US Voting Machines Standards Open To Public 115
Online Voting writes "The U.S. Election Assistance Commission has published new voting systems testing and certification standards for 190 days of public comment. For all the critics of electronic voting, this is your opportunity to improve the process. This will be the second version of the federal voting system standards (the first version is the VVSG 05). To learn more about these Voluntary Voting System Standards see this FAQ."
I wanted to read it... (Score:2)
How about (Score:5, Insightful)
- All code open source, all architecture fully documented and publicly available
- No person-vote information recorded in database (database lists people as "voted" or "not voted", as soon as person enters a vote it changes to "voted" and won't allow another vote, while a separate database increments a counter for a particular candidate. These two databases are NOT linked together.
- No timestamps to ensure manual matchmaking between people and votes are not possible.
Ah hell. I could come up with lots of other reasonable suggestions, but its not like any of this will ever be implemented.
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Counterfeiting voting receipt (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:How about (Score:5, Funny)
For one, you could get a discount on your union dues with a Democrat on your voter receipt.
Or you could use it to secure your job (since your boss won't fire you if he can see you voted Republican).
Or you could sell it to the highest bidder: exchage your Billary/Osama receipt for a $20 gift card (for example). Buying votes otherwise is a real pain: people take your money but can still vote for the other guy if you don't watch them.
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Why must you hate our free market? About time the little guy got in on the action.
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Problems, not solutions (Score:5, Insightful)
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The digital voting controls should be similar to traditional voting (count how many people entered/left and compare to number of votes), but NEVER record the voters identity on the ball
Re:Problems, not solutions (Score:4, Insightful)
It means the voter doesn't log into the voting booth. the voter should only walk up to the both press a few buttons get a confirmation receipt and then stick said receipt in another box. The voting machine then is reset for another voter.
Electronic voting should only make counting faster not a complex database system that records everything about the voter.
Indeed a regular computer system is a waste in such a case. no more than powerful than the newton, or early palm is needed, no full oS is needed. the least complex the better.
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Re:How about (Score:5, Insightful)
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The only valid reason for checking peoples' IDs at the voting place is try and make sure that each person is eligible to vote, and gets one and only one ballot. Beyond that, there is no reason to keep track of any voter's ID.
Re:How about (Score:5, Insightful)
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Of course, if the essential information is human readable, then you don't need machines to do any counting either - all of the old, time-tested procedures for vote-counting paper
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Also there should be timestamps but on the voted database and not the votes database.
So Mr XXX voted at 1:15pm but not who they voted for.
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A printed receipt that you drop in a box after visual verification sounds great.
In practice I wonder how that would work for elections where you vote for many different items. I just finished voting on a bunch of proposed constitutional changes on an electronic voting machine in Texas. Even the final verification screen was pretty useless unless you had a reference sheet to compare against. It was just a long list of Prop #1 - No, Prop #2 - Yes, ... Prop #666 - Yes, etc. and no descriptions of individual i
Receipt (Score:1)
If the receipt shows that you have voted, but doesn't show how you voted, I don't see what use it is to making the process verifiable.
On the other hand, if the receipt does show how you voted, it defeats the point of the secret ballot.
...I do agree with the open source part (at least, meaning "all voting and counting software must be available for inspection.")
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If you can't see what's going on in the machine, when you cast your vote, you can't be sure of anything. Elections and voting are too important to leave up to these machines, which are too easy to tamper with, by a very small number of people. It only takes one guy in the right p
I certainly much better now! (Score:5, Informative)
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Why the continued paranoia? (Score:4, Interesting)
The only answer I can see is that the machines are badly programmed or they have been rigged in some way.
Vote counting research (Score:5, Funny)
In response to your question, "Is there really a concern that some competing software vendor will copy their 'tally up the votes' routine", we here at Diebold take great pride in the quality of our product. Our "tally up the votes"TM routine is a prized trade secret developed through extensive research and experimentation. If our competitors could simply copy our unique technique for counting votes they could develop the same product without incurring the significant costs of researching how to count.
I'm sure you can appreciate the sensitive technical know-how at the core of our product. Only a few vendors have discovered the secret to counting votes. If this knowledge became public anyone could count see how we count votes which would take away our incentive to create a much valued product which serves to protect democracy.
God Bless America,
Tom Swidarski
CEO of Diebold, Inc.
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The future of voting needs to be open with pen and paper. If you hide the process away you have lost what you are voting for already so what is the point in voting. Modern democracy needs and option to say "i don't agree with the voting system" when voting. Kind of like a "none of the above" option where if that option wins new people are encouraged to stand.
I live in the UK i have been British all my life. My Vote does not count in this country for the people who run this country !. Many people are not awa
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They could find flaws and then exploit them at the next election to make their candidate automatically win.
Of course its nonsense,
If it went through a standard *nix development cycle with alphas, betas and release candidates along with a x86 compatible testing program and allowing (audited) patches then it would be very secure.
Many people (especially conspiracy nuts) would be reading over the code.
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For example; I'm a lot more worried about MS apps phoning home than linux ones. The real world proves me write with numerous examples available.
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How would they do that?
Access to the source of the code running on your own PC is an excellent thing. It lets you modify it, confirm that it does only what it claims to do, find and fix bugs, and so on.
Access to the source of the code running on a machine that you have no control over is useless. You cannot confirm that it is the source of the running code. You cannot confirm that there are no hardware issues - intentional or otherwise - that are affe
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Re:I certainly much better now! (Score:4, Interesting)
Amen to that. I worked for a temp firm for a contractor to ES&S when they were prepping the code for audit by a 3rd party under the previous version of the voting machine audit standards. The code needed major cleanup to comply with the coding standards (for readability), and we were in a time crunch, so everyone dropped what he was doing and worked on sanitizing the iVotronic code. After it was done, we had beautiful code. All variables were declared at the top of functions and names that made sense. No more globals. Functions had meaningful names and headers describing purpose, input, output, method, etc., etc., etc. We sent that software off to be audited for use in US elections. Of course, that code was never compiled. And it never made it back into the production s/w vault.
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On an open source system, technical professionals, besides average joes, will be able to examine and validate the integrity of the code. To verify it has not been tampered with authorities would compile the public source, get a checksum on the binaries, then compare that to what is installed on the machines, if there is a difference they replace the invalid binaries with the verified.
If there are bugs it can be
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Nothing like having the eyes of every coder on you to keep you honest.
This stuff isn't rocket science.
profit
Take the users id number,
display a list of questions,
record the answer to the questions,
transmit them home securely, (hardest part)
profit
Honestly, there's no reason not to use a generic kernel, ncurses and a flatfile db.
weld the case shut, seal off all ports save fine vents.
pgp crypt the data with the local machines public key.
pass the
big problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:big problem (Score:5, Insightful)
They're also good at providing alternative interfaces for the disabled (sound or braille) while still printing out a nice, clean ballot.
The only reason for COUNTING machines is for speed though, and since there's no easy way to make sure the counting machines haven't been compromised, we shouldn't depend on them at ALL except maybe for "preliminary results". For the final official result, we should still stick to the hand counting votes (especially if we have nice, clean, easily-readable ballots).
Re:big problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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You should print the ballot on a machine, verify that it really did vote for what you wanted, and then put it in a ballot box.
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As I mentioned, however, the only reason for using a machine to do the counting is speed. As long as you're using a "black box" for counting, it becomes very, very difficult to be sure that the votes are being counted the way you inte
Re:big problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Some problems that are typical with regular elections:
- missing ballots for a given party make the thing go slooow
- you waste time finding ballots when there are many options (most countries don't have a two-party thing going on but instead have tens of partys)
- long time to cut ballots when you have elections for more than a single position (say, president and senators) - this factor also favors "block voting" for a party
- the signed-envelope system has loopholes that allow people to buy votes anyway
- you need people to supervise the whole thing, and no one wants to volunteer
- the whole process is so troublesome and complicated that people just want to get it done instead of actually thinking about the election they are making
Of course, the electronic counterpart isn't easy to build. But it could be better, it's not really that hard. You need an easy consistent interface, solid machines that won't be easy to break, and some kind of receipt showing that you voted. That's it.
Re:big problem (Score:5, Interesting)
To supervise the whole thing, we require people from multiple parties to be present at the polling station. It's hard to fiddle with something when it has to be verified by two (or more) opposing people at the same time.
I don't understand your references to multiple ballots. Is each party on a separate ballot or something? Why in the world would it be done like that?
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Here in Canada, voting takes maybe half an hour at most
Here in the UK, it takes no more than a couple of minutes. You turn up to find a mostly empty hall, because no-one has bothered turning out to vote. You spend 30 seconds or so wondering why you've bothered, since all of the candidates are lying bastards anyway, and their policies are broadly the same as everyone else's. Then you put a cross in a box next to the name of some guy who has no chance of being elected anyway, and you piss off home again, with a nice warm glow inside from having participated in t
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In Canada you usually have one contest.
This [nist.gov] is why hand-counting doesn't work in the United States. Chicago, November 2004: 10 pages, 15 elected offices, 74 judges, one referendum. That's 90 contests.
See more at NIST's ballot collection [nist.gov].
Works just fine in the UK (Score:2)
Punch cards, machines, everything else, just unnecessary. I never understood the whole situation in the US where you have people queueing and some unable to vote due to being in line too long.
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I don't see any of the problems you list about paper ballots that can't also happen with electronic voting.
- RG>
Sweet (Score:2)
With Diebold's incompetence, this shouldn't be too hard to do, should it?
Re:Sweet (Score:5, Interesting)
But when it comes to voting machines, the only thing that separates the voting machines from their other products is strong bias. Tamper with an ATM at the factory, sure some FDIC bank will lose a few thousand dollars but the one doing the tampering gains nothing. Tampering with a voting machine, the perpetrator stands to influence an election in ways they see fit.
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The main difference is that the ATM is there for convenience. They're everywhere and can fit in places that banks can't. They also are available 24/7. Meanwhile, voting machines are much less convenient than absentee ballots, as you have to go to the voting precinct, rather than having them sent to you, resulting in you being able to fill them out anywhere and deposit in those seemingly ubiquit
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I for one.... (Score:5, Funny)
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It's not so "comforting" to know that regardless of which candidate or party Diebold selects, we can all rest assured in foreknowledge that the USA will: continue the genocidal punishment of the Cubans and equally genocidal elimination of the Palestinian people, ignore preventable humanitarian crises in favor of reinforcing corporate hegemony over
What a bunch of crap (Score:4, Insightful)
Can someone please... (Score:1, Informative)
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Why hack a voting machine? (Score:2, Insightful)
They don't have to hack the voting machines. They've already hacked the voters. Just as Plato predicted they would!
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This is the first I'm hearing about anything in the USA PATRIOT act that has anything to do with the Electoral College. Would you have any links to a fuller explanation of these added powers you seem to think the College has been given?
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Of course with our two card monty, er, party system it doesn't really matter anymore anyway.
Software independence is required. (Score:4, Informative)
I definitely recommend reading the guidelines. There's a lot of stuff in there.
My opinion on "software independence." (Score:2, Interesting)
My problem with the term "software independence" is that it is misnamed. The guidelines give a definition of "software independence" th
And the FAQ, too. (Score:1)
Yes, and I suggest reading the FAQ, too:
"Q: Will the source code be available to the public?
A: No. The EAC will make all information available to the public consistent with Federal law. The EAC is prohibited under the Trade Secrets Act (18 U.S.C. 1905) from making the source code information available to the public.
This is a bad idea. A much better idea is this: "No voting machine shall be certified unless the vendor ma
Open-ended vulnerability testing. (Score:1)
The second chapter of the introduction provides a good rundown of the new material [eac.gov] in the guidelines.
scantron (Score:1, Insightful)
It doesn't even need to be modified. Actually, it should be in the guidelines that it is encased in a solid unbreakable enclosure and not have any custom software, the same scantron software they use in high schools.
Maybe a second system to check who has voted and to prevent doubles (not connected to the scantron machine in any way)
No input problems
Very accurate counting
No link between voter and vote
Accurate, tamper proof paper trail (given that votes aren't thrown away, but they sh
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Scantrons can be hacked as well. The false assumption is that the manufacturer is pure of heart. They ain't.
Canada uses the #2 pencil and paper system, and they finish national elections in hours. With no room for cheating. And they can do recounts. Easily. There is no reason, NONE,
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Its not that freaking hard people (Score:2, Interesting)
So how freaking hard is it to burn one PROM with the questions/canadates names to be displayed on the screen and a second PROM
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Adding complexity to a functioning system only benefits the producers of
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You're suggestions mitigate tampering by a 3rd party, but don't necessarily prevent fraud on the part of the manufacturer. This is a concern to many in the US, due to ties between the DVR makers and politicians. E.g. Diebold with the Republic Party and ES&S with (former) US Senator Exon, just to name some of the known associations.
You can also review the full document... (Score:1)
Why not start with an open standard? (Score:3, Insightful)
So a good start on the standards but it would be good to see compulsion come in.
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Still no access to source code (Score:4, Interesting)
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Bzzt. Thanks for playing. The United States of America is still a banana republic. What is so difficult about full and open scrutiny? The first principle of any electronic voting system is that it should be open. There can be no proprietary code. It doesn't matter if Joe Six-pack can't read it, as long as someone who is independent from the government and the contractor can.
The reason that's not a requirement is that if the other requirements are defined correctly, access to the source code is irrelevant. If the other requirements are not defined correctly, access to the source code is also irrelevant, because there's no practical way to be sure what code is actually running on the voting machines.
The only reasonable way to do electronic voting is to define a system such that there is no way the software could manipulate the vote without being detected, no matter how mali
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Voter-verifiable records only help ensure that votes are counted as recorded. They don't fully address problems that occur before the votes are recorded: votes can still be recorded incorrectly due to ballot presentation errors, or never recorded at all due to software failures.
Think of an election as a scientific measurement. In order to get an accurate result, the polling mechanism has to be free of bias. If the so
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Perhaps you're understanding something different than I mean when I say "voter-verifiable paper trail".
What I mean is that the voting machine's sole purpose is to print out a paper ballot. That ballot is the real vote, and it is easily human readable and verifiable. The voter can, and should, verify that the printed ballot correctly represents their selected choices. If a voting machine generates ballots that disagree with the user's selections (i.e. system error, not user error), then the system shoul
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Don't you think that would influence an election?Did you see this part of my comment?
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Did you see this part of my comment?
Yes, but I thought my response to it was implicit in my response to the rest.
Don't you think that would influence an election?
Don't you think those behaviors would be noticed? I certainly do, especially if the printed ballot showed all races, even those the voter didn't state a preference on. The hardest-to-detect of the behaviors you mention is crashing, but even that one would be fairly obvious to anyone bothering to look.
It's also worth noting that the punchscan system addresses these concerns very effectively, and does not require open source
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Let's go back a bit to clear up what we're discussing. You made a number of points in your first comment. I chose to address just one of them because I didn't have the time to engage in multiple debates with you simultaneously. But I'll explain my thoughts more fully now so you can understand where I'm coming from.
I see three points you're made so far (please confirm):
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I don't think it's all that easy.
Based on what you're written ("The mechanism has to be free of *undetectable* bias." and "Don't you think those behaviors would be noticed?"), I suspect you are making the assumption that detectability
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The short answer: chain of custody.
Like any other piece of election equipment, the voting machines have to be physically protected from the time they are configured to the time they are used. The same holds true for mechanical voting machines, paper ballots, electronic pollbooks, and so on.
I'm not saying that current procedures for this are adequate -- far from it. Obviously if you leave the machines for unatt
Code can be altered on the fly (Score:3, Insightful)
Canada does (did? sigh) vote using a manual process with real time oversight by suspicious characters from both parties present -- you know, the process we decided was mad in Florida in 2000. Somehow they finish up their elections in hours. Although, really, what the hell is the hurry to finish an election? Why not take a week? Someone REALLY wants to alter those votes. They want it quick, unmonitored, and completely open to tampering, and somehow this is the Only Way To Do It?
This idiocy wouldn't stand if we didn't have Kourictainment for a news media... god.
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Canada does (did? sigh) vote using a manual process with real time oversight by suspicious characters from both parties present -- you know, the process we decided was mad in Florida in 2000. Somehow they finish up their elections in hours.
The reason they can count quickly is that they have so little to count. I don't mean in terms of number of ballots, I mean in terms of ballot complexity. A US ballot often has upwards of thirty or forty separate decisions recorded on it, because it combines federal, state and local elections, and because the US system votes on many offices that are appointed in Canada (and elsewhere).
Personally, I wouldn't mind waiting a few days for the outcome, but for some reason Americans don't even want to wait u
It's called paper (Score:2)
The amazing thing is you can still vote if the power goes out.
It's highly scalable, as voting station tables are cheap and easy to store and setup. you can have a two dozen of them at a polling station for not much money.
The optical scanner is there to count ballots. But they can be counted by
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Getting rid of the queues (Score:1)
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plain paper voting (Score:1)
120 Days + 120 Days... Don't procrastinate. (Score:3, Informative)
They make some bad assumptions (Score:2)
The assumption is that voting is based on the "VOTING MACHINE", but this isn't always the case.
So any system fitting there template must rely heavily on "SECURE VOTING MACHINE HARDWARE" and looks at physical Security totally over looking the network and electronic security.
My largest single concern is the possibility of a clever software trick that could alter larger numbers of votes in mass using some automate
Proposed MailClad system (Score:2)
This is a very rough draft but any criticism and suggestions are appreciated.
my approach, it's actually very simple, and based on the same solution that the Horse racing tracks, Vegas Casino's, lotto lottery system uses and many others.
Plain Random numbers, in a secure data base, no encryption at all. The "software" and underlying network, will not be able to alter or bias any of the results.
See: http://www.dnull.com/~sokol/patent/WO200 [dnull.com]