Open Source Electronic Voting Progress Limited 113
An anonymous reader points us to a story about how the problems with electronic voting mostly stem from one source: the lack of mandated standardization. The LinuxInsider article goes on to suggest that once the issue of a universal voting platform is solved, the way is paved for open-source software to address concerns over accuracy and transparency. Though the article states that "no open source program for voting machines yet exists," it should be noted that such software was successfully tested earlier this month. Quoting:
"People debate the merits of e-voting for a variety of reasons, including suspicion of new technologies and a general distrust of politics, according to Jamie McKown, Wiggins professor of government and polity at the College of the Atlantic. 'Reports on e-voting security often de-contextualize the history of voter fraud in this country, as if boxes were somehow assumed to be better. You constantly hear calls for paper trails, and open and free inspection of voting machine source code. But it's a very thorny issue and one that has a lot of facets,' McKown told LinuxInsider."
Standard is already set (Score:2, Insightful)
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The US may be having diffiulty with Open Source voting, but other http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2003/11/61045 [slashdot.org]">parts of the world have been doing it successfully for the past 5 years.
The benefits include the opportunity for privacy for disabled voters and illiterate people as well as reducing counting errors and costs.
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Electronic voting has many other compelling benefits. As the number of voters grows, it takes longer and longer for the results to be tabulated, and shortcuts get taken to make the process faster (such as sampling balots to veri
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Punch cards != paper ballots.
Op scan ballots are okay, but at a minimum there needs to be random, hand-counted audits conducted in public view, and some clear rules that state that any discrepancy should trigger a full re-count by hand. For example: if the totals for all candidates don't match the number of people who voted at a polling place, there should be a recount.
Requiring some third party to pay for audits that ought to be
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I don't know how you can legitimately say such a thing. There clearly are some very compelling problems that come from the current voting process that the electronic voting methods are trying to address. Or more to the point, con
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In Australia our Federal elections are done using cardboard booths setup in just about every school. Paper forms are used for voting. The elderly can use a paper form without being completely bewildered. Cardboard booths and paper are cheap. The smallest town can get as many as they need so we don't have long queues waiting to vote. The system
No open source voting? (Score:2)
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Or is demodratic in there to help fix the election?
Re:No open source voting? (Score:5, Funny)
if(lever==REPUBLICAN) republican = republican+2;
if(lever==DEMOCRATIC) democratic++;
assert(republican > democratic);
cout << "Republicans: " << republican << " " << "Godless, pussy liberals: " << democratic << end;
}
There, fixed that for you... oops... I may be in violation of my Diebold employee nondisclosure agreement
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while(1) {
if(lever==REPUBLICAN) republican++;
if(lever==DEMOCRATIC) democratic++;
total=republican+democratic;
cout << "Republicans: " << (total*0.51) << " " << "Godless, pussy liberals: " << (total*0.49) << end;
}
The Trick (Score:1)
If one can keep the people equally divided 49 - 49 by the way an issue is framed then one only needs to control a small voting block to make the decision.
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~exploit by Crash Override~
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That and your simole solution to a problem that really doesn't exist.
There is NO SIGNIFICANT PROBLEM with paper balloting that all-electronic voting solves:
- Speed of count. Not an issue. We have weeks before the Electoral College must meet. Plenty of time to count and recount paper ballots.
- Accuracy. Not necessary to be an issue. OCR or optical-scan ballots arte reliable, affordable, and paper; verifiable. We need not use punch ballots, though better punch technology wou
Wrong thinking (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think its as much as a suspicion of new technologies as much as the objections of those familiar with it. Even those who works with computers at a basic level understand that its far easier to drag and drop a thousand doc files into a trash can on the desktop than it is to shred a thousand physical copies.
That is my biggest argument for paper ballots is not fear of new technology, but rather a safe guard of making it harder to destroy evidence of tampering. If you wanted to cheat and election, it is far easier to type an SQL command in a console than it is to dispose of or forge thousands of physical ballots without anyone noticing.
In a perfect world, electronic voting would be the obvious choice, but given human nature and politics there should be as many safeguards as possible against possible corruption.
Re:Wrong thinking (Score:4, Insightful)
Regardless of whether or not fraud occurred, huge numbers of people would believe that it possibly/probably did. The whole "he's not my president" meme would grow exponentially. I could easily forsee mass demonstrations (tens of millions of people), massive civil unrest, etc. And keep in mind that the potential for this outcome is completely independent of whether or not fraud actually occurred!
Not only is there no way to prove fraud, there's no way to prove a lack of fraud. That's what scares me.
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Mod parent up. (Score:2)
It's worth spending billions for "regime change" in Iraq (and get how many people killed) but there's no money and people to do it properly at home?
While it's not surprising if the burglar doesn't want to remove the ladder he used to get in, the Diebolding crap should be considered a big embarassment.
What does it say about the USA (especially the voters/citizens) if the US Gov doesn't even bother to rig (run?) their
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Of course - you may want to have some kind of traceability but it shall not infringe on the vote secrecy. There may be valid cases where you actually want a specific traceability, like when each machine is set up you will want to verify that it actually works, which mea
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That's not true. It just has to trace to a non-identifiable source. For instance, let's say you vote for Obama, when you vote you're issued a vote id, that ID is then hashed with some data you enter, sort of like a password and stored as the "real" voteid. That original (pre-hashed) code is then printed out on a voteid card to the voter. At any time after the election, they can go on the internet (even at a coffee shop or something if they want anonym
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Or unless you are *forced* to.
"and someone can be coerced just as easily without such means"
Bullshit. Noone can coerce you with current standards because the one who tried perfectly knows in advance his intent is moot (you can say whatever and the other party knows that has no means to know if you lied or not). But try it once there's a method to know for certain.
"One can also prove how they voted by using a cell phone with a built-in camera t
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I don't see what's the big problem with that in practice.
Votes are sold all the time one way or another. Just make it illegal to coerce someone against their will, with hefty penalties. Your boss tries to force you to vote one way or try to force you to reveal how you voted against your will, just record him doing that and you can
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The problem is, you can have a list of how everyone actually voted, and you can even add restrictions that prevent anyone seeing anyone else's vote. (In fact, the surer you are that you can do that, the better.) But if there's even one layer of abstraction between the physical action taken by the voter and what actually gets counted, what's to prevent them from claiming some utterly bogus totals as the "final count"? Just because
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The part you're missing is that how you voted is irrelevant. It's how everyone else voted that swung the election. Seeing something that proves you voted for candidate A is meaningless. You don't have any way of knowing who the 499 others who re
on the subject of secure electronic voting (Score:2)
His opinion is just another soundbite based on abject ignorance.
The powers that be don't want the E- Vote to work (Score:1)
The truth is those that benefits from the current systems do not want electronic voting to work.
It would result in the transfer of power from the few individuals influenced by special interests and fictions in their minds to the collective, intelligence and wisdom.
The few that benefit to the detriment of the many.
To
The many that benefit to the detriment of none.
The plan was to
Re:The powers that be don't want the E- Vote to wo (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole idea behind electronic voting is to speed up the counting process to have the results early. And that's exactly the reason why I don't want any electronic voting. With paper ballots I (that's me personally. Not a rhetoric "I", but just me, the person registered as "Sique" on Slashdot) can make sure that at least in my voting district there is no tampering with the votes. I can watch the whole process, registering of the voters, printing the ballots, distributing the ballots, sealing of the voting boxes, checking the identity of the single voter, handing the ballots to the voters, putting of the ballots in the box, breaking the seal, counting and charting the results, then resealing the boxes and sending them to the central election office, and recounting them for the final results.
I don't need any special abilities. I don't need to understand code, I don't need to understand hardware, I don't need to know about chip card formats or sending protocols. But I can verify that my vote gets counted exactly as I cast it. Every speed up of the process means I lose the ability to watch what happens to my personal vote, or I have to give up the anonymity of my vote.
Where I come from this ability to be able to watch an election was the reason we caught the election board of a complete country rigging the election, and we had enough proof to put them in prison. I don't see how we would ever managed it without being able to watch the whole voting process.
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Nope (Score:4, Interesting)
I love computers, like most folks here have owned them for years and owned quite a few of them, but for elections, I like a plain ballot box and normal paper ballots.
"Open source" with elections is, I am sure, being pushed by well meaning folks, but if falls exactly under the "if your main tool use is a hammer, everything looks like a nail to you" syndrome. It just ain't needed, tons of other projects out there could use the dev help instead.
Wha, huh? (Score:2)
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but for elections, I like a plain ballot box and normal paper ballots.
You're obviously not the poor schmuck that has to count them. Seriously, have you considered how many pieces of paper are generated in an election? How many people have to touch the data to process that? And how the chance for abuse and corruption increases with each person that touches a physical ballot? Here in Washington State, the governor's race required a number of re-counts. They recounted twice, with the last time finding a number of previously misplaced ballots, swinging the count in favor of
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Keep in mind that most of the people who are voting judges tend to be senior citizens, who frankly suffer slightly from dementia and other a
if you are willing... (Score:1)
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There's absolutly *nothing* in the "counting by hand" process that biases it towards the elderly: just make it mandatory, like being a jury in a trial and it's done.
"This is a tough problem. I asked my wife.... "How long would it take for you to process a Presidential general election with your crew by hand counting?""
Believe it or not, that's pure nonsense as clearly demonstrates the fact that greatest parts of civilized world make it by hand and manage to
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America has had participatory citizen governance for well over 300 years.... back when it was likely your c
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Yes gunpointing citizenship no less and no more than about being a jury in a trial, paying taxes or having all your paperwork in order if you want to start a company. That's called Res Publica. You don't need to accept it, you always can go and buy your own lonely island. I think you are a bit out of proportion here unless you are a liberal anarchist in which
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They were contested because they were incredibly close elections. Politically America is split into several different philosophical camps, and none of them have a strong and overwhelming command over the general population.
If you are thinking about the elections that George W. Bush were involved with.... in spite of some of the screamers on the internet and a few media outlets that would have you
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It's amazing that voters accepted a crappy system like diebold when the USA has immense resources to do things right (lots of smart people, lots of money).
Maybe the people in your country have difficulty counting, but it seems a really ridiculous excuse to me.
In my country, at the various counting stations, the various parties (opposition and incumbent) and designated independent observers get to
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any voting (Score:1)
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How to do this right (Score:5, Interesting)
It's really not that hard to do this right.
This really isn't that hard.
Add this Invention entered to the public domain. (Score:1)
Re:Add this Invention entered to the public domain (Score:2)
You don't get to keep any record of your choices, lest you be able to prove to a third party that you voted in accordance with *their* will and not your own.
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There isn't any such adversarial relationship between presiding officers
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That's exactly why hand-counting is superior to machine counting: By making the parties sit down together and cross-check their results, one can make fraud very difficult.
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The voting machine interacts with the voter to determine their will, repeating back choices as needed.
Once the vote is finalized it is counted within the machine. It is also printed in a human readable form
that the voter should check. The voter then carries it to a ballot box/optical reader where it is counted again. Once inserted in that reader it is saved in a locked box and can be hand counted if need be.
Of course both machines should conform to the highest standards for security. (like o
Vote verification online (Score:1)
Consider an untamperable module, call it the "VoteBrain," that controls the basic identity functions of every voting machine and every vote counting machine. The Votebrain would generate the Registered Machine ID, the date, time of day and GPS location. This information would be displayed on every screen and be printed on
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Secret ballots mean secret. You sould be able to verify your own vote, but not get a verifiable record open to use for intimidation or corruption.
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- Provide a way to accurately check that the OS running is the OS published.
This is really hardRe: (Score:2)
I'm serious. Yes, TPM in a home computer where you, the owner, lose control is bad. There are lots of other scenarios where it's good.
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Indeed, if you can't trust the hardware, you're fucked.
Maybe somethings aren't better... (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe paper and pencil might be the best tools for the job?
Anyone ever stop to consider that. I know it's blasphemous to say new technology isn't the solution to every problem at the High Citadel of Cowboy Neal, so burn me at the Karma steak...
Simplification (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead let the voter choose between manual forms and machine forms which both look exactly the same. The only difference is that if you fill in the manual form you make marks with a marker pen, but if you use the touch-screen interface the form comes out of the printer with the spots already marked the way you selected on the touch screen.
The scanner scans both types of forms in exactly the same way. In both cases it looks for the same human-readable ink-filled spots.
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Of course I've been a strong advocate of machine-assisted ballot preparation and not for having the counting in the voting booth. The process of counting votes has a completely different domain challenge an
Electronic voting IS the problem (Score:4, Interesting)
You can't trust what you don't understand, so any voting system needs to be Universally Comprehensible. An electronic system based on Open Source principles -- where the blueprints for the hardware and the listings of the software are available for all to examine -- is still really only comprehensible to a minority of the population. It doesn't satisfy the goal. (In the worst case, you could conceal a deliberate design defect by a combination of hardware and software techniques: anybody examining the hardware and not the software, or vice versa, will miss it.)
Just forget the whole thing as a failed experiment, and go back to pencil and paper and manual counting. Everybody knows what all the possible failure modes are, and how to minimise their effects.
yes yes yes! (Score:2)
Even if everyone *could* understand the software and hardware, who is to stop the system from swapping the "ok" binary for a compromised one at the instant of voting, only to be switched back, with absolutely no record? Or how about at the time of counting? If TrueCrypt can do all the things it can do, why can't voting machine software?
A paper ballot count could show a discrepancy. But if the paper ballots are not vo
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And the best solution to the potential drawbacks of old-style voting (like speed) have solutions which are actually improvements (use more people; increase participation).
I love technology, in its place. The voting system is not such a place.
US' decentralized elections are the problem (Score:2, Redundant)
here in brasil, where elections has always been centralized by the federal judicial branch, creating a standard method of voting is much easier.
here we used to have a starndard canvas sack and standard paper balots, now we have a single, federaly mandated model of electronic voting machines.
both proccesses were|are hardened aga
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Centralizing important things is a bad idea.
Having the federal government do it wrong for everyone is much worse than having some local communities doing it wrong for themselves.
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Why not just create human-readable ballots and count those by hand? The counting doesn't have to be centralized (local candidate-based counting with cross-check is efficient and tamper-resistant), but a standardized procedure and a standardized ballot layout (where applicable) would reduce opportunities to mess with the voting procedure in order to skew the result (cf. butterfly ballots). It's not hard to
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A good standard is possible - and once a specific good standard is finalized I can see myself being for that standard. But we both know what happened the last time the federal government tried to standardize something about voting: Mandatory DREs. Given that, I'm going to have to stand by my position of being strongly against any non-specific standard.
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The problem being here that they are not "doing it wrong for themselves" but "doing wrong for everybody". Specially with your "winner takes all" system, the *whole* voting process is flawed as soon as some states (or even some counties) have it wrong, so there's no added "penalty" on taking the risk of doing it wrong at the whole country level. And it is not an argument e
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I've seen videos of election fraud where someone running for office tested a system with a simple button push next to each name. She pushed her name, and some diagnostic screen at the bottom flashed her opponents name for a moment. As there was no paper trail, there would be no way to do a correct recount.
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One thing to keep in mind i
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Then the problem is in the process, not in the hand counting. At the end of the day you end up with one president, one congressman, some local officers and maybe some legislations casted. That's not away from other countries' standards and still, they seem to manage it more efficiently.
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One President. One Congressman. One Senator. One Governor. One state Senator. One state assemblyman. Three or four county councilmen. One sheriff. One (or more) judges. Four or five School Board members. Possibly more local officials as well. In the more referendum-happy states, maybe a dozen or more of those. It does add up...
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Then again you are shifting the problem. On one hand, can't it be more of a concern the ability of the voter not to make a mistake than the ability for a fast counting? Then you s
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Actually, many states *do* have elections every year. In my own state of Virginia, the election for governor is held the year after the presidential election. Elections to the House of Delegates happens every odd year, and we have state Senate elections the odd years that don't have a gubernatorial elect
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granted, just low level grunts were arrested, the top guys shielded themselves with several layers of party hiererchy.
If you want to help... (Score:2)
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Not only have they been making some progress, but Karl Auerbach — yes, that Karl Auerbach [slashdot.org] — is on the board.
Suffice it to say, I don't think ICANN has donated money to their cause... ;-)
Is the voting process rigged? (Score:1)
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Is this a trap?
Let's just say it can be, without naming names, political parties, etc. As long as it can be rigged in some way, a better solution must be searched for.
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My advice: stick to pen and paper.
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In the 2004 election, there were peculiar discrepancies between the exit polls and the reported results which correlated with the use of electronic voting machines: Who won? [slashdot.org].
Statistical indications like this are all you're likely to get in this game, and now you won't even get that much -- they changed the way exit poll data is handled because the 2004 situation was too embarrassing.
It will happen as soon as all.... (Score:1)
See! It's no problem at all.
Does it really matter if the voting machines work? (Score:1)
A few people, party leaders with the help of the corporate owned media pick the candidates. They give to us whom we may choose from.
The person they have picked to be president is matched with one not as desirable.
They create the illusion that we picked or voted for the president but the elections are really a big Hollywood type production.
The bottom rungs of the parties think there is a big competition, but those at the top are one.
open source isn't the solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do geeky people (myself included) like to wipe a new machine before they use it? Why do corporate IT departments have policies about wiping new hardware, or machines that have been infected with a virus? Simply because when you are using a general purpose computer, it is complex enough that no human can have any confidence in what it is doing unless they had control over the entire installation process.
D
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I even E-Mailed this consortium with my question.
Just because you coded honest code, how does that mean YOUR honest code is what the binary has in production?
The code is only as honest as the person who compiled it.
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There are simply too many layers of complexity present in any electronic system to deem it 100% secure.
Well, if you have the source.. (Score:2)
You're absolutely right that OSS isn't a magic bullet, but it certainly carries plenty of clear advantages over anything else.
Transparency in the election process isn't something we should have to beg for. It's a right.
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You're right. Actually there's more to it than just allowing the general public to review the code. The important part of OSS is that it allows someone other than the manufacturer to own the software build and setup process. OSS would be worthless if it simply meant that people could see the source code, yet the manufacturer's machines still ship with everything pre-installed and ready to use. The real value comes into play when the
Verifiability (Score:2)
Whether the source code is open source or not doesn't change this.
draw attention to open source (Score:1)
Finaly people can see an application where it is actually *really* important to know what a computer is doing, and where trusting some company just isn't enough (obviously protecting their private datas doesn't seem important enough for that to them).
Rmember: the last thing random Joe heard about FOSS vs proprietary probably is the often repeated sentence in the "24" show: "oh no, I can't crack this software, it's propriet
e-voting = shorter election night shows. (Score:1)
What e-voting can do is make the process more efficient