Hard Evidence of Voting Machine Addition Errors 275
goombah99 writes "Princeton Professor, Ed Felton, has posted a series of blog entries in which he shows the printed tapes he obtained from the NJ voting machines don't report the ballots correctly. In response to the first one, Sequoia admitted that the machines had a known software design error that did not correctly record which kind of ballots were cast (republican or democratic primary ballots) but insisted the vote totals were correct. Then, further tapes showed this explanation to be insufficient. In response, State officials insisted that the (poorly printed) tapes were misread by Felton. Again further tapes showed this not to be a sufficient explanation. However all those did not foreclose the optimistic assessment that the errors were benign — that is, the possibility that vote totals might really be correct even though the ballot totals were wrong and the origin of the errors had not been explained. Now he has found (well-printed) tapes that show what appears to be hard proof that it's the vote totals that are wrong, since two different readout methods don't agree. Sequoia has made trade-secret legal threats against those wishing to mount an independent examination of the equipment. One small hat-tip to Sequoia: at least they are reporting enough raw data in different formats that these kinds of errors can come to light — that lesson should be kept in mind when writing future requirements for voting machines."
One thing to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've just got to ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, how hard?
Someone presses a button and a counter gets incremented. Big whoop.
Any error at all in a programming exercise that goddamn simple is evidence enough for me to call for a full on corruption investigation.
I'm amazed by this every time that I (Score:5, Insightful)
But this gets shoved under the carpet at every turn like a bit of dirt that not even MSM wants to report on.
It makes me sad to be American, well, sad that such things happen in America. We are supposed to be better than this. We were (I think) and I hope that we are better than this soon. It's disgusting.
The machines themselves are not complex pieces of equipment that take rocket scientists to develop or maintain. According to someone that should know, they are not even as secure as an ATM machine. How fucking sad is that?
Why, yes, I do have some suggestions. Where is the forum for me to submit them?
My Question (Score:3, Insightful)
Are there any good reports as to how accurate paper ballot counting really is? And how far off do the two diverge?
Simple solution? (Score:2, Insightful)
The easy solution would be to have 2 paper print-outs: 1 that the voter tears off (like a receipt) and can examine to verify that they voted the way they intended, and 1 that is automatically ripped off and deposited in the 'lock box' for any audits or recounts that might need to be done. (I'm thinking a system that automatically tears the receipt paper and drops it within the sealed system--no human hand touches it, though you can see it through glass/plastic.)
That way, the ease of transmission and voting exists, there is a verifiable record that the voter can examine, and there is no concern over anonymity, since no order of voting can be extrapolated when the individual votes are separated from the roll. It works on all levels.
I can't get over--What is so hard about this!? Why are voting machine manufacturers having such a hard time getting a simple solution, and why are they so resistant to improvements on their designs?!
John (Score:2, Insightful)
what kind of programmer (Score:1, Insightful)
seriously, how can any programmer fuck up addition?
Re:I've just got to ask... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I've just got to ask... (Score:4, Insightful)
Aside, even if the devs were 100% perfect and typed ALL the code perfect, there's nothing stopping some jerk from slipping something in at final compile time, or even after that with "last minute update" to the "firmware".
Re:what kind of programmer (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That may be... (Score:4, Insightful)
These machines are intended and designed to prop-up the parlour-game of democratic basis for American government. They are not meant to "work". They are meant to reduce the definition of "democracy" to merely "voting" for the general public - and then to manage that vote. If they decrease the confidence of a certain segment of the public in the whole process, then they are also serving their secondary purpose: The devolution of the US to Banana Republic status.
The coup was completed in 2000. The dramatic operations began 40 years earlier, but it took awhile.
You don't see this. You think you still live in the same country that you were born in, that you attended Elementary School in, that you call the same name.
But it just isn't true. Visitors to your country get it in a very short time - but most of them clamp their mouths shut - it is quickly apparent that Americans are uncomprehending.
This isn't just Republicans. Sure - the Republican leaders are the sharp and shiny spear-tip, slicing the American side. The Democrats are just as on board - the solid wooden shaft, following this through the body. The elite of these - Cheney's and Pelosi's - will keep their mansions and their millions, their holidays in Vail and Sun Valley.
They will never join the people who "voted". That would be to join Dr. King, or Mel Carnahan.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Studies of ballot counting accuracy (Score:4, Insightful)
Hand counting paper ballots is robust and adaptable. However even here it is hard to test under labratory conditions.
The most recent study is one happeing right now in Bernalillo county NM, by University of New Mexico and Caltech. Many different ways of counting ballots by hand are being tried (different numbers of observers, different ways of verbalizing, different ways of pre-sorting ballots, and different orders of counting races, etc...) One of the more remarkable findings so far is that teams of counters can have prodigiously different rates of counting (10x variation). This makes logistics of recounting hard to predict and hard to allocate resources for.
However even that study is flawed in part by the neccessity of time. You cant convince people to count a full election a dozen different ways. So you have to use shorter ballots or only count selected races and this will mask certain error modes.
Another kind of error mode those studies cant' examine is the one that happened in Washington state during the Governor's race. In king county, various piles of ballots were "misplaced" and later "discovered". It could be malice, but more likely incompetence and lack of procedures causing ballots to be stacked willy nilly in various store rooms or in different containers when gathered from all the precints.
I'm really please with Bernallilo County Clerk Maggie Toulouse for staging this mock recounts since these will iron out procedural issues and establish a lot of currently anecdotal human factors issues more concretely. Moreover the willingness to be som open about this and invite activists in is quite refreshing. Many clerks have a siege mentality--and of course this is because they have so many activitst making demands and too little money to staff their positions.
The typical clerks office pays less than $10/hour to new staff and your not going to get IT folks for that rate.
Send Maggie [bernco.gov] an email telling her she's got your respect: clerk@bernco.gov [mailto]. Clerks really deserve a pat on the back when they do it right.
Re:I've just got to ask... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:One thing to say... (Score:1, Insightful)
Voting is a human decisionmaking process that should be handled by humans. It also scales perfectly - communities can do vote tallies that are just added together by districts that are added together by counties that are just added together by states etc. It's not like america is even particularly special - india (MUCH larger than the USA in these terms) and europe can manage human-operated elections.
There is simply no need for voting machines, except to allow corruption of the voting process.
Yes, paper ballots can be corrupted, but it takes a lot more resources - many human potential whistleblowers to pay off, or just to make mistakes in implementing the orders. And we've got expertise in dealing with such things. Whereas a voting machine can just be quietly reprogrammed, perhaps only once if you get at the code prior to its distribution to all machines, and nongeek people tend to have a blind faith in answers provided by machine.
Re:I've just got to ask... (Score:4, Insightful)
Free software voting machines don't engender trust (Score:4, Insightful)
This really has nothing to do with a voting machine's software being "closed source".
From the voter's perspective, there's no real solution to this problem but hand-counting of voter verified paper ballots. For me the ultimate solution to this problem is this: Voters walk up to a machine they had no part in preparing and (optionally) use it to prepare a voter-verified paper ballot. That ballot is then stored and counted by hand. This process makes the trustworthiness of the machine completely irrelevant. If any voter doesn't trust the machine to do this job, they should be given the freedom to fill out the ballot by hand (also handy when the computer breaks down or the power runs out). There are substantial benefits to using computers to prepare voter-verified paper ballots and there are substantial benefits to using exclusively free software voting machines [counterpunch.org] but trustworthiness is not one of those benefits. Nobody can trust any computer they don't control and no voter is given the freedom to completely control their voting machine. Even if trusted voting machine software existed nobody would be able to know that their voting machine was running it.
Contrary to another poster's view [slashdot.org] on this, no audit trail would be sufficient to engender trust in any code because the preparation of the audit trail would always be in question.
The benefits of a free software voting machine lie in the government and public avoidance of monopoly (thus reducing maintenance cost and possibly increasing machine flexibility), and supporting business opportunities (politicians love it when they can say some project "creates jobs" in their district), and in turn leaving the body that paid for the machines in a position where they can make the machines meet their needs. All proprietary software distributors are monopolists. It is this monopoly that each proprietary software voting machine manufacturer works to protect; this is what's really at stake for those businesses. If any one of them were more user-focused than they are (ES&S is in a great place to be this user-focused since they don't depend on other software for their machines), they would see free software voting machines as a point of sale. They could be the best situated to compete in the maintenance market for their brand of machines because they've known their machines the longest, so ostensibly they know those machines best. Governments will think this way when it comes to purchasing support contracts whether long-term or ad-hoc.
Alas, competing monopolies is the way of things right now in the US. The voting machine makers have the country carved up like the mafia in The Godfather movies and they exploit county after county in every sale. I ought to know, I helped Champaign County, Illinois recommend a pair of voting machines to the county board. We saw demos from a few vendors (ES&S, Hart Intercivic, and Diebold via their local distributor) and picked the least worst pair of machines (ES&S).
As opposed to what? (Score:3, Insightful)
And I can't believe people are still raising this objection. If the choice came down to:
A. The system you describe where individuals could be pressed to vote a certain way individually or face consequences from known or knowable others who would be committing a crime which would be easy to prosecute.
B. The system we have now, where votes can be stolen wholesale and there's not a damn thing anyone can do about it.
...would you actually prefer B? If so, this seems very illogical. It's like saying "people shouldn't be allowed to carry money out of the bank, or even proof of how much money they have, because criminals could use the information". Yes, there are risks associated with A, but they are nothing compared to the risks associated with B.
--MarkusQ
Re:That may be... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:That may be... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How OVC system works (Score:4, Insightful)
Two questions:
1. You propose using a 1D barcode along the side to "encode" the selection(s). It deliberately contains the minimal amount of data necessary to record the vote at the time of counting. Yet the barcode contains data that links it to a session on the voting machine, so that the printed ballot can be linked to a physical use at the machine. How do you obfuscate the session so you can't connect a particular voter to the vote,
In OVC the machine just records the session happened but it has no way to ID who voted. This point was debated at length in the design. One lighter weight protocol is simply to record the vote pattern and not create a UID for the session. Then one is simply verifying that some session had that vote pattern. That is less unique but still a reasonable check. If I recall correctly the standard OVC system uses a UID. But the protocol could work without it.
In both cases they both have to not only get these into the metal box, but they have to also remove the same number of other ballots.
Even if they did that, there would still be an anomolous number of ballot creation sessions. More sessions than ballots cast, discarded or left the prceinct without voting.
If they tried to stuff the ballot box in some private moment--perhaps later in the evneing when the boxes are hauled down to city-hall, then these wont match the scanned records or the Creation sessions.
It would take a rather daunting conspiracy to pull off this in just one precinct. Expertise in the computer hack, and the paper stuffing is needed.
(I did think of one possible solution for #1 but you introduce additional hardware into the system. Right now the touchscreen voting systems I've used, someone hands you a smart card, you put it in the system, it keeps the card locked in until it's recorded whatever you've entered, and then you hand it back to the election official. You could do the same thing, except the card is merely an "access card," rather than a "vote-recording card.")
2. Continuing with the barcode, how do you encode a short-enough code that still permits write-in candidates? Obviously you can't use a barcode format like [session-number]-[candidate-number] if you provide a "Write-in" option.
Re:I've just got to ask... (Score:3, Insightful)