Maryland Electronic Voting Systems Found Vulnerable 417
snoitpo writes "My fine state (Maryland) has hired some people I can respect to hack into Diebold voting machines. The Washington Post (read it free for 2 weeks) has the details. From this story and the one on NPR, the state hired a company and set up a test voting precinct and had the group try whatever they could to break into the machines. Most of the attacks would probably be noticed by an even-half-awake poll staff, but some vulnerabilities were exposed. The net seems to be that you could really mess up individual machines, but the grail would be to get to the central collection servers and send a megavote to your favorite candidate. The last paragraph mentions problems that voting machines had in the last election in Virginia; it's interesting to note that those use wireless networking--my jaw has dropped onto my keyboard and I can't comment any further." Other readers sent in two stories in the Baltimore Sun (1, 2), and one in the NY Times.
Need paper receipts (Score:5, Insightful)
Bruce Schneier [schneier.com], author of Beyond Fear [slashdot.org] and the fantastic Applied Cryptography [amazon.com], has an old but good commentary [schneier.com] on the some security issues of electronic voting machines in his Crypto-gram newsletter.
Re:Need paper receipts (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Need paper receipts (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, you could sidestep the whole issue if you do it my way [slashdot.org]. I propose that no counting be done by the polling machine, but by a separate sealed tabulator. Further, I propose that the mechanism for getting the ballots tabulated be optical character recognition scanning of the printed text of the ballot -- no barcodes, no punchholes, no encryption keys. This way the tabulator has no programming and does not need to be loaded with data prior to counting.
Re:Need paper receipts (Score:5, Insightful)
President: John Adams
Vice-President: Thomas Jefferson
Treasurer: Etc
This way, the user gets a visual confirmation, and it's crystal clear who voted for whom. They put that chit into the ballet box (which is locked). Chits are stored. In the event of a question of fraud, the old ballot chits can be pulled out and verified - no "hanging chads" here. Users feel good "knowing" what they voted for, and the system can still be paperless.
I'd also want to see a 5% of all results double checked against what was reported, with random precincts checked to always keep things in line.
Re:Need paper receipts (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Need paper receipts (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Need paper receipts (Score:3, Insightful)
Independent of whether this is electronic-voting-from-home or show-up-at-the-polls-and-touch-a-screen-voting, there's a simple concept from the business world that can be adapted for this situation
MERCHANT COPY / CUSTOMER COPY.
Re:Need paper receipts (Score:5, Interesting)
A basic requirement for a fair vote is that the voter does NOT receive a copy of their vote. Otherwise somebody threatening you / bribing you to vote a certain way has a way to confirm that you did like you were told.
What is so hard and confusing about THIS method:People vote by checking off a box on a sheet of paper. People fold this paper over and hand it to a poll worker, and watch while this worker places the folded piece of paper in a locked strongbox. Poll worker has a clicker to count the number of votes placed in the box. When the polls are closed, a public counting occurs, where a third-party counts all of the votes up. If the number doesn't add up to the clicker number, they count again. Once their count has been confirmed, representatives of the various candidates are allowed to count it themselves, if they want, again under observation. If their number doesn't agree with the third-party number, they can dispute the count. Otherwise, the people present sign off that they witnessed the counting.
Now, nobody can hack the system. Can a worker stuff the box? No, the box is plainly visible to public observers. This is VERY important. The press, and public watchdog groups need people at EACH voting station to make SURE the workers arn't on the take. Additionaly, bribing a vote counter or a poll worker, or any other sort of fraud, should be considered treason, and punished by life in prision. Again, there is no good way for the counters to disrupt the vote, because they are being watched. (Behind closed doors, democracy dies) Disputed boxes will be recounted elsewhere by somebody else, but still under public observation. To prevent rampant disputing, the campaign officials and watchdogs will face stiff fines if they dispute a vote, and the recount is not in their favour. Similarily, if the recount differs signifigantly from the original count, the official counters will face punishment. The end result is, it makes it quite hard to foul up a vote without being caught. And the punishments are dire enough to (hopefully) prevent most people from trying. There should also be more stations, so that no group is counting thousands and thousands of votes.
This whole process is time consuming, and expensive (Small poll stations = lots of workers). But if bringing Democracy to other coutnries is worth hundreds of billions, isn't bringing it to yourself worth even 1? Also, I've never understood the need to have results NOW NOW NOW. Can't you wait a day? Is is so necessary to have the vote results within an hour? No doubt it would be nice, but is saving day of suspense worth potentially wrong results?
Re:Need paper receipts (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed, you don't want the voter to take it away with him as that provides a verification method for vote buying schemes. As it is now, you can bribe someone to go in and vote for your favorite candidate(s), but you have no guarantee that that's who they a
Re:Need paper receipts (Score:2)
At a minimum, electronic voting machines need to print out a paper receipt.
(NB: I'm in
Re:Need paper receipts (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Need paper receipts (Score:2)
Re:Need paper receipts (Score:3, Insightful)
2) Voting machine spits out receipt with a MD5 hash key of his vote record, it's one way, it can never be decrypted again to determine how user voted. MD5 hash is also stored on server
Worst Case Scenario: Votes are suspected to be tampered. All voters are asked to submit their receipt. MD5 hashes are compared to what is on the server. If MD5 hash isn't the same,
Re:Need paper receipts (Score:4, Insightful)
Use the computer to make a human and machine readable paper ballot, walk ballot over to box, leave it there... any complexities beyond that is just asking for trouble.
Re:Need paper receipts (Score:2, Insightful)
2) Voting machine spits out receipt with a MD5 hash key of his vote record, it's one way, it can never be decrypted again to determine how user voted"
Yeah, that'll be real hard to search for hash collisions on...
if(md5("joe schmoe: CandidateA") == $STORED_MD5)
print "Joe voted for candidate A"
if(md5("joe schmoe: CandidateB") == $STORED_MD5)
print "Joe voted for candidate B"
Re:Need paper receipts (Score:3, Insightful)
No, this is a good idea in concept but it won't work. There's generally only a very small set of possible voting outcomes, generally in the thousands, and that's brute-forcable in trivial time.
You can't pad with a random number or any of the other tricks usually used to make MD5 useful even in these circumstances because th
Re:Need paper receipts (Score:5, Interesting)
In order for the voter to verify their vote, you must give them every last bit used to compute the hash.
If we assume that we are not printing out the voter's vote, then we must give them everything else, plus we must give them exactly how the vote was encoded.
Otherwise, neither they nor anybody else can every verify the has by re-computing it.
Once somebody has all the data, plus precisely how the vote was encoded, it is trivial to take the hash of (all voter data + all possible votes) and determine which matches the hash. Thus, we are still giving the voter a piece of paper that confirms exactly how they voted, making them susceptible to all vote-selling and other such nasty scams.
There is no way to give the voter the ability to verify their vote without also giving someone else the ability to reverse-engineer the vote in trivial time with an MD5 hash. If even one bit is kept from the voter, they can not verify. If all bits are given to the voter, then anyone can verify. There is no in-between.
(Even if you ask the voter to provide some secret, it can be beaten out of them, and it can be trivially positively determined whether a given secret is the one in the hash; this is one of those cases where more security is bad; see how making cars harder to steal has increased carjackings, a far more dangerous crime.)
There is no way out. You must not allow the voter to take any proof of their voting out of the booth; they must leave all evidence in the booth or the system breaks. That's why a paper receipt is desirable, but the system must keep it.
Re:Need paper receipts (Score:2, Insightful)
Where would they put it?
In a lucky case, it disappears behind a cupboard within minutes. In a less lucky case they switch slips with their neighbors because they mix them up with bingo charts.
But probably they would just throw it away.
So what would be the whole point of those printouts?
IMHO you can not use automata to count votes until you can assure, no tampering with
Re:Need paper receipts (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Need paper receipts (Score:5, Interesting)
What the machines need is a paper roll printer, with a glass window above the print mechanism that allows the viewing of only that last line printed.
When the user casts their vote, they are instructed to verify in the window that the vote they cast is the one that was printed. If not, get an attendant.
Nobody can cach in their vote chit, and with batches of votes on individal rolls of paper it would be a lot easier to tabulate than counting paper ballots.
-Chris
Re:Need paper receipts (Score:4, Interesting)
oh, the irony
budget: $5 million
time: 2+ years
result: joe voter drops a paper slip in a box
What bothers me (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, there was no discussion of the debate between those of us that believe that the e-voting systems should be required to use Open Source software vs. folks at Diebold and other vendors, who foist off the "trust us, we know what we're doing" line on the public. There was no real discussion of the effect that questionable e-voting results could have on the American political system. There was also no mention of the fact that Diebold's president is involved with raising money for the G.W. Bush re-election campaign and has pledged, IIRC, "to do everything I can to deliver the vote to George Bush." All in all I'm afraid that NPR really dropped the ball on this particular issue.
Just my $.02,
Ron
Re:What bothers me (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What bothers me (Score:3, Insightful)
Good point! All this talk about hackability of the system and paper receipts and back doors obscures what should be the basic necessary but insufficient condition for any electronic voting system. Let me lay it out:
If the code isn't open and viewable to the public, I don't trust it...and neither should you.
Re:What bothers me (Score:3, Insightful)
He led the discussion with the whole Diebold 'committed to raising $100,000 for GWB' thing.
Actually, I think he should have led with the paper trail issue - as others have said before, the GWB fund-raising thing is a red herring that makes voting machine critics look like tin-foil hat-wearing nutcases.
At the end of the day, the Diebold people are clearly incompetent, and the system is hugely flawed. Those facts are hard-to-dispute.
The idea that large groups of Diebold s
Wireless connections? (Score:5, Funny)
No overloading terms (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wireless connections? (Score:5, Funny)
when will they ever learn (Score:2, Interesting)
No No No! (Score:2, Informative)
The voter might be able to see the paper (under glass), but that's about it.
J
Re:No No No! (Score:5, Insightful)
The voter might be able to see the paper (under glass), but that's about it.
Thats the WHOLE POINT of paper receipts! How useful is a machine if you can't verify it's results? The big thing with paper reciepts is that the voter then has proof for himself that *he* voted in a particular way.. he can't walk away with that proof... that proof is left for verification purposes only. How hard is that to grok?
Re:No No No! (Score:2)
A receipt is something you take with you for your own records, and for your proof to other parties. Like those tidbits of paper that the IRS or your company's reimbursement desk wants to see.
Re:No No No! (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, Yes, Yes (Score:2)
Paper ballots and ballot boxes are used around the world. I am sure that American voters could cope with the inconvenience of being able to check that what they inputted was what got registered. (... and therefore no danger of vote selling, or at least no printed receipt to present for payment
why not use retinal scanners at each location? (Score:2, Insightful)
If you want accountability, put in some form of VERY hard to break security and go with it.
Voter apathy is going to occur whether people can vote online or not.
This is a rehash of all the other Diebold crap down in Fla. Until it's secure, imo this is non-news.
Is it because it's in a different state? Or because it's an attempt at accountability?
Re:why not use retinal scanners at each location? (Score:3, Insightful)
Trying to invent solutions to non-problems... (Score:5, Insightful)
The phone-in system is also a bit nonsensical. Ideally, the local counts should be published in each locality as quickly as possible, so that news organizations can do the math on their own, and any error introduced at any step in the way would quickly be noticed when numbers that are supposed to be the same don't check.
Diebold seems to be in the business of selling solitions that are worse than the problems they claim to solve.
It's not a panacea (Score:4, Insightful)
Electronic voting will not help if two candidates are neck and neck or the election becomes complicated in some other way. They also throw in a very significant variable: hackability.
Re:It's not a panacea (Score:5, Interesting)
The other, related issue is whether or not the security model of the voting system is comprehensible to the people who are charged with running the election. I think that, in the case of paper ballots, the model can be understood by any normally-intelligent person. (You only get one ballot paper, it has to be put in the box, no one can mess with the box, etc.)
On the other hand, I would guess that there are fewer than 5 in 100 election officials (including those that select the systems) that actually grok the security model of electronic systems.
The frequently-heard claim by election officials (e.g, here in Fairfax County VA) that the election was held and "it all worked out" is scary evidence of this.
What is wrong with paper? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What is wrong with paper? (Score:2)
Re:What is wrong with paper? (Score:4, Interesting)
A year and a half ago here in Georgia, Gov. Purdue and Sen. Chambliss both overcame 10 point poll deficits to win. There's no paper trail and no recount is possible.
-B
Re:What is wrong with paper? (Score:2)
Yay. I'll feed the troll I guess.
Take any "general" population, and by general I assume you mean "on average", and you will find that they are dumb. Just because you, in your whatever country you are from, might be above the average American in intelligence does not mean the rest of your population is brilliant, above the average American, or even semi-intelligent. In general, your country's citizens are dumb too.
That being said, I doubt you raise the bar in your po
Argument for open source (Score:4, Insightful)
The Best Democracy Money Can Buy - (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The Best Democracy Money Can Buy - (Score:3, Informative)
This sentence is 100% false. Katherine Harris had nothing to do with the voter felon scrub list. This list was initiated as a result of Florida Statute Section 98.0975, passed in 1997 by the state legislature, a year before Harris or Gov. Bush were elected. This list was created by ChoicePoint systems, who was hired by Ethel Baxtor (D), the Florida Director of Elections.
And Katherine H
Tamper tape (Score:5, Insightful)
(Can they cover the software issues with tamper tape, too? That might be helpful.)
-Trick
Re:Tamper tape (Score:2)
There should be some way to identify a compromised voting machine. But it can't be something so simple as tape on the locks. The voting system should be so secure from the start that the tamper identification system never gets used. And the tamper identifcation is to ensure that no tampering was done. Throwing out all the votes from suspicious machines would be a disaster!
Re:Tamper tape (Score:2, Interesting)
Exactly. This points-out the difference in thinking of the hacker's mind. An election official thinks adding complexity (tamper tape) to the system would raise the bar for mischief. Now, instead of just being ar
Re:Tamper tape (Score:2, Interesting)
However, tamper tape need not invalidate the votes; it could merely mean the machine is subject to an extensive review of the logs. Increasing time/cost/unreliability, but not necessarily resulting in total disenfranchisement.
Maryland Bill (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Maryland Bill (Score:5, Informative)
Why voting machines? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the Canadian federal elections, IIRC, as well as the Ontario provincial elections, voting and counting is still done by hand. At every stage a paper record is created, so that if any irregularities are suspected, the whole process can be audited. I believe such an inquiry was undertaken in Quebec after some tricky vote counting in Quebec after the last referendum.
So what? (Score:5, Funny)
wait..
Security of paper voting machines (Score:3, Insightful)
If I could pick the lock or steal a key to the paper ballot box, I could tamper with the votes too.
Re:Security of paper voting machines (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Security of paper voting machines (Score:2)
and rightfully so.
Oh Canada! (Score:5, Insightful)
We use a simple paper ballot,
That all can understand.
Pine cones. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Pine cones. (Score:2)
IT'S A KILOGRAM
Re:Pine cones. (Score:2)
I couldn't figure out what you were talking about until I searched on Google for:
"Rick Mercer" pine cone birch branch
came up with one web page with the previous quote.
T
Re:Oh Canada! (Score:2)
Amen.
My favorite quote (Score:2, Insightful)
Can't think of anything else to add to that comment.
If I may reason... (Score:4, Insightful)
The reasoning is simple:
ATMs exist.
Re:If I may reason... (Score:2)
What these bal
technophobia (Score:2)
Re:If I may reason... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, and they give you a paper receipt. And the banks are audited by a third party. And they can count the money still left in the machine to see if it matches what the machine says it should have, and that money is paper cash.
Why not do this: have the machine ask you all the questions, and print it out in human readable form with a 2D barcode of the same information. You check the sheet over and verify it's what you really wanted, or you put it in the handy-dandy shredder right beside it, and do it again. When you're satisfied with the result, fold it in half, take it to the ballot box and stuff it in there.
Then, to count it, open the box, scan the 2D code on every piece of paper, and the results are tabulated. If any of the results look suspect, then you can still use the paper for a manual recount, using human eyes.
Also, for every election, select 10% of the ballots at random and manually verify that the 2D barcode matches the human readable portion, just to audit the system. Obviously the auditing system has to be from a different vendor than the voting terminal.
Just one Canadian's opinion. Myself, I'm happy with a pen and paper.
Re:If I may reason... (Score:3, Insightful)
No, all it takes is less corruption between the vote-machine makers and the politicians currently in office.
Take back the power, before it's totally out of your reach.
--rhad
What they neglected to mention (Score:4, Informative)
August 2003 in Virginia (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems now that Maryland is finally catching on, too.
In other news: (Score:2, Interesting)
Internet voting system for overseas Americans is vulnerable, security experts say [securityfocus.com] - and their comments extend to a scathing debunking of *all* internet voting methods.
A slightly older, but very thorough, article by Scott Granneman entitled the Electronic Voting Debacle [securityfocus.com].
Oh, and I can't leave without mentioning the essential Black Box Voting [blackboxvoting.org] site...
[posted as an AC as I don't want to whore the karma]
Diebold knows security like I speak Klingon (Score:5, Interesting)
Their response: "We'll put firewall software on the machines."
Since the contract was already signed we had no leverage and that ended up being the solution. Nice, eh?
kind of like Linda Lamone's response... (Score:2)
"I don't disagree with what they say -- they're the experts," Lamone said after the Senate hearing. But, she added, "I think it's a very good system."
Did she twirl her hair in her fingers and chew bubblegum when she made that last statement?
(Washington Post article)
Other problems (Score:4, Insightful)
Suppose I know the tendency of a district and I would rather that districts results are lost. Examples of activity to interfere would include:
- Cutting Power
- Electromagnetic Interference (burst device wiping out memory cards)
- Knocking out wireless infrastructure (cell towers, radio repeaters, whatever they use)
Some folks would say that we are overreacting and that all of these criminal activities have current-day equivalents. But without a paper-trail you only need to wipe one memory card remotely to kill hundreds of votes before they are sent to the server.Perhaps you all should read our report. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Perhaps you all should read our report. (Score:2, Informative)
MyDoom says Hi (Score:5, Insightful)
Still, she noted that tampering with voting equipment is a felony. "I'm not sure how many people would be willing to get a felony conviction and risk going to jail over an election," she said. Citing the problem of easily opened locks on the machines, she said an attempt to unlock a machine "would be very unlikely to succeed, because it would have to occur in a public place."
This woman should be fired from her job. She basically states that because some act would be a crime that no one would do it!!!
Did that stop Richard Nixon?
Did that stop whoever blew valerie Plame's cover?
Did that stop the authors of MyDoom from writing the virus?
Did that stop all the people in the US who committed crimes last year?
Did that stop Ken Lay and the fine folk at Enron?
Did that stop Halliburton from overcharging the Army?
What a fucking joke. It could have been a Microsoft security advisory for all the good it will do.
My premontion: There will be massive irregularities in the 2004 elections and guess who will win again?
Internet not ready for something as big as this... (Score:3, Insightful)
The last thing we need is a botched up election with later claims that the system was found vulnerable, etc..
It's handy, no doubt, but maybe we should wait a bit...
Maybe that's what we need... (Score:2)
Re:Maybe that's what we need... (Score:2)
Re:Maybe that's what we need... (Score:2, Funny)
Why the rush? (Score:3, Insightful)
One more thing. Where are these people from, who authorized computerized voting. Have these people never used a computer before? Have they never lost their work due to a system problem? I can only assume that they don't give a damn about election integrity, and that is telling.
My favorite quotes... (Score:2, Informative)
Mr. Wertheimer said the application of security was inconsistent, with encryption applied in some places without the accompanying technology of authentication to ensure that the machines that are communicating with each other are the ones that are supposed to be
What's wrong with mechanical voting systems? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mechanical voting machines have proved effective and relatively reliable for many, many years. I've heard the claim that the company that once manufactured them has gone out of business and that spare parts are no longer available. I say, BUNK. Given the amount of money that will undoubtedly be spent on engineering incredibly vulnerable systems which will be obsolete in a few years as compared to the previous systems which worked fine for a few decades, it would be a trivial task to have new parts designed and produced for the older machines.
Whose boondogle is the whole idea of electronic voting?
Mod me down if I'm too off-topic (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.capc.umd.edu/rpts/MD_EVoteEval.pdf [umd.edu]
It looks like... (Score:3, Informative)
I haven't been concerned about outsiders... (Score:5, Interesting)
hacking into the voting computers. It's the insiders with an agenda that I am concerned about. The ONLY way to get around this is with a voter-verifiable paper trail AND taking the vote counting away from corporations that create the machines and putting the counting where it belongs: citizen groups.
Diebold and ALL the other commercial vote machine vendors are heavy Republican donors and, particularly in the case of Diebold, run by individuals devoted to getting Republicans elected and Bush elected (I can't say "re-elected" as he didn't get elected in the first place). THESE criminals have the means and motive to taint the vote...in secret! They are in control of the machines and the vote tallies. They cannot be trusted, given how openly partisan they are.
It is NOT the random outside hacker we need to worry about that much (sure, protect against it), it is the machine makers and vote counters themselves that have to be protected against. Ask yourself this: Why is it that EVERY vendor of voting machines are so adamantly opposed to any paper trail possibility? Why are they so strenous in their arguments against it? Because it would queer their ability to tamper with the vote tallies.
Voter-verifiable paper trail. It's the only way to be sure.
With these results... (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, we remember what happened a while back right? If I recall there were a number of security related risks regarding customer information... or did they release that information on a voluenteer basis?
might do good. (Score:5, Interesting)
How to Steal an Election (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you like to steal an election? Here's a quick survey of how to do it. I'm absolutely serious: I've been involved in political campaigns for years, and have held elected public office. And one of the reasons I'm no longer actively involved in party politics (per se) is that I caught one of my committee people doing some of the shenanigans I mention below.
First--don't waste your time trying to cheat inside the polling place.
You would think the obvious place to steal votes would be in the voting booth, right? After all, bank robbers rob banks--so election crooks would gravitate toward polling places. Right?
Wrong. The place to steal elections is in absentee ballots.
Absentee ballots: the mother lode of vote fraud
Let's suppose that you learn that you've been scheduled for a trip out of state that will keep you from voting. You can call your county courthouse and ask for an absentee ballot application. They'll send you a form, which you fill out and return, and then you'll get an absentee ballot in the mail. You fill out the ballot and send it back to the courthouse by the due date--congratulations! You have voted absentee, and your vote has made the nation stronger. In a perfect world, that's how absentee ballots are supposed to work.
Over the past twenty or twenty-five years the absentee ballot process has, um, changed. In a blowout absentee ballots are meaningless--but in a closely-contested race a handful of absentee ballots can be the difference between a "moral" victory and the real thing. (As a college student I functioned as an "absentee ballot captain"--identifying college students in the Philadelphia area who lived in the 10th congressional district in Illinois. I got them registered to vote at home, and made sure they voted absentee. I put in scores of hours of work--and turned in something like a dozen votes. In 1978 we lost the election by 6 votes--in a special election in 1979 we won by something like 120.) As the value of absentee ballots has become more apparent, people have started to cheat. (The rules for absentee ballots, and the opportunity to cheat, really expanded dramatically with the "Motor Voter" bills that got jammed through state legislatures in the early 1990s.)
How to steal absentee ballots
The simplest way to steal absentee votes is to work your way through nursing homes. The ideal method is to have a dedicated party worker who is a resident of the nursing home--but you can also send in a "volunteer." Nursing homes love volunteers who come to visit--so it's easy to plant somebody. However you do it, your party worker announces that she (or he) wants to help everybody participate in the election. Nothing wrong with that, right? So she distributes voter registration cards (perhaps with your party already checked), and promises to make sure that all the cards get turned in to the courthouse. When election time rolls around, she points out that senior citizens can get absentee ballots without question, and without anything like a doctor's note. All you have to do is ask. So Helpful Sally signs up everybody for absentee ballots. And since the absentee ballot is a bit confusing, Helpful Sally helps everybody fill out their ballot. As a general rule, Helpful Sally is going to get in trouble if she tries to buffalo people into voting for her candidate for governor--but practically nobody knows the names and/or positions of candidates for judge, for district magistrate, for local races--even for state legislative positions. All Helpful Sally has to do is say, "if you don't know the candidates, just leave the ballot blank." Oh, how helpful Sally really is. And to be really helpful, Helpful Sally offers to save the voter the cost of the stamp: she'll take the ballot to the courthouse herself, so your vote won't get lost in the mail.
Once the ballot is done, Helpful Sally can do two things. If the voter picked the wrong office, Helpful Sally can simply "lose" the ballot. Unless the senior citiz
Oregon voting (Score:3, Informative)
Nathan
Maybe we should do this differently (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Start with each machine being configured to run stand-alone.
2) The voter places their votes, and is issued a paper reciept containing who you voted for, and what booth you used (perhaps a machine readable only side to give to the attendant, and a human readable side that you keep, for privacy) with their entries encoded into a bar code of sorts, as well as being recorded locally.
3) They bring the reciept to the person administrating the voting at that location, who takes their reciept and runs it though a reader which tabulates the votes for the whole voting session.
In the end those results are tallied against the individual voting booths, and as well as having a paper trail to fall back on, and it prevents someone in the booth from being able to do any more damage than corrupt whatever was done on their machine. And if the attendant tries anything with his machine, the count between the different booths will also be thrown off, and it would be very difficult (never say impossible) to destroy reciepts for one specific person because of the encoding.
Throw strong encryption and a minimal and hardened OS into the mix, and it might actually be reliable.
democracy inaction (Score:4, Interesting)
The most frustrating part is that my county already had perfectly good voting machines: paper-based scantron-type forms where you mark the appropriate rectangle and a simple scanner tabulates the results. Effective, verifiable, well-understood, and relatively inexpensive. In other words, the complete opposite of what the state just bought for us.
--Approve Approval Voting Now! [geocities.com]
Hacks--Not Hack(ers) (Score:5, Insightful)
What does all this tell us? Well, I think anybody with a modicum of sense can see that the Diebold system is badly flawed. The Baltimore Sun has spelled it out in words that even non-technical people can understand.
What we have here is an elections board made up of political hacks, all trying to cover their individual and collective arses so they can continue to feed at the government trough. They made an ill-considered and ill-advised purchase of these machines, and they'll stop at nothing to excuse themselves and to see that we're forced to vote under the ridiculous circumstances they've imposed on us. Trying to make logical sense of what they say is an exercise in futility.
Didn't somebody once say that the OSI model had an eighth layer--the political layer? Well, fellow Marylanders and assorted interested parties, that's where we're functioning now. The merits (and lack of merits) of the Diebold system are a moot point, and I fully expect to be voting on one in November.
I have to echo a question asked by someone else: What is/was wrong with the voting machines we used for so many years?
Anne
Electronic selection, paper ballot (Score:3, Insightful)
NPR - Better link (Score:3, Interesting)
what if... (Score:3, Interesting)
my question is: suppose someone DOES manage to wipe out or tamper a bunch of votes, and the volunteers realize it. would the county actually admit they just lost 10,000, 20k, 30k votes by accident? there's no way you could sue the county, so all these folks would be denied their constitutional rights with no way for recourse.
in the neon of agrajag:
be afraid, be very afraid...
Re:*gasp!* Voting machines vulnerable?!! (Score:2, Informative)
We'll never have a valid e-voting system until the software is treated as a critical-systems type of application. I mean, it's not like the software is doing something like figuring the interest on a loan. The developers need to treat this software as seriously as they would the software in emergency medical equipment.
And for bonus Karma, that quote is from The Simpsons:
"Me fail English??? That's unpossible!"
-Ralphie
Another favorite by Ralphie:
"And so the doctor sa
Re:*gasp!* Voting machines vulnerable?!! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:*gasp!* Voting machines vulnerable?!! (Score:2)