Accounting (Score:3, Funny)
That's disgusting! Everybody knows that rewriting the results of an election is a job for the courts!
Re:Accounting (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe they took a vote.
Actually, their software *IS* open source (Score:4, Funny)
#include <stdlib.h>
int main()
{
printf( "%i\n", rand() );
return(0);
}
Re:Actually, their software *IS* open source (Score:2, Funny)
For Chicago... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:For Chicago... (Score:3, Informative)
Glad I looked for a post like this before I tossed in my immediate reaction: these guys are amatures, Cook County ILL has been running this way spanning three centuries and two millenia!
Closed or Open...it doesn't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Closed or Open...it doesn't matter (Score:3, Insightful)
But if it's closed and you get a reasonable number, it could either be right, or it could be a believable but wrong number.
I think this is probably what gets people concerned?
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Closed or Open...it doesn't matter (Score:2)
Re:Closed or Open...it doesn't matter (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't Worry, Be Happy (Score:5, Funny)
Do we also have close source laws? I think not (Score:5, Insightful)
Modified open source for voting machines (Score:2)
Excellent point. The need for public oversight suggests a modified open source development process and secure traceable binaries. Perhaps we might call this model "exposed source" because the code would be publicly accessible but not publicly modifiable.
I wonder if the FEC (Federal Election Commission) needs to setup a CVS repository to hold voting machine source code. The sou
Re:Do we also have close source laws? I think not (Score:2)
This is a lovely coincidence.
Last night, thinking about how to explain the concept of "open source" to a judge (we're in a small legal case, my company), I had exactly this idea: open source software is like open source laws. It's a metaphor that is entirely clear and meaningful. Of course people don't have to read the source code in order to use the product, but when you need to know what's going on, it's the only way you can be sure of your facts.
Thanks for your comment, it is an excellent one.
Black Budget = closed source spending (Score:2)
True -- we don't have Star Chambers.
But we do have "Black Budgets" -- many billions of dollars for covert military/spook purposes, approved by small Congressional committees, the details of which are
Re:Black Budget = closed source spending (Score:4, Insightful)
True. However, the idea is to avoid that sort of thing unless it is truly necessary, since even though there are good reasons to keep the details of military and espionage spending secret, the secrecy can be abused and used to hide unethical and even illegal actions. It's best to keep government activity public by default and only maintain secrecy if there is a compelling reason to do so.
Re:Do we also have close source laws? I think not (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, as a matter of fact, in the U.S.A., we do have this.
And it's so much easier when you can rig an election.
Closed source? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sod that.
With yet another mistake, does anyone trust electronic voting full stop?
(I think that Open Source might be better, but to the majority of voters, electronic voting is the same thing irrespective of how visible the code is - and quite frankly, even with peer review on open coude this sort of bug might still happen)
Re:Closed source? (Score:2)
Re:Closed source? (Score:3, Insightful)
But in that case we at least get to see the bug *and* the fix. Now someone has 'fixed' the count and but he could just as well have done that by inserting some hardcoded reasonable looking numbers.
Re:Closed source? (Score:3, Interesting)
With yet another mistake, does anyone trust electronic voting full stop?
Or as some of the American Electorate might say; "with yet another mistake does anyone trust voting full stop". I think the source of the problem is the perception by various interests in the US that there is some form of money to be made in these systems. This is wrong. Get the _process_ of electronic voting designed right (I mean imagine the first elections back in the year dot. All those who vote for Trevor stand to the left,
Ok.... (Score:5, Insightful)
At least it wasn't 250 extra votes... (Score:5, Interesting)
yet another mistake (Score:3, Interesting)
what causes me more worry are the bugs (features?) in these machines that are known only to a select few. i was hoping that after the elections last week more hue and cry would be made in the mainstream media about these machines by the candidates who lost. that doesn't appear to be forthcoming, though. pity.
Diebold v MicroVote (Score:2, Funny)
Now for the anagrams
Diebold [wordsmith.org] My fave: Be Dildo
MicroVote [wordsmith.org]My other Fave: Evict Room
slashdot = SAD SLOTH & SHALL DOS
This sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This sucks (Score:2)
Votes must not be able to be forged. There must be an audit trail of every vote cast, when and where they are cast. Yet voting must be 100% anonymous.
I know what you are thinking... PKI. And you are right - but it is still a nontrivial problem. This is almost as hard as true anonymous eCash.
Additionally, people must (well... should) be able to be sure that the voting system is secure. It MUST be available to public scrutiny.
Open source is the only way.
Two big differences: (Score:3, Insightful)
When an ATM machine cheats you, you know it, often immediately. When a voting machine cheats you, in a secret ballot system with the simplistic unauditable voting machines we use now, you never find out.
Found the bug (Score:5, Funny)
blame it on... (Score:2)
Open Source isn't a cure all (Score:5, Insightful)
This infers that open source == no mistakes. That's simply not true. It just means that there *may* be less mistakes as theoretically more people look at it. Think SendMail... that's open source, widely used, but that sure has had plenty of "mistakes".
Re:Open Source isn't a cure all (Score:5, Insightful)
When the results are blatantly wrong, like in this case, we can be sure that an error will be detected and corrected. However what security do we have that the "corrected" number is truly correct? And what if the result had just been skewed a few percent instead of blown out of all proportion?
Your argument is like saying that public access to government documents is inferring that public access == no mistakes. As with oversight of voting, access to public documents are important not because we're guaranteed that it will result in fewer mistakes being made, but because more people, including those not in power, are given opportunities to try to verify that people stick to the rules should they choose to.
Re:Open Source isn't a cure all (Score:3, Insightful)
are there any opensource solutions? (Score:2, Informative)
If there is one out there, then it needs to be pointed out to the govt buyers.
Meanwhile... (Score:2)
Open, closed, I'm the guy with the gun. (Score:4, Interesting)
Open-sourcing the voting software is important, but in my opinion, not as important as maintaining separate systems for ballot printing and ballot tabulation.
I wrote about it in this [slashdot.org] journal entry.
Open source cures cancer! Film at 11! (Score:5, Insightful)
With yet another mistake, does anyone still trust closed-source electronic voting?
Open source, closed source, it does not matter. Open source is not a cure for solid software development practices, and open source is not a synonym for solid software development practices. Likewise "closed-source" does not equate to poor practices.
One of the strengths of open source is the price. Free software probably means more people are using it than would otherwise, so the software is being tested more, and the pool of people available to fix bugs is also larger. This works for software that is generally useful, but consider voting software. Who is going to install the full voting suite (voting software is much more than a voting terminal) and then hold mock elections in their home? Granted, the importance of such software may bring out more people willing to try the software but you are still relying on people to do this in their leisure time.
The "many eyes" argument is merely a shotgun approach to quality control. What is needed is strong leadership implemeting a plan which includes rigorous and ongoing testing. Open source does not guarantee this any more than closed source guarantees its absence.
The software was released before it was ready. That's obvious. It seems to me that a closed source shop would be theoretically better positioned to meet an immutable deadline (such as an election date). At least when you own your employees you can mandate overtime and crack the whip harder. When the software is open source you cannot enter "crunch mode" and make the scattered developers put in long hours.
The fault was not in the development model but in the failure of the project leadership.
Re:Open source cures cancer! Film at 11! (Score:3, Insightful)
Glitch = pathetic euphemism (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate the word "glitch", I really do.
It's an evasion, a pathetic euphemism.
What it really means is "bad programming", "fucked up", "profoundly fucked up", etc.
-kgj
Over complicated (Score:4, Insightful)
What is the ridiculuous complexity making these things so easy to fcuk up?
Combine it perhaps with a bar code scanner so that every individual can have a street bar code. Add a few simple checks like no more bar codes are counted for a paricular street than were issued.
I still don't see where this becomes a complex task compared to existing systems. Most of the components needed to build a system already existing.
Some one please tell me what I am missing.
As for the open source/free software issue. Perhaps the solution is that the requirements for the system should be published so that anyone can right something to conform. (Oh that's like having open standards).
closed vs open source not the issue (Score:2)
Obviously missed the bug in testing - therefore the testing wasn't adequate.
This is one this I like about the extreme programming methodogies, it expounds testing to start with. Like security, it shouldn't be bolt on the the whole development process, but an integral part.
just my 2 pence worth...
Cartesian Join? (Score:3, Interesting)
RP
Don't trust any of it (Score:5, Insightful)
Get off the open/closed source debate already. If you use electronic voting, you open the door to electronic voting fraud. Open source is helpful in this regard, but not as effective as keeping to paper voting. Think about it. You can pay people to commit fraud anyway, but the cost goes up with number of votes altered/subtituted/whatever. With electronic voting, one guy can automate the fraud process with much greater effect. You raise the efficiency of the fraud as well as the voting.
People will argue the supposed cost and efficiency advantages of e-voting. Think about the cost of counting YOUR ONE VOTE and compare that to what YOU PAY IN TAXES each year - then tell me it's expensive. It's been working fine for over 200 years, there is little to gain from changing and everything to lose.
Re:Don't trust any of it (Score:3, Insightful)
Anybody notice the number 144000 (Score:3, Funny)
Google on 144000 [google.com]
Personally I think that Judgement Day is nigh and that the AntiChrist will use an evoting machine to gain control of the world.
Or perhaps not.
As an Indiana voter... (Score:4, Informative)
I went to vote at 7:00 am after the polls had been open for an hour and was turned away because of "computer problems." Apparently one of the "pick X candidates for city council" votes was not allowing a voter to pick multiple candidates. Our election board had to print up paper ballots at the last minute, delaying the opening of the polls for about two hours. When I finally got a chance to vote, it was the good-old-fashioned way: checking off candidates pen and paper, and counted by hand.
Okay, shame on us for not having a backup in place in case the computer screwed up. But the computer shouldn't have screwed up in the first place. Testing, people?
Elsewhere in our county, first the machine neglected to tally absentee ballots in a very close race. Then it was discovered that one of the voting stations put the wrong candidates on the ballot, which may lead to a special run-off election. [lafayettejc.com]
http://www.lafayettejc.com/news20031111/2003111
Re:As an Indiana voter... (Score:3, Insightful)
Gotta love them [slashdot.org]. Good thing they do not have an ulterior motive.
Perfectly Reasonable Explanation (Score:3, Insightful)
Automated testing? (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, automated testing of a voting system can't be hard. Build yourself a little network of voting machines in the office, write a bunch of scripts that enter a certain pattern of votes and ensure the correct results come out the other end. Make sure your scripts perform a wide range of possible voting patterns, and do all the 'odd' things your users might do (try to vote twice, mash the keypad with their palm etc).
Or am I being terribly naive about the way the software industry does things?
I give up (Score:4, Interesting)
Machines crashing while the polls were open
Central collection point jammed with call-in traffic (understandable)
Machine inflates count almost 30 times the actual figure.
Alright, I give up. Let us at least try to put a positive spin on this issue. Were there any elections that didn't have problems when using the new electronic voting systems? And what was the ratio of non-problematic electronic voting to problematic electronic voting? I'd say that if more than half of the electronic voting machines had problems, the manufacturer should be sued. I'd advocate a lawsuit to get out from under any contracts that may exist for the installation and maintenance of this equipment.
An aside: Does anyone know whether or not computer scientists had any input at all on the design of these beasts? If not, then what a terrible waste of good talent. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong there, because I still think an electronic voting machine wouldn't be very complicated to design.
You Know What You Can Do (Score:3, Insightful)
If your country uses electronic voting, you should write to your representative and point out the necessity of opening up the process. Specifically, the need for the public to be able to examine mechanical drawings and software source code. Public scrutiny over the democratic process is more important than any corporate secret.
Looking forward... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Closed source? (Score:2, Funny)
If you subscribe to the notion that humanities job is to discover/understand everything it can about our unvirse/life then opensource very well could be the answer to life it self . Or at least part of the solution
Re:Closed source? (Score:2)
And invisible, unaccountable, untrustable computerized voting is the second coming.
Put down the OSS Kool-Aid for a second, people... (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact of the matter is that open source software will do very little to help the issue of the untrustworthiness of electronic voting.
Simply put, being able to read the source code does you no good if you can't be sure that the binary that the voting machine is running was compiled from that code.
With a Linux distro, if I for some reason suspect Red Hat may be compiling back doors into xdm or login, I can go somewhere else. If I don't trust anybody, I can compile the damn thing myself and put it on my computer.
These machines, open source or not, are going to be provided by a company like Diebold. Do you trust them, even if they have to give you a copy of some source code which may or may not be the source code that they used in their voting machines? Are you going to be able to browse the source code on the very voting machine you're using? Are you going to be given the compiler flags used to create the binary so you can re-create it yourself, and access to the voting machine's disk so you can compare them?
It is necessary that any electronic voting system be open source, as a matter of duty to the public. It is not, however, sufficient.
Re:Put down the OSS Kool-Aid for a second, people. (Score:3, Informative)
What people need to realize here is that technology does NOT always solve a problem. Even if it appears to solve the problem it may create numerous other problems. Why put the election results into the hands of a few campaign-funding corporations? Our government has a history of setting up phony elections to install leaders in other countries, why make it easy to do so here. Read here [bowlingforcolumbine.com] or here [bowlingforcolumbine.com]. You can argue that Michae
Re:Does anyone trust closed source anything? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Karma (Score:2)
Re:Heh Heh Heh. Boone county losers! (Score:3, Informative)
If you want to see what it looks like, watch the opening minutes of "Hoosiers". Much of it was filmed here.
Boone county is mostly farmland; corn, soybeans, winter wheat, although much of the farmland that borders I-65
is being converted to industrial parks. There are clusters of new home developments, ugly self-similar brownish houses
made of styrofoam and pressed wood, packed together with no t
Re:Byzantine Generals Problem (Score:3, Informative)
Kinda. Not public/private keys (voting is anonymous) but... Voter Verified Electronic Election [free-project.org] is Ivory Tower Egghead stuff that you might like.