More on the Dangers of eVoting 339
blamanj writes "A lot of discussion has been focused on the lack of security in electronic voting systems. What hasn't been as widely discussed, is just how tiny the voting manipulations have to be to have an effect. In this months CACM (cite, pdf of original paper is here), some Yale students show that altering only a single vote per machine would have changed the electoral college outcome of the 2000 election. Changing only two votes/machine would have flipped the results for four states."
OOPS (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Unrealistic (Score:5, Informative)
That kind of access is far from unrealistic, and the number of machines necessary is far from countless. The latter was kind of the point.
see that horse? It's dead. You can stop beating it.
OK sir, I'll stop talking about or caring whether my vote is being counted. Very responsible of me, thanks for the suggestion.
The only way people will rise up and kill it is if (when) some massive fraud or error occurs that totally fucks the outcome of a major race.
How do you know that hasn't already happened? Seems to me circumstantial evidence points to it happening in Georgia in 2002. Unless there's a paper trail (which I admit I think is likely, eventually) or someone spills the beans about manipulating electronic vote counts (which I think is inevitable), we'll never know.
That OTOH is a great point.
To me, talking about touchscreen systems is crying wolf. The problem is not touchscreens, it's the totally independent issue of secretively operated and maintained closed-source vote counting servers.
We don't need vote counting servers to have touchscreen voting.
Diebold using DES encryption! (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.jewishtimes.com/2435.stm [jewishtimes.com]
Re:Voter fraud is going to be the biggest issue of (Score:5, Informative)
Why?
Because you don't have to story peoples' names or any other information! You just have a bunch of dna entries, but you don't know who they belong too, where they live, etc. You can't even figure out who is a voter from the database. If you have the dna from someone you can check them against the database, but you can't do it the other way around. So as far as the government or anyone else who might abuse voter information is considered, the database is just about useless.
What about removing, say, a convicted felon from the database? Just get a sample of his dna and pull the matching strand from the database.
The downside: First, electrophoresis probably doesn't scale well to millions of samples. It's a lot better than the old methods, but not really designed at present for large scale work. Second, getting the DNA is going to annoy voters. Probably the easiest thing to do would be to swab cheek cells, but still. Third, while I firmly believe this could eliminate almost all voter fraud, this is not some super-secure database. I mean, what method are you using to check whose dna is allowed in? Probably birth certificate and social security card. And as easy as it is to forge those, so would it be to get into the database.
Re:Paper receipts and voter fraud question. (Score:1, Informative)
In the primaries, both the voters and volunteers absolutely loved the new system. Everyone knows how to fill in bubbles, and the voter himself feeds the ballot into the machine (smaller than a copy machine), where it is instantly added to the tally. If there is a misvote, the ballot is kicked back out and the voter can re-vote. At the end of the day, the count has already been tallied.
The only thing I disliked is that the ballots are freaking huge pieces of (very heavy stock) paper, I guess so that old people can read the big fonts.
Re:On a side note (Score:2, Informative)
So, are you equally upset about that rhetoric or are you only upset when liberals engage in these tactics.
This is called the politics of fear, both sides are doing it on a range of issues, and doing it so much many Americans are voting entirely out of fear. The Republicans are almost certainly benefiting from it and far better at it than the Democrats. It sucks, but unfortunately it tends to work really well.
I assure you there are plenty of ill informed voters of all ages and many of them are voting out of fear and not on issues, so don't try to hang it on young people. Numerous studies of Bush voters show they consistently have no clue what Bush's actual position is on most key issues, and frequently get his positions exactly backward. They are just voting for him because he says he will make the "safe" or because he is God's chosen one, or at least so he says.
I'm not sure mandatory training of all young voters to be good Republicans or good Democrats before they are allowed to vote is how these democracy things are supposed to work. Its a personal responsibility to educate yourself, and unfortunately most Americans are pretty bad at it.
As for the whole draft proposition there is a reasonable chance the draft is going to come back real soon now, and it may come back under either Bush or Kerry. Unless the U.S. pulls out of Iraq soon or slashes its troop commitments elsewhere it is going to run out of bodies to put in the boots on the ground. The volunteer army works a lot better when you just get great benefits and aren't volunteering to drive a truck in Iraq and get your ass blown off, literally.
Indications are volunteers for the Army and Marines are in fact slowing and the U.S. can't use the current tactics indefinitely(calling up the guard and reserves in perpetuity and using stop loss to keep people in the military indefinitely). So there is a pretty good chance young voters may be voting over whether they are going to get drafted after the election. The only catch is Kerry is about as likely as Bush to reinstate it. Kerry after all has said he is going to put about 40,000 more bodies in army boots first thing and I doubt he is going to do that with volunteers if it entails combat duty.
Re:On a side note (Score:4, Informative)
The hope is that they will come in and vote even if they aren't completely knowledgeable on every little issue. It's not a test, they can skip over anything they know nothing about. The typical American ballot is quite intimidating especially since you must vote for a variety of people and referendums both statewide [city-directory.com] and local [city-directory.com]. Don't forget to scroll down to the bottom where we get to vote on the definition of marriage and who should be the official local land surveyor. This can take you long time and if you are the kind of person who usually gets in the 90% on tests, it can make you feel kinda stupid.
Re:On a side note (Score:5, Informative)
I didn't attend the Vote or Die rally at my school (mainly because I greatly dislike P. Diddy, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Mary J. Blige somewhat), but the reports I've heard indicated that DiCaprio fully admitted his support for Kerry during his speech, and Blige's incoherent ramblings were something to the effect of the war in Iraq being bad because it leads to a cycle of domestic violence. P. Diddy at least spread around the criticism by noting that neither major candidate spent much time politicking to large urban centers.
Straight ballot in Texas (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Paper receipts and voter fraud question. (Score:5, Informative)
In one fork the paper trail is machine readable and it gets fed into an optical scanner which actually counts it. In this scenario the electronic voting machine is of marginal value though it can reduce errors, double voting for example or not filling in the ovals properly for an optical scanner. But the main thing they do is provide electronic assistance to the blind so they can vote without assistance. We are blessed with these machines partially because the handicapped, especially the blind, are rightly complaining they are denied their right to anonymous voting by most/all non electronic voting machine.
In the other more likely fork the electronic machine does the count, but their is a paper receipt for every vote so you can:
A. randomly recount a subset of the machines to verify that the paper trail matches the machine count and catch fraud.
B. If the election is close or their is a dispute you can do a complete manual recount and disregard the machine count if it appears suspect.
Venezuela recently had a hotly contested recall electon for Hugo Chavez and they used all electronic machines, but with a paper trail unlike the U.S. which is sorely lacking paper trails. Here [economist.com] is a good writup on some of the issues the Carter foundation found in trying to monitor and audit the election.
Re:Unrealistic (Score:5, Informative)
The truth lies somewhere in between, I think. It's hard for me to look at something like this [thehill.com]: ... and accept the notion that Sen. Hagel has never once considered or talked to anyone about the possibility that election results might have been manipulated on his behalf.
From what I've read, it seems many of the employees of Diebold are pro-VV-paper-trail, and the resistance to it from Diebold comes from on high. That, and a philosophical commitment to bad engineering, exploitable vote servers, aggressive lawyers, and closed source (all of which seems to be in evidence), is all the guys up top really need to do. There doesn't have to be any coordination with the parties that manipulate elections, you just have to be committed to giving them the right tools to succeed.
Voting Machines only a small part of the reason (Score:4, Informative)
There are a few others of pressing concern.
1) Provisional ballots: The Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed by Congress to prevent some of the nonsense from Florida in 2000, requires that a voter who tries to vote but does not show up on the list of eligible voters be allowed to cast a provisional ballot, which will be set aside to be later verified and counted, if valid.
There are a number of legitimate reasons why this may happen -- a voter shows up at the wrong precinct for example, or has moved to a different precinct in the same county, or a different county in the same state, or their registration wasn't properly processed, etc.
HAVA, however, only requires that these prospective voters be given a provisional ballot; it does not require the states to count provisional ballots. In Ohio, the Secretary of State issued an order that provisional ballots will not be counted, and instead errant voters are to be directed to the proper polling place. This order was upheld, overturned on appeal, and overturned again in Federal Appellate Court about a week ago -- meaning the secretary's original order stands, and provisional ballots in Ohio may be collected but not counted.
Expect more lawsuits, especially if the vote is as close as it now appears it will be.
2) Absentee Ballots: All states allow for voting by absentee ballots, but most require that the ballots are returned by the close of polls on election day. Not postmarked, but returned.
A state cannot even print absentee ballots untill all primary election results have been certified by the state. Some states (can't remember which off the top of my head) have primary elections as late as October, meaning there's less than one month to certify primary results, print, mail, and recieve absentee ballots.
I suppose most of you heard about the 58,000 missing absentee ballots in Florida. They were supposed to mail out new ones on Friday, but even with overnight mail, there is no way those can be returned by Tuesday, 7:00 pm, at least by mail. There is talk about extending the deadline, but one can expect quite a few gripes in the coming weeks about lost ballots. Again, expect lawsuits.
Also of note, though purely anecdotal, is that in 2000 I was living in a former Warsaw-Pact country and requested an absentee ballot (Cuyahoga County, OH) through the US embassy in September. I never got my ballot. Expect more complaints, and yes, lawsuits.
3) Multiple voting: In most states, it's piss easy to get on the voter registration rolls, and much more difficult to get off them. This issue has already been raised in Florida this year, particularly concerning 'sun birds' who have residences there and in other states, notably New York. It is not difficult at all to cast valid votes in both states, provided one is registered in both states. This shouldn't be possible, but it is not unusual.
4) Experience. This is something that has largely been ignored by the media, but an unprecedented number of county-level election supervisors will be running their first national elections.
There are an awful lot of county clerks, board of elections chairmen, recorders, and elections supervisors who saw the writing on the wall after November 2000, and who opted for private sector jobs or retirement, early or otherwise, to avoid a Florida-type scandal. Not that their replacements are not competent, but they are rookies. Check with your local government to find out who is running this election, and how long he or she has been there.
All this is not to say that DREs are absolutely acurate and foolproof, but there are many more problems besides the physical mechanisms of voting, just as there were in 2000. Problems 2 and 3 happen every four year, for example; they just don't matter unless the vote is close.
This has been all well and good in the past because the margin of victory has been
Re:My hack will cancel-out your hack... (Score:3, Informative)
This article really isn't meant to harken back to 2000. No one out there, that I know of, is really accusing that this sort of fraud took place 4 years ago.
The reason it's news is because we worry that it may take place in the future -- and let's face it, the Republican party's track record when it comes to lying, cheating and stealing to win is pretty clear.
Re:My hack will cancel-out your hack... (Score:2, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_
57,746 voters were listed as felons on a "scrub list" and removed from the voting rolls, but later analysis shows that many were incorrectly listed. (For instance, many had names similar to actual felons, and some erroneously listed felonies were dated years in the future.See bullet 2 on this screenshot (http://www.gregpalast.com/Harpers_img.htm)) These persons were disproportionately Democrats of African-American and Hispanic descent. In some cases, those on the scrub list were given several months to appeal, and many successfully reregistered and were allowed to vote. However, in many cases no effort was made to contact them before the election.
Re:Straight ballot in Texas (Score:5, Informative)
It's not a bug. It's just an easy way to misuse the eSlate tablets. After selecting a straight-ticket, it takes you to the next selection box, which it the presidential race. Ol' Dubya is first on the ballot, so he gets highlighted. Pressing the selection button instead of the "Cast Ballot" button selects him.
I'm familiar with the issue because I work with the Travis County Democratic Party in Austin, Texas, the headquarters of eSlate and a county that exclusively uses eSlate machines.
Re:I don't understand the problem (Score:2, Informative)
You ignore accurate... I've read elsewhere (I can't find the link at short notice) that electronic voting is more accurate than any manual system.
Re:and what's everyone else doing? (Score:3, Informative)
The difference is free association and where the funding comes from.
The GOP is using campaign donations to reach out to people who voluntarily go to church and may get up and leave at any point. No law is compelling them to sit and listen to the speach, nor are tax dollars paying for it.
Activities during the school day are at least partially funded by public money and in most schools, students are compelled by truancy laws to attend. In the grandparent's case, he was able to to skip the rally, but I wonder how often that's true.
Re:My hack will cancel-out your hack... (Score:3, Informative)
They tried to do the same thing this year: [sptimes.com]
Let's recap:
Say "2000, never again!" Come up with a new felon list
Refuse to show the list to anyone
Refuse to show the list to anyone under public pressure
When forced to by a court order.... admit that horrible, horrible "mistakes" were made, and by some incredible coincidence, the list was again totally slanted against the democratic party...
Election's only a couple days away now...
2 Brothers Will Count 80% of US Vote (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0404/S00
Re:Unrealistic (Score:2, Informative)
Turns out, it was voter error, not a dark manipulation of the machines as Dems would love to believe. See the news summary of the issue at http://www.news8austin.com/content/election_2004/e lection_stories/?SecID=409&ArID=122743 [news8austin.com]
IMO, there should not a straight-ticket voting option on voting machine. Why promote brain -dead voting?