Sequoia Vote Machine Can't Do Simple Arithmetic? 254
whoever57 writes "Ed Felten is showing a scan of the summary from a Sequoia voting machine used in New Jersey. According to the paper record, the vote tallies don't add up — the total number of Republican ballots does not match the number of votes cast in the Republican primary and the total number of Democratic ballots does not match the number of votes cast in the Democratic primary. Felten has a number of discussions about the problems facing evoting, up to and including a semi-threatening email from Sequoia itself."
Update: 03/20 23:30 GMT by J : Later today, Felten added an update in which he analyzes Sequoia's explanation. He has questions, comments, and a demand.
Minor discrepancy...MAJOR problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
Lawyers (Score:3, Insightful)
Hypocrisy (Score:5, Insightful)
I love the double-standard here. The government wants to invade the privacy of it's citizens (discussed several times over on these very forums) and one of the typical responses is "Well, if you don't have anything to hide...".
But when an independant third party wants to verify that an important piece of hardware used in our political process can actually do the very simple math that it's required to do, the corporation who produces is has laws that it can throw in one's face to prevent verification of data. Shouldn't someone be pressing Sequoia with the "if you don't have anything to hide..." mantra?
Does anyone else here see the obvious double-standard that we've created for ourselves?
Software bug (Score:4, Insightful)
print array.lastIndex.indexNum
instead of
print array.count
The real concern here is not that it has a bug. All software has bugs. The concern is over what kind of QA was performed to guarantee our votes. If such a simple and obvious test case was not performed, how on earth are we to feel good about this machine?
Re:Count from Zero (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the Republican tally was heavy one vote, while the Democratic tally was light one vote. Thus, your proposed explanation doesn't wash.
On the bright side at least the error will vanish as the number of votes approaches infinity
That's assuming that the error is due to the cause you postulated, which cannot be the case.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:2, Insightful)
Enough Already! (Score:5, Insightful)
On the whole of it, I have a big problem with the "Winner takes all" system anyway, with the majority giving the power to a handful to beat up on us all. Not even getting into how the Republicans and the Democrats systemically shuts out all other parties.
But if we are going to have voting, at least make it fair. Give equal time to ALL parties, not just the D-R club, and use paper ballots under tight security. At least make "Democracy" less of a joke than it already is.
Re:Minor discrepancy...MAJOR problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Minor discrepancy...MAJOR problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
He used the "look at the vote totals the machine printed" method.
Seriously, it has a picture of them. Did you RTFA and somehow didn't notice it, or do you like making uninformed comments? (Okay, that is a bit inflammatory. The first time I went to TFA, the pictures didn't load. But it still says in the text.)
Re:Maybe the votes were not placed? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's hard to believe this is even an issue. The problem is that the people making voting machines (like Diebold) come from Banking sectors, where privacy and private, proprietary systems are the modus operandi.
Seems to me a good way to fix this would be to get some high-profile Non-Profs and top-brand CS schools (I'm thinking MIT, Apache Foundation, Cal Tech, Carnegie Mellon, Case Western, etc) all working together to gather some grant money, build the hardware and software solutions, open everything up for scrutiny, and produce a working product.
We can wave our arms over what somebody SHOULD build, but if we had a compelling alternative ready to go, it'd be a lot easier to pressure governments to do the right thing.
Re:Minor discrepancy...MAJOR problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
However, the size of the discrepancy is 1/60 or so. That's 1.6%, which is enough to change the outcome of some recent US elections [wikipedia.org]. So is it of a significant size? Yes, it is.
Re:Minor discrepancy...MAJOR problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Count from Zero (Score:2, Insightful)
Corporate Death Penalty (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Corporate Death Penalty (Score:2, Insightful)
Mark my words, this is the beginning of the end for closed source code in government elections. Here is the perfect opportunity for open source. It's the *only* legal possibility.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes and no. It appears that this is a contractual issue. The State of New Jersey signed licensing terms that does not allow an independent party to review the code. The state should not violate that contract.
Thing is, there is a limited market for voting machines in the US. There are only 50 states, it seems to me the states are in a pretty good position to negotiate the licensing terms. Why is it that New Jersey didn't specify in the terms that the code and hardware had to be reviewed by independent sources? This isn't an issue so much of "if you don't have anything to hide" as it is simple economics. Abide by my terms or I won't purchase your product. Instead NJ bought a pig in a poke and now they are stuck with these machines.
The idea that the machines workings have to be secret for security reasons is a complete fallacy. Sooner or later one of these voting machine companies is going to break ranks and allow independent security reviews - just so these problems go away.
Re:Bigger fish to fry (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Bigger fish to fry (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Software bug (Score:3, Insightful)
What stupid thing the programmer may have done is irrelevant here.
This is supposed to be a secure machine for tallying votes. Either it is capable of counting, and providing a verifiable audit which matches the results it reports. Or, it's fundamentally broken and can't actually be used to count elections. I don't see how there is any middle ground.
There simply is no room for trying to account for what might be the underlying cause.
Software used for mission critical things (and I would argue an election counts) goes through much more rigorous certification.
This stuff hasn't, obviously. The fact that they keep threatening to sue people who point out that this thing has glaring mistakes in it means they probably know how badly written it is, and don't want to be accountable for it.
Cheers
Re:Enough Already! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Maybe the votes were not placed? (Score:3, Insightful)
If those trillions of dollars had to be transacted via "secret ballot", I'm pretty sure that hundreds of billions of them would have disappeared. Somehow it's a lot harder to write error-free code when you know that nobody's going to be able to do something as simple as checking their bank statements to catch your errors.
Re:Bigger fish to fry (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Minor discrepancy...MAJOR problem. (Score:3, Insightful)
For all we know, the machines could be programmed to work perfectly, except on election day when subroutine X is used (on that day only).
But, we also know that thanks to compiler trickery, even studying the source code isn't enough.