E-Voting Undermines Public Confidence In Elections

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?"

That's the plan

[spun]

If they take away people's confidence in our elections, people won't care as much when they do away with elections altogether.

Public Confidence?

[nurb432]

When was there ever public confidence in politics?

Let's extend that a bit

[Dachannien]

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.

Moreover, a well-designed voting system should be 100% accurate in the counting of votes because of, not despite, the removal of humans from the counting process. The problem is that so far, no commercially available electronic voting system exists yet that has been well designed.

Transparency

[l2718]

In principle, the ballots being counted in public in front of everyone in the village will inspire more confidence than an obscure computer calculation. However, as the 2000 Florida debacle has demonstrated, hand counting has its own problems (e.g. error rates) which the voting public does not understand either. It seems to me that if the system artificially produces a landslide (e.g. via a winner-take-all-state-electoral-votes system), the public is happy that things went well. If the elections are close there is a lot of consternation and misunderstanding. On the technical level, ballots that are both human- and machine-countable but generated automatically (so there is less room for voter marking errors], look best to me. If the voting machine prints the ballot out but keeps no record otherwise that would be best. But just wait for a close elections and the voters will express lack of confidence in the results. The problem is the following: if you are trying to measure a large effect, then you will get the right result no matter what method you use and everyone will be quite confident you got the right result. If you are trying to measure an effect which is just at the level of resolution for your detector (or worse, as in the Florida case, below the measurement error) then there is no way to be as confident that you got the right result.

Re:That's the plan

[Hatta]

Meh, they don't need to get rid of the elections, rigging the process by which candidates are chosen is good enough. Let the people make their choice, either way it goes it's going to be acceptable to those who really have power.

Re:I would say

[l2718]

I also discuss this in another comment, but the problem really arises not when your candidate loses, but when your candidate loses narrowly. This is quite justifiable: the smaller the effect (difference of support between the candidates), the less likely it is that your detection system (election procedures) can measure it correctly. There are two kinds of voter confidence issues: confidence that they system is free of biases, and confidence that, assuming it was free of biases, the system got the right result. It's true that electronic voting reduces confidence in the first property -- but I think the main driver for lack of voter confidence is their ignorance of the fact that even an unbiased system will get the "wrong" result some of the time. Since we lack an objective measure of the support of the candidates, there is of course no "right" result of the election beyond the actual results, but in the end I think that what happens is that when elections are close voters come face-to-face with what scientists have been facing for centuries under the name like "measurement error" and "scientific significance", they (the voters) tend to ascribe the problem to systematic bias rather than random error. It's true that less transparent systems make it easier for the voters to believe in conspiracy theories, but the underlying problem is lack of scientific thinking skills. I'd predict that after a close election voters will react the same way regardless of the technology employed (or lack thereof).

Conceited E-Voting Vendors

[Doc Ruby]

If they just put the same untrustworthy electronic voting machines into big, heavy metal cabinets, with metal pull-levers for voting and a big red handle that commits the votes while it opens the curtain (just like we've used in NY for generations), no one would complain. And those freaks who did complain because the actual votes are counted by an untrustworthy device buried inside it would be treated like freaks.

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

[Psychofreak]

I personally like the little bubble sheets that get filled in. They are commonly called Scantron. Use a disposable paper mask that is pre-punched to match the sheet you mark on, and the voter takes it to the one or more machines for reading them in. Trackable, human readable after a fashion, simple technology that can be easily deployed for very large number of voters. Best part is one machine can service about 100 voting stations as cafeteria tables with dividers are all the voting stations are!

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:i've been saying this for weeks

[Sciros]

No the "biggest threat to western democracy" is people being so stupid that they believe rejecting electronic voting will remove the bigget threat to western democracy. What a joke.

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 fully competent, and the majority simply aren't. By the way, electronic voting can potentially have a lower margin of error than counting by hand.

Finally, if you are THAT concerned about pressing a button on a touch screen and having a program tally the results rather than marking a paper ballot and having a person tally the results, you're nuts.

Perceptions are grounded in reality

[plnrtrvlr]

Americans may not be big into knowing their history, but history has shown again and again that if politicians can lie cheat or twist their way around they will... It's a reality that is so pervasive that even that majority of Americans who never cracked their history book open in high school know it to be true. They may say "even when there is no evidence of wrongdoing" but what everyone thinks is "so we just don't have the evidence, and even if it isn't, it's going to happen." And that isn't perception, it's good ol' pattern recognition: if there's a way to cheat, someone is going to do it eventually.

Re:Let's extend that a bit

[l2718]

Moreover, a well-designed voting system should be 100% accurate in the counting of votes because of, not despite, the removal of humans from the counting process. The problem is that so far, no commercially available electronic voting system exists yet that has been well designed.

I think you are going a bit over the top. There is a trade-off between accuracy, flexibility, and openness here. There's no way to reach 100% accuracy in the counting of tens of millions of ballots, each containing selections for tens of races. If you allow yourself to also take into account the discrepancy between the voter's intent and the voter's markings on the ballot (I'm against it but many aren't) then "100% accuracy" is not even meaningful. What you should strive for is 1. maximum accuracy 2. known error rates. If you knew the error rate of the ballot-generating-and-counting system then you'd know at which point a thorough recount is warranted (assuming it had a lower error rate), and when you simply need to rerun the election (or draw cards [cnn.com]). By the way, it's true that ATMs are more reliable than voting machines, and that the banking system is more reliable than the election system -- and yet even there the system is not 100% reliable. A bank "lost" $20K belonging to a friend of mine through bad record-keeping on their part. It took weeks to get her money back. Once in a while banks will record a transaction wrong -- and each bank has a controlled system that they design and implement. Elections are run in parallel by many independent local authorities under many conflicting criteria and need to be more flexible (do we allos for write-in candidates? for people who are voting provisionally?). Yes, there is an accuracy price to pay for that, but since almost all races are not close, and when the race is close we shouldn't really care who wins in the end, it's not too much of a price to pay.

They say this like it helps...

[Ghazgkull]

I love this kind of quote (my emphasis added):

Again, there's no evidence anything untoward has occurred in Maryland.

Umm... exactly?

i wish to make an example of you

[circletimessquare]

please read the above comment slashdotters

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

Re:I would say

[Geoffrey.landis]

In any country with over a million or so people, there's sure to always be somebody who claims fraud on any election. The point is that it should be clear to the rest of the people that these claims are crackpot. If the answer is "well, the software claims the election was fair, and we trust the software..." then that doesn't inspire confidence. And if they say that the software's proprietary, you're not allowed to look at what it does... and there's no way to recount, you just have to accept it... that's not good for confidence in the system, even if it actually really is true that the vote counting was fair.

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"?

Re:That's the plan

[FudRucker]

i believe it, what we are witnessing is the slow and methodical destruction of the USA...

Re:Scantron

[bcrowell]

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.

Re:That's the plan

[thecountryofmike]

"...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?"

Ummm. Hmmmm. Gotta be 4 or 5 years ago by now.

your question is easy to answer

[circletimessquare]

i actually do believe that people are better and worse than other people, on a whole number of judgment calls

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 magic test or projected characteristic that is a shortcut for making a determination of a complicated quality of that person. race for example. income another example. all failures at judging someone's true value

take a test for intelligence

can you even define intelligence? how incredibly complex a topic are we dealing with? do you honestly think it can be measured in such a way as to find the best leader out there?

your standard iq test has things for example that put value in manipulating 3D shapes in your head. there are autistic people who can do that. meanwhile, some guy fails miserably on an iq test for manipulating 3D objects in your head. ok. that same guy is extremely gifted in many leadership qualities: persuasion, instilling trust, etc. so what is the point of this stupid iq test again in determining worthiness in life? zero

so the idea of drawing people into classes in terms of good potential to lead or not lead, vote or not vote, is completely a nonstarter

it's not that people aren't better or worse than another. i believe in fact they are. it's just that there is no way to determine that objectively, so you can't go down that path in any moral or intellectually honest fashion

Re:That's the plan

[TapeCutter]

Regarding #1 on your list - How do you think Saddam consistently got 99% of the popular vote? Despots and dictators implement the public disclosure part by having the 1% who get it wrong dissapear.

"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).

Re:Transparency

[Chandon Seldon]

The concept can - in principle - be implemented as well as, or better than, alternatives.

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 be able to understand that the election was legitimate. Any voter should be able to act as an election observer or auditor. This simple requirement immediately eliminates any sort of DRE voting system.

Even the best-practice that most "voting experts" suggest, optical scan with statistical sampling, isn't good enough because an arbitrarily selected observer can't follow the statistics. Hell, in the 2004 Ohio recount the voting officials couldn't even get the concept of a *random sample* right and most of the people involved didn't realize anything was wrong.

The traditional paper ballot / ballot box / hand count protocol isn't perfect, but it's the only system that's been suggested that meets the "any voter can observe or audit" requirement - and without meeting that requirement, it'd be a stretch to call the resulting system democratic.

a nation steered by hoardes/mobs of couch potatoes

[circletimessquare]

is actually better than all the other options

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