NIST Condemns Paperless Electronic Voting

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."

Hand-marked is the way to go

[koehn]

Here in Minnesota we use the hand-marked optical scan system, and it's great. There's a high degree of confidence that your vote actually counts for something. That, coupled with a mandated recount in a random sampling of districts in each county after the election.

I agree

[Bobo_The_Boinger]

Having worked as an election judge in Maryland, which is now using Diebold machines, I just don't trust them. I have seen the printed tape shown at the beginning and end of each election, so I know the machine told me that it took X number of votes, and that that total matched my hand tabulated total from who went to each machine, but how do I know that when the button for candidate X was pressed, the machine actually recored it for X. I don't know. No one knows. And furthermore, there is no possible WAY to know after the voter leaves the machine.

It is a stupid system, and I am proud that someone with more authority than me is saying so. I believe all the politicians who decided that touch screen voting was a "great idea" should be voted out of office ASAP.

Old paper ballots were fine.

[Anonymous Coward]

To understand the history of the push for e-voting, we must understand the main event sparking this push. That event is the presidential election of 2000. Several voters who lacked the most basic intelligence in comprehending the shockingly simple instructions on a paper ballot voted in Florida. These voters submitted flawed ballots that, for example, had hanging chads which should have been removed to clearly indicate which candidate should receive the vote.

Unfortunately, the idiots were too stupid to understand the instructions.

So, some good samaritans started the push to adopt e-voting machines as a way to protect people from their own stupidity. Yet, these samaritans lacked the technical good sense to understand the need for a paper trail.

That brings us here today. The old paper ballots were fine. They worked well. There was no need to replace them. More to the point, there is no need to protect a person from his own stupidity. If a person is so stupid that he cannot understand simple instructions, then his vote would likely not have been an informed vote: no vote is certainly better than an idiotic vote.

Re:Old paper ballots were fine.

[toddhisattva]

"Why are we doing this at all? is the question people are asking," said Warren Stewart, policy director of VoteTrustUSA, a group critical of electronic voting systems. "We have a perfectly good system -- the paper-ballot optical-scan system."

The parent answers the question from the end of TFA. It needs to be modded up:

To understand the history of the push for e-voting, we must understand the main event sparking this push. That event is the presidential election of 2000. Several voters who lacked the most basic intelligence in comprehending the shockingly simple instructions on a paper ballot voted in Florida. These voters submitted flawed ballots that, for example, had hanging chads which should have been removed to clearly indicate which candidate should receive the vote.

Unfortunately, the idiots were too stupid to understand the instructions.

So, some good samaritans started the push to adopt e-voting machines as a way to protect people from their own stupidity. Yet, these samaritans lacked the technical good sense to understand the need for a paper trail.

That brings us here today. The old paper ballots were fine. They worked well. There was no need to replace them. More to the point, there is no need to protect a person from his own stupidity. If a person is so stupid that he cannot understand simple instructions, then his vote would likely not have been an informed vote: no vote is certainly better than an idiotic vote.

Re:Old paper ballots were fine.

[Anonymous Coward]

Several voters who lacked the most basic intelligence in comprehending the shockingly simple instructions on a paper ballot voted in Florida

Do you actually understand what happened? Do you know how punch ballots work? "Shockingly simple" isn't even funny as a joke. You're given a ballot card with perforations that mark off squares. You're given a round pointy piece of metal. Instructions: Poke out a square hole with a round stick. "Hanging chads" are of course rampant, and for decades, they have been a known problem with a well-established solution for determining whether you voted or not: If the chad is hanging by only one or two corners, you voted whether or not the machine can read your vote. Cue the 2000 election, and Republicans whining about Gore's whining for a hand count for hanging chads. Cue retarded insults like yours that ignores the fact that hanging chads have been around for decades with an established procedure for dealing with them. Cue the supreme court canceling the recount, without any constitutional authority to tell Florida how to run an election or to demand Presidential election results on any particular day prior to the electoral college's ballot.

Re:Direct Democracy

[Telvin_3d]

At one time I strongly agreed with this position. That time was for about 2 weeks in high school before I paid much attention to the actual process of government. The reason we ahve representitive government instead of direct democracy is because keeping up with issues and bills is a full time job for an entire staff of people. I am sure you feel qualified to vote on a handful of issues that are close to your heart, but what about the other 99.9% of thing going on? What about the really boring stuff that almost no one caress about?

The easiest way to demonstrate this point is to ask you what your opinion is on Congressional Bill H.R. 2862? Do you know? Do any of your fiends know? how about H.R. 2744? or H.R. 2360? No? Leave the job to people who can devote their full time and resources to it.

-Fianlly, I appologise for the spelling of this post. It is being typed off quickly on a terminal without any spell check. Sorry.

Wow, just when Domecrats win

[dcollins]

Goddam funny that the federal government gets concerned with this just as Democrats are poised to take power in Washington, after several election cycles where it apparently didn't give a damn.

Whatever, it's the right thing to do, finally.

Re:I agree

[Detritus]

I voted via the Diebold machine in Maryland. It didn't have a paper tape that could be examined by the voter. The election official gave me a smart card that I inserted into the machine. After casting my ballot, it ejected the smart card, which I then returned to the election official. The whole process relied on blind trust that all of this technology was working properly.

Re:Question

[hmbcarol]

While open source will be a critical part of the solution, most of the practical mechanical issues would remain:

Touch screen requires a complex GUI level machine with hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines of code. Even if the code is "open source" there is still that complexity there. Stuff to go wrong.

Some systems have no paper trail. Open source does not change this.

One machine per voting booth solutions are VERY expensive. Optical ballot systems allow my booth to be a curtain, pen, and table. I can then walk to a shared optical scanner and "cast" my vote.

I happen to take my time to vote. If I am standing in front of an expensive touch screen that they can't afford too many of, I am stopping others from voting. But if the only resouce I'm consuming is a table and pen, more people can vote at the same time.

I personally think the solution is optical scanning. These require very little software, which could easily be open source.

Re:Wow, just when Domecrats win

[yali]

Maybe the NIST folks figured they'd finally have a little protection [house.gov] from getting censored or worse [cbsnews.com] for giving their honest analysis.

Instant runoff voting

[AlpineR]

What ballot system would support instant runoff voting? That's the method in which the voter ranks candidates and then, if no candidate attains a majority, the least popular candidates are eliminated and the voters' second choices counted [1 [instantrunoff.com],2 [wikipedia.org]]. It prevents third parties from spoiling elections, like Ralph Nader was accused of taking votes from Al Gore in 2000 or Ross Perot from George Bush in 1992.

With instant runoff voting, it's safe to vote for third parties since you can choose a major party as your second choice. I think the emergence of viable third parties would really improve politics and governance.

But how do you actually collect appropriate ballots? I don't know of a simple way that "connect the arrow" paper ballots would work. One of the advantages of electronic ballots is that they could theoretical handle instant runoff voting elegantly. However, I doubt that the electronic voting system manufacturers are designing for that ability, especially since they seem to be funded by the two major parties.

AlpineR