Virginia Scraps Electronic Voting Machines Hackers Destroyed At DefCon (theregister.co.uk) 194
Following the DefCon demonstration in July that showed how quickly Direct Recording Electronic voting equipment could be hacked, Virginia's State Board of Elections has decided it wants to replace their electronic voting machines in time for the gubernatorial election due on November 7th, 2017. According to The Register, "The decision was announced in the minutes of the Board's September 8th meeting: 'The Department of Elections officially recommends that the State Board of Elections decertify all Direct Recording Electronic (DRE or touchscreen) voting equipment." From the report: With the DefCon bods showing some machines shared a single hard-coded password, Virginia directed the Virginia Information Technology Agency (VITA) to audit the machines in use in the state (the Accuvote TSX, the Patriot, and the AVC Advantage). None passed the test. VITA told the board "each device analyzed exhibited material risks to the integrity or availability of the election process," and the lack of a paper audit trail posed a significant risk of lost votes. Local outlet The News Leader notes that many precincts had either replaced their machines already, or are in the process of doing so. The election board's decision will force a change-over on the 140 precincts that haven't replaced their machines, covering 190,000 of Virginia's ~8.4m population.
Let's face it (Score:5, Insightful)
Despite the ongoing efforts of all political parties; democracy is too important to entrust to for-profit organizations.
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We entrust our parties and politicians to them, why does it bother you that the way to choose between the whores is in their hands, too?
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It isn't that democracy is being entrusted to for-profit organizations, it is that politicians are trying to use technology for technologies sake. If you want to create high-tech voting booths, you have to have a team of specialists to audit and maintain them. For this task, computer/human readable paper ballots are the sweet spot we should be looking toward. Humans can use them in the absence of tech in order to audit the machine that can count and tabulate much faster with great accuracy.
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Not really. Purchasing bodies just need to include security audit requirements as part of the bid criteria.
The bigger issue right now however isn't so much profiteering as it is political partisanship. There are few companies that don't lean to one side or the other, and the people in government obviously aren't neutral since you know.. its their job to be political and partisanship is the name of the game these days.
And I mean paper ballots aren't exactly the panacea that people like to believe either.
Why americans don't care? (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean other countries manage to do the important ballots with just plain pen and papers and multiple parties observe them.
why the country that prides on democracy has so few volunteers to make it? ..also why the fuck just 2 parties while at it...
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The problem in the US is that they vote on vast numbers of things. At most, in the UK, I'm voting for 3-4 offices at a time (MP, MEP, devolved parliament / assembly representative, local councillor) and these rarely line up so I typically only vote for 1-2 at a time. In the US, they vote for everything from local dog catcher on up. This increases the complexity of the elections considerably (and has secondary effects, such as politicising the judiciary - which in other countries is intended to be apolitical - by making both the judges and the district attorneys elected positions).
It should be noted that this varies state by state in the US. In my state of Massachusetts, for example, judges aren't elected but are appointed for life. We do elect for various offices at the state, county, and municipal levels however.
Also, some towns, like to one I grew up in, still practice direct democracy in the form of a town meeting. Any eligible voter can attend the meeting, and everyone in attendance gets to speak and vote on proposed ordinances.
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why the fuck just 2 parties while at it...
For one simple reason: the two parties want it that way, and work together to ensure it stays that way.
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I have yet to meet a single person who claims to want a third party who is willing to get off his ass and actually participate IN ANY PARTY AT ALL.
I bet that you have, but you may not know it.
Don't like who the Democratic Party nominates? Get involved. Don't like Republican candidates? Get involved.
I'm not sure what you're recommending here. Do you mean get involved to make sure that the Dems or Reps nominate candidates that you like? If so, that's beside the point because it does nothing to break out of the two party system.
About a third of eligible voters actually bother to vote in presidential elections. More like a tenth in other elections, and fewer in primaries. The number of people who volunteer or make contributions is microscopic. The number of people who show up at party functions is close to zero.
All true, but it's pretty easy to understand why -- it seems pointless.
If you're not willing to participate in either of the two existing parties, you won't participate in a third one.
Baloney. Lots of people don't participate with either the Dems or the Reps because they feel that both parties are beyond redemption, and therefore the election proc
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Throwing a bit of shit to the wind and possibly verging into troll territory here but my guess.. Americans just feel entitled to democracy. They've always had it and therefore they assume they always will have it and forget that its something they have to continually fight for, even if the "fight" is as simple as exercising their right to vote every couple of years.
As for two parties, check out this video [youtube.com]. The guy has quite a few interesting videos on voting systems as well as a bunch of other topics, but
Re:Why americans don't care? (Score:5, Informative)
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Yet, here in Canada, we have 5 parties in Parliament and Provincially, the last election was close enough that the Greens with 3 seats hold the balance of power and hopefully will force us to change from first past the post. At that the last Federal election saw the winners winning partially for promising "no more first past the post federal elections", which promise they broke. (Too decisive was the excuse)
Hmm, looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] agrees with a list of examples of first past the po
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We only really have two parties federally -- the Liberals and the Conservatives, and its been a battle between those two for decades. The NDP took over the opposition spot for the one election cycle because Jack Layton was amazing and showed up as the NDP leader right as the Liberals shit the bed, but even then we just ended up with the Liberals being nearly irrelevant and we still had effectively two parties.
As for BC.. the Green's still aren't a major party even though they ended up having an amount of p
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by voting for some quixotic can't-possibly-win third-party candidate, on the theory that that will somehow change things.
So, what do you suggest people do when neither party is remotely acceptable to them? Not vote?
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Right to bear arms - how is that holding up in UK? Free speech - how is that holding up in Germany?
France, Italy, Greece, India, multiple parties, they seem to be doing great, yes?
It is telling that you list the right to bear arms ahead of the right to free speech. Those other countries you mentioned have their problems, no doubt. But in case you haven't noticed, the very-wealthy have used their money and influence to take over the two political parties in the US. The country is essentially a plutocracy at this point.
Re:Let's face it (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't use the computer to take the voter input and then generate a paper receipt, use the paper ballot with on-site optical scan to record the result that the voter marked on the paper. If you want to get 1980s-fancy, implement an on-ballot print technique that puts one pattern of ink dot next to each entry that the voter filled-out correctly, and possibly another next to those that the voter did not fill-out correctly (like those pick 3 entries for county commissioners etc, or where the voter left the field empty) in case later manual review is necessary. Could even go so far as to generate serial numbers on the now-scanned-and-printed ballots, where those ballots that had issues have their serial numbers noted for manual review if necessary (ie, at a minimum if the voting is too close to call for some particular initiatives) and for that serial number to be machine-readable in the future (ie, also helps the computer know the ballot is already scanned, so that it doesn't tally multiple times if scanned multiple times). We had this technology with optical-scan "scantron" forms for school tests from at least the 1980s, if not the 1970s, so this should not be a hard thing to do.
If an election goes well then board of elections can perform a small audit, looking at perhaps a few polling places to confirm that the paper matches the electronic, and then perhaps a random sampling of ballots at other polling places, and then pat itself on the back. If an election goes spectacularly badly, the board of elections can hand-tally each and every paper ballot if necessary, because they were human-readable when marked by a voter. The ballots, not the computer, is the official result of the election. The computer merely helps speed-up the process of counting the results.
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So then, how do you tell if an election goes badly?
Counting the ballots is one thing that should absolutely NOT be done automatically - the counting machine is a prime target to be compromised, and how would you know unless you also count the ballots by hand? A random sampling is unlikely to catch strategic compromises unless you double-check a significant portion of them, in which case why not just count them all manually in the first place? There's not really any advantage to machine counting except not
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Don't use the computer to take the voter input and then generate a paper receipt, use the paper ballot with on-site optical scan to record the result that the voter marked on the paper.
How is that better than printing the result of what the user selected on the screen?
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Every election I've voted in since 2012 has used optical scan ballots.
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WTF is the US' problem with paper ballots? Are you too stupid to count the votes or too lazy to carry the ballot to the voting committees?
I mean, for real, folks, why the hell is it that it works in third world countries in Africa (provided the local warlord doesn't stop it at gunpoint) but it's completely impossible for the country that pretty much invented process management?
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WTF is the US' problem with paper ballots? Are you too stupid to count the votes or too lazy to carry the ballot to the voting committees?
Pure speculation here, but thinking is that "we" don't like paper ballots because it doesn't give the news networks access to "real time" voting information. Elections are a spectator sport around here, complete with viewing parties, we need our information now dammit!
In reality though, I like the way my county does the voting. When I show up they cross my name off the list of registered voters or write my information down if I'm not on the list. I get a paper ballot, go into my little cubicle to fill in
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Then paper ballots are the best thing since sliced bread! Some count faster, some count slower, you can do coverage round the clock, from the first early counts to statisticians blowing it out of proportion and predicting the outcome from the voting result of some backwater county with a handful of votes that could easily be counted in a few minutes while we're waiting for the results from NY and LA.
You can make that show last through the night. Hell, with recounts you can make it last days!
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Elections are a spectator sport around here, complete with viewing parties, we need our information now dammit!
This. I think this is one of the largest factors for why our elections aren't terribly trustworthy.
We need to have a 24 hour national holiday for voting day, not staggered by time zones. No counting of votes until voting day is over. Also, a media blackout on election coverage (and ads) during that 24 hours.
And paper ballots.
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Nah. Its primarily cost. Paper ballots are expensive to print and once the counts are confirmed, they're entirely useless and just get burned. So you have a few hundred million sheets of paper to print and distribute across the country that you just dispose of a day or two later.
E-voting removes the majority of that cost. You just pull them out from storage, plug them in and away you go.
Or at least they would remove the majority of the cost if we'd start auditing the suppliers of these things instead of
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Three things spring immediately to mind:
There's no blinkenlights - how can we claim to be the greatest country on earth if our voting doesn't even involve any blinkenlights?
It's too difficult to steal the election.
There's not enough money to be made by voting-related corporations. Do you want the Diebold executives to starve after all the bribes (sorry "lobbying") they've spread around?
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Do you want the Diebold executives to starve after all the bribes (sorry "lobbying") they've spread around?
Is that a rhetoric question?
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Electronic voting machines were just a mistake some people in some places made historically. Elections are managed locally in the US, so there are 1000s of people making these decisions in different places across the country. Now that electronic voting machines are more-or-less universally understood to be a mistake, they are being gradually replaced with scanned paper ballots.
It's not very meaningful. People make mistakes. They get corrected. It takes time.
Re:Let's face it (Score:5, Insightful)
The city of Richmond replaced all their touch-screen voting machines 3 years ago. The replacement? Paper ballots and scanners.
As an election officer, I prefer the paper ballots. Easy to track and easy to recount when necessary. I trust the system a lot more than the old touch screens. What's wrong with paper ballots? It's just as fast getting voters through and counting is actually easier.
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I can see the appeal of touchscreens (or screens with voting buttons along the side, to avoid any possible calibration issues) to create a paper ballot - you can have much clearer ballot, with plenty of information available, while guaranteeing no improperly cast votes due to user error. It does require voters to double-check their paper ballot to make sure nothing was compromised though.
Immediately scanning a paper ballot to detect problems gets you much the same benefit of course, with even fewer risks
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while guaranteeing no improperly cast votes due to user error.
No matter what system is used, this is something that can never be guaranteed. There will always be user error.
The trick is to keep the error rate low enough that it doesn't affect the outcome of elections -- something that can be easily accomplished with paper ballots.
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True. But scanning the ballot for anything questionable, in the presence of the voter, gives them a chance to fix any problems so that no errors reach the counting stage. Ideally you'd do it in the voting booth, with a screen or printout that highlights exactly where the errors are, and explains how to fix them (need to vote here, can only vote for one candidate, etc). Your ballot doesn't get accepted until it scans as flawless. Add explicit "abstain" option for each issue/office and you can even ensure
Re:Let's face it (Score:5, Insightful)
If we look at the conditions of a fair election, we have certain criteria to be met. Elections should be fair, meaning that voting should be no undue burden to each of the voters. Elections should be free, meaning no one should be able to force you to vote a certain way. Elections should be equal, meaning, that each vote counts the same, votes are not tampered with, and no additional votes should be added (e.g. ballot stuffing or changing invalid votes into valid ones).
The problem with e-voting is that it can't warrant free and equal at the same time. If voting is free, no one should be able to know how you have voted, and you should not be able to keep any proof how you voted. Because if you could prove your vote, a "voting enforcer" could either pay you if you provide proof to have voted correctly, or punish you for not having the proof. For e-voting that means that there should be no electronic or physic trail from a vote back to you. On the other hand, there has to be proof that all valid votes have been counted, no vote has been tampered with, and no additional votes have been added to ensure the equality of votes. How do you keep track of immaterial entities? You can't sign them with the voter's key, otherwise they aren't free anymore. If you sign them with another key, how do you ensure that this key is not used to add votes? And how do you ensure that the votes are really counted the way they were cast? And how do you watch the count? One important argument why to use computers in the first place is to speed up the counting process. I disagree. Counting should never be faster than the watchers can count.
It takes a team of specialists to go through the code of the voting application itself to ensure it does only what it is supposed to do. And the Underhanded C Contest shows how easy it is to hide side effects within code. And this only looks at the application itself. It doesn't even look at the operating system or hardware tampering. Who does audit the millions of lines of code for the operating system and the billions of transistors on today's processors and RAM chips?
Having people watching the sealing of the ballot box and people watching the ballot boxes during the voting process until the seal is broken and the votes are counted by hand, and then the resealing of the boxes and the transport to the central voting office together with the counting tabs, and then watching how the final tab is counted does not require any specialist knowledge.
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On the other hand, there has to be proof that all valid votes have been counted, no vote has been tampered with, and no additional votes have been added to ensure the equality of votes. How do you keep track of immaterial entities? You can't sign them with the voter's key, otherwise they aren't free anymore. If you sign them with another key, how do you ensure that this key is not used to add votes? And how do you ensure that the votes are really counted the way they were cast? And how do you watch the count?
You are asking the right questions, but there is indeed an answer. It's called "blind signature" AKA the "digital cash problem." There are a few researchers who posted solutions to this over a decade ago, even before blockchains. So it could be solved, but it is a significant effort and most people wouldn't understand it. So in the end, you are right that paper is the way to go.
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So it could be solved, but it is a significant effort and most people wouldn't understand it.
And a lot of people would understand it just fine, but it still requires an unacceptable amount of blind faith that it's been implemented properly.
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The problem is almost all of your arguments against e-voting also apply to paper ballots. What proof do you have that all paper ballots have been counted? You drop your slip in to a box and then trust that the people doing the tallying (and their overseers) are going to be honest. You don't retain any sort of receipt to indicate how you voted (because if you did you'd have that whole voting enforcer issue again.)
Similarly, how do you know the paper ballot is going to be counted as it was cast? Once agai
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Out of curiosity, what issues have invalid ballots caused in the past? Have they invalidated elections so they had to be repeated?
Do you not remember the 2000 election and the "hanging chads"? I am still all for paper ballots, but they are not without issue.
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Seems like it should be easy enough to avoid a "hanging chad" fiasco just by designing a more robust ballot-punch. e.g. give the arm a ratchet-lock so that it must be pulled down fully before it can be raised again.
Or alternately, if you really like the digital stuff - just print out a ballot card with the appropriate votes clearly marked, and display it to the voter for confirmation before it's cast (or shredded if they don't confirm). Ideally the confirmation should require mechanical intervention so th
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just print out a ballot card with the appropriate votes clearly marked
Trouble with that (and trouble with the opposite direction of scanned ballots) is that there's no technical reason that the machine has to print the same thing that it recorded (or record the same thing that it scanned.) You're just having to trust it.
It always comes down to trust. We have yet to come up with any ballot system (even paper ballots) that don't require you to trust someone along the line. Or at least if anyone thinks they've come up with one, we haven't tried putting it into practice yet.
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Why would it record it? I guess I wasn't clear enough that the paper ballot is what should be counted, the machine exists only to generate it. Just a more compact and easy-to-use version of the mechanical ballot-punchers.
I firmly believe that computers shouldn't be involved in official ballot-counting at all. At most it should do a redundant "sanity check" count, so that if the machine count disagrees with the official count by more than the accepted margin of error, you can know to look for "funny busin
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One of the few good uses of a computer in an election I can think of, is a scanner to immediately scan your ballot and confirm that everything is valid before you leave.
Just don't use the damned thing to actually count the votes, no matter how tempting it is.
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Do you not remember the 2000 election and the "hanging chads"? I am still all for paper ballots, but they are not without issue.
The "hanging chad" thing is an issue, but a very minor one. It was blown all out of proportion by the politics of that particular election.
There is no scheme that is perfect, but paper ballots, even with their issues, are much more trustworthy than electronic voting machines. At least with paper ballots, if there's a problem then it is usually obvious to everybody.
We had paper ballots here in Virginia Beach (Score:4, Informative)
In my Virginia Beach precinct, we had electronic voting machines a while ago, but have had paper -- fill in the bubble, then scanned -- ballots for the past several years including the 2016 election. The ballots are scanned on their way into the locked ballot box. This system is easier and faster than the electronic versions were, plus there's a paper trail.
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Yep. The computer merely makes counting ballots in a well-run election faster. It makes the paper the authoritative documentation, with the computer merely a tabulation device so that many fewer people can actually run the election to bring costs down.
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Unfortunately, counting the votes is a much more lucrative attack vector than casting them, where it might be noticed (assuming there's a paper trail). Basically no one wants to do a recount after the fact, and there's no other way to tell if the tallying machine was compromised (especially when even gross inconsistencies with exit polls are routinely ignored).
There's nothing wrong with having a machine tally the votes as a backup/sanity check, but it should *never* be used to create the authoritative tall
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Counts are normally quite consistent - you do 2-3 independent counts in parallel, under supervision, and only do a recount if there are significant discrepancies. There will be errors, but usually small ones insufficient to tilt the election. Most importantly, it's *extremely* difficult to compromise the count - improper chain of custody for the ballot boxes is pretty much the only major weakness.
Computers on the other hand are incredibly good at counting with near-perfect accuracy, but also incredibly ea
The attack vector for that (Score:3, Informative)
These bubble counting machines themselves have an attack vector that's been well exploited.
In Florida, they did an analysis of faulty misaligned ballot counters and there was a statically higher number of mis-calibrated counting machines in Democrat districts. Those machines rejected votes as invalid that were valid.
Really, lots of people, done under surveillance of representatives of the candidates standing for vote is the way to do vote counting.
When you have elections run by political groups, you have op
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The point isn't that the scanning machines are perfect or impartial. The point is that scanned paper ballots can be re-examined and re-counted later.
Scanned paper ballots are also individually numbered, so the quantity can be matched to the number of voters who signed in. This is a safeguard to prevent someone from filling out 1000 extra ballots or throwing away 1000 of them during the recount.
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Its not hard to count the number of voters who signed in and compare it to the total votes reported by the machine. The only way that would fail is if the machine just reports a winner rather than the counts, and that would be dumb even by voting machine standards.
Making sure it recorded the correct vote for each voter, without removing their voting privacy, is far more challenging.
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In my Virginia Beach precinct, we had electronic voting machines a while ago, but have had paper -- fill in the bubble, then scanned -- ballots for the past several years including the 2016 election. The ballots are scanned on their way into the locked ballot box. This system is easier and faster than the electronic versions were, plus there's a paper trail.
With a bit more it's possible to go a step further, and get election systems that not only have a verifiable paper trail, but which are end-to-end verifiable, allowing any voter to check after the fact whether or not their vote was included in the tally (but without being able to prove to anyone how they voted), and allowing anyone to verify the correctness of the tally. The method relies on applying the concepts and methods of modern cryptographic proofs to the problem of voting. It not only ensures that b
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That's not really all that useful. Being able to verify that somewhere, the fact that I voted was recorded, doesn't tell me a) if it tallied the correct vote I gave it or b) if the verification service and the vote record match.
That is, for a) you could punch in Democrat and it silently, internally records a vote for Republican. Since your after-the-fact check only notes that you did vote, not who you voted for, you still have no way to prove this one.
And for b) the verification website/service/whatever c
Re:We had paper ballots here in Virginia Beach (Score:5, Informative)
I have a theory why some districts may prefer voting machines to electronically scanned paper ballots. Voting machines make it possible to manipulate election results without actually hacking the machines themselves. You just have to hack the wait times in districts unfavorable to you. Lest that seem far-fetched, note that studies have shown that waits in minority-dominated precincts are on average almost twice that of white districts.
For the price of a single voting machine you can put up a dozen of those cheap pop-up voting booths. This means the marginal cost of scaling up an overloaded precinct's capacity is extremely low. I live in a state that uses scanned paper ballots, and the voting places have so many booths that in 45 years of voting I've never had to wait more than five minutes to vote -- and that's for checking in with the elderly volunteers. There's always free booths, no matter how heavy the turnout.
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Ok, maybe. But maybe the electronic voting machine salesman just told them people could vote in 90 seconds so it's OK that they cost twice as much. Meanwhile voting actually takes 3 minutes (or whatever) so you get lines.
Conspiracies make for interesting stories. Interesting stories are less likely to be true than boring stories.
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Well, there's a different between conspiracy theories and theories about possible conspiracies.
Conspiracy theories are prima facie irrational, because they require the believer to assume that the actors will do a number of improbable things -- usually things that are actually against their interests or wildly risky -- with a level of perfection that is beyond what could be practical. Typically vast numbers of people who have good reason to distrust each other work together in a perfectly trustworthy way.
Wh
Simpsons take. (Score:2)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=... [youtube.com]
Manual counting only in Norway last night (Score:5, Informative)
Here in Norway we just had a general election last night:
Just 2-3 weeks ago Jan T Sanner, the minister with responsibility for elections, decided that every single vote had to be counted manually, including all early voting ballots. Previously those votes had been counted using optical scanners but with the news about how hackable most voting machines have turned out to be, he decided that we won't trust them.
Voting booths closed at 21:00 and the trend (our current prime minister will almost certainly get another 4 years) was immediately clear even though many of the details were less settled. This is mainly due to our voting setup with 169 representatives from 19 counties, where each party is supposed to get a total number which corresponds as closely as possible to the total vote counts, but with a cutoff of 4.0%: If a party gets less than that they will not get any of the final 19 slots which goes to the parties which have gotten too few direct representatives.
This morning at 07:00 we had passed 95% of total votes counted and a couple of the smaller parties had just managed to lift safely above the 4.0% cutoff point, so now the result is for all practical purposes final.
The key idea is that in all countries with "one person - one vote" the effort needed to do a full manual count (which is actually a dual count and verification) is exactly proportional to the size of the country, so it should be just as easy to do this in the US as in Norway!
Terje
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Re:Manual counting only in Norway last night (Score:5, Interesting)
That doesn't sound right. As I understand it, Ireland has a Single Transferable Vote (STV) system. Under STV, you count all of the first votes, and if no one wins outright then you eliminate the least-popular candidate and redistribute their votes to their second choice. If there's still no clear winner then you eliminate the least-popular remaining candidate and redistribute all of their votes to their second choice if they're still there or to their third choice if they aren't. You repeat this until someone has 50%. You never dump all of the votes out, you only redistribute them from the least-popular candidate.
There are other problems with STV, including some quite odd failure modes. For example, if you have four candidates, A, B, C, and D and 30% vote ABCD, 25% vote CBDA, 24% vote DBCA, and 21% vote BCDA, then candidate A will win. B is eliminated in the first round (because he receives the fewest votes) and all of his votes are redistributed to A. Now A has 51% and so wins, in spite of being there last choice for 70% of the electorate, and B never gets to see any of the second-choice votes in spite of being the first or second choice for 100% of the electorate. Of course, the same problem happens with first past the post, but there you don't have the information required to know that it's happened.
There are some variations on STV that avoid these corner cases, but they make counting harder.
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It's a painfully slow system to be sure. In some cases it takes all weekend to figure out who won.
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If i was being uncharitable, I'd say it looked like you had already made an incorrect conclusion and were trying to come up with data that supported it, and got the math very very wrong.
Sorry, I was trying to reconstruct the example from memory. I did a detailed analysis of the corner cases of various voting systems for an assignment about 20 years ago, but it turns out that 5 minutes starring at a Slashdot post wasn't enough to reconstruct the examples. It is possible to construct cases where someone is everyone's second choice but is eliminated in the first round fairly easily, but I was trying to show a more complex example where tactical voting backfires.
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I really can't understand why it is so hard to build a secure voting machine. Maybe we need GNU Democracy or something.
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It's easy to build one.
But how do you know it hasn't been tampered with?
Usually someone proposes an intricate cryptographic protocol as a fool-proof solution. But that's a great way to ensure that 99.9999% of the population will never be able to verify that the machine hasn't been tampered with.
You need something which is obviously correct. That is just difficult to do with complex machinery.
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Ballot boxes are not exactly fortresses. They are, at least in my country, metal boxes secured shut with an official zip tie.
The solution to verification is to simply print out a receipt. If there is any doubt the receipts can be manually counted.
The main problems with these machines always seem to be extreme stupidity - USB ports on the outside, connected to the internet, running Windows XP... An open source version could easily build custom hardware and run a hardened BSD system. It wouldn't be invulnerab
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That's why ballot boxes should always be guarded by at least 2-3 people loyal to competing parties until the votes are actually counted.
Receipts are a nice idea - but once you have an official tally nobody wants to go through the difficulty and expense of counting them manually (especially if the incumbent party won), and without a manual count you have essentially zero confidence that the tally hasn't been tampered with. So why not just do the manual count up front and leave the automated tally out of it
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The biggest most obvious weakness - how do you tell if there's a need? And if there is cause for suspicion, but the incumbent party won the official tally, what are the odds that there will be a recount?
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@toonces33 gave a pretty good description of how the paper ballots with electronic scanners in the USA work.
Why do these make sense in the USA? In most US jurisdictions, elections are about much more than electing a few people to a few offices.
For example...
Here is a list of all 132 judges that serve in your jurisdiction, should they be retained? (Yes or No)
Referendum # 3453: Should the greate
Re:Manual vote counting (Score:4, Insightful)
... it should be just as easy to do this in the US as in Norway!
mmmmm....yeah
Norway - population ~5.2 million total
Ireland - population ~6.4 million total
Virginia - population ~8.5 million total
Two countries vs one state
Bit of a difference in scope, donchathink?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
To count the ballots you need X counters per million people. The Us is ~60 times larger than Norway, so would need 60 times as many counters, but has 60 times as many taxpayers to pay for the counters. The overall cost and complexity of manual counting per citizen is exactly the same.
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You just need more polling places. You then have group of mutually untrusting individuals escort the sealed ballot box 100 miles to the nearest counting center.
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The point is that it scales easily. The you need say one counter per 5,000 votes, no matter how many votes you have. You can adjust the work-load based on how quickly you want to know the result.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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It not just scales, it scales incredibly well. It's not as if it has 8.5 million people and the same amount of people capable of reading a ballot.
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The populations you list are on order of the size of States within the US. The US Constitution gives the power to run elections to the States, so your numbers argue that this if this works for countries this size, it should work for states this size.
Most States in the US then delegate the business of implementing the elections to their counties (or Parishes). These are even smaller.
It may actually be the small size of the bodies running the elections in the US that make it harder to implement. It is why
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To which you replied that the USA has a lot more people than Norway. I strongly suspect that this means that you are an idiot.
I probably am an idiot. But even an idiot recognizes that there are some problems that do not scale linearly. I have had similar arguments (scalability) with regards to health care.
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Counting ballots and healthcare are two problems which do scale wonderfully... More people voting means more people who can count ballots, and more people served by a healthcare system means more taxpayers paying for it. Both of these are solved problems elsewhere in the world.
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Just 2-3 weeks ago Jan T Sanner, the minister with responsibility for elections, decided that every single vote had to be counted manually, including all early voting ballots.
He should go one step further and implement end-to-end verifiable voting [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2)
Here in Norway we just had a general election last night:
Just 2-3 weeks ago Jan T Sanner, the minister with responsibility for elections, decided that every single vote had to be counted manually, including all early voting ballots. Previously those votes had been counted using optical scanners but with the news about how hackable most voting machines have turned out to be, he decided that we won't trust them.
Voting booths closed at 21:00 and the trend (our current prime minister will almost certainly get another 4 years) was immediately clear even though many of the details were less settled. This is mainly due to our voting setup with 169 representatives from 19 counties, where each party is supposed to get a total number which corresponds as closely as possible to the total vote counts, but with a cutoff of 4.0%: If a party gets less than that they will not get any of the final 19 slots which goes to the parties which have gotten too few direct representatives.
This morning at 07:00 we had passed 95% of total votes counted and a couple of the smaller parties had just managed to lift safely above the 4.0% cutoff point, so now the result is for all practical purposes final.
The key idea is that in all countries with "one person - one vote" the effort needed to do a full manual count (which is actually a dual count and verification) is exactly proportional to the size of the country, so it should be just as easy to do this in the US as in Norway!
Terje
Australia had a national election last year, it took over 2 weeks for a leading party to be established as it came down to counting postal votes in many electorates.
That being said, there is nothing wrong with paper votes leaving a verifiable trail. It means that votes can be trusted in cases like the 2016 Australian federal election.
Re: (Score:2)
I think the only problem here is that the US doesn't have "one person - one vote". They seem to vote on pages worth of issues in each election. It's "one person - one ballot" but that ballot may contain 20 or more questions. I'm not sure if any other countries have this problem. It seems to me that most countries you just elect an MP and that's it, but for some reason in the states they have a huge number of elected offices.
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I wish I only had 20 or so things to vote on each election...
There are the federal candidates, President (every 4 years), Senator (1 of 2 every 3 years), Representative (every 2 years).
Then the State, County, and municipal candidates. These usually number 20 to 40 each election.
Then there are electable judges. 20 to 30 each election.
Then the vote on whether or not to retain appointed judges. These are appointed by electable judges and approved by the level of government legislature they serve, but the v
Use paper and a pen (Score:3)
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Sure, it will take some time, but I rather have reliable results slowly than wrong results fast. This is not the case where failing fast is a good thing.
On the contrary, failing fast is the right answer. That means deciding early on that the correct result cannot be determined and reporting the failure, rather than wasting resources only to fail later on (failing slowly) or silently producing the wrong result (not failing at all). Electronic voting machines are one example of a "fail fast" election system, when they work correctly: any issues with invalid selections are handled interactively, before the ballot enters the system. Electronically-scanned paper
Blockchain!? (Score:2)
You could have each voter with an ID to authorize its vote (PKI maybe), it would make relatively easy to find if some ID was used more than once and you could give the voter a paper with a sequence of characters that could be tested against the blockchain to see if it is valid.
Could it work?
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As of September, 2016, 13% of US adults still don't use the Internet [pewresearch.org], so this wo
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I think you're a little confused - a constitutional convention is not required for amendments - it's basically just a way for the states to make an end run around congress and modify the constitution without their cooperation.
It almost never gets done because any time it starts gathering momentum, Congress ends up passing a "good enough" amendment themselves to maintain their power
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Blockchain is a buzzword. Blockchain is not useful.
If you want an electronic method that can't be altered after cast and requires the voter's presence to cast, use a UAF, same as I recommended for credit reporting agencies [facebook.com].
Wait... (Score:2)
They expect to have completely new equipment in place and running in less than a month? One can only hope they're already done choosing and testing the equipment and now it's only a matter of delivery from stock and training the users or else this screams clusterfuck.
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It's possible to print a lot of paper ballots in that time frame and I think training the user to use a pencil should be doable in a month.
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I think I speek for all nerds when I say, (Score:2)
"WE FUCKING TOLD YOU SO!"
No immutable audit trail and no possibility to audit internal functioning with anything that's not already internal and thus suspect. What could possibly go wrong?
When the tech nerds are telling you, "Go Luddite and use paper," maybe listen?
This is actually a huge win for the manufacturers (Score:2)
Think about it. They got a big sale, so money in pocket. And now they're relieved of any obligation to support what they sold, so money stays in pocket.
Really, the perfect business model is that buyers give you lots of money for absolutely nothing, and can't effectively demand anything afterwards. "Once you have their money, you never give it back." Plus, the uselessness of the articles you sold this time creates a built-in opportunity for the next sale, since obviously your "customer" has to replace what t
Now for the rest of the states (Score:2)
Electronic voting machines are a huge security problem, and there's no clear way to fix the situation. Everyone needs to stop using them until/unless they can be made secure.
Is fake news. Machines fine. (Score:3)
Finally (Score:2)
Does this mean we can just finally go back to the "machines" we had before which worked perfectly? You get a punch card from the front desk, you walk to the booth and put it in a little holder, you flip the pages and punch holes it in and then pull it out and insert it into a counting machine YOURSELF that counts the votes AND stores the paper card in a locked bin for later auditing?
Simple, effective, cheap, perfect auditing, no way they can ruin privacy. We never needed "touchscreens" and those machines
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So it would take someone who has long term access to the voting machines. Like, say, a representative of a party sitting there to make sure nobody dares to mess with the voting process?
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Like, say, a representative of a party sitting there
Party reps are the people who have been caught most often committing vote fraud. You've heard their motto: "Vote early and vote often."
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You don't say...
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It seems to me to be a clever solution in search of a problem - much like electronic voting. It also is only applicable to winner-takes-all and proportional allocation voting.
I could see several issues that seem to be completely unaddressed, at least in a quick skim - one of the most obvious: what if someone ignores all other issues and, say, dumps all their tokens into the presidential election? If you do the per-issue scale thing you'll immediately know that they've done so, but you won't know how they