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Federal Panel [not NIST] Rejects Paper Trail For E-Voting
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Dec 07, 2006 01:43 PM
from the democracy-costs-too-much dept.
from the democracy-costs-too-much dept.
emil10001 writes "The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has rejected a proposal suggesting that electronic voting have a paper trail. The draft recommendation was developed by NIST scientists, who called out electronic voting machines as being 'impossible' to secure." From the article: "Committee member Brit Williams, who opposed the measure, said, 'You are talking about basically a reinstallation of the entire voting system hardware.' The proposal failed to obtain the 8 of 15 votes needed to pass. Five states — Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland and South Carolina — use machines without a paper record exclusively. Eleven states and the District either use them in some jurisdictions or allow voters to chose whether to use them or some other voting system." So ... accountability in voting will be a joke for the foreseeable future because it costs too much?
Update: 12/11 03:20 GMT by KD : Correction: It was not NIST that rejected NIST's recommendations, it was a federal panel chartered by Congress, the Technical Guidelines Development Committee.
Update: 12/11 03:20 GMT by KD : Correction: It was not NIST that rejected NIST's recommendations, it was a federal panel chartered by Congress, the Technical Guidelines Development Committee.
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First p (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:First p (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Parent is insightful (or at least funny). (Score:3, Informative)
This is one of those situations where knee-jerk moderating doesn't quite work.
In short... Yes .. and ... no (Score:2)
Then There's the Conspiracy Theory (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
But you and the GP seem to fit Occam's Razor better, so I think it's likely to be true. Sadly.
-nB
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Are you saying that they're waiting for something REALLY important to come along before they unleash the their cheats?
I do think we need better accountability in elections, because it's terrible that we can't be certain in the country
Re: (Score:2)
realistically though if you were to cheat you would want it to me hard to detect, maybe if they did the algorithm just needs more tweaking?
I dunno, I simply hope for the big backlash to put indys in office. I bet if Ross Perot ran now he'd take it by a landslide.
-nB
Re: (Score:2)
Or, if you are a republican:
Well, it is obvious that the dirty dems riged the vote this time around! They stole the election! And we all know that the dems ALWAYS rig elections (*point back to past casses of votter coersion*).
heh, pardon me, just felt like it
As for why I think they voted it down?
They don't r
Re: (Score:2)
Democrats use dead votes to win.
We still all lose.
Re:In short... Yes .. and ... no (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, if each American who reads slashdot went out and smashed just ONE voting machine each with a sledgehammer, this entire argument would be a moot point.
I do think we need better accountability in elections, because it's terrible that we can't be certain in the country that's supposed to be the leader in democracy.
Is this a joke? America has replaced more democratic leaders with puppet dictators than Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia put together, and their own democracy looks more and more like a trick of the light with each passing day.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I am not saying that they did that, I am saying that just because they won it doesn't mean they didn't cheat. It could mean they didn't cheat enough and maybe next time they will.
Great quote (Score:5, Insightful)
Um
Stupidest. Excuse. For. Shilling. For. The. Forces. Of. Evil. EVER.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Wasted money going electronic (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This is absolutey not true. Electronic voting done right works in many places, most notably Brazil. Theyve had some scandals but now they have paper verified voting. You vote and it prints out a slip of paper. The paper goes in a bag in case of contestment. (is that a word?) Not to mention Brazil is HUGE country. Its almost 200 million. We're at 300 million and we dont
Re: (Score:2)
It shouldn't only be about cost. (Score:5, Interesting)
I have no idea who I voted for in any election. I know who I thought I voted for, but I have no idea if it was counted that way. Where can I go to find that out? Let's say there is some way for me to determine if my vote was counted in a certain way. What about everyone else? Is there a way to make sure the vote they think was mine was exclusively mine?
I'd rather have the problems associated with receipts with ids on them that I can log online to see who I voted for instead of the current system.
Re: (Score:2)
So what if there's a paper trail? It means absolutely nothing unless it's actually used, and is accessible by the people casting the votes! This is something that is wrong with the current system also!
I have no idea who I voted for in any election. I know who I thought I voted for, but I have no idea if it was counted that way. Where can I go to find that out? Let's say there is some way for me to determine if my vote was counted in a certain way. What about everyone else? Is there a way to make sure the vote they think was mine was exclusively mine?
I'd rather have the problems associated with receipts with ids on them that I can log online to see who I voted for instead of the current system.
That would alloc coercion and vote buying.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
You gotta be kidding me if you think they aren't already buying votes.
Let them attempt to buy elections, make it illegal, put out "honeypots", catch the rats and disqualify them from the race! Even if they could directly buy votes, think of how much money you'd need to spend just to sway an election... and there's no way you could do that without getting caught.
I sure hope so
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
See this post [slashdot.org] for my solution..
re: privacy (Score:2)
i still don't see the problem with simple scantron "fill in the bubble" voting sheets. fill them in, take them to a machine and feed it in. the machine displays the votes on screen that it is about to record. you confirm that "yup, the machine rea
Why don't you understand vote fraud? (Score:3, Insightful)
Fine. In the next election, make sure you vote for the party I tell you to. I expect to see your reciept as proof you voted appropriately. If you don't, I'll break your kneecaps with a sledgehammer. And if I can't find you, I'll just have your family killed.
Or we could just, you know, *not* promote vote fraud. That would be OK too. Whichever you and
Re: (Score:2)
It is used. Whenever there's a recount.
No, you can't link an individual ballot to a particular individual. That's a feature, not a bug. If you could identify individuals you would enable coercion before the election and reprisals afterwards, hardly favourable conditions for a democratic society.
But while you can't follow your particular ballot through the system, you can do that as a group. If 100 people vote at your polling station and more or less than 100 votes are tallied then there has been some ta
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt." - Mark Twain
So, the next question is, are the willfully ignorant worse than those who have tired of dealing with them?
Or, to put it another way. Voting, and the pitfalls inherent in it is a very old topic with lots of information available, and examples to show the pitfalls in practice. Perha
Too Costly? (Score:3, Insightful)
So, disregarding the fact that their own scientists cited the machine's insecurities, the executives feel that the 'cost' of replacing or updating the machines is prohibitive for our countries (arguably) most important decision?
This whole things reeks of pork and the 'old boys' club'
Things have changed in two days (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Bad math or uncounted votes? (Score:3, Interesting)
How do you deadlock 6 to 6 on a 15 person committee? Were the other 3 votes just not counted?
Re:Bad math or uncounted votes? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Story is out of date! (Score:5, Informative)
http://news.com.com/Panel+changes+course%2C+appro
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1095 [freedom-to-tinker.com]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's interesting, I submitted the story yesterday at noon, and hadn't seen anything new on it. But reading the update is also quite interesting, because the issue remains that the voting machines which are currently in place, and have no paper trail, will stay there as they are. The proposal that passed leaves it to the "next generation" of machines, and does not seem to affect the ones currently in place. So, this story is still relevant, because those problematic machines are still in place, and will st
Come Again? (Score:2)
So who's got the real story and who's just spreading FUD? Inquiring minds want to know.
Not cost (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Accountability in voting will be a joke because that would be an inconvenience to the Inner Party achieving their goals, whatever those may be. Cost is simply an excuse for the public.
No price is too high for securing Democracy! (Score:2, Insightful)
Think about it, we spend more in Iraq each month than this proposal would cost, all in the name of "securing democracy". Not only that, it's perfectly clear at this point that the only "freedom" we are providing the Iraqis is the freedom to kill each other and our soldiers.
How the hell can anyone not support this measure? Or, more appropriately, how are the clowns who don't support it keeping their jobs?
Oh,
yeah,
the easily stealable elections...
Really Tired of this Crap! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Conspiracy (Score:2, Insightful)
Open Voting (Score:2)
Now, while I'm a fan of open source, I can definitel
Secure tallying (Score:3, Interesting)
Whatever scheme we dream up, such as punch-card voting, or a paper trail, the fact remains that we really don't know whether our vote will affect the *tally*. A paper trail only comes into play when the official tally is suspect for some reason. What we really need to know is that our vote is counted. Even if we have a bar-code on a paper receipt that shows exactly who we voted for, we have no way of knowing whether or not our little bar-code verified data gets in to the official tally.
Here's what I wrote [slashdot.org] the last time this discussion came up on slashdot:
"What I'm envisioning is some kind of method where votes can be tallied, and the running tally can be periodically published during the count. I imagine it would have some kind of hashing technology, like PGP, where tallies are perhaps encoded in a string, and the string is published. The hashing token, or whatever mechanism allowed a vote to be legitimately added to the tally, would be passed from one voter to another, after they voted. This puts the power to count votes into the hand of the voters, rather than a poorly-trained election volunteer, a partisan, or a hackable machine. Because of the constraints of the token and hashing, a voter can only vote as they are allowed, without destroying the tally hash string."
One problem with secure tallying is that you want to make sure that your vote is counted in the official tally, but you don't want others to deduce how you voted from the official tally. At this point, I imagine one voter passing the official tally to the next voter. That way you can be certain you have affected the tally, and the design of the system constrains you to only one vote. Periodically, perhaps every hour, the official tally is publicly released. Nobody can then figure out how you voted; they only know how the crowd voted in the past hour.
To satisfy the choke point of one voter passing the official tally to the next person, there can be multiple official tallies that are running concurrently, and at the end of voting, they are all added together in a master tally.
Wasn't E-voting the promised land? (Score:2)
Now you're complaining about other countries taxing energy use to reduce global warming and u.s. lagging behind in such taxes. Wonder where this is going.
Stalin was right... (Score:2)
If voting mattered, they wouldn't let you vote! Silly to think you actually have choices in an election. Elections are just your high school SGA with older people. Simple popularity contests.
So ... accountability in voting (Score:3, Insightful)
So ... accountability in voting will be a joke for the foreseeable future because it costs too much?
And accountability in voting will be a joke because the first implementation was a total fuck up?
In software, the solution to this problem would be: eVoting 2.0
Changelog:
OSS voting in 1 day (Score:2)
1. Setup linux distro with apache, tomcat, whatever
2. Install ballot web app
3. Install ballot CUPS printer filter
4. Setup firefox for kiosk mode
Counting machine:
1. Setup linux distro with ballot_counter.py
2. Attach scanner
3. Run ballots through OCR software
4. Update counters (in realtime as scanned)
Ballots print like this, one measure per line:
PRESIDENT: AL GORE
SENATE: JAMES WEBB
STEM-CE
An illustration of how stupid this situation is (Score:2)
I do not understand why an
Mail voting problems (Score:2)
Problem with mail voting is that ballots could be made to "disappear" outside the election system (for example post office clerks could be bribed to toss them). The more hands sensitive data passes through, the more of a chance there is for corruption of said data, whether accidental or malevolent.
-b.