NIST Condemns Paperless Electronic Voting 201
quizzicus writes "Paperless electronic voting machines 'cannot be made secure' [pdf] according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In the most sweeping condemnation of voting machines issued by any federal agency, NIST echoes what critics have been saying all along, that due to the lack of verifiability, 'a single programmer could rig a major election.' Rather than adding printers, though, NIST endorses the hand-marked optical-scan system as the most reliable."
Sleight Of Hand (Score:5, Insightful)
And no ID verification to boot (at least in MD) (Score:4, Insightful)
Direct Democracy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sleight Of Hand (Score:3, Insightful)
Note: I'm not saying secure computer-assisted voted is impossible. Just that nothing remotely close has been invented yet.
MOD PARENT DOWN (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, that would be illegal, and if I'm caught, I'd be in trouble, unless I just got my friends elected to a position where they can get me off the hook.
Moderation isn't for squeltching points of view (Score:5, Insightful)
"We" may have been over this before, but that doesn't mean you are correct, and it certainly doesn't mean you should be calling for people to be modded down just because you disagree with them.
Letting the voter verify that their vote was counted as cast, might, as you suggest, make vote buying easier. But it would also, as the GP points out, make stealing an election wholesale much harder. To make a rational choice between the two, you have to consider the relative risks, and doing so does not lead to the conclusion you're advocating. Even with receipts of some sort, vote buying is a very risky proposition, since by its very nature a lot of people would have to know about it before the election. If you want to buy ten thousand votes, at least ten thousand people will have to know about it, including who to vote for and what the payoff or threat is. If even a few of them blab, you're goose is cooked.
Conversely, without receipts, elections can be stolen by a small group of people with no witnesses except for the machines, and they can steal as many votes as they want--a million isn't that much harder than a dozen.
--MarkusQ
Optical scanning offers significant benefits (Score:4, Insightful)
2 - Inexpensive scaling. Since you mark on paper the polling station can have 20 booths for people which are not much more than a table, curtain, and a pen; yet they can share one or two optical scanners. Touch screen systems require one expensive machine per booth.
Do the math. 20 expensive touch screen machines per polling station, versus 2 less expensive optical scanners.
This cost savings could be used in urban areas where there traditionally have not been enough resources for the election.
3 - Trustable. Any dispute can be settled by the actual piece of paper I wrote on. Optical scanners are based on technology used by schools to grade for decades and require little more than a motor, light sensor, and a very low end CPU. There is little to go wrong and very little which can hide tricks.
4 - Easy to use. I take a pen and fill in a box. Touch screen systems appear to suffer serious "alignment" issues which can cause votes to be mis-registered and which require frequent realignment in the field.
5 - Robust. There is no screen to be scratched, or broken. The voter never interacts with the scanner except to slide a piece of paper into it. There is no printer to jam, or foul, or have other issues.
Re:Hand-marked is the way to go (Score:2, Insightful)
I do actuality believe that a company could make valid and secure voting machines, but I have not heard of any yet that where not foolproof. My guess is the companies that supply's them just don;t put in the work required to make a secure machine. as that HBO special showed, here is a company that said there machines are secure and there is no code on there memory card,s tho someone showed there was and used this against the machine. but say there was no code on the card, maybe then it would be different, but the company in question chose to Lie directly to people about it instead of owning up and helping make there machines better.
this is where I like being Canadian, we have a agency called elections Canada (think thats right) that takes care of the voting at federal level (not sure about provincial level tho). Its not taken by the individual province and separate laws per area, nope one set of laws, one way one agency. Any place I have voted at just uses paper ballots, no machines or anything. Just hand counts, and guess what, when was the last time in Canada you heard mass issues of rigged elections and such.
I call bull puckey (Score:3, Insightful)
I call bull puckey.
The potential for corruption is massively greater when THERE IS NO WAY TO CHECK FOR IT.
When it can be detected (and is routinely watched for), trying to rig an election stops being a path to power and becomes a path to jail.
Re:because without a verifiable paper trail... (Score:4, Insightful)
When a single programmer can steal the elections, it's because the electronic voting system is poorly designed.
Re:I agree (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Sleight Of Hand (Score:3, Insightful)
A tiny bit of fuding the numbers, and you have 5% of votes from people who only exist on paper...
They certainly aren't going to come forward and say that their votes weren't counted correctly...
Re:because without a verifiable paper trail... (Score:5, Insightful)
Elections can be stolen with paper ballot elections. However it is far more work to do so than with a fully electronic election. To steal a paper ballot election, especially if it isn't close, you would likely have to create a large number of fake ballots manually, and then selectively replace your victim's ballots. When there are many hundreds of thousands of ballots, this is a huge task, and cannot be done quickly. And to really cover your tracks you might want to shuffle the ballots, so they are not sorted by choice. Scrambling a deck of 52 cards is hard enough. Imagine hundreds of thousands of ballots. And of course all of these changes would have to match with the vote tallies. Any errors will be obvious, and could be considered evidence for voting fraud.
Contrast this with electronic paperless voting, where a single piece of software can replicate itself through many voting machines, as was shown possible [princeton.edu] by two Princeton professors. This code can then invisibly alter votes, and then eradicate itself after use. The fraud in this case would be undetectable.
Re:Direct Democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Politics and governance is no different. Specializing is a good thing, and representative democracy allows people to specialize in governance. We don't even let generalist physicians do surgery, let alone the average layperson. It's too complicated, and too important... so we give the job to a specialist. Same with government. We could let the average person make decisions about long term taxes, economic growth, foreign policy, and the like, but I think it's too complicated.
I'm in California, and we've got more direct democracy than pretty much any other state in the union. And every election we're bombarded with propositions. No one really bothers to read the text of the summaries, let alone the actual text of the proposed legislation. So people vote based on their instincts, the television ads, and what their friends tell them. These aren't well-considered or thought out reasons... just the reasons that people have time for. I try my best to wade through them, but I've got a job and a family, and there often just isn't the time.
If you've got the time to keep up with all the information that *should* go into making these decisions, more power to you. But I think that the vast majority of the population doesn't have the time, interest, or education to do the same.
Machines bad until Democrats win (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyone?
Anyone?
[crickets]