Schneier On Electronic Voting 299
Bruce Schneier of security and other fame has posted a web log entry on the problems with electronic voting machines. The post is an excellent one, and does a very good job of covering all of the issues associated with the machines. I think it's fair to say that at some point electronic voting will be ready - but it's not ready now.
Article, if slash-ellipsized: (Score:4, Informative)
The Problem with Electronic Voting Machines
In the aftermath of the U.S.'s 2004 election, electronic voting machines are again in the news. Computerized machines lost votes, subtracted votes instead of adding them, and doubled votes. Because many of these machines have no paper audit trails, a large number of votes will never be counted. And while it is unlikely that deliberate voting-machine fraud changed the result of the presidential election, the Internet is buzzing with rumors and allegations of fraud in a number of different jurisdictions and races. It is still too early to tell if any of these problems affected any individual elections. Over the next several weeks we'll see whether any of the information crystallizes into something significant.
The U.S has been here before. After 2000, voting machine problems made international headlines. The government appropriated money to fix the problems nationwide. Unfortunately, electronic voting machines -- although presented as the solution -- have largely made the problem worse. This doesn't mean that these machines should be abandoned, but they need to be designed to increase both their accuracy, and peoples' trust in their accuracy. This is difficult, but not impossible.
Before I can discuss electronic voting machines, I need to explain why voting is so difficult. Basically, a voting system has four required characteristics:
1. Accuracy. The goal of any voting system is to establish the intent of each individual voter, and translate those intents into a final tally. To the extent that a voting system fails to do this, it is undesirable. This characteristic also includes security: It should be impossible to change someone else's vote, ballot stuff, destroy votes, or otherwise affect the accuracy of the final tally.
2. Anonymity. Secret ballots are fundamental to democracy, and voting systems must be designed to facilitate voter anonymity.
3. Scalability. Voting systems need to be able to handle very large elections. One hundred million people vote for president in the United States. About 372 million people voted in India's June elections, and over 115 million in Brazil's October elections. The complexity of an election is another issue. Unlike many countries where the national election is a single vote for a person or a party, a United States voter is faced with dozens of individual election: national, local, and everything in between.
4. Speed. Voting systems should produce results quickly. This is particularly important in the United States, where people expect to learn the results of the day's election before bedtime. It's less important in other countries, where people don't mind waiting days -- or even weeks -- before the winner is announced.
Through the centuries, different technologies have done their best. Stones and pot shards dropped in Greek vases gave way to paper ballots dropped in sealed boxes. Mechanical voting booths, punch cards, and then optical scan machines replaced hand-counted ballots. New computerized voting machines promise even more efficiency, and Internet voting even more convenience.
But in the rush to improve speed and scalability, accuracy has been sacrificed. And to reiterate: accuracy is not how well the ballots are counted by, for example, a punch-card reader. It's not how the tabulating machine deals with hanging chads, pregnant chads, or anything like that. Accuracy is how well the process translates voter intent into properly counted votes.
Technologies get in the way of accuracy by adding steps. Each additional step means more potential errors, simply because no technology is perfect. Consider an optical-scan voting system. The voter fills in ovals on a piece of paper, which is fed into an optical-scan reader. The reader senses the filled-in ovals and tabulates the votes. This system has several steps: voter to ballot to ovals to optical reader to vote tabulator to centralized total.
At each step, errors can oc
Re:Article, if slash-ellipsized: (Score:3, Informative)
Check out the numbers for the following precincts:
Bay Village - 13,710 registered voters / 18,663 ballots cast
Beachwood - 9,943 registered voters / 13,939 ballots cast
Bedford - 9,942 registered voters / 14,465 ballots cast
Bedford Heights - 8,142 registered voters / 13,512
But what about provisional ballots? (Score:2)
Re:Article, if slash-ellipsized: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Article, if slash-ellipsized: (Score:2, Insightful)
Yea, voting is so much more complicated than ATM transactions.
Unlike ATM,
there is no money being transferred...
or lookups to financial accounts...
or cash being dispensed...
or communications across different banks...
or printout receipts...
or
Bunch of friggin excuses induced by LACK OF INCENTIVE.
There should be a HUGE outcry about the accuracy of our voting sys
Simplicity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Simplicity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Simplicity (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Simplicity (Score:2)
Now, figuring out the algorithm for what to do when there's disagreement in the counts - that might take some work.
Amazing ... (Score:5, Funny)
CC.
Re:Amazing ... (Score:2)
Only when it's counting votes. The PTBs never seem to have problems counting how much money I owe.
Re:Amazing ... (Score:2)
Well no they have the same and worse problems, but the system is self correcting.
If they charge you too much and you don't realise it, it's even better than a correct good count.
If they charge you too much and you complain, they make you jump through a lot of hoops and let you prove they're wrong. If you succeed, they may correct the error.
If they undercharge you and don't realise it, you're lucky.
If they
and 20 years ago... (Score:2)
Funny how much things stay the same.
Re:Amazing ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Any voting system that requires trusting any one counter is inherently flawed. No trust should be needed or expected. The counting process should be fully transparent. The counting of each election should be observed, checked, audited and verified, by people representing each candidate.
Funny ... (Score:5, Interesting)
He brought up one important point then that I didn't see in his blog -- accuracy is the most important thing.
This might seem obvious, but most people seem more concerned with knowing the results of the election on election night than having every vote counted reliably.
Re:Funny ... (Score:2)
Re:Funny ... (Score:2)
On his weblog he says, "to the extent that a voting system fails to [be accurate], it is undesirable." He then says that "voting systems should produce results quickly. This is particularly important in the United States, where people expect to learn the results of the day's election before bedtime."
Seems like a discrepancy worth pointing out to me.
CNN changes exit polls numbers after the fact!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
While this isn't tampering with the vote itself, it shows CNN is trying to help Bush cover the unlikely discrepancy! Perhaps we're living in interesting times and it was a one-in-a-billion discrepancy between votes and exit polls... but since we CAN'T VERIFY THE MACHINES my opinion is that vote tampering is much more likely than not and CNN covered the trail.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/3/3646/14
(backup that entire web page please, we never know)
Quote:
"Let's first look at the women. In the first sample, 53% of 1,963 people can be anywhere from 1,030 to 1,050 women in the sample (try punching numbers outside that range into your calculator, it won't round to 53%). In the second sample, 53% of 2,020 people is anywhere from 1,061 to 1,080 women in the sample. So anywhere from 11 to 50 additional women were surveyed.
Well, in the first sample, 53% of women went for Kerry, meaning an absolute minimum of 541 (541/1030) women to an absolute maximum of 561 (561/1050) women for Kerry. So in the first exit poll, somewhere between 541 and 561 women were for Kerry.
Now for the second sample. 50% of women going for Kerry means an absolute minimum of 526 (526/1061) to an absolute maximum of 545 (545/1080). So in the second poll, somewhere between 526 and 545 women were for Kerry.
So it is *technically* possible that, say, 542 women went for Kerry in the first sample, and almost all the women they interviewed afterwards went for Bush (say only 2 went for Kerry), and then you'd have 544 women say they're for Kerry. This is actually within reason. If we had the raw numbers, we could tell for sure. Or even percentages to the tenths place.
*BUT*..... With the men, in the first sample there were between 913 to 933 men, and 940 to 959 men in the second sample. So anywhere from 7 to 46 additional men were surveyed. In the first sample, anywhere from 462 (425/913) to 480 (443/933) men were for Kerry. But in the second sample, anywhere from 438 (438/940) to 455 (455/959) men were for Kerry! You had at
THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE. I've allowed for the biggest intervals possible that would still result in the given percentages. Something is very wrong here. This is mathematically impossible."
So can any statistician give us an idea of why that kind of thing could be happening??
Re:CNN changes exit polls numbers after the fact!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:CNN changes exit polls numbers after the fact!! (Score:2)
Re:CNN changes exit polls numbers after the fact!! (Score:2, Informative)
This is stupid on so many levels.
CNN is notoriously left-leaning. Even if you believe they are central, I defy anyone to explain to me why the fuck CNN would change numbers to suit Bush. It is pure insanity.
Let's apply Occam's Razor.
Perhaps the exit polling sucked balls? Perhaps the numbers they were showing were not correct and they updated them with the correct data? Perhaps the early voters were Democrats and the later voters were Republican.
Re:CNN changes exit polls numbers after the fact!! (Score:5, Insightful)
HUH??? Oh, I keep on forgetting that the range of debate in mainstream American media is so small that they use "left" and "right" in a completely different sense than the rest of the world. Everything is shifted to the right. CNN is definitely right-wing, when compared to something that is *actually* leftist.
Re:CNN changes exit polls numbers after the fact!! (Score:2)
Re:CNN changes exit polls numbers after the fact!! (Score:3, Insightful)
For all the confused people out there, I think the prolem can be broken down thus: In general CNN is actually fairly right leaning. At the same time, in American politics CNN is fairly Democrat lean
Re:CNN changes exit polls numbers after the fact!! (Score:2)
Re:CNN changes exit polls numbers after the fact!! (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't even think of how many times I have seen stupid celebrity worship and random bullshit on the CNN webpage instead of real news. Right now it's a flag-waving piece, "U.S. honors veterans", as the top story (while there's a massive battle on in Fallujah), along with some celebrity nonsense (Princess Anne, Justin Timberlake), something about the White House puppy (thank you, CNN, for keeping us informed), a story designed
Re:CNN changes exit polls numbers after the fact!! (Score:5, Insightful)
CNN is notoriously conventional-wisdom leaning and don't-rock-the-boat leaning. That conventional wisdom among the college educated (of whatever political party) is in some aspects "liberal" when compared to, say, that of those with only high school degrees, and the the major media almost exclusively employs college grads (Jennings being the exception) gains it accusations of "leaning left."
But conventional wisdom also says: "They would never rig the voting machines - despite the many ruthless things a side has engaged in, including faking evidence for war and voter suppression, and despite highly partisan hacks running the elections in OH and FL, rigging the vote tabulating machines themselves is just beyond imagination." And don't-rock-the-boat says, "We must make sure the sheep don't develop a fundamental distrust of their shepherds, or we (the current establishment, including particularly Time Warner, GE, Disney, Viacom) are all in trouble."
Re:CNN changes exit polls numbers after the fact!! (Score:2)
People put more faith in the exit polls being correct than the counting of the actual ballots.
Re:CNN changes exit polls numbers after the fact!! (Score:2)
No kidding. Most of the people I talked to who were polled after voting told me they lied to the exit poll takers. So they either lied to me or they lied to CNN -- either way, they lied. I tend to believe many people lied to CNN because of some of the statistics I saw on election day. One example was "% of people claiming to be liberal voting for Bush: 81%" and "% of people claiming to be conservative voting
Re:CNN changes exit polls numbers after the fact!! (Score:3, Insightful)
No. Even if they are left leaning, there is a reason for them to change the poll numbers to suit Bush: Otherwise their exit poll data would look inaccurate, due to the mismatch with the election result. After two well publicized failures in a row, people would stop paying attention to their inaccurate exit polls.
There are both legitimate and illegitimate reasons for
Occam's Razor is overused (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, CNN is almost as bad as FOX these days. I don't know what anybody means when they say any of the major news networks are "liberal". They're corporate is what they are.
And yes, the first sentence was intended as a joke. The second bit wasn't.
disbelief (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, seriously... an industrialized nation that is filled with some of the smartest minds in the world (i.e. Einstein was German), goes on a campaign of genocide because they decide all Jews are inherently bad people.
Truth is more outrageous than fiction. Go ahead and keep believing whatever is necessary to keep your faith in authority.
Re:CNN changes exit polls numbers after the fact!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:CNN changes exit polls numbers after the fact!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, from the 3d election results:
http://www.esri.com/industries/elections/graphics/ results2004_lg.jpg [esri.com]
It looks like most of the areas who voted for Kerry were in urban areas. Now, if the exit polls were conducted in mostly urban areas you can see how the results would be biased in favo
Re:CNN changes exit polls numbers after the fact!! (Score:2, Funny)
The wacky Left's descent into madness is bittersweet for me. On the one hand, it's sad to see otherwise-reasonable people throwing their minds away like this. On the other hand, it helps insure that the party I support will retain control of all three branches of
Re:CNN changes exit polls numbers after the fact!! (Score:2)
Of course I realize it. I separated the wacky Left from the Republican party, but there has always been a Leftist part of the party, they're just not wacky. I don't have a problem with Bush's liberalism on economic issues so long as he retains the conservative social views that put him into office. Which he has.
Re:CNN changes exit polls numbers after the fact!! (Score:2)
Hardly. If you read my post, you should have noticed that I encouraged the original poster and his brethren to continue down this road. Please, by all means, continue talking about this issue as long as you can. A party of cranks is much easier to defeat than a party of reasonable people.
Re:CNN changes exit polls numbers after the fact!! (Score:2)
Relax, relaxrelax. (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, exit poll numbers are unreliable for a variety of reasons.
First, you don't know who is taking the poll and what their biases are. How were the voters selected - just the pretty girls, or people who looked safe? You never know.
Second, you don't know where the polls were taken. Were they only in urban areas, easily reachable? Were the areas chosen to be representative, or were they chosen with true randomness (out of a literal hat, for example)? Or were they chosen off the top of someone's head? The sites should have been selected at random and with a large enough distribution of sites.
If you don't do it randomly, but you pay careful attention to demographics to get an approximation of the overall population and their likely voting preference, you are still injecting your preconceived bias (that the pre-election polls were accurate) into the process. Garbage in, garbage out.
The sample size of 1000 or so is ok *if* it's an independently drawn sample. That is, the exiting voters should have nothing in common. By virtue of the fact that they all voted at the same time, and they were willing to answer a poll, they obviously have something in common, even if the areas chosen for the sampling were chosen well.
I suspect that there weren't enough people doing the exit polling. If you had 30 or more sites chosen at random, and then randomly selected people from those sites to ask, you might get a clearer picture. You'd still have error, and it could still all be skewed one way or the other, but at least you'd minimize the risk.
Overall, announcing the results of exit polls before the election is done is a bad idea, if only because it convinces the simple-minded that something is wrong with the system.
Re:Relax, relaxrelax. (Score:3, Interesting)
That's as maybe, but then how come exit polls generally reflected actual voting patterns pretty closely in elections prior to this one?
Just because the soundbites about exit polls broadcast by the media don't explain the entire methodology used doesn't mean that there isn't one.
Overall, announcing the results of exit polls before the election is done is a bad idea
Agreed. But then, no major media outlets DID announce exit poll results
Re:Relax, relaxrelax. (Score:2)
However, as it became apparent that there was a remarkable discrepancy between the exit polls and the "real poll", the reported result of the exit polls was modified.
Re:CNN changes exit polls numbers after the fact!! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:CNN changes exit polls numbers after the fact!! (Score:2)
Re:CNN changes exit polls numbers after the fact!! (Score:2)
"68 Year Old Grandmother Gives Birth To Alien!"
http://dontgetyournewsfromtabloidsidiot.com
Re:CNN changes exit polls numbers after the fact!! (Score:3, Funny)
You are on to something there. I follow you.
"It's fairly typical of most media outlets, they cater to the lowest-common dominator of public person because they are the consumers for their product and thus generate the largest revenue. "
It is the "MOST" common denominator which generates the most revenue.
Lowest common demoninator is a term you nicked from your grade 7 math class. "Lowest" does not i
Excellent point. (Score:5, Insightful)
And nobody outside the geek community will ever, ever give a shit. I was talking to a nontechnical coworker last week about it, conversation went something like this:
Her: So, turns out your fears about electronic voting weren't anything after all, eh?
Me: Why do you say that?
Her: Well, there were no problems...
Me: Yeah? How do you know?
See, the lovely thing here is that this whole issue is just going to fade away because people by and large aren't sophisticated enough to realize that voter fraud can be taking place unless they see people squinting at punchcard ballots. And the media ain't going to look into it for the exact same reasons.
I'm Skyshadow and I approved this little ray of morning sunshine. Now go about your business.
What does she mean there weren't any problems? (Score:4, Informative)
The 2004 election revealed many problems with electronic voting: lost votes, undervotes, overvotes, and votes rolling over into negative numbers. These links are taken from the group blog E-voting experts [evoting-experts.com]:
Re:Excellent point. (Score:2)
Getting people to change their political views would be a waste of time. The goal should be making people aware of the problems with evoting, regardless of their political party.
It shouldn't be an issue that only one party cares about, but one that both parties care about.
Impatience regarding results (Score:3, Informative)
But in the rush to improve speed and scalability, accuracy has been sacrificed.
I never really understood *why* people in the US expect to know results "before bedtime". Do they really? Or is it just a sensationalist media creation, which tries to portray elections like a "game" - this was even more evident in this year's election coverage - with CNN's bank of wide screens and "more projections after the break".
Almost every other country I know goes through the tedious process of counting (and recounting) votes (electronic and/or paper based) and it's about 5-7 days before the results are known for sure.
What is the real need to know results on the same day (especially at the cost of accuracy), and when we have a few months at hand before major changes are affected anyway?
Re:Impatience regarding results (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Impatience regarding results (Score:2)
The only way to get a fast turnaround whilst using paper is perhaps to split the vote into the presidential race on one piece of paper
Re:Impatience regarding results (Score:4, Insightful)
Keep in mind that the 2000 Bush/Gore race was the first of the television era where the margin of victory wasn't significantly larger than the margin of error in exit polling.
1976's Carter/Ford race, the previously closest race post-WWII, had a spread of 57 electoral votes. In contrast, Bush won in 2000 by only 5 electoral votes.
When the race is so close, it's much harder to accurately predict the winner quickly. It doesn't stop the media from trying, though; fast results are what the public has come to expect.
Re:Impatience regarding results (Score:3, Interesting)
One reason we've come to expect "instant" results is that we're leary when the process takes too long. Look at the recount in 2000 -- most people probably thought someone was manipulating the vote in those sealed rooms, not verifying that the votes were counted.
Proprietary Code (Score:5, Insightful)
Open source voting software such as this one [sourceforge.net] should be replacing proprietary code from private corporations.
Re:Proprietary Code (Score:3, Interesting)
We make ATMs that work well... (Score:5, Interesting)
If we can make ATMs that work well then we should be able to make voting machines that work just as well. In fact, why don't we get the people that Make ATMs to make voting machines as well. Let's see, do ATMs stand up to his four criteria?
Let's take that a bit further, why not turn ATMs into voting machines? They're already part of a large, secure, nation-wide network, they're built for security, and there's bazillions of them. Wouldn't it be great to just go to your bank to vote? That would eliminate the need to go to a polling place and should reduce the lines tremendously.
Sure there might be other problems with this approach, but banks already have years of experience securing and relying on ATMs.
--Not free as in effort, but I'm willing to try it. [wired.com] Free Flat Screens [freeflatscreens.com] | Free iPod Photo [freephotoipods.com] |
Re:We make ATMs that work well... (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean like these guys [diebold.com]?
Re:We make ATMs that work well... (Score:2)
With this kind of voting may
Re:We make ATMs that work well... (Score:2, Interesting)
RTFA:
Some have argued in favor of touch-screen voting systems, citing the millions of dollars that are handled every day by ATMs and other computerized financial systems. That argument ignores another vital characteristic of voting systems: anonymity. Computerized financial systems get most of their security from audit. If a problem is suspected, auditors can go back through the records of the system and figure out what happened. And if the problem turns out to be real, the transaction can be unwound and
Re:We make ATMs that work well... (Score:2)
Re:We make ATMs that work well... (Score:2)
Yes, and there's nothing wrong with that. The idea is that ATMs are already accurate, scalable and speedy and widely available. Also, wouldn't it be great to use the huge network that ATMs already use to report the votes?
Basically my position/idea is that ATMs already do a good job at what they do and there are thousands of them. If we could use that existing infrastructure for electronic voting then it would be great. It does open electronic voting up t
Doing it better in India (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Doing it better in India (Score:2)
Depends who you mean by "we". The powers-that-be (corporate interests, lifetime policitians, ie the people whose financial futures rest on the results of elections) have it figured out. If you mean "we" as in "we the people", well then I have bad new for you, "we" don't matter anymore. The elections aren't about choosing our leaders, they're about maintaining the status quo while screwing over the least amount of peo
This article was posted earlier on /. (Score:4, Informative)
The main differences I see between the machines in the US and in India is that the machines over in India are *simple* and completely *hardware* based. Also look at the graphic of the machines [bbc.co.uk] (in several areas candidate names were replaced by well-known party symbols to cater to the illiterate population, which the picture doesn't show).
In the US, on the other hand, there's been a great deal of corporate lobbying to introduce *complex* machines running a complete *OS* (for Chrissakes!) with some machines even sporting a connection to the Intarweb. Their main argument for these "features" seems to be that they can be used easily by disabled people. It sounds pretty hollow, when you see that most people spouting these justifications either stand to profit from the elections (Diebold, Microsoft) or are getting paid to push them (politicians). And again, there are a zillion other ways to make the elections more "disabled friendly" without having to install the entire OS on it.
Granted, the elections in India were not completely without incident, but for a democracy with an electorate of 600 million people, a million voting machines and 543 constituencies, they were pretty darn effective.
We should sample votes (Score:2, Funny)
Diebold source code reveals security flaws. (Score:5, Interesting)
Technical director Dr. Avi Rubin of the John Hopkins University Information Security Institute (ISI [jhu.edu]) has made a presentation regarding Diebold's voting machine source code (pdf) [nist.gov] to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST [nist.gov] has been playing a key role [nist.gov] in the improvement of voting systems since 2002.) Turns out, amongst other major security problems, Diebold was using NIST's Data Encryption Standard (DES [wikipedia.org]) to encrypt votes and audit logs. DES was developed in 1976 was proven breakable [infoworld.com] by a "brute force" system in 1998. NIST proposed revoking DES's certification last July and recommends AES [wikipedia.org] or at least 3DES [wikipedia.org].
Read from page 13. There are some hilarious comments
Nader calls for US election recounts (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Nader calls for US election recounts (Score:2)
my rant on electronic voting... (Score:3, Interesting)
What we need to do is create accurate and easy to use voting machines that are extremely cheap to produce and are maintianed via an open source model. Preferably we write it for a physical chip that is archaic by todays standards so that its extremely easy to emulate, extremely cheap to produce, and will have less script kiddies using it on a daily basis. If i was designing a voting machine it would be simply 5 buttons, (4 candidates per screen and a more button). Also a big green/red/whatever button elsewhere that says "Record votes" You make your selection it moves to the next. At the end it tells you your choices and lets you go back as much as you want. When done you hit that record vote button and it prints a receipt. Id probably use a single 6502(i like these chips they are neat) cpu to accomplish this because thats all i NEED, I dont need no p4 running winblows or anything running linux to record my votes what is all that wasted functionality doing? I'll tell you what its doing providing hundreds and thousands of lines of unnecessary code that basically amounts to a huge liability. I don't trust linux or windows alike in that respect. What i do trust however is some miniscule "VoteOS" that was designed with nothing but voting and auditing in mind.
Its time we stop trying to produce canned solutions for things from piles of unnecessary code(linux, windows, qnx whatever).
Re:my rant on electronic voting... (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps one solution would be to have the software randomize the order of the candidates, so it would eliminate the crease arguement altogether. You could have your 5 buttons then.
Each machine would still require a printer for our voter-verified paper trail, but coming up with a fast, efficient, inexpensive, and stable (no jams) shouldn't be THAT big of an issue.
Re:my rant on electronic voting... (Score:2)
Better yet, just display the first four candidates that randomly come up. "Oh, you wanted to vote for Bush? Well, it's Nader or Badnarik for you, buddy. Better luck next time."
Better yet, (Score:2)
And instead of a screen we could use a big piece of paper that you shove in and align with the levers...
The idea behind the electronic systems and touch screens is that there are a myriad of rules in each state and county about how ballots are formatted and presented. The only way to create a system that can address all of those issues is to go with touchscreens and fancy graphics.
More interesting is supporting the handicapped voters and providing enlarged text op
I wished people wouldn't call it that. (Score:2)
Not just Diebold. (Score:2)
HMMM...
Paper trails are a bit overstated (Score:4, Interesting)
I think there should be some sort of hashing and/or signing throughout the day, with the hashes periodically given to poll workers and watchers (and perhaps the voters themselves) that could authenticate the paper trail later.
Of course we're so far off from clueful use of cryptography in voting that this point is not relevant yet. But it seems to me that these are the kind of problems cryptography was designed to handle, and it would be smart to start thinking that way.
Re:Paper trails are a bit overstated (Score:2)
Re:Paper trails are a bit overstated (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is *not* solved, because someone up to no good can generate a whole slew of printed vote records alot easier than a manually generated ballot.
You cannot always trust the election judges, or the poll workers, or the people guarding the ballots, and the ease of replication of printed vote records greatly increases the potential damage by a rogue poll worker (or group of poll workers).
And to be clear, I'm not arguing against paper trails. It's just that the requirement of anonymity makes it very easy to forge paper trails (even more so if they are not hand generated). This is why crypto techniques are vital in the elections of the future. You have to be able to ensure that the paper trail is the same one generated by the voters.
Statistically elections are meaningless (Score:2, Insightful)
You have what's essentially a multiple choice ballot with two choices.
You have huge drives to register new voters, get everyone to the polls it doesn't matter who you vote for.
If I were to ask a large population a true or false question that none know the answer to, I'd expect my results to come back about 50-50.
The question asked on election night, as most americans saw it was "which is the lesser of two evils?" There was very little support for either candid
I don't think they'll ever be "ready" (Score:2)
Ideal Electronic Voting System (Score:2, Insightful)
This way, we have the ease of use of touch-screen machines, the audit trail of paper ballots,
please (Score:2)
Just what is it they are supposed to do better?
They have no reason to exist at all, paper trails are absolute nonsense and are only useful in a recount.
Schneier on the stump (Score:2)
Let's think back a ways, a long ways to the original [st-and.ac.uk] tabulating machine.
Counting votes is not rocket science. If ever there was a category of software that could be substantially more correct rather than less correct, it would have to counti
Why should both recommendations be implemented? (Score:2, Interesting)
1) Require a paper audit trail
2) Open the code for wanyone to see
Why is #2 necessary if #1 is implemented? Would not #1 ensure that the election is fair? Of course, #1 is only used in the case of a recount, but I would expect if the elections were rigged in any significant way (ie. outcome was something other than it should have been) then a recount would occur. In the case where an election was altered but that alteration had no meaningful effect on the o
Dumbold Voting Machine for The Sims (Score:2)
The Dumbold Voting Machine [dumbold.com] for The Sims enables the simulated people in your virtual dollhouse to vote! It's an interactive "get out the vote" public service message, in the form of a free downloadable Sims object. This Sims object is an electronic voting machine that lets your Sims vote between four candidates: Kerry, Bush, Nader and Badnarik.
I've included informative text in this Sims object, which it displays in illustrated dialogs to educate players about electronic voting machines.
A major side-sh
Elections in Canada (Score:4, Interesting)
Voting is done with a pen on paper.
Then we count them.
We must be insane in Canada eh?
Wish someone would define "electronically" (Score:3, Informative)
The voter physically marks his ballot (about the thickness of a postcard) with a pen. The ballot is then taken over to a reader and "read". If there is anything wrong with it, it is rejected, giving the voter an immediate opportunity to figure out what is wrong and cast a new ballot.
I've lived in different places and voted all sorts of ways, and this is the best system I've ever seen. It combines the speed of electronic results, but still keeps a valid paper-trail of the ballots cast.
From the looks of the machinery, the system is probably twenty years old (it may be older).
I am confident in this electronic system. I could never trust a system which did not include a physical ballot of some sort.
Examples of 2004 voting anomalies (Score:2, Interesting)
Some 2004 voting anomalies
>
Mon, 8 Nov 2004 16:01:13 PST
For those of you interested in following a collection of reported problems
more carefully, here are just a few reported anomalies, collected from a
variety of sources:
* Palm Beach County logged 88,000 more votes than people who had voted in
the presidential race. (Teresa LePore of 2000 Butterfly Ballot fame is
the County supervisor of elections there.)
* A Franklin County Ohio ma
Electronic paper? (Score:2)
The problem is when you say "Yes" it goes down the rabbit hole and you have to trust it from there. (I used an older lever machine myself which gives you the same impression.)
The "solution" to electronic machines is to use a paper trail for audit/validation. A paper trail can fail for two reasons. First, it may never be followed. Sec
voting machines are not the main problem. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, I'm French... Feel free to ignore this post (but replying by bashing France in general would be off-topic).
I think that the main problem is not the voting technology. It is the electoral system (in the US, and sometimes elsewhere).
The 2-level presidential vote is not really democratic... The people should be able to choose from many candidates. FWIW, in France, the presidential vote is usually a 2 round vote: on the first round, dozens of candidates (with a small limitation: each candidate has to be approved by > 500 county majors or MPs from several regions). On the second round, only the two candidates with the biggest votes (on the 1st one). So in the first tour, you vote for whom you like. In the second one, you vote against whom you dislike the most.
The lack of several (more than 4) realistic candidates at US presidential elections.
Most importantly, the lack of real constraining limits on the budget of each american party. IMHO, there should be a strong legal limit (of about a few dollars per voter) on the electoral budget. Since a campaign costs much more than a billion dollar, each of your candidate has to sell himself to big corporations... There are such limitations in France, but I think they are not severe enough.
I prefer the 2-round system used in France for the presidential election. (and yes, I am ashamed it did not work very well on the last presidential election, when Chirac faced an ultra-right candidate LePen; and Chirac did not understood that he was not really elected by 80% of the voters. He should have resigned immediately after his election, to let start a real vote.).
Exit polls did worse where e-voting was used? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've heard that Kerry is considering retracting his concession, and that if you've personally observed "voter disenfranchisement" in Ohio, you should phone the DNC (202) 863-8000 or send email to: CKerry@Mintz.com.
(Interestingly enough, the Green Party is also legally allowed to demand a recount: the catch is that they've got to be able to pay the $100,000 price tag...)
Schneier missed the point: it's trustworthiness (Score:3, Interesting)
Anything in a computer can be hacked. Period. And there is no way to tell that it hasn't been hacked. Period.
Paper ballots are plain to read. When you recount a paper ballot where the person marks in ink what their choice is, there is no hanging chad and no concern that the punch card or optical scanner or touch-screen software has a glitch that led the machine to systematically miscount. Most importantly, people can do a recount with paper ballots. If there is a question about the accuracy of the tally, it can be independently verified.
Paper ballots are still prone to election fraud: people can "misplace" them, burn them, etc. But fraud and systematic errors are way easier with a computer. As long as balloting is done by computer, every election will be clouded by deep uncertainty.
http://greenlightwiki.com/lenore-exegesis/Parliame nt_of_Attitudes [greenlightwiki.com]
Re:Wow a blog entry 2 weeks late (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't you think now is the oportunity to improve the system so that when election time comes in two or four years, the system has already been improved. Starting to discuss this again two months before the next election will not allow the system to be fixed/improved.
Re:Anonymity? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh wait, yeah: vote-selling, retribuition, targetted disenfranchisement, harrassment, intimidation, etc. Forgot about those. But hey, otherwise you make a really great point.
Re:Anonymity? (Score:3, Informative)
Although your post was already rated flamebait by someone else, I'll assume your question is serious, and answer it.
Anonymity is important in voting because without it, there can be two Bad Things: 1) vote buying (I pay you to vote a certain way, but I'll need proof that you really did vote that way) and 2) coercion (You better vote a certain way or else I'll break your mother's kneecaps).
Anonymity in voting provides assurance that for the most part things like th
Re:Anonymity? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anonymity is important.
Who would think that they had a right to vote if they thought that they might lose their job based on who they voted for ?
Who would think they had a right to vote for whomever they wanted if they thought there was a chance that their life, or the the life of their friends and family, could be in danger if someone knew who they voted for ?
If you don't think it is important, you obviously haven't thought about it.
Re:Anonymity? (Score:2)
I just hope that Congress doesn't institute secret ballots for its own voting.
This is unrelated to an anonymous public vote. When you vote, you vote your view. When Congress votes, they are supposed to be voting on your behalf, as your representative. Therefore, it is important to know which way a Senator or Representative voted in order to ensure that they are representing their constituents. In a public vote, you aren't voting on behalf of someone else, and therefore how you vote should not need to be
Re:Free elections dead? (Score:2)
Re:Response to two ideas. (Score:2)
1. Leave a paper trail.
In response to issue one, I don't think that's really necessary in pure technical terms.
It absolutely is. Without a physical, voter-verifiable paper ballot, a user can never be sure what the machine did when they pushed the button to vote. The user may have pushed "A" and the machine said "confirmed vote for A" on the screen, but it could have really recorded a vote for "B". Everything between
Re:Verifying election results w/ exit polls (Score:3, Insightful)
With really accurate exit polling, it would be really hard f
Re:Show every single vote on the internet ... (Score:2)
Yeah, and the election would be so much easier to handle if no more than 10,000 people voted!
That doesn't solve anything. There is still a way to associate a vote with the person who made it. This is BAD. The only sensible verifying step that can be made is before the voter leaves the booth.
=Smidge=