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E-Voting Undermines Public Confidence In Elections
Journal written by Jeremiah Cornelius (137) and posted by
Zonk
on Wed Jan 30, 2008 05:46 PM
from the i-totally-trust-the-network-my-favorite-inwo-card dept.
from the i-totally-trust-the-network-my-favorite-inwo-card dept.
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Techdirt columnist, Timothy Lee, hit the metaphoric nail on the head, claiming that e-Voting undermines the public perception of election fairness - even when there is no evidence of wrongdoing. 'In a well-designed voting system, voters shouldn't have to take anyone's actions on faith. The entire process should be simple and transparent, so that anyone can observe it and verify that it was carried out correctly. The complexity and opacity of e-voting machines makes effective public scrutiny impossible, and so it's a bad idea even in the absence of specific evidence of wrongdoing.' Add to this the possibility technical faults, conflicts of interest and evidence of tampering, how long before the US vote is viewed as an electronic pantomime?"
Related Stories
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Your Rights Online: NY Rejects E-Voting, DOJ Trying to Force the Issue 228 comments
CompaniaHill writes "Hastily passed in the wake of the 2000 election mess, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) supposedly offered funding to help states update their voting systems. In reality, the short deadlines have been used to push the sale of untested and uncertified new e-voting systems. Many states continue to demonstrate that the new e-voting machines are not reliable. The New York State Board of Elections (NYSBOE) took the time to pass their own voting legislation with additional testing and certification standards which far exceed the HAVA standards. As a result, they missed the HAVA deadlines. In March 2006, the Department of Justice (DOJ) sued New York to comply with HAVA. Now, the DOJ is serving a motion to try to take away New York's right to select and acquire their own voting machine systems — in effect, to force e-voting machines on New York anyway. At the moment it's too soon to say how the NYSBOE will respond."
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Your Rights Online: New Jersey E-Voting Problems Worse Than Originally Suspected 118 comments
TechDirt is reporting that the New Jersey e-voting troubles are even worse than originally thought. Apparently the "minor bug" which was supposed to be fixed is still not corrected, suggesting that Sequoia still doesn't know what is going on. "Ed Felten has received a bunch of 'summary tapes' from the last election in New Jersey, and while many of them do have the vote totals matching up correctly at the end at least two of the summary tapes simply don't add up, meaning that Sequoia's explanation of what went wrong is incorrect. Given how often the company has denied or hidden errors in its machines, despite a ton of evidence, we shouldn't be surprised that it was inaccurate in explaining away this latest problem as well. However, we should be outraged that the company refuses to allow third party researchers to investigate these machines. It's a travesty that any government would use them when they've been shown to have so many problems and the company is unwilling to allow an independent investigation."
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That's the plan (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:That's the plan (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The answer is:
1) To make peoples votes public information so everyone can see them immediately, know where everyone stands, and know if the votes were tampered with.
2) To allow them to directly vote on each issue if
Re:That's the plan (Score:5, Insightful)
"The answer is:" - To fully understand why it's been practically impossible to rig an election in places such as the UK and Australia for well over a century now.
E-voting seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to the 2000 election but before re-inventing democratic elections a second time in a single decade please take a look at the existing designs that have withstood the test of time and two world wars.
Party politics at the simplest level is two or more people who agree with each other. Too many parties and you end up changing governments more often than underwear (re: Italy), not enough and you end up with no genuine choice (re: US).
Parent
Public Confidence? (Score:5, Insightful)
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How long? (Score:3, Funny)
I thought that ship had already sailed...
e-voting or not (Score:2, Funny)
Let's extend that a bit (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Let's extend that a bit (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
100% accuracy isn't necessary (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think a well designed voting should necessarily have to be 100% accurate. A hand-counting system isn't that accurate, but it can still be trusted as long as there aren't barriers from people being involved in the process
Transparency (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Transparency (Score:4, Informative)
Another part of the problem is that most existing implementations are - frankly - crap. They offer minimal security, have frequently been reported as having errors such as non-zero counts, have poor reliability, provide minimal accountability and often provide no means of verification. This is wholly unacceptable. Nobody would accept that from a cash register in a supermarket, never mind a system that is mission-critical in a democracy.
Hand-counts can be reliable. For the longest time, the British system was entirely done by hand-counting, with very small error rates for a population of 60 million. The American system includes machine counts, statistical sampling, and other mechanisms for speeding up the returns, with different States using different methods. It is also worrying that the first returns are announced prior to the polls closing on the west coast, which will inevitably introduce bias and strategic voting. The British system isn't perfect, and has recently developed all kinds of flaws and fraudulant practices, but it can be used as a yardstick of what a democracy should minimally achieve.
Of course, a democracy has other dependencies. It's only meaningful if enough of the population votes for the votes to truly represent the population. The electoral college has the potential for distorting the consensus of the people and probably has. There is no ballot option to reject all candidates and re-open nominations. Media saturation and candidate funding warp awareness. The educational system isn't up to the standards needed to ensure the population have the breadth or depth of knowledge to understand the complexities of a nation or avoid the wiles of a skilled talker. If these flaws remain, then even a perfect voting system can never represent what the public actually want or need, which is what a democracy is about. Being heard has no meaning if you never learned how to talk.
To me, the question shouldn't merely be how we reliably count votes, but should also include how we reliably cast them. There may be no better solution than the one we have, I accept that, but I won't accept that this is known until it actually is.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It can, and then the very small fraction of the population that is capable of understanding the security properties of cryptographic protocols will be convinced that the election was legit if they personally act as election observers (through the audit mechanism included in this well-designed e-voting system).
There's a problem though: One of the properties that any voting system should have is that *all voters* should
Sure, the polls might say so... (Score:2)
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Not one voter requested the paper ballot option.
As a second observation, in all three elections the county ran a 100% audit, comparing the output of
i've been saying this for weeks (Score:5, Interesting)
it's electronic voting
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=413698&no_d2=1&cid=21986758 [slashdot.org]
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=409654&cid=21950000 [slashdot.org]
democracy has plenty of problems, but one of democracy's greatest strengths is that by making the citizens it rules a part of the process, it inspires confidence in the government, it instills legitimacy
if you make the voting process opaque, you destroy confidence, you destroy legitimacy, you weaken people's faith in their democratically elected government, out of bad perception that their part in the process has been messed with, hidden
electronic voting must be universally rejected in all ways and all levels of government, asap
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Like an earlier poster insightfully mentioned, people are also distrusted when the measurable effect in an election is close to or below the error margin. This is because the error margin when paper ballots are counted by people is not 0%. Making citizens a part of the process only "instills legitimacy" when those citizens are fu
i wish to make an example of you (Score:5, Insightful)
Making citizens a part of the process only "instills legitimacy" when those citizens are fully competent, and the majority simply aren't.
i want you to look at and consider you fellow citizens, your fellow human beings. if, when you look at those people, you find something lacking, something untrustworthy, this is an antidemocratic instinct
the full inference of the comment of the man above is that there is the unworthy, a magical cut off line (which no one can determine, but that's besides the point), and then a special higher class of worthy people
this is a story as old as time. it's called aristocracy. it's called classism. it can be based on an arbitrary test for intelligence, a certain amount of money in your bank account, a certain genetic makeup
but the end results of aristocracy and classism is all the same: the french revolution
if you find yourself with antidemocratic instincts like the poster above, take a deep breath, step back, and fix yourself. you are broken in a dangerous, authoritarian, fascist way
you fellow human beings are your fellow human beings. beginning and end of story. you are no better than them. if you think you are, and there is a special class of people who share this superiority with you, you are a danger to society. YOU and your thinking is the seed to the downfall of democracy. and it is the same fear based pap that you often howl about coming from the right
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scratches head (Score:2)
and i'm the nut
huh
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Rejecting electronic voting shouldn't make you trust the system if you didn't before, unless you thought that electronic voting was the only possible source of error in the process.
Concerning "fairness," paper voting and electronic voting
your question is easy to answer (Score:3, Insightful)
however, there is no one out there who can accurately measure those qualities in any trustworthy way
therefore, you have no choice other than to start looking at people as equals, and let things fall as they may. proof by outcome of life. no test can test for the qualities that are important in leading, for example. the only honest way to look at your fellow human being is as an equal. there is no mag
a nation steered by hoardes/mobs of couch potatoes (Score:3, Insightful)
in other words, a nation steered by hoardes/mobs of couch potatoes absolutely sucks
and yet every single other option you can think of is yet worse
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E-Voting Undermines ... Elections (Score:2)
E-Voting Undermines Elections.
Now having said that... Electronic tabulation (by optical scan for example) of paper ballots, accompanied by statistically appropriate manual audits, would inspire happy confidence in this voter.
with your paper receipt? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
how long? like, maybe 2000? (Score:2)
Conceited E-Voting Vendors (Score:3, Insightful)
Especially if the metal cabinets were aged in the factory with a little rust and scrapes...
But the vendors are used to scoring sales by just keeping the purchase procedure as closed as the IP in their opaque devices. The user themself doesn't figure into their business model at all, whether they're casting a vote or reading about the purchase on their behalf in their newspaper.
Scantron (Score:5, Insightful)
I prefer voting on those than the touch screen units. Especially when I have to wait 20-30 min to get my time to vote, and I am in a relatively small voting district now. When I was in a larger district it was a 1-5 min wait to get you ballot, and a 1-5 min wait to scan in at one of the two machines.
I also find that older folk are afraid of touch screen technology because they feel that it will break, or they are not comfortable with computers to start with.
Let me just sharpen my #2 pencil and vote!
Phil
Re:Scantron (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a teacher, and I give scantron tests once in a while. They're extremely error-prone. If you don't fill in the space completely, or if you try to erase and change your answer, it will often grade it wrong, i.e., someone looking at it would say that the student probably intended B, but the machine scored it as D or something. I've been told that the error rates are lower on a carefully calibrated and maintained machine, but ... then we just have to sit around wondering whether Florida went the wrong way because a certain district didn't maintain their scantron machines properly.
I'd be happy with any system that let me have a printout to take home. I could verify that it really recorded my vote the way I thought. I know there's the argument that this makes it possible to buy people's votes, because the buyer can verify that the seller really voted as he was paid to do. But in fact it's already trivial to buy votes: get the person you're bribing to vote absentee. Voter fraud is one of these silly Republican vote-getting issues (like flag burning) that is a total non-issue in reality. For that matter, let's just do all voting by mail. It's the 21st century, and I don't see any rational reason to make a busy person go to a particular place on a weekday in order to transmit 67 bits of information.
Parent
Solution already exists -- machine rejection (Score:4, Interesting)
This at least gets rid of the over-votes, and could get rid of the under-votes if the Scantron has a "possibly read a filled bubble but not sure" threshold (I really don't know).
One interesting tidbit from the 2000 Florida election that often gets ignored in favor of controversies over the felon lists and the nature of the butterfly ballots themselves, is that the machines they used were in fact capable of this! It was an optional setting, the machine could either take the bad ballot as-is but just not count it, or it could reject the ballot back into the voter's hand for correction. As you may have guessed, voting machines in the precincts with high rates of bad ballots had this option disabled, and ones with low rates of bad ballots had it enabled. But we weren't told that, and were instead just left to assume that the people in the high-error precincts were simply dumber than everyone else, and we just accepted it! But in reality, errors are common, but most get a chance to correct it when the machine spits it out.
That said, I do agree that the best thing to do is have the computer print out the ballot so as to minimize the possibility of error. It's really the best of both worlds: The accessability of a voting machine that lets you edit your choices, read more about propositions, and enforces rules like no over-votes, but you still get a human-readable paper ballot that serves as the vote of record and can be recounted by anyone with working eyes. And if you make the printed ballot machine readable -- I prefer an OCR-friendly font so it's the *same* markings that are both human and machine readable -- you can still use a machine counter to get your instant-gratification.
It's not that hard to design a working voting system that minimizes voter error, maximizes accessibility, and most importantly maximizes openness and transparency. Just... nobody that I can tell has actually come forward and put the pieces together in a real system intended to be sold.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
nobody that I can tell has actually come forward and put the pieces together in a real system intended to be sold.
There are probably reasons for this and a few come to mind fairly readily. First, the potential market for these machines is somewhat small and relatively fixed (i.e. it is a niche, a larger one perhaps, but still a niche). Second, the voting hardware has to maintain a high degree of accuracy and quality. For example, it will be made of quality materials and provable micro-programming with good documentation and easy configuration. All of these things would make the products expen$ive, at least to buy, and
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now (Score:2)
See, these days, they don't even have to have the appearance of propriety. Witness Dick Cheney giving his Halliburton shares to charity when he became VP...or did he?
Perceptions are grounded in reality (Score:5, Insightful)
They say this like it helps... (Score:4, Insightful)
And the answer is so simple.. (Score:2, Interesting)
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In a way, confidence is what is most important (Score:5, Interesting)
The purpose of elections in a republic is NOT because there's something "right" or "nice" about selecting the government officials and rules that are preferred by a majority of the voting population. (In fact, sometimes that's actually a bad idea. "Democracy" is often three wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.)
The purpose of elections is to increase the stability of the country and pacify it internally. They do this by attempting to figure out which way the war would come out, if it were actually fought over the issue.
To do this, elections must convince the losing side that they can't reverse the result by resorting to force.
That means they don't have to be perfect - but they have to be convincingly good enough.
- A wide race will be convincing. If the exact numbers are off it doesn't really matter.
- A really close race may come out wrong. But if it's close it also means a war won't reverse the result: Too many additional people will get annoyed and oppose those who try the violent option. So the losers might exhaust the peaceable remedies: Recounts, courts, etc. Then they gripe about it non-stop until the next election. And EVERYBODY tries to fix the system to be more accurate and avoid this hassle next time. Repeat until the elections are believable and/or the margin is broad enough that there's no serious dispute.
But the easiest way for an election to be believably fair and honest is for it to be VISIBLY fair and honest. Count the votes behind locked doors or inside a software-driven black box and you substitute trust for visible honesty.
Once the people stop trusting the elections their stabilizing effect is gone. Then losers may think they are strong enough to reverse the result and (when the winners start doing things that hurt their interests) morally justified in making the attempt. Then you are just asking for civil "unrest", comities of vigilance, death squads, coups, and civil or revolutionary war.
So it's far more important that the election procedures be VISIBLY honest and their approximate accuracy known than that they be dead-on accurate.
Which is what we're seeing now. Computerized black-box voting killed the audit trail and enabled the possibility that a small number of people could introduce large and undetectable changes to the result. Then came a close election with important issues at stake. Regardless of whether the black boxes gave an accurate count or were corrupted, there was no way to SHOW they were right - or close enough not to matter. So the losers were unconvinced.
Repeat after four years, and again after eight, adding in a foreign war, massive government spending, "security" intrusions on civil rights, and attempts by media conglomerates to swing the election exposed by comparison to uncontrolled Internet communication. Now you're starting to approach a scenario where large groups of losers start thinking "Maybe the elections were stolen. Maybe we've been conquered. Maybe there are enough of us to reverse this. Maybe violence will work. Maybe the system is corrupted to the point that violence is the only answer. Maybe violence is PROPER."
This is WHY it is more important that the elections be VISIBLY, CONVINCINGLY accurate than that they just be accurate.
Vote Counting Doesn't Belong at the Booth (Score:3, Interesting)
Electronic vote counting simply doesn't belong at the voting booth.
Instead, what should happen at the voting booth should be ballot preparation, not vote counting. I have absolutely no problem with a fancy machine that has cool graphics and touch screen voting options in a thousand different languages. If you want to go through the effort of putting that together for a somewhat reasonable price, knock your socks off. I don't even mind this end of it being completely closed and propritary.
But the vote counting part needs to be separated from the ballot preparation. The only thing all of this fancy hardware is really doing is to assist a voter in understanding the rules of the election. In other words, not vote for multiple people if multiple votes invalidate your ballot, remind you of races that you didn't vote in, allow you to clearly note who you are voting for (no missing chads or fuzzy and inconclusive ballots), and provide a very clean ballot that election judges can use later for the vote counting process. Ballots cast should be on some sort of physical medium that has irreversible marks (so an election judge can't modify the results afterward) and human readable so the voter can have clear confidence in how their vote was cast. Any computer scientist worthy of that title ought to be able to figure out how to make something simultaneously human and machine readable... we aren't talking rocket science here and this is a decades old solved problem in the field.
One of my largest problems with the Diebold machines is that they have the vote counting take place in the voting booth itself. This opens up not only the traditional forms of voting fraud, but it also opens up new vectors of attacking the system and requires far too much in the way of securing the machines in order to ensure the integrity of the data. Besides, most of the security protocols aren't followed anyway, and those that are followed are a joke in many cases and have multiple methods of being circumvented. By its very nature at least in America, voting is done in private and away from the eyes of election judges. This is also done to ensure the integrity of the vote cast (by stopping coercion). But this act, by its nature, means that the machines can be compromised during the act of voting itself.
Let's look at what problems these machines are trying to solve:
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Re:I would say (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:I would say (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a scientist by education, training, and occupation, and I deal with statistics and measurement uncertainty on a daily basis. I have absolutely no faith in electronic voting precisely BECAUSE the lack of verifiability makes it inevitable that a systematic bias will be introduced by a corrupt individual. Random errors in counting should be nearly negligible, and should be able to be kept down to around a percent or so. Also, if random errors of that magnitude are significant, they should be able to be dealt with by recounting ballots which have been secured in a publicly observed chain of custody. (Multiple measurements, smaller uncertainty.)
But the systematic errors are the real threat, because they give undue influence to lone individuals. There IS a "right result" in an election, and it is the one obtained by adding all the votes that were legitimately cast by voters in the election. And this can be obtained by using observable procedures which ensure the counting process accurately reflects the votes that were cast without systematic error.
I think you are viewing the problem completely backwards when you say that a less transparent system makes it easier to "believe" in conspiracy theories. The actual problem is that a less transparent system makes it much easier to CONDUCT a conspiracy. You don't need the consent of poll workers and poll observers to steal an election if you are using an electronic machine with no paper trail to do it.
I am quite confident that if I were programming or configuring a voting machine with no paper trail, and I wanted to steal an election, I would have the technological know-how to do this. And if I can do it, countless others can. The fact that electronic voting machines can be easily and invisibly compromised has nothing to do with voter perception. It is simply an objective fact.
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Re:I would say (Score:5, Insightful)
Who the heck's idiotic idea was it that companies could make software to count votes, and then not let anybody look at the software and see what it actually does because it's "proprietary"?
Parent
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