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Voting Isn't Easy, Even if Cheating Is
from the sobering-thought dept.
Diebold also builds automated teller machines (ATM), the definitive model for reliability and accountability.
The AccuVote machines are what they are, not due to poor design or unintentional mistake. They are the result of a deliberate intent to enable fraud on a massive scale. Viewed from this perspective, the AccuVote design is very good. The real problem comes when Diebold realizes that it needs to become better at obfuscation and makes it harder to detect the fraud.
"Electronic voting machines with no paper trail are an insult to democracy," writes pieterh. "That they come with switches to bypass even the dubious 'safeguards' provided is hardly a surprise."
Paper trails, of course, are only as good as the people guarding the paper; readers familar with more recent allegations of vote manipulation may be interested in the 1946 confrontation in Athens, Tennessee (pointed out by reader William J. Poser) between WWII veterans and the election officials.
Reader Soong, though, provides a conspiracy-free explanation for the presence of such a switch:
Several readers pointed out that voters might better trust the machines as well as the process of electronic voting if regulation were more rigorous; as reader Animats puts it, "slot machine standards are much tighter":The ability to boot from different sources is a normal debugging feature, not in itself sinister. Should they have cleaned that up on the production model? Yeah, sure. But verifiability is ultimately a human concern anyway, not a tech one.
It all comes down to who you trust.
If you don't trust the polling place, make the voting machine tamper proof. But then you have to trust the guy who built the voting machine. You have to trust the guy who loaded the software on it at the factory or the elections office. You have to trust the guy who wrote the code. Even if you inspected the code, you have to trust him to give you a binary based on that and not pull a fast one. You have to trust his compiler to give him a binary without compiled in back doors. I feel like I probably haven't listed all the points where this voting machine chain of trust can break down.
Even if e-voting machines had a spec list that would pass at the Gaming Commission, Midnight Thunder is puzzled that tamper-proofing techniques aren't more evident on the Diebold machines:The Nevada Gaming Control Board has technical standards for slot machines. They've had enough fraud over the years that they know what has to be done. Some highlights:
- ... must resist forced illegal entry and must retain evidence of any entry until properly cleared or until a new play is initiated. A gaming device must have a protective cover over the circuit boards that contain programs and circuitry used in the random selection process and control of the gaming device, including any electrically alterable program storage media. The cover must be designed to permit installation of a security locking mechanism by the manufacturer or end user of the gaming device.
- ... must exhibit total immunity to human body electrostatic discharges on all player-exposed areas. ...
- A gaming device may exhibit temporary disruption when subjected to electrostatic discharges of 20,000 to 27,000 volts DC ... but must exhibit a capacity to recover and complete an interrupted play without loss or corruption of any stored or displayed information and without component failure. ...
- Gaming device power supply filtering must be sufficient to prevent disruption of the device by repeated switching on and off of the AC power. ... must be impervious to influences from outside the device, including, but not limited to, electro-magnetic interference, electro-static interference, and radio frequency interference.
- All gaming devices which have control programs residing in one or more Conventional ROM Devices must employ a mechanism approved by the chairman to verify control programs and data. The mechanism used must detect at least 99.99 percent of all possible media failures. If these programs and data are to operate out of volatile RAM, the program that loads the RAM must reside on and operate from a Conventional ROM Device.
- All gaming devices having control programs or data stored on memory devices other than Conventional ROM Devices must:
- Employ a mechanism approved by the chairman which verifies that all control program components, including data and graphic information, are authentic copies of the approved components. The chairman may require tests to verify that components used by Nevada licensees are approved components. The verification mechanism must have an error rate of less than 1 in 10 to the 38th power and must prevent the execution of any control program component if any component is determined to be invalid. Any program component of the verification or initialization mechanism must be stored on a Conventional ROM Device that must be capable of being authenticated using a method approved by the chairman.
- Employ a mechanism approved by the chairman which tests unused or unallocated areas of any alterable media for unintended programs or data and tests the structure of the storage media for integrity. The mechanism must prevent further play of the gaming device if unexpected data or structural inconsistencies are found.
- Provide a mechanism for keeping a record, in a form approved by the chairman, anytime a control program component is added, removed, or altered on any alterable media. The record must contain a minimum of the last 10 modifications to the media and each record must contain the date and time of the action, identification of the component affected, the reason for the modification and any pertinent validation information.
- Provide, as a minimum, a two-stage mechanism for validating all program components on demand via a communication port and protocol approved by the chairman. The first stage of this mechanism must verify all control components. The second stage must be capable of completely authenticating all program components, including graphics and data components in a maximum of 20 minutes. The mechanism for extracting the authentication information must be stored on a Conventional ROM Device that must be capable of being authenticated by a method approved by the chairman.
Those standards cover the possibility of an "alternate program" in a slot machine, and provide a way to check for it, with logs and an external program check capability.
The Gaming Control Board of Nevada was asked to take a look at Diebold, and Nevada rejected Diebold equipment as a result.
Voting machines need tough standards like that. They don't have them.
Several readers are for canning electronic voting for U.S. elections completely. Reader Iamthefallen wants to knowGiven taxi meters and electricity meters both have tamper seals, you would have thought that these would have visible tamper seals as well. If in doubt you could even have two tamper seals: one from Diebold and another from the voting commission, in order to ensure that both parties are satisfied with the state of the machine.
Similarly, slofstra writesHas anyone answered the question regarding need for automated vote counting in a satisfactory way?
Seems to me that manual counting of votes would be vastly more secure as it would take a huge conspiracy to affect the result either way.
Counting a hundred million votes is hard, counting a thousand votes in a hundred thousand locations is easy.
Sorry, I have never seen the point of these machines. Paper ballots are auditable, user friendly, and if electronics is put into the reporting system, can be counted in a few minutes and submitted. Voting machine are a perfect example of a technology fetish at work. It would make an interesting case study to examine the economic and sociological reasons why we sometimes buy technology that we don't need, don't want and further, serves no useful purpose.
(Augmenting electronic voting machines with a paper record is a frequently raised idea; reader megaditto, for one, asks "Is it that hard to put a thermal printer behind a glass shield?" A similar system is required in Nevada voting machines already.)
Paper ballots and electronic ones aren't the only options, though; lever-based voting machines have dominated recent American national elections. Mark Walling writesReader WillAffleckUW suggests skipping in-person voting completely; absentee voting is a good idea, he argues, not only in light of the flaws (demonstrated or alleged) in electronic voting methods, but becauseMy district switched to electronic- from lever-based. in 2004, at 7:15 when I voted on lever machines, there was no line, and just about as many signatures in the book. In 2005, the line was out the door and around the corner at the same time. The person in front of me took 5 minutes to use the electronic machine. People knew how to use the old machines, and they were reliable. These new things take the old people forever to use, and then they complain that they were hard to read ...
Not so fast, says reader JDAustin:absentee voters get a paper ballot that is not only delivered by a trusted source (the U.S. Post Office) who have a verified date/time stamp — and that the ballots can be audited, traced, and verified — now that is a reason to register permanent absentee.
I suggest you take a look at the research into the recent Washington state elections done by SoundPolitics.com. They verified close to a 20% error rate in absentee balloting. The signature verification on absentee balloting is no verification at all due to non-verification being done by those who count the ballots. Additionally, the USPS is not a trusted source, they are just another government bureaucracy. The ballots themselves cannot necessarily be traced nor verified — and even when the signatures are completely different, they are still counted. Due to the nature of voter rolls, duplicate ballots are sent out all the time due to slight variation in a person's name, and the duplicate ballots counts are not caught until after the final tally has been done and the election finished. Finally, mischievous government officials can always delay sending the military their ballots so those serving overseas do not have time to get their vote in on time. This actually happened in 2004 in Washington state.
Permanent absentee is not the solution. Neither is electronic voting.
The true solution takes elements of the recent Mexican election to prevent fraud (voter ID cards, thumb inking, precinct-based monitoring and tallying) and combine them with the best paper-based voting machine.
Many thanks to the readers (especially those quoted above) whose comments informed this discussion.
Diebold lobbied slashdot... (Score:4, Funny)
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along
That's exactly what Diebold wants you to think...
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So which party/candidate would take advantage of this exploit first - the Democrats [uglydemocrats.com] or the Republicans [uglyrepublicans] - both are ugly!
Re:Diebold lobbied slashdot... (Score:5, Insightful)
Every non-partisan issue, mostly those concerning government contracts, business/industry legislation, and the budget rarely fall on party lines. The lines they do fall on are unseen and concern large sums of money and lobbying groups.
Let me put it into the simplest terms: Washington is the evolutionary product of a pool of sharks that use camouflage and obfuscation as chief predatory tactics. Most everyone aside from those with political science majors and those who are very good with them will not have the slightest fucking clue as to 90% of what transpires on the grounds of the capitol. There is simply too much going on too often that is far too subtle for any investigative journalist to know what the fuck.
Diebold machines are kept with those flaws, I suspect, so that both parties can weed out anyone seen as too keenly idealistic, anyone that might upset the corruption so deeply in place that keeps so many people so wealthy, so happy.
On the other hand, one party might've been a bit to bold when they sensed they were losing power, and possibly overstepped the unspoken agreement of how far that fraud would go when during a certain election(s) for the highest office. Of course, the other party is left rather speechless and with no end to turn to, as it would mean a political suicide for all involved.
Just some creative articulation... of course.
Re:Diebold lobbied slashdot... (Score:4, Interesting)
- We have the republicans gerrymandering (of course, the democrats invented this back east).
- The republicans pushed through that Colorado will be electronic, but then limited it to just 4 companies (all who push paperless, but support a paper; amazing since a company would make more profit off the paper than the machine).
- Of course, Owens is good friends with O'Dell and a number of the districts elected to go with Diebold.
And now the democrats are in control of 2 of 3 parts of Colorado congress and likely to get the gov as well. So, will they take advantage of all the openings that the republicans have created (i.e. re=district to kill tancredo's joke of a district (my old one) and create their version of it)? Or will they do the right thing and create laws to avoid these set-ups. Perhaps re-do the constitition to say that a neutral group will suggest the map and congres will do an up-down vote; turn over to judge after 3 plans.It will be interesting to see what happens.
Given the choice... (Score:5, Funny)
...I'd rather scratch me 'X' on a piece of pay-pur!! Yaaaaarrrrrhhhhh!!!!
This message brough to you by the Pirate Party!
Deja vu, the feeling that computers shouldn't vote (Score:5, Insightful)
Open Source (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Open Source (Score:4, Insightful)
But how will you know, the actual machine in front of you is running the software examined?
Come on, people get fooled by spyware and "phishing" e-mails every day — at their own computer. You expect anyone to detect a problem on a system, they see for a minute or two once in two years?
I really don't care, what kind of systems are used, as long as it is not the same system. And if it happens to be the same, I hope, there is not "central repository" of its results or anything. Because everything, that is centralized, also has a single "total failure" point...
Re:Open Source (Score:5, Funny)
Of course it will have a sha1 signature (eg, d46b82a7f4dad427760124c777c0b56fe642afbc) of the binary similar to a BSOD error message so that every grandmother will clearly know that the same code was used.
What did you think?!?
Sarcasm aside, I'm a fan of either paper or lever systems. Simple, reliable, accountable, proven, inexpensive, and hard to hack.
Wouldn't solve the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
In a democracy, the perception of vote fraud is almost as dangerous as the actuality of vote fraud. If we all go into the booth and we all come out convinced that we've had our say and that it counted for something, then even when we lose, we can feel we were a part of the system. If we go into a booth and don't even have that basic reassurance, why go into the booth at all? Why work to change the system if you have reasonable suspicion that the system has been rigged against you in the first place? People in that mindset will either drop out of the system entirely, or seek to voice their feelings through alternative means (violence, etc).
We've had two national elections in a row that were close and had an air of suspicion about them. There are countless anecdotes of votes getting switched on the computers, voting machines dissapearing overnight, etc. Even if there's not actual fraud going on, all of that adds up to a suspicion of the system itself. We can't afford to have that suspicion if we want to remain a democracy.
Too many hoops... (Score:5, Insightful)
Good old-fashioned paper is the solution. It's cheap, it ensures a paper audit trail, and it's counted in public by thousands of real people who witness the count.
Of course you knew that.
Re:Too many hoops... (Score:4, Informative)
can you prove to me the 2004 election was fraud free? can you even support the statement that it was fraud free? Of course fucking not, even a cursory glance at Ohio will tell anyone who has a brain that we can never know if bush really was the honest winner of that state (not to mention several others) or not.
Why did they make up a fake terrorist threat claim on the last county to count it's votes (which prevented all observers from seeing the count)? We know it wasn't a real threat, and we know counting votes in secret like that is one of the fundmantal signs of a flawed election.
How about the ESS tech who, without authorization, accessed on of the voting machines used in voting between the voting and the "recount" (retabulating insecurable inauditable unreliable data tables doesn't constitute a recount).
Insecure elections is NOT a partisan issue, just like jerrymandering ISN'T a partisan issue. The last two national election cycles the insecurities in the voting system have merely happen to have been taken advantage by the republicans - there Is no gaurantee that the democrats wouldn't do that same thing, and I have no illusions that they are immune to the temptation.
Insecure balloting techniques, jerrymandering, etc should ALL be illegal. Jerrymandering is impossible in exactly ONE state in the nation: Iowa, where I happen to live. One state with only 5 house reps is the only state where you cannot jerrymander
Unjerrymandered:
Iowa http://www.legis.state.ia.us/GA/77GA/Congressiona
Hawaii http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/32/HI-
(probably) Idaho http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b3/ID-
NH http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2c/NH-
Jerrymandered:
Texas http://z.about.com/d/uspolitics/1/0/w/texas_congr
California http://www.senate.ca.gov/ftp/SEN/cngplan/CNGMAPS/
Florida http://www.democracyinaction.com/dia/organization
Illinois http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b8/IL-
see the difference? Jerrymandering leads to complex districts most of the time, unjerrymandered districts are as geographically simple as possible.
rather obvious are they not? Jerrymandering is just another form of election fraud and both parties engage in it.
Re:Too many hoops... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd much rather have confidence in the results than a fast turnaround.
Besides, hand counts don't take that much longer. Canada gets their results overnight.
Couldn't the FOSS community (Score:5, Interesting)
- A private, confidential paper receipt, for each vote, that has:
- a voter-legible ballot that the voter verifies before leaving the vote,
-
a bar-code computer scannable version of the vote, and
- some kind of code or a non-serial 'serial' number that will indicate any missing paper receipt, or blocks of paper reciepts. We don't want a true serial number so that the vote remains secret and no one can tell who voted for whom by the serial number. Perhaps hashes of hashes?
- A secure, electronic, computer version of this receipt that has some kind of data integrity -- not just a tally of bits, but some binary sequence that has some kind of verifiable, tamper-evident integrity. Perhaps this digital ballot would have a hash stored in a seperate log.
This is just a preliminary brainstorm. Perhaps encoded into each vote's serial number would be a running tally? That would be one method of tamper-evidence -- by going through the votes, we should be able to tell where and when exactly the fraud happened. The tally should be consistent all the way through, and by the time the polls are closed, we have tallies for each booth.My plan for secure voting, and improving democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
So we know that Diebold is capable of producing secure ATM systems, and that money is the root of all evil in politics, and that we have insufficient voter turnout. So here's my plan for a foolproof voting system. :)
Each polling station will consist of one (1) secure Diebold ATM system, which is capable of accessing the bank accounts of the Republican and Democratic parties. Voters will walk into the voting booth, and withdraw $20 from the bank account of their favourite party. At the end of the election, the party that has received the most votes/withdrawals from their account wins. To cap it off, voters have a new incentive to participate in "the process."
Alternately, the system can be turned upside-down, and people remove money from the account of their least favourite party. Not only does one side win, but the other side is bankrupt!
I love rules like these (Score:5, Funny)
10^38?
Because requiring an error rate of less than 1 in 10^39 is simply unreasonable to ask.
It's just part of the bigger picture (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a greater culture of voter fraud at work here. The Democrats in particular are quick to scream about voter fraud, voter disenfranchisement whenever an ID-less black person tries to vote and things like that, that go back well before Bush "stole the election." They even have been known to put in fraudulent votes in the names of dead people.
Both major parties are bad about this. The Republicans now have leverage that can allow them to kick the Democrats squarely in the pants for all of the years of having to fight uphill against democratic-lead voter fraud. They aren't going to give up on Diebold lightly.
As I have said before, I think that voter fraud by a normal voter should be a simple felony. Six months, permanent revocation of all voting rights, even with a pardon. However, any conspiracy should be legally classified as a conspiracy to overthrow an elected government because that is precisely what organized voter fraud is! It is trying to use the system to bring down an elected government.
Take a bunch of these Republicrats, especially a few rich and powerful ones, out and give them a firing squad for attempting to overthrow the United States government. That will put a dent into voter fraud like this.
Re:It's just part of the bigger picture (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't care if they are a felon, or a muderer, or a kiddnapper or anything else. They can be in jail on death row for all I care. They still get to vote, as long as they are an adult.
Otherwise we have created a way to create classes, 'true citizens' and 'partial citizens.' Which is an enabler of discrimination.
There is no good reason to deny votes to any possible voter. No matter what.
Re:It's just part of the bigger picture (Score:4, Insightful)
I do agree with you 100%.
Now, if companies caught in voter fraud could no longer donate to campaigns, we might be onto something!
Re:It's just part of the bigger picture (Score:5, Informative)
(Disclaimer: I'm a long-time libertarian candidate. You've never heard of me, but then neither has anybody else.)
First of all, regarding your statement, The Democrats in particular are quick to scream about voter fraud, voter disenfranchisement whenever an ID-less black person blah blah blah, the Democrats have long been the party to defend minority rights. If they weren't quick to scream about voter disenfranchisement they wouldn't be sticking to their platform. It's true that they have a personal interest for doing so, but you can't separate the fact into two separate agendas and treat the Democrats as though they're just scrounging for votes.
Second of all, Rep John Conyers (D-MI) wrote What Went Wrong In Ohio, describing mountains of evidence for vote tampering and voter disenfranchisement within the Ohio election system by ES&S, Diebold, and Secretary of the State of Ohio Kenneth Blackwell (election supervisor, who will be supervising his own election for governor this year; he was also the chair of Ohio's re-election campaign for GWB). Thousands of complaints were filed by Ohioans (Ohioese?) for the difficulty they'd found in trying to vote.
To say that both parties are guilty is a serious mistake. I really don't think there is a 'conspiracy' leading up to the Bush administration, but the Republicans, lets face it, have had a culture of corruption leading at least as far back as Eisenhower, McCarthy & J Edgar Hoover. Read the history books, or the nightly news.
Of course, that's not your entire point. How do you expect to get the government to produce and enforce a law regulating itself? As someone else had said, with an incumbancy rate so high (80-95%?), congress likes things just the way they are. And given the amount of well-documented evidence of vote tampering in Ohio in '04, the federal election officials obviously aren't going to lift a finger to investigate anything. Unless more people start asking questions instead of mockingly crying 'sure, a conspiracy! right!' everytime somebody criticises the gov't, there's not going to be a change. Corruption starts from money, the Republicans have the vast majority of corporate support, the corporations don't care about *you* only your money, yet these cowards, willfully standing up for the power to get robbed by corporate america, still stand up for the republicans when there's evidence of tampering with the election system.
I'm from Chicago (Score:5, Funny)
Canada uses a manual method with 10% of voters (Score:4, Informative)
Why not dual-count? (Score:4, Interesting)
- One company develops the casing and only uses old fashioned electronic push buttons.
- The other two other company's each develop a counter module which are both connected to the same buttons.
This way, the final results should match.
If they do not match, the device is broken, or one of the two company's are attempting fraud.
By keeping the push button system simple, the connections to the counter modules can easily be veryfied by looking at them.
If the whole thing would be sealed and shielded by a glass plate and the wires would be clearly marked, everyone could in theory check the correctness of the machine.
This way, for fraud to be commited, the three company's would have to work together which is more unlikely.
Also, it is possible to prevent the company's from getting in touch with eachother.
A very important point here is: Keep it stupid simple.
Re:Ken Thompson for President (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Don't answer with "use paper ballots"! (Score:5, Insightful)
You didn't prove what you thought you did. (Score:5, Interesting)
Since there is no way to check that the Diebold machines are counting corretly - or even that they're not making up votes on the fly to be a close match to the number of voters using them - all you've proven is that now that youv'e switched to Diebold machines you no longer can FIND fraud.