Punchscan Wins Open Source Voting Competition

An anonymous reader writes "Punchscan emerged victorious at the open source university voting systems competition, VoComp. For their efforts, they will receive the US$10,000 prize provided by ES&S (which has recently been named in a scandal in Florida). The second-place team put up a good fight: 'Per Ron Rivest, one of the contest's judges, the runner-up team, the Pret-a-Voter team from the University of Surrey in the UK, gave Punchscan a tough run for the first-place money until the Punchscan team dug through Pret-a-Voter's source code and found a significant security flaw in their random number generation. Oops.' It will be interesting to see if these systems ever make it into the mainstream. Kudos to ES&S for showing their forward thinking in this area, as the other voting machine vendors, such as Diebold, did not support the competition."

So

[by Anonymous Coward]

A system with a significant flaw in security comes second?

Re:So

[inaequitas (885724)]

What do you expect, when one with an undocumented number of security flaws is marked for real-life use?

But an interesting competition. Puts responsibility back in the way people write their code, not license it and hide behind the legalese.

Why do they use a random number generator?

[Intron (870560)]

Does this explain the last two presidential elections?

Re:

[raddan (519638)]

Without knowing the specifics of the system, I'd guess it's probably used as some part of an authentication token. You want to make sure that you can verify that the printed paper receipts correspond to a vote, but you don't want to give away the voter's identity, right? Random numbers are frequently used where you need a shared secret or seed for an encryption algorithm to work on, and encrypted secrets or seeds are often a part of an authentication system. Numbers that are "random enough" are difficult

The only problem I see with this

[InvisblePinkUnicorn (1126837)]

The only problem I see with this system, as it was with the hanging chads, is that people with poor vision or low brain power will be easily confused by the way the choices are out-of-order. Maybe they could use colored letters to make it easier to match them up, or even use pictures, e.g. a dog for Clinton, a snake for Giuliani.

Re:

[techno-vampire (666512)]

They were already using that in Shakespeare's time: "The Cat, the Rat and Lovel the Dog, rule all England under the Hog."

Irrelevant

[Gothmolly (148874)]

To quote a now dead, but once very powerful man: "He who votes decides nothing. He who COUNTS the votes decides everything."
It's charming to see people coming up with Open Source voting and other governmental tools, but extremely naive to think that they'll ever be implemented. Even if they make their way into governmental dialog, they'll be co-opted by Diebold, et.al. in the 11th hour before any policy is changed.

Re:

[fistfullast33l (819270)]

Even more disturbing...how will we know if they're implementing an open source system? If a voting machine is a black box, it wouldn't exactly be easy to determine whether or not the source code originates from an open source system.

Oversight

[InvisblePinkUnicorn (1126837)]

It's called oversight. Punchscan makes it easy for every single voter to ensure that the items they marked are exactly what was entered into the database. People can even download large randomly-selected chunks of the database to help ensure integrity. Read Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] for more of the security features.

Re:

[Reverend528 (585549)]

It's charming to see people coming up with Open Source voting and other governmental tools, but extremely naive to think that they'll ever be implemented.

Well, if users could verify that their vote was accurately counted, doesn't that kind of undermine the purpose of staging an election?

Re:

[shrubya (570356)]

Yeah yeah, and we may as well throw in "A witty saying proves nothing" from Voltaire.

In this case, however, the words were backed by real action. Comrade Joe was indeed the one counting the votes, and he did in fact end up deciding everything in his nation.

And let me guess

[WindBourne (631190)]

It was a pharoh who said to take everything with a grain of salt?

More publicity for OSS voting machines, please.

[TheDarkener (198348)]

We need more than preaching to the choir - everyone should link to this from their blogs, post it as a bulletin to their friends on Myspace, etc. etc. etc.... the more people hear about these things, the more likely it will be that we actually start using OSS-based voting machines on a large scale.

3 2 1, GO!

Re:

[oyenstikker (536040)]

Hearing is not caring.

Re:

[TheDarkener (198348)]

Hearing is exposure. Don't underestimate exposure. Ever heard of the saying, "Even bad publicity is good publicity?"

Re:

[Kadin2048 (468275)]

I love OSS as much as the next Slashdotter, but I'm not sure it's a panacea here.

As long as the system relies on software, rather than something that can be physically verified, to actually tally votes, then you are at the mercy of the software. And that is a problem. Even if the code is available, you still have a long way to go. You have to ensure that the code that's running on every one of the voting machines is actually the source code that's available. And you have to have a completely clean, verified

Re:

[TheDarkener (198348)]

Did you RTFA? You can verify your votes at a later time online with your vote tally. This is a major element in verifying election integrity. Sure, it isn't perfect - but what truly is? We're always chasing after a better solution, and this is definitely a better solution than what we have right now.

How about redundancy...I think we can all agree that the more independent, distributed systems that are in place to verify voting integrity, the better. It's hard to hack 10 separate systems to change voting res

Re:

[CastrTroy (595695)]

We do it in Canada, and since counting ballots scales perfectly well, no matter how many people you have, there are no problems. The more ballots you have to count, the more people you have to count the votes, the more people you have to watch the counting, to ensure that it's done properly. I don't understand why we need any other way. For hundreds of years (if not longer) paper voting has worked just fine. Why all of a sudden are we trying to fix something that was never broken.

Was it a fair competition?

[91degrees (207121)]

After seeing the machines, the 6 judges cast their votes electronically. The votes were 2 for Pret-a-voter, 3 for Punchscan and 107,345 for Diebold.

But...

[AntsInMyPants (819105)]

How did they count the votes to determine who won?

Diebold Afraid to Compete vs Superior Products

[CodeBuster (516420)]

as the other voting machine vendors, such as Diebold, did not support the competition.

Of course they didn't support it. The first or second place projects in the competition are both better than the crappy voting system marketed by Diebold and they are *free*. If your competition is free and it is better then you are in a world of hurt. Diebold is the classic example of a company which didn't make a very good transition of expertise in physical real world security products to software products.

Re:How can reciepts ever work?

[InvisblePinkUnicorn (1126837)]

"Any random voter could go home and make a fake receipt to claim the results were tampered with."

TFA explains how that would be pointless, since the pairing of letters with names is different on each form. The receipt doesn't tell you anything about who you voted for, only what letters you chose. And if their point was to try to change an election, they would need a large group of people to be in on it to guarantee their desired outcome, and the larger the group, the more likely their fraud would be to be exposed.

Re:

[Not_Wiggins (686627)]

And if their point was to try to change an election, they would need a large group of people to be in on it to guarantee their desired outcome, and the larger the group, the more likely their fraud would be to be exposed.

More to your point, if you could organize that many people to swing the vote a certain way, couldn't you have just gotten those same people to vote your way at the start without any fraud?

Re:public key techonology

[bobdehnhardt (18286)]

Voters would be able to see that their vote counted in the right direction, and unless someone else knows your private key, nobody would be able to tell who you voted for.

That "unless" part is the biggest problem with this approach. Digitally signing the ballot eliminates the anonymity of it. On measures that are controversial or highly contentious (stem cell research, gay marriage, abortion, legalization of drugs, to name a few), people need to be able to cast their votes without fear of reprisal or being ostracized be their community. If I'm digitally signing my ballot, that creates a solid link between me and my votes, which may make me reluctant to vote in ways that don't conform with the views of my neighbors.

Of course, the Government has a solid reputation of keeping secrets, so there's no chance that the ballot data could be stolen [newsnet5.com], hacked [virginia.edu] or otherwise compromised [stltoday.com], or have their contents improperly made available to the general public [pcworld.com]. And encryption never [slashdot.org], ever [slashdot.org] gets cracked. And the public would never fall for any tricks to get them to divulge their passphrase or surrender their key (for example, a phishing site claiming to be a Voter Verification Portal). Nope, the security here is 100%, nothing to worry about, just go about your business....

Re:

[cduffy (652)]

Punchscan handles this scenario. It means you can prove that you voted for A, A, D and C (and validate that this set of votes was counted correctly) -- but you can't prove who option A on item #1 was on your ballot (as opposed to someone else's ballot), so even when knowing that you voted for A on #1, Vinnie can't tell whether you voted for Enzo or not.

Bloody hell, people, learn how this works before you trash it.