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Politics Government Technology

Maryland Tests Voting Machine, Declares Success 48

Posted by michael from the works-for-me dept.
Dachannien writes "Capital News Service reports that the Maryland State Board of Elections has staged a test of its Diebold touch-screen voting machines in an effort to demonstrate their security and accuracy. A machine randomly selected from Maryland's voting machine warehouse was tested in a mock vote against two human vote-counting counterparts, and after counting fifty votes, the human vote counters had made several errors versus zero for the voting machine. But is this a legitimate test of the concerns of voting machine activists, or does it merely support a logical fallacy?"
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Maryland Tests Voting Machine, Declares Success More

Maryland Tests Voting Machine, Declares Success

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  • In somewhat related news... (Score:4, Informative)

    by MSBob ( 307239 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @11:42AM (#10598602)
    International election observers noted several issues with the US election process this year. One of the criticism in their report is electronic voting without a paper trail. Here's the link [alertnet.org]

  • It's the wrong test. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Pyromage ( 19360 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @11:44AM (#10598627) Homepage
    We *know* computers can count very well. That's what they were designed for. The problem with the test they ran is that they tried to have a normal, successful election. Try this test: try to rig it. So it succeeds at the easy part, that proves nothing. I hope TrueVoteMD manages to flog the state on this one.

    • We *know* computers can count very well. That's what they were designed for. The problem with the test they ran is that they tried to have a normal, successful election. Try this test: try to rig it. So it succeeds at the easy part, that proves nothing. I hope TrueVoteMD manages to flog the state on this one.

      I'll tell you an even better "right" test - open source the damn thing. I cannot think of a better application of open source than the opening of electoral software. The concepts of honesty, transpare

      • Re:It's the wrong test. (Score:3, Informative)

        by hype7 ( 239530 )
        Damn straight!

        And guess what? This is exactly what Australia has done [wired.com]. If you want an example for when you write to your representative, use the Aussies.

        -- james
      • And what, exactly, would that solve? Why do so many idiots keep proposing these ridiculous "solutions"? How exactly is making software open-source going to solve anything? Do you seriously think it's more difficult to rig an election if it uses open-source software? If anything, it makes it easier.

        The ONLY real solution is to have machines print out OFFICIAL PAPER BALLOTS that the voter can check and put in a sealed ballot box and which can later be recounted by hand. This still enables the use of the
        • isn't obvious? by opening the source, you can see how the "rigs" might work!

          right now, how the hell do you know that the software that collects votes isn't adding one vote to kerry's count when someone votes for bush, and one vote for bush when someone votes for kerry?

          you don't - but if the source was open, you would!

          it's the same reason that spyware isn't in linux, and is in Windows. MS can hide it because it's closed, Linux can't because it's not.
          • I take it you've never actually tried to read someome else's source code. It's a very difficult, time-consuming task, and it's very likely that nobody would bother reading it. Looking at source code is not a sure-fire way to find bugs.

            Besides, the main concern is that state election officials would attempt to tamper with the results (since they generally belong to one of the parties). They can do that more easily if the software is open-source (add a backdoor, recompile, replace executable -- voila). H
            • You don't need to read all of the source. A code audit can be focused. That said, if the code is not clear the audit can say so and force a re-write of the un-clear parts...making it both easier to debug (mistakes) and easier to catch and discourage any actual fraud.
              1. How do you assure that the open-source code is what's actually being used?

              The same way you would with closed source. It's not rocket science, just a lot of work involving independent investigators. As a member of the public that does v

              • Your solution isn't open-sourcing the code, it's making the development process for those machines public. Basically, you want the state to develop the machines and do all kinds of security procedures to assure it's secure, and have a bunch of Slashdot nerds verify the machines. What you are proposing is not really possible to do, and would still have loopholes.

                My solution is to do it the old fashioned way, using paper. That way, it doesn't matter how the machines operate. If you choose Nader but the p
                • You're not even close. Please go back and re-read what I actually did write and stop guessing what I meant. Thanks.
                  • Well, let's see...

                    Keep in mind that with something as serious as an election, everything -- from BIOS firmware through to the OS and supporting libraries -- is also in that 'code' block. That necessitates available source for everything -- even if some of the code is propriatory and not open for redistribution -- because anything that is a closed binary is much harder to check (though not impossible).

                    Sounds like you want the source for everything to be available for redistribution, free of charge. That
        • I disagree entirely. (If I didn't this wouldn't be ./)

          Point by point;

          1. Do you seriously think it's more difficult to rig an election if it uses open-source software? If anything, it makes it easier.

          That depends entirely on who is doing the rigging. The conspiracy theorists on the left think that Diabold has ties to the right wing and may assist in election fraud...covering over any issues with technical hand waving and hiding any of the real details.

          Having all parts of government -- including the

          • The conspiracy theorists on the left think that Diabold has ties to the right wing and may assist in election fraud

            If you think Diebold does the rigging, you are an idiot. If they tried that and someone found out, they would be out of the voting machine business permanently. They have nothing to gain and everything to lose. Not to mention it's kind of hard to do, given how many variables there are. All they need to do is make a system with some backdoors, and they can be assured that the election wil
                1. The conspiracy theorists on the left think that Diabold has ties to the right wing and may assist in election fraud

                If you think Diebold does the rigging, you are an idiot.

              You quote me, but didn't read.

              1. The real danger here is that any state election official can tamper with the results. From what I've heard, Diebold basically uses Access to store stuff and anyone can modify it. The most likely rigging scenario is that some state employee will add/remove a few dozen extra votes from a couple of cr
              • You still haven't answered my primary question: how exactly will an open-source voting system prevent voting fraud? I think we can agree that code auditing won't help matters much.

                During the recount phase, how do you know that the people counting and the systems being used haven't been compromised?

                Simple. You keep the process simple (no fancy computerized systems, etc -- just a manual recount). You send in representatives from both of the major parties to supervise the recount process. This has been
                • First of all, while an open-source voting system *might* not prevent voting fraud, it *would* make it much easier to fix problems. Diebold's software is backward -- it suffers from stupid buffer overflows, unprotected databases, and other mistakes that a first-year CS major probably wouldn't even make.

                  If you open-source the code, the hackers can fix it. The leaked Diebold code hadn't even fixed problems that were pointed out to them over 6 years ago by code inspection commitees (ie, Diebold offered to let
    • While I agree with you post, I can't help but wonder how much of this electronic voting FUD is just fear-mongering or preperation by both sides to challange the result of the election.

      I hope to God that the recount debacle of 2000 doesn't set a precident for all future elections. I fully expect something similar to occur in a few weeks.
    • They don't need to test whether these machines count properly or not. What they need to test is whether they result in the election of the proper candidate.

  • 50? (Score:2)

    by mpost4 ( 115369 ) *
    That is not enough to do a statistical test. it just a feel good, look it going to work bull shit.
  • 1 Machine and 50 votes, that's really small sample size. Wouldn't it be better to do something like 1% of the machines to be used (or 5 or 10%, just pick a number) and have the number of people expeceted to use the machine use it(or have lots more people then expected, just to make sure it can scale it the future)?

  • Well... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Bluesman ( 104513 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @11:54AM (#10598760) Homepage
    Holding the machine up to a zero-defect standard is the logical fallacy.

    Any voting system has potential for fraud, mistakes, etc. The issue should not be whether this system has that potential, but whether it's any better or worse than the current system, which isn't that great. You can't tell me that it's not within the realm of possibility for a purely mechanical machine to malfunction, or be rigged.

    If something bad doesn't happen with these new machines, I'd be very surprised. That would worry me far more than hearing about a perfect election with no mistakes, as that's evidence that someone is truly incompetent or lying.

    • Almost. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by abb3w ( 696381 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @02:25PM (#10600883) Journal
      The issue should not be whether this system has that potential, but whether it's any better or worse than the current system, which isn't that great. You can't tell me that it's not within the realm of possibility for a purely mechanical machine to malfunction, or be rigged.

      The failure modes, however, should be considered using a metric weighted for both likelihood and impact of failure. A miscount is random; vulnerability to it is roughly equally likely to be for or against the candidate who would otherwise win. Sabotage on the other hand, where deliberate vote tampering occurs to a directed purpose, is highly likely to be for an undeserving candidate-- almost by definition. As such, I'd consider vulnerability to tampering a bigger problem than an equal probablility of a vote miscount. And the most effective way to reduce vulnerability to tampering is to increase transparancy to (multipartisan) human observers-- which the proposed electronic methods need to work on.

      I believe it is possible for electronic voting to allow for an improvement in both usability and security in the electoral process over current methods. I do NOT believe it represents that improvement yet.

    • I've used these machines in the past two elections. I didn't have any problems with them and I haven't heard any reports of problems with the machines.

  • I am confused: (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Thunderstruck ( 210399 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @12:14PM (#10598991)
    Where does this intense desire to use an electronic voting system come from in the first place? What is the net result of pulling people away from the process? Withough vote counters and poll workers, will we eventually cause people to care even less about elections?

    Florida taught us one thing: News broadcasts showing jillions of people counting and recounting ballots can spur interest in the political process and get more people to vote.

    • Where does this intense desire to use an electronic voting system come from in the first place?

      OK, I'll bite.

      It is much easier to steal an election if there is no way to recount the votes. Clear?

      It is much easier to avoid recounting the votes if you replace all the voting machines with new "efficient, electronic" machines that have no recount ability. Clear?

      It is much easier to replace all of the voting machines if you argue that this will "improve" voting for disabled people. Clear?

      It is much

  • Sure... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by andreMA ( 643885 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @12:21PM (#10599056)
    Humans counting 50 votes made "several errors"?

    Were they Diebold employees or something? That's simply not credible.

    • Well, I couldnt find any specifics as to the nature of the error. I'll assume at least some were minor errors added to the count to make it appear more definitive.

      Besides, no one argued that machines do well with precision... I for one, dont worry about the machines screwing up, I worry about people screwing the machines up.

  • I propose some different tests. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    We need to test the system when it FAILS. Just sitting here on the shitter I came up with this test:

    1) set up two electronic voting machines. One works "normally" and another has been tampered with so that it sometimes records a vote that differs from the real votes. Don't reveal the probabilities or algorithm involved or which machine has been tampered with.

    2) Set up two punched-card ballot where the candidates have been mislabeled. Don't reveal how it has been mislabeled or which has been mislabeled.

    3)

  • Precision vs. accuracy again. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MillionthMonkey ( 240664 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @01:11PM (#10599608)
    after counting fifty votes, the human vote counters had made several errors versus zero for the voting machine.

    Did the humans make random errors (degrading precision), or errors tending to favor one candidate (worse, degrading accuracy)?

    This looks like a test of precision, not accuracy, and Maryland is confusing the two. I wrote a long post a few days ago in another story that's relevant to this one, and makes the point I'd want to make here, so I'll be a lamer and paste it.
    * * *
    The punch card system proved itself to be a very accurate method of vote counting, even under the extreme condition of a tie- to a precision of several hundred votes. Much attention was paid to the relatively few cards that had chads hanging, but the vast majority of the cards were quite unambiguous in their representation of the voter's intent. Unfortunately they occurred in equal numbers for both candidates. The entire system was at least as auditable as any vote counting system can possibly be.

    People don't understand the difference between precision and accuracy. Precision means that, given a measurable X, your measurements are sharply defined. But that is not the same as accuracy- which implies that the measurements actually reflect the true value of X, and not the influences of other sources of systematic error- like air resistance, or the thermal expansion of the ruler you're using, or the political affiliation of the manufacturer of your measuring equipment. A measurement is only accurate if sources of systematic error have been minimized. Sources of random error- like hanging chads- merely degrade precision.

    The outcry for computerized voting that followed the 2000 election- to "bring our elections into the 21st century" and similar nonsense- was most unfortunate. We are making the transition from an accurate but slightly imprecise system to a new system that promises only extreme precision with no guarantees of accuracy. What is worse, we are about to trade susceptibility to random error for something far worse- susceptibility to systematic error- which is fundamentally different from a human perspective since it introduces a huge motive for people to screw with the accuracy of the electoral process.

    The 2000 election had its share of systematic error. There was that butterfly ballot, which confused both Gore and Bush voters alike, but had the effect of transforming Bush votes into Bush votes and Gore votes into Buchanan votes. There was the Florida felon purge, which knocked thousands of blacks but only dozens of Cubans off the rolls. The 2000 election is still bitterly disputed, but very few people still complain about the hanging chads, which were sources of random error with relatively nonpartisan effects. The sources of systematic error had a much more corrosive effect- they cast doubt on the very legitimacy of the outcome, since they gave the election the appearance of having been stolen.

    I have no doubt that we have an ultraprecise election ahead of us- computers are good at being deterministic, after all- but as far as accuracy goes- we'll see. There are many who would love to insert some systematic error into those Access .MDB files. Election Day hasn't even arrived yet and already people have been busy introducing systematic error into the pool of registered voters. [google.com] Even if the 2004 election involves pretty blinking lights, and is the most precise ever, it will undoubtedly be a less accurate measurement of the desires of the electorate than the election we had in 2000. This is what Stalin meant when he said that those who cast the votes decide nothing, and those who count the votes determine everything.
    • Imagine that some state has n ballots which are mistakenly marked, but are done so randomly, that is each one is 50% likely to be Democratic instead of Republican or vice versa (I'm simplifying things by using a 2-party system here, but the same argument would hold with more parties).

      Each time we miscount a Democratic Vote as a Republican, we mistakenly increase the Republican's margin by 2 votes. The reverse holds true when we miscount the other way. So the error in our margin can be thought of as the s
      • You can degrade accuracy by increasing precision.

        Say all the Democratic voting districts still vote on punchcards while the Republican suburbanites vote on their brand new ultraprecise Diebold machines. This gets rid of the random error in the Republican districts. However it converts the random error from hanging chads in the Democratic districts into systematic error favoring Republicans, since random walks toward Republican candidates in Democratic districts are no longer balanced by random walks toward

  • It's been said a Thousand Times (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SpamKu ( 809119 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @01:31PM (#10599810)
    and I'll say it again.

    Without a Paper Trial, this system is not trustworthy.

    I hate Diebold for political reasons, but I'd still be OK with the system, even though Diebold makes it, if it had a paper trail the voter could see and the Board of Elections could use in the event of trouble.

    These people, OTOH, have a system I would trust:
    http://www.sequoiavote.com/

    This test was in a vacuum,so of course it wouldn't have any issues.

    I remain unconvinced of the security/reliability of paperless ballots, epecially Diebold.
    .

  • First, it's worse than you can imagine - these... (Score:5, Informative)

    by JimMarch(equalccw) ( 710249 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @01:54PM (#10600128)
    ...were tested in "test mode" versus "election mode".

    Yes, I'm serious. There's a software setting on the touchscreen to do one or the other.

    But that's OK, 'cuz the software in there is "certified" and subjected to code analysis by a test lab, right?

    Oooops. Diebold withheld thousands of lines of custom code in the voting terminals from review by declaring it "Commercial Off The Shelf" (COTS) software. Under FEC rules, "COTS" doesn't need serious scrutiny...but Windows CE at the terminal is NOT "COTS" despite Diebold's assertions otherwise - WinCE is a "software kit" that needs to be "finished" (mostly core drivers like video, etc) by the hardware manufacturer.

    Diebold.

    So hide a couple hundred lines of code somewhere that checks for the "election mode" versus "test mode" flag...

    For more on this WinCE issue including Diebold internal EMails discussing it:

    http://www.equalccw.com/sscomments2.html [equalccw.com]

    That's not even getting into how screwed up the central tabulator software is:

    http://www.equalccw.com/deandemo.html [equalccw.com]

    Ain't no WAY you can trust a Diebold system. Period.

    Jim March
    Member, Board of Directors, www.blackboxvoting.org [blackboxvoting.org]

  • Overstating computer reliability, yes (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Media Girl ( 823578 ) on Saturday October 23, 2004 @03:40AM (#10607392) Homepage
    I mean things always happen. Just getting a new browser and email client have been months of hard work and debugging for the Mozilla developers.

    Personally, I'm skeptical. People are willing to kill over $10 in someone's pocket. Why wouldn't we believe that people will resort to things like election machine tampering when it affects who controls the most powerful nation on Earth?

    I'm not reassured by Diebold's CEO about "doing anything" to get Bush re-elected. But really, is a paper trail going to fix that?

    There is nothing preventing a system from printing one thing, and logging another. Any hand-counted discrepancies would be considered "human error" and discounted, anyway. And while a code audit may not be realistic, having the machine's code secret due to patent rights is just plain silly!

    Machines could be checked by a number of ways, including a sort of ghosting/registry check done by an independent agency supervised by the various parties. And so on.

    But then there's the need to hardened the machines to external manipulation. The casinos have been fighting this for years, and still people find ways to cheat.

    All we can do as citizens is keep fighting. The struggle for freedom will never go away, not even in the USA ... especially in the USA.

  • I have been wondering why this hasnt been covered in the main-stream press, and more importantly why voters are not up in arms about this issue. As much as a conspiracy freak as I can get sometimes, I refuse to believe in a left or right wing conspiracy in the media. (I think there is an anti-administration/pro-scandal bias-compare media fervor over WMD intelligence and blue dress stain intelligence and you'll get my point)

    If we want to get the public's attention on this issue, we need one of the follow

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