Deathblow To a Voting Machine

SiggyRadiation writes "According to their newsletter (my English translation here), the Dutch group that 'doesn't trust the voting computers' has won a round against the industry and the civil servants that seem hell-bent on reintroducing voting machines — NewVote, made by SDU — that the Dutch minister of the interior has suspended. Apparently SDU provided 5 slightly different samples of its machine to the Dutch version of the NSA (well... the very humble Dutch version anyway) for testing purposes. Of those five, four machines emitted radiation in such a way that the votes cast could be monitored. SDU's NewVote received its final deathblow when it became clear that the one machine that stayed within the radiation limits used a green-on-red color-scheme for its screen. And that would be a small problem for the 4% of all men that cannot distinguish between red and green."

Voting computers, not machines

[moonbender]

One of the many good points Rob made during his talk at last year's 23C3 [events.ccc.de] in Berlin was to call the things voting computers as opposed to voting machines. Machine is associated with a simple, understandable and verifiable piece of gear, while computers are very complex, difficult to understand even by experts and unverifiable. Although the commonly used term (in Dutch) was machines, too, they exclusively referred to computers, and within a fairly short period of time everybody called them that way. In a way this was their first major success. Funnily enough, when they - much later - got hold of an actual device, the label on the back said voting computer, too: that's what the manufacturer had called them all along, internally, that is.

Re:Colourblind

[govtpiggy]

Just a verification of the parent. I'm also red/green colorblind and while I can't see this [steverosswick.com] I can tell the difference between red and green. It's colors that are only separated by shades of red or green that are a problem. Think white to pink or blue to purple.

Re:Radiation?

[Otter]

My first thought was to wonder why the Dutch were the only ones freaking out over a vulnerability that probably affects every electronic voting machine on the planet. But of course, Van Eck is a local security bigshot and if he wasn't on the commission himself, his buddies probably were.

Re:In fits and starts but it will proceeed...

[Sique]

Electronic voting steals you half of your voting rights: The right to watch the counting. As someone born and raised in the former Eastern Block I know this is important. We had the right to mark a sheet of paper with a pen and put it in a box. But the outcome was predetermined anyway. Most later convictions for voting fraud in East Germany were only possible, because people watched the counting in enough voting places in 1989 to compare their results with the officially stated.

So don't let you take the right to watch the counting!